The educational system doesn't need to provide healthcare to students. Unlike prisoners, we haven't taken away the students' (or more accurately, their parents) ability to provide healthcare for themselves. We don't need to house them at night because that's not in any way part of the mandate of the educational system. Our educational system isn't charged with keeping students separated from the general populous, and it isn't responsible for punishing them for crimes they have committed.
I think most schools would disagree with you there - while rules saying "you can't leave the grounds" makes sense at the elementary school level (no-one wants an eight-year-old disappearing), there are high schools that prohibit students leaving the grounds during school hours (including "free time" such as spares or lunch hour).
And for better or worse, schools have found (or put) themselves in the position of being responsible for the student's care, and that's extending to issues that shouldn't involve the school. School lunch programs exist because kids couldn't learn because they were too hungry to concentrate. And there are just enough teachers who give a damn that they won't let a kid suffer just because it's not their job.
You realize that most conservatives want to take that 7000 dollars and give it to the parents to pick whatever school they think is best for their child? That way the poor kid and the rich kid can go to a good school together.
This only works if all the schools have tuition
Otherwise, the rich kids (or more properly, the rich parents) will spend extra to make sure that their kids get all the best bells and whistles, field trips, lab supplies, etc. Everyone else will end up at Ed's Discount EducationMart.
An alternative would be how the school district here works - there are a ton of special programs, but they're all part of the district. Your kid can go where-ever they'll accept them (or they qualify, for the "kids needing help" programs), and there's no additional cost to the parents - the government funding goes to where the kids are. Schools compete for students, and programs that are popular get cloned across the district. Currently about half the kids in the district go to schools that *aren't* their default (read: whichever one is closest).
In my experience, the administrators are/were rarely all that great of teachers, they're the ones who play the political game the best.
Of course - if you're good at teaching, you'd want to be a teacher. Admins fall into two groups (a) the teachers who want to be in charge because they hope they can change the crap they're having to put up with, and (b) the teachers who suck at teaching, so move into admin so they can be in charge.
I see you love education, so once you're done bashing the GOP, don't forget to ask Obama why he killed the D.C. voucher program.
That's easy - vouchers are a way for rich parents to get their kids away from the masses using tax dollars. It bleeds the public system, and that doesn't help anyone. (Easy comparison - if the grad rate in the public system is 50% now, what was it before the vouchers and the private schools? Is the rate lower simply because all the smart and rich students left, leaving everyone else to rot in the public system?)
He misses an important point, kids already get most of those things at home. Prisoners, on the other hand, *are* home. Also, I must say $7000 per student per year actually sounds like quite a lot to me. This doesn't seem like an argument to spend more on schools so much as it is one to spend less on prisoners. The reason we give prisons libraries is to try reform prisoners. If that expenditure lowers re-offending and re-incarceration rates by some measurable percentage, then it actually saves some money. It would be interesting to study how effective they are though.
I think the point the superintendent is making is that if he really wants to help his students, the best thing he can do is get them put in prison for a couple years - there's more money available for education in the prison system than the education system.
Japanese comics routinely feature a finite storyline. There's a definite beginning and end. Some have a tendency to stretch out a particular storyline to an absurd length, but at least there's the satisfaction that there will eventually be a true conclusion and that major characters could actually die.
Non-comic comparison of "how to do this right" - Coronation Street. Longest running television show in freakin' history, and it'll likely never end. But whatever happens this week, happens. And you can trace continuity all the way back.
Could you imagine Coronation (or for the US-centric, any soap opera) doing a "reboot"? I've always wanted to see senior citizens rioting.
The problem of a long-running strip is that the characters are stuck in a time warp even while the world moves on around them. Archie is always going to be in a 1950's America that never really existed even as computers and cell phones are dropped in. (or at least that's how it looks at the checkout line. That Archie is even still published is in and of itself a time warp.)
I haven't picked up an Archie in years and years, but my understanding is that they're on a floating timeline, similar to Simpsons. The year is 2011, they're in their senior year, Veronica and Betty fight over Archie. Next year it'll be 2012, they'll *still* be in their senior year, etc, etc.
The theory is that this will keep everything "current" without requiring a change to the actual setting (which, to be frank, would kill the Archie-verse; put them into college and question one becomes: why aren't they just having threesomes?)
