Really Old Beaver

I've got TV Land on with a really old Leave It to Beaver. Wally is not Tony Dow, and he has different friends. Ward is not Hugh Beaumont. Lumpy's dad isn't Lumpy's dad, but works for a milk company. This must be the pilot episode. I don't think I ever saw it before.

It's about Wally and Beaver collecting 1000 bottle caps to win a bicycle from a TV show. But there really was no contest. Wally's buddies had made it up. But the milk company gives them a new bike anyway. Ward then explains to the boys why it would be wrong to keep the bicycle.

How much did we learn about appropriate behavior from TV like Leave it to Beaver and The Andy Griffith Show? How much did our parents learn about parenting?

Differences between schoolteachers, professors on what students should know

By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY

State learning standards may help high school teachers focus their coursework, but college faculty say they're focusing on the wrong things, says a report that finds a "significant gap" between what high school instructors teach and what college faculty think entering freshmen ought to know.

"States tend to have too many standards attempting to tackle too many content topics," the report says. The report examines science, math, reading and English.

"High school teachers are working very, very hard at following and teaching their state standards," she says, but college faculty "felt it was more important for students to learn a fewer number of fundamental but essential skills."

High school teachers put more weight on advanced content, while college instructors said "a rigorous understanding of fundamentals" was more important. More than half (55%) of faculty ranked "basic operations and applications" most important, compared with 40% of high school faculty. Among material most desired by college faculty but covered the least in high school were algebraic problems such as solving quadratic equations and factoring.

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