Composition 101

For those of you who went to college, unless you were some sort of wonder child, you had to take a freshman composition class. It was hell. I never realized there were so many grammar rules, syntax constructions, parts of speech, and punctuation guidelines they never taught me in high school, or maybe they did and I just did not pay attention (but I don’t think they did). Today I still fight the problem that the way I talk should not be the way I write.

Somehow I muddled through, and even ended up teaching English in high school for a few years, before they fired me on a trumped up “reduction in force” scheme. The truth was I made the mistake of taking on the superintendant, otherwise known as Boss Hogg of Grant County, over a contract dispute. The dispute was we had a contract for the district to pay me to coach baseball and he was not paying. My big mistake was to think I ought to be paid, and so I took him on and won. The next year, even after they offered and I signed a tenured contract, I found myself “laid off.”

All things considered, they did me a favor, because I hated teaching. Not only was I not very good at it but I had utter contempt for the people who ran the schools and the fraud they were perpetrating on the trusting public in general. Trust me when I tell you that paying for our public schools is like buying penny stocks; you can invest billions but will only get back pennies in return.

Parents in our society are as much to blame as the many ticks and leaches that are educators and administrators in our public school systems. For too many parents, school is the place they can send their children for up to 12 hours a day (if the kid plays sports) and not have to be bothered by actually raising the child themselves. To be fair, many mothers and fathers both work in jobs and careers; they need to work to support the family at some subsistence level to which they have become accustomed or aspire. They cannot work and at the same time be at home to raise and school their children. On the other hand, it becomes very convenient to put the kid on the bus, or drop him at the front door of the school, and let the teachers and administrators deal with him all day. Raising a child is hard work that lasts 24 hours a day for about 18 years. Far too many parents duck as much of this time as they can by dumping it onto the schools. We have the most expensive childcare system in the world.

Rich folks do it, too, by sending their kids to private and military schools. Somehow, though, they seem to demand and get a better return on their investment in most cases. Not so in public schools. My first father in law was an English teacher for several decades following his stint in WWII. I know he had a poor opinion of most of his fellow teachers and the schools in which he taught. He told me once that smart students learned in spite of everything that schools did to hinder them, while all the others who were not so smart were just grist for the mill.

I must take a second here to be fair and acknowledge that there are a large number of good, caring and effective teachers. It is easy in any school to single out one or two that are clearly incompetent or ineffective or simply gave up. Once you get past plucking these low hanging rotten fruit, however, it becomes much more difficult to say that the majority of the teachers are no good. What make our schools so bad are the way the entire system is set up and the attitudes of the people running them.

Blame, if you must, all of the 20th century education theorists, who could not have done a worse job of getting it all wrong. Also, blame our society to the extent that we want the schools to raise our kids, but we do not really want them to discipline them or even hold them accountable. Who wants to see their precious Johnny told he is a failure, even if Johnny is a lazy drug saturated loser? That is the point: nobody is allowed to admit and treat Johnny for what he really is, so we all pretend that something else is the cause. Naturally, the teachers do not want to have their salaries and performance ratings tied to Johnny’s success on tests. So now, we have this vicious little closed loop going where failure breeds failure that causes yet more failure, but everyone involved is calling it success.

Our school systems are a reflection of a more far spread and insipid problem. We do not want to hold people responsible for their own success or failure. We, and I mean a large portion of our society, don’t like the idea that some people will fail, or have miserable lives, or live in poverty, or be unhappy because they just cannot compete very well. We have begun to think that competition is bad. We do not like the idea that a person fails because he does not have the ability. We do not like the idea that a fellow achieves little or nothing because he does not have the intelligence, cleverness, skill, willingness to work hard or accept responsibility for his own results. Rather, many have started thinking that the fault is competition itself. It is the cause of unhappiness and lack of success. If there were no competition, no one would fail! Progressives and liberals love this idea.

Our geniuses in charge of the education system of this country truly believe that competition is bad. Except for sports, of course. Sport is the only place where our students should compete. Indeed, we substitute all that intellectual competition with athletic endeavors. That is so because, and you will love this part, sports are optional! If you do not want to play sports because you are uncoordinated, unskilled, clumsy, slow, fat, or lazy, then you do not have to do so. The competition of sports is, in other words, completely voluntary. The individual can opt out of sports and so opt out of the competition.

But real life? Hey, nobody can opt out of that. Therefore, we have to make it fair for all, which means we have to eliminate competition in all those things that we cannot opt out of, like going to school and getting grades. Life, you see, is not voluntary, not like sports, right?

Our public schools and our leading educational theorists have been going down this path for decades. I don’t want to beat this horse anymore, lest it die, but you can take my word for it that this is the basic philosophy of our school systems in America today. Just as importantly, it is proving quite convenient for the educators and administrators, too. Why do you think they are so fired up against standards testing and having their appraisals and pay tied to student results? It is not just that they are afraid of what Johnny’s results will do to them. Rather, they do not want to have to compete with each other for their salaries like the rest of us in America do.

Enough.

For the last 8 years or so I have been slowly teaching myself basic computer programming. Frankly, I am a hack, and probably do not have any skill at all. However, I have learned how to write Visual Basic for Applications code for Microsoft Excel, Word and Access. I created and currently administer several large databases that are independent applications in their own right. I’m not saying they would stand up to close scrutiny by real programmers, but they are in use by a couple of hundred people, have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, provide something that was not available before their creation, eased the work load of many, and function just fine. I am a little proud of them.

The thing about writing programming code is that it will not allow a single error. Get one comma wrong and it will not run. Misspell a single word and it will crash. Substitute a parenthesis for a bracket and it goes into an endless loop and you cannot make it stop short of turning the computer off. Think about that. Every bit of syntax, grammar, spelling and punctuation must be perfect. You cannot make a single error, or it will not work. How many syntax, punctuation, grammar or spelling errors have I committed in this rant so far? If the same sort of software programming standard were applied in my college freshmen composition class, I would have failed. I probably still would.

In programming the first hurdle you have to pass (I have never taken a class, but I bet this is the way it goes) is your code must run and it must produce what it is supposed to produce. In the most basic example, used in all the beginning books I have read, the output should read, “Hello, World!” If it says “Hell Whorl”, you failed. If nothing showed up on the screen, you really blew it!

Once you get to the “Hello, World!” part, then we need to look to see if you got there in the most efficient way possible. This is where I would fail if an expert looked at my code. I am likely to take 12 lines to do something that can be done in three. In terms of CPU cycles, memory usage, and so on, three lines is much better than 12. If it were a football game, my team would lose with the score 27 to 7 in favor of a real programmer. In the real world, CPU cycles and memory usage cost money. Big money. Good programmers, the ones who can write the most efficient code, are highly sought after.

Wow. Amazing how that ugly competition thing just reared its head.

We have all read about those kids who can hack a video game, or the school network system, or their cell phone. They can write amazing software for all sorts of things, some vicious like viruses that shut down the planet and others that are improvements on the originals. My son went to school and was friends with several kids who could do this stuff.

The thing is, they did not gain this knowledge or learn these skills in any class they ever took in public school. Instead, they taught themselves and each other. My first father in law was right: they did this in spite of the school. I wonder how well these kids are going to do in real life. I like their chances.