June 8, 2006
On one of the web forums I read, one of the posters was railing against the tendency of guest speakers to ramble on incessantly instead of getting to the frickin' point.
I don't remember much about my high-school graduation, and I can't even remember who spoke. Definitely can't remember if they took too long to finish. But I did remember that I had to give the valedictory speech. I was one of six, actually.
We weren't all tied, mind you. My GPA was just a fraction higher than everyone else's -- 4.22 to 4.19 was the closest, I think. I didn't mind, since the only reason their grades were lower was because they had taken music classes and thus "diluted" their AP grades in a way that I hadn't.
But this wasn't the school's decision, or the students'. The report from the computers downtown automatically assigned the #1 ranking to anyone whose GPA was 4.00 or higher. No checking to see who had straight As or anything like that. Just, if you had a 4.0 or better you were #1.
So in the Akron public school system, not even the computers can do math worth a damn.
Edit: I just remembered something else: If the computer had used straight As as a determiner, I may not have been one of the co-#1s. One of the art classes I took, I got a B in one grading period. For the semester I grabbed an A, but if they counted each of the 6 grading periods per year instead of the 2 semesters, I wouldn't have had to give a speech. Which would have been a good thing, because I
