And speaking of school daze...
The Curmudgeon points to this beauty by Erika Hayasaki in the Los Angeles Times - Writing term papers has become a lost art:

Junior Dominique Houston is a straight-A student enrolled in honors and advanced placement classes at Northview High School in Covina, Calif. She is a candidate for class valedictorian and hopes to double-major in marine biology and political science in college, preferably the University of California at Los Angeles or the University of San Diego.

But the 17-year-old said she has written only one research paper during her high school career. It was three pages long, examining the habits of beluga whales.

Houston frets over whether she will be able to handle assignments for long, footnoted research papers once she gets to college.

''Bibliographies? We don't really even know how to do those. I don't even know how I would write a 15-page paper. I don't even know how I would begin,'' she said.

Her experience appears to be increasingly common. Across the United States, high school English and social studies teachers have cut back or simply abandoned the traditional term paper.

There are lots of excuses offered - primarily that the teachers have no time to grade lengthy papers. I'd be more sympathetic if I thought the tykes could actually do arithmetic. What's the excuse there?