"when Hong Kong'rs wanted to leave the Canadian government stipulated you had to deposit ~$460,000 Canadian as an escrow to establishing a business in Canada and citizenship would be fast pathed.

BTW I have three passports. All legal. It's not hard at all especially among English speaking former crown colonies.

-- RealName"

As I said, that gift to Hong Kong had more to do with its participation if a mainland Chinese citizen or a current Hong Kong citizen sought to make such a similar investment it is doubtfull that this policy is still in effect.

Now I will grant that "buying" citizenship is not undeard of for Candians. As a quirk of Canadian citizenship law the Minister of citizenship and immigration in Canada has absolute power to grant citizenship regardless of qualifications, and a few have over the years used this power to enrich themselves. Since Minister Sgro's ouster however the press in Canada has been a little more investigatory with regard to this old cash cow. The Minister also has the right to arbitrarily fast track immigration, (as was done after the Tsunami a few years back) but such humanitarian gifts are rare and shouldn't be counted on.

As to your three pass ports, I say congratulations, I doubt most Americans have that many options. I know when I attempted to exercise my additional citizenship rights I had the door slammed due to archaic regulations with regard to paperwork my father failed to file at the time of my birth.

Canada is an easier country than most to immigrate to and to aquire citizenship in, but it still has more difficult procedures to navigate than the US. The irony of this of course is that Canada which is largely frontier, and most European nations (with aging shrinking populations) need immigration far more than the US, but have a much more negative attitude towards it than the US.

It is not that English Majors hurt scientific education; it is just that there are so darn many of them who later go into teaching.

Any student who studies the arts but lacks the ability (even if not the talent) to pursue an artistic career will often find themselves in the field of education.

A student who studies an applied science or even an esoteric science is far more likely to be lured into a research position or an applied field than to take on the thankless role of teaching our nations youth.

As a result you have people who perhaps have a fascination with science (like the Actress in “Insignificance”), but limited understanding teaching science in schools.

If people do not truly understand what they are teaching, if they are essentially teaching from the book, they are more likely to teach by rote and thusly fail to teach the nature of subject.

For example, if your entire English education were merely the recitation of the various works of Robert Frost, and you were never asked to understand the deeper meaning of the words you spoke, I think you would agree you would be a very poorly taught English student. But more often than not that is what our public education system does with regard to math and science.

I would offer that perhaps your own turning away from math and science had less to do with your lack of ability to learn and more to do with your teachers’ lack of ability to teach. As a tragic co-occurring problem many mathematicians and scientists are dreadfully bad at teaching as well, but hopefully the ones that choose teaching do so because of a knack for the practice.

Regardless, it is not so much that English Majors teach science as it is that when teaching science they aren't approaching it as a language. Science and math are about interactions and about beauty and symmetry, just like language. And like language it is the understanding of the smallest parts that make for the understanding of the whole.

All teachers need to understand that teaching math and science isn't about reciting rules and tables, but about understanding how these rules and tables were formed.