This is silly. Girls already do way better in school than boys, on average, and US colleges are majority-female. If girls are so uncomfortable with boys in their class, how come they are kicking our asses in school?

If memory serves, if a black person is shot and killed, it is something like 80x more likely that it was by another black person than that the shooter was a white police officer.

The better advice is to avoid high-crime areas, and that is without regard to skin color.

Given all of the news stories lately I don't blame you for this, but you should look up the statistics don't support the fatherly advice that you've given your children. I don't really feel like googling, but if memory serves, among the number of black people who are shot and killed annually, something like 1% of those is by white police officers, and roughly 80% are shot by young, black men.

So..... yeah. You should probably consider giving your black children the same advice that I give my white children: to avoid high-crime areas, stay with friends, look like they know what they're doing, etc.

And for what it's worth, I have family in Chicago and my kids have been there many times. Chicago is a fine city, but like any other major city, you need to be aware of where you are because there are certain neighborhoods that are not welcoming toward white people.

Not like we have a choice. Our state government mandates that all new developments must have an HOA. It's been that way for decades.

That being said, I don't live under an HOA. Just sayin' that many don't have a realistic choice and endure it out of necessity.

Now that only drove up Bennett's click count. I guess commenting only drives up his comment count, too.

Oops.

But I just can't help myself. I have to click so that I can comment, and I have to comment so that I can bitch about what a shitty writer Bennett is.

One day I'll have to write a greasemonkey script to filter Bennett Haselton out.

When did advanced students cease being role models and instead become problems that need to be kicked out of the room?

I don't really get the point of the Google initiative. I think that most schools have an intro to computing/programming concepts course that is geared toward catching up those who don't have prior programming experience. Not sure why booting white males and Asians out of the room is necessary or fair.

I think most schools do the same thing. My college did. The intro to CS was two courses, but you didn't take the first one if you had prior experience.

We didn't even need to take a test or require the assistance of Google's affirmative action task force or anything. We just self-selected ourselves into the appropriate course and that was that. I guess life is more complicated now.

That can be a little dangerous. A buddy of mine in high school spoke Russian at home and took Russian for the easy A. Wound up being an easy F because he was illiterate and his grammar was atrocious and he didn't realize until too late that he needed to study.

I like to think that a decent teacher wouldn't have let one outlier student screw up the grading for an entire class. Especially since animations and sounds were not required and introduced unnecessary complexity into his codebase.

You probably had a shitty teacher, then. Recursion is a little tricky to get the hang of at first, and it's easy to screw up and create an infinite recursion, but if you follow a few simple rules, you should stay out of trouble.

Not really, but it's usually up to the teacher how to assign the grades, so it's entirely possible that the grading was normalized and only a certain number of each grade was awarded. That's not usual, however.

A typical grading curve in the US is to take the top X scores as a baseline for the highest grade and everyone who gets a certain percentage of the top X grades gets an A, then a certain percentage lower is a B, etc. In that sense, GP could have distorted the curve by being an outlier score.

I had that happen in an Econ class once. I had already taken the course in high school and had already finished my degree requirements, but still had to take the intro course to graduate. I earned 100% in the class (I was qualified to teach it at that point) and ruined a lot of freshmen's transcripts. I think the Econ department has since loosened up that requirement a bit.

How many classes did you take that were graded on a strict bell curve where there were a certain number of each grade to be awarded, and the scores were forced into that grading distribution? I don't think I had even one course graded that way.

I had many courses that were graded on a curve, but the formula was generally based on a percentage of the top X scores achieved in the course. In theory, the entire class could earn As, but it would not be possible to have all students fail.

FYI, they don't all last the rest of your life. There are some that require boosters in adulthood. If you see the doctor regularly you should be covered, but just letting you know.

I'm sorry, but you are the one who is arguing irrationally.

GP didn't say that vaccines were bad. He said that he was uncomfortable with the government forcing medical treatments on its citizens. Yet you responded all huffy-like that vaccines are good. Well, no shit vaccinating is a good idea. But that is beside the point.

If you want to respond to GP's assertion that he is uncomfortable with the idea that governments should be forcing medical procedures on his citizens, then you need to argue why it is a good idea for government thugs to be kicking down doors and stabbing citizens with needles at gunpoint. Because that is the point that is under discussion.

Most people around here aren't too happy about the drug war, either.