We all know teachers' unions can sometimes be a little reactionary, but they're not what's ruining public education today.
They sure as hell aren't helping. Everyone needs to quit pretending that the teachers' unions are for anything but the teachers. I think they have every right to organize, but they DON'T have education at heart, they have teachers' working conditions at heart. Can a teacher with bad working conditions do a good job? Hell no. But do the most wonderful teachers' working conditions in the world guarantee a good education? Also hell no. Accountability is something that is anathama to any union ("we have a right to this job, no matter how badly we screw it up!"), and the teachers' union is no different.
On the other hand, I couldn't agree with you more about the lawsuit issue. The point is that the legal system needs to produce just ends--if that happens, the rest of it (number of lawsuits attempted etc) don't matter. And for the drug companies in particular, I have absolutely zero sympathy, given their record of watching the bottom line closer than the public good. Sorry, but if my child had a mercury based preservative in his vaccines because some fucking moron didn't bother testing these vaccines thoroughly on children to find out the negative effects, the drug company responsible deserves to die (in Ben's words).
While I agree that we do not put a high enough priority on spending for education versus spending for other things, spending alone does not solve the problem. There has to be an agreed upon means to enforce accountability. I don't believe that such a system has been proposed, and I'm not sure how successful it would be if it were proposed; too many vested interests want to keep things pretty much the way they are.
There also has to be a real interest by parents. Not interest in "johnny getting good grades"--that leads to parents blaming teachers for their kid's lack of motivation--but interest in actual education. I just don't see it happening.
That doesn't mean that there's some excuse for not engaging your common sense about curious children etc. And nobody said there was, you just inferred it because you're an idiot who can't seem to see anyone but yourself as having any common sense.
News flash sherlock: there are quite a few more people who have guns and deal with them appropriately than there are people who don't.
Re:Try an "educational" toy store
on
Low Tech Toys?
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· Score: 2
I've been seeing Kaleidoscopes of all price ranges for the last 15 years that I've been paying attention. The original questioner's insistence on a "brick and mortar" store (proceeding to list major retail chains that play to lowest common denominators) seems absurd. There are plenty of "real world" places to buy kaleidoscopes, and that doesn't count all the places online.
And I meant to add: I'm not responsible for the rest of the square pegs either. While I think it's reasonable for me to do my part paying taxes to help the local school system, I have one BIG priority and that is MY child and MY family and they DO come first.
I dunno, it does seem to me that continuing to try to put the round peg into the square hole is an exercise in pointless frustration for everyone involved. And that's what it sounds like you're advocating.
While I don't insist that the right answer is to drill out the hole (that has obvious impact on everyone else), it should be my right as a parent to take my child elsewhere, where I can find the right fit for them. It's not my fault if our system is prioritized and/or broken in such a way that this makes it hard for the rest of the square pegs.
And what exactly are the differences between those three examples? Oh, wait. I know. George W. is taking our rights away for our own good, to protect us from terrorists.
The modern "education system" is not set up to teach children so much as it is set up to control them. Now, in some cases, kids are lacking discipline and need some control, but that only goes so far. Other kids who want to learn just get fried by the system.
I went through much the same process, though in my case I was just getting C's for the most part, not struggling to pass.
I have a fair amount of sympathy for your perspective, and a few years ago, I probably would have said almost exactly the same thing (except I'm lucky enough that the mother of my son is not unstable).
However, I think there's a middle road. I have chronic depression issues. USUALLY they are manageable by willpower/behavior mod, but, in the winter, and under times of extra stress, those things do not suffice. After making my wife EXTREMELY miserable one season, we started investigating other means to deal with my issues (keep in mind that I think 99% of all shrinks are quacks who went to school to try and fix themselves, and I hate the idea of a drug that dulls my mind--my brother has a more severe version of my problems, and spent quite a long time on many "fine" drugs).
Turns out, if I get regular doses of vitamin B (standard stresstabs) and 5-HTP (a mood stablizing supplement) I only become unbearable every once in a great while. In the winder, a full spectrum light also helps a lot.
While I cannot absolutely rule out placebo effects, since a study of one individual is meaningless, I'm pretty convinced that there are brain chemical issues involving seratonin that do predispose you toward certain mood disorders. It is probably also useful to note that I also once experimented with Choline, a so-called "smart drug" that affects your seratonin levels, and ended up in one of the blackest, foulest depressions I've ever had, and ended almost as soon as I stopped the Choline--that can't really be written off to placebo effect, since I expected something quite the opposite.
I absolutely agree that the pharmaceutical companies are not in it for my best interests, and if they could, they'd sell us all the soma they could make. But that doesn't mean that all the science is junk. It just means that, like everyone else, they're using the facts and statistics to lie for their own benefit. The right stuff, in my opinion, is that serotonin is a key mood regulator. The wrong stuff is that we need their drugs to control it. There are means that don't dope you and don't cost a lot (diet, supplements, sunlight or equivalents) that are as effective if not more in all but the most extreme cases.
Very sad. While it's great to hear lots of people want to do something about this, it's not so great to hear we've prevented anyone from doing anything about it, at least at this very moment.
Either that, or the spooks are using it as an excuse to shut them down....
It's not like he was able to force CSS stylesheets on slashdot to make the actual formatting look good as well as realistically breaking up the content.
The XHTML tags, while they don't affect your display on "most" browsers, do appear to break the information up into chunks that could be identified seperately by browsers with the accessability features he talks about. He's got it split into sections which presumably could be summarized for someone with, for example, a vision disability, so they could skip around without having to hear the entire page read to them.
I do what I can to change it, but of course what impact do I have when I don't have millions of corporate dollars to spend convincing congressmen to pass legislation that really benefits me?
