Florida Thinks Their Students Are Too Stupid To Know the Right Answers

gurps_npc writes "Robert Krampf, who runs the web site 'The Happy Scientist,' recently wrote in his blog about problems with Florida's Science FCAT. The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test is an attempt to measure how smart the students are. Where other states have teachers cheating to help students, Florida decided to grade correct answers as wrong. Mr. Krampf examined the state's science answers and found several that clearly listed right answers as wrong. One question had 3 out of 4 answers that were scientifically true. He wrote to the Florida Department of Education's Test Development center. They admitted he was right about the answers, but said they don't expect 5th graders to realize they were right. For this reason they marked them wrong. As such, they were not changing the tests. Note: they wouldn't let him examine real tests, just the practice tests given out. So we have no idea if FCAT is simply too lazy to provide good practice questions, or too stupid to be allowed to test our children."

Comments

The most important lesson in life being taught

[GodfatherofSoul]

Who's right doesn't matter, who has the power does!

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's right doesn't matter, who has the power does!

Yes, but kiddies also need to be taught that it *ought* to work that way.

Otherwise some of them will get uppity later in life.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[trout007]

There is no power involved. The only FCAT that matters is the 10th grade one. You need that to graduate.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[DigiShaman]

Close. The most important lessons I've learned is three fundamental truths in life. Everything else being immaterial nuance.

1. The world is governed by assholes.
2. The world is governed by the aggressive use of force. Rush Limbaugh's rule #6
3. We're just another money in the social hierarchical tree of life.

Yup. That pretty much sums up humanity and our world history.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Wonko the Sane]

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[kelemvor4]

Who's right doesn't matter, who has the power does!

Yes, but kiddies also need to be taught that it *ought* to work that way.

Otherwise some of them will get uppity later in life.

Then they'll end up posting on slashdot all the time.. we can't have that.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[causality]

There is no power involved. The only FCAT that matters is the 10th grade one. You need that to graduate.

It's the power to sow confusion which actually ends up making impressionable people more complacent and compliant. It's hard to stand up for yourself or generally to have a backbone when you aren't rooted in a solid foundation of fact. A generation of young people who don't know which way is up and which way is down is a tyrant's wet dream, for they will be needy and dependent and that's always been the ticket to real power.

You don't think this, the side effects it will have, or the fact it comes from government is one great big accident do you? It's not so much a carefully planned conspiracy. It's more like, the same mentality that believes power for its own sake is a worthy goal is the same mentality that would believe this kind of institutionalized insanity is a good idea.

Anyone who really had the students' best interests at heart would expect better of them than they expect from themselves and equip them to rise to meet or exceed that standard. Assuming from the start that they're just too dumb to be expected to understand some basic things comes from the belief that they're already under your thumb, right where they "should be", and will always be dependent, subservient and mediocre. No one expects excellence from cogs in a machine or blocks at the bottom of a pyramid. If any of you have taken the time to learn about how public schooling was established in America, then you are aware the industrial tycoons feared the poor and wanted to keep them stupid and created their own imitation of the Prussian schools and the Hindu caste system in order to do it. We still pay for that today.

Ideally, adult people wouldn't have children they were not in a position to afford, both raising them and educating them. Since the bar for personal responsibility (and actual adulthood, which is marked by sound decision-making) has been lowered so much, government involvement is here to stay for the foreseeable future. If we're going to have government involved in the upbringing of children, it needs to be in a limited and controlled fashion. For this reason I would love a voucher-type system where the money follows the child, not the other way around (which do we value more?), and parents can move their children to other schools at-will instead of being stuck.

But allowing government to directly administer the schools is a terrible, horrible idea. It breeds stupidity like this, and zero tolerance, and the total lack of justice (in a fistfight, the unprovoked attacker AND the defender are both punished equally?!) and it can do nothing else. That is in the nature of the situation when you hand your children over to these people. Seriously, stop acting surprised every time there's a story like this. I for one would never consider having children until I could make other arrangements -- private school if I have the money or homeschooling in a friendly community if I don't. But then I don't think I'm entitled to create life, I don't pretend that this is something that "just happens" as if it weren't the product of adult decisions, and I don't think I'm entitled to shift the burden of parenting onto other people. It's a situation I wouldn't be in unless I were truly prepared to handle it. No excuses, no bullshit, and no pretending like my actions have no impact on it.

If you love your children and care for their well-being you don't make excuses about not subjecting them to such a suffocating and degrading environment as modern public schools. If you love your convenience more, and secretly regard your children as little more than property or sophisticated pets, another chore to be done, then you whine about how that's "too hard" or how it's so terrible that not everyone can do the same because they fail to plan ahead, have children they are not prepared to raise, etc. It amazes me how people say things like that as though more good examples wouldn't have a positive effect.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the most important lesson here is that authority can and should be challenged.

The FAA used to administer multiple choice tests from a closed database of question/answer pairs until someone successfully sued. Now every student can study all the questions/answer pairs from which a small subset appear on an actual certification exam. Because the question/answer set is open to scrutiny, it is verifiable, and where the questions are invalid, they are thrown out. The courts found the question of openness worthy of consideration in that case, but you'd probably have a hard time making the argument that a 5th grader has standing to sue the state of Florida for incorrectly assessing its students. Whether the federal government might find the question of accuracy in the FCAT worth pursuing could be another matter, being that they distribute funds on the basis of test results. (Good thing the Bush's aren't still in office to take the heat for elementary-gate.)

Holding students to a standard that implies the state of Florida's authority is unassailable is just the sort of thing I would expect from a bureaucrat who really needs a demotion to a position more befitting of their sense of responsibility to the electorate. Something like turd-wrangler in a public park.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[kelemvor4]

There is no power involved. The only FCAT that matters is the 10th grade one. You need that to graduate.

3rd grade FCAT also matters. If a student does not pass 3rd grade FCAT the law says they can't be promoted to 4th.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[NateWhilk]

Close. The most important lessons I've learned is three fundamental truths in life. Everything else being immaterial nuance.

2. The world is governed by the aggressive use of force. Rush Limbaugh's rule #6

Obama's and Rahm Emmanuel's rule #1.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[publiclurker]

Still trying to scapegoat for your own shortcomings I see. At least this time you didn't pick only minorities.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[SpryGuy]

Oh please...

(rolling eyes)

Not EVEN.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[PeanutButterBreath]

In fact, public schools do not breed the kind of spineless, easily tyrannized citizens that you claim. If what you claim were true, everyone would hold teachers in high esteem. On the contrary, teachers are nobody's boss in America. They are hamstrung by tribal politicians, terrorized by broken testing regimes and bullied by parents who think teachers are simply there to babysit their unruly children.

The problem is not that America's schools breed spineless students. The problem is that America's broken priorities breed spineless teachers.

Moreover, as is often the case, government management is the worst option, except for all the alternatives. Our public schools have many problems, but they do a commendable job, considering what they have to work with.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[digitallife]

You know, I have 2 children, and I'm f'ing sick and tired of people here on slashdot standing on their pulpits preaching about how others should raise their kids, or what they would do if they 'love' their children. It's the hardest damn job in the world to raise kids, and every single parent (whether you think so or not) loves their children. They do the best they are able and know how. One thing I can practically guarantee: if you haven't actually DONE what you are preaching that others should, then it doesn't work like you think it will. That's a basic lesson in life.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't wish to point fingers my friend.. but the irony should be shared with all

It breeds stupidity like this, and zero tolerance, and the total lack of justice (in a fistfight, the unprovoked attacker AND the defender are both punished equally?!) and it can do nothing else.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[RazorSharp]

I'm sick of bad parents bitching about the difficulties of parenting as an excuse for what a poor job they're doing.

I'm not saying you're a bad parent - I don't know anything about you. But the fallacious excuse you just spewed is one that is far too often used by a parent to defend how they've raised their child who just got in trouble or just dropped out or became an embarrassment in some other way. It's one thing to believe that being a parent has given you some insights into raising kids, it's another to say that you're beyond reproach of any non-parent. I don't believe your claim that every single parent loves their children, but I would agree that most do. But love isn't much of a recompense for bringing a person into this world without being able to properly provide for them.

The fact of the matter is that people who consciously choose not to have children tend to be the ones who realize what it takes to be a parent. It's the hopeless, short-sighted, optimistic, "I can do better than my parents!" ones who end up with kids they can't handle. They end up with a responsibility they never understood the magnitude of until it's too late to get out of it and then they say with astonishment, "Parenting is really hard!" Well, no shit.

However, unlike the poster you're responding to I don't feel that having a child is irresponsible because of the public school system. I believe it's immoral because there are so many millions of orphans in the world, that if you want to raise a child selecting from that pool is the only moral option.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[interkin3tic]

A generation of young people who don't know which way is up and which way is down is a tyrant's wet dream, for they will be needy and dependent and that's always been the ticket to real power... You don't think this, the side effects it will have, or the fact it comes from government is one great big accident do you? It's not so much a carefully planned conspiracy.

Tyrants these days don't really thinking that far in advance though. I mean, these kids are what, 10 years from voting? Why bother teaching them complacency when they'll just be someone else's serfs?

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. The school officials are trying to teach kids to be followers because they're easier to manage then and there. And also because making a test that is correct is harder.

No arguments here though that this will make them more sheeplike to government orders, but it's a happy accident for our future overlords, not by design I think.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Zoinks! T-t-t-t-teabagger! Run Scoob!

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[DeadCatX2]

I went to a public school. In fact, I was even attacked unprovoked. Some kid punched me in the face, twice, and I shoved him away so he couldn't hit me anymore before going straight to the office (and then the nurse, because my face was all bloody). I got suspended just like he did. So I know exactly what you're trying to talk about.

But my public school rocked. My teachers were awesome and I learned a great deal from them. No one ever pushed their beliefs onto me, and instead I was given an opportunity to learn a wide variety of topics.

My fiance went to a private school growing up. Her parents blew tens of thousands of dollars so that she could be indoctrinated with beliefs that she knew were bullshit even at that young age.

So forgive me if I don't buy your whole "public schools suck" spiel. Any time the public school is shitty, it's because the folks who live in that district don't want to or can't afford to pay enough in property taxes to afford good teachers.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

It is precisely because raising kids is hard that people should be very, very prepared before they try to do it. While it's true that nothing ends up quite as planned and no one can foresee all the snags, it's equally true that a lot of the parents out there simply are and were not qualified to be parents under any reasonable standard.

Our society is permeated by this ridiculous concept of 'the right to reproduce'. As a result, the amount of quality control in parenting is tiny, and the negative effects on society are huge.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[JWSmythe]

No, the most important lesson here is that authority can and should be challenged.

    I agree totally.

    I happened to have survived the Florida educational system, although many years ago. The examples given were not only in the FCAT tests, but virtually every standardized test, as well as teacher generated and rehashed tests.

    Some teachers were (and I assume still are) really good about listening to the *student* and re-evaluating the accuracy of the test. With those teachers, when challenged and provided with an accurate review of the question and answers, where it could be shown that more than one answer is the correct one, the teacher would re-grade the tests and change the question for next year. With those teachers, when the circumstances presented themselves, I would turn a C grade to an A, because my answers were already correct.

    Some teachers passed it off with "use the *best* answer if there are more than one which are correct." Best answer for who? The teacher apparently, so they didn't have to consider that their test was flawed.

    And some teachers (the majority) were just plain dumb as rocks and honestly were glorified babysitters. They would say "that's what the book says, it has to be right." Usually, those teachers didn't know or care about the material, and the sessions were typically "read these chapters", and then hand out photocopies of the test from the teachers edition of the book. It seemed this was preferred over actually discussing the topics with the students, where they could get feedback from a real person.

      I'm surprised more people don't just quit school. There is some point where you simply won't learn any more, or you'll realize that the material being presented to you is just wrong.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[NeverSuchBefore]

if you haven't actually DONE what you are preaching that others should, then it doesn't work like you think it will.

Oh? So even if your conclusion is actually correct, it is wrong simply because you haven't experienced it being true yet? How does that work?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[NeverSuchBefore]

While I think it's true that there are some public schools that are better than others, most, if not all of them, still rely on varying degrees of rote memorization and teaching to the test. Sure, some people are still able to learn, but it's not a very good way to teach. No Child Left Behind just makes things worse in that regard.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Surt]

Adopting orphans just makes the problem worse in the long run unless you're willing to sterilize them upon adoption. It's immoral to contribute to the situation. Better to breed your own children to compete with the orphans for resources if you want that situation to change.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[jdavidb]

But allowing government to directly administer the schools is a terrible, horrible idea

Believing that you can protect against the dangers of government by somehow firewalling it off to only do things "indirectly" is something you were taught in government schools. Personally, I believe the government always melts through the firewall and becomes uncontained and uncontrolled.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[HapSlappy_2222]

I don't see where his "fallacious excuse" was. I also don't see where he said he was "beyond reproach of any non-parent". All I saw him say was most parents are doing the best they can, it's unfair for a non-parent (I think this should say "anyone", actually) to make "if you really loved your kids you'd do X, Y, or Z.... " arguments, and that raising kids is much, much different than you'd think it is prior to actually attempting it.

As for your arguments:

1) "... being able to properly provide for them." According to what standard? I provide the best I can for my kids, and I think I do a good job. You may not think so, others may think I give to much, and still others think any child not getting at least a Yale-level college fund is getting neglected. Your standards are not my standards, and if you want some kids to fit into your worldview go have your own.

2) "Parenting is really hard!". I disagree with both you and the GP. It's not hard - it's easy. The hard part, as with anything worthwhile and long term, is the consistency. If you're consistent with your parenting, everything else tends to fall in line. Maybe I lucked out with awesome kids; or maybe they're awesome because I'm consistent. Either way; I look forward to raising my kids into full adulthood from mid-teenage years, and look back fondly on my successes and failures.

3) "selecting from that pool [of orphans] is the only moral option." I've never understood this argument. I get what you're trying to say; namely "there are enough great kids out there already; why make your own?" but that's kind of a dumb argument when you remove the "starving, lonely kids" aspect. Why make your own furniture when there's plenty of furniture to buy from Ikea (obviously kids are not furniture, but the difference is one of - admittedly vast - scale)? Well, in both cases, because I made them, they come from me directly. There's a huge over-supply of starving kids, for sure, and I'm very sorry, but I don't have the 50 grand to adopt another child, nor would it prevent me from wanting my own child with my own genes if I did. Make those people start taking care of their kids (or stop having them in the first place) before you tell me I can't have kids myself. This may seem an immoral stance to you, but it's the same kind of "immoral" as not sending every penny you earn to the orphans in Africa, or sending your paychecks directly to Sara McLachlin. I help how I'm able, and it's on me, not you, to decide how much I should be helping. Besides, by your logic, YOU are the perfect person to adopt all the children you can afford to, since obviously know how to parent better than other parents do, especially if you are not currently encumbered with your own.

The rest of your post I don't really take issue to, other than a general tone of contempt, to which you are entitled.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the hardest damn job in the world to raise kids

It's hard to make three or four servings for dinner, instead of two? It's hard to spend money, like you'd be doing anyway, even if you didn't have kids? It's hard to take responsibility for another life, like so many billions of pet owners do?

I'm pretty sure on the scale of hardest jobs, parenting rates somewhere below Alaskan crab fisherman.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[jedwidz]

Disagree that parenting is inherently a hard job.

The bar is set very low - you join the parenting club just by following your instincts, and after that the legal requirements for parenting aren't at all onerous.

Just make sure that the kids have a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and no awkward bruises or breakages, and you're pretty much in the clear. You don't need a job, and you don't need to teach them jack. If your kids grow up to be lazy, stupid, obnoxious, criminal and/or bankrupt, that's not your problem.

Good parenting may be hard, but that depends on what standard of 'good' you set yourself as a parent. If you think parenting is hard because you hold yourself to high standards and care about the outcomes of your parenting, I'm with you on that.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[ATMAvatar]

The courts found the question of openness worthy of consideration in that case, but you'd probably have a hard time making the argument that a 5th grader has standing to sue the state of Florida for incorrectly assessing its students.

Perhaps the students themselves would not have standing, but involved parents would.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

> defend how they've raised their child who just got in trouble or just dropped out or became an embarrassment in some other way

All of these things can and do happen to good parents. The totally benign and unimaginative examples you've chosen to qualify your overuse of the terms 'poor' and 'bad' have essentially proven the OP's point. Until you have a good idea of exactly what it means to really fuck up as a parent, you shouldn't be judging them. OP never claimed to be completely beyond reproach, just beyond the reproach of people like you that believe having a child that 'gets in trouble' makes you a bad parent.

> The fact of the matter is that people who consciously choose not to have children tend to be the ones who realize what it takes to be a parent

Baseless and utter rubbish. I love the breeder revolt just as much as the next person, but knowing yourself to lack the skills required to care for a child doesn't give you any more insight into what it takes to be a parent than the 'hopeless, short-sighted, optimistic, "I can do better than my parents!". You tried to counter a bad argument with a bad argument. They're both bad and you should feel bad.

> I believe it's immoral because there are so many millions of orphans in the world, that if you want to raise a child selecting from that pool is the only moral option.

Would you have suggested this to your parents? Good thing you have the luxury of spouting this nonsense knowing full well they didn't buy into your ridiculous morality.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't care if you bitch if it makes you look like an impotent whiner. Whiners don't lead without the blessing of a superior, spook easily, and are easy to turn on one-another. People do care if you embarrass the emperor by pointing out his lack of attire, however. And, god help anyone that actually tries to do something about it, because no one else will.

In a sick sort of way, it is almost like the BDSM community runs the show.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Never raised a child, I see.

If you had, you'd know that kids who do bad stuff are not proof of bad parenting. It's an indicator, but not one that is as strong as you might think. For that matter, having kids who are great is not proof of good parenting. There are plenty of bad people from good families/parents and plenty of good people from bad families/parents. What you learn if you raise a child -- or especially if you raise a few of them -- is that they show up with their own personalities and they make their own decisions. Parents can teach them, and guide them, or parents can ignore them, and abuse them, but what the kids ultimately do is at least as much about them as it is about their environment.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Alex Belits]

The problem is identified correctly, however it has nothing to do with the government managing schools. Vouchers are a terrible idea because almost parents want obedient children who follow exact beliefs of their parents and never in their life challenge the weakest authority figure that there ever was -- a parent.

Education system is an institution of the society, so if government handles it poorly, you need better government, not worse education.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Penguinisto]

If what you claim were true, everyone would hold teachers in high esteem.

...you mean like how every time something goes 'bump' in the school budget, the teachers are the first to be held up as the martyrs? You name the political campaign, budgeting debate, or what-have-you, it's always the same old spiel about how the poor teachers need less students, more money, etc.

Now here's the kicker: In any school, the teachers are the minority. Here's an extreme sample: When I taught, there were 210 employees of the (tech school, then state collegiate) campus, but only 42 faculty. Yep... forty-two actual teachers on a huge campus. The other 168 employees were administrators, student counselors, janitors, student aid, IT staff, Accounts (Payable|Receiving), fundraising/income specialists, marketing specialists, accountants, special-ed workers (not teachers), program managers, facilities (landscaping, electrical, plumbing, etc), curriculum specialists, bookstore staff, certification specialists (that keep track of teachers' certification requirements), legal staff (you betcha), receptionists, school district liaisons, high school (AP course) liaisons, cafeteria staff, union reps/shop stewards, a staff psychologist, nursing/medical staff, public relations staff, and assorted other positions.

In most other schools, the same ratio holds... about 20-30% of a given school's employees are actual teachers. Sometimes that drifts up to 40%, but only in rare cases.

OTOH, whenever a school budget is argued over, who gets thought of first? It ain't all those other positions I listed up there - just the teachers.

The problem ain't the teachers per se (though an amazing number are incompetent beyond belief, yet the NEA would go ballistic and threaten a general strike if you tried to fire the bad ones). The problem is this monster army of administrators and middle-management that swallows any given school budget, leaving damned little for the actual teachers. Now I'm not talking about the janitors and IT folks, but the massive percentage of paper-pushers, make-work positions (usually granted as political favors), curriculum specialists, and all the bloat that a typical school district carries on its ledger.

Trust me - it can stand a LOT of improvement, and having it run by an unaccountable, spend-happy, typically corrupt-as-hell city/state government agency? Umm, yeah.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Raising kids is hard in the same way living is hard: every generation of humans (ever) has done it-- some better than others. While no life is without some suffering, and a wayward or sick/disabled child is a great burden, many of the hardships we parents face and bitch about are purely the result of the our laxity. Of course this is hard medicine for us to swallow (and the mod points will show it ;) ), but there's no denying it. "In order to have a garden full of weeds, it is not necessary to do anything. One must just let it go. And in order to have a home full of grief, it is not necessary to do anything either. Just let it go."

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

However, unlike the poster you're responding to I don't feel that having a child is irresponsible because of the public school system. I believe it's immoral because there are so many millions of orphans in the world, that if you want to raise a child selecting from that pool is the only moral option.

Being a relatively bright person and slightly egotistical to boot, I think it would be immoral not to provide future generations with the benefit of my own genetic awesomeness.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

> " Why make your own furniture when there's plenty of furniture to buy from Ikea "

More like: "Why start a furniture factory when Ikea already does it cheaper, has a massive distribution chain, and can readily beat me on price and scale any day of the week?" Much less, why sink resources into something that replicates the hard work of others for which you have no hope of improving upon a system that's standardized. Unless you're catering to some demographic that isn't served by existing services (great genes) or unless you're able to do it far more efficiently (hard to beat free), why bother? Babies are, as you've demonstrated, more of a commodity good than we want to believe.

You're right in exposing the expense of some adoption agencies, but that's only for people who greedily want to be very picky and obsess over external appearances instead of realizing the potential inside of everyone should you give them the tools to unlock them.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, its difficulty lies somewhere between sunday school teacher and youth ski instructor.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Alex Belits]

Why is this shit up to the teacher in the first place?

The whole point of multiple choice test is to reduce the amount of work performed by the teacher and allow less intelligent people to become teachers. When I studied in a far superior public education system, multiple choice tests were banned, and teachers were supposed to evaluate every answer individually, however all teachers were also supposed to pass the same course and use the same curriculum and textbooks -- no skipping chapters because teacher is too stupid to teach it.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[AK Marc]

Ideally, adult people wouldn't have children they were not in a position to afford

The problem is that they will, so what do we do about it?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[AK Marc]

And I think you are wrong. I was 37 when I had my first. My sister started 5 years before me. I was happy to give her advice, which she spouted the "you haven't had kids, you don't understand" response. I didn't think about it until our after second kid and my mother asked if it was what I though it was and if I was following the advice I had given my sister.

Well, I was following my own advice, and it worked great. Yeah, I gave parenting advice when I had no kids. It was good advice, and now that I'm a parent, my advice is worse (rather than giving what "should" work, I give more of what "did" work, much more limited in scope and usefulness), but I'm treated as being more authoritative. It works *exactly* the way I thought it would. That's a basic lesson in life.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Homr Zodyssey]

I had a young single coworker say to me once, "I understand how parents feel now that I have a dog".

I asked, "Oh yeah? Where's your dig right now?"

He responded, "At home, in his cage."

I chuckled, "They'd put me in jail if I left my son at home, alone, in a cage."

Parenting is a hell of a lot more than cooking extra food or owning a pet.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Homr Zodyssey]

I'm so glad that you're not right. My son goes to a public Montessori school. They do not "teach to the test" nor does he learn things by "rote memorization".

The GP is absolutely correct, in that it takes a community to make a school. Hell, it takes a community to make a government. If your public school (or public library, or public park or public ANYTHING) sucks, then for gods sake, get off your lazy ass and fix it! It's PUBLIC! That means its as much yours as it is anyone else's! Take some responsibility for yourself and your community instead of blaming it on "the Man" or "the Government" or whomever your boogyman of choice is.

Personally, I still blame everything on Dick Cheney.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Dare nMc]

>folks who live in that district don't want to or can't afford to pay enough in property taxes to afford good teachers.

I agree up until that part. The teachers are probably fine, if they had the right support. If the school has a winning sports team, and no robotics team, then it is clear the parents, admin, alum have set the priorities, and they are maximizing that success. If you went to more HS basketball matches, than robotic competitions your showing the kids who you idolize more. No one would blame a coach for a loosing team with no players, and no interested parents. But everyone blames the school/teachers when few kids are going to the harder math classes... We have are priorities in this USA, and it does not appear to be academics and engineers we are counting on to take us into the future.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[rtb61]

That problem is quite easily remediable. Quite simply take schools from local government budgets and shift them to state budgets. Each state would need only 1 administrative body to administer all schools in that state and to establish curricula for the whole state. Double plus benefit here, is the Federal department of education can be reduced not eliminated, as it would still be required to ensure all the states align the education so grade equivalence is maintained and the curricula is sufficiently similar (it provides the meeting place for the fifty states to discuss education) and federal funding would be hugely simplified, needing only to go to fifty different organisations.

Of course this will be next to impossible to achieve due to every bum hicksville town believing from the gut religious thinking is the best way to manage education and who cares what the rest of the country does.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Homr Zodyssey]

Rush Limbaugh's Rules:
#1 Be an asshole.
#2 ...
#3 Profit!
#4 Take lots of pills for fun
#5 Piss off women every chance I get.
#6 The world is governed by the aggressive use of force.

Wow...that last one just doesn't seem to fit with the rest.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

No amount of terror and horror produced by public schools can dissuade me from one basic principle: the public schools are NOT in business to make a PROFIT off children. in theory, public schools are accountable for how they teach. In practice, republican politicians and christian crazies (yes, and a good share of idiot liberals) have brought the public school system to its knees. You need to throw out all the lunatics that want to destroy public education. then, we can have 2 parallel systems: public schools financed by ANYTHING other than property taxes of the districts, and NONPROFIT public benefit companies, including parent run cooperatives. no property tax breaks for religious schools or churches (a clear violation of the constitution, which sets the govt up as the determiner of which institutions are churches... just THINK ABOUT IT.), and ABSOLUTELY NO FOR-PROFIT COMPANIES IN CHARGE OF EDUCATION. If a nonprofit is discovered to be funnelling profits to executives, throw the bunch of them in prison for at least 10 years, as a bunch of treasonous sociopaths. If anyone should have their heads on pikes outside the white house, its adults who knowingly conspire to profit off substandard education of our future leaders. Child abuse at the highest level. and libertarians who advocate for charter schools are either criminals or fellow travellers (a really good concept borrowed from the anticommunist crazies, who were on to something in principle there). remember, the plan they have is: 1.destroy public education by any means necessary. 2.defund public education based on its engineered failure. 3. redirect public monies to private, for profit, companies whose only loyalty is to the quarterly profits of stockholders. 4. turn the nations children into wage slaves for the New World Capitalist/Fascist Order. Oh, and of course, i do agree with poster that parents who dont get completely involved in their childrens eduction are idiots. i say they dont deserve to have them, and wish we could screen people before they conceive (hmm that couldnt possibly go wrong...).

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[OrigamiMarie]

In some states, it doesn't matter much what the residents of a given school district are willing to pay. It all gets funneled into the state coffers, and distributed evenly amongst all districts. So the quality of local schools has little to do with how much the local taxpayers care about the schools.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

I used tergas the first time on an unprovoked assault, locker door on the second and a billy club on the third attack. And I had a 3.8 GPA in a well-respected public school. It was a classic "Ender's Game" scenario, even though I'd never read the story at the time. If an idiot attacks you, escalate so far beyond their reach that they c*quit* rather than letting the game continue. I was hated because I caused the school's best track&field athlete to leave the school, but tough noogies for him. You taunt me for months, then you attack me, and some like me will *end* the matter in ways where you will *not* sneak up on me later (which was how he wound up discovering I had the club: no weapons policy my *ass*).

The ones who taught me about tactics and put the muscle on my frame with hard work were the Jesuits in private school. The public school "officials" were the idiots who had *created* the fight: the coach thought I could "handle myself" and "teach the boy a lesson". The "lesson" he learned wasn't one the other student learned wasn't one the school planned, but I'm sure it stayed with him.

It made me appreciate how the Jesuits deal with politics. They pick their fights, and nthey fight for things worth protecting. (For me, it was my next few years of safety.) And everyone deals with them *politiely*, because if you turn it nasty with them, you'll be lucky to be able to walk away.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't think "the misfortune of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time" is a genetic trait that one can breed out of the population

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[RazorSharp]

if you haven't actually DONE what you are preaching that others should, then it doesn't work like you think it will.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority#Fallacious_appeals_to_authority

The argument is a fallacious appeal from authority because he claims that one must be a parent to understand what it means to be a good parent. It reminds me of our current paradox of politicians. Everyone thinks politicians are rotten but no one wants to vote for someone with no experience in politics. Experience in politics seems to me to have nothing to do with how good one is as a politician just as experience in parenting has nothing to do with how good a parent is. Maybe, with the second child, Jessica Crackwhore knows some tricks that makes it easier on her. But she's still a bad parent when Child #2 doesn't graduate and ends up in prison at age 18.

The quoted sentence is also a non-sequitur because it is possible for something to work like you think it will even if you haven't done it.

Regarding your stance: Kids aren't furniture. My argument may be dumb if you remove the "starving and lonely" part but until some magician steps up and waves his magic wand that fills the bellies of orphans around the world and provides them with responsible and resourceful caretakers, "starving and lonely" remains an irrevocable truth. I think it's selfish that anyone could love one human more than another because they share the same genes.

This may come as a surprise to you, but it's not about my standards or your standards. Morality is objective. My moral standards may be incorrect but they're certainly not subjective. It's not up to me to determine how much you help but doesn't invalidate my opinion on the matter. Why it it so outrageous to tell someone, "If you really loved your kids you wouldn't blow cigarette smoke in their faces"? What's unfair about that? If you really love someone, you wouldn't purposefully harm them. I don't have to be a parent to arrive at that conclusion.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[NeverSuchBefore]

I'm so glad that you're not right.

Even I said that some schools are better than others. But it would be more accurate to say that I am wrong in some circumstances. But is it true in a majority of cases?

If your public school (or public library, or public park or public ANYTHING) sucks, then for gods sake, get off your lazy ass and fix it!

You said it yourself--it takes a community. Even if I were to endeavor to do it, I would still need the support of others. While it's commendable to do something yourself, in some cases it's very difficult.

Take some responsibility for yourself and your community instead of blaming it on "the Man" or "the Government" or whomever your boogyman of choice is.

Bad laws like No Child Left Behind still affect us all. While blaming the wrong people is annoying, excluding the people who at least share part of the blame is also annoying. If public schools are forced to put more focus on testing by the government, just what do you think that will encourage? Teaching to the test.

Let me ask this: what if, in some cases, it is the government's fault? That doesn't mean citizens can't do anything (although the voting system is pretty broken in the US), but sometimes it really is the government's fault.

I will say that you're right: a more informed general public can do wonders. It's great if you live in a great community. But what do we do until that becomes more widespread?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting suspended even if you didnt start the fight is standard, anybody in a fight is to be suspended. I saw a "fight"(not really) where a student acting tough decided to slam another students head into the lockers both got suspended the victim for 2 days to recover and the bully for 12 days.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Penguinisto]

I wish it were that easy.

In Utah at least, the local schools are 'supported' by a massive state bureaucracy (known as the Utah State Office Of Education). It had its own army of curriculum specialists, administrators, PR people, union-management interface managers, test/competency proctors and formulation managers, textbook approval boards, textbook distribution centers (local school districts 'bought' books from state depots), teacher certification specialists (mostly to keep track of all the teachers, approve classes and CE credits, etc), inter-school activity specialists, and its own massive IT department to maintain the state .edu sites, servers, and networks.

If you look back in my own posting history (well, via Google), you'll see when I put up the first public school approved Linux courses, in January 2000. I had to contend with the local city school board, the local county school board, and the USOE (that state office I mentioned :) ). A root canal would have been less painful (and far less tedious), just to get that one course approved as a replacement for the 1980's era UNIX System 7 (no, really!) course that I found when I was first hired. It was approved mainly because enough bureaucrats at the top had heard the word "Linux" to know it would make them look more up-to-date (and don't ask about explaining the GPL. That took 3 months all by itself, and went all the way up to the state Attorney General's office. I never thought I would never hear the phrase "I don't understand..." so many damned times. :( )

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Surt]

You have to look at what the parents are doing: having a child at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and getting others to pay to raise and support that child. An awesome reproduction strategy, and one that can propogate if it isn't stopped.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[greg_barton]

It is so easy to spew bullshit from a point of ignorance. That is why you must be a parent to understand.

So please shut the fuck up.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[buybuydandavis]

As Super Chicken would say - "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it."

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[buybuydandavis]

Everyone thinks politicians are rotten but no one wants to vote for someone with no experience in politics.

Untrue. Not everyone wants a professional ruling class. Lots of people prefer to vote for someone with no *government* experience, and lots more want term limits. Just not enough, in both cases.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[b1scuit]

Whether the federal government might find the question of accuracy in the FCAT worth pursuing could be another matter...

The idea that it might not be is completely mind boggling to me.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Toonol]

However, unlike the poster you're responding to I don't feel that having a child is irresponsible because of the public school system. I believe it's immoral because there are so many millions of orphans in the world, that if you want to raise a child selecting from that pool is the only moral option.

I'm on child four. They're all bright, intelligent, ranging in age from 23 years to six months. I hope they each have at least a couple kids of their own.

Just wanted to let you know, I spit at your twisted claims of morality.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[DigiShaman]

...yet. Only a matter of time. Soon his 1st amendment rights will be violated only later to be restored by the 2nd.

You're just pissed at his poo flinging. And he's pissed at that other woman's poo flinging to get free pills paid for by our tax dollars. And you are an asshole for taking his 6th rule out of context. Which can only mean, rule #1 has been observed. Thank you for proving my point.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[countach74]

You are very fortunate if your son's school does not teach to the test or learn things by rote memorization. Every school I attended had more than their fair share of both. Unfortunately, I do not think the problem is limited to public schools. I was homeschooled through sophomore year and the material was very much strict memorization and/or "teach to the test" (granted, it's really up to the parent on how strict one should follow the curriculum). My experience in the public high school I attended was boring with mostly memorization and not near enough focus on understanding and applying concepts (aka no thinking required). My college experience proved much the same as well, but it did vary class to class more than the others.

I'm sure everyone's got their own experience with these things, but by just looking at how utterly stupid the majority of US citizens are (regardless of how far they went in school), it doesn't take much reasoning to come to the conclusion that our system is broken. What the broken piece(s) is/are may be harder to pinpoint, but I imagine test-oriented and memorization-based teaching (if one can call that teaching) would be good things to start with.

That said, Dick Cheney is a very bad man. I support blaming many things on him, including this.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[countach74]

Then how about we remove "directly" from the statement? Personally, I think a lot of problems could be solved by separating schooling from the government but that will never happen because it's far too important for propaganda campaigns.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

And a class action lawsuit against the fuckers would show them exactly who really has the power:

The lawyers.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

... when you aren't rooted in a solid foundation of fact.

That doesn't stop the Christian fundamentalists preaching Intelligent Design or Creationism. Unlike living on a futuristic star-ship, modern living doesn't depend on comprehensive education.

No one expects excellence from cogs in a machine ...

The effect of modern education, maybe the creation of wage-slaves, but its point is ensuring every citizen has a minimum level of literacy (no child left behind). This is achieved by giving the smart students nothing and dumbing-down the curriculum. Thus causing the hard-working and smart students to be more disillusioned with education.

