Finneran: Lunch Counter Wisdom

Friday, November 22, 2019

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Tom Finneran

It was an obvious “girls’ weekend”.

There were five of them, all chatting away in that completely comfortable manner that marks long-term friendships. They laughed delightedly when asked where their husbands were…….”Not here”! was the happy reply.

My wife and I, per our custom, were seated at the counter---all right, at the bar if you insist---with two open seats to our right. We offered to move down to those seats so that the group of five could then sit together. That’s just an everyday courtesy practiced by folks who choose to sit at bars rather than at tables. The five were delighted and thankful for the accommodation.

As is often the case, the banter between us and them took on a life of its own. Where were they from, what brought them to this little restaurant on the Cape, were they high school chums, were they work colleagues??? All of them were mothers, three of them were grandmothers………somehow the topic turned to school, specifically the “new way” of teaching math, and citizen unrest was suddenly in the air.

A total of seven adults, simply out for dinner on a quiet Saturday night, were doing a not so slow burn over the new methods of “teaching math”. Admittedly, none of us were math prodigies at MIT, but all of us had mastered math including long division, algebra, calculus, geometry, trigonometry, and quadratic equations. More specifically, we had mastered those now frowned upon multiplication tables. And yes, our mastery had come through old-fashioned drill and rote memorization. How quaint. And how successful. Do you remember those old flash cards? They worked.

Leave it to the education “industry” to find new ways to screw things up. None of the seven rational, reasonable, accomplished adults at that counter could confidently help their children or grandchildren with their math studies. The “new system” made no sense to them and yet, in conversation with their children and grandchildren, they were able to discern that the child lacked a basic understanding of the most basic elements of math literacy---such as those maligned multiplication tables.

Other pet peeves about education emerged. Grammar? How old-fashioned…………Punctuation? How out of date………Composition? An extinct concept………….

Civics? No. Geography? No.

I am a huge admirer of teachers in both the generic and the specific sense. But I must ask---what is going on here? Why are kids today less literate and less numerate than ever before? What is going on in teachers’ colleges? Why are we dumbing down on subjects that have served our families, our country, and our world so well?

My own observations are that students will rise to the level of expectation. But if spelling and punctuation and grammar are not drilled, or worse, are totally dismissed as out-of-date concepts, then the resultant illiteracy becomes a sad fact of life.

There’s a word for education jargon which places parents on the sidelines and which dismisses proven methods of instruction for “new methods”. That word is bunkum.

And those five women out on the town agreed.

Sadly, bunkum reigns.

And teachers’ colleges should be called on the carpet.

Junk is junk, even when it’s dressed up.

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.