This Time It’s For Real

September 20, 2009 (?)

As millions of American children confront the first homework assignment of the new school year, a recent education survey has revealed that seventy percent of American teenagers cannot locate France on a map, sixty percent cannot locate California, and, as expected by many parents, fifty five percent of American teenagers cannot locate “the map” itself, when it’s hanging in front of them on a classroom wall. Teachers and educators blame the poor geographic skills of American schoolchildren on an education system that focuses, on reading, math, history, and a bewildering web of school rules, classroom restrictions, and hallway regulations that make sense only when applied to certain species of social insects.

Educators also blame parents who provide children with little latitude for learning about Earth-based locations that do not have shopping malls or where the unemployment rate is above nine percent.

Said history Teach Runwhy Cornel at Dade City Florida’s Pasco High School:

“ The last time I pointed to a classroom map and asked students what it was for, they hedged, stammered, and stuttered answers such as:

– ‘I dunn-no—like, is it some Lord of the Rings thing?’

Or:

‘I got it. It’s one of those funny roach shapes psychology guess tests’

However, the more savvy students did better by providing answers such as:

‘like, it looks like, maybe, like, some,– primitive form of a GPS device’”

Teachers, who hope to reintroduce basic geography into the school curriculum, are fighting across numerous fronts, a couple backs, and even a few ups. Opposing the introduction of geography courses are:

– education administrators who claim that the internet has collapsed the entire world into one spot, located somewhere, within twenty yards of the principal’s office of their favorite school,

–parents who fear that their children will boot up the family computer and exchange e-mails, music, and photos with wayward teenagers in any country that they learn about in school,

—and the students themselves, who insist that they be allowed to use GPS devices on geography tests.

Despite these obstacles, a recent impetus to re-introduce geography into the school curriculum came from Senator Maxigrandon the 3rd of the State of Mississippi, who reported, from the Senate intelligence committee, that the average eleven year old Chinese student can name every county in each and every State of the United States and can recite the name, population, and number of Wal-Mart’s in every county seat in America. Senator Maxigrandon also reported that, the average sixteen year old Chinese student can recite tables of American zip codes while hitting three hundred consecutive table tennis forehands shots and can cite population figures for four hundred and twenty American cities why hitting eight hundred consecutive table tennis backhand shots. And, according to the Senator, the average sixteen year old, in China, also can name every U.S. Congressional representative from every United States Congressional distinct, while putting over sixteen different distinct spins on a table tennis ball. And they can name the city which any table tennis ball was manufactured by watching the way it spins off a standard Chinese made table.

The Mississippi Senator made the following statement, on the steps of Capitol Hill to a group ninety nine visiting school teachers from eight states, one hundred and one teacher aides, and five of the Washington D.C.’s savviest street panhandlers.

“America’s school children are reputed to be unable to name the sites of the notorious battlefields of America’s own Civil war, cannot locate or spell the grand state of Mississippi, and think Ancient Rome was, and perhaps still is, located in the marble and monument district of Washington D.C. Furthermore, some of our lesser colleagues in the House suffer and take pleasure, in the same blissful fog of geographic ignorance. Meanwhile the average Chinese teenager has the ability to send a thousand table tennis balls zip-spinning at any coded mailbox in America. I fear a future America, where Chinese, or even panhandling, chaperons will be required to guide and escort American citizens from country to country, state to state, city to city, and, perhaps, even from cotton to soybean field.”

Remarkably as the next generation’s geographic skills, implode, teenagers report having close, best, and off/on and on/off friends from an extraordinary wide variety of the worlds regions, countries, and mental states.

Runwhy Cornel attempted to explain the situation to a Pasco News reporter:

“Today’s Teenagers cannot find a country on a map but without looking they can e-mail eight friends living across nine Asian countries, while texting a friend in Europe, while using an I-phone to order a pizza from Mexico. And if there is a “happening” clothing outlet in the Capitol city of some far off exotic foreign speaking country, they know the store’s street address, aisle layout, and belt prices, in three languages and two computer codes.

