It's a housewife day here in rainy Jersey. Our bathroom resembles a toxic waste dump. I've got my jeans rolled up and I smell like Tilex. I live the glamorous life, people!
I'm about to burn out on this cleaning crap in about thirty seconds. So, I started surfing. Some stuff I found.
National Geographic's Photo of the Day.
High school should look more like college. The problem is that we need lots of good teachers to do that. Nicholas Kristof also writes about the importance of good teachers. Maybe they should let some PhDs teach high school and not make them waste time getting a teaching certificate. My modest proposal.
Old people give the secret to a great life.
Yeah, I don't think Khloe's a Kardashian either.
Apt. 11d 
I do not think that even someone with a very high-quality high school education could take on most of the jobs that now require college degrees, e.g., as a bank loan officer, or a newspaper reporter, or some such. At least, this Exeter graduate would not have been able to do those jobs well. It takes years of practice in critical reading, writing and analysis, and white-collar employers are not set up to provide such practice. That said, I have often thought that Laura’s proposal would make sense, as a way of improving high school teaching. It is actually pretty common at fancy private schools to have teachers with doctorates but no teaching certificates.
On the picture, it’s very pretty, but a church is not made of bricks and mortar, and this one, like English churches generally, appears to be short on the “living stones,” no?
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But in the old days, people with high school degrees did learn how to do those jobs; the period of time where they learned to do the critical reading, analysis, etc. required to do the bank loan officer stuff was learned on the job (rather than in a philosophy class in college).
I didn’t read the article, so I’m commenting on a theory. But, I think the problem with making high school more like college isn’t that we’d need a different group of teachers but that we’d need a different group of students. College (still) is about taking advantage of the opportunity for learning that is provided by your classes. There is often very little requirement that you do so. It seems to me that most high school students would fail miserably under these circumstances (though not all). I think the difference between the olden days and now is that we didn’t expect nearly everyone to be capable of that kind of learning in the olden days. The student who was incapable would drop out and no one would try to make them come back.
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“But, I think the problem with making high school more like college isn’t that we’d need a different group of teachers but that we’d need a different group of students.”
Yep.
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I think they should try it first with bank loan officers. They can’t do that much worse than the last batch.
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Of course “incapable” is a relative term. Really in the olden days, one style of educational opportunity was offered, and if you couldn’t fit that style, you dropped out and either moved on (or suffered).
A friend recently reported being dismayed that a child said that he’d learned to “advocate for his educational style” ’cause as a professor, she doesn’t think she should care what a student’s educational style is. It’s his responsibility to figure out how to make her style work for him. That is, without a doubt, true at the graduate level.
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