Most of my school's funding is and was not dependent on their student's skills, schools get funding for attendance. When I went to school they checked attendance 6 times every day (once for every class), and gave you 3 bathroom breaks/year/class. Taking attendance took about 5 mins/ class, every time you went to the bathroom a teacher had to sign a form verifying you had permission. This comes out to about* 340,000 HOURS of wasted time in ONE YEAR FOR ONE HIGHSCHOOL. This isn't even considering many, many fundamentally wrong things with how grades and classes are structured and credit is awarded. For every competent teacher teaching a useful subject there are 3-4 incompetents wasting people's time with sophistry and selectively blind adherence to stated rules.

Public high school education in this country is a net negative. High school "education" has nothing to do with teaching students skills, its there first to benefit the people running the school, and second to make people obedient for factory jobs.

Math & science people tend to be humble & introverted because they're usually wrong about the solution to whatever problem they're trying to solve, and they spend all their time doing math/science and not talking to people. This is a bad thing. Every hour spent on spiffy presentations is an hour not spent on telling people public school's are doing it wrong. The author wasted his/her time on this* * , it's not going to change anything. Math/Science people who want to improve the state of math/science education should spend their time politicking, not science'ing.

* (5mins/attendance * 6 classes * 10 mins bathroom break form filling/a day * 2000 students * 34 weeks/year / 60mins/hour = 340K)

* * It is pretty cool, though.