Prove to me that a+b=b+a, for all values of a and b.
Don't just say it's obvious. Don't just give a few examples and assume it will always work.
Umm, that's exactly how the vast majority of science works. We observe a few examples and assume it will always work that way (or at least under whatever constraints the theory was set up with).
The GP was talking about fallacies in inductive logic. You respond by requesting a formal proof in deductive logic. These things don't tend to play by the same rules. The vast majority of science is not prepared to (and is rarely required to) be as reductionist as trying to prove something like the commutative property of addition. (By the way, what axioms are we allowed? Peano? Zermelo-Fraenkel? Unless you have a specific purpose in requesting this bizarre exercise in mathematical analysis in a discussion about empirical science, your choice would be arbitrary anyway, since this has very little to do with the logic of empiricism....)
The fact is that people (children in particular) are not equipped to evaluate the truthfulness of every statement.
Umm, what the hell is "truth" as applied to inductive logic as practiced in scientific empiricism?
I definitely agree with your point that we, of necessity, have to trust in the opinion of experts. But the rest of your argument about logic is frankly a non sequitur, given that we're talking about science here, not Russell and Whitehead. Science is not formal logic. But that doesn't mean that the scientific method doesn't make use of logic -- but not really the type you're talking about here.
Aside from your general point about the necessity of relying on authority, I have no clue why this was modded +5 "Insightful".
The problem with removing standardized testing is that you'd revert to a situation where we really had no idea if they were learning anything at all before.
Or, you could just have better teaching evaluations where people who actually know a darn thing about classroom teaching (i.e., NOT most public school administrators) spend more than a few minutes per year in a given classroom, seeing whether learning is actually going on. As someone who has experienced the public school teaching evaluation system and one at an elite private school, I can tell you that nobody knows what's going on in public school classrooms 97% of the year, but everybody at that private school would have known if there were a slacker or just a bad teacher.
Testing was implemented precisely because of your "participation" idea... you had kids getting decent to good to even great grades just for "class participation"... when they really weren't learning the material.
This isn't all the teachers' fault in all cases. There's a lot of pressure put on teachers from administration to promote students, and a lot of pressure put on administrators and teachers from state curriculum boards, which effectively tends to force teachers to ignore true problems of understanding.
My first year teaching, I took over about 1/4 of the way into the fall semester after the previous teacher quit. Why? Because she was supposed to be teaching algebra II to kids who didn't know a darn thing about algebra I (many had had a substitute for most of the year because of the teaching shortages many poor schools have in math and science) and in some cases couldn't even do basic arithmetic. She had previously taught at schools where you'd actually want to fix that problem of understanding first, before trying to shove algebra II into their heads.
So, she first asked whether she could do remedial algebra I work. Nope -- the students had already passed that class, and the state curriculum board had a set of topics that MUST be covered in algebra II. So, then she asked whether she could require students to attend extra sessions before or after school. Nope -- the students had already passed the previous class, so on what basis was she requiring students to do more work on material they supposedly already should know?
Eventually, she attempted to fail about 70% of her students in the first grading period, because, frankly, they deserved to be failed. She was "asked" to change most of those grades. She did, and then she quit a week or two later.
I, being a young and naive teacher, came in and did the best I could. I came up with rote algorithms for students to do the steps to solve algebra II equations, even if they didn't have any conceptual understanding of whatever the heck they were doing or any applications of what it would be used for. But it was enough to satisfy the state curriculum requirements. I still failed some students, but enough could pass a stupid test based on the standardized state requirements that the school was satisfied that I had done my job.
The net result is that many of those students experienced their last math class and went out into the world not having any intuition about mathematics whatsoever or how to use it in their lives. I tried incorporating realistic application problems sometimes (like, I don't know, how to calculate loan payments when we were doing exponential equations), but the state curriculum didn't allow much time for that sort of stuff... some of which was never part of the curriculum, and some of which was assumed to have been taught in 7th grade or something, so I was not allowed to "waste" time on that in algebra II.
So, it's not just individual teachers who are at fault. It's teachers inheriting problems from other teachers, facing administrators who can't let you fail most of the class, facing state curriculum boards who tell you how to allocate 90% of your classroom time, even if it doesn't result in
How would you know which student learned, and which did not, if you do not have testing?
Umm, believe it or not, as someone who has over a decade of experience teaching, you can actually assess students on the basis of things other than performance on paper tests.
What would happen is that a few students do all the work, while the other students slackoff and do nada.
Yeah, there's this thing called: paying attention to what your students are doing in your classroom. As a physics teacher who included a huge amount of lab activities in "conceptual physics" classes, I would continuously wander around the room, talking with groups, asking individual students what's going on, etc. You pretty quickly get a sense of whether someone is actively contributing or whether they're sitting there watching everyone else. And, heck, if you ask them to write a lab report or answer questions as individuals based on what they did after the fact, you can easily tell which students actually understand what's going on.
How do you eliminate bad teachers like the joker I had who wasted 40 minutes of every class talking about his karate lessons and/or last weekend at the bar? You need testing to see if the teacher is really teaching, or not.
Umm, no. Standardized testing can give some sort of general baseline about whether any learning at all is going on, but it's not going to tell the whole story.
Having taught at both public secondary schools and a top-tier elite private secondary school, I can tell you that the solution is easy: real, true professional evaluations by good teachers. Many if not most public school administrators who are tasked with doing teacher evaluations are principals for a good reason -- they often were terrible teachers, and took the administration certification test to get into something they'd be better at. These are the people we have evaluating our teachers... most are hardly experts in classroom teaching.
The elite private school I taught at had one member of the faculty who was the head of teaching evaluations and teaching coordinator. (I forget his actual title, but that's what he was.) He was an actual teacher. Just about everyone at the school acknowledged that he was one of the top teachers at the school. He would come to sit in on maybe a half dozen or more of your classes each year, not just the 45-minute mandatory evaluation done by some anonymous administrator at a public school.
And the other administrators were teachers too. The head of the high school still taught a course. He would come and sit in on at least a few classes with every teacher too. Students were used to these people being around, so they didn't behave weirdly (unlike public school evaluations, where students were usually freaked out when the principal came to class once per year). The head of the high school would actually commonly just drop in with very little notice and see what was going on in a classroom, hang out for 15 minutes or so (he was an English teacher, but loved hanging out with students doing science experiments, because he found it all fascinating)... and frankly, because all of this happened so often, it really wasn't stressful for teachers, because everyone at the school was so comfortable with it.
After you had taught at the school for a few years (and before you had whatever their equivalent of "tenure" was), you were teamed up with one of a handful of very experienced teachers at the school who acted as a mentor for an entire semester or year. (These mentor teachers were usually required to teach one fewer class for their service.) You would do in-depth classroom observations, planning, discussions of teaching improvements and strategies, etc. with this person. And all teachers at the school were required to repeat some lesser version of this program with their peers every 7-10 years or something after the initial intensive one.
I don't argue that the fundamentals of +|-|/|x are essential, and that multiplication and division tables up to 12 are critical to core math skills.
As someone who has actually taught high school math, including trying to teach algebra II students who could not do basic arithmetic (I'm talking things like 12 minus 5), I dare you to try to think of ways to get students to actually understand how algebra works, what its applications are, etc. when they can't manipulate even the most basic equation without a calculator to tell them that 12 - 5 is 7.
Is it possible? Yeah, I managed to do it with some kids. But these kids mostly had a fundamental barrier preventing them from doing just about anything in higher level math, because they simply couldn't manipulate even small numbers on a basic level.
