For those of you that don’t know, I’m deployed to the Middle East right now. I’m not allowed to say where (which pisses me off), but I’m perfectly safe here. Nobody carries weapons or anything. I was sitting here on my rickety chair at my metal desk in a crappy double-wide trailer, air conditioner humming, waiting for MS Outlook to actually function. I shouldn’t blame the poor program…it’s our comm squadron that sucks.
It occurred to me that I was getting pissed off at all the little 0s and 1s that were conspiring against me, preventing me from doing work, and then I remembered what that work was: worksheets.
My first experience with worksheets was as a four-year old. My mother had acquired several booklets of perforated worksheets full of addition and subtraction problems. Once she taught me how to add and subtract, I couldn’t get enough. “Give me another problem, Mom!” I was adding and subtracting double-digits before I could read, and by second grade I was multiplying while the rest of the students were learning the aforementioned addition and subtraction. Thus I was diagnosed with ‘The Knack’ at an early age.
Something happeend when I was in second grade, however; my first experience with worksheets that I didn’t like. Our reading curriculum had a ‘Resource Book’, a "Workbook’, and a ‘Journal’, if I remember correctly. The ‘Resource Book’, i.e. Reading Book, was okay. Large, hard-bound, colorful, pleasing crisp paper, full of stories. The ‘Workbook’ tended towards short-answer questions and exercises…but it was not large, hard-bound, colorful, or printed on nice paper. It was recycled, dull-gray, porous paper. It was perforated like my arithmetic workbooks had been, but the perforations weren’t as good, causing little rips to propagate at obtuse angles. The ‘Journal’, tending towards sentence-answer or longer questions, was even worse. The paper in the ‘Journal’ was grayer, even more porous, and even more susceptible to tears.
You had to make a difficult choice: write in these books and leave an impression ten pages deep on the pages beneath, or try to carefully rip them out beforehand, with the nagging knowledge that you would cleave one-in-ten clean in half during your attempt to liberate it from the spine. I normally chose the latter because I prefer to write on a solid surface with pencil, with which we were encouraged to write in case we made mistakes. Not that you could fix a mistake with a pencil, because erasing smudged your carbon all across the surface of the answer blank and also tended to rip the paper, causing a crimped-up triangle of paper to bunch around the eraser when you rubbed through.
And the questions were bad. Oh were they bad. They left you two lines to fit an answer requiring a paragraph and a whole page to write about something you could sum up in five words.
On top of that, to go with the aforementioned ‘Knack’, having both a ‘Workbook’ and a ‘Journal’ to work out of was a complete waste! We always used both at once, and often you couldn’t tell the difference between the questions! It just seemed like somebody did it to make my fledgling ‘engineering herpes’ flare up. You had to carry two books around instead of one, leading to easier damage, especially for the much thinner journal. If they had combined the two and even just averaged out their quality it would’ve been a drastic improvement.
Since that day, worksheets haven’t improved. All through elementary and high school, and even sometimes in college, worksheets were unbearably bad. “Why would he ask that question? It doesn’t even dignify an answer!” or “Why would he ask that question? I don’t have enough time in a week to answer it!”
Now I’ve entered ‘the real world’. Granted, it’s the military, so a certain amount of lax intellectual standards is expected. But here I am, being paid some ungodly amount of taxpayer money to sit in another country and wait for Outlook to exorcise the computer daemons so it will work again, so I can help people fill out…worksheets.
Bad worksheets. With bad questions. Some that don’t dignify an answer, some that you can’t write enough about, and, as an added twist, some you can’t answer on a non-secret network.
Why is it that people can’t see the horror? Did they not have the same experiences in second grade? Is this some kind of meme, the persistence of a terrible idea just because it’s what they know? These worksheets won’t have any bearing on the decisions to be made–I’ve practically been assured of that–but I guess it would somehow seem less official without these worksheets. I don’t know. That’s the only reason I can think of.
Worksheets…when we’re fighting a war. Fighting a war…when people are starving. I look at the millions of dollars…probably billions…wasted on this little plot of land in the desert, and all the millions of man-hours, and I think of how many people we could feed. I think of how I’d barely heard of this country before I arrived, and wonder how many other bases we have with how many more billions of dollars invested in countries not even close to the action, just sitting, waiting in case we need them for some other ‘contingency’. What kind of progress we could make with all that money and effort.
People are screwing up that dream all the time, I get that, but someone has to remind the war-drum generals that there’s a higher goal. Someone has to be there when the fighting finally stops to remind them of how to live without fighting. When people have toys they like to play with them; we need to take them away. Not now–al-Qaeda and others are seeing to their necessity–but some day the bases and the missiles and the nonsense has to end.
I want to be on the side reminding people of the ultimate goal: peace. Not peace and harmony, just to be clear, but peace. I want that portion of my life to begin right now.
The worksheets aren’t helping.
