Actually, they never really said exactly everything that the Bussard collectors did. They very well could have also been used to suck up said particles just before exiting warp. I'll be in my parent's basement if anyone would like to discuss this further.
Lots of school districts are either trying this now or gearing up to. It's not without some questions and challenges. For example, how do you keep their viruses out of your network while allowing them Internet access? How do you afford beefing up your school wireless network to handle hundreds of simultaneous wi-fi connections? How do you make sure you are complying with CIPA through filtering? You also have to consider equity (do you buy devices for the kids who can't afford one). I'm in the tech side of education and I can tell you that things are moving this way, but it takes time, effort and thought to implement.
"I can't tell you exactly when the Pullman Trials happened without looking it up on Wikipedia, but I can tell you why it happened and the effects it had on organized labor."
This.
This is why standardized tests can only measure so much. There was a question on the NC history test a few years back that asked who invented the refrigerated boxcar. I don't care if my daughter knows that. She can look it up on her phone, or her contact lens eventually. I do care if she knows WHY the refrigerated boxcar was important.
I don't "loathe" standardized tests. They are a useful tool, but they only measure what they measure. They need to be one tool in the toolbox of assessing teachers. We also need better training of teachers, better pay for teachers to attract better new teachers, better administrative observation and assessment of teachers, a shift in focus from lecture to project and problem-based learning and more.
And don't be so enamored of those "neutral third parties" who are making these tests. They are in it for money and money alone. For them, the more tests the government requires, the more money they make. Their lobbyists are working hard to push the idea that kids need more tests.
No, it doesn't sound "harsh," I'm a former classroom teacher who is still in education. I can point out teachers who need and deserve firing and who should be fired and fired quickly. The problem is that the number of "obvious fires" is small, I would guess somewhere in the 5-10 percent range. The real problem comes in measuring how the rest of the teachers are "competing." Rhee, Obama, and Duncan Gates think high-stakes testing is the only answer. It's not. Testing measures how well a student does on a test on that one day and very little else. Even if testing was a good indicator of student learning, I repeat what I said above. Teachers can only work with the material that parents provide them. Do we really want to fire teachers who had a bad group of kids?
Fine, some of those are good ideas. They would get rid of the small percentage of egregious teachers. But how do you measure the merit-based increases when so much of a student's performance depends on their parents? Teachers can only work with the material they get.
Also, why would you want to encourage competition among teachers. The Finns don't do that. Instead the foster cooperation and it works.
The problem with Rhee's "plan" was that it was all based on test scores. The teachers were basically being asked to agree that they could be instantly fired if their kids didn't do well on a standardized test that they had no part in creating. If you aren't a teacher, you wouldn't know that sometimes no matter how hard you work and how well you teach, you get a bunch of kids that doesn't score well on tests. This is because the main factor in a student's performance in parental engagement and involvement. Rhee's plan was to fire all these "bad teachers" and hire shiny new ones, who she would then fire the next year. How about instead, do what good teachers do and look at what works and what doesn't and use that to improve next year?
This is a big part of the problem. I was an English teacher and routinely had average class sizes in the low 30s. That's teaching 3 periods a day. Sometimes I had as many as 36 in a class. Imagine trying to assign, edit, return, and regrade a 3-5 page writing assignment. It was nearly impossible when you throw in all the worthless No Child Left Behind paperwork.
I agree that those are two of the biggest reasons. But they aren't the only one. As it says in TFA, they also go to China so they can have 30,000 engineers on hand and ready to work a problem. Over here you can't find engineers, at least not in that number. Part of our problem is focus. We have "career-technical" classes here in my state. Here are some of the offerings. "Introduction to Computers" (taught by people who know little about computers), "Foods" (where they learn to make a cake from a box mix) and the utterly useless "Sports Marketing," These kids should be building rockets and making stuff. A generation of sports agents who can make a cake from their box is not going to be able to compete with the technical side of what Foxconn offers Apple.
Anyone who is "unimpressed" by a guy with a wing and four jet engines strapped on his back flying in formation with jet planes for no reason other than because he feels like it needs to have his or her geek card revoked.
Expound on that for me. for example, in NC, the "union" can't negotiate contracts, they can't require members to join, and pretty soon, they might not even be able to allow members to deduct dues directly from their paychecks. The only thing they do is lobby, and they don't do that very well any more. I don't even call that a union.
A lot of what you say makes sense, but you need to rethink the first paragraph. What about all those states, primarily in the South, that have toothless unions or no unions at all?
I'm in education and I agree that we don't have a good evaluation system. I also agree that unions push too hard against real evaluation systems. But I won't go as far as saying that we know how to evaluate teachers. Gates, Arnie Duncan and their ilk would have us pretty much use test scores. That's not a realistic measure of teacher ability. We need real assessments that include input from multiple administrators, as well as highly rated teachers and even students. This, combined with test scores might give us a better picture of which teachers are good, which need help, and which need a new job.
But the real problem is that if we could snap our fingers and fire all the idiots tomorrow, we don't have anything better to replace them with. That's where your "recruit better teachers" idea is right on. We need to look at Finland, where most people who apply to ed schools can't don't cut it. They accept only the best, train them well, pay them well, and then let them do their thing without a lot of meddling. It works.
