A few years back, Vimeo got angry at me for one reason or another and erased my account. We only had the equivalent of home movies on it. If memory serves, they said they received some form of copyright complaint. This was probably bosh. They just erased everything and closed my account. When I inquired about it, they replied that they had sent an email to me. You know, to an email address I no longer used, and wasn’t the current one I had in their info stash.
Like most little bits of ephemeral moments in people’s lives, it’s simultaneously trivial and earthshaking to lose certain things. I’ve seen videos of people picking through homes destroyed by fire and flood and tornadoes and similar calamities. They always seem to be looking for their photo albums, first and foremost. Boy howdy, do I understand that.
I currently have eleven broken or abandoned desktop computers in my office. Some belonged to my children, most to me over the years. It’s been many moons since I was able to buy a new computer. I kept buying used ones, or had some given to me, and simply got another one and kept going when each gave up their silicon ghosts. I kept them in the hope I could someday pillage their hard drives, at least. Today is someday.
There was this precious video I recalled that I featured fourteen years ago. My Son Invented President Math. It’s had a blank placeholder for many years because the embed link led to Vimeo’s version of the River Styx. Well, I finally got around to hooking up a SATA drive docking station and yanking the hard drives out of my computer graveyard, and searching through the old, mostly unlabeled files. Lo and behold, I give you, once again, President Math:
The video is hosted right here on my server. No one’s ever going to steal my children’s lives again.
The public school in the town we were living in when this video was made had declared that this child was mentally substandard. So we took him out of that school, moved away, and my wife taught him at home. He eventually attended a statewide charter high school in Maine, and was a Valedictorian. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Security from the University of Maine. Summa cum Laude. In three years.
Perhaps they’d be willing to admit, after all these years, that he at least turned out standard. Prolly not. I won’t lose any sleep over it.
5 Responses
No, my friend, he is clearly non-standard.
The prefix ‘sub’ says more about the person saying it than anything else.
Bright kid.
Imagine how many other “substandard” children were captured by the professional educators, and had drugs and IIEPs, and were shoehorned into boxes, and came out the other side… standardized.
But for sure the Department of Education is vital, necessary, and underfunded.
I’m glad, for his sake and yours, that you saved him.
…because different = bad in so many very tiny minds…
Those substandardbearers are fehkenghey, and severely tarded. The video is a treasure. Many thanks. 🙏🏼
The public school in the town we were living in when this video was made had declared that this child was mentally substandard. So we took him out of that school, moved away, and my wife taught him at home.
If you had saved the paper work, you could drive back to that school and present them with a gross misdiagnosis, along with a copy of your son’s college diploma. The guilty parties are probably long gone, but it would still be interesting to see how the current staff reacted.
I recall reading your account of your travails with that school. What stuck in my mind was your determination to keep your cool, to not lose your temper. Good decision, but not always easy to carry out. At least for me.