Monday, June 15, 2015

Mainstream Journalists

At my school, statistics is a class that is for the most part reserved for seniors--and the vast majority of those students who take it are doing so only because they have passed Algebra 2, need a 4th year of math for college entrance, and don't want to take pre-calculus or AP Calculus.  In other words, they're not the most math-philic students we have.  On the first day of school I tell them that I recognize this and that I know they're all going to be poets or journalists. 

I say it as an icebreaking joke, but maybe I'm not far off:
After thousands of examples of the intellectual flaccidity and inferiority of the journalists in our midst, we have to accept the fact that they are not the best and the brightest. They are, overwhelmingly, college students who couldn't handle college math, couldn't manage to do the work to pass Biology 101 and Chemistry 101, and were daunted by the prospect of reading a bunch of long books with lots of facts in them, so history was not an option either.

So what was left? (fill in the blank)_____ Studies or Journalism.

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