← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 18419 | Posts: 21 | Started: 2005-05-27
2005-05-27 08:03 | User Profile
[URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/27/education/27gap.html?th&emc=th]New York Times[/URL] May 27, 2005 School Law Spurs Efforts to End Minority Gap By SAM DILLON
BOSTON - Spurred by President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, educators across the nation are putting extraordinary effort into improving the achievement of minority students, who lag so sharply that by 12th grade, the average black or Hispanic student can read and do arithmetic only as well as the average eighth-grade white student.
Here in Boston, low-achieving students, most of them blacks and Hispanics, are seeing tutors during lunch hours for help with math. In a Sacramento junior high, low-achieving students are barred from orchestra and chorus to free up time for remedial English and math. And in Minnesota, where American Indian students, on average, score lower than whites on standardized tests, educators rearranged schedules so that Chippewa teenagers who once sewed beads onto native costumes during school now work on grammar and algebra.
"People all over the country are suddenly scrambling around trying to find ways to close this gap," said Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard professor who for more than a decade has been researching school practices that could help improve minority achievement. He said he recently has received many requests for advice. "Superintendents are calling and saying, 'Can you help us?' "
No Child Left Behind requires schools to bring all students to grade level over the next decade. The law has aroused a backlash from teachers' unions and state lawmakers, who call some of its provisions unreasonable, like one that punishes schools where test scores of disabled students remain lower than other students'. But even critics acknowledge that the requirement that schools release scores categorized by students' race and ethnic group has obliged educators to work harder to narrow the achievement gap.
"I've been very critical of N.C.L.B. on other grounds," said Robert L. Linn, a co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing. But he called the law's insistence that test scores be made public by race and ethnic group "one of the things that's been good."
At least 40 states compiled scores by racial and ethnic groups before President Bush signed the law in January 2002. (In New York, scores broken down by ethnicity were first made public in March 2002.) But even though scores were publicly accessible, many schools felt little pressure to close the gap before the law required that they show annual improvement for each category of student, including blacks, Latinos and American Indians, or face sanctions.
"More folks are talking about the achievement gap than we've ever seen before," said G. Gage Kingsbury, a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association, an Oregon group that carries out testing in 1,500 school districts.
Whether all the new activity will have any long-term effect is a matter of debate. Some academics are skeptical that the gap, a measurable condition of American education since the advent of standardized testing at midcentury, will narrow significantly in response to any short-term policy shift.
"There's nothing right now to suggest that nationally we've begun to invest in poor children at the levels that would lead to widespread improvement in math and reading skills of black and Hispanic children," said Freeman A. Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of books on raising successful African-American children. Still, he said, lots of educators are trying.
"I've been in dozens of states talking to school boards, and in every case one of the critical priorities has been closing the achievement gap," he said.
Social scientists, noting that there is a measurable achievement gap even as children enter kindergarten, argue that its causes may lie not only in school policies but in an array of factors that include family income, parents' educational attainment and health care.
In a National Public Radio interview last month, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was asked whether the gap was closing.
"Absolutely," Secretary Spellings said, "every state in the country is showing progress."
As a success story she cited Maryland, where the percentages of Hispanic and black fifth graders demonstrating math proficiency, for example, have risen somewhat faster than those of white students, whose scores have also risen.
"We've done it by training our teachers and by identifying and helping those students who need special support," said Nancy S. Grasmick, Maryland's state superintendent.
Educators nationwide are pursuing similar strategies. In the Pascagoula School District in Mississippi, where 43 percent of black sixth graders scored at the proficient level in math last spring, compared with 83 percent of whites, Superintendent Hank M. Bounds recently ordered all 60 or so district administrators, even directors of technology and security, to tutor low-performing students.
For Diana Krebs, the nutrition director, that has meant that after overseeing lunch for 6,000 Pascagoula children each day, she has driven to East Lawn Elementary school to work on arithmetic after school with four fourth-grade girls whose teacher said they needed extra practice.
"It's like helping your children with homework," Ms. Krebs said.
But not all states are focusing on the gap with equal energy, or in ways that will help minority children, said Enrique Aleman Jr., an education professor at the University of Utah, leaving him with what he called "conflicting views" on No Child Left Behind. Until last year he lived in Texas, where he said the law had seemed to turn his son Diego's elementary school into a testing factory.
