"Pardon me hon, do you know if where we're going takes American money?" says the woman sitting

[Floyd R. Turbo]

next to my wife on a cruise to Alaska. My wife “Yes, Sitka is in Alaska and they take American money.”

[elleng]

1. REALLY, our education 'system' has declined.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

2. Personally, I wouldn't blame that on a decline in education, but more like

a huge, vast, enormous amount of ignorance, much of which is deliberate.

For enlightenment, start reading this: https://notalwaysright.com/date/2007/

The link puts you to the very beginning, in 2007. I've been slowly working my way through it for a couple of months now, and am halfway through 2011. The kinds of totally ignorant things people say are just endless.

Plus, a lot of people are very proud of not knowing any math, history, or science. Some huge proportion of people never read another book after high school or college. To me, that's incomprehensible because I am always reading. On one hand I get it that someone else might prefer to play golf, or make a quilt, or fish, or any one of a number of other things, but NEVER reading? I can't beginning to imagine. I'd rather never breathe.

[Thomas Hurt]

4. Ignorance is noble to the conservative. If you are ignorant you not one of icky elitists types

(snark)

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

7. LOL!

I've been pointing out for years that history is often very poorly taught in our public schools, even the good ones. Too often the history teacher is also known as "coach". Either that, or "coach" is teaching high school biology.

I had the enormous good fortune to attend high school in the early 1960s. Graduated in 1965 from Amphitheater High School in Tucson, Arizona, in case any other alumni posts here. Back then we tended to have very good teachers, including a surprising number of men in the profession, even though teaching was possibly even more poorly paid then than it is now. Our teachers had all become adults by the end of WWII, often earlier, and they cared about teaching, about passing their love of learning on to us.

In my era, we also benefited from the many restrictions on women, as sad as that might sound. For the most part they were blocked from things like law, medicine, finance, and the like, and so many of the best and brightest became teachers. I am not trying to insult teachers now, because virtually all of them are dedicated and caring, but there's been a shift in the kind of women who go into the field now compared to 60 years ago.

I want to add that many, possibly most people, work hard in their jobs. Many jobs are thankless and ill-paid as I know from personal experience.

[Thomas Hurt]

8. The basketball coach was my English teacher. I don't know if he was a good coach....

but he was a good English teacher.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

9. That's lovely to hear.

I had a high school history teacher who knew less than I did about certain things. I knew that wasn't right.

[TexasTowelie]

10. My high school health education teacher was a coach.

I spent most of my adolescence in fear that if I was promiscuous that I would catch a Gentile disease.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

11. And were you Jewish? That would make a Gentile disease far, far scarier.

[3catwoman3]

12. I did not have any good history teachers in high school.

Simply memorizing events and dates is stultifyingly boring.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

13. The terrible teacher that I knew more than had the most

boring approach to teaching. He gave us lectures. We had to take notes that he actually graded us on. He went over each test the day before we took it, which meant anyone who was even partially sentient should have been able to get at least a C. I was getting straight A's and hated it.

I then switched to another World History class second semester, because of a change in my English class which affected the rest of my schedule. The new teacher had a system where every test, every quiz (and he did love pop quizzes), every piece of homework had some kind of value. Maybe 20 points for a test, 3 points for a pop quiz, 7 points for a homework assignment. Our grades were posted (this was about 1964, when such things were commonly done) but I LOVED history and was doing quite well, getting all the possible points in every test, quiz, homework assignment. Several weeks into that semester the teacher announced to the class that Poindexter Oglethorpe was NOT included in the curve. I was doing so much better than everyone else that establishing a normal curve would have given me an A and the next best student a C, maybe even a D. I think my classmates had complained to him, because they'd started being a bit hostile to me, and after that announcement, everything was okay.

I know, I was very much the kind of annoying student who would cheerful destroy the class curve.

[3catwoman3]

15. I think it was my jr year of high school when I had a particularly...

…dull teacher. There were 10 point quizzes, sometimes with one bonus question. This guy would take off if you got the bonus question wrong. I did manage to get all 11 questions wrong one time. The bonus question answer was Guantanamo Bay, which I misspelled Guantanamo.

This would have been way back in 1967 - funny what things stick with you.

[Effete Snob]

3. You can SEE Russian money from Alaska

[rurallib]

5. But can't you see Russia from Palin's porch?

[ret5hd]

6. "Oh no, hon...they only take rubles!!! Do you need...

me to exchange some money for you?”

You wasted a great opportunity!

[cbabe]

14. At my neighborhood library reopening celebration

they had a Cajun band.

A neighbor complained, 'Could've at least hired an American band'.