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Oh yeah, that's why so many teachers have extra toaster ovens, as their premiums from the recruitment organizations.
They sure as hell aren't helping. Everyone needs to quit pretending that the teachers' unions are for anything but the teachers. I think they have every right to organize, but they DON'T have education at heart, they have teachers' working conditions at heart. Can a teacher with bad working conditions do a good job? Hell no. But do the most wonderful teachers' working conditions in the world guarantee a good education? Also hell no. Accountability is something that is anathama to any union ("we have a right to this job, no matter how badly we screw it up!"), and the teachers' union is no different.
On the other hand, I couldn't agree with you more about the lawsuit issue. The point is that the legal system needs to produce just ends--if that happens, the rest of it (number of lawsuits attempted etc) don't matter. And for the drug companies in particular, I have absolutely zero sympathy, given their record of watching the bottom line closer than the public good. Sorry, but if my child had a mercury based preservative in his vaccines because some fucking moron didn't bother testing these vaccines thoroughly on children to find out the negative effects, the drug company responsible deserves to die (in Ben's words).
There also has to be a real interest by parents. Not interest in "johnny getting good grades"--that leads to parents blaming teachers for their kid's lack of motivation--but interest in actual education. I just don't see it happening.
I thought he asked for a credible link :-)
That doesn't mean that there's some excuse for not engaging your common sense about curious children etc. And nobody said there was, you just inferred it because you're an idiot who can't seem to see anyone but yourself as having any common sense.
News flash sherlock: there are quite a few more people who have guns and deal with them appropriately than there are people who don't.
I've been seeing Kaleidoscopes of all price ranges for the last 15 years that I've been paying attention. The original questioner's insistence on a "brick and mortar" store (proceeding to list major retail chains that play to lowest common denominators) seems absurd. There are plenty of "real world" places to buy kaleidoscopes, and that doesn't count all the places online.
If there were no difference between an actual signature and a silkscreened signature, you might have a point.
And I meant to add: I'm not responsible for the rest of the square pegs either. While I think it's reasonable for me to do my part paying taxes to help the local school system, I have one BIG priority and that is MY child and MY family and they DO come first.
While I don't insist that the right answer is to drill out the hole (that has obvious impact on everyone else), it should be my right as a parent to take my child elsewhere, where I can find the right fit for them. It's not my fault if our system is prioritized and/or broken in such a way that this makes it hard for the rest of the square pegs.
And what exactly are the differences between those three examples? Oh, wait. I know. George W. is taking our rights away for our own good, to protect us from terrorists.
This needs to be modded up and I don't have points!
Where precisely did I say the system had to change for these kids? I was simply pointing out that the system does not serve them well.
I meant that the Choline clearly demonstrates some of the chemical nature of the brain, not that there was any permanent effect.
The modern "education system" is not set up to teach children so much as it is set up to control them. Now, in some cases, kids are lacking discipline and need some control, but that only goes so far. Other kids who want to learn just get fried by the system.
I went through much the same process, though in my case I was just getting C's for the most part, not struggling to pass.
However, I think there's a middle road. I have chronic depression issues. USUALLY they are manageable by willpower/behavior mod, but, in the winter, and under times of extra stress, those things do not suffice. After making my wife EXTREMELY miserable one season, we started investigating other means to deal with my issues (keep in mind that I think 99% of all shrinks are quacks who went to school to try and fix themselves, and I hate the idea of a drug that dulls my mind--my brother has a more severe version of my problems, and spent quite a long time on many "fine" drugs).
Turns out, if I get regular doses of vitamin B (standard stresstabs) and 5-HTP (a mood stablizing supplement) I only become unbearable every once in a great while. In the winder, a full spectrum light also helps a lot.
While I cannot absolutely rule out placebo effects, since a study of one individual is meaningless, I'm pretty convinced that there are brain chemical issues involving seratonin that do predispose you toward certain mood disorders. It is probably also useful to note that I also once experimented with Choline, a so-called "smart drug" that affects your seratonin levels, and ended up in one of the blackest, foulest depressions I've ever had, and ended almost as soon as I stopped the Choline--that can't really be written off to placebo effect, since I expected something quite the opposite.
I absolutely agree that the pharmaceutical companies are not in it for my best interests, and if they could, they'd sell us all the soma they could make. But that doesn't mean that all the science is junk. It just means that, like everyone else, they're using the facts and statistics to lie for their own benefit. The right stuff, in my opinion, is that serotonin is a key mood regulator. The wrong stuff is that we need their drugs to control it. There are means that don't dope you and don't cost a lot (diet, supplements, sunlight or equivalents) that are as effective if not more in all but the most extreme cases.
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion....
Either that, or the spooks are using it as an excuse to shut them down....
It's not like he was able to force CSS stylesheets on slashdot to make the actual formatting look good as well as realistically breaking up the content.
The XHTML tags, while they don't affect your display on "most" browsers, do appear to break the information up into chunks that could be identified seperately by browsers with the accessability features he talks about. He's got it split into sections which presumably could be summarized for someone with, for example, a vision disability, so they could skip around without having to hear the entire page read to them.
Or your skin.
Maybe you could just educate us what the strategy is, since you work for Sun?
Dunno, those bigfoot shoes sure look an awful lot like the castings I remember seeing when I was into this as a kid.
I didn't say I thought it was a GOOD interview :-) Just that it wasn't rude.
Short? Yes. Rude? Where the hell did you get that idea? He mostly seems to be trying hard to be amusing, with some success.
I do what I can to change it, but of course what impact do I have when I don't have millions of corporate dollars to spend convincing congressmen to pass legislation that really benefits me?