Our Education System is going to be Our Downfall – Amanda Green

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

*Sarah has gone on a canoodling writing weekend for her anniversary.  She’ll be back Monday.  Please, don’t burn down the blog in her absence.  Also, decorating it in Hello Kitty Theme will NOT (repeat NOT) be appreciated.

Also, an  announcement Witchfinder is on Sale on Amazon and Barnes and Noble for 2.99 electronic through noon on Monday.  It’s 2.99, so less than a half but a little more than 1/3 the price.  Please share the news as much as you can.  Much appreciated.*

Our Education System is going to be Our Downfall – Amanda Green

 

Our current education system is, in all too many situations, a joke. From revisionist history to students being told they can’t wear t-shirts with the American flag on it on certain days because it might upset other members of the school population, it has become clear that there is more importance being placed on turning out a generation of Stepford students than in teaching students to think outside the box.

One of the pet whipping horses and, in my opinion at least, rightly so is the Common Core curriculum that many districts across the country have adopted. If you have spent any time on Facebook the last month or so, you’ve seen an image of what looks like a pretty simple math problem on it. The top of the image shows how most of us were taught to solve the problem. The bottom of the image is, frankly, a bunch of gobbled-goop.

commoncoremathsm

Now, I don’t know about you, but the top method makes a great deal more sense to me. The one article I found defending the bottom method stated that the Common Core method was better because students didn’t understand why they answered the way they did in the top method. Sorry, but that doesn’t fly, not if the students were taught how to add and subtract and not just told to memorize the tables.

A quick look at the two problems shows a difference right off the bat. In the top, you have the problem and the answer. The bottom shows, supposedly, the methodology for getting to the answer. So, the issue is skewed right off the bat – and by both sides of the equation. The side disliking Common Core didn’t show the methodology in the top example to illustrate how easy it is to solve the problem in the first place. In other words, if it is that easy, why do you need all the gobbled-goop?

As for the Common Core proponents, they will show the methodology in order to explain why it works but they won’t show the methodology on the top because, duh, it is a more streamlined process.

But that is just one example of the issues with not only Common Core but the education system in general. Another come from an assignment handed out to eight graders in Rialto, California this past May.

The assignment asked students to discuss whether the Holocaust “was an actual event in history,” or whether it was “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain,” the San Bernadino Sun reports.

More specifically, the students were given three sources they could use to justify their position. Frankly, I hesitate to use the term “sources” since they were given handouts and those were all they could use. These so-called sources were About.com, History.com and “Holocaust denial site BibleBelievers.org.au”.

Really reliable and accurate, much less in-depth sources the students were given. Right?

Making matters worse, when concerned parents and the media contacted the school district about the assignment, administrators said that no student had argued against the existence of the Holocaust as an actual event. Funny though, when the Sun got hold of hundreds of papers turned in for the assignment, it found at least 50 students who argued that the Holocaust was a lie. One student justified their position that the Holocaust was a lie because one of the sources said it had been exaggerated.

Needless to say, the community as a whole was outraged, and rightly so, over the assignment. Not only were the students not being taught about the horrors of the Holocaust and all those who lost their lives as a result, they were being given good grades for arguing against its existence.

After the fact, the district has pulled the assignment from the curriculum and it is “being revised.” The episode – and I have to wonder if, by that, they mean the publicizing of the assignment – is now viewed as a bad mark for the district. Whether this was, as the Anti-Defamation League put it, a misguided attempt to help students learn critical thinking or not, it was a badly thought out assignment. Worse, it was an assignment approved of by those in the district in charge of curriculum. If that isn’t a cause for worry, I don’t know what is.

Take into account the fact that the district also said “the assignment is merely to teach students to evaluate the quality of evidence made by advocates or opponents of an issue.”

If that were the case, why choose sites like About.com as one of the so-called sources? It is about as reliable on most things as Wikipedia. There is no real requirement, as far as I know, for any sort of special knowledge or training to answer a question. Then there is History.com. You know them. They’re the internet side of the History Channel, home to such historically accurate shows as Vikings. (yes, the snark meter is on high right now.) And the final “source” was from a Holocaust denier site – the only one you could really say advocates or opposes this particular issue.

Worse, this is the sort of thing that is happening more and more often in our schools. Quick internet searches will reveal where curriculum guides are rewriting our Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights, to meet the agenda of whatever the group’s political agenda might be. You will find reports, along with images to support them, of districts handing out worksheets claiming that the Second Amendment allows people to own only certain types of guns and only if they register them.

Some of the alleged attempts are more subtle than others. There is a text book in which the Second Amendment reads, according to sources, that “The people have a right to keep and bear arms in a state militia.” The actual phrasing of the Second Amendment is, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

So what is Common Core? It is a Washington DC based non-profit organization (yeah, yeah, I laughed too). Its mission statement reads as follows:

Common Core seeks to ensure that all students, regardless of their circumstance, receive a content-rich education in the full range of the liberal arts and sciences, including English, mathematics, history, the arts, science, and foreign languages. We work with teachers and scholars to create instructional materials, conduct research, and promote policies that support a comprehensive and high-quality education in America’s public schools.

Here are some examples of what different Common Core worksheets look like.

Now, like Common Core or not – and I don’t – there still has to be some sort of understanding that our education system is to educate and not indoctrinate. We have to stop worrying about teaching to the lowest common denominator and we have to give our teachers back the ability to adapt curricula to meet the needs of each and every student without having to spend weeks or months justifying it to the powers that be. We need to challenge our students, all of them, and give them back the joy of learning.

Frankly, I don’t give a flying rat’s behind if a kid can explain to me why 32 – 20 = 12. If he has been taught properly, he will understand the process. My concern is that he not be so intimidated or turned off by a complicated process for something that is really very easy to do. I was one of those kids who was hit during school with multiple changes in how math was taught. As a result, I hated math. Each change in the process made everything much more complicated than it needed to be. You have to teach the basics first and build from there. Not start on the 14th floor.

But what really concerns me is what we are doing to our kids when it comes to history and government classes. Yes, the victors write the history books. It’s been that way for time immemorial. This need our education system seems to have to go back now and rewrite history so it conforms to the current definition of politically correct is going to lead to our downfall if it isn’t stopped soon. The quote, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it,” will come into play. We already have students who have never heard of the Korean War and who don’t understand the origins of the World Wars. Others have been taught that the only reason our country fought a civil war was because of slavery. Those are just a few of the examples.

It is time we, as parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, started paying attention to what our younger generations are being taught. It is time to tell our school boards that they need to get their acts together and start focusing on teaching and not on mandating policies that keep teachers from being anything more than glorified babysitters. It is time to tell our government, especially the federal government, to quit mandating policies for our local districts that make no frigging sense and only serve to lower our education standards.

In other words, it is time to start giving a damn and letting our voices be heard.

 

 

 

288 thoughts on “Our Education System is going to be Our Downfall – Amanda Green”

  1. She says don’t burn down the blig m; while handing me matches and a gas can of a blog post.

    I’m going to go sit over hear on the corner.

    Like

                2. Not wishing to embarrass him but I think Josh’ s difficulties with language are dyslexia plus whole word teaching. Normally highly intelligent dyslexics (my kids) can work around it with phonics, but not with whole word.

                  Like

                  1. Accurate.

                    Plus poor editing skills.

                    It’s not until I come back to reread something with fresh eyes, that I catch some of my mistakes.

                    This time I rushed to get my witty remark I didn’t read through it before hitting seened.

                    :-)

                    Like

          2. I sympathize. I have a nasty habit of typing some words “wrong” — sometimes backwards, sometimes with the first and last letters transposed, and sometimes just plain screwy. Luckily my word processing program catches most of them, and corrects them automatically. Sometimes, however, the “corrections” are worse than the original typing.

            Like

                1. If like Firefox, and it just doesn’t work, try Pale Moon. I had some issues with Firefox on one of our machines. Switched to Pale Moon and everything works again

                  Like

                  2. I’ve switched to Pale Moon on Windows boxes and it does seem to be less of a memory hog than FF on the same boxes, but Pale Moon isn’t available on Kubuntu Linux and I suffered a drive death a few weeks back and wasn’t paying for a windows image to get all the faulty drivers and useless programs from eMachines

                    Like

                    4. it seems to not like KDE and I need to install with a terminal, because it wouldn’t do so with the deb package program. For what ever reason, all flavors of linux hate me trying to install things. It has gotten better, but I still have more issues than I should. Must be me.

                      Like

                    5. If you like I could direct you to my housemate; one of his jobs is doing over-the-net tech support/debug/virus removal/etc and I do believe he has paypal. It’s the ….

                      Uh, he just said yeah, send you over to him. aff at affsdiary dot com.

                      Like

                    9. I have read it being installed in Ubuntu and working fine, but not Kububtu. I know a few of the packages needed to do so look to be Gnome packages, but I have some of those from the initial install as all flavours of ubuntu need a few to work fully

                      Like

                    10. Sorry for my ignorance. I have friends (gasp! shock! he has friends) /snark who like Ice Dragon from Comodo.

                      Like

                    11. If I ever get a windows disk to reinstall win7 I will try that and the chromium based Dragon. I find streamed video works a hair better in Chrome based browsers, but it would be interesting to see if Ice worked better

                      Like

              2. Question: What gender and number is the word autocorrect?

                If it is singular and female, IIRC, the rest of the phrase is spelled delenda est.

                Salafi Necandi Sunt

                Like

                1. You are correct. I was trying to type while answering a question about languages and misspelled the Latin. I can’t multi-task.

                  Like

                  1. You mean ‘linda’ wasn’t a clever point about autocorrect? Oh, shock and horror! :)

                    Like

  2. As I understand it, there’s a difference between Common Core and this new-new math. Common Core just states that students should be able to add and subtract and understand the reasons behind it. The problem is that the gobbledy-gook is considered compliant, so brain-dead administrators will purchase these textbooks.

