What the FUCK are you idiots yammering about? Since when does a high school principal control who is in jail and who isn't? She reported a crime to the police, and they arrested the kid after looking at the evidence, apparently without noticing the phone company was giving out the wrong caller-ID time. Yes, she then expressed a stupid opinion about it, but quite a lot of victims expression stupid opinions about people they are informed are the suspects without waiting for a trial, and some even get so attached to the suspects they protest when evidence clears them.
Meanwhile, can we start moderating people or something? Because a lot of the people posting here are so ignorant of the government that they think a high school principal is in charge of the legal system.
Don't talk about how it's stupid. Talk about how it's slander.
Possessing a WMD and threating to use a WMD are, in fact, actual crimes, and if you accuse someone of committing that when the actual crime you mean is something else, you've just slandered them.
Now, if they've possibly committed said crime, but have not been convicted, that's one thing. You can get sued, but it's much harder. But if, for example, you have evidence they sell drugs, but they have not been convicted of it, while calling them 'drug dealers' may or may not be slander, calling then rapists certainly is.
A 'WMD', under US law, is a biological, chemical, or nuclear weapon. While calling in a false bomb threat is certainly illegal, it is not the same thing as threating to use a WMD, which carries much harser penalties. Threating to use a WMD is always considered terrorism, while theatening to use a bomb isn't automatically, although if you do it to terrorize they can add 'making terroristic threats' and various other anti-terrorist statutes on.
Well, at least there's one other moderately intelligent person here who realizes the principal didn't march the kid down the police station and lock him up herself.
However, you've missed the fact that Caller-ID information includes the time and date, and hence it's the responsibility of the phone company to provide the correct one, not the school.
More to the point, people shouldn't be held in jail based on Caller-ID information anyway, as that can be trivially spoofed. That's what goddamn phone records are for.
On the other hand, Wikipedia articles (at least the non-volatile ones) tend to have references to good academic sources.
No shit. The concept of blocking Wikipedia is completely stupid. It's like taking students to the library to research their papers, but barring access to encyclopedias because they aren't original sources. So what? They're a damn good starting place, both for references and just a general overview.(1)
A much better solution to stop students from cribbing off Wikipedia is for the teachers to read the Wikipedia entry that is related to each paper. Either announce they will do so, to stop it, or just simply do it and see who decided to use Wikipedia as a sole source and copy the references.
1) I was always told that if we're not sure if we should cite some information, because we didn't know if it was generally known (Aka, something like 'George Washington was the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army in 1776'.), we should check if it's not in the encyclopedia. If it's not there, we should cite it, because it wasn't generally known. That didn't mean we shouldn't cite it because it was there, just if it wasn't, we should almost certainly cite it.
That rule-of-thumb doesn't really work with Wikipedia, though, it's got way too much information in it.
People like to say ignorance of the law is no excuse, but there's ignoring the other half of that: Ignorance of the crime is, indeed, an excuse.
Almost all crimes require intent. If you knew you were doing the action, but didn't know you were violating the law, you're a criminal, but if you didn't know you were doing the action, or didn't mean to, you're in the clear. If I loan someone my car, and there's a car bomb in there I didn't know about, I'm not guilty of murder or even manslaughter.
People with broken speedometers do not know they're speeding, and thus don't met the level of intent required. Now, all motor vehicles are required to have reasonable correct speedometers, so the excuse that your speedometer is miscalibrated only works to a certain level.
Likewise, even without a speedometer argument, you can claim you were accidently speeding. You were driving at the speed limit, and unforeseen circumstances like a curve or hill or cruise control added a few extras MPH to your speed, which the police happened to catch. You didn't intend to be speeding, but the movement of your car is not 100% under your control, other things like momentum and gear shifts and mechanical oddities can alter it before you catch them and slow back down.
But, anyway, if the police really are giving tickets for being less than five over, you can usually win in court simply by saying that you didn't intend to. This has been true for so long that in many states, mine included, the fines for speeding start at five over now, and thus while they could possibly, in theory, write you a ticket for lower speeds, there would be no actual fine. (Although I don't know if it's even legally possible to charge someone with a crime that has no punishment.)
Now, to confuse the issue, there are 'car crimes' without intent required, because they are on the cars. Parking violations usually have no intent required, and if someone steals your car and parks it illegally, it is still, indeed, parked illegally and you can get fined for it. A tornado could pick up your car and step it down illegally, and it's still parked illegally and you can get a ticket. Although in practice the cops won't actually do either of those. This is why red light camera tickets have to identify the driver of the car, and people get out of them all the time by arguing that they were not actually driving when their car ran the red light, whereas parking tickets just go to the owner of the car.
There are two aspects to the left: Liberalism and progressivism
Liberalism is marked by freedom and, more importantly, equality.
Progressivism is trying to solve problems by using the government.
The left wasn't liberal until the civil right movement. And the right was liberal, but, and this is important, not progressive. The Republicans were, in essense, the Libertarian party, which gets its name from exactly that usage.
This is why, when you look back in history, things like anti-slavery (liberal) were Republican, but things like Prohibition (progressive, although somewhat stupid) were Democratic.
Progressive ideas, like unions and social engineering, especially of the religious kind, always conflicted with liberal ideas that basically say 'Let everyone do whatever they want.'. Because the US was founded on liberal ideas, liberal ideas also, basically, equaled conservative ideas. (Put that in your pipe and smoke it!) Most religious political organizations were progressive.
Even more interestingly, the racism in the Democratic party was mostly due to the unions and social engineers, both of which saw immigration and plurality as large threats.
But LBJ basically stole the Republican Party's liberal platform when it became obvious civil rights were here to stay. The Republican, and the Democrats that left, were left standing in midair with no support, and grabbed desperately at an unholy alliance of all people who disliked liberalism and progressivism, which is why the Republican party doesn't make a lot of sense when objectively considered.
A decade later, the Republans grabbed all the religious progressives who were unhappy that people in the Democratic party, the progressives who vaguely remembered the last time they tried social engineering on a large scale (Prohibition) and the liberals being against it to start with, wouldn't take a stand against teh gays and teh abortions. But that wasn't until later.
And the fact the Democrats have two distinct heritages also sometimes results in conflict and weird outcomes, like affirmative action, which is a progressive concept to implement a liberal ideal. To try to make people equal...the government passes laws to make them not treated equally. Heh.
As the Democrats continue to lose the South, I think you'll see this more and more.
There are people in the Democratic party saying 'Forget the South, we can win without them.'. And it's actually looking like they're right.