Knowing basic arithmetic is not just memorization -- with it should come some more intuitive understanding about how numbers relate to each other, and elementary schools should try to convey that information along with any memorization task. The issue isn't so much that a particular student doesn't happen to know the exact fact of 12 - 7 as much as that the student has no intuitive grasp of what the relationships between "12," "-," and "7" are, which should at least give him an intuitive sense of what the answer to that relationship might be.
Massive amounts of memorization interferes with cognitive learning.
Not true, unless it becomes too dominant in the curriculum that it doesn't allow time for anything else. I'm not a huge fan of lots of memorization in schools, but actually having some knowledge in your brain is not only incredibly useful for solving problems that require that information, but it also makes it much, much, much more likely that you'll ever meditate upon that information and make higher-level connections within it.
Memorization does not contribute to higher skill sets beyond the basics, cognitive learning allows people to do advanced work with minimal research.
I have no clue how one can do "cognitive learning" without knowing any facts about anything. I've heard hundreds of hours of educational theory BS yammered at me in numerous pedagogy classes and conferences, but the reality is that critical thinking requires something to think about. If your brain is empty, you can never make connections beyond whatever is on the page or the website in front of you, which improverishes your ability to think with any breadth.
Access controls are a must. You can't put a picture that includes a student on a school's public facing website without moving a lot of paper for clearances.... meanwhile the local paper's website has the same photo from the game up that day and the kids themselves post everything onto their facebook pages in realtime. And it simply must be this way, the idea that it could be different could never occur.
Well, a lot of this has to do with federal laws regarding student privacy. Just about anything that happens in school can be considered an "educational record," which the school is required to protect or face potential legal consequences.
So, not just grades or tests, but any assignment, any commentary by a student (online or not) that might be counted as part of a student's grade, any communication with a student regarding anything possibly related to anything academic, any information collected about a student (usually including ID pictures), etc., etc., etc., etc. must in theory be kept secure and private.
That's why schools often have to reinvent the wheel. In the era when students voluntarily give up their privacy everywhere all the time, schools are still required to police it. And that idea, in general, I think is good -- though admittedly the choices schools make to solve such problems are far from efficient or reasonable.
If anyone could recommend something comparable for Calculus, I'd love to hear it.
Well, I'm not sure there's anything quite "comparable" to the Feynman lectures, but if you're looking to go back and really learn calculus thoroughly, I'd highly recommend Tom Apostol's Calculus.
(These are known to some mathematicians affectionately as "Tommy 1" and "Tommy 2.")
Apostol taught the 2-year calculus sequence at CalTech in the 1960s, so he was going after the same audience at a similar time to Feynman -- it's comparable in that way. It is really a textbook, rather than a series of lectures, but the coverage is quite thorough and methodical, and if you do a large selection of the problems, I guarantee that you will understand a lot more about how calculus works than with most more modern textbooks. It's a little dense if you're new to calculus, but I think it makes a great book to go back and relearn the material properly after you have a basic understanding.
Then, I had the choice of doing extra work or slacking off. I generally chose slacking off as doing the extra work wasn't going to get me anywhere.
Of course, that's completely false. Unfortunately, I think you missed the entire point of what "education" is, then. This sort of attitude does more to poison the American educational system than any non-ideal classroom setting could ever do.
And I'm not saying it's entirely your fault -- the American educational system has more-or-less been designed from the beginning to keep learning and independent thought in check, to produce good obedient workers who only do what they are told, etc. If you want an "education," rather than just "schooling," you sort of have to do it yourself.
Anyhow, even outside of education, if you only ever do the minimum of what people ask you to do, you're probably not going to get ahead in life. That's perhaps a greater lesson for kids to learn than the entire rest of the crap taught in schools.
The other issue is that "tracking" -- the educational term for separating students into different levels -- does have bad effects as well as good ones.
Yes, it's great for kids who get into an "honors" track not to have to be in the same classroom as the unruly or dumb kids. It allows them to move ahead more quickly and to make more efficient progress. It also allows slower kids to be with their peers and get more attention as needed.
But numerous studies have shown that tracking decisions are (1) often made based on poor teacher decisions and evaluations, and (2) tracked students often find it very difficult to switch between tracks once they end up there, even if their abilities really change.
In terms of the former, most teachers are not developmental specialists, so their judgments about various abilities and possible tracks for development are often suspect. And that's not even taking into account errors due to teachers' biases for or against particular students, genders, races, etc. (which have been shown to be significant in such decisions in many cases).
As for the latter, different kids have different "spurts" in their intellectual development, just as they have in their physical or social development. If these are ill-timed, students can end up in a lower track and never really be given the opportunity to catch up. I know of quite a few students who had significant (but not insurmountable) learning disabilities, but they were often placed in special ed with kids who were in fact mentally retarded. A student in that scenario has little chance of ever catching back up to a mainstream classroom, even if cognitive abilities significantly improve. On the other hand, a few of my friends were tested for advanced abilities and ended up being put into a special enriching learning class a couple times per week in elementary school. Once a student was in the program, you stayed there -- but, by the end of middle school, it was clear that some of the kids still belonged there, but some of the others really should have been tracked a lot lower again. (It's hard to convince parents that their kid should be removed from a program like that.)
These sorts of problems are behind the strong push for "democratic values" in keeping students all on the same track, which is of course a sort of "lowest common denominator" solution.
A better solution would be to have more flexible boundaries between "tracks," which would more easily allow students to move up and down. Unfortunately, given that various studies show that teachers tend to settle into a particular opinion of a student rather quickly, it can be difficult to get objective opinions to move students around properly. (And no, standardized tests are generally not the best answer, since they tend to be so limited in what they test.)
Unless you have schools where there are effectively NO levels and each student is treated as an individual, you're never going to get all students at appropriate levels. And teaching everyone as an individual makes things really tough for teachers, giving tests, etc., and is basically impossible with the teacher/student ratios we have at most public schools.
I'm not saying there are no solutions. But whether your democratic values keep all students in the same class or whether you aggressively try to track students into different levels, it's still going to hurt a lot of kids and help others.
Yeah, most of the best parts of college are not the classroom stuff at all. I feel sorry for people who miss out on that, as the social stuff is the one part of college you can't come back to 20 years later or even a few years earlier.
That is so true -- and, in fact, I would say it applies much more to intellectual socialization than to things like frat parties and beer binges.
The social aspect of college seems to have shifted over recent decades to encompass more and more non-academic things. (Many studies have shown that students 50 years ago spent a lot more time studying, etc.) But many of the most important aspects of my intellectual development happened in college due to conversations I could have with peers, whether it was stuff related directly to class or random philosophical debates with the guy next door at 3am.
I imagine that it would be a lot harder for a pre-teen or young adolescent in a college to build up the kind of relationships with significantly older students that could result in such intellectual socialization.
This is just a random theory, but I've wondered whether a lot of the awkwardness and "weirdness" we see in prodigies -- and their frequent inability to continue success at the same level as adults -- isn't just because of the lack of normal emotional social skills, but rather because they don't tend to work closely enough with peers at the appropriate level who are working through similar problems as they learn material (even if they are a decade older). Most very young prodigies tend to be taught by adults who often have things sort of "figured out" (or they think they do), but I feel like I learned the most from conversations with other peers in college who were actively trying to figure stuff on the same level... that exploration seems to be an essential skill in moving from the great "absorbing" and problem-solving skills most prodigies possess to the ability to do more creative and productive work as an adult.
