On Kids and Old-Timey Days

In one of the episodes of Alvin and the Chipmunks (not every day I get to start a sentence with that) that I watched at the age of eight or so, the Chipettes are being babysat by this old lady they don’t like because she’s strict and not “hip” enough for them. Although the Chipettes bitch about having to be with her and revolt against her every command, they finally find a common bond through song: it turns out the old lady liked music in her day, too, and the Chipettes and the old lady give a bouncy rendition of “I Wanna be Loved By You.” Moral of the story: even old-timey things can be fun.

I remember even as a kid cringing a bit at the awkward schmaltziness of that episode, but that’s not what really strikes me about it. About ten years after seeing that episode, I watched Some Like It Hot for the first time and was astounded to find that contrary to what the Chipmunks episode implied—-that "I Wanna Be Loved By You" was a saccharine piece of shit--it was in fact a seduction barely appropriate for kids (especially with the blush-inducing, practically see-through dress she’s wearing), making it way more badass than the Chipettes could ever make it seem.

Of course, Marilyn Monroe could even make the Happy Birthday song sound raunchy, and I haven’t heard the Helen Kane version, but I bet it’s more in line with the Chipettes’ and is probably actually the version the old lady knew and loved. But that’s beside the point. The creators of that episode chose that particular song—-out of all songs they could have chosen—-to represent the old-timey days, and they chose one of the dorkiest songs ever (if the Helen Kane version is, in fact, as dorky and obnoxious as the Chipettes’ version), making the “old-fashioned things are fun!” message all the more sugar-coated and unconvincing.

The fact that it’s apparently necessary to sugar-coat the old days to make them seem “more entertaining” is clearly because most kids are resistant to anything created prior to their birth. My sister vehemently refused to watch black and white movies until she was about eighteen. My brother has actually insisted on wanting to only watch something made in the last ten years. I have never been able to understand this, having never been resistant to anything from any age (except the Middle Ages—-they sucked!). It wasn’t a matter of having been more disciplined or tolerant, or even convincing myself that old-timey things could be fun—-it’s that I don't see them as "old-timey". Yes, they were from long ago, but I just see them as different as opposed to quaint and laughable. Because as much as external things change, human nature never does (at least not yet, Isaac Asimov). Therefore, if Marilyn Monroe singing “I Wanna Be Loved By You” was sexy as hell in the 50’s, it’s still sexy as hell now.

How is this different from the moral of the Chipettes? It’s the difference between some idiot saying “LEARNING CAN BE FUN!!” and dressing up a math book with all sort of colors and shit, and saying, no, I like my learning straight up, please. Because in that case, it’s the learning itself that’s fun—-not that all the crap around it is fun in spite of the learning. To me, the idiot saying “Learning is fun” actually serves only to convince me that learning is not, in fact, fun, as if it “protests too much”. Of course, I say this having grown up on Sesame Street and Square 1 TV, whose sole purpose is edu-tainment, but I suppose the difference is that they’re actually effective: they bury the hidden intention to educate so deeply and so skillfully that it feels more like an entertaining show that happens to include educational things-—because why not? The whole world is educational, really. Here’s an example: that famous thing on Sesame Street where they “Brought to you by the letter G” or some other number or letter. Strangely enough, I totally didn’t get that it was a parody until just recently when I happened to randomly think of it, but even if a kid doesn’t get that it’s a parody, they know that many shows say “brought you you by”, and this particular show happens to be brought to you by letters and numbers instead of products (hence this is also an example of Sesame Street’s extraordinary double-layering of humor for both adults and children—-as well as the fact that it’s, mercifully, public instead of commercial television. God, Sesame Street rules!).

I had to confront the horror of “Learning can be fun” head on when I was teaching the SAT to high school students.

The director of the program twice told me that according to the surveys they gave the kids, the area of teaching I was most deficient in was motivating the kids to learn (although even in that I still got about 4 points out of 5). My attitude was like, motivating them to learn is their own damn responsibility! Which is of course exactly why I failed to motivate them. The director’s suggestion to me to solve this problem was to make the class more fun. And I was like, it’s the SAT—-it’s fun already! (Hahaha.) Apparently the director’s concept of fun was doing word games like hangman with the vocabulary words for that week. And I was like, a) how can hangman teach anyone vocab?? and b) that’s not fun. Apparently I was the only one who thought b), because the kids actually did seem to enjoy it the most out of everything else we did. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go through round after round of hangman (and other word games), bored out of my mind, and not because I was the teacher: I’m sure I would have felt the same way as a student, too.

As far as I can tell, by the time you get to the SAT, the time for fun is over. By that time, all you can do is really learn the test. It’s all the learning on the way to sixteen that can possibly afford to be fun, because fun takes time. I so badly wanted to take those kids to plays and get them listening to NPR and reading books on subjects they were interested in instead of random excerpts that were often snoresville even to me, but with a hundred vocab words a week to memorize and the test a semester away, we couldn’t afford to go the organic route, so hangman was all we had. (Not that learning a hundred vocab words a week is a great idea anyway or would really help you on the SAT. Surely there must be some pedogogical theory against it, like there is against cramming.)