"My son was bringing home practice tests every day, and that's not real education," Dr. Aleman said. "My view from Texas was that N.C.L.B. was hurting the kids it was supposed to help."
After moving to Utah, however, Dr. Aleman watched last month as the Republican-dominated State Legislature passed a bill protesting the federal law for what legislators called its intrusion on states' rights to control local schools. Dr. Aleman said he believed the lawmakers were simply shrugging off test scores showing Hispanics and blacks lagging, and he has joined with other educators to press for strict compliance with the federal law's requirements on highlighting the achievement gap.
"Here in Utah, community groups can use the law to highlight the educational needs of people of color," Dr. Aleman said.
In Minnesota, Vernon M. Zacher said he, too, found the federal law helpful in attracting attention to the needs of the 400 Chippewa youngsters in the Cloquet Public Schools.
Mr. Zacher, a member of the Fond du Lac Band of Chippewa who is director of Indian education for the district, said that since the 1970's Cloquet had run an Indian education program that had often allowed Chippewa students to spend school time sewing beads onto native costumes while languishing academically, he said. The federal law has helped to marshal support for refocusing Indian students' energies on core subjects, he said.
"I couldn't have kids doing beadwork when they were reading two years below grade level," Mr. Zacher said.
Not all educators have found it easy to use the law to help low-performing students. At Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High in Sacramento, a high-poverty school labeled by the federal government as "in need of improvement" for several years, the principal, Samuel Harris, said he has found charting new strategies difficult.
"Basically, everything they suggest that you do to turn things around, we've already done," said Mr. Harris, a retired Army lieutenant colonel.
This year, Mr. Harris hired a math consultant to improve teachers' skills. He barred 350 low-achieving students - 9 out of 10 of them black, Hispanic or Laotian immigrants - from participating in band, chorus or other elective activities to make time for five hours of unbroken remedial reading and math study each day. He convened hundreds of students to the auditorium for a pretesting pep rally, and before they sat down for the statewide exams this month, his aides distributed free snacks.
"We called it brain food," Mr. Harris said.
On last spring's tests, fewer than one in five of King Junior High's minority students demonstrated proficiency in reading or math. Yet under the terms of the federal law, Mr. Harris could lose his job unless an additional 24 percent of students demonstrate proficiency this year, a large one-year leap.
Still, some schools have made extraordinary strides.
In Boston, for example, where Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant announced last summer that closing the gap would be the public schools' top priority, the Boston Community Leadership Academy raised the number of its African-American students who demonstrated proficiency in math last year by 20 percentage points, to 35 percent.
A key to the school's success, said Nicole Bahnam, its headmistress, has been careful analysis of student tests to diagnose where more work was needed. Volunteers from Boston Partners in Education, a private group, then tutor students in those areas during a 90-minute period that overlaps with lunch.
This month, Catharina Stassen, a business consultant whose specialty is quantitative analysis, and Jim Terry, a retired actuary, sat in the academy's library, tutoring five students, including Shatara Rutledge, in algebra. They worked on a problem that Ms. Stassen wrote on a plastic board: (b{+3} + 5b{+2} - 2b) - (b{+3} + b - 1).
"What do we need to do?" Ms. Stassen asked.
"Take away the parentheses, multiply by a negative 1, and combine like terms," Shatara answered.
"Shatara, you are brilliant," Ms. Stassen said.
2005-05-27 15:32 | User Profile
I will bet dollars to doughnuts that successfully 'closing the educational gap' will consist primarily of a combination of the following two methods: 1. Dropping all gifted and advanced programs, so the white kids who disproportionately fill those programs cannot get 'too far ahead' of Tyrone and LaKeesha. 2. Lowering standards across the board, so that everyone is performing 'at grade level.'
2005-05-27 16:23 | User Profile
If you're black, you get lots of extra help. If your slow and white, you're screwed - no extra help. If you're gifted and white, you're screwed - dumbed down.
2005-05-27 16:58 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Happy Hacker]If you're black, you get lots of extra help. If your slow and white, you're screwed - no extra help. If you're gifted and white, you're screwed - dumbed down.[/QUOTE]
That's right. Q's right, too. "Closing the gap" is paramount, not "improving skills." And if that means making white kids less proficient in math so that the outcomes will be closer to those of their black classmates, the bastards will do it.
