Math is almost entirely rote memorization. So long as you can memorize the appropriate formula and rules pretty much any math question can be answered by reasoning out the solution by implementing the formula appropriately. Being better at math means learning those memorized formulas well enough that you don't have to do each step individually anymore. When I took and failed a College Algebra CLEP test it was because I hadn't needed half or more of those formula's in over a decade and just didn't remember them anymore.
Freud and Stalin were both covered in my public high school courses at the least. I didn't have an in depth knowledge about Freud's work but I knew who he was and why he was significant. And now that I think of it Stalin might have been covered in middle school also. It is odd though that a nurse would not have had a basic psych 101 class before getting her Masters. I know it was a required course for the law enforcement degree I very briefly worked on.
I dated a girl that hadn't read anything that I recognized for high school english. I ended up buying a copy of 1984, brave new world, fahrenheit 451, to kill a mocking bird and a couple others so she'd read them instead of harry potter in her spare time.
Like some other posters have said, home work is supposed to be more about practice than about initial learning. That said I think homework is often over done but it's probably still needed in a well rounded teaching style.
I think a huge part of the difficulty of teaching though is the students attitude. Even one or two trouble makers in a class can screw an entire teaching period. I serve as a Cub Scout Den Leader once a week and it's amazing how difficult it can be to teach a group of cub scouts much of anything. No matter how fun the activity you have planned is and simple the rules at least one kid is assured to be uncooperative and try to spoil it for the others. I never noticed this so much as a child myself which makes me wonder if I was that asshat kid most of the time.
I don't think the athletics programs themselves are purely to blame. I played football my senior and junior years of high school. I wasn't really any good but I had a really fun time, well actually practice sucked but the game nights were enough to make it worthwhile. The coaches would get upset because I played for fun not to boost their career.
I think the emphasis we place on excelling at all these sports to the exclusion of academics is the problem.
Granted I did poorly in school regardless because I wouldn't do any homework. That had nothing to do with sports though. I just didn't see any added value in excelling grade wise. I didn't really want to go to college so scholarships and college admissions wasn't a motivator. I eventually joined the Chair Force as a programmer and got enough experience that now I don't need a degree to find work.
A project I used to work on had to rollback a major release and work on it for an extra year and a half, while I was there, because nobody consultated an actual user. When the release was pushed to the field the users basically completely rejected it, even though our functionals who wrote the requirements were former users. Our functionals had been out of touch with the real userbase for years since they only ever talked to the top level managers of the userbase. And those top level managers hadn't actually used the application in probably ten to fifteen years.
6 days? hahaha Our boezoe of a director pissed off our guru and we spent the next three years trying to figure out how the hell anything worked. In fact we never did get to where we could do anything as well as he did. The entire program is now slowly being replaced by a shiny java script based web application that is promising to be just as absurd to work with and maintain.
Sales and Marketing based mainly on the proven fact that your product is better can only get you so far. It shouldn't but because of the way large business contracts are actually negotiated the presentation of both the product and the salesperson can make a disproportionate difference. And while you observe that women are often prone to making decisions based on properties that you view as illogical men are prone to the same thing, sports cars in all their variety being a great example.
I don't know about all that. Granted my watch is not a "fine" watch but I appreciate the complexity and engineering of a good watch.
I wear a Seiko Kinetic Titanium. I like the look of an analog face marked with ticks's rather than numerals, a second hand instead of a seperate face, and a date dial. It's an electric watch but the energy comes from a pendulum type device inside that charges the battery or capacitor whenever the watch is moved. So I dont' have to wind it unless I don't wear it for more than six months and the battery doesn't need to be replaced every few years. The reason I got a titanium one is the weight difference, which was pretty astounding coming from the view point of previously wearing a stainless steel watch. The only feature I wish it had is a saphire crystal instead of the scratch resistant crystal it has now.
I wouldn't mind owning and wearing a much more expensive watch but it would have to be as simple looking as the one I wear now. I don't want something encrusted with gems or valuable metals, just a very dependable watch that is asthetically appealing to me.
Haha, my wife often asks me to roll my sleeves. I hate wearing my shirts like that myself, it feels weird to me that my sleeves end at such an akward place and add bulk in the elbow. I'd rather wear my sleeves either all the way down or all the way up. Hell when I wore BDU's I wore them with the sleeves down all the time even when I was in the desert.
The majority of women whom I have discussed it with said cologne wasn't worth much in their opinion. Almost invariably they just didn't want a guy that smelled bad. If you are the one guy wearing cologne it might help you stand out a little but it won't necessarily be a point in either direction.
Helping a women positively associate your particular scent, Tide plus Speedstick in my case, is far more important which comes down to not being a jerk. At least one woman I've dated admitted she wouldn't have gone out with me if I had been wearing a common brand of cologne a former boyfriend had worn. Which would seem to indicate that wearing cologne might actually be a handicap in some instances.