Or, to put it another way: eventually, there are no more math books with "challenge problems" in the back, and you need to have some sort of intellectual skills to figure out what to do after that, unless your greatest goal in life is to join MENSA and do puzzles all day. Having productive intellectual socialization with peers in college and graduate school seems, to me, to be one way you learn how to think about the sorts of problems the rest of the world might actually be interested in, once there are no more introverted "academic" challenges to complete.
And you couldn't read ahead because you'd be told that the class hadn't got there yet. One of my friends in grade 7 gave up and taught himself calculus during math class, the teacher didn't dare stop him, but neither did he allow him to complete a single assignment or test before the requisite time, nor could he advance to the next grade early (despite the fact that he was already working himself 5-6 grades ahead of the class)
Our standard system is broken, since in the name of "socialization" we require students to stay with other kids at almost exactly the same age. (Of course, the fact that socialization skills and social maturity advances at vastly different rates in different kids doesn't seem to bother anyone, let alone the academic abilities.)
Nevertheless, there are many strategies for students "stuck" in scenarios like that. In math classes, to take your example, I found working on the "extra exercises" and "challenge problems" to be a useful diversion, and teachers were generally happy to discuss them before/after class, since most teachers like motivated kids, and it's not a lot of extra work to look in their teacher's manual to see the solution.
I found that most teachers were actually pretty accommodating and left me alone to do whatever I wanted to during class, once they realized I already knew the answers to most everything... it would have been more annoying and more disruptive to the class if I were trying to be actively engaged asking challenging questions or keeping other kids from offering answers.
At some point the "challenge problems" became rather boring, so I started working on calculus some years ahead of time during math classes. I'd just bring the book and work on those problems myself while the class did whatever it was doing. When I started asking the teacher questions, he could answer some of them, but eventually he just referred me to the calculus teacher, who was quite helpful and met with me a few times to discuss some problems and concepts.
I know quite a few people who had similar experiences -- the key for kids stuck in such a situation is to encourage them to keep doing their own independent work and not to be afraid of asking teachers about the stuff outside of normal class time. While some teachers were more helpful to me than others, I remember very few who didn't seem thrilled to discuss more advanced topics with me for a few minutes outside of class when they were free.
And as someone who has gone on to teach, I can say that such students often are the best part of your day -- many times, they'll ask questions that will get you to think about stuff in new ways, even if it's dealing with very fundamental topics.
There are really bad parts to our educational system, but someone with the right attitude and motivation can still end up arriving at college well ahead of the pack, even if a few years later than they might have in a more ideal world.
What are you talking about? That's what the entire US public education system is based around: mindless repetition.
I take it you didn't actually read my post, since I actually agree with you. I explicitly stated that tests should be designed to require higher level thinking, rather than regurgitation of facts.
What I said is that memorization often goes hand-in-hand with true, deep understanding of something. If you've thought about something enough to really get it, you'll probably have memorized a lot of the essential components and ideas (whether equations, algorithms, even a poem). On the flip side, if you take the time to memorize something properly over time (and not just in late-night cramming to be forgotten two days later), you'll have that stuff in your head to think over, review, and probably come to a better understanding of over time compared to if you had to look everything up all the time. Whether that thing is an equation or a Shakespeare sonnet, you'll have a better chance of making more connections around it in your brain if it's actually in there (and potentially to make use of in confronting other things, new problems, etc.), rather than just something you can look up on Google.
If you thought I was talking about "mindless repetition," please go back and re-read my post.
He's the guy who writes about how everyone doing space-space at the end of a sentence is "wrong".
Yep, and that article has been completely refuted as BS, at least in terms of its historical claims and the reasons why many modern publishers have mostly adopted a single-space standard. See, for example:
http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324
Why should people who can cram but don't know what they are doing get better marks then people who know what they are doing but are not good at craning.
This is a problem with test design, which has little to do with whether memorization is good or not.
As an undergrad engineering major, most of my advanced engineering courses were open book -- usually not just open book, but open notes, open just about anything you could carry. (One student in one course actually carried in a graduate student and was allowed to make use of him -- they changed the rule to exclude carrying in persons the next year.)
Electronic devices other than calculators were restricted I think, but this was before the age of Wi-Fi, so perhaps even laptops were allowed.
Of course, all of those exams consisted of problems unlike any of us had seen before -- they were designed to test whether you could actually think independently and apply the broad concepts of the course to new problems, rather than just regurgitating information or plugging numbers into an equation. Google would have been of little assistance with such a test.
All of that said, I do still believe that there is value in a test that is NOT open book/open notes/open Google, whatever. Most of the information I have in my head has been through extra levels of processing and understanding. For example, to memorize an equation, I usually tend to know something about why the form of the equation is the way it is, rather than just memorizing the abstract symbols.
These days, it seems many people devalue the skill of memorization, but with memorization comes the ability to internalize the content, to recall it at will, to think through it as a tool when considering various problems, even to meditate upon it. (Medieval monks tended to memorize entire books to gain greater understanding and synthesis of ideas in this way.)
All of this is unlikely if you're just cramming and memorizing the night before, because you're likely to forget all of it next week. But if you're a more mature person with different study habits and learn things gradually, review them, and go over them in preparation for the test yet again, memorization is likely to come more naturally and ultimately reflect a greater internalization of the ideas.
Agnostic means that you don't believe it's possible to know. Atheist means you hold no belief.
False.
Agnostic means that you believe it's impossible to know. There's a distinction. Agnosticism is a positive statement of a belief in a particular philosophical truth about this particular matter.
A person may not believe that it's possible to know simply because he has never considered the question. But an agnostic has actually thought about the question and has acquired a positive belief that he cannot know. Some philosophers have created distinctions about these sorts of things (varying types of "atheists" and "agnostics"), but generally most who use the word "agnostic" assume that there is actually a positive stance on the matter, and not simply ignorance of the matter.
I would like him to be able to access Wikipedia unsupervised
And there's the meat of it. You want to give your kid the internet, but you don't trust him (rightfully so) to judge content.. but you also can't be bothered to do it yourself.
Umm, have you taken a few moments to think about how this would actually work in practice, assuming you allow your kid any freedom to want to explore anything?
Child: "Daddy, I want to be a dentist. Can I search for some files on Wikipedia that might show me some pictures of toothbrushes?"
Dad: "Oh crap... uh, Jr., let Daddy just click back and..."
Your solution would require Dad to require Jr. to exit the room before just about any click on any link, so he can pre-screen any page on Wikipedia that Jr. might want to look at, even something innocuous like a search on "toothbrush."
So you want everyone else on the internet to spend their time and resources essentially babysitting your kid for you.
Well, I think a lot of parents out there would be interested in helping to police such things. It may not be perfect, and different parents may have somewhat different opinions, but a consensus can probably be reached for a lot of parents. (And if not, let them split into groups and make a couple different filters.) Let them create the filter and police it themselves if they want -- it can be crowdsourced among parents. If you don't like the darn thing, turn it off! How is this hurting you?
If you want your kid to be safe on the internet, then monitor his usage, just as you would (hopefully) monitor him in any other public setting.
Yeah, that's true. But in most public settings you don't generally have the expectation that if your child turns the knob and opens an unlocked door labeled with some innocuous word that he'll find people participating in some random sex act. Sure, you might say -- the parent should have looked behind the door first. Well, if you want to teach your child anything about independence and let him have the ability to explore a little bit, it's nice to have a relatively safe place where he can explore without worrying about random encounters with "bad" stuff (however that is defined). There are plenty of places people can take kids with the reasonable expectation that if they go around a corner or open a door, they won't happen upon random sex acts. Is it that unreasonable to let a group of people work on a filter that would at least allow the option for parents to treat Wikipedia as such a place?
