Boredom

A national survey of high school dropouts reveals the main reason they left school. “They were bored.”

The educated response to that, of course, is, “Waaaaaaaaa!”

Boredom is inescapable. Get used to it. The goal one ought to have is to become well-paid for boredom, not to escape it. In the professional world there are staff meetings, after-lunch lectures on the latest quality program, award ceremonies, reading government reports . . . Boring! So is cooking French fries.

The lout who chooses to be bored in American History would do well to go sit on a tractor and plow a field eight hours a day for three weeks. This would not make American History more interesting. I know how dreary it gets listening to the football coach babble about . . . “the Panic of 1857, an economic dip touched off by a ship full of gold sinking and by the failure of the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company, a major financial force that collapsed following massive embezzlement. James Buchanan was then president. He was a bachelor, so his niece was “first lady.” Quiz on Friday. Extra credit if you come to the game.”

What one ought to learn from this is that coaching football is a boring job. Sure, you have that high-adrenalin moment on Friday night when your team gets behind by six points, and with ten seconds left, Frankie McDonald runs eighty yards before he spikes the ball on the two-yard line as time runs out. But then this same coach has to go teach history class all week to lethargic teenagers pining for their video games. He cares as much about the Panic of 1857 as you do. It’s boring. But does he drop out? No! He gets fired for not beating arch rival Bumpkin High.

About plowing. (Plowing is to ploughing as donuts are to doughnuts. This may help you on the SAT test.) Why does one willingly do something so boring as to plow a field? And believe me, plowing is boring. Most of the time. When I was about fifteen I was plowing the south forty near the hives from which the beekeeper had recently pinched the honey. The bees were having their Panic of 1857, and it was clear what stage of the grieving process they were experiencing. Every time I neared the hives, the bees sent sorties out to let me know that they were not in the mood for more visitors.

When one plows, one does not take whimsical detours to avoid enraged insects. So each time I neared the south part of the field I encountered several disgruntled bees. At these moments a passerby would have surmised that I was conducting one of Beethoven’s symphonies. “Possibly the Fifth . . . or maybe something by Rossini,” the passerby would have thought before encountering the bees himself and diving into the protective waters of the irrigation ditch.

In the late sixties it was popular to have long hair. I don’t know why. It was groovy. People of my generation now secretly wish that most of our high school pictures could be destroyed. Still, there is one comfort. At least we don’t look as though we’ve dived face-first into a tackle box like these idiotic kids today. But I digress.

This particular bee came in from about ten o’clock and somehow became entangled in the hair on my forehead. People in the Sixties were known for spasmodic self expression on the dance floor, but this was nothing to my performance on the tractor. To no avail. The bee stung me just above my eyebrow. As I turned the tractor toward home I became aware of severe itching all over my body. I brushed this off as a minor irritation. After all, what’s a little itching when your eyes are swelling shut and you’re driving full throttle next to a barbed wire fence.

Life in the farmhouse can be a little boring at times. There is laundry to do, bread to bake, the garden to weed, butter to churn, and your hysterical son with his eyes swollen shut suddenly bursting in the door imploring you to take him to the doctor. The Panic of 1857? It was nothing.

My father plowed the next day. He had short hair. But the following day I was back on the tractor. The question remains open, “Why does one willingly do something so boring as to plow a field?” It’s so your father will have enough money to send you to college.

Bag it until next month

There’s caramel eggs and jelly beans,
But on your South Beach Diet.
It’s tuna fish and collard greens.
Oh go ahead and buy it.

Let's Get Rich

It’s the American dream, and it’s achievable. All it takes is . . . the correct lottery number. Americans annually spend about $430 per household on lotteries. And why not? It’s a chance to get rich without all the bother of hard work. Wouldn’t it be great to win a few hundred million dollars? You bet it would. As an unemployed immigrant from Costa Rica was recently quoted in USA Today regarding her frequent attempts to win the lottery, “Maybe I buy homes for my children.”

