Numbers for the Day

An assortment of numbers came in the mail today. One, a dollar figure for the cost of natural gas, wasn’t welcome, though describing it as $7.40 a day for heating the house doesn’t sound as bad as the total. It’s going to get worse, too, unless January and February are unaccountably warm.

On the other hand, Lilly’s TerraNova test scores came in the mail as well. TerraNova is a McGraw-Hill standardized test that seems to be used quite a lot in schools all over the country. Naturally, I’d never heard of it before, since I haven’t paid much attention to standardized testing.

So I couldn’t say how useful or valuable such a thing is. Maybe no one can, really, but I can’t help but be pleased that Lilly’s in the 99th percentile for second graders in reading, 91st in language (and 76th in math, which isn’t bad). I don’t need a score to tell me she’s a good reader, however. That one I’ve already figured out. Good thing, too. Means that lifelong ignorance is less of a risk for her, whatever else happens.

It reminds of the time in the 8th grade English class when a wiseacre named Tim asked the teacher, Mr. Allen, why anyone had to learn what he was teaching. Mr. Allen, a man of decades of experience in dealing with the likes of Tim, did not hesitate. “Because if you don’t know it, you’ll be ignorant,” he said.