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Every time I hear a teacher's union wailing about the unfairness of assessing teachers' effectiveness, I think back to The Stupidest Class I Was Ever In.

I was in my last quarter of grad school, and as an elective I took a class called Grammar for Teachers. Passage was required of English Education majors—in other words, future high school English teachers. And passage required that they get an 86%. That might seem high, but think of it this way: should your kid's English teachers be able to diagram a sentence to 86% accuracy? Yes. Yes they should. But my god, the whining, the histrionics. You would have thought they were being asked to cleave out their kidneys and toss them into a wood-chipper. It was an anarchic atmosphere. Their indignation would swell until they shouted down the prof.

For all that, I say without the slightest qualification that these hundred or so students were by far, bar none, the stupidest assemblage of students I have ever seen. They were the absolute dregs of higher ed. Appallingly incompetent, obtuse, incurious, intellectually feeble. The thought that these imbeciles were six months away from conducting a classroom of their own appalled me then and appalls me still.

Just how stupid were they? You're about to lap them.

There are two tests for whether something is an adverbial:
  1. it can be relocated in the sentence without changing meaning and/or
  2. it answers how, why, when, or where.

Based on that lesson, can you identify the adverbial in this sentence?

The troll read this sentence slowly.

There, I knew you could. THOSE STUPID FUCKS COULDN'T DO THIS AFTER EIGHT WEEKS, AND THEY THOUGHT THIS WAS THE ADVERBS' FAULT. Ahem. Sorry. I meant to say that after seven weeks of being told the two tests over and over, they were still raising their hands and asking "Wait. Too fast. What's an adverb?" as if it had never been addressed. Most galling is that they weren't humiliated by the question. They thought the class and the subject matter cruel, a grossly unfair imposition on their birthright to be teachers.

In the time that's passed since, I've winced with ultimate agony to think of them clogging the public school system. With a nod to P.J. O'Rourke, giving these idiots classrooms of their own is like giving alcohol and car keys to teenage boys.

And then I hear a teachers' union rep decry the unfairness of evaluating teachers, and my head pops.

Last night I wrote my prof in that class. He's now teaching in Alabama. I'd hoped that he would tell me "God no, your class wasn't typical. It was the worst I've seen in 40 years in the classroom." Instead I got this:

"Here, the English Ed majors need merely a 60 to fulfill the requirement for the grammar course. I laugh when they tell me how unreasonable is. Really, I just go hysterically laughing-boy on them. They're far, far worse than the students you saw."

I will never again question why my friends spend fortunes on private school.