Okay, I'm from the Maiden area, and I'm seeing some misconceptions. So here's a few local facts.First, we are in Western/central NC and not in the mountains. That means lots of red clay, and only mild rockiness. Also, while it is rural, this is not Dogpatch. We've had pretty good broadband penetration for years now. I don't know anybody who doesn't have the choice of of DSL or cable, unless they live very far off the road. It's also not a place of isolated farms. it's pretty built up with lots of subdivisions and rural/transitional housing.
Incidentally, the other big reason Apple chose that location was water. There are massive county/city water lines in the area that were originally also there to service the textile plants.
This is true. I live about 10 minutes from the Apple data center in Maiden. When it goes online, they expect to only employ about 50 people, and most of them will be imports. Still though, I've been impressed at how little a footprint they have left. The place is insanely huge, but if you didn't know it was there, you might miss it. It doesn't even seem to have any lights shining up in the air at night. They also kept things tidy during construction, even washing down the roads to prevent mud and dust.
I live just outside of Maiden and went to the town council meeting where the data center was announced. It was surreal. The town council clearly had no idea what this thing was all about, other than it was huge and would be a good thing.
I am preferably interested to hear what people in China feel about these issues more than people in the West demanding on behalf of people in China.
Please note that I had to use the rate for Hong Kong
Gee. What a great idea. Let's listen and see what they think. . . . . . . . . .
Oh wait, you can't hear what they think because they don't have freedom of speech.
The economics are getting closer every day. Right now in the school where I teach, the total bill for textbooks for one kid is about $140 - $160. These books usually last about 5 years, which is about the same amount of time a digital "pad" would last.
When the price of a digital device drops into that $140-$160 range, change will start to happen. Many teachers already make their own content and there are already several open-source textbook initiatives. The unspoken secret is that most educators of all levels HATE the textbook companies. They overcharge for generally crappy Texas and California-centric materials that don't change with the times. They should get thrown under the bus as soon as it is financially feasible to do so.
Except that in most of the U.S. the old dusk active mosquitoes have been replaced by the invasive Asian tiger mosquito, which bites all God-dammed day long. Where does the line for these lasers start. I want at least two of them. I'll wear a welding mask when I have to go outside.
When I told my mother (a retired teacher) about this notion of selling lesson plans to other teachers online, she replied, "That's silly!"
That's because my mom knows that teachers are the original open-sourcers. We routinely create lesson plans, worksheets and other classroom materials, freely give this material to other teachers, encourage them to adapt it, and assume that they will freely provide the material to other teachers. Sound familiar?
We've done this for decades because, frankly, we have to. Time constraints and the need for quality free material forced it on us.
That's why these sites have been around for years, but have never really taken off. They never will. If I meet a teacher who sells their plans to this site (and I haven't yet) I will gently remind them of the strong tradition of open-source material in education.
"But aren't the lesson plans essentially property of whoever paid the teachers for the time they used to developed said plans?"
HA! Double HA!
If that's the case then this argument is over. I have three high school English classes of about 25 students each. One is creative writing, two are English 4. That means that I'm preparing material for two separate classes and grading material from three groups of kids for a total of 75 students. Keep in mind that this is actually fewer students than I normally have. The average class size I am used to is 28-32.
Each class lasts 90 minutes. Preparing a well-planned, interesting, accurate lesson can often more than 60 minutes per lesson. Grading takes even longer. I have to read and comment on 75 half-page to one-page papers for EACH assignment.
How much paid planning time do I get for all this work daily? 90 minutes.
Now subtract from that time that the required meetings, hall monitoring duties, special education IEP meetings, parent phone calls, extra assignments for sick and suspended students, and other assorted paperwork and inane e-mails I spend time on.
Needless to say, most planning gets done at home, when we are not getting paid.
Graphics: 10/10 (The graphics are perfect, its hard to imagine any improvements that could be made)
Speak for yourself. I ran into a glitch where the graphics were great for a while, but started fading around level 20. At first I thought it was my video card, because I could still see things nearby, but everything far away was blurry. By level 32 or I had to rate the graphics a 20/60. I finally dropped 2000 gold pieces on a permanent healing buff that fixed the problem. I'd give it a 20/20 now.
