How to divide 90 by 18 in 108 steps

… and other wonders of Common Core

A mother speaking to the Arkansas Board of Education on 16 December is being hailed on many websites for “obliterating” the Common Core curriculum by posing a simple fourth-grade math problem to the board members.  (Video here; math problem read out starting around 1:45.)

The board members are able to solve the problem instantaneously by dividing 90 by 18 and coming up with 5.  Granted, this was some years ago for me, but I do remember that in fourth grade, I could have solved the problem that way too.

Schools asking parents, students to declare political affiliation

This can’t be coincidence.  Blog reports in the last two weeks indicate that public schools in two different states have assigned students to identify their political affiliation by answering questions about policy issues (mostly social-policy issues).  The assignments are handed in.

This isn’t a matter of students being asked

Video: Manhattan college students play “baby-killing” game

It turns out that when you insist it’s just a blob of tissue, people do view it without respect.  Students in the video here are playing a game in which young males put balloons under their shirts and try to pop each others’ balloons – with onlookers shouting, “Kill that baby!  Kill it!”

That’s bad enough, of course.  I’m struck by something else as well: the astounding immaturity of the people involved.  This isn’t what undergrads looked or acted like when I was in college.  We were mostly bleary-eyed from working, studying, and keeping up with activities.  We were, naturally, callow, self-important, and over-earnest.  But at the same age as the kids in the video, we would have been taken for adults, rather than for eight-year-olds.  The students in this video literally run around giggling like children in elementary school.

The males’ activity is, moreover,

Are the American voters idiots?

What do you think, readers?

I still say no, even after 2008, when it took very little effort to find out everything you needed to know about Barack Obama.  Steeped in ‘60s-era radicalism, a “community organizer,” and a close associate of everyone in the political-guilt shakedown industry in Chicago.  This guy was everything my leftist college professors thought of as a hero.

His associates, political thugs, pried open sealed divorce and child-custody records to embarrass his opponents in the 2006 Senate race.  Yet his own records

Glenn Beck, History, and Why Tolstoy Was Wrong

It’s one of the most memorable lines in fiction, but it’s inaccurate. Leo Tolstoy opened his novel Anna Karenina with this proclamation:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

The implication here, that there is an interesting variety in unhappiness, is one of the human race’s most profoundly erroneous beliefs. Unhappiness takes only a very few forms, and they recur with unvarying consistency in every generation.  Happiness, even in family life, is much more varied, eye-opening, and worthy of interest.

The same can be said of chronic unhappiness in people’s political and social views.  There are no new or interesting reasons for being angry, indignant, or resentful about the status quo or the iniquities of others.