Evidently Gore Vidal couldn't handle Algebra.

[Smarmie Doofus]

Today's NY Times obit:


Mr. Vidal graduated from Exeter at 17 — only by cheating, he later admitted, on virtually every math exam — and enlisted in the Army, where he became first mate on a freight supply ship in the Aleutian Islands. He began work on “Williwaw,” a novel set on a troopship and published in 1946 while Mr. Vidal was an associate editor at the publishing company E. P. Dutton, a job he soon gave up. Written in a pared-down, Hemingway-like style, “Williwaw” (the title is a meteorological term for a sudden wind out of the mountains) won some admiring reviews but gave little clue to the kind of writer Mr. Vidal would become. Neither did his second book, “In a Yellow Wood” (1947), about a brokerage clerk and his wartime Italian mistress, which Mr. Vidal later said was so bad, he couldn’t bear to reread it. He nevertheless became a glamorous young literary figure, pursued by Anaïs Nin and courted by Christopher Isherwood and Tennessee Williams.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/books/gore-vidal-elegant-writer-dies-at-86.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

So... educationally speaking... what do you do with someone like that? Keep him in school 'til he's 86?

Referencing the math weakness, btw; not the ethical implications of the self-reported "cheating".

[FBaggins]

1. Plenty of successful people without ANY formal schooling.

Does that mean we don't need public schools or some compulsory education laws?

[rfranklin]

2. The occasional genius should not be the example held up for all others...

There are plenty of people who couldn't do algebra and never amounted to anything.

[Igel]

3. Gentleman's C. Terminal degree.

There are ways, but we don't write them down.

One school the teachers complained that any SpEd kid that was failing would be transferred between classes and the administration would assign them a grade of C. The reason given was always "incomplete implementation of accommodations and modifications."

This is always a plausibly true claim unless you documented day by day, with corroborating evidence, exactly how you had fulfilled the letter and the spirit of the kid's educational plan and that this fulfillment was at least the minimum intended. The only reason to do that is to cover your butt. And the primary reason to engage in butt-covering is, well, if you know you're going to fail the student. Then it looks like you actually intend to fail the student, and that's a problem.

The brute force way is just to override the grade in the software or erase and overwrite the grade in your paper gradebook. "Oops! Did you misread that '6' as an '8'?" Or, "You're right, that test grade was 19 and I plugged it into the calculator as '91.' My bad." "Oh, that was John William's grade I put down for Mac Winston. Finger slipped!"

Like I said, there are always ways to pass a student you want passed.