We all need to get out kids the hell away from the educational establishment. It's really a sin to turn your kids over to your average school.
Liberals. I'm telling you. You know, the heartbreaking thing is that some of these people - especially the volunteers - seem so very sincere. Deluded, but sincerely deluded. It's like somebody who was told he has cancer but can't accept the news.
I'd like to put my arm around that guy and say "see, man, the thing is that BLACKS ARE DUMB, as a group of course. This is proved by generations of testing that establishes the fact that blacks just aren't nearly as smart as whites and Asians on average. There are some bright blacks, to be sure, it's just that they're very rare relative to whites and Asians. This is a matter of genetics. The "schools aren't failing blacks," blacks are failing the schools. Get it? It's not your fault. It's not Society's fault. It's not the fault of blacks. It's Nature with a capital "N" and there's just nothing you can do about it. Accept that blacks will never, as a group, be as smart as whites and Asians, and stop making believe that they can be made to be so by throwing even more of our scarce resources down the same old tired rat hole. Your black students are just what God made them. Stop denying reality and accept your black students - and indeed whites and Asians - just as they really are and not as you want them to be. And then go home and play with your kids instead of wasting your time and our tax dollars trying to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse."
The human talent for denying the reality of what's right in front of a man's eyes never ceass to amaze me.
2005-05-27 21:40 | User Profile
I agree with all that's been said. The entire public debate on this subject is based on the completely baseless premise that the races are intellectually equal. They aren't. There's no shortage of relevant data, and it all points in the same direction:
(1) IQ tests of all kinds, from those heavily dependent on prior learning to those that make use of nothing but abstract figures. The more emphasis in a given test on pure reasoning as opposed to achievement, the worse blacks and spics perform relative to whites.
(2) Levels of scholastic achievement. Affirmative action and a large number of scholarships earmarked for "underrepresented minorities" (read: smart Asians need not apply) have tilted the playing field heavily in favor of blacks and hispanics, yet they still just can't seem to hack it in demanding fields. You can lower the threshold of university admission for blacks who want to get their PhDs in theoretical physics, but you can't lower the level of difficulty of the material.
(3) History. This is perhaps the ultimate test. How many great civilizations have been built by blacks? How many technological achievements have they made? Enough said.
Punishing teachers and schools for the intellectual weaknesses of minority students is grossly unfair. If whites are somehow failing to educate minorities properly, then perhaps those minorities should return to Africa and Mexico and see if their learning situation improves.
2005-05-27 22:02 | User Profile
They are already doing that in some South Texas school districts. How wrong.
[QUOTE=Quantrill]I will bet dollars to doughnuts that successfully 'closing the educational gap' will consist primarily of a combination of the following two methods: 1. Dropping all gifted and advanced programs, so the white kids who disproportionately fill those programs cannot get 'too far ahead' of Tyrone and LaKeesha. [/QUOTE]
2005-05-27 23:29 | User Profile
Anyo0ne read "The Bell Curve" yet? Should be required reading in order to post here.
Anyway, I read it right after college (22 yrs old) and it really hit home. Basicaly, H&M write that we MUST spend ALL our resources on the gifted! They're the ones coming up w/all the cures, technology, new products, etc.
What good does it do a society to mis-allocate resources to educate the dumb....or the mediocres, who don't really WANT to produce anyway? HOrrible philosophy. Thanks, libbie do-gooders.
2005-05-28 05:46 | User Profile
[QUOTE]
Spurred by President Bush's No Child Left Behind law, educators across the nation are putting extraordinary effort into improving the achievement of minority students, who lag so sharply that by 12th grade, the average black or Hispanic student can read and do arithmetic only as well as the average eighth-grade white student
[/QUOTE] For blacks reading at an 8th grade level is great compared to their Brothas" in Africa, many of whom are competely illiterate.
It is so retarded who they keep on coming up with all of these excuses time and time again to explain the "achievement gap" It should be more than obvious to anyone with half a brain that this achievement gap has existed and continues to exist because of the low abilities of the students in question. Instead of admitting and recognizing this, which would help not only white children, but the non-whites as well, since they could then learn at their own level, they just shove them all together and everyone suffers, especially the brighter white kids, but noone gives a shit about that.
