Sometimes I feel like Stranger in a Strange Land. I’m of this place, but not of this place. And by this place I don’t so much mean the US as the current mode of Western civilization, say, the last 300 years or so.
You see, I can’t exactly claim to have been born and raised in a village that time forgot. I mean, the village I grew up in was ten miles from the second largest city in Portugal, and could be visited in 20 minutes by train.
On the other hand, other than the five or six kids per year who went to high school and the few men who had jobs outside the village (I’m sure there were more, but I keep thinking and the only ones I can say for sure were my dad and his best friend from childhood) Porto might as well have been on the far side of the moon. My grandmother had visited it three times in her life by the time I was ten. And while people in the village prided themselves on being ever so much more sophisticated and forward thinking than the rubes from “behind the mountains” most people in the village lived in conditions virtually indistinguishable from their grandparents’ lives. They might (or might not. It was a mixed bag until I was about six) have electrical light. They almost for sure had a radio and were addicted to soap operas (I used to walk down the main street at the time of the soap opera (it’s when the bus from middle school arrived) and hear the entire thing, just walking from door to door. They probably didn’t have a tv. Or a refrigerator. Indoor plumbing was hit or miss and the arrangement we had, with the full bathroom just outside the backdoor was about average, both because thick stone walls were hard to pierce for new plumbing and because people raised on outhouses found the bathroom a “dirty” thing to have indoors.
The rhythms of life — how food was acquired; how a living was earned; how one behaved; what mattered – all of it could have been grasped by someone from the seventeenth century, with perhaps a bit of excitement at the “innovations,” light, radio and the two private cars in the village. Heck, a Roman from the Christian period (before that it was just too weird) would have taken only a few days to fully integrate.
What I’m trying to say is that modernity, as we know it, and as most people here (even those older than I) grew up with, was hit or miss in the village, as we lived in it.
There might have been some comforts and conveniences, but no one took them very seriously. The innovations existed, but they hadn’t changed life yet.
So while there were factories around, the industrial age was something we rolled our eyes at.
Factories, schools, all gave a great leeway on when you show up and if you do.
Take my first day in official school: I had my morning coffee (it was believed to help with asthma. It would have been coffee with milk but mom had got it in her pointy head that I was allergic to milk (I’m not. I have eczema which responds mostly to carbs and secondarily to stress. Might have responded only to stress back then. My son’s does) so I had my coffee black and sweetened. With day old bread dropped in.) at my leisure. And then at nine or ten mom looked up from her work and said “oh, yeah. I was forgetting. It’s the first the day of school.”
So I grabbed my bag, and the little blackboard we used to practice letters in the village, and off I went. About half the pupils were in class, as my mom delivered me in. The others straggled in through the day.
All this got more formal come fourth grade, because there was a national exam, but the first three years were… charmingly informal.
Modernity had all sorts of rules and regulations about how we had to be in school and people in the village shrugged and did whatever.
We had a substitute teacher for a year because our regular teacher had some operation to her bac. The substitute teacher was in her twenties and got a thing going with the male teacher of the boys next door. We had three recesses a day, about an hour each. We liked it. (And they got married, because you couldn’t behave like that in the village and not get married, or all the matrons would have a talk with you.)
The point is, lesson plans, and everything was fairly flexible. Until we had to prepare for the national exam, no one was straining to make sure we knew what everyone knew.
Two thirds of the class was just going to work in the textile factories at 10, anyway. The rest of us had learned at home.
By the time I entered school I knew how to read, write and knew the rudiments of history. I also knew the multiplication tables, though you’d never know it from my performance because the minute I got up in front of the teach to say them, my mind would go to static.
In the same circumstances, my brother got advanced from first to fourth grade. The only reason I didn’t is that my mom thought at seven I was too young to take a bus to the next larger village for fifth and sixth grade.
But let’s just say I completely understand Mark Twain’s thing about not letting school interfere with one’s education.
My friends and I who went on to high school in the city did well enough and adapted to the model well enough, but it never “took”. Our original exposure to school was more of a rural, relaxed atmosphere than in a factory-school of the industrial-educational model, so internally I at least have never internalized the non scholastic lessons of school.
My early schooling was more as Shakespeare’s might have been where the parent pays the petit school teacher to teach you your letters (and she returned me to my grandmother saying by law she didn’t have to put up with me. This is what I call “getting kicked out of kindergarten” – mostly, I was playing barracks lawyer on behalf of low-status girls the teacher continuously picked on.) and then at some point you pursue your schooling, but age divisions aren’t strictly observed and the classes are small enough that the teacher doesn’t care what you’re doing provided you know the material and are quiet. Most of my time in elementary was spent either reading or inventing well… I didn’t know they existed, but that’s what they were rules for LARPS to play at recess.
My later schooling was more formal, but the Portuguese believe in “genius” as a magical thing and since they’d decided I was one (I wasn’t. I just had the advantage of an intellectually curious family and a lot of books) I got away with clean forgetting my homework, obsessing on one subject to the detriment of others, and spending an untold amount of time writing novels at my desk.
This might be why I’m so bad at holding down real jobs, with real routines, but why I do okay working for myself (the last two years haven’t been stellar, but then I have been ill way too much.)
And this might mean (might) if the future goes as we expect, that a looser, more ad hoc form of schooling MIGHT be better for most people.
I know that schools purport to teach you the skills to survive in the modern world. They actually teach you the schools to survive in the nineteenth century. But here what they don’t teach you that gets passed on and that I’ve run into trouble with (as have other people) in self directed professions:
- You have more in common with people your age than with anyone else. People born within nine months of you have everything in common with you. This has got us to think in generations, which is stupid. To the extent boomers are as portrayed and to the extent that some of them discriminate against past and future generations, it’s the idea that there’s some magical bond between people within x years or each other. (This is mostly seen among leftists who view people as widgets, anyway.) Do I need to tell you there isn’t? The internet should prove that. And yet it was a shock to me to find that most of my friends are either ten years older or ten to twenty years younger than I. I find myself thinking “What is wrong with me?” Of course, nothing is. I’m just not complying with the educational-industrial complex version of it.
- Performing to set task. I’m actually very bad at it. I think it’s a version of standing up to recite for the teacher. When I’m under contract my mind freezes. Back when there was no indie I could force myself to sort of perform, but it wasn’t my best work. Now… let’s say when these two books are delivered, I hope Toni will let me go on a loose rein. I will still deliver books to Baen, probably twice a year. But if she doesn’t want them, I can bring them out myself, and that allows me to work “loose”
However, even I have bits of this thought. I most often run into it with new authors. “I’ve written this book just as the publisher said he/she wanted it. Why didn’t they buy?” Or among college graduates “I’ve done everything I was supposed to. Why don’t I have a job?”
Of course real life doesn’t work like that. Real life is not “I performed well enough to pass.” It’s competition and, in the artistic fields, it’s something else. It’s “I performed well enough to have a divine spark.”
I feel most of the problem with the women in their forties who are stomping, throwing fits and falling on the floor pumping arms and legs about male privilege in SF/F is that they have this mentality. They have done everything they were told. How can the book business be falling apart around them instead of making them millionaires. How dare it? It must be the evil patriarchy.
Thank G-d for the village school and the village itself, where I learned real life is not a point-check system and that whether you succeed or fail is not dependent on how hard you tried and how well you performed, even, but on a multitude of factors, including personality and yes, luck. And it’s not “unfair” – it is what it is.
- Teacher knows best.
Everything, EVERYTHING from “we belong to the government” to “violence never solved anything” is predicated on this idea that there is someone all-knowing and benevolent watching our every move and rewarding the just and punishing the unjust.
The president’s infantile “Putin is going to regret invading the Ukraine, because he’s against the times’ or whatever, relies on this ridiculous conceit that someone is watching over you and keeping count of how well you follow the curriculum.
Well, I believe there is someone watching over us, too, but I believe the accounting will come after we die. I don’t think He puts His fat finger on the scales, except at very rare, miraculous times.
But that’s not what they refer to. They talk about it as the government or “society” or, for the more new agey “the Universe” but what they REALLY mean is “Teacher knows best and you’re gonna get it.” And this is part of what they learned to school, even if it wasn’t explicitly on the curriculum.
- The cool kids know best; I wanna be a cool kid.
Part of this is of course being a monkey. Okay, an ape. We are creatures built on the frame of apes. There is any number of things we get from that, including group mechanics. The “cool kids” being band leaders.
But the idea that these “band leaders” should have no more skill than working the crowd is part of being in a school with same age group. No one is that far ahead of the others, so what excites admiration is superficial prettiness and ways of behaving that are … petty and stupid. Self-aggrandizing cr*p.
This then bleeds into society in celebrity worship and in people trying to get attention by being know-it-all loudmouths.
All of which is hurting us, from our politics to our business.
How else is an advanced society supposed to school its young? I don’t know. Being a libertarian I am against public education as such, simply because while if we didn’t have it lots of people would go uneducated, I am at a loss to know what difference that would make from now, where after years in prison-schools, many people emerge functionally illiterate.
I’d suggest leaving it to the parents or perhaps as small a community as possible. In large cities, perhaps a “neighborhood.” They’ll know what’s going on the best. Let people choose, and those who can’t choose, help, arrange for a network to help them.
“But the children won’t all learn the same things/have the same assumptions.”
Good. In the unbelievably complex world that’s emerging, we need true diversity. Diversity of ability and mind. Not millions of robots indoctrinated into things that are no longer true, if they ever were.
According To Hoyt 
In the US I blame the failure of modern education on the mass produced, industrialized model where students marched into class, sat quietly in rows where they were taught important things. The measure of your education was being able to remember the most nearly correct answer out of four possible suggestions.
Multiple guess examinations were for the convenience of the instructor who had forty or more tests to score. Tests that were purchased in bulk from a vendor, and came with an easy to use plastic matrix of ‘correct’ answers.
Public education went downhill from there.
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The first time I encountered multiple choice was when I came to the states.
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Wrong. The SAT was created at the instigation of James Conant, President of Harvard, in order to give smart public school kids a better chance against the swarms of well educated but not necessarily super bright private schoolers who dominated the Ivy League. Public education’s rapid decline began in the late 1960s, long after the onset of standardized tests.
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Public education in the US was intended to produce docile factory workers who don’t question anything. There are innumerable statements by John Dewey and many others to that effect. The corollary was that the Elites would send their kids to excellent private schools and fine Universities. All of this has come true…..except that there are no longer many factory jobs for the public educated proles.
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that is not a bug, that’s a feature to them.
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I’m going to take this a step further and say that the goal of Dewey and the rest of the Progressives creating their perfect society back around the turn of the last century was to create a proletariat that would work at the behest of experts who would professionally run everything for the good of all. That problem is that the complexities of everyday life overwhelm any kind of planning and the experts inevitably resort to expediency and coercion. Add to that that the experts create a closed shop and that shop works very hard to instill a sociopathic attitude and you get what we see today I government and corporate life.
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I believe it’s been shown that a command economy can not work because all communications channels have be co-opted to carry commands. This means they can not function as information carriers, and you need the information to plan.
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This also tends to result in communication being mostly one direction — commands — and what feedback the commanders get is filtered to suit the perceived favour of the commander. Nobody likes being bearer of bad tidings.
[Insert link to Hitler hearing ______ video]
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Well, yeah, that’s what co-opting it does.
The thing with economies is that it doesn’t matter what your underlings SAY. What you need is their revealed preferences.
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It doesn’t help that the “Planners” tend to be tricking deaf regarding information that doesn’t agree with their preconceptions. Not just Progressives (though they tend to be very bad about this), but all Planners.
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There was also a push to raise the age at which a child might start working and to make school mandatory that was supported by the organized labor …
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Anti-union nonsense, as this excerpt from a British documentary exposes:
Those short on time might jump to the 1:55 mark, but the entirety is worth viewing.
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Thank you. I needed a laugh.
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The push was entirely ineffectual until child labor had stopped of its own accord, and legally, those areas where child labor was still used were exempted.
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Yep. Portugal was one of the earliest countries to ban child labor. People in my generation, fifty plus years later still went into the mills at ten. They just needed a certificate saying they were incapable of learning.
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Evaluating the program by its effectiveness is raaaaacist.
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This is going to sound strange, but I’m not so sure that child labor was all that bad a thing for the kids for the most part. I know some jobs were bad, but I think that those pictures we all saw were more than a little distorted by people who had every interest in distorting the picture. If things were so bad, how come we never have books written by the kids themselves after they grew up about how horrible it all was. I’ve never seen anything like that and I’m always looking for old and unusual stories.
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Doesn’t sound strange at all, in fact I think that is one of the biggest problems we currently have in this country; that people don’t learn to work as kids.
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Nod. And in the past, mid-to-late teens were the time that “kids” were expected to act like adults and were given adult responsibilities.
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“You don’t need study skills.”
Probably does the most damage to the bright kids.
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Parents of bright kids are also told that their children do not need to be challenged because they’ll get it anyway.
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There are a LOT of studies coming out lately that talk about the difference between telling a kid “You did well; you must be smart” and “You did well; you must have worked hard.” Kids who are told the latter tend to attempt harder things and strive more whereas kids who are told the former tend to stay in a safe zone and feel as though they’re not smart when they encounter something with which they are unfamiliar.
I wish they’d known this when I was young, because it took me a long time to build reasonable study skills when I finally encountered things that I couldn’t just “get” because I was smart.
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Throughout my educated life, I was told that I was smart, but I had a hard time believing them. I think this was, in part, because I saw other students around me I considered smarter, and I think it was also in part because I tended to do well on tests because I did the homework, and also because I had a tendency to try to learn things on my own.
To this day, I’m not sure if I have good study skills; I find that I have the tendency to read things, and to try to read two or three different sources (ideally before I took the class, if I could).
Having said that, I was nonetheless able to make it through graduate school, to the point where I got a PhD in math. Even so, I have had a difficult time figuring out what I might want to do to make a living, since I want to work on mathematical things, but I’ve been working as a software developer…and I’ve had a difficult time thinking of things I can do on my own…
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(I meant to add that perhaps my inability to think of interesting things to do on my own may be my own struggle caused by being told I’m smart all that time…)
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You could always take over an “orphaned” OpenSource project. My husband was complaining recently that “libgeotiff” is about to be kicked from the RedHat distribution because no one was stepping up to maintain it. Never mind that other packages in and out of the distribution need it.
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I didn’t think I was smart.
I didn’t even think that the other kids were dumb.
I thought they were unspeakably lazy and therefore blamable for my having to listen to every lesson twenty times.
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Yes. I simply didn’t understand as a kid that some people learned more easily than others.
Because of how I was born (grossly premature) my family always told me I was mentally retarded (the doctor had told them I’d be and he was an EXPERT) so, of course, if I could do it, the others were LAZY.
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When I was in fourth grade, my parents had the following conversation with my teacher:
TEACHER: You know, your son listens to the first five minutes of the lesson, then he sits in the back of the class reading a novel. I call on him and ask him a question so he’ll be embarrassed and start paying attention, but he doesn’t even look up! He just spits out the right answer and keeps right on reading!
MOM AND DAD: Yeah, we know…
By fifth grade I was testing at college reading levels, and my ability to pay attention to a slow-moving lesson was permanently ruined. Sadly, it took me years to get decent grades after that, because my ability to make myself care about doing homework and turning it in on time was ALSO impaired. I’d get perfect scores on tests, but get C’s because I just didn’t do the whole homework thing. That’s my ADD for you. :D
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Pretty similar except in high school most classes, homework was 30-45% of your grade. So yeah, flunked classes.
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You need software project ideas? Shoot me an email, I’ve got a list I’m never going to get through… :D (Actually, looking at the list,, most of them are things no one but me is likely to find interesting or useful, but you’re welcome to them just the same. Got a couple of security ideas that may be broadly useful)
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What are these “Study Skills” you people keep blathering on about?
Bachelor of Fine Arts, 1995.
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Really? The habit of laying out your points in an ordered manner, pinning them down with specific references, appropriately labeled, coming to a conclusion at about the end of the required length of paper, and then shutting up.
My high school basically spent four years on this. The classes were called something else, and varied as to subject, but that was the emphasis of the instruction. Every humanities class would require at least one paper a week, written to assigned length. If the assigned length was 2 pages, and you wrote 5, you got a failing grade.
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I fail to understand what essay writing skills have to do with study skills.
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I wondered the same.
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Oh hell, papers I can do. At the uni I attended I preferred the “writing intensive” courses.
It was that so-called “Homework” and “Notes” and stuff I had issues with.
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I don’t think that’s study skills, it sounds like “building a rational case” or “properly formatting a paper.”
Both of which are neglected, sure, but wouldn’t study skills involve actually getting information you don’t have, rather than organizing the stuff you do?
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Yes. And also that they don’t really need teaching or emotional support. They’ll “do well in life anyway.”
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I was mostly left on my own in school because I did well enough. I’m not sure if anyone ever really noticed that I did well enough without working at it, at least nobody ever told me that I was smart. I spend most of my school years with this vague feeling that I was cheating in some way, and mostly tried to hide the fact that I worked hardly at all for my grades. (I started to wonder about that only when I was an adult and finally took an IQ test when I was almost forty. Yep, high).
