September 15, 2023
Editor’s Note: Since launching the website. we’ve experimented with some changes to the newsletter. You, our readers, have made clear that you enjoy receiving the full stories in the newsletter format. So we are going to continue to do so. Links to the website story will be placed in the title of each story.
A Good Run for Stafford Schools
by Martin Davis
FOUNDER AND EDITOR
Schools are under intense scrutiny these days, with people from the governor on down talking about the failure of traditional public education for all. But in Stafford County, the past week has brought a lot of news to celebrate.
Last Friday the district released the following news:
According to the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) State Accreditation Report, all schools in Stafford County earned the highest accreditation rating of “Fully Accredited” for this school year.
The county’s not resting on its laurels, however.
“There are a lot of gaps to fill,” said Dr. Thomas W. Taylor, Superintendent. “We recognize that there is a lot of room for improvement in these areas and we are committed to continuous improvement that leads to Stafford Schools becoming the highest performing school division in the Commonwealth.”
Of particular concern is chronic absenteeism. “There is a direct correlation between absenteeism and proficient levels of student achievement. Our students need to be in school, and they need to be engaged every day,” continued Dr. Taylor.
On Thursday, the district announced that it had awarded a contract for the construction of high school No. 6, which is needed to deal with overcrowding.
A groundbreaking ceremony will take place Tuesday, October 24, at 12;30 p.m. The school will be constructed in the southwest quadrant of Stafford County between Route 17 and Truslow Road.
In between those two announcements was the news on Tuesday that Silver Companies Foundation was giving $30,000 to Stafford schools to support six minority Stafford educators completing their raining and professional learning needed to earn licensure with the Virginia Department of Education.
The six the grant supports are members of the first “Reflect Stafford” cohort, which is a program that aims to recruit and retain teachers of diverse backgrounds in order to better reflect the student body demographics.
“Though Stafford Schools is considered a minority-majority school district, our staff demographics aren’t even close to our student and family demographics,” said Taylor. “We acknowledge that this is a barrier for some families and kids. The inaugural Reflect Stafford cohort … will … strengthen our schools by adding instructors with backgrounds that better reflect our student population.”
SATIRE: What’s 69 plus 69? Dinner for Four
by Martin Davis
EDITOR AND FOUNDER
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.
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-Martin Davis, Editor
That dictionary might not be reliable. They don’t know it’s from its when they say “pounces on it’s prey.”
After doing very well in trigonometry 60 years ago, I still have absolutely no idea what all the terms mean and I only know that it helps determine how tall a tree is without having to use a very long tape measure and climbing to the top. Perhaps if there has been sex in my text book I might understand it all.
Humorous indeed, but pathetic on the part of Mark Taylor, Esq.
That’s a riot. Thanks, Martin.
TGIF
Robert Kravetz
As a former teacher who is a lifelong resident, I find your articles quite refreshing and well written. I can attest the vulgarity of math and pray for the innocent children exposed to it. How far have we fallen?