One of my late mom's (it's four years this month, still miss you daily) best jokes, belated Mother's Day tribute:
Shopper: I'd like some grits, please.
Attendant: Hominy?
Shopper: Oh, two or three...
David Brooks has put his humble-failed-political-journalist baseball cap back on the rack and shown up in his world's-greatest-education-expert mortarboard, for the first time in weeks or months ("
Putting Grit in its Place", New York Times, May 10 2016):
We all know why it exists, but the grade-point average
No, you mean like any time you have a set of integers between 0 and 4 you can calculate the mean and—
is one of the more destructive elements in American education.
No wait, I think I
don't know why it exists. Can we go back over that, Prof?
Success is about being passionately good at one or two things,
It is? In what sense? Is it a limit, like it's not OK to be passionately good at three things, or that's the best you can hope for? Is it what high schools or colleges should be aiming at, graduating kids with a minimum number of passionate skill sets, or is it a choice the kids should be making, in contradistinction to aiming at a high GPA, say? Is it a definition of success in school, or is it about preconditions for success in their future lives, that if they don't come out of school with those passionate skill sets they will end up failures as adults?
