You should see what happens when a teacher tests the limits of his students and gives 110%! (My home phone number went up on the chalkboard on day 1 with instructions to call me by 10 pm if they got stuck on a problem. In 3 years I only got two calls, but all 800 students knew that I was in their corner.)

Solve, in a single cell of a spreadsheet, for any elapsed time -ANY elapsed time- given a start and end time in two other cells. Without reference to pre-defined functions.

My students could.

Not bad for a small group of people who, on average, left school in the second month of 6th grade.

They also wrote serious relational databases (following Cobbs rules), set up boilerplate mass mailings and knew DOS inside and out. Hands down. On any of a half-dozen versions of DOS in our classroom.

In my opening lecture I told them that I was going to prove to them that they were made of better stuff than they dared dream about … even if I had to kill them to do it.

There was always a nervous chuckle … because they could see that I was serious.

An education is still possible. The students are still willing. It is the way things are organized that has failed.

JTG was a highly successful NYC public school teacher who’s teaching career was eventually destroyed by his outspokeness against the school system in this country. His writings basically equate public schools to federal prisons.

The truly stunning thing about this photo is that it’s proof that Ramit was possibly perusing the work of a modern day leftist revolutionary. Pretty cool.