Good point. I've taught and worked outside the classroom teaching other teachers how to integrate technology. The tech is a tool, a multiplier, not the teacher. When done right, it can help a good teacher work wonders. It can't do squat about a bad teacher. for example. I had a class of high school creative writing students. About half of them liked to write and the other half were there because there weren't any other open electives. I set them all up on Google Docs and we started writing, collaborating and editing. They could write at school, they could write at home. I could go into their stories as they wrote and make comments and suggestions. Their friends could and would do the same. In November, we took part in National Novel Writing Month and the students tracked their progress online and communicated with other students around the country who were writing their own novels. At the end of the month, we used a spreadsheet to calculate that they had written 226,691 words in one month. One student who had failed English the previous year wrote a 9,700 word story. Just about every student in the class came out a much better writer than before.
Of course we could have used paper and pen, writing multiple long hand drafts we me scribbling on the margins of each draft in red pen. Or we could have used clay tablets and cuneiform. I doubt those methods would have had the same outcome.
I work in education and this is the problem. It's all test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Set in a factory where creativity, collaboration and outside-the-box thinking are tossed over the side in the race to increase fairly meaningless test scores.
I fail to see why K-12 students need pencils to learn a damned thing.
chalk and slates are a win from a management, reliability, latency and bandwidth perspective. Not being constantly distracted by broken lead is something I would also check in the plus column.
There is at least some credible evidence pencil lead is harmful especially to children. Given pencils simply are not required in any shape or form to educate students what precisely is the downside?
Good analysis. The real problem is that a lot of the rampant speculation around what has happened/is happening revolves around how closely Tepco has held information about what is going on at Fukushima. These days, a vacuum tends to create conspiracy theories.
Google the freaking pictures. It wasn't an MH-60 or an SH-60. The shapes are all wrong. The tail rotor is just weird Stealth deals mostly with sound and radar. Good cloud cover will help someone from seeing you with the mark 1 eyeball. RPG's are (very) unguided. They hit or miss depending on the skill, or more often luck, of the user. They don't give a crap about stealth. Plus I haven't heard any claim that it was hit by an RPG.
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Actually, they never really said exactly everything that the Bussard collectors did. They very well could have also been used to suck up said particles just before exiting warp. I'll be in my parent's basement if anyone would like to discuss this further.
Those darn science fiction writers/producers and their getting things right!
In other news, standing in front of an arriving airplane leads to being chopped up by the prop. Clearly we can't invent powered flight.
Lots of school districts are either trying this now or gearing up to. It's not without some questions and challenges. For example, how do you keep their viruses out of your network while allowing them Internet access? How do you afford beefing up your school wireless network to handle hundreds of simultaneous wi-fi connections? How do you make sure you are complying with CIPA through filtering? You also have to consider equity (do you buy devices for the kids who can't afford one). I'm in the tech side of education and I can tell you that things are moving this way, but it takes time, effort and thought to implement.
"I can't tell you exactly when the Pullman Trials happened without looking it up on Wikipedia, but I can tell you why it happened and the effects it had on organized labor."
This.
This is why standardized tests can only measure so much. There was a question on the NC history test a few years back that asked who invented the refrigerated boxcar. I don't care if my daughter knows that. She can look it up on her phone, or her contact lens eventually. I do care if she knows WHY the refrigerated boxcar was important.
I don't "loathe" standardized tests. They are a useful tool, but they only measure what they measure. They need to be one tool in the toolbox of assessing teachers. We also need better training of teachers, better pay for teachers to attract better new teachers, better administrative observation and assessment of teachers, a shift in focus from lecture to project and problem-based learning and more.
And don't be so enamored of those "neutral third parties" who are making these tests. They are in it for money and money alone. For them, the more tests the government requires, the more money they make. Their lobbyists are working hard to push the idea that kids need more tests.
No, it doesn't sound "harsh," I'm a former classroom teacher who is still in education. I can point out teachers who need and deserve firing and who should be fired and fired quickly. The problem is that the number of "obvious fires" is small, I would guess somewhere in the 5-10 percent range. The real problem comes in measuring how the rest of the teachers are "competing." Rhee, Obama, and Duncan Gates think high-stakes testing is the only answer. It's not. Testing measures how well a student does on a test on that one day and very little else. Even if testing was a good indicator of student learning, I repeat what I said above. Teachers can only work with the material that parents provide them. Do we really want to fire teachers who had a bad group of kids?
Fine, some of those are good ideas. They would get rid of the small percentage of egregious teachers. But how do you measure the merit-based increases when so much of a student's performance depends on their parents? Teachers can only work with the material they get.
Also, why would you want to encourage competition among teachers. The Finns don't do that. Instead the foster cooperation and it works.
The problem with Rhee's "plan" was that it was all based on test scores. The teachers were basically being asked to agree that they could be instantly fired if their kids didn't do well on a standardized test that they had no part in creating. If you aren't a teacher, you wouldn't know that sometimes no matter how hard you work and how well you teach, you get a bunch of kids that doesn't score well on tests. This is because the main factor in a student's performance in parental engagement and involvement. Rhee's plan was to fire all these "bad teachers" and hire shiny new ones, who she would then fire the next year. How about instead, do what good teachers do and look at what works and what doesn't and use that to improve next year?
