The Kids Are(n't?) Alright

Da Update

Henlo frens.

It’s been quite a long damn while.

You see, I’ve taken on a new profession that’s kept me quite occupied and away from the keyboard as of late. In short, I’ve been busy, but the kind of busy that’s productive. Peaceful. The Dutch have a phrase for it: “gezellig druk”. “Pleasantly busy”, in a way.

To catch you up, I’ve been working a remote job for the past few years in Compliance. It was something that seemed like a fantastic job. I had started the job back when I lived in New England. After the "lockdowns”, the job had converted to more remote working environment. Essentially, my job consisted of reading regulations, ensuring we were following regulations, and dealing with the absolutely fucktarded bureaucrats in charge of enforcing those regulations.

Most of my day consisted of reading regulations that were drafted by empty-headed, unelected morons and I had to make sure the company adhered to this dreck. Often the regulations were so poorly worded that the regulating body could fine us for literally anything, and boy did they try.

In short, my life became a world of staring at Excel spreadsheets and reading the fine print in esoteric state codes. It involved handling “crises” with no real consequence other than the State would come pounding on our door had we not dealt with it.

I was good at it. At least, my boss seemed to think so. The job paid decently, and my “work-life balance” was in “good order”. That is, there were periods where I had fuckall to do at work and periods where I had to burn the midnight oil. I kept getting raises. The boss told me that they wouldn’t monitor my “work time” like so many places with remote workers do so long as the work got done. It did, and he was happy.

Had I still been at the office, these light days would have been spent chatting with people or maybe tightening up some procedure I found during a visual inspection, but when working remotely it meant I had nothing to do. Sure, I could scrape the bottom of the barrel to find more efficiency or conduct some kind of audit, but the pressing question was: why?

I had no passion for the job, and really no room for growth. I headed a one-man department named “Compliance”. I wasn’t going to get much further, nor did I want to.

So, in my absolute boredom, I took to surfing the interwebs. I’d see what was happening around the country. I listened to podcasts and livestreams and eventually found Substack. I wrote a few Substack articles. These are all things I had liberty to do because I could not think about work.

I was more worried about the meaning of life.

The longing of the soul.

How wrong everything felt.

How I should be doing anything with my time other than this.

I just could not sit back, play videogames, and cash my checks. Something had to change. I started poking around for some job opportunities on the island (oh yeah, since I was working remotely, I moved to the Caribbean), and found they had a science teacher position at a local private school.

I hesitated for a while, but then applied at the insistence of my wife. She knew I was losing my mind being stuck at home all day. She knew I was bored. She knew I was restless.

She knew I’d be good at this.

In my interview, the director of the school looked at my rather curious resume, and asked:
”So… why are you willing to work twice the hours for half the pay?”
I paused, for a moment because I wasn’t anticipating the question.

I finally blurted out:
”Purpose”.

He nodded his head, and we moved on. I had no teaching experience save for my time in grad school as a TA and my time spent teaching scuba. But he explained to me before we left:
”Hey , around here, we’re not necessarily looking at resumes, we’re looking for a certain sort of person.”

I got the job.

The next few months during the summer break I was sweating bullets. The job wasn’t just a middle-school general science position; it was a High School Physics position. And it wasn’t just a typical Physics program, but an IB physics program. It’s rigorous. I was a chemist by training. I was a bit rusty at chemistry and I damn sure well was rusty at physics. I almost got cold feet.

This school, by its nature, has a high turnover of teachers. The teachers at this type of school are typically nomads. They go to one international school, teach for a while, then go on to the next adventure. As such, I was put in a “staff week” of teambuilding and “how to do things our way” type of training.

I met teachers with an incredible amount of experience. Even the younger ones have been doing this for over eight years. The question comes to me: “So do you have any experience teaching IB?”

“Uh… yeah, this is my first time”.

“Oh, so did you teach the AP curriculum before?”

”Oh, I mean, this is my first year teaching”

The look of concern on their faces was palpable.

But hey, you have to start somewhere right?

Idiocracy

I got the 10th, 11th and 12th grade science classes. 10th grade is Chemistry. Right up my alley. 11th and 12th grade was Diploma Program Physics. For the 12th graders, they had already been through one year of Physics. It was my job to prep them for the final IB examinations. I had no idea what their previous teacher had done the previous year, but apparently he was a braniac. Mechanical engineer or something.