I voted for the more open sourced educational material on the internet project. I felt that more government transparency accomplishes nothing for us if the voting majority is still too ignorant to make use of it. And better education for more people helps us as a world in every way. The more higly educated people are in general the more likely they will be to support and push for reforms in other areas. It's like 1984, if you can't express your desire to enact a change you have little chance of success.
The ammount paid in Federal Income tax is deducted from your gross to figure your state gross. It's basically works just like medical and charitable deductions. It's a nice bit of law but I'd rather groceries not be taxed than have that tax break. Partly because it would lower my taxes by a couple hundred bucks, but mainly because I'm opposed to life's necessities being taxed.
$1,500 isn't a bad price at all. A decent Bike with appropriate equipment can cost that much or more. Frankly the one turn-off for me is the relatively low speed. I want an electric transport for that price or close that will get me to work in twenty minutes or less, I live 3.6 miles from my office, which is how fast I was able to do the trip on my pedal powered bike.
Horses are not necessarily environmentally friendly. The amount of vegetation they need to consume just to stay alive requires a large area of specifically cultivated land, or a whole lot more pasture area. They also require regular exercise and room to move freely even when riden daily.
That's partially true I think. The real problem is that people lose the ability to walk on their own and then don't alter their eating habits and so start putting on lots of weight. Even if they do cut back once they realize what's going on they don't have a way to work off the excess and would have to rely on under eating to get rid of the extra. And when you do that it's way to easy to push your body too far and it'll start hoarding fats.
Set it up to constantly crawl the web and download all the latest pr0n, then sort and categorize it all before finally prioritizing and assembling it into a nice presentation mode.
Alabama charges Sales Tax on everything including food. In Montgomery the state and city sales taxes add up to 10%
There was talk of eliminating the sales tax on groceries last year but the catch was that they wanted to repeal the bit of the tax code that let you deduct your federal income taxes from your deductible income for state income tax purposes. That's a faily popular bit of tax code and so I don't think the legislation went anywhere, despite the fact that you'd need to have a rather large income or spend very little on groceries to make it a better deal.
Although if our tax code was simplified and cleaned up to the point that corporations and extremely wealthy individuals could not avoid most of their taxes, funding social programs like universal healthcare would be much easier. I don't believe the poster you replied to meant to say that we shouldn't have universal healthcare, just that reforming our tax system and hopefully government spending in general would help us get to a point where we can do all the social programs without having to fight tooth and nail every inch of the way.
This is true in part but there is another side to it.
One of the things that got us into the recession was banks over leveraging their assets. Meaning they loaned out more money than they had in the form of deposits by as much as 22:1. The buyouts were supposed to help reduce this over leveraging. By putting money into a savings account you boost the banks ability to loan money by more than the amount you deposited. It might be argueable that saving or not is a nuetral action by and large, it's when the ratio of money being saved drops so low that there is more demand for loans than banks can safely leverage against their deposits that we start having problems.
I am not an economist by any means and this is just my uninformed postulating.
In Alabama all sales are subject to sales tax, well gas might not be but it's already got a bunch of taxes on it. I don't know that rent is taxed specifically but there is property taxes which is no doubt being passed on to the renter. Property taxes are pretty minor here though.
This is true, where I grew up there was sales tax but not on groceries. Things like chewing gum, sodas, and prepared foods were all taxed but not the basic food stuffs that you'd be buying to keep from starving.
We have a similiar problem in Alabama. We have state income tax, sales tax and property tax. They raised the sales tax a couple years ago because they weren't getting enough tax revenue accross the board. The problem with that is in Montgomery that put sales tax up to 10%. So lot of people started shopping elsewhere whenever possible and especially for big purchases. So now the City and State are bringing in even less money from sales tax than before. And the whole time our property taxes are still almost non-existent. I pay in a year what my family paid in a month in Ohio for property taxes. Granted my families home is roughly twice the value of my home now but that doesn't account for a 600% difference in taxes.
Personally I feel that the revenue from sales, property and income taxes should all be about the same. That way you don't encourage people and corporations to abuse and exploit the system. Of course the problem in Nevada and Washington is that in order to try and draw more people and hence business to their states they eliminated taxes of one type or another and subsidized it with another, which opens the door for the exploitation. And in times of financial difficulty the more specialized tax systems are at higher risk I should think.
I've always gota good laugh about the flooding along the Ohio River. It happens to some extent somewhere along the river every freaking year. Yet the news would always make a big deal about it washing away a bunch of trailer homes that were stupidly placed right on the bank of the river.
The systems he hacked being Federal does make a difference. It means that the people he pissed off have a lot more clout than a private business would. Being a "significant other" as it were to his own government.
