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[tikistitch]

Study finds one-third in D.C. illiterate

WASHINGTON - About one-third of the people living in the national's capital are functionally illiterate, compared with about one-fifth nationally, according to a report on the District of Columbia.

Adults are considered functionally illiterate if they have trouble doing such things as comprehending bus schedules, reading maps and filling out job applications.

So, as you may know tiki R a Scientist. As such, we had to spend several years doing Research, which in our case basically boiled down to injecting strange hormones into rat brains. Whilst the rats were still around and biting.

The "student athletes" (hahahaha) at our university liked us rat lab types, since they could get class credit in psychology by, basically, helping us feed and water and scrape up shit for the rats.

tiki had an assistant one quarter who attended the university on a football scholarship. He was a really nice guy. He'd been raised on a farm, so he loved animals. One of his duties was to weigh our little critters. The task involved copying the weights from a digital scale into a lab notebook.

Which, he could barely do.

He was in college, at a major state university, on a scholarship. And he could barely write well enough to transcribe numbers from a digital readout to a piece of paper.

I later learned he dropped out of the program. I guess it was fairly common with scholarship athletes. And did I mention he had a kid? A lot of the football guys already had kids.

We often wonder what happened to him.

Comments

[sarahpolk.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's really sad to hear.

College students on athletic scholarships -- the "star" ones plucked out from high school specifically to play sports in a major college sport like football or basketball... I have a lot of opinions about it and most of that just makes me really sad. That the system thinks it's OK to use and discard these kids, that they think it's OK to give them a pass and let them do things other kids wouldn't get away with. That they would rather the kids skip class in order to make the games.

If you are smart and you have mentors helping provide guidance and telling you how to play the game to your advantage (that's the game of life, not the game of that sport), it's one thing. But most of these kids don't, and they don't have role models that'll help keep them in the straight and narrow, either. Breaks my heart.