Illiteracy in American middle schools - updated

This is a super-outstanding rant by a middle-school English teacher about the frustrations she is facing in her profession.  I don't know how to transfer Facebook videos to TYWKIWDBI, so I'll just embed this screencap and add the link here and hope that readers of my blog will venture over to Facebook to listen to her for 2 minutes.

Addendum:  Her school has apparently forced her to take down her TikTok post or lose her job.  Fortunately the Facebook one is still alive, so view it while you can.  It may be doomed.

Middle school horrorshow "educational" material. Honestly WTF???

This is what AI can generate when not supervised by an intelligent human.  Explanation via FoxNewsVegas:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB/Gray News) - A student agenda distributed at Farnsley Middle School contains a map of the United States with misspelled state names, a distorted periodic table and unreadable phases of the moon, prompting questions from parents about whether artificial intelligence was used to produce the materials...

The agenda’s U.S. map renamed Kentucky as “Venecky,” Louisiana as “Lookoong,” and Alabama as “Alotome.” Illinois was listed as “Vitoiis,” Arizona as “Arizone,” and South Carolina as “Sorth Cuanto.”

On Wednesday, Farnsley administrators emailed teachers warning them of a lot of mistakes on pages 19 through 36, instructing them to have students tear those pages out. The principal also emailed parents to notify them of the “inaccurate information.”

“This is not a misprint,” Morris said. “Someone did not look at what they were handing out to the students.”

Families pay a $10 annual instructional fee for the agendas. Morris said the errors led her to question whether artificial intelligence was used to generate the content.

“We have to pay a ten-dollar instructional fee every year to get this agenda,” Morris said. “But you’re making us pay for something you used AI for? That’s kind of silly, in my opinion.”

Jefferson County Public Schools officials said they are communicating with parents about the inaccuracies.

The district did not respond to questions regarding who printed the agendas and whether they were distributed to other schools before publication.

The Seattle Space Needle has been duplicated in San Francisco, there are two Tijuanas, "Havana" is in the Yucatan Peninsula, and various rivers start and end randomly.  This was noticed and may be remedied, but what other crap is being fed through the system?  Please listen to this teacher's tangentially-related rant.

I spent my entire life first learning from, then teaching in, this country's educational system, which seems now to be going to hell in a handbasket.  

Addendum:   I found a video and took screencaps of other crap in this "agenda":

College students who cannot read

Excerpt from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Longread at the link.

A university adapts to changing times

Headline from The New York Times.  A couple excerpts:

Syracuse University is closing or halting enrollment in about 20 percent of its academic programs, in a move that the school’s provost said was designed to create a university that would be “more focused, more distinctive and more aligned with student demand.”...

In all, 93 of the 460 academic programs at the school will be closed or paused, meaning that no new students will be able to enroll in those majors. Coursework in the areas will still be offered, and minors in many of the subjects will continue to be available.

Similar changes are happening at universities around the country, as students seek out fields that they believe will more directly translate into higher-paying jobs, a recent analysis by the American Enterprise Institute showed. College administrators, following the market, have been reducing humanities offerings...

“A university carrying nearly twice the number of programs as peer institutions is not a sign of strength; it is a sign that regular, honest assessment is overdue"...

At Syracuse, the most popular majors include psychology, information science, economics and sports management...

Like other universities, Syracuse is confronting a decline in enrollment of international students. Two years ago, 12 percent of the freshman class was from abroad; in September, international enrollment dropped to 5 percent. Chancellor Kent Syverud, who has led the school since 2014, said last September that the drop was attributable mainly to challenges in students getting visas. That represents a significant revenue hit because most international students pay the full $66,580 tuition.

7 + 2 = x + 6. Can you solve for "x" ?

Certainly you can.  Probably in less than 5 seconds, or you wouldn't be reading this blog.

But... one-fourth of incoming University of California San Diego freshmen taking a placement exam last year failed to solve for the x.

And... 3/5 of them failed to round 374,518 to the nearest hundred.

I found those numbers in the May 2026 Harper's Index, attributed to Akos Rona-Tas, University of California, San Diego.  A Google search led me to confirmatory editorial commentary in the San Diego Union Tribune.