Despite this, we must facebook the facts. Increasingly American teenagers cannot find foreign locations—as well as the foreign locations can find American teenagers.”

Senator Maxigrondon the third‘s speech to the ninety nine visiting school teachers and growing assembly of Washington D.C. panhandlers continued in a similar vein:

”Our blessed new American generation is reputed to be asymmetrically attached to this disputed world. They, by reputation, cannot locate a city, state, or country using a parchment map, a compass, or a sextant. Instead, young Americans have enslaved themselves to the nefarious GPS electronic device and the ego maps of the eye-goggle computer corporation. On the very same hand, hundreds of cities, towns, and rural abodes that span the breath of this grand God blessed earth, can find, and have found their way to the wallet of the typical American teenager.”

Education experts agree that, increasingly, the world has beat a tracking path to the American teenager who rarely falls out of web site or phone connection with hundreds of geographic locations across the globe. Despite this, according to experts, such teenagers, often, cannot be located by school officials or their parents.

However, experts also claim that blind electronic connection to the world is not enough. Senator Maxigrandon the third’s, oration to the school teacher and D.C. panhandler group reached a pitch making the very same point:

“To have the ability to name the Capitol city of Mongolia, or to cluster six African countries into the correct contiguous group, or to develop a passion for the shape of the world’s great rivers systems and mountain ranges, is critical to development a of worldwide sense of spacial belonging, place, and reality.

Runwhy Cornel elaborated similar sentiment in a parchment letter which he sent to Senator’s Maxigrandon’s home address in Tupelo Mississippi:

“To America’s school children the real world contains as much spacial sense and geography as does a nine level, Mario running, video game. I am afraid that the next generation of  young people soon will feel trapped, in a spaceless real world, and end up frantically spending their time attempting to score enough points to move up to the next game level. That’s what my mother’s, and perhaps your mother’s, church group wasted their time on.”

And School teacher Runwhy Cornel finished his parchment letter in a bid to bridge the gap within his own generation by emphasizing the new gap between generations:

“At least when part of my generation was lost we knew where we were. And we knew where all the South American countries were located so we could hitch our way there, check out the local crops, and use them to get even more lost trying to find our own lost selves and our small time loser friends. But when a whole new generation gets lost, even before discovering college and becoming lost, our country has lost something; something which I would have specifically named, if I had not lost my focus on the what it was our country and the next generation has lost.”

Critics complain the whole issue of increasing geographical ignorance has been blown out of proportion and is just another case of one generation’s reaction to the changing knowledge set of another generation which is faced with a distinct set of needs and technology.

A Washington D.C. Panhandler, who introduced himself as: “fourteenth and L street” summed it up to the ninety nine school teacher group and a worn out Senator Maxigrandon the third:

“This geography fuss the Senator was going on about is some kind of a rorch psychology test. Some see a bunch of school kids that don’t know where France used to be or cannot see which item on the wall is a map, and,—–

— they go crazy worrying about the ‘next generation’.

Other people say: ‘So what. I never had to drive my car to France. And, besides, these kids have got themselves electronic gizit-mo’s to tell them where to go . I don’t see any school teacher, school-king-principal, or Cushy Chair Senator, that can find their way around the web and site world. In fact, most of the last generation can’t even find, the search key on a google map site.”

Senator Maxigrandon agreed that perhaps the “geography” problem was not as severe it may, at first, appear: “The average Chinese eighteen year old is so computer contained by his Communist Government that he cannot even name ten separate websites when trying to paddle block table tennis slams. Our reputable American boys, and girls, may be lost in geography class, but they appear to have, at this moment in time, a running Mario jump on the next generation of Chinese web and site users.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 19th, 2009 at 9:26 am and is filed under Main Posts, Table Tennis, Top Stories, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.