So I got good average grades, with some subjects good ones, but ended up with lousy work habits and hardly any study skills. And when I then ran into difficulties because I started to lose my ability to concentrate due to seasonal affective disorder in my early 20’s things went south a lot faster than they probably would have if I _had_ learned good work habits and good study skills early on. With them I most likely could have gotten my degree. Without them, well, I tried to learn them at that point, but it takes time, and I ran out of that. The SAD didn’t hit me all at once, I had started to have some slight problems with being tired during the winters already in my late teens, and it got gradually worse until when I was about 30 I was pretty much a zombie for three to four months, but there probably would have been enough time to get that damn masters if had known how to really work towards it back when I was just tired but still functional in winter. Except that I didn’t know how because I had learned to expect that I could get a subject just by skimming the books and lessons, which would not have worked with the university level stuff past the beginning courses anyway, and when you added the mental fog which kept getting worse each winter… not a chance.
If I had gotten that degree it might have changed a lot. At least I would have had more options than I did have as a university dropout with no useful work experience. Like maybe finding work further south when I started to suspect I was suffering from SAD.
And I think there is a fairly good claim that at the base of all this was the fact that I was just left on my own in school because I was such an easy kid. You leave the smart kids to figure everything out themselves and you will most likely get a lot more failures and averages than you’ll get high performers. They need to be challenged and pushed, not ignored.
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” You leave the smart kids to figure everything out themselves and you will most likely get a lot more failures and averages than you’ll get high performers.”
In theory this isn’t so, and in fact if the teacher is leaving the smart kids to figure it out, and doing their job with the slow kids, this isn’t so. What you get is a lot more averages, because the smart kids can make average without effort, while the teacher isn’t wasting effort on them that she could be using to push and prod the slow kids up to average. If your goal is mediocrity, this isn’t a bad system.
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The failures will be ones like me, who aim high but hit the wall once they get where they would need to actually work for it, and for one reason or another give up at that point. Or the ones who get so bored in the early years of school that they give up then. And the ones who opt out because they rebel, figuring out that the system sucks but not being able to figure exactly why it sucks, and how to fight that effectively (becoming a drop-out usually just makes one a drop-out, not a successful rebel, and at times they can also become patsies to the people who are responsible for the suckitude since they usually have not figured things out particularly well – how could they when they haven’t acquired the tools for that – and so are easy marks for the snake oil salesmen).
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From what I understand, you are not a failure from the schools academic standpoint. You graduated, and hold down a job rather than subsisting on government handouts, that actually probably makes you a shade over average.
You are a success story as far as your teachers are concerned, you went on to the next grade from their class with a decent grade, graduated with the ability to make a living in the world (not strictly a necessity to be a success as far as they are concerned, but a nice bonus) and can read, write and do sums at an acceptable level. What do they care if you could have did so much better? After all you did good enough to get by.
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True.
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Who cares what the school’s position is? It’s not like they care about our position.
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Oh, but they do care. According to them your position is to vote for every school bond and school related tax increase without question. Then pay up without complaint.
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But yes, all that is quite a good method for keeping the serfs as the average masses who stay in their place.
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Except that then the smart kids get bored and goof off or act out. They are more likely to drop out than average students.
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YES! I thought the genius in the family was going to drop out in sixth grade. He was SO bored.
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Interestingly enough I heard a conversation between my mother and a friend a few months back, where my mother stated that they (her and my father) weren’t concerned about me going to college, they considered themselves lucky that I graduated high school rather than dropping out. This flabbergasted me, because I never really considered dropping out, and graduated with honors. Sure I didn’t like school, and didn’t show up to class all that often, but that was because it was boring and I didn’t need to show up very often to learn everything they were teaching.
It is sometimes interesting to learn what your parents thought about you fifteen or twenty years later, often enough it is totally at odds with what you believed they thought/knew.
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Sometimes it’s pretty horrific… my mom had been beating herself up about not pushing me into going to more class parties and be “more social.”
With people that still can’t hold up part of a conversation, over a decade later. (And I don’t mean “a conversation on interesting things.” I mean basic small talk.)
It waaaaay too much repetition to get through to her that these parties meant going to a Poor Little Rich Kid’s house to watch porn, get drunk and smoke weed, then have sex in that condition, for her to let go of that idea. (She’d also forgotten that she had pressured me into going to some of them, to prepare for setting up the prom. Heaven only knows what the heck she thought was going on– apparently she assumed that we’d tell her if there was anything “bad enough”?)
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Neither of my parents were ever into the party scene, but both had plenty of brothers that were. So I had to claim I was going somewhere else/doing something else, in order to go to any of those parties.
Now that you mention it, I can never recall seeing porn (other than something like a poster, or page out of a magazine pinned on the wall, but no movies or even people looking through magazines) at a party. And it is more likely the party would be in the local rockpit than at a house, but otherwise your description is nearly perfect.
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In a class of 40-something, we had six different kids whose parent(s) would leave for a week+ at a time, and several more where the custodial parent simply didn’t give a crud as long as the police weren’t called. They did their job by buying stuff, including a big house in a High Quality School. (I use “poor little rich kid” mockingly, but I really do feel sorry for them– a couple weren’t really bad kids, but holy cow did they need PARENTS.) They all had everything on cable as a matter of course, and if they even tried to lock the “Adult” channels it didn’t work, and the TVs were big enough to make it really hard to avoid.
It allows for the posturing to reach really painful levels of dumb.
Example: One of the girls whose step father was a bit more restrictive– she wasn’t allowed to host parties, as best I can tell, but could go to them at will– demonstrated this by organizing a contest, in a class where the teacher was called out for a medical emergency, to write porn scrips. And yes, even at 14 I was more embarrassed for them than by it, because that was just pathetic. Plus, farm kid. Tab A to Slot B was something I understood before I could write A and B. That said, I didn’t notice if anybody else just ignored it, because I was re-reading “Sojourner” and only know anybody went along because they started reading off parts out loud about the time the bell rang.
Not bad people, mostly, but… man, do I wish they’d had parents. A lot of them were or are very smart, and at least one has totally turned her life around since graduating. Most of the rest of the popular ones that I’ve heard anything of are either dead or at least one divorce in to following their parents.
Yeah, really don’t wish that I could “be like the cool kids.”
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Yeah, looking back now we did some really stupid things (like tapping a keg in the bed of the truck and running the tap through the sliding rear window so we could drink out of it while driving), and the crowd I hung out with was a little wild, but really quite tame compared to some of the examples you hear about now.
Like I said, I don’t recall porn ever being present at even the house parties I attended, and while lots of alcohol was consumed and drugs were present, anything but pot was kept well hidden and even pot was usually smoked out on the back porch or in somebodies truck, rather than in the full group of everybody. Of course there were people getting drunk and having sex, but it was always done in a room or vehicle, never as a spectacle for the rest of the party. In fact I can only remember a couple of instances of even very drunk girls flashing people.
It wasn’t until I was older and more likely to be the designated driver than an actual partier that I was around such things as after a girl demonstrating for everybody that she could lick her own nipple, her friend having to one-up her by insisting on demonstrating that she could stick a bayonet up her…. well you get the picture.
Looking back there are a few good memories from that age, but I’m glad I outgrew it quickly, and I certainly don’t want to relive it. The sad thing is that while a fair number of those I was in high school with outgrew their high school partying and became useful human beings, I am about the only one* out of the harder core bunch I was around shortly after high school that cleaned their act up and made something of themselves.
*I have only contacted one friend from my school and after days in the last decade, so I really don’t know what became of a lot of those people, but I know a few are dead and one or two are in prison.
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her friend having to one-up her by insisting on demonstrating that she could stick a bayonet up her…. well you get the picture.
*look of total and utter horror*
*pauses*
….nevermind.
*shudders*
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Thank you.
I know my kids are smart– not genius or anything, but definitely above what is used as average, or likely will be just because we can look and see three to five generations of above average but not genius IQ– and I’m obvious enough about worrying about homeschooling them that my husband sends at least an article a month about the good outcomes.
That said, this sounded really familiar, and it’s a great counter to my fear that I’m pushing the kids too hard. Princess has taken to trying to insist that something is “too hard!”– but ten minutes later she’ll get it done in a flash, or she did it fine the day before. I worry about everything, but in this case I worry that I’m going to make her hate schooling because I push her too hard.
Being able to focus on it teaching her how to go above and beyond is a really good method for figuring out what is hard enough/too hard.
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Slightly OT, but this pushed my buttons … when my youngest was in 2nd grade, I found that she did not really understand her math and was skating by with high marks because of (1) high natural intelligence, (2) superb natural test-taking skills and (3) teacher’s pet syndrome. The topic in question was place value, which is absolutely fundamental to learning any further math and I was worried about it. I approached the teacher about it privately and was brushed off because “she’s so bright; she will be fine.” We began home schooling the next school year. Guess what the first math topic was? :) Maybe she would have been fine, but it wasn’t a gamble I was willing to make. Just because they’re bright doesn’t mean they can read minds or perform telepathic osmosis.
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And there we get proof positive that the goal is mediocrity, not excellence.
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The goal is tenured firing-proof jobs. All else is either individual inititaive on the part of not-yet-broken-to-harness teachers, or camouflage.
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For people who preach Diversity, they sure do want everyone doing the same thing at all times
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+1, because I can’t find that like button.
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why thank you Milady
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OH!
“When I think back on all the crap I learned in High School”
Kodachrome! Paul Simon.
As I gaze in awe at the beauty of a good photograph, especially a beautiful woman, I find myself asking, “How do you get them to pose like that?”
Then I realize, it’s all about the money…and the fame….and the marketing.
Fast cars, beautiful females, but it’s all an illusion; slick marketing and packaging. Talking Heads “Once in a lifetime”.
..and you may find yourself asking ‘where did I go wrong?’
I was naive.
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Didn’t it make you feel your gray hair when they quit making Kodachrome?
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No, just sad.
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Most people are unaware of the tricks photographers play. Lighting filters, lens length, camera angles and in some cases just some ineffable quality* serves to make some people look spectacular when on film. I have heard people comment about Paul Newman’s blue eyes seeming washed-out when meeting him in person. ALL film is an illusion.
*I recall a TCM filler of Robert Mitchum about Marilyn Monroe, marveling at how her skin, on film, looked real. Those not in the business tend to not realize that the camera just likes some people more than others.
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I once saw someone post an obvious double exposure to a LJ group about photos: same scene, one with a woman, one without.
The kids were all going wow-wow-wow — HOW do you do that in Photoshop?
(Though now I know: you take two pictures, put the one on top and set to 50% opacity.)
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There are some in-camera tricks for that as well; long exposure with a flash and a person walking through the shot. I’ve done “ghost” photos like that (using a fill flash mode on a point-and-click, in fact.)
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If the person stands still, double-exposure works just fine.
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This is the entire film. Watch the opening. Not only the customer, but all the musicians in the orchestra pit are Mr. Keaton. This effect was achieved in the camera — using pieces of tape on the lens and running the same strip of film through seven times.
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Or back when you used film instead of everybody having a digital camera, you just took the shot, would it back a frame and double exposed it without the woman standing in the picture.
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wound, not would.
Is wound a proper tense of wind? It sounds right, but it just doesn’t look right when it is written.
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It’s correct. But written it’s like trying to determine which tense is meant by “read”.
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I worked for Playboy in their Chicago office for a couple years, and was routinely in and out of the photo studio (never during a shoot though).
It’s *amazing* the amount of manipulation that goes on.
And in the photographs too.
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What always amazed me was the number of senators who can’t tell the difference between a Playboy Bunny and a Playboy Playmate. (But I suppose screwing that up enhances their anti-porn cred.)
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“But the children won’t all learn the same things/have the same assumptions.”
Good. In the unbelievably complex world that’s emerging, we need true diversity. Diversity of ability and mind. Not millions of robots indoctrinated into things that are no longer true, if they ever were.
Perhaps, stemming from such an educational environment, children could become to understand the complexity of the modern environment. Perhaps they could complete the formal education without the assumption that they’ve been taught the important stuff so clearly they understand what’s going on around them.
I don’t propose to dispense with the arrogance of youth (there’s a lot of value in there), just to give it an environment wherein it’s assumptions might be challenged.
Besides, if I were to look at all the ways the current system fragged my canted brain…
I’d pick any number of experiments over the current mess.
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I highly recommend any alternative to public education….and also encouraging your kids to learn on the internet.There are a lot of great college and even graduate level courses, and many excellent Youtube videos at any level you want to look for. Some great stuff on quantum physics, for example.
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I highly recommend any alternative to public education
when I lived there, New Orleans was the very model of this. anyone with a semi decent job did their best to send their kids to a private school. The only public school they ever aimed for was Ben Franklin, which, last I looked, had moved out to the University of New Orleans campus. Granted, some of those Private schools are just as bad as everyone else’s public schools, but they were still far better than the N.O. public system. For an example, The textbook at a then considered high quality all girls highschool for Senior’s Advanced Literature was my Michigan Public Schools 7th grade English textbook.
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Vouchers are being used in Louisiana, thanks in large part to Gov. Jindal’s efforts and in spite of the Teachers’ Union’s efforts. A voucher is no guarantee of a good education, but then neither is public school nor teacher certification.
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N.O. in particular it was the only way to get even a halfway decent education. The Burbs were not nearly so bad, but there are a high number of private schools in Louisiana though in N.O. it is far more private schools compared to the public ones. I’d not be surprised if it was 4-1 or maybe even 5-1 private to public … if it was higher, I’d actually not be shocked. I know some have gone away. Out where I lived in Kenner, things were more public based ( the schools not being near as bad as Orleans Parish), and most of the private ones were church related.
Also, I knew a woman that once she became a teacher, only applied to the private schools simply to avoid having to join the union.
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Philadelphia: when I was growing up those with money mostly tried for the Quaker schools, those without the Parochial schools. If you could get in neither you scrambled to get your child into Mendenhall Middle, then Girl’s High or Central High (boy’s) schools for the gifted. This was long before the state took over the public schools the first time…
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Ben Franklin is one of those for the gifted only schools. It moved out to UNO to allow the kids some access to the Profs and more advanced labs etc.
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I think one of the reasons a college education became a necessity for so many jobs was the poor job the public schools were doing. Now we’ve gone to the next step where a whole lot of college degrees are worthless. At the moment, specific certifications seem to be the right qualifications to fit ones peg into an employment hole.
Where we’re going to go from here, I haven’t a clue. Perhaps we’ll all become self employed, and larger companies will keep trying private contractors on short term contracts and gradually building up a staff of contractors they hired pretty well permanently because of proven ability. On site or on the ‘net.
I’m already an internet hermit, but if I’d started out this way I’d never have met my husband, had kids, nor had the experiences that are necessary for writing anything of interest. So really, I’d hate to think of the whole employment scene turning into isolation.
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also because of all the litigation and claims of discrimination, should people hire based on tests.
This was all the rage in Portugal in the seventies and I was never hired according to one of these, mostly because they asked things like “when were you weaned” — going on some cooky Freudian version of character.
Still OTOH just COMPETENCE tests would help.
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But But Sarah! Competence tests would be racist!!!!! [Very Big Sarcastic Grin]
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Can’t really do that. If there’s a disparity in results against any minority group, then the claim is that the test is biased and needs to be rewritten to better accommodate that particular group.
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Asian students have had to have the bar raised in the this-is-not-really-a-quota system of college admission.
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Good heavens, you don’t think people who apply statistics on the job should actually know them!
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The unfortunate truth is that testing was used in this country to see that individuals were properly channeled, and once channeled, even worse, they were not given the chance to rise above the level initially assigned.
To be able to decide what kind of learner every child is going to be forever when five? Really!
On the other hand, if we were to use the testing to enable placements where students might thrive and would get the necessary help/challenge to rise to their best? YES.
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Right now, I am a veteran and a PhD student in plasma physics.
In 6th grade, I was counseled to aim for a low skilled vocation, like janitor or garbage-man because I didn’t have the aptitude for any “higher position in society”. (My grades were perfect, but I couldn’t be ‘socialized’.)
In 2nd grade, my teachers decided that I was mentally defective and needed to be institutionalized to protect myself and others. (I kept asking questions, and had the stubborn idea that the answers should make at least internal *sense.*)
If people ever wonder why I am (passionately) against “tracking” or people deciding what your “position” should be when you are 5, well ….
My “position in society” hasn’t been invented yet. I’ll let you know when I’ve done that. :-P
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Reportedly Jay Leno’s High School guidance counselor advised him and his parents that McDonalds offered excellent opportunities, with benefits and even, if you stayed long enough, paid time off. And they didn’t even require a High School diploma!
I wonder how many students had that particular counselor?
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Younger son was told in second grade that he’d never be normal IQ, but if we worked hard with him he MIGHT qualify for manual labor. (They were technically right on the first, since he tests at 185 on the most common tests. Or he hits his head on the test ceiling, which sorta comes to the same.)
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I once saw a quote that said that any IQ score over 130 is suspect because the odds are, at that point, the person taking the test is smarter than the person who designed it. (I’ve never had a complete IQ test; the only administered one I had was in first grade and they stopped when I got bored. At the time, I tested out at the seventh grade reading level, which even at the time I thought was a sad commentary on seventh graders.)
