I'm embarrassed because my ultimate boss, Kathy Cox the state superintendent of schools for Georgia, is on "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?" tonight. When I heard earlier this week through the digital grapevine of mass e-mail in my school inbox my first thought was "I hope there aren't any science questions on the show. She actually was for dropping the word evolution from the state curriculum for science a few years ago (but I think it never happened). It's not that surprising that a state official in the Bible Belt is anti-evolution, but I don't hold them in any higher esteem just because they're Southerners.
And true to form, when the 2nd-Grade Animal Science question "A crawfish is a fish. True or False" flashed on the screen, it was greeted by a blank stare by the head of the Georgia public education system. She eventually got it right by working through the fact that mudbugs have legs and fish don't, but if having to differentiate between a crustacean and a fish requires a moment of panic, you probably shouldn't be in charge of deciding what science gets taught to the students of an entire state.
Update: Kim's watching the rest of Kathy Cox's performance on the show while I watch the Harold and Kumar sequel. She stops me to point out that at one point the crowd comes back from commercials chanting "Cox, Cox, Cox, Cox." Oh hells yes. The superintendent just got a crowd to chant cocks on national television. I no longer hate this woman.
2 comments:
I wonder who she had to pay off to win? Ratings probably would have been higher for the next show if she'd lost, so she must have paid someone off.
I'll admit: I was bored and watched the last half of this show. I kept expecting Fox to seize on some good publicity and say: "OK, since you're going to donate the money to the schools, we'll match it again."
But they didn't.
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