The day after I had given the assignment, a mother visited my classroom to air her complaint: "This is too much to ask of sixth-graders. I didn't even know what a sonnet was until I was in high school. And then, no one asked me to write one."

"It is hard to know what is too much or too little until we try it on for size," I said, in an ameliorating tone of voice. "So far, the children have not expressed any concerns."

"Will there be a grade for it?" she asked, not ameliorated.

"That depends," I said. "If Sarah writes a good sonnet, it is only fair I give her a grade. She'd probably deserve two or three good grades, for the sonnet is a challenging form."

"And what if she can't write a sonnet, or it's not good enough?"

"Then we will have to look elsewhere for a grade," I added.

After the mother had left, Sarah, who had been by her side during our exchange, dropped her insouciance and said, "I can write a sonnet, Mr. Sub."

My assignments were tough, but there was flexible netting all around them, so students were not afraid to take on challenges.

People will rise to the highest pinnacle on strong expectations as long as the paths leading to it are not needlessly burdened with fear or the shame of failure.

Call it "tough love" or something else, but there is no doubt that people put forth their best efforts when the bar is set high and they are asked to do more.

Ask a young athlete to run just a mile each day, and he will settle into that comfort zone, but ask him to train to compete in a marathon, and there is a good chance he will finish at least a half-marathon one day.

A major failure of our public-education system is that it is riddled with low expectations. This is especially true in special education where children receive accommodations so that they may succeed in class. Sadly, though, once the plan is in place, efforts to challenge students become seriously attenuated. Success at the lower rung is accepted as full-fledged, and the ladder itself gets taken away.

Subramanian: Education specifics ignored in campaigns

Ramnath Subramanian, Columnist 8:18 p.m. MST February 3, 2016

In an election cycle rife with contentious issues, education has received short shrift.

Here’s all we know from the perfunctory statements that have been issued at rallies and debates on the Democrat and Republican sides:

Jeb Bush is for Common Core.

Donald Trump thinks Common Core is a disaster.

And Bernie Sanders plans to make college education free for everyone.

Allow me to expand on these points and, in so doing, to highlight some details that ought to belong in the repertoire of presidential candidates.

Common Core is not a gift from the gods, because all the programs under its aegis take authority and controls away from classroom teachers who know best how to educate their students.

Teachers know how to sing, dance, and cast the magic dust that makes education interesting and invigorating. When their natural talents and proclivities are intruded upon by outside mandates like Common Core, the song is muted, the dance loses its pizzazz, and the magic dust becomes common and colorless as air.

We need just three components for a powerful education model to take shape: a competent school principal, talented teachers, and proactive parents. All else is superfluous.

A solution like Common Core threatens the very fabric of excellence in education, because it takes authority and autonomy away from teachers, replacing talent with staid lesson plans, and subduing the riotous waves of innovation and creativity to form standing pools of mundane, humdrum mediocrity.

The reason why the constant influx of funds into education is not fixing the problem is that nearly all of the money is spent in the wrong places.

Extra money should serve only two purposes: improve teacher salaries, and enrich the classroom environment.

On the higher education front, it is interesting to inspect the high cost of obtaining a degree.

Tuition wouldn’t be so high if students had to pay it out of their own pockets. Enrollment would drop and prices would come down to attract more students.

As it is, all the money flows from banks to institutions of putative learning, and students are used merely as conduits to make the transfer of money possible.

Banks get rich, universities get rich, and students are left after graduation with a choking debt that they must suffer for years.

The anemic economy and its depressed jobs market exacerbate the situation.

Before we attempt to make higher education free for everyone, let us bring college costs under control.

Based on direct experiences in diverse countries, I can state unequivocally that the honest price of any college course in the U.S. should be no more than one-tenth of what it is today.

Once we bring tuition down to that level, it would be so much easier to contemplate further reform, which should include an investigation into the high cost of textbooks.

Erudition should not come with such an expensive price tag. The high-dollar cost of acquiring any degree reflects the sad truth that universities have ceded the high ground of learning and become places of business.

Ramnath Subramanian is a retired public-school teacher. E-mail address: marianramm@yahoo.com.