It's not the Democrats that lose if they can win without the South. It's us, the South, that loses if the fucktards down here continue to vote against their own interests, voting for 'family values' politicians who have been divorced repeatedly, refuse to impliment any sort of mass transit or health care or fix the schools, as long as they are against teh gays and teh terrists and teh librals. (Of course, those are all really the same thing.) The Democratic party will just totally stop listening or caring about the South, which will be lots of fun because they're almost certainly going to be in charge for the next fucking decade.
On the other hand, Democrats are such a disparate coalition that they have little else in common. Do you really think that blacks, Hispanics, or union workers broadly support abortion or gay rights?
LBJ grabbed the Democrats from the dustbin of history by making them inclusive, over the objection of unions, which rightfully saw minorities as competing for their jobs. Unions really need to check their history books again if they're opposing gay rights. They can fight them for decades, or they can accept them and get more members. Their choice.
As for abortion, that's actually been a non-issue for more than a decade. The Republicans use it to energize their base, but in the real world, most people have no problem with the laws as they currently stand. I.e., they're pro-choice, even if they don't describe themselves as such. Religious conservatives are discovering this, because their decade long plan to take over state governments and put conservatives on the Supreme Court has finally finished, so they've started passing laws outlawing abortions and have run into unexpected problems with the voters, even in very conservative states.
Will unions and Hispanics line up shoulder-to-shoulder on immigration?
Unions and Hispanics should line up on immigration, because if they don't one of them is going to be destroyed and the other seriously injured. Republicans would prefer the unions be destroyed, with illegal immigrants continuing to work at slave wages. Some unions, OTOH, seem to think stopping all immigration would help them, but then they'll be harmed by outsourcing and offshore manufacturing. If they don't stand together against the corporate mentality of 'Let's produce everything as cheaply as we can, human beings be damned', they'll fall apart.
The solution? Import tariffs based on human rights and worker protection laws. Guest worker programs. Repealing NAFTA. I don't have all the details, but there's plenty we can do to improve everyone's position.
Oh, and the most important thing we can do: Fix Mexico. Part of this would be stopping the damn drug war that has reduced so much of that country into lawlessness. The Republicans like a third-world country next door, but no one else should. If we keep this shit up with them, they will elect an anti-American leader and we'll be truly fucked.
As an added bonus, once the insanely high level of smuggling people through the Mexican border is reduced, (by reducing demand, not ability), we will be safer in case any of these increasingly hypothetical terrorists wants to sneak in. The whole smuggling infrastructure would be gone.
McCain and Giuliani have both amply demonstrated they have no positions on anything at all except where the votes are.
McCain, Mr. Non-Straight-Talk, has changed his position on everything. I mean, everything. He will sprout exactly what's needed to get elected, and then do whatever his Republican masters want him to do, like he's done until now. Or, alternately, he'll break free at that point, having accomplished his goal, and do...well, we have no idea, because we have no idea what he's actually standing for. Plus, he's got the 'PResident Bush is making a mistake, we can't win this war unless he sends more troops.' problem, which are a fairly nice way to assert the failure in Iraq wasn't his fault...until Bush actually sent those troops.
And Giuliani is a celebrity. He has almost no skills, certainly no foreign relation skills, which, after this last president, would seem rather important. He's got an absurd past with various wives and mistresses. His stated and recorded positions are incredibly liberal (He wanted New York to pay for abortions.), and about the only states that would consider him a 'conservative' are New York and California. His only claim to fame is being on TV a lot after 9/11, but when New York finishes explaining to the nation exactly how all that worked out and exactly the screwup he made during that, that will be a minus, not a plus. (There's a reason Spin City takes place in New York. That's basically what New Yorkers thought of Giuliani. Unfair, but true.)
Your logic is like going house hunting after your house has burned down. 'Yeah, this place sucks, the AC is broken, it has rats and termites and mold, and the floors are rotted, but at least it's not a burned out shell of a house.' I really think we can do better than that. I know you really like the street you're on, but come on.
The third candidate, the one catching up that the Republicans want to ignore, is Romney, who almost certainly is going to win the Republican primary if nothing unexpected happens, because he's the perfect religion man once voters get over their Mormonphobia. The Republicans would give anything to make this not happen, as there is no way in hell Romney can reposition himself to win the general election, and they suspect he wouldn't even try.
I say this as someone who would vote for a dried toad to win before a Republican next election, but I'm trying to look at it from the POV of the Republican voters. I'm frankly glad that Romney is pulling ahead, and I'm considering voting the Republican primary (We have open primaries in this state) to help Romney out some.
If there's some minor level of lawbreaking allowed, I want it coded into the law.
As it so happens, the cops can't give you a ticket in my state for under 5 over the limit, but that's because you can argue that you went down a hill or your speedometer was off, and the courts got tired of dealing with it. They can, however, still pull you over.
And other minor infractions, like busted taillights and all the other crap cops make up when they want to harrass someone...either they follow the law exactly or they don't get to do that.
Ben Franklin, Michael Faraday, Frank Lloyd Wright, Albert Einstein, Craig Venter, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, etc etc I don't think they got any special help from their schools teachers.
In fact, half of them flunked out of elementary school, and the other half never made it through college (at least the first time around).
Every single one of those people except Ben Franklin and Michael Faraday graduated high school, and those two didn't do it because, duh, education was vastly different 200+ years ago, and there was no 'high school'.
Albert Einstein and Craig Venter both earned their college degree, although Venter had a war in the middle and Einstein has unsupported and probably untrue rumors he wasn't good at math in school. The last threes are people who dropped out of college to start tech companies that was very influential, but that's almost entirely an accident of historical timing within the computer industry boom. And, yes, if you have Frank Lloyd Wright's skill, you do not need to graduate college. Good luck with that plan.
I don't know what a random list of people you've asserted you 'don't think got any help from their school teacher' have anything to do with dyslexia. Those people are not dyslexia, as far as anyone knows. And you have no idea how their schooling went.
And I really like the fact you don't like how impersonal and mechanized schools are and use that to...argue against personal instruction and help for people who are behind. Yeah, that make a lot of sense, thanks for that argument.
Ironically, I agree with you 90% about how schools are failures, but, frankly, you're a fucking moron when it comes to learning and reading disabilities. People who can't seem to learn to read when everyone else can need help learning to read, and that is done through the classification of them as 'dyslexic' and assigning special resources to them to help them catch up. Somehow you've gone from 'The classification of dyslexia is stupid. It's a spectrum and some of it's not related at all.', which is a valid, yet slightly silly, claim, to 'We shouldn't bother identifying students who are behind in reading, despite the lack of reading hindering their entire education'.