On a nerdy note, I designed something about like this for a roleplaying game back when I was in Junior high.
This is a big part of the problem. I was an English teacher and routinely had average class sizes in the low 30s. That's teaching 3 periods a day. Sometimes I had as many as 36 in a class. Imagine trying to assign, edit, return, and regrade a 3-5 page writing assignment. It was nearly impossible when you throw in all the worthless No Child Left Behind paperwork.
Whew! I'll be getting off your lawn now.
I agree that those are two of the biggest reasons. But they aren't the only one. As it says in TFA, they also go to China so they can have 30,000 engineers on hand and ready to work a problem. Over here you can't find engineers, at least not in that number. Part of our problem is focus. We have "career-technical" classes here in my state. Here are some of the offerings. "Introduction to Computers" (taught by people who know little about computers), "Foods" (where they learn to make a cake from a box mix) and the utterly useless "Sports Marketing," These kids should be building rockets and making stuff. A generation of sports agents who can make a cake from their box is not going to be able to compete with the technical side of what Foxconn offers Apple.
You realize that you are probably typing this screed on a "slave-built good," right?
Anyone who is "unimpressed" by a guy with a wing and four jet engines strapped on his back flying in formation with jet planes for no reason other than because he feels like it needs to have his or her geek card revoked.
Expound on that for me. for example, in NC, the "union" can't negotiate contracts, they can't require members to join, and pretty soon, they might not even be able to allow members to deduct dues directly from their paychecks. The only thing they do is lobby, and they don't do that very well any more. I don't even call that a union.
A lot of what you say makes sense, but you need to rethink the first paragraph. What about all those states, primarily in the South, that have toothless unions or no unions at all?
I'm in education and I agree that we don't have a good evaluation system. I also agree that unions push too hard against real evaluation systems. But I won't go as far as saying that we know how to evaluate teachers. Gates, Arnie Duncan and their ilk would have us pretty much use test scores. That's not a realistic measure of teacher ability. We need real assessments that include input from multiple administrators, as well as highly rated teachers and even students. This, combined with test scores might give us a better picture of which teachers are good, which need help, and which need a new job.
But the real problem is that if we could snap our fingers and fire all the idiots tomorrow, we don't have anything better to replace them with. That's where your "recruit better teachers" idea is right on. We need to look at Finland, where most people who apply to ed schools can't don't cut it. They accept only the best, train them well, pay them well, and then let them do their thing without a lot of meddling. It works.
Good point. I've taught and worked outside the classroom teaching other teachers how to integrate technology. The tech is a tool, a multiplier, not the teacher. When done right, it can help a good teacher work wonders. It can't do squat about a bad teacher. for example. I had a class of high school creative writing students. About half of them liked to write and the other half were there because there weren't any other open electives. I set them all up on Google Docs and we started writing, collaborating and editing. They could write at school, they could write at home. I could go into their stories as they wrote and make comments and suggestions. Their friends could and would do the same. In November, we took part in National Novel Writing Month and the students tracked their progress online and communicated with other students around the country who were writing their own novels. At the end of the month, we used a spreadsheet to calculate that they had written 226,691 words in one month. One student who had failed English the previous year wrote a 9,700 word story. Just about every student in the class came out a much better writer than before.
Of course we could have used paper and pen, writing multiple long hand drafts we me scribbling on the margins of each draft in red pen. Or we could have used clay tablets and cuneiform. I doubt those methods would have had the same outcome.
THIS!
I work in education and this is the problem. It's all test, test, test, test, test, test, test. Set in a factory where creativity, collaboration and outside-the-box thinking are tossed over the side in the race to increase fairly meaningless test scores.
Programmer needs quarters . . . badly.
Minecraft on Kinect? I just get tired thinking about it. Digging all those tunnels would be a pretty good upper body workout though.
I fail to see why K-12 students need pencils to learn a damned thing.
chalk and slates are a win from a management, reliability, latency and bandwidth perspective. Not being constantly distracted by broken lead is something I would also check in the plus column.
There is at least some credible evidence pencil lead is harmful especially to children. Given pencils simply are not required in any shape or form to educate students what precisely is the downside?
Fixed that for ya!
Good analysis. The real problem is that a lot of the rampant speculation around what has happened/is happening revolves around how closely Tepco has held information about what is going on at Fukushima. These days, a vacuum tends to create conspiracy theories.
In the first-12-day timeframe, the water wasn't boronated, it was just seawater.
Uhh, what?
Google the freaking pictures. It wasn't an MH-60 or an SH-60. The shapes are all wrong. The tail rotor is just weird
Stealth deals mostly with sound and radar. Good cloud cover will help someone from seeing you with the mark 1 eyeball.
RPG's are (very) unguided. They hit or miss depending on the skill, or more often luck, of the user. They don't give a crap about stealth. Plus I haven't heard any claim that it was hit by an RPG.
Oh, and it really wasn't even black.