... wouldn't have children they were not in a position to afford ...

Unfortunately, the pair-bonding process (fucking) causes babies which that pair of adults have to look after. Both biology and society is designed to encourage pregnancy, if not the child neglect caused by under-educated/under-employed/under-motivated parents. This is biggest obstacle of the pro-abortion lobby.

... I don't think I'm entitled to create life...

You're obviously not a woman, and a woman's major role in society is making babies.

...I'm entitled to shift the burden of parenting onto other people.

Caring for a baby, like watching security scanners is a dull, low-skill job. That's why school-girls get jobs as baby-sitters. Most adults want to spend their days with other adults, not listening to screaming children. Ignoring the socialism of tax-paid education, providing mass baby-sitting services is good capitalism: Remember economic rationalism?

... your children as little more than property ...

Children are not independent adults. Someone must bear that burden, so for that reason they are legally-speaking, sophisticated pets.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Lost Race]

I'm a parent, I understand, and I agree with both RazorSharp and causality. I sympathize with digitallife but I've found that the parenting advice of experienced parents is every bit as useless, unworkable, and inappropriate as that of the childless. Most parents are pretty crappy at parenting. What they're good at is compromising ideals and rationalizing inadequacies.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Omestes]

Morality is objective.

Damn you, you made me undo mod points with that phrase. How is morality objective? There are TONS of variants of what is moral out there, so how can you claim it is objective. Morality is an opinion, yes, and some opinions are more commonly held than others, but it is still an opinion. Opinions aren't objective. You BELIEVE your morality, but that still doesn't make it objective, it is still an opinion.

It's not up to me to determine how much you help but doesn't invalidate my opinion on the matter.

But it does, for him. He doesn't agree with your opinion, thus for him your opinion is invalid. I don't agree with your morality here, and thus, to me, it is completely invalid. You can live with it, your can think it is valid as the day is long, but that doesn't make it universal. It doesn't make it magically objective.

Further, I'm sick of people saying that "appeal to authority is a fallacy, this your argument is automatically invalid", that too is a fallacy. If the soul basis of argument is "authority", then it is a fallacy, but claiming authority in itself isn't. I'm sorry, this guy is a parent, thus he is an authority, and thus he probably DOES know more about child rearing (at least the nuts and bolts of it) than I, a non-parent, does. I'm going to weigh his opinions more than yours on that topic. Just like I'm going to weigh a cosmologists opinions on the functioning of the universe over that of a television personality, or the Time Cube guy. Yes, if your follow up was true, you might be correct on your appeal to Wikipedia, but I didn't see what you saw.

Further, my parents were awesome, and yet I got in a shit-ton of trouble as a kid. Hell, I dropped out of high school, got hooked on drugs, and made more than my share of terrible decisions. I only managed to pull through thanks to the background my parents gave me, and their forgiveness and patience. I'm sick of this "blame the parents" bullshit, kids have free will, circumstances have pull, and peer groups are a bitch, these are just as important as parents once kids enter the real world. "Blame the parents" is overly simplistic, there are huge webs of causes and effects out there. Yes, there are bad parents, but there also are good parents with wild children. This has always been true, and always will be true.

I think it's selfish that anyone could love one human more than another because they share the same genes.

If only someone would write a book about that!

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[narcc]

every single parent (whether you think so or not) loves their children

Oh, how wrong that is!

A local baby died last winter because the idiot parents were sick of hearing it cry and put it out on the porch over-night.

My useless sister-in-law gave up her baby to her "baby-daddy's" mother (who lives just a couple block away from her) a few months after it was born and hasn't seen the child since -- even though she could just drop-by any time she wants. It's a five-minute walk. Tell me she has any attachment at all to that child, let alone anything approaching 'love'.

There are many selfish people in this world. Some of them become parents and change for the better. There are others, however ...

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole choose the best answer thing determines whether someone can determine the better of multiple correct answers, clear as that.

That is, if three of the four answers can be interpreted as correct by analyzing beyond the denotative meaning of the words, but the fourth answer is simply correct based on the denotative meaning of the words, then that fourth answer is obviously the best answer.

See, these standardized tests don't account for those who are going to try to interpret beyond what the words on the page mean, that's connotative meaning crap. If someone does apply connotative meaning to denontative meaning words on a standardized test that is their problem, not a problem with the test.

In the case of something that may be incorrect, again, don't overinterpret it. What would someone who didn't apply academic style hairsplitting understand it to mean? Sure a mushroom is a fungus, but if the test considers it to be a plant, then it's because many would see a mushroom on the ground, growing in dirt or grass, and see the plant relationship anyway.

Sorry if some people are overthinking such a simple test.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[parliboy]

I teach at a school that is more teacher-heavy than that. 3 to 4 teachers per core area, plus languages, technology, and other electives. Compare this to two admins, one counselor, 5 office staff (one of whom took over my technology responsibilities to give me cover), and 4 custodians / plant operators. The district's curriculum specialists were shown the door.

It used to be even more teacher-heavy for awhile, but a prior administration tried to add more non-teaching positions in order to solidify power. After that administration left, we found a ... Happy medium.

It is possible to have a teacher-driven school, but it means committing to more hats than just teaching. In my case, I handle admissions scoring and course registration, as well as other issues that would normally require additional office staff.

That's the big rub of this. There are things that have to be done to keep a campus functioning. If teachers want more power, they have to assume these responsibilities, and they have to defend them, lest the school become too office-heavy. But very often, teachers (on both a personal and union level) have often taken a position of "We aren't required to do that; go away." So that position is one of the things that has caused teachers to lose power over the years.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon his 1st amendment rights will be violated only later to be restored by the 2nd.

When people post things like this, I usually assume they have an erection.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Eskarel]

Children are not machines, they are people.

Every single one of them is different(well I don't know about twins as I have no experience with twins). This is the bit which every single non parent fails to understand. A child, from a very young age, is a person with free will and their own personality. They can and do make their own decisions, from the age of 18 months or even younger. You can provide an example to your child, you can use you power over them to force them to do certain things, but that's really about it. You can no more force a two year old to think a certain way than you can a 30 year old, you can make him or her go to daycare, make them put on clothes, but you can do that because you have physical power over them. Sometimes good parents raise shitty kids. Sometimes shitty parents raise good kids. Sometimes a technique that for one kid helps them to achieve all their dreams stunts the growth of another.

Sure there are some general rules like not blowing smoke into your kids face, but for the most part parenting is a matter of patience and faith. You try to be the best role model you can be, you have the patience to love them even when they fail and you have faith, sometimes unrewarded, that they will turn out, at the very least, a little bit better than you did. All the rest of it is bullshit dreamed up by middle aged men who have never had kids or based on some parent's experiences that worked for their particular kid. No non parent ever understands this, they think that you have a kid, you perform actions A, B, and C for 20 years and then out comes a functional adult. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.

As for the whole orphans thing, there's reasonable evidence showing that pulling some kid out of their native country and raising them with no sense of their heritage or background can be damaging. Most foster kids are already so horrendously damaged that it takes more than most people have in them to try and turn that around.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[mmortal03]

Here's my argument referring to what you said would be acceptable authorities on morality being objective: "One study found that most philosophers today accept or lean towards moral realism, as do most meta-ethicists, and twice as many philosophers accept or lean towards moral realism as accept or lean towards moral anti-realism." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_realism

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

The only moral choice....

And another human being with the ability to reason and exihibite self control removes temselves from the gene pool. Evolution in action.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[silentcoder]

So your answer on point 3 is basically the biology version of "not invented here" syndrome ?

I mean I know every mammal has an instinctive desire to spread their genes but humans are also capable of rational thought so in theory at least we shouldn't be bound by those instincts. That doesn't mean listening to our instincts is always wrong, but it isn't always right either. Our primitive fight/flight instincts want us to associate threats with a particular pattern which is why we invented ideas like racism: we find it calming to imagine that we know what danger looks like. It worked well for our ancestors - recognize the lion, get the hell out of dodge. It doesn't work so well for us because in reality the predators we face look exactly like the rest of our pack (can even be PART of our pack). All those times we imagine differently - we end up doing something atrocious to some group of people who haven't as individuals done anything to deserve our fear and hatred.
That is why, since we have the ability to, we have a moral obligation to be rational rather than instinctive in our actions.

So does that mean I think you can't have kids ? No, I think there is too many variables that these simplistic answers ignore. You cannot draw a hard and fast rule here because the complexities are too great - and I think each person and couple need to work out what makes most sense for them. Perhaps one day we'll have the kind of mathematical models to draw up an absolute right answer (everyone in this generation ought to adopt, then the next one can breed again or something) but even if we could get a definitive answer here anything more than suggestion would be tyranny with major unintended consequences (how many baby girls have been murdered or abandoned due to China's one-child policy ? That was certainly not it's intention was it ?)

So I think your argument is just plain wrong, so is the argument of the person you're responding to. He is trying to be rational but ignoring too many details to be right, you are ignoring all rationality to feed your instinctive desires.

As for me ? I made my own choice which tried to strike a middle ground between the two. Me and my fiance want kids - our decision was that we'll have one (or maybe two) of our own, and adopt another.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[TheRaven64]

It may start with a Slashdot post, but pretty soon there's a Facebook group, and then there's nothing you can do except issue a content-free pacifying press release.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Public schools and teachers do not create those idiotic tests. It's the "job" of third parties contracted by the government. Apparently, they have nothing to do with science or education and are worse than construction mafia.

On the positive side, perhaps such atmosphere helps students who are interested in science to find their true calling and succeed in life. After all, nobody goes to jail for low test scores and you can sue the school for administering a fraudulent test. Seriously, people go to court every once in a while, trying to ban evolution theory from the school curriculum. Why not in this case?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[silentcoder]

I'm surprised to hear that comment about tertiary education. My experience of university was of a place where rote memorization was a guaranteed way to fail. I could see it being of some use in the undergrad versions of the hard sciences, maths or engineering courses since those do involve a lot of facts you need to learn. You could probably manage a pass on those facts without being all the good at actually applying them.

But the real test - that which made up the bulk of your score wasn't your knowledge of the facts (indeed in the humanities in particular there are often very, very little facts to go on) but your ability to construct an argument based on those facts. Doing an assignment or a test was a case of coming up with a theory (bonus points if it was a new theory and then supporting that theory with the available facts.
Do that well and you had at least a C. Do it great and you had a B or an A.
And if you wanted to increase your chances of that B then you chose a theory you knew your lecturer didn't agree with, if it directly contradicted her favorite theory then all-the-better. The lecturer would see this as genuine independent thought - and if you could solidly defend a theory they didn't like with the facts available to you, every lecturer I ever had would be hugely impressed and mark it very highly.
They wouldn't agree with a single word of your conclusion - but if it was a logically supported conclusion they would mark you HIGHER for NOT agreeing with them than if you did.

Now the latter part was just human psychology - when you disagree with somebody they are more critical of your arguments and if you argue well then they are more aware of it. So if arguing well is the scoring system, this bit of psychology got me some slightly higher marks (perhaps at the expense of the student who argued just as well but by coincidence agreed with the lecturer's conclusion).
But there was no authoritivity there. Nobody ever said "because I said so" or "I have the experience here"... that was a school thing (and the major reason I suffered in school - because that think-this-way thing never worked for me). At university I excelled because the emphasis was in fact the exact opposite.
We were encouraged - and more importantly TAUGHT - to think critically for ourselves - and do so logically, effectively and soundly. And above all - our ability to do so was rewarded.

So reading your words I find myself wondering if I just went to a very, very good University... well I did... but it never occurred to me that the difference would be on this issue. I could see a difference in the budgets and the research projects you could do post-grad and such... but actual universities where logic and critical thinking was NOT the cornerstone of absolutely EVERY class ?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[cffrost]

You have to look at what the parents are doing: having a child at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and getting others to pay to raise and support that child. An awesome reproduction strategy, and one that can propogate if it isn't stopped.

An intriguing idea... Can you imagine if these cuckoo-kids began adapting by dumping the parents' own children out of the "nest?"

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

"The fact of the matter is that people who consciously choose not to have children tend to be the ones who realize what it takes to be a parent."

I would like to see some evidence to back this up. It has the smell of pure, unadulterated bullshit.

If you don't think you can handle having kids, that's fine. It's ultimately a very selfish position unless you think the species should die out, life is not worth having / giving to others and that the current population should grow old and die out alone. Still, it's better to admit that you lack what it takes to bring a child into the world than to produce a miserable one.

By the way, being a parent is really hard.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[hairyfish]

That problem is quite easily remediable. Quite simply take schools from local government budgets and shift them to state budgets.

Here in Australia schools are run by the states, and people are talking about shifting control to the Federal level as 6 states worth of administration is considered 6 times too many.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[hairyfish]

However, unlike the poster you're responding to I don't feel that having a child is irresponsible because of the public school system. I believe it's immoral because there are so many millions of orphans in the world, that if you want to raise a child selecting from that pool is the only moral option.

When I decided to have children, it wasn't simply to "raise children". I believe my genes are superior than most other people's and to improve the world it will need more people like me, and less people that breed orphans. If you truly want to make the world a better place, and you think you offer above average genetics, then it is you responsibility to breed to balance out all the fucking retards that are increasingly out-numbering us.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[L4t3r4lu5]

Just like I'm going to weigh a cosmologists opinions on the functioning of the universe over that of a television personality, or the Time Cube guy.

Your cosmologist is a qualified professional, with letters after his name and all (I would hope). I don't remember seeing a BSc in Being a Good Parent.

There are no experts or authorities on parenting, and those who claim to be are just giving you their opinion. If they were an expert, they would have written "The Book On Being A Good Parent" and "Raising the Perfect Child" and brought about a generation of impeccably behaved, altruistic individuals, but of course these books don't existt. There are books on methods for coping with the stresses of parenting, home tuition, weaning, first steps, potty training, all of the different little nuances of raising a child. However, there is no "authority". Therefore, I do see "appeal to authority" here as an invalid argument in this instance. The "authority" is just a guy with anecdotal experience backed up with overly vague statistics.

People aren't machines with instruction manuals, and different people respond to different stimuli... Differently. Raising a child is not a science.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there's a huge bubble right now in educational administration, both at the public school and the university level.

I think the public is waking up to what's going on.

And I think the bubble is going to burst in the next 5 - 10 years.

In my state there's been a 10% reduction in public school enrollment in the past ten years. During the same ten years, budgets have skyrocketed.

Tax payers aren't going to take it for much longer.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[mjr167]

I have a baby who screams constantly. Would you like to demonstrate to me what I am doing wrong since you clearly have all the answers?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[dave420]

Just as many spit at your twisted sense of humanity.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

undoing bad mod - sorry

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is not that America's schools breed spineless students. The problem is that America's broken priorities breed spineless teachers.

You're an idiot.

Most teachers, if they had a "spine" would be unemployeed. Sorry, but that's reality. No Child Left Behind legally prohibits teachers from doing their job. Period.

The problem is the majority of parents are complete peices of shit. They in turn bring their self-entitled, piece of shit child to school. This in turn creates resentment amongst the children who are not complete pieces of shit. This creates piece of shit children who otherwise are being raised properly.

The result are self-entitled children who have no clue how to be responsible citizens and feel everyone owes them. Many have trouble with basic read and writing skills because they were not properly taught thanks to No Child Left Behind. Worse, a seemingly growing majority have no idea of their Constitutional rights, why they exist, or how they are supposed to protect them. Students are no longer reading classics and socially important books such as Animal Farm or 1894, and no alternative is provided. In other words, modern schools and stupid parents are literally breeding the near perfect class of serfs in America.

Sorry, but it sounds like you're the perfect candidate to create yet another perfect serf, all the while blaming teachers for your poor parenting and/or upbringing and/or deviation from your own upbringing.

And thus the Entitled Generation was born...and steadily erodes the very fiber of society.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[BigDogCH]

Now here's the kicker: In any school, the teachers are the minority. Here's an extreme sample: When I taught, there were 210 employees of the (tech school, then state collegiate) campus, but only 42 faculty. Yep... forty-two actual teachers on a huge campus.

I am not thinking this is a very common ratio for a typical public elementary or secondary school. In my experience, 80% teachers. 5% administration. 5% maintenance. 2% IT. 3% secretarial. 5% misc. This assumes cooks and bus drivers are private employees.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

>The fact of the matter is that people who consciously choose not to have children tend to be the ones who realize what it takes to be a parent.

Bullcrap. Those are the morons that think they know it all and no nothing.

>However, unlike the poster you're responding to I don't feel that having a child is irresponsible because of the public school system. I believe it's immoral because there are so many millions of orphans in the world, that if you want to raise a child selecting from that pool is the only moral option.

Thank you for not reproducing.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[datavirtue]

This is the wisest collection of statements I've ever seen from someone who has no children. Usually, when people who don't have kids open their mouth about the subject it is a dreadful, unwitting embarrassment to themselves.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[datavirtue]

Please do not apologize for the system. It is lame, misguided, and undeserved.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Homr Zodyssey]

Being that you "went to university" and studied "maths", I assume you were not in the U.S. Most of this discussion has been around how broken the American system is.

That being said, I was not expected to simply do rote memorization or learn to the test in either my public High School or the small liberal arts college where I did my undergrad work. Of course, that was over a decade before No Child Left Behind...

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Homr Zodyssey]

And he's pissed at that other woman's poo flinging to get free pills paid for by our tax dollars.

Obviously, you never heard what she actually said, only the lies that he made up about her. This whole thing was about PRIVATE INSURANCE not YOUR TAX DOLLARS. The only thing your tax dollars had to do with it was that they had to spend money having a second hearing because they refused to let any women speak at the first one.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[datavirtue]

The problem ain't the teachers per se (though an amazing number are incompetent beyond belief, yet the NEA would go ballistic and threaten a general strike if you tried to fire the bad ones). The problem is this monster army of administrators and middle-management that swallows any given school budget, leaving damned little for the actual teachers. Now I'm not talking about the janitors and IT folks, but the massive percentage of paper-pushers, make-work positions (usually granted as political favors), curriculum specialists, and all the bloat that a typical school district carries on its ledger.

Looking around me at this very moment, I can attest that this is 100% true. It is human nature as seen in the principles of microeconomics, people act in their best interests. The administration does what they need to do to get people off their back and whatever else makes THEIR life easier. This is not leadership, and generally leads to a dysfunctional environment. They have little real incentive to promote quality, and science is not used to make decisions--politics is. A system has to be designed that constructs incentives that only promote the desired outcome--good luck. People say vouchers would work, but it doesn't seem to help community colleges. The people who attend community college have a choice of what school to attend, and can spend their money how they like, but the same problems exist. I think technology will eventually offer a free range of choices to students and the market will fix these problems--give it a generation or two.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

When people post things like this, I usually assume they are a pantywaist.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Homr Zodyssey]

P.S. You gave no context for the 6th rule... How could I possibly be taking it out of context?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[silentcoder]

>Being that you "went to university" and studied "maths", I assume you were not in the U.S. Most of this discussion has been around how broken the American system is.

Fair point, no I wasn't in America, though I honestly thought this concept at least was pretty much universal.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Lurker2288]

How much food do you eat a day? Because with so many starving people in the world, the only moral option is to cut yourself down to starvation rations and give the surplus to the needy.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

It may be "selfish" to love someone because they share your genes but that doesn't make it wrong. The goal of man has been to continue his bloodline and pass his genes on (think Midieval Ages when survival was not as easy as it is today). The only way forgoing the chance to have children in order to raise someone else's makes sense is if there was a proven master race or genetic code. Only then would you be helping mankind as a whole progress and evolve into a better species. What if your blood contained this master genetic code but you didn't have children because you were so concerned about taking care of somene else's kid? Raise your own child first, and if you can afford to raise another go ahead and adopt. If you can't look after your kid(s) don't have one (or five). I'd venture to say the act of creating a child when you aren't ready (financially, emotionally, etc) is a more concerning and selfish act.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[_8553454222834292266]

.I believe it's immoral because there are so many millions of orphans in the world, that if you want to raise a child selecting from that pool is the only moral option.

My genes are better. Use those orphans as fertilizer to grow food for MY kids.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[JWSmythe]

    From what I remember, a lot of them were very indistinct. The answer would be what was mentioned in the book. Quite often, you couldn't apply logic to the questions, without trying to guess at the thought of the test writer. That's doable if you know the teacher who wrote the test. If the test is derived from the book and multiple authors, it becomes an exercise in futility. I've seen questions where there are clearly 3 answers that are correct on various merit. Then it becomes a game of "guess one."

    Here's an example. I'm just making this one up, but it serves as an illustration. I've seen such questions on standardized tests, where you are suppose to think about what the right answer is.

    Q: Which one is different?

    1) Cow
    2) Dog
    3) Car
    4) Tree
    5) Mountain

    1,2,4 are all living things.
    3,4,5 can all be green.
    1,2 are mammals.
    1,2,4,5 are all natural.
    1,2,5 all have the vowel "O" in them.
    1,2,3 only have one vowel letter.
    1,2,3,5 all have a vowel in the second position.

    So, based on the criteria I chose, weighing each answer by the number of matches, it would make up:

    1) 6
    2) 6
    3) 3
    4) 3
    5) 4

    The right answer (since I made up the test) is actually 2. I intended the answer to be which is smallest.

    It's never to who can apply the best logic to the question. It's a game of "can you guess what the writer was thinking?" I've taken constructive thinking classes, and this was one of the questions that I remember.

    Q: Which one is different?

    1) A
    2) E
    3) I
    4) O
    5) X

    The right answer in that one is 4. Why? Because they were looking at the shapes that make up the letters, not the fact that 1-4 were vowels. There were no hints towards that conclusion, nor guiding questions leading up to it. It probably made sense on a previous revision of the test, where other questions helped you understand what this question was looking for. In the case of the test that was on, it was just dropped in the middle of a bunch of other random questions.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[hackula]

I don't agree with your morality here, and thus, to me, it is completely invalid.

WTF?! reductio ad absurdum: Hitler did not agree that killing Jews was evil, and thus, to him, the claim that killing Jews is evil is completely invalid

Sure, at a certain level morality has a "leap of faith" component that everyone makes based on their own subjective experience (same as science or any belief in reality), but after that, morality is actually quite objective. Everyone starts from a set of axiomatic principles and goes from there. Like science, things get fuzzy and people start to disagree when a case is sufficiently complicated, but the majority of moral decisions are agreed upon by a vast majority of people, suggesting there is an underlying objective morality. For example: stealing is bad, child abuse is bad, killing defenseless people is bad, rape is bad, etc. All of these claims are objective claims about morality. They do not have anything to do with opinions. Someone can have an opposing opinion, but they would be wrong.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Hognoxious]

That is, if three of the four answers can be interpreted as correct by analyzing beyond the denotative meaning of the words, but the fourth answer is simply correct based on the denotative meaning of the words, then that fourth answer is obviously the best answer.

Care to illustrate that by means of an example?

Ideally, it should involve cars.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the hardest damn job in the world to raise kids.

You know, I have 3 children, and I'm f'ing sick and tired of people here on slashdot standing on their pulpits preaching about how hard it is to raise kids. It's one of the easiest, most natural jobs in the world and anyone who would say otherwise is doing it wrong.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Ries]

If stealing is moralily wrong, does that mean it is moralily wrong to steal a bottle of penecillin, if it would prevent a child to live in agony the rest of its life? There is no such thing as objective morality. If all jews where hell-bent on killing all non jews, would it be evil to kill them first?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[hackula]

So the quality of local schools has little to do with how much the local taxpayers care about the schools.

Idk. I was talking to a teacher from FL in a low income district a few days ago. His school's PTA has two people on it: him and the principle. PTAs have a huge impact on the quality of a school. Wealth in general, even if not directly through taxes, has a big impact. Another friend of mine has been teaching hearing impaired students in a low income area for the past 20 years. It is unbelievably sad. He has had several students over the years who could have been in normal classes if they had hearing aids, but their parents could not afford them (actually, with government aid they could get these virtually for free but many simply did not care and refused for whatever reason).

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure that your 'proof' is correct. At the 8 school districts I have been involved in, teachers make up around 75-80% of the staff. These are districts that range in size from 800 children k-8, to around 10,000, counting feeder schools, middle schools and high schools together.

Not every school is full of 'make work positions', my opinion is that the example you use speaks to the politics of the specific area you live in.

Posting Ac because I don't remember my password, and left my laptop at work.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[phlinn]

What irony? Holding the defender and attacker equally responsible is very much an outcome of zero tolerance, and is very stupid.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[docilespelunker]

Seems rather the same over here in the UK. Rather sad isn't it.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[RogueLeaderX]

Most humans are pretty crappy at life. What they're good at is compromising ideals and rationalizing inadequacies.

FTFY

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

You conservative fucks asked for it.

You picked on liberals for being wusses, like Carter, so we put some real assholes in charge.

So anytime you want to fire you sovereign leaders, Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and company we'll start playing nice again. But until then.

Fuck you.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[rezalas]

Your public school sucked actually. Any time you teach someone to run away instead of standing up for themselves you breed dependence. What you should have done was fight (win or lose) and defend yourself. School is supposed to be a learning environment for the real world, and in the real world nobody saves you from the bully.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! That was awesome to read, good show! Catch and release!

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[phlinn]

No Child Left Behind legally prohibits teachers from doing their job. Period.

Please explain. My default response was that you are wrong, and I have some familiartiy with this law. Maybe I've missed something though. It was a poor attempt to fix the end result of poorly crafted government incentives instead of fixing the incentives, and is flawed in numerous ways, but it doesn't actually prohibit teachers from teach AFAIK.

Even as written, it could have been implemented better. Instead of tracking, say, 5th graders from year to year to guage AYP, schools could have grouped students by year of starting school and retired groups from tracking when the numbers got too low. Which would have been far more sensible as you'd mostly be comparing the same kids to the same kids, and could show progress no matter how bad the students were as long each student was improving from year to year. That was a suggestion I heard back when it was being debated, but of course no one actually does it that way. Could have missed a clause in there, I've only skimmed the thing.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[CimmerianX]

Schools aren't in the business of education.... they are now in the business of providing beneficial statistics so the councilmen and politicians who supply the funds can get re-elected when they tout the "under my watch, FCAT scores went up by 1.3%"

 

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, teachers getting thought of first, what a joke. TOP LEVEL ADMIN *ALWAYS* gets thought of first, then teachers.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[phlinn]

She was speaking at a government panel. There's a strongly implied "I'd like to have governement fix this" there. We won't get into the substance of her testimony, why she should or shouldn't have been allowed in the first one, etc.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you for real?
Try a year of waking up every few hours to deal with a hungry/screaming baby... Right after a full day dealing with the same screaming baby. The only breaks you get are when your mom stops playing bridge and comes over to take it for an hour. 1 of 24. Only a year or two of that left! Per baby.
Then you get a couple years of the most willful, ignorant person imaginable who's running straight at the road if they aren't dragging on your heels. 24 hours a day (what you thought you'd get to sleep by this point? Good luck with that peepee bed at 4am).
If you're lucky enough to be the working parent instead of the homemaker, you at least get a 8 hour break from your kids. Now get off your damn ass and help make dinner, take the kids to the park and pretend you're happy, get that screaming one out of the bath and somehow get clothes on it, now the other! Have you paid the bills yet?
Alright the kids are finally asleep, let's snuggle for a... Crap one has woken up again...

Raising kids, especially the first 5 years or so, is about 4x harder than the hardest job I have ever been exposed to. Your comment is the exact reason the OP is right.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing that you either blocked the first 5 years from your memory, or weren't really around to experience them.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[HapSlappy_2222]

I guess I learned a few things about "loving your kids" when I was a child, myself.

If I told you my father used to call me ugly and would hit me when he got angry, you'd call him an abusive prick, right? Or that he gambled all our money away on stocks, would wander around the house in his underwear so often that I was too mortified to bring friends home, and couldn't hold down a full-time job? You'd call him a deadbeat and a loser, yeah? A whole hell of a lot of other people looking in from the outside thought so too, and I used to hate him for it all.

Well, my father also survived 3 brain tumors that left him with the emotional capacity of a 4 year old, and an intellectual capacity that seemed to vary day to day. Something like that Robin Williams movie "Jack" or maybe "Forrest Gump", though the movies don't really portray what it's like to live with an adult that has night terrors or burns himself in the shower. My father died 18 years ago as of March 21st, and it's only in my adulthood that I can recognize the things he'd do to show much he loved us. He'd make sure we got ice cream, and he'd make sure to kiss us goodnight every night. He'd be the one to put bandaids on when we got hurt, and would beg my mom to make sure we'd get to school on time and do all our homework. When he got mad, it was because he worried about us. When he'd lose all his money, it's because some asshole would trick him out of it, and he DID keep a job for nearly 20 years mowing lawns at his best friend's bank branch (this was a long-time friend from before the cancer). He was too embarrassed to tell us since all of our friends' dads had jobs at desks and fixing cars and science-y things, and he couldn't do that.

Before the cancer took his life away from him, which occurred when I was very young, he had graduated from Boise State with a masters' degree, and was teaching. He played and coached soccer and football, and was very respected in his hometown as one of the best public speakers around. His parents' pride and joy. After the tumors, his family disowned us, thinking we (well, my mother, really) couldn't provide the care that they could. It became something of a war, which ended in my dad leaving us after a few years, moving to an apartment his parents paid for. When he died, my "grandparents" buried him before his sons (myself included) arrived. I said goodbye to my father with my mother and 3 brothers, while the undertaker's backhoe was idling 10 feet away, waiting to resume filling the grave back in. That memory is forever burned into my mind. My mother TO THIS DAY pays for his decades-old medical bills, and I visit his grave every year.

Sometimes the people who love us are unable to show us in the standard ways, but that love is no less meaningful. On the other hand, some people who think they are showing love are simply horrible people. Knowing which is which can be very difficult even from inside the situation; those not privy to all of the information are simply not in a position to judge.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

(Good thing the Bush's aren't still in office to take the heat for elementary-gate.)

I've never heard of something called fucking "elementary-gate." I don't care what it is you're referring to, I'm so fucking tired of the relatively modern pattern of attaching "gate" to an existing word when describing a scandal. You know what Watergate was? It was the name of a fucking hotel. It had nothing to do with fucking water.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, it's really quite easy... At least when someone else is doing it for you. Try being a homemaker. 24 hours a day of relentless hardship for about 4 years per kid. There is nothing in the world to prepare you for it.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

In any school, the teachers are the minority... In most other schools, the same ratio holds... about 20-30% of a given school's employees are actual teachers. Sometimes that drifts up to 40%, but only in rare cases.

Well here's the other side to that. Be careful what you wish for.

I work in a school in Australia with 300-400 students, 30-40 staff, where 60% off staff are teachers -- the rest are reception/cleaners/IT/lab/special ed/deputy/principal. There are 5 computer rooms, laptops for high school students, and my take is from the view of IT.

The previous IT guy was there part time and needless to say it was an absolute shambles when I inherited it (even though the guy was really quite capable). There had been no attempt to clean the IT office for several years due to lack of time. IT equipment was scattered around the place and bad purchasing decisions/no user training for teaching staff had been put in place/etc. If something did not absolutely have to be done it was not, because it could not have been done with no resources to do it. Teaching staff had been supplementing time by wiring up computing rooms! (Yikes! Not a professional, complete job in sight, and of course no documentation).

Now the IT position (in case you haven't guessed it is one person for everything) and the library positions are to be merged to save money. On the radio you can hear people talk about inefficiencies in administration in schools and merging reception staff across campuses and different schools. What a bleeping joke. This kind of thinking also leads to reductions in teacher staff position quality as it becomes normal to think of removing teachers willy-nilly as anyone else.

Sorry for the rant, but the school now pays this position full-time because I put my foot down before taking it. The school saves the difference in pay and then some in mere strategic planning and IT purchasing decisions in 1 year easy! What would be real simple and actually save heaps of money is buying software licenses/hardware/vendor support in bulk as a collection of schools instead of duplicating small user licence agreements/etc. Corporations and contractors alike see schools as large sacks of money and I think this is where the spotlight should be shining (that and focusing on student learning outcomes, which does not revolve solely around how many teachers there are or what they are doing).

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's selfish that anyone could love one human more than another because they share the same genes.

If only someone would write a book about that!

They did. It was called Mein Kampf.
Hello Godwin.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[MozeeToby]

You want some real advice?

#1 Love your kids.
#2 Do the best you can.
#3 Do what feels right to you and your family.

And I'm not just being a jackass, each of those points comes from 2 different directions and that's something a lot of people don't get.

Most parents get #1 pretty easily the day their kids are born but, and this is something no one likes to talk about, not everyone feels an instant connection to their newborn. If you don't feel it don't panic. The first days, weeks, and months are an emotional and hormonal roller coaster ride (yes, for both parents), you'll get there eventually if you stay involved.

#2 seems obvious too, just work your hardest right? But it goes the other way, don't try to force more out of yourself than your able to give. That means asking for and accepting help when you need it, it means letting the mess pile up in the kitchen so you can sleep for an extra half hour, it even means taking time for yourself every now and then so you don't go insane. In extreme cases, it means setting your crying baby in the crib and walking away for 10 minutes if it gets to be too much.

And #3, probably the only piece of 'real' advice out of the three. You don't have to follow other people's advice (not even mine)! Don't let anyone tell you how to be a parent. There's a million right ways to raise a child, and most of them can the the wrong way to raise a child just as easily so you may as well do it the way that feels right to you. You've got millions of years of parenting instincts living up in your brain, if advice contradicts those don't ignore it and blindly follow what someone is telling you. That doesn't mean don't read up on things, or solicit advice, or listen when your mother tells you how she used to do it, it just means don't feel like a bad parent if you don't want to follow them.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

It all gets funneled into the state coffers, and distributed evenly amongst all districts.

So the poor kids don't have shitty schools. Cry me a river, tea bagger.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[HapSlappy_2222]

I think that if your point was accurate, we'd have no further need for college ethics classes (which teach a wide variety of viewpoints and theories on morality) nor would we need nearly as many cops, jails, and courts.

Like Hitler, most of the bad people in the world are pretty good at justifying to themselves why doing a thing isn't bad. So many people rationalize their own actions away, and morality is a construct of society (albeit a very, very important one).

I can even counter your examples directly (I don't necessarily believe any these positions; just showing that in ethics there is always an opposing viewpoint that someone can contrive, silly as they might be, and this is why ethics are so commonly argued, but 2 + 2 = 4 isn't): Stealing - what if my family's starving to death? Child Abuse - locking a kid up is child abuse, but what if he kills another kid and gets stuck in a cell? Killing defenseless people - what if they are harboring war criminals and refuse to move out of the way? Rape - some cultures initiate marriages this way, and some men systematically rape their women for the duration of the relationship (unless you consider "just plain giving up on life" as the woman's consent).

We think many things others do are wrong, but they think WE are wrong to "allow" our women to be educated or don't wear enough clothing or that we don't wear super long beards or that we value individualism over collectivism or about a trillion other things. Obviously you and I believe certain things, and being in the same culture, most of our morality is likely similar, but yes, other cultures truly believe other things as strongly as we believe ours. If you go to another culture, YOU are in the wrong based on sheer numbers (this is also why I don't go to stupid shitty pig fucker cultures, and I'm comfortable judging the ever living shit out of them, much to my old sociology professor's chagrin).

