A story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reinforcing a growing, frightening trend in school systems around the country: students are not allowed to completely and utterly fail.

The concept, according to the article, is to “give kids a chance” to recover when they’ve screwed up for an entire grading period, giving them a grade no lower than 50 percent on any quiz, test or exam.  That means that they never are lower than 50 percent away from perfection, even if they answered the question, “What is Sacajawea?” with “A bag full of jawea.”  (I wish I could claim ownership of that joke, because it’s flippin’ hilarious, but I can’t.)  While giving kids a second chance is a good idea in theory, it’s a horrible, horrible idea in real life.

Now, there are going to be a lot of people who are going to want to lynch me here, but I believe in letting a child fail.  One of the most important skills a person can learn to prepare themself for adulthood is the ability to cope with failure.  Outside of chemical imbalances, I would bet my life that the number one cause of depression in teens is their inability to understand that screwing up happens, and the only way to fix the problem is to try harder.

The best analogy here is the U.S. automakers.  They’ve royally screwed up their standing in the world auto market by producing inferior products on the premise of “status quo is good enough.”  What ultimately happened is they produced crap long enough to allow Japanese makers to surpass them in quality and take a near-stranglehold on U.S. auto sales.  Now, they carry such a stigma of crap that they’re struggling to regain market share in an economy that is refusing to buy the overweight, fuel-consuming vehicles that have been a trademark of U.S. design for decades, even when the cars are now as good or better than their foreign counterparts.

But, rather than letting the companies fail or allowing one of the major manufacturers to purchase another, the U.S. government is proposing ways to bail them out.  In other words, the people who are supposed to be looking out for the better good of the U.S. are recommending we simply scold the problem child of the economy who broke the neighbor’s window, and then pay to replace the window with no consequence to the one(s) who created their own problems to begin with.  The only message that sends is, “we can’t fail, no matter how hard we try.”  And, in doing so, the government is in no way giving the automakers a reason to fix the disease of failure.

It works the same way with kids: if you coddle them while they can still be coddled, they won’t have a clue as to how to fix their real failures when they are adults and will be held fully accountable for their actions.  Under the sudden stress of failure, a situation in which they never found themselves as a child, I’d wager most of them will crack.

So, by telling a kid they will receive half-credit for no effort, we are setting them up to expect that.  If a recent high-school graduate gets his first job after receiving his diploma at a school where zero equals half, do you think that kid is going to put in a full day’s hard work?  Probably not, because they’ve been taught that “good enough is good enough.”  But, in the real world, there are no free rides (except for some shady people under the current, poorly managed welfare system, but that’s a different issue altogether).  Great gets you a promotion, good enough gets you a paycheck until someone better than you comes along, and expecting a second chance lands you in the unemployment line.  That’s how the real world works, and school is supposed to prepare us to handle the everyday challenges we will face in life.  This does exactly the opposite, and contributes to the sense of entitlement so many people have in the world today.

News flash: nobody owes you anything.  I don’t care if you are black or Native American looking for reparations.  I don’t care if you are earning an adequate wage with a merely adequate effort.  No one owes you a dime for what happened to your ancestors, and no one owes you a pat on the back for simply doing your job.  Heck, no one even owes you a promotion for going above and beyond; this is a free-enterprise economy, and if you don’t like your situation, you are responsible for making it better.  Not your boss, not your neighbor and certainly not Uncle Sam.  And in order to be prepared to improve your life, you need to be challenged in school, not pampered.

There’s another downside to this mountain-like issue, too: by flattening out failure, you are cheapening success.  If it isn’t as hard to succeed, people won’t give it the extra effort.  And, thanks to decades of caving to minority factions of the population who think giving a kid an F is harmful to his or her “fragile” ego and to those who believe that spanking lowers self esteem, we’ve spiraled rapidly into nearly unfightable crime and standings in math, science and language that are so low in the developed, modern world that it’s a wonder we’re still even considered a world power.  By attempting to bring up the average through artificial means, we’ve dumbed down the top end of the supply of intelligence.

