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Well ladies and gentlemen, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
There comes a time in all of our lives when you just gotta get up on a Saturday morning, take the dog to the dog park, pick up the poop the dog has deposited at the dog park (because others are around and have witnessed the fecal indiscretion), walk the dog to get your morning steps in, return home to a cold can of carbonated diet soda, and then take to the internet to bitch, gripe, and moan oxford comma style about the continued bastardization of common sense and the happy memories of days gone by.
In fact, I utter those words so much, I should probably have them emblazoned on a t-shirt for casual wear at the gym in accompaniment of my blatantly truthful yoga pants.
Wow.
There’s some verbal imagery that can’t be de-visualized.
Now that I’ve set you on edge and put you in the correct mindset to see things my way, let’s proceed.
Last night, I found myself wandering around a book store. The alternative was to join Wifey in the arts and crafts store looking for inspiration for the upcoming wreath season. Having endured just about as much inspiration that a 50 year old man can handle during wreath season, I opted to rely on the written word to spur my imagination.
The good news is that I got some inspiration.
The bad news is that said inspiration generally pissed me off.
All things being equal, there have been times where I visited other branches of the same chain of book stores and encountered far more disturbing events.
Yet at the same time, that particular event all those years ago didn’t serve to bastardize common sense and the happy memories of days gone by like last night’s encounter did.
Prior to the antagonistic assault I encountered, I wandered all over that store killing time. I checked out what was new in fiction and found nothing appealing. I traipsed through humor and found nothing funny. I navigated politics and current events and found myself wanton of some hand sanitizer. I wandered around the digital media section wondering just how significant the DVD and CD sales at a book store could be in this day and age where most of our media is purchased digitally out of some cloud up there in the sky. At the same time, there was an older gentlemen asking the young sales associate what album “Rainbow Connection” appears on.
“Muppet Movie soundtrack, track 1.” I chimed in. “I have it on 8-track in the garage if you’re interested.”
The boomer just looked at me and told me to go fly a kite instead.
Having sufficiently been put in my place, I wandered off to look at what else was placed in the store that I didn’t want to buy. And there it was.
Right smack dab in the edumacation section was a collection of math books geared to assist those in the 2nd grade.
Granted, it wasn’t the mere fact that it was a math book that caught my attention. Instead, it was the theme of the book and probably one of the saving graces from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
That’s right y’all. Darth Maul was on the cover.
This character was basically the 1999 version of Boba Fett.
He was a bad ass.
He was under used.
He had probably fewer lines than Maggie Simpson and Silent Bob combined.
He was killed off too early in the grand scheme of things, if you want to subscribe to the notion that he was killed off at all.
I’m not going to warn you about spoilers here. After all, Rosebud was Luke’s father and Darth Vader was a sled.
Back to the math book.
Let me drop some background on you about your favorite blogger on the worldwide web. During my extensive and uncompleted college career, two of the fields of study where I dedicated a handful of semesters was Journalism and Mathematics.
Not all at once, mind you.
If memory serves, Journalism came after Data Processing, and Math rounded out that chain of events before I’m moved onto a Bidness orientation.
Sure it’s a messed up sock drawer of study when you get all myopic about it. In the grand scheme of things, my studies in each one of those fields have served me well over the years in my work life.
In that time that I was focusing on Math, my goal was to be a teacher.
Looking back, I’m glad I never followed through with that one. Aside from the monotony and ennui associated with the premise of teaching the same old thing year after year for the entirety of a career, I just couldn’t envision dealing with the kids of other people for that much of my waking hours without blowing my stack.
All these years later, cultural de-evolution and my generation’s colossal ability to jack up the practice of parenting has left educating our young to be a process by which our offspring and other spawn are taught how to pass standardized tests created by a collective groupthink of policy wonks and bureaucrats.
Now aside from wondering what prompted you to get this far into this rant, you’re probably wondering where I’m going with it. That’s understandable. I was just wondering the same thing myself, so I’ll wrap up my indictment of the educational system with the note that the Darth Maul Math Book I’m bitchin’ about “Aligns With National Common Core Standards”.
Common Core, ladies and gentlemen, is the epitome of what I’m griping about. Remember the old commercial that compared an egg in a frying pan to your brain on drugs? This is now emblematic of your kids brains on Common Core math. It involves a bunch of estimations (wild ass guesses) and the suspension of straight forward thinking.
The creation of the Star Wars universe took a great deal of imagination, thinking outside of the box, innovation, trail blazing, creativity, and several other activities I could pull out of the thesaurus. How dare the publishers of that math book appropriate all of that effort with the bastardization of education.
If you’re not whipped up in a froth yet, go back and read that part about me in yoga pants. Just be sure to come right back, because there’s more irritation ahead.
Okay, assuming you’re in a state where you can’t even remember what your happy place is or how to get there, let’s discuss an even uglier insult with this book.
As I mentioned before, Darth Maul is a bad guy.
There are no puppy dogs, unicorns, or cupcakes in the life of this Sith Lord.
If Maul has anything to smile about, it’s because he’s about to do some wonderful things to your innards with his double bladed light saber. Even then, he’s brandishing a pretty evil grin.
Otherwise, this guy does not have the ability to generate a smile designed to make math fun for your average 7-8 year old.
Naturally, that didn’t stop the publishers of the this book from abandoning the bad-assary of Darth Maul by putting a goofy “Come learn 2nd grade math with your favorite light saber wielding villain” display of friendliness on his otherwise menacing mug of evil.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to finish this thought before I go outside and mow the lawn.
Acts of stupidity like this are available to us for a dime a dozen.
Stop chipping in the damn dimes.
