The only reason I open the door now, is I keep hoping for the mythical meat truck. Does anyone know the story here? Is it stolen? Did it fail USDA inspection? Is it cheap? I assume it is frozen -- is the butcher listed on the packaging? If so, is it a local butcher? Why would someone in their right mind try to sell meat door-to-door?

Russian is a very difficult language to learn, and I wouldn't want to sway anyone away from it if they had a personal or cultural reason to learn it. However, Latin has some advantages over Russian: Latin has an AP and Subject SAT test, but Russian does not. This helps for external validation, college admissions and maybe placement. Latin is not conversational, so you spend no academic time working on pronunciation and learning dialog. More importantly, Latin was studied for centuries in the West, and echoes throughout the great works of the canon. To have some understanding of Latin literature is to better understand our cultural heritage.

I totally and completely agree with your position here. I would point out that while I would always start with a high school text, there's no need to wait until 9th grade to do so -- many middle schoolers are ready for this kind of work.

And (I'm guessing) this is two college years, which would be roughly the same amount of material as four high school-paced years.

I totally agree with the above. I believe that only young children can learn how to idiomatically pronounce a foreign language. I would pick one of French or Spanish, and look for immersion and listening opportunities. The classical languages can wait -- pronunciation of Latin, especially, can be picked up by a high school student in a couple of days, and if they speak Latin with a wicked American accent, well, we all do. Spending 30 minutes a day for six years learning what would be less than 1 semester of high school Latin strikes me as time that would be better spent doing other things, be they listening to Spanish videos or exploring the scientific aspects of the great outdoors.

We choose to .. do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

Questions I would have, that probably depend on the school or school district you are teaching at: 1) Do you want to be full time or part time? If part time, does the school hire part time teachers or part time AP teachers? If full time, are there enough AP History/Social Studies classes to fill your schedule, or would you have to teach non-AP classes as well, if that's an issue? 2) Who gets to teach the AP classes in the school? Seems to me that everyone would want to teach "the good kids". I think in some schools the advanced classes are given based on seniority (among other factors), so if you started late, you might not ever get to teach them. Good luck!

Any reason it must be in France? You could stop in Belgium on your way down from London.

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. A pandemic kills off 99%+ of Earth's population, but a roving band of Shakespearean actors tries to retain their humanity. All of the Connie Willis time travel books, including "Blackout" and "All Clear". Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson: Hard Science Fiction about the terraforming and colonization of Mars and beyond.

If this is all happening within an HOA, and on non-public streets, do the police even have jurisdiction for traffic violations? I think this may depend on what state you live in.

I've not sure that drive and passion are taught in any course. However, there's nothing like a Science Olympiad competition, Science Fair project or the like, to reveal one's drive and passion.

I think this is good advice no matter what our kids' career path may be.

When we talk about literature, it is easy to think that means only novels. I would encourage you to also look for plays, short stories, poetry, essays and speeches. Unfortunately for you, the British have given us rather a lot them worth reading.

In the US, there is no legal right to a college education.

Looking at their department web page: http://www.tamug.edu/mara/faculty.html, there are nine faculty members in the department, and only one of the nine has been there more than two years. Six of the nine appear to be adjuncts. The department chair is also new to the department. Interesting that the university's strategic goals include increasing enrollment and raising the graduation rate. I wonder if that is causing something to give. Still would have like to have heard the other sides of the story.

News sources are now saying that the outbreak was traced to potato salad made from home-canned potatoes. Color me ignorant, but why can potatoes? They are cheap in the stores, easy to get year round, and hard to grow yourself.

Note this is TAMU-Galveston which I suspect has a very different culture than at College Station. For example, as someone said above, the 4 year graduation rate is 18% at TAMUG, substantially lower than TAMU. Interestingly, the second result I get for googling TAMU-G graduation rate is a link to their strategic plan, part of which is to raise their 6 year graduation rate to 45%. One wonders if pressures from above to meet this goal may play a part, as well.

Nope -- this was his first year: http://www.tamug.edu/mara/FacultyBios/IrwinHorwitz.html

Apparently, here is the complete text of his letter: http://texags.com/s/16976/fed-up-am-galveston-professor-fails-entire-class Would love to hear the students' side of the story.

I find it consistently frustrating how shallow journalism has become. There are salient details that you or I could find out with 20 seconds of googling (e.g. how long has he taught there, what was the class size, etc), that weren't in any of the stories. With so few details in most of the stories, I could easily spin this story to meet any agenda, for example "The Prof is Psychotic", or "Lazy Kids These Days".

If I may ask, how do you, and your CC, handle cheating?

Of course, he shouldn't have quit in the middle of the semester and flunked the whole class, but this quote is interesting: This adjunct professor is surely paid a pittance to teach his one class, and it sounds like the University refused to take any action when he brought up academic misconduct charges. It sounds like there were at least four or five cases of cheating in the one class of 30 students. I can see how that could be demoralizing to the professor, who would be forced to spend all kinds of time preparing the misconduct cases, time which is isn't being paid for, and not really part of his teaching mission. And after all that, the students didn't seem to be punished by the University, but were still taking his class. Apparently, one of the students called him a "F*ing moron" to his face, and the university decided that the appropriate punishment was a four line written apology, and the student continued in his class. I hope the message here isn't that "This professor isn't suitable for teaching this class (though he may be)", but "Let's take academic misconduct seriously".

It is hard to know what to think without details, but this professor got his PhD in 2003, and has bounced around as an adjunct at a bunch of different campuses, perhaps following a spouse. This was his first year at A&M Galveston, and it sounds like his previous positions were at colleges with much more serious students: Baylor College of Medicine, University of Texas medical school, teaching MBAs at U of Saint Thomas. I can understand how it would be a huge culture shock to switch from teaching medical and professional students at UT to then teaching a undergrad business class at a third rate school with students who cheat left and right.

The Teaching Company lectures by Robert Greenberg, like "How to Understand and Listen to Opera" are fantastic, but they aren't the full operas themselves.

OK, so that's just a special case, then, and not the usual situation.