"... it is so jarring to read a lengthy new report from UCSD’s Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions that says many students can’t answer simple math questions. “Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly 30-fold, reaching roughly one in eight members of the entering cohort,” it stated.

Some 25% of students in need of remedial math training couldn’t figure out the answer to this equation — 7 + 2 = blank + 6 — the sort of problem that California first-graders are expected to master. And 61% were unable to round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred — a basic task third-graders are drilled on..."

From what I've read elsewhere, it appears that UCSD students take the placement exam in order to assess what level courses they should enroll in in the STEM programs.  So the low numbers would seem to reflect science-interested students, not necessarily the liberal arts-focused students.

A number of potential causes are cited, including grade inflation during high school:

But the last cause on that list — high school grade inflation — is something that UCSD can’t fix. It is part of a far-reaching educational crisis that demands a much broader response.

The report said even the students admitted in 2024 who were most in need of remedial support had high school math grade point averages of better than 3.6 — and the difference in such GPAs between the least and most prepared entering students was very small.

If you're interested, here is one Math Placement Exam from UCSD, which you can take at home privately and for free.  It seems to start easy and get harder as you go along.  I didn't see these particular questions on this particular placement exam. 

Related:  Over the years I have hired a number of bright young neighborhood high schoolers to help me with yard and garden chores, and I sometimes challenge them with math and geometry puzzles from the mathematics category of this blog to ponder while they walk in diminishing circles behind a mower, or to take home to work out.  Last year I messaged a new puzzle to a high-school junior.  The correct answer came back in a few hours.  I told him I was impressed.  He said he and his friends couldn't figure it out, so they plugged it into ChatGPT...

This is a "timeout box" in an elementary school

As reported in The New York Times:

It has ignited an uproar in the school system, the Salmon River Central School District, a small district with 1,300 students on the Canadian border.

Within days, the school board enlisted a law firm to investigate what happened. It reassigned the district’s superintendent to “home duties” until the review is completed. And it placed several other leaders on leave, including a principal and the district’s special education director.

Officials also revealed that the box depicted in the social media post was not the only one: Two others had been installed in schools, according to the superintendent. They have been removed.

Images brightened and cropped for size from the originals at the link, where there is additional information and commentary.

Student handcuffed for carrying a bag of Doritos

"Baltimore cops swarmed and handcuffed a high school student after an artificial intelligence tool mistook his bag of Doritos for a weapon.

Taki Allen, 16, was hanging out with his friends after football practice at Kenwood High School Monday night when all of a sudden, armed officers approached him.

"It was like eight cop cars that came pulling up for us. At first, I didn't know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, 'Get on the ground,' and I was like, 'What?'" Allen told local outlet WBAL-TV.

The student described the moment he was handcuffed by police: "They made me get on my knees, put my hands behind my back, and cuffed me. Then, they searched me and they figured out I had nothing.”

Allen said police then found the bag of Doritos he had been eating shortly before."

The story continues at The Independent.  How difficult is it to be a high school student nowadays?  This is a generation that has gone through mandatory shooter response drills since their childhood.  Now AI is deciding whether they are suspected of being a criminal, and the responders come with guns drawn.  FWIW any childhood stress in my era from nuclear war drills pales in comparison.

Word for the day: "Lunch-shaming"

Excerpts from an editorial in the Minnesota Star Tribune:

Imagine being a hungry child at school, only to have your hot lunch tray taken away and replaced with a cold sandwich in front of your classmates. This is the reality for thousands of children across the U.S. — all because their parents couldn’t afford lunch fees. Debt collectors are literally chasing down families over school meal debt. For children unable to pay for meals, not only have school districts served them separate food from their peers, but some students are forced to wear wristbands or stamps.

A few years ago, Valerie Castile put this issue at the top of mind for legislators. She is the mother of Philando Castile, the 32-year-old cafeteria worker who was fatally shot during a police traffic stop in 2016. In his honor, Valerie used her son’s foundation to pay off student lunch debts, ensuring no child would be denied the chance to graduate because of existing debt. Philando’s compassion sparked a movement — and helped shift the conversation in Minnesota and across the country around school meal debt and universal school meals.

Back in 2019, more than 40 students at Richfield High who had lunch account debts of $15 or more had their hot lunches removed from their trays, thrown in the trash and replaced with a cold lunch. This was an unacceptable form of humiliation that generated outrage and helped pave the way for real action in our state. Examples like this have been all too common in schools across the country...