Good point! And actually, someone has done the research. I don't recall where I read it, but while getting my masters degree in instructional technology, I read that kids have the least attention early in the morning. The author's idea was that we should start school much later in the day and make it last longer. Instead of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., we should probably go 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
As a teacher, I wouldn't mind having a longer day if we restructured it a bit. High schools (including the one where I teach) have a schedule that gets tighter and tighter each year. Class changes are 5 minutes, lunch is 24 minutes and the kids have a nearly-useless 10-minute break in the afternoon. I would like to see a longer day with some down time, and perhaps an hour long "club time" at the end of the day. Kids could go and work on moviemaking, fiction writing, drama, weight lifting, gaming, etc., each sponsored by an interested teacher.
Having been a journalist doing stories on large-scale hog farming, I call bullshit on this one.
I'll give you the dairy cattle. That is as described, but hogs on a large-scale operation live an incredibly different life from your 8 backyard piggies. They don't wallow in mud because they live crammed into small pens and stand on a metal grate so that their waste can be siphoned off and dumped into leaky lagoons to sit a while before it's sprayed onto plants as "fertilizer" (much of that runs off into local streams).
Look. I eat meat and will continue to do so with no qualms about the morality of it all. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to eat less of it and demand that it be raised with a bit more thought to sustainability, the environment, and yes, as humane treatment as possible.
This means more small, local operations like yours and less factory-style megafarms.
I'm also a teacher and I pretty much completely disagree. We spend a lot of time and money trying to buy up-to-date computers for schools and hook them to the Internet, but when a kid brings one of their own we're going to jam them all? Mobile phones have so much classroom potential if we can only harness them.
The answer is two words.
Classroom management.
Londovir, I'm not sure where you work, but your district is wimpy. Established case law around the country has held for a long time now that we can pretty much take any damn thing we want away from kids. It always works fine for me. My rule was no texting in class. You get caught texting, you lose the phone. If the parent complains, don't be their enemy, get on their side. Explain that you are trying to help their kid, and then explain what their kid is doing with the phone. If you are caught in a system where you can't take phones, then just let the little suckers text. Chances are if they are not paying attention, their grades will suffer. At some point, the kids have to take responsibility for their performance.
Worried about kids texting the answers? Don't give them tests with easily shared answers. I teach English, and the vast majority of my tests are short answer/essay. Good teachers aren't looking for recall of facts, but for reasoning skills. Of course this is a bit harder for math teachers.
If you have a parent concerned about a test grade 30 minutes after the test is handed out, you should REJOICE! That's not a "helicoptor" parent, that's an INVOLVED parent. Again. don't let the parent be the enemy. Get them on your side to gang up on the kid.
Finally, to everyone who said "back in my day we didn't have cell phones and we got edumacated . .." Please. Our schools are still working on an educational model that is over 100 years old. Every technology since chalk has been consistently challenged and bemoaned as the end of education as we know it. We need to learn to use the technology kids take for granted or school will become increasingly irrelevant to them. I heard a great quote once from a bright student who was doing poorly in school. He complained that school didn't seem relevant to his technology-driven life. "I have to power down at school," he said.
Actually, TFA does. The dispatchers who sent out the pics to relatives thought it would shock them into driving better. A fairly sick bit of reasoning if you ask me.
QFT
As a former high school teacher, I can second this. Their little adolescent brains just aren't quite finished yet. Many of them really do feel they are invincible and only time (or disaster) will cure them of this fallacy
Yep, The store I go to puts you on the treadmill, looks at your tread wear, and then brings out some shoes. Several times they have had me try on a pair of expensive shoes but then swapped them for a cheaper pair that fit better.
Funny though, in my seven years in the classroom, the teachers I saw getting the "regular abuse" were mostly the ones that had no clue how to interact with teenagers. They took everything personally, went on power trips, and reacted to every 15-year-old troll they ran into. These are the people who complain the most about school being a hostile workplace.