The point is, you cannot be absolutely "right" or "wrong" in all ethical quandaries, though it's helpful to have a guide, which would only work when stated in absolute terms. So, you can easily state things in general terms, but, as is the norm for sweeping statements, you still have to take an individual situation and decide based on that individual situation's merits, although in ethics, starting from a solid bias can actually be a good thing; it saves shit tons of time, that's for sure.

Generally speaking, there are many schools of thought on how to make ethical decisions and belief systems. You can do the thing that provides the most utility (Utilitarian), provides the greater good to all (Altruism), provides the greatest pleasure with least pain (Hedonism's original form), simply go for pleasure only (Cyrenaicism; what most think of as Hedonism), and about a thousand more; and it's trivially easy to rationalize every single act you commit, good or bad. This is why ethical considerations are very much a societal agreement and don't come from a genetic stamp, and it's why morals in different cultures can vary so much, and also why cultures can change moral views over time (which is also a VERY good thing; ethical considerations tend to need resolution prior to progress).

Stephen Pinker's "The Blank Slate" talks about this, and many other things, far, far better than I could ever attempt to. I strongly recommend it.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[HapSlappy_2222]

If only someone would write a book about that!

You surprised me cube-mates, making me laugh like that. Gogo Dawkins!

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

People with "authority" can be wrong and people without it can be right, but it's much easier and less time-consuming to disregard someone based on their supposed lack of qualifications (on top of inflating your ego). We've all personally experienced good and/or bad parenting while growing up unless you were an orphan, and certainly we've all seen other people raising kids. By no means am I saying parenting is easy, but it doesn't require years of education to form a sensible opinion.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Archangel Michael]

Awesome Post! Nicely Done!

Blame the Parents is often right, but often wrong. Parents don't get to choose their kids (usually) so they get what they get. I have three kids myself, and people loved to try to blame me for one of them as if I were to blame for the choices made. However, the counter to them is my other two that, while not perfect, are awesome none-the-less. I look at the whole of the family, the structure, at all the various bits and measure the results. Random chance explains exceptional kids raised by bad parents, and bad kids being raised by exceptional parents, and I've known my share of both. Most parents are normal everyday people doing the best they can, and their children are a direct reflection of this, being normal kids doing the best they can.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[yurtinus]

- Potty training: check
- Encouraging appropriate social interaction: check
- Teaching to fetch the newspaper: check

I really don't see the difference...

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[HapSlappy_2222]

One thing I didn't mention; the "big bad" versus "the little bad". In ethics, it's harder to use tools like analogy to prove your point, simply because every single situation requires its own analysis based on its own merits, and sometimes committing a small bad IS the moral choice over committing a big bad.

You can certainly say "Hitler did not agree that killing Jews was evil, and thus, to him, the claim that killing Jews is evil is completely invalid", and I'll even agree with you 100% (though you do risk a Godwin ;). Still, saying that does NOT mean that "I don't agree that stealing food to feed my starving family" is also wrong; the two situations are completely unrelated, and there is no logical disconnect in thinking both "Hitler's was a douche" and "It'll suck for that guy to lose some profit but my kid hasn't eaten in a week so... *yoink*" while still others may think "Ill find another way... I refuse to steal." and ALSO not be wrong logically.

Every single ethical quandary needs to be decided on an individual basis, for weighing "right" versus "wrong" cannot and should not be done via standard recipes. Ethics and logic aren't always buddies. Trying to make it so is just lazy thinking.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[yurtinus]

And I'm betting that despite the suspension you probably heard a "yeah, we're just doing this because it's policy" from at least one person involved in the process...

Teachers in public schools in general really are quite good. There are not many professions where you have that many people do that much work for relatively meager pay simply because they're passionate about it.

The issue people have with public schools is that everybody wants them to be a silver bullet for educating (and raising) our youth. There are an awful lot of people out there who feel that schools (public or private) should teach their kids the most of what they should know. There is little consideration for what the kids do *outside* of that six hour school day. Fundamentally this is where the problem lies: You don't have bad public schools, you have bad communities.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[CrimsonAvenger]

That problem is quite easily remediable. Quite simply take schools from local government budgets and shift them to state budgets.

Here in Australia schools are run by the states, and people are talking about shifting control to the Federal level as 6 states worth of administration is considered 6 times too many.

The notion that you'll get LESS administrative overhead by creating a higher-level control organization is simply mind-boggling.

Moving school control to State won't eliminate local admins, it'll just add State admins. And move school control from State to National will result in National, State, and Local admins....

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[yurtinus]

Mock them relentlessly. Next question?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

Each state would need only 1 administrative body to administer all schools in that state and to establish curricula for the whole state.

Of course this will be next to impossible to achieve due to every bum hicksville town believing from the gut religious thinking is the best way to manage education and who cares what the rest of the country does.

Right, so that's part of the reason why its a bad idea to have each state manage its own curriculum. The end result is no unified standard, which also complicates college enrollment and admission. What chance does a kid have of getting into a good engineering or science school if he/she has been been taught since Kindergarden that Jebuz rode dinosaurs, that evolution is just a theory, that creationism is science, etc?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[painandgreed]

That problem is quite easily remediable.

Clue number one that the following paragraph should best be modded as "Funny".

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[randyleepublic]

You, more than any random million others have a duty to have children. Lots of them. If you don't what will happen? That's right, the percentage of people who can think will shrink yet again.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[CodeHxr]

I think he misspoke (mistyped?) and meant *sub*jective, perhaps? :)

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

thank you my good sir, for this eye opening expression of my trip through the Florida Public School system.

Being a student in Florida most everything from 4th grade onward was centered around FCAT, 4th grade is where they introduced us to writing(based on the FCAT model) and said that the FCAT would determine our eligibility to pass to the next grade.

I also was one of the students that got to play test subject for the FCAT science "Beta" if you can call it. We were told that our score for our FCAT science(10th grade) did not matter in regards to our overall passing our final FCAT. First thing I noticed about the FCAT science was that I had never been taught the information being tested. Our science test, told to us later by several teachers, was focused on air/space science, basic stuff that if requested I might be able to logically work through today; in the 10th grade I had no idea what some if not most of the questions were asking. I had a Biology class, a Chemistry class, and some other basic science classes most of which focused on teaching the scientific method, and none of which taught any great measure of air/space.

This article:

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

actually makes sense to me, I can look back and analyze the foundation of my many personality flaws, and my problems, and link them to aspects of this article. As much as this New York teacher wanted this to be ironic, I can taste the truth in his words.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

What's your point? I work on an eCommerce team that has about 75 people, only 6 of which are developers.

News flash, other people have jobs that are important.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[CodeHxr]

They have Montessori schools that are public? All the ones we've found in our area are private and *very* expensive.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

What they're good at is compromising ideals and rationalizing inadequacies.

Important life skills. Parents and parenting are a product of the world in in which they exist as much as they are an influence on it. What you call 'crappy' may be fit and what I call 'good' may be an impediment.

We're back at the beginning -- what is 'crappy' for values of parenting that aren't universally/extremely crappy? As a parent, maybe other parents think you're the crappy one based on their own qualitative analysis.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Omestes]

WTF?! reductio ad absurdum: Hitler did not agree that killing Jews was evil, and thus, to him, the claim that killing Jews is evil is completely invalid

This is true, for Hitler. Obviously he didn't think killing Jews was evil, being that he decided to try to kill them all. He actually thought it was morally good. Most of us, obviously don't agree with him, but the point remains that "killing x = bad" is not an a priori truth. There is no universal system of morality, and if we just say it is consensus driven, we are pretty much saying it isn't objective.

Further, morals are pretty much subjective by nature, ethics, on the other hand, might have a bit of hope for objectivity. Morals are more related to values, and values are pretty much completely arbitrary. For example, the Bible says that usury is bad, but a lot of people today think it is a very moral principle (micro loans, and such), here something switched from good, to bad, for arbitrary reasons.

Ethics, at least, should have the backing of some logical system, and in some cases actually empirical data. But even then I doubt there will ever be discovered a universal, existent, system of ethics. They too are forced to only be descriptive or normative (i.e. wishful thinking).

For example: stealing is bad, child abuse is bad, killing defenseless people is bad, rape is bad, etc./quote?

Child abuse being immoral is a rather modern thing. My father, and most of the kids in his community (Irish Catholics in rural Minnesota during the 50s) were abused regularly. Spare the rod... all that. Rape is also a rather new moral issue, raping your enemies was considered one of the great perks of conquest. Further, killing children was also pretty acceptable. Stealing, too, is fine in various contexts, and these contexts were more permissive in the past.

That said, I don't completely disagree with you. I believe that there is probably a universal ethical template which we evolved with (in the form of something like the golden rule: empathy), but it is only that, a lose template. And its applicability is wholly dependent on who we consider to be like us. Thus most of the "immoral" acts you listed were perfectly moral 200 years ago, but only against black people, or Jews, or Indians. Hitler, and his ilk, decided that the Jews weren't human, and this all ethical judgments were pretty much moot in regards to them.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

They do the best they are able and know how.

Failure: When your very best just isn't good enough.

One thing I can practically guarantee: if you haven't actually DONE what you are preaching that others should, then it doesn't work like you think it will. That's a basic lesson in life.

Bullshit. I can look at how 1,000 people raise their kids and identify things which work and things which do not, and I can look at how you raise yours in comparison. You're not the first person to raise kids, nor will you be the last, and there are plenty of people I can talk to who have vastly more experience than you do.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[moeinvt]

It's worse to put the Federal government in charge. What happens when the Federally approved (and mandated) curriculum starts to include the very things you mentioned? Keep things under local and state control and worry about the education system in your own back yard. If people in other states want to teach their kids a science curriculum that conforms to a literal interpretation of the bible, so be it. I'll trust the science/engineering schools to weed out the unqualified applicants.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[nmr_andrew]

A semi-related anecdote from a time when I was living in Georgia:

One of the rural communities had a crumbling school, outdated and/or just missing textbooks, and most of the better teachers looking to move due to low pay (the school average was well under $30k in the late 90s). What do the fine residents decide? Why, let's build a new $2M football stadium and pay 6 coaches well over $100k/year each. Because Johnny is going to get a full ride to college playing football before a lucrative professional career, and Sally is going to go to the same college on a cheerleading scholarship and then marry Johnny. It didn't seem to matter that maybe one student from that town had gotten a football scholarship in the last decade.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[nmr_andrew]

This doesn't surprise me at all. When my mom took the test to be certified for elementary education (she was already certified to teach HS), she came home somewhat annoyed. Nearly every question had anywhere from 3-5 "correct" answers out of the 5 choices given. Apparently, you were supposed to figure out from the way the question was written that it was targeted at a 4th grader, and that answer (C) was the way in which an "average" 4th grader would answer it. I don't know how you figure out what an average 4th grader is or knows. And then complicate it by the fact that you need to differentiate between how a 3rd, 4th, and 5th grader would answer the same question since all three were possible choices.

Of course, I also took the SAT back in the day, which in the reading comprehension section had similar issues. There were often two correct answers, but one was "better" because that's what whoever wrote the question liked.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we fund school budgets from the property taxes of that district? I've long thought schools should be funded on the state level. Pool all those property taxes, get a formula based on number of students and local cost of living. The inner city school doesn't need to get less money than the school in the rich suburb.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[lightknight]

And try to change things, and we can't have that; too much of the human race is 'invested' in keeping things the way they are.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[lightknight]

Ah yes, but to ze government, they are numbers. From the day you are born, you owe the government a certain amount of money for them letting you live.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[lightknight]

What do you think public schools are (in the US)? Servant Ed.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Further, my parents were awesome, and yet I got in a shit-ton of trouble as a kid. Hell, I dropped out of high school, got hooked on drugs, and made more than my share of terrible decisions. Did you ever stop to think of much better person you would have turned out to be if your "awesome" parents beaten some common sense into you at a young age? Your parents FAILED boy! They FAILED!

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Wonko the Sane]

As much as this New York teacher wanted this to be ironic, I can taste the truth in his words.

He wasn't being ironic. Shortly after being selected New York State Teacher of the Year he publicly resigned because he believed his profession was inherently harmful to children.

Then he wrote a book detailing the history behind the design of modern education

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

ok what are you guys dumb or something all, the dumbing down of the school system is clearly plan has there are reports has far back has 1912 from the rockerfeller foundation, about taking over the school system and making every one slaves, and yeah there be yearly status reports 100 years long.
anyone that does not believe in the NWO need to go back to 1rst grade and relearn how to read.
duh follow the papertrail and the money.
read The Underground History of American Education - John Taylor Gatto

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[darnkitten]

For this reason I would love a voucher-type system where the money follows the child, not the other way around (which do we value more?), and parents can move their children to other schools at-will instead of being stuck.

We have this, after a fashion, where I live in Montana. Currently about a quarter of the students from my district (read one elementary and one junior high/high school) have been transferred to the school district 8 miles down the road (read one elementary and one junior high/high school)...because they have a better football team.

Consequently, because the "money follows the child," this district, which boasts high test scores, graduation rates, and college graduation rates, is losing funding, not due to educational quality, but due to sports--sports at which, due to the small school/team sizes, the students can't compete effectively at the collegiate level.

Another large portion of the community homeschool their children. I can think of only two parents who appear competent at the task (one is a teacher, and one comes from a part of Europe with high educational standards). The rest complain about the failings of the public schools while failing to provide their own children a basic, rounded education.

Parents don't appear to make rational choices based on the children's best interest any better than the government.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[interkin3tic]

ok what are you guys dumb or something all

There are simpler ways of saying "Don't bother reading the rest of this post," you know.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep i had a teacher who wrote tests like this. In tertiary ed. Stuffed up my mark for the whole course. But it wasn't cos she had any great concepts about anything, she was simply incompetent and obviously just really stupid. She didn't understand that her whim shouldn't be the correct answer in her tests.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[causality]

You know, I have 2 children, and I'm f'ing sick and tired of people here on slashdot standing on their pulpits preaching about how others should raise their kids, or what they would do if they 'love' their children. It's the hardest damn job in the world to raise kids, and every single parent (whether you think so or not) loves their children. They do the best they are able and know how. One thing I can practically guarantee: if you haven't actually DONE what you are preaching that others should, then it doesn't work like you think it will. That's a basic lesson in life.

I'm a little tired of something myself: adult people who use emotional "arguments" instead of telling me why they think my position is faulty. Perhaps you would like to start by telling me why you disagree with my statement about waiting until you can afford children before having them? Or perhaps you want to tell me why the public school system is so much better than private or homeschooling even though the facts are strongly against you? Or perhaps you could elucidate for me why a responsible adult should never consider these things prior to creating new life? Didn't think so.

Oh there's another thing too: people who see me making general statements about large groups of people and decide to take it personally, perhaps out of some kind of guilt they feel for not doing so well as they had hoped, as though anything I say were the cause of that.

Rather than use a pulpit, I gave my reasoning and explained what I believe to be best and why I believe that. You? Not so much. We do agree on one thing though: parenting is very hard work. In light of that, why the hell would you want to start doing it at a disadvantage (such as having no second parent, not being able to afford the children you chose to have, etc)?

Oh, and if you really, REALLY don't want other people to comment on parenting, stop expecting other people to help you raise your children. That means you pay for and arrange for their education, not the taxpayers, and it means you equip them to deal with the world instead of trying to childproof the whole world. Then it will truly be none of their business. Until then, others are involved, and since they help pay for things like public schools it is perfectly legitimate for them to articulate a position on them.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you have suggested this to your parents? Good thing you have the luxury of spouting this nonsense knowing full well they didn't buy into your ridiculous morality.

I would suggest it to anyone, paradox be damned. It's not like unconceived children can give a shit.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[JWSmythe]

Q: A Porsche, Ferrari, and Lamborghini drive up to a bar. A priest, monk, and rabbi get out .... They go to the bartender and ask, "What is the correct answer?"

A: 42
B: Red
C: Round
D: C=MC^2
E: All of the above.

oh.. Not quite what you meant. :)

(BTW, the answer is A: 42, obviously. It's always the answer.)

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

No. When so many schools rely on rote memorization and teaching to the test, you also have bad public schools.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[NeverSuchBefore]

and thus he probably DOES know more about child rearing

And he's also either right or he's wrong. Unless he provides actual evidence to back his points up, merely mentioning he's a parent is pretty useless (especially since "bad" parents can and do exist).

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[NeverSuchBefore]

This is the bit which every single non parent fails to understand.

Can we do away with the generalizations? I'm no parent, but even I knew that. I was a kid once, and so were they. I saw other kids and continue to see other people's kids.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[NeverSuchBefore]

It's ultimately a very selfish position unless you think the species should die out

How is not having children selfish? We are in absolutely no danger of being extinct. Seriously. Just check out how many human beings there are on this planet. A few people choosing not to have children will not make much of a difference, and they may not even be the selfish ones.

Why haven't you had 20 children? Clearly, one of them could grow up to become someone great. Therefore, you need to have even more children, or else you're just selfish! Can't afford it? Work harder and do better for society! Everyone should have children until they're not able to anymore.

Using this logic, it's difficult to not be selfish.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[NeverSuchBefore]

Using this line of logic, you could literally (and I think in your case, it might've been unintentional) justify anything. Help this dying person out by calling the ambulance? Please! I don't need to hear that from a hypocrite (which magically makes someone wrong, by the way) who doesn't even give all their food away to the needy!

Some people believe there is such a thing as "good enough."

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[_8553454222834292266]

To the degenerate troll who modded me down: fuck you.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming from a family of teachers (mostly public school, although I teach in a public university), all coming from a mother who was an education lobbyist for 15 years, describing teachers as "spineless" is going into the republican side of the name-calling game a bit too strongly.

Years ago, it was decided that the lobbiests with the most money would have the most powerful voice in the statehouses and the capital. This led to a drastic loss of funding for education beginning with Nixon and continuing to the present day. Reduced funding for public schools at the state and federal level meant that teachers had larger classes, more responsibilities and lower pay. Many teachers took on second jobs to keep their standard of living at the 60's/70's level. This, naturally, affected the time and effort that they put into teaching. The students suffered and the solution, proposed by the lobbyists for the other interest groups was to cut education funding because it wasn't doing a good job.

Move forward to the present day when we have failing public schools, grossly underfunded, fighting for students with "charter schools" that exist to promote racism, classism and sexism, and the solution is.... reduce funding because the system doesn't work.

Those from my generation who remember good schools, good teachers and good jobs are told by the pundits and powers that be that the cause is unions, or teachers, or government, or some other bullshit. the simple truth is that we, the people, didn't pay attention to what we were doing as a people. We let the lobbyists write the laws and budgets for our states, localities and federal governments. We elected people who told us that they knew the problems and how to solve them without actually finding out ourselves, or even thinking about the truth of what was being proposed.

We have the power to turn that around at any time. Yesterday, today or tomorrow would work just as well as any other time. But, we have become used to things as they are. We actually believe the Mitt Romneys, the Newts and the Santorums of the world who are told by the same people that got us into the shitpool we are in that all we need to do it give more money to the people who filled it with shit and they will clean it up, just as they promised before to clean it up. We believe them enough that when anybody who comes in and tries to do anything to actually clean it up (whether it was a Clinton or a Bush or a Reagan or an Obama) they meet with an insane posse of fanatics who have been convinced that the shit is good shit because it is their shit.

And we believe them. We don't think and learn and decide for ourselves, we let someone else decide for us and just parrot their words.

The next time someone complains about teachers or parents or schools or government, remember, you get what you pay for. You don't want to pay for your goverment, you get shit government. You don't want to pay for schools, you get shit schools, you don't want to pay for a war in Afghanistan you get an absolute shitstorm of a war. DUHHH You want a good government, then pay for good, highly qualified civil servants to run that government. You don't need a fucking company to do it, you need good, well-pid civil servants: how hard is that to understand?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying "Tax Dollars" is a fallacy, you are correct. But she was pushing for the government to FORCE private employers to provide something to its employees, based on the arbitrary decision of an un-elected secretary of health and human services. What was more laughable was the administration's pitch that it is a "compromise" to say that the insurance company pays for it, not the private employers. Who pays the premiums again? Oh wait...

My objection to a contraception mandate was not a religious one, but one of freedom/liberty. If an un-elected cabinet member can decide that free birth control MUST be provided free of charge as a condition of employment in this country, what CAN'T she mandate? Similarly, can she OUTLAW coverage of certain things her administration does not approve of? (e.g. could a Republican Secretary of HHS OUTLAW the coverage of birth control?).

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

It's worse to put the Federal government in charge. What happens when the Federally approved (and mandated) curriculum starts to include the very things you mentioned? Keep things under local and state control and worry about the education system in your own back yard. If people in other states want to teach their kids a science curriculum that conforms to a literal interpretation of the bible, so be it. I'll trust the science/engineering schools to weed out the unqualified applicants.

LOL but the federal government IS IN charge and has been for a fairly long time. Its very unlikely it would mandate such things because that goes against certain parts of the U.S. Constitution...like the 1st Amendment, which includes separation of church and state. However unlikely, if the Federal government ever did mandate such a curriculum, then we as Americans deserve to be fucked for allowing such a backwards culture to completely manifest our government. Let me pose this question to you: Suppose, you get a great job opportunity in another state. Hypothetically, the states control the school curricula as you favor. Now suppose you have two children in grammar school and your job offer is in a state that preaches from 1600's Puritanist educational standards, eschewing any modern science or math...Or perhaps you are Catholic and the school system is based entirely on Mormonism or maybe some Pentecostal/Evangelical sect. What then?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

And when the people with educations, jobs, and power decide to create and especially, MARKET food that makes the kids fat, lazy and stupid, how will they ever find out?
The premise that fails is the concept of intentionality being a normal human trait. Sure, everyone SAYS they want certain things or that they intended to do things a certain way, but in the end, it's just hormones and opportunity. Some will prepare for the time when opportunity comes knocking, and they will jump in the boat that takes them to the money. Others simply live according to circumstances.
VERY few set out in life and follow plans and make their life what they 'intend' for it to be. Those that do are freakin' annoying asses most of the time.
Morality could be objective, if we had the ability to actually use our brains intentionally and reasonably. The subjectivity of what passes for morality in humans is a result of hallucinating ourselves into a 'special' place in the world.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Wovel]

Maybe we should ship all of the worlds children to large, mostly empty island for 12 years. This is the ultimate in efficiency. I am thinking of a place.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Wovel]

The worst choice is a professional politician that pretends it isn't one (like a Sarah Palin for example).

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Wovel]

I have an 18 year old, a 15 year old and a 3 year old (adopted about a year ago). While parenting is not always easy, it is not quite as difficult as a lot of people make it out to be. The rewards far out weigh the difficulty. I do not believe you have to be a parent to understand the challenges or difficulty. Everyone one of us without a mental defect has memories back to age 4 or so. You do not have to be a parent to give sound advice nor does being a parent qualify you as an expert.

I am very concerned with the parents who try to make themselves out as martyrs. How must their children feel.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Wovel]

I have biological and adopted children and I spit on his claims of morality too.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Wovel]

That is silly on every level. You clearly had horrible parents, but that does not mean everyone else did.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

You want some real advice?

#1 Love your kids.
#2 Do the best you can.
#3 Do what you think is right to you and your family.

FTFY.
Not to be pedantic, but this whole "feel" abuse is part of what's wrong -- THINKING and FACTS are demonized/marginalized. See Elizabeth Hasselback vs Jesse Ventura for a good example.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they charge *more* taxes for people with children?

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

Does your definition of 'orphan' expand the regular 'children with dead parents' to include 'children put up for adoption'? Because I'm not sure who this strategy is awesome for if it doesn't.

Re:The most important lesson in life being taught

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the population of parents of orphans is already low enough, surely.

No child left...

[Anonymous Coward]

...educated.

Re:No child left...

[Anonymous Coward]

ur rite lolz

Re:No child left...

[Cmdrm]

At least they are using the metric system.

Re:No child left...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why teachers need to teach to the the test and not deviate from established testing dogma.

Real information is not nearly as important as statistical evidence that some form of learning is occurring. But if children learn things outside the classroom, the tests can't measure it, and school administrators are unable to credit themselves with the accomplishment.

So If you can't prove you learned something from a teacher in a classroom, you need to forget it, because it will only lower your test scores. Children exhibiting knowledge gained outside the classroom must be punished frequently, and exceptionally bored students too bright for the curriculum must be diagnosed as autistic so that CNN can write stories about how maladjusted they are. We can prove this by their test scores. I'd scream all day too if this shit happened to me.

Re:No child left...

[steelfood]

China had their Great Leap Forward. Looks like we're about to take the plunge ourselves.

Common Misconceptions

[KalvinB]

You have to realize that teachers teach those misconceptions so they can pretend to teach a particular concept when other essential prior knowledge has not been covered yet. This happens a lot in math as well. For example we covered a problem that could be solved without the mid-point formula but the mid-point formula drastically reduced the complexity. Most teachers would just find a way to fudge it. I went ahead and taught the midpoint formula.

It really is up for debate how much a kid and handle and if we should teach all the essentials or just give them a few hacks so we can teach other parts of the whole. Personally I despise teaching misconceptions but I haven't been around long enough to say conclusively it's not necessary. I just haven't found a particular case yet where it is.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[forkfail]

If you read TFA, you'll find that this isn't assuming that student's won't know something yet - it is defining a predator as an organism that gets its nutrients from consuming another organism (meaning a cow is a predictor).

And even if it was the first, consider the impact on anyone with an advanced-for-their-age understanding, and the impact on them. It knocks down their confidence in their budding intelligence, reduces to the least common denominator.

No, this is wrong in every way, and not defensible.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[repapetilto]

They should just have different questions then...

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

a kid and handle... is that like 2 girls and a cup?

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Kneo24]

It's clear you did the right thing as an educator. I hope you continue to do these things to the best of your abilities. Students love it when you teach them the easier way of doing things - it leads to a better understanding of the material.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[UnknowingFool]

I read the article and it seems to me that the practice test has major flaws in that those who wrote the practice tests were not precise. The definitions were off. The 3 of 4 example was one where the student of asked which of the 4 was testable:

1. The petals of red roses are softer than the petals of yellow roses.
2. The song of a mockingbird is prettier than the song of a cardinal.
3. Orange blossoms give off a sweeter smell than gardenia flowers.
4. Sunflowers with larger petals attract more bees than sunflowers with smaller petals.

Softness is a physical property you can test. Sweetness when it comes to aromas is a chemical response. And size vs bee attraction is also testable. What the question intends is which of these is most plausible when it comes to cause and effect which the right answer is 4. 1 and 3 are right due to the way the question was asked.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[tolkienfan]

There is no excuse. When there is a multiple choice question where only one choice is allowed, (like most standardized tests), all correct answers should be counted as correct. If there are answers that are correct for subtle reasons, either put alternate (more obvious) incorrect choices, or allow them as alternative correct answers.
No debate is necessary.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[GodInHell]

My favorite story of ignorant "science" teachers from growing up, test question: Do plants produce or consume oxygen? Answer - both, produce in photosynthesis, consume in resparation. Graded wrong with a note: plants don't respire!!
sigh.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[93 Escort Wagon]

If you read TFA, you'll find that this isn't assuming that student's won't know something yet - it is defining a predator as an organism that gets its nutrients from consuming another organism (meaning a cow is a predator).

They're just trying to teach critical thinking - getting young minds to consider alternative points of view. In this instance, for example, they want the students to look at things from the point of view of the grass!

(also, FTFY)

Re:Common Misconceptions

[repapetilto]

Really you can test subjective qualities like prettiness as well.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Milyardo]

The misconception this question enforces is stronger than that. 1 and 3 attempt compare the the measurement of physical properties while number 4 is a behavioural observation that can only be measured through correlation. Numbers 1 and 3 can be proven to be fact through measurement while number can only be a hypothesis(that can only be proven with a causation or disproven with a observation that states otherwise). From the TFA the purpose of the question is asses the student's ability to discern opinion/interpretation from a scientific observation. While number is undoubtedly a scientific observation, asserting number 4 is true after observation is still an opinion/interpretation, making it a poor choice to assert that student has a clear understanding of the difference between opinion and fact.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[wisty]

In multiple choice questions, the "most correct" answer is the right one. Otherwise, all answers can be correct, if you argue hard enough (if it's at all subjective).

The problem is, they used a stupid question - you can scientifically test the "softness" or "sweetness" of a flower. There should be one that's obviously "most correct".

For in-class quizzes, it's not so important (as the student can challenge it), but for a state-wide test there shouldn't be any wriggle room.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[amicusNYCL]

The response to his questions was pretty telling also. The official agreed with the science, that 3 of the answers were testable, but he said that students who learned about mineral hardness couldn't be expected to realize that applied to other materials, and that students couldn't be expected to realize that you can use a chromatograph (or anything else) to test the qualities of a smell.

The obvious solution is to choose other properties that are actually non-testable instead of list testable properties and assume the students won't know, but they refused to change those responses.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[repapetilto]

I remember one that was something like this:

Mushroom: Plant as _______: Animal

A: Cat
B: Pizza
C: Rock
D: Table

I guessed the "Correct" answer was A. Really those tests were full of questions like this.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[fido_dogstoyevsky]

If you read TFA, you'll find that this isn't assuming that student's won't know something yet - it is defining a predator as an organism that gets its nutrients from consuming another organism (meaning a cow is a predictor)....

[pedant]Actually, a cow can be considered a predator. And because the prey (eg area of grass) survives the cow is a grazing predator - just like a mosquito.[/pedant]

Hey... what happened to [shift}+[,] and [shift]+[.]?

Re:Common Misconceptions

[mkiwi]

Sweetness when it comes to aromas is a chemical response.

That response is relative to each person, so it can't be objectively tested. It's a result that has to be interpreted and can't be measured.

Softness of a pedal can be tested, as it is a physical quality of each pedal. Granted, you may need a University laboratory to prove it, but it's still possible. If you were told to choose only one answer, 4 is the only logical choice, because doing a study on bees is easier than measuring the material properties of a plant.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[PeanutButterBreath]

Actually, a cow can be considered a predator. And because the prey (eg area of grass) survives the cow is a grazing predator - just like a mosquito.

I think that the relevant definition of "predator" hinges on survival by eating other animals.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be totally correct... if you went to school in the 18th century.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[fido_dogstoyevsky]

You have to realize that teachers teach those misconceptions so they can pretend to teach a particular concept when other essential prior knowledge has not been covered yet. This happens a lot in math as well. For example we covered a problem that could be solved without the mid-point formula but the mid-point formula drastically reduced the complexity. Most teachers would just find a way to fudge it. I went ahead and taught the midpoint formula.

It really is up for debate how much a kid and handle and if we should teach all the essentials or just give them a few hacks so we can teach other parts of the whole. Personally I despise teaching misconceptions but I haven't been around long enough to say conclusively it's not necessary. I just haven't found a particular case yet where it is.

Have you tried presenting the misconception as something like "This is a simplified model which has some inaccuracies that you can live with for now. I can't go into the accurate version yet because you'll need next year's maths to get it properly..."

Re:Common Misconceptions

[tolkienfan]

I completely agree. Especially about the wiggle room.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[honestmonkey]

Near as I figure, the correct answer is D: Table. What'd I win?

Re:Common Misconceptions

[cpt kangarooski]

Don't kid yourself Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about!

Re:Common Misconceptions

[realityimpaired]

Can even do it scientifically, if you're using an fMRI....

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't that be 'neither?' Plants don't seem to perform any thermonuclear reactions, just chemical reactions. A plant might be thought of as consuming carbon dioxide and releasing free oxygen, but it doesn't produce oxygen since it doesn't release any oxygen that it didn't first take in.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[wisnoskij]

That is not how a lot of teacher do it. Often it is the Most correct that is graded correct (you are lucky if you get 1/2 points for the other correct ones).

Re:Common Misconceptions

[dgatwood]

The problem is that it's hard to construct a hypothesis that isn't testable except for hypotheses that they can't list on a test, e.g. God created the universe.

Okay, I suppose they could go absurd, like "Invisible trolls live under the bridge and occasionally eat small children", or philosophical, like "The universe is infinite" or "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", but....

Re:Common Misconceptions

[chadenright]

Being on the board of education in florida is like voting: being alive is not a prerequisite.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[fido_dogstoyevsky]

Actually, a cow can be considered a predator. And because the prey (eg area of grass) survives the cow is a grazing predator - just like a mosquito.

I think that the relevant definition of "predator" hinges on survival by eating other animals.

Eating other organisms - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predation - it's on the interweb, so it HAS to be right. And yes, the same source does say that grazing isn't true predation, but I still teach it that way (...can be considered..).

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Obfuscant]

Softness is a physical property you can test.

Once you have defined a measurement system that correlates with your opinion of "soft". Most readings on the mineral hardness scale are hardly what a normal person would call "soft". A number 2 pencil is "soft", but you can stab someone with it. What scale do you use?

Sweetness when it comes to aromas is a chemical response.

For many decades, scientists have told us that sodium saccharine is a "sweetener". Sorry, not to me it isn't. It tastes horrible, not sweet. Women pay lots of money for perfumes that smell "sweet". To me, many of them smell bad and even repulsive. The only Axe version I ever thought smelled good was the chocolate one.

Yes, you can use a chromatograph to analyze the chemical makeup of something, and then say that "because it contains X it will smell sweet". That's based on someone actually smelling X at some point in time and saying "X smells sweet", and then smelling Y and saying "X smells sweeter than Y" -- an opinion. But the chromatograph cannot smell. If you give it a chemical that you've not analyzed before (and thus cannot identify), the chromatograph won't tell you how it will smell.

You MIGHT be able to use NMR or other methods to determine the chemical structure and say "because it has a structure similar to X, it should smell sweet", but the NMR isn't measuring "sweetness", it is measuring structure. And it certainly won't tell you "sweeter".

Ok, you get ten people together and have them smell orange blossoms. That's a scientific test for sweet smelling, right? No, it's still their opinion. Someone may like gardenia more than orange.

Now, if you are going to these extremes to attempt to get a scientificatlly testable answer to "soft" and "sweet", why not "pretty"? Feed the bird songs to a program that identifies music (SoundHound, e.g.) and see which misidentified commercial product is higher on the charts -- it must be "prettier" than the other, right? Well, that's how I'm defining "pretty" so I can test it scientifically.

And size vs bee attraction is also testable.

That's the only one. "More bees" is objective. "Sweet" and "pretty" and "soft" are subjective. They need human input from the start. "More" is a well defined concept that doesn't have regional or social differences.

1 and 3 are right due to the way the question was asked.

One and three are wrong the way the question was asked, and because it takes some convoluted means to make them even close to testable ("smell" is a function of the nose; apply a chromatograph and you're using second best tools) four is still the best answer. That's the "right" answer for any test -- the most correct answer. By the time someone gets to fifth grade, "most correct answer" should be derigour.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Just Some Guy]

In multiple choice questions, the "most correct" answer is the right one.

What's the next number in the series [2, 3, 5, 8]?

1. 13 (Fibonacci style: 2 + 3 = 5, 3 + 5 = 8, 5 + 8 = 13)
2. 12 (Incrementing by increasing integers: 2 + 1 = 3, 3 + 2 = 5, 5 + 3 = 8, 8 + 4 = 12)

Of those, which is objectively "most correct"?