    The most disturbing thing to me about the whole Holocaust assignment was that nobody in the development process said “Wait, I get that we want to teach source analysis and critical thinking, but the Holocaust? Really?”

    The basic problem is that you can’t get a PhD in education without doing something novel, and we’ve been teaching kids since before we were human. Pretty much all of the good methods have been discovered. So we’re forced to choose between coming up with crap methods of teaching or going without Doctors of Education. May the saints preserve us from the latter doom.

    And now I must go to work. For the seventh straight day.

    Like

    1. That’s a really good point. Judging by the average masters and doctors of edjimication I’ve met – a good proportion of whom can’t even speak proper English – we are putting the idiots in charge of the schoolhouses. We have too many focused on the field of teaching, not enough focused on specific disciplines. Education, like creative writing, should level out at masters and focus on a project rather than new research, and educators should be encouraged to get further education in the fields in which they teach rather than in the educational metadiscipline.

      Like

      1. Education, like creative writing, should level out at masters and focus on a project rather than new research, and educators should be encouraged to get further education in the fields in which they teach rather than in the educational metadiscipline.

        Yes. A broad reduction in the number of PhD fields in general might be of some benefit, but certainly squashing the tendency of educators to experiment on the kids would be welcome.

        Like

      2. But if such an approach were successful, it would disprove their theories of education, which are that you don’t need mastery of the subject matter, you only need to know how to teach.

        Like

    2. To this day I still recall an English class where it felt like we spent the entire year hashing and rehashing why “this too too solid flesh” meant that Hamlet was fat. Guess what the teacher based her master’s thesis on.
      Over the course of the years it has been my observation that teachers teach, and educators are always looking for the next new thing they can sell to justify a budget increase or blame for their past poor performance.
      And if an entire class of kids is royally screwed, well we’ll just try again with something different next year. How convenient is it that every year they pass their failures on to be someone else’s problem.

      Like

      1. You hit the nail on the head, Uncle Lar. The problem is, the system is running off the “teachers” by not letting them teach. It is killing them with curricula they know may be harming their students and burying them under paperwork and it is the kids who are getting royally screwed.

        Like

    3. Jeff, that “novel” requirement has spun into something insane and counterproductive. I’d really like to hunt down the person — or persons — who decided that we needed to revamp teaching methods a couple of times each generation without good cause and make them sit through each and every new method until they beg for forgiveness.

      Like

    5. In theory, yes; in practice, they have specific things pushed.

      My niece tried to explain the math she’s taught. TOTALLY not seeing how teaching kids that each place is another step up in base ten is harder, although if I squint I can see the “new math” thing being an attempt to use the short-hand you might use for complex math in your head.

      Like

      1. As others have mentioned, it’s a case of causation reversal. Educators have observed that smart kids develop these shortcuts, so they assume that by teaching the shortcuts they’ll make not-smart kids smart. Instead they wind up frustrating the not-smart kids because they don’t learn the basics that could allow them to understand the shortcut, or at least the subject.

        Like

        1. As I’ve complained about here before:
          “Oh, look! Kids who have goals in 8th grade are more likely to be successful– let’s make everyone write down (approved) goals!”

          Gee, could it possibly be that if you’ve got a Calling at age 13, you’re more likely to have made progress by age 25?

          Like

          1. Differentiating between cause and effect is one of those things that we should probably be teaching kids. It would help if our education professionals had the skill.

            Like

              1. We don’t need to teach it to teachers. We can’t teach it to educators. This is the root of our problem.

                Like

            2. Adding a two-semester formal logic requirement in Sophomore/Junior years would surely do no harm to the educators. I shudder to think of the harm it might do classic logic.

              Like

              1. RES,

                Often what is wrong is not a failure of Logic but a failure of perception.

                You can have or use perfect logic, but if the underlying assumptions or their perception doesn’t match reality, they’re going to come to faulty conclustions.

                What happins is they aleeady do what you sugesting. Common Core has Guidelines on what is termed critical thinking. All they are doing is using it to shape “Correct Thinking!” 

                Just listing or showing all the logic falicies will not get them to see when they employ them themselves. What happens often times is they just become even more certain they are right.

                So, if the goal is to teach how to better determine or see cause and effect, then just teaching a couple of formal logic course could actualy do more harm than good.

                A belief that logic leads to correct decision making or percetion of the world is a fallacy in and of itself.
                 
                GIGO, because perception rules over logic.

                Spock = Logic.
                McCoy = Emotions.
                Kirk = The melding of the two.

                Like

              2. If you want to end Common Core, don’t fight it, just work to put basic economics and safe weapon handling into the requirements. The vileprogs will do all the work casting it into the outer darkness.

                Like

  3. Alas, I caught the New Math straight in the neck when I was in (IIRC) the third grade. I had been pottering along quite happily, mastering long division, and then suddenly … yes, put off mathematics for the rest of my school years and beyond. At least I had learned to read well by then, using the good old reliable phonics. My sister caught the new-fangled ‘see-say’ heresy and never really did learn to read for pleasure the way that my brother and I did. I’d say that Common Core is just a new and infinitely more complicated educational heresy, and one intended primarily to fatten the pocketbooks of those educationalists selling the textbooks and educational materiel at inflated prices to local schools …but in my more tinfoil hat moments, I wonder if it isn’t meant to make school (especially math) so confusing and impenetrable as to prevent parents from helping their children learn anything at all … and leaving the learning/indoctrination process solely in the tender hands of the ‘professional’ educators, who are guaranteed absolutely to produce students who are more ignorant after finishing 12 years of public education than they were before they started it. And I am wondering also if that is the intent – to turn out several generations of an ignorant and easily-governed proletariat class.

    Like

    1. This clip is from the NY Post, but it’s been cited other places:

      Duncan is US secretary of education, and on Friday [Nov 2013] he tossed a lit cherry-bomb:
      “It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, ” he said. Ka-Boom! [end of quote from paper]

      Add in a few SJWs gloating about how to game the system so inner city schools do well and WASPs (or Asians) get hammered, and it’s easy to see why so many people get their hackles up. FWIW, I think each state needs to have a master curriculum, so students can go from public district to Public district (or public school to public school) and pick up where they left off. Common Core’s got so many flaws that it ain’t the way to go.

      Like

      1. You are assuming that curricula are for teaching students useful knowledge and not for scoring points or seeking revenge on hated groups.

        Like

        1. Yup. And I remember sitting at an award banquet and pretending that I knew nothing about the TX board of education election, as two academic SJWs and a Chicana advocate were talking about how once “they” had won the demographic war, “they” would change the history standards to “tell our story – the real story.” I didn’t exist, since they assumed that I was just an ignorant gringa from Flat State. I didn’t disabuse them of the idea.

          Like

          1. That’s why the bloodletting, once “la raza” attempts to take over, will be such a surprise to them. Something my sister-in-law keeps saying, “don’t mess with Texas!”

            Like

      2. Yep, when I heard that, my immediate verbal response was a graphic description of an impossible act. Well, impossible without amputations. But these people think they can’t possibly be wrong because they have letters after their names. They are essentially a bunch of overeducated fools.

        The problem is that parents who really care, like me, are less likely to have time to fight Common Core to begin with. My two young daughters, ages 6 and 4, are extraordinarily and instinctively good with math. My husband and I have genius IQs, and he works with math-intensive high-tech stuff. When we looked at the Common Core math, the curriculae, the worksheets, we said no way. That stuff is, first, a great way to turn off even a very smart kid from education forever. And second, because Mom and Dad are also the primary Homework Helpers, it’s a great way to convince kids that Mom and Dad are idiots and teachers are brilliant – driving yet another wedge to prevent kids from trusting parents.

        So I’m homeschooling them, on top of all the other stuff I already do. Which means I really don’t have time to get involved, no matter how much I hate this pile of dung. I’m sure there are thousands of parents in precisely the same position.

        What I WILL do is ensure my votes only go to school board candidates who promise to work for the elimination of Common Core.

        Like

        1. Kudos, Jamie! Since the Leeper vs TXBOE decision it’s very easy to home school in Texas. We did, and we’ve known many others who taught K-12. Then their kids went on to college and excelled because, among other things, they knew how to study amidst distractions.

          Like

          1. As a parent who took the home school route I can say that it is quite rewarding, far less time-intensive than formal education and teaches invaluable lessons — such as learning is an active verb and self-reliance is possible. For the self-directed child especially it is a wonderful experience.

            Like

    2. Celia, you have brought back nightmares from my elementary school days. Math, then New Math, then the New New Math and then me running and screaming for anything math related but the schools continuing to put me in the advanced classes due to test scores. At least then our teachers had the freedom to adapt their curriculum to meet the needs of their students. And yes, I am one of those who asks “Why do I have to learn how to add A plus B when my checkbook is 1 + 2?”

      Like

      1. I swear, I was so scarred by the New Math that I didn’t learn how to figure percentages until I was in my forties, working retail at a place that was closing its doors and reducing the prices of the items by so much a percentage a week. And of course, the customers wanted to know, how much something was, and I had to figure out how much was 60% or 70% off the marked price. Thanks, New Math – for making me functionally innumerate!

        Like

        1. I knew how to do percentages in fourth grade. Dad had me calculate tips to train me. No we, after New math in sixth grade I can’t. Also, I ‘d always played with math in my head ‘invented’ negative numbers, came up with ways to solve systems of equations. New math destroyed that part of my mind. I know it sounds funny, funny and there were other factors, by it would be like suddenly your tongue stopping working. So I had a breakdown and was never the same in math again.

