My Life in Pink

My wife is a schoolteacher in Cobb County, Georgia.  She spent Monday and Tuesday of this week in a training session, termed “professional development” or some other highfalutin phrase meaning training.  The trainers were former teachers who are now teaching teachers; in other words, they couldn’t hack it in the classrooms, so they became what are termed managers, or some other highfalutin phrase meaning hack.  The hacks talked a lot of talk about theories that have no real application in a real classroom, but which pass for “thinking” about education in today’s America, that is, in a land of ironic illusion where what you see is the demo and what you get is shit.

In a nutshell, a scene transpired closely resembling the following:

TRAINER: Blah blah blah no child left blah blah.
TEACHER: That won’t work in our classrooms because of blah blah and you know it.
TRAINER: Well, you’re right, that’s true, but really, ladies and gentlemen, teachers, that is, there’s nothing we can do about it, and really, I’m just trying to do my job.
TEACHER: That’s what Adolf Eichmann would say!
STUDENT: Who is Adolf Eichmann?

Nothing is “greater” than one human life.  Nothing is more important.  Or more meaningless.  Simultaneously.  The meaning, and the insignificance, of one human life transcends logical classification.  This transcendence must be faced — this contradiction and others like it — must be grasped if the human species is to survive. We are — we exist — only beyond reason.  Reality is beyond reason. Is not comprehended in its completeness by reason.  Only incompletely comprehensible and expressible in words.  If this fact is not accepted in all its consequences, we are all going to perish.  (Note that because our reasonable, incomplete understanding yields marvels — smallpox vaccine, 747s — we are profoundly distracted from the truth — distracted at depth.)