And I don't know in what universe when you're taught to read determines how 'slow' or 'gifted' you are. I think I pretty clearly explained that dyslexia is not a standard learning disability, and thus it doesn't put you in special ed. And reading 'gifted' to mean 'smarter' is idiotic. 'gifted' students are ahead of other students, and learn quicker, so are put in classes that teach them faster. They are the opposite of learning disabled. (Which is why the gifted program is also 'special education'.) It doesn't have anything to do with reading or what skills you show up to kindergarten with, in fact, gifted programs don't normally exist until third or fourth grade, and entrance to those is based on testing.
As for being 'special education', some kids have actual problems learning, aka, learning disabilities, and some are just behind, either because they develop slowly, or because of something else. Special ed teach put a lot of work put into to catching up the second category, at least to one year behind and then holding them back, and getting them out of special ed, or at least having them in a normal classroom 95% of the time. If you're a 6th grader with a 5th grade education, you don't need to be in a slow 6th grader class, you need to be in a normal 5th grader one. This is called 'holding them back', and I like how you think you've invented that idea.
It's really ironic how you're against schools doing things correctly: Teaching students at the level they are at, instead of their grade level and/or age, and giving those who are behind in one thing but nothing else special help in that one thing. You've somehow managed to come to the complete opposite conclusion, that this a
Yes, dyslexia can be neurologically-based, but it's a very small percentage of the population. And a proper diagnosis is extremely helpful. But what about the kids who've got something else going on (some kind of reading disorder) and get misdiagnosed as having dyslexia? Now, they're totally screwed.
Oh my God! Kids who have some sort of reading disability will have...individual..instruction to help...them...read...no, wait, what was the issue here again?
With all these experts continually dispensing advice on a problem, is there any time or self-confidence left for the individual to address the problem themself? Many reading problems are easily self-fixed without "expert" interference.
Yeah, cause that's the problem. The kids just, um, were busy earlier when everyone else was learning to read. They may be a few years behind everyone else, but if we just stand around doing nothing I'm sure they'll fix the problem themselves!
What are you talking about? Do you know anything about education? Did you even go to a school? You can't ignore children lagging behind their grade level in something and just hope they're magically going to catch up, especially in reading, which would cause them to lag everywhere.
Yes, some kids see right through the schooling crap, and figure it out for themselves. But, others get stuck in this I-need-help-from-an-expert mentality for perpetuity. Corporations and the health care industry are quite happy with this kind of thinking.
No, you think kids get stuck in something like that, but in reality, they don't. It doesn't matter what is called 'dyslexia' and what isn't. Kids who are behind in reading but without any other obvious learning disabilities need, duh, a specific kind of help.
The only other options are to stand by and do nothing, waiting as they get further and further behind, or to treat them as having a generic learning disability, and putting them in special education, both of which behaviors are clearly stupid.
You want to talk about setting expectations for them, how would they feel when they constantly lag behind due to their reading difficulties? Or how would they feel in 4th grade being put in classes with people who have trouble adding 18+5? (Especially if such people can read better than them!)
What exactly is the solution you're proposing here besides a teacher saying 'You appear to have dyslexia (Or whatever word you want to use), we're going to give you a special tutor for a bit and you'll be fine.'?
Maybe where you come from there's some sort of special stigmata on 'dyslexia' or something, but the rest of us have no idea what you're talking about. You can argue medically or scientifically that it's not a 'real disorder' or whatever, and for all I know you're right. But if it is, as various people claim, just code for 'children who appear to have normal intelligence but have trouble reading', that doesn't have a damn thing to do with whether or not we should identify such children and give them some extra help.
Yeah, cause we all know dyslexia is completely made up with no basis in fact.
Why do educators make a big fu$$ about reading? They're always arguing about phonics vs. whole-word, switching between versions of the two every couple years, depending on what's trendy in the education schools. But really, learning the alphabet and the sounds they make takes less than 30 hours. After that, there's nothing left to be taught. It's up to the student to make a private appointment with themself and practice using the alphabet key to unlock written language.
What are you talking about? No educator makes a big fuss about reading. They make a big fuss if someone can't read by a certain point, as well they should, but the fact they disagree how to teach reading isn't why certain segments of the population can't read. Educators disagree about the 'best' ways to do a lot of things.
Functional illiteracy is due to a failure much later in the education process than people actually learn to 'read'. It's due to middle and high schools that act as nothing more than babysitters, and children that are never really required to read anything past a verification they can sound out the word 'cat'. This sucks, obviously, but it doesn't have anything to do with 'How should they learn to read in elementary school?' debates. Functional illiterates can, in fact, 'read'. They can turn letters into words and know what what the words mean. They just have no practice at understanding sentences.
Reading is like driving a car, you actually have to do it a few times before you can operate a car, no matter if you've memorized what all the signs mean. It's a very sad commentary on our schools that people manage to get through them without that practice, and just 'theory' in reading, but I'll point out that illiteracy is going down as you go down in age. And a large part of youth illiteracy is due to speaking English as a second language. Remove that, and I'd wager that no more than a tiny faction of a percent of people who get a high school diploma are functional illiterate. (Of course, now you have to ask yourself: What's the dropout rate in DC?) To get out of HS anywhere, you have to read several novels, and even if you cheat and read cliff notes, you still have to read the cliff notes.
No, the failure of people to read doesn't have anything to do with 'How should we teach reading' and your idea that they diagnose dyslexia and learning disabilities to make excuses for kids is just silly. Identifying those kids is incredibly helpful in actually teaching them how to read, especially dyslexia. Once dyslexia is identified, they have specific tricks they teach them that make it fairly easy for them to read normally. And even for learning disabled and actual mentally handicapped kids, basic reading is one of the things they try very hard to teach. (That, and basic math so they can use money.) So the idea that overdiagnosing disabilities is somehow leading to functional illiteracy makes no sense.
So how much should teachers make? If the average is $54K and starting pay is $35K, there are probably senior staff making in excess of $70K. In my estimation, they are paid enough.
*sigh* I quote myself:
And the reason you hear about underpaid teachers is that, in many parts of the country, they still are. Michigan, however, is not one of those places.
Of course teachers being paid $52,000 are not underpaid. $52,000 is fucking great average pay for a teacher. It's $20,000 dollars higher than in some places. It's $10,000 dollars higher than here in Georgia.
Of course, 'average' pay is pretty misleading by itself. The problem is high turnover of teachers, and the real way to fix that is higher starting pay. But, anyway, Michigan apparently pays their teachers more than enough.
So, being generous and not accounting for the dozen or so 'teachers days' that occur at most schools each year, the ratio of teacher workday to private sector workday is 190/250, or 76%.
And, yet again, you're adding things twice.
Schools are required to be in session 180-175 days. Teacher had a week at both end.
They also have days they show up that kids are not there. Those are not counted in the 190 days.
I love how, when counting teacher workdays, everyone rounds down, and subtracts things twice, and when counting everyone else's workdays, they round up, and ignore holidays.