          Like

          1. That happened to me in college. I couldn’t understand how Statistics was being taught because the problems and solutions made no sense to me. The teacher had a chip on her shoulder because she was being taught a ‘minor subject’ (ergo, supplementary, not one of the major focuses of my course) and especially liked to torment students, refusing to teach properly, or help students who were struggling.) To say that it was traumatizing is understating how bad it was, and the sight of me after an exam had my dean fly into a towering rage. Before that, I was not bad at math, playing with equations for fun at times. Now…

            Like

    3. You and me both. I was understanding things pretty much when I was in Texas, but my folks moved to St. Louis in 6th grade and I was lost with a different curriculum. I never really caught up, and even today I’m… well, not mathematically illiterate, but I’m aware of some significant shortcomings in my knowledge.

      The offspring, however, is doing very well. He’s FAR past what I was able to piece together, but he ‘hates math’.

      I could weep. He’s got more resources available now than I ever did – but he won’t bestir himself to look at something like Khan Academy because ‘it won’t be taught the way they do it in the schools.”

      And I agree – I think this common core (and New Math, and whatever flippin’ fad comes along next isn’t designed to make kids want to LEARN, or make things EASY to learn – it’s designed to sell textbooks and push out something that kind of maybe can be spun as an ‘education’, while leaving the kids basically unknowledgeable about pretty much everything.

      Like

      2. It is worth noting that Common Core is* a practical solution to the problem of families changing school districts — or would be if there were more apple and less worm. As is, it appears a trojan horse virus intended to destroy intellects nationwide, one that has, by virtue of its pretty packaging, subverted many otherwise sensible politicians.

        *Okay – would be if it actually were what it is being sold as, and I recognize it is not, but it is important to acknowledge the problem this patent nostrum is addressing is a real issue. It is also another reason for home schooling.

        Like

    4. The nice thing is that our six-year-old is so far ahead on his intuitive math (multiplication of multi-digit numbers, fractions, and yes, percentages) that I don’t think the educational system is ever going to catch up to him. If he figures out division soon, he’ll be all set. (It doesn’t hurt that both of us have a decent grasp of math, I’m sure.) And thankfully, his school seems to be staffed with a bunch of teachers rather than educators; we’ll reevaluate as needed, but right now it actually seems like school.

      Like

  4. If the Holocaust assignment was really about discerning truthful sources, they probably should have used sources that didn’t have problems discerning the truth themselves.

    Like

  5. I remember when they first introduced “Set Theory” to my math classes. fortunately it died out a while later, and I never saw it again.

    But then while at my neighbors, one of his girls was telling us about the “Numerical Root” thing they were taught, which was more numerology than math. One added up all the digits of a number, and if it was greater than 10, you added them up again until you had a single number. Nifty, but what does it mean? What can you do with it? What problems can you solve with it? The answer to that was nothing.

    (gotta find a YouTube link for Tom Lehrer’s “New Math”.)

    And a classic story was when a friend of mine and I were having a conversation, I forget what about exactly, but the Holocaust came up, and in the middle of the discussion, my friend’s young housemate interrupted to ask us “Who’s Auschwitz?” When we picked our jaws up off the floor, we educated him, but his high school education had failed him.

    Found it:

    Like

    1. The “adding up the digits” trick you described is also known as “casting out nines”. I started doing it as a kid, on my own, when I was bored and there was a number nearby. :D It got to be a habit, and actually helped speed up my addition skills because I was practicing so much. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I found out it has a use as a rough checksum. For long addition, cast nines out of both addends, and add the results. It should be the same as casting out nines from the sum. Of course, I was too old at that point for that to be of much use, but I still use it occasionally (in addition to still doing it compulsively with most numbers I see).

      Like

      1. I’ve been told it is a fairly good way to tell if a number is divisible by three.

        Like

        2. And nine! Add the digits of any multiple of nine, repeat until you get a one-digit number. It will always be nine. I don’t know about anyone else, but I thought this was pretty awesome as a child. Though I’d only vaguely heard the term, this probably has something to do with why it’s also called “casting out nines”, per Oyster’s comment. And now the more I think about it the more sense it makes — for 17, 1 + 7 = 8, 127 — 1 + 2 + 7 = 10 — 1 + 0 = 1. I think I can see how it would work in the general case too. A number with ones digit a_0, 10s digit a_1, etc., is a_0 + 10*a_1 + … + 10^n * a_n. The difference between the number and the sum of its digits is 9*a_1 + 90*a_2 + … + 9 * 10^(n-1) a_n = 9*(a_1 + 10*a_2 + … + 10^(n-1)*a_n). So a whole lot of nines.)

          Come on, I would have thought this was crazy awesome as a child. You wouldn’t have, Dr. Mauser?

          Like

            1. With that I agree. And it should be explained what it’s useful for (a quick way to check calculations), not this made-up “digital root” nonsense. (Theorem: the digital root of n is 9 if 9 divides n, and otherwise n mod 9. Done. (Or I guess they’d say “the remainder when n is divided by 9”, which is what n mod 9 is defined to be anyway.) Now if this becomes a segue to modular arithmetic, that wouldn’t be too bad either.)

              Now “spending lots of class time” on anything is probably bad. I remember a chunk of elementary school where it seemed we did the same exact things in math every year, for about three years straight. No wonder I was bored silly.

              Like

              1. As a mathematical process, it’s a dead end. Once you’ve got your end result, what can you do with it beyond saying, “Oh, that’s neat.”?

                Like

    2. It’s called the Rule of Nine, and was used as a checksum before accountants had spreadsheets. In fact, a traditional accounting pad still has columns for those check digits. You see, if you add 2 numbers, you can also add the ‘checksums’, and it should match. Great for error checking when adding long columns. Today about as useful as a slide rule.

      Ah, I see Oyster already touched on this use. And Bob & AnalogKid touched on finding multiples of 3 & 9.

      Like

    3. There is a Fred Pohl article on “Russian Peasant” multiplication that relies on a similar principle. He also did one (possibly in the same essay) about How To Count On Your Fingers, teaching binary coding: right pinkie = 2 to the 0 power = 1, right ring finger = 2 to the 1 power = 2, right middle finger = 2 to the 2 power = 4, so Four You, Buddy!

      Using all ten fingers lets you count as high as 2 to the 11th – 1, or 1,023, which is higher than one needs to count for most ordinary purposes (for extraordinary purposes, learn Phoenician counting techniques.)

      It is easy, gives kids finger play and models higher order math thinking in a tangible way.

      If they were really interested in teaching kids math fundamentals they would start them with natural logs and work from there.

      Like

      1. I seem to recall someone selling a system (“Chismbop?”) that appeared to involve binary finger counting as a miracle math method for your kids. Musta been late 70’s or early 80’s.

        After the Biblical flood, the pairs of animals needed to reproduce. There was a table built from heavy logs atop a hill where they could mate and be guaranteed to be fruitful. All the animals took their turns, until finally a pair of snakes came to it. People wondered if it would work for them. It did, and those watching observed “Even Adders can multiply on a Log Table.”

        Like

        2. Oooohhhhhhh mmmmaaaAAAAAAnnnnn, that’s horrible. I am so stealing it to inflict on some unsuspecting liberal-arts major.

          Like

      2. We learned binary on our fingers, but we started with the left thumb, moving out, and then the right thumb, moving out. The reason for this is that it’s physically a bit easier, and it means I can still have a fidget finger-drumming session that is mathematical.

        Like

  6. On the Holocaust thing, a few years back a college professor was shocked to have some of his freshmen students argue that we (Americans) can’t criticize the Germans for the Holocaust because Germans are/were a different culture (the big thing that all cultures are equal).

    I doubt those college freshmen were taught that about the Holocaust and Germans, but were taught that nonsense of “all cultures are equal”. They just used that nonsense to its logical extreme. [Sad Smile]

    Like

    1. I remember hearing a while back of students applying the same moral relativism to “The Lottery.” Those of you who recall that short story, feel free to be alarmed at the moral inadequacies of the current generations of young people. We failed them.

      Like

      1. Well, refusing to slaughter populations whose culture leads them to have conflicting interests with ours is racism, because the Romans were perfectly fine with that.

        Like

        2. I don’t know…
          I keep feeling my inner Genghis Khan coming out more and more every day.

          Like

          1. Oh yes. I’m going to skip the Stossel special tonight about the “border patrol” checkpoints well inside the borders because I don’t need my blood pressure to go that high.

            Like

          2. Cultural relativism seems self impeaching.

            If you tolerate cultural differences, and different ways of living without reservation, than you tolerate my intolerance. Else, it is a matter of picking and choosing. If one picks and chooses, why not side with the likes of me, over a society that commits stupid acts of destruction to buy fights they cannot win?

            While I think much of the Romans in many aspects of foreign policy, the Mongols were clearly their superior when in came to certain aspects of the institution of diplomacy.

            Like

            1. “While I think much of the Romans in many aspects of foreign policy, the Mongols were clearly their superior when in came to certain aspects of the institution of diplomacy.”

              Hear, hear.

              Like

        3. I used that argument in a college composition paper (the class was a mixed freshman comp/history of western civilization course).

          Got an A. From the future Poet Laureate of Illinois.

          Like

          1. Hasn’t everyone done something similar in a college paper?

            The standards modern militaries are often held to are not very diverse, nor representative of historical and prehistoric militaries.

            Perhaps modern western armies should be more inclusive of how other armies have treated alien noncombatant populations they control. Perhaps modern western navies should be more inclusive of how other navies have treated alien shipping they come across.

            Like

    2. Silly, they forgot the part where it doesn’t count for white people!

      (where are all these fish coming from?)

      Like

    3. So, given the cultures in effect at that time, especially the concepts of Manifest Destiny and Survival of the Fittest (which, even if we no longer hold those beliefs were undoubtedly critical elements of those cultures, we cannot blame predecessor American Cultures at fault for genocide against the Amerindian tribes nor enslavement of African peoples: they were just expressing their cultures and all cultures are equally worthy of our respect (except for those which are not, of course.)

