Pink numbers and fluffy words.

If a man cuts wood into planks at a rate of x planks per hour, seven hours a day, and if it takes 12x planks to make a shed, how long does it take the man to prepare enough planks for four sheds?

That was the sort of 'practical' question we used to see in maths classes. They were never ever worded as 'A properly butch bloke, married, with kids, and not even slightly camp, not even a bit of it, was cutting planks...'

Nor were they worded 'A man minced to work at a walking pace of three miles per hour, but stopped at every shoe shop on the way...'

Most of the time, the 'man' in the question didn't even have a name. He had no religion, no skin colour, no age, no sexual preferences of any kind and for all I knew, no teeth and no hair. He was just a generic human whose only reason for existence was to give the question a focal point.

So I was a little mystified by this statement:

"When you have a maths problem, why does it have to involve a straight family or a boyfriend and girlfriend? Why not two boys or two girls?

Well, where there were two fictional characters in such questions, they were usually two boys or two girls. There was no suggestion they were shagging each other into a frenzy, they were usually passing apples around or sharing out sweets. I recall no questions involving boyfriends or girlfriends. They were all very platonic and all focused on the point of the lesson. The maths. Not the social engineering, just the maths.

Children apply very simple forms of logic to life. If they are in a maths, English or geography lesson and their teacher starts insisting on bringing sex into it, they are first of all going to forget all the maths, English and geography and concentrate on the sex. Here's what will go through the mind of the teacher while writing up a quadratic equation in rainbow colours:

"I'm being really right-on and politically correct and all these children will now understand, through the medium of numbers, that being gay is a valid and noble way of life."

Here's what's going through the mind of every kid in that room:

"Whoa. My teacher is a poof."

The quadratic equation? Forget it, they aren't listening to that any more. They are now speculating on whether Mr. Maths is getting hot and bothered with Mr. English, whose new rendition of Romeo and Jeremy they have just had to read. Or maybe they have a threesome with Mr. Geography, who insists they speculate on why gay people move from the countryside to the town while ignoring the straight people who do the same thing for the same reason. It's where the jobs are. In teaching, apparently.

This goes all the way down to four-year-olds who have only just worked out how to use those bits for peeing and have not yet dreamed of any alternative function for them. They know nothing about sex, straight or gay, and care nothing about it either. Which is just as well since they aren't supposed to be doing anything about it for another twelve years yet. Show them video of Larry Grayson's show and they'll laugh, because it was funny. Mr. Grayson's sexuality will simply not occur to them, he's just a funny man doing a funny show.

Start putting gay scenarios in front of them and they will just be confused. Whatever lesson was supposed to have been taught will be lost among the random noise in those small brains, which are now trying to work out why the man selling planks to the shed-maker gets paid in kisses. Lessons will, as usual, not be learned.

Then they'll go home and little Dwayne will explain to his dad, Tattooed Dave, about this new and strange lesson format and Tattooed Dave will phone Hairy Bob and Tumbleguts and the entire estate will explode in homophobic rage. Then the producers of this insanity will purse their lips, tut loudly and say "See? Told you they were all homophobic." Ah, the glory of the Righteous, creating and then exacerbating the problem they claim to solve.

How can this have come about? Didn't the Coagulation say they would get schools back to teaching things kids actually need to know rather than baffling and distracting them with irrelevancies? Well, here's a clue, tucked neatly into a corner of the text:

A spokesman for the TDA said the funding was secured last March and that £20,000 was to go towards the lesson plans, with the rest spent mostly on the website.

Last March. So it's not the Coagulation's doing. It's one of the Brown Gorgon's little time bombs, with funding already placed and the fuse lit by the blob in charge of education at that time. A certain Ed Balls. The bug-eyed globule of lard who insisted that children must be taught about sex from an early age, for reasons upon which we can only speculate because they were never defined.

How many more pre-funded bombs are waiting to go off, I wonder? How many more of these land-mine groups are sitting on a pile of money, waiting just long enough to ensure the Coagulation get the blame for their lunatic actions? Should we expect the 'Delights of Divorce' group to pop up next, or will it be the 'Get your Parents Arrested' consortium, or maybe they managed to get as far as the 'Maths makes your eyes bleed' and 'Spelling gives you cancer' and 'Why learn geography when you can't afford to go anywhere' syndicates?

This Labour-produced rubbish will not 'enhance children's understanding of gay issues' at all. It was never intended to. Like all Labour's meddling, it is a distraction from lessons, a means to disrupt learning, to produce more dependent drone voters who spend all day in front of the TV soaking up propaganda. If it has any effect on anyone's opinions on matters of gayness, it can only make things much, much worse.

But then, that's all Labour's meddling ever did. If only the Coagulation could see that.


UPDATE: Quiet Man has noticed another issue here:

I just wonder how they believe our resident Muslim/Islamic community are going to react to this?

Indeed.