In Minnesota, I am grateful that the universal school meals bill was signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz. Because of this crucial legislation, not only are children receiving free meals at school, but this legislation has effectively canceled all future school meal debt. It has transformed the lives of so many children across our state. If you can’t feed the bellies, you can’t feed the brains...

More at the link, written by Representative Ilhan Omar.

Is there a GenZ 2.0?

I've seen quite a few reports on the internet observing (or lamenting) the fact that young Americans can no longer be expected to adopt a liberal/progressive viewpoint.  Lots of reasons have been proposed, with no concrete data to explain the phenomenon.

The current issue of Harvard Magazine has an article entitled How MAGA Went Mainstream at Harvard:
Trump, TikTok, and the pandemic are reshaping Gen Z politics.  Herewith some salient excerpts:

Harvard, like many American universities, has long been seen as a bastion of liberalism. In its attacks on the University, the Trump administration has often pointed to a lack of ideological diversity on campus—a charge that even Harvard’s own leadership has conceded, at least in part, by launching formal efforts to address it.

But whatever you think you know about the politics of Harvard’s faculty, its student body is an increasingly different story—one that reflects a broader shift in Gen Z politics. In poll after poll, the youngest members of Gen Z have shown a surprising conservative tilt. In the last presidential election, a Democratic polling group found, white men under 20 voted for Trump at higher rates than those in their late-20s—and at higher rates than white baby boomer men. And the latest Yale Youth Poll revealed a whopping 18-point partisan gap between voters aged 18 to 21—who leaned Republican by 11.7 points—and those aged 22 to 29, who leaned Democrat by 6.4 points.

In April, a theory about this shift went viral on X.

“I said it before and I’ll say it again,” Rachel Janfaza ’20, an analyst focused on youth politics, wrote. “There really are two Gen Zs.” Her post included a graphic contrasting “Gen Z 1.0,” the liberal-leaning older cohort, with “Gen Z 2.0,” their younger, more conservative peers.

According to Janfaza, the pandemic marked a dividing line. Older Gen Zers were in college when it hit, able to quarantine with roommates and friends; younger ones were still in high school, isolated at home. The two cohorts also came of age in different political climates: Gen Z 1.0 came up during Trump’s first presidency, when resistance meant protesting at the Women’s March or walking out of school for climate action. Gen Z 2.0 grew up under President Joe Biden—disillusioned with institutions, skeptical of pandemic rules, and more likely to lean into contrarian conservatism.

Now, Gen Z 2.0 is filling college campuses around the country, including at Harvard. They’re revitalizing conservative institutions, shifting the boundaries of campus discourse, and getting ready to shape national politics.

Much more at the link.  Please at least browse it before waxing eloquent in the Comments with your own theories.

A teacher expresses doubts about her career

"I start school tomorrow with 150 new students. Although I don’t know them yet, I’ll protect them with my life if/when a shooter decides we’re the target.

I decided to be an English teacher when I was in seventh grade. I’ve never really wavered in my vocation. I started volunteering in schools as a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I student-taught at twenty-one, the same semester in which I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from my elite liberal arts college. (There were only four of us teachers in my class at Macalester, and the school has since stopped offering teacher training because no one wants to do this job anymore.)

In my career, I’ve switched positions more than teachers usually do, I think because I keep hoping that there’s a utopian school community that embodies what I feel is possible in K-12 education. Maybe I can find the right grade level, I tell myself, the right school policies, the right leaders, that will make me feel at home. A parent of a student once told me I was born to be a teacher. It was a compliment — I’d done well for her kids. I do think I’m born for it, but I don’t really want to do it this year.

It’s my twenty-fourth year. Because I’ve taken three years off along the way, the math works out like this:

The Columbine shooting happened while I was student teaching at Tartan High School in 1999. The school had been designed in the 1960s progressive era, and the classrooms were situated in circles with a common space in the middle of each loop. The classrooms didn’t have doors.

The teachers sat in the auditorium on the afternoon of the first school massacre. Was it even safe to go to the auditorium, all together like sitting ducks? We teachers wondered this that day. We discussed how shooters in our school could just stand in the middle of our department areas and hit people in each room around the circle without even moving their feet.