In the real world, a lot of people get Christmas holidays off. And they get Thanksgiving off. I somehow don't see that in your 250 days. They get at least three or four three day weekends, I'm not seeing that either.
Teacher actually work ten months. They show up, just as much as everyone else, for ten months. Now, you can claim that they're actually doing nine months of work, and that is actually true. But by that logic, everyone else is doing eleven.
The actual numbers of real days at work are good deal closer to 200 for teachers and 240 for other people.
When add to that the fact that $54K was an average. By that statistic, nearly half of all teachers make more than that. I have an uncle who teaches shop (i.e. babysits), and earns over $80K a year for working 9 months out of the year (yes, 9 not 10). That, and in less than 5 years he's going to retire with full benefits. What kind of private sector jobs pay that kind of money and offer that kind of job security and benefits? Especially only working 3/4 of a year?
No sir, teacher salary and benefits are not the reason the school system is in its present state.
I think I was pretty goddamn clear when I said that teacher in Michigan were not unpaid, you lunatic. Sadly for your point, teacher pay in Michigan is the second highest in the nation, so I don't know what claiming that Michigan pay is normal is supposed to prove. Michigan schools are broken because they are run by idiots, not because of anything to do with teacher pay.
The point is pretexting is illegal for the police in investigating, say, a rape. And the police have lots of oversight, both internal and external.
I'm not actually sure pretexting should be illegal for the police as part of an actual investigation. I can see arguments for and against it. Here's a fun question. The police legally get a warrant for your computer, and install the keylogger. They learn your password, and decrypt your files. When they decrypted them, did they not 'pretend' to be you? If they were to log into your webmail, are they not representing themselves to a third party as you? That is, in fact, legal, assuming a warrant to search your email. How does lying via a computer differ from lying via phone?
I'd be okay with pretexting if we required judicial authorization, and only used it against places unlikely to comply with a legally issued warrant. (For example, banks in certain countries.) I.e., treat it like a warrant, but instead of handing it to someone and demanding the information, we trick the information out of them and then hand them the warrant. With basically the same sort of oversight.
However, this process does not exist, and the RIAA has no oversight at all.
The RIAA wants to use this method to investigate copyright infringement. The RIAA, who's already had quite a lot of cases thrown out of court and rather obviously is abusing its already existing power, wants the legal right to do something police cannot do. And I mean 'cannot', as in, cannot currently even get a court order to do.
This is so clearly idiotic I can't even explain it. It's one thing to let individuals temporarily, in certain situations, do actions that are normally illegal to anyone but the police to prevent a crime, like citizen's arrest or killing self-defense. It's quite another to ask for powers the police don't even have to investigate crimes, or, in this case, civil infractions.
blame the American car companies for not making vehicles that people want to buy, and the corporate practice of rewarding executive failure with multi-million dollar bonuses.
If they would stop the second, the first would stop by itself.
It was wrong that my parents' childless neighbors were once forced to pay for my schooling. It is also wrong that I should now pay for others kids' schooling.
You're not, and they didn't, you fucktard.
You're paying for your own schooling. As are they.
No one who went to public schools for free can whine about how they're having to pay for other people to go to public schools for free.
I like how people, when talking about how much teachers work, love to mention the fact they're only working 9 months a year. And then add in 'and holidays'. Um, no, not 'and holidays'. Teachers have to work 190 days or so, which barely fits in 9 months without holidays. School years are actually 10 months, with a month of holidays spaced in there.
So your calculations about summer school are entirely off. If the 10 month year paid 54 thousand, then summer school would be maybe another 11 thousand, so we're talking about 65 thousand there. And this completely ignores the fact that teachers can't just 'decide' to teach summer school. Maybe one out of ten teachers is wanted for summer school. And, no, they can't run out and get a job elsewhere, because that's exactly the wrong time of year to be looking for jobs. They're competing with high school students.
And they completely ignores the fact they do without a lunch hour. It's more a lunch 20 minutes, and lower grade teachers eat with their class, so it's not a break at all.
'Traditional' 9-5 day is 8 hours minus an hour for lunch is 7 hours times 20 days a month times 12 months, for 1680 hours a year.
Teacher 7:30-3:30 day is 8 hours times 190 days. That's 1520 hour, or a single month extra. Of course, a lot of teachers come in around 7 instead, or leave about 4. My mother did both, for ten years, and barely had time to do all the work required of her. I saw plenty of other teachers that did that too. Even if they don't show up for themselves extra, teachers end up hanging around before and after school for quite a lot of school-required functions, from monitoring students before classes to parent/teacher conferences to PTA meetings to after-school clubs.
Of course, people in other contract jobs work extra too, but usually not consistently. Maybe once a year they end up working a 12-hour a day week.
Oh, and teachers don't get any sick days or personal leave days. Well, they do, but they have to pay their replacement, which no one in any other job has to do. Just like no other eight hour job doesn't have a lunch break.
Teachers work weird times, compared to other jobs, but pretending they work less actual amounts of time is just ignorance. They may work 190 days a years instead of the 240 days that other contract workers do, but that doesn't have any bearing on the actual hours spent, which often is about the same amount other contract workers work.
And the reason you hear about underpaid teachers is that, in many parts of the country, they still are. Michigan, however, is not one of those places.
Oh yeah? Well, a hundred and fifty years ago, class sizes in the US were a lot smaller, and large portions of the population couldn't even read.
Don't compare two completely different things and pretend the difference is one variable. The main difference between Japanese and US schools, and this has been demonstrated over and over and over, is the level of involvement parents have in their education and the emphasis society place on it. In US schools the question is 'How do we get students to learn?' which is not a question in Japanese schools. (There, sadly, it's 'How do we keep students from cracking under the pressure and killing themselves?', which is a large problem that people who assert our schools should be more like Japanese ones might want to consider.)
Meanwhile, in the US, average class size is almost directly proportional to the quality of the education, although that doesn't mean it causes it...high class size is almost always a sign of less money, and it's possible the lack of money is, in some other way, causing the failure to educate. Or it's possible that poor education and less money are both symptoms of some even more underlaying cause, like a fundamental neglect of the system or mismanagement of resources.
However, there are many specific examples where class size was decreased with no other changes and student performance immediately improved. So there are certainly some oversized classes where lower class size would help. But there are also some classrooms that look oversized and are fairly poor performing where making them smaller would not help.
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What the FUCK are you idiots yammering about? Since when does a high school principal control who is in jail and who isn't? She reported a crime to the police, and they arrested the kid after looking at the evidence, apparently without noticing the phone company was giving out the wrong caller-ID time. Yes, she then expressed a stupid opinion about it, but quite a lot of victims expression stupid opinions about people they are informed are the suspects without waiting for a trial, and some even get so attached to the suspects they protest when evidence clears them.
