Baldo by Hector D. Cantú and Carlos Castellanos for October 12, 2011

Actually. meeting standards is important. Many geniuses supposedly never excelled in school. Einstein, Edison, Jobs, Gates, Zuckerman, etc….

@ Sorkh omfg

You’re really smart Gracie. You should of knew there would of been a catch.

xxx

A very long, false analogy.

If the teacher is going to “educate”, he should use correct grammar to do so. It’s “…I’m interested in YOUR becoming a better person!”

This is about as grating as the incorrect over-use of “got”.

When a teacher says they aren’t interested in grades what they mean is they don’t want critiques on their teaching abilities.

Well, that proves the old saying “you want to kill something, just put it to a board/committee”.

My wife told me that story a while back, then proceeded in the next few years to unwittingly call the father’s bluff. She works incredibly hard at everything she does, and as a result many of her cohorts asked for her help, which included participating in numerous late-night study sessions near the end of each quarter. She couldn’t refuse, and as a result of the extra time spent helping others, her grades would occasionally suffer.

Some of the students who benefited from the extra help were just like Audrey, but the majority were simply in need of the boost because of other deficiencies, such as having to work and not getting any free study time at home, lack of support from their families, or learning disabilities that they fought constantly to keep up with the rest of the pack. (The story seems to assume that all students with low grades are “Audreys”). In the end, despite her personal setbacks, my wife was glad to see that the loss of one grade point resulted in a much greater net gain.

The idea of redistribution is not to “force” everyone to give up what they have earned. That’s why it fails so badly when it is enacted by even the most well-meaning government. The real point is to encourage the “haves” to willingly give of their means for the sake of those who have put forth just as much effort (or more) but were not as lucky.

If the pervading culture can achieve such an attitude (and that’s a HUGE “if”), then it becomes possible for a responsible government to facilitate a system of redistribution. The catch is that it’s too inefficient to weed out all of the Audreys and only give to the “deserving” poor. The upside is that over time most of them will weed themselves out. (In the case of my wife’s fellow students, one has already been dismissed for incompetence.) Yes, it’s a waste of resources to give them to those who will squander them and refuse to work, but this is minuscule compared to the benefits to everyone who gratefully applies the assistance and puts it to use – not only for themselves, but for society at large.

But it all begins with the daughter saying, “I’m not comfortable with Audrey getting what she hasn’t earned, but if it also helps Brian, Cheryl, Dean, and Emily, then I’m willing to do it.”