So, another week of sparse blog posting. I have no excuse, really. Just doing other things. Working on the novel, gym every day, social activities with Malaya, and
doing a bunch of prep work on an upcoming website. It's not online yet, and much work remains to be done but I think it will be pretty cool when it's ready. It's a lot of work to get things ready though, and I'd forgotten how brain-fried and eye-tired you can get from 8 or 10 straight hours of work on something that's supposed to be an amusement. Reading previews/interviews and looking at screenshots of a video game, in this case.
I am not a college basketball fan, and I haven't seen a moment of any of the games in the NCAA tournament, other than a few bits and pieces on the TV at the gym, but looking at the sports news tonight, I see that the final two are set. Like most idle fans I always root for the underdogs, though how much "rooting" I can lay claim to, having not intentionally watched even a second of the games, is open to debate. That aside, I was overjoyed (mildly interested) to see so many big teams were upset in this year's tourney. None of the #1 seeds made it into the final four for just the second time in 30 years, or something like that. Unfortunately for underdog backers, all those upstarts vanished past the cloyingly-named "Sweet 16" round.
Looking
at the bracket, I see that of the needlessly-aliterative "Elite Eight," seven were #1-#4 seeds, and five of them were the expected #1 or #2 seeds. Not exactly upset specials there. There was one exception; the previously and future-ly unknown #11 seed George Mason University. Tragically, their glass slippers were shattered by the leaden-hooves of #3 seed Florida, while #2 UCLA Katrina'ed #4 LSU.
I can't imagine I'll remember the game is on, or care enough to turn on the set for Monday's championship game, but if I did I can't imagine who I'd root for. Neither team is especially loathesome, but neither do they have any compelling storylines, or famous players to watch for future NBA interest. Is there any sort of national concensus on the sentimental favorite? With them both being highly-seeded there's no underdog angle, and since LSU lost to UCLA, I can't even do what most people do, and root for the team that beat Duke. I'd personally be more likely to root for the team that beat UNC, my life-long least favorite college sporting team (thanks to legendary UNC coach Dean Smith's Jerry Fallwell tendencies and his invention of the worst tactic in the history of sport; the "four corners" stalling tactic) but that was George Mason, and they lost Saturday too.
So anyway, having seen nothing of either team this year (or millenium), and having no ability to name a single player on either team, I'm going to throw my completely random prediction to UCLA. They'll win 57-54 in an ugly, painfully-low scoring matchup, since that seems to be how they win all of their games.
It's ironic too, since the only game in the entire tournament I saw more than 2 minutes of was Gonzaga vs. UCLA, since it was on at the gym one night while I was on the elliptical machine. In that game the Zags were wiping the floor with UCLA, beating them by like 15 in the second half. The guy at the gym actually changed the channel to another, more-competitive game, so imagine my surprise when I saw the scores online hours later, and found that UCLA had scored like the last 13 points to win by 2. And here they are a week later, just days from a national championship. Or perhaps not. Like I care.
Elsewhere, I would have blogged about this a couple of days ago, but I was lazy. Read the
whole LA Times article if you want, but it's basically about how high school students are showing up in 10th and 11th grade biology and pretty much heckling the teachers with the anti-evolution nonsense their parents have filled their heads with. It's depressing, and I feel quite a bit of sympathy for the underpaid and overworked biology teachers, having to tolerate the smug and utterly-clueless comments of the children.
LIBERTY, Mo. — Monday morning, Room 207: First day of a unit on the origins of life. Veteran biology teacher Al Frisby switches on the overhead projector and braces himself.
As his students rummage for their notebooks, Frisby introduces his central theme: Every creature on Earth has been shaped by random mutation and natural selection — in a word, by evolution.
The challenges begin at once.
"Isn't it true that mutations only make an animal weaker?" sophomore Chris Willett demands." 'Cause I was watching one time on CNN and they mutated monkeys to see if they could get one to become human and they couldn't."
Frisby tries to explain that evolution takes millions of years, but Willett isn't listening. "I feel a tail growing!" he calls to his friends, drawing laughter.
Unruffled, Frisby puts up a transparency tracing the evolution of the whale, from its ancient origins as a hoofed land animal through two lumbering transitional species and finally into the sea. He's about to start on the fossil evidence when sophomore Jeff Paul interrupts: "How are you 100% sure that those bones belong to those animals? It could just be some deformed raccoon."
As if I needed another reminder of why I would never, in a billion years, survive a week as a high school teacher.
It occurred to me, after reading the article, what the teacher's real difficulty is. He's got to try and defend evolution to kids who don't know the first thing about science, and who have an active distaste for learning it. It's like a math prof trying to teach trigonometry to people who can't even add, and who have been taught that numbers are magical and beyond human understanding. Even worse, the teacher has to try and defend scientific knowledge against a cartoonish alternative, and he's handcuffed by not being able to counter attack.
He can try to explain geology and the history of the earth and random mutations and all of that, yet he can't say a word about Christian cosmology, because the kids would run yelping to their parents about how he was attacking their religion. So the kids can cherry-pick their targets and argue from stunning ignorance ("I feel a tail growing!"), yet it's not a real argument, since they do not have to defend their alternative explanation against what would be a withering cross examination of the laughable "science" upon which modern day creationism rests.
I say we add a humanities class that compares and contrasts the
top ten creation myths, and be done with it. The kids would have more fun there than they do studying the fossil record, and for added payback they could let the biology teachers grade their papers. Imagine the fun Mr. Frisby would have going over argumentative essays in which his students attempted to prove that the earth was created from nothing in six days, after which woman was created from a man's rib -- while disproving the theory that Ymir's giant children turned his bones into mountains and his hollowed out skull into the starry heavens above?
Labels: basketball, evolution
