Metadish, Fresh from NYC

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When I first read this headline in the New York Times my first instinct was to hoist up my pinko commie socialist boxer shorts and start balling up my anger about the man keeping pregnant teenagers down.

Then, I read further.

A dozen girls, some perched awkwardly with their pregnant bellies flush against the desks, were struggling over a high school geometry assignment on a recent afternoon.

No pencils, no textbooks, no Pythagorean theorem. Instead, they sewed quilts.

That is what passes for math in one of New York City’s four high schools for pregnant girls, this one in Harlem. “It ties into geometry,” said Patricia Martin, the principal. “They’re cutting shapes.”

Created in the 1960s, when pregnant girls were such pariahs that they were forced to leave school until their babies were born, the city school system’s four pregnancy schools — or P-schools, as they are obliquely referred to — have lived on, their population dwindling to just 323 students from 1,500 in the late 1960s.

What the fuck? Sewing quilts? Did we suddenly time warp back to the 1880’s? And the principal had the nerve to try and equate it to geometry because “they’re cutting shapes”.

I for one can’t think of a better way to prepare a young, possibly single mother, to succeed than planting them in a school and teaching them to quilt. I hear in second period they get to learn how to churn buttermilk and be more submissive.

Attendance rates for the schools is less than 50%. Fewer than half of the pregnancy students ever transition back into high school. And the average student only earns 4-5 credits each year out of a possible 11. And the cost for this fabulous education? $33,670. Over double the city-wide average spent on a per pupil basis.

Your tax dollars hard at work. Fortunately though the schools are shutting down. Perhaps someday soon they’ll be able to take that scarlet letter off their shirts.

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