“Do you know how to work the paint mixer? Then please match this paint.” And then the guy wanders off down the paint aisle to find the paint that matches the card.

You tell the truth. That’s what customers want to hear.
“I don’t have the information right now, but if you’ll give me a minute, I can get the information or someone more knowledgeable on that specific item for you.”
And then you Get That Info or person.

THAT is what your customers want.

I loved that show.

The tasks were to choose a theme, read three books consistent with that theme, write a not less than twenty page paper on that theme, and give a ten minute precis of the paper to the class. Most of them spent more than half the semester trying to come up with a theme and a proposal that the professor would accept (and he was anything but a demanding professor). No more than three or four of them could actually do the ten minutes precis in any organized and articulate fashion. None of them really had a true beginning, middle, and end. The young men mostly mumbled and hemmed and hawed for three or four minutes and sat down. The young women sang their disorganized messes much like the young woman in the video. The Ed Majors, male and female, all came equipped with graphic aids and note cards then went on and on for fifteen or twenty minutes until the prof put them out of their misery for lack of time. All were colloquial and ungrammatical. It was one of the more painful things I’ve ever witnessed but I sat through it out of morbid fascination all the while thanking my stars that I don’t have to rely on Social Security and these people’s earning power in my old age.

In the later days of my career with the State, most of my subordinates were young lawyers. Even they had a terrible time with hearings because they weren’t particularly articulate or quick on their feet. They knew the law and were good at analysis and writing, but they’d had little or no training in oral argument or in conducting adversarial hearings. They could write you a nice memo on relevance or probative value, but they couldn’t quickly make a relevance objection and then explain why they did it. I spent a LOT of time making them do mock hearings before they got sent into real ones.

And BTW here’s one I learned recently from my wife, who works at a local high school – a typical middle class suburban one. All these kids who don’t know how to write English also don’t know how to read a regular analog clock. The only clocks they see are the digital ones on their phones, iPods, or computers. None of them wear watches any more – at least not for the purposes of telling time with them. I swear to God I am not making this up.

It makes you feel good to defend this kid for being clueless, that’s aweome. Honestly (and sincerely), it speaks very well of you as a person to come to the defense of this person you don’t know. Maybe I’m old and jaded. I just honestly don’t care, except about what this clip (and the statistics the clip is referring to) says about the state of education in this country.

“A horse is a horse, of course, of course…….” I dare not try to remember more of it lest it be playing in my head the rest of the day.

If she can’t answer a simple question (she wasn’t asked to solve poverty, war AND education — perhaps you, also, should have listened to the question) with a coherent, if not informed, opinion, that’s honestly not my problem. It’s part of the competition. People prepare to get on Jeapardy — I’d think some minimal preparation (beyond hair and makeup) would be called for here.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the real answer to the question is that there’s an utter failure in the educational system to prepare students for life. Even so, she asked for it; so “fair” or not, she’ll have to own her stupidity. That’s life.

C’mon!