Word: dullards
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Students may fail to live up to their potential in early grades for complex and varying reasons, but that very failure often triggers a common result: the pupil steadily slides farther behind, gets tagged as a dullard, loses confidence in his ability to compete. In a drastic attempt to check that slide, North Carolina's public-school system is pulling such "underachievers" out of their home schools and into a costly public boarding school in Winston-Salem -with remarkable success...
...Carolina, last year's fink is this year's squid, cull, troll or nerd. The perennial rat fink is R.F. in Southern California and mouse fink or straight arrow (a combination pill and moral paragon) in the Harvard Yard. But though a tool in Florida is a dullard, a tool in the academic machinery of M.I.T. is merely a diligent studier. A tooler at the University of Texas is a showoff, the equivalent of a cake-eater at Detroit's Wayne State, and a vest at George Washington University...
...embodies the type with remarkable vigor and exact ness. Finney's strongest asset as an actor is his presence, an inward weight that holds the center of every scene, as the heaviest fish holds the bottom of a net. But he is also a grandly gifted mimic. His dullard eye and dirgelike stroke, as he rides his bike to work, present an ex erience as old as that of the fellah on the water wheel - the quiet desperation of the man who works for someone else. Best of all, he has the rare intensity of talent that seems...
...seasoned ghosts. Among them: Morris Needleman, 52, assistant principal of a Brooklyn elementary school, and Joseph Lasky, 72, who advertised himself as a former instructor at New York University. Slickest of all: debonair Freelance Writer James Butterly, who is charged with taking an exam in adolescent psychology for a dullard student at Columbia's Teachers College. Though Butterly is a grey-haired ghost of 54 and his client was 23, officials suspected nothing...
...Amherst men listed drawbacks aplenty, notably dullard school boards, low pay and low prestige. They emphasized a paradox created by crowded schools: U.S. teachers now look forward to school jobs that "will get them out of the classroom." Especially affected is the really good teacher-"a master, an expert, a torero"-who gets all the tough classes with no extra pay. Eventually, he grabs an administrative job to survive. "The whole question of improving U.S. education," said one teacher, "is tied up with this dichotomy...