Education Dept. Sets Minimum of Four Weirdo Teachers per School

Washington, DC (Reuters) – The Department of Education announced today that it has issued new rules regarding the hiring of teachers, mainly the requirement that each school with more than seventy pupils must have at least four weirdos on its teaching staff.

The move comes in response to census data indicating that children in some areas of the country are exposed to vastly different levels of weirdness from their teachers, and the numbers are critically low in such straight-laced portions of the country as Iowa, Idaho and Kansas. The new rules also address the difficulty of children being exposed only to weird teachers, which occurs primarily in California, though that has not had an appreciable effect on the state’s weirdness quotient in the last two decades.

Educators and education officials alike have long noted the importance of zany, absent-minded or just plain creepy teachers in children’s development, especially between the ages of ten and sixteen. Repeated studies have shown that exposure to comical faculty attire, unkempt hair, unsettling mannerisms, cutesy lingo and inexplicable ignorance of pop culture mainstays are a critical component of a healthy outlook and ability to learn. In China, where weirdness is currently outlawed, standardized tests consistently demonstrate the youths’ difficulty in understanding the centrality of such crucial issues as reality TV, the popularity of The Big Lebowski and why it is simply not cool to actually complete one’s schoolwork properly.

Weirdness has also been shown to play a role in electoral decisions, notably whether a voter will actually decide to submit an absentee ballot if necessary. Approximately 95% of absentee ballots are submitted by weirdos, many of whom are passionate about local politics and run for positions such as village alderman and the local school district board.

“America didn’t get where it is today by ignoring the importance of people like Doc Brown in Back to the Future,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “In fact a large number of the greatest minds in history were those of eccentric – no, we’ll say it plainly – weirdos.” He cited pioneering geologist Charles Lyell, who adopted excruciating positions in his chair when engaged in deep thought, and Isaac Newton, who had no romantic relationships in his life, as prominent examples.

“There’s quite a correlation between genius and social awkwardness,” said Abby Slightlyoff, a lecturer on cultural anthropology at the University of North Carolina, as she hunched over, twisted her body to the left and twisted some of her hair between her fingers as she spoke. “Anthropologists have known for years that the pervasive influence of weirdos during childhood makes it all the more likely that a person will grow up with at least a modicum of obliviousness to social conventions.”

The new regulations specifically exempt home-schooling families from any specific requirement, noting that home schooling is inherently weird enough to guarantee at least six times the minimum recommended weirdness.

Please Like Mightier than the Pen on Facebook. Weirdo.

Dear Grandma: Where Did Those Sores Come From?

Thank you for attending this lesson on letter-writing. No one does those anymore. In fifth grade, we spent several days learning the proper format for letters: where to put the recipient’s name and address, where to put the sender’s address if the letter were for business purposes, the greeting, body, closing, carburetor, etc.

The wholesale transfer of written human communication to the paperless medium has rendered many of those lessons moot. I may still cling to sensibilities enshrining specific formats, but e-mail simply does not lend itself to same. However, occasionally one of my dear readers might have a need for the old-fashioned kind of letter, and I am here to fill that crucial niche (Yeesh, it’s tight in here. Better lay off the croissants for a while). This may also prove helpful to the growing number of home-schoolers out there (really out there), who wish to impress old-time values and principles to their children and find that the formal frameworks for elementary education fall far short of the ideal, i.e. when we were their age.

OK, here we go:

The name of the recipient goes here.
The recipient’s mailing address goes here.*
Followed by the city, state and ZIP code, here.

Then today’s date, here.**

Dear (recipient name),***

This is the body of the letter. It is used to convey the actual information that the letter serves to impart. For example, you might be writing to your grandmother, who does not know what e-mail is, and you nevertheless wish to let her know what has been going on in your life. This would be the place to do so. You must remember, however, that your grandmother, or anyone else reading off a piece of paper for that matter, does not expect to see numbers used as letters, and expects sentences to begin with a capital letter and end with proper punctuation.

Ideally, letters should contain more than one paragraph. At this point you could further explore the subject you introduced in the first paragraph. For example, if you had informed your grandmother that you recently hooked up with a boy named Zachary, you could use this paragraph to explain what you mean by “hooking up.” Your grandmother, after all, might not understand teenspeak, and might need as much explicit explanation as possible for you to get your point across.