2005-06-02 14:13 | User Profile
[QUOTE=starr]For blacks reading at an 8th grade level is great compared to their Brothas" in Africa, many of whom are competely illiterate.
It is so retarded who they keep on coming up with all of these excuses time and time again to explain the "achievement gap" It should be more than obvious to anyone with half a brain that this achievement gap has existed and continues to exist because of the low abilities of the students in question. Instead of admitting and recognizing this, which would help not only white children, but the non-whites as well, since they could then learn at their own level, they just shove them all together and everyone suffers, especially the brighter white kids, but noone gives a shit about that.[/QUOTE] This racial gap in testing has existed for as long as testing began. There are articles on this subject over 50 years old. Talk about slow learners, the academics never will admit to a fact for fear of being accused of prejudice. It seems every effort to turn the black and brown peoples into whites is doomed to failure.
2005-06-02 15:34 | User Profile
As long as the "white" man continues to judge others according to their own standars it is the white man who is doomed to failure.
Why do you think that we are loosing the war in Iraq? you should have gone to war against the Iraqis with a different frame of mind and not with the one of "either you are with us or against us".
Maybe the bush man in Africa cannot read a whites man book but he can read the passing of an animal, look at the sky and know if is going to rain and then feel the wind and know for how long is going to rain.
The black man in Africa has been there far longer than the white man has been anywhere else and they have survive just fine for all this time and is only thanks to the white man who has invaded their land that they are "backwards".
The same as the Palestinians (Arabs) in Palestine where they din't have a so called "country" because they didn't need it, their land had a name and everyone knew what belonged to whom and the elders were the government.
You people keep taking the mule to the water hole and trying to force it to drink water and now the donky is kicking the daylights out of you.
As far as the "brown" man? they are retaking that which was lost to the gun, therefore for being "under educated" they are doing pretty good.
Always remember that in order to "fight" the enemy you must think like they do and in order to do that you must "become" one of them no matter how much you hate it.
Hey but what the hell do I know, I am only a under educated Cuban refugee who has been in this country for the past 53 years.
2005-06-02 16:32 | User Profile
[QUOTE=jay]Anyway, I read it right after college (22 yrs old) and it really hit home. Basicaly, H&M write that we MUST spend ALL our resources on the gifted! They're the ones coming up w/all the cures, technology, new products, etc.
What good does it do a society to mis-allocate resources to educate the dumb....or the mediocres, who don't really WANT to produce anyway? HOrrible philosophy. Thanks, libbie do-gooders.[/QUOTE]
Exactly. Where's the nobility if trying to make people do what they're not good at, at the expense of the people who have strong aptitude in those areas. Everyone's quality if life is improved if government isn't trying to force equal outcomes.
2005-06-02 22:04 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Happy Hacker]Exactly. Where's the nobility if trying to make people do what they're not good at, at the expense of the people who have strong aptitude in those areas. Everyone's quality if life is improved if government isn't trying to force equal outcomes.[/QUOTE]
It only makes sense if you accept the notion that all people have the same abilities, and the only reason why one exceeds the other is due to an imbalance of ecomonic and educational opportunity.
To a great extent spending money on those who will least benefit from it is a feel good policy for the giver.
2005-06-02 22:08 | User Profile
Ponce:
You make some good pionts, but as a follow up, how do you feel about "Separate but equal" as an approach to public education?
Or, do you object to public education in principle?
[QUOTE=Ponce]As long as the "white" man continues to judge others according to their own standars it is the white man who is doomed to failure.
Why do you think that we are loosing the war in Iraq? you should have gone to war against the Iraqis with a different frame of mind and not with the one of "either you are with us or against us".
Maybe the bush man in Africa cannot read a whites man book but he can read the passing of an animal, look at the sky and know if is going to rain and then feel the wind and know for how long is going to rain.
The black man in Africa has been there far longer than the white man has been anywhere else and they have survive just fine for all this time and is only thanks to the white man who has invaded their land that they are "backwards".
The same as the Palestinians (Arabs) in Palestine where they din't have a so called "country" because they didn't need it, their land had a name and everyone knew what belonged to whom and the elders were the government.
You people keep taking the mule to the water hole and trying to force it to drink water and now the donky is kicking the daylights out of you.
As far as the "brown" man? they are retaking that which was lost to the gun, therefore for being "under educated" they are doing pretty good.