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Eh. 130 is not that rare. I’d bet everyone on this site has above that. Any IQ test above 160 is unreliable, though, but that’s because at that level you get … splintering and saltational specialization.
In human words: my son is great at math, loves anything to do with patterns. Wrote at college level at 12. Learned to tie his shoes last year. Still has issues understanding WHY he shouldn’t sew a tear in his black pants with lavender thread. :-P
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To be fair, my younger son would do that, just because. But then again, he’s like that on purpose.
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I am of the opinion that my IQ is 100. There are, I admit, appallingly many sub-70 IQs and rather few over 130.
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“Learning Through Many Kinds of Intelligence
by Dee Dickinson
Dr. Howard Gardner, author of Frames of Mind and co-director of Project Zero at Harvard University, has created a Theory of Multiple Intelligences. He points out that school systems often focus on a narrow range of intelligence that involves primarily verbal/linguistic and logical/mathematical skills. While knowledge and skills in these areas are essential for surviving and thriving in the world, he suggests that there are at least six other kinds of intelligence that are important to fuller human development and that almost everyone has available to develop. They include, visual/spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, naturalist and intrapersonal intelligence.
The strongest skills of many children lie in these six areas, which are frequently undervalued in some traditional schools. The fact is that when children have an opportunity to learn through their strengths, they may become more successful at learning all subjects–including the “basic skills.”
Gardner believes that the eight intelligences he has identified are independent, in that they develop at different times and to different degrees in different individuals. They are, however, closely related, and many teachers and parents are finding that when an individual becomes more proficient in one area, the whole constellation of intelligence may be enhanced.
…”
For the full article:
http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/strategies/topics/mi/dickinson_mi.html
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I would wonder more why he HAS lavender thread. Unless of course it was on sale for less than the other colors. In which case I see nothing wrong with it. I mean if he is sewing a hole in them they are probably going to be work pants, not Sunday-go-to-meeting pants anyways. So who cares what color of thread is used as long as it keeps the wind out?
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Because he got it off my current embroidery project…
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My third grade teacher told my parents that there was no need for me to do my work, because I was smart and would become a doctor anyways. (really she had cancer and was going through chemo and was rarely in the class room, and when she was she didn’t want to be bothered with students).
I bounced in and out of gifted classes all through school, mainly on a whim; which no doubt would have driven a guidance councelor nuts, if there had ever been one who cared about what this student was doing.
Now I am self employed at what can charitably be described as “manual labor”. But I don’t have to put up with a boss, and I don’t mind grunt work, and I can get a lot of time off, even if my working time consists of hard work and long hours (16 1/2 hrs today); so I’m happy where I’m at. No matter how many people try and tell me I wasted my opportunities to do something I have the intelligence for, but would hate.
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I’m reminded of one of Doc Travis’ childhood friends on his show Rocket City Rednecks. Doc said that he was smart enough to go to college and become a physicist like he is, but chose to do other things. On that show, he was an invaluable team member filling an important role, and more than capable of holding his own with the “eggheads”.
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This also highlight the prejudice towards what is seen as ‘clean’ work vs. ‘dirty’ work.
Daddy, a gifted and very successful lawyer, observed that plumbers were more important to society, but I doubt that he would have been excited if The Daughter had chosen that field of pursuit.
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When I was in 3rd grade, the teachers put in me the below-average math class because I had a speech defect, and anyone who speaks that badly must be stupid.
Meanwhile, whenever they wanted to show off how well they taught reading, they displayed my little sister — whom they had not taught to read. I had taught her.
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Ah yes. One of the very important things I learned in school. Adults could be idiots.
The Daughter learned it in second grade when the teacher announced that snakes were invertebrates. The Daughter corrected her, mentioning that the next week when the class went to the zoo they would get to see a lovely snake skeleton that was on display near the entrance. When I talked to the teacher afterward she was livid. SHE was the teacher and The Daughter was eight, so even if snakes were vertebrates … they weren’t in her classroom.
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Sounds like my “perfesser” in my college “White Males Are The Cause Of All The World’s Problems” class.
WIFE: You realize she’s going to flunk you for arguing with her for every class period, right?
ME: She better have a good reason for doing it, or I’ll start calling newspapers and threaten the school’s bottom line. [EVIL GRIN]
I didn’t get flunked. But the perfesser didn’t have a good semester. After a while, my conservatism started opening eyes and even the OTHER students started debating her. BWA ha ha ha…
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Too many good answers for that…
“As a Child.”
But even better, “What time is it?”
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It was the socialist “it isn’t FAI-IR” whinge about aptitude tests that businesses used post WWII to screen job applicants. Frequently, these tests revealed otherwise hitherto-hidden talent that was subsequently developed on the job.. But that was all put-a-stop-to by the great levelers of the Left, and businesses farmed out the selection process to college degree mills. Which, in turn, led to the current higher education bubble.
M
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I think one of the reasons college degrees became required for so many jobs was that there was plenty of labor available, so the employers could choose the most highly educated applicants (thinking that they were likely getting the most skilled applicants that way, which may or may not be true). Then it went to “don’t apply unless you have these credentials”. So many people are being churned out of the colleges and universities that there are plenty of workers with degrees available, so they don’t have to look at the applicant who ‘just’ has on-the-job training and experience.
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A college degree was also evidence of the ability to defer gratification and stick to a course, making it more likely that you would last long enough for the company to train you to do something useful.
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…and for anything but a “hard” (sciences, engineering, medical, architecture) degree, evidence that someone was gullible enough to go tens of thousands of dollars in debt (or had rich parents) to be spoon fed information of moderate utility they could have gleaned for themselves (“but I did what I was told to succeed!”) rather than go achieve something.
Heck – an architect client LOVES his HS interns, and wishes he could just hire them and teach them as he has to first de-train the college graduates.
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For most corporate jobs this is a feature.
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The reason a College Education “became a necessity” is because there were enough people out there who *had* one that it was a quick way to sort out those with the discipline to finish a degree program–which was clearly of value–from those who were not.
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On the other hand I know a number of employers who automatically round-file any applications from people with a four year degree. Their theory, backed up by experience, is that those who choose to go to school for four or more years after high school, rather than getting a job and working, are much less likely to have a decent work ethic, or know HOW to work.
I’ve also heard more than one make the complaint that, “I can’t teach someone who already knows everything.”
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I strongly suspect you’re talking about jobs in the trades, while I’m talking mostly about office jobs.
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Yes I am, although I have heard the quote at the end applied by both architects and engineers.
Still as much as those actually doing the work may cuss them, architects and engineers are actually crossover jobs. They may do the majority of their work sitting at a computer these days, but it still has to work in the real world.
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My brother (the rocket scientist) was astonished at the ease with which he got into graduate school… after a couple of years of “real world” experience (with Boeing.) When he was in graduate school, he figured out why; his work experience showed him what was important in his classes.
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There is I think an even more insidious aspect to the “someone is watching and keeping score” philosophy, and that is “if I don’t get caught (or can get everyone to pretend it didn’t happen) it doesn’t count.”
This appears to be quite a popular concept with our current political class, particularly the present bungler in chief.
Of course where it gets truly ridiculous are the many recent occasions where multiple politicians have denied ever saying something despite video tape evidence to the contrary.
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And don’t forget the insincere apology when they do get caught. It always sounds like “I’m sorry I got caught, I’ll be more careful not to get caught next time” as opposed to “I’m sorry I did X and I won’t do it again”
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I lucked out in many respects, educationally. I had a very good (Yes public) school, and was if an argumentative temperament (which I suspect some here may have noticed). If the teacher was wrong they were wrong (there were those who proved me wrong so I managed to keep a good balance between I’m not always right and they’re not always right.). They encouraged us to think and disagree. (to the point where two winning essays had diametrically opposed views on the topic at hand. I’m still startled that that sort of thing isn’t the norm.
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I grew up in a medium sized college town (65k permanent residents in the early 1980s) that had 3 schools–one a major state U, a school for rich kids who failed out of State U, and a school for girls looking to get their MRS from the Med or Law school of State U. Well, they didn’t *admit* that any more, but that’s what it started as and largely was.
“What’s the difference between a bowling ball and a…yeah, I better not finish that.
Oh. Time to stop drinking and get some sleep.
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There is a smoother finish on the bowling ball?
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Uh.
No.
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And hence why homeschooling is becoming so popular.
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which is going to be a problem in and of itself as well. About half the people I’ve had to deal with that “home school” their children, are flat out nincompoops. They have no education, no skills, no ability to teach or impart anything of value they might have accidentally learned or no common sense. They either use the current text books the public school system uses or they have gone to the re-printed text books from the 1800’s. Which is fine if your raising your children to be Amish. What about those jobs that your children will have when they grow up. you know, the jobs that haven’t even been invented yet.
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And yet, with all these problems, home-schooled children do better academically than those taught by college-credentialed teachers.
You do realize what you are saying about the school system by comparison?
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I’ve heard that repeatedly, but never seen hard data on it. Can you point to sources?
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http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000010/200410250.asp
Yeah, HSLDA’s pretty biased, but they’ve got studies referenced in this article.
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Take this for what it is worth as it was done by the Home School Legal Defense Association:
http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/rudner1999/rudner2.asp
And this one with more links from multiple sources (but mostly still slanted towards the homeschool sites):
http://infographiccommons.com/view/homeschool-domination.html
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They’re a start hopefully there’s enough background to rabbit trail through. Thank you and Holly both.
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For little kids:
http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ794896
And someone did a study on kids in Washington State, in the mid to late 80s, which showed a minimum 35% advantage on tests for home schooled vs public schooled.
The only study I can think of that found any bad outcome was a Canadian one where they seperated home schoolers into “structured”– had lessons– and “unschoolers.” There the home schoolers who ever used lessons were a minimum of a full grade ahead in 5 of 7 subjects, and half a year ahead in the other two.
The “never used a formal lesson” unschoolers, on a standardized test,* scored from one and a half grades below the other home schoolers to over 4 grades below (“word recognition”) the other homeschoolers. I have not found them compared the raw scores to the public school students. I’m not paying 12 bucks to find out. Small study, 35 public, 12 unschooled and the rest “ever took a test” home schooled, initially intended to just compare the public to the home and then found out that home schooling isn’t standardized. That said, they did compare mother’s education and household income, and found it made no difference in the results.
*yes, this means they were the ones that hadn’t been taught to take tests. I don’t know how much of the result difference might be that.
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Judging from my recent experiences, not having learned to take tests makes a huge difference in test results. We hauled our older two to the university for testing: comparatively cheap, all paper records, and helped with a maternal crises of ‘Am I teaching them right?’ (Answer, ‘No, you’re boring them. Make it harder.’) Eldest officially has the vocabulary of a post-doc and the math abilities of a college sophomore, but they would not give him an IQ score, because he doesn’t react to the timed phase of the test in a standard way: he ignores the timer and digs in with his usual perfectionism. He answered all the problems correctly, he just didn’t do them fast enough, so he didn’t do very many. Number two did the exact same thing with the exact same results: unscorable IQ. Which is good for giggles, if nothing else.
There was also something about never having seen a kid do trig in his head while flat on his back on the floor before.
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Okay, but the vocabulary of a post-doc is not what it used to be … and you should probably wash his mouth out with soap.
It has been noted that home schoolers are terrible about time on task. The philosophy tends to be “spend as much time on it as is needed to do it right, and not a second more.” Regular schoolers are more “we’ve already spent a week on the Revolution and we have to cover a lot more before semester end, so we’re gonna skip the Articles of Confederation.” It seems to me that they are also prone to skipping Reconstruction, summarizing it as “Grant was Republican and corrupt, let’s move on to Teddy Roosevelt.”
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Hey, I resemble that [censored] [censored] {not in that language either, nice try though} statement!
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Thanks, definitely adding it to my list of things to look at and rabbit trail through sources. :)
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Good luck!
Since I don’t know what schools in Canada are like, I can’t even help. :(
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I’m not in Canada so that’s not an issue (thought might be a point of curiosity to see if it works differently there or if they just track things differently there or both). I’m on the other side of the red river from quite a few of our members here.
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Mostly meant that a lot of the studies I see are from Canada.
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I have some upvotes for you here. Where should I dump the truck bed? :D
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Er… I raised my son on the classics and math. Somehow this is serving him fine in Engineering. Go figure.
That said the two homeschooling groups in town were the ultra-religious whose job was to hide the wicked reality of the world from their kids and the hippies who “unschooled” which in their minds (yes, I know it can be done right, but these people weren’t) meant not teaching anything at all and letting the kids pick up something by osmosis.
I still maintain neither group was less well-taught than if they’d been in public school.
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From what I’ve observed homeschooled kids generally have 2 or 3 advantages
1) They can actually read (and write)
2) They can usually do sums in their head, at least well enough for doing change at a store.
3) Possibly the most important, they are good at problem solving.
I think 3) is generally because HS parents have an incentive to teach the kids the tools to figure stuff out on their own. That way later on they can give them stuff to do and do something else like cook dinner while the kids figure out the problem.
I’d say even the unschooled hippy kids get to do 3) and most of them also do 1) & 2)
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It is not so much rare for an employer to be able to afford as it is that those slots are usually already filled, with the bosse’s nephew or brother-in-law, or with the local union’s or mafioso’s “find him a job he won’t have to show up for” protege.
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In defense of using 1800’s readers: It’s not too difficult to look at those readers, compare them to our modern readers, and conclude that 19th century people expected more from their education than modern educators do. That, and arithmetic is arithmetic, you generally have to go beyond calculus and statistics to get into 20th century math…not that I haven’t been trying to teach my 9-year-old daughter group theory, mind you, but so far, she’s proven to be somewhat disinterested.
As for general concerns about the “evils” of home-schooling: I have come to notice that those who are critical of universal home-schooling (even some home-schoolers are skeptical that everyone should do it) often fall into the trap of highlighting the failures of home-schooling, while ignoring the failures (and they are pretty bad failures) of government schooling.
Which reminds me of an article I read several years ago, making the case that Washington D.C. should abandon public schools altogether. It addressed the concern “What should be done about the entities that organize just to take people’s money, without providing an education?” with “There’s really not much we could do about that. There will be nothing to prevent the Washington D.C. education system from re-incorporating as a private organization, after all.”
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Part of why I use McGuffey’s is because the illustrations are lovely and– spoiler!– I happen to know they were in common use in the 1960s. Not exactly Amish.
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Professor McGuffey was hardly Amish! Although of course when he was alive the Amish were more distinguished by dress and theology than language (lots of similar German speakers in Ohio) or tech level.
McGuffey’s Readers were designed to last and last, and they have. They were also designed to teach reading ability (schoolhouses started kids in grades but managed kids by getting them through the curriculum on their own pace) rather than to be tied to specific grades, so they are working as designed if the kids get through them in faster than nine months per book.
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Goodness, have they ever lasted!
Making fun of the idea that learning to read from a 19th century book is “training to be Amish” because makes it so you can’t ever be at all technological, since the computers we use were designed by folks who learned with them.
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I think that the best argument against universal homeschooling is the experience our society had in trying to expand the Progressive school experiences of the beginning of the 20th century to a universal model.
There were a lot of experimental Progressive schools, and almost without exception they produced better results than traditional schools. People got very excited by this, and it is essentially how Progressive thought took over the public school system. But the experimental schools were self sleeking samples on multiple levels. First, parents were likely to be dedicated to education to put their children in hem in the first place. Second, the teachers were highly likely to be enthusiastic supporters of the experiment. Third, the students who didn’t like the experiment were likely to select out by complaining to their parents and being removed.
Homeschooling has the same kind of dynamic going. People who don’t give a fat damn about education aren’t going to go to the trouble. There will be exceptions, but they will be rare.
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I don’t know about the hippies, but the ultra-religious homeschoolers seem to always be Christians and if nothing else they teach their kids to read the KJV Bible. That’s a level of literacy which will enable those kids to self-educate–if you can read the KJV you can read anything I encountered in college. The public schools should be so capable: our local schools have something like a 70% literacy rate for graduates.
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Yes, but the ones I encountered also tried to protect their kids from things like… knowing there was evil in the world. As in murders. I know a young woman right now who is “den mother” to graduates of a homeschooling list where most things this group considers normal are considered horrible and “banned.”
Nothing can be achieved from raising kids in the equivalent of madrassas where memorizing religious texts is ALL. That said, would these kids be less messed up with the same parents going through public school? Probably not. BUT yeah, some people shouldn’t homeschool. Or drive. Or write letters. None of which means I want to stop them doing that, just that we can’t enshrine what they do was “best practices” just because it’s a form of what we do.
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Oh, I wouldn’t say they aren’t nuts. Just that even the nuts manage to pretty reliably give their kids the most basic tool to learn with, and the public schools don’t.
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Yes. Exactly.
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this is why I don’t worry about the curriculum of (mostly still) theoretical “Voucher Schools”. Yes, some dolt will pretty certainly set up an school of schools that teach Afrocentrism as if it were something other than an new iteration of pre-rosetta stone Rosicrucianism with a thin veneer of Black Power twaddle. If the kids are taught to read effectively they can check for themselves. Maybe they won’t, but they COULD.