For various reasons, I ended up taking an IQ test a while back. The number of unobviously "most correct" answers almost drove me nuts. For a definition of "IQ" meaning "comes up with the same answer as the test author because of similar thought processes", it was great. For "IQ" meaning "able to infer patterns in the world around themselves", it sucked.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this attitude is always wrong and leads to difficulty in college and sometimes earlier, whenever teachers start expecting students to talk about all they _know_ rather than all they've been taught. While few elementary school teachers will allow a student to argue for points back on an exam, many high school students and I'm pretty sure all college professors will, and then that time comes, it's better to have an answer that you can argue is correct rather than answer which is correct _if_ you assume that something false is actually true.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Idbar]

In the same pedant mode, I was just wondering what predators have anything to do with any predicting ability of the cow (if any).

Furthermore I was wondering what does the cow predicts? I know they probably can make better weather forecasts than many weather men I've seen though.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Relayman]

A mushroom is not a plant, so the relationship is "the first item is similar to the second but not a member of it." Since a cat is an animal, A is wrong. Since of the three left, only a rock is not manmade, so I say the the correct answer is C. But that's a poor question for a test.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Obfuscant]

The problem is that it's hard to construct a hypothesis that isn't testable except for hypotheses that they can't list on a test, e.g. God created the universe.

SCIENTIFICALLY testable. You can ask 100 people their opinions about whether A smells "sweeter" than B, but that's not measuring anything but the opinions of 100 people. The actually "sweetness" is still an opinion. You can't take those results and tell people they are wrong when they think B smells sweeter than A. It is their nose, and their nose may be different than yours.

"More" is objective. All you need to do is count. Ten is more than five. Everywhere. It's defined by the number system. There is no opinion involved in comparing the two items in question 4. You count bees. End of story.

Now, you might argue that the statement "more people think A smells sweeter than B" is scientifically testable, but that's not the statement in the question. Using scientific apparatus (chromatograph, e.g.) to measure the amount of certain chemicals in A and B isn't a scientific test of sweet smell, it's only pushing the opinion down one level.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[digitig]

That response is relative to each person, so it can't be objectively tested.

I didn't see the word "objectively" in the question.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[jd]

When it was found that the British GCSE examiners were marking salt as something you couldn't melt, it was considered a national disaster and the media ripped the examining authorities a new one.

In Florida, marking something that scientists test everyday as untestable is more likely to get you a promotion and a hefty bonus.

Standardized exams are EVIL and worthless (exams should be tailored to as small a group as practical and should test that group's ability to acquire and understand knowledge, it's the only way you can establish anything of value) but standardized exams that are also factually wrong should be burned at the stake. There is no excuse for them. Ever.

It doesn't matter what the examiner "expects" the students to know. A "C" grade should be what you "expect" the students to know. "A" should be reserved for people who know things you DIDN'T expect them to know. If you run out of grade letters, as the UK's A-level group did when they added A* to the mix, then that's for people who know things you didn't even know yourself.

If you restrict people to boxes, expect them to have boxes for brains when they leave school. Maybe that works "just fine" in everglade country in the middle of a recession, but it should still not be acceptable. Anywhere. Ever.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[lgw]

A measure is still scientifically testable as long as it's quantitative and repeatable. There are plenty of survey-based scientific measures in the soft sciences. It may look like BS, but if anyone can do the same data collection and get the same result, it's a scientific measure.

Also, "sweet taste" is very well studied and quite quantifyable (it's the result of specific chemical reactions, after all); I don't know about "sweet smell" but it might be as well.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[digitig]

Once you have defined a measurement system that correlates with your opinion of "soft". Most readings on the mineral hardness scale are hardly what a normal person would call "soft". A number 2 pencil is "soft", but you can stab someone with it.

The question didn't say "soft", it said "softer". The number 2 pencil might well be hard, but it's still softer than a carbon-steel dagger.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Which was his point. The tests are full of shit like that. If you can't make sense while asking a question, then don't ask a question...seriously these test makers need to be shot in the face(with a shotgun.)

Re:Common Misconceptions

[amicusNYCL]

That response is relative to each person, so it can't be objectively tested.

Leave people out of it. You can test the chemical composition with a gas chromatograph and, if you know what chemicals elicit a "sweet" response from people (which we do), then you can determine which of the two would be found "sweeter" without even smelling it.

The fact is that it is testable, you can determine the composition of it in an objective way and you can use that to say how "normal" people, or a certain person who maybe has a taste disorder or whatever, will perceive it. You can do all of that, objectively, without ever smelling it yourself. The fact that some people may have a disorder that causes them to taste differently doesn't change the fact that you can analyze and determine how a certain smell or taste will be perceived given its chemical composition.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, no you can't. Human thought and emotion, by definition, is outside the realm of scientific inquiry.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Guppy]

If you read TFA, you'll find that this isn't assuming that student's won't know something yet - it is defining a predator as an organism that gets its nutrients from consuming another organism (meaning a cow is a predictor [sic]).

Now here's where it gets complicated -- the cow only consumes part of the other organism (the blades being essentially expendable, with the core of the grass-organism being the meristem and roots). Is an organism that only consumes a piece of it's prey still a predator?

Well, yes. Consider the cookie-cutter shark, or Lepidophagous fishes, which consume the tissues of their prey -- but the prey generally survives the attack. That being said, such organisms would not be considered "True Predators", but "Grazing Predators" (Mosquitos also fit into this category).

So what about parasites, which eat their "prey" in tiny bits too? Sometimes it can be a subtle line between parasitism and grazing predation (for instance, the gradient between a scabies mite, a flea, and a mosquito). And then there are symbiotic relationships where one member feeds off the other (yet both benefit), but can sometimes blur into parasitism when the exchange is unequal.

Anyway, going back to the original definition in the test ("Predator—An organism that obtains nutrients from other organisms."), it could be said a fetus/infant is a predator. Now that I think of it, it could be argued whether or not it counts when a plant acquires nutrients from a decaying organism, so just about the only organisms which don't meet the broadest sense of this definition are Lithotrophic microorganisms that feed on minerals.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[AlamedaStone]

If you read TFA, you'll find that this isn't assuming that students won't know something yet - it is defining a predator as an organism that gets its nutrients from consuming another organism (meaning a cow is a predator).

They're just trying to teach critical thinking - getting young minds to consider alternative points of view. In this instance, for example, they want the students to look at things from the point of view of the grass!

(also, FTFY)

FTFTFY

Re:Common Misconceptions

[repapetilto]

Right, but in the context of the test, I figured the most likely explanation for that question was that the person making it thought mushrooms were plants.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

(also, FTFY)

He predicted you would do that.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you might find that a cow is a she.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[jd]

Sweet can be measured objectively. You know the taste buds that register sweetness, so can measure the level at which they are firing and with what intensity. Doesn't matter if they're linked to a part of the brain measuring Donald Duck impressions in some given person. Doesn't even matter if other tastes overwhelm the sweetness in 99.9% of people expressing an opinion. If you register an intensity of X on the sweet-sensing taste buds, then that is an objective measure of a level of X. What registers in the brain is of no value or interest.

Soft can also be measured objectively. The mineral scale is not measuring what "joe average" calls soft, it's measuring what mineralogists consider soft. On the mineral scale, X is softer than Y if Y can permanently scratch X and X can't permanently scratch Y. However, when you measure the softness of a blanket or a petal, you probably aren't trying to see if it will scratch diamond or even a number 2 pencil. (I'd hate to see a blanket that COULD scratch diamond - ok, maybe it would be fascinating in some strange way.) The mineralogist's scale is, however, a perfectly valid way to measure soft for that definition of soft. For most regular people, the meaning is closer to pliable. How pliable something is is also measurable. So that, too, can be quantified. But because these are two different meanings for the word "soft", you should really prefix or suffix "soft" to say what "soft" you are measuring, although by stating units you will usually imply this.

Smell is indeed a function of the nose, and it's perfectly possible to measure the intensity and type of reaction in the nose's nerves (the direct measure of smell) or the measure the intensity and type activity in the brain (the indirect measure of smell). They're both measuring actual smell because they both utilize the nose as the sensing device.

"Most correct answer" should NEVER be de rigour, because you should NEVER be asking questions in a way that requires such a concept. The correct question should have been to ask how you might measure these different characteristics or why you can't (with a score of 0-4 for level of completeness of each answer). "Multiple Guess" questions SHOULD DIE!!!!

Re:Common Misconceptions

[EdwinFreed]

No, the correct answer is B. Mushroom vs. plant is a living thing vs. a group of living things this specific living thing isn't in. Rocks and tables aren't alive. Pizza, on the other hand, can be, if the old one I found in our refrigerator the other day is any indication.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[repapetilto]

You just ask people to self report... It's not like every red rose petal is going to be softer than every yellow rose petal.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Obfuscant]

A measure is still scientifically testable as long as it's quantitative and repeatable.

Key word: quantitative. "Sweeter than" is not quantitative. "More than" is.

There are plenty of survey-based scientific measures in the soft sciences.

Yes, measuring opinions. Or reporting statistics. Had the suggested answer been "most people think orange blossoms smell sweeter than...", that's testable. "Is" is a statement of opinion itself, and that's why it isn't.

It may look like BS, but if anyone can do the same data collection and get the same result, it's a scientific measure.

What data are you collecting? Opinions, not facts. "More people like...". "People tend to...". Ok. None of that was in the possible answers.

Also, "sweet taste" is very well studied and quite quantifyable (it's the result of specific chemical reactions, after all);

As I already pointed out, saccharine is one of the proofs otherwise. People tell me it is sweet. I don't agree. It's my taste buds, I can tell you for a fact that it isn't. As I recall, it has a bad, metallic taste. I don't remember. I stay away from it specifically because it does taste bad.

Now, let's see if I can tell you that five is more than ten. You'd laugh. Ten and five are well-defined quanitites. "More than" translates into every language and culture. "Y is sweeter smelling than X" doesn't. It's an opinion.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Relayman]

Old pizza? Not in my world!

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Sperbels]

Human thought and emotion, by definition, is outside the realm of scientific inquiry.

The term used here is is testable. You can survey people to ask them if something is pretty. Prettiness has no definition beyond human thought, so it's implied that this is the only way to test it.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

These questions are a good way of testing social intelligence. Really smart kids often need to ask themselves "how dumb is the person I'm talking to right now?" and engage them accordingly.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[TrekkieGod]

Um, no you can't. Human thought and emotion, by definition, is outside the realm of scientific inquiry.

Human thought and emotion evolved as a result of environmental pressures, like everything else. It's a very active field of scientific inquiry. For example, did you know that if you take an average of faces from people you find less attractive, you will arrive at an attractive face? Which makes perfect sense, as things we perceive as blemishes tend to disappear.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[repapetilto]

Sunflowers with larger petals attract more bees than sunflowers with smaller petals.

That's the only one. "More bees" is objective. "Sweet" and "pretty" and "soft" are subjective. They need human input from the start. "More" is a well defined concept that doesn't have regional or social differences.

1001 bees are observed visiting the large flowers and 1000 bees are observed visiting small flowers. Would you say "more" bees visit large flowers?

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Myria]

How do you define that? This is a question I ran into once:

"Of the twelve proposed amendments in the [U.S.] Bill of Rights, how many were ratified by the states?"

The traditional answer is ten. But the real answer is actually eleven. If I were to answer that with 11 on a test, am I wrong?

(11 wasn't an available answer, so I answered 10.)

Re:Common Misconceptions

[interval1066]

I'm confused on why Florida is doing this. I point does it make or purpose does it serve? They must be doing it for some reason, right?

Re:Common Misconceptions

[arth1]

Wouldn't that be 'neither?' Plants don't seem to perform any thermonuclear reactions, just chemical reactions. A plant might be thought of as consuming carbon dioxide and releasing free oxygen, but it doesn't produce oxygen since it doesn't release any oxygen that it didn't first take in.

You appear to make the mistake of thinking that since Oxygen is an element, oxygen refers to the element. It doesn't. Usually, oxygen means oxygen gas, O2, which some plants do indeed produce through photosynthesis.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[jbeaupre]

In my wife's school district, practice tests are usually generated from questions that were rejected from the official test. The point being to practice taking the test using questions that don't matter (your don't assess kids using practice tests), and save the good questions for official tests.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[nbauman]

Don't ever take a law school admissions test. In the example booklet I read, every question was wrong, and you had to pick the least wrong answer. That's the way it was supposed to be. Legal thinking is like that. Don't be surprised that the Supreme Court figured out a way to give the election to GWB.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[repapetilto]

The song of a mockingbird is prettier than the song of a cardinal.

Here is how I look at it:

"Most people think the song of mockingbird is prettier than the song of a cardinal".
"I think the song of a mockingbird is prettier than the song of a cardinal".

If something is considered more or less pretty, that must be according to someone. The question presupposes the existence of at least one person assessing "prettiness". Whether or not he/she/they find it pretty can be tested.

That said, the most likely answer to be marked correct would be "D. Most bees like big flowers."

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually #1 probably provides a more plausible test than #4. The number of bees approaching small-petal sunflowers will depend on which species are present, what time of day it is, whether it's cloudy or windy, what other flowers are present... Furthermore, are the small petals correlated with any other differences, like smell, color (bee space color, that is), or height? It could be that bees visit the small petal sunflowers of one species, but the large petal sunflowers of another, based not on petal size, but these confounding factors. 4 is not a straightforward test. I say this as a bee biologist, but I promise you my 7 year old (here in Florida) would have the same reservations about it.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[wierd_w]

.... honestly people?

You can still test for "sweet scent", and define "sweeter" objectively without humans these days.

Inside your nasal mucosa, there are olfactory nerve endings, covered in reactive receptor sites.

By either collecting some genuine receptors, or culturing the receptor complex on a substrate (such as a microchip), it is possible toe create an objectively repeatable aparatus that senses environmental molecules in exactly the same fashion as a human nose does.

By being able to examine receptor site binding/interaction with each target chemical, you can determine strength of interaction, duration of interaction, and percentage of site activation. This will give you many objective values for "sweetness."

This is similar to how artificial sweeteners are evaluated. Sweet sensing tastebuds react to hydroxyl groups on the target molecule. The more hydroxyl groups, and the better it docks in the receptor, the more intense the sensation of sweet. Sodium saccharine was designed specifically with this in mind, but it also binds with bitter receptors.

You don't need a blind human taste test. You can recreate the sensory organ, and get empirical data in a repeatable fashion. That is the definition of objective.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[arth1]

I think that the relevant definition of "predator" hinges on survival by eating other animals.

By that definition, scavengers and carrion eaters are predators too. And so is athlete's foot. While there may be different opinions on that, I think the majority would define a predator as an animal or organism who hunts and kills prey.

As for cows, they sometimes eat meat too. If they find a dead small animal in the field, they will eat it. Really. But they are not predators by any sane definition of the word.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[pkinetics]

Hmmm... I wonder... Do cows think people taste like chicken?

Re:Common Misconceptions

[jvkjvk]

Since one could define a softness scale for flower petals, this is scientifically testable.

Since we do define ppm's for airborne chemicals, this also appears scientifically testable.

Regards.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[arth1]

Softness of a pedal can be tested, as it is a physical quality of each pedal. Granted, you may need a University laboratory to prove it, but it's still possible. If you were told to choose only one answer, 4 is the only logical choice, because doing a study on bees is easier than measuring the material properties of a plant.

Is it? I would disagree.
Fill a cylinder halfway up with petals, and drop a weight on top. easy and quick
Getting bees to cooperate: time consuming and lots of unknown variables that can affect the result.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Z34107]

Are you implying electing GWB was the least wrong decision?

Re:Common Misconceptions

[dryeo]

Was the original second amendment part of the bill of rights? Limiting when a politician can give himself a raise seems more like on par with an amendment changing the voting day then an amendment outlining a freedom.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Alex Belits]

Well, a table kinda looks like an animal.

Really, WHAT THE FUCK was that motherfucking shit of a question?!!

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, all I've learned from the IQ tests I've taken is that my IQ is somewhere between 64 and 189.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how you can argue that his solution is incorrect. It still follows a pattern that allows for only one answer.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Alex Belits]

Intimidation of intelligent people, forcing everyone else to memorize the authority figures' preferences instead of truth.

Or maybe people who wrote this are incredibly dumb.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct is a boolean, not a measure. Something is either correct or not. You cannot argue something into being correct with a properly worded question and question set if both are constructed properly. Subjectivity or 'wiggle room' is the fault of a poorly worded question or solution set. Do you have an example to the contrary?

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Just Some Guy]

Yeah. I narrowed the range to somewhere between Charly and Charlie, depending on how much coffee and sleep I had that day.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[SomeKDEUser]

You think wrong :)

If you think in terms of relationships between the organisms, and how their populations fluctuates dynamically, then the cow is a predator to grass. If the cows eat too much grass, they die out.

This is not completely true, as the cow grazing does not kill the grass: it will regrow. So ok, the cow is not a real predator to grass. Not like foxes and rabbits.

This is different from the athletes foot: this is a parasitic relationship: the parasite takes some of the hosts resources for himself. If he takes too much, he dies with his host.

But the bigger point is that clearly the students are not taught to think in terms of models and theories. And this is what id deeply wrong -- never mind that the test's question be inane.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I'd hate to be that student. Thought practice was for preparation, not misdirection.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[formfeed]

The misconception this question enforces is stronger than that. 1 and 3 attempt compare the the measurement of physical properties while number 4 is a behavioural observation that can only be measured through correlation.

But so is 2: Studying human behavior, "The song of a mockingbird is prettier than the song of a cardinal." means "More humans will assign the term 'pretty' to the vocalization of a mocking bird than to that of a cardinal." Which, for someone studying human behavior, might be an interesting observation.

What makes this question double-dumb is the superficial understanding of science behind it: Science should never be about our emotions, feelings, passions. That's what these kids have to understand. The question is designed to weed out the kids who can't switch that part of, when doing science: "Bird song", "pretty" No, that can't be the right answer, any kid who falls for that doesn't belong in science.

First of all, social science, psychology , etc. go exactly for that kind of question. The scientific mind there is: Wow, this seems prettier, I wonder why, is it cultural, could I test that...

And second even in the hard science, it's passion that sparks the motivation.

(Would be interesting to see how questions like that de-select girls.)

Re:Common Misconceptions

[tftp]

Can even do it scientifically, if you're using an fMRI

Or a measuring tape.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

True story. Grade 5 (11 years old) arithmetic class (this is not in the US):

There were 10 questions. We got caned for each wrong answer.

One of the questions was something like 1 ___ 1 = 1 (fill in the blank)

The teacher expected 'x' (or *) to be the answer, and one of my friends gave /. (not slashdot!)

He was caned (and that was the only one he got 'wrong').

Re:Common Misconceptions

[AK Marc]

A pizza, a rock, and a cat.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

You are ignorant. "The petals of red roses are softer than the petals of yellow roses" cannot be "proven as fact" unless you test every yellow and red rose. Otherwise, it's still a correlation. You think you understand the scientific method, but you don't.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! +1 for the Brits.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[AK Marc]

Once you have defined a measurement system that correlates with your opinion of "soft". Most readings on the mineral hardness scale are hardly what a normal person would call "soft". A number 2 pencil is "soft", but you can stab someone with it. What scale do you use?

"Soft" is irrelevant. You aren't measuring soft. You are comparing two items to see which is softer. Scratching one with the other is the mineral test, but you could easily test other ways, such as force to deflect the pedal and such. But the ease with which you can measure it is unrelated to whether you can or could.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember a project that took thousands of people found attractive and merged them together to find a normal for attractiveness. I would say you could take that created person and find a deviance from the person being tested to rate attractiveness.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say logistics would make standardised exams not worthless. You mentioned 'as practical', well when you want to compare students across a state equally for university placements I don't see how you can tailor the test to small groups as practical. (Perhaps I'm thinking of a different kind of testing).

But from memory of my time in high school in Australia for university placement exams (which were state-wide), you literally could put your hand up during the exam and ask for clarification of a question such as situations presented in the op, and if the teacher couldn't provide an acceptable response they could literally call up the examining board who had to be on call at the time of testing (since the whole state does it at the same time) and ask for clarification. If any changes to the test are required the examining board would then inform every school doing the test and in turn the students taking the test would be informed.

In my opinion, they highest grade should be reserved for the student who knows 100% of what's in the syllabus. However I'm all for a bonus grade where a student can demonstrate going above and beyond and showing more knowledge than is required for that syllabus. Though yes I agree a 50% mark as a passing grade is pathetic, but while I would not increase the passing mark too high, I would also make it abundantly clear that a 'pass' mark is not any kind of achievement and students should aim higher if they are capable. Apparently this is the stance in the universities here, they'll pass you to move you along, but you are told early on that simply getting a pass wont impress future potential employers by any means.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Rich0]

Um, no you can't. Human thought and emotion, by definition, is outside the realm of scientific inquiry.

Uh, would love to see what "definition" you're using here. Chopping up neurons and figuring out how they work is science. Understanding the behavior of algorithms is often considered a "science" (though arguably computer science is really a branch of math). Working out the fact that lions eat zebras and not the other way around is science.

I'm not sure how understanding all of that is science, but understanding other emergent behaviors of particles in a brain are not. Thought and emotion are nothing more than organized movement of action potentials in the brain.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[steelfood]

You Brits and your modicums of sophistication, like your Monarchy, Obamacare on steroids, Fish and Chips, and Education.

We simple folks living on this side of the pond don't believe in that kind of stuff. The only thing we'll ever want and need to know here is "America, Fuck Yeah!"

America, Fuck Yeah!

Re:Common Misconceptions

[steelfood]

The year 2000 called. They want their election results back.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[jd]

That depends on whether you want a direct comparison of knowledge. You want to see if they meet the minimum requirements of the course, but after that what matters is surely their raw ability to learn. You don't get that information off a standardized test, you can only get that from specialized testing. Standardized tests only tell you how good the student is at that syllabus, which means that you'll get identical scores for someone who reached that level when they were half the age and have learned vastly more and those who didn't learn it all. Those who are average to mediocre will actually score the highest, but the reason universities have exceptionally high drop-out rates is that average-to-mediocre just won't cut it. Not at that level.

However, what about the gifted kids, the ones who have forgotten more than the rest ever knew? Because they are capable of learning faster and more independently, they are prime university candidates, the IDEAL people to have. Yet they will score average or even below average on any standardized test -- precisely because they know more and therefore answer better than the examiner anticipated.

The correct testing strategy is to ALWAYS have the ones you want most score the most. The ones you want most, above all, are the ones who will be getting first class honors and be continuing on to get their PhDs. It is extremely doubtful that many of those will do well in SATs, which is in part why Oxford and Cambridge traditionally set their own specialized tests (long-answer format, replete with fascinating and bizarre questions) and allowed you to score whatever you wanted in the national standardized exams if you did well at their specialized quizzes. They wanted the people who actually WERE the best, not merely the best at answering multiple-choice tests.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Mateorabi]

I'm guessing that the review committee is someone [important] 's brother.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

when they added A* to the mix, then that's for people who know things you didn't even know yourself.

Those were the students that were exceptionally good at finding an efficient path between two points.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Standardized multiple choice tests and subjective don't mix. Applying kludges that are being used to mix them anyway to cases which are not subjective is fail squared.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

When an individual teacher with a non-standard test makes a stupid mistake, it doesn't make it to Slashdot.

Is there any indication that standardised exams contain more factual errors than tailored, non-standard exams? I'd expect the reverse, to be honest: if there's only a single exam, you can spend more time checking it.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you should see medical board certification examinations. I had the infuriating opportunity/requirement to sit for the American Board of Pediatrics exam last year. An hour into it, I wanted to pull my hair out, precisely because it was full of things like this. For example, one question required you to believe that MRSA was not a common cause of abscesses in children and that MSSA was the predominant pathogen, and that therefore Keflex was a more appropriate choice that clindamycin. When the hell was the question written, 1995?

The "most correct" excuse that test makers use is criminally wrong. If you ask a multiple choice question, then you must accept ALL correct answers. For example, for the above you need to *say* that it's MSSA in the wound instead of MRSA. Instead, they require that you infer from whatever data/experience *THEY* have in their control community that it's MSSA and not MRSA. In many places, that simply isn't the case. I've seen one abscess in 18 months that was MSSA; the rest were either MRSA or something rare. So if I assume MRSA, then I am making a good medical decision and it does not mean that I don't know what I'm doing or that I provide "inferior" care.

It is amazing to me that lawsuits aren't flying all over the place against tests like this. (And in the case of the medical boards, for massive Smith Anti-Trust Act violations, unfair restriction of trade, etc.)

Re:Common Misconceptions

[dunkelfalke]

You confuse "sweet" and "tastes good". Two different things altogether. I cannot stand honey, gagging from the taste alone. But it does taste sweet. Just also repulsive.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Law school exams are all about logic. What makes them tricky is that they'll use familiar symbols and labels which are redefined in the question, sometimes in a contradictory fashion. The answer which is most correct is usually the one which depends on the fewest external premises but which is still logically correct.

Alone most questions are quite simple. The hard part is doing several hundred in the time allotted. Question 5 and question 7 might have similar symbolic identifiers, but with different definitions. It's meant to require rigorous analytical thought for every question. The vast majority of test takers aren't expected to finish the exam. This applies to the LSAT as well as many exams in law school--at least the good ones.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Zinho]

I also remember a project where pictures of criminals were merged together to find what an "average" criminal would look like. The result was surprisingly attractive, and similar to the result from averaging photographs of vegetarians. Neither average was useful for identifying the population it was drawn from. Lesson learned? The "normal" for attractiveness is the average for the population, and a good baseline for attractiveness can be found by averaging multiple pictures of ugly people.

The take-away for you is that you can save your money on supermodel photo shoots, just use mugshots instead. Of course, if you get enough funding totally go for the supermodels. The result will be the same, but the process will be much more enjoyable for you.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[wrook]

This actually reminds me of a question I put on an English test (for Japanese students):

Mary doesn't each meat, fish or eggs. Mary only eats plants. What is Mary?

My student answered "cow". I think I gave him bonus points.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

So? Those teachers should be fired on the spot.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Was your IQ test a multi-hour affair conducted by a trained professional? If not, it wasn't an IQ test.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[jd]

I would expect the opposite - a test that must be 100% free of anything that might be specific to a subset of the audience would be harder to write if it could be taken by 360 million people vs. 3,600 (for example), just as it is much harder to write 100% portable code that really will run absolutely anywhere without modification (be it an Android, an iPad, a PC or a Cray supercomputer) that will also do something useful. For exactly the same reason.

In programming, nobody tries to write something that is utterly generic to all environments. There just aren't enough common denominators to make it worthwhile. (Not all systems have GUIs or, indeed, any user. Not all systems have storage devices. Not all systems have network access. What, exactly, does that leave you with for your generic program to do?) You write for a much more restricted set.

It's no good saying that people who have learned the syllabus are the equivalent of that restricted set, they're not. Education is about learning methods, procedures and tools, specialties are about learning the specifics of that field, and the programming equivalent of those two are libraries and programming languages respectively. Since real-life education doesn't mean your home will magically acquire a chip fab plant, a chemistry lab and a synchrotron radiation ring, the programming equivalent cannot give you any additional hardware either.

In programming, we work in as specific a niche as we can get away with - specific systems (or classes of system), specific problems, specific specifications, etc, generalizing where it won't hurt more than we can afford, but never more so.

Education and exams should ergo follow the same strategy - custom-fit education tailored to smaller groups of individuals to get the most out of them and the most into them, then custom-fit exams to establish how well this is achieved. Production-line education of pre-fab "individuals" will indeed get you the lower variance in quality that production-line pre-fab goods does, but variance != errors.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[sjames]

Even with the absurd, you could disprove the troll if no children ever go missing and item 3 if you can find a single case where the enemy of an enemy is also an enemy (or just not a friend). A brief view of American politics should do that. :-)

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an answer to all such types of questions that is always correct: Presume periodicity, i.e. 2,3,5,8 -> 2 (theoretically followed by 3,5,8, ad infinitum).
Nevertheless, do not dismiss those tests as useless. Being able to deduct from ominous clues what another individual thought or tried to communicate does require intelligence.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[melikamp]

When I grow up, I want to go to bovine university!

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I just remembered, the guy was even smarter than that. The question was

1/2 ___ 1/2 = 1

The teacher expected "+" and he answered "/"

Re:Common Misconceptions

[zzyzyx]

so just about the only organisms which don't meet the broadest sense of this definition are Lithotrophic microorganisms that feed on minerals.

And even among those a lot are aerobic and consume oxygen that has been produced by other organisms (arguably that's a quite broad definition of nutrient). Sometimes CO2 too. So the only non-predatory organisms would be the archaic bacteria who rely solely on oxidizers that come from the Earth's crust in volcanic areas.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[TFAFalcon]

Well cows are a bit tricky. Sure they 'eat' the grass, but they can't actually digest it. They rely on bacteria for that. Then once the bacteria are done the cows digest THEM. So in a way cows are predators.

BTW athlete's foot is a parasite, since it doesn't kill the host.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Was your auditing a multi-hour affair conducted by a trained professional? If not, it wasn't an auditing.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[archen]

For a definition of "IQ" meaning "comes up with the same answer as the test author because of similar thought processes", it was great. For "IQ" meaning "able to infer patterns in the world around themselves", it sucked.

Maybe the subtle hint there, is that they want to encourage smart people to be conformist.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[jasenj1]

Cool Story Bro:
When I was in third grade, there was a question on a math test, it was something like:

  4444444
-5555555
--------------

I answered -1111111 and had it marked wrong. I argued with the teacher that the answer was correct and his response that it wasn't in this class; the correct answer was that the problem couldn't be done.

This deeply affected my perception and attitude toward school. Cynicism was born that day. It's not about doing your best or learning as much as you can; it's about towing the line, giving the expected answer, making the system happy.

30+ years on I still remember that incident. And its lesson still holds true - quietly obeying a broken system is often easier and more personally advantageous than being right or doing your best.

FWIW, we are homeschooling our child. My wife worked as a sub while our child was in kindergarten and first grade. She saw the ugly truth of the local school system and we plan to keep our child out of that environment.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Z1NG]

You have to realize that teachers teach those misconceptions so they can pretend to teach a particular concept when other essential prior knowledge has not been covered yet. This happens a lot in math as well. For example we covered a problem that could be solved without the mid-point formula but the mid-point formula drastically reduced the complexity. Most teachers would just find a way to fudge it. I went ahead and taught the midpoint formula.

That isn't a misconception. Maybe the point of the exercise was to have students figure out the midpoint formula on their own, without rote instruction. A situation analogous to the FCAT one would be multiple choice answers like: 3/2, 1.5 and 1 1/2 which are all numerically equivalent. Math classes leave things out, but I find that we don't lie quite as much. I was tutoring once and heard someone explaining to an elementary school student that basically gravity and magnetism are the same thing - I flipped out a little bit.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[pavon]

Yeah my girlfriend is in nursing school, and their tests are written such that most of the answers are correct, but you have to choose the most correct answer; which is the most important side effect, which is the most important vital sign to monitor, etc. The problem is that none of the instructors can agree with each other, let alone the book, as to what the most correct answer is. Some will choose the most serious, some the most likely, or a third that is both moderately likely and moderately serious. Hell the book doesn't even agree with itself. There was a question that was exactly duplicated at the end of two chapters (same wording, same choices, no additional context), but the correct answer given was different both times.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[hackula]

I took a computer class as my last credit in college (I was actually already working as a software engineer, but my diploma had not come through yet since my advisor forgot to get me into a Comp 101 class). The book was written 10 years prior by a faculty member from the small tech school I was attending (No way I was going to pay full uni prices for a joke like this). I swear after getting through a pretty rigorous CS program and working as a SE for a year, I actually almost failed this Comp 101 class. Of course, the reason was that most of the questions were like this (this is a real one from the final):

Which type of device can store files that would normally be stored on a PC?

A an ipod

B a palm pilot

C a cellular phone

D an mp3 player

I guarantee you, get enough of these questions and you will begin uncontrollably weeping, especially when it is the last class between you and a diploma.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[David Chappell]

Cool Story Bro:
When I was in third grade, there was a question on a math test, it was something like:

  4444444
-5555555
--------------

I answered -1111111 and had it marked wrong. I argued with the teacher that the answer was correct and his response that it wasn't in this class; the correct answer was that the problem couldn't be done.

What was his reasoning? Am I missing something obvious?

Re:Common Misconceptions

[David Chappell]

I have a similiar story. I had an English teacher in the seventh or eigth grade who conducted a lesson on the proper punctuation of direct and indirect quotations. For the test she took about ten sentences, stripped them of all punctuation and required us to restore it. One of the sentences looked something like this:

the principal said that school opens two days earlier

The was divided in its answer:

The principal said, "that school opens two days earlier."

The principal said that school opens two days earlier.

She insisted that one of them (the first I think) must be marked wrong. She claimed that those who insisted that both were perfectly plausible parsings of the sentence were simply trying to be difficult.

Years later I realized that she had missed a golden opportunity to impress upon us the great importance of correct punctionation. I now think the reason she missed it is that she had no understanding of the purpose of punctionation. She tended to see correct grammar and punctionation as conformance of arbitrary rules by which one proves that one is educated.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[jasenj1]

The reasoning was, "We haven't covered that so the answer is 'it can't be done'". The accuracy of my answer was irrelevant. We hadn't covered negative numbers in class, so I could give no answer.

Reading further in this thread, I see many people have had similar experiences.

It amazes me that I remember the incident so vividly. It is truly one of my earliest and foundational memories of cynicism. Authority does not care if you are "right" only if you give the answer they want.

I went on to be an A,B and occasional C student without trying very hard. I saw no value in pushing myself when I could be near the top of the class and provide the answers expected. Anything more was wasted effort.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[yurtinus]

Four is still just a survey of the preference of the bees... Just like two and three would be preferences of the people. How can you objectively measure bee preference for one aspect of the flower? Sure it's testable, but isolating what exactly the bees are attracted to is non-trivial and lowers the testability of that statement. Maybe they preferred the smell, the lighting, the lack of aphids, or any number of factors. Hell, as I see it the best answer is one - because you can objectively measure hardness of materials through several readily available scientific means and thereby determine which rose has softer pedals, and of course since you're comparing two it makes the comparison that much easier. Then again, depending on my mood and what I most recently read, I could push for any answer as the "best one."

Or you could accept that the "most correct answer" all depends on the background of the test taker for a question where the answers are shades of correctness and not absolute right and wrong. This is exactly why "most correct" does not work for multiple choice questions and why you see statistically significant variances in answers for different populations of people in these sorts of questions (educational, ethnic, and income backgrounds).

Re:Common Misconceptions

[yurtinus]

This is a very good point. The folks generating standardized tests do collect statistics on who gets what questions wrong. Ever wonder why every standardized test collects your ethnic background as well? If a population is more likely to get a question wrong, they can reject it and find out why people would get it wrong, using that feedback to improve the test.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[nbauman]

That's good, because it teaches you not to take books (and teachers) as authorities, but instead forces you to think out the answer yourself. Why is this vital sign important? What's the mechanism of this disease that causes it to change?

That's bad, if you have high-stakes testing, because high-stakes tests are equivalent to rewarding or punishing people on the basis of a roll of the dice.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[yurtinus]

All of the answers depend on the test takers experience and that's why it's a bad question. Look at it another way:

- If I were into sewing or stitching or had any interest in materials science, I'd say the pedals and I'd be right (to be honest, from where I sit this is the most testable answer).
- If I were big on instruments and music (or if I were big into bird watching), I'd say the bird song question and I'd be right.
- In elementary school, we had done a "name this substance" science project where there would be some common kitchen ingredients and we needed to figure out what was what without tasting. If we'd done a project like that recently in class, I'd say the sweetness test and I'd be right.
- If I were a bug collector or interested in insects (as many kids are), I'd say the bees and I'd be right.