I'm not saying that it would be easy to create such a thing or that everybody is going to agree about every image or whatever. But is the idea itself so completely ridiculous? Does it necessarily imply that anyone who would use it is a terrible parent who wants to shirk duties?
Before I even start, let me say -- the copyright system is broken, and the current laws are ridiculous. But that doesn't mean that "copyright" in a general sense is always bad.
And there's a reason why people don't think piracy is a serious crime, and it's because the private ownership is of a copy on their own bits and hard disks. The original remains the private property of the owner.
You do have a point here, but you have to admit that the system has changed just in the past decade or two. Before that, you might have to, say, go to the library and spend an hour photocopying a book to make your own copy; now you download it in a few seconds. Perhaps there is an analogy to be made for those who would photocopy a book for their private use in past years -- but it would be a different thing if that person then started offering copies of that copy to everybody on the street. In the past (and by that, I mean at least 500 years, since mass production as well as and copyright restrictions date back to the late 1400s), people would think that was immoral, even if they didn't think it was criminal. And this myth that protecting ideas even started with the printing press is nonsense, because medieval libraries and ancient libraries were often incredibly secretive and restrictive about their holdings, refusing permission to copy or even access manuscripts depending on who requested it.
I'm not saying any of this is the right way to think or will result in an ideal system, but the ideal of intellectual property goes a long way back in time. And nowadays when you don't even have to bother to photocopy a book or dub a tape or whatever before offering it up for thousands of other people to make more copies... you have to admit this has changed things.
I wonder if you understand the mentality of an artist? The classic artist feels the need to create even if nobody appreciates his work. It's an internal need, not a kind of narcissism. There are plenty of famous artists who never saw a lot of money in their own hands, or were appreciated in their lifetime.
This is a crock of BS dreamt up by a movement called "Romanticism" in the 19th century. Beethoven, Keats, blah, blah, blah.
Here's the reality: before Romanticism created the myth of the "starving artist," everybody had to work for money. Well, except people who were already rich and could spend their leisure time devoting themselves to "the arts." (Do you want to restrict artists to rich people?) The rest of people needed to work for a living. Bach directed music at a bunch of churches, taught a huge number of students, etc. He composed music because it was part of his job, and he was paid for it. Same with Haydn and most every musician who worked before about 1800. (Mozart and a few others tried to work off of commissions, but only major opera composers like Handel ever really made that work -- the rest of the schmucks, like Bach, had to work hard steadily creating music for someone else who paid them.) This is more-or-less true of other arts too: they were either employed by a rich person or a city or something and had a job with them to create art, or they were independently wealthy.
And, despite the myth, most artists since have still had to work for money -- many of those "great composers" of the 1800s like Chopin, etc. vied for publishing contracts. They had to, because rich people were no longer as willing to employ private artists. How else were artists to make any money, which they had to, to... well, eat and stuff.
Now, I'll grant you that many of these people, both present and past, may have had this "need to create" that you talk about. But it's not different from a doctor's desire to heal, an engineer's desire to build stuff and make stuff work, etc.
Lots of people enjoy their work in other professions, too. And many would say they got into them because they had a "calling" (a "vocation") to do so. Should we also not pay t
When you throw around words like "treasonous" in casual conversation about copyright, you demonstrate an utterly extremist view that is easy to ignore.
I do agree with your general point. Inflated rhetoric often tends to alienate people on the other side of an argument, rather than convincing them.
On the other hand, "treasonous" is a perfectly legitimate word to use in a metaphorical sense here. In the U.S., we have a limited legal concept of "treason," given that it is explicitly defined in the Constitution as levying war against the U.S. or aiding those who would do so.
However, we clearly use the word "traitor," which is derived from the same root, to describe all sorts of betrayals all the time. Indeed, the words "traitor" and "treason" both come from Latin "traditur," a verb which means "to hand over," as Judas handed over Jesus to his enemies (which was often the original use of the word).
Given that many special interest groups interested in restricting copyright have effectively declared a sort of legal "war" on American consumers by suing an individual they can find for hundreds of thousands of dollars just for a non-commercial infringement act, I'd say that any person who aids them in their "war" for monetary gain (as is true with a lot of lobbying, directly or indirectly) is, metaphorically, a "traitor" against American consumers.
Hence, "treasonous." If it weren't for the fact that "treason" is often considered a sort of legal jargon in the U.S. due to its Constitutional definition (which actually limited the use of the term to a more narrow meaning at the time), the word wouldn't have inflated connotations at all. It does have those connotations, but its metaphorical use here is perfectly legitimate.
Now, if the GP was actually suggesting that the officials in question are guilty of "treason" according to the legal definition, that's a different issue -- and in that case, he is "off his rocker."
With an MS, you can teach at a community college. A lot of the students there are really trying to learn.
I agree that you may be likely to find more motivated students at some community colleges than at many public schools. Often students at community colleges are really trying to get ahead in life.
my roommate 23 years ago was a computer engineer who graduated near the top of his class at VPI... who did 2 years at a community college, and then 2 years at VPI. Now he has a PhD.
While, this does happen, it is rare. Most community college students never complete a 2-year degree, let alone go on to a 4-year school or a Ph.D.
Arguably the job teaching at a community college is better than that at a 4 year institution,
Only if you want to teach 6-8 courses per semester and still get paid 1/3 of what a tenured prof. at a 4-year college earns to teach 2-3 classes per semester. Don't get me wrong: I admire those who teach at community colleges, and I think it's a great vocation for those dedicated to it. And I think there's a lot less administrative bureaucracy at many community colleges, compared to universities and 4-year colleges. But at the majority of community colleges, you'd be challenged to earn as much as many public school teachers earn with the same credentials, even with twice the teaching load as public schools.
especially if you use your time for such things as textbook / study guide creation. You write the handwritten pages and sketches, and let the publishing company pay for a person to do the compositing / typing / proofing / photoready copy, and you can do quite well.
What the heck are you talking about? Most publishers these days barely bother to proofread properly, let alone type in a book for you. I have no clue what they'd think if someone from a random community college started mailing them handwritten pages and handdrawn sketches.
....or are they simply more cynical about the actual value of strong passwords in the era of large-scale user-database compromises?
I seriously doubt that most young people (i.e. the ones who aren't tech majors) even understand what this means.
Yeah, seriously, who wrote the summary crap? Does anyone really think that most Yahoo mail users under 25 have conversations like this:
-- Reginald, I'm signing up for a new Yahoo account. I must design a new password.
-- Well, Theodore, I read in my issue of Network Security Weekly that lots of account information is compromised everywhere.
-- You know, Reginald, I never thought about thought about it that way. I am feeling rather cynical about strong passwords, given this era of large-scale user-database compromises. As an existential protest against the very concept of password protection in such an age, I think I'll just make my password "password" or maybe "123."
-- Good show, Theodore! Let's celebrate the anarchy of the internet by joining in a medley of Gilbert and Sullivan tunes from HMS Pinafore. Tally ho!
Umm, no. Actual conversations are more like:
-- Yo, Bob, I need a new email. Gonna go with Yahoo, even though it's kinda crap. Damn... I need a password.
-- Woah, Sam, who cares? Pass me a beer.
