Word: algebraical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...easy courses proliferate, classes in the harder subjects wither away. Calculus and Russian, two post-Sputnik specialties, are extinct. Only 35 students are braving physics this year. Few kids prefer the nononsense, four-year algebra-geometry-algebra-trigonometry sequence to the simpler math courses. The attrition rate in foreign languages is so great that after the first year, students in higher courses are combined in one class. High-ability kids are not taking high-level courses," says Accounting Teacher James Whitty. The students ask: Why should we?" The school's course brochure advises college-preparatory students that they "should make...
...last week from Johns Hopkins University at the age of 17. All have IQs of more than 150. And all three-along with five other precocious seniors-were found at the early age of 12 or 13 to be mathematical wizards, capable of feats such as scoring well on algebra tests without ever having taken the subject...
...sample what Stanley calls a "smorgasbord of educationally accelerated opportunities." Some, who live near by, are ferried by their parents to special two-hour Saturday tutorial classes at Johns Hopkins. Tutored by other prodigies just a few years older than they, these gifted students now race through advanced algebra and geometry. Others leapfrog over grades, and some will attend a special summer session at Johns Hopkins...
...writer reports bleakly of his schooling in Niles, Mich.: "Well I don't know how it is now, but in those times practally all the teachers in high school was members of the fair sex. Some of them was charter members." That throwaway second sentence, evoking algebra-spouting harpies of deadly rectitude, would be recognizable as pure Lardner if it were found unsigned in a fortune cookie...
Thesis anxiety or not, if Eric Ambler's fifteen or so books were not so wildly interesting I could have kicked the habit. Agatha Christie, who has all the psychological insight of second year algebra, couldn't have maintained interest like that, and if you've ever tried Rex Stout you'd know after three of four books that Nero Wolfe is really just a fat old fart. Almost every collection of one-author-one-genre books gets repetitive after a while: critics betray this by calling thrillers a "craft" or a pulp writer a "masterful technician," generally revealing that...