Morning Quote...

"A philosopher is somebody who likes giving advice to people happier than they are." -- Tom Lehrer.

we had a year or two like this...

Pass the Aspirin, Wedding Bells Are Ringing and Ringing and Ringing - New York Times:

It’s exactly this time of year, as August grinds along, that you see young men and women suffering from a powerful seasonal affliction. They drag through their days looking drained, sluggish. It’s not the heat. It’s not even the humidity. It’s the weddings.

Summer is supposed to be a season of peace, of relaxation — time to hang the Gone Fishin’ shingle and take a break. Instead it has become a gantlet of festivities. Five weddings in a single season have left me a nearly broken man, and I have several friends and acquaintances who have gone to even more. I have wedding fatigue and I am not alone.

a new wrinkle...

A Tale of Two Pols:

But Allen failed to follow the other George's playbook for what to do when caught red-handed. Allen, in at least two interviews, apologized to the volunteer "if he's offended" -- kind of like telling your girlfriend you're sorry that she's mad at you. Late and lame, chided the state's editorialists. Bush, however, writes in his autobiography, "A Charge to Keep," about the time he accidentally shot a rare songbird, the killdeer, while dove hunting during his 1994 race to unseat Texas Gov. Ann Richards (D). Bush, at the behest of advisers, called a news conference to confess his transgression and add a dollop of humor. "Thank goodness it was not deer season; I might have shot a cow," he joshed.

Gee, I didn't know Bush already had a history of attacking the wrong target...

Johnny Can't Read - now can we talk about the why's?

From the 'Post, copied here intact (with all credit and apologies to Mr. Skube).
Writing Off Reading:

Writing Off Reading

By Michael Skube
Sunday, August 20, 2006; B03

We were talking informally in class not long ago, 17 college sophomores and I, and on a whim I asked who some of their favorite writers are. The question hung in uneasy silence. At length, a voice in the rear hesitantly volunteered the name of . . . Dan Brown.

No other names were offered.

The author of "The DaVinci Code" was not just the best writer they could think of; he was the only writer they could think of.

In our better private universities and flagship state schools today, it's hard to find a student who graduated from high school with much lower than a 3.5 GPA, and not uncommon to find students whose GPAs were 4.0 or higher. They somehow got these suspect grades without having read much. Or if they did read, they've given it up. And it shows -- in their writing and even in their conversation.

A few years ago, I began keeping a list of everyday words that may as well have been potholes in exchanges with college students. It began with a fellow who was two months away from graduating from a well-respected Midwestern university.

"And what was the impetus for that?" I asked as he finished a presentation.

At the word "impetus" his head snapped sideways, as if by reflex. "The what?" he asked.

"The impetus. What gave rise to it? What prompted it?"

I wouldn't have guessed that impetus was a 25-cent word. But I also wouldn't have guessed that "ramshackle" and "lucid" were exactly recondite, either. I've had to explain both. You can be dead certain that today's college students carry a weekly planner. But they may or may not own a dictionary, and if they do own one, it doesn't get much use. ("Why do you need a dictionary when you can just go online?" more than one student has asked me.)

You may be surprised -- and dismayed -- by some of the words on my list.

"Advocate," for example. Neither the verb nor the noun was immediately clear to students who had graduated from high school with GPAs above 3.5. A few others:

"Derelict," as in neglectful.

"Satire," as in a literary form.

"Pith," as in the heart of the matter.

"Brevity," as in the quality of being succinct.

And my favorite: "Novel," as in new and as a literary form. College students nowadays call any book, fact or fiction, a novel. I have no idea why this is, but I first became acquainted with the peculiarity when a senior at one of the country's better state universities wrote a paper in which she referred to "The Prince" as "Machiavelli's novel."( continues... )

I will say that while I still don't read fiction very much, I do read far more now than I ever did 20 years ago, though every word Skube listed above I was well familiar with by the time I graduated.

This section gets to me, though:

College admissions specialists are of a different view and are apt to label the student with high SAT scores but mediocre grades unmotivated, even lazy.

How about bored out of our brains?  by virtue of our high scores, maybe they could discern that either 1) we're already overly familiar with the material being "taught", 2) we're already aware of the *real* lessons supposedly taught in the classes that have material we haven't yet seen, or 3) the material really has no purposes other than itself (take about half of American 19th century literature, for example...yeah, its "American", but like American music of the time, its really low quality stuff compared with Europe).

As for "unmotivated", the question is "motivated for what, exactly?"  From the perspective of the high school student, school exists solely for its own sake, not for any actual pragmatic understanding of the world, particularly when science and history's importance are all but removed from the curriculum and math is just a wrote set of either quickly discarded memorizations or excessively repetative "3 digits times 2 digit multiplication" worksheets.  (I knew I was good at maths when I once saw problem 38: 24x31, and wrote "see problem 11: 31x24" years before "commutative" was introduced in algebra 1.)

Yes, in hindsight I can see more use for what i "learned" than I expected to, but there's the problem - they don't expect to need this stuff, so they mentally discard it.  What needs to be done, and this is a parent thing not a teacher thing, is to raise that expectation, to actually get students aware that they will actually need and use this stuff daily in the real world.

Granted, that we have a generation of parents who don't know this doesn't give much hope for the next generation of students...