This is why this is a bad question, and if it were in the practice test, exactly why it was rejected. The disconcerting thing is why a question like this was ever considered in the first place. The only thing in this question that is not easily testable is which answer is "most correct."

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Just Some Guy]

Yes. I was proctored, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[yurtinus]

Oh there's plenty of debate... I remember taking some of these sorts of tests in school and coming across questions where they want the "most correct" of several quite correct answers. All it does is increase the stress on the test taker and all it actually tests is how accurately the test taker can anticipate the psyche of the test maker. If there is a multiple choice question where only one choice is allowed, there damn well better be just one absolutely correct answer. Luckily with computer based testing, it's easier to to do things like "choose all correct answers" or "rate these from most to least testable."

Re:Common Misconceptions

[yurtinus]

Five baguettes is more than ten slices of wonderbread.
Five quarters is more than ten dimes
Five good questions is more than ten bad ones.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[lgw]

Key word: quantitative. "Sweeter than" is not quantitative.

No - i think you misunderstand the word. "Sweeter" is objective - it's the intensity of well-known chemical reactions.

As I already pointed out, saccharine is one of the proofs otherwise. People tell me it is sweet. I don't agree. It's my taste buds, I can tell you for a fact that it isn't. As I recall, it has a bad, metallic taste. I don't remember. I stay away from it specifically because it does taste bad.

Yep, you're confusing "sweeter" with "tastes better". They're different concepts. I find many sweet things taste bad these days (I've been avoiding sugar for years, so I find sweet snacks generally insipid and overwhelming).

Re:Common Misconceptions

[yurtinus]

If only the teacher was there to grade it... In my own experience, most teachers at those grades *loved* when their students were able to point out mistakes or other correct answers and then justify their results. Typically when we had a test, we would go back over them after they were graded. We'd find out what the correct answers were, how to get there, and in some cases (usually math-related) there would be an opportunity to make up credit. For me this was a very effective way to learn and further understand the material.

A major problem with standardized testing is there is no feedback like this. Most teachers *hate* it. There is simply "take the test so we can find out what you know." The result? Teachers can not as effectively teach you the material and instead have to adjust their curriculum to teach you the test.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[CodeHxr]

You're talking about test results. You wouldn't know that there were 1001 bees at the large flowers and 1000 bees at the small flowers unless you had already conducted your test. The fact that you were able to conduct your test (regardless of what the results were) makes it testable, yes?

(And, no, gathering the opinions of people on what they think is prettier is not a test - it's a survey)

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you're a moron. I wonder if someday lefties will stop misrepresenting Bush v Gore... no, wait, I don't wonder that.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[residieu]

What's the "Mid Point Formula"? Just finding the midpoint between two points? I can't imagine a teacher going out of their way not to teach something so simple.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[residieu]

but for a state-wide test there shouldn't be any wriggle room.

I agree, but they should ensure this by correctly writing the questions to provide one and only one correct answer, not by choosing the "most correct" one to designate as the right answer.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we talking about a mushroom pizza here?

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9vxHN8_jSE
what now?

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Relayman]

But this question illustrates the problem: Someone who really knows science will be totally confused by it. The average person, incorrectly thinking of the mushroom as a plant, answers it quickly (A: Cat) and goes on. Since the person writing the test is average, he/she also says the correct answer is A. They're writing the tests so that smart kids do worse than average kids. And that is just wrong.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Anonymous Coward]

That actually sounds like what a lawyer's job is supposed to be. To take two sets of fuzzily defined data and twist them into alignment. If that can't be done then you've lost the case and it's just a matter of how badly.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[wisty]

"What is the best treatment for stage 1 prostate cancer".

Obviously, there's a number of factors. "Wait and see" is best for an old man with a heart condition, as their heart will give out before the cancer grows. But usually, the best treatment will be something else.

Arguably, the question should include all the context, but it's not always feasible. Also, when it's a close call, the question is probably a bad question.

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Your.Master]

Nonsense. The statement is ambiguous.

A. "The petals of red roses are always, without fail softer than the petals of yellow roses"
B. "The petals of red roses are typically/most often softer than the petals of yellow roses"

B is by far a more reasonable interpretation.

As an analogy, consider the phrase "Men have more upper body strength than women". This is true, and scientifically testable with multiple investigations agreeing on this fact. This despite the fact that some women have more upper body strength than some men, even controlling for age, weight, etc. (and especially when you don't control for those confounding factors).

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Erikderzweite]

Country of Belarus once had a 5-point grade system (along with the rest of the USSR) with "5" being the highest grade and "2" de-facto the lowest (1 has been used very seldom if ever). As only 4 possible grades were not sufficient, "+" and "-" have also been used but did not have an effect on resulting grades.

The system has been reformed to a 10-points grade system with "1" still reserved for students who can't tell globe from a map. What has been a "5+" is now "8" with "9" reserved for extra knowledge and "10" for exceptional performance (e.g. what the teacher did not know himself).

Re:Common Misconceptions

[Savantissimo]

How the hell did this moron get modded up? Pretty much everything in science is correlations. Every experiment is limited to the specific things tested. You think we can't say one type of rock isn't softer than another unless we test all rocks everywhere?

Science is just voodoo magic anyway.

[forkfail]

Good for making the magic iBoxes work so I can watch porn, but not so much for anything important, like resource utilization or climate modeling. And anyway, math is hard. Who needs it when you can just be a landscaper or stripper anyway?

Re:Science is just voodoo magic anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

And anyway, math is hard. Who needs it when you can just be a landscaper or stripper anyway?

Well, maybe if you've never seen the really GOOD strippers before...

Re:Science is just voodoo magic anyway.

[Beardo the Bearded]

Or good landscapers... ...which may or may nor be the same person.

Re:Science is just voodoo magic anyway.

[roc97007]

...reminds me of my nephew. He dropped out of his programming classes because "programming is hard". He decided he wanted to be a game tester. I don't think that worked out.

Apropos of your comment, he also wanted to date strippers. To my knowledge none of his attempts ended well.

Re:Science is just voodoo magic anyway.

[Osgeld]

yea or like my cousin who is running a state subsided pot farm, hows that working out for you hippy ... you and your making 5x as much as I am high off your ass listening to original records and living in a picturesque landscape on your own schedule!

I got the last laugh there ... sigh

Re:Science is just voodoo magic anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah. There's a chance he made at least halfway right choice there. Great game testers don't grow on trees any more than great programmers do and I've maintained so much code written by people with absolutely zero programming skill that I prefer to actually discourage anyone without obvious talent from entering this profession.

Unfortunately, the price for that choice is that in game companies, testers are generally regarded as extremely replaceable second class citizens rather than something valuable.

Re:Science is just voodoo magic anyway.

[roc97007]

Ok ok ok... just because some bizarre set of circumstances causes a totally irresponsible lifestyle to work for some, doesn't make it a good business plan.

Re:Science is just voodoo magic anyway.

[roc97007]

I understand -- you don't necessarily want inept programmers because someone else has to clean up the ghastly morass later. The thing is, a good game tester has similar skills to a good QA or beta tester, plus a love for games. They have to be regimented, good at documentation, have good communication skills, and be able to keep track of a number of technical factors while testing. Merely spending a lot of hours with WOW doesn't necessarily mean you qualify.

Re:Science is just voodoo magic anyway.

[Lando]

Hmmm, why is this labelled funny? Shouldn't it be insightful, sad really, not really funny.

Re:Science is just voodoo magic anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it irresponsible to run a state-subsidized pot farm?

Excuse me, but what is this?

[sixtyeight]

I've been noticing stories that are covered much like this a lot on Slashdot lately. It's difficult to know whether it's journalism - which reports the facts and allows the reader to reach their own conclusion about them - an editorial piece - which is where blatantly opinion-laden writing is usually found - or tabloid reporting - which purports to be legitimate but is usually written for sensationalism.

I realize that proper journalism went out when political pundits were brought in, but this weird crossbreed of online reporting is becoming a trend.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[Kidbro]

Could you please point me to a place where they have this proper journalism of which you speak?

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new here. Slashdot hasn't really been journalism since oh, 1997 or earlier.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You're wrong.

Assuming the author isn't batantly fabricating anything (i.e. the responses from the state) this is fact, not opinion.

If you RTFA the sample questions listed clearly have multiple correct answers and that's the crux of the piece. One could argue that the official answers are "more correct" (e.g. frequency of bee arrivals may be easier to test than the softness of a petal), but the issues documented in the article are real and relevant to the public interest.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[sixtyeight]

This works.

If we can agree that the mainstream news media are no longer opting to practice legitimate journalism, and that many new online reporters do not know how, it doesn't follow that journalistic standards do not exist, or that they're impossible to implement or insist upon. I think it may argue the case in favor of them more strongly.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[Hatta]

Slashdot has always been a blog.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[LordLimecat]

THe crux of the piece is that they assume that the child wont be able to extrapolate from one area of science (testing hardness) to another, and will penalize the student smart enough to make that extrapolation.

This bugged the heck out of me throughout school, how the standardized tests were ambiguous as hell. I generally knew when I didnt know a concept, but I think more often my wrong answers were because I didnt pick the specific correct answer that the test key had.

It ends up not being a test of knowledge, but who is best at taking test and discerning which particular hoop they want you to jump through (or fill in with a #2 pencil).

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[sixtyeight]

I should have clarified that I was referring to gurps_npc's writeup of the piece, and particularly the conclusion.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[RazorSharp]

Basically, you didn't read the article.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[Daniel_Staal]

It bugged the hell out of me as well, and I was good at figuring out what the answer they wanted was. Give me a question like many of these and I'd go 'Ok, several of these are correct, but the idiots want ___.' Put that, and I'd get the grade. No sweat.

Meanwhile I'm learning that the teacher and the test creator are idiots, and can't be trusted to teach me anything useful or accurate. Ever.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[nbauman]

They used to have it in the Wall Street Journal, but that was a long time ago, before Murdoch bought it even. Look up some old issues from the 1970s in the library.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[LilGuy]

People have been noticing that lately since the first time I read Slashdot.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[steelfood]

Public radio and TV are also good places to start.

Of course, reality is known to have a liberal bias, so it's Fox News for me.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[sixtyeight]

Basically, I think the writeups are faulty and I'm calling attention to that.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[wrook]

Meanwhile I'm learning that the teacher and the test creator are idiots, and can't be trusted to teach me anything useful or accurate. Ever.

This is useful information. Every student should take control of their own learning. It is a mistake to implicitly trust one source of information, because as hard as we all try, even the best of us are biased in some way (or just plain wrong).

The problem with the school system is not that students lose faith that the information flowing from their teachers is correct. The problem is that students are expected to unquestioningly believe it in the first place. In fact, they are punished for questioning. If your accademic success is dependent upon you parroting what the teacher has told you regardless of its truth, you have significant problems that go far beyond the teachers.

A "teacher" should not be a shoveller of facts. They should be a mediator in a student's discovery of knowledge. Whether the teacher knows the answer or not, the important part is that you should be able to discover it. If you can, the teacher has succeeded. Not understanding this point is the main problem with education today, IMHO.

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[Daniel_Staal]

I don't disagree, but the point of the above was that I learned to actively avoid trying to learn in school, and that I should consider the teacher a hindrance at best, and an actively creator of ignorance at worst. Therefore the teacher was no longer a mediator, or even a helper: they were someone to be avoided, ignored, and mocked.

This does not help either the education or the socialization of the student. (At best it is neutral.)

Re:Excuse me, but what is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

No no no no.

I can test the softness of flower petals in a few minutes. I can take dozens of measurements on dozens of flowers and I'll be done. I can even take samples back (granted dead samples won't test as easily but they can be examined under a microscope).

The damn bee watcher is going to have to watch

a) how many plants?
b) for how many hours?
c) for how many seasons? (maybe next year short pedals will be in fashion again)
d) how many geographical areas? (is the pattern specific to bees in general or just this hive?)

Granted, you might be able to say the same thing about the hardness question, but at least hardness guy can test quickly, efficiently, and might be able to find a biological explanation more easily.

Just because counting bees is conceptually easier, doesn't make it easier in practice. I'd much rather gauge the flower petals with my shore tester or whathaveyou.

How smart?

[jr88keys]

No, the FCAT measures student achievement. No standardized test would claim or attempt to measure "how smart the students are."

Re:How smart?

[King InuYasha]

Everybody gets this confused. All standardized tests for scholastic purposes measure achievement or potential achievement, not how "smart" someone is. That being said, everyone says that these tests measure how smart you are, which isn't true.

Re:How smart?

[Kneo24]

Even then I wonder how they can manage to measure "student achievement" if a correct answer turns out to be "wrong".

Re:How smart?

[suutar]

They've just decided that overeducation is also bad, and that the best achievement is mediocrity. So they're testing for average knowledge.

Re:How smart?

[DragonWriter]

Everybody gets this confused. All standardized tests for scholastic purposes measure achievement or potential achievement, not how "smart" someone is.

IQ tests are used for scholastic purposes. They pretty expressly are intended to measure how "smart" someone is.

(Plus, a number of tests that are intended to measure potential acheivement have results that correlate very strongly with IQ, which suggests that, intentionally or not, they also measure how smart you are. Which shouldn't be surprising, since "potential acheivement" and "being smart" are very closely linked concepts -- even if actual acheivement and being smart are more distantly related concepts.)
 

Re:How smart?

[Anonymous Coward]

Item Response Theory.

In all the high stakes tests for NCLB that I am familiar with, all of the test items undergo fairly extensive review, not "subjectively" for correctness and bias, but these items are seeded as experimental in the actual tests delivered but do not count towards student measurements. The statistics of the experimental items are examined, looking at the discriminant ability of the question, the probability of getting the question right or wrong given an estimate of student skill. Test items are routinely rejected based on the subjective reviews and analysis from item testing.

However, each state does determine how the test is assembled, administered, and what the item characteristics are. From my experience, Florida is, um, rather challenged in assessment.

Re:How smart?

[DarwinSurvivor]

The only time I've ever heard of IQ tests being used for scholastic purposes (other than students doing research) is determining the type and degree of learning disabilities. They are fairly good at determining if a student is actually "slow" or if they simply are not taking in the material due to teaching methods/etc.

I personally know people with diagnosed learning disabilities.

Re:How smart?

[causality]

Everybody gets this confused. All standardized tests for scholastic purposes measure achievement or potential achievement, not how "smart" someone is. That being said, everyone says that these tests measure how smart you are, which isn't true.

Remember that schooling is mostly intended to be preparation for employment. What they really measure is how compliant you are.

They measure that you memorize by rote what you're told to memorize by rote, that you go through the motions and regurgitate this memorized information according to the sequence in which you are instructed. That's why any seriously tough-minded reasoning is glossed over and not properly taught, and any "critical thinking" is framed in narrow terms*.


* Like a debate where you pick "this side" or "this other side" and defend your choice as though there could only be two options -- that's how it was done in the school I attended. Suggesting other views that don't fit that pattern, however politely or respectfully, got you branded as "disruptive". N.B. that this is not the same thing as a teacher explaining "that's mistaken/inaccurate/faulty/doesn't work and here are the logical reasons why". It's much more of a "sit down and shut up and comply" type of deal. Few understand the subtle power of framing what otherwise looks like a fully open, healthy debate.

Re:How smart?

[causality]

Even then I wonder how they can manage to measure "student achievement" if a correct answer turns out to be "wrong".

If they can regard correct answers as wrong, they can also regard incorrect answers as right. In effect, they are assuming the power to make "student achievement" whatever they say it is.

Didn't get the result you wanted? Move the goalposts! Students doing "poorly" means naturally that the schools and your NEA buddies need more money. Students doing "well" when convenient means that you're a competent leader who can successfully manage something important to most parents. That's the problem with politics when it is not divorced from facts.

Re:How smart?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but THIS is all I have to say to that.

Re:How smart?

[JazzHarper]

Yes, but intelligent students can easily game that system.

Re:How smart?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't get the result you wanted? Move the goalposts! Students doing "poorly" means naturally that the schools and your NEA buddies need more money.

Except that here in Florida, things have been exactly the reverse of what you seem to imagine is happening.

Public school doing badly (according to deeply flawed measures)? Then *decrease* funding to the school! In Florida, we reward "high-performing" schools with a larger portion of the ever-shrinking education budget, and take the monies from "low performing" schools. No account is taken of the effects of repeatedly slashed school budgets on quality of teaching or the state of classrooms and textbooks, or that some schools serving economically-disadvantaged districts include a bottom quartile that will never make the cut without heroic intervention. Funny how this scheme has always resulted in shifting the money away from urban to suburban schools. I'm sure that this wasn't the intention...

Schools can't continue to function under plainly inadequate budgets? Blame the teachers, cut their salaries, cut their pensions. Cut staff. Cut capital budgets. Blame everything on the teachers and the teachers unions. Drive out any good teachers who still can get the heck out.

School "fails"? Convert it to a magnet or a private school -- parents have little or no say in this -- then use tax dollars to fund vouchers so that parents can "choose" better options for their children. Except that the vouchers don't really cover the increased costs of the private schools -- because, you know, *private* school teachers and administrators have to make a living -- so parents have to kick in a lot more on top of the vouchers if they want their kids to have any chance at all.

FCAT has been the most powerful tool of a visible, unapologetic segment of the Republican party in this state that *says outright* that it wants to destroy the teachers unions and do away with "government schools" altogether.

The essential thing you need to know about FCAT: *none* of this ill-conceived, corrupt, and ever-tightening testing apparatus applies to private schools, even those which receive very substantial public funds through our voucher system.

Re:How smart?

[DragonWriter]

The only time I've ever heard of IQ tests being used for scholastic purposes (other than students doing research) is determining the type and degree of learning disabilities.

Even if that is the only use for scholastic purposes, it is a use for scholastic purposes, and so refutes the blanket claim that tests used for scholastic purposes do not measure how "smart" people are.

Re:How smart?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a distinction between what something is intended to do and what that thing actually does.

The Titanic was intended to be an unsinkable ship. It was not actually unsinkable.
IQ tests may be intended to measure how smart someone is, but there is some doubt and debate as to whether they actually do, or whether the test is actually comprehensive enough (it might measure only for certain kind of intelligence, rather than intelligence as a whole).

That said, I wholeheartedly support counterexamples for blanket statements like "All X are Y".

Re:How smart?

[Archangel Michael]

Standardized Tests aren't for the student's benefit. They are for the people making political decisions based on the results of those tests. The flaw in your logic is assuming that the people who require the tests care about the children required to take them. STAR testing all week here.

Re:How smart?

[Savantissimo]

No, for psychometric purposes "smart", is defined as the largest common factor behind the correlation in the same person or group's scores on different tests. That is the factor-analytic definition of intelligence. Those who do well on valid IQ tests generally do well on all valid tests, even those that seem to be of specialized subject information. (Exposure to that information helps, of course, but it helps the smarter ones disproportionately.)

What did you expect?

[HangingChad]

You're expecting a lot from a state that would elect Rick Scott governor. Modern Florida is what you get when the tea party runs a state.

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, you mean the states that aren't running massive deficits? There's very little correlation between the amount of money spent on education and the quality of the service provided. What you end up building is an expensive bureaucracy over the whole system... the kind that makes tests like this.

Re:What did you expect?

[reve_etrange]

Ah, you mean the states that don't have massive federal tax imbalances?

FTFY

Re:What did you expect?

[LordLimecat]

Except we had this same crap in Virginia, including when Warner was running the state. But go ahead, bash the tea party and show your ignorance.

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

>There's very little correlation between the amount of money spent on education and the quality of the service provided.

Within limits. If you starve the beast, it will die. Unfortunately, the bloat is usually the last to go. Of course, it varies state to state.

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Florida is $30B in debt and growing. More than average, less than some, but pretty significant nonetheless...

Re:What did you expect?

[iamhassi]

Florida had problems long before Republicans were in office. Based on your userid you should know this better than anyone

Re:What did you expect?

[AK Marc]

If you starve the beast, it will die.

This has been used as an excuse by supposedly small-government nutjobs to increase the government size. But they've never been right. The US government shut down due to lack of operating budget multiple times under Clinton. Care to tell me what the deficit (and debt) did since he left office? How about CA, when they ran out of money? Are they much smaller now than before?

Starve the beast is a lie used by tax-and-borrow large-government nutjobs to excuse their unethical and insane behavior.

Re:What did you expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

If a state cuts education funding significantly enough, her education system will die. I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that's what will happen. CA is funded through taxes and it can borrow money, a state education system can't and is dependent on the state.

The GOP think that starve the beast will force efficiencies, but it's very simplistic thinking. Take your job and quit without any additional income. Will you become more efficient? Sure, you'll cut all your unnecessary expenses and some necessary ones. If enough time passes, you go into debt and end up bankrupt and living with some poor soul who will take you in (if you are lucky). That's the same thinking as cutting off a leg will help you to lose weight. It's technically true, but a great and permenant folly.

Re:What did you expect?

[Methuseus]

Florida has been Republican run since 1999. Not sure if you knew that...

In reply to the title alone.

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad part is that they're probably right.

Fark has a "Florida Tag" for a reason

[Anonymous Coward]

News stories out of Florida always paint Floridians as stupid, so this is why Fark.com has a special "Florida" tag.

Re:Fark has a "Florida Tag" for a reason

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a reason that round here in Georgia, we tend to call those from Florida, Floridiots.

Re:Fark has a "Florida Tag" for a reason

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, the Florida panhandle (that's the northern section of Florida) is very different from the southern part of the state. The panhandle is all rednecks. The southern part is all Yankee senior citizens. For bonus points, guess where the state capital is.

Banana monochromator

[Anonymous Coward]

From K12 Science 3, Semester assessment
Question: Explain why a banana looks yellow.
Sample answer: Answers may vary but should include: When the light hits the banana, the surface of the banana reflects yellow light back to our eyes and absorbs other colors of the visible spectrum.

Re:Banana monochromator

[Jiro]

That one's not too bad because it's not presented as a multiple choice question but as something for a teacher to grade. It's obviously asking the teacher to look for the student's knowledge that the banana is yellow because of the light it reflects. A student who gave an actual correct answer (that the banana reflects a part of the spectrum that looks yellow when combined) would then be marked as correct.

And to add another anecdote to the mix, I had an elementary schoolteacher who insisted that iodine is a liquid. She probably thought that bottles of "iodine" contain pure iodine rather than this being short for "iodine solution".

Ah, Florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Par for the course for the only state with it's own Fark tag...

FCAT

[Anonymous Coward]

What you see here is the result letting an organization take charge that willingly misspells the word "fact" in order to name themselves.

Re:FCAT

[alexo]

What you see here is the result letting an organization take charge that willingly misspells the word "fact" in order to name themselves.

I don not remember hearing you complain when French Connection UK used a similar tactic.

protecting pseudoscience

[jaroslav]

Honestly, I'd bet the reason the test designers are using these correct "incorrect" answers is because they know they can't include more appropriate examples of non-testable theories. Specifically: "God created the Earth in 7 days", "God created man in his own image", etc. etc.

Re:protecting pseudoscience

[sqlrob]

"God created the Earth in 7 days"

Testable, and disproven. Billions of years != 7 days, and the order is wrong.

Re:protecting pseudoscience

[Anonymous Coward]

"God created the Earth in 7 days"

Testable, and disproven. Billions of years != 7 days, and the order is wrong.

Sssh!! You might get the attention of the Indian police or the Iranian Inquisition!

Re:protecting pseudoscience

[digitig]

I think that "God created the Earth in 7 days" would be a great example of an untestable statement for the test. Partly for the controversy it would cause, and partly because you've just failed that question. There are excellent reasons for believing the statement false, but I'd be fascinated if you could actually come up with a way of testing it.

Re:protecting pseudoscience

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that is still untestable. Did you _see_ the earth form? Were you there with a stopwatch? Dating rocks, estimating cooling time of the earth (Kelvin, right?), etc. are provide evidence. This evidence, as most (and certainly yourself) would contend constitutes proof beyond a reasonable doubt; however, it is not a test. You can't try it again because you were never there.

Re:protecting pseudoscience

[Anonymous Coward]

"God created the Earth in 7 days"

Not testable. God could have created the Earth in 7 and made it look like it was billions of years old.
The reason this hypothesis is not taken seriously by scientists is because of the Occam's razor. All other things being equal, the hypothesis that doesn't involve an additional parameter (in this case : god) is simpler, therefore, it is preferred.

Reminds me of elementary school

[poity]

Teacher was introducing order of operations, and started off by using the incorrect way as an example of what not to do (as in "you solve it this way right? AHA you were WRONG! It's actually this way!) Well, being the smartass who already knew order of operations I jumped the gun had to make it clear to her how wrong that was. Got yelled at for messing up her teaching plan haha

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[captjc]

I had a similar incident around 3rd or 4th grade about the "3 states of matter". There was a bit of a kerfuffle when I mentioned plasma. It got worse when I later corrected that glass didn't technically fit the classical model of a solid. That is what I get for reading too much...

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I'm still a little sore about the time when I was 7 years old and the class was asked to write a definition of a certain word. Having a familiarity with the dictionary's style I wrote what would be suitable for a dictionary. However the teacher would not believe I had not cheated and taken it from an actual dictionary. Seems rather remiss for a teacher to ignore such ability. I'm now 32 and I still can't let it go, an abject failure in life, but at least I know that at age 7 I outclassed a school teacher intellectually!

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Nidi62]

While not quite the same thing, I have an interesting anecdote from elementary school as well. By the time I was in the 4th grade, I was already reading books such as Michael Crichton. In 4th grade we used to have to fill out sheets showing what books we were reading. One week I put in that I had read The Lost World. When the teacher returned it to me, she had written on there asking if I wanted help finding "more age appropriate books". I remember our school library had a set of books on the Vietnam War. I must have gone through those 4-5 times as well between 3rd and 5th grade.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[reve_etrange]

My teachers got wise to that response so I had to start reminding them about Bose-Einstein condensates.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[reve_etrange]

Not quite the same (since the teacher didn't really know the correct answer), but my favorite story like this is from a friend who was asked, "what's heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold."

To the elementary teachers out their, you should always use bricks or lead in that example...

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[LordLimecat]

Glass is nevertheless a solid, despite urban myths to the contrary.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[slippyblade]

unfortunately, level of knowledge is a huge problem. I'm a computer geek - been programming all my life. I'm working on my first degree at the moment and am being forced to take an Intro to Computer Systems. (One of those, "This is a keyboard, This is a document" kind of classes.) I've had SO many after class discussions with the teacher because a lot of the book material is flat out wrong. Granted, they are expecting the students of this class to have never so much as turned on a computer before but still. An answer is wrong, whether you understand the background or not - it is not "most correct for what the student is expected to know"!!!!!

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[moderatorrater]

Good teachers will be able to deal with that by pointing out that they're using a simplification. Unfortunately, not all teachers fit the bill.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[slew]

Glass is nevertheless a solid, despite urban myths to the contrary.

And at that level of understanding, plasma is probably best considered as just ionized gas.
Otherwize, you start getting into a categorization/definition game with stuff like bose-einstein condensates, strange-quark-matter, and other weird shit.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole idea of mutually exclusive states of matter is an urban myth. Most materials have either properties of solids, liquids etc.; some materials have properties of multiple (such as glass, and supercritical fluids.) Things get even weirder when you consider that materials can change their properties based on external stimuli outside of the normal temperature/pressure way of looking at things (such as cornstarch and water, and magnetic fluids.)

One of the things that has most consistently bothered me about science education is teacher's reliance on simplifications and (sometimes) downright lies to teach to the "lowest common denominator." Things like HONC 1234 and functional groups* seem to me like ways of getting students to give correct answers to questions rather than understand how things actually work. IMHO that's completely backwards.

* - the way we were taught was that certain arrangements of atoms ALWAYS had certain properties, which led to a lot of confusion for me later on.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[bosef1]

I also had a similar incident in 3rd or 4th grade: one of our tests had asked us how many stars were in the Big Dipper. The expected answer was seven. However, I put a larger number, having already learned that several of the "stars" in the Big Dipper are actually binary or larger families. I was appearently very frustrated that I got the question wrong.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm now 32 and I still can't let it go, an abject failure in life, but at least I know that at age 7 I outclassed a school teacher intellectually!

Yet you are totally class-less about it. I'm sure you weren't the first (or last) smartass the teacher had to deal with. From the teacher's point of view there are 2 likely possiblities. You cheated, you didn't cheat. The teacher can choose 3 reponses: accuse you of cheating, ignore it, praise you. Let's look at the 6 states:

1. you cheated, teacher accuses you of cheating: teach the kid that they will get caught if they cheat
2. you didn't cheat, teacher accusses you of cheating: kid feels superior to teacher.
3. you cheated, teacher ignores it: might teach kid cheating is okay
4. you didn't cheat, teacher ignores it: kid feels underappreciated by teacher
5. you cheated, teacher praises you: definitely teaches kid cheating is okay
6. you didn't cheat, teacher praises you: kid gets a big ego

So why wouldn't the teacher choose to accuse you? Outcome 1 & 2 seem like the best "payoff" in the game matrix for the teacher (avoiding 3&5&6)
Hmm, how did that whole thing work out for you? Yes, I see that you included that in your post.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember those days...I burned through all the classroom reading material at my level and above, then read the lower levels b/c there was nothing else to read, then the teacher let me read whatever I wanted and I wrote up short book reports for her to show that I *had* read them...I was bringing in horror novels that my mom was giving me after she had read them.

Learned more about sex early that way i guess. The only developmental issue i point out now is that I missed out on comic books entirely - big hole in my geek education.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

kill yourself. you're too stupid for me to bother explaining what the correct answer is here.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[mrchaotica]

You know how kids stereotypically get in trouble for hiding comic books behind their textbooks? Yeah, for me it was Star Trek novels...

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[mrchaotica]

You're at the wrong school, then (or not actually majoring in CS?). A good school wouldn't waste your time like that.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[KingAlanI]

yeah, teachers often get annoyed when I jump ahead.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

Correcto-mundo! A solid is generally defined by an enormous (often near-infinite) relaxation time. Glasses are, however, non-equilibrium solids. This makes them quite interesting (and no, they don't flow).

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[slippyblade]

No, not majoring in CS. Secondary Education with a Physics emphasis. Going to teach High School Physics. 37 years old and I finally decided what I want to be when I grow up!

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

And another example of education system idiocy:

I took a university night school class which included students from other countries. One of the requirements was that any foreign student had to take an English As A Second Language test. A fellow student was from Bristol, England.

Quick, what language is most common in Bristol, England????

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

supercooled liquid, but it sure feels hard

look up glass transition temperature of other things

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

It's debatable.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/Glass/glass.html

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[LordLimecat]

People debate it, but as one person points out on snopes, its melting temperature is quite a bit higher than room temperature. They quote 1400C, though for pure fused silica I understand it to be substantially higher.

Suffice it to say that people bounce it back and forth, but Ive generally heard it called an "amorphous solid".

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[AK Marc]

I was beaten in 2nd grade (about 7) for being told to draw a man with two orange heads for a Halloween thing. I drew a man holding one orange head in each hand. So off to the whipping room I went. Everyone else drew a person with, in place of one regular head, two orange ones. So I "disobeyed instructions" to justify being beaten. I was also locked in a closet at lunch, but that didn't ever bother me, as a locked door between me and the classroom was more a comfort than a problem.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

Gas is just vaporised liquid, and liquid is just melted solid, right?

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[L4t3r4lu5]

Good nerdgasm there, but useless in primary and mostly secondary education (up to 16). What they teach is basics, because basics is what is needed. You need to know that you can't swim through a brick, water will take the shape of its container, and 100% oxygen is bad for you. All of the advanced science stuff comes from being interested in a career, or just interested, in advanced sciences. Carpenters don't need to know the difference a fermion, lepton, boson, and quark, but they do need to know that glass won't run all over the window sill.

On a separate note: Otherwise. At least there's one word you colonials still spell correctly. :)

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[OwMyBrain]

My 3rd grade teacher was aware of the fourth state of matter. She knew it was called "plasma", and she explained that it existed in our blood.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[LordLimecat]

Possibly I should have checked wikipedia on this before commenting, which indicates glass is its own phase.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it's not Pakistani, but it is in Birmingham & Bradford.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[Anonymous Coward]

Having a parent who was a high school science teacher, this happened to me all the time. Eventually, I learned most people prefer not to be corrected, especially elementary and middle school teachers. So, I shut up and let them misinform everyone else, who would have to re-learn things when they got to high school or college. What was really annoying was when the tests would have multiple right answers and you knew it, but you had to figure out which one the stupid test makers at the time thought was right. Of course you can't take the test with you, so there is no way to validate that these expensive standardized tests have answerable questions or prove to anyone else that they don't. So, we are left with less than worthless, but destructive tests. They really are tailored only students who know exactly what the test makers know.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[mrchaotica]

That explains it, then. If your school has a CS department, I suggest asking your adviser if you can substitute the "real" intro to CS class (that CS majors take) for the worthless class non-CS majors usually take. They should have no problem with it, especially since you'd be substituting a more rigorous class for a less rigorous one.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[green1]

I was once forced to take a computer fundamentals course with a similarly ridiculous number of horrid test questions. Some of my favourites:
- How many ports are on the back of a computer? (which computer? what peripherals? what level of technology??)
- Which of the following is a non-impact printer:
    a) dye sublimation
    b) laser
    c) ink jet
    d) dot matrix
    e) daisy wheel
(only one choice allowed)

Other favoured questions from courses over the years:
- in a geography course asking what body of water the mackenzie river flowed in to:
a) Pacific Ocean
b) Atlantic Ocean
c) st lawrence seaway
d) Hudson Bay
(in fact it is none of those, it's the arctic ocean, when this was brought to the attention of the teacher he informed us it was proof that we couldn't trust teachers (which we knew already) but refused to remove the question from the test)

And many many more questions that I don't remember the exact details of over the years.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[eugene ts wong]

Wow. I'm so surprised about the Mackenzie River question. Before looking up the map on Wikipedia, I was expecting the drainage area to be so close to the Hudson Bay, that I could have said, "Yeah, but it's close enough that you could have selected the desired answer.". Now that I have seen it, I'm thinking, what on earth are these people smoking? :^D The correct answer is so far away from any of those places, that I kind of wonder if the options were created while somebody was burning the candle at both ends.

Some people might be demoralized by those types of questions, but I'm comforted, because it shows that, a lot of times, it really is the other person. A lot of times, we really can't do anything about it.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[slippyblade]

Heh. MORE rigorous is the opposite of what they want. I kid you not, first day of class we had to do the old, "Stand up, state your name, and why you are in this class" Over half the class is on various sports teams. Four of us were there to fill the requirement for an education major.

Re:Reminds me of elementary school

[mrchaotica]

Right, which is why you need to get out of that class.

Not just florida...

[Lumpy]

In michigan during the 80's I proved a chemistry teacher wrong in the 6th grade. He Flunked me on the test for being "combative" and "not respecting authority". I took it home to my dad and my oldest brother, who worked as a chemist looked at the problem and my answer and said, " you are correct, the teacher is an idiot" and went with my dad to a conference with the teacher asking the principal to be there.