The very next year, or soon after that, I started practicing active shooter drills with students. In the beginning, we all did the same things — turn off the lights, pull the shades, hide in the corner. At one school, they wouldn’t tell us if the drill was a drill because they didn’t think we’d try hard enough to enact the protocols if we knew we weren’t actually going to get shot. Kids would always ask, “Is this real?”

“Probably not,” I told them. “Listen for the sirens. If we don’t hear them, it’s not real.” And then, we’d go back to talking about characters or commas, or whatever we were doing before the alarm sounded.

There was a big kerfuffle the year I was teaching third grade (I had decided maybe elementary was the utopia I sought) because the school moved to a run-hide-fight model where you trained children to throw scissors and staplers at the shooters who came to their classroom doors. Some of us thought that it was inappropriate to teach them to expect to be shot.

At my next school, we started table-top drills during which we discussed shooting scenarios. It was a Catholic high school (also not the utopia I imagined), and the kids were empowered to make their own decisions during attacks. I imagine this is because of liability? Like, if I, the teacher, decided to go out the window, and we all got obliterated that way, then at least the girls had had the choice to run down the hallway instead?

Anyway, you get the idea. My new school does the I Love U Guys model. We teach with our doors locked and closed all the time. We stay and barricade. We practice the system a bunch of times per year and assure the children that we’ll protect them with our lives if necessary.

Last week, my brother’s and my sister’s kids’ school was the latest site of a school shooting. My brother was there, as was my sister’s husband. They all saw it. They were all there at Mass, not a location we normally practice in, by the way. We don’t practice escaping shooters at lunch or recess or in the auditorium because it’s super logistically hard to do. I think today’s shooters know that. All of today’s madmen and women have been through the same drills I just described for the last twenty-six years themselves.

So… in addition to being in a job where, despite my talents and qualifications and dedication to the craft, my earnings are capped in the five figures…

… in addition to being in a job where all/most/some parents think they know more than I do about how to teach…

…in addition to being in a job that suffers the whims of public opinion about our lack of quality and suitability as professionals…

…in addition to being in a job where successfully writing and publishing four novels makes me LESS employable (thanks to the snobbery of high school English departments??)…

I also have to be ready to die at work.

I already thought about it a lot, and now that six of my family members have actually been shot at in school, I’ll think about it more. I’ll go back tomorrow because I have to (I need a full-time income, I have a life and family), and also because it’s my vocation. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher.

But I don’t want to do it tomorrow."

The author is Kathleen West, a daughter-in-law of one of my high school classmates; she is currently teaching at a public middle school in northeast Minneapolis.  The essay has been published in her Substack.

Considering your future

"Have you considered your future, Archie?"

"Have I considered my future?  Well, lets see... I was top of my class in junior, secondary and sixth form college.  I was first violin in the school orchestra, captained the girls' volley and football team, was head prefect, woud've been head girl if it wasn't for a dirty campaign run by Katie Clark, which I refused to lower myself to.  I volunteered for community projects, helping disaffected youth and disenfranchised elderly.  Ran a breakfast and an after-school club, got 15 A to A-star GCSEs, and five A-star AS and A2 levels.  I worked at an ethically-sourced cocoa bean plantation in Costa Rica in my gap year.  I was the first student from my school to be awarded an unconditional offer to study politics, psychology, and sociology at Cambridge University, which is where you find me now.  Do I sound like someone who has not considered my future?

"So what do you want to do?"

"I don't know."

Dialogue excerpted from The Lazarus Project, season 1, episode 5.

U.S. Secretary of Education mispronounces "A.I."

There has been quite a bit of press about her letter to Harvard University that was riddled with grammatical errors, but I found this report only in the Irish Star.

The former promoter, who co-founded World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), shared her thoughts during a recent panel discussion in San Diego, California. McMahon said to an assembled crowd: “I heard…there is a school system that is going to start making sure that first graders, or even pre-K, have ‘A-one’ teaching in every year, starting that far down in the grades.”

