Today was a moving day. We woke up at 5:30am and Kaz's Aunt Lorie (Lory? Loury?) drove us to the airport to fly to Newark airport. The plane ride went smoothly; so smoothly in fact that I managed to read a few pages of a book Kaz game me for Christmas: Artemis.
The only snag we hit was renting the car. Apparently the insurance we had payed for online had been cancelled by default after changing the pickup time. It was at this moment I got the full dose of the New Yorker "I don't give a fuck" attitude. Looking back at it now, I'm kinda glad I had the experience of staff being completely unhelpful and downright lying to their customers about company policy, however at the time, i was beyond furious.
Anyway, we finally got the car sorted and we were on our way to Cherry Hill where Kaz's aunty lives in New Jersey. We arrived there after 2 hours of driving, had an amazing dinner and good walk around town and a good nights rest.
Aunt. D is a math teacher for a community college. We had a fascinating conversation about the quality of US education. The conclusion: It's not good. A lot of the high school graduates she teaches don't even know their times tables or how to add fractions. Terrifying. Apparently this is in large due politics. Teachers can choose what parts of math they want to teach, so many just ignore the challenging stuff. State tests are designed to make sure teachers teach students everything they need to know, but students that fail the exam still move up to the next grade anyway, so in practice, there's no incentive (from the teacher or the student) to fill in massive gaps in their math knowledge.
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