Saving Our Pathetic Public School System with Justin Bieber and Twitter

Whether it’s because we aren’t spending enough, hiring quality teachers, or utilizing the best curricula available, the United States’ formerly-vaunted public school system is now steadfastly mediocre . The Programme for International Student Assessment, a tri-annual global survey of education quality in 34 of the world’s top countries, found in 2009’s study that the U.S. ranks 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. For a country that prides itself on being exceptional, that’s barely average.

A classic lament of crotchety high school science teachers in movies and television is that the kids these days care more about their rock music than the Krebs cycle. That’s not surprising either. Let’s be honest here: Gucci Mane is way more interesting on Twitter than Albert Einstein.

But what if rock stars used the enormous vocal platforms available to them, like Twitter, to encourage their followers to study hard? To get a sort of baseline idea of how the famous affect their fans’ studies through social media, I searched for the intersect of Twitter demigod Justin Bieber and science. Here, I’ve classified my results by perceived emotional state of the responses, under the assumption that general feelings of well-being and happiness suggest a positive correlation between Bieber and junior high science homework.

This certainly isn’t the best way to start things off. Here, someone using a mildly-disturbing mashup of Bieb’s and his girlfriend’s names has proudly proclaimed that they’d fail the most basic disciplines but dominate a Bieber test. A future leader in the celeb gossip rag world, I’m sure.

I’m not sure how Justin Bieber would feel about his followers wishing to recreate the lust scene from Se7en in class. I’m more curious about whether or not generic “science” classes are actually given in high school.

I’d really like to know what discipline “my science” falls under and how that resulted in @BiebsGummyBearr asking the teacher if he’s a Belieber. More pressing is the question of whether or not Beliebers will ever align with Creationists to label science folk “douches”.

Actual experiments in “science” class are always highlights of the class curriculum. If even those hands-on affairs can’t beat out Bieber for discussion, well, I guess we end up in a world of questionable spelling and weird punctuation.

I love this. By lamenting the fact that science homework has limited her ability to fawn over Bieber, @dtfJustinBiebs (what a creepy handle) is still “fangirling.”

I may not know who Kenneth is or why he deserves to be loved, but I do know the difference between comparative and superlative suffixes.

Other misspelled words aside, I believe the fact that young folk can get so worked up about the spelling of Justin Bieber’s name suggests perhaps he can have a positive impact on education. How about starting the National Spelling Bieb?

Potential academic improprieties aside (are kids really just printing their homework these days?), I take it as a bad sign that the mere mention of science, rather than more Bieber, on Twitter has pushed one user to suicide.

No wonder students are doing so terribly in science. They can’t even see the textbook through their Bieber tears.

This young lady is so desperately lost in class that she’s “crying out”: http://twitter.com/#!/Ninja_Aubergine/status/139112608027516928 to the Twitterverse for a tutor. Or, yeah, she’s just high.

I love this dad’s response. It suggests perhaps Bieber isn’t totally to blame for poor school performance. It’s a bad sign when a parent responds to his child’s request for school help with “HEY! GET OFF THOSE DAMN BIEBER SITES!”

No wonder we can’t find any good teachers. Who’s going to sign up for a job that includes random thirty-person Bieber shouting sessions?

Here’s how to get a class’s attention: Bieber references and diarrhea . Now, whether they actually learned anything has yet to be seen.

To me, this reeks of a teacher trying to connect with his or her students through the lowest common denominator. But hey, at least this is “one pupil”: http://twitter.com/#!/MirandaMcKenna/status/139762553197821952 who didn’t say she hates science!

I only found one tweet that had expressed a genuine positive feeling of both Bieber and science. I’m not sure what makes @yusrinanor such an outlier, but it’s nice to see someone jamming to both.

There doesn’t seem to be much framework for a positive Bieber-science correlation, but there certainly are a lot of young folk in the Twitterverse that seem more concerned with anything he says than what their teachers say. Does that mean that Bieber himself has the power to reboot America’s schools, possibly with a Bill Nye collaboration? Come on, who are we kidding? The damn kid got famous precisely so he didn’t have to go to school. Who’s going to argue with that?

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