Always remember that in order to "fight" the enemy you must think like they do and in order to do that you must "become" one of them no matter how much you hate it.
Hey but what the hell do I know, I am only a under educated Cuban refugee who has been in this country for the past 53 years.[/QUOTE]
2005-06-03 18:40 | User Profile
Yesterday I was helping my teenage daughter prepare for her economics test.
I read the three chapters in her econ textbook that this quiz covered (6-9). This material covered the concept of productivity, why it's critically important, and what sort of investments are designed to improve it, and also government programs aimed at dealing with income inequality.
The first part discussed why the Japanese pounded the crap out of American industry in the 1980s - one of the big factors being a vastly higher Japanese savings rate that reduced the cost of capital, which in turn allowed increased investments in capital equipment and worker training.
But there was a second reason - the so-called "learning curve." It turns out that the productivity you can wring from an investment in capital equipment is greatly impacted by the speed with which the workers can learn to use the new equipment. The steeper the initial learning curve, the greater the productivity increase over the life of the investment.
The text showed a graph of the Japanese vs. American learning curves, with the Japanese curve substantially higher at the left side, which flattens out at a higher productivity yield level to the right side of the graph.
Chapter eight then discussed the "dual labor market" that has been created by the technological revolution of the past decades, and listed figures showing that educated people made lots and lots more money in relative terms, even as the unskilled were left in the dust. That is, the share of total US GNP is noticibly bunching in the top 20%, and noticibly declining in the bottom 20% of so in terms of percentage share of GNP. The text didn't discuss income levels in absolute terms.
All well and good through chapter eight. In fact, I'm getting rather excited. I'm looking forward to discussing this with my kid.
Then we get to chapter nine, which talks about governmental responses to income inequality. The text stated that the dual labor market is a big problem, and that education and concomitant income inequality is large between the sexes and across the races. Blacks make 75% of what white males make, women make so much less, etc. I forget the exact figures (this material was somewhat dated, btw, probably five years old). I feel the wind up for a fast ball.
It then made the startling statement that "there are no innate differences" in terms ofpotential employee productivity" due to race and sex, and that it follows that the existence of unequal income distribution between the races and sexes must be due to invidious discrimination, and that for this reason affirmative action programs and other wealth transfer programs make sense. My blood pressure went through the roof.
I mean, WTF??
It's so obviously false. The Japanese wring more productivity gains from their investments in captial equipment back on page 182 because they learn faster than American workers. But why should that be? The text listed envirnmental and cultural factors on page 184, but never once mentioned IQ. It simply stated that there are no innate differences on page 220.
No innate differences between men and women in terms of their work preferences, life/career tragectories, and innate abilities in objective reasoning. No innate differences between Japanese workers and African bushmen. Just put them in the same schools and they'll all do equally well.
What a transparent lie. And that even without reference to the volumes of studies done by revered scientists over the past bleeding century proving that IQ is innate and that it is THE KEY FACTOR in learning ability and a whole slew of life outcomes.
My daughter spent most of her life abroad going to schools for ex-pats, and she knows the score on racial differences. I asked if she was CEO of GM whether she'd get a steeper learning curve from Koreans or from black Africans - which would give her more productivity bang for her capital equipment investment buck - and she looked at me like I was nuts. I then pointed out that her textbook was saying that there should be no difference, at least not due to anything innate like IQ.
The textbook is obviously lying, which I pointed out to her, to which she replied (while rolling those big brown eyes at me) "but Daddy, if they even hinted at that, they could never have published their book. Besides, it looks like both the authors are Jews!"
Ah, school days. Education really is the way forward for us all, don't you agree, oh my brothers.
2005-06-03 19:18 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]It then made the startling statement that "there are no innate differences" in terms ofpotential employee productivity" due to race and sex, and that it follows that the existence of unequal income distribution between the races and sexes must be due to invidious discrimination,[/QUOTE]
Maybe you need to read further, and get to the part were it explains that people lie for material gain. For example, the authors of the textbook want to sell textbooks. If they don't tell lies about race ane engage in white-bashing, public schools won't use their textbooks.