By me saying " no you are wrong", and then saying "NO WAY! THAT"S UNFAIR" I was being combative. my dad ripped into the principal and the teacher for 1 hour. My grade got changed to an A before they left.

A lot of teachers are not teaching but regurgitating what is in the book, and the book was wrong. the teacher was outed as not doing his job and by dad found out he actually was an english major and had only 1 class in chemistry.

Any monkey can regurgitate a book. IT's time we get real teachers in there and fire all the administration that makes retard decisions to have the Phys Ed teacher, to hold the algebra classes because he knows how to use a calculator.

Re:Not just florida...

[forkfail]

If we want good education for our kids (and thus, to maintain our position as an economic world power), there's two things that need be done.

First, hold teachers accountable. As you note, having the tenured gym teacher teach algebra because he can use a calculator must stop.

But the other bit is that we have to pay the true professionals what they're worth. Look at the teachers in the nations that lead on the test scores (Finland, Japan, etc) - they're not only highly respected, they're highly paid.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't be done in this country currently, the teacher's unions are too much money for the DNC in their current form in order to risk losing some of it by changing things.

You mention holding teacher's accountable. It has been mentioned many time here on /. with hundreds of people explaining how it won't be fair no matter which metric. Not a single post ever says, "finally the good teachers will have a chance to be recognized and given the bigger raises". Its more important to protect bad teachers.

Throwing more money at education doesn't work, you can look at spending vs results over different areas. More money means more burecrats, which equals more DNC money from union members. More money improving education does not equal more money for DNC, so it won't happen.

GOP is not allowed to do anything with education without guarnteeing losing elections due to lies from the DNC.

So you are suggesting we stop the DNC's war against children.

Re:Not just florida...

[Amouth]

I still remember having an elementary text book wrong, and the teach teaching too it.. it has a typeo saying the Statue of Liberty was made of bronze.. When i pointed it out after the teacher read it.. she paused and then just moved on ignoring me.. what can you do right? i believe i was ~6-7 years old at the time, but i knew i was right so i crossed it out and corrected it in my book so the next kid would get it right.

Re:Not just florida...

[Yaotzin]

The initial salary for teachers in US is actually higher than for teachers in Finland and Japan (source: OECD, Education at a Glance, 2011).

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

> First, hold teachers accountable.

You sound anti-union. If you hold teacher accountable then the bad ones will get fired. That is morally wrong. That is the type of competitive system Repukians are trying to jam down our throats in this country.

Re:Not just florida...

[Herkum01]

Why stop at the teachers? Are administrators helpless dolts trapped in their offices by the teacher's union?

You know, there is management in schools, however, it is much easier to ALWAYS blame the teacher. If we were talking about IT here, we have endless stories of managers screwing up large projects and budgets, why should school administrators be left off the hook?

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

GOP is not allowed to do anything with education without guarnteeing losing elections due to lies from the DNC.

Ah yes, the GOP. The science-loving organisation that has done so much to combat myths like creationism and unscientific prejudices like sexism and racism. Them.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

having the tenured gym teacher teach algebra because he can use a calculator must stop.

If there's something wrong with that, then it means the education departments are screwed up.
Point 1: We're talking about algebra here, not higher mathematics. Anyone who has graduated from high school is required to know this material.
Point 2: The teacher has been graduated, qualified, and certified as a teacher.

So he officially knows algebra (having graduated), and he officially can teach.
So why can't he teach algebra?

Re:Not just florida...

[uniquename72]

Can't be done in this country currently, the teacher's unions are too much money for the DNC in their current form in order to risk losing some of it by changing things...

GOP is not allowed to do anything with education without guarnteeing losing elections due to lies from the DNC.

So you are suggesting we stop the DNC's war against children.

I notice you very carefully neglected to mention what exactly Republicans would like to do to increase education. Teach creationism in science class? An economics class explaining how cutting taxes while vastly increasing spending (during wartime, for example) leads to a balanced budget? Babies from storks?

The fact is, neither party has any interest in educating anyone, as it would put their jobs at risk.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be surprised if Finland doesn't have just as strong unions as we do in Norway (where practically everyone is in some kind of union)...

Re:Not just florida...

[PeanutButterBreath]

IT's time we get real teachers in there and fire all the administration that makes retard decisions to have the Phys Ed teacher, to hold the algebra classes because he knows how to use a calculator.

Obviously, the Phys Ed teacher is better suited to teaching Physics, what with being a professional Physician.

Re:Not just florida...

[reve_etrange]

It's not that the metrics don't work, it's that in most areas teachers literally have to read from a script.

How could it possibly be fair to judge someone by the effectiveness of a standard curriculum that they must use?
It's also one of the reasons that socioeconomic factors have a larger impact than teacher quality.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Rush Limbaugh and Boortz will rot your brain, you should stop while you can.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep blaming the Unions and the Teachers for your problems. That's just the kind of personal responsibility that the GOP enjoys.

A completely hypocritical attempt to blame a convenient scapegoat for the problems while not bothering to correlate it with facts.

I agree, the bureaucrats are the problem. But those bureaucrats have been ones espousing the conservative ideologies. They funnel money into private providers, into bean-counters and result-measurements, and report-makers, all of which the GOP has demanded. Who fought hardest for a test-based system? That would be the Republicans.

It hasn't worked out. Yet you blame the Teachers and their dirty nasty unions. Because you have this gut feeling that it's still the teachers that are the problem, nothing else. After all, they're being protected...yet not one thought ever intrudes into your head that maybe the teachers aren't the problem, but the administration? Maybe it is more important to protect good teachers from bad bureaucrats. You do realize that they are the ones who want to fire teachers? It is more important not to judge people on bad criteria, and that's what those metrics really are. You can't conceive of it, but it's true.

The GOP has had plenty of opportunity to change education. It's failed. It's been failing for the past few decades. We've been marching to their tune. It never works. It just keeps failing, but like the narcissistic demo-gouges you are, you never have to live up to that, but can continue with your path of deflection and blame.

And yes, I do blame the Democrats for not standing up to that, for not actually doing what it would take to fix schools. Namely implement a national education system that is accountable and answerable, and not leave everything up to the local school boards who can scapegoat the responsibilities elsewhere. Except in Football and other sports. Those matter.

  But education? Ah, clearly somebody else's fault.

That's the GOP way. They've learned from you. Deflection, Evasion, Denial, Narcissism. Never once do you take accountability or blame. Democrats and liberals will. They don't have the arrogance since of self-important delusion that's found all over the Right-Wing.

That's why you can blame anybody but yourself. And why we're too inclined to try to listen to you, because we don't want to be like you. And yet you will continue trying your lies, while you're not challenged by those in authority.

A pity, huh? We need some liberals with back-bone.

Re:Not just florida...

[Lumpy]

It is the fault of the Administrators FIRST. And that is where I laid the blame. Like I said, Fire all the idiot administrators that put the gym teacher in the job they dont belong.

All cuts need to start at the Superintendant level first, and start rolling down hill.

Re:Not just florida...

[nukeade]

Not quite the same, but I've seen college exams where the professor had it wrong, marked me wrong, and would not fix the mistake.

One professor (computer graphics exam) thought the Sun behaved like a point light source on Earth. It does not, it behaves like a plane light source because it is much larger than the Earth and the light arriving from the sun is for all computer graphics purposes arriving with the same vector direction. He would have none of it.

The other was on a quantum information exam, with a question about quantum encryption. Essentially a probability question involving a classical channel and a quantum channel. If he had been correct, then you would have been able to transmit information faster than the speed of light using quantum entanglement. You cannot, and instead you require the extra piece of information from the classical channel.

I've even had college profs knock me down a letter grade out of spite. This happened to me in two CS courses, one where I finished all of his weekly projects on the first day and aced his exams by reverse-engineering the code instead of memorizing what he wanted us to do. In the other, the prof was teaching an object-oriented programming class and couldn't figure out object polymorphism, so I offered to teach it for him because he said he was just going to skip that part of the course. I did a great job, but he didn't like being made to look like the amateur he was.

The grades don't bother me so much as the majority of a class walking out and having a misconception about the world around them or missing out on one of the most critical components of a subject. People pay good money for education and will go out and do important things that are relevant to anyone with what they learn, and that is absolutely important to me. That said, I learned long ago that most adults are actually just children that were given a measure of authority. While I can definitely sympathize with your situation, the approach I take now is never to touch anyone else's claim to authority.

Re:Not just florida...

[PeanutButterBreath]

First, hold teachers accountable.

Disagree. First, hold parents accountable.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

with hundreds of people explaining how it won't be fair no matter which metric.

There are fair metrics. They just won't be used, instead we get shit metrics like "students scored well on the FCAT".

One fair metric is the measurement of improvement in the field that teacher is responsible for teaching. If you get shit students on day one and they're less shit on day 200, you're doing a good job. Figuring this out requires a skills test at the beginning of the school year matching a skills test at the end of the school year to see the difference.

due to lies from the DNC

Why would they lie? The truth has been damning enough lately. Maybe if the GOP could stick to the Constitution long enough to stop trying to teach the Bible, they could come up with a coherent step-by-step plan to improve public schooling... oh who am I kidding, they can't work together long enough to do something like that before half the leaders fuck it up on a quest to prove that the government fucks everything up.

Re:Not just florida...

[roc97007]

In fairness, sometimes you have to teach a topic on which you are not an expert. My daughter was homeschooled for a few years (she's now about to graduate 12th grade at a magnet school) and I don't mind telling you, I had one hell of a time with biology, which I had skipped in school. (My school allowed you to take physics instead if you had already passed chemistry.) I wasn't even a chapter ahead of her; often I was only two or three pages ahead of her. (Geeze, biology is hard! I now have a profound respect for people in that field. As an engineer, I always thought of organisms as "really complicated machines". Now I think of organisms as "impossibly complicated machines".) And because I did not know the subject (as was the case with your teacher) I did not unquestioningly believe the textbook. If we found something questionable, we looked it up on the internet, found three or four sources, and saw if they agreed. (Not a sure thing, but better than having only one source.) We never found an actual error, although in a couple of cases I'd argue that some parts violated the "correlation is not causation" rule.

And then, we got into US History at her current school, and wow! Talk about logical fallacies! In reading the text to her, I'd have to stop every second paragraph and remark "those two things are actually unrelated". or "that's demonstrably untrue" or "that's a false dilemma". It was hard to get through the materials, find answers that passed the course, and still leave her critical thinking skills intact.

In summary, it's not necessarily how well the teacher knows the material, it's how well the teacher is engaged as a teacher.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the downsides to women's liberation is that all those previously really smart women now can do something other than be a low-paid teacher. The quality of teachers had declined precipitously. We as a society need to be willing to pay teachers competitively if we expect our children to get a quality education.

Re:Not just florida...

[isilrion]

I guess I was very lucky, most of my teachers were the opposite of that... or at least, the ones I remember the best (though I do remember two who didn't know anything about the material).

One of my favourite anecdotes was with my 10th grade chemistry teacher. On the first class, he told us to take out the textbook (which he called "the evil spawn"), and to never open it or read it. One student asked why... and he answered: "first exercise for the class. Open the evil spawn at page X and list everything that it has wrong". (I'm being a bit dishonest here: he was the trainer of the Havana team for the Cuban chemistry competitions, and the group was chosen because we were the most likely to make the team... the rest of the school wasn't so lucky. When I moved to the math group, I missed him a lot.)

 

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you expect the teacher to do, go into a long dialogue about an inconsequential error?

Re:Not just florida...

[Relayman]

You learned a lot about human nature in college. Maybe you shouldn't touch someone else's claim to authority, but you don't have to accept it at face value, either. I hope you don't pull your punches because of your experiences but are now in a position to show people what a truly intelligent person can accomplish. Started a company yet?

Re:Not just florida...

[NeverSuchBefore]

Great. This is another problem with the educational system. Rather than encouraging free thinking, it encourages absolute obedience to authority. Don't question authority! They could never be wrong! I experienced this many times when I was in school.

Shut up and memorize this information for a test! Rote memorization is the best way to learn and understand the world around you!

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/05/06/obama_proposes_extending_dc_vo.html

GOP supports school vouchers. Obama has cancelled the program in DC despite its sucess and popularity amongst poor parents that can't afford private school. The above story tries to spin it as Obama not ending the program because they know it is a losing issue for him.

Vouchers make private school available for everyone and allows the PARENTS to make the call on if the public school teachers are acceptable.

But just go ahead with your ignorance and name calling, the first resort for those who lost the debate before it began.

Re:Not just florida...

[GrahamCox]

My daughter is only just 6yo and she already had an example of this. In a spelling test she was given, one of the words was "Cumulus". The teacher insisted that it was "Cumulous" and she was marked wrong.

On that occasion we let it go because on the whole we respect her teacher and we don't want to be labelled as troublemaking parents. But it was quite hard to do it! We quietly turned it into a lesson for her that teachers can be wrong sometimes, yet insist that their version is right, and yes, it is unfair. We'll save the trouble-making for later when something more important comes up. (I'm not saying you did the wrong thing - I think you did the right thing).

I recall an incident from my own schooldays aged about 13 where I had written a science fiction story for English that I was accused of plagiarising. I hadn't, though looking back it was a fairly derivative piece that probably would seem familiar. I was a poor student in that class with no interest in the subject - mainly because we were going through stuff that was way below my reading age, a classic case of being bored into being a dull student. I was rarely inspired and did little work, so to suddenly find myself inspired by the topic "science fiction" and actually turn in a decent piece of work raised a red flag for the teacher. The ugly confrontation that followed where I was accused of plagiarism taught me a valuable lesson - don't bother to do your best, no matter how inspired you might inadvertently have become, because you'll still end up with a C- (actually I got an A+ after pleading with her, but looking back I should have swallowed my pride, taken the C- and simply gone back the next day and gunned down the class. Only kidding!).

Re:Not just florida...

[Rytr23]

You forgot perhaps the most important piece of the puzzle. The parents MUST be engaged in the education of their children. My local school districts provide unbelievable resources to students and bend to every shithead parent saying their kid shouldn't be graded or can't be called on in class because it damages their fragile psyche (absolutely true story btw). But if parents are involved the right way, there is almost no limit to what little Suzy or Bobby can accomplish in public schools. And while I am personally not a fan of unions in general, I can see the benefit they do provide in the school system. They protect teachers, good and bad, from the flippant child falsely accusing them of harassing them or making inappropriate comments and also lunatic parents who raised garbage kids and want to take out their frustration on someone. It's not a perfect situation, but it mostly works.*

*This is the situation local to me, I know there are many underfunded districts where resources are much more scarce. And parents are also much less involved or put a lot less of an emphasis on education.

Re:Not just florida...

[CyprusBlue113]

Vouchers are a backhanded way to have taxes fund schools that don't have to follow separation of church and state among others, and that is the main issue with them. Go back to your rock.

Re:Not just florida...

[nukeade]

I wish I could say that I didn't still bite my tongue. I was at the ACM World Finals and have worked at several start-ups where code or an architecture was handed to me. In the past, when I've voiced concerns about serious flaws (such as: "I don't know what this totally undocumented and comment-free module for a critical medical device is supposed to do, but it's never done what you think it does since the first line is a type mismatch") to supervisors, I've been literally screamed at.

I thought that was over when I finished my PhD: that an advanced degree meant that my concerns would be taken seriously. Last week I asked for a task that it was thought could not be completed by a deadline because I felt that it would make the company look bad if it wasn't. I went and talked to several experienced engineers and came up with an elegant solution, and when I showed it to my supervisor he went flying off the handle because "I made a major change to the architecture without consulting him." In fact, what I'd done was changed a binary large object that was being passed around between some functions into a first-class object in the language for improved compatibility. I even showed him a demo where a malicious BLOB allows an attacker to compromise the system with four lines of code. He was certain that such an attack would never be implemented.

The project was completed on schedule, but unsurprisingly to any experienced software engineer exhibits random behavior when the binary large object is passed between machines in the cloud and would be very easy to exploit should anyone ever discover what's happening.

I can only conclude that everything is the same everywhere, no matter what. I'm actually going to a conference next weekend where I hope to make some connections that lead to me being the one in charge, but will certainly never bother to question anyone's authority here again.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your reding comprehension sucks. I blamed the DNC 100%. They are waging the war against children, women, and minorities.

School vouchers have proven to be a great system for helping poor families escape the failed system. The DNC won't let voucher programs expand because it cuts their money laundering through the unions.

I'm not sure why you attacked me, I never once mentioned teachers as the problem. You are so full of your talking points you completely failed to actually READ what was said. Not possible to have debate with someone who insists on being so ignorant.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess he wanted a GOLD star.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

>fuck it up on a quest to prove that the government fucks everything up.

That is comedic gold, my friend. You win the internet.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I've a got a Master's in History and would love to teach high school again. I left after two and a half years. The problem? You have to take a vow of poverty to teach in this country and be willing to die on the job as you play a mix of social worker and security guard. You don't actually get to teach, unless you suck up to the administration and get the "good" kids. Those of us with an education in the subject matter instead of an education degree (which are basically worthless) weren't considered to be real teachers. Make public education a privilege and not a right. Little Johnny been in the ninth grade for two years in a row and going for a third? Boot his ass out and his parents can pay for his education.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

> I blamed the DNC 100%. They are waging the war against children, women, and minorities.

>money laundering through the unions.

Please tell me you're just trolling and don't actually believe all this type of stuff. Sandra Fluke was really testifying about sex, right?

Re:Not just florida...

[j-beda]

Not quite the same, but I've seen college exams where the professor had it wrong, marked me wrong, and would not fix the mistake.

One professor (computer graphics exam) thought the Sun behaved like a point light source on Earth. It does not, it behaves like a plane light source because it is much larger than the Earth and the light arriving from the sun is for all computer graphics purposes arriving with the same vector direction. He would have none of it.

Humm, he wanted to treat the sun as a point source at 1 AU (93 million miles, 49,597,870.7 kilometres from wikipedia), while you wanted to treat it as a point source at infinite distance (thus generating plane waves)? Any "plane wave" like behaviour of sunlight is not because the sun is huge, but rather because the sun is far away. The larger the sun, the LESS its light behaves like a plane wave.

From a shadow casting point of view, both plane wave illumination and distant point source illumination result in sharp shadows, with very little to distinguish them. For a point sources at 1AU, the difference between angles on different sides of person-sized objects at for person-sized distances where the shadow is formed, is pretty minimal. To get a 1% increase in shadow size, you would need to have the shadow be 1% longer than the distance from the point source to the object casting the shadow, or about one million miles - which is probably not the type of thing you are trying to represent with your computer graphics.

  I've never done any computer graphics involving scene lighting or anything like that, but I doubt the difference between point source and plane wave would be noticeable in modeling sunlight.

In actual fact, the sun is not a point source, it is an extended object about 1/2 of a degree in size, which means that shadows cast by sharp edges in sunlight have a "penumbra" of 0.5 degrees. Here is an image showing the formation of this type of shadow:

http://www.pnas.org/content/96/9/5239/F2.expansion.html

For a shadow cast on something a meter behind the object, using good old trig (1m) x tangent(0.5 degrees) = 0.00872686779 m or almost 9 mm. Thus sunlight shadows are fuzzy edges for real-world distances (albeit not really very fuzzy), compared to the sharp edges that plane waves or point sources would cast.

It may well be that the professor was "wrong" to model sunlight as a point source, but it seems at least as wrong to model it as a plane wave, when there is up to 1/2 of a degree in difference between different directions of the light from the source.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your defense sucks. Your allegations of the money flowing to the DNC are pretty squarely originating from those unions and teachers.

You even brought up the same old line about the need to fire the "bad" teachers. Your refusal to accept your own words is typical of the GOP.

Voucher programs are actually failures, they don't raise student test scores, they don't improve public schools and they don't increase educational access. See Milwaukee and Ohio studies. See DC where four studies showed it did nothing.

If you want DC schools to work, make Congress send their children there.

Re:Not just florida...

[tftp]

What would you expect the teacher to do, go into a long dialogue about an inconsequential error?

A wise teacher would have offered the student to prepare, at his convenience, a 5-minute lecture to the class on construction of the statue.

Re:Not just florida...

[diamondmagic]

I don't know if you've caught this little fact yet, but the first amendment doesn't apply to private entities. The Constitution applies to the government exclusively. It's not enough that Congress not establish a religion, the Constitution also requires that the Congress shall "make no law... prohibiting the free exercise thereof". Following the incorporation of the first amendment, not allowing people to spend a voucher on a private school of their choice falls into the latter. It's the same reason public schools can't prohibit students from starting a club on the grounds it is religious.

Re:Not just florida...

[CyprusBlue113]

It does if they want to receive government subsidiarity, on both of your examples. I don't know if you're just trolling at this point, or really this ignorant.

Re:Not just florida...

[nukeade]

Yes, you are technically correct, but that's not how anybody actually does the calculation. The "correct" way to model the sun would in fact be to do some ray tracing from every point on the sun--but that's ridiculous. Nobody is going to notice the 9mm on the edge of the shadow to appreciate your calculation in the first place, and even if they did the same effect could be achieved more efficiently by just softening the edges a bit using some graphics algorithm.

Similarly, it's just ridiculously expensive to treat the sun as a point at a huge distance, subtract the vector from the vector to a point on your model, then project along that vector onto whatever lies behind the model. It's slow and inefficient.

Instead, we just choose a vector for the incident sunlight and do a projection along that vector onto what lies behind the object. This is fast and efficient and how computer graphics are actually done in order to make your game run at reasonable FPS!

So, in an Optics class, both myself and my professor would both be wrong and you would be right. In a computer graphics class, the sun is most definitely a plane light source.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to know something then...a lot of State Constitutions expressly forbid the application of public funds into private schools.

Guess who proposed the Blaine Amendment?

Re:Not just florida...

[diamondmagic]

Subsidiarity? Do you mean subsidy? It's not just any money, it's a voucher. It's an option for an individual to go to a school, which the school can in turn redeem for funding. There's no endorsement or establishment of religion implied anywhere in the process. Government cannot prohibit money from going to a church or religious organization purely on the basis that it's a religious organization, that would be a violation of the Constitution's free exercise clause, and likewise, would not constitute an establishment or endorsement of religion, as would be necessary to be in violation of the first clause (even if it was claimed that it's an endorsement, there's various tests the Supreme Court applies to prove it). Even if it weren't a religious organization, it still might be a violation of the equal protection clause.

I mean, I just cited out of the Constitution. Instead of claiming I'm just wrong and ignorant and possibly trolling, you could tell me why. You know, with counter examples and stuff. If I'm gonna be the one to back up my opinions and you not so much, I'm pretty sure it's not me who's trolling here.

Re:Not just florida...

[AK Marc]

Not a single post ever says, "finally the good teachers will have a chance to be recognized and given the bigger raises". Its more important to protect bad teachers.

That's because nobody has ever identified a good way to identify good teachers. And even if they did with objective results, you'd likely end up with a tragedy of the commons situation where the goal isn't an educational framework, but jumping the right hoops (teaching to the test, to the exclusion of education is something I've seen lots of).

In general, those who step in, claiming to have some solution to improve things, are really there to break it (sometimes with good intentions, but often with bad intentions).

Re:Not just florida...

[AK Marc]

half the leaders fuck it up on a quest to prove that the government fucks everything up.

Vote Democrat. Republicans and Libertarians both believe the government is incompetent, while petitioning to join it and get the power to ensure it is incompetent. At least the Democrats are trying to help (even if misguided).

Re:Not just florida...

[j-beda]

Instead, we just choose a vector for the incident sunlight and do a projection along that vector onto what lies behind the object. This is fast and efficient and how computer graphics are actually done in order to make your game run at reasonable FPS!

So, in an Optics class, both myself and my professor would both be wrong and you would be right. In a computer graphics class, the sun is most definitely a plane light source.

That was the sort of thing I would have thought - the efficiencies of modeling the system in one particular manner (lit by a bunch of parallel rays) being more important than the potentially more "accurate" other options. Your statement that the sun "behaves like a plane light source because it is much larger than the Earth" though, is more wrong than it is right. The sun behaves like a plane light source because it is so far away that even though it it is freaking huge, it can be fairly accurately treated as a point source at infinite distance. The smaller it is, and the farther away it is, the more like plane waves is the light coming from it.

But you already know that. Your point was that your instructor was unable or unwilling to see the limitations of his idea.

Re:Not just florida...

[Osgeld]

when I was in high school, almost all of my teachers were lazy blobs damn near asleep at their desks passing anyone who attempted to do the busywork they assigned while eyeballing the hot young cheerleaders

they dont give a shit, they ARE PROTECTED, all they have to do is lay low, avoid anything that will get them in legal trouble and fuck they are golden, from age 20 to retirement.

so yea its MY fault that the unions have provided nothing but easy rides for the most worthless people (in any industry). Trust me I know, I come from a family of union workers, though I love them, they are just about too stupid to tie their shoes, and act insulted when their one simple task is hindered by not having "scented toilet paper"

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

That'd only be a violation if they allowed it to some, but not others.

Not allowing it to any...completely legal.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

And when I was in High School, the teachers were what I expected them to be, all reasonably hard-working, whereas I could tell the school board was less than diligent, especially the elected members.

Never a problem with the teachers that would be directly tied to being lazy.

Same with workers. Including some family. In a right-to-work state, better expressed as a "right to get fired for no good reason state" which doesn't increase productivity, but does increase abuses, as your supervisor decides to fire you for no reason, and there's next to nothing you can do about it.

My experiences are so different from yours, that I wonder whose are closer to reality.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody else came up with it.

The phrasing is something like "Republicans get elected on a platform of the failure of government, then set about proving themselves right"

Re:Not just florida...

[tapspace]

> Any monkey can regurgitate a book. IT's time we get real teachers in there and fire all the administration that makes retard decisions to have the Phys Ed teacher, to hold the algebra classes because he knows how to use a calculator.

Heh. Michigander here too. On the flip side, now we've got these "well qualified" restrictions where you can't even teach high school math without a math degree. So, I have a masters in CS, but I can't teach HS math? Get a life. I've considered teaching (I've always had a passion for it and sometimes a more fulfilling career is better than making more money), but not if I have to get a new degree. With well-intentioned regulation, you lose good teachers who can do the financial math and skip it all together for a better paying career.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that teachers in Finland aren't really that well paid. It's nothing like a McJob, but you could earn twice as much as a DBA, for example.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, I just realized that sentence could be read to mean the exact opposite what I was after. Well, I'll leave figuring that up to the reader.

Re:Not just florida...

[shutdown -p now]

It's not just any money, it's a voucher. It's an option for an individual to go to a school, which the school can in turn redeem for funding.

Yes, funding by the government. Payed by government money.

Government cannot prohibit money from going to a church or religious organization purely on the basis that it's a religious organization

They cannot prohibit private money, yes. They can and must prohibit public money from being spent that way. School vouchers are backed with public money.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

This has no bearing on your argument, but s/payed/paid/;

Re:Not just florida...

[archen]

I had a few similar instances when I was growing up. It was much as you say, "being combative" made me in the wrong, but it came down to something like a teacher unwilling to admit they were wrong or there was another correct answer. The lesson learned there wasn't that I was wrong, or that the teacher was always right. What I learned what pride and arrogance of authority figures allows them to do. It's strange how things like that can change a kid's perception on life. The result is a lot like "not respecting authority". I certainly distrust things authority figures tell me and I've been much more argumentative with those in positions above me.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Finnish teachers are highly educated, by the very same system they are later maintaining themselves. Teachers ( even kindergarden ones, have university level education in the subjects they teach and pedagogy ) Teachers are not paid so much, but since school age kids in Finland have about 3 months of summer vacation the teachers are actually teaching only for 9 months a year. Rest of the time they are actually preparing themselves for the next year. Keeping up with the field they teach, etc. And yes, as a finn i'm ready to pay higher taxes to provide a good education for the new finns. After all, they will be the ones providing for me when i'm old. I'd rather like the idea of them being civilized and well educated instead of stupid fucks.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

"First, hold teachers accountable. As you note, having the tenured gym teacher teach algebra because he can use a calculator must stop."

I am going to disagree here. If the gym teacher is honest, reasonable, and works through the material with the children, this could be excellent. I'm assuming the gym teacher just happens to NOT be a math whiz.

I have seen teachers get wrong answers and when they are honest and reasonable, it can be a productive experience for all involved. This is true in math more so other areas because - while the right answer may be known or easily verified - the process by which you get there is the crux of the matter. Think thusly, watching someone solve a quadratic equation quickly may be less useful than someone mulling over each step.

The teacher is there because the system often demands a leader to push through the right material or keep things in order. Expertise is nice but often overrated.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just any money, it's a voucher. It's an option for an individual to go to a school, which the school can in turn redeem for funding.

Yes, funding by the government. Payed by government money.

Government cannot prohibit money from going to a church or religious organization purely on the basis that it's a religious organization

They cannot prohibit private money, yes. They can and must prohibit public money from being spent that way. School vouchers are backed with public money.

So then would a government employee drawing a paycheck paid with public money be prohibited from donating any of that money to a church?

Re:Not just florida...

[Hognoxious]

Anyone who has graduated from high school is required to have known this material.

FTFY.

Re:Not just florida...

[phlinn]

Vote libertarian. Democrats and Republicans both believe the government has a fundamental right to control your life, just disagreeing about in which areas and how effective it can be. At least the libertarians recognize that freedom includes the right to make choices they personally disagree with.

Re:Not just florida...

[phlinn]

Because he has since forgotten all of his algebra skills OR holding basic skills doesn't mean you can teach them. And despite what education degree holders will claim, having a teaching degree doesn't actually make it possible to teach anything you know. Teaching algebra is not the same as teaching writing, which is also not the same as teaching art, etc.

Re:Not just florida...

[Anonymous Coward]

Libertarians have no recognition that those most likely to try to control your life is another individual, not the government, which actually gives you the constructive right to influence the government for a reason.

So it has that authority.

Your average Libertarian dictator will do what they want, and screw you for standing in their way.

Re:Not just florida...

[Archangel Michael]

It is just as irresponsible as Democrats wanting every girl to get pregnant and have an abortion while handing out condoms at High School by reason of "they are going to do it anyways, might as well provide abortion and condoms". I mean, what part of education does handing condoms and taking kids to Planned Parenthood (oxymoronic) to have a medical procedure done.

See, it is easy to create proper hysterical hyperbole*

The point is, Education should focus on READING, WRITING and MATH, everything else comes from these, and we are neglecting these in favor of condoms** and creationism. Give me someone who can do these things, and I can teach them anything else. But we have people who are graduating High School who can't even make change at McDonalds or read an Election Ballot correctly.

As for Creationism and Condoms, I actually believe one is the response to the other. I'll let you figure out which one is which ;)

*Please note, I'm a Libertarian, and think Education should be under the control of the parents, not the state.
** meaning Social Engineering .

Re:Not just florida...

[Da3vid]

Exactly. Why do teachers act like glorified baby sitters? The answer is because we're paid like glorified baby sitters. The talent that is attracted to the position is largely unable or unwilling of achieving much beyond following simple instructions. I have to write curriculum for my district in such a manner that it can be followed like a fast food employee preparing a sandwich. Yes, I am a teacher. I teach high school physics to juniors and remediate biology and chemistry to seniors. I hate the argument that we still make more than the average American family. That may be true... but I have two bachelor's degrees and I'm finishing my second masters this summer. I've accomplished what it takes to have an advanced understanding of my subject matter to the point where I can explain it competently. I'm rewarded with the huge sum of a raise of ~$80/month over the gym teacher teaching algebra because of my qualifications. The vast majority of us who are capable of performing well and have the proper training don't work as teachers. That same training and capability allows us to make more money at other jobs that we also enjoy.

Re:Not just florida...

[Archangel Michael]

http://greenewable.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/how-to-fire-a-teacher-in-new-york-city/

Reality is often more cruel than the (R) actually state. If it weren't for the fact that the Teacher's Unions are a Subsidiary of the (D) party you might have a point. The reality is there are enough bad teachers (yes, I've seen them) that you cannot dodge all the raindrops.

Re:Not just florida...

[AK Marc]

At least the libertarians recognize that freedom includes the right to make choices they personally disagree with.

They recognize it, but given that they can't even agree on things like abortion (banning it as murder, or allowing it as a choice is not consistent), they, in practice, are no different. Sure, they are more likely to respect the freedom of using drugs, but then, they also don't observe any personal protections, so companies can have daily drug tests and landlords can have daily drug tests as well. Libertarian paradise is rule by the landed gentry, as rights are held by property, and the more property you hold, the more rights you have, and those with no property have no rights.

Please, disagree. I've had every libertarian I've say that to disagree, but none could articulate the disagreement in a non-circular manner.

Re:Not just florida...

[Lumpy]

"don't want to be labelled as troublemaking parents."

This is the problem. I was taught to go out of my way to be recognized as a troublemaker. someone who does not just sit there quietly not making waves. I was taught to splash the water hard and make as big of waves as I can when I see injustice.

Never ever let your child be punished for being right.

Re:Not just florida...

[phlinn]

"Libertarian dictator" is a null concept. By being a dictator, they cease to be libertarian. There are natural limitations to what can be accomplished without the initiation of force. One caveat: it depends on flavor of libertarian. Libertarians are not anarchists... but often that's for the pragmatic reason that government is inevitable, not because they recognize any right to initiate force.

Many people conflate failure to help with causing harm so that they can justify the use of force to make others do what they want. Most of the ways in which individuals are accused of controlling others is actually a form failure to help. Your rhetoric strongly suggests you don't understand that distinction, but I could be wrong.

Re:Not just florida...

[phlinn]

That's where it gets into underlying defintions of things which are not part of the definition of Liberty. If a fetus or embryo is a person, than it is murder. If it isn't a person, than it's the mother's to do with as she pleases. The classification "Libertarian" does not include whether or not a fetus is a person or not. But they still recognize a general right to be free from the interference from others, which causes lots of practical distinctions from the 2 major parties in the US

Property doesn't grant or hold rights. It does measure a form of power or ability to act, which is not the same thing. I think companies and landlords could do those things, but that it would be a stupid idea which would lose out to competitors. They are free to condition any efforts they exert on your behalf on whatever constraints they would like. Worst case is they do nothing for no one... which means no one is doing anything for them either. Life without cooperation really is nasty, brutish, and short. It dependson your definition of "rule". Since conditional assistance is not force or coercion, they aren't ruling you by opting not to work with you unless you do what they want, no matter how onerous those wants are.

My short form libertarian philosophy: There are no actual rights, they are entirely illusionary. However, since I don't particularly like being subject to random assault and battery, I'll recognize everyone else's right to be free from force as long as they do the same for me. Existence demonstrates that I can assume everyone else is ok with this until proven otherwise. It's natural (but sometimes foolish) to assume other people are willing to leave me the hell alone as long as I do the same, so anything compatible with equal rights can be called natural rights. Anything which requires the initiation of force is inherently not compatible with equal rights. Everything called a positive right requires the use of force. Taking the product of my labor without consent is force. Once you have demonstrated that you don't respect other people's rights, you have voluntarily given up your own parallel rights. Please accept that in the short form here, there are limitations, but I think this is sufficient to get the idea across.

Short short form: An it harm none, do as thou will shall be the whole of the law. Alternately, the golden rule.

Re:Not just florida...

[Relayman]

Obviously, we're only hearing your side of the story, but you seem rather intelligent. When you develop a track record, people will start listening to you. The right people will make money off of you which hopefully they will share with you in the form of stock. You need to keep fighting and not give up just yet. You will have plenty of time later to become cynical.

