Or even better, imagine going through college as a conservative. As you no doubt remember, only expressions of Leftist doctrine are permitted in the "marketplace of ideas" that we call college. Never mind examining the merits of all ideas; college is a place where everyone from the students through the professors consider it to be their moral duty to ignore what you say and then insult you personally while explaining how sensitive and inclusive and open-minded they are.

At the end of the day, the path to your dreams need not run through any club nor class nor approval of the tactless. It's consistent, persistent action that advances you toward your goals and dreams, and that is the lesson that I hammer into my children's heads. I have very little patience for "oh, but she might get awkwardly hit on!" Apparently that happens 742 times per hour just walking down the street, anyway.

I understand what they do. My point is that they should not do that. They should give motivated kids a chance to be challenged. And let's be honest, do AP classes represent an actual challenge? I took a metric assload of them, and I did not find them to be challenging at all. The reason for this should be obvious: they take a semester-long college course and consume a full academic year teaching it. Of course they're dead easy.

Well, maybe they should change that.

I'm not GP, but many schools restrict who can enroll in AP courses. Personally, I think that this is stupid. Even the lower-class-rank students should be able to take an AP class if they think that they can handle it. They may not be taking a full course load of AP, but why not let them try some college level work in a subject that they like?

I would argue that those guys are not brilliant at all.

Any programmer can solve a complex problem with a complex solution. The brilliant programmers are the ones who can take a complex problem, distill it down to well-organized chunks, making the solution appear straightforward and obvious (even when the solution was anything but obvious).

When you get a dev on your staff who writes clear, straightforward code, you keep that dev in high morale and you don't let him or her go.

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.