There are some problems. Some kids are jerks no matter how well you try to relate, some administrators make your life a living hell, and some parents just need to shut up. But overall, I had decent experiences, and I was NOT always teaching at a suburban cupcake school.
The real problem I saw was that in addition to the teachers who didn't understand the psychology of teaching, there were a lot who didn't know their content. If teachers were making $75K, I think the people who know the content would show up pretty quick, especially if we did real observations and got rid of the ones who don't know their business.
Did I mention that I have a two-month old? Sorry if I made the world more stupid, but I had about five minutes in between changing a diaper and going to work. I figured I could either spend an hour digging the journal articles we found out of a drawer where they've sat for 6 months and then typing them in verbatim, or I could just summarize what we found. Sorry that the latter option wasn't enough. Luckily my beautiful daughter keeps me happy and prevents flaming on my part. Here are a few journal articles and other info:
Cord Clamping and Intraventricular Hemorrhage Cord Clamping and Postnatal Cerebral Oxygenation Cord Clamping and Iron/Anemia
I would post more, but I would rather go and play with the kid.
. . . is to let your baby have it. We looked into cord blood banking for my daughter (2 months old and way too cute) and we found studies showing that most doctors clamp and cut the cord way too early anyway. When the baby is born the cord actually pulsates, pumping blood from the placenta into the baby. The studies so far show that the benefits to the baby are better blood pressure and less chance of anemia. There are probably more benefits too that we will see as more studies are done. Banking or donating cord blood necessitates clamping and draining the cord, so baby doesn't get all of his or her blood volume.
We decided it was better to get the certain benefits now than it was to get dubious benefits later. Even though my wife eneded up getting a C-section, the doctor let the cord stop pulsating before clamping. As a result, the baby was pink, healthy, and vocal after a near 32-hour labor.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I'm from the Maiden area, and I'm seeing some misconceptions. So here's a few local facts.First, we are in Western/central NC and not in the mountains. That means lots of red clay, and only mild rockiness. Also, while it is rural, this is not Dogpatch. We've had pretty good broadband penetration for years now. I don't know anybody who doesn't have the choice of of DSL or cable, unless they live very far off the road. It's also not a place of isolated farms. it's pretty built up with lots of subdivisions and rural/transitional housing. Incidentally, the other big reason Apple chose that location was water. There are massive county/city water lines in the area that were originally also there to service the textile plants.
This is true. I live about 10 minutes from the Apple data center in Maiden. When it goes online, they expect to only employ about 50 people, and most of them will be imports. Still though, I've been impressed at how little a footprint they have left. The place is insanely huge, but if you didn't know it was there, you might miss it. It doesn't even seem to have any lights shining up in the air at night. They also kept things tidy during construction, even washing down the roads to prevent mud and dust.
I live just outside of Maiden and went to the town council meeting where the data center was announced. It was surreal. The town council clearly had no idea what this thing was all about, other than it was huge and would be a good thing.
Are you kidding? Google was first in with their data center in Lenoir, NC.
I am preferably interested to hear what people in China feel about these issues more than people in the West demanding on behalf of people in China.
Please note that I had to use the rate for Hong Kong
Gee. What a great idea. Let's listen and see what they think. . . . . . . . . . Oh wait, you can't hear what they think because they don't have freedom of speech.
The economics are getting closer every day. Right now in the school where I teach, the total bill for textbooks for one kid is about $140 - $160. These books usually last about 5 years, which is about the same amount of time a digital "pad" would last. When the price of a digital device drops into that $140-$160 range, change will start to happen. Many teachers already make their own content and there are already several open-source textbook initiatives. The unspoken secret is that most educators of all levels HATE the textbook companies. They overcharge for generally crappy Texas and California-centric materials that don't change with the times. They should get thrown under the bus as soon as it is financially feasible to do so.
Except that in most of the U.S. the old dusk active mosquitoes have been replaced by the invasive Asian tiger mosquito, which bites all God-dammed day long. Where does the line for these lasers start. I want at least two of them. I'll wear a welding mask when I have to go outside.
When I told my mother (a retired teacher) about this notion of selling lesson plans to other teachers online, she replied, "That's silly!"
