My One Sided Conversation With Barack

I am now getting minute by minute text messages from our president. I signed up to get his twitter feed sent directly to my phone. It was a mistake. I get a lot of messages from him. It’s like thinking someone’s cool and then getting to know them and finding out they are not. Yesterday He kept droning on and on and on about smaller class size.

Barack says, “I want smaller classrooms for kids.”

I am all for our children’s education. I think the less they learn the harder my life is going to be when I get old and I would like to get old someday, and I would like my old age to be easy, but are smaller class rooms the way to go?

I think the issue is the apathy of the American students, the malaise of boredom, in addition to a prison like environment, and the jailor like attitude of the instructors, the rigors of standardized testing. I remember one of my nephews a few years ago, he had to pass a single test or he would be left behind if he graded lower than a certain point.

He was in tears.

Couldn’t sleep.

Stressed to the point of hives.

He was in middle school. I don’t ever remember being that stressed out in school at any point in my life and I have a college degree. Two in fact, and some of a third. I had a boss from Mumbai, India. We were standing in our office’s kitchen and I was listening to him talk about his children learning English and how he was worried that they would have a tough time when they went to school fitting in with the other kids. It made me curious about his education.

The guy was brilliant. He could code programing like no one I have ever seen. He could run numbers faster than a calculator, and his logic abilities were amazing. One of the smartest people I have ever met. Seriously one of the smartest people I have ever met.

“How are schools in India,” I asked.

“Full,” he retorted as if it was going to be the final word on the subject. I pushed and got, “Big classrooms 60 to 70 kids, one teacher who lectured.

“How did the teacher cater to all of those students?”

“She didn’t, gave no individual attention, I don’t remember ever being addressed in school by a teacher. Either you learned or you didn’t.”

“How did a system like that produce you?” I asked. It might seem like ass kissing, but I was genuinely curious. I went through an education system with half the number of kids my boss did and have the math skills of a goat and I am not being fair to the goat.

“We took what we were going to be tested on home and had a tutor go over the information with us until we knew it.“

“So tutoring was available for everyone?” I was thinking about my community college days preparing to pass the state mandated standardized math test. I had to take this test to get my first degree, because my math grades were below a 3.0. I went to a study lab and tried to work my head around the quadratic formula and other rules and laws of the subject and had available to me people who would come and answer my ridiculous questions. Without that lab, oh how much less debt I would have right now.

“No. tutoring was something the mothers and fathers provided.”

“Cheap?” I was getting rude, I was so curious I had to know, how such an overcrowded education system produced a commodity such as my boss who was worth enough in American currency for my company to bring him over here support his visa and pay him gobs of money.

“No.” and he got embarrassed.

I told Barack about the larger class sizes in India. “…think deeper not smaller. “ I was ignored.

He has lots of followers.

I was not truly expecting a conversation with the president, but the tweets being sent to my phone started to make me irritated.

Barack says, “More teachers will be able to teach more kids at the speed they need,” and “smaller class size means more help to kids”, and “large class sizes mean kids who fall in the middle are easier prey to the cracks of obscurity.”

My first retort was, “More teachers equals more bureaucracy, kids don’t care, number of teachers will not change that.”

My second, “More teachers to pay to baby sit bored kids cramming for standardized tests.”

And then finally giving up on the matter and realizing that education reform was not a subject I should even be involved in I sent, “You got my vote, but it’s too bad we can’t hear some talk about innovation and change regarding education. Class size is not the true issue, how our kids enter their adult lives, now that is a point of importance that need to be discussed.”

Then I shut up. There wasn’t much point in responding to the tweets. My voice is too soft and meek to be heard, and the teachers’ lobby and millions to spend every four years. I am still getting tweets from the president, today though; I think I will ignore them.