Lies! All Lies!

It's slowly dawning on me that just about everything that my teachers have told me is nothing but lies, hokum, and flim-flam. Like my seventh grade social studies teacher, Mrs. Selesner, who, on sweltering May afternoons, wouldn't let us fan ourselves because, she claimed, "it would only make us hotter." So, now, nine years later, I came across this article, which not only contradicts Mrs. Selesner but also includes a lot of math, thus giving it credibility that my ex-social studies teacher lacked.

Okay, so it's not exactly a lie on the magnitude of "Saddam is hoarding weapons of mass destruction" or "America is safer now thanks to George Bush's leadership," but sheesh, she's a teacher for Christ's sake. She's in a very powerful position, filling young tabulas rasas with whatever horseflop comes into her uninformed head. Now I've got to call into question everything she's ever taught me, like whether the Missouri Compromise really happened and whether Parliament really passed the Declaratory Acts. (We already know that the whole "No taxation without representation thing" was a bald-faced lie.) Because honestly, we were in seventh grade — the hell do we know? She could tell us that the Pilgrims came from Mars on the U.S.S. Enterprise and we'd believe her.

Maybe I'm being unduly harsh on Mrs. Selesner; I still nurse a grudge against her for putting Dave Loewinger, Kevin Grinberg, and me in a group with Phil Trout because quote that's what the Japanese do. (She meant that Japanese mega-corporations evidently group their disinterested, troublemaking burnouts with honor students in order to reduce overall productivity.) How much of an education do you really need to be a seventh-grade social studies teacher? Prolly none — all you do is read from the teacher's copy of the textbook with all the answers in it and hand out dittos. Besides, from what I heard, the other social studies teacher was worse.