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Bin dere, done dat, long since.
Back in the mid-Nineties there was quite the kerfuffle over an Afro-centric charter in DC —
Patrice LumumbaMarcus Garvey Public Charter School — when a Washington Times reporter doing an article on the school was assaulted by the principal and had her notebook confiscated.http://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news/reporter-files-charges-against-school-principal-over-attack
As facts came out about the charter’s curriculum and management the school was soon forced to close, IIRC.
And yes, vouchers could end up supporting madrassas.
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… the ones I encountered also tried to protect their kids from things like…
I have met parents if various stripes who are attempting to raise ‘hot house’ kids both through home education or by bringing pressure to bear upon their school system.
Consider: what is it that SJWs are trying to do? (In fact they are trying to make the whole world their own hot house.)
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Oh, yes, it’s all part of a power trip. The ideological/religious justification is immaterial. As I said, I’m just not going to say all of them use “best practices.” I AM going to say that at least on the basics all those kids are still better than institutionally-schooled kids.
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But how fragile are they if they not only don’t have to learn to cope with things, but don’t even realize they happen?
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So would most right minded people.
Which is why I have as little to do with right minded people as possible.
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Only half?
About two-thirds of the public school teachers I’ve had to deal with would have required serious upgrades to be nincompoops, and I’d set that at better than eighty-five percent for school administrators.
For school boards, not quite 100%.
I have read very few stories about home school teachers sexually molesting their students. And, of course, there is a great feedback mechanism in place for home schooling that public schools lack: if the teachers do a bad job of it, the kids will never move out.
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BTW – what training do you recommend for jobs that haven’t even been invented yet? Unless they are industrial assembly line jobs, few of the kids in public school are trained for them.
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I’ve gotten the impression that graduates from the modern public schools won’t be fit for “industrial assembly line jobs”.
They’d likely fail at the “do you want fries with that” jobs. [Frown]
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Many of them seem to do well in positions requiring them to ask “Regular or decaf, tall, venti or grande, do you want room for milk?” … but I suspect most of those are graduate students. Who are probably making more money than they will once they become full-time academics.
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Professors tend to pull in decent salaries, at least given the amount of work they do.
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The nice thing about being an engineering research assistant (I DNFed–did not finish in NASCAR parlance) is that they pay you to work 20+ hours and you get to make stuff, which is almost the coolest thing ever, to see something go from paper to steel or ceramic.
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Funny, but when they *get* jobs they can usually do them. At least as well as my (Gen X) generation could.
The first two or three years someone is in the workforce they generally suck (not everyone, most people). It takes them that long to settle down and grow up.
If you start that at 16, by the time someone is in college they’re a good worker. If you start it at 24, they’re still figuring it out 3 years later.
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English, math, science, Spanish, and a trade. If you’re in the U.S. If your kids are ambitious, have them get an associate’s degree by the time they graduate. For boys, with all the faults the program has, they should get their Eagle Scout rank. This will prep them for an entry level job with which they can either master a trade or get through school for a profession without taking on student loans.
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For boys, with all the faults the program has, they should get their Eagle Scout rank
Hear!Hear!
I have 4 Eagle sons. 2 look like career Marines now, one a FF/Paramedic, and the youngest a senior Civil Engineering major who is likely to go into project management due mainly to his Eagle project. His project was recognized by the local council as the best that year, and the local council executive said it was the best one he’d seen in 25 years of scouting. One of our Eagles the next year won again, he’s now a junior mechanical engineering major.
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Yup. In addition to “Eagle Scout” being a great resume bullet, all those merit badges gives young men an opportunity to explore the nuts and bolts of dozens of careers and learn a lot about how different businesses function. I may need to look into 4-H or another program for my daughters; I’m not going to send them into the Socialist Girl Scouts of America.
Also, knowing Spanish in America today is more and more useful for business. If they can pass the AP Spanish test, they can get college credit for it. A lot of people speak gutter Spanish; few people have a sheepskin that says they speak USEFUL Spanish. The daughter of a friend of mine is studying architecture and civil engineering, and her parents are native speakers. I told her she should minor in Spanish so that she can be prepared to speak Spanish in a business environment and have the sheepskin SAY that she can.
Also, I can’t think of a single trade that ISN’T hurting for people these days (unless it’s the construction industry). A trade will give young people a very livable wage and a great fallback if they decide to not go into a profession or can’t finish college, etc. Plus the trades (and working their way through college, even as a nontraditional student) will teach kids things they would otherwise take decades to learn if mommy and daddy paid for their college.
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I may need to look into 4-H or another program for my daughters; I’m not going to send them into the Socialist Girl Scouts of America.
The Venture program of BSA. They take 14 yr olds of both sexes and follow mostly the same program as the scouts, with more emphasis on high adventure.
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While Spanish may be good for getting hired in business there are other languages that are going to be more in demand. There are many in country who are fluently bi-lingual in English and Spanish. There are far fewer that can work in English and Japanese, Chinese or Korean.
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You can make a lot more money with Japanese or Chinese, but if you’re looking to get a job without having to uproot yourself (IMHO, I’m not a Japanese or Chinese linguist), a lot of businesses all over the country regularly do business locally with Spanish speakers, and the number of first- and second- generation Latino immigrant-owned businesses in the US is constantly growing, making local job opportunities for Spanish speakers far more numerous. That’s not to mention that Spanish is typically within the reach of most native English speakers, as it shares a common alphabet and *fairly* similar grammatical structure. It’s less work to pick up for most native English speakers. Just my two cents.
Mostly, this is my natural inherent laziness speaking. :D
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You might be surprised at how much need there is for folk who speak and understand Japanese and Chinese right here in the US. At least regarding Japanese.
My wife works for SIA (Subaru of Indiana Automotive–a rather awkward name but it use to be Subaru/Isuzu automotive before Isuzu left and they wanted to keep the same logo so….), up in Lafayette, IN. A large part of the reason that she was hired there is that she’s Japanese but a permanent resident in the US. One of her major tasks is acting as a go-between between the trainers and other folk here temporarily from corporate in Japan and the many local hires. Someone who speaks both English and Japanese fluently and who has a reasonable grasp of both cultures is valuable in such roles.
Every once in a while she gets a bee in her bonnet over some issue with the work environment there and starts listing all the other Japanese companies or suppliers to Japanese companies within commuting distance where her ability to fit between the two cultures would be of value. (Since she has a 45-50 minute commute now, that’s actually a pretty good distance.)
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That’s really great. I had no idea the opportunities were that common.
For me, ever since I got back from being a missionary in Latin America, my Spanish skills have either gotten me all my jobs or been heavily utilized at them. Soon as I get done with my degree, that’ll put me head and shoulders over other Spanish speakers, because I’m minoring in Spanish myself.
Just make sure that you don’t let your wife’s linguistic skills make you start treating her like a sugar momma!
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;)
It’s a team effort. I make more money, but at a smaller company where there aren’t any benefits to speak of. She doesn’t make as much money, but her company provides health and dental insurance.
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As an Eagle Scout myself, I highly endorse this. And while it can be gamed by the parents to make the accomplishment much easier for their precious snowflake, the Scouting program was designed to prevent this, and it needs the active cooperation of multiple scouting leaders. This plus the general bad odor scouting has come into in the “right-minded” people’s circles means that extreme vast majority of Eagle Scouts earned their rank.
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One Mom of a former scout still won’t speak to me after over 10 years because I would not make it easy for her little darling and let Dad and Mom do his project for him.
I am the Scoutmaster and if I do not approve it, he won’t make it to the Board of Review.
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I’ve heard of a teacher who collected all the term papers, gave the students a gimlet gaze, and told them all to write down a summary of their paper, just a half a sheet.
Then graded accordingly.
I told this to my sister the chemistry teacher, and after laughing, she said she was going to tell the English teachers about it.
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As much math as you can stand, as much physics as you can stand and, shockingly, as much *business* as you can stand. Not economics, *business*.
Oh, and every chance you get study something completely new. Try to retain brain plasticity as long as possible.
See, no matter *what* jobs there are in the future there will still be the *business* to consider. Understand that at a level close to reflex and you have headspace and timing left over to worry about the tasks.
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Certainly it wouldn’t hurt to take some intermediate accounting — it will make talking to your accountants much more productive. Business Law, absolutely, and Finance and Statistics (for business) but some of the business courses are pure fluff, so choose them carefully — and talk to several students in the curriculum about which courses/professors to try for.
If there is a good literature or History prof, try for that. That is not career training but it will greatly enrich life.
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y’all wouldn’t like the business classes I took…
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HKU?
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I don’t know what HKU is…
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Hard Knocks U
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Nope, I have a BA in Cinema, specializing in Producing and Cinematography… that should pretty much tell you what kind of business classes I took.
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They either use the current text books the public school system uses or they have gone to the re-printed text books from the 1800’s.
Would be an improvement over my (very highly ranked, well funded) high school.
We HAD the text books. The only part we used was the question/answer part in the back, other than the math book– which the teacher read verbatim, typos and all, then copied the examples out of the back.
It is very likely that they have the internet, and the kids have access to it. There are approximately fifty gazillion websites that are around to help beyond the text book– actually, I’ve got a “resources” post I might send to Sarah as a filler article, depends on if I can get it off of Ricochet without hand-typing all the links again.
The flipping PBS site is better for basic learning than most kindergartens, depressing as that is.
******
By law, the parents do have education. You just hold that it’s so bad that their children should be forced to have, at best, the same education because of it…..
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I do believe that you have insulted the Amish.
The Amish can read, write, cypher, balance books and draw up business plans. They can navigate governmental regulations and maintain their farms and businesses to meet code.
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I was public schooled, K-12. I went to an actually Christian university, which meant there were tons of homeschoolers, some of whom were more reasonable than others. (Not being the most conservative person in the room can be terrifying, sometimes.)
Given the choice between homeschoolers or public schoolers running the country, I’ll pick the homeschoolers. Every time.
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I understand that I was not as clear as I should have been, but still, ya’ll missed my pint. [b]some[/b] of the “home school parents” make the worst public school teachers look good. I understand that my viewpoint is often skewed by the population I regularly deal with. I get to deal with the dysfunctional children of dysfunctional children of dysfunctional children, etc, etc, lo unto the 9th generation, did the children of dumb and dumber keep producing children that were dumber than their parents. which should be statistical impossibility, yet we see it daily. I’m a former school board member (13 years total in 2 different school systems) and a cop with 28 years in so far. I’m on the committee for local BSA and an Eagle father. I’ve seen the best, the worst and the average. I’ve seen the best at their worst and the worst at their best. I understand the problems with public school systems and the problems with home school systems. I don’t have an answer, I don’t believe in common standards or especially common core, but without some guidance and a lot of help, some of these home school parents are not capable of teaching their kids. They themselves never learned to learn because they are also victims of public school. There needs to be viable, affordable alternates to both public school and home school available, without the local school board or state or federal government extorting money from the property owners to fund the K-12 prison system.
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Doug,
In TX there is an answer. There is this misconception that it all or nothing; either public school or your home schooling it alone. Maybe it is true in other states, but in Texas a lot of homeschool parents band together in homeschool co-ops.
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I have heard stories of even another alternative, something that was called privette schooling, or perhaps pryvatt schooling, whereby companies, hoping to provide a useful service and gain a slight return on their investments of time and money, organize to form facsimiles of public schools, often promoting a particular educational philosophy, and proceed to offer instruction on a fee basis to any so unwary as to fall into their clutches. (Can you believe, many of these reportedly not only employ non-union teachers but accept instructors who have not completed even the most basic coursework in classroom management, much less pedagogical theory. They reportedly hire people to teach based only on the vulgar qualification of subject knowledge, as if thirty-five years as a professional engineer or in a chemical research laboratory qualified them to convey such knowledge to impressionable young minds.)
I have even heard rumours of such schools established and operated by religious groups, of all things! Outlandish, I know, but I have been assured of their truth. Supposedly they teach History by focusing on such “Drill & Kill” methods as learning the sequence of “significant” events and their connecting causal factors. Some of them apparently don’t even teach Darwin in their math courses, and claim that a workable understanding of biological variation can be achieved through study of some strange practice they call study of “Natural History.”
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RES,
Heresy!!! How can speak such lies.
;-)
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” Some of them apparently don’t even teach Darwin in their math courses,”
How do they possibly expect their students to understand the evolution of numbers?
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I understand that I was not as clear as I should have been, but still, ya’ll missed my pint. [b]some[/b] of the “home school parents” make the worst public school teachers look good.
There are parents that, say, sexually assault their children. As the worst of public school teachers do.
Thing is, they get the kids taken away, rather than having a new crop each year and being moved around to avoid detection, until it gets just too obvious and/or gets general public attention.
Sure, there are some home schooling parents who shouldn’t be teaching their kids. You’re not going to have a lot of luck making that point if you try to claim that they’re worse than the equivalent level of public school teacher. Too many of us have dealt with teachers that not only don’t teach, they scream at you for expecting them to– heck, we had a Spanish teacher who spent his classes cussing at the students in German. He was fired after four years because he locked a kid in the closet for the entire class and his parents had enough oomph.
Note, this was at one of the best schools in the state.
The high school math teacher (football coach) read the chapter out loud, copied the examples (sometimes doing it wrong) and would go sit. If you couldn’t figure it out, you were to nag another student to help you, not him. When the parents threw a fit, he was moved… to teaching the distance learning calculus class, which meant he had FIVE classrooms. The logic was that anyone signing up for calculus could teach themselves if they had a book.
The jr high science teacher routinely slept through class, and sent kids to detention for correcting him on science facts… or just basic spelling. (DUCT tape is the generic, DUCK tape is a brand.)
I’m sure there are folks here who had worse.
Again. This was a good school, in Washington. People moved to take advantage of it, highly rated, etc.
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They would definitely be better off using the 19th century books for a lot of basics like reading. But then I’m sort of biased because my parents had a lot of that stuff even though we always went to public schools. Though, growing up in Greenwich CT I imagine that the public schools were better than most private schools.
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Nothing I learned in high school (graduated in ’74) prepared me for the personal computer explosion of the ’80s.
If that hadn’t happened, there’s an excellent chance I’d have bounced from minimum wage job to minimum wage job. I was smart enough – but I had (and still have) pretty much nothing in the way of study skills.
Son has study skills, though. My lovely bride made sure of it.
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Oh my, all those hours I spent learning to touch type on a typewriter because it was considered a useful skill and you would always be able to get work…
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People always tell me to quit hammering my keyboards. I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter.
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Ah. Brother. Yes, me too.
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;-) Manuels also required controlled touch. I got to work on an electric in my junior and senior years and it was much easier.
The Daughter does not have the excuse that she learned on a typewriter, still she types with force and will get up to such a speed that I wonder if she might have had a career in percussion.
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I’m not going to to make fun of typo. I’m not…
Oh, heck — I grew up with many Manuels who WOULD have loved tough of any kind, controlled or not. Unfortunately for them, I wasn’t interested.
BTW, interesting point, I think I prefer the nick name for Manuel Portuguese — Neca — to the English — Manny — but it might confuse Japanese speakers, since Nekko is, iirc “cat”
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Neko, thus Nekocon! ;-) (#17 is coming up at Hampton Roads Convention Center in Virginia this November 8-9.)
Our four mascots are cats. ^-^
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I got a Das Keyboard and am happily clacking away, almost as firmly as I did on Ye Olde Selectric I learned on. And it drives the cat nuts. *beatific smile*
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Hulk TYPE! [ADJUSTS GLASSES]
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Well, Clark Kent used to destroy his manual typewriters by typing too fast. They melted down. [Evil Grin]
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Not entirely their fault. I remember when the homeschooling movement started ramping up. A lot of it was reaction to a ruling that said, basically that–
— if a millionaire hires someone to teach his ten kids in his house, he’s having them *tutored.*
–but if four families pool their money to hire someone to teach *their* ten kids at one of their homes, that’s a *private school,* and they’ll have to spend another half a million on a building that conforms to the same rules as the publicly funded 2,000-student middle school up the street. Among other things.
This was supposed to force them back into the fold, where good union teachers could teach their kids to good government standards. Instead, parents who weren’t rich went to “sweat equity.” And they do the best they can with the background they have.
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“and she returned me to my grandmother saying by law she didn’t have to put up with me.”
Does anyone else find this image tremendously funny? It’s like a reverse Calvin.and Hobbes, where we see the teacher’s daydream.
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So I don’t know much about US schools but in Europe (well the UK for sure and it seems like a bunch of other countries too) there used to be differetn schools for people with different levels of smart (where smart is some combination of IQ + learning ability + …).
I understand that being streamed into the wrong one at age 11 or so could be a problem, but the solution should not have been to teach everyone together so that the smart kids are bored to tears and a bunch of kids at the back of the class get to tune out everything and graduate knowing nothing.
