Wednesday, 11:55 am
Outside Haines, waiting for classroom to be emptied.
A girl and a boy from my French class (yes, the painfully moronic one) are conversing.
Girl: So did you do the reading for homework last night?
Boy: Yeah, it was short, thank god.
Girl: Yeah. They mentioned World War II. You know, I've never learned about World War II.
Boy: ... Really?
Girl: Yeah. It was always kind of interesting to me though. I don't know what it was about. . . or why it happened.
Boy: You didn't take US History?
Girl: No, I mean, I did. . .
Boy: They didn't cover that?
Girl: I don't know. . .
Boy: Did you take European history?
Girl: Yeah. My teacher said that we probably all already knew about it. . . so she didn't bother teaching us.
Boy: Well. . . I guess maybe that makes sense. World war II stuff is all around us -- it's always on the history channel. That stuff's boring though.
Girl: Yeah. Maybe eventually I'll learn about it.
Me: (After eavesdropping and screaming profane frustrations in my head) You should.
Girl: (Surprised) Oh.
I -- wha . . . - sh -- and --- why -- wha!? -- I just. . . WHAT?!!
Am I crazy? Or did I just assume that it took some amount of intelligence to get accepted into this university? Excuse me, admissions board, please fire the sickeningly optimistic guy with the lazy eye, because you're sure letting some of these slide on by. Okay, I'm not a history buff. I don't know when the Franco-Prussian war was, I couldn't tell you the year the Treaty of Cordoba was initiated. . . but for heaven's sake, I know the details of World War freaking II. Granted, it may not have been all the girls' fault, I'm certainly willing to blame bad education... What kind of teaching ethic is that?! "You've already heard it already, and it's everywhere, so you probably know about it." WHA, I MEAN WHAT?! The English alphabet is everywhere, but you don't see any pre-school teacher calling it a day, opening up a pack of cold ones, and telling their kids, "You guys have all probably heard about the alphabet. So I just won't teach it to you."
... NO!
Well hey, back in New York I had a roommate who asked me what communism was. As in, it's a word he'd heard before but didn't know anything about. And this guy was at least 5 years older than I was, so he was around and awake when the Berlin Wall came down.
ReplyDelete