-- Yeah, you're right. Hell... I'm just gonna type "123." Pass me a beer, too.
Yeah, you can usually still get through from what I understand. But unlike the situation before 2008 or so, the TSA no longer guarantees that they will let you travel without ID. And you'll usually be forced to submit to some "ID verification" steps where they ask you questions to verify who you say you are.
Are you saying that you guys *don't* have to show your ID and boarding pass again at the departure gate immediately before boarding the plane?
It's funny (and not widely known), but you actually didn't need a photo ID to fly domestically in the U.S. until maybe the past couple years. For quite a few years after 9/11, you could just say "Oh, I forgot it," and they'd stick you in an alternate line that usually got you through security faster (though often with an extra patdown).
Technically, there was a legal principle that you had a right to travel freely within the U.S. without having to present "papers" (a la Nazi Germany). People who "forgot" their IDs were usually fine, but the TSA started harassing those who just refused to show ID.
Around four years ago, it started to get harder -- they'd ask for any sort of ID even without a photo: credit card, whatever, and then they'd make mysterious phone calls and generally let you through.
But then around the time of the nude scanner crap, the TSA finally decided it was just going to ignore people's right to free travel and just officially admit that we've descended into the likes of Nazi Germany if we want to travel any distance within the U.S.
For all the harassment that has been shown to people by the TSA, most people are shocked that for about 8-9 years after 9/11, you still didn't even need ID to get on a domestic flight.
One correction: "It's because white flour can be stored longer. It doesn't go rancid as fast because it contains all those fatty acids and other nutrients."
I obviously meant "[White flour] doesn't go rancid as fast because it doesn't contain all those fatty acids and other nutrients found in the whole grain version.
I'm sorry. I thought you actually had a clue about what you were talking about. That's why I actually bothered to have a conversation. Now I'm not so sure.
Bran (what makes grains brown, like brown rice or wheat bread), is fiber. It's what makes grains hard to digest, and completely, 100%, without nutritional benefit.
Umm, wheat bran contains a bunch of B vitamins, among other things. That's, in fact, why white flour is fortified with all those B vitamins in the first place: scientists know they are lost in white flour, and so they are added back in (even more than is usually there). There are also essential fatty acids and other things there. If you ate a whole wheat berry (which wouldn't be pleasant), you'd probably get very little nutrition out of it. But when you grind it up, which is how everyone eats it, you can get some of the nutrients out of it.
The germ, which is also removed from white flour, is fattier and less nutritionally dense than the endosperm.
Nope. Wrong again. This is actually where the most vitamins and minerals in wheat are concentrated, and it is also high in fatty acids.
Seriously, go to any nutrition website and look these things up. It's not that hard. Heck, even take the time to note why the bran and germ are generally removed even today -- it's not for nutritional reasons. It's because white flour can be stored longer. It doesn't go rancid as fast because it contains all those fatty acids and other nutrients. I don't know how dense or brainwashed someone has to be to believe this nonsense.
What's worse, whole grain has the best part, the endosperm, locked away behind a bran coating from being digest, which is what it's there for, to protect the seed (the grass's offspring) in the first place.
No, no, no. Nobody eats whole wheat berries. You grind the damn thing up. That's how you get access to the endosperm, the germ, and everything else. As for other grains, if they aren't ground, they are either spouted or soaked and cooked until they swell and release their interior.
I'll state it outright: aside from calories, and the impact on bowel movement, there's absolutely zero benefit to eating whole grains over processed white flour, in terms of nutrition.
Give me a single citation of a scientific resource where they have actually chemically measured the nutrients in grains where this is shown to be the case. You can't.
By sugar, of course you mean glucose. The benefit isn't in any of the germ or the bran, it's simply in eating less glucose (and I'm not against glucose, but too much is known to be correlated with diabetes). But this only comes into play when one is eating too much glucose and fructose in the first place. A better hedge against diabetes is to be more thoughtful about that than replacing refined grains with whole grains.
Glucose response in the bloodstream is greatly affected by the mix of foods you eat at any given time, not just the sheer quantity of any particular sugar. The glycemic response to whole grains is significantly lower than to "white" grains, presumably because of the mix of other stuff. Regardless of whether this other stuff has significant nutritional value (which it does), the fact is that it significantly changes the way our bodies digest the food, probably in a way that is beneficial.
But as a larger point, of course reducing actual sugar is important first and foremost. Yet, our bodies respond to things like white wheat flour, white rice, potato starch, etc. in ways that are almost equal to a response to sucrose. (Most people don't encounter glucose by itself, except when in a fructose/glucose mix like honey, or when they are bonded together as in sucrose.)
Anyhow...
From the absolute nonsense in your last post, I have to conclude that you are either a troll or are hopelessly lost to some propaganda, so I'm signing off.
It's a myth that whole grains are notably more nutritious than processed white flour.
Hmm... do you have a reliable citation for this claim? Not some paleo or Atkins diet page or something, but something, say, peer-reviewed?
And, yes, in a raw form, whole grains often are hard to digest and release nutrients, but if they are cooked, soaked, or spouted, it gets easier to absorb these things. Regardless, I'd hardly say it's a "myth" that whole grains are more nutritious than processed counterparts. Except for the few vitamins that processed wheat and rice tend to be specifically fortified with, whole grains generally contain more vitamins, minerals, protein, other useful fats, etc. If you eat them raw, you won't absorb most of them, but if you break down the grain by grinding or cooking or soaking (as almost everyone does), you'll get more of the nutrients out.
The primary basis for this assertion is observational studies where people who eat whole grains over processed grains live longer. This shows a correlation, but not a causation.
Okay, fine. I'm on board with your "this is only a correlation" business. Yet, your alternative proposed explanations are again only hypotheses: they don't mean that whole grains don't have any benefits over refined ones.
But, ultimately, grains can't hold a candle to meat when it comes to nutrients
You're comparing apples to oranges here. Grains shouldn't be seen as replacing meat in a diet. If you switch from an omniverous diet to a vegan diet, grains aren't where you need to add foods to replace the meat. Instead, you need to consume many more nutritious vegetables, fruits, legumes, seeds, and nuts, all of which are much more nutritious (in terms of providing vitamins, minerals, and other trace nutrients) than grains. And, notably, most of these are just as or more nutritious by this standard than meat is.
Meat is best at certain vitamins and minerals, as well as a good source for complete protein. If high in fat, it is also a good calorie source. But, with the exception of B12, you can get those vitamins and minerals in plant sources (though admittedly you have to work harder for some of them, particularly if you won't drink milk or eat any eggs). As for protein, a mix of grains, legumes, seeds, and nuts will give you a pretty good source of protein too. For the rest of the trace nutrients, vegetables and fruits are better than meat or grains.
That's why flour and bread in America are generally fortified. Back at the turn of the century, Americans were extremely malnourished, and bread was the primary culprit.
I'm not sure why you bring up this nice story, which I'm well aware of. But it has nothing to do with a discussion of whole grains, since Americans (even poor ones) had mostly been eating white flour for long before 1900. This malnutrition says nothing about whether whole grains are better or worse.
If you want to argue that placing too much emphasis on grains in the diet is a problem, I'll gladly agree with you. Grains are mostly for calories, not for (most) nutrients. But if you are going to eat grains, which most hard-working people in the past had to do to get enough calories, whole grains are probably better in part because they are harder to digest. While some of the benefits of whole grains are in question or unproven, I do think a link between diabetes and processed grains makes a lot of sense, given the way processed white flour and rice is almost like pure sugar in the way it screws with our body chemistry. For that reason alone, I'd say whole grains are usually a better choice.