Bottom line: the failures of those at the bottom end — and I say this with heartfelt apologies (but no remorse) even about the ones who give it an honest effort but still struggle — should not carry a bill that is paid for by those at the top end.  Those who excel should not be hindered by those who don’t.  Period.

I hate English.

Anyone who knows me can see the absurdity in that statement.  After all, Inverted Mind majored in English.  Heck, I’ve been a published writer for years, in subjects ranging from computer games to software development articles to sports to…well…me.  I wrote for a newspaper.  I was editor-in-chief of a small, Web-based marketing publication.  Had I not chosen to go down the software engineering path instead, I would be a professional writer today.

But let’s face it: our language is absurd.  Sure, the grammatical constructs make the most sense of any language on earth.  Of course, the relaxed standards to which we adhere in this nation today have all but eliminated poetry that would be considered among history’s finest.  But screw poetry.  While I consider myself to be well-versed (pun intended) in the intricacies of poetry, it’s linguistic fluff.  I’m talking about the way we allow words to be spelled in America.  That’s where my beef with the language lies.

What got me thinking about this was a post on a sports site I frequent, pointing out how many wild variations there are in the names of athletes.  I give you my response — verbatim, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, Lorem Ipsum and a whole bunch of other Latin words:

Aaron Rodgers is 0-2 in the Phonetic Names competition: a double-A and a superfluous D.

That said, American English is so hard because we’ve mashed together various combinations of Olde English, New(e?) English, Spanish, French, German and, of course, Latin. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U (as in “vacuum”) and Z can be doubled but make the same sound as they would all by their lonesome; C, G and J can be hard or soft, and it’s not a medical condition; H makes other letters do weird things (CH, GH, PH, RH, SH, TH, WH, ZH); C, K, CK, KK, Q and QU can all sound the same — sometimes; and don’t get me started on dangling participles. And that’s not what you think it is, you perverts.

Welcome to the melting pot, where we can’t decide on a national language, our PRIMARY language is harder to learn than pi to 500 decimal places, and we all taste like chicken.

This is Mike from The Steel Tradition, signing off.

(I majored in English; sue me.)

This has actually led me to create a new category on this site that I’m going to call So To Speak in which I will discuss the insanities and inanities of the English language.  Seriously, I could write a book on this.  But I won’t, because it’s been done, and conforming isn’t exactly my style.  I value my individuality, just like the other six billion people on the planet.

Wait…that doesn’t sound right…

I’ve been absent, but with reason: the football season is here, and The Steel Tradition has taken the vast majority of my free time for the last week or so.  But, this was too important to wait on.  No further introduction, just watch.

I should be in bed, but I’ve had this running through my head this evening.

Rewind to last Wednesday: I was about to head out to dinner for my neighbor’s birthday.  I get in the car — I had just been driving it all of three minutes before — turn the key, and all I get is a repeated electric “click.”

Uh-oh.

I figured the starter got killed.  It had been pouring rain earlier, so I thought I had, in some freak incident, managed to short it out and fry it.  A few helpful neighbors tried to jump it, but I knew it wouldn’t work.  A friend even offered to use her AAA membership to get me a free tow (she was going to dinner with me, so technically she was in the car and we were completely within the rules).  Eventually I had it towed at my own expense since my insurance covers it.

It turns out it was just some corrosion on one of the electical connections to the starter.  $95 for labor and $65 for a tow, and I was good to go.

Fast forward to Monday night.  I left my briefcase in my car over the weekend.  I’ve had a habit of doing that, and I usually lock the car up even though i live in a ridiculously safe neighborhood.  I had gotten into the car late in the evening, and apparently failed to lock it up.

This morning, I opened my driver’s side door to find the glove box and the dashboard storage wide open.  And the briefcase?  Gone.  No big deal, it’s a $20 Wal-Mart special.  What stung was the fact that my Zune and my Sansa were both in it.  For those counting, that’s $250 worth of electronics on top of $160 for car repairs.

