Let me be straight – math and I never enjoyed an intimate relationship.
Two tumbles with Algebra (once in high school and once in college), I learned, were enough for me. Math was simply out of my league.
Praise the Lord I was too dumb to venture deeper into the mysterious world of numbers. Who knows how much damage I would have suffered had math and I intertwined?
Apparently, quite a bit.
My colleague Shaun Kenney argues that the Spotsylvania School Board’s war “over who-reads-what has to be the dumbest, most ignorant, most illiterate and stupidest debate on the history of God’s green earth.”
Oh how wrong he was.
Thanks to the School Board’s work to shelter us from the vast array of pornography that exists in the public school libraries, and now the schools’ forcing teachers to stick a warning label on student syllabi about dirty words in textbooks, I now know that that word (you know, s – e – *) has infiltrated our AP Calculus classes.
You read that right.
Superintendent Mark Taylor warned that we don’t know what’s in our school libraries’ 400,000-plus volumes, or in our textbooks. I think he does. Otherwise, why would he have had AP Calculus teachers post the following on their syllabi:
(And yes – this is actually on the syllabi in Spotsylvania classes offering AP Calculus.)
Well thank god our teachers have been put on alert and are being required to protect our children from sexual content.
I thought, after all, that math was safe from sex. But Taylor has done his homework. After all, had I not seen that warning label, I would have never started Googling things like “Sexual content in Calculus.” Oh the things that filthy discipline is teaching our innocent children.
For example, there’s a book called The Calculus of Coitus, which:
attempts to show that this dreaded discipline is more scintillating — and more relevant — than most of us ever dreamed. The book presents current mathematical research that can be used to answer questions like: How will we know when we’ve found “the one”? How much should individual partners compromise in a relationship? Who has better orgasms, men or women? Cresswell also uses mathematical equations to show how dating services work and why most people will end up happier if they actively proposition as many desirable partners as possible.
There it is, plain as 2 + 2! Take AP Calculus, and your innocent children will be taught to proposition anyone and everyone they find attractive.
They’d also laugh at cartoons like this one (WARNING – NSFW).
And then there are the jokes that no doubt get circulated when the recorders are off and kids are concentrating too hard on the curves of the integral sign. I mean, can you imagine?
In fact, there are whole websites dedicated to sexual math jokes. (You guessed it, that site’s NSFW, too.)
What’s 69 + 69? It’s dinner for four.
What is 6.9? Good sex interrupted by a period.
Q: How are math and sex the same?
A: I don’t get either one.
And it goes on and on.
So shocked was I to learn of the graphic nature of Calculus that I signed up to be on the School Board taskforce charged with finding every possible sexually explicit word, photo, math symbol (see integral sign – look long and hard), maps (Does Africa look slightly pregnant? – Scratch it), videos, and more. It’s name?
Sex Undermining Children’s Knowledge-acquisition.
But I’m not without criticism of Taylor and the School Board. Have you looked at the digital clocks in the schools? The 8 looks like a computerized drawing of Sophia Loren. Take them out and replace them with Analog clocks (Roman numerals only, please).
And Courtland High School has to get a new nickname. “Cougars”? If you have to ask, look it up in the urban dictionary.
They’re doing good work in Spotsy – but they’re not looking hard enough. So I’m taking up the mantle.
Now, I wonder if I can still get into that Intro to Calculus class at Germanna. I have a lot to learn – for the children, of course.
