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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >Well, I accept your direct experience as being more reliable than my  
> casual observations. I may be giving credit for a veneer of  
> sophistication and computer smarts more weight than deserved.
> 

I think that happens a lot.  I remember a great deal of that during the rise 
of PC's.  Some parent or the other would present me with their genius kid who 
was going to be the next Bill Gates, only to find that the definition of 
'genius' meant they knew more than their old man, even if that just meant how 
to 
plug it in.

Likewise I've seen language students able to say nothing more than "Hello" 
and "Where is the post office" in this or that language, and because the 
parents 
can say nothing in that language, their offspring appear as linguistic 
genuises in their eyes.




>> I would have taken your offer to pass the class and take the rest of  
> the semester off. I remember starting new high school classes, reading  
> the assigned books in a few days and then being bored silly for many  
> weeks thereafter. 

I was bored to pathological proportions all though school.   I failed 
freshman English (and never did anything but low C's at any time) and was the 
consternation of teachers and parents when they discovered I was using my 
class time 
to learn Greek and for no particular reason except for an opiate to the 
boredom.  I bade fair to fail senior English as well because of a heated 
argument 
with the teacher when I held that English was not based on Latin.  
Fortuenately 
it was the late 60's and I discovered the transcendentalism and meditation 
that was all the rage (and kept me [mostly] off drugs) so I'd just go into a 
trance during classes, that added the ire of the Church in addition to 
parental 
and teacher ire.

As I was writing this, the mailman (a neat fellow who plays Celtic flute) 
drove the winding obstacle course up to the house to deliver some packages, 
including some of those neat molecular model kits where you build all and 
sundry 
molecules from atom centers and spaced bonds.  I found I could no longer 
answer 
some of the children's questions (11 and 12 year olds) without some visual 
aids.  And so it will go:  "It is called atom because in Greek it means 
'cannot 
be cut', and the most important thing for you to understand is that they 
don't 
exist, they are just ideas...ah, but what ideas!"  This all came from a 
question, one that most thinkers have come up with independently though human 
history, that one of the girls proposed to the rest some time back .... if 
you cut 
this copper penny (which is actually bronze rather than copper) into smaller 
and smaller pieces, would you just keep cutting it forever?  Now we are going 
to 
demonstrate that, no, you can't.  At some point it becomes a-tome, not able 
to be divided and still be copper.  You see, copper does't really 'exist', 
it's 
only an illusion brough on by its atomic number.

Ripping stuff, this!   </HTML>