Re:they don't need to reboot, they need to end it
on
DC Reboots Universe
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· Score: 1
Don't forget Transmetropolitan (ran 60 issues and done), Scott Pilgrim (6 volumes and done), Wanted (5 or 6 issues, and *far* superior to the movie), Preacher (can't remember the issue count there). I'll mention Promethia (32 issues) since it's self-contained, but that series is *really* weird.
There's gobs of good comics out there that tell a story and then let it be. They just don't have "Super", "Bat", or "Hero" on the cover.
While Logo is a programming language (I remember using it in grade one, although my school didn't have the robot), at that age it's used far more for "can you explain what you want" than any sort of formalized programming.
If you need a course to teach something, you must not want to do it very much.
You mean like a Mom apparently teaching an entire high school curriculum? I had a handful of excellent teachers in high school but I can't think of any of them who could have taught all the subjects.
Two points:
You'd be surprised what a teacher can do with the curriculum - teachers can be reassigned to a new class yearly (very common for teachers just starting out). So your awesome English teacher this year could very well be sitting in front of the Biology class next year, even if they haven't taken Biology since *their* HS days. A good teacher could very well be able to teach all the subjects (particularly if the class size is two.) Hell, your elementary school teacher had to teach all the subjects, didn't they?
Second, while Mom might not know everything, she apparently knows when she needs support material to look things up.
give him a break: he's being home schooled. Which probably explains word processing being CS...
My high school "Computing Science" curriculum was: CS10: Word Processing, CS20: Spreadsheets, CS30: Databases.
Most high school Comp teachers are just physics teachers who like computers (or one year, an English teacher who was thrown in there to fill the seat). He'll probably get a better education home-schooled, simply because they've already realized they need to find some better manuals/instructors.
(I reserve the right to stop defending the home-schooler if he replies "that's OK, God will show me how to compile".)
Calgary is happy with this - they get Stallman without having to pay to get him there. U of A is a little miffed - they're paying all the bills, but they're losing out on value. They call up Stallman and say "hey, we're not really thrilled with paying for you to come and give speeches to our rival school as well - if we're paying the bill, we don't want you going there".
I don't think I'm really twisting anything. If he agreed to this theoretical case, then they would be buying him in the exact same way.
As long as U of A isn't paying *anything* extra whatsoever if he's doing the other talk, I think it's fine. Would it be best if both schools cooperated and split the costs? Yeah, but as I said originally, I think this would just be more efficient use of the travel time.
I think the issue is of competition - if I'm paying for Famous Person A to come over and speak, I would be less than thrilled if a rival institution gets him without paying all those costs.
Depends on the job you're applying for, of course. HR may be perfectly willing to overlook the lack of a degree in exchange for an adequate amount of work experience.
This is a long-shot at any reasonable sized company (read: any company where HR is a "department" instead of just a person).
Two reasons - one, the HR department only knows what the paperwork says about the job. And unless you're very lucky, they'll put "yeah, I'd like someone with a degree" on the list (out of habit, if nothing else). Second, most larger companies outsource a lot of the hiring process, which means you've got to sneak past both the company's recruiters, and *then* the HR folks before you get to talk to someone in charge.
Here's a secret - as a "boss type", interviewing sucks - it takes up time, and you end up spending it with some very... interesting people. So while I agree that it's entirely possible to have The Goods without The Degree, you have to remember that there's a lot of people who only *think* the have The Goods, don't have The Degree, and will happily make me lose an hour of my life trying to bullshit through the interview. So when I'm flipping through resumes, you're going to need to stand out over all those folks.
Also worth noting that through the late 80s-90s there was this sense that the future was in computers and business - choosing not to go to university (or at least a college of some sort) was a sign of "dropping out".
Of course, it turned out that we still need plumbers and carpenters and electricians, so now they're making the huge money while I know tons of university-graduated IT pros working call centers.
Around here it's even worse in the medical industry - the government see-saws funding for nurse training wildly, which means we skew from "there are not enough graduates to fill all the positions" to "we don't have enough positions to give all these people jobs".
Me? I'm still watching the perfectly good, pre-HD TV I bought 20 years ago.
I replaced our old TV for two reasons
1. The old TV only supported composite hookups (not even component).
2. The old TV was an absolute bitch to move around and took up a ton of space.
The old TV was donated to a family friend who had been bugging his parents for his own TV.