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That’s been discussed, and for a while there were (and still are in some states, not Texas [thank you teachers’ union et al]) vocational high-schools, where you get less of the advanced classes (no calculus or advanced English literature) and studied skilled trades instead. When the state of Texas mandated that all public school teachers had to have a bachelor’s degree, that hit the vocational programs hard. Now it’s the “everyone-goes-to-college” foolishness that has left no room for learning a useful trade. So the guys (and some girls) drop out and get into apprentice programs, or go to junior colleges and get a GED, then an associates degree and learn a skilled trade. *sigh* And as badly as the schools are doing at teaching basic literacy and numeracy, the students have to pick up reading and writing and math on the job in some cases (probably more than anyone wants to admit.)
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An employer wants 4 basic things from a new hire
1) They can actually read
2) and write/type something others can read
3) can do basic sums in their head, at least well enough for doing change at a store.
4) they are good at problem solving.
I don’t care what job you are doing, if you can’t do those then you are essentially unemployable except under close supervision – which is something it is rare for an employer to be able to afford.
And (4) is something schools never teach except by accident. To a large degree it doesn’t matter whether you know the specific tasks for the job or not when you join as long as you can pick them up and not fall down in a heap when something doesn’t work.
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You left one out –
5.) The employee will show up on time, and stay through the end of his or her shift
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6) Be presentable in dress and grooming.
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5) and 6) aren’t things a school can teach. At least not easily. Though I guess the presentable in dress and grooming thing can be taught if you have a school uniform.
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School can cover #5. Students are expected to turn up on time for class, after all.
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Actually I would argue #5 is the one thing public schools do a fairly decent job of teaching. The majority of students learn that if they show up on time, and stay all day, they can get a passing grade regardless of what they do or don’t do during that time. On the flip side if they are tardy or skip out part way through the day they are likely to get detention or some other form of punishment.
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From a new hire?
As in “entry level”?
They want:
1) They can actually read
2) and write/type something others can read
3) can do basic sums in their head, at least well enough for doing change at a store.
4) They can AND WILL follow directions.
You do NOT hire someone into an entry level job and have them shooting trouble/solving problems.
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Regarding 3) can do basic sums in their head, at least well enough for doing change at a store.
For many years my mother-in-law would work every Christmas season at a Hickory Farms that was run by a friend. She, who had only completed a semester of college in the late 1940s, could run all the sums in her head. The college students of the 1980s needed to use the register.
Many places now use registers that will tell the operator what change to give, some even doling out the coins.
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EVERY TIME I go to a store with my dad, he complains about nobody knowing how to properly count back change anymore. And if the register doesn’t tell them exactly what change to give you, they don’t have a clue.
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It’s bad when the cashier reads a message code instead of the change due and hands you that (which was $2 off what I should have gotten), then when you question them on it, they don’t see the problem.
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I remember the time I gave a cashier 31 cents for a 26 cent price and telling her to ring it in didn’t do the trick — her manager had to come over and tell her to ring it in.
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On the upside, most kids I have met can be taught to properly count change in less than 5 min (done it.) There is hope.
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I always wonder how much of “Can’t do it” is “never had a need to. My sons can’t tell time. They learned in school, but they have everything digital and never USED it.
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The Daughter! Can read all sorts of dials in the chem lab with greatest ease, but an analog clock, not so much.
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YES.
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We had an analog clock in the living room, so the boys eventually learned to read it, but because of digital clocks, they would never go along with my family’s tendency to round the time to the nearest 5 minute mark.
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I’d say a good portion of it. Most of my 5 min lessons were to kids who suddenly couldn’t rely on the register for whatever reason. Usual responses are “That’s… so easy. Why didn’t they show us earlier?” (some cases they were shown and it hadn’t taken because they were told but never actually used it practically, others they hadn’t been shown, usually because someone figured they’d always have a calculator somewhere.)
My highschool’s business class had a very simple way of teaching the practical aspects. They ran a candy stand at lunch. The business classes were in charge of all of it. Which meant they had to manage the schedule of which club got to use it for fund raising and how often and had to keep track of the profits and who got what cut and where all the money they kept went. No cash registers at all. It wasn’t the most earth shattering thing but looking back it was significant to the purpose of so much of the math sticking in people’s heads.
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*mischief* Next time you’ve got two folks going on that, ask them to describe how to “properly” count back change.
I know… too many ways of doing so
Count *up* to the amount due back, from biggest to littlest (five twenty-six; one two three four five, twenty five and six);
count up to the total given starting at the charged amount, biggest to littlest (four seventy four, five seventy four … nine seventy four, nine ninty-nine, ten dollars),
count down from the amount tendered to the amount due, bills to change, (ten, nine … five, twenty-five and one)
count down the change due from the total (five, four … one, twenty-six, one, there you go sir have a nice day) bills to change
And, of course, all of those from change to bills.
Most of which I have had people grumble at me about how I don’t count out change “correctly,” and when asked they “taught” me the “right way.”
(Mom was the 4H leader. I ran the register every year from the time I was old enough to count at all.)
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When I first worked in retail I was taught the following:
1) announce the amount due.
2) say the amount tendered as it is handed to me.
3) say amount due form amount tendered.
4) give the change, counting up from the amount due to the amount tendered.
5) hand customer the merchandise
6) pleasantries including: thank and ask customer to return.
Thus:
1) Your total is twelve fifty-nine.
2) Out of fifteen.
3) Twelve fifty nine out of fifteen.
4) Twelve fifty nine (hand a penny), sixty, (hand nickel) sixty-five, (hand a dime) seventy-five, (hand a quarter) thirteen, (handing two one dollar bills, one at a time), fourteen and fifteen.
6) pass bag to customer
5) (Smiling) Thank you very much. Have a good day. Please come again.
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I learned my multiplication tables to twelve at school, but to fourteen counting cartons of cigarettes at a one-man convenience store (locked inside a bullet proof glass box with a brick office on one end).
(I wasn’t the one selling discounted cigarettes to my friends; I was the one who twice forgot to check the very short “do not take checks from this person” list.)
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Standardized tests as reductio ad absurdam…
I went looking for a summer job while at Yale (circa 1973), as a junior agent for a local New Haven insurance office (an older gentleman). He carefully administered the standard psychology test for a potential agent. The questions were along the lines of:
What would you rather do?
1) Watch the World Series
2) Win the Nobel Prize
3) Have a date with Marilyn Monroe
4) Sell insurance
All of the questions were at about this level of sophistication. I giggled as I whizzed through it, but the best was yet to come. When I handed in my answer sheet, first the fellow’s eyes widened, but then he said, “Oh, I have to adjust it because you’re a girl.”
He then proceeded to reverse the scores on about half the tests (something about aggression being suitable for males but not females, etc.). By then, I just couldn’t keep from laughing out loud and waving off his helpless apologies about not being able to buck the system. I’m still not sure he understood why I found it so funny.
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Yes, but that’s not a COMPETENCY test. It’s a pop psychology test.
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Uhh, 5) die of boredom?
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Nonsense. 2. It comes with money. And you could always write under a pseudonym to hide later.
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Leaving the village: Don’t know if you’ve heard of Holland, Michigan; it was settled by Dutch folks. The wife of a friend told me she’d had lunch with some women from Holland; many Hollanders are proud of never having been 25 miles away from there, and that for dessert, she was the only one not having Dutch Chocolate ice cream.
“However, even I have bits of this thought. I most often run into it with new authors. “I’ve written this book just as the publisher said he/she wanted it. Why didn’t they buy?” Or among college graduates “I’ve done everything I was supposed to. Why don’t I have a job?”” They just don’t realize they have been lied to.
“But the idea that these “band leaders” should have no more skill than working the crowd is part of being in a school with same age group. No one is that far ahead of the others, so what excites admiration is superficial prettiness and ways of behaving that are … petty and stupid. Self-aggrandizing cr*p.” This continues long after school, too. The SJWs are a clique, trying to foist their values on everyone else. Never grew up emotionally from middle-school.
“But the children won’t all learn the same things/have the same assumptions.” And they keep telling us of the Virtue(s) of Diversity!
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All diversity is good, except diversity of morality (unless one is an oppressed minority) and diversity of thought (outside of one’s socio-economic/race/gender checklist as assigned by sexually depraved, baby-killing old White socialists).
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For what it’s worth, I’ve heard of Holland, MI; I think they made transplanters there. We used them for tobacco plants, and once for sweet potatoes.
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I spent some time in Iowa’s version of Holland MI. My church choices were: Christian Reformed, Reformed, Protestant Reformed, American Reformed, Dutch Reformed, and Netherlands Reformed. Culturally it felt a bit like living in Germany again.
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“I’ve done everything I was supposed to. Why don’t I have a job?” – because self-selected elites are willing to tell you what to do, but it never occurred to them you might construe it as a contract!
“But the children won’t all learn the same things/have the same assumptions.” – I’m not revolutionarily libertarian enough to take this literally – some basics of hygiene, math, civics probably ought to be the common property of everyone. But the ability to select further studies a la carte makes tremendous sense, especially if you also have examples of what use those studies might be.
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You have more in common with people your age than with anyone else. … (This is mostly seen among leftists who view people as widgets, anyway.)
“They” speak of promoting diversity in school — HA!
I have stated before that I abhor age segregation.
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One of the things I despise about the idea of “High School Class Reunions” is the realization that I made friends from the years before, as well as the years afterward. I even made a few friends for the year after I graduated, when I considered myself a “professional debate judge” (not that I made that much money), which was an extension of my years of debate in high school.
Participating in debate and drama (among other things) will do that to you, though…
But, even still, why the segregation? And why have rigid “tracks” where, if you have a bad year, you are permanently derailed? Why shouldn’t anyone who thinks they can handle AP English, for example, be free to attempt the class?
While I enjoyed my years in school (despite being subject to relentless bullying at times), it’s these things that have convinced me to home-school my children, even when I was in the public school system myself. (Incidentally, I learned later that bullying is largely a result of the environment our modern education system sets up, as well…)
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“And why have rigid “tracks” where, if you have a bad year, you are permanently derailed?”
Because knowledge is cumulative.
We should indeed have ways to push people upward but it’s not going to be easy.
“Why shouldn’t anyone who thinks they can handle AP English, for example, be free to attempt the class?”
shudder
I spent enough of my lower grades shackled to fellow pupils of enormously lower ability. Beside the stuff noted above about study skills — we probably don’t want the bright kids sitting in the chair, listening to the twentieth repetition of a lesson that was perfectly clear the first time — if not perfectly clear three grades ago — and developing a smoldering hatred of the pupils of lower ability.
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My wife often rolls her eyes when I tell her that working in a group in school taught me that most people were far less educated than myself, and for best results, should be manipulated until they did things my way.
In retrospect, it’s probably a wonder I didn’t go into politics. :D
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There’s still time.
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DON’T SAY THAT TOO LOUD! My wife might be in the room, and I don’t want to start walking with a permanent limp. :D
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I should emphasize that students should be allowed to attempt the class, but the class itself shouldn’t be dumbed down for those who aren’t ready to hack it. If a given person wants to attempt AP English, regardless of how well they think they are prepared for it, they should be ready to study as hard as they need to (and to study extra hard, if they have good reason to believe they might not have the background for the class), and they should be prepared to drop the class if they can’t handle the material.
Our insistence to try to “mainstream” both the brilliant and the (sometimes severely) disabled together with the normal kids–heck, assuming there’s such a beast as a “normal kid”–and then segregate them solely based on age–does a great disservice for everyone involved.
I’m also not convinced that knowledge is as cumulative, or as linear, as our track systems make things out to be. While knowing both algebra and geometry would be very helpful going in to study calculus, I’m not convinced that it’s crucial to learn algebra before geometry, or vice versa; indeed, sometimes one child could pick up geometry easily, but be discouraged by algebra, and another discouraged by algebra but enjoy geometry–and both children might enjoy both subjects more intensely if they could just start out with the one they find more natural!
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Considering the fact that I know the school I went to switched which of the two (algebra and geometry) they taught first at least three times between the time my mother went there and the time I went there; you’re not the only one who isn’t convinced that it is crucial which one is taught first.
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Algebra is not in the same branch of mathematics as Geometry. Depending on which version of Geometry you are talking about, (Euclidean Proofs as a starter, or calculations of angles and geometric shapes), it is either an introduction to formal Logic, or else it is an extension of basic math, applied to the aforementioned geometric shapes. No Algebra involved, unless you extend to require such.
Trigonometry can extend directly from the computational Geometry, or it can fuse Geometry and Algebra, but Calculus requires learning Algebra first, and Geometry as well as Trigonometry assist along the way.
So yes, learning is cumulative, but some subjects branch out so that different branches can be learned in no particular order, because one does not precede the other, but rather both follow different paths from an earlier point.
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Some things are definitely sequential, but not everything. You are not going to fair well in a literature class if you have not learned to read. Once having learned to read whether you start with a course in English literature or American literature less so.
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Age segregation is just normalizing the skill levels, the same way we do it on the athletic fields. After all, aren’t all kids of a given age cohort pretty much the same height and weight?
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Consider, on the other hand, the effect of social promotion. A child who cannot comfortably read who gets promoted to a grade where they are handed a text book from which to learn will probably fail. A child who has not mastered the basic arithmetical functions is not going to do well when faced with Algebra.
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Then combine this with the fact that one student may have excelled at math, but was lousy at reading, and another excelled at reading but was lousy at math.
What are we to do with such anomalies? Hold them both back a year, where they’ll now find one subject incredibly boring, until they can master the other subject (which they may still find boring, because it’s taught the exact same way as before)? Or do we advance them a grade, and then have them struggle in the new grade?
Or do we dispense with the idea of grades altogether, and teach each child whatever they are ready to learn, when they are ready to learn it? (This is what one-room school-houses did, and what home-school parents do right now…)
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The obvious solution is to advance in grades by subject, so you’ll have kids in first grade math, sixth grade reading and fourth grade writing.
Heck, steal from the military tech schools– have a whole bunch of classes that are only a few weeks long. Pass one, graduate to the next. Fail twice, go back one. (multiple choice tests– you can, in theory, guess your way through; more commonly you just didn’t “get” some aspect of the prior class)
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+1
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Like in “Understood Betsy”. :-)
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The obvious solution is to advance in grades by subject…
There was a proposal to do try something like this at a grade school in our system which ultimately failed when they were faced with working out the logistics.
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Implementation is always a stone cold killer.
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Converting something is harder than building from the ground up; the “test and advance” model would probably work best in a charter school, with a good supply of computers, recorded lectures, etc and the teacher’s main job being a facilitator.
The major issue with converting to this system is that teachers have to actually know the subject. You can’t get by with reading out of the text book, you gotta KNOW what you’re doing. Most teachers that I had…didn’t. They knew broad strokes at best and could fake it, and knew “how to teach.”
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Education is the foundation of a strong society. A Republic only truly works when the citizenry is educated and has the tools to make an informed decision. Those that neglect their education leave themselves open to being controlled by others.
Josh’s 10 Principles of Education
1) Tests are to evaluate where the student is at! They are not a measure of how smart the student is!
Two types of testing.
• The first is a “test of progression,” and will be given periodically to the student to determine which subjects to focus on.
• The second is to test for “subject of study” level advancement and can be taken at anytime the student feels ready. Once you pass you move forward. Each “subject of study” is separate and will not hold the student back from advancing in another “subject of study.” Except where proficiency in one subject is need for another.
2) Everyone is different in learning style and in learning speed. Age and time limits will not be set in stone. Teachers will insure that students progress in there studies and do not neglect areas of disinterest.
3) Focus on how to learn vs what to learn.
• Peter M. Senge
• Edward de Bono
• Richards Heuer
• Mind Mapping
• Mind Tools site.
4) Basics…. Basics…. Basics…. and emphasize organizational & research skills. You don’t have to memorize everything if you know where to find the info you need. Keep It Simple Silly (KISS) Teachers will keep this in mind and not over complicate the subjects being taught.
5) Emphasize how the “subjects of study” are relevant and used in the real world; also, teach the students that there is a reason, a “Why,” a method to the madness if you will.
6) Students need to be given a strong understanding of Social and Life Skills. It does the student no good to know lots of facts and information if the student doesn’t have the social skills to productively interact with society or the life skills to take care of them selves.
7) A healthy lifestyle will be emphasized with stress management, meditation, nutrition and physical fitness.
8) The Goal of the School system should be to turn students into life long learners: Not to make them think that when they graduate that they will have learned everything and no longer need to study.
9) Parents and guardians should have a leading roll in their children’s education, so schools should be set up as a learning hub, and organized like a Community/ Learning Center, with many different clubs, sports and physical activities; along with a Mentor/Tutor program. Teachers are there to provide structure and to point students toward answers, not to hold their hands and just tell them the answer. Along with a formal class room setting there should be support for homeschooling and access to physical labs and shop areas. To support all this learning software and tech (can be developed) for keep track of progress; also, down-loadable text books. This way the student can learn at anytime and from any situation.
10) NO CENSORSHIP and NO ADVOCACY!!! Students will be given the tools to evaluate and decided for themselves. Teachers will not support or condemn any position, but deal in facts. Teachers will give both sides of any position, the good and bad. Students will have freedom of choice, and the ability to support or refute all forms of thought and be able to debate both sides of any position. Students will then be able to deal with new ideas by them selves and not have to rely on someone to tell them what is right and wrong.
