I read the Sports Illustrated article on Kentucky's John Wall (at my usual magazine-reading place, a waiting room). I was pleased that he thought he had learned good study habits at his Christian academy and has a 3.2 GPA. It sounded refreshing. He went on to talk about having done a paper on Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr, and going to a German restaurant and then talking about it for a Small-Group Communications course.
This is simply shameful. Kyle's assignments in Eighth Grade are more challenging. It makes you wonder what the players who don't have "good" study skills and a 3.2 average are doing.
3 comments:
I dunno. Holding intellectual discourse while trying to keep down German food sounds pretty rigorous to me. (No offense to all you whatever-wurste fans out there.)
Erin: Considering how heavy German food can be, the problem is not that it can come up, it is that it feels like a lead ball in your stomach.
I wonder if there is some genetic component to food preferences. I am of partial German descent but never ate Red Cabbage and Apples until I was well into adulthood. Love it.
John Wall's academic experience appears to be more of the dumbing down of education. Credit for talking about a restaurant. That also can illustrates a problem of the smorgasbord of expanding course choices.
When you don't have a lot of grounding in literature, history, math and science, along with the reading, writing, and problem solving skills to go along with it, a course in Small-Group Communication is superfluous. Moreover, as a course like SGC takes time away from learning some basics,it can be downright harmful to a student's development.
John Wall is better off where he is than in the typical public school in the 'hood, mainly because he is no longer surrounded by peers who do not value learning.
My husband went to St Anselm's Academy in Washington DC for late middle school. He still is traumatized that he had to write a 15 page paper about the effects of the Cold War on the Dominican Republic when he was 13. Perhaps that will be Wall's Master's thesis?
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