A Denmark television program shows children the varieties of the naked human body

Posted to accompany my post about "The Boobs of Texas," here are excerpts from a 2020 article in The New York Times:

COPENHAGEN — “OK, children, does anyone have a question?” the TV show’s host, Jannik Schow, asked. Only a few in the audience of 11- to 13-year-olds raised their hands. “Remember, you can’t do anything wrong,” he said. “There are no bad questions.”

You can’t blame the children if their thoughts were elsewhere. On a stage before them in a heated studio in Copenhagen stood five adults in bathrobes. There was a brief moment of silence, as faces turned serious. Having discussed it for days before in school, the children knew what was coming next. Mr. Schow gave a little nod, and the adults cast off their robes.

Facing the children, and the cameras, they stood completely naked, like statues, with their hands and arms folded behind their backs.

And so began a recording of the latest episode of an award-winning Danish children’s program, “Ultra Strips Down,” which is shown on Ultra, the on-demand children’s channel of the national broadcaster, DR. The topic today: skin and hair.

The program is now in its second season, and while perhaps a shock to non-Danes, it is highly popular in Denmark. Recently, however, a leading member of the right-wing Danish People’s Party, Peter Skaarup, said he found “Ultra Strips Down” to be “depraving our children.”

“It is far too early for children” to start with male and female genitalia, he told B.T., a Danish tabloid. At that age, he said, they “already have many things running around in their heads.”...

Mr. Schow, 29, who helped develop the concept of the show after a producer came up with the idea, said the point was also to counter the daily bombardment of young people with images of perfect — unrealistic — bodies. The adults are not actors, but volunteers.

“Perhaps some people are like, ‘Oh, my God, they are combining nakedness and kids,’” Mr. Schow said. “But this has nothing to do with sex, it’s about seeing the body as natural, the way kids do.”...

“Danish parenting generally favors exposing children rather than shielding them.”

One famous example of how far the Danes take this philosophy was the euthanization and dissection of a giraffe at the Copenhagen Zoo in 2014, where children observed from the front row.

Abroad it was seen by many as a nightmarish spectacle, topped off by the feeding of the carcass to the lions, but in Denmark people shrugged their shoulders. The children in the audience that day had asked “very good questions,” one zoo official told CNN...

Asked during the program on skin and hair why she decided to take part, one of the adults, Ule, 76, said she wanted to show the children that perfect bodies are rare and that what they see on social media is often misleading...

In its first season, in 2019, “Ultra Strips Down” won an award for the best children’s program of 2019 at the Danish TV Festival. In the 2020 season, the show, which is produced by the Danish branch of Warner Bros. International Television Production, will offer five new episodes on a variety of topics, each to an audience from mostly different schools...

If a child does become uncomfortable, she or he can join their teacher in the studio. “But we have had over 250 children in our audience,” Mr. Schow said, “and this has never happened.”

Addendum May 5, 2025:

In overturning District Court and Court of Appeals decisions, the state’s high court ruled last week that there is nothing illegal about a woman having her breasts out in public in Minnesota, as long as she is not engaging in sexual activity. ( Breastfeeding was already exempt from the law.)

Carl Sagan's foreboding (29 years ago)

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” 

-- The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Random House, 1996

Reposted from last year because it's so damn accurate and needs to be read more widely. 

First day of school

Also reposted from 2020, which was a good year for humor posts.  via.

Mastermind

I would bet that most readers of TYWKIWDBI would enjoy viewing episodes of the BBC program Mastermind.  I've embedded a random example of a program above.  Contestants are quizzed with in-depth questions on a single subject, then have to answer "general knowledge" questions.  For ultimate success, it is not sufficient to have expertise on just one subject, because winners have to come back for additional (3? 4?) rounds to reach the finals. 

For this particular episode, the specialty subjects were the geography of Switzerland, the family of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Sir Roger Moore and Bruce Springsteen.

Lots of episodes are available on YouTube.  I don't know if they are available streaming somewhere or not.

Mastermind

When I was on sabbatical in London many, many years ago, Mastermind was my favorite program to watch on the telly in my rented room in Turnham Green.

The original quizmaster was Magnus Magnusson (quizzing a contestant on Sherlock Holmes here)

Originally posted by some guy over at Neatorama.  Reposted from 2017.

University Challenge

 

I had no clue on some of these questions.

Reposted from 2017.

