Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader: Vacuous Primetime TV Proves My Point.

For a few years now I've become rather adamant about how useless the entire education system in the US is. Rather than teaching how to use and formulate critical thought, it seems to me that public schools have always seemed to be obsessed with teaching random arbitrary fact memorization. This will lead to a wasted education that will be forgotten months after school has ceased. It's applicable to many facets of education in this country from elementary school to college. I recall once in a public health class for pharmacy school, one of the learning objectives was to memorize the phone number of the WV poison control center. WHY!?!?!? Just think about that. I'm wasting my time memorizing a bloody telephone number I could f'n google.

To make matters worse, and this is just tangential rambling about how much pharmacy school sucks, the woman made the exam make the question unnecessarily tough. As I recall the number was something like 800-323-3322. The exam question was, roughly:

What is the telephone number of the WV poison control center?
a) 800-323-3223
b) 800-232-2332
c) 800-233-2223
d) 800-332-3332
e) none of the above

And I'm getting a doctorate degree for this shit.

So anyway, back to my point. Education in this country leaves me dumbfounded. Usually I get assholes that tell me I'm wrong, memorizing crap is good, blah, blah, blah.

Well FINALLY pop culture has come to my rescue. Fox has produced this show entitled "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" The show has so many instances of irony, it's beautiful. First, it's quiz show that is ironically hosted by international idiot Jeff Foxworthy. And second, it's a show that is made to ironically make intelligent adults look stupid because they are smart enough to not memorize useless facts.

I want to get on this show some day. "So, Mike, do you know what the capital of Alaska is?"
And I'd say, "Hell no, redneck boy. I don't care if 11 year old Jessica knows the answer. I'm a successful grown ass man that doesn't need to know that. It's either know the capital of Alaska or know what drugs interact with that St. John's Wort the cooky naturalist lady down the street takes. Lucky for her, I don't give a rat's ass about the capital of Alaska. Knowing state capitals pays jack, being a 5th grader pays jack...but being a PharmD gets me bank, baby! So fuck you and fuck the city of Juneau! I'm going to go diversify my stock portfolio, bitch."

Anyway, it's proof that elementary school, at the very least, is pointless. They had a successful lawyer that graduated from UCLA on there today. He didn't know a single damned question thrown his way. And why the hell should he? It's all useless trivia to him. He forgot all of that useless crap years ago because he doesn't need to know it, hence, his elementary school education was worthless to him in many aspects. Rather than memorizing the list of impeached presidents, he could have been hanging out at Dave & Busters or...gasp...learning about something that genuinely interests him. It reminds me of a quote my favorite movie director once gave about how he hated having the main motivation driving his education being fear of getting bad grades and, thus, punished at home:
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Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker. - Stanley Kubrick
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Damn straight.

Another annoying thing is that they obviously got ringers for the show. These kids were definitely taken from the gifted program of the state they live in. You could tell because they were cocky and thought they knew everything. I'm specifically pissed about one thing though. Some dumbassed 5th grader wrote down that "REM" stood for "Rapid Eye Movment" and they gave him credit for it. To hell with that, "Movment" isn't a word, there, genius boy.

I'm done.

~~Apathetic~~

Rotation II, Mylan: Thank God for Wikipedia.

My January rotation was at Mylan Pharmaceuticals. Good for me because it's right down the street from my ghetto trailer park. Nothing like waking up at 7:55AM and being on time at 8:00AM. You learn to shower the night before.

The rotation itself involved little to no work. The first two days they made me do actual work. The other 18 days involved them dumping me off in a room and not talking to me for days at a time. I had a "project". Two of them. One was a presentation on BPH, the second a new drug primer for Januvia. Januvia kinds of creeps me out. The enzyme it inhibits, DDP-4, isn't just a metabolizer of incretins, it also activates T-Cells, inactivates polypeptide Y...among other things. Anyway, back on track, I had the BPH one done in about 2 days, the other I procrastinated on and didn't get started on until my next-to-next-to last day. So I had about 13 days where I did literally nothing, they had no work for me, I already did everything they and the school wanted me to do.

The cool thing was that I got my own cubicle complete with phone (ext. # 6339) and PC with internet access. The bitch of it is that they had this proxy blocker called "Websense" that blocked every remotely amusing site on the internet. There was a single bastion of hope; Wikipedia. Now I've never used it as a tool to combat boredom prior to this rotation, but Wikipedia is a potential source of months upon months of wasted time. Hell, I brushed up on diabetes stuff prior to my February rotation. I also learned about 15 magic tricks and how soda is made, among other things.

I once went about 3 days without anyone there actually talking to me. I came in on Monday and someone came in to make sure I was still alive about Wednesday at 3:30PM. That pretty much describes the rotation in a nutshell. A plus was that they let me take occasional field trips over to the R&D department to play with crap and over to the Marketing/Sales dept. to learn how to be a conniving bastard. It was fun and potentially useful, respectively.

Another source of fun was the fentanyl patch complaint line. You can't even imagine the stupidity of some people. One guy's druggie brother stole his fentanyl patch and used it as a coffee filter. Mmmmm, Duragesic-caramel latte. The guy calls and says, "My brother brewed some coffee with my patch, he's barely breathing, and he's foaming of the mouth....should I be concerned?" Lots of people claiming that the box only had 4 patches instead of 5. People thinking it's the Pepsi challenge and demanding a new brand Duragesic patch for the Mylan patch they "didn't like as much." A lot of people think putting it in a blender with mudslide mix is a good idea, too. But, yeah, that sort of stuff. Good fun for all.

Now I'm doing this diabetes drug management thing in Parkersburg. I'll muse about it next month.