      Ayup, the inherent contradictions of their philosophies require them to digest multiple contradictions before breakfast.

      Like

  7. Another problem is that us old farts (who were educated in the ‘traditional’ methods and actually taught history, civics, and math) no longer have children in the systems. Hence we are ignored or marginalized by the educators as being “out of touch” with the new reality of education. And the ‘revision’ of textbooks has been going on for 30 years… sigh…

    Like

      1. And that family living downtown in a rented apartment and not paying property tax gets three votes to my one, to vote to raise my taxes in order to pay for their kids to go to school.

        Why yes I can say, “Taxation without Representation.”

        Like

    4. As Dr. Mauser said, they still want our tax dollars so it is up to us to hold them accountable, at least in my opinion.

      It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the classroom as either a student or teacher, but I have friends who still teach and who spend more time each week justifying what they want to teach and how they want to teach it than they do grading papers or working with students outside of class. It is ridiculous the process they have to go through to vary an approved curriculum assignment even a little to meet the needs of the class — and it’s worse if they want a variance for a student.

      Like

    5. Not all of us are out of child-rearing. LOT of grandparents raising their grandchildren, because their children either can’t or won’t. We have a child that suffered a traumatic brain injury at a very early age, and still has problems. Technically, he’s two years behind. In some things, he’s current. He has ENORMOUS trouble learning, yet we can’t get his school district to teach him what he needs. He’s being “pushed along”. We’re trying to teach him at home, but there’s a ton of flack from the school district. The only solution may be to move.

      Like

      1. I have friends who live in a lot of different states and it seems that acceptance of IEPs (Individual Educational Programs) varies widely by state and region. For instance, my eldest has an IEP and it’s been smooth sailing—not only are they discerning and addressing his strongest needs (he’s ASD), they’re discovering problems before I even know they exist and are addressing those too. (Self-focus is the next goal; honestly, a lot of neurotypical kids have issues with that one, so kudos to them for deciding to work on it.)

        In contrast, I have a friend in Washington state whose child with dyslexia—a well-known issue—cannot get help at all; she’s been homeschooling most of the family and has only recently been able to get people to understand that said child is not just being obstreperous. And then friends in various places who cite examples so horrible I can see why they’d never want anything to do with schools ever again.

        So—good luck, because it apparently is a matter of luck.

        Like

  8. Let me start by saying I despise common core.

    The theory behind the way that method of teaching math has to do with studies that show that Number Sense is a good predictor of future ability to learn math. Number sense is being able to internalize the idea that if you have 32 apples and you take out 12, you get 20 the same way as if you have 27 apples and take away 7 you get 20. (Yes, I’m not explaining it very well.) The difference between that and Drill and Kill (you remember flash cards?) is rote memorization isn’t as effective at getting kids to visualize what math really is.

    The problem is that the methods they’re using suck. Getting kids to actually get addition/subtraction/multiplication/division on a visceral level is difficult and each kid learns differently. My wife (a teacher) and I already know we’re going to have to do flash cards and such for our daughter because it won’t be taught in school.

    Most the teachers I know hate common core because it treats kids like widgets which they aren’t (but the left really wants them to be). As for No Child Left Behind, all it’s done is distort rewards and results so kids are learning how to take tests. A goodly chunk of any school year is dedicated just to how to pass TCAP or CSAP whatever standardized test Houghton-Mifflin is making a ton of money writing and grading. If they’re being honest, most teachers (who aren’t union stooges) don’t like being told what to teach by the Feds.

    As for indoctrination… most teachers I’ve met are to the left of Vladimir Ilyich and think Republicans are Satan. (In other news, the sun came up in the east this morning and water is wet.)

    Sorry for the long, rambling screed. Hot button topic and not enough coffee.

    Like

    1. The problem with those studies is that they reverse cause and effect. You start with rote memorization, and then you note that being able to generalize from the memorized data to those concepts is a good indicator of future ability. So then you decide to teach those concepts. Which is ok for the kids that would have generalized to them on their own, mostly, and terrible for the kids who wouldn’t have, because they never do get the memorized knowledge.

      If successful people do “X” on their own, it simply does not follow that forcing everyone to do “X” will cause more success.

      Like

      1. Wait, you mean forcing everyone to go to college won’t make everyone have an above average income?

        Like

      2. Thank you!

        Before my son shipped out to Germany, we had a long discussion about how the emphasis is on everyone getting a college degree whether they need one or not — or are even college material. He went to college and did very well in a 5 year program at Texas A&M. But, he admitted that if he’d had his druthers — which his dad wouldn’t let him have — and if there had been a real trade school and not the rip-offs so many are these days, he’d have gone for that sort of training after high school. It didn’t even shock me when he said it. What he liked about his degree plan was the hands-on aspect of it and the field work. He excelled at it and had to force himself to deal with some of the idiocy that occurred in the classroom. Idiocy that had nothing to do with what he would do in the real world of working.

        Like

      3. The Whole Word reading method comes from the same kind of flawed concept. Someone noticed that the fast/ proficient readers didn’t sound words out but picked them up (to steal from a favorite source grokked them :-)) in their complete form, or even grokked whole phrases at a time.

        Having mistaken cause for effect (somehow these types do that all the time) They said lets skip sounding out words and go straight to this fast way, not comprehending that the fast way came by first recognizing the letters and the phonemes they generated and later that all just falls away
        as the brain does its pattern recognition thing..

        Like

    2. My wife’s a teacher as well. Only about half of the teachers here bleed blue. Still, that’s vastly over represented in a state that every statewide elected position is firmly held by the red side along with about 85% of the state House/Senate.

      Like

      1. Yes, I know a number of teachers with a wide variety of political positions, not that you’d know from how the union reacts. (I’m in California, and the teachers’ union is well-known.)

        Like

    3. Agreed. My own opinion of Common Core is unprintable (even on the Internet which is pretty tolerant of such expressions.) My daughter is almost done with her own studies in becoming — wait for it — an elementary educator. She especially wants to teach kids with difficulties, especially in the English language. Not a lazy bone in HER body, nosiree! She began her quest for a teaching degree the year before Common Cr*p came out. I asked her what she thought about Common Core. She calmly replied, “they want us to teach with it, so we are learning how to do that.” I asked her if she thought the Common Core approach was one that would help kids learn, she repeated, “They want us to teach it, so we are learning how to do that.” I asked if, after she learned how, would she be teaching using the Common Core method?? She replied again, with emphasis ever so slightly on certain words, “They _want_ us to teach it…so we are _learning_ how to do that.” In other words, you must think like a lawyer. Just because “They” WANT you to do something, and therefor “They” require you to be trained in it, doesn’t mean “They” will get “Their” wish. It MIGHT mean that the new teachers will LEARN HOW to do (& teach) Common Core but will “forget” to do so….. just as one example. Not saying that WILL happen, you understand! just sayin’ it MIGHT.This is still, after all, a wonderful world, full of amazing coincidences……….;-)………….yes, defend your children in any way needful. It’s only the first 15 or 20 years that are really essential, after that you can relax.

      Like

  9. I think that one problem with the education system is the idea of professional educator that has no life experience in anything else. Prospective teachers learn all sorts of teaching methods but have little or no experience in real life using things like math and science. The system is set up to avoid experience and reward credentials. The problem is that with things like math or writing that experience is essential to understanding what skills you need and what you don’t. That’s why the US sucks at math:http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/24682-Why-Do-Americans-Stink-at-Math.html

    Like

    1. I think this is absolutely correct, and I have the anecdata to prove it ;-) I hated math until I was a) persuaded by my friends* to take the honors level class and b) it was taught by a mathematician who happened to be a teacher (as opposed to the Teachers(tm) who were assigned to teach math). HUGE difference. This was in junior high. In high school, the alleged physics teacher was such a loser I would read the book, IN CLASS, and then explain the concepts to HIM. But he was a Teacher(tm) and held all the right opinions, so he stayed hired and the good calculus teacher left due to institutional stupidity.

      *Special note to the GHH crowd–my persuading friends were male and the math teacher was female. And to conclude, pthhhbhbhbhbht!

      Like

      1. Math and I didn’t get along until I hit college trig. Lo and behold, I’m really good at slogging away trying to figure out how to keep a bridge from falling down, or calculating the shortest route for a new road. But hand me three pages of long-division problems to turn in by Tuesday and *screechcrash* the brain hits a wall.

        Like

        1. I was that way with geometry. The first time I was dropped into that class, everything suddenly clicked. It made sense. A lot of it was because I could see the real world application for it. Trig, on the other hand, was lost on me because the prof was a mumbler. It was bad enough when he faced the class. But when he turned to face the board, which was most of the class, all you got was the low buzz of his voice and he did not let you interrupt him to ask him to repeat something.

          Like

  11. I was taught to read in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which was a brief craze in the early 1960’s. The very next year I had to relearn how to read in English–the differences aren’t major, but it was extremely frustrating, particularly because IPA had been dropped down the memory hole over the summer and all of the texts that I had read the year before had vanished.

    Math worked the same way pretty much through my entire scholastic career. What I was taught one year was taken away and replaced by some entirely new concept the next year. What’s more, doing a problem by last year’s method would be marked wrong, even if you got the right answer. Pretty quickly I learned to do the problems in my head, get the right answer, and then fill in the bullshit method of the week.

    Honestly, it seems to me that the whole point was to raise a generation of people who hate and fear math. And it seems to have succeeded. So many people accept whatever numbers they are given with a kind of superstitious awe. I see so many clearly absurd statistics being reposted over and over by people who just accept them as gospel with no way of checking to see if they make any sense and no desire to learn how.