Yes, maybe. Maybe not. She unfortunately faces about the same odds as I do. And I don’t buy lottery tickets, preferring instead to put my money into the home of my children.

I stopped for munchies one morning when the Powerball jackpot was up above 100 million. The guy in front of me bought three lottery tickets and a fifth of vodka. The next day I saw on the news that that fellow had won the lottery, but tragically he was out dancing in the rain to celebrate and was struck by lightening and was nearly vaporized.

Just kidding. He didn’t win the lottery. But he could have. And so can you. Maybe.

It’s lottery fever almost everywhere. Before New Mexico joined in the national gaming craze, I knew a woman who regularly drove to Colorado to purchase lottery tickets. I suspect that she bought several to make the trip worthwhile. She returned home clutching her tickets-of-hope, but she never struck it rich. Why isn’t she a millionaire? I personally know several millionaires, but why have none of my many acquaintances achieved financial independence by playing the lottery? I think one key is not to succumb to impatience, as again we quote the unemployed immigrant from Costa Rica who observed, “I play for a long time, and never I win.”

The state of New Mexico, concerned that our scarce New Mexico money was going to Colorado and elsewhere, and eying the potential tax dollars that were at stake, joined the Powerball Lottery pool and also added state lotteries and allowed Indian gaming. I can’t drive anywhere now without passing scores of places offering a chance to get rich. Even the local hardware store sells rolls of lottery tickets along with the traditional sort of vice-grips. Is this okay? Hey! The lottery funds education, so it’s obviously worthwhile. And after all it’s just a game. So play, even if you’re unemployed. Play generously and support education. Play frequently and be a regular gamester.

Chaucer, in his medieval writings, noted that “gamester” was an appellation given to a person of weak moral character, a profligate who wasted both time and money. But no one heeded Chaucer’s wisdom because he used archaic words and his spelling was atrocious.

Today, we don’t denigrate gamesters, we encourage them. Radio and television personalities promote the lottery and make celebrities of those few who make off with the big bag, airing naught of the lives of those many who invested heavily but came home empty, both in wallet and in spirit. But remember, it’s okay because a small fraction of the proceeds ends up in the amorphous state budget, ostensibly earmarked for education, a boon for unprincipled politicians, if you’ll pardon the redundancy.

If gambling is a game it ought to be fun. I’ve been in casinos. If it’s fun, those playing ought to look like they’re having fun instead of looking like guppies. Fun? I’m no authority because I stopped gambling after I tried it once and felt stupid after losing twenty bucks playing slots. I don’t buy lottery tickets, and thus my odds of winning are zero, which I would argue is so numerically close to the odds of playing the game as to be indistinguishable.

In contrast to zero, slot machines boast odds of about 90%, which is significantly closer to 100%. So go stand at a slot machine and plop in $1,000. On average you’ll win about $900. Yahoooooo! Fun! The balance is taken by the house, which always wins. Just look around. Do you have white tigers, gaudy chandeliers, and gold nuggets in your living room? The house, if it is well behaved, gives a generous portion of the take to the state to pay for roads and policemen, and let’s not forget education. So we can have hours of fun away from our children AND educate our children.

Perhaps after tiring of the amusing, but increasingly obnoxious electronic noises emanating from the slot machine, you’ll want to try another casino game. Try roulette. A roulette wheel has 36 numbers placed about an inch apart, and you win money by betting on one or more of the 36 numbers spinning before your eyes. Your average roulette gamester will lose money, but there are strategies that provide better odds than placing all your money on just one of the 36 numbers. Let’s assume, however that you want the biggest payoff possible, so you go ahead and bet all your money on one number. Odds of one in 36 equates to only a 2.8 % chance of winning. Them’s not very good odds, but you don’t win big without betting against the low odds. Your goal is to get RICH. Few people accomplish this by playing roulette. To get really rich you’ll have to play for lower odds and higher prizes. So buy a lottery number.