In the last few days before school started I crammed and I crammed hard. I tried to recall all of the derivations I learned way back in undergrad. I finally met the kids, and to my amazement, they listened to me. I guess I forgot that with kids, the role of authority is expected.

Shortly into my first quarter, I learned, to my absolute amazement, just how bad my 10th graders were at math and, to be fair, any form of critical thinking.

They couldn’t understand ratios. They couldn’t understand basic unit conversions. I had to explain to them that you have to record the mass of a beaker first before you put stuff in it, and then you’d subtract the mass of the beaker + the stuff from the mass of the beaker alone to get the amount of stuff you had in a beaker.

Their minds were absolutely blown by this.

So, as of now, I have a room of 14-15 year olds that cannot grasp the concept of “If the label on the Coca-Cola can says there are 39 grams of sugar in the 355 mL can, then that means there is 0.1099 grams of sugar per milliliter of cola.

Yeah. It’s tough going.

When trying to explain the concept of “Mass percent” in a solution, I said “Hey, you guys know how to take a percentage right? A part over a whole?”

”We never learned percentages”.

Bullshit, I wanted to scream. I know for a fact you learned this in 6th grade you little shits.

But what I was shocked at the most was the absolute lack of attempt at thinking.

Our first lab was determining the amount of water in a hydrated copper sulfate salt.

To me, this seemed like the most straightforward lab imaginable. Copper sulfate can exist as a pentahydrate: that is, for every copper sulfate you had, you had 5 waters attached to it. It’s hydrated, you see.

So naturally, as I explained thoroughly, if we apply heat, we can evaporate the water, and then by comparing the mass of the dehydrated salt to the hydrated salt, we can find how much water is in the salt.

We can then calculate the number of moles of water compared to the number of moles of copper sulfate. We should be able to recreate the chemical formula by experimentation: CuSO4 * 5 H2O.

And, yeah, man was that a chore. I can’t tell you how many different ways I had to explain to students that the copper sulfate weighed less after heating it because the mass that was lost was due to evaporating water.

This was lost on them. Completely.

I, honestly, was flabbergasted. I was unprepared for how poorly this would go. But it occurred to me that up until this point these kids were not taught to think. They kept complaining that I didn’t provide “study guides” with the things they ought to know for a test.

I told them their “study guide” was their notes and their homework assignments.

Most of them didn’t take notes.

For their first homework assignment, I assigned them questions from the book.

They were confused at how to turn it in. I had to tell them “write the answers to the questions down on a piece of paper and, um, give it to me.”

It was about this time that I realized these kids never actually had to turn a physical piece of paper in as homework. It was all done with on-line multiple choice quizzes. Kahoot. Google Forms. etc.

The entire notion of “showing your work” is lost on them. The entire idea of constructing a rational train of thought is foreign. They thought they would just be expected to memorize some definitions and processes and be on their way.

Man, they were wrong. They were dead wrong. At least in my class they are. There was no way I was going to have these kids go through my chemistry class without having to think, I told myself.

Erica

Maybe I’m picking on the 10th graders a little too much here. I can’t say they are all like that. There are, like in any class, kids who understand that most learning doesn’t take place in the classroom. It takes place on your own. They read the book. They take notes. They watch Youtube videos on the subject to fill in gaps in their knowledge. They know how to think and how to learn. These kids are near and dear to my heart.

My 12th grade class is like this. I guess part of this is how the IB’s Diploma Program is structured. Once students get to 11th grade, they choose a science class that they will take for two years. At our school that choice is between Biology and Physics. Most kids are scared to death of the math in physics, so naturally I get the nerds.

Somewhere along the way, they learned, for the most part, how to learn. They provided me a decent lab report. They know how to think through the (often complex) word problems the IB likes to throw at them. They’re seasoned.

But they can also be lazy.

One of these kids is a blonde-haired surfer-looking dude. It’s painfully obvious that the kid likes to party. I want to ostracize him when he’s not paying attention in class but at this point I’m thinking “Hey, he’s a senior. He wants to go to college, he’ll be on his own by then. He’s digging his own grave. He should know how this works by now.”

