Bring Back Flogging Summary

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Essays for Analysis Bring back flogging? by Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe BOSTON'S PURITAN FOREFATHERS did not indulge miscreants lightly. For selling arms and gunpowder to Indians in 1632, Richard Hopkins was sentenced to be "whipt, & branded with a hott iron on one of his cheekes." Joseph Gatchell, convicted of blasphemy in 1684, was ordered "to stand in pillory, have his head and hand put in & have his toung drawne forth out of his mouth, & peirct through with a hott iron." When Hannah Newell pleaded guilty to adultery in 1694, the court ordered "fifteen stripes severally to be laid on upon her naked back at the Common Whipping post." Her consort, the aptly named Lambert Despair, fared worse: He was sentenced to 25 lashes…show more content…
Why are the tests they design more fair than the ones written by the fine men and women of the Education Board of the State of Texas who author the standardized tests? Supporting one kind of test but not the other is flagrant hypocrisy. Standardized tests ask basic questions. Look at the following example from a fourth grade test: “If you were on a 40-foot yacht that was 20 feet wide and had a 12-foot hull and a 21- foot mast, how many feet would you travel if you walked from starboard to port six times?” If a student doesn’t understand how to solve a simple word problem, how can we expect him to succeed in the fifth grade or beyond? And why don’t teachers want their students to answer these basic questions? If they were doing their jobs, these questions wouldn’t be so difficult for their students to answer. Maybe Ms. Heraldo doesn’t want anyone telling her how to teach her classes? But this doesn’t change the fact that some of the worst teachers in the state are working in the poorest neighborhoods, like Cuevitas, Texas. At Cuevitas High School, students earned the lowest scores in all of Texas because they have the worst teachers. Or does Ms. Heraldo think these students aren’t succeeding because they are busy playing video games on consoles they can’t afford? Some can’t afford

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