Got a 40" widescreen, 1080p, for about $800. I don't want 3D, and wasn't going to pay multi-thousands for LED. Works fine, and I expect to keep it for the next decade or so (which is how long the old TV lasted)
True. But if you don't make it into med or law, you still have your bachelor's degree. (And probably an Honors degree, if you were trying to make med/law).
Engineering struck me as rude because they're weeding at the bachelor's level. So if you crash and burn (or just have a "frell it" moment), you've got nothing. (And my university was not generous about transferring engineering courses into other faculties - you could easily end up repeating your entire first year, because "Calculus for Engineers" didn't count as "Calculus".)
That's because they've managed to make it the worst of both worlds.
On the one hand, it's sterile enough that a farmer can't use it for renewable crops - so it's a negative for the farmer.
On the other hand, it's not completely sterile, so stray seeds get blown into fields and ditches and whatnot. Since it's still resistant to chemicals, they've very difficult to get rid of. Not to mention Monsanto likes to sue people who have their Magical Mystery Seeds.
Why wouldn't it be? You have to be able to justify the expense in your head, and since we firmly squash the "I did it because I love learning about things" answer... it's gotta be for the cash.
The schools encourage this, because rich alumni can be wrung for more money.
Seriously - copy writing and editing, proofing, speech writing, public relations. There's a lot of jobs out there for someone who can make things sound good. I have two friends in that bent - they work for political parties, non-profits, that sort of thing.
That's actually pretty good advice - quite a few of the financially successful folks from my high school either went trades or smaller programs (one works in insurance, only needed two years of coursework to get started).
In practice, a degree is as good as any other, unless you need a specific degree for your career path (doctor, lawyer, librarian). So do what you're interested in.
The joke at my university was "Engineering - the worst four or best seven years of your life."
I had a floormate who did engineering, and the school has no shame about ruthlessly beating the students down - extra courseloads, little to no choice in courses (or even scheduling), and they just keep waving that promise of a big paycheck at the far end.
It maybe one of those bad corrolation dealies (people who can suck it up through a degree would have done better either way).. but I suspect the paper still helps.
And when you boil it down, that's what it ends up being:
People with degrees (of any sort) are likely to make more money over their lifetime than people without degrees.
Engineers are likely to make more than psychologists, teachers, and authors.
Yes, there are rich authors and poor engineers, but that's statistics for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, alternatively:
Why do we pamper criminals and starve the future?
Why does a criminal get better access to education than the education system?
The educational system doesn't need to provide healthcare to students. Unlike prisoners, we haven't taken away the students' (or more accurately, their parents) ability to provide healthcare for themselves. We don't need to house them at night because that's not in any way part of the mandate of the educational system. Our educational system isn't charged with keeping students separated from the general populous, and it isn't responsible for punishing them for crimes they have committed.
I think most schools would disagree with you there - while rules saying "you can't leave the grounds" makes sense at the elementary school level (no-one wants an eight-year-old disappearing), there are high schools that prohibit students leaving the grounds during school hours (including "free time" such as spares or lunch hour).
And for better or worse, schools have found (or put) themselves in the position of being responsible for the student's care, and that's extending to issues that shouldn't involve the school. School lunch programs exist because kids couldn't learn because they were too hungry to concentrate. And there are just enough teachers who give a damn that they won't let a kid suffer just because it's not their job.
You realize that most conservatives want to take that 7000 dollars and give it to the parents to pick whatever school they think is best for their child? That way the poor kid and the rich kid can go to a good school together.
This only works if all the schools have tuition
Otherwise, the rich kids (or more properly, the rich parents) will spend extra to make sure that their kids get all the best bells and whistles, field trips, lab supplies, etc. Everyone else will end up at Ed's Discount EducationMart.
An alternative would be how the school district here works - there are a ton of special programs, but they're all part of the district. Your kid can go where-ever they'll accept them (or they qualify, for the "kids needing help" programs), and there's no additional cost to the parents - the government funding goes to where the kids are. Schools compete for students, and programs that are popular get cloned across the district. Currently about half the kids in the district go to schools that *aren't* their default (read: whichever one is closest).
In my experience, the administrators are/were rarely all that great of teachers, they're the ones who play the political game the best.
Of course - if you're good at teaching, you'd want to be a teacher. Admins fall into two groups (a) the teachers who want to be in charge because they hope they can change the crap they're having to put up with, and (b) the teachers who suck at teaching, so move into admin so they can be in charge.
