I'm old enough to remember when there was no "middle school." The building I went to growing up was Public School 22 (P.S. 22) in Queens, and when I was there there were kids in the 8th grade. They went from K-8 in that building, and although it was then co-ed, there were entrance archways marked BOYS, and entrance archways marked GIRLS. With a distance between them. It was heated by coal.
Sometime on my way to fourth grade, the city started a Junior High School designation to hold the kids in 7th, 8th and 9th grade, These were new buildings, and quite large. They were the equivalent of what is now called middle school. No matter.
As parents, real-life situations were presented to our kids as something to learn from. For me, I tended to think in terms of math, so I usually translated something that was happening to a math word problem. And right now, I can think of no better problem to present to any child that should be able to answer it, and any adult for that matter...
If New York City builds a subway that runs for a mile and half for $4 billion, and China helps Africa build a rail line that goes 466 miles for $4 billion, how much per mile is each builder spending?, and who is getting more for mileage for their dollar?
Of course, the projects are not directly comparable, since New York City's is a subway, completely underground and through an already heavily populated area of Manhattan, and Africa's is a surface rail line through open, often unsettled land, but there is a numerical answer to the word problem.
The cost of the Second Avenue Subway reminds me of the Westway project was was supposed to replace the elevated West Side Highway that ran along parts of Manhattan's West Side, hugging the Hudson River.
Driving on the old West Side Highway was like driving on the Great Wall of China, if you were allowed to do so, and if a car could fit. I remember watching them demolish the old highway near the World Trace Center in the 70s.
The Westway project's expense projections increased every day, somewhat like a debt clock. At one point it was going to cost $1 billion per mile. (A billion is a thousand millions, but is really now the new million.) I distinctly remember a Russell Baker column that pointed out that was a lot of money to create a road that would allow Wall Street brokers quicker access to 42nd Street to buy pornography.
I don't know why he picked on Wall Street people as being customers of the bookstores and peep shows that were part of the Times Square of that era, and that they would drive to get there, but he did.
Environmentalists complained of what it was going to do to the striped bass population in the Hudson River. I'm not sure striped bass were being fished from the Hudson River and landing on plates in New York City restaurants, but it shows you the variety of arguments that were presented to try and convince the powers in place that Westway was a bad idea.
Eventually, even after a huge cardboard check of an ungodly amount representing a down payment was presented to someone to get the project rolling, the project was scrapped, and an ordinary repaving job was put in place. Westway became NoWay. And of course, a far as Times Square being the epicenter for smut, that too disappeared and went online. Time changes a lot.
In all fairness of course, the Second Avenue Subway cannot possibly be compared to the Djibouti/ Addis Ababa rail link. On the Second Avenue Subway, a conductor opens and closes the doors, with fares collected by a MetroCard swipe at the turnstile.
On the African rail line, and because China helped finance the line as part of their $1 trillion (a thousand billions!) Silk Road initiative intended to cement ties with international trading partners in developing countries, Chinese conductors will run the rail line for five years.
Kids, what would our unions say about that?
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
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