From a student’s homework:
Some of the intellectuals who changed the world were Sigmund Freud, Socrates, Aristotle, and Carl Jung.
I swear to God, none of this is coming from me. I’m happy, anyways.
How come everybody suddenly got so civilized in this region? Where did all those students who thought Rio de Janeiro was the President of Mexico suddenly go?
Clarissa's Blog 
Maybe the amended the high school curriculum recently and those students are now filtering out to you?
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We have raised our acceptance requirements and it really shows.
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Raised?
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“Where did all those students who thought Rio de Janeiro was the President of Mexico suddenly go?”
Well, In a nation where corporation are people, cities who are presidents is probably not that far off. 🙂
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You are happy with that incoherent and vacuous statement? Or are you just happy that they have heard these names?
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I’m happy that they heard the names in a positive context.
I have to take whatever I can get. 🙂
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The student’s statement was neither vacuous nor incoherent, from what Clarissa posted. A vacuous statement would be something like “All women who have walked on the moon have brown eyes.” This is true, but vacuous. For it to be false, there would have to be a woman who had walked on the moon who did not have brown eyes. There is no such woman.
It is certainly not incoherent. If it were incoherent, it would be impossible to determine what the writer meant. An example would be something like: “He knows more seventeen between a rooster.”
The most that can be said is that the student’s statement is superficial. But, if it was in response to an assignment such as: “Name four intellectuals who have changed the world.” It is a perfectly reasonable response. We do not know whether the student submitted any followup discussion or not.
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That’s exactly what the question was like. I want the students to practice writing in Spanish every day so I give them these assignments. This student produced a long and interesting response but I just quoted one sentence from it because of the names.
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I’m not so sure for Socrates, but this this is good stuff.
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Socrates was a profoundly important teacher. His methodology of teaching has affected other teachers for millenia, including me and, I suspect, including Clarissa.
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It definitely affected me. I love Socrates.
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For humanities, I tend to agree.
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I don’t think Socrates in itself was as important as the others in this sentence, but if you consider the Plato-Socrates duo, I agree completely with you.
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