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There is allegedly some fairly strong proof that this isn’t true.
Or at least no actual evidence that it is, other than assertion by some people.
http://www.danielwillingham.com/learning-styles-faq.html
Note that this applies mainly to the ~80 percent called “normal”. There are people with various structural or emotional issues that might display a bias.
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William,
Ability vs style. I Don’t care.
http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/remmer/validity-of-learning-styles-remi-tremblay-and-p
The point is kids are individuals and we need to evaluating them as such.
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Fair enough.
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I don’t believe #7 is the purview of the schools, otherwise no major problems with what you propose. Mind you, I don’t think it will ever happen, WAY to much organization needed, which means that there will have to be people doing the organization which is likely to devolve into a fight for power, and back into a bureaucracy like our current system within a generation.
Still it isn’t a bad goal to work towards.
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Sorry, hit reply to soon.
Still it isn’t a bad goal to work towards, IF you think taxpayers should pay for public education.
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While I am not sure how far I would go, I do think that in the interest of society seeing that everyone learn a basic level of reading, writing, arithmetic, science and civics. I am also convinced that there are parents who either won’t or can’t teach their children.
I tutored at risk kindergarteners for a few years. I foundly recall a lovely little girl who always arrived at kindergarten clean, neat and eager to lean. It was obvious she was loved by her mother and that she was being encouraged to do well in school. Yet she did not know those things that most of us expect a kindergartner to know, like her alphabet. One day I realized that the reason her mother did not read to her is that she had never learned, and that her mother was desperate that her daughter would not have the same fate.
(Yeah, I know, hard cases make bad law.)
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Bearcat,
It’s my principles of Eduction list. Schools, if a community decides it needs them, are only a small part of a larger whole.
Not everything one needed to learn in life, to be a well rounded individual, is mental. Eg., a lot, if not all, of your life / survival skills are that way. You have to have a physical capacity to beable to perform the task required. Knowing how to do something and being able to do it I think are equaly important (IMO).
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Remember when school included a health class? (No, sit down you, I don’t mean that one where they separated the boy and girls.) I have no problem with teaching the basics of public health. In fact I think that hygiene — such as washing of hands, not coughing, spitting or sneezing on people — should be presented and required. Nor do I think that presenting the rudiments of nutrition in Science, in Health and in Home Ec classes would be amiss.
(I know I am weird, I would have both boy and girls should take Home Ec, Shop and Mechanics — but I gather there are now insurance issues with those classes.)
I also definitely advocate for some physical activities to be included, simply because all indications are that it is hard for a growing body to sit still and pay attention non-stop. You want to eliminate a substantial amount of wiggling in the seats, give the wiggles a constructive outlet.
Stress management? Well it depends in what regard and how. If it is how to manage academic matters that is appropriate. One of the best science teachers I knew had developed a check list breaking down all the steps required in the process of doing research papers. It was set up so it could be adapted to other subject matter as well as allowing you to set up your schedule within the overall time allotted and amount of work to be done. Lovely thing. Everyone who got this and paid attention to it was certainly less stressed about the process of doing papers after that.
Meditation? Ah, nope, there are too many problems with that.
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CACS,
Can you expand on this, “Meditation? Ah, nope, there are too many problems with that.”?
Problems?
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With meditation you move into the issue of religion. Really. For those who do it as a religious practice to remove the religious aspect might be a blasphemy.
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CACS,
I can’t think of one that would.
But on an other note you can’t actually stop people believe the things they do. This is why we have principle #10.
Meditation are the skills and techniques for focusing ones mind. What one uses and does with the skills and abilities is the students business.
It’s is not the schools job to censor or advocate how knowlwdge is used.
Let’s not forget principle #,… “9) Parents and guardians should have a leading roll in their children’s education,…” Parents and Guardians can advocate and censor all they want and have the final say. This is the answer to your porn book in the school scenario.
As a Buddhist myself I could careless what you used the techniques of meditation for. You want to use them for some focused preyer time to become closer to God or if you just want to take all spirituality out of it and just use the techniques as mind focus training à la our favorite Vulcans, either way more power to you.
This is the spirit or under lying principle be hind number 10, “You can not protect kids from the world forever, eventually they will come a cross this stuff on their own and hopefully they will have the skill to deal with it on their own.”
Antifragility!!! is the goal we should be shooting for (IMO).
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She’s right on how some would view it. I don’t see any reason they can’t coordinate with each other, myself, but I recently read an article on how meditation is anti-Christian.
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Wayne,
Sounds like a personal problem to me.
How do they explain what monks do in those pesky monasteries.
If it is a real problem then their kids don’t have to take that class and it is still available to those whom want to take the instruction. Or their is homeschooling. Which is suport also.
Because they don’t agree then no one should. This mentality annoys to no ended.
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How do they explain what monks do in those pesky monasteries.
Problem– equivocation.
That type of meditation isn’t taught– the type of meditating they’re discussing is from (usually badly mangled, highly pop, PC selected) Eastern religions.
As they are using the word, the monks pray, and they wouldn’t say that meditating on the one-ness with the energy of the cosmos is praying. Only Christians pray. (The question of if Jews and Muslims pray depends on the context and what answer is most useful, for example Muslims bowing to Mecca several times a day doesn’t “count;” the dreidel isn’t even vaguely religious, unlike a Christmas tree, etc)
Ironically, they behave as if the only real religion is Christianity, and all religions are measured in proportion to it. The only oddity is that they target “real” religions for scorn, rather than respect.
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Hmmm….
http://www.wccm.org/content/what-meditation
So we can’t have a class on all the different traditions of meditation from around the World because someone might be offended?
Are there any other subjects we should stay away from? Should we start a list. Maybe we should get a few SJW’s to consult on it. They’re pretty good at this exclusionary and right thinking stuff. Once we start down this road where are we going to stop.
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So we can’t have a class on all the different traditions of meditation from around the World because someone might be offended?
No. As I explained, when they say “a class on meditation,” they mean a very specific, narrow subject. Talking about something only vaguely related, changing it to a class about that much broader subject, and trying to act like it’s the same thing is not helpful.
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I never defined what I meant by meditation. You and others narrowly defined it to the eastern tradition then built their arguments against that. I point out it doesn’t have to be that narrow of a focus and can be more inclusive, but that still not good enough. I can’t make everyone happy so I’m not going to even try. They are free to move on and take another class.
But to say others that want to take the class can’t, that “Problematic” that’s petty.
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You know what? I’m not going to go along with you picking arguments.
I’ve been sufficiently clear, and it’s not my job to make you like the information.
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Foxfier,
It’s a discussion descending from his list. It’s not terribly neighborly to accuse him of argumentativeness for defending his position against a narrow definition of his intent.
It’s not really his job to accept your terms because you find them favorable.
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He asked a question; I answered it, elaborating on what several other people were telling him, and he decided to take issue with the explanation, while ignoring large chunks of it.
That is wasting my time.
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I believe I was careful not to specify a school of religion. Even within Buddhism there are disagreements on the proper object of focus in meditation. (I practiced Buddhism for twelve years…although I no longer do.)
The problem arises in teaching anyone’s particular religious practice, or any practice that runs counter to anyone’s practice (or lack of practice) in a state run school.
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We do not have a class that teaches religious practices because of the First Amendment.
Court precedence says that history and literature can be legally taught. Practices cannot. Although many systems now avoid history and literature in fear of challenge from those who argue for freedom from religion.
This argument long proceeds the rise of SJWs.
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I would kibitz here. I have read the Tanak — the Old Testament — and there are many who prayed and many of their prayers recorded.
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You expect these idiots to be sensible? They haven’t even figured out that the Dali Lama is a lot closer to the Pope in theology than they’d be comfortable with.
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So open it to “quiet time of your choice”. I don’t really care – I was just verifying the point.
It would still be more religion-friendly than what they have now.
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I can actually answer some of this though it’s second hand from my mother. My folks grew up in Korea in the 50s and 60s and so had a lot of interaction with the meditation, as practiced by the Buddhists as well as the Shamanic practices. /background
A good many of the ‘meditation exercises’ that she and I have seen in this country are actually poorly relayed Buddhist prayers and practices rather than simply the exercises in concentration. It’s not universal, but given they’re often transliterated rather than translated, it is hard for people unfamiliar with Buddhism to tell what is a mental exercise and what is actually part of someone else’s religion.
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I suspect the one who wrote the article you mention has the definition of meditation is quite narrowly defined.
There is always someone who will take a stand and argue something / anything. Quiet a few of them even believe what it is that they argue. There will also be those who, when they read such articles, believe them. Sigh
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That you can’t think of one does not make it so.
Meditation (from thefreedictionary.com)
Meditation is generally viewed as a religious practice. I know many people devout people who believe that to focus on anything other than the deity in meditation would be to draw your attention away from the only proper focus in meditation, the one true deity, and therefore such practice would constitute a blasphemy – an anathema — to them. While you might not believe this they do and they have every right to believe it.
Therefore, as I do not think that you could teach their view of meditation without imposing on those who do not believe as they do, and as you cannot teach it otherwise without imposing on their freedom of religion, it would be better not to teach it at all.
The objection is not about the exposure to other ideas, it is about teaching the practice.
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I fall on Josh’s side on this one. There are any number of practices in our large, heterogeneous society with religious connotations. Yet, millions of people exercise those practices daily without reference to the religious aspect. Those who hold those practices as tenets of their religion freely practice them with religious devotion, those who do not — don’t.
While many people associate meditation with religious practice, many do not. That we might need to remove something from a curriculum because someone might find offense disturbs me. I certainly have no issues with accommodation (large, heterogeneous society), with alternative practices aimed at the same goal or instruction that illuminates differing viewpoints as appropriate. But elimination? Because a minority might take offense? Or, worse in my mind, because it might be complicated to handle? I find that to be a religious imposition on the broader society.
In another sense, let’s remember Josh is a dedicated Anarcho-Capitalist. It seems unlikely (in the extreme) that he’s proposing an educational mandate backed by the .gov. He’s listed the principles of education that he finds important, vital even, for a society. In that context, I’m not sure the complications of the religious associations with meditation are a compelling argument.
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You will find that just about every atheist doesn’t believe in one religion, in reality. if you dig through their arguments.
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“We do not have a class that teaches religious practices because of the First Amendment.”
I’ve heard of a teacher that required the children to play-act being Muslims, keeping diaries to track their conformity, and to make a Hindi idol and “worship” — but when a parent asked for an equivalent Christian program, said it was a violation of the separation of church and state.
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That this occurs, and I , too, have read reports that it does, does not mean it is legal. It means that we have an inconsistent and prejudicially selective enforcement of the law.
I wonder what the teachers would have said if these exercises were objected to by Muslims and Hindus as a making light of their true worship?
And does anyone notice that the implication of these teachers and the schools reaction is that Muslim and Hindu practices are not religious — as teaching them do not violate the separation of church and state?
Anyway: as most of us know the separation of church and state is not in the First Amendment, rather the First Amendment protects the free exercise of religion from intrusion by the Federal government, and the Fourteenth Amendment extends the prohibition of interference to state and local governments.
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But but… We have a Living Constitution!!!!!! [Sarcastic Grin]
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The problem with item 10 is that, rather like the notion of an unbiased media, it is impossible. One cannot teach without having a point of view. Advocacy should be in the open, up for debate by parents, and grounds for termination where it violates school policy. And there should be enough different schools with enough different policies to accommodate the beliefs of most parents.
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10) NO CENSORSHIP and NO ADVOCACY!!! Students will be given the tools to evaluate and decided for themselves. Teachers will not support or condemn any position, but deal in facts. Teachers will give both sides of any position, the good and bad. Students will have freedom of choice, and the ability to support or refute all forms of thought and be able to debate both sides of any position. Students will then be able to deal with new ideas by them selves and not have to rely on someone to tell them what is right and wrong.”
cspschofield,
It’s a principle and an ideal to strive for. When teachers just tell students what something means or is, then that teacher is robbing them of the ability to think and figure things out for themselves. And later in life when no one is around to give them the amswer they do not have the skills to come up with one on their own. Plus, often times we state are opinions as if they were facts, and I believe teachers in a public system need to work on minimizing this. Eg. I believe Communism is a crap system. vs Communism is a crap system. Students then learn these opinions as if they were facts.
Every one having biases doesn’t mean can’t, or shouldn’t, be able to identify them and deal with them in a proactive way.
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I’ve had students ask for my opinion on socialism and communism when I was helping them review 20th century history. I always say that based on my observations and in my opinion, the free market economy and a system of individual liberties are better for the individual and society. As much as I’d like to undermine everything in their text book, I’m not the “regular” teacher and I don’t want them flunking because they quote what I told them. However, I know at least a few have written down what I say and made notes of the books I suggest.
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:)
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When the parents in our county protested a course using a book that not one of the local news-outlet could find a passage they could freely present people counter-argued they were attempting to censor the book. The issue was requiring an x-rated book to be read in the 9th grade International Baccalaureate English class. (If you opted not to take IB English in 9th you were out of the IB program for good.) In only a couple of the parents wanted the book banned from school libraries and no one was proposing that the public libraries or the book stores not carry the book. The objection was requiring it to be read. Not requiring is not the same as censoring.
The funny thing, the no one objected to the fact the book that the author also was openly advocating for socialism…
Here you have another problem, a catch 22. To have no advocacy you would have to censor. And what you choose to censor will in some way be an act of advocacy.
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I’m tired going to bed. I’ll try and address this latter.
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Everyone! Thanks for the feed back.
It’s my list, and as such principle 7 now reads: 7) A healthy lifestyle will be emphasized with stress management, mental mind training, nutrition and physical fitness.
Problem solved or is it ?
This list is how I think schools should be set up and run to actually teach kids how to live and thrive in this world.
What meditation is and isn’t. Do we tailor or thoughts and what is taught on an individual or groups understanding of what something is, or do we try to look at the whole of it.
psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/mindfulness-meditation-may-improve-decision-making.html
psychologytoday.com/blog/use-your-mind-change-your-brain/201305/is-your-brain-meditation
– From:
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/_/dict.aspx?rd=1&word=meditation
I’m going to keep, “7) A healthy lifestyle will be emphasized with stress management, meditation, nutrition and physical fitness.” as is. Why, because people that live their life with preconceived notions of what is and isn’t true are never going to be happy. And, you don’t have to be a practicing anything to practice and get the benefits of a well ordered mind.
If you can’t be exposed to other forms of thought, ideas and ideologies then your faith, or understand is weak, and I’m not going to tip toe around your delicate sensibilities.
IMO school and learning; i.e., ones education should be about exploring and seeing what the world has to offer. But people on both sides just want to turn it into passing on ones own ideology unexamined.
If our beliefs as individuals and as a whole are correct then they can stand up to scrutiny, we demand this of the Left (SJW being the most egregious offenders), and we should demand this of ourselves.
Sorry for the long pause! I was starting to respond emotional vs with reason, and had to stop and order my thoughts.
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On meditation, I think the point you missed is this: many of the resources currently available in this country on meditation (especially for those otherwise unfamiliar with it) are not techniques independent of Buddhist or other far eastern religious rituals and ceremonies or their new age manglings, but incorporate them often without realizing they have done so.
Personally I have no issues with the concentration techniques if they are presented as such and not incorporating the religious specifics, not because I think my faith can’t stand up to tests, but because it would be disrespectful to recite a Buddhist prayer (as an example), especially a badly transliterated one, when I am not a Buddhist and am trying to learn a technique rather than offer a genuine act of faith.
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Wyrdbard,
It’s not that I missed the point it’s that I don’t find it to be true… any more.
A lot of the new age stuff has tainted people perception.
There is now a lot of independent studies and hard science on mindfulness and mediation and how it effects the brain.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=mindfulness+science+and+practice&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=V-FSVIrlB4KbgwTl1YHoDg&ved=0CBkQgQMwAA
To the second part of your comment Ok. You do that no one here is forcing you to take Monistic Vows or become a Buddhist Monk. There are a lot of Psychology and Psychiatric text on mindfulness and it’s benefits.
I’m unapologetically American. I see no problem in “culturally appropriating” the best of other cultures and incorporating it into myself.… Melting Pot and all that.
If they want to get offend, that is their problem, not mine.
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The research is done on those who willingly choose to follow the practices. Those who take it on with trepidation would likely not be the same.
Some things exceeds should governments authority even if it is for the people own good. And certainly within our present system it is not within the governments authority — even if the wife of the present POTUS thinks she should teach us all how to eat.
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Dang … late night for me: some things should exceed…
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CACS,
Again this is my list of how I think Education could or should be handled.
At not point on the list is there and we will force everyone to take all the classes.
If you or your kid don’t want to take the class then don’t.
In an ideal world the government would get out of the education business and return it to the private sector where it belongs.
No advocacy and No censorship becomes easy when you don ‘t have a power structure that dictates what people can a can not learn.
Free-Markets work.
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In an ideal world the government would get out of the education business and return it to the private sector where it belongs.
On this I can agree.
But, sadly, I don’t think it is ever going to happen.
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We may be talking past each other again, but I’m going to try and clarify once more.