    Like

      1. IPA is a tool for adults doing linguistic transcriptions, or for singing teachers to explain the exact desired pronunciations. It was never intended to be used by kids who cannot read their own native writing system yet, and it sounds like a crude attempt to get rid of local dialectical pronunciations, to boot.

        Clearly we should go back in time and execute somebody for teach-malpractice.

        Like

        1. And in that regards, it works fairly well. I was exposed to it in a linguistics course, and it seemed a decent method for, among other things, making sure pronunciation was understood even when the written form of the word gave no clue or was misleading as to pronunciation. (Which made me wonder why the words were spelled or transliterated in such a way.)

          Like

            1. The saying is that English drags other languages into dark alleys, beats them up and steals any words it finds interesting or useful. If they get a little bent up in the process, so be it.

              Like

              1. I’ve said it before. Other languages appropriate words and misspell them according to the way they mispronounce them.
                English, on the other hand, appropriates words and spells them exactly, or as closely as possible as they were found in the original language, and then mispronounces them anyways.

                Like

  12. YES! Exactly! I pulled my kids out of school permanently a year ago and now homeschool them. People without kids or those who don’t pay attention to what is going on in their children’s schools really have no clue. We NEED to educate them!

    Like

          1. So was this recent, or in the past? Public schools have been bad for a long time but Common Core is fairly recent.

            Like

            1. Not common co r e__ middle school for second son.He was bullied by a group of 18 girls by the method of accusing him of stuff they were doing to him. Even when we’d been there or he was on camera girls treated as truthful. Then we looked at the teaching. Trust me, it already– 8 yea r s ago– had little room to worsen

              Like

  13. Sigh….
    I *knew* we were in trouble when I was in high school. I made friends with a girl who had lived in Armenia– who fled Russia right around the time the Iron Curtain fell. Keep in mind, She told me that the schools she attended in the USSR were far BETTER than our high school. From what I’ve been able to determine– my high school had quality education by US standards.

    She eventually dropped out of high school, took her GED and went to college. Then she contacts me and says the classes at the community college are more useful than anything she saw at the four year college. I had been tempted to follow suit, but the fam still had faith in the public schools…somehow.

    Like

    1. one of my numerous cousins is a firm believer in the Community College system (and feels it best if you work your way through and not use loans …But he got his degree to be a CPA). He got his two year degree and never looked back…Now makes BIG bucks and has a ton of Ivy League multi-degree boffins working under him.
      Not bad for a kid who was cutting wood for the paper mill and decided there MUST be a better way.

      Like

      1. Different strokes.

        I had full ride scholarships when I graduated high school (without applying) and told them I had taken all the schooling I wanted to, and what they could do with their scholarships. Now I’m currently cutting wood for a living, and believe it IS the better way.

        Like

        1. well now it is a different industry, but according to his brother who was working with him, it had been freezing that morning and a warm front came through so by lunch it was rather hot (for Yoopers quite cool for others is Hot) the bugs were bad as always, and he had twisted his ankle several times. At lunch time, he set down his chainsaw, said “There has to be a better way to make a living, and left the site. He went and enrolled in the local college, took a bunch of part time jobs (stocking shelves of the grocery was one) and got some schooling.
          Oddly enough, he still wields a chainsaw from time to time helping my Uncle with his specialty wood cutting (selling odd shapes and weirdly grained wood to artists and woodworkers etc)

          Like

        1. I don’t think he ever got the full licensed CPA though that was where he was heading, he ended up working for a Casino owned by the Indian tribes and moved up the ladder.

          Like

      3. Community college students are typically more mature and extremely pragmatic about their education, with scant time to waste on Category Studies or other liberal artsy-craftiness.

        Community college instructors are frequently retired professionals, having toiled in the corporate vineyards and now looking to provide others the benefit of their experience (N.B., unlike most 4-year college professors, they have experience against which theories have been tested.)

        Like

    2. My foundation in mathematical thinking was based on the Russian Peasant Method taught in East Berlin. Problems and their solutions had to make SENSE to the person doing them, so understanding the why and how was part of the basics because in the long run it was easier for the teachers. I remember learning how to use an abacus and THAT was our calculator, and that I was looking at a ruler-like thing to do more complex equations with when I’d hit grade 6. Alas, I don’t remember any of it now, because I had to learn how to do maths the ‘American’ way when I moved out of there, but the ‘must understand’ part stuck, and gave me SERIOUS issues when people tried to teach me using rote memorization and ‘plug numbers into equation to get answer.’

      Like

      1. I remember learning how to use an abacus and THAT was our calculator, and that I was looking at a ruler-like thing to do more complex equations with when I’d hit grade 6.

        Oooh, I think that was a sliderule!

        (When I ran into that in an old scifi book, I thought it was something he’d made up…..)

        Like

        1. Yep, a slide rule. I’d looked them up online and they’re rather expensive now. But just the thought that you could learn to do complex equations with that thing boggles me now.

          The way I remember being taught the basics involved coins and apples. Fractions made sense because 1 mark = 100 pfennig, and not only did it make sense, it wasn’t hard to visualize AND use in day to day life. A math lesson example once involved us making apfel strudel, which was an adventure for us because we got to go to the big school kitchen, where no students are allowed!

          They also didn’t have a problem with intelligent students and would quickly identify children with talents toward something. A child with an aptitude for chess was encouraged that way; my parents were being told I could easily learn Russian side by side with German because they’d identified I had a knack for picking up language and pronunciation. (My parents said no even though I thought it would have been fun to talk to my classmate Vladimir in his native language, because they were somewhat justifiably worried that entry into the gifted students programs would result in my having less of a childhood and become more of a robot.)

          Like

        2. Grumble Grumble

          You’re making me feel old. I’ve used sliderules. [Wink]

          Like

            1. I know how to use the ‘logarithmic’ scale of the slipstick to multiply, extract roots, raise to powers, etc. But there’s much more to the tool than that. Tried to learn it on my own, but never really went very far. Pre-teen attention span was short for things that didn’t apply to rocketry, explosives, and electric model cars.

              Like

          2. I missed them by just a couple of years. I believe the TI-30 came out when I was about in the 9th grade, but maybe that’s just when it became cheap enough for people in my class to buy them…

            Like

            1. Ah, the old LED one that would flicker while it was “Thinking”? I had that one, and a few of the later LCD ones. The newest one I got has a bazillion new functions, but the manual is less than sketchy on how to use them, and no “Math on keys” book to go with it.

              Like

          3. I was taught to use one in high school, but I doubt I’d remember it now… I used a TI-83 last semester and a very nifty graphing app on my tablet that does amazing stuff. Technology is good.

            Like

        3. My grandfather could use one faster than anybody he competed against could use a calculator, but I have no idea how to use one.

          Like

  14. Gaah. A bit of sentance got snarfed somehow. “Keep in mind, Armenia was a backwater in the USSR, and the schools would have been less than optimal even by soviet standards.” ALL that got et. Sorry!

    Like

  15. Common core has so much in common with any number of other lib/prog initiatives. Sounds good on the surface which is as far as most folks will look. All about fairness and standards and other buzz words that sound sensible. Then if you dig deep enough to actually examine the mechanics of it all and how it’s being implemented you discover it’s just another tool in the never ending quest for control of the minds of our citizens starting with our children.

    Like

      1. ACK!

        I had teachers who would bring their own — ancient — copies of McGuffey’s to school and use them as extra resources to use when teaching us. I had a love-hate relationship with those books for years.

        Like

      2. I grew up in Michigan (The U.P.) and then after graduating, moved to New Orleans. A few years later I was dating a girl who was going to one of the better Girls only Schools (at that time, then it went coed, then closed) in N.O. (btw, anyone with a job works to get their kids into private schools there…Most of the schools I knew of in N.O. were private, before I left, there were more private schools than public).
        One of the days I went to the home she lived in (she was in a foster care group home) I had to wait for her to get some homework finished and saw her “senior advanced literature” textbook.
        It was the same book I had in 6th grade english in Gladstone Public Schools.
        She thought maybe it just had the same cover, but I then started naming stories in the book (the only one I recall now was “We” by Charles Lindberg) and she then agreed with me that if we happened to ever have kids, maybe I was right when I said we’d have to move back to Michigan because I didn’t want my kids going to school down there. Though later, her daughter (after we broke up) grew to graduate from the Air Force Academy so I guess she did okay with raising the kid (though I don’t know for sure if she or the father did the raising, they never married)

        Like

        1. how was she able to be going to one of those “better” schools being in a foster care group home – wouldn’t have thought they would have footed the expense for that; they certainly didn’t for my daughter-in-law when she was in one; they couldn’t even be bothered to be sure her “online” GED prep program – (yep, you read that right; they were letting her do that; not even ensuring she had to actually go to school) – was valid; when she went to apply for college later is when she found out it wasn’t and then they wouldn’t even acknowledge it when she confronted them about it

          Like

          1. The home was run by a church group. Several of the girls in the home went to the same school, and the Church was associated with the school in some way. I never got into how it exactly worked, but not all the girls in the home went there … a few went to the local public school (though the home itself is/was not in New Orleans proper, so they went to the less atrocious East Jefferson Parish Schools, which sounds like a religious school but is a public as Louisiana has Parishes instead of Counties), and a few went to another private school. I’m guessing it was a scholarship style deal, and I know they had to keep their grades up or had to go to the public schools.

            As an Aside, my neighbor there became a teacher, and she was happy to get on at a private elementary school on the West Bank (I think it was in Westwego) because it meant she didn’t have to join the union.

            Like

    2. I have a circa 1900 English book (grade school, iirc) in my personal library and I know kids today, even most college freshmen and sophomores, wouldn’t be able to do the work in it.

      Like

  17. I have this idea of taking a 1940s textbook (properly updated) and selling it as a new teaching method.

    “The new highly rounded square works and looks just like a wheel. Yes, I know conventional wisdom tells us squares work better for rapid movement than wheels do because they force you to be stronger. But if you shave the corners enough that you can no longer see them then the new highly rounded square works even better!”

