This is the most hilarious piece of news that I’ve read in a while. In LA, a student cheated and has been caught doing it. So now his father is suing the school for not celebrating his stupid cheater of a son:

At a high school school . . . a father is going to court to keep his son from facing the school’s discipline for cheating. No one is denying that the boy broke the rules, copying essay homework from another student, but the father’s argument is that the punishment — throwing the sophomore out of the English honors course — is too harsh because a regular English course doesn’t impress colleges as much as the more rigorous class.

“Cause we totally need this kind of a cheating fool among our college student. Some values this idiot family has.

I feel very sorry for the kid whose unprincipled loser of a father is teaching him that cheating is an acceptable way to go through life because there will always be a helicoptering adult who’ll defend your right to be as stupid and dishonest as you want. The boy is in for a very rude awakening.

Seriously, what are such parents thinking? Don’t they understand that they will be the first in line to sample the dishonesty they fostered in their own kid?

People of Quebec, you disappoint me. I used to be so proud of our progressive, enlightened province but lately it has been growing more and more reactionary and useless. You hand over a scarily huge percentage of your money to the government in taxes and then don’t even try to hold the authorities accountable for what they do with the taxes.

Your young people seem to be the only ones who are still interested in ensuring that all of your money doesn’t end up in the pockets of fat-cat bureaucrats. And what do you do in response? Do you support them? Do you join them in solidarity, trying to protect the access to higher education that Charest’s government is trying its damndest to take away from you?

No, you do none of these things. You keep repeating like a weird mantra that the tuition raises are not going to be that high. “It’s just $300!” You keep saying. You are either a lot less intelligent than I thought and honestly fail to understand that the erosion of your rights is always a slow and nearly imperceptible process, or you really don’t care that within 20 years, your taxes will be 4 times higher than in the US and your college tuition will be just as high. Every time I read the comments to articles on student protests in Canadian newspapers, I want to go vomit. You call the intelligent young people who see the future a lot more clearly than you do “spoiled brats.” Shame on you, people.

Now the dishonest, completely corrupt government of Jean Charest is trying to get you to condemn the student protests by spreading the stupid rumor that “because of the protests, your taxes will be raised.” Wake up already! Your taxes will be raised because Charest is greedy and his army of useless bureaucrats is greedy, as well. The students of Quebec are defending your right not to be trampled on by your hugely unpopular government. And you are buying the government’s lies that the students are to blame for the province’s financial problems.

And since I’m on it, Canadians from other provinces, you suck, too. I cannot believe that you’d bought Harper’s lies that he wasn’t going to open a discussion on abortion. He is a Conservative! Of course, he was going to open that discussion. They always do. So you voted for him and what has he done? Started harping on abortion. Because, apparently, the country faces no other problems. Of course, he is trying to pretend that it’s the uncontrollable party members and not him who is starting all this abortion-related brouhaha. Please, please tell me that you will not fall for his lies once again.

To the people of Quebec I can only say that if Charest’s government does not fall as a result of its egregious mishandling of the student protests, then you, folks, are hopeless and deserve to be bled dry by your bureaucrats.

From a student’s essay: “In the story, people vote for the candidate just because he makes a very good speech and they fall for the beautiful words he uses. This would never happen in real life. People vote on issues, not because one candidate speaks better and is more charming than the other candidates.”

This kind of youthful optimism and faith in humanity bring tears to my eyes. I feel so old and cynical by my students’ side.

A student writes: “The genre of this short story is fantasy. The narrator says that the protagonist couldn’t read or write at the age of 20. That’s completely unrealistic. Also, the protagonist had to leave home and make her own living since the age of 11. This makes no sense. Her parents would never just let her leave and fend for herself at such an early age. Another thing that sounds completely fantastic is that the Coronel was illiterate, too. How could he get to be the Coronel if he didn’t know how to read and write?” [Translation mine.]

Apparently, I’m not managing to explain the concept of a different cultural reality very clearly.