2005-06-03 19:51 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]...And that even without reference to the volumes of studies done by revered scientists over the past bleeding century proving that IQ is innate... Not to nitpick, but IQ is not completely innate. It's determined in substantial part by environment and upbringing -- especially early upbringing. But your general point remains, since psychometric studies revealing the racial IQ gap control for such factors: e.g., comparisons of whites and blacks from equivalent socioeconomic backgrounds still show an IQ gap (and a corresponding gap in achievement).
...and that it is THE KEY FACTOR in learning ability and a whole slew of life outcomes. That is definitely true. Motivation also plays a role, but intelligence is even more important.
The textbook is obviously lying, which I pointed out to her, to which she replied (while rolling those big brown eyes at me) "but Daddy, if they even hinted at that, they could never have published their book. Besides, it looks like both the authors are Jews!" Sounds like she's on the right track at an early age! :thumbsup:
2005-06-04 04:02 | User Profile
[QUOTE][Angler]Not to nitpick, but IQ is not completely innate. It's determined in substantial part by environment and upbringing -- especially early upbringing. But your general point remains, since psychometric studies revealing the racial IQ gap control for such factors: e.g., comparisons of whites and blacks from equivalent socioeconomic backgrounds still show an IQ gap (and a corresponding gap in achievement).[/QUOTE]
To be sure environmental factors do play a role, but those identical twin studies (separated at birth, raised in different families, IQs much more lke separated twin than adopted family) and other studies set forth in the Bell Curve prove that it's much more nature than nurture.
I should add that even the environmental factors tend to be artifacts of innate IQ. Dumb people tend to have low socio-economic indicators. And they also tend to have dumb children. Nature is the chicken, low socio-econonic indicators are the egg.
And the authors of the textbook were saying ZERO innate differences. It's a transparent lie.
[QUOTE]Sounds like she's on the right track at an early age! :thumbsup:[/QUOTE]
Oh, she knows the score on the Tribe. She grew up with many Tribalists, and she counts some among her friends. But she told me there's always a price to pay for it, and you really have to ask yourself whether its worth it.
Smart kid. She speaks four languages. And a good student. She's gearing up to take the SAT now, which should keep her busy this summer.
2005-06-04 04:15 | User Profile
Did living in foreign countries contribute to her development? What and how can you learn the score if everything you are subjected is the uniform pc droning?
2005-06-04 04:31 | User Profile
[QUOTE=madrussian]Did living in foreign countries contribute to her development? What and how can you learn the score if everything you are subjected is the uniform pc droning?[/QUOTE]
Living in foreign countries taught her early on that we're really not all the same, that there truly are racial differences and cultural differences that matter.
She got a good dose of the old PC line of crap, but I (and Mrs. Yannis) were there to challenge her indoctrination at every step. I'm pleased to say that it just didn't take with her. She'll get into a most selective school, God willing, but she knows they're Yeshivas in drag, and I think she'll smile and chuckle warmly at all the egalitarian swill on offer, but keep her own counsel.
She knows too much to fall for that.
My daughter likes African people, by the way. They can be pretty warm and fuzzy, for sure. And a lot of fun. But she knows that the blacker they are the dumber they tend to be, and that's just the way that is. She's on to Jews and their constant scheming (which is actually at its most fevered pitch among adolescent girls jockeying for social position. Seriously. You wouldn't believe some of the crap her Jewish gal pals pulled). She's wise to Muslim boys, too.
You know, the thing is that she takes the whole PeeCee game as just part of the rules. She knows its b.s., and she knows that everybody else (especially her Jewish friends) knows its b.s. But she also knows that "they" - the people who run the institutions she was raised in - require daily nods to the PeeCee flag. And it's a price she's willing to pay. In short, she's consciously lying, and she really has no problem with that, since she's lying to liars who knows she's lying. See what I mean? I'm not sure that's a good thing, but it's definitely a survival skill for the 21st century.
Overall, she received a great education on all levels. She's going to spend most of the next year (her senior year) in France on an exchange program, then off to college (she already speaks French beautifully). Her childhood is drawing to a rapid conclusion. How quickly it all went by.
Makes me feel old. :whlch:
2005-06-04 14:44 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis] Makes me feel old. :whlch:[/QUOTE] My daughter is taking SAT this morning. Be a junior next year. I feel the aches right along with you. :whlch:
2005-06-04 16:07 | User Profile
The world is like a good book where each page is a new country where you never know what will happen till you read it.