A third paragraph might anticipate and address some concerns that the first two paragraphs raise. Your grandmother, at this point, is probably still reading and rereading the second paragraph to make sure that she has read correctly, so you have some time to consider this one. In this case, keep in mind that in addition to harboring certain expectations and sensibilities when it comes to letters, people of older generations also tend toward older standards when it comes to romantic relationships. So you will want to allow for your reader’s reaction to the news in the previous paragraphs. Any potentially objectionable implications of the news should be mentioned, as well as arguments, gently expressed, to allay the fears or concerns that those objections represent. Your grandmother, for example, might feel jealous that you scored with Zachary, because she has a thing for youthful boys. You can reassure her here that in fact Zachary is about her age.

You can continue discussing the above topic, but usually, two or three paragraphs will do. If there are other items of interest, you can use the rest of the letter to relate them. This works especially well if all the topics you wish to discuss are related in some way. You can report on your visit to the doctor about some persistent sores around you mouth, for example, if you can find some way to make the topic relevant to your relationship with Zachary.

Eventually, you will close with a paragraph wishing your grandmother well and express a hope to hear from her soon, especially in person, but certainly in written form. If you follow the format of this letter, you can rest assured you will hear from her almost as soon as she finishes reading your letter, and possibly sooner.

Here is a closing, such as, “Yours truly,” “Love,” or “Get well soon.”

And here is your signature.

* “Mailing address” refers to the number and street name of a person’s residence. There is no @ in a mailing address.
**  This means the day you write the letter, not today specifically. “January 23, 2011” is only correct on January 23, 2011.
*** Use the recipient’s actual name, not (recipient name). Some people have special titles before their names, in which case the person’s last name immediately follows the title, and the first name is omitted entirely: Dear Rabbi Ahmadinijad, not Dear Rabbi Christopher Ahmadinijad; Dear Mrs. Hitler, not Dear Mrs. Martin Luther King Hitler.

I do hope this lesson proves useful. If not, you could always try to write to me about it.

Some of My Closest Friends Are Home Schoolers

My mother has said on at least one occasion that if she could, she would have home schooled me.

Considering how well I took to my first eight years of formal schooling, that’s hardly a revelation. And in fact my brother (well, mostly my sister-in-law) home schools his kids. So the concept is hardly alien, nor do I have a problem with the idea.

It’s the practice of it that gives me pause, and I don’t just mean the logistics that make it impractical for us. We might be eccentric people (if we were dirt poor, the term would be “bat-$#!t insane”, but as we have a roof over our heads and enough money in the bank to last a few months, “eccentric” will do, much in the way that money, or lack thereof, makes the difference between “blessed with a large family” and “breeding like rabbits”), but our idiosyncrasies are nothing compared to the astounding looniness that some of our homeschooling friends have encountered in that world.

Most readers of The Onion could read this fake news article and laugh, secure in the knowledge that no one could be so warped as to think that a child could be raised to choose its own sex. Most. Not I, not after being told of a child whose two female guardians (I think one was actually the biological mother) refused to refer to their little one as either boy or girl, saying, “We’re going to let it decide.”

Let us ignore, if we can, the glaring ignorance of basic biology, not to mention irreparable psychological burdens that this kid will carry forever. Let us omit discussion of the ways in which such radical gender-neutrality will collapse in the face of myriad practical circumstances (“I’m sorry, Ms. X, but we simply cannot process your child’s passport application until you choose to check either the male or female box in section 2, but not neither, and not both”). Let us instead focus on the sheer nutsoid insanity that this episode represents.

Not to say that freaks do not abound in the non-home-schooling demographic; indeed, we have plenty to spare. And the dozens of home schoolers that I know personally are, to a man (excuse the non-gender-neutral formulation), delightful people. But there’s something not surprising at all, somehow, in the news that people so out of touch with societal sensibilities – nay, with reality itself – would choose to home school. I mean, what choice do they have? If they sent their kid to a mainstream kindergarten, it might encounter dangerous ideas, such as the wonderful, essential differences that Nature bestowed upon us! It might learn singular pronouns other than “it”, “this” and “that”! It might begin to doubt the weltanschauung of its guardians! We can’t have that! Cut it off from society! Handicap its functionality for decades to come, lest the guardians’ vision be challenged!

Don’t try to wrap your head around this one; it will break. I try to be open-minded, but I think these people tried to be a little too open-minded, and their brains fell out.