This morning I spent time at a high school. Schools in California really don't look at all like the one I went to in western NY. There is a courtyard and the buildings are not made of brick and they have a look of worn inpermanence. But that smell - they sure smell the same. Is it a combination of dirty gym clothes and moldy socks? or is it the odor of boredom mixed with jealousy and anxiety?

There was a group of kids standing around before class started, and they were discussing whether or not they would ever NEED algebra in life after high school. One thought that you might need it to figure out where a tree would fall if you were cutting one down. (well, actually that would be geometry, wouldn't it?) Another thought that you could use it to figure out your shopping bill, but they decided that would be more simple math, not x-squared or "a + (b*c)" type math. I was going to chime in and tell them how I had used algebra just yesterday, designing a database.. but the world of work, I think, is too foreign to them. They can imagine working in yard or shopping for a family, but not slaving in front of a computer, running equations and logic problems til you're blue in the face.

My quartet sang for a class, the school girls choir, and taught a tag or two. How fun! You could tell they rarely get to sing anything as fun as a barbershop chord. They sang for us, and it was Stabat Mater. Why do schools still make kids sing in Latin????

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