Is this possible, this getting rich by guessing numbers? Try this simple experiment. Go to the best math teacher in your school and have him or her secretly write down a number from 1 through 15,840. The latter happens to be the number of inches around the football field track. Tell the teacher that you’re going to pay an imaginary dollar each time you fail to guess the secret number, and at the end of six-hundred imaginary dollars, if you’ve failed to guess a correct number you’ll buy the teacher a steak dinner. If you do guess one of the selected numbers within six hundred attempts, the teacher will buy you a steak dinner. Any good math teacher will eagerly take you up on this, especially after delegating the task of doing the experiment to a computer program. One of you will get a free steak dinner. It will be the teacher. Trust me. (Some math teachers, underpaid and aware of your habitual desire to fund education, will try to convince you to play this game for real money. Don’t do it. What the state smilingly promotes, if done by an individual involves jail time.)

The problem is that a steak dinner isn’t really what you’re after. You want to be set up for life. You want millions of dollars. So, picture a roulette wheel with numbers placed an inch apart, but there are 176,000,000 numbers. This roulette wheel is slightly larger than the distance around the football field track. In fact, it would extend from Chicago to New Orleans. The wheel would completely cover Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas. It would cover most of Illinois, Missouri, and Indiana and half of Georgia. It would cover small chunks of Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Texas.

This, my friends, is a game with the same odds of when you buy a lottery ticket for the nation’s most lucrative lottery, the Mega Millions Jackpot. It’s a stupid game, but go ahead, buy a ticket for an inch-long number on the wheel . . . hmmm . . . Why not pick an inch one hundred and thirteen inches southeast of the 64th fence post north of Hank Partridge’s barn on Highway 31 north of Lapaz, Indiana. Now walk for about thirty days and buy a second inch-long number in the corner of the Dairy Queen parking lot in Woodville, South Carolina. They only cost a dollar each. Buy ten numbers . . . maybe a hundred. Walk over to Tatum, Texas and buy a few inches worth. Cough up a thousand dollars, and buy about thirty yards of numbers scattered amongst the sixteen states and several hundred miles of the Gulf of Mexico along the roulette wheel’s edge. Now step back for a minute and let the wheel spin for a few revolutions. Yeeehaaaa! After spinning at a fairly alarming circumferential velocity it slows and stops at . . an inch of ground in Mel Gromner’s three-hundred acre corn field about 120 miles south of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Dang! You should have guessed that spot. Too bad. You can always spend a thousand dollars again tomorrow. Be patient. You missed the big prize, but happily the giant roulette wheel will occasionally toss you a few bucks to tease you, like the periodic clink-clink from the slot machine. Small prizes are built into the lottery system to add a little fun. You might luck out and snag a few hundred dollars. You may know someone who won several thousand. That’s nice. But what are the odds you’ll win the big one, a hundred million dollars or more, the only real reason you’re playing? Is it sinking in? The odds are really good that a few of the thousand dollars you spend will help fund our children’s education. Maybe they’ll learn statistics, but what are the odds of that happening when we fund education by promoting stupidity.

No Taxpayer Left Behind

I’m interested in education. I’ve been listening to politicians, and I’ve been talking to my kids’ teachers and administrators. Now I’m confident that thanks to the bipartisan “No Child Left Behind” law, we need to spend massive amounts of money to pay teachers enough money to endure the bipartisan “No Child Left Behind” law. All Americans, particularly those who suffer from insomnia, need to read the law to find out why everyone is so atwitter. See “Policy” at http://www.ed.gov/. It’s only 670 pages long, but fortunately, in this case, many Americans can’t read.