    Like

  18. Oh, before I forget, if you won’t allow Hello Kitty! can we decorate the site with My Little Pony?

    Like

          1. Do you mean Hello Kitty, or everyone’s favorite homicidal droid from Knights of the Old Republic? (Even better: HK-47 wielding an HK-47.)

            Like

  19. I am not an educator, but it seems reasonable to me that a system of curriculum with various levels of learning could be devised. Grade 1 would have 2-3 levels in each category, and completion of each level would advance the kids to the next grade. If enough levels were completed, they could actually skip a grade. There would be no need for teachers to ‘teach to the test’. because the grade/level system would BE the test.

    When they finished a level, their scores would be tabulated. Eventually the whole idea of age/grades would be eliminated, with the ‘progressive education’ model. I use the terms specifically to mean linear advancement, not a sociological model. No fish, please!

    Like

    1. Doug, it is reasonable and doable. Heck, our teachers in my part of Texas had been doing it for generations until No Kid Left Behind and now the Fed’s additional requirements. Now you do lesson plans based on a district curriculum and it is geared, in too many situations, to the lowest common denominator.

      Like

      1. I have long entertained the idea that a solution is to eliminate end-of-year qualifications, eliminate graduation from [whatever]-grade and replace that with entry exams. Let each grade-level’s teachers establish the educational equivalent of “you must be this tall to take this ride” rules.

        Let fourth-grade (f’rexample) teachers establish their starting post, with the understanding that if they don’t admit enough kids we won’t need so many teachers. Fifth-grade teachers would be doing the same thing to the fourth-grade. Set too low a standard and you won’t get enough kids into the next grade-level, which will affect your pay. Set too strict a standard and you won’t have enough students to justify keeping you all employed.

        The idea is to use feedback to correct system errors (badly manufactured product) rather than maintain incentives to pass such along.

        Like

  20. I was asked to help my granddaughter with her math, turned out it was common core math. I found myself thinking this is dumb, it has no purpose.

    Like

  21. The gobbledy-gook method teaches students to subtract by adding. It doesn’t teach students how to subtract. It makes simple subtraction problems take a lot longer than they need to.

    Like

    2. They also teach (or at least taught, my girls are in college now) division by what seemed like successive approximation. My elder girl was using this ungainly method back in like 3rd grade, and I said “this is ridiculous”. I taught her good old fashioned long division in about an hour. Next day she caught hell from the teacher by not doing it the way she should (and then for saying ” but this way is so much easier”). She will get her revenge though, she’s off to be a middle school math teacher :-).

      Like

  22. We just had a taste of common core in our area and the person who brought it has just been fired. So yea– maybe the parents, etc. are waking up. Anyway, it is still slipping in– a 13 year old boy was telling his grandmother that the Holocaust was a lie. She was so distressed and mad that she told him the stories… then got him the books. He was shocked for days. Plus he doesn’t argue with his grandmother anymore…

    Like

    1. Two very important lessons learned then by the kid. That is the only good thing I can see coming out of that situation. ;-)

      Like

  23. About number sense– some kids never get it, some kids have a natural talent, but many kids (and adults) learn it through doing several problems for a long period of time– and through repetition.

    Like

  24. Yes, jobs program for the lefty faith clergyish set. Yes, a laboratory for the education grad students. Yes, self identified academics and intellectuals who confuse well educated with willing to pander to them. Yes, politicians who will take the political utility.

    I’ve a sneaking suspicion of another component.

    Why were the Boy Scouts so forbidden? Perhaps they were a lone hold out, attacked to avoid needing to defend the teacher’s unions being in lock step compliance.

    What could be served by an institutional bias against letting parents police the sexual interests of those allowed around their children?

    I’ve the notion it could be selling the schools as a game preserve for predatory pedophiles and ephebophiles, presumably in exchange for bureaucratic support and reliability in local politics.

    Like

    1. Remember the scandal when it turned out that the Boy Scouts had been covering up the abuses of some gay Scoutmasters… and in spite of all the criticism ladled on them over that, the next thing we get is the left demanding that they have, guess what, more gay Scoutmasters.

      Like

      1. An early big push on gays in the Boy Scouts was triggered by a fellow who was identified due to his own political activism.

        Misha recently mentioned that he apparently counts as a homophobe purely on political grounds.

        Consider the recent post on diplomad about occurrence rates, especially the comment by our friend Green Bear.

        Looking at it as a political purity test gives a perhaps reassuring perspective. Disproportionately high quotas might be more a way to get many mediocre leftists into a position of influence.

        Then I start thinking about the BBC scandals, and hints of wider influence in government. There are things it would have made sense for the soviets to have their agents of influence cultivate.

        I probably need to shelve one of my current projects, my headspace may not be up to handling secret wars conspiracy horror at the moment.

        Like

        1. There’s no actual conspiracy, but a lot of Leftists believe there is one, and that if they do their best to advance the cause, the secret masters will reward them.

          But yeah, it is a curiosity why it is SO important to the left to have gays in the Boy Scouts, and to simultaneously trash them for promoting non-denominational faith.

          Like

          1. The left believes in endless conspiracies against THEM because THEY are involved in endless conspiracies against EVERYONE ELSE.

            Like

            1. Projection.

              Just as those spouting off about privilege are exactly those who think they never have to take anyone else’s point of view into consideration, and they get to dictate the terms of any conversation — that is, who have privilege by their own definition, and true to their definition, don’t realize they have it.

              Like

          2. There’s no actual conspiracy, but a lot of Leftists believe there is one, and that if they do their best to advance the cause, the secret masters will reward them.

            Reminds me of this.

            Like

                    2. yeah, I got that part, it’s the “hilarity” part I never got and it was and is still not funny, and iirc it is far older than the 133t 1uzrs. I find it as funny as thinking 2+2=22 is funny. it’s like Beavis and Butthead…it is not funny, it is stupid. I don’t need to watch TV to see stupid. I deal with it every day in some form and it is annoying. In fact, the xkcd is about the only funny take on it I have seen and it is only mildly so mainly because it was making fun of the “Join The Club” portion of the joke as well.

                      Like

                    3. Writing something like that on someone, usually when they’re drunk, is stupid and not funny once someone matures beyond middle school humor. The funny part here is not that someone wrote that on him, but that he misread it, and thought it was a message informing him of being a member of a conspiracy group.

                      Like

  25. Arrrggghhhh…..

    Where to start?

    The “Common Core Standards” that are mandated for states to adopt have absolutely nothing at all to do with the actual teaching method used to accomplish them. The standards are a set of definitions of what the minimum acceptable education levels are.

    Consider the following from the Grade 5 math standards:

    *** Students apply their understanding of fractions and fraction
    *** models to represent the addition and subtraction of fractions
    *** with unlike denominators as equivalent calculations with like
    *** denominators. They develop fluency in calculating sums
    *** and differences of fractions, and make reasonable estimates
    *** of them.

    As to the particular method shown in the image above, I will defend for the umpty-thousandth time that not only is it a valid method of doing subtraction, but that it is, in fact, the common method used by most numerically competant people to do subtraction in their heads.

    When subtracting 378 – 189 mentally, you do not line the two numbers up on a mental blackboard and perform the traditional operations regarding carry and so forth. The far more common method is to notice that it takes 11 to get from 189 to 200, and then another 100 to get to 300, and then there’s 78 left… so 100 + 78 + 11 is 189. Cool! It’s half! Who knew?

    The point of showing kids is that -some- kids will develop mental fluency with numbers the same as some will not. The ones who don’t will have at least two methods of coming up with a solution, and can choose to use the one that is most “normal” for them.

    As to casting out nines, I think I was told that “A number is divisible by 3 if the sum of its digits is” in third or fourth grade. I clearly recall being taught WHY that was in 8th grade, which would have been 1969.

    In this day and age, there is no excuse for not knowing about alternate numerical bases. If you don’t recognize hexadecimal numbers and have some sense of what they mean, you’re handicapped. Plus, you can’t understand that Halloween = Christmas.

    Similarly, an early exposure to set theory, ven diagrams and “and”, “or” and “Not” operations of boolean algebra make the process of working with and programming computers MUCH easier.

    The problem isn’t teaching these things to kids, the problem is that elementary school teachers DO NOT UNDERSTAND MATH and that they teach math as though it is JUST a set of algorythms, which they don’t understand themselves and can not explain. Requiring elementary school teachers to have math through Calc 1 and “real” statistics would be a really good step forward. The alternative would be to have a math specialist for each five classrooms in each elementary school who rotated between them.

    Oh well.

    Like

    1. I’d agree that all of that is useful stuff to know. I use much of it directly in my everyday work (except the adding/summing big numbers mentally part – I usually just do a lot of rounding there, or use a calculator). That having been, if teachers can’t get children to understand basic base-10 arithmetic, we’re so F’d I don’t even want to think about it. It is walk before you run, in my opinion. They need to have the basics under their belts before they’re taught the rest.

      Like

    2. “When subtracting 378 – 189 mentally, you do not line the two numbers up on a mental blackboard and perform the traditional operations regarding carry and so forth.”

      Erm, actually, that is exactly what I do. ;-)

      Like

        1. Same here. complete with waving hand while ‘writing’ in the air. Only way I can keep things straight when I don’t have writing implements handy.

          Like

    3. Rick, I’m going to disagree with you on several things. The first is if you have Common Core Standards — and on paper they look reasonable — you have to have approved and accepted curricula and teaching methods that make sense. Yes, the method shown makes sense. But it also will turn off those students, especially early in their school careers, who aren’t math oriented.

      Second, you focused only on the math aspect and nothing else. Yes, I gave that example but I also gave others as well.

