Grand Avenue by Mike Thompson for August 13, 2012

The reason a watched pot never boils is that the watcher will take the pot off the heat source when the pot starts to melt.

Actually, summer vacation does NOT need to be shorter. American students spend more time in the classroom than any other country, and they learn less.

Wolf Emperor: It comes from teabag propaganda. They want to abolish all public everythings, and put home schooling as a stopgap before going back to the medieval tutors for rich kids and 12 hour work days for poor kids, and nothing in the middle except possibly indentured apprenticeships. Japan became a major post-WW-II economic and technologic power with six-day school weeks and one-month vacations.

The length of vacation isn’t the problem. There are too many teachers who don’t really teach anymore. A lot of them pull worksheets from websites and watch children try to kill each other! At least in my city. There are good schools but after they select the children they want, the rest are just leftovers who get the leftovers.

Not really Kate.

I’ve heard that the original phrase was, “A watched pot never boils over.” That changes the whole meaning.

Shyygirl: They don’t teach because state and federal governments are forcing them to spend all their time teaching some test or other that only tests the ability to regurgitate party lines. One thing they will be fired the quickest for is teaching kids to evaluate conflicting data and think for themselves. The teachers who don’t want to teach are relatively rare and assigned to rich neighborhoods where the kids already know the test and so make them look good. Your thinly veiled race/classism isn’t veiled enough, your bigotry shows through.