I guess what I’m trying to say is that most kids hate the old-timey days and learning, and that this completely baffles me. I once had an argument with a kid I was tutoring over the necessity of algebra: you know, the age-old crap about how “I’m going to be a rock star; I’ll never have any use for algebra,” and while I gave him the age-old answer of “you never know,” all I was really thinking was “why wouldn’t you want to learn it just for fun?” I know this seems really goody-two-shoes, but that's exactly the problem I'm talking about: because authority figures ram learning down kids' throats, actually genuinely being interested in something is seen as being "goody-two-shoes". And since when did kids do things based on practicality, anyway? I bet that kid played video games hours a day, which (unless he wanted to be a video game designer) was just as useless to his supposed future career as algebra.

But here’s what I wish I could have said—-to him and the kids in the SAT classes: curiosity is a sign of intelligence. You are not curious—-in fact, extremely INcurious. This is a syllogism. But since you don’t know what that is and have no desire to find out, I guess you’ll never know what I meant by that.

(By the way, this essay would not pass muster for the SAT graders.)

What I wish I learned in college—car accident fatality edition

A lot of people bag on their college education—-they’ve forgotten everything they learned, being able to analyze To the Lighthouse never helped them get a job, blah blah. Now I’m not going to that far. I actually think I’ve actually used my English degree in my chosen profession and even my day job—-and NO I’m not a teacher.

But there are a few aspects to real life that I felt woefully unprepared for upon graduation. For instance, there really, really, really should be a Health Insurance 101. And it should be a requirement. I also wish introductory classes to finance and economics had been a requirement, since there was no way I was going to take those classes of my own volition and take away time from my novel reading, and since I now feel completely lost in regards to economic issues and had to flounder around with my personal finances at square one.

But those aren’t the classes I want to discuss today. Today I would like to discuss the necessity of using education to prevent people from dying in car accidents. Or having them in the first place. And I’m not talking about some lame-ass DARE-type program (although I actually loved DARE, haha) where you see gory pictures of people in car crashes, although I’m sure that helps to an extent. No, I’m talking about evasive driving courses.

Oh sure, evasive driving courses exist, but they cost a shitload of money and no one takes them. And oh sure, you have to take driver’s ed, but that just teaches you how to drive, not how to evade a car coming right at you. At the same time, do you know what your likelihood of dying in an accident is? If you’re in your twenties, it’s the most likely way for you to die, higher than every single disease or other type of accident. Almost every time I get into my car, I feel like I’m stepping into a death trap. I should probably take public transportation more often.

Anyone ever heard of Jacqui Saburido? She’s one of those stories to scare you into never drinking and driving, since she was in a car hit head-on by a drunk driver. And maybe there’s nothing that could have prevented that, even with the most skillful driver at the wheel. But who knows: maybe if the driver had taken an evasive driving course, they would have known what to do and would have avoided the accident, or at least it may not have been as bad as it was (the driver and front seat passenger were killed instantly).

For that matter, I don’t see why colleges (or better, high schools) also don’t mandate courses in Krav Maga. That’s a mixed martial art form developed by the Israeli army that’s the only martial art I know of that actually takes guns into account, making it actually applicable to the modern world. It’s designed for last-resort situations where someone’s going to kill you whether you act or not. Doesn’t that seem like something you might want to know??

You know why they don’t already teach these courses? Other than lack of desire, it’s also, of course, lack of funds. Ritzy private schools, however, have no excuse.

No one wants to think about this stuff. Whenever we have to go to our office’s safety orientation, we kind of chuckle and roll our eyes. But in the middle of a fire, it’s not going to seem so funny. I sure would have like to have taken a “what to do if the ship sinks” course before getting on the Titanic. In light of disasters like that, such training doesn’t seem so quaint.

But it would also be a pain to take all those courses, wouldn’t it? All that time we’d be spending on evasive driving and Krav Maga is time away from what we really want spend our time (and money) on (like plasma screens and WoW). Fatal accidents and attacks happen just rarely enough that they don’t seem worth preparing for—-the same reason a lot of people in Los Angeles don’t bolt down their furniture in case of an earthquake. But we do have enough foresight to have health insurance, car insurance, life insurance, disability insurance—-although a lot of that is—-surprise!--mandated by the state, or else we’d never do it. So why not require training to minimize the risk of ever making a claim on our disability or life insurance in the first place? Who even knows how to do CPR?? (I don’t.)

That said, am I now gonna run out and take such courses? Hell no, I don’t have the time for that. But it sure would have been nice to have done it in college. If I had to.