"Jaywalking"-teacher version

One of my favorite things on television, besides the History channel and Forensic Files is the "Jaywalking" segment on the Tonight show. Although I laugh as hard as anyone at the inane answers Jay Leno gets from the average American it's also a bit sobering for a teacher. I mean, isn't it sad just how uninformed the average American citizen is? My son's friend, Courtney, was railing against this in his blog, Alotta Usless Jargon, and I have to agree with him.
I grew up in a home where politics and world events were discussed regularly. I thought it was de riguer to at least be conversant with the major global events. I've come to the realization in recent years that my family must be somewhat out of the norm. I came to this realization on Parent night at school. There I was blithely describing the Social Studies curriculum for the parents of my 8th grade students and to keep it interesting I'd throw in a little witticism about some recent news report. Nothing...blank stares on many faces, confused looks on others. O.K., maybe this house is a little dead, I'll try with the next group. Same response. Occassionally I'd get a little embarassed chuckle like they felt bad for me because I had made some obscure reference and obviously wanted someone to laugh because I was pausing expectantly.
Today, however, I had a real doozy. One for my scrapbook. One of the essay questions on my recent Civil War test was to describe the causes of the war. I had spent a great deal of time telling students that although many Americans beleive the war was about freeing slaves, it really wasn't. I gave them all the reasons that most historians point to such as economic factors, sectionalism and westward expansion. One student however had not studied the two page handout I had given them on the causes of the war and consequently lost 18 of the 20 points for that particular essay. He had written that the war was because the North did not want slaves and the South did. I wrote "No, that is not what the war was about" on his test. His father wrote a note back to me wanting an explanation of my comment since he believes the war WAS about slavery and he attached a highlighted printout from Encarta that started out "The Civil War was fought because of slavery". Of course, he had neglected to highlight the subsequent sentences that explained the friction resulted from the efforts of both northern and southern states to establish a majority in Congress. They wanted the majority to be either non slave-holding states (north) or slave-holding states (south). Throughout the article Dad had highlighted any sentence with the word slave in it while ignoring the explanation that followed that clarified the issue as economic or political or idealogical. I typed a page and a half trying to teach Dad about the causes of the war.
Well, in all fairness, if Jay wants to stop me on the street and ask about the Atlanta Braves record I'll probably give a stupid answer too. Sigh.