I have been helping one of Tiffany’s daughters with her math homework recently. She’s currently learning about ratios. It is no wonder to me that she needs help. Not because she isn’t bright. In fact, she is very bright and has a natural knack for math, I would say. Rather, the text book is horrendous.

I am pretty decent at math, and I deal with ratios all the time in computer graphics and animation. But this text book confuses me. And I already know the topics it is covering. How on earth is someone new to the material supposed to find it helpful? And from what I hear, the teachers are extremely hit-or-miss.

Good god. This makes me really angry. The only kids that are going to learn this math are the kids that go off and learn it from completely separate sources. And at that point, what is the point of the school system? It seems like all it’s doing then is taking up valuable time that the kids could otherwise spend actually learning things. And how are kids supposed to develop a love of learning if this is their experience of it? It is sabotaging these kid’s lives.

Public schools need to be better than this. Why aren’t we funding them well, again? Why are we throwing them bone scraps? How do we stop this?

Also, apparently students are only allowed to go to the bathroom during class 3 times a week. Not per class, but for all of school. 3 times a week. How is that okay? If someone needs to go, they need to go. And they only have 5 minutes to get between classes, and their lunch break is 30 minutes. It sounds to me as if they need bladders and colons of steel if they expect to eat and get to their classes on time. Not to mention that is just an oppressive environment. I seriously fear for these kid’s psychological health.

This makes me absolutely livid.