I was the best of students and the worst of students... about as average as you can get.

So it stands to reason that you could use my experience in education as a sort of Everyman example.

This is a tale of two teachers, and I think that through this example you can see how ridiculous some of the so-called "fixes" for education would be.

Ms. Speers (I'll use her real name because she's the good example) was my worst nightmare. Mr. Smith (I won't embarrass any of his family who might read this) was a dream.

In Ms. Speers' history class, students might have to read a chapter or two at night, and would be expected to come to class the following day not only having read the material, but also having retained some basic facts contained therein.

On the night after my first day in Ms. Speers' class, I read over the material as quickly as I could and tossed the book aside. The next day, there was tension in the air as Ms. Speers fixed the class with a steely stare.

She walked from row to row of desks, looking into the eyes of each student like a predator seeking its most likely victim. She must've noticed my nervousness.

"Dave (when she fired off the name it sounded like a rifle shot), please tell us where Gen. George Washington received his early education."

I think I replied with something intelligent, like, "Uh... uh."

She walked to her desk, took out a book and wrote something, then went looking for another victim. After class, I found out what she had written. Beside my name, beside that date, she had written a big, fat zero. One question, one chance. A hundred or zero.

Yikes!

My first day in Mr. Smith's class was quite a contrast. I looked around the room, a typical chemistry laboratory/classroom, and noticed the students were divided into little groups. One group was engaged in a rousing game of paper wad baseball, while another was singing folk songs. Yet another group had rigged five Bunsen burners in a circle, four of them pointing into the center of the circle and the fifth pointing straight up from the bottom. They fired them all off at once and made a flame go almost to the ceiling.

Mr. Smith seemed not to notice. He stood at the front of the class droning on as if nothing unusual were happening.

I was aghast when I got my first test paper a 25! But other students didn't seem too upset at their scores of 20 or 30. Then I found out Mr. Smith graded on the curve. My 25 earned me a B!

After working my brain to a nub in history class all year I was thrilled to come away with a C+ and an amazingly thorough understanding of American history. In chemistry, I loafed all year and came away with a B that meant nothing to me. It also didn't help me much when I went to college and took physical science and couldn't remember a single thing from high school chemistry.

I think about Mr. Smith and Ms. Speers, and other teachers I've learned or not learned from, when I hear politicians bemoaning the state of education and offering expensive solutions for it.

I sympathize with the president's desire to improve pupil-teacher ratios. It's hard to give any student much individual attention if there are too many of them.

At the same time, I don't think it would have made any difference whether Mr. Smith was teaching 20 students or 40. He still would have stood at the front of class droning on, paraphrasing the stuff we could read for ourselves in the textbook.

I'm not opposed to trying to improve "the system" of education, but I do believe that there are really only two elements that matter in the educational equation the teacher, and the student. Give me a truly gifted teacher in a classroom of 50, and I'll bet most of those students will learn.

Put a poor one in a classroom of ten, and you'll get one student who will learn on his or her own and nine who will learn little or nothing. You can fill that classroom with computers, wire it to the Internet, enhance it with the latest visual aids and air condition it for maximum comfort and it won't make a bit of difference unless you've got a motivated, qualified teacher sitting behind the big desk.

Is pupil-teacher ratio really the key element? Or do we need to increase the class size for the top-notch teachers, get rid of all the bored, unqualified teachers and replace them with aides to handle the paperwork so the remaining teachers can spend more time one-on-one with the students?

Along with that, perhaps we should greatly increase pay for the teachers that can make the cut, but make it much, much harder to get a teaching certificate. We would also need more alternative schools, and more authority for teachers so that they could get the discipline problems out of these larger regular classrooms and thus spend their time teaching rather than handling disruptions.

These are just thoughts. Shoot them down if you've got better ideas.

But so far all that our politicians have been able to think of is pouring more money into the system that isn't working.