Slashdot Mirror
Math is almost entirely rote memorization. So long as you can memorize the appropriate formula and rules pretty much any math question can be answered by reasoning out the solution by implementing the formula appropriately. Being better at math means learning those memorized formulas well enough that you don't have to do each step individually anymore. When I took and failed a College Algebra CLEP test it was because I hadn't needed half or more of those formula's in over a decade and just didn't remember them anymore.
Freud and Stalin were both covered in my public high school courses at the least. I didn't have an in depth knowledge about Freud's work but I knew who he was and why he was significant. And now that I think of it Stalin might have been covered in middle school also. It is odd though that a nurse would not have had a basic psych 101 class before getting her Masters. I know it was a required course for the law enforcement degree I very briefly worked on.
I dated a girl that hadn't read anything that I recognized for high school english. I ended up buying a copy of 1984, brave new world, fahrenheit 451, to kill a mocking bird and a couple others so she'd read them instead of harry potter in her spare time.
Like some other posters have said, home work is supposed to be more about practice than about initial learning. That said I think homework is often over done but it's probably still needed in a well rounded teaching style.
I think a huge part of the difficulty of teaching though is the students attitude. Even one or two trouble makers in a class can screw an entire teaching period. I serve as a Cub Scout Den Leader once a week and it's amazing how difficult it can be to teach a group of cub scouts much of anything. No matter how fun the activity you have planned is and simple the rules at least one kid is assured to be uncooperative and try to spoil it for the others. I never noticed this so much as a child myself which makes me wonder if I was that asshat kid most of the time.
I don't think the athletics programs themselves are purely to blame. I played football my senior and junior years of high school. I wasn't really any good but I had a really fun time, well actually practice sucked but the game nights were enough to make it worthwhile. The coaches would get upset because I played for fun not to boost their career.
I think the emphasis we place on excelling at all these sports to the exclusion of academics is the problem.
Granted I did poorly in school regardless because I wouldn't do any homework. That had nothing to do with sports though. I just didn't see any added value in excelling grade wise. I didn't really want to go to college so scholarships and college admissions wasn't a motivator. I eventually joined the Chair Force as a programmer and got enough experience that now I don't need a degree to find work.
A project I used to work on had to rollback a major release and work on it for an extra year and a half, while I was there, because nobody consultated an actual user. When the release was pushed to the field the users basically completely rejected it, even though our functionals who wrote the requirements were former users. Our functionals had been out of touch with the real userbase for years since they only ever talked to the top level managers of the userbase. And those top level managers hadn't actually used the application in probably ten to fifteen years.
6 days? hahaha Our boezoe of a director pissed off our guru and we spent the next three years trying to figure out how the hell anything worked. In fact we never did get to where we could do anything as well as he did. The entire program is now slowly being replaced by a shiny java script based web application that is promising to be just as absurd to work with and maintain.
Sales and Marketing based mainly on the proven fact that your product is better can only get you so far. It shouldn't but because of the way large business contracts are actually negotiated the presentation of both the product and the salesperson can make a disproportionate difference. And while you observe that women are often prone to making decisions based on properties that you view as illogical men are prone to the same thing, sports cars in all their variety being a great example.
I don't know about all that. Granted my watch is not a "fine" watch but I appreciate the complexity and engineering of a good watch.
I wear a Seiko Kinetic Titanium. I like the look of an analog face marked with ticks's rather than numerals, a second hand instead of a seperate face, and a date dial. It's an electric watch but the energy comes from a pendulum type device inside that charges the battery or capacitor whenever the watch is moved. So I dont' have to wind it unless I don't wear it for more than six months and the battery doesn't need to be replaced every few years. The reason I got a titanium one is the weight difference, which was pretty astounding coming from the view point of previously wearing a stainless steel watch. The only feature I wish it had is a saphire crystal instead of the scratch resistant crystal it has now.
I wouldn't mind owning and wearing a much more expensive watch but it would have to be as simple looking as the one I wear now. I don't want something encrusted with gems or valuable metals, just a very dependable watch that is asthetically appealing to me.
Haha, my wife often asks me to roll my sleeves. I hate wearing my shirts like that myself, it feels weird to me that my sleeves end at such an akward place and add bulk in the elbow. I'd rather wear my sleeves either all the way down or all the way up. Hell when I wore BDU's I wore them with the sleeves down all the time even when I was in the desert.
The majority of women whom I have discussed it with said cologne wasn't worth much in their opinion. Almost invariably they just didn't want a guy that smelled bad. If you are the one guy wearing cologne it might help you stand out a little but it won't necessarily be a point in either direction.
Helping a women positively associate your particular scent, Tide plus Speedstick in my case, is far more important which comes down to not being a jerk. At least one woman I've dated admitted she wouldn't have gone out with me if I had been wearing a common brand of cologne a former boyfriend had worn. Which would seem to indicate that wearing cologne might actually be a handicap in some instances.