      As for your example of how to solve a problem in your head, that may be how you do it but not everyone else does. Frankly, after being caught in the mess of math to New Math to the New New Math, I know how easy it is to screw kids up when it comes to numbers. The schools almost did it with my son — who is math oriented — by changing to a system that made no sense when he was in the third or fourth grade.

      It’s clear we have different opinions of Common Core, especially about the math and that’s fine. I still say any program or curriculum that allows the wording of our Bill of Rights to be changed or that advocates so-called critical thinking exercises that fail to use reliable sources and that makes it appear that historical atrocities didn’t occur is fundamentally flawed.

      Like

      1. And again, I’m going to argue that there are two substantially different issues here.

        There are the common core standards, which I have read all the way through, and honestly, I think they’re basically fine.

        Then, there are the various attempts to implement those standards into a curriculum. There is nothing in the CCS that re-writes the second amendment, that was done by some libtard. If (s)he blamed CCS for it, (s)he’s a liar.

        As to how to teach math, I taught physics. I’m /very/. good at teaching math, or more specifically very good at teaching calculation technique. In the course of a year, I would typically have to use any one of seven algorithms that I know of in order to get -all- of my students able to come up with numerically valid answers.

        I have strong opinions on the subject because I’ve -done- it. The traditional vertical calculation algorithms work fine for some students. They’re the mathematical equivalent of intense phonics. SOME people learn to read by other paths. Some people find other paths into calculations.

        Please note that I say calculation and not “math” Math involves symbol manipulation. Calculation is a tiny subset of math.

        The physics curriculum at the school I taught at focused on sophomores and juniors. The rota was Bio, physics, chem, and some AP, or for non-STEM bound earth science/bio/physics/chem.

        I expected my sophomores to be able to resolve the sum of four vectors, and to define and calculate the standard deviation of a data set no later than the sixth week of class.

        Back to the original subject, I want to distinguish between CCS and the many utterly crappy curricula that attempt to implement it, and between CCS and the incompetent elementary teachers who don’t understand how calculations and arithmetic work.

        The problem with “new math” wasn’t the new math, it was the mathematically illiterate teachers who tried to implement it. For those teachers, having one utterly mechanical algorithm is best, “teach this. it works.” That’s fine if that’s all you can do, but it’s very sad.

        Like

        1. What you say makes sense, and objecting to both the intrusion of Common Core and the crappy materials separately makes sense to me. That said, there seems to be this explosion of horrendous teaching material that correlates strongly with the arrival of Common Core. Or… it just occurred to me, maybe these are not new, but the controversy over Common Core made more people pay attention. I don’t have the data to make that call, but I do object to Common Core because it’s none of the Feds’ gorram business, and the new textbooks and exercises because they’re a steaming pile of gos-se.

          Like

    4. Actually, I DO line up the numbers on an imaginary blackboard in my head. You are very misguided. Common Core is horrible. Period. BTW, very high IQ myself and my kids, none of which are learning this garbage because I pulled them out a while ago and homeschool them now.

      Like

    5. Ah, someone else who does math similar to the way I do. But, WE ARE A VERY SMALL MINORITY! If I happen to do it aloud or try and explain the way I do math, 98 times out of a hundred I get this completely befuddled look, and the person says, “huh?”

      Teach kids how to do it the other way, and practically all of them will learn to do subtraction, and then a few will learn to do it our way later, because it is faster and simpler if your brain is twisty enough. Don’t try and teach it our way without teaching the basic way first, only one or two percent will be able to easily grasp it.

      Like

      1. so it really is true that the way we do it isn’t the way everybody does it and that’s why I’m continually getting that befuddled look from everybody; who knew? seriously it was a long time before I finally got it that not everybody did things they way I did; I just thought it was the way everybody did it

        Like

        1. Yep, my math is mostly, well not exactly self taught, but sorta grasped out of thin air. Much of the basics was taught in school, but parts of them I only learned much later in order to teach others. I never learned long division until after I was grown up, because my mind just grasped division, I never used a method per se. I just looked at 144/9 and KNEW that it was 16, but you CAN’T teach the average person that 144/9=16 so 588/9=16*4=64, their mind didn’t make the first corner; so it is kind of like you giving directions to your house, with the first instruction being; when you hit Market St. take a left, go two blocks and take a right, head south until you see an ugly red house with lime green trim, my house is the next white one on the left. Uhh, first I have to go through a couple states to Colorado, then get to Colorado Springs, which I can probably do, but where the heck is Market St., and where do you expect me to intersect it?

          Like

    6. Oh, and a day later I look at your example, without looking at exactly how you would do it first, and no, that isn’t how I would do it. 378-189, 378 is 22 under 400, 189 is 11 under 200, 11 is half of 22 so 200-11=189. But that is my twisty brain being self-taught, you CAN’T teach people that way and expect them to understand it, a small percentage will understand it after thoroughly learning the basics, a minuet percentage will grasp it with little to no foundation in the basics. So teaching it to grade schoolers while NOT teaching the basics isn’t idiocy, it is LUNACY!.

      Now apparently I was one who went to a lucky school district that was slow to switch to teaching new math. They still taught the basics when I went to school, I’m not sure when I started doing things my way by shortcuts that seemed obvious to me, but it was before third grade when we were supposed to learn long division. Because I never learned it and used to drive teachers nuts by handing in assignments with just the answers. They would tell me I was supposed to show my work, in some respects I guess I was a little slow, because that never made any sense to me, there wasn’t any work to show 117/9=13 What else am I supposed to write?

      Now I have relatives that go to the same schools, and the idiots are teaching the new math, almost nobody learns math, because they don’t understand the basics. Not only is teaching the ‘faster’ method used by your 1% star students (reference the threads above about cause and effect, confusion thereof) to the other 99% idiotic lunacy; but those 1% will all be making up their own individual shortcuts that work best for them, mostly subconsciously. So even they will look at the method you are teaching and scratch their heads, not in their case because they can’t comprehend it, but because they will look at it and say; but why would you do it that way? It is much easier to do, this way.

      /looks down/
      Hey, who put this soapbox here?

      Like

  26. Wow, that math example is a mess. Waaay to complicated. I get it, teach them the track the difference between to numbers in factors of 10, but still more complicated than working right to left, 2 minus 2 is 0, 3 minus 1 is 2. Your answer is 20.

    And I thought the “new math” of my school years was weird. –sg- It doesn’t matter if Johnny knows *how* to do the process, as long as he understands the concept of 32-12=20. ARG. To me, you have to understand the “how” as much as the “what” in math. Granted, I am lousy at math. I never got past basic algebra. But what I did manage to learn has stuck with me. Of course my father can still do complex mathematics in his head.

    Erm, those common core sheets scare me. Seriously. I know education has changed in the decades since I was in school, but those are just too much. Common Core comes across, imo, as a back-door attempt at Federalizing the education system, something the NEA has been trying to do since at least the 70’s.

    “the victors write the history books.”

    Hah. To paraphrase a quote History is Propaganda – Even when the losers write the books. ;-) This was brought home to me when I was looking into Queen Mary of Scotland. The English history books paint her one way, the Scottish history books paint her another. Personally, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. (And never mind the convoluted mess of Glen Coe.)

    “Others have been taught that the only reason our country fought a civil war was because of slavery.”

    This, I am afraid, has been going on for a very long time. It was already happening when I was in school. At least two generations have grown up believing this. Many will refuse to accept that there were any other factors. Or, if they do acknowledge other factors, they manage to associate them with slavery. I have notices that most of these are people who were educated in more, shall we say, liberal states.

    On a similar note, I was very dismayed when my niece graduated high school, taking four years of English, without learning how to do a proper research paper. I spent an entire quarter my Junior year learning all the steps, starting with the 3 paragraph theme, the 5 paragraph essay them moving to the actual research. My poor niece had to learn from her history teacher. Her English classes were more “Lit” than “English”. In fact, I don’t think she ever learned how to diagram a sentence. ((Okay, I have forgotten how to it, but I did learn.)) One of the problems in Virginia is the tendency to teach the SOL, and little else. Teachers spend as much as a month preparing students before the test dates. –sigh-

    Like

    1. Wyldkat, you are right about the truth falling in the middle of what the victors and the losers write re: history. I love reading the disparate accounts and then drawing my own conclusions.

      As for your niece graduating without knowing how to do a proper research paper, all I can do is sigh. Back in the dark ages when I was in school, someone really “intelligent” administrator decided it would be a good idea to make senior English an elective. That moved the senior research paper, mandatory for graduation, to our junior year. Another brilliant — and I use that term loosely — admin decided it would be a cool idea to teach American lit with American history in the junior year as well. So, guess what we had to do with our research papers?

      Think about it. You are taking a lit class and expected to write a college level research paper, following the MLA stylebook and Strunk & White. That research paper has to do with something in post-Civil War US history. Add in that they usually teamed up teachers who couldn’t stand one another AND both teachers graded the paper and it was a recipe for disaster.

      Fortunately, for those who graduated after me, the policy on senior English was reversed. Fortunately for me, I had some really good English teachers before the stupidity hit and that served me well when I went on to Baylor which, at the time, had an English program where you’d flunk a paper for three misspelled words or two comma faults or two dangling modifiers, etc.

      Like

      1. H-ll. The history dept at Flat State was considering adding basic composition and research classes to the MA program. That should NOT be a graduate-level class. Advanced research methodology, perhaps, and there are short courses for reading paleography (French, Spanish other handwritings before 1800), but basic composition?!?

        Like

        1. The local community college *requires* incoming students to take a Pre-English course (up to two classes) before you can take English 101. Oh, those Pre classes are not counted towards your credits.

          How scary is that?

