[nascarnation]

when California schools were excellent.

Living in Ohio, I was always impressed with my California cousins when we visited. This was back in the late 50s, early 60s.

[Night Hides Not]

To put it in perspective, most of my classmates and I were testing at 12th grade reading levels in sixth grade. One of the books we read together as a class was The Count of Monte Cristo.

In 4th grade, we had a daily vocabulary exercise where we'd write that week's 20 words five times. By the end of the year, we had 600-700 words in our vocabulary that you couldn't help but spell correctly.

That style of rote learning, like multiplication tables, is sneered at today.