Word: asking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...This place" is Webster Groves High School, which sits off the main street of a pretty town of old elms and deep porches, about 10 miles southwest of St. Louis, Mo., where, when people ask you where you went to school, they are not referring to college. That's just the way it is here; high school tugs hard and holds on; people graduate and come back and send their kids, who graduate and do the same. This town of 23,000 is not as tony as nearby Clayton or Ladue; it has its mix of $90,000 cottages...
...doors are open at dawn and left unguarded; 96% of the kids polled this fall by the student newspaper say they feel safe in school. They say the kids get along pretty well, races mix, jocks and geeks hang out together. And yet they will say, if you ask, "Littleton could happen here." Last spring, after Columbine, someone scrawled a bomb threat on the wall of a boys' bathroom. The marginal kids know they are being watched, very, very closely...
...aren't allowed to wear a hat, toot your horn, form a clique or pick on a freshman, all because everyone is worried that someone might snap, it's fair to ask: Are high schools preparing kids for the big ugly world outside those doors--or handicapping them once they get there? High school was once useful as a controlled environment, where it was safe to learn to handle rejection, competition, cruelty, charisma. Now that we've discovered how unsafe a school can be, it may have become so controlled that some lessons will just have to be learned elsewhere...
...making plans for the weekend, and even those are subject to change at the last minute. They get jobs, not necessarily to save for college but to buy a $400 leather jacket. So many kids skip their homework that most teachers stop assigning more than 15 minutes' worth: ask too much, push too hard, and the students will give up, drop out, become a menace to society. We have to strike a balance, the adults say. We have to be reasonable. We want them to enjoy themselves, have a certain freedom, before the world turns serious on them and there...
...Harvard Crimson: Mr. Malkovich, I have to ask you a question first, because this really intrigued me when I saw the film. How much of the John Horatio Malkovich in the film was actually you, the real John Malkovich? How much was it an invented character...