Two Thousand Heartbeats A Minute...
At biology class...
Far: Okay, you do this one. Subject A's heart beats 50 times in 38 seconds. How many times does it beat in one minute?
Student: [works it out laboriously on paper because she's not allowed a calculator] Uh... 2,180...?
I couldn't help laughing. Although I shouldn't, because it really isn't funny at all. All I kept thinking was, What the hell are they teaching kids these days? I tutor biology, but sometimes I find myself teaching math as well because... apparently, whatever else they might be doing, school teachers aren't teaching their students manual arithmetic.
I firmly believe that the quality of education was shot to hell the day the education board allowed calculators in class. When I was in high school [... Oh god, you know you're getting old the day you start saying, When I was your age... I'm *not* old, but I'm definitely feeling the gap], the only class you were allowed to bring a calculator to was Additional Math in the upper forms. For every other subject, and that included everything that used math, be it biology or physics, you had... paper. And a pencil. And a data numbers table, or whatever the hell you call it, because my entire education in math and science wasn't even in English, the way it is now. (I still remember having to do my O Levels practical chemistry math longhand, by the way). If you wanted the square root for 2.35, you looked it up. If you wanted tan[71], you looked it up. If you wanted to calculate 5.12 x 14, you did it longhand on your scratch paper, stupid. Oh, we suffered, believe me, especially when we got careless, and everything downstream of the mistake was hideously wrong. But at least you couldn't say we *didn't* know our math.
These days, every high school kid has a shiny scientific calculator that gives you the answer to everything in a flash of a second. Multiply 2323842 by 58905? No problem. Need the x values for 12x2-9x+1=0? No problem. (And to hell with the formula x = [-b ± √b2 - 4ac]/2a; do they still even know it?) What's log[9]73.11? Eat my shorts, here's my calculator.
But a calculator is a gadget, and gadgets are time-saving, right? Only if you know how to work without one in the first place. And I think that's the problem in school these days: Kids are left to be completely reliant upon calculators that they wouldn't know how to calculate 2.5/3.0 x100% by hand if they had until Doomsday. (I wish I were kidding). Or be able to divide 5 by 4 without having to write it down and stare at it for minutes. Or... even have the common sense to realise that there is no way a person's heart could beat 2,180 times in one minute without the poor sod keeling over, dead, the next. (And this was my best student, the one who always aced her biology papers!).
I was terribly amused when I first read Isaac Asimov's short story, The Feeling of Power, because then a future in which people *couldn't* calculate without a machine was utterly, ridiculous, inconceivable to me. I'm no longer amused, because his story now seems to carry the prophetic weight of doom. Jehan Shuman, I feel like you in reverse: this *is* a feeling of power, only it's a lonely and despairing one.
Art Digression
Force, I am so good at starting twenty new art projects simultaneously (without finishing half of them), I don't know what to do with myself. Here's a work-in-progress for a portrait that I started for absolutely no reason, and now have absolutely no idea what to do with:
(Robson Green, because he rocks).
*facepalm*
In the meantime, my *actual* ongoing projects are being put on hold... for no reason. Like, oh, the latest installment in the Stephen Garrity saga, or the webcomic my Tank-phobic friend and I are working on. Gah.