Progress reports come out and he’s got a failing grade. He just isn’t doing the work. I know he’s capable, just lazy. Disconnected. Distracted. Demoralized.

I assign a project in which the students are to build a pendulum device that can swing in time to a song. After building the pendulum, they present to me. They get to pick the first song, and then I pick a second song. They’ll have 5 minutes to adjust their rig to get it to swing in time to my song (or a song at any tempo). This requires them to come up with a mathematical model that will relate the length of the string to the beats per minute of the song.

Simple Harmonic Oscillation- it’s a cool project. I dig it (and I can’t say I came up with it on my own).

During the start of the project, surfer dude and his group are trying to decide on a song to demo. He says “Hey how about this one?”, and through his phone I hear…

Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein

*boom boom boom* und das heißt:

*Boom boom boom* Erika!

I look up in astonishment. His lab partner says “Nooo! That’s a Nazi song!”

Now, I had told myself that I would avoid discussing politics amongst my colleagues, and that I damn sure would avoid talking about it in front of my students. No good can come from this, I figured. My fellow teachers would be aghast if I revealed my power level, and I would surely be subject to a whipping if I was accused of “corrupting the youth”, but I couldn’t help myself:

”Well, I mean, it was a popular march among the Bundeswehr during the time, but there’s nothing about the song that is explicitly tied to the NSDAP….”

I catch myself…

“Buutt… since it could be construed that way, I think, in the interests of sensitivity, maybe you should pick another song.”

Surfer dude is a troublemaker. A mischievous grin crosses his lips:
”But, Mr. Maize, it’s my favorite song.”

I understand immediately. I’ve got surfer dude figured out. I can’t help but be amused. I can’t help myself but mutter, almost inaudibly:
”Based.”

He looks surprised, I catch a grin, and then we move on.

I understand because I know what the kid’s going through. Single mom. She owns a business. She feels bad for him underperforming because she “can’t be there all the time”. She’s putting food on the table. Dad, of course, is out of the picture.

And surfer dude sees a world that is aligned against him. His masculine impulses are demonized. His self-interest is a thing of loathing to his peers and to his teachers. After all, that’s only for the students of color and women and gender fluids.

Him? He needs to check his privilege, you see.

And, facing a world that is going to offer him no quarter, no favors, no sympathy, he does what many of his kind do: they give up.

If your ambitions are actively being quashed by the establishment, why even try? Why not just try and have a good time?
I’m not excusing his miserable performance, but I understand it now, and if I were a 17 year old kid during this nonsense, it probably would have been me.

Hell, it was me just a few years ago.

And it’s not just him. I had another kid- one of my tenth graders, bravely speak up against cancel culture in a room full of girls talking about sensitivity.

The teachers talk amongst themselves about how the 9th grade boys are, to their horror, “quoting Andrew Tate” and are saying “the most vile, homophobic things”.

I have to stifle a smile.

During Halloween I pass a kid in a helmet and cloak. After a second take, I see he’s dressed as a Templar Knight. In permanent marker, he has scrawled the words “Deus Vult” on the cloak.
Nice.

Periodically I subtly drop redpills about the fallibility of consensus-based science, and about how, say, pharmaceutical companies, have a vested financial interest in pushing their own agenda. I talk about the replication crisis. About how dark matter is essentially a mathematical invention, and that I bristle a bit at the way it’s talked about as absolute fact by the mainstream.

All of this is, of course, anathema to the IB (which is, naturally, at its heart a globohomo project). But hey, if our enemies got where they were by subverting our institutions, why not subvert theirs?

The IB text instructs the students that “back in Maxwell’s day scientists had to keep their findings a secret so they would get credit for their work, but now science is much more collaborative and there is international cooperation…yada yada.”

“Yeah”, I commented, “Tell that to the grad students I knew who had their chemistry experiments deliberately sabotaged by other grad students so they could publish first.”

I show an article with the headline “Washing dishes is a great stress reliever, Science Says” and ask them what the problem is with that headline. They know right away.

One of my seniors asked me about “that thing you were talking about where the experiments in a bunch of scientific articles can’t be reproduced,” because she wanted to write her Theory of Knowledge essay on that.

Maybe the kids are going to be alright.

And maybe I’ll be alright too.