re: #395 SteveMcG

I find it hard to believe it was the teacher’s fault you got the F. When I was in high school I tanked junior English for what I thought was the same reason. Perhaps I was a little immature, because I was the only one who didn’t like him. You obviously learned something in that class, so the teacher couldn’t have been all bad.

Oh it wasn’t. He was utterly incompetent, but by the same token I had that class at 11:00 so I usually blew it off, walked a half mile to the airport and had a liquid lunch at the bar there (I would have been 17 at the time, WI drinking age was 18 and the penalty even if I was caught was only $10 for me. The bar wasn’t penalized in those days)

I had learned basic chem long before it was taught in the Eau Claire schools. Same with with simple newtonian Physics. I was never taught the Calculus by a school, I have only learned that by myself. I had a high school history teacher tell me, with a straight face & unwilling to accept correction, that John Kennedy died November 22, 1965. I walked out of the class room that day and never returned. We later worked out a compromise where I wrote a thesis sized paper on the design of the US WWII nuclear weapons and how that knowledge could be used by terrorists (in 1982) instead of my attending his class. I cleared an A that way.

I’m sorry but I will never accept standardized testing as meaning anything of any importance.