For those who can read, let’s just say that Thomas Hardy novels are more uplifting. Still, I’m making good progress as each evening I wrap myself in a blanket on the couch to read expensive gems like this from pages 101-102: ‘‘(A) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in subparagraph (B), funds appropriated pursuant to subsection (f) shall be allotted to each State based upon the number of children counted under section 1124(c) in such State multiplied by the product of—‘‘(i) the amount in section 1124(a)(1)(B) for all States other than the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, except that the amount determined under that subparagraph shall not be less that 34 percent or more than 46 percent of the average per pupil expenditure in the United States, and the amount in section 1124(a)(4) for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, except that the amount in section 1124(a)(4)(A) (ii) shall be 34 percent of the average per pupil expenditure in the United States; multiplied by ‘‘(ii) such State’s effort factor described in paragraph (2); multiplied by ‘‘(iii) 1.30 minus such State’s equity factor described in paragraph (3).”

One hopes that by the time no child is left behind we can all decipher this stuff. And maybe we can all correctly identify Puerto Rico on a map of the Pacific.

I have yet to find the part about paying teachers more money because I keep rereading the section, beginning on page 412, where it says we need to spend massive amounts of money to fly Eskimos to Massachusetts to visit whaling museums. See “Subpart 12 – Educational, Cultural, Apprenticeship, and Exchange Programs for Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Their Historical Whaling and Trading Partners in Massachusetts.” The text relates that 200 years ago there were whalers who sailed from Massachusetts to the waters off Hawaii and Alaska. Today’s lawmakers, possibly from one or more of these states, think it would greatly enhance education if taxpayers were to pay to “bring together the children, parents, and elders from the Arctic region of Alaska with children and families of Massachusetts to learn about their historical ties and about each other’s contemporary cultures.” Section 5523 then spells out which whaling museums and related organizations need grant money to boil this bounty of blubber.

I like the idea. It made me realize that my children ought not be left behind. Hundreds of years ago, my ancestors pillaged the villages of England, and I think it would be very educational if the government would pay for my children, me, and my wife and parents to go to England to learn about our historical ties. We could sack a bakery or two. We could sail up and down the English coast visiting various seaside villages to say, “Howdy” and eat fish and chips. We could also sample a few Brussels sprouts, which the English began consuming after my ancestors made off with everything edible. My children would learn a lot.

Hey! What about Hawaii?

The Hawaiians, beginning on page 508 of the law, suffered several pages-worth of imperialistic abuse over the years, and on page 511 now need some compensating assistance in the form of education funding. There is a precedent. It says that “in 1988, Congress enacted title IV of the Augustus F. Hawkins-Robert T. Stafford Elementary and Secondary School Improvement Amendments of 1988 (102 Stat. 130) to authorize and develop supplemental educational programs to address the unique conditions of Native Hawaiians.”

However, the text continues, “In 1993, the Kamehameha Schools Bishop Estate released a 10-year update of findings of the Native Hawaiian Educational Assessment Project, which found that despite the successes of the programs established under title IV of the Augustus F. Hawkins-Robert T. Stafford Elementary and Secondary School Improvement Amendments of 1988, many of the same educational needs still existed for Native Hawaiians.” So the last round of money, despite its many successes didn’t fix anything, but we’re confident that the new law, with its freshly-minted funding wrapped in red tape, will fix everything. If it doesn’t we can always throw a virgin into a volcano.

So what does the law do for those of us who aren’t underpaid teachers or Eskimos, Hawaiians, or the education-funding-deprived natives of Nantucket? The bill’s name alone tells you it will enhance everyone’s education, but it’s tough reading, and I still haven’t read anything about paying enough to keep good teachers from leaving the profession.

I need more time to study the law’s many features, one being a dreadful, 863-word sentence ironically enunciating English proficiency requirements. There is, however, a silver lining. When you think about what’s really essential to quality education, it’s reassuring that the “No Child Left Behind” law mentions the word “reading” 291 times, “writing” is mentioned 63 times, and “math” is mentioned 104 times. Incredibly, the word “pork” isn’t mentioned at all.