So, when I say "fake processed shit", I'm including things you might be mistaking for being healthy.
Great. So, the fact that I bake my own bread, which generally includes at least a half dozen whole grains plus some seeds or some other stuff is no better than Wonderbread. Forget about cooking up some quinoa -- I'm just as good eating that cheap white rice. Thanks for educating me.
well, perhaps that's the moral. or perhaps it should be that a vegan that won't eat carrots doesn't represent the vegan community at all.
Or perhaps the moral is that we generally eat food that was previously alive. Where we draw lines about exploiting that "life" is usually based on arbitrary divisions projecting human feelings and morals onto things that have a very different experience of the world.
For most of the vegans I know who have a problem eating honey, I think the carrot really represents a conundrum. It is really a greater problem to exploit the work of bees than it is to rip a living organism out of the ground and kill it completely to consume it? Some people say that the bees still have a nervous system that can feel pain or something and harming or exploiting them is a problem... but have you never had a garden and stepped on a plant, or tore a leaf, or made some sort of other damage or barrier or whatever to the plant's growth? The plant will respond (albeit more slowly). It is a living thing, and it has systems designed to react to the environment, as all animals do.
The line is always arbitrary. For most people in my experience, it's primarily about "cute and cuddly" things more than anything else... and I'm not sure that's a good thing to build a moral philosophy on.
Slashdot Mirror
Prove to me that a+b=b+a, for all values of a and b.
Don't just say it's obvious. Don't just give a few examples and assume it will always work.
Umm, that's exactly how the vast majority of science works. We observe a few examples and assume it will always work that way (or at least under whatever constraints the theory was set up with).
The GP was talking about fallacies in inductive logic. You respond by requesting a formal proof in deductive logic. These things don't tend to play by the same rules. The vast majority of science is not prepared to (and is rarely required to) be as reductionist as trying to prove something like the commutative property of addition. (By the way, what axioms are we allowed? Peano? Zermelo-Fraenkel? Unless you have a specific purpose in requesting this bizarre exercise in mathematical analysis in a discussion about empirical science, your choice would be arbitrary anyway, since this has very little to do with the logic of empiricism....)
The fact is that people (children in particular) are not equipped to evaluate the truthfulness of every statement.
Umm, what the hell is "truth" as applied to inductive logic as practiced in scientific empiricism?
I definitely agree with your point that we, of necessity, have to trust in the opinion of experts. But the rest of your argument about logic is frankly a non sequitur, given that we're talking about science here, not Russell and Whitehead. Science is not formal logic. But that doesn't mean that the scientific method doesn't make use of logic -- but not really the type you're talking about here.
Aside from your general point about the necessity of relying on authority, I have no clue why this was modded +5 "Insightful".
The problem with removing standardized testing is that you'd revert to a situation where we really had no idea if they were learning anything at all before.
Or, you could just have better teaching evaluations where people who actually know a darn thing about classroom teaching (i.e., NOT most public school administrators) spend more than a few minutes per year in a given classroom, seeing whether learning is actually going on. As someone who has experienced the public school teaching evaluation system and one at an elite private school, I can tell you that nobody knows what's going on in public school classrooms 97% of the year, but everybody at that private school would have known if there were a slacker or just a bad teacher.
Testing was implemented precisely because of your "participation" idea... you had kids getting decent to good to even great grades just for "class participation"... when they really weren't learning the material.
This isn't all the teachers' fault in all cases. There's a lot of pressure put on teachers from administration to promote students, and a lot of pressure put on administrators and teachers from state curriculum boards, which effectively tends to force teachers to ignore true problems of understanding.
My first year teaching, I took over about 1/4 of the way into the fall semester after the previous teacher quit. Why? Because she was supposed to be teaching algebra II to kids who didn't know a darn thing about algebra I (many had had a substitute for most of the year because of the teaching shortages many poor schools have in math and science) and in some cases couldn't even do basic arithmetic. She had previously taught at schools where you'd actually want to fix that problem of understanding first, before trying to shove algebra II into their heads.
So, she first asked whether she could do remedial algebra I work. Nope -- the students had already passed that class, and the state curriculum board had a set of topics that MUST be covered in algebra II. So, then she asked whether she could require students to attend extra sessions before or after school. Nope -- the students had already passed the previous class, so on what basis was she requiring students to do more work on material they supposedly already should know?
Eventually, she attempted to fail about 70% of her students in the first grading period, because, frankly, they deserved to be failed. She was "asked" to change most of those grades. She did, and then she quit a week or two later.
I, being a young and naive teacher, came in and did the best I could. I came up with rote algorithms for students to do the steps to solve algebra II equations, even if they didn't have any conceptual understanding of whatever the heck they were doing or any applications of what it would be used for. But it was enough to satisfy the state curriculum requirements. I still failed some students, but enough could pass a stupid test based on the standardized state requirements that the school was satisfied that I had done my job.
The net result is that many of those students experienced their last math class and went out into the world not having any intuition about mathematics whatsoever or how to use it in their lives. I tried incorporating realistic application problems sometimes (like, I don't know, how to calculate loan payments when we were doing exponential equations), but the state curriculum didn't allow much time for that sort of stuff... some of which was never part of the curriculum, and some of which was assumed to have been taught in 7th grade or something, so I was not allowed to "waste" time on that in algebra II.
So, it's not just individual teachers who are at fault. It's teachers inheriting problems from other teachers, facing administrators who can't let you fail most of the class, facing state curriculum boards who tell you how to allocate 90% of your classroom time, even if it doesn't result in
How would you know which student learned, and which did not, if you do not have testing?
Umm, believe it or not, as someone who has over a decade of experience teaching, you can actually assess students on the basis of things other than performance on paper tests.
What would happen is that a few students do all the work, while the other students slackoff and do nada.
Yeah, there's this thing called: paying attention to what your students are doing in your classroom. As a physics teacher who included a huge amount of lab activities in "conceptual physics" classes, I would continuously wander around the room, talking with groups, asking individual students what's going on, etc. You pretty quickly get a sense of whether someone is actively contributing or whether they're sitting there watching everyone else. And, heck, if you ask them to write a lab report or answer questions as individuals based on what they did after the fact, you can easily tell which students actually understand what's going on.
How do you eliminate bad teachers like the joker I had who wasted 40 minutes of every class talking about his karate lessons and/or last weekend at the bar? You need testing to see if the teacher is really teaching, or not.
Umm, no. Standardized testing can give some sort of general baseline about whether any learning at all is going on, but it's not going to tell the whole story.
Having taught at both public secondary schools and a top-tier elite private secondary school, I can tell you that the solution is easy: real, true professional evaluations by good teachers. Many if not most public school administrators who are tasked with doing teacher evaluations are principals for a good reason -- they often were terrible teachers, and took the administration certification test to get into something they'd be better at. These are the people we have evaluating our teachers... most are hardly experts in classroom teaching.
The elite private school I taught at had one member of the faculty who was the head of teaching evaluations and teaching coordinator. (I forget his actual title, but that's what he was.) He was an actual teacher. Just about everyone at the school acknowledged that he was one of the top teachers at the school. He would come to sit in on maybe a half dozen or more of your classes each year, not just the 45-minute mandatory evaluation done by some anonymous administrator at a public school.