Meanwhile, can we start moderating people or something? Because a lot of the people posting here are so ignorant of the government that they think a high school principal is in charge of the legal system.
Don't talk about how it's stupid. Talk about how it's slander.
Possessing a WMD and threating to use a WMD are, in fact, actual crimes, and if you accuse someone of committing that when the actual crime you mean is something else, you've just slandered them.
Now, if they've possibly committed said crime, but have not been convicted, that's one thing. You can get sued, but it's much harder. But if, for example, you have evidence they sell drugs, but they have not been convicted of it, while calling them 'drug dealers' may or may not be slander, calling then rapists certainly is.
A 'WMD', under US law, is a biological, chemical, or nuclear weapon. While calling in a false bomb threat is certainly illegal, it is not the same thing as threating to use a WMD, which carries much harser penalties. Threating to use a WMD is always considered terrorism, while theatening to use a bomb isn't automatically, although if you do it to terrorize they can add 'making terroristic threats' and various other anti-terrorist statutes on.
Well, at least there's one other moderately intelligent person here who realizes the principal didn't march the kid down the police station and lock him up herself.
However, you've missed the fact that Caller-ID information includes the time and date, and hence it's the responsibility of the phone company to provide the correct one, not the school.
More to the point, people shouldn't be held in jail based on Caller-ID information anyway, as that can be trivially spoofed. That's what goddamn phone records are for.
On the other hand, Wikipedia articles (at least the non-volatile ones) tend to have references to good academic sources.
No shit. The concept of blocking Wikipedia is completely stupid. It's like taking students to the library to research their papers, but barring access to encyclopedias because they aren't original sources. So what? They're a damn good starting place, both for references and just a general overview.(1)
A much better solution to stop students from cribbing off Wikipedia is for the teachers to read the Wikipedia entry that is related to each paper. Either announce they will do so, to stop it, or just simply do it and see who decided to use Wikipedia as a sole source and copy the references.
1) I was always told that if we're not sure if we should cite some information, because we didn't know if it was generally known (Aka, something like 'George Washington was the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army in 1776'.), we should check if it's not in the encyclopedia. If it's not there, we should cite it, because it wasn't generally known. That didn't mean we shouldn't cite it because it was there, just if it wasn't, we should almost certainly cite it.
That rule-of-thumb doesn't really work with Wikipedia, though, it's got way too much information in it.
Yeah, but those tickets won't hold up in court.
People like to say ignorance of the law is no excuse, but there's ignoring the other half of that: Ignorance of the crime is, indeed, an excuse.
Almost all crimes require intent. If you knew you were doing the action, but didn't know you were violating the law, you're a criminal, but if you didn't know you were doing the action, or didn't mean to, you're in the clear. If I loan someone my car, and there's a car bomb in there I didn't know about, I'm not guilty of murder or even manslaughter.
People with broken speedometers do not know they're speeding, and thus don't met the level of intent required. Now, all motor vehicles are required to have reasonable correct speedometers, so the excuse that your speedometer is miscalibrated only works to a certain level.
Likewise, even without a speedometer argument, you can claim you were accidently speeding. You were driving at the speed limit, and unforeseen circumstances like a curve or hill or cruise control added a few extras MPH to your speed, which the police happened to catch. You didn't intend to be speeding, but the movement of your car is not 100% under your control, other things like momentum and gear shifts and mechanical oddities can alter it before you catch them and slow back down.
But, anyway, if the police really are giving tickets for being less than five over, you can usually win in court simply by saying that you didn't intend to. This has been true for so long that in many states, mine included, the fines for speeding start at five over now, and thus while they could possibly, in theory, write you a ticket for lower speeds, there would be no actual fine. (Although I don't know if it's even legally possible to charge someone with a crime that has no punishment.)
Now, to confuse the issue, there are 'car crimes' without intent required, because they are on the cars. Parking violations usually have no intent required, and if someone steals your car and parks it illegally, it is still, indeed, parked illegally and you can get fined for it. A tornado could pick up your car and step it down illegally, and it's still parked illegally and you can get a ticket. Although in practice the cops won't actually do either of those. This is why red light camera tickets have to identify the driver of the car, and people get out of them all the time by arguing that they were not actually driving when their car ran the red light, whereas parking tickets just go to the owner of the car.
You might think so. You have conventional wisdom on your side. But you might be wrong.
There are two aspects to the left: Liberalism and progressivism
Liberalism is marked by freedom and, more importantly, equality.
Progressivism is trying to solve problems by using the government.
The left wasn't liberal until the civil right movement. And the right was liberal, but, and this is important, not progressive. The Republicans were, in essense, the Libertarian party, which gets its name from exactly that usage.
This is why, when you look back in history, things like anti-slavery (liberal) were Republican, but things like Prohibition (progressive, although somewhat stupid) were Democratic.
Progressive ideas, like unions and social engineering, especially of the religious kind, always conflicted with liberal ideas that basically say 'Let everyone do whatever they want.'. Because the US was founded on liberal ideas, liberal ideas also, basically, equaled conservative ideas. (Put that in your pipe and smoke it!) Most religious political organizations were progressive.
Even more interestingly, the racism in the Democratic party was mostly due to the unions and social engineers, both of which saw immigration and plurality as large threats.
But LBJ basically stole the Republican Party's liberal platform when it became obvious civil rights were here to stay. The Republican, and the Democrats that left, were left standing in midair with no support, and grabbed desperately at an unholy alliance of all people who disliked liberalism and progressivism, which is why the Republican party doesn't make a lot of sense when objectively considered.
A decade later, the Republans grabbed all the religious progressives who were unhappy that people in the Democratic party, the progressives who vaguely remembered the last time they tried social engineering on a large scale (Prohibition) and the liberals being against it to start with, wouldn't take a stand against teh gays and teh abortions. But that wasn't until later.
And the fact the Democrats have two distinct heritages also sometimes results in conflict and weird outcomes, like affirmative action, which is a progressive concept to implement a liberal ideal. To try to make people equal...the government passes laws to make them not treated equally. Heh.
Yes, that's why people elect Democrats: To watch the country suffer.
I can't say that the results are quite what I hoped.
Me, I once ordered a pineapple and ham pizza and ended up raped by wild boars and left bleeding on a Pacific island to die.
I dunno, I guess yours was worse.
And I NEVER LEARNED TO READ!
Listening to: Bangles - Eternal Flame.mp3
As the Democrats continue to lose the South, I think you'll see this more and more.
There are people in the Democratic party saying 'Forget the South, we can win without them.'. And it's actually looking like they're right.
