Sunday, April 25, 2010

A Plague of 'A' Students

Go read. Things like
Barack Obama is more irritating than the other nuisances on the left. Nancy Pelosi needs a session on the ducking stool, of course. But everyone with an ugly divorce has had a Nancy. She’s vexatious and expensive to get rid of, but it’s not like we give a damn about her. Harry Reid is going house-to-house selling nothing anybody wants. Slam the door on him and the neighbor’s Rottweiler will do the rest. And Barney Frank is self-punishing. Imagine being trapped inside Barney Frank.
...
Why are A students so hateful? I’m sure up at Harvard, over at the New York Times, and inside the White House they think we just envy their smarts. Maybe we are resentful clods gawking with bitter incomprehension at the intellectual magnificence of our betters. If so, why are our betters spending so much time nervously insisting that they’re smarter than Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement? They are. You can look it up (if you have a fancy education the way our betters do and know what the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is). “Smart” has its root in the Old English word for being a pain. The adjective has eight other principal definitions ranging from “brisk” to “fashionable” to “neat.” Only two definitions indicate cleverness—smart as in “clever in talk” and smart as in “clever in looking after one’s own interests.” Don’t get smart with me.

The other objection to A students is what it takes to become one—toad-eating. A students must do what teachers and textbooks want and do it the way teachers and texts want it done. Neatness counts! A students are very busy
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Found thanks to Cold Fury

2 comments:

fboness said...

The "A" students described here are a subset of "A" students. The subset has particular characteristics. They are all "book learning" and no worldly experience. They are so smart that they can complete group projects single handed. They do not know failure in their academic lives.

Out in the real world, they run into problems so big that not even their swelled heads can wrap around them. They are so unworldly that they miss the reasons things are done the old way. They really need to organize coordinated efforts with others but, they don't have any experience working in groups. They don't know how to manage and recover from failure even if they are able to recognize that they have a failure on their hands.

Windy Wilson said...

Yup, my ex was an "A" student. In fact, she was the "A" student's "A" Student, and everything Fboness said is true.
except also "A" students think that makes them right in everything else, too.