Boomers Could Never Survive High School Today
Teens today are held to an absurdly high standard in comparison
In the early days of the pandemic, I was doing school-at-home with my oldest child, who was in 9th grade at the time. He was doing algebra and it wasn’t going well; math isn’t his favorite subject.
“At least this is the last math class he’ll ever have to take,” my mother-in-law said cheerfully. She lives with us and had front-row seats to the train wreck that was school-at-home in the spring of 2020.
My son and I both stared at her, wondering if we misheard her or if she didn’t understand what was happening.
“He has three more years of math,” I said.
“Three more years?” She made a face of revulsion. “After algebra? What is there even to teach after algebra? That’s the end of math!”
My mother-in-law graduated high school in 1964, decades after public education reform began in earnest in this country. I thought, surely, she was mistaken. She was remembering it incorrectly, she had certainly taken more math past her freshman year of high school.
I looked it up, for my own peace of mind, and found … she was right.