It's not the Democrats that lose if they can win without the South. It's us, the South, that loses if the fucktards down here continue to vote against their own interests, voting for 'family values' politicians who have been divorced repeatedly, refuse to impliment any sort of mass transit or health care or fix the schools, as long as they are against teh gays and teh terrists and teh librals. (Of course, those are all really the same thing.) The Democratic party will just totally stop listening or caring about the South, which will be lots of fun because they're almost certainly going to be in charge for the next fucking decade.
On the other hand, Democrats are such a disparate coalition that they have little else in common. Do you really think that blacks, Hispanics, or union workers broadly support abortion or gay rights?
LBJ grabbed the Democrats from the dustbin of history by making them inclusive, over the objection of unions, which rightfully saw minorities as competing for their jobs. Unions really need to check their history books again if they're opposing gay rights. They can fight them for decades, or they can accept them and get more members. Their choice.
As for abortion, that's actually been a non-issue for more than a decade. The Republicans use it to energize their base, but in the real world, most people have no problem with the laws as they currently stand. I.e., they're pro-choice, even if they don't describe themselves as such. Religious conservatives are discovering this, because their decade long plan to take over state governments and put conservatives on the Supreme Court has finally finished, so they've started passing laws outlawing abortions and have run into unexpected problems with the voters, even in very conservative states.
Will unions and Hispanics line up shoulder-to-shoulder on immigration?
Unions and Hispanics should line up on immigration, because if they don't one of them is going to be destroyed and the other seriously injured. Republicans would prefer the unions be destroyed, with illegal immigrants continuing to work at slave wages. Some unions, OTOH, seem to think stopping all immigration would help them, but then they'll be harmed by outsourcing and offshore manufacturing. If they don't stand together against the corporate mentality of 'Let's produce everything as cheaply as we can, human beings be damned', they'll fall apart.
The solution? Import tariffs based on human rights and worker protection laws. Guest worker programs. Repealing NAFTA. I don't have all the details, but there's plenty we can do to improve everyone's position.
Oh, and the most important thing we can do: Fix Mexico. Part of this would be stopping the damn drug war that has reduced so much of that country into lawlessness. The Republicans like a third-world country next door, but no one else should. If we keep this shit up with them, they will elect an anti-American leader and we'll be truly fucked.
As an added bonus, once the insanely high level of smuggling people through the Mexican border is reduced, (by reducing demand, not ability), we will be safer in case any of these increasingly hypothetical terrorists wants to sneak in. The whole smuggling infrastructure would be gone.
McCain and Giuliani have both amply demonstrated they have no positions on anything at all except where the votes are.
McCain, Mr. Non-Straight-Talk, has changed his position on everything. I mean, everything. He will sprout exactly what's needed to get elected, and then do whatever his Republican masters want him to do, like he's done until now. Or, alternately, he'll break free at that point, having accomplished his goal, and do...well, we have no idea, because we have no idea what he's actually standing for. Plus, he's got the 'PResident Bush is making a mistake, we can't win this war unless he sends more troops.' problem, which are a fairly nice way to assert the failure in Iraq wasn't his fault...until Bush actually sent those troops.
And Giuliani is a celebrity. He has almost no skills, certainly no foreign relation skills, which, after this last president, would seem rather important. He's got an absurd past with various wives and mistresses. His stated and recorded positions are incredibly liberal (He wanted New York to pay for abortions.), and about the only states that would consider him a 'conservative' are New York and California. His only claim to fame is being on TV a lot after 9/11, but when New York finishes explaining to the nation exactly how all that worked out and exactly the screwup he made during that, that will be a minus, not a plus. (There's a reason Spin City takes place in New York. That's basically what New Yorkers thought of Giuliani. Unfair, but true.)
Your logic is like going house hunting after your house has burned down. 'Yeah, this place sucks, the AC is broken, it has rats and termites and mold, and the floors are rotted, but at least it's not a burned out shell of a house.' I really think we can do better than that. I know you really like the street you're on, but come on.
The third candidate, the one catching up that the Republicans want to ignore, is Romney, who almost certainly is going to win the Republican primary if nothing unexpected happens, because he's the perfect religion man once voters get over their Mormonphobia. The Republicans would give anything to make this not happen, as there is no way in hell Romney can reposition himself to win the general election, and they suspect he wouldn't even try.
I say this as someone who would vote for a dried toad to win before a Republican next election, but I'm trying to look at it from the POV of the Republican voters. I'm frankly glad that Romney is pulling ahead, and I'm considering voting the Republican primary (We have open primaries in this state) to help Romney out some.
Yeah, but cops shouldn't be allowed to.
If there's some minor level of lawbreaking allowed, I want it coded into the law.
As it so happens, the cops can't give you a ticket in my state for under 5 over the limit, but that's because you can argue that you went down a hill or your speedometer was off, and the courts got tired of dealing with it. They can, however, still pull you over.
And other minor infractions, like busted taillights and all the other crap cops make up when they want to harrass someone...either they follow the law exactly or they don't get to do that.
Ben Franklin, Michael Faraday, Frank Lloyd Wright, Albert Einstein, Craig Venter, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, etc etc I don't think they got any special help from their schools teachers.
In fact, half of them flunked out of elementary school, and the other half never made it through college (at least the first time around).
Every single one of those people except Ben Franklin and Michael Faraday graduated high school, and those two didn't do it because, duh, education was vastly different 200+ years ago, and there was no 'high school'.
Albert Einstein and Craig Venter both earned their college degree, although Venter had a war in the middle and Einstein has unsupported and probably untrue rumors he wasn't good at math in school. The last threes are people who dropped out of college to start tech companies that was very influential, but that's almost entirely an accident of historical timing within the computer industry boom. And, yes, if you have Frank Lloyd Wright's skill, you do not need to graduate college. Good luck with that plan.
I don't know what a random list of people you've asserted you 'don't think got any help from their school teacher' have anything to do with dyslexia. Those people are not dyslexia, as far as anyone knows. And you have no idea how their schooling went.
And I really like the fact you don't like how impersonal and mechanized schools are and use that to...argue against personal instruction and help for people who are behind. Yeah, that make a lot of sense, thanks for that argument.
Ironically, I agree with you 90% about how schools are failures, but, frankly, you're a fucking moron when it comes to learning and reading disabilities. People who can't seem to learn to read when everyone else can need help learning to read, and that is done through the classification of them as 'dyslexic' and assigning special resources to them to help them catch up. Somehow you've gone from 'The classification of dyslexia is stupid. It's a spectrum and some of it's not related at all.', which is a valid, yet slightly silly, claim, to 'We shouldn't bother identifying students who are behind in reading, despite the lack of reading hindering their entire education'.