I see you love education, so once you're done bashing the GOP, don't forget to ask Obama why he killed the D.C. voucher program.
That's easy - vouchers are a way for rich parents to get their kids away from the masses using tax dollars. It bleeds the public system, and that doesn't help anyone. (Easy comparison - if the grad rate in the public system is 50% now, what was it before the vouchers and the private schools? Is the rate lower simply because all the smart and rich students left, leaving everyone else to rot in the public system?)
He misses an important point, kids already get most of those things at home. Prisoners, on the other hand, *are* home. Also, I must say $7000 per student per year actually sounds like quite a lot to me. This doesn't seem like an argument to spend more on schools so much as it is one to spend less on prisoners. The reason we give prisons libraries is to try reform prisoners. If that expenditure lowers re-offending and re-incarceration rates by some measurable percentage, then it actually saves some money. It would be interesting to study how effective they are though.
I think the point the superintendent is making is that if he really wants to help his students, the best thing he can do is get them put in prison for a couple years - there's more money available for education in the prison system than the education system.
Japanese comics routinely feature a finite storyline. There's a definite beginning and end. Some have a tendency to stretch out a particular storyline to an absurd length, but at least there's the satisfaction that there will eventually be a true conclusion and that major characters could actually die.
Non-comic comparison of "how to do this right" - Coronation Street. Longest running television show in freakin' history, and it'll likely never end. But whatever happens this week, happens. And you can trace continuity all the way back.
Could you imagine Coronation (or for the US-centric, any soap opera) doing a "reboot"? I've always wanted to see senior citizens rioting.
The problem of a long-running strip is that the characters are stuck in a time warp even while the world moves on around them. Archie is always going to be in a 1950's America that never really existed even as computers and cell phones are dropped in. (or at least that's how it looks at the checkout line. That Archie is even still published is in and of itself a time warp.)
I haven't picked up an Archie in years and years, but my understanding is that they're on a floating timeline, similar to Simpsons. The year is 2011, they're in their senior year, Veronica and Betty fight over Archie. Next year it'll be 2012, they'll *still* be in their senior year, etc, etc.
The theory is that this will keep everything "current" without requiring a change to the actual setting (which, to be frank, would kill the Archie-verse; put them into college and question one becomes: why aren't they just having threesomes?)
Don't forget Transmetropolitan (ran 60 issues and done), Scott Pilgrim (6 volumes and done), Wanted (5 or 6 issues, and *far* superior to the movie), Preacher (can't remember the issue count there). I'll mention Promethia (32 issues) since it's self-contained, but that series is *really* weird.
There's gobs of good comics out there that tell a story and then let it be. They just don't have "Super", "Bat", or "Hero" on the cover.
While Logo is a programming language (I remember using it in grade one, although my school didn't have the robot), at that age it's used far more for "can you explain what you want" than any sort of formalized programming.
If you need a course to teach something, you must not want to do it very much.
You mean like a Mom apparently teaching an entire high school curriculum? I had a handful of excellent teachers in high school but I can't think of any of them who could have taught all the subjects.
Two points:
You'd be surprised what a teacher can do with the curriculum - teachers can be reassigned to a new class yearly (very common for teachers just starting out). So your awesome English teacher this year could very well be sitting in front of the Biology class next year, even if they haven't taken Biology since *their* HS days. A good teacher could very well be able to teach all the subjects (particularly if the class size is two.) Hell, your elementary school teacher had to teach all the subjects, didn't they?
Second, while Mom might not know everything, she apparently knows when she needs support material to look things up.
give him a break: he's being home schooled. Which probably explains word processing being CS...
My high school "Computing Science" curriculum was: CS10: Word Processing, CS20: Spreadsheets, CS30: Databases.
Most high school Comp teachers are just physics teachers who like computers (or one year, an English teacher who was thrown in there to fill the seat). He'll probably get a better education home-schooled, simply because they've already realized they need to find some better manuals/instructors.
(I reserve the right to stop defending the home-schooler if he replies "that's OK, God will show me how to compile".)
Really, if your software doesn't work on Lynx...
I don't think I'm really twisting anything. If he agreed to this theoretical case, then they would be buying him in the exact same way.
As long as U of A isn't paying *anything* extra whatsoever if he's doing the other talk, I think it's fine. Would it be best if both schools cooperated and split the costs? Yeah, but as I said originally, I think this would just be more efficient use of the travel time.
