Curse of the Gene Pool

The wind is out of the south and the sky is starting to cloud over. My wife calls to tell me that our son got a D on his latest math quiz. Going in the boy assured us he had this one in the bag, that the extra study time he’d invested would pay off; when he came home on quiz day he was confident of at least a B.

The kid is by no means incapable, he just dislikes math, and perhaps he comes by his aversion naturally, via the gene pool. I did okay with basic math but tanked when it came to algebra and geometry, to equations, solving for x; the language of math was like a buzz in my head, annoying and discordant, and no matter how hard I tried or how many hours I spent working out problems, I still felt like a man lost in a strange country.

My wife is better at math than I am, but understanding never came easily for her, either; she had to work extra hard at it.

What’s a parent to do in this anxious age, when the school curriculum moves like lightning, teachers are stressed and constantly under fire, school administrators and State officials are obsessed with standardized test scores, education budgets are gutted year after year because politicians in California don’t have the stones to confront the unintended consequences of Prop 13, and principals spend most of their time fund raising?

The public education system that was for many years the envy of the nation is a shell of its former self, and California now swims at the bottom of a muddy pool with Mississippi and Louisiana and Arkansas.

The Golden State, for reasons of politics and money, which in this era are indistinguishable from one another – decided to put prisons ahead of public education. It doesn’t seem to be working that great.

But back to my son and math: what to do? Private tutoring? Done that. Peer tutoring? Kid refuses. Threats, rewards, pleas? Tried them all.

People who hate exercise won’t go to the gym and kids who equate Algebra with torture shy from the subject. If you don’t like something, you won’t do it, at least not willingly.

When I lived in Japan in the early 1980’s, I remember the annual ritual of “Examination Hell,” a week of intense testing for high school seniors that determined what colleges they could enter. The better the college or university, the better the job prospects, and a position with a prestigious corporation often meant the difference between an affluent life and a mediocre one. Exam Hell Week was high stakes and even higher anxiety and stress, and every year some poor kid slashed his wrists or leaped to his death from an elevated train platform because his test scores didn’t measure up. Not only had the kid failed himself, he had failed his parents, his grandparents and his ancestors, shamed them all.

I always thought Japan’s system insane and inhumane, but in large part, America has adopted the same sort of madness. The curriculum has become dangerously narrow, focused on math and language arts and prepackaged “aligned standards,” and weeks before the annual standardized tests the kids are prepped and prodded and exhorted, while parents are bombarded with pre-recorded telephone messages reminding them to make sure their children are well rested and fed a nutritious breakfast on testing day.

It’s the AA age but by that I mean anxiety and austerity. The kid tanked on his test and I sit here feeling as if I let him down.