Start here with Joanne's comments and read the tale of the student who's flunked algebra six times - and who is being reassured, by the Washington Post, that that's just fine.
Pharyngula puts the hurting on scaredy-cat Richard Cohen: "It's about what you'd expect of a fellow who brags elsewhere in his essay that his best class in high school was typing." The comments are pretty phenomenal, too.
Let me just add my $.02. It should be a criminal offense for a journalist to address this issue (on any school subject) and fail to ask: "Were her teachers any good? Did they offer any tutoring? When she failed once, did they try something different the second time? And how many other students are this frustrated as well? How many of them all have the same teacher?" To add to this lack of any sort of journalistic investigation the insistence that the problem is the math, because it's just a bad old hard subject that adults almost never use in real life, is idiotic as well.
Posted by kswygert at February 21, 2006 10:12 AM