          Like

          1. The amount of remedial (or “preparatory” or zero-level) courses is definitely on the rise. During my first go around with college as a callow youth mumble-mumble years ago, there were no such courses at the university. I screwed up all on my own that go around, and had to take some community college courses to be allowed back in. There were virtually no remedial courses at the community college. I moved to another city when my parents moved (thank heavens they didn’t toss me out on the street), and signed up for courses at a branch campus of a local university. There were a couple of remedial courses, but there were few sections being offered, because virtually everybody tested into the normal university courses for English and Math. Alas, I didn’t finish me degree at the time because I’d acquired a Real Job and had to spend time travelling, sometimes for weeks at a time. Then when the bubble burst travel for work became a rarity and I went back to the university to get my degree. There were many more remedial courses (i.e. more levels of remedial Math and English) being offered, with more sections per course. I only received my degree two years ago, and while I was attending courses on campus I’d sometimes read the campus newspaper. Their were articles about the need for even more remedial courses in more subjects and/or at more levels.

            Like

            1. My son, who graduated from TAMU a little more than a year ago, is starting his Masters online through one of the universities that work closely with the military. I say online because that is how he is planning to take it but there are classes at bases near the one where he is stationed that he can go to in case he gets stuck. But, before the semester starts next month, he had to go through a non-credit course all post grad students are required to take so they know how to do their research papers, what style manual to use — and how to use it — etc. All stuff he knew because of TAMU but that others taking it at the same time had trouble with. That sort of lacking in our graduate students does not fill me with confidence when it comes to our education system.

              Like

            2. The social sciences dean at the community college my son’s attending told me just last week (or the one before) that they’d just gotten the stats on remedial classes and 68% of the students were having to take them

              Like

          2. My four-year private college *required* English 101 for all but twenty students a year (in the Honors Program.) The fact that I’d gotten a 5 on the AP English Composition would have had no effect. I made very sure that I got into the Honors Program. It would have been an easy class, but I’m sure I would have committed homicide upon another student at some point.

            (mid-90s, for those keeping score.)

            Like

      2. My high school had “Term Paper” as the required sophomore English class. I ended up taking it a year early, and I think it was probably the single most useful class I had in high school. In fact, I’m going to make sure that my kids get a version of it from me, because I’m also sure they won’t get it from school. (“A” version, because we used 3×5″ note cards, and by the time I got to college I’d already figured out it was easier to create such “notecards” with footnotes in a word-processing program, to drag & drop as needed.)

        Oh, and I’ll also make sure they get a taste of physical research. Internet-only will only work with sources such as the Library of Congress, and not Wikipedia-level stuff (or below *shudder*).

        Like

    2. We learned English Grammar from a book called, IIRC, Warriner’s. It had sections on diagramming sentences, and we skipped all those parts, which I thought was a shame because it looked like a useful tool. Hell, if everyone understood diagramming sentences, we could diagram the Second Amendment and it would end all the liberal arguments against it.

      Like

      1. Diagramming sentences is VERY useful. Boring, but useful. I learned from the Last of the Grammarians in junior high. We even had to get the little footy-symbols at the base of the subordinate clauses correct. (I don’t remember them now, mind, but I knew them mumblemumble years ago!) Our final exam was diagramming a sentence that would make Bulwer-Lytton blench. It was half a page, single-spaced. I still have nightmares. BUT! Subject-verb agreement is no problem for me.

        Like

        1. Subject-Verb agreement… Don’t get me started on Pronouns. My Dad used to yell at Burger King commercials in the 70’s for saying “Everyone’s having it their own way.”

          Like

            1. I maintain that if “To each his own” gets someone’s feminist panties in a twist, the correct replacement is not “To each their own.” but “To all their own.” But while correct, it’s not the way the Grammar Feminazis have declared it shall be.

              Like

      2. I hated, hated, HATED diagramming sentences. Then, years later, I wanted to learn it again in order to try out an Artificial Intelligence program I wanted to create, and couldn’t find anything by searching online. I don’t know why – I guess nothing listing such books had any searchable information that would indicate they contained such a thing.

        Like

        2. Weird Al diagrams a sentence or two in his “Word Crimes” video, so the knowledge is not completely lost. I can imagine people seeing that video and going “cool! What is that?!”

          Like

          2. Yeah,I didn’t meant to imply that it was a lost art, just that when I wanted to find it (over 10 years ago), there didn’t seem to be any references I could locate on the subject (or possibly I couldn’t find any that weren’t college textbooks and cost $100 or so).

            You know the problem – can’t find something when you want it, trip over it when you don’t need it.

            Like

        3. A quick search for “how to diagram sentences” turned up quite a few links for me.

          I hated trying to learn diagramming in Jr. HS. I don’t know if the teacher never mentioned it, or did and I just forgot, but I never did know *why* we were supposed to be learning such an arcane, and apparently useless, technique.

          It didn’t help that, while I recognized the *words* the teacher used (eg: predicate), I didn’t know what they *meant*. Presumably I’d been taught such things at some point, else I wouldn’t have recognized the terms as something I should know, but if so, I’d long since forgotten them:-(.

          Like

  27. Since I’ve made it a habit to check in on what the SJWs are babbling about on Twitter, I’ve been struck by the depressing sameness of them all. I thought: It’s like there’s a factory somewhere that churns out an endless assembly line of ideologically identical drones. Then I realized there was one: the education system.

    Like

    1. As I just posted elsewhere, I think liberals secretly believe in a grand Liberal Conspiracy that is very well hidden, and that if they play their part and promote the cause well enough, the secret masters will reward them somehow.

      But I’ve been really big lately on the “Headless Conspiracy Theory” idea.

      Like

      2. You know, that makes sense if you take how often it overlaps with the christian heresy of Socialism… It’s not so much that they think there’s a conspiracy, as that TPTB will karma them rewards for doing The Good Thing.

        Like

        1. And the lack of actual dark and secret forces behind the conspiracy is what gives rise to all the ridiculous contradictions those who believe themselves to be minions end up coming up with.

          Like

      1. Ya know, if you go dressed as Linda Hamilton’s Wonder Woman, or slave Princess Leia, or Mystique, or some of the anime characters, people (especially young male people) are gonna look. And if someone gropes you, slap ’em, call Con security, and file an assault charge. I’m not a fan of booth babes (unless we get booth hunks, too), but I can live with ’em, or ignore ’em. Otherwise, write a letter to the folks selling the stuff and let them know you are not going to buy from them and why. *SIGH* Once again, here we go: I am “victimized,” hear me roar.

        Like

        1. Oh, don’t forget those who complain about being photographed as they are walking around in their cosplay outfits. I bet they don’t get upset if men cosplayers are photographed without getting permission. But don’t you dare photograph a female cosplayer without getting permission — or perhaps even a written release. It really is time to pull up the big girl panties and start standing up instead of playing the victim. The only thing I’ll disagree with you on is that they don’t roar. They whine and whimper and wheedle.

          Like

          1. People who dress up in a costume, and then complain about people looking at them, need some sense slapped into them… or put in a nice padded room somewhere where they can’t hurt themselves.

            Like

              1. Oh, they want to be ogled, but only on their own terms. It’s a sort of using sex to control people without actually letting them touch you power trip, so they want that aspect, they just don’t want that control to slip their grasp.

                OTOH, they do have a point about the creepoids who try to sneak awkward candid poses and upskirts.

                Like

                1. IIRC there was a great response to that from either Comics-Con or DragonCon. Two gals were cosplaying the characters Stockings and Panties, and several men tried for up-skirt shots as they posed.1) The gals had bike shorts on and 2) people posted pictures of the creeps in action on cosplay and Con blog posts, leading to people from the Con having a word with them.

                  Like

        2. I used to do Themed Dress Up (somewhat EGL-style dress or wa-loli style – they’re clothes styles from the Japanese Elegant Gothic Lolita fashion type, not the same as the thing about the nymphomaniac) when going to a con; people take pictures and some will ask first so you can pose for/with them. Some people will ask where your cosplay is from; or ask where you got the clothes or who made them for you. The most I’ve gotten are compliments and questions about the outfit.

          The SJWs would utterly FREAK OUT at the scene that is Comiket in Japan. For the most part there’s no groping, from what I hear, and the majority of the goers will be very behaved and orderly; but people WILL take close up crotchshots of some of the girls – and some of the girls cosplaying WILL pose to make it easier to do so. Have their heads explode on that!

          Like

      1. Numerous “Thought Leaders” in the SF/F Communistity have pledged to boycott any con that fails to write and enforce an anti-harassment policy.

        I have no idea why they think such a policy would be more effective than most cons’ personal hygiene policies. At least with personal hygiene there is no space for “He said/She said” arguments.

        If the only way they can sell their books is by suppression of less idealistic (four-syllable word meaning “full of it”), less ideologically pure authors, mayhap they ought reconsider the concept of a free* marketplace.

        *Yes, I know: under the new regime the marketplace will be open to all authors — at least, to all socially responsible authors. Dangerous, unhealthy ideas must be kept out as a matter of good hygiene; you don’t want fecal matter in the drinking water, do you? What kind of monster are you, that wants fecal matter in drinking water???!!!!

        Like

        1. “How could you possibly be opposed to our “More restrictive than Antioch College” behavior rules, you’re not Pro Rape, are you?”

          Like

          1. “There’s nothing wrong with a gender-based Con, gender being what you feel your gender identity to be at the time you purchase your day-pass, of course. Sexism/racism/homophobia/lookism/weightism are strictly prohibited. Remember to have all three portions of the consent form filled out and signed in blue or green ink, and turn the top portion in to ConSecurity, the central portion goes to the lookee, and you must keep the lower portion for your records. Thank you, and have the sort of day you desire to have. “

            Like

        2. Now, now, we don’t want to concede that they are idealists, at least not in any sense that precludes our being idealists. Even if the ideal we seek is to entertain people.

          Like

Comments are closed.