That's because my mom knows that teachers are the original open-sourcers. We routinely create lesson plans, worksheets and other classroom materials, freely give this material to other teachers, encourage them to adapt it, and assume that they will freely provide the material to other teachers. Sound familiar?
We've done this for decades because, frankly, we have to. Time constraints and the need for quality free material forced it on us.
That's why these sites have been around for years, but have never really taken off. They never will. If I meet a teacher who sells their plans to this site (and I haven't yet) I will gently remind them of the strong tradition of open-source material in education.
"But aren't the lesson plans essentially property of whoever paid the teachers for the time they used to developed said plans?"
HA! Double HA!
If that's the case then this argument is over. I have three high school English classes of about 25 students each. One is creative writing, two are English 4. That means that I'm preparing material for two separate classes and grading material from three groups of kids for a total of 75 students. Keep in mind that this is actually fewer students than I normally have. The average class size I am used to is 28-32.
Each class lasts 90 minutes. Preparing a well-planned, interesting, accurate lesson can often more than 60 minutes per lesson. Grading takes even longer. I have to read and comment on 75 half-page to one-page papers for EACH assignment.
How much paid planning time do I get for all this work daily? 90 minutes.
Now subtract from that time that the required meetings, hall monitoring duties, special education IEP meetings, parent phone calls, extra assignments for sick and suspended students, and other assorted paperwork and inane e-mails I spend time on.
Needless to say, most planning gets done at home, when we are not getting paid.
Graphics: 10/10 (The graphics are perfect, its hard to imagine any improvements that could be made)
Speak for yourself. I ran into a glitch where the graphics were great for a while, but started fading around level 20. At first I thought it was my video card, because I could still see things nearby, but everything far away was blurry. By level 32 or I had to rate the graphics a 20/60. I finally dropped 2000 gold pieces on a permanent healing buff that fixed the problem. I'd give it a 20/20 now.
No, typically, they just extend the year, add more duties or take away things like assistants and just force teachers to do more for less money.
Good point! And actually, someone has done the research. I don't recall where I read it, but while getting my masters degree in instructional technology, I read that kids have the least attention early in the morning. The author's idea was that we should start school much later in the day and make it last longer. Instead of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., we should probably go 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. As a teacher, I wouldn't mind having a longer day if we restructured it a bit. High schools (including the one where I teach) have a schedule that gets tighter and tighter each year. Class changes are 5 minutes, lunch is 24 minutes and the kids have a nearly-useless 10-minute break in the afternoon. I would like to see a longer day with some down time, and perhaps an hour long "club time" at the end of the day. Kids could go and work on moviemaking, fiction writing, drama, weight lifting, gaming, etc., each sponsored by an interested teacher.
Having been a journalist doing stories on large-scale hog farming, I call bullshit on this one.
I'll give you the dairy cattle. That is as described, but hogs on a large-scale operation live an incredibly different life from your 8 backyard piggies. They don't wallow in mud because they live crammed into small pens and stand on a metal grate so that their waste can be siphoned off and dumped into leaky lagoons to sit a while before it's sprayed onto plants as "fertilizer" (much of that runs off into local streams).
Look. I eat meat and will continue to do so with no qualms about the morality of it all. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to eat less of it and demand that it be raised with a bit more thought to sustainability, the environment, and yes, as humane treatment as possible.
This means more small, local operations like yours and less factory-style megafarms.
Stossel is a right-wing stooge who pretends to be objective while shoveling skewed facts that support his pre-conceived anti-government bias.
I'm also a teacher and I pretty much completely disagree. We spend a lot of time and money trying to buy up-to-date computers for schools and hook them to the Internet, but when a kid brings one of their own we're going to jam them all? Mobile phones have so much classroom potential if we can only harness them.
." Please. Our schools are still working on an educational model that is over 100 years old. Every technology since chalk has been consistently challenged and bemoaned as the end of education as we know it. We need to learn to use the technology kids take for granted or school will become increasingly irrelevant to them. I heard a great quote once from a bright student who was doing poorly in school. He complained that school didn't seem relevant to his technology-driven life. "I have to power down at school," he said.