And I don't know in what universe when you're taught to read determines how 'slow' or 'gifted' you are. I think I pretty clearly explained that dyslexia is not a standard learning disability, and thus it doesn't put you in special ed. And reading 'gifted' to mean 'smarter' is idiotic. 'gifted' students are ahead of other students, and learn quicker, so are put in classes that teach them faster. They are the opposite of learning disabled. (Which is why the gifted program is also 'special education'.) It doesn't have anything to do with reading or what skills you show up to kindergarten with, in fact, gifted programs don't normally exist until third or fourth grade, and entrance to those is based on testing.
As for being 'special education', some kids have actual problems learning, aka, learning disabilities, and some are just behind, either because they develop slowly, or because of something else. Special ed teach put a lot of work put into to catching up the second category, at least to one year behind and then holding them back, and getting them out of special ed, or at least having them in a normal classroom 95% of the time. If you're a 6th grader with a 5th grade education, you don't need to be in a slow 6th grader class, you need to be in a normal 5th grader one. This is called 'holding them back', and I like how you think you've invented that idea.
It's really ironic how you're against schools doing things correctly: Teaching students at the level they are at, instead of their grade level and/or age, and giving those who are behind in one thing but nothing else special help in that one thing. You've somehow managed to come to the complete opposite conclusion, that this a
Yes, dyslexia can be neurologically-based, but it's a very small percentage of the population. And a proper diagnosis is extremely helpful. But what about the kids who've got something else going on (some kind of reading disorder) and get misdiagnosed as having dyslexia? Now, they're totally screwed.
Oh my God! Kids who have some sort of reading disability will have...individual..instruction to help...them...read...no, wait, what was the issue here again?
With all these experts continually dispensing advice on a problem, is there any time or self-confidence left for the individual to address the problem themself? Many reading problems are easily self-fixed without "expert" interference.
Yeah, cause that's the problem. The kids just, um, were busy earlier when everyone else was learning to read. They may be a few years behind everyone else, but if we just stand around doing nothing I'm sure they'll fix the problem themselves!
What are you talking about? Do you know anything about education? Did you even go to a school? You can't ignore children lagging behind their grade level in something and just hope they're magically going to catch up, especially in reading, which would cause them to lag everywhere.
Yes, some kids see right through the schooling crap, and figure it out for themselves. But, others get stuck in this I-need-help-from-an-expert mentality for perpetuity. Corporations and the health care industry are quite happy with this kind of thinking.
No, you think kids get stuck in something like that, but in reality, they don't. It doesn't matter what is called 'dyslexia' and what isn't. Kids who are behind in reading but without any other obvious learning disabilities need, duh, a specific kind of help.
The only other options are to stand by and do nothing, waiting as they get further and further behind, or to treat them as having a generic learning disability, and putting them in special education, both of which behaviors are clearly stupid.
You want to talk about setting expectations for them, how would they feel when they constantly lag behind due to their reading difficulties? Or how would they feel in 4th grade being put in classes with people who have trouble adding 18+5? (Especially if such people can read better than them!)
What exactly is the solution you're proposing here besides a teacher saying 'You appear to have dyslexia (Or whatever word you want to use), we're going to give you a special tutor for a bit and you'll be fine.'?
Maybe where you come from there's some sort of special stigmata on 'dyslexia' or something, but the rest of us have no idea what you're talking about. You can argue medically or scientifically that it's not a 'real disorder' or whatever, and for all I know you're right. But if it is, as various people claim, just code for 'children who appear to have normal intelligence but have trouble reading', that doesn't have a damn thing to do with whether or not we should identify such children and give them some extra help.
Yeah, cause we all know dyslexia is completely made up with no basis in fact.
Why do educators make a big fu$$ about reading? They're always arguing about phonics vs. whole-word, switching between versions of the two every couple years, depending on what's trendy in the education schools. But really, learning the alphabet and the sounds they make takes less than 30 hours. After that, there's nothing left to be taught. It's up to the student to make a private appointment with themself and practice using the alphabet key to unlock written language.
What are you talking about? No educator makes a big fuss about reading. They make a big fuss if someone can't read by a certain point, as well they should, but the fact they disagree how to teach reading isn't why certain segments of the population can't read. Educators disagree about the 'best' ways to do a lot of things.
Functional illiteracy is due to a failure much later in the education process than people actually learn to 'read'. It's due to middle and high schools that act as nothing more than babysitters, and children that are never really required to read anything past a verification they can sound out the word 'cat'. This sucks, obviously, but it doesn't have anything to do with 'How should they learn to read in elementary school?' debates. Functional illiterates can, in fact, 'read'. They can turn letters into words and know what what the words mean. They just have no practice at understanding sentences.
Reading is like driving a car, you actually have to do it a few times before you can operate a car, no matter if you've memorized what all the signs mean. It's a very sad commentary on our schools that people manage to get through them without that practice, and just 'theory' in reading, but I'll point out that illiteracy is going down as you go down in age. And a large part of youth illiteracy is due to speaking English as a second language. Remove that, and I'd wager that no more than a tiny faction of a percent of people who get a high school diploma are functional illiterate. (Of course, now you have to ask yourself: What's the dropout rate in DC?) To get out of HS anywhere, you have to read several novels, and even if you cheat and read cliff notes, you still have to read the cliff notes.
No, the failure of people to read doesn't have anything to do with 'How should we teach reading' and your idea that they diagnose dyslexia and learning disabilities to make excuses for kids is just silly. Identifying those kids is incredibly helpful in actually teaching them how to read, especially dyslexia. Once dyslexia is identified, they have specific tricks they teach them that make it fairly easy for them to read normally. And even for learning disabled and actual mentally handicapped kids, basic reading is one of the things they try very hard to teach. (That, and basic math so they can use money.) So the idea that overdiagnosing disabilities is somehow leading to functional illiteracy makes no sense.
So how much should teachers make? If the average is $54K and starting pay is $35K, there are probably senior staff making in excess of $70K. In my estimation, they are paid enough.
*sigh* I quote myself:
And the reason you hear about underpaid teachers is that, in many parts of the country, they still are. Michigan, however, is not one of those places.
Of course teachers being paid $52,000 are not underpaid. $52,000 is fucking great average pay for a teacher. It's $20,000 dollars higher than in some places. It's $10,000 dollars higher than here in Georgia.
Of course, 'average' pay is pretty misleading by itself. The problem is high turnover of teachers, and the real way to fix that is higher starting pay. But, anyway, Michigan apparently pays their teachers more than enough.
So, being generous and not accounting for the dozen or so 'teachers days' that occur at most schools each year, the ratio of teacher workday to private sector workday is 190/250, or 76%.
And, yet again, you're adding things twice.
Schools are required to be in session 180-175 days. Teacher had a week at both end.