I could have been upset.  At first I was, but I knew it was my own fault.  But as I steamed my way to work after filing a police report, I started to gain some perspective on the situation.  I have a home.  My car runs.  I don’t live paycheck to paycheck.  I’ve got an awesome job and the best friends in the world, hands down.  And, above all else, I have a child who is my entire world.  She’s safe and I’m safe.  When it all comes down to it, nothing that actually matters has changed; God doesn’t care about my electronic toys.

It got me thinking deeper, though.  I came to a realization tonight, which ultimately is the reason I’m not already off dreaming about something random.

Think about this for a while: if I wake up tomorrow, I’ve been given the gift of another day filled with untold adventures and lessons from God.  If I don’t wake up in the morning, I finally get to meet my Savior face to face.

Bottom line: if every day is a gift from God, then there is no such thing as a bad day.

The Audacity of Hope?  More like Hopeless Audacity.

The two primary non-bashing talking points of the Obama campaign have been “change” and “youth.”  Barack Obama is 47 years old, and has used his age as a weapon to attack the McCain campaign.  Then he picked a 66-year-old senator as his running mate — a guy who is just six years younger than John McCain.  Youth?  Out the window.

Then the Obama campaign — and his “independent” supporters, the so-called unbiased media — had the audacity (you like how I worked that in, don’t you?) to rip into McCain’s vice-presidential selection of 44-year-old Sarah Palin, saying she was too young and inexperienced.  Well, age can’t be a problem, since the three-year difference between them would be, in statistical terms, inconsequential.  And to attack her experience?  Okay, so she hasn’t been in politics as long.  But she governed first over a town, then over a state.  What have you governed over, Mr. Obama?  A campaign?  Being a senator is hardly governing; in fact, you have no constituents, you merely have a region within a state whom you represent.  You have no power, no authority, beyond your meager vote in the senate.  And, when senate decisions are split almost entirely down party lines, your vote doesn’t mean crap.

Palin, on the other hand, has had to oversea an entire state, and to bear the brunt of any bad press that may befall the Alaskan government.  See, the beauty of being a senator or a representative is that you don’t have to be the face of a failure; you vote, move merrily on your way, and then blame the other party if things don’t go your way.  But, as a governor, Palin became the face of a state — a state that is no less than an equal to any other state, regardless of how many people reside there.  She put herself in harm’s way; she doesn’t have an army of fellow party members to laugh or cry with.

Okay, so the youth-and-experience is a pile of bull excrement.  What about change?  John McCain has 26 years of experience as a politician.  The Obama camp has attacked this fact, stating that their candidate hasn’t been in Washington very long, and hasn’t been in town long enough to have become a true politician.  Well, Mr. Obama, your votes are entirely along Democratic party lines.  Where, Barack, is the change?

Not convinced yet?  Okay, I’ve got more.  This man touting the fact that he hasn’t spent much time in Washington went ahead and picked a 36-year political veteran as his running mate.  And Joe Biden has made a career of toeing the party line, too.  Did great things for Delaware?  I lived there.  The state has been on the verge of bankruptcy for about two decades, if not longer.  And don’t get me started on the bunch of whack-jobs who have run the state for the last 12 years.  A foreign policy expert?  The same guy whose cries to bring the troops home only grew louder as the surge in Iraq began to show true dividends?  Don’t forget, Iraq was one of the main talking points during the primaries.  But things on the ground have stabilized — a sign that current strategy is becoming more and more successful — and the topic has suddenly falledn off the political radar.

Palin, on the other hand, has made a history (albeit a very short one) of standing up against traditional government beaurocracy.  Party lines be damned, she’s done what is best for her state.  She’s a maverick in the same mold as her partner in this election, but maintains her conservativism.  She is exactly what the Republican party needed to win in November.  The other party now knows that.

And now they have to find a whole different platform on which to stand.