I voted for the more open sourced educational material on the internet project. I felt that more government transparency accomplishes nothing for us if the voting majority is still too ignorant to make use of it. And better education for more people helps us as a world in every way. The more higly educated people are in general the more likely they will be to support and push for reforms in other areas. It's like 1984, if you can't express your desire to enact a change you have little chance of success.
The ammount paid in Federal Income tax is deducted from your gross to figure your state gross. It's basically works just like medical and charitable deductions. It's a nice bit of law but I'd rather groceries not be taxed than have that tax break. Partly because it would lower my taxes by a couple hundred bucks, but mainly because I'm opposed to life's necessities being taxed.
$1,500 isn't a bad price at all. A decent Bike with appropriate equipment can cost that much or more. Frankly the one turn-off for me is the relatively low speed. I want an electric transport for that price or close that will get me to work in twenty minutes or less, I live 3.6 miles from my office, which is how fast I was able to do the trip on my pedal powered bike.
Horses are not necessarily environmentally friendly. The amount of vegetation they need to consume just to stay alive requires a large area of specifically cultivated land, or a whole lot more pasture area. They also require regular exercise and room to move freely even when riden daily.
That's partially true I think. The real problem is that people lose the ability to walk on their own and then don't alter their eating habits and so start putting on lots of weight. Even if they do cut back once they realize what's going on they don't have a way to work off the excess and would have to rely on under eating to get rid of the extra. And when you do that it's way to easy to push your body too far and it'll start hoarding fats.
Set it up to constantly crawl the web and download all the latest pr0n, then sort and categorize it all before finally prioritizing and assembling it into a nice presentation mode.
I'd do it just to make them cry.
Alabama charges Sales Tax on everything including food. In Montgomery the state and city sales taxes add up to 10%
There was talk of eliminating the sales tax on groceries last year but the catch was that they wanted to repeal the bit of the tax code that let you deduct your federal income taxes from your deductible income for state income tax purposes. That's a faily popular bit of tax code and so I don't think the legislation went anywhere, despite the fact that you'd need to have a rather large income or spend very little on groceries to make it a better deal.
Although if our tax code was simplified and cleaned up to the point that corporations and extremely wealthy individuals could not avoid most of their taxes, funding social programs like universal healthcare would be much easier. I don't believe the poster you replied to meant to say that we shouldn't have universal healthcare, just that reforming our tax system and hopefully government spending in general would help us get to a point where we can do all the social programs without having to fight tooth and nail every inch of the way.
This is true in part but there is another side to it.
One of the things that got us into the recession was banks over leveraging their assets. Meaning they loaned out more money than they had in the form of deposits by as much as 22:1. The buyouts were supposed to help reduce this over leveraging. By putting money into a savings account you boost the banks ability to loan money by more than the amount you deposited. It might be argueable that saving or not is a nuetral action by and large, it's when the ratio of money being saved drops so low that there is more demand for loans than banks can safely leverage against their deposits that we start having problems.
I am not an economist by any means and this is just my uninformed postulating.
In Alabama all sales are subject to sales tax, well gas might not be but it's already got a bunch of taxes on it. I don't know that rent is taxed specifically but there is property taxes which is no doubt being passed on to the renter. Property taxes are pretty minor here though.
This is true, where I grew up there was sales tax but not on groceries. Things like chewing gum, sodas, and prepared foods were all taxed but not the basic food stuffs that you'd be buying to keep from starving.
We have a similiar problem in Alabama. We have state income tax, sales tax and property tax. They raised the sales tax a couple years ago because they weren't getting enough tax revenue accross the board. The problem with that is in Montgomery that put sales tax up to 10%. So lot of people started shopping elsewhere whenever possible and especially for big purchases. So now the City and State are bringing in even less money from sales tax than before. And the whole time our property taxes are still almost non-existent. I pay in a year what my family paid in a month in Ohio for property taxes. Granted my families home is roughly twice the value of my home now but that doesn't account for a 600% difference in taxes.
Personally I feel that the revenue from sales, property and income taxes should all be about the same. That way you don't encourage people and corporations to abuse and exploit the system. Of course the problem in Nevada and Washington is that in order to try and draw more people and hence business to their states they eliminated taxes of one type or another and subsidized it with another, which opens the door for the exploitation. And in times of financial difficulty the more specialized tax systems are at higher risk I should think.
I've always gota good laugh about the flooding along the Ohio River. It happens to some extent somewhere along the river every freaking year. Yet the news would always make a big deal about it washing away a bunch of trailer homes that were stupidly placed right on the bank of the river.
The systems he hacked being Federal does make a difference. It means that the people he pissed off have a lot more clout than a private business would. Being a "significant other" as it were to his own government.