Netlets for Saturday, Dec. 6

The good egg: First comes the well-treated chicken It was disheartening that Sarah Moran's article "A Good Egg" (Variety, Dec. 1) did not tackle the issue of cruelty in conventional egg production. Chickens on most modern egg farms are treated horrendously, yet the article chose to focus on consumerism, barely giving the issue of cruelty a glancing mention.

For me, the question of whether or not to pay an extra dollar or two for a dozen humanely produced eggs is an easy one. In the article, a spokesman for the United Egg Producers is quoted as saying "producers should be free to raise those eggs in whatever environment they choose." Who will speak for voiceless farm animals? Too bad Moran didn't take a stab at it, or even let someone else.

BILL LEHTO, FARMINGTON

After-Thanksgiving pilgrimage ... For years I've read with intrigue the stories of people killed by stampedes at religious festivals in the Middle East and south Asia. I was reminded of these stories last week when a Wal-Mart worker was killed by a stampede of early-morning shoppers. Is it fair to say that Black Friday after Thanksgiving is a religious holiday?

PAUL SOMMERS, MINNEAPOLIS

... is promoted by commercial media While I don't think that anybody should be trampled to death by shoppers wanting to get a good deal, I do think it is a little hypocritical of Nick Coleman to lecture us with another self righteous diatribe about what we have become as a society ("This country is becoming too stupid to live" is the exact quote in his Dec. 2 column), when he works for and is paid by the very media outlet that promotes and profits the most from Black Friday advertising.

JIM VAN SOMEREN, GREENFIELD

These schools are not failing because the teachers need evaluation. Compared to other schools, more students come to these schools underprepared for the rigor of high school curricula, and even the most accomplished and dedicated teachers cannot make up the deficit quickly enough. The article devotes most of its space to explaining the method of evaluating teachers, but not to other root causes of school failure.

The teaching at these schools cannot be blamed for their not passing NCLB benchmarks. Accountability for success (or failure) is shared by the students, the parents, teachers (kindergarten and up), principals, district administrators, superintendents, school board members, community members, governing representatives and more. Evaluating teachers (both new and tenured) is important, but the root of this problem is poverty and social promotion, pretending that you can just pass a student on when they haven't passed benchmarks of learning in the early grades.

KATHY KAHN, BIOLOGY TEACHER, COMO PARK HIGH SCHOOL, ST. PAUL

The essence of an excellent teacher As a former student of Charlotte Westby, I read the Nov. 29 news obituary with interest. Your writer, Ben Cohen, really captured the essence of Westby: her "fierceness" in the classroom.

I took several different classes from Westby in the early 1970s. West High was allowing students to register for classes at that time, and I remember the rush to get to her table in order to sign up for one of her classes so that you got the "good teacher." It was not that the other teachers weren't good; it was just that Westby was excellent -- fiercely excellent. Some of her classes included Russian Literature, Shakespeare, Early American Literature, and Romance Literature. There was no sleeping through works such as Ivanhoe or Canterbury Tales. These works came alive in her classroom. Many students came alive in her classroom, too, as a result of her passion for the classics. We learned to analyze and to question, and we learned how important it was to write a well-supported thesis statement. Westby's teaching style was public school teaching at its finest.