The average layman is not going to get from ‘meditation’ to ‘mindfulness’ readily, and under the word ‘meditation’ New Age and Buddhist religious rituals are pervasive, even in as simple things as Yoga videos (If my mother can pin point the ‘meditation’ at the end of the video as the same thing the buddist monks were doing when she was growing up in Korea, their equivalent of morning and evening devotional the odds of it being secular are slim). Currently the Buddhist texts have a heavy leavening of Tao and Confucius in them, though the Indian sets are becoming more available in this country. This is a very common background, currently, in this country in regards to meditation. This is at least one of the things parents are likely to be approaching you about in regards to your proposed educational system.
While this is an exercise in theory, you’re right no one’s objections are your problem. Should you ever desire to approach this from a practical stand point those objections become your problem as you have proposed a system that extends beyond how you educate your own children, which means persuading others that your way is, indeed, what should be pursued. This means addressing their concerns about your way, including meditation. Your links have been to theory, not to a practical way a class could be taught that would not require participating in a religion against the will of the parent. I can think of several ways to do so, but you, yourself, have not presented one other than ‘well they can withdraw from the class’, which seems to contradict how important you think it is to the proposed curriculum. The articles you have given are good background for establishing a foundation different from the religious connotations, but they are incomplete for a discussion of teaching meditation, and addressing concerns.
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Wyrdbard,
“Your links have been to theory, not to a practical way a class could be taught that would not require participating in a religion against the will of the parent.”
We are talking past each other.
The parent is free to have their kid take the class or not. It is up to the parent to review the material and determine if it is appropriate for their child.
But this is a two way street. They themselves do not get to dictate to the rest of the class what is or is not going to be taught.
If the parent is so concerned about their kid doing or practicing another religion, they need to home school and lock their kid in the basement, because the kids when out of their sight are going to be exposed to things that the parent doesn’t agree with.
;)
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Quibble: There’s a difference between a kid choosing to follow another faith and a class going ‘We’re teaching this and it happens that you’re going to be doing Buddhist prayers this week, praying to Allah next week, observing all the Hindu rituals the week after that, and performing several shaministic rituals from the Korean traditions the week after that.’ Which is, in turn different from a class that goes ‘This week we are going to look at Buddhism and what it actually says, Next week we will be doing the same with Islam, then Hindu, and then the Shamanistic traditions from Korea.’ The format I’m objecting to is the first of the two.
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Wyrd ,
Agreed there is a difference.
And the point I was making is the first is only a problem if followed by, “And you have no choice you must do it.”
;)
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On occasion, reading history, you run across things like a rancher killing a man who called him a “cowboy.”
This horrifies current folks, because they think that yes, the man is a cowboy– not just that, he owned a ranch and had been riding around moving cows since he was a tiny baby.
They don’t know that the really old “cowboys” still living in the north west had to teach themselves to understand that people were using the word incorrectly.
A “cowboy” was a seasonal worker that you hired out of desperation to get your cows to market– if they couldn’t find someone to hire them, they were rustlers that year. Not infrequently, they hired on and then turned rustler.
A guy who works cows for a living was a hand, if you were trying for a generic term. My folks were born in the 50s, watched westerns as a child, and they still twitch a bit when people call them a “cowboy” if they’re tired.
The cattlemen killed someone that accused them of being a murderous thief that not only widowed women but left them in grinding poverty, with all the debts run up to get those cows to the point where they were stolen. At a time when a reputation meant a lot more, and such a rumor could ruin you just as surely as being targeted by these “cowboys.”
*****
There is currently a fad of “Christian Buddhism” going around– including “Catholic Buddhist” teenagers– rather like in the 80s or so, and once again various yoga is getting big. Part of the movement is that there’s a loud portion of “meditation instructors” who insist that Buddhism and various other religious meditation disciplines are philosophies, not religious at all.
Thus, there are going to be articles responding to this specific conversation to point out that yes, meditation is religious.
People jumping in to the conversation at that point to insist that those Christians are ignorant, because every Catholic that’s ever prayed a rosary has “meditated,” is just silly. It’s like the folks who still insist on using the word “gay” to mean “happy,” or who insist that anyone who would admit that they love a child is thus a “pedo-phile.” (Using the original meaning of the “philos” part.)
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Foxfier,
So, It’s our own definitions of how we use words that matter and no one else.
We do not need to try to understand how someone else is using language, and what their intent is.
So, I is ok for Muslims to kill people that use language that offends them, because it is our responsibility to know.
Communication is a two way street both parties how a responsibility to try communicate clearly and to figure out, understand, how the other is using language. To ask question and to clarify misunderstandings.
The rancher could have given a warning going, “Around these parts that is an insult, you might want to take it back.” Especially if the gent is a city slicker that might not know any better. This gives both parties a chance to clarify there intent.
Some people are going to be offended no matter what you do. And, I do not try to please them, because you can’t.
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So, It’s our own definitions of how we use words that matter and no one else.
No, and I did not say that could reasonably be taken to mean such a thing. You completely missed the point.
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Foxfier,
No! I did not miss the point.
How others are using the word does not change what I am doing or how I’m using the word. They can try to understand what I mean or not. They can be offended or not. They can join in or not. They are the one making demands of me.
They are the ones trying to dictate what can an can not be taught or thought. Not I. They want to be or are offended, so be It. I can not control them, nor do I want to try.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2014/11/02/we-free-men/
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How others are using the word does not change what I am doing or how I’m using the word.
This shows that yes, in fact, you did miss the point. Wildly.
Language isn’t about you. It’s about communication.
By refusing to figure out what they were trying to say, simply because that’s not what you mean when you say a thing, you’re refusing to communicate. You’re being Humptydumpty with the added issue of trying to apply it on others– even those who were doing it before you were born.
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Foxfier,
You must agree with my definitions and I get to discount yours is not communication. They do not want to take the time to understand my position then I do not have to validate theirs and I’m under no obligation to respect it either.
It ‘s not that I do not understand their position. It is that I reject that I must change what I’m doing because of it.
If they do not like what I am doing then do not have participate.
Respect and communication are a two way street. People do not get an automatic veto on what I doing because I might hurt their sensibilities.
If I’m not breaking your leg or picking your pocket, you do not get a say in what I’m doing.
“I will accept the rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
— Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
If you tell me that I should stop doing something because you find it offensive and I find what you say reasonable then I will stop. If not then I won’t. I do not have to automatically agree with you for communication or a dialog to occur.
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Josh–
having solidly beaten to death that you’re not getting the point, it’s over.
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Josh, I suggest you drop it. That others cannot dictate language must be a two way street. If you want to communicate you have to be open to what others have said. I am sorry that you do think you have been understood, but suggesting to others it is all their fault is unconstructive.
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CACS,
“If you want to communicate you have to be open to what others have said. I am sorry that you do think you have been understood, but suggesting to others it is all their fault is unconstructive.”
I am open. What I am not doing is agreeing that your position is the only valid one. You, Wyrdbard and Foxfier explained that meditation is problematic to certain people because it has religious connotations that might conflict with their religious beliefs. This is only a problem if I was trying to force everyone to participate and take the class. Your guys solution was to not have the class at all because it might offend someones sensibilities or religious beliefs.
My list is my list! You do not get to dictate what it means to me or tell me what my intent behind it was.
Even then I tried to make accommodations by explaining that you can teach meditation from a scientific and mental health perspective, but that wasn’t good enough.
You guys want to restrict the definition of meditation only to that of religious connotations. Fine, but I do not have to accept that or change what I am doing to conform to your beliefs.
How about those that want to take the class take it. Those that don’t, don’t.
I recognize that some might have a problem with almost anything that can be taught. But the solution is not to restrict the flow of information and what is taught, but to allow people the freedom to choose what is right for them.
I expect this restricting of thought to only that which is approved from the left and SJW crowd. It really annoys and depresses me when I get it from the right.
My list is how I think it should be done. and if anyone wants to come up with their own list they are free to do so.
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“I expect this restricting of thought to only that which is approved from the left and SJW crowd. It really annoys and depresses me when I get it from the right.”
Josh, that is because you ARE NOT LISTENING to what they have said. Your argument that people are not required to participate does not invalidate the fact that this represents a government endorsement of a practice which can be reasonably construed to be religious. Your defense that it is not necessarily religious fails to rebut the critical issue.
I STRONGLY recommend you stand down and give this issue a few days to rest.
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RES,
I’m an Anarcho-Capitalist do you think if I set up a school that Government is going to be involved. This is my list “Am I the f’n Government?”
If I set up a school for my community and these are the principles under which I would do it. Communities can set up schools without using government funding. By having community schools where you pay for the classes you take, not through property taxes and bonds. Think Community College but for K-12.
Again this is My List of My Principles, and other than taking the class or not, tell me again why you should get a say in what classes are offered or not?
Everyone is so worried about what others are doing when they should be worrying about what they are doing. Atheists & Theists needed to stay out of education and stop telling people what they can and can not learn or hear or think about (IMO).
You guys are making some assumptions and then using them to set up the parameters of how my list would be implemented and declaring one part of it unfeasible.
You are correct in that it would be impossible to have a class on meditation in our current public school system but what does that have to do with my list or how I would set up a school to serve the community.
If I had made that case you could have the that class in the public school system, as it now stands with the Government we have now, adhere to these principles, then you guy would have valid points. My lust was just a statement of my guiding principles for how education should be done. I did not make any assertions that it could be done under the current climate. I tried to correct some the mis-assumption about how I would implement my principles. And to restate why my position on meditation as a class stands. You guys were arguing against positions I never made.
Meditation as a class is only a problem under our current system because people feel that they are forced to pay for and have their kids take class that go against their beliefs. As you choose which class are taken and you pay for there should be no points of contention. If there still is then it is because they just want to dictate to others what is available to learn and think about.
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Atheists & Theists needed to stay out of education and stop telling people what they can and can not learn or hear or think about (IMO).
Just as you want to see education available that is shaped according to your own belief system Atheists & Theists want to educate their children according to their belief systems.
Which is why I support both home education and real school choice.
As to the rest:
It is not about what is or is not good enough for ME. Nor is it about MY definition of meditation.
There are people to whom meditation is a particular religious practice and teaching meditation from a scientific and mental health perspective would not be acceptable. To them the only proper object upon which to meditate is predicated by their religion. I know many people who hold this opinion.
Often what is taught in the name of meditation in this country is a misrepresentation and/or misinterpretation of eastern religious practices, even when it is supposedly striped of its religious elements. For many I know who follow those eastern practices this is seen as insulting.
Your list is yours. I found it interesting and posted a reaction to another’s person’s post regarding it. My observations and comments are just that: mine. This is a place of rough and tumble exchange, and when I post I expect that.
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CACS,
And that is fair. They are free to start their own school, homeschool or just take the classes within “my” school that conforms to their beliefs. What they do not get to do is tell me or others what class we can have or take.
They can be offended all they want. IMO a schools roll is to store knowledge and to provided it to those that want to learn it. Not to pick and choose what is correct or right think; which is the problem I see in our current Government run public school system.
“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
This why I find it problematic, because anytime anyone says, “[…]“This you may not read, this you must not know,”[…],” they are trying to control and manipulate you.
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Oh – my mistake. Coming in the context of an extended discussion of the societal importance of education, lacking ANY indication you were speaking about the Ayn Rand School for Excellence, I misunderstood your “Principles of Edumacation” as being of broader application than your own backside.
You might have said as much at the start.
I doubt anybody here much gives a dang what you do in private, it is only when we have to watch you doing it that it becomes an issue.
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Teacher knows best.
A teacher in fourth grade suggested to my father that I was an idiot savant. She told him I would never know how many Supreme Court judges there are. He asked her how many congressmen there are. She could not tell him. I can name the present justices and, in most cases, who they replaced.
Sometimes what the teacher know ain’t necessarily so.
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Ah, but can you count them?
(I’m guessing that you can, but we need to know, just to make sure that the teacher was wrong, after all. ;-)
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(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9)
There are presently nine, although President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to take it to twelve.
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I never knew FDR tried to make it twelve, and have a knee jerk reaction to oppose anything he wanted. But I have idly wondered at times why we have 9 instead of 12 supreme court justices. While the odd number so there are no ties makes sense, what is the original reasoning behind nine?
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They wanted an odd number to prevent ties. I do not know why the odd number was nine. Probably in the Federalist Papers.
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The size of the Supreme Court is set by Congress.
It started at Six, went as high as Ten and is now set at Nine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States#Size_of_the_Court
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I had thought it was dictated by the number of circuits. Anyway it is set by an act of the Congress. Among things I learned while looking the subject up that I found interesting was that the Congress deliberately cut the number under Andrew Johnson to prevent him from appointing any justices. Another thing I found out was that ultimately President FDR’s plan would have allowed for up to 15 justices.
(Thanks for asking the question bearcat and thanks for the link Paul (see below). I enjoyed.)
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OK, as the thread went make that –> see above
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When I was young the school I attended got a new Principle who tried to pull the advanced form of “teacher knows best” (“I’m an education professional”) on parents. She hadn’t done her homework; the district drew the children of the faculty of three colleges and a teaching hospital, none of whom were amused by being considered “not education professionals”. The Principle didn’t last a year.
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I had to repeat 2nd grade (math and English–my teacher had a personal issue with my mother but at least the math was fair). Big into space and science. Reading constantly. But supposedly too stupid to complete second grade the first time. Then I was in “remedial” math through Junior High. And while I took the “college prep” courses in High School, through basic calculus, I still struggled with simple computation.
Turns out that I had a perceptual disorder characterized by reversals and the like. I’d see a “6” as a “9” or “32” as “23” or even “-” as “+” (a rotated “-” superimposed on the actual one). While I was never officially diagnosed with it, I discovered it when I was in the Air Force. I had to tune two radio receivers to the same frequency, only I’d just get dead air from one. I’d call my supervisor down thinking the radio was bad only to find that I’d mistuned one of the radios, swapped digits or read one upside down.
About the third time I realized what was going on.
In this case, just knowing what the problem was made a big difference and I’ve largely learned to cope since then.
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Yeah, that particular type of problem can be mitigated by knowing that it is happening. I’ll have to say that I’ve never heard of the rotate/superimpose thing before, though.
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I’m speculating as to the exact mechanism, but a very consistent error I would make is adding where I should be subtracting, or switching switching a negative number to positive (and always that direction, never the other).
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Yep. that’s me on the numbers. I didn’t realize what I was doing till I was in my thirties. The boys have the same issue, but I TOLD them what the problem was. once you know you can compensate. They always did well in math.
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At the beginning of my junior year of high school I took a math test where I had flipped the numbers. The teacher noticed and checked my computations which were correct given the flip — bless her she gave me partial credit for knowing how to do the problems correctly. She also helped me learn to pay attention to that as a possible issue going forward.
It wasn’t until after I crashed and burned in college — I failed a history mid term on spelling mistakes alone — that someone put it together and I was diagnosed as dyslexic.
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Presented without comment beyond that implicit in my editing of the piece:
Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns
By Valerie Strauss October 24
Do teachers really know what students go through? To find out, one teacher followed two students for two days and was amazed at what she found. Her report is in following post, which appeared on the blog of Grant Wiggins, the co-author of “Understanding by Design” and the author of “Educative Assessment” and numerous articles on education. A high school teacher for 14 years, he is now the president of Authentic Education, in Hopewell, New Jersey, which provides professional development and other services to schools aimed at improving student learning. You can read more about him and his work at the AE site.
[SNIP]
I have made a terrible mistake.
I waited 14 years to do something that I should have done my first year of teaching: shadow a student for a day. It was so eye-opening that I wish I could go back to every class of students I ever had right now and change a minimum of ten things – the layout, the lesson plan, the checks for understanding. Most of it!
This is the first year I am working in a school but not teaching my own classes; I am the High School Learning Coach, a new position for the school this year. My job is to work with teachers and administrators to improve student learning outcomes.
As part of getting my feet wet, my principal suggested I “be” a student for two days: I was to shadow and complete all the work of a 10th grade student on one day and to do the same for a 12th grade student on another day. My task was to do everything the student was supposed to do: if there was lecture or notes on the board, I copied them as fast I could into my notebook. If there was a Chemistry lab, I did it with my host student. If there was a test, I took it (I passed the Spanish one, but I am certain I failed the business one).
[SNIP]
Key Takeaway #1
Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.
[SNIP]
Key Takeaway #2
High school students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90 percent of their classes.
[SNIP]
… I don’t mean to imply critically that only the teachers droned on while students just sat and took notes. But still, hand in hand with takeaway #1 is this idea that most of the students’ day was spent passively absorbing information.
It was not just the sitting that was draining but that so much of the day was spent absorbing information but not often grappling with it.
I asked my tenth-grade host, Cindy, if she felt like she made important contributions to class or if, when she was absent, the class missed out on the benefit of her knowledge or contributions, and she laughed and said no.
[SNIP]
Key takeaway #3
You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.
I lost count of how many times we were told be quiet and pay attention. It’s normal to do so – teachers have a set amount of time and we need to use it wisely. But in shadowing, throughout the day, you start to feel sorry for the students who are told over and over again to pay attention because you understand part of what they are reacting to is sitting and listening all day. It’s really hard to do, and not something we ask adults to do day in and out.
