Word: flunk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Showing up in Atlantic City, N.J. to talk before an Israel Bond rally, Novelist Leon Uris (Exodus, Battle Cry), 35, recalled his record at Philadelphia's Bartram High School, said he had flunked English three times and was about to register flunk No. 4 when he enlisted in the Marine Corps. To Uris, who recently signed a contract with Columbia Pictures for four sight-unseen novels, the matter was merely academic, but "it's a good thing English has nothing to do with writing...
Dread of impending shame weighed with crushing force on Cheng Guan Lim, Chinese engineering student at the University of Michigan. He was doing badly in physics and math, thought he was sure to flunk out. Soon there would be nothing for it but to leave school, quit his job as janitor at Ann Arbor's First Methodist Church, and take the humiliating news back to his schoolteacher father in Singapore. Finally, one day in October 1955, Cheng disappeared. His friends, including the Rev. Eugene Ransom, pastor of the church, called in police. They found no clues...
Princeton students once voted him the world's worst poet, and a jeering couplet hounded him for years: "I'd rather flunk my Wassermann test/Than read a poem by Edgar Guest."* Such insults missed their mark, for Edgar Albert Guest never even pretended to be a poet. Said he: "I am a newspaperman who writes verse." And at the time he died last week at 77, Edgar Guest's success as a verse-writing newspaperman had never before been equaled and may never be again...
...students who flunk out "are certainly not dumbbells," said Bender. "They are often very useful, fine, intelligent people, who have a problem adjusting to the Harvard environment." He pointed out that the seven per cent drop is "only one class--an isolated situation, not a trend...
...Russian students who escape the frequent opportunities to flunk, the ten-year school can be an efficient factory of learning. Children start when they are seven, go through only four years of elementary school. The next year-their fifth-they begin a stiff, six-day-a-week secondary school program. By the time a Russian child reaches the eighth year, he is assumed to have a thorough knowledge of grammar-a subject most U.S colleges find it necessary to pound into freshmen. By graduation, he has studied one foreign language for six years, has been exposed to 4½ years...