It is with a mighty "heh" that I register the information that President Obama will not seriously consider education reform until sometime between the mid-term elections (2010) and the re-election campaign (for 2012, of course). All of his speeches and assertions so far about education are merely politics and policy. The real meat-and-potatoes stuff that will require folks to go back to the drawing boards to reconsider, redesign and restructure education from kindergarten to high school graduation will not get the great presidential shove in the back until it's time to establish the themes for the second Obama administration.
Why then?
Malia Obama, the eldest First Daughter, will have to take the three-year transition from arithmetic to Algebra to Geometry. Her younger sister Sasha will have to go through the same thing during the second term. I choose to smile and make a nod towards the correlation of challenging mathematics and puberty.
The diary continues in a moment.
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I don't know whether I hope the Obama parents are brushing-up on their factoring skills or not. As a teacher, I take a grim pleasure in considering a moment when, after a day leading the world, the President walks into the family residence part of the White House and confronts his wife and eldest daughter in full hormonal fury, daughter versus mother, and the spark issue was a seemingly-unsolvable quadratic equation or a multiplication problem involving algebraic fractions (otherwise known as "rational expressions," but the f-word- fractions- causes people to mumble or shout the other f-word more often, it seems, than anything else in mathematics).
Can I see a show of hands for anyone who has already said, or heard, the following? "You talk to her. She won't listen to me."
Somehow, somewhere, the collective intelligence of Those Who Write Education Policy (definitely not teachers) has created a one-to-one correspondence between adolescence, during which sweet, concrete-thinking children change into unpredictable psychopaths, with equivalence (two things have the same value but look different- consider the effect that has on parent-adolescent communication) and pattern recognition and manipulation (ditto). A metaphor for this is, I suppose, the system of dams and levies, augmented by furiously working citizens with sandbags, trying to control and direct a rising river. Even a tiny break can lead to floods on a biblical scale.
I wonder if the President would like my phone number on speed dial for those crisis moments.
Any questions?