Lies They tell the Chirrens: "Pay attention, you'll need this!"

It may be 90 degrees here in Philly, but as far as the calendar is concerned, summer is over. The leaves will turn brown, orange and red as they decay in the streets (never understood the fascination with that...it's just dead leaves, seriously. People will literally travel to the Northeast to see dead leaves on the ground...I'm about to start a new business that ships huge bags of dead leaves all over the country for a modest fee so you can either scatter them on your own front lawn or paperclip them one by one to a tree in your yard or whatever the hell else you want to do with them...there are people dumb enough to go with that...I'd rake in the dough, plus I would be doing folk a service, saving them expensive airfare in this economy...dammit, I'm off topic!), college and NFL football relegates wives and girlfriends to second class citizenship (sorry gals, you still get 5 days...and 7 on the bye weeks!) and kids, tweens, teens and slow 20 year olds everywhere will be dragged off kicking and tweeting to school.

Now, far be it from me to discourage education...even though trying to get a child to sit still and learn something it has no interest in is like trying to teach a cat to scuba dive, a lot of kids are plenty stupid enough without taking away their one hope at getting half an education. (They damn sure don't get it at home...half the parents are just as dumb as their spawn...it's not their fault, people just prefer Facebook to "a book".) However, I gotta say, there are a couple things I learned in school that they put a lot of emphasis on and still haven't used to this day, some half a decade after graduation. (Damn, I just made myself feel old...lol...)

For one, there's cursive writing. When is the last time after you learned that that you saw it? Are we in the 1700's? Am I writing a letter on parchment with a feather pen? The last time cursive was used on a regular basis, people like me weren't allowed to learn to read it (or anything else...it's cool, white people, you can laugh at that, we're mostly over it). NOTHING is written in cursive anymore except when people are trying to make shit look fancy. I'm not even sure they teach it anymore, and for good reason...maybe they'll replace it with another form of semi-obscure script, like textspeak or Olde English characters so they can design gangsta tattoos...it's about as useful, and way more current.

For another, there's higher math for anybody that's not gonna be an trig teacher or a rocket surgeon. Maybe I'm biased because my mathleticism is way lacking (it's possible that ADD is to blame...which is ironic as hell, considering that and subtraction are the only forms of math I do consistently well...) but they could have saved that shit for math majors, not 7th graders. I like to consider myself a pretty smart dude, but I barely grasped the multiplication tables before they started throwing all types of letters and shit into the equation. Guess what? I sucked at it...and you know the most fucked up part? After graduation (and a year of college) I never saw a x or y anywhere near math again. I hope I don't either, because if I'm ever at the store at a register and the cashier says "Your total comes to 7x + y dollars and 2(z-1) cents", I'm gonna punch their hairline back. Fair warning.

How is it that programs that can be lifetime benefits like gym and music are being cut out in some places but we always have money in the budget for a new math textbook, like the numbers inside change or some shit. The bottom line is, younglings need education, but we spend a lot of time teaching them useless shit when we should be teaching them important life skills like how to write a resume, how to raise the child that more than a few of them have (or how to work a condom in the first place lol), and consumer skills like how to live on one's own without going back to your parents house for dinner every night or washing your clothes in the fire hydrant. They always tell you "you're gonna need this in life" right before they teach you something you'll never even think about again...but even when it was me being told it all those 5-10 years ago, I knew it was just another lie they tell the chirrens.