WTF Wednesday?? Dusting Off the Soapbox or What The Hell Are People Thinking

As my decade in review post indicated, self-reflection is not something I do often, however, once in awhile I come out of the rabbit hole and appraise the world around me. It scares me. The craziness of the world scares me. I'm not talking about wars in Iraq or genocide in Darfur. I'm talking little things, that seem innocuous enough until you sit and think about them.

Things like business cards for Moms. That's right, apparently one of the big trends on the playground is for Moms to have business cards printed with their stats; indicating that they are INDEED a mom (because little Johnny hanging onto their leg screaming for gummy bears isn't indicative of this fact), stating who their children are (often with pics of their kiddos) and how Mom can be reached to set up a playdate for little Johnny. WTF???? When did childhood become a "have my people contact your people" game? When did it become necessary to validate motherhood with a business card? Because let's get real here folks, cell phones (who EVERYONE has) these days can do everything but wipe your ass for you, this includes the ability to store phone numbers and schedules. These cards have nothing to do with necessity, it seems to me a way for these moms to feel validated in their role as mommy, and that need for validation - that's what scares me. Is the bond between a mother and child no longer validation enough?

USAtoday.com reports that research financed by the Sage Foundation and the Human Motivation research program at Rochester recently discovered that people are happier on the weekends. Researchers used pagers with 74 adults, ages 18 to 62, who worked at least 30 hours a week, paging them at random intervals to determine their level of happiness at that particular time. The researchers were shocked to discover that this rule of thumb (being happier on the weekends) did not apply to those that normally work weekends, leaving them to conclude that people are happiest when not working. WTF...you needed to do research to discover this......excuse me while I bang my head against my desk.

Educational experts calling for a "report card free" school system. This is akin to getting rid of the practice of passing out trophies to the "winning" team, or making a school policy whereby if a child is having a birthday party, they are required to invite everyone in the class...or no one at all.

Oh dear jesus just kill me now. As a society, could we get any more politically correct or touchy feely? Seriously. The world can be a harsh, cruel place. We all know that. Don't we, as parents, have a responsibility to teach this to our kids? I know I know, it's also our job to protect them. But at what cost? Google "teacup generation" and see what comes up. We're raising teacups. So the whole report card free way of thinking is so that teachers and parents are required to communicate (a good thing) and little Johnny is assessed on his effort rather than a grading system. I'm sorry, if I have a brain surgeon opening my skull, I take no comfort in the fact that he tried really hard in med school, and he played well with others. No, children are not doing brain surgery in K-12...but what alot of people don't realize is that as the bar is lowered in the K-12 system, this forces Colleges/Universities to also lower the bar. I know this for a fact. Post secondary educators spend (on average) 75% more time today doing remedial training (writing, math, language arts) than they did 10 years ago. What does this equate to? Rather than teaching College students how to assemble the engine for a plane, we're spending a significant amount of time teaching them how to do the math required for such a task, we're teaching them how to read manuals, and write a report with proper punctuation and spelling, things that you and I knew how to do when we graduated from high school.

And last but not least....American Idol. WTF?!?!?! Simon is leaving? And where the hell was Ellen? I was looking forward to watching Ellen give the gears to Simon. Instead we get Victoria Beckham? And consider this my PSA for the day -  just because you're really good at playing the video game version of American Idol does NOT mean you should go on National tv. Shake your damn head. Also, if you have a muffin top like one of those super sized muffins one would buy at a high end bakery....yeah....a belly top might not be the wisest fashion choice.