Hitting Home: The Last Latin Student

This Commentary by Thomas G. Palaima over on the Austin American Statesman website struck a chord with me personally and hit on something I've been fuming over for a few weeks now so forgive me if this critique includes a bit of my own commentary on the matter as well.


The commentary starts off as a summary of education in America with a prose-like sound to the words. Perhaps not prose, exactly, but literature, at the very least. The commentary does not get to the "juicy stuff" and actually become a commentary until the last several sections of the commentary. This author hits on a subject I took in high school, Latin, and even uses my personal high school, LASA, as one of the main examples and arguments for keeping this subject in schools. LASA, which is technically no longer part of LBJ but is its own high school (but is still on the same campus and in the same building as LBJ...), is the magnet academy for Liberal Arts and Science which I graduated from in 2009 with my foreign language credit being in Latin. Mr. Browne, the Latin teacher there, is one of the most dedicated, thorough, strict, successful, inspiring, and all-around awesome (I might even say bad ass) teachers I have EVER had the joy of being taught by. Needless to say, when I heard that not only his job, but that of Mrs. Browne, his wife who is the head of the Spanish department at LASA, was on the line I was furious not only for their sake but also for the sake of the future LASA students who would no longer get the experience I was able to have. This has been a tender issue with all Latin student graduates from LASA ever since we heard the news. In fact, many of us showed up at a meeting the school had to attempt to argue for the job of Mr. Browne. I was not present but I can not imagine the impact was enough.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, onto the actual commentary. Thomas G. Palaima is a regular contributor to this portion of the Statesman's website and it is clear in his writing. A quick google search shows that he is not only a good writer, but also the perfect person to be writing this particular commentary: He holds a Ph.D in Classics, is a professor of Classics at UT Austin and holds a chair in the Classics department at UT Austin. Needless to say, I believe he is more than qualified to write this commentary.(And that is not just because I agree with him with my entire heart and soul).

As far as his evidence or fact checking the statistics he lists, specifically for LASA, I lived most of those statistics, I do not need to fact check. Yes, ALL of the Latin students that took the AP exam scored AT LEAST a 3. Most students who obtained a 3 were disappointed in that grade and in fact most students made HIGHER than a three. Yes, Latin not only has increased my vocabulary and overall reading skills but also my ability to learn, read, and understand other foreign languages.

As for his intended audience, hopefully anyone who is able to read would see the sense in this article however I believe it will only truly hit home with other scholars, teachers, and students that are already familiar with, and angry at, this particular budget cut.

P.S. Why cut Latin rather than Japanese? I have been a Japanese student in my past, I love the language, and I don't WANT it to get cut, however I can honestly say it has not helped me nearly as much as Latin has. I'm simply pointing this out.

As always, this has been a student's perspective. (However in this case I believe this makes me more credible rather than less credible.)

Texas Textbooks are at it Again

According to this editorial at the Austin American Statesman's website, Texas has taken it upon itself to rewrite history. While this does not shock me after Texas's past reputation with education, I do wonder how much research this unnamed author has done exactly. The target audience of this editorial is obviously other liberal persons like the author. As far as the author's credibility, I personally would say it is questionable at best. Not only is the author unnamed (as far as I could see anyway) but they also included a link at the bottom of the editorial to backup their research. The link, however, was not only in a "tinyurl" format, which simple does not seem professional to me EVER but it easily could have been embedded into the text. Heck, I can do it, why can't they?


The author of this editorial argues against Texas's censored textbooks, at least as far as the subject of history. According to this author "The board ignored the experts and instead adopted a hodgepodge of wishful thinking, distortion, exaggeration and fantasy dressed up as historical fact." It is hard to discern exactly what all that means, especially with the oh-so scholarly use of the word "hodgepodge", but it sounds pretty bad, right? The hidden meaning behind all of that is that Texas is once again censoring their Text books and in this case putting certain spins on some of America's history and entirely leaving out other parts.

All in all, though I can not say I was very impressed by this editorial, I do agree with the main point and I have been annoyed by the censorship of textbooks in Texas in the past.

But all of this, as always, is just from a student's perspective.

p.s. For a little laugh read through the comments on that editorial.

Kyle's Mayor Gives Me Hope

In the article "Kyle Moves to  band synthetic marijuana" on Statesman.com, Patrick George reports on the efforts of the Kyle City Council to make the sale of a "pot substitute" illegal. This "substitute" is called K2 as well as Spice and is "an herbal product" (like marijuana?) "sprayed with chemicals". Side effects may include " vomiting, hallucinations, elevated blood pressure" and the vague "other health problems". I know of video game levels with similar side effect warnings and at least one episode of Pokemon that caused seizures. Personally I don't think any of these side effects are anything to get too worked up about.

Fortunately, Kyle City mayor Lucy Johnson agrees with me. She would prefer the council to focus on "real drugs" and I agree with her. Johnson doubts that K2 is problematic in the city and again, I agree with her. As a college student in a larger city (a group which is among the most frequent of drug users) I had never heard of either K2 or Spice which leads me to believe it is not as rampant as the Kyle City Council would have you believe.

I would suggest this article for several reasons. For one, George does an absolutely wonderful job of reporting unbiasedly, leaving the reader to decide whether the council is overacting or not and also gives good information on the drugs along with both sides of the story. Another reason I would suggest this article is because I believe it is a prime example of not only Texas politics but also US politics in the possible overreaction of the Kyle City Council. I also enjoyed this article because it gave me some hope that some politicians, such as Mayor Johnson, are still focused on what needs to be focused on, such as the "real drugs".

But that's just a student's perspective.