And the other administrators were teachers too. The head of the high school still taught a course. He would come and sit in on at least a few classes with every teacher too. Students were used to these people being around, so they didn't behave weirdly (unlike public school evaluations, where students were usually freaked out when the principal came to class once per year). The head of the high school would actually commonly just drop in with very little notice and see what was going on in a classroom, hang out for 15 minutes or so (he was an English teacher, but loved hanging out with students doing science experiments, because he found it all fascinating)... and frankly, because all of this happened so often, it really wasn't stressful for teachers, because everyone at the school was so comfortable with it.
After you had taught at the school for a few years (and before you had whatever their equivalent of "tenure" was), you were teamed up with one of a handful of very experienced teachers at the school who acted as a mentor for an entire semester or year. (These mentor teachers were usually required to teach one fewer class for their service.) You would do in-depth classroom observations, planning, discussions of teaching improvements and strategies, etc. with this person. And all teachers at the school were required to repeat some lesser version of this program with their peers every 7-10 years or something after the initial intensive one.
You ca
I don't argue that the fundamentals of +|-|/|x are essential, and that multiplication and division tables up to 12 are critical to core math skills.
As someone who has actually taught high school math, including trying to teach algebra II students who could not do basic arithmetic (I'm talking things like 12 minus 5), I dare you to try to think of ways to get students to actually understand how algebra works, what its applications are, etc. when they can't manipulate even the most basic equation without a calculator to tell them that 12 - 5 is 7.
Is it possible? Yeah, I managed to do it with some kids. But these kids mostly had a fundamental barrier preventing them from doing just about anything in higher level math, because they simply couldn't manipulate even small numbers on a basic level.
Knowing basic arithmetic is not just memorization -- with it should come some more intuitive understanding about how numbers relate to each other, and elementary schools should try to convey that information along with any memorization task. The issue isn't so much that a particular student doesn't happen to know the exact fact of 12 - 7 as much as that the student has no intuitive grasp of what the relationships between "12," "-," and "7" are, which should at least give him an intuitive sense of what the answer to that relationship might be.
Massive amounts of memorization interferes with cognitive learning.
Not true, unless it becomes too dominant in the curriculum that it doesn't allow time for anything else. I'm not a huge fan of lots of memorization in schools, but actually having some knowledge in your brain is not only incredibly useful for solving problems that require that information, but it also makes it much, much, much more likely that you'll ever meditate upon that information and make higher-level connections within it.
Memorization does not contribute to higher skill sets beyond the basics, cognitive learning allows people to do advanced work with minimal research.
I have no clue how one can do "cognitive learning" without knowing any facts about anything. I've heard hundreds of hours of educational theory BS yammered at me in numerous pedagogy classes and conferences, but the reality is that critical thinking requires something to think about. If your brain is empty, you can never make connections beyond whatever is on the page or the website in front of you, which improverishes your ability to think with any breadth.
I'm sorry, but you assertions are a load of crap.
Access controls are a must. You can't put a picture that includes a student on a school's public facing website without moving a lot of paper for clearances.... meanwhile the local paper's website has the same photo from the game up that day and the kids themselves post everything onto their facebook pages in realtime. And it simply must be this way, the idea that it could be different could never occur.
Well, a lot of this has to do with federal laws regarding student privacy. Just about anything that happens in school can be considered an "educational record," which the school is required to protect or face potential legal consequences.
So, not just grades or tests, but any assignment, any commentary by a student (online or not) that might be counted as part of a student's grade, any communication with a student regarding anything possibly related to anything academic, any information collected about a student (usually including ID pictures), etc., etc., etc., etc. must in theory be kept secure and private.
That's why schools often have to reinvent the wheel. In the era when students voluntarily give up their privacy everywhere all the time, schools are still required to police it. And that idea, in general, I think is good -- though admittedly the choices schools make to solve such problems are far from efficient or reasonable.
If anyone could recommend something comparable for Calculus, I'd love to hear it.
Well, I'm not sure there's anything quite "comparable" to the Feynman lectures, but if you're looking to go back and really learn calculus thoroughly, I'd highly recommend Tom Apostol's Calculus.
http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Vol-One-Variable-Introduction-Algebra/dp/0471000051
http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Vol-Multi-Variable-Applications-Differential/dp/0471000078
(These are known to some mathematicians affectionately as "Tommy 1" and "Tommy 2.")
Apostol taught the 2-year calculus sequence at CalTech in the 1960s, so he was going after the same audience at a similar time to Feynman -- it's comparable in that way. It is really a textbook, rather than a series of lectures, but the coverage is quite thorough and methodical, and if you do a large selection of the problems, I guarantee that you will understand a lot more about how calculus works than with most more modern textbooks. It's a little dense if you're new to calculus, but I think it makes a great book to go back and relearn the material properly after you have a basic understanding.
Then, I had the choice of doing extra work or slacking off. I generally chose slacking off as doing the extra work wasn't going to get me anywhere.
Of course, that's completely false. Unfortunately, I think you missed the entire point of what "education" is, then. This sort of attitude does more to poison the American educational system than any non-ideal classroom setting could ever do.
And I'm not saying it's entirely your fault -- the American educational system has more-or-less been designed from the beginning to keep learning and independent thought in check, to produce good obedient workers who only do what they are told, etc. If you want an "education," rather than just "schooling," you sort of have to do it yourself.
Anyhow, even outside of education, if you only ever do the minimum of what people ask you to do, you're probably not going to get ahead in life. That's perhaps a greater lesson for kids to learn than the entire rest of the crap taught in schools.
The other issue is that "tracking" -- the educational term for separating students into different levels -- does have bad effects as well as good ones.
Yes, it's great for kids who get into an "honors" track not to have to be in the same classroom as the unruly or dumb kids. It allows them to move ahead more quickly and to make more efficient progress. It also allows slower kids to be with their peers and get more attention as needed.
But numerous studies have shown that tracking decisions are (1) often made based on poor teacher decisions and evaluations, and (2) tracked students often find it very difficult to switch between tracks once they end up there, even if their abilities really change.
In terms of the former, most teachers are not developmental specialists, so their judgments about various abilities and possible tracks for development are often suspect. And that's not even taking into account errors due to teachers' biases for or against particular students, genders, races, etc. (which have been shown to be significant in such decisions in many cases).
As for the latter, different kids have different "spurts" in their intellectual development, just as they have in their physical or social development. If these are ill-timed, students can end up in a lower track and never really be given the opportunity to catch up. I know of quite a few students who had significant (but not insurmountable) learning disabilities, but they were often placed in special ed with kids who were in fact mentally retarded. A student in that scenario has little chance of ever catching back up to a mainstream classroom, even if cognitive abilities significantly improve. On the other hand, a few of my friends were tested for advanced abilities and ended up being put into a special enriching learning class a couple times per week in elementary school. Once a student was in the program, you stayed there -- but, by the end of middle school, it was clear that some of the kids still belonged there, but some of the others really should have been tracked a lot lower again. (It's hard to convince parents that their kid should be removed from a program like that.)
These sorts of problems are behind the strong push for "democratic values" in keeping students all on the same track, which is of course a sort of "lowest common denominator" solution.
A better solution would be to have more flexible boundaries between "tracks," which would more easily allow students to move up and down. Unfortunately, given that various studies show that teachers tend to settle into a particular opinion of a student rather quickly, it can be difficult to get objective opinions to move students around properly. (And no, standardized tests are generally not the best answer, since they tend to be so limited in what they test.)