GE College Bowl epic battle (Princeton vs. Agnes Scott)

 

I've just spent an enjoyable half hour walking down memory lane, watching an episode of General Electric's College Bowl. This quiz bowl series ran on U.S. television from 1959 to 1970.

The most dominant team was the University of Minnesota, which had teams appear in 23 of the 68 broadcast matches. The 1953-55 series had a powerful appeal because it used remote broadcasts; each team was located at their own college where they were cheered on by their wildly enthusiastic classmates. The effect was akin to listening to a football game, but this type of excitement evaporated in later versions, in which both teams competed in the same room.

One of the most memorable upsets in the history of the show occurred in 1966, when an all-woman team from tiny Agnes Scott College [Atlanta], took on the defending champions from Princeton University.

Agnes Scott fell behind 185-130 with less than two minutes remaining. You can see the final segment of the show in the embedded video above. (Although if this subject matter interests you, it's more fun to watch the first ten minutes here, and the second ten minutes here. The videos also incorporate the original advertising that ran in 1966.)

One particularly poignant aspect of the contest was pointed out recently by Robert Earle, who was moderator of the program. The last bonus question was answered by Karen Gearreald with about one second left in the game. "That young lady, by the way, was the only person in the theater who could not see the clock," Mr. Earle wrote. "She is blind."

And here's the final question: "For twenty points, what were Balmung and Durandal?"

For the answer, watch the video. It's more fun than Googling the answer.

(via Metafilter)

Reposted from 2017 to accompany other posts.

A college student expresses some stark realities

Excerpts from an eye-opening essay by an undergraduate student:

I was surprised to find I spend far, far less time on my classes than on my extracurricular activities... It turns out that I’m not alone in my meager coursework. Although the average college student spent around 25 hours a week studying in 1960, the average was closer to 15 hours in 2015...

This fall, one of my friends did not attend a single lecture or class section until more than a month into the semester. Another spent 40 to 80 hours a week on her preprofessional club, leaving barely any time for school. A third launched a startup while enrolled, leaving studying by the wayside... These extreme examples are outliers. But still, for many students, instead of being the core part of college, class is simply another item on their to-do list, no different from their consulting club presentation or their student newspaper article...

Half of the blame can be assigned to grade inflation, which has fundamentally changed students’ incentives during the past several decades. Rising grades permit mediocre work to be scored highly, and students have reacted by scaling back academic effort...

And therein lies the second reinforcing effect of grade inflation, which not only fails to punish substandard schoolwork but actively incentivizes it, as students often rely on extracurriculars to get ahead. Amanda Claybaugh, dean of undergraduate education, made this point in a recent New York Times interview, saying that “Students feel the need to distinguish themselves outside the classroom because they are essentially indistinguishable inside the classroom.”..

One of my classmates last semester, who is one of the more academically oriented people I know, told me that to get the best grade on an important essay, he simply “regurgitated the readings” without thinking critically about the material...

This utilitarian approach to schoolwork requires a cultural explanation beyond grade inflation, and some of the blame must be placed on the newly meritocratic nature of college admissions. Although the partial shift away from the monied legacy networks that dominated Ivy League spots has been beneficial overall, the change also initiated a résumé arms race... nationwide surveys of incoming freshman confirm this narrative, as an increasingly large share of first-years view college as preparation for financial success rather than a site of learning per se...

This attitude is one manifestation of what Fischman and Gardner call a “transactional model” of college. According to their book, a so-called transactional student “goes to college and does what (and only what) is required to get a degree and then secure placement in graduate school and/or a job; college is viewed principally, perhaps entirely, as a springboard for future-oriented ambitions.”..

In contrast, a professor who is also a College alumnus recently told me that he spent most of his time at Harvard taking five or six classes a semester without doing extracurriculars. Hearing that made me think I’ve probably approached this place in the wrong way. I was discussing the professor’s comments with my roommate the other day, and we both agreed that if we were to go back and redo our undergraduate education, we would basically drop all our extraneous clubs and take as many classes as possible.

I'm sure this essay will trigger a lot of responses from readers (most of whom have probably attended college and experienced similar (or opposite) situations, and I anticipate some vigorous comments.  I would encourage you to read the essay in its entirety and not rely on my focused excerpts.  And note the student is at an elite university, but the principles expressed likely extend broadly across the academic world.