I think the issue is of competition - if I'm paying for Famous Person A to come over and speak, I would be less than thrilled if a rival institution gets him without paying all those costs.
Depends on the job you're applying for, of course. HR may be perfectly willing to overlook the lack of a degree in exchange for an adequate amount of work experience.
This is a long-shot at any reasonable sized company (read: any company where HR is a "department" instead of just a person).
Two reasons - one, the HR department only knows what the paperwork says about the job. And unless you're very lucky, they'll put "yeah, I'd like someone with a degree" on the list (out of habit, if nothing else). Second, most larger companies outsource a lot of the hiring process, which means you've got to sneak past both the company's recruiters, and *then* the HR folks before you get to talk to someone in charge.
Here's a secret - as a "boss type", interviewing sucks - it takes up time, and you end up spending it with some very... interesting people. So while I agree that it's entirely possible to have The Goods without The Degree, you have to remember that there's a lot of people who only *think* the have The Goods, don't have The Degree, and will happily make me lose an hour of my life trying to bullshit through the interview. So when I'm flipping through resumes, you're going to need to stand out over all those folks.
Also worth noting that through the late 80s-90s there was this sense that the future was in computers and business - choosing not to go to university (or at least a college of some sort) was a sign of "dropping out".
Of course, it turned out that we still need plumbers and carpenters and electricians, so now they're making the huge money while I know tons of university-graduated IT pros working call centers.
Around here it's even worse in the medical industry - the government see-saws funding for nurse training wildly, which means we skew from "there are not enough graduates to fill all the positions" to "we don't have enough positions to give all these people jobs".
Me? I'm still watching the perfectly good, pre-HD TV I bought 20 years ago.
I replaced our old TV for two reasons
1. The old TV only supported composite hookups (not even component).
2. The old TV was an absolute bitch to move around and took up a ton of space.
The old TV was donated to a family friend who had been bugging his parents for his own TV.
Got a 40" widescreen, 1080p, for about $800. I don't want 3D, and wasn't going to pay multi-thousands for LED. Works fine, and I expect to keep it for the next decade or so (which is how long the old TV lasted)
Obvious counter - integrate the camera with the IR receiver for the remote. No watching, no control of the TV.
Medical and law schools are a bitch to get into.
True. But if you don't make it into med or law, you still have your bachelor's degree. (And probably an Honors degree, if you were trying to make med/law).
Engineering struck me as rude because they're weeding at the bachelor's level. So if you crash and burn (or just have a "frell it" moment), you've got nothing. (And my university was not generous about transferring engineering courses into other faculties - you could easily end up repeating your entire first year, because "Calculus for Engineers" didn't count as "Calculus".)
That's because they've managed to make it the worst of both worlds.
On the one hand, it's sterile enough that a farmer can't use it for renewable crops - so it's a negative for the farmer.
On the other hand, it's not completely sterile, so stray seeds get blown into fields and ditches and whatnot. Since it's still resistant to chemicals, they've very difficult to get rid of. Not to mention Monsanto likes to sue people who have their Magical Mystery Seeds.
So yes, they've managed to Double Fail.
Why wouldn't it be? You have to be able to justify the expense in your head, and since we firmly squash the "I did it because I love learning about things" answer... it's gotta be for the cash.
The schools encourage this, because rich alumni can be wrung for more money.
Short answer: Writing.
Seriously - copy writing and editing, proofing, speech writing, public relations. There's a lot of jobs out there for someone who can make things sound good. I have two friends in that bent - they work for political parties, non-profits, that sort of thing.
Get a trade profession
That's actually pretty good advice - quite a few of the financially successful folks from my high school either went trades or smaller programs (one works in insurance, only needed two years of coursework to get started).
In practice, a degree is as good as any other, unless you need a specific degree for your career path (doctor, lawyer, librarian). So do what you're interested in.
The joke at my university was "Engineering - the worst four or best seven years of your life."
I had a floormate who did engineering, and the school has no shame about ruthlessly beating the students down - extra courseloads, little to no choice in courses (or even scheduling), and they just keep waving that promise of a big paycheck at the far end.
It maybe one of those bad corrolation dealies (people who can suck it up through a degree would have done better either way) .. but I suspect the paper still helps.
And when you boil it down, that's what it ends up being:
Yes, there are rich authors and poor engineers, but that's statistics for you.