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This then bleeds into society in celebrity worship and in people trying to get attention by being know-it-all loudmouths.
As someone who constantly gets accused of this, and the sibling accusation of “it must be nice to never be wrong,” or “why can’t you just give in some times?!?”, I think it should be noted that the type of know-it-all loudmouths that get supported are the ones saying stuff that promotes popular things without actual support for what is “known.”
The other kind get crucified for, say, pointing out that the UK murder rate is solved and closed murders, while the US murder rate is all suspected homicides. Or that points out there’s a difference between a dead victim and a dead attacker— they shouldn’t be counted as “one death” as if they’re equal.
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What I meant are the “poor me, discriminated against” type.
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In context it’s clear, I’m just well trained by the Twerps’ habit of equivocation where I can just SEE them going “you’re wrong!” and puffing up an example.
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So +1 death for the victims and -1 for the dead attackers? I’d be okay with that, we could end up with a negative murder rate one day. :)
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*grin* I would NOT mind keeping score that way, and I’d even call it a wash if two gang members kill each other while the dead one is trying to execute the other…..
I believe that the US rate is homicide, and that the murder rate is an entirely different number that counts only unlawful killings and unsolved ones. It’s been a while since I looked, though.
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One should give in sometimes, when the question doesn’t matter.
For example, “Sausage or Pepperoni”. No reason to restage the Alamo. Off to do the right thing (sausage), but hey, it’s pizza.
OTOH, there *are* lots of hills to die on, and most of them worth leaving someone else’s corpse on.
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Neither Sausage or Pepperoni for me. Canadian Bacon or Ham for me. [Big Grin]
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You’re a dragon — it is to be expected you will have peculiar tastes.
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Not Sausage, not Pepperoni, not Canadian Bacon or Ham. While I liked them all (although not necessarily on pizza) they don’t like me back. :-(
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Get a meat lovers, then you don’t have to choose. And if you get it from the right place it will have bacon to. :)
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Seriously speaking, Meat-Lovers Pizzas are my first choice but who’s being serious? [Grin]
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I generally go for pepperoni, but if I have to do vegetarian, then onion and jalapeno. That’s a *spicy* pizza!
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Out side of the no meat/fish/fowl issue I am pretty open as to what I will try. Onion and jalapeno is not a bad combination. I also like onion and hot banana peppers. Or roasted bell peppers. Or spinach with lots of garlic. A little bit of good olives and or caper can add a nice touch. But I have yet to meet broccoli on a pizza that I thought worked.
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Roebuck, perhaps?
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Ewww.
Proper pizza has cheese and tomato sauce and nothing else.
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Heretic!!!!!! [Very Big Kidding Grin]
I knew a guy who would eat the toppings of his pizza but leave the crust. [Smile]
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that would be me — low carb diet.
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Well, he never told us a reason. [Smile]
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I wish.
One has to put out the plain pizza last because otherwise the toppings lovers will eat up your pizza and then their own as well.
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True.
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Not this topping lover, the only reason I will eat your cheese pizza is because all the pizzas with toppings on them are gone, and I am still hungry.
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There’s a place on the south side of town that my daughter loves, “Incredible Pizza.” (Well, their Pizza isn’t so incredible as all that, but it’s an all you can eat buffet and it’s in combination with a pretty good game and activity arcade.) Since I’m on a low carb diet, really low, that’s exactly what I do–scrape the toppings off the pizza to eat and pitch (well my wife saves them as a treat for the dogs) the crusts. Oh, they have other stuff that I’ll also eat, but we’re talking pizza here. ;)
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No crust? Yechhh.
There was an advert some while back for a pizza claiming “take away our toppings, take away our cheese, take away our sauce and we still offer the best pizza on the market. It takes a lot of crust to make a claim like that.”
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When I was in high school, a buddy and I would each buy a large, stuffed-crust half-meat lover’s half-pepperoni lover’s, and down them during a couple of episodes of ST: TNG along with a couple of liters of coke.
I could still do that, but like they say, chili dogs always bark at midnight, and I’m a married man. :D
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And if the folks you’re eating with INSIST on Sausage, is it a hill to die on?
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As long as I get a pizza that I like, I don’t care what kind of pizza they get. [Big Dragon Grin]
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Anchovies. Robert and I always held out for anchovies. Made people mad at us…
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It depends, how much does it cost me?
If the last two times that they got what they wanted, the pizza ended the night with them being the only one that ate any except from desperation, yes.
I’ve been in way too many clubs or classes where half the pizza budget was spent to cater to people who just had to have their favorite pizza… which nobody else wanted. And yes, usually they’d eat at least a slice of the pizzas they insisted was unacceptable, and heaven forbid if you tried to group the various strange pizzas for half’n’halfs, or some other proportional representation of demand.
That’s actually caused a lot of places to not do parties because it’s simply too expensive.
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The question of sausage or pepperoni is supposed to be answered, “Yes”.
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We must be polite. “Yes, please.”
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Depends on the surroundings. Sometimes its’s “Oh Hells yeah”.
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*hides in corner with ham, pineapple, mushroom, and black olive pizza*
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Those aren’t bad, either, but I think pineapple adds too much sweetness to a pizza.
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Pineapple can work very well as part of a stir fry well seasoned with garlic, ginger and hot peppers.
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If you’re going to put ‘sweet’ on the pizza, go whole hog.
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Pepperoni is a sausage. The sausage question is properly: “Hot or mild?”
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Nitpicker. When addressing the topic of pizza toppings, sausage and pepperoni are different foods, despite their formulaic relationship.
Then again, I’m also not a proper carnivore, as I think some veggies, such as bell pepper, onion, fresh tomatoes, and black olives, as well as mushrooms, belong on a proper pizza.
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/amen, especially if the next question is “Salami?”
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Thing is that I don’t bother saying anything unless I am VERY sure they’re wrong, and it matters. (That’s what the real problem is– I’m a “know it all” because I always offer facts to support what I’m saying when I think it’s important enough to speak up, because I really, really hate confrontation.)
Also, quite obviously, they could just as easily “give in” if they think it’s too petty to argue about.
It’s kinda like that joke about how you never hear a politician say “in this time of crisis, we must all pull together– so I am dropping all my opposition to the policies of my opponent and am going to throw myself full body into what he thinks is the right solution until we get out of this.”
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I have a relative who gets in a snit about my always wanting my own way. That is, she never bothers to notice when I don’t complain.
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*Sigh* I have several people (mostly my family) who are that way with me. They also never remember when I ask them for things I know that my knowledge is deficient on.
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The SJWs have a precocious sense of their centrality. It always tickles me to hear (for example) far Left union activists denounce Scott Walker as “divisive” for wanting to stop their looting of the state treasury. Or as when, here in NC, Kay Hagan denounces Thom Tillis for wanting to deny the baby killing factories of Planned Parenthood access to the State till.
Such unreasonable people insisting we “be reasonable, do it my way.”
I always envision the street punk complaining that he was the real victim; if the murdered guy had just handed over his wallet and cell phone as demanded there would have been no trouble.
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Strangely, only one of the people I mention could come close to the definition of Social Justice Warrior.
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“I always envision the street punk complaining that he was the real victim; if the murdered guy had just handed over his wallet and cell phone as demanded there would have been no trouble.”
Yes.
that is not a joke.
Not long ago, a murderer entered my room in the prison shortly after his arrest to seek a prescription for the methadone to which he was addicted. I told him that I would prescribe a reducing dose, and that within a relatively short time my prescription would cease. I would not prescribe a maintenance dose for a man with a life sentence.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s just my luck to be here on this charge.”
Luck? He had already served a dozen prison sentences, many of them for violence, and on the night in question had carried a knife with him, which he must have known from experience that he was inclined to use. But it was the victim of the stabbing who was the real author of the killer’s action: if he hadn’t been there, he wouldn’t have been stabbed.
http://www.city-journal.org/story.php?id=1371
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…if the murdered guy had just handed over his wallet and cell phone as demanded there would have been no trouble…
Yes, there are some people who will not take responsibility for the negative effects of their actions. Daddy, when he was in the DAs office, dealth with people who would make that very argument — except for the cell phone bit.
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People don’t tend to notice when you don’t do something unless it is seen as a failure to do something that they wanted.
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Poking at it some more– because doing trash doesn’t take much brain power– and I realized that I do actually refuse to fight pretty often– a variation of saying “it’s not worth fighting over.” And then I don’t.
I just don’t insult the person who spoke up by effectively saying “it’s not worth fighting over, so shut up and agree with me already.” Obviously, if they said something they thought it was important enough to argue the disagreement about, and thus aren’t going to fall into line just because I repeat that I don’t agree with them.
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Teacher knows best.
Everything, EVERYTHING from “we belong to the government” to “violence never solved anything” is predicated on this idea that there is someone all-knowing and benevolent watching our every move and rewarding the just and punishing the unjust.
Hmm. Me, I learned that there is someone all knowing and malevolent who never bother to watch our every move — that’s dull — and rewarding their favorites and punishing me for being the victim of injustice or expecting them to do their duty.
I’ve notice the effect for authority figures
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To complete:
I’ve notice the effect for authority figures in my fiction. Except for occasional plot devices.
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Teacher DOES know best; see Sarah’s blog regarding the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Leftists simply don’t learn about them. As Reagan said, “…it’s that there’s so much of what they know simply isn’t true.” Forgive me butchering the quote, I’m writing this in class. ;)
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Funny how the very same people who talk about genetic diversity, about ethnic diversity, and about “cultural” diversity (at least so long as it’s the right culture that you’re being diverse in), are so dead set against educational diversity.
I’m not so worried about it. I look back on some of the uh, stuff (yeah, that’s the word) taught back in school (mountains are formed because the Earth has cooled and, in cooling, shrank because hot things expand and cool things contract, and the shrinking caused the surface to wrinkle–this quite a few years after plate tectonics were understood) and yet somehow I managed to get a degree in physics and go into Atomic Force Microscopy as my day job.
Teach kids to love learning and be enthusiastic about discovering the world around them and the rest will pretty much take care of itself.
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Modern pedagogy believes something similar: Teach kids not to love learning or be enthusiastic about discovering the world around them and the rest will pretty much take care of itself.
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“(mountains are formed because the Earth has cooled and, in cooling, shrank because hot things expand and cool things contract”
So why does lava always come out of the tops of mountains instead of in the bottom of valleys?
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Vents are out the side, eruptions are out the top. Or so the media seem to think. And if it’s a rolling red and black cloud, you’d better have jam in your pockets, because you’re fixin’ to be toast.
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Just because: I gather that the rate of the flow from Kilauea has pick up speed and gone from 10 yards an hour to 15 – 20 yards an hour. Relentless it may be, but I’d call it more of an ooze than a flow.
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It’s more the ones with large clouds of burning ash you want to avoid. Neue Ardants are NOT Your friend… and if you are too close you might not even see them coming in time to kiss it good bye. Moving at several hundred miles per hour and reaching temperatures of ‘it doesn’t matter, you’re fried’ lead time is rather important. You’re not out running that thing without it.
Side note, the description of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah matches pretty well with a pyroclastic eruption. If you’ve got barely enough lead time to flee don’t look back, the incendiary cloud will get you.
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Of volcanos I know a little.
As a child I was fascinated by the articles in the National Geographic about Pompeii. The gas and ash were what proved fatal there. I recall watching the various films of Mount St. Helens grand eruption, again the incredible ash cloud was the primary source of destruction.
The Daughter’s first declared professional intent was to become a vulcanologist. Do you know how much knowledge one eager little mind can collect if a subject catches their fancy? She worked her way through just about every book she could read at the library on the subject, much to the chagrin of the librarians. (Imagine a child barely as tall as the check out desk lugging adult books to the counter.) She watched all the programming she could find on The Learning Channel (back when it was devoted to learning). She planned that she and I would to move to the Bay of Naples. This later became modified to a chemist studying the poisonous gases in the fields of Solfatara. (This all was before she developed her love for Japan…)
Oh the memories … :-)
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I can see how one could lead to the other. (And vice-versa.)
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because hot things expand and cool things contract
I had not initially commented on this, but what about H2O?
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It’s an odd-ball — and only at freezing.
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It’s a very rare exception, too.
Although, I wonder about CO2 when it’s in a high enough pressure system to liquefy it…
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Odd-ball or not it occupies a major percentage of the surface and has much to do with how it has been shaped and reshaped.
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Still, it has nothing to do with the creation of mountains, only the erosion of them.
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Question: If a retreating glacier cuts deep enough into the surface of the would you call that the resulting changes the creation of valleys or the creation of mountains?
(And is the zebra…? ;-) Yes, I know I’m being silly.)
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The result would be land lower than you started with. And it only cuts as it flows. And it only flows because of a gravity gradient–form high to low. You need something to create the “high points” for it to flow from and cut in the first place.
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I vaguely recall learning that some of the surface can be made of harder material than others. Therefore when the glacier retreated it did not always leave a level plain.
Then again this side discussion started with an example of something being taught that was not only not so, it was known to be incorrect at the time.
Note: The Daughter had a brand new just published textbook in Social Studies. It had a map of Europe which showed Czechoslovakia, a country that no longer existed. The Daughter, stubborn as ever, told the teacher as much. Fortunately this teacher used it for a teaching moment. The map was correct when the book had gone to print, but the world changes.
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In my native Connecticut, it’s a lot easier to go north and south than east and west. That’s because the glaciers (note the plural) went north and south.
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:-)
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Oooh, those are fun– like when the new teacher pulled down the map and found out it still had the USSR on it, and none of her class knew what the heck that was, or when some big politician came to the county seat and they found out that their ginormous flag was from a few states ago. (The bank loaned them theirs, since it flew every day on the other side of town.)
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Diversity WILL be required if we are to succeed. And it’s not ‘all’ education. You also need people that actually know how to build/repair things. Everyone looks down on ‘service’ trades until the A/C breaks, or the plumbing backs up, but you immediately call ‘someone’ to come fix it… Supply and demand drives the price of service, and expecting the prices to go down is nuts. If there aren’t enough of those ‘service’ people to go around, guess what…
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But, but, that’s not the right KIND of diversity! You know, having one of each shade of brown in a position ending in O (CEO, CFO, CDO, EIEIO) on the company or university brochure. That’s real diversity, not this “people with the ability to do different useful tasks” foolishness.
Aaaannd I’m going to go wash my hands after channeling the SJW.
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You forgot CDO,
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oop, n/m, cant delete
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OCD, with the letters in right order……
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C4C
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Not what to learn , but how to learn.
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This is off topic. But being in Colorado, I thought yo might like this. I wanted to email it, but could not find a contact.
http://www.examiner.com/article/armed-american-radio-premieres-hickenlooper-blues
Enjoy.
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“Indoor plumbing was hit or miss and the arrangement we had, with the full bathroom just outside the backdoor was about average, both because thick stone walls were hard to pierce for new plumbing and because people raised on outhouses found the bathroom a “dirty” thing to have indoors.”
Reminds me of the old joke about how city people are weird because they eat outside and use the bathroom inside.
My father’s folks lived on the highway and got a telephone before World War I ended; my grandmother (born in 1911) tells me that she remembered someone calling to tell them that the war was over. My mother’s family lived off the highway three miles or so (and three roads) back didn’t get their telephones until after WWII. I don’t know about electricity (and thus electric water pumps and running water); post WWII I’m pretty sure. One of my aunts got married at the church in the ’50s, and you can see the new wires for wall sconces hanging in the back of the picture.
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I overheard a professor and one of the hippier grad students opining that the REA was one of the worst things to happen because without it, all the farms would use wind and solar power and be energy independent.
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I’m glad I wasn’t drinking anything when I read that.
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So, the rural population would have, in this no REA reality, have just done without electricity until they could buy solar cells in the 1980s??? Hogwash! (Wind? How do you store it for calm days?) Admittedly, the energy independent part sounds nice.
The richer farmers (for themselves and their tenants; then the other farmers when the prices came down) would have bought internal combustion generators in larger numbers and larger sizes than people did in the middle and later part of the 20th century (for back-up when ice storms or hurricanes hit; my uncle had one that ran off the power take off–the shaft that you attach your bush hog shaft to–of his tractor). People still do that in fact; I saw a This Old House episode where they were doing a propane powered backup generator for a family. (And a cousin who farms put in a 20 kW unit a couple of years ago.) Electricity still would have come, just slower and different. The farmers closer to towns with their own electric plant or companies would have become customers of those utilities to a greater degree than they did.
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The Amish in Pennsylvania work with generators to run the necessary equipment to meet the laws on handling dairy products for market. If wind and solar would do the job they would have adopted it by now.
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TXRed | October 29, 2014 at 11:25 am | Reply
I overheard a professor and one of the hippier grad students opining that the REA was one of the worst things to happen because without it, all the farms would use wind and solar power and be energy independent.
Here in Texas, the farms started replacing windmills with electric pumps just as soon as they could. Not really sure why, but they sure did.
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Is it time to start singing “Kodachrome” or just time to call it a night?
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Bwa ha ha ha haaa!
“Yo, principal! Do you have your own petard, or would you like us to use this one?” :D
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