Unfortunately, immaculate conception has to do with being born without original sin, not children without semen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_conception

Thanks for playing.

The priests use condoms? Are they really expecting 12 year olds to have STD's? South Africa must be in bad shape.

I definitely misread that about three times as something more naughty, and thought two things:

a.) What the hell is that?
b.) You are a terrible, terrible father.

The majority of children need that repetition to even recall how to do basic addition, subtraction. Do you know how many children struggle with basic arithmetic all through elementary school. In my school district at least, there was a tiered system that seemed to work very well. You were in an essentially randomized teacher's classroom in elementary school (out of 3 classes per grade). Then you were split into high, medium, and low groups, and actually switched teachers for math section, even in elementary school. Within each of these groups, there were 3-4 subtiers each with 5-8 students, except for the highest of the high, where they pretty much just sit you down with an algebra book and tell you to go to town.

As long as teachers make this sort of differentiation among students, they are all getting (in the teacher's judgement at least) the exact subject matter / practice time that they need.

I don't think your suggestion that only some students see a fraction by grade 6 is necessarily valid. There were 8 students in my middle school class of about 300 that had a teacher shipped in from the high school to teach Algebra 1 in 6th grade, whereas there were other students that had a specialized two-year Freshman-Sophomore Algrebra 1 curriculum.

I don't know when / where you were in school, but at least in Missouri (a region not exactly known for pushing education bounds), differentiation is pretty common, in math / reading. Science / history are another subject (pardon the pun).

On the other hand, do you really want to have your tonsils removed by someone who has some strange urge to remove other people's tonsils?

Oh no, you're not paranoid. All the non-Americans are out to make us look bad.

Did you really just use the words flagellate twice in the same sentence?

Slashdot overloaded with quality posts because Flash Flip allows swarms of Anonymous Cowards to RTFA before posting. Consequently, each post becomes so long an thoughtful that each one becomes the size of the actual articles, but being comments rather than articles, Slashdot users won't spend the time to read them. Apocalypse.

The thinnest, lightest, most-mobile way to have your identity stolen yet! Unless of course iPod shuffles start coming with rootkits to steal the title...

I'm a student at one of the universities discussed in the article. I can tell you the games program is a VERY serious program, and the people who come in thinking that it's a goof off major get flunked out quickly. Every Computer Science(Games) student takes all the same computer science classes as the standard CS major, but instead of having 30 units worth of electives to take Intro to Basket Weaving, they have to take group design courses and other collaborative classes focused on preparing them for the teamwork that will be necessary in the field. I've recently decided to switch my major to Computer Egineering / Computer Science, but it was by no means because CS-Games was too easy. You really do have to be the complete package of a game designer - artistic and technical - to cut it in that program. In the end, I decided I liked the hardware more than the creative process.