Our children are 4, 6, and 7. There’s no credits for them. 
And they’d STILL do a better job…
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Add them together and you could potentially have a responsible 17-year old.
I think that crew together adds up to more than a responsible 17 year old. Even a responsible 17 year old is usually on only 65-75% of the time. With the toddler plus wrecking crew you have a pretty good chance one of them will be paying attention at any particular time.
They don’t make 17 year olds like they used to. I think a 17 year old from even 40 years ago would be shocked at the ignorance and lack of motivation of an average 17 year old today.
Have to agree there. You should see the looks of shock when I tell people I’ve been on my own off and on from the time I was twelve and completely when I was fifteen. It wasn’t easy, but my mom had taught me enough to make it by then. She started teaching me how to cook when I was seven or eight, and how to balance a checkbook around age ten. I made my first complete Thanksgiving dinner (turkey, corn, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce and two kinds of pie) from scratch when I was fifteen. I graduated from high school with a 3.76 GPA and was accepted to UC Berkeley. I don’t know any teens now who could do that on their own.
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Any teens that accomplished are beaten down by the system well before then unless their parents can afford to get them out of public school. I think our next geniuses are coming off the street, self educated, or home schooled.
Schools spend an awful lot of time telling people they are unique individuals, and then stamping them all through the same molds. Current education was set up to create factory workers, not thinkers. Creative thought is bad, conformity, while thinking your nose ring makes you unique, is the rule of the day. Discussion is shut up and listen to me.
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The new proxy server here at work is not wrecking havoc with this site. Nope. Not at all.
“No Child Left Behind” has created more problems than it (allegedly) fixed. It basically forced schools (and therefore teachers) to teach to the test.
I doubt most teenagers today would have the slightest idea how to construct a geometric proof, since it requires reasoning beyond a simple A + B = X. I’ve heard teenagers groaning and whining about first-year algebra, insisting they will never use it in “real life” (I use algebra on a daily basis). I have no idea how they could possibly get through Trig.
The same with logic and critical reasoning. These kids have no idea of the difference between objective and subjective arguments. They’ve been taught to either believe anything they’re told, or that “it isn’t fair” is a reason to change the facts.
I think that was true of more than half of the people I went to college with, more than 20 years ago. Some of the students hated non-traditional students (i.e., people entering college after age 20, or re-entering college after a substantial hiatus), because the non-trads could refute the attitude of “this won’t be on the test” and had no sympathy for someone who came to class to take an exam while hung-over from the night before.
A few of my instructors would cater to these “fragile egos” (i.e, spoiled brats). I told two of them very bluntly, “you are degrading my education - I’m switching to a different section, with an intelligent instructor”.
Common Core is no prize pig either.
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Considering Common Core just got tacked onto NCLB, it was doomed before it was even conceived.
Education should be handled at the lowest level of government feasible. I’m thinking state at most, but more likely county.
Half the kids in my daughters school are farm kids. And about half of them are going to be farmers, there are no classes that prepare them for that. Yes, they need math, and communication, and business skills, but there is no agricultural program anymore, it was killed. So was most of shop, and replaced with engineering classes. They used to work with the local prison on car repair, prison for body work, the school for engine and electrical work. Now there is no auto shop at all. Home ec is now “Foods” and “Textiles” and useless as either. My daughter can’t sew a button, and learned more from osmosis on cooking from us than she did the class. And still doesn’t know what “healthy food” is after three years of “Foods.”
Some kids are reading 50 Shades of Gray in class. Now this one I’m actually not sure about, because it’s always some other class that is reading it, so it may not be true.
Education at the local level only works if there are affordable alternatives that can provide adequate competition. Unfortunately, this rarely happens. I lived in one county where the only alternatives were charter schools where kids were marked unexcused if they didn’t participate in the morning prayer, and every subject was filtered through the religious bias of the sect that created the school.
If the state of Texas had to compete with private schools who excel at specific vocational programs or specific course programs to attract students, there would not be any of this “our version of American History” and this dumbed-down foreign language bullshit.
But I’m not sure that any alternative that based its marketing on “our homework is harder than anyone else’s” would do very well in our pablum society.
Tying funding to a test was a great idea. Unfortunately there was no interest in implementing it to ensure students were being taught. Frankly, the only tests I’ve ever seen that were partially worthwhile were the college competency tests that I had to take at one out of four colleges that I attended. The downside was the purpose of the test was to identify the students who needed to be rerouted into Bonehead English and Algebra 0.1.
Shop is not on the test. Vocational skills are not on the test.
Business skills are not on the test. Communication skills like composition, speech, debate, research… are not on the test.
Cooking, sewing, balancing a checkbook, basic employment skills… are not on the test.
Some of these can not be tested within the confines of a strict, proctored testing environment. Others, I will admit, were discontinued because of political ideologies. Note the plural. Some were axed because they did not fit into the liberal “vocational education is oppression” shtick, others were dismantled because they were “too liberal” for the conservatives. Others were discontinued because they were supposedly “inherently” racist, sexist, etc. (I’m surprised that Phys Ed hasn’t been ended as being “ablist”)
I didn’t take Home Ec when it was offered because in the community in which I lived, it would have led to even more bullying than I was already experiencing, and my mother wouldn’t have let me take it anyway. Yes, girls were required to take it. Under the community mores, boys were not allowed to. Which one was more sexist?
The only foreign language offered at that school was French. I still don’t know why, it wasn’t a language spoken in Northern Michigan hardly at all and we weren’t that close to Quebec.
The parochial school down the road was not competition. Kids were required to attend it for three weeks at the end of second grade if they were Catholic, and the town was overwhelmingly Catholic. Most of the families sent their kids there from third grade through eighth grade, some of them borrowing money to do so to appease the nuns and two priests that ran it. Those that definitely could not afford it were shamed on a daily basis (and twice on Sunday).
That’s not competition.
I do feel that giving power back to school administrators would fix some of this, and neutering tenure. Let’s not eliminate it, but give a principal control of his school back.
Trying to get some work done, so that’s all I’ll say for now, some really good points in there.
well, it’s Dell. That’s all you have to say.
Welcome to the site. Soul check to right, first box of pens is free. See @Nabiki for badges, @Boomer (or myself) for the heavier ordinance. Beware the rat, the orange mouse (he’s not pumpkin flavored), and the relic. Be nice to the moderators or you’ll get zotted (and zots are forever)Free toaster after 5000 monitor clean-ups caused. And don’t forget to wave your hat.
We need a small wiki for our in-jokes and tropes.
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We need a fairly sizable wiki for the ones we’ve forgotten over the last decade.
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We already have one for the stuff we’ve forgotten.
If you’re going to lie to the engineers, can you at least do it in a way that won’t be easily discovered? They just called you out on your BS with the APs. You told them there were several users having issues logging in, but in truth there were only two (one guest and yourself). Then you start bitching and moaning to me about how the engineers never do the job right. Maybe if you actually told them the truth and included all the pertinent details, you’ll get less hassle.
And no, telling them one guest and yourself can’t log in and that you’re using a loaner laptop to test is not a huge effort. Also, they can’t read your mind.
Seriously? The entirety of the “what’s new” for this version is “fixed some problems”?
I would ask if you got your software development skills out of a box of Cracker Jacks, but it’s obvious that you got them off the Nutrition label!
Welcome to half the changelogs on Google Play.
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This one comes from a hardware manufacturer whose name is two letters:
These papers takes place, they take time to arrange and they can get lost, stolen or destroyed!
“takes place”. The verb tense is wrong and they use the wrong word for the object. I believe it should have been “take up space”… but that is probably beyond the grasp of their marketing department.