They also have days they show up that kids are not there. Those are not counted in the 190 days.
I love how, when counting teacher workdays, everyone rounds down, and subtracts things twice, and when counting everyone else's workdays, they round up, and ignore holidays.
In the real world, a lot of people get Christmas holidays off. And they get Thanksgiving off. I somehow don't see that in your 250 days. They get at least three or four three day weekends, I'm not seeing that either.
Teacher actually work ten months. They show up, just as much as everyone else, for ten months. Now, you can claim that they're actually doing nine months of work, and that is actually true. But by that logic, everyone else is doing eleven.
The actual numbers of real days at work are good deal closer to 200 for teachers and 240 for other people. When add to that the fact that $54K was an average. By that statistic, nearly half of all teachers make more than that. I have an uncle who teaches shop (i.e. babysits), and earns over $80K a year for working 9 months out of the year (yes, 9 not 10). That, and in less than 5 years he's going to retire with full benefits. What kind of private sector jobs pay that kind of money and offer that kind of job security and benefits? Especially only working 3/4 of a year?
No sir, teacher salary and benefits are not the reason the school system is in its present state.
I think I was pretty goddamn clear when I said that teacher in Michigan were not unpaid, you lunatic. Sadly for your point, teacher pay in Michigan is the second highest in the nation, so I don't know what claiming that Michigan pay is normal is supposed to prove. Michigan schools are broken because they are run by idiots, not because of anything to do with teacher pay.
They need pretexting for people who refuse to cooperate with warrants and subpoenas. Like I said, foreign banks are the only example I can think off.
The point is pretexting is illegal for the police in investigating, say, a rape. And the police have lots of oversight, both internal and external.
I'm not actually sure pretexting should be illegal for the police as part of an actual investigation. I can see arguments for and against it. Here's a fun question. The police legally get a warrant for your computer, and install the keylogger. They learn your password, and decrypt your files. When they decrypted them, did they not 'pretend' to be you? If they were to log into your webmail, are they not representing themselves to a third party as you? That is, in fact, legal, assuming a warrant to search your email. How does lying via a computer differ from lying via phone?
I'd be okay with pretexting if we required judicial authorization, and only used it against places unlikely to comply with a legally issued warrant. (For example, banks in certain countries.) I.e., treat it like a warrant, but instead of handing it to someone and demanding the information, we trick the information out of them and then hand them the warrant. With basically the same sort of oversight.
However, this process does not exist, and the RIAA has no oversight at all.
The RIAA wants to use this method to investigate copyright infringement. The RIAA, who's already had quite a lot of cases thrown out of court and rather obviously is abusing its already existing power, wants the legal right to do something police cannot do. And I mean 'cannot', as in, cannot currently even get a court order to do.
This is so clearly idiotic I can't even explain it. It's one thing to let individuals temporarily, in certain situations, do actions that are normally illegal to anyone but the police to prevent a crime, like citizen's arrest or killing self-defense. It's quite another to ask for powers the police don't even have to investigate crimes, or, in this case, civil infractions.
blame the American car companies for not making vehicles that people want to buy, and the corporate practice of rewarding executive failure with multi-million dollar bonuses.
If they would stop the second, the first would stop by itself.
It was wrong that my parents' childless neighbors were once forced to pay for my schooling. It is also wrong that I should now pay for others kids' schooling.
You're not, and they didn't, you fucktard.
You're paying for your own schooling. As are they.
No one who went to public schools for free can whine about how they're having to pay for other people to go to public schools for free.
I like how people, when talking about how much teachers work, love to mention the fact they're only working 9 months a year. And then add in 'and holidays'. Um, no, not 'and holidays'. Teachers have to work 190 days or so, which barely fits in 9 months without holidays. School years are actually 10 months, with a month of holidays spaced in there.
So your calculations about summer school are entirely off. If the 10 month year paid 54 thousand, then summer school would be maybe another 11 thousand, so we're talking about 65 thousand there. And this completely ignores the fact that teachers can't just 'decide' to teach summer school. Maybe one out of ten teachers is wanted for summer school. And, no, they can't run out and get a job elsewhere, because that's exactly the wrong time of year to be looking for jobs. They're competing with high school students.
And they completely ignores the fact they do without a lunch hour. It's more a lunch 20 minutes, and lower grade teachers eat with their class, so it's not a break at all.
'Traditional' 9-5 day is 8 hours minus an hour for lunch is 7 hours times 20 days a month times 12 months, for 1680 hours a year.
Teacher 7:30-3:30 day is 8 hours times 190 days. That's 1520 hour, or a single month extra. Of course, a lot of teachers come in around 7 instead, or leave about 4. My mother did both, for ten years, and barely had time to do all the work required of her. I saw plenty of other teachers that did that too. Even if they don't show up for themselves extra, teachers end up hanging around before and after school for quite a lot of school-required functions, from monitoring students before classes to parent/teacher conferences to PTA meetings to after-school clubs.
Of course, people in other contract jobs work extra too, but usually not consistently. Maybe once a year they end up working a 12-hour a day week.
Oh, and teachers don't get any sick days or personal leave days. Well, they do, but they have to pay their replacement, which no one in any other job has to do. Just like no other eight hour job doesn't have a lunch break.
Teachers work weird times, compared to other jobs, but pretending they work less actual amounts of time is just ignorance. They may work 190 days a years instead of the 240 days that other contract workers do, but that doesn't have any bearing on the actual hours spent, which often is about the same amount other contract workers work.
And the reason you hear about underpaid teachers is that, in many parts of the country, they still are. Michigan, however, is not one of those places.
Oh yeah? Well, a hundred and fifty years ago, class sizes in the US were a lot smaller, and large portions of the population couldn't even read.
Don't compare two completely different things and pretend the difference is one variable. The main difference between Japanese and US schools, and this has been demonstrated over and over and over, is the level of involvement parents have in their education and the emphasis society place on it. In US schools the question is 'How do we get students to learn?' which is not a question in Japanese schools. (There, sadly, it's 'How do we keep students from cracking under the pressure and killing themselves?', which is a large problem that people who assert our schools should be more like Japanese ones might want to consider.)
Meanwhile, in the US, average class size is almost directly proportional to the quality of the education, although that doesn't mean it causes it...high class size is almost always a sign of less money, and it's possible the lack of money is, in some other way, causing the failure to educate. Or it's possible that poor education and less money are both symptoms of some even more underlaying cause, like a fundamental neglect of the system or mismanagement of resources.
However, there are many specific examples where class size was decreased with no other changes and student performance immediately improved. So there are certainly some oversized classes where lower class size would help. But there are also some classrooms that look oversized and are fairly poor performing where making them smaller would not help.