Thursday, April 06, 2006: Why can I never remember the titles I think up?

You wouldn't believe the kind of people I have to put up with at my school. Listen to what happened in my Pre-AP (supposedly the more intelligent ones) English class: yesterday we had a discussion on the book The Sun Also Rises. Due to all of the people who left this country in it, we started by going into our pre-assigned groups and making a list of ten reasons we would or will leave the country. We came up with things like "if there were extreme prejudice against a group to which I belonged" (of course, I was referring to Atheists) and "if Jeb Bush were elected President." Then we had a discussion. Our group was asked, and we went with the prejudice one. Then our teacher casually changed what question he had asked, insisting that he had asked what would make great numbers of people leave, as opposed to just us, being what he had actually asked. So, we went with our first one: if the draft were re-instated. Apparently, we were the first ones to come up with it all day, even though we were the second-to-last class. So, the teacher read a quote from a congressman about his draft plan. He said that the everyone between the ages of 18 and 26 would be eligible--all classes, males and females. At "and females," the class went into uproar. I shit you not, they were ecstatic about how horrible the new draft would be if it included females. There arguments were fairly houmourous, though. They said "well, then you'd kill off an entire generation, instead of leaving the females" and "well, men are the stronger, tougher ones, so they should go and leave the women behind." And before I get a bunch of misandrists saying how horrible and typical those guys are, please note that no males argued against that idea. We had a bunch of women--in school and wearing pants--saying about how all of the seventeenth century misogynist ideas are, in their opinion, correct! I retorted: "What? So now that sexism is taken out of the equation, it's suddenly a horrible thing?" To which they responded with more sexist and misogynist talk, followed by discussion amongst themselves.

And this isn't the first case of bigotry in that class. Many were talking about how horrible Atheists are some time ago. They never discussed reasons for it, merely the idea. But, I don't remember enough about that incident to comment on it sufficiently.

At any rate, time for today's English lesson: number VII--mathematical operations. Fill in the blank: to order someone to do the following operation: 9+7, you tell them to _____ nine and seven. If you said "plus," then this is for you. "Plus," "minus," and "times" aren't mathematical operations--they are symbols. One times one is one, but if you multiply one and one, you get two. No exceptions. Good bye for now.