Part of your challenge is dealing with a world filled with what appear to be stupid people. They're not stupid, they just don't operate at your level. But they usually want the same things you want. You just have to herd them (like a dog herds cattle) to get them to the same place you want to go.

You may need to work on your knife skills. When you stab someone, you don't want them to complain about it, you want them to tell you that they now feel better and could you stab them somewhere else as well. This, my friend, takes people skills. However, the right boss/owner can work with you even if your people skills aren't great if your technical skills are.

If you haven't read it yet, read Steve Jobs' biography. I think you may find that you have a lot in common with him.

Re:Not just florida...

[AK Marc]

Property doesn't grant or hold rights.

Libertarians believe you should be able to do what you want on your own property "no blacks allowed" is fine, so long as it's private property. So, take it to the extreme. What happens if whites buy up 100% of the property and all put up the "no blacks" signs? You've suddenly outlawed being black. All blacks could be shot on sight (as they were the aggressors, starting the confrontation by tresspass, so the "do no harm" joke of libertarians doesn't apply).

So rights are tied to land only. People have no rights. Your employer can take them all away. Slavery should be legal. After all, why can the government interfere with a contract between two free people?

Re:Not just florida...

[phlinn]

The thought experiment of one person or group freely purchasing 100% of any commodity that isn't naturally tied to that person or group is nonsense. It doesn't happen in the real world, ever, without overt coercion. Because the larger a monopoly you have, the more you have to pay to acquire ownership of the next bit freely.

Even accepting your thought example, the only reason trespass might justify force is if it reasonably indicates a threat to use force itself. Which in that scenario is not a reasonable assumption. The only justified response to failure to respect property rights by someone is to cease respecting their property rights in turn. Which is a null threat in that scenario.

And nothing in your example ties rights to the land in particular. Logic fail. Your conclusions do not follow from your premises.

Re:Not just florida...

[AK Marc]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Thursday

Not land, but still proves you wrong to my satisfaction.

Re:Not just florida...

[phlinn]

They held an estimated 1/3 of the non-government held supply of silver. That's a long, long ways from 100%. You ignored completely my second paragraph, which stipulated that your though experiment example was true, but pointed out how the facts given still didn't lead to the conclusions you were making. Step back, think about it for a minute, and decide if you really want to hold on to that argument in the face of actual libertarian ideas and real world limits.

Re:Not just florida...

[Lando]

Hell, you don't even have to pay the people that know the subjects all that much. My mentor was taught by PhD's that generally took a sabbatical every 5 years and taught one year in the local schools, it was the accepted practice for the area. Nowadays, unless you have a degree in education, you aren't allowed to teach except at the university level. And since the cost of education is high, with course loads being loaded, how many spare credits do the teachers really have to actually learn the subject they are supposed to be teaching?

Problem is, just like in computers, you have administrators that don't know the subject hiring the people that are supposed to know the subject, but relying on pieces of paper rather than actually finding out whether someone knows something or not. Piss poor way to get qualified people, but hey they graduated from a nice college. Or in the case of outside jobs, hey, they graduated from high school of course they can read, maybe do math, um fuck it, college education required they know how to read right?

Florida is

[Anonymous Coward]

absolutely correct! after moving here, it's quite apparent that this is a state filled with kiddiewinks with no education, no work ethic, and a propensity to slack

Lately...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems Slashdot confuses "News for geeks" and "News for atheists and school teachers to rage at"

The science of test design

[Guppy]

They admitted he was right about the answers, but said they don't expect 5th graders to realize they were right. For this reason they marked them wrong.

Some of the problematic questions given as examples are close to techno-babble -- ie, the more you know about the topic, the less sense it makes. I'd venture a guess that the FCAT likely has not been through any sort of rigorous analysis of its test design (let alone the question of test content).

Even without knowing anything about the content, you can learn a lot about a measurement instrument's internal validity by doing analysis on the students' results. One particular technique that would be applicable in this case -- upon examining the particular students that got a disputed question wrong (or right) , was it the highest-performing students that tended to get it wrong, or the lowest? (This type of analysis assumes that the test is valid overall, with occasionally invalid questions).

Re:The science of test design

[Anonymous Coward]

They admitted he was right about the answers, but said they don't expect 5th graders to realize they were right. For this reason they marked them wrong.

Some of the problematic questions given as examples are close to techno-babble -- ie, the more you know about the topic, the less sense it makes. I'd venture a guess that the FCAT likely has not been through any sort of rigorous analysis of its test design (let alone the question of test content).

Even without knowing anything about the content, you can learn a lot about a measurement instrument's internal validity by doing analysis on the students' results. One particular technique that would be applicable in this case -- upon examining the particular students that got a disputed question wrong (or right) , was it the highest-performing students that tended to get it wrong, or the lowest? (This type of analysis assumes that the test is valid overall, with occasionally invalid questions).

What's really stupid is - I'm fairly sure - that FCAT is not even written by people in their field. Scientists don't write the Science test, Mathematicians don't write the Math test, ect. Instead a board of people in a place called the Test Development Center in Tallahassee write it.

Re:The science of test design

[Anonymous Coward]

And how do you define who are the "highest performing students" in the first place? Isn't that what the test is for? Are the "highest performing students" the ones that gave the "correctly wrong" answers in previous tests?

Re:The science of test design

[Anonymous Coward]

Upvote.

Also: the smarter students probably know how to choose the answer the test wants when they see more than one valid answer.

In the case listed in TFA, it's pretty obvious which one would be counted as correct. And it's probably even more obvious to the students, because they probably watched a film about counting bees that visit a flower.

Re:The science of test design

[reve_etrange]

Just like the green and violet stars. Unfortunately, the problem has been widespread for a long time.

The link is to Feynman's account of the various problems with math and science textbooks (and the text selection process). There certainly isn't any more competition or higher standards among textbook publishers today - indeed, the anti-patterns of the Texas schoolbooks are often even foisted upon states with far superior science and math (and history and English) standards.

Re:The science of test design

[Guppy]

And how do you define who are the "highest performing students" in the first place? Isn't that what the test is for? Are the "highest performing students" the ones that gave the "correctly wrong" answers in previous tests?

Ah, you've just hit upon a fundamental point in any sort of test (be it a scholastic test or a medical diagnostic test) -- your variable definition / case definition. It is this factor that your measurement instrument (your exam or laboratory test) seeks to quantify (and there are various ways to correlate how well it does, using tests like Cronbach's Alpha). And yes, it can be anything you like, including being able to answer "correctly wrong" -- what matters is that you can justify your definition, and that it has utility towards whatever purpose you're seeking to achieve.

That being said, "correctly wrong-ness" would be an example of a poorly chosen variable to measure, even if we leave aside the issues of how useful or justify-able it is; it's a variable with some odd behavior that makes it difficult to work with. Because when you start looking at parameters of students you might want to study (for instance, "how well they predict the behavior of a test-tube microbial ecosystem's behavior vs. their correctly-wrongness-metric", or "how much students will eventually earn in an engineering career vs. their prior correctly-wrongness-metric"), you'll find that the tail of your "correctly-wrongness" metric splits into two groups that have very little in common with each other -- in reality, this being the students on the opposite sides of the bell-curve; too knowledgeable to answer incorrectly-right, and the students too dumb.

Because what you've done, is that while your subjects have fundamental characteristics that could have allowed you to sort them along one dimension, you've picked a variable that ends up splitting them into a pseudo-categorical sort, where two very different types of subjects end up in the same category.

Re:The science of test design

[tool462]

Absolutely. My wife is a 5th grade teacher. I'm a physicist by training, engineer by trade, so she'll often bring home some of their testing materials to have me take a look. There have been quite a few "That's not right. That's not even wrong" moments where the question and answers were clearly written by somebody who did not fully understand the material. A lot of it appeared to be misguided attempts to put something from a textbook into their own words. Confusion on similar terms like meteor, meteorite, comet, asteroid, etc.

It's the kind of mistakes I would never fault an individual for making (5th grader or not). It's easily corrected, and not harmful in and of itself. However, when teaching this problem is amplified. You end up with students who are even more confused, and the one person who is supposed to alleviate that confusion can not. You end up reinforcing the "science is hard" mantra and have a disengaged class as a result.

Re:The science of test design

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember taking the FCAT as an AP English Language student because I moved to Florida during my Junior year. I barely passed the writing portion because I dared to write above a 10th grade level that they were grading at. Meanwhile 2 months later I got a 5 on the AP test and that entire year earned an A in my English composition class.

I always knew standardized tests were complete bull shit before that, but seeing my FCAT score was the final proof.

Re:The science of test design

[Anonymous Coward]

And I can tell you that the problems Krampf points out are rife also in reading portions of the exam. We've been appalled at the number of ambiguous, poorly-worded, or downright misleading multiple-choice questions we've encountered on our daughter's third-grade practice FCAT materials. She's a very bright, exceptionally intuitive student and is often able to see that one of the "wrong" answers is justifiable or in some, perfectly valid, interpretations appears to be the best response to the question. We've also taken the test exams and have often chosen "wrong" responses to questions. My spouse and I have PhDs in comparative literature from Ivy League universities. We've been teaching literature, composition and rhetoric for a combined 30 years.

Knowing which is the "right" FCAT answer means fitting your thinking to a narrow, capricious idiom: testing as a way of verifying that the student can walk and talk a certain way, not that she can think critically or inventively.

FCAT is a scandalous mess, a boondoggle that has enormously benefitted the Jebushite insiders in Florida state politics who marketed its lousy model of test-driven, teacher-punishing education. It has resulted in a distinct dumbing-down of the public school system in the decade we've been here, and been used to justify draconian, irreparable cuts to public education.

This is why I hated school

[jdbannon]

This sort of thing was the start of my disaffection with school in about the first grade. Up to this point I was really excited to come and learn, and then we got a math workbook that had a tremendous error rate in the answer key. I pointed some of these out to my teacher and she actually went back to check the answer key again to tell me I was wrong. I don't think it would have been possible to design a better way to show me that:

1. The teacher didn't care.
2. The system (IE the textbook writers) didn't care.
3. The teacher was so caught up in the system that she depended on an answer key for checking rather than performing the simple addition herself and seeing what was obvious.
4. School was irrelevant. Even in elementary the teachers were dumber than the students, and grades didn't necessarily correlate with anything important in reality.

Re:This is why I hated school

[Anonymous Coward]

This sort of thing was the start of my disaffection with school in about the first grade. Up to this point I was really excited to come and learn, and then we got a math workbook that had a tremendous error rate in the answer key. I pointed some of these out to my teacher and she actually went back to check the answer key again to tell me I was wrong.

I don't think it would have been possible to design a better way to show me that:

1. The teacher didn't care.
2. The system (IE the textbook writers) didn't care.
3. The teacher was so caught up in the system that she depended on an answer key for checking rather than performing the simple addition herself and seeing what was obvious.
4. School was irrelevant. Even in elementary the teachers were dumber than the students, and grades didn't necessarily correlate with anything important in reality.

You left out number 5:

You, as a six year old kid, didn't properly understand the problem and were actually wrong.

Re:This is why I hated school

[flimflammer]

Wait, so you're telling me your first trade math teacher marked correct answers as wrong, and had to check the answer key to determine if you were marked incorrectly, when all first grade math tends to involve is 2 digit addition and subtraction?

Honestly, I've heard of bad teachers but your personal anecdote is setting off my bullshit detector.

Re:This is why I hated school

[ledow]

I work in UK schools, and have done for my entire working career. Mostly I do primary schools (5-10), but I've done the whole range of statutory education.

In one school, I kid you not, as the IT guy, I was selected from the staff to run an in-lunch maths session for those kids who were borderline between passing and failing. Just me, on my own, no teachers, only kids that they were worried about failing. What the hell was *I* teaching them for? They all passed.

I've had to ADD UP for teachers who can't do it without a calculator or laptop (seriously, I had to stop one teacher from going to their laptop in their room to use it as a calculator to add two two-digit numbers). I've had to tell a group of four teachers how long 8 hours and 49 minutes was in minutes because after TEN MINUTES none of them had got the right answer (and it was for a sheet describing how much time they'd spent on a "special needs" child that week!). These people were teaching basic numeracy to children at the time.

I've had to correct everything from newsletters to parent's letters to website notices for basic punctuation, spelling and grammar. I've done it in every school I've ever worked in, even my current one which is an independent (private) school. I've had to tell office staff and teachers where apostrophes go in possessive plurals, because they didn't know.

In one secondary school and sixth form college (so ages 11-18), they printed up thousands of brochures to "sell" the school in which they stated that the equipment in the rooms was "complimentary" to their child's education (when they meant "complementary"). I was the only member of staff to point it out (and I don't teach!) and was told that the English department had checked the proofs "so it must be right". Nobody thought to pick up a dictionary to check.

Just because they are a teacher does *NOT* mean they are infallible, or even have the skills they used to have any more. Teachers are *NOT* given maths tests every year (and, yes, in the UK, it *is* maths with an 's'). They are marking their own children's work and nobody else sees that except (possibly) during an inspection. All anybody else sees in a number that they trust implicitly. Any mistakes discovered will result in a hasty "Oh, that's just a mistake" and then only THAT one checked and changed, even in the face of an inspection.

This is not just one school, one teacher, hell even one country (if some posts I read on educational IT forums are anywhere near true), this is universal. Sure, there are probably places out there that clamp down more than most but still these sorts of things happen all the time.

In one independent school I worked for, they produced "lateral thinking" quizzes. In my early career, I spent a great deal of time converting these quizzes from sketched paper into reprintable, readable, electronic documents. They supplied the question and "answer" and I just had to make nice worksheets and answer sheets.

I corrected literally EVERY OTHER QUESTION as I typed it up and drew the diagrams for them. Nobody complained, or even spotted that I'd done so (i.e. my answers were correct, theirs weren't - and NOBODY WAS CHECKING) and my brother continued to work there for 10+ years still teaching using those same sheets. This was a school that only opened when other schools shut so that pupils in private schools could be pushed through the entrance exams for the private secondaries. The fees were enormous, and on top of private school fees, and the teachers literally could not write questions and correct answers for the simplest of things (and, also, did not notice if someone had tampered with basically EVERY answer they gave).

My bullshit detector is reading zero, here, personally. It'd only raise if someone said they worked in a school that had NEVER employed people like that, or even that they CURRENTLY had no staff like that.

Re:This is why I hated school

[jdbannon]

I was considering that possibility, but I'm reasonably confident I had pretty decent adding and subtracting capability even as a six year old. Regardless, the way to handle the situation was certainly not "Let's check the answer key!", but rather "Hmm... why don't we count out ten marbles on the desk here, now if we take away seven of them, how many are left?" -- You know, actually teach.

i always hated the fcat

[Anonymous Coward]

The practice week would come and the teachers would go "Fcat practice time, we are going to go over how to properly bubble in your answers! And this is the only way to solve this, and the only way to interpret this story." They don't tell you why or how, IT JUST FUCKING IS! Why? Because the better the score for the school the more money for the teachers. So rather than teach how to learn and understand, here are the facts and use them.
Glad i am out of public schools, but then again college is not all the great either, i am still doing English, Math, History, Science and nothing i want to learn. What about all the stuff about college i was promised? Learn what i want to learn, work on projects the broaden my knowledge, i took 13 years of school (if you count kindergarten) 13 years of Math History Science and English, why do i have to take 2 more in a place where i am supposed to choose what i want to learn!

The entire school system does not work with today's modern world and needs a complete revamp.

Re:i always hated the fcat

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll admit that most of the liberal arts courses I took weren't worth anything then (or now - I graduated with a Master's in Electrical Engineering and write software for my job), but there were a few notable exceptions. The biggest one was my Medieval East Asian History class, co-taught by two profs - one did China, one did Japan.

The Japan prof. immediately captured my interest when he started off a lecture talking about how samurai considered it a sign of weakness to "simply" chop off someone's head - they preferred to slice from shoulder to waist diagonally, or slice across at waist level. The China prof. was almost as interesting. I paid attention for the entire rest of the course because they made the history come alive.

Medieval Russian History, on the other hand, had a completely boring prototypical academic prof. I regret not taking that class pass/fail.

Re:i always hated the fcat

[Fned]

Glad i am out of public schools, but then again college is not all the great either, i am still doing English, Math, History, Science and nothing i want to learn. What about all the stuff about college i was promised? Learn what i want to learn, work on projects the broaden my knowledge

You get to do that stuff after they re-teach you all the remedial crap that public schools failed to teach you correctly.

Re:i always hated the fcat

[Anonymous Coward]

Glad i am out of public schools, but then again college is not all the great either, i am still doing English, Math, History, Science and nothing i want to learn. What about all the stuff about college i was promised? Learn what i want to learn, work on projects the broaden my knowledge

You get to do that stuff after they re-teach you all the remedial crap that public schools failed to teach you correctly.

yes make a person who got a 1900 out of 2400 or 1400 out of 1600 go to community college and take college algebra again as a requirement... messed up system!!!!!!
sure i got out with a 2.8 but i did not study for the sat at all!

Re:i always hated the fcat

[Securityemo]

You know, that's the weird thing I've never understood about american college. In my country this sort of "general education" stops at senior high, and if you want a degree in something after that you simply study for the degree at university, a degree being a certificate of a collection of accomplished courses in that field. Why would you waste an adults time with irrelevant things, especially if that person is paying you to teach it to them?

"Choose the best answer"

[shoppa]

Oh man, everyone's turning a multiple-guess test, into an essay question.

When there are multiple answers that could be correct, the job of the test-taker is to choose the "best" answer. Almost invariably "best" is "the one that the test writer was thinking of". Clearly you have to put yourself in the head of a high school or middle school or grade school teacher to understand "best" in that context, and someone with a PhD or even just graduate coursework in the subject is going to be at a disadvantage.

Re:"Choose the best answer"

[Flavio]

To understand many policies related to education, you have to think like a lawyer. A huge number of decisions don't take under consideration what's best for the students or society, but what reduces their liability.

Many questions are poorly designed, since they're the work of mediocre professionals. The bureaucrats know and expect this. Thus, they require the test-taker to choose the "best" answer (often a subjective concept), thus relieving themselves from having to cancel questions or admit the existence of flaws in exams.

Re:"Choose the best answer"

[reve_etrange]

The problem is not unique to elementary level standardized tests. Every multiple choice test suffers from such questions, including the subject SATs, AP exams, subject GREs and even scientific society tests such as the ACS exams.

What standardized, multiple-choice exams are really good at is identifying (that is, punishing) dyslexics and English language-learners

Re:"Choose the best answer"

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, if you're too smart; be stupider if you want to go anywhere in life.

And by extension: Don't think for yourself. Shut up and think as you're taught even if what you're being taught is wrong.

Re:"Choose the best answer"

[Rakarra]

As I had mentioned elsewhere, this was the case with my Sun Solaris Certification Exam as well. Not "what gets the job done," or "what gets the job done in the cleanest or best way," but "how would Sun like the job to be done?"

Re:"Choose the best answer"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea or you could word the question correctly.

Re:"Choose the best answer"

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. One the things I learned in school was how to figure out what answer the test wanted. Even if I didn't know the correct answer, I could usually pick out the one that was correct just because it looked like the right answer.

Re:"Choose the best answer"

[Rich0]

And all of the above is why I'll never subject myself to "education" again if I can possibly avoid it.

I loved taking classes and learning. For the most part I didn't even mind the tests. However, once in a while you get the wrong professor and it creates nothing but headaches if you're like me. Whether that means:

1. Doing stuff because you have to, not because it is useful.
2. Having to regurgitate the appropriate incorrect answer on demand.
3. Having to avoid correcting the teacher.
4. Acknowledging the fact that you are taking the course to get it on your transcript, not to learn something.
5. Realizing that you're paying thousands of dollars to accomplish what could be gained from listening to some CDs, reading some books, and having a few conversations.

I love learning. I love learning in classrooms. However, much of what happens in formal education programs has nothing to do with education.

Re:"Choose the best answer"

[L4t3r4lu5]

As far as I'm concerned, any "industry qualification" should just be called what they really are: Brand indoctrination

Re:"Choose the best answer"

[zzyzyx]

Then be fair and label it "mind reading test", not "science test" ...

Re:"Choose the best answer"

[Rakarra]

As far as I'm concerned, any "industry qualification" should just be called what they really are: Brand indoctrination

In my case, it was "qualification for jobs I wouldn't have qualified for" and "continuing education that lets me get a higher salary." I was a contractor, so this widened the field of possible places to get placed at.

I will admit, the cert books -forced- me to learn the nitty gritty details of a lot of the OS. There were a few brand "gotchas," but I could generally see through those.

Ironically (and annoyingly), the Solaris certification exam was the last time I dealt with anything Solaris-related.

Re:"Choose the best answer"

[dosun88888]

I have an enormous problem with this.

You cannot be expected to guess the intelligence level of the test-writer, and should never be penalized for answering with a completely defensible answer.

This specific test is especially atrocious because the "wrong" answers (only due to knowledge they didn't think the kid would have) are exactly the kind of answers that some self-satisfied test writer would throw in there as correct.

This is Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Having read the piece, I'd say that the Happy Scientist's post was actually conventional journalism (done in a rather brief and bloggy style).

He briefly outlines the test he's discussing, including the ramifications for schools that underperform on that test, and then outlines what he felt to be factual errors in the test. He then contacts primary sources (the test makers) for their commentary, allows them to comment on his findings, and rebuts their assertions, again, drawing on his own expertise as a science educator.

The last two paragraphs are when the editorializing starts. But he did a good job singling out specific problems, seeking out proper sources for comment and allowing them to speak fully to the issues. "Unbiased" newspaper-style journalism is one style, and when done well it's praiseworthy. It's not the only style of journalism out there, as centuries of "biased" magazine reporting would show: Mother Jones and the Economist are both magazines with clear ideological orientations that do valuable reporting.

The key is always that the facts are not in question, and that the fact-finding remains undistorted by the interpretation, so a reader has the tools to understand and challenge those interpretations for themselves.

Re:This is Slashdot

[sixtyeight]

I agree with you.

I'd been referring to gurps_npc's writeup of the piece, and particularly his or her conclusion.

No civil servant left behind

[stevegee58]

Just doesn't trip off the tongue like the original somehow.

Not exclusive to 5th Graders.

[wisnoskij]

I have encountered similar situations in my University exams.

The most annoying thing in the word is having to take time out of a already harried exam to figure out if you should just put down the answer that you think that they want you to put, or if you should put the correct answer (and then sometimes you are just stuck in the situation of simply not having enough time/space to write down why the question is critically flawed and you cannot answer it).

And absolutely no one is surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Standardized tests have always been rife with these kind of errors. In a way its good. You learn that in the real world you have to give the answer people want to hear and not the right answer.

Reall problem is much more serious.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true that what we teach students is a simplified version of well, everything. It's useful tool when used properly because you can pass on big ideas without bogging down on details.

What you're supposed to learn later, in higher education, is that everything you learned all the way up through highschool besides the very basics is pretty much crap. All but the very basics are massive oversimplifications that have pretty much no use in actual application. Higher education is where you learn what you need to be anything more than semi-skilled labor. .. The problem is that a whole lot of students graduate without knowing it.. It leaves them lacking a lot of the tools needed to make informed decisions.

States that aren't running massive deficits?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell us which states, and why.

I bet you will find that the only ones without deficits are the ones who can impose a tax burden on other states.

Texas especially, but also Alaska, Oklahoma, the Dakotas and West Virginia.

Excuses

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem I have is not that there are errors in the test. The problem occurs when errors are pointed out and defended to the death with whatever specious nonsense can be dreamed up at the moment.

Why piss away public trust and your own integrity with these rediculous games? Admit you fucked up and move on or better yet just resign. Parents and students deserve better.

Massive STEM fail

[damn_registrars]

Naturally, when your state can't handle simple math, the science, technology, and engineering will end up failing as well. It's a good thing that Florida does so well at ... wait, what was it that Florida did well?

Re:Massive STEM fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Election fraud?

Re:Massive STEM fail

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA should write the tests. They've got enough laid off engineers.

Re:Massive STEM fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Oranges, Florida grows very nice oranges.

Re:Massive STEM fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Providing Sanctuary for Old Ones.

Re:Massive STEM fail

[CompMD]

"... wait, what was it that Florida did well?"

Florida could assemble spacecraft and launch them successfully into space. Though I doubt that's ever going to happen again.

Re:Massive STEM fail

[Archangel Michael]

Which Fraud? The obviously over stuffed ballots ("hanging chads" are virtually impossible on a properly marked ballot) from Democratically controlled precincts or the Political maneuverings by the Republicans?

If you claim fraud on only one side, you're too partisan to make an informed opinion.

Why change?

[Anonymous Coward]

We exist in a system with no real competition for anyone at the top. These systems will not change until you take the power from these people. But so far we see that people are happy to keep eating shit, buying shit and voting for shit again and again.

You get what you deserve.

From the "Big Bang Theory"

[Anonymous Coward]

DMV Lady: Take this to the testing area, put your name at the top, sign the bottom, answer the questions, bring it back, next!

Sheldon: Excuse me, but I have some concerns about these questions.

DMV Lady: Look at that sign up there.

Sheldon: Yes?

DMV Lady: Does it say I give a damn?

Sheldon: No.

DMV Lady: That’s because I don’t.

Sheldon: Just, look, see, this first question makes no sense, how many car lengths should you leave in front of you when driving? There’s no possible way to answer that, a car length is not a standardized unit of measure.

DMV Lady: Look at the sign.

Penny: Sheldon, it’s C, just put down C.

Incorrect questions do happen...

[starseeker]

it's how you handle it that counts. Years ago, I was part of a program where a college did some summer school programs for (IIRC) middle school students designed to give them more exposure to science. On the whole it was a good program, but the college physics students working that summer looked at the physics questions on the final test and discovered several problems. To the credit of those running the program, when the college students pointed out the issues to the program leaders they either struck the questions or gave credit for correct answers when more than one answer was shown to be correct. And they did so as the test was in progress, rather than let the students trip on them and get slowed down. I was impressed at the time, and am more impressed in retrospect.

Science questions can be tricky to get right - what seems like an unambiguous question when it is written turns out to be much less so when you start thinking more "generally" about things like frame of reference. It's important to own up if those kinds of mistakes happen though, because the students who are thinking about the questions deeply enough to spot those issues are exactly the ones you most want to encourage in scientific study. The response "yeah you're technically right but we're not changing your score because we meant this" is very discouraging, and will tend to cause students to shy away from complex subjects. It demonstrates that learning the material is not always enough to get decent grades - why bother putting effort into it when there are other fields that more reliably reward their efforts?

Part of me wonders why teachers are still having to write their own questions for basic subjects like this... you'd think there would be Creative Commons licensed materials assembled that had been widely vetted and community reviewed... add a bunch of vetted, correct "twists" to each question that the teacher could opt for when assembling a given test and memorizing all the possible answers gets prohibitive - or at least, gets hard to do without actually learning what needs to be learned to answer correctly in the first place...

Re:Incorrect questions do happen...

[Anonymous Coward]

This should be +5.

Teachers are not gods. Someone who has to constantly create new tests, over and over (in case there are identical old tests floating around which would cause a scandal and huge pain) WILL make mistakes. I challenge anyone here to try for themselves to make a reasonably hard multiple choice test where the alternatives test understanding and not just memory regurgitation and where the answers could be correct but aren't. It takes a lot of time.

So the standard policy needs to be that test-takers can give feedback on tests and graders take this into account.

The US jumped the shark

[Snaller]

So why are you surprised?

What To Think, Now How

[deweyhewson]

Another classic example of the system - and this is hardly unique to public education - putting emphasis on teaching what to think, instead of how.

I had a 4th grade teacher who I used to drive bonkers because, while teaching mathematics, she would teach that it was not possible to subtract to any number smaller than 0, similar to teaching that you can't divide by zero. This was because, at that point, the curriculum had not yet reached the level of negative numbers. Well, I would constantly insist that no, you could subtract to a number smaller than 0, but because it was contrary to the point she was trying to teach she would tell me I was wrong.

The problem is in having a system which is so structured to the point of quantifying learning to a set of metrics based on what we want children to think that any actual education, or independent thought on the part of the students or the teachers, is completely marginalized and often destroyed.

Re:What To Think, Now How

[Anonymous Coward]

Another classic example of the system - and this is hardly unique to public education - putting emphasis on teaching what to think, instead of how.

I had a 4th grade teacher who I used to drive bonkers because, while teaching mathematics, she would teach that it was not possible to subtract to any number smaller than 0, similar to teaching that you can't divide by zero. This was because, at that point, the curriculum had not yet reached the level of negative numbers. Well, I would constantly insist that no, you could subtract to a number smaller than 0, but because it was contrary to the point she was trying to teach she would tell me I was wrong.

The problem is in having a system which is so structured to the point of quantifying learning to a set of metrics based on what we want children to think that any actual education, or independent thought on the part of the students or the teachers, is completely marginalized and often destroyed.

While her mouth might have indeed been saying 'you are wrong', her brain would have been thinking 'shut the fuck up and stop interrupting me you snotty nosed asshole'.

.. or I could be wrong.

Re:What To Think, Now How

[Anonymous Coward]

So, how would you represent a negative quantity using, say, Church numbers?

Re:What To Think, Now How

[jasenj1]

Same experience here. In third grade, I believe, we had a quiz question where the answer was a negative number. I put the negative number answer and got it marked wrong. The teacher's response was that it was impossible in our class.

Cynicism was born in me that day 30+ years ago. You only need to work hard enough to pass and give the expected answers. Anything beyond that makes you a troublemaker.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

True! (in the United States) The most important thing is to keep all intelligent people out of schools so that only the mediocre rise to power and preserve the status quo ( a good'ol boy network). School is meant to kill creativity by forced memorization with a lack of problem-solving and logical reasoning, poor math education, and no scientific education. School would not be complete without the typical conditioning that involves studying the revolutionary war in each year of education. Then we can have republicans that were born into money brag about their lack of an education... perhaps as members of the tea party. What a sad future we are creating filled with both ignorant service sector workers and ignorant middle managers (all other jobs go over-seas until our country is totally irrelevant)!

Teaching Definitions and Categories

[slew]

One of the biggest problems with curricula in early education is that it too heavily on teaching definitions and categories. Curricula is basically chopping up knowledge and understanding into small enough chunks to teach to average groups of students in a quarter. Sadly, it's probably really hard to change as this allows folks that are not particularly knowledgable teach in general subjects (more cost effective for schools).

Unfortunatly, definitions and categories often have "soft" boundaries and the more discriminating we try to make tests (to see if a student learned say 100%, 95%, 90% or 80% of the material), the tests tread uncomfortably near the boundaries. This is just silly. In a reasonably short test of a curricula (the kind you could give in say 30-45min), you probably can only tell Pass-Marginal-Fail on a test. People who think more discrimination is possible on a short test like that should probably retake statistics 101. I imagine that some people might think that avoiding the grey area in answers probably makes the tests too easy, but isn't it more important to find out those that fail to learn and remediate, rather than try to discriminate levels of success and accidentaly perpetuate/punish misconceptions in grey areas?

I've found this to be a bit of a philosophical argument with teachers. Can you get an 'A' just by learning all the material in the curricula? If so, shouldn't everyone be capable of an 'A', and then inevitably comes the the argument of a "bell" curve, and somehow it degenerates from there to expectations of parents and students and administrators. Funny how it all comes down to us collectively getting the "education system" we seem to want rather than the "education" that we want. Apparently, the education establishment wants to define what is an 'A' or 'B' or 'C' student, and put students into those categories and the students and parents seem to just go along. Sometimes that's just so depressing it makes we want to give up thinking about the education system we've created for ourselves.

Re:Teaching Definitions and Categories

[j-beda]

Amen brother, amen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen ...Common English translations of the word amen include "verily" and "truly". It can also be used colloquially to express strong agreement,[2] as in, for instance, amen to that.[4]....

Nothing new

[Arker]

Back decades ago when I was in 5th grade I remember noting the same thing on many tests. There might be three right answers or no right answers, although it's usually not hard to see which answer they are actually looking for. And it wasnt just 5th grade, this goes on into college. Surely I am not the only one that noticed?

They don't understand what a TEST is.

[mysidia]

We cannot assume that student saw a TV show or read an article."

You also cannot assume that a student DID NOT read an article.

If they had read an article, you could be penalizing them for having an additional understanding beyond the material in addition to full understanding of the material.

Tests are supposed to be objective measures of understanding of the material under test. Not subjective measures of the student's level of understanding matching your assumptions.

And tests are not supposed to be measures designed to ensure that students do not have an understanding of other matters unrelated to the material; whether that came from independent learning, instructors providing students learning opportunities that encompass the material but exceed it, etc.

Re:They don't understand what a TEST is.

[highlander76]

From TFA:

The response to my comments on Sample Item 7 for SC.4.E.6.2 (page 42), I was told: "Here again I don't disagree with your science; however, elementary educators consistently told us that glass plates are not used in elementary classrooms for safety reasons. They did not feel that 5th graders would be familiar with using glass plates to test hardness."

Hmmm... This is interesting logic. We don't send 5th graders to war either so should we not teach about WWI, WWII, etc? That would certainly make history class a lot shorter.

A little Orwellian?

[MDillenbeck]

'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'

'Four.'

'And if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?'

'Four.'

The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.

'How many fingers, Winston?'

'Four.'

The needle went up to sixty.

'How many fingers, Winston?'

'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'

The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.

'How many fingers, Winston?'

'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'

'How many fingers, Winston?'

'Five! Five! Five!'

'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?'

'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!'

Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brien's arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it.

'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.

'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.'

'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.'

I can understand the viewpoint given in the summary - how can a 5th grader possibly know the answer to such a challenging question? After all, are not all children ranked by their grade and set to be equal to their peers in that same approximately 1 year category? It defies their understanding of "abstract though begins at age x", and they forget that their is variance within that spectrum. There may be a child in 5th grade that understands advanced scientific topics, but since the probability of that is far, far lower than the probability of selecting the answer at random when given 1 of 4 or 1 of 5 choices, they have assumed the child just guessed.

However, there is something frightening about assessing the right answer as incorrect. Perhaps the testing needs to be redesigned to eliminate the ease at which randomly guessed right answers can be assessed. Unfortunately, scantrons are cheap ways of correcting thousands of tests - thus the write your answer and have a human correct will probably never be reimplemented. (Sorry for the ramblings - I'm cramming for a Linear Algebra midterm while slashdotting.)

Re:A little Orwellian?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a solution: don't ask the fuckin' questions to begin with.

Re:A little Orwellian?

[identity0]

'No, Winston, the thumb is a digit, but not a finger - thus, four fingers and a thumb'

WHAT NOW?!

Re:A little Orwellian?

[Lando]

Scantrons are also a way of grading the test and giving a test score without telling the student what questions were missed so that they get used to never questioning the "official" score.

Easy solution

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a question that can't survive being answered correctly by someone with a PhD in the topic at hand, should be stricken. Let them vet the questions, by running them by experts. If the experts can't answer them, then, they should not be asked.

False advertising?

[gstrickler]

"Robert Krampf, who runs the web site 'The Happy Scientist,' ...

I read his blog post, Robert doesn't sound so happy.

Sounds familiar

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of when I was in 5th grade. We had a student aid who wrote a test and graded it. He marked a true/false question 1/2 off. His explanation was that he thought I misunderstood the question. My answer was correct, he just didn't know how to ask his question correctly. That was the first time I realized I was more intelligent than an adult.

