I’m pretty sure the teachers knew.

Definitely! I had a teacher in 7th grade who told me, at the end of the year, that he’d spent all year surreptitiously watching me read my under-desk book and trying to catch me out on the in-class material – calling on me to pick up where the last student had left off from the on-top-of-desk book and so on. He seemed both disappointed and ruefully admiring of the fact that he never did.

It failed, of course. It was a square peg/round hole failure. Those exhorting the idea were presenting a paradigm shift, but it had to take place inside the orthodoxy of the public school setting. Can you imagine the anarchy of children learning at different rates and moving to different classrooms mid-school year, teachers learning new students mid-term, teaching one level to one group of students and another level to a different group of students, usually in the same classroom at the same time? Naturally it failed, and the theory was defamed instead of the orthodoxy.

My mother, on the other hand, was a special education teacher. To the end of her career, she told me she dealt with very few dumb kids. These kids were smart, but they couldn’t learn in the environment of 30 kids in five rows of 6 desks. They needed one-to-one instruction. Again, established physical plant impedes the progress of students, and more insidiously, stigmatizes them. And to compensate, the schools started medicating them.

My parents were relatively smart people, fully up to the task of teaching middle school children. But they always struggled against the orthodoxy and the actual physical setup of schools.

In any case, what this means is that in the public schools, taught by graduates of teachers’ colleges, if you charitably assume an IQ of 100 (it actually appears lower), for every teacher with an IQ 1 STD above the mean, you will have one 1 STD below. And without any tracking, you will find those 1STD below trying to teach those 1, 2, etc STDs above the mean. It doesn’t work, as many here can attest.

It didn’t work for me, or the two women I (sequentially) married. My goal was a 3.5 GPA, which, plus my high SATs got me into an elite small liberal arts college. I was bored silly through middle school, and esp high school, where I could maintain that by reading and doing homework for the next class, in the current class, while not diverted by looking to see the girls’ underwear in the nearby seats. Proudly didn’t take a book home my last two years in HS, and only got Bs in the highly subjective classes where the As went to the girls who could butter up the teachers the best (and often ended up going to the state teachers’ college).

My daughter grew up in the same school district as we did (and her daughter may do so too). It was decent, which, in retrospect, is scary. So, we sacrificed, and sent her to a good private school. It was worth it. Instead of teaching some sort of gestalt math, they learned their math tables the hard way, and had competitions for speed every Friday (her PhD is in engineering). And they had more AP classes than any other school in the state (even the best public HS with 10x the class size).

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5PPSRIcnHuwOVdmdndTWjRRcGs/edit?resourcekey=0-E8qpKNHSjjOpCI2gZaiaOg

No argument with that. But the big problem is that those who don’t vote for him don’t deserve him any more than those of us not in NYC!

I lived in Manhattan most of my adult life and recently left (for reasons other than political). I feel I got out just in time! I have many very liberal friends in NY but not one that I know of who will vote for him. They didn’t vote for Di Blasio either, but figure they made it through 8 years of him. I thought Adams was reasonable – but my liberal friends hate him. Probably, no, definitely, because he was willing to talk and work with Trump. Mamdami is riding into office because of political derangement syndrome and he has made no secret of the fact that a vote for him is a vote against Trump. That is the only reason, I think, Kathy Hochul finally endorsed him. Ironically, my liberal friends are hoping that Trump will rein Mamdani in and prevent his most auspicious intentions by shutting off the money tap and thus restricting him. I find that rich (they are all Trump haters, but quietly are depending on him to protect them from Mamdami’s intentions. Those who are voting him in are those who are listening to his campaign “promises” now. Not what he said 6 mos. ago 1 year ago, 2 years ago. Poof! All the statements of global jihad are gone from his daily stumping thanks to the advice (orders) of campaign managers and advisors. What comes after the election? People figure they’ll deal with it when they are faced with the consequences: higher taxes, riding free subways ,dealing with crime and justice if it affects them and cops are told to stand down (think Chicago now), and counting on Amazon to be able to import food they can no longer get on local store shelves.