“In big cities, they raise children like unloved puppies. That’s why there’s shit everywhere.”
The other students were mostly kids, but all of them were taking Latin as a course required by their majors, not because they wanted to read De Bello Gallico in the original. As a result, they discovered real studying for the first time in their lives. They had all just been shining it on, all along – class discussions and rambling essays and group projects – even in math classes! They found the wall in Latin class: If you can’t keep up, you will be left behind.
The teacher graded from A to J – and even an F was once worse than an E. The point she was getting across is that there is a lot to get wrong, and she was kind enough to point out everything. If you studied, you were fine, but you had to give the work as much time as it needed – every day – or you were instantly overwhelmed. The class went from 40 to 20 students in three weeks.
No one lives or dies on discriminations among semi-deponent verbs, but everything we rely on relies on people who know what they are doing. A middle-school in Minnesota proposes to eliminate the F grade – to combat the ‘systemic racism’ known as academic excellence – which notion deserves a grade lower than J.
I realized when I was a young scruffian in New York than the welfare system replicates the plantation system – “the second time as farce.” It is funny but not fun to watch people attempting to erect an aristocracy of the inept. But it won’t be funny at all when you tender you life into the hands of a surgeon who has never had his memory tested – or has never even had his ‘self-esteem’ challenged.
In other news:
American Thinker: Homeschooling Growing by Leaps and Bounds.
Thomas Lifson: Saturday schadenfreude: Prog thinks she can change nature and suddenly and hilariously discovers that she can’t.