Punishing curve wreckers

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it more likely that this is an attempt to tip the scales in favor of under performing schools, by penalizing high performing ones. Highly knowledgeable students will score a bit lower than they otherwise would average students will be unaffected, and low performing students will face a gentler curve.

The Silver Lining

[NicknamesAreStupid]

It is good to discover that you may be living a lie. Three reasons:

First, facts change. How many of you were taught that 'Christopher Columbus discovered America'? Or that 'matter could not be created or destroyed' (really old farts, eh)? Kids need to know that facts are not absolutes.

Second, authorities are imperfect. Kids need the 411 that all those they rely upon are flawed and will often misjudge them. Too many kids grow up to rely on their society like an infallible support system. This is not only unhealthy but self-defeating. Kids should question authority, and the best way is to question their 'facts'.

Third and most importantly, wrong is relative. The English once thought the America was wrong for revolting, but we saw it as being right. Some people think that water freezes at 32 degrees, where others (most of the world) think that 32 degrees is pretty damn warm. Tests only test what the testers intend, and often not very well. Kids should learn not to be afraid to be told they are wrong. It is merely a challenge to learn more and make some bogus teacher look like an idiot, the true goal of an American education.

This is Florida

[PopeRatzo]

They don't just think you are too stupid to know the right answer, they are counting on it.

Otherwise, how would guys like admitted Medicare fraudster Rick Scott ever get elected governor?

If you've been to South Beach or Disneyworld or one of the nicer Keys, don't make the mistake of thinking that Florida is anything but another Confederate shithole. And it's a damn shame, too, because there are some fine people and a lot of beautiful geography down there. But there's always been a core of the ugly racist buttcrack of America in Florida.

Our students ....

[PPH]

... are dumb as rocks. Please send more money.

Nepotism?

[sdguero]

About Us: Test Development Center Florida Department of Education Steve Ash, Executive Director ph: 850-922-2584, ext. 225; fax: 850-922-4150 email: ashs@leonschools.net Victoria Ash Bureau Chief 325 West Gaines Street Tallahassee, Florida 32399-0400

Saw one eat a rocking chair one time

[Marrow]

Oh wait, that was someone else entirely.

I note you didn't even disagree

[SuperKendall]

Pure ad-hominem response, not even a vague attempt at hand-waving to attempt to claim the assertion is wrong.

But then with Obama doubling down on the War on Drugs from our latin neighbors that so kindly provide them, what could you possibly say at this point to refute the assertion?

You are mute, just angry and bitter now that the dream to which you pinned all your hopes now is so utterly revealed as to the true nature within.

Re:I note you didn't even disagree

[Homr Zodyssey]

You are mute, just angry and bitter now that the dream to which you pinned all your hopes now is so utterly revealed as to the true nature within.

Yet somehow, still better than all the alternatives....

Re:I note you didn't even disagree

[publiclurker]

poor little drug addled looser. nothing more needs to be said, in fact, you are barely worth the time expended for this reply. Fortunately, I feel generous today.

Mensa anecdote

[Kittenman]

Reminds me of a story about a student who was asked to measure the height of a building, given nothing but a barometer. The answer was the obvious one, but rather than give that, she came up with three alternatives.

a) Measure the height of the barometer, and carefully laying it end to end on the side of the building, find how many barometer-lengths high the building is.
b) Measure the length of the shadow of the barometer and the length of the shadow of the building. Using proportions, work out the height of the building
c) Locate the custodian of the building. Say to him, 'If you tell me how high your building is, I'll give you this barometer".

History doesn't record whether she got a pass or not.

Re:Mensa anecdote

[Anonymous Coward]

d) Drop the barometer from the top of the building and record the time taken to fall to the ground

Re:Mensa anecdote

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a record of the result and a more complete story here http://www.mycoted.com/There_are_many_correct_ways_to_answer_a_test_question

Re:Mensa anecdote

[Anonymous Coward]

what about

d) drop it from the roof and start counting ?

Re:Mensa anecdote

[Anonymous Coward]

The easiest is to drop the barometer from the top of the building and time how long it takes to hit the ground.

Re:Mensa anecdote

[brausch]

Drop it off the roof and time its fall.

Re:Mensa anecdote

[nu1x]

What ? Where are the "drop the barometer, calculate the drop time, factor in the atmospheric resistance (usually not significant at that scale), and, if you know (have as tool in your head) local planetary gravity as expressed in meters per second per second and a time measurement device (your hearbeats are pretty standard, just correct them to seconds with a fraction), you pretty much have the height, in meters".

Or so I would think.

Re:Mensa anecdote

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of a story about a student who was asked to measure the height of a building, given nothing but a barometer. The answer was the obvious one, but rather than give that, she came up with three alternatives.

a) Measure the height of the barometer, and carefully laying it end to end on the side of the building, find how many barometer-lengths high the building is.

b) Measure the length of the shadow of the barometer and the length of the shadow of the building. Using proportions, work out the height of the building

c) Locate the custodian of the building. Say to him, 'If you tell me how high your building is, I'll give you this barometer".

History doesn't record whether she got a pass or not.

Don't forget dropping the barometer off of the side of the building and measuring how long it takes to get the ground.

Also, if you can find a way to destroy the building using the barometer and some explosives, then the height is zero.

Re:Mensa anecdote

[Anonymous Coward]

My first thought was:
e) Drop barometer from the roof and calculate height from the time it takes before you here sound of crash and/or yelling. In advanced version apply correction for finite speed of sound in air and for average student height if necessary.

Re:Mensa anecdote

[Erikderzweite]

I recall this story as well, there has been more answers than these three. IIRC, the student passed after issuing an answer that if you know the mass of the barometer you can throw it off the roof and measure the time before impact.

BTW, the student in question was Niels Henrik David Bohr who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.

Not the lack of education.

[SuperKendall]

Then we can have republicans that were born into money brag about their lack of an education

What is worthy of bragging about is that you escaped the CREDENTIALED system.

Very few people in that system are really being educated, they are simply being stamped and sorted.

Cheer on that hoary model if you like, but the nation that fought slavery so long ago still continues to fight it in all forms today. And the system you so gleefully cheer on is no less than the largest slave-making system ever devised.

Well, it's color blind at least so it's got that going for it. But that doesn't make the results something to be happy about.

P.S. I am fully "credentialed" as well but my eyes were opened before I entered as to the real value to be found, which was simply to be able to learn for myself whenever I desire. My education did not end with college or grad school as it does for so many...

So think twice about laughing too hard at Tea Party advocates. They probably know history AND law far better than you even have the capability of understanding what with the full-on acceptance of the "credentialed" state of mind you embrace.

[Truthiness : Truth] as [ _______ : Science]

[Guppy]

Who needs Science when you've got "Sciencyness"?

Nothing but barometer, not barometer + X

[TimTucker]

Each of those examples calls for more than just a barometer:

a) Measure the height of the barometer, and carefully laying it end to end on the side of the building, find how many barometer-lengths high the building is.

Requires the barometer, some type of measurement device, and a ladder or other way of scaling the building.

b) Measure the length of the shadow of the barometer and the length of the shadow of the building. Using proportions, work out the height of the building

Requires the barometer and some type of measurement device.

c) Locate the custodian of the building. Say to him, 'If you tell me how high your building is, I'll give you this barometer".

Requires the barometer and a custodian.

Re:Nothing but barometer, not barometer + X

[toddestan]

You could argue that to do the measurement the "correct" way that you would need to know the temperature of the air (as its density depends on it) requiring that you have a thermometer.

Re:Nothing but barometer, not barometer + X

[j-beda]

a) and b) can give you results in "barometer-length" units. "The building is 234 barometers tall"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question

http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp

This is a nicely written account:
http://philosophy.lander.edu/intro/introbook2.1/x874.html

here are a bunch of ideas (most involve extras beyond the barometer)
http://www.esmerel.com/circle/question/building.html

Re:Nothing but barometer, not barometer + X

[Rich0]

Yup, and don't forget some means of scaling the building. If you can use a stairwell to scale it in the "correct" answer you could use it to do it the "wrong" way too.

I suspect the shadow method is likely to be more accurate than using a barometer to measure pressure anyway. It requires a great deal of care, but the error is likely to be pretty small as long as the barometer is reasonably long. If it is some tiny round aneroid barometer then that might be an issue.

Re:Nothing but barometer, not barometer + X

[tftp]

Each of those examples calls for more than just a barometer

Then you can't measure the height of the building with just a barometer. You need also to know temperature, relative humidity, and the lapse rate L that is an estimated, experimental value that varies with locale. Perhaps you could build your own L profile, though.

The model also has other imperfections.

If I were to measure the height of the building, I would use the shadow and return the result in barometer lengths, for lack of a ruler. Air pressure is not a good replacement for an ideal unit of distance, especially when you can't measure top and bottom pressure simultaneously (the shadow method avoids this flaw if you have two hands and a few wooden pegs.) You'd do about as good if you drop the barometer from the roof and count 1001, 1002, 1003 until it hits the ground.

Re:Nothing but barometer, not barometer + X

[connor4312]

Each of those examples calls for more than just a barometer...

Or drop the barometer of the top of the building, and count how long it takes to reach the ground! Obviously a stopwatch would be nice, but it is not a necessity.

Re:Nothing but barometer, not barometer + X

[Vegemeister]

d) Measure the pressure difference between the top and bottom of the building.

Requires a table of atmospheric density, a hygrometer, and a thermometer.

Re:Nothing but barometer, not barometer + X

[Alioth]

You don't need a thermometer, aircraft pressure altimeters don't have thermometers built in. If you take the pressure difference from the bottom of the building to the top of the building, you have what you need given a sufficiently good barometer, although you'll only be within about +- 10 feet or so accuracy wise. It's about 30 feet per millibar of pressure change.

Re:Nothing but barometer, not barometer + X

[virg_mattes]

Given your answer in (A), there's no solution that requires nothing more than the barometer, since the answer involving pressure differences and the drop count both require a method for scaling the building as well (a measuring device is unneeded for both (A) and (B) since there's no rule that says you can't find the building's height in barometer-lengths as opposed to any other unit of length). Sure, you could use the stairs to get to the roof, but then you could do the same thing with measuring the building by the length of the barometer as well. There's nothing in the measuring solution that requires that you measure the outside of the building, after all, so you could just do it (very carefully) as you climb the stairs.

Virg

Re:Nothing but barometer, not barometer + X

[Anonymous Coward]

...Only if you want to correlate your measurement to an objective length. Otherwise, you can simply report the differential in pressures. It would only be a relative measurement for those atmospheric conditions, however.

Bonus: Invent your own system of measurement by measuring the length of something else and interpolating. ("This building is 63 Cowards High!" (Coward=1 length of barometer. Tomorrow, "It's shrunk! It's only 62 Cowards and falling! The building is falling! The building is falling!")

Not uncommon in certification tests

[Rakarra]

One question had 3 out of 4 answers that were scientifically true

This was the case in quite a few multiple choice questions on my Solaris certification exam awhile back -- a problem with several choices, but some problems had several choices that solved the question correctly, but you had to choose which of the answers was the "most" right one. And in some cases, had to guess or theorize "how would Sun -want- this problem solved?" and answer based on that. Those cert exams were more frustrating than any of my college tests.

FCAT testing

[Anonymous Coward]

Having taken the FCAT from 6th through 11th grade (where it stops) I can say with absolute certainty that it is the easiest test I have ever taken. Since I was always in the gifted program for math, and FCAT tests your current grade level, I was always tested 2 grade levels below what I was actively being taught. For reading comprehension, you are randomly assigned a packet, and by sheer randomness I was handed the exact same prompts in 9th, 10th, and 11th grade. The test is an utter joke, and anyone who fails it, honestly NEVER paid any attention in class anyway. I know exactly 4 people that failed the test that did not have learning disabilities, and to be fair one of them put B for every response because the tests only matter in 4th,8th, and 10th grade.

The problem with the FCAT is it is not a test to learn what the students have comprehended through the course of the year; rather, it is a set of guidelines for teachers to stick to so that students learn specifically that material during the year. Students in Florida have suffered for it too. The tests are an utter joke and most students will agree. Florida needs to find a different teaching method, especially since the real problem with Florida Schools, at least where I live, is that they are ALL far past capacity. Reduce class size and improve class quality rather than focus teaching to a standardized test that should have been thrown out years ago.

maybe

[KingAlanI]

some of the other answers are right (and thus, the test design is wrong), but some of the arguments seem like lawyering on a technicality
there are many criticisms of standardized testing, this may or may not be one of them

Re:maybe

[Rich0]

Truth is truth. It is exactly the edge cases where you learn anything in science and especially in mathematics. Planets travel in elipses, as long as there is no such thing as relativity. If asked true or false, planets travel in elipses, you'd have to answer false. Of course, true elipses don't even work in Newtonian physics unless there are only two bodies in the universe.

Re:maybe

[KingAlanI]

You're right, those details are key at higher levels, but we're talking about fifth graders here.

Re:maybe

[Rich0]

Unless the people creating the tests are fifth graders, there is no reason that we can't make sure the tests are accurate.

Otherwise we're just testing the ability of kids to regurgitate incorrect information. If one happens to know the correct principle then they have to remember not to apply it. Do we really want to punish kids who watch PBS? I think my first introductions to relativity were sometime before 7th grade from watching a documentary my father had recorded. While my understanding was certainly weak, I did appreciate that the passage of time varied with relative velocity and gravitational fields.

Do we really want to be punishing our most potentially promising students, rather than encouraging them?

Posting as AC due to mod points

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as AC due to mod points.

Alright, you had me until the word "moral." That word gets used as though it's automagically true, giving credence to an argument that has a serious flaw: It's just one point of view.

So I agree with you on all points, but I feel you fall down at "moral."
"Moral?"
It's bullshit. I recently saw a book called "Better Off Never Having Been" about how the only morally good choice is to never have kids. The entire book is well grounded and makes sense, but only you accept the premise that there is moral good and bad that pertains (reasonably) to the author's ideas.

I say this morality bullshit needs to stop when it comes to talking about having kids. You know what? It's more like a biological imperative. MY take? I WILL NOT ADOPT. Not now, not ever. I don't care that there are orphans and starving children; if I'm going to put decades of my life, my blood and sweat and toil into something so important then that kid is DAMN WELL going to be MY DNA.

Nothing wrong with that, nothing immoral, just a perfectly human desire that I will no short circuit because of the internet or TV's ability to show me suffering at every turn.
  To me, it's all about passing on who we are to the next generation. Raising a child that isn't mine has little or no meaning in the greater biological scheme of things, so I will not do it. Do I feel this is immoral? Moral? Heck no! It's just basic human fact. As a living human being it seems perfectly ok to be arrogant enough to want to pass on part of ME to future humans and discard others who can't make the cut. Cold? Heartless? Only if you count the desires of all past generations as that, too.
If I could wave a magic wand and make everything Ok for the world, stop all the suffering, I would do it. But I can't and adopting doesn't change that.

Only moral option? Please.

Re:Posting as AC due to mod points

[Dripdry]

Oh, and just to be clear, I don't have kids. I'm not terribly keen on having kids either, but it could still happen. My arguments are similar to the GPP: It's really important to understand what in the hell you're getting into. Even then, I know that nothing can prepare someone for becoming a parent. Shit, look what happened to Bill Cosby :P

Re:Posting as AC due to mod points

[Anonymous Coward]

if I'm going to put decades of my life, my blood and sweat and toil into something so important then that kid is DAMN WELL going to be MY DNA.

In my opinion, you're very superficial. The end result is the same; you cannot live through your child. Immortality is impossible. Your child will live and die. Whether you adopt or make a new child, the end result is the exact same. Your genes do not matter in most cases and are quite irrelevant. You're the only one placing imaginary importance in them.

Raising a child that isn't mine has little or no meaning in the greater biological scheme of things

Neither does raising a child that is yours. They'll live and die. Not everyone needs to have children, you know. There are already plenty of people on this planet. Believe me, even if you choose to adopt, we'll still have an overabundance of humans. We're in no danger of extinction, really.

As a living human being it seems perfectly ok to be arrogant enough to want to pass on part of ME

Superstitious nonsense. You cannot live through your children. When you die, you are gone from this planet. What happens after that is quite irrelevant, and it does not matter if you adopted or made a child yourself.

only in the us ... not

[Keychain]

Writing from Belgium here, and i found that those kind of things are unfortunately a common occurrence , both in standardized and teacher-made test.

Far more than the simplification errors (example 1 and 2 in the article, though both seems kinda gross) it's the second type of error that are far more annoying for a student passing a test. For the first type of errors, intelligent students can generally realize that the test is just asking for them to give the (flawed) answer that they have been taught, and they'll do so while making a mental note about its correctness in their head. But questions with multiple correct answer will confuse anyone who happens to recognize them, making them lose time in addition to risking a wrong answer. (btw multiple choices sucks, anyone with half a brain can get a passing grade without studying by applying some simple reasoning)

Now onto a personal experience (the real reason i wrote this post : I m still wanting to vent nearly 15 years later)

Elementary school, fourth grade, the question is counting the number of "rectangle" on a drawing. So I do the counting, then naively write down the answer I deem correct. A few days later the result come in, I happen to have a mistake on that question : the "correct" answer is one less than the one I had given, because some idiots writing standardized tests don't think a square is a rectangle (justification is about the same as the one given in this article, student not "smart" enough to realize it)

Nowadays, i m a university student, and its gotten a lot better once out of high school (well maybe it's just my faculty, applied sciences. You should see an economy teacher trying to explain second derivative to engineering students : he appears to understand what it does (i d hope so), but from the way is teaching it, either he's the worst teacher on earth (not confirmed on the rest of his subject) or some students in other sections must have a really hard time grasping anything about it), but i still sometimes go and check test and report card of my little sister, and i m really appalled by some the questions given. Most of the time the problem lie in badly formulated questions, but sometimes you'll find questions where it seems obvious the teacher has only a passing familiarity with the subject at hand (this is a plague in elementary school).

phew, rant off, i m out

no child gets ahead means...

[Anonymous Coward]

comparatively, no child is left behind either. Brilliant! All children are equally appallingly uneducated, and no-one is disadvantaged (well, except by growing up in Florida, but how much education is needed in a state of geriatrics, swamps, alligators and oranges, after all?)

Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is so incomprehensibly written, I wonder if they're also failing to test literacy.

Same thing everywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

I had some similar curriculum concerns with some material brought home by my 3rd grade daughter. Basically the materiel she was bringing home was dumbed down to the level of being factually incorrect (not to mention grammatically incorrect). I wrote the school district and received an audience with the assistant district director of curriculum (or something like that). While she did not dispute any facts I presented, her answer was remarkably similar to the Florida answer of "This item was reviewed and deemed appropriate by our Content Advisory Committee."

As Deion would say,

[buybuydandavis]

> So we have no idea if FCAT is simply too lazy to provide good practice questions, or too stupid to be allowed to test our children.

"Both!"

See 90s pizza hut commercial. And get offa my lawn.

Textbooks, too

[swm]

It's not just the tests.
Textbooks have similar problems.

Critique of a bad physics text
Prentice Hall's Science Explorer: Motion, Forces and Energy
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/textbook.html

(1) Uncertainty is natural. (2) On "Critical Mass"

[Gimbal]

Uncertainty is a natural part of life ...and so is science.

Though I'm not a parent, myself, I can understand that parents who care enough to not be complacent about their kids' well being may be concerned at such sense of uncertainty as I would expect one would encounter in being a parent - even without such manufactured uncertainty as and advertisers would typically try to inspire, so in order to sell their products.

I think that a reasonable sense of uncertainty would be natural, however - and it's not as if any parent was in it alone. There is the thing called commuinty. Whether or not in community, we also have this lovely thing called knowledge - It might even be more lovely than speculation.

That we can use science in developing knowledge, then, I think that's important.

To comment to the issues raised in the article: Not to sound like an alarmist, but seriously, I think it raises it a concern for whether we may be approaching a condition of "criticial mass" in inadequate education, in some regions. If the people designing the tests are not even qualified enough to be able to produce valid tests, then what can we expect as results, from the schools? and what can we expect, later, when the students taught in those schools endeavor to set the rules for the next generation of schooling?

I think that the concept of educational reform should be recognized as a concept of national concern. I only hope there are enough people around who are not so touchy about it, though, to be unable to address it.

File a class action lawsuit now.

[Fujisawa Sensei]

And here I thought GA was stupid for helping the kids cheat.

I spent my entire school career dealing with teachers who essentially said: He can't be that smart, he has prove it. And of course by the time I proved it, it was time for the next class and the cycle started again.

Those fuckers need to be outright with prejudice with no severance and no golden parachute. But since that's not going to happen, a class action lawsuit by the parents against the fuckers is the only solution.

Fuck picketing and letter writing, nothing says disagreement like filing a class action lawsuit. And I'm certain with 1 in like 250 or so people in the US being lawyers, there are a few with children in school right now.

Once the lawsuit is filed, then start the negotiations from a position of strength. Just watch the how fast the "protect the children" fuckers roll over when they're the ones getting crucified for that shit. The'll learn real fast that shit cuts both ways.

Test taking skills

[JazzHarper]

It's not about knowing which answers are accurate--it's about passing the test. Perceptive students learn very quickly how to provide the answers that are required, regardless of whether they are technically true or not. There is new about that--I learned it 40 years ago and scored much higher on standardized tests than I really deserved. It is utterly naïve to cast that in terms of recent politics.

Re:Test taking skills

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but did it take longer to figure out which right answer to select than it did to solve the problem? These are timed tests, so you might run out of time and get a lower score on a test where you had to spend time figuring out which right answer to select (even if correct every time) than on a test where you could simply select the correct answer and move on, thus finishing the test.

subject

[stuffman64]

There's got to be a joke relating to "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?," but I'm too tired to come up with one...

Re:subject

[Elky Elk]

I'm sure a 5th grader could.

Hence the need for moderation

[bittersdotter]

It's easy for any test to fall into this trap of being so entrenched in trying to test for a particular piece of regurgitated knowledge that the wood is obscured by intervening trees.

This is one reason why any Test That Matters should not be just devised and then thrown out into the wild without further recourse, but rather should be followed up by appropriate examiners'/moderators' meetings that discuss the types of answers that were received in practice and make appropriate changes to the mark scheme.

It doesn't particularly matter in the grand scheme of things that the occasional cock-up is made in devising questions. What is a little odder in this case is the apparent lack of a procedure to recognise and correct for those cock-ups. There's far less shame in saying "Yeah, at the examiners' meeting we realised that question was nonsense so we discounted it in students' final marks" than saying "Crap meaningless question? Move along now, I see no problem here!"...

Wait for it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Flora-duh!
Sorry.

If you want to get nitpicky...

[BinBoy]

Multiple choice questions are invalid. Students select the answer they were predetermined to choose by the big bang.

Ah, but that is part of the test!

[DrVomact]

I long ago realized that success in standardized tests does not come from giving the correct answers; you must deduce what the author of the test believed to be the correct answer. Usually, you can find an answer that corresponds to popular belief; that's the one you pick. If a question has no correct answers, or the choices presented contain several conceivably correct answers, you just have to figure out which answer would be obviously true to a guy with a degree in education or psychology. I always scored in the 99th percentile using this technique.

I have often wondered about the test-makers...

[cowtamer]

"The Content Advisory committee felt that students would know what flowers were and would view this statement as subjective."

It doesn't get better, actually. Even in higher education you might be punished for knowing too much, or not having the same mindset that a bunch of people sitting around a conference table had at a given moment.

This is why I'm a fan of tests like the MCAT and the GRE, which test application of scientific concepts, with questions statistically validated and reviewed by a lot of people. You won't find as much of the the type of nonsense mentioned in the article on national tests seen by a lot of people.

Always had excellent teachers.

[Securityemo]

(I'm swedish, not american, yada yada...)
Aside from a few outliers I've always had excellent teachers, especially in senior high. When I complained to the math teacher that I had difficulty solving problems (l discovered later that I had ADD, simply couldn't keep the numbers in my head for long enough) he borrowed me his copy of "how to solve it" by Pólya. At the first chemistry class the teacher told us an anecdote about how he'd taught students to make fireworks and how a few students later had tried making a batch for new years eve - killing one and maiming the others. So, no fireworks. One of my phys-ed teachers was an ex-jaeger, the other a former acrobat and the curriculum actually included some theory as to why and how you should do things. Shop class guy was a carpenter by trade. My electronics teacher was a former EE (though unfortunately I think he was a bit schizophrenic, he sometimes gave us quizzes on alchemy... nevertheless, he seemed to know his electronics well...), etc.

Even those teachers who didn't have professional or academic backgrounds had at least an interest in teaching the students actual knowledge about whatever they where teaching. Looking back, I think you could say that the only bad teachers where those who didn't have knowledge about the field they where teaching, regardless of being qualified teachers. Excepting those who had personality disorders and such - one female teacher in middle school had "real aspergers" and couldn't deal with people. She once threw a book in the head of poor Johnny (his actual name) beacuse he kept making such noise. Later, poor Johnny was assaulted by the librarian because she had forgotten to take her antipsychotics. Poor Johnny grew up to be a manual laborer AFAIK. Not that it matters here, because professional manual laborers have pretty high salaries.

A terrible thing to be teaching smart children.

[Securityemo]

At worst, I guess that a system like this means that some smart children will be crushed. But certainly, a smart child would realize what the expected answer would be. However, what kind of mentality does that set up in a child? Having to lie/embellish the truth to authority figures because they don't know any better would certainly be alienating, and (speaking from experience as someone who probably would be considered "gifted" in the american education system) with all the other children having such different ideals and being angry at you for expressing complex and confusing opinions instead of just rolling along with the groupthink there's just not anyone else there (unless there's other smart kids to hang out with, I guess). This would set you up to go into adult life with the attitude that you're surrounded by dangerous cretins that you have to subjugate for your own safety - and only if they're strong enough to fight back you regard them as human beings. Not to start a flamewar, but this certainly explains the apparent popularity of "Atlas Shrugged".

Testable

[DrYak]

They only asked for testable, not objectivable.

You can do a survey and statistically test if a significantly bigger enough number of people prefer one of the singing birds.

Or, if you work in advertisement, you can even have more tools to test people's preference (I don't know for auditory cues, but markteers can for exemple measure how long your eyes spent on any part of a picture to check for measurable preferences).

Re:Testable

[CodeHxr]

I think that "prettier" is surveyable, but not testable. At least, not testable by yourself, which is how I personally interpret the word "testable". If you need to ask a group of other people their opinion on something, then that's not testing it - that's gathering a popular consensus of opinion as opposed to fact.

Re:Testable

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do a survey and statistically test if a significantly bigger enough number of people prefer one of the singing birds.

I can survey 1,000 people who all say bird A is prettier, and then do another survey and all 1,000 say bird B is the pretty one. Which is right? Neither and both.
There is no way to directly measure how pretty something is, the best you can do is make a statistical prediction as to whether or not a particular person (or group of people) will, in fact, consider it to be pretty. More to the point, a person can change their opinion, what is pretty today may not be so pretty tomorrow.
  Thus, it is not testable.

Re:Testable

[Lando]

Whether or not a song is prettier is culture based. Music is culture based, consider that a complex and beautiful rock ballad, still is played in "rock" format and is just noise to certain people. Whereas the beating of drums and logs in certain societies is impossible for most modern entertainment listeners to recognize as music. So testing if something sounds better or prettier is subjective and not really testable. When you test which one is prettier through a survey, you are testing the people not the song.

The FCAT is going away

[Dr. Zim]

It's a moot point. According to WUSF, the Tampa NPR station, the FCAT is being replaced with a test shared by a couple dozen other states. This should be happening within the next year or so.

My 4th grader is in the middle of her FCATs now and loves taking tests... but she's always been weird that way :)

FCAT too stupid period

[hesaigo999ca]

After reading their excuse for doing what they did, it lets me know they are stupid compared to a fifth grader.

Waste in the School System

[jasenj1]

Cool Story Bro:
My mother-in-law is a retired secretary from the local school system. She is now working part time for the administration so that they can justify hiring a full time person. She sits and reads books most of the time! The system is paying her - and a couple of other retirees - to sit around doing nothing so they can show the need for a new full time admin person.

Shameful.

PPD

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you heard of postpartum depression?

This always drove me nuts

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of my actual intelligence, I was always good at taking tests. The one thing that drove me absolutely nuts on any test was questions where more than one answer was correct. How the heck do you pick the one correct answer when it could be any one of three? I thought I learned the secret to these questions: Use the most precise definitions possible. So in the sample question, I would have decided that softness and sweetness were measurable, but the bees would take setting up a "real" test.

Now I see that I was giving the question writers too much credit. It wasn't a trap based on definition, it was just poorly written. I should have been trying to be as simple-minded as possible.

Your knowledge may vary

[johnpagenola]

My son got the following question wrong when he was 5: What is the difference between a pen and a pencil? We were told by the psychologist that the correct answer was that pens write in color and pencils do not. However, his mother is an artist and he had been using colored pencils for years, so he would never have answered this question correctly. And this was the test for whether or not he was gifted! Know too much and you get it wrong. Amazing. In general, the people who make up these tests are not as smart as the top kids who take them. The knowledge of some fifth graders about science would be way past the knowledge of the test preparers.

Choose "Best" Answer

[Dareth]

I often did well on tests with a multiple choice format that say, "Choose the Best Answer".
It does make the test more of a psychological analysis of the instructor rather than knowledge of the subject matter.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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Skipping the pro/con education arguments...

[anyGould]

They should be strung up for the simple sin of assuming that they can put a valid answer in and marking it incorrect because "the kids won't know better".

Especially by fifth grade, any given kid could decide to geek out about any particular topic (I personally knew way more about probabilities and gambling than any ten-year-old ought to). That's before you consider that one of the Good Teachers might have gone above the curriculum.

Failing a kid for knowing too much is just plain wrong.

story of my entire scholatic adventure...

[Anonymous Coward]

"They admitted he was right about the answers, but said they don't expect 5th graders to realize they were right."

I quickly learned to shut up and act stupid, so at least teachers wouldn't ridicule me in front of the class. Then when I proved myself right send me to the principle's office for "disrupting class". I guess years of bowing to public school teachers prepared me for having to do the same with professors.

Florida Thinks Their Students Are Too Stupid To Kn

[Sasha-Whitefur]

"too stupid to be allowed to test our children"

I vote for this.

Thee debate is over, we have consensus

[drainbramage]

The correct answer is what we say the correct answer is; we used science.
We would let you see the science but you would not understand it and it would only encourage dissension.
Now go away, you have been schooled and are fully prepared for a life not understanding enough to question your superiors.

My experience with a Florida HS math 'teacher'

[Anonymous Coward]

I went from a C/D/F student in Connecticut schools one year to honor role in Florida the next, where the grade scale required higher averages (60=D, 70=C, etc. in CT vs. 64=D, 74=C, etc. in FL).

One math 'educator' I was blessed with was so bad, his curriculum consisted of 5-10 min on the blackboard showing a new formula and assigning homework, and the remaining time we could do whatever. Since he, like many other teachers, were also coaches, he and his players would do nothing but converse. When a classmate went to him for help, he just redirected them to me. I was the unofficial TA for the class (as well as the one who was routinely called out of class to fix the computer labs, but that's another story). When we had our weekly quizzes, If I had a wrong answer, it was because his answer key was wrong--and HE wrote the test. He would correct my test, but no one else.

After my experience, I wasn't going to take a chance with my kids, so I'm back in New England with high income and property taxes (which is still cheaper than private schools in Florida).

everything is "fake" in computer graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

In computer graphics scenes, the simulated sun is MUCH closer to the scene than the real sun would be. (It might be effectively a few tens of kilometers from your scene geometry, maybe even less). In the real world, the difference between treating it like a point source and a plane source would be irrelevant. In a simulated world, treating it like a plane source would actually give more "correct" results.

However... You already need a system for rendering shadow volumes from the point of view of a point light source (for normal terrestrial point light sources). Using the same system for the sun is a reasonable thing to do, and unless you want to mess around with a non-perspective projection matrix, treating it like a point source might just be easier. OTOH, many real game engines for outdoor games have a completely different system for sun shadows than for normal "dynamic" light shadows, and that system is simpler if it only deals with one sun direction vector for the whole scene.

Re:everything is "fake" in computer graphics

[j-beda]

In computer graphics scenes, the simulated sun is MUCH closer to the scene than the real sun would be. (It might be effectively a few tens of kilometers from your scene geometry, maybe even less). In the real world, the difference between treating it like a point source and a plane source would be irrelevant. In a simulated world, treating it like a plane source would actually give more "correct" results.

However... You already need a system for rendering shadow volumes from the point of view of a point light source (for normal terrestrial point light sources). Using the same system for the sun is a reasonable thing to do, and unless you want to mess around with a non-perspective projection matrix, treating it like a point source might just be easier. OTOH, many real game engines for outdoor games have a completely different system for sun shadows than for normal "dynamic" light shadows, and that system is simpler if it only deals with one sun direction vector for the whole scene.

That seems pretty reasonable.

Re:What the hell?

[AK Marc]

That wasn't Alaska. It was John J. Pershing Elementary school in Dallas, Texas in about 1980.

5th graders don't understand? Hah!

[Anonymous Coward]

I detested questions like this on tests when I was in school. I distinctly recall them happening as early as third grade, but they were, fortunately, rare.

I suppose one might assume that people that young might not identify alternate possibilities, but when I was that young, the idea of speaking up in protest did not enter my mind. Didn't make the shoddy questions any better though.

Basically

[LienRag]

Testing with Multiple-Choice question is renouncing to teach anything else than "passing the exam"...

Just like MCAS in MA

[Captain.Abrecan]

I had a bone to pick with a bullshit question on the MCAS when I was in high school. None of my teachers could believe it had made it through the cracks, and the 'issue' was never resolved: one of the multiple choice question was something like 'which country did the USA receive the Statue of Liberty from?' France was not one of the four answers. I remember what they were: Britain, Spain, Germany, Canada. The people who make these tests are friggin idiots. There were a lot of questions that were to vague to answer correctly, and a whole lot more that were also fundamentally flawed. If I had the choice I would have refused to take it. They 'refused to grade' my essay for the end of the test, I assume because no one knew what the fuck I was talking about. Apparently 17 year-olds aren't supposed to write 40 pages on Nihilism for their voluntary essay at the end of the MCAS tests. The SAT's are even fucking more retarded. Bullshit testing is bullshit testing.

ACT's did this too

[Paco103]

The science section was more of a reading test than science. I specifically remember one that pissed me off on the practice test, and this was in high school. There was some paragraph about the H2O is something because X, and a bunch of other cause effect patterns, so what is H2O2. Well, H2O2 is Hydrogen Peroxide, which was a choice, so I marked it. Based on all the reading, I was expected to conclude something that was wrong (I don't remember what the "wrong" answer was).

I do well in testing, but that BS just pisses me off. Reading was a poor subject for me, because I'm slow at it, so I never finished in the time provided. Making the science section just another reading test does nothing to test science knowledge. At best, it tests deductive reasoning.

Damn Stoggers

[Anonymous Coward]

They admitted he was right about the answers, but said they don't expect 5th graders to realize they were right.

So they're pretty darn sure no 5th graders will get it, which means there are probably only a few thousand fifth graders that will and will see their authority figures as goddamned heads-up-their-ass stoggers.