Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for July 22, 2021

Somebody has to teach the jocks and legacy admissions.

I know there are many student-athletes that are outstanding academically.

Both then and now teachers at all levels are not respected and are grossly underpaid. How did you learn to read?

My brother taught me with comic books. He got tired of reading them to me.

Is that Jeremy Cavendish?

I don’t see how teachers do it nowadays. Education, like everything else has been politicized.

My mother taught me, long before I was in school.

I just wonder how he’s going to dumb it down…

I transferred my AS credits into a state BS program. They wouldn’t accept the math, even though they were from another state college, so I had to take a “Math Refresher”. Six week summer course, 3.5 hours a night twice a week, with a TA who vowed no one would fall behind. The class started with adding fractions and went through Algebra 2. At the end of week four we were just starting monomial equations, and still had Trig and Algebra 2 to get through, in the four remaining class’. Yet we never saw the professor overseeing the TA’s work. We could have used this guy….

Maybe he should look for an opening in a drama club or theater group somewhere. Perhaps in the village?

I had always read about the U.S. producing a surplus of attornies but never thought about excess of PhDs.

Colleges are producing graduates that are a collection of premium parts that are being assembled and directed by trust fund MBAs.

Is this before or after a math professor and Walden were sued by a student who received a B+ on a math test? If Walden guarantees every student an A why would they need a remedial math class?

PhD in math? Go to work as an actuary for a starting salary of about $80,000. Math majors don’t teach because they can make so much more money doing other things.

Good thing I only got my bachelors in math.

It’s a sad fact that most people who obtain a PhD are over qualified for most jobs and the only real option for them is to Teach.

Even in those few Professions (Doctors, Lawyers, etc) where a higher level Degree is required just to meet minimum qualifications, what they learned in College is obsolete as soon as they graduate.

“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all”.

Yep, colleges want tuition so badly that they lowered their admissions standards. Hence, courses in remedial math and English… although (at least back in my day) students didn’t get college credit for those courses. The college would even give them three attempts to pass the remedial courses before reluctantly kicking them out! They didn’t mind charging them for each attempt…

At first I thought that the watered down STEM courses that liberal arts students took were below professional grade, but after seeing the content of the remedial courses I realized they could really lower the bar. I tutored some students in remedial math and also in remedial English (as well as worked as a lab assistant for some liberal arts versions of chemistry). The remedial material was stuff usually covered in middle school… worse, there were “college-able students” who really struggled with it.

When our college decided that it was losing too much potential tuition from remedial students who couldn’t pass the remedial courses, it created new avenues to keep them. They created new liberal arts decrees that had no STEM requirements whatsoever. I had a girlfriend who couldn’t get past remedial math, so they convinced her to switch to religious studies. She managed to graduate with that degree, but it ruined her – she started out bubbly and fun, but it turned her into a self-righteous sourpuss.

Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.

Some teachers drank from the fountain of knowledge, others have only gargled.

You should have majored in not getting fired. I know that this reference doesn’t quite fit, but what the hell.

He should become a quant at a Wall Street brokerage firm or hedge fund. Big bucks there, but you have to give up your soul.

Why do you like the word “retards”??