re: 9 reasons why public educ fails

Rex, re: Rote memorization. I learned addition, subtraction, multiplication from memory exercises way back in the day. Division also became automatic to me without writing anything down due to studying baseball statistics; IE, by age 6 I knew that if Johnny Callison got 24 hits in 100 ABs I knew his average was .240 without taking out pen and paper.

In my senior year of HS I took the hardest final exam I've ever gone through. My 70 year old bitch of a teacher (British Authors) told us exactly what the final exam was going to be the day before we took it.

She said "I'm going to give each of you 10 pages of blank paper. You shall write down the entire table of contents of your English text book."

The table of contents was 10 pages long... divided by Era, Genre, Authors, Works. It was massive. I studied all night. I got an 'A'. But I thought it was totally inappropriate.

Then when I went to Centenary and took Lit classes it paid off. When a prof asked the class something like 'Does anyone know who wrote Childe Harold's Pilgrimage?' I would always wait and look around to see if it was commonly known. When no hands came up I would say "Lord Byron."

BTW... here is my favorite poem by Byron ...

epitath to a dog