The answer is two words.
Classroom management.
Londovir, I'm not sure where you work, but your district is wimpy. Established case law around the country has held for a long time now that we can pretty much take any damn thing we want away from kids. It always works fine for me. My rule was no texting in class. You get caught texting, you lose the phone. If the parent complains, don't be their enemy, get on their side. Explain that you are trying to help their kid, and then explain what their kid is doing with the phone. If you are caught in a system where you can't take phones, then just let the little suckers text. Chances are if they are not paying attention, their grades will suffer. At some point, the kids have to take responsibility for their performance.
Worried about kids texting the answers? Don't give them tests with easily shared answers. I teach English, and the vast majority of my tests are short answer/essay. Good teachers aren't looking for recall of facts, but for reasoning skills. Of course this is a bit harder for math teachers. If you have a parent concerned about a test grade 30 minutes after the test is handed out, you should REJOICE! That's not a "helicoptor" parent, that's an INVOLVED parent. Again. don't let the parent be the enemy. Get them on your side to gang up on the kid. Finally, to everyone who said "back in my day we didn't have cell phones and we got edumacated . .
Are you a teen. Most teens don't react that way to these types of pictures. Their brains are not yet ready to accept their own mortality.
Actually, TFA does. The dispatchers who sent out the pics to relatives thought it would shock them into driving better. A fairly sick bit of reasoning if you ask me.
QFT As a former high school teacher, I can second this. Their little adolescent brains just aren't quite finished yet. Many of them really do feel they are invincible and only time (or disaster) will cure them of this fallacy
Yep, The store I go to puts you on the treadmill, looks at your tread wear, and then brings out some shoes. Several times they have had me try on a pair of expensive shoes but then swapped them for a cheaper pair that fit better.
Funny though, in my seven years in the classroom, the teachers I saw getting the "regular abuse" were mostly the ones that had no clue how to interact with teenagers. They took everything personally, went on power trips, and reacted to every 15-year-old troll they ran into. These are the people who complain the most about school being a hostile workplace. There are some problems. Some kids are jerks no matter how well you try to relate, some administrators make your life a living hell, and some parents just need to shut up. But overall, I had decent experiences, and I was NOT always teaching at a suburban cupcake school.
The real problem I saw was that in addition to the teachers who didn't understand the psychology of teaching, there were a lot who didn't know their content. If teachers were making $75K, I think the people who know the content would show up pretty quick, especially if we did real observations and got rid of the ones who don't know their business.
Actually, I remember reading here http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/21/1744251 that NASA was putting up $3 million at first and then backed off and tried to get people to do it for free. What ever happened to that?
Did I mention that I have a two-month old? Sorry if I made the world more stupid, but I had about five minutes in between changing a diaper and going to work. I figured I could either spend an hour digging the journal articles we found out of a drawer where they've sat for 6 months and then typing them in verbatim, or I could just summarize what we found. Sorry that the latter option wasn't enough. Luckily my beautiful daughter keeps me happy and prevents flaming on my part. Here are a few journal articles and other info:
Cord Clamping and Intraventricular Hemorrhage
Cord Clamping and Postnatal Cerebral Oxygenation
Cord Clamping and Iron/Anemia
I would post more, but I would rather go and play with the kid.
. . . is to let your baby have it. We looked into cord blood banking for my daughter (2 months old and way too cute) and we found studies showing that most doctors clamp and cut the cord way too early anyway. When the baby is born the cord actually pulsates, pumping blood from the placenta into the baby. The studies so far show that the benefits to the baby are better blood pressure and less chance of anemia. There are probably more benefits too that we will see as more studies are done. Banking or donating cord blood necessitates clamping and draining the cord, so baby doesn't get all of his or her blood volume.
We decided it was better to get the certain benefits now than it was to get dubious benefits later. Even though my wife eneded up getting a C-section, the doctor let the cord stop pulsating before clamping. As a result, the baby was pink, healthy, and vocal after a near 32-hour labor.
Yeah, we had two Saturns, a 94 and a 92. They were both great. Then we upgraded to an 02. Not so much.
and it was "small" too!