Unless you have schools where there are effectively NO levels and each student is treated as an individual, you're never going to get all students at appropriate levels. And teaching everyone as an individual makes things really tough for teachers, giving tests, etc., and is basically impossible with the teacher/student ratios we have at most public schools.
I'm not saying there are no solutions. But whether your democratic values keep all students in the same class or whether you aggressively try to track students into different levels, it's still going to hurt a lot of kids and help others.
Yeah, most of the best parts of college are not the classroom stuff at all. I feel sorry for people who miss out on that, as the social stuff is the one part of college you can't come back to 20 years later or even a few years earlier.
That is so true -- and, in fact, I would say it applies much more to intellectual socialization than to things like frat parties and beer binges.
The social aspect of college seems to have shifted over recent decades to encompass more and more non-academic things. (Many studies have shown that students 50 years ago spent a lot more time studying, etc.) But many of the most important aspects of my intellectual development happened in college due to conversations I could have with peers, whether it was stuff related directly to class or random philosophical debates with the guy next door at 3am.
I imagine that it would be a lot harder for a pre-teen or young adolescent in a college to build up the kind of relationships with significantly older students that could result in such intellectual socialization.
This is just a random theory, but I've wondered whether a lot of the awkwardness and "weirdness" we see in prodigies -- and their frequent inability to continue success at the same level as adults -- isn't just because of the lack of normal emotional social skills, but rather because they don't tend to work closely enough with peers at the appropriate level who are working through similar problems as they learn material (even if they are a decade older). Most very young prodigies tend to be taught by adults who often have things sort of "figured out" (or they think they do), but I feel like I learned the most from conversations with other peers in college who were actively trying to figure stuff on the same level... that exploration seems to be an essential skill in moving from the great "absorbing" and problem-solving skills most prodigies possess to the ability to do more creative and productive work as an adult.
Or, to put it another way: eventually, there are no more math books with "challenge problems" in the back, and you need to have some sort of intellectual skills to figure out what to do after that, unless your greatest goal in life is to join MENSA and do puzzles all day. Having productive intellectual socialization with peers in college and graduate school seems, to me, to be one way you learn how to think about the sorts of problems the rest of the world might actually be interested in, once there are no more introverted "academic" challenges to complete.
And you couldn't read ahead because you'd be told that the class hadn't got there yet. One of my friends in grade 7 gave up and taught himself calculus during math class, the teacher didn't dare stop him, but neither did he allow him to complete a single assignment or test before the requisite time, nor could he advance to the next grade early (despite the fact that he was already working himself 5-6 grades ahead of the class)
Our standard system is broken, since in the name of "socialization" we require students to stay with other kids at almost exactly the same age. (Of course, the fact that socialization skills and social maturity advances at vastly different rates in different kids doesn't seem to bother anyone, let alone the academic abilities.)
Nevertheless, there are many strategies for students "stuck" in scenarios like that. In math classes, to take your example, I found working on the "extra exercises" and "challenge problems" to be a useful diversion, and teachers were generally happy to discuss them before/after class, since most teachers like motivated kids, and it's not a lot of extra work to look in their teacher's manual to see the solution.
I found that most teachers were actually pretty accommodating and left me alone to do whatever I wanted to during class, once they realized I already knew the answers to most everything... it would have been more annoying and more disruptive to the class if I were trying to be actively engaged asking challenging questions or keeping other kids from offering answers.
At some point the "challenge problems" became rather boring, so I started working on calculus some years ahead of time during math classes. I'd just bring the book and work on those problems myself while the class did whatever it was doing. When I started asking the teacher questions, he could answer some of them, but eventually he just referred me to the calculus teacher, who was quite helpful and met with me a few times to discuss some problems and concepts.
I know quite a few people who had similar experiences -- the key for kids stuck in such a situation is to encourage them to keep doing their own independent work and not to be afraid of asking teachers about the stuff outside of normal class time. While some teachers were more helpful to me than others, I remember very few who didn't seem thrilled to discuss more advanced topics with me for a few minutes outside of class when they were free.
And as someone who has gone on to teach, I can say that such students often are the best part of your day -- many times, they'll ask questions that will get you to think about stuff in new ways, even if it's dealing with very fundamental topics.
There are really bad parts to our educational system, but someone with the right attitude and motivation can still end up arriving at college well ahead of the pack, even if a few years later than they might have in a more ideal world.
What are you talking about? That's what the entire US public education system is based around: mindless repetition.
I take it you didn't actually read my post, since I actually agree with you. I explicitly stated that tests should be designed to require higher level thinking, rather than regurgitation of facts.
What I said is that memorization often goes hand-in-hand with true, deep understanding of something. If you've thought about something enough to really get it, you'll probably have memorized a lot of the essential components and ideas (whether equations, algorithms, even a poem). On the flip side, if you take the time to memorize something properly over time (and not just in late-night cramming to be forgotten two days later), you'll have that stuff in your head to think over, review, and probably come to a better understanding of over time compared to if you had to look everything up all the time. Whether that thing is an equation or a Shakespeare sonnet, you'll have a better chance of making more connections around it in your brain if it's actually in there (and potentially to make use of in confronting other things, new problems, etc.), rather than just something you can look up on Google.
If you thought I was talking about "mindless repetition," please go back and re-read my post.
He's the guy who writes about how everyone doing space-space at the end of a sentence is "wrong".
Yep, and that article has been completely refuted as BS, at least in terms of its historical claims and the reasons why many modern publishers have mostly adopted a single-space standard. See, for example: http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324
Basically, he's a famous Troll.
Pretty much.
Why should people who can cram but don't know what they are doing get better marks then people who know what they are doing but are not good at craning.
This is a problem with test design, which has little to do with whether memorization is good or not.
As an undergrad engineering major, most of my advanced engineering courses were open book -- usually not just open book, but open notes, open just about anything you could carry. (One student in one course actually carried in a graduate student and was allowed to make use of him -- they changed the rule to exclude carrying in persons the next year.)
Electronic devices other than calculators were restricted I think, but this was before the age of Wi-Fi, so perhaps even laptops were allowed.
Of course, all of those exams consisted of problems unlike any of us had seen before -- they were designed to test whether you could actually think independently and apply the broad concepts of the course to new problems, rather than just regurgitating information or plugging numbers into an equation. Google would have been of little assistance with such a test.
All of that said, I do still believe that there is value in a test that is NOT open book/open notes/open Google, whatever. Most of the information I have in my head has been through extra levels of processing and understanding. For example, to memorize an equation, I usually tend to know something about why the form of the equation is the way it is, rather than just memorizing the abstract symbols.
These days, it seems many people devalue the skill of memorization, but with memorization comes the ability to internalize the content, to recall it at will, to think through it as a tool when considering various problems, even to meditate upon it. (Medieval monks tended to memorize entire books to gain greater understanding and synthesis of ideas in this way.)
All of this is unlikely if you're just cramming and memorizing the night before, because you're likely to forget all of it next week. But if you're a more mature person with different study habits and learn things gradually, review them, and go over them in preparation for the test yet again, memorization is likely to come more naturally and ultimately reflect a greater internalization of the ideas.
False.
Agnostic means that you don't believe it's possible to know. Atheist means you hold no belief.
False.
Agnostic means that you believe it's impossible to know. There's a distinction. Agnosticism is a positive statement of a belief in a particular philosophical truth about this particular matter.
A person may not believe that it's possible to know simply because he has never considered the question. But an agnostic has actually thought about the question and has acquired a positive belief that he cannot know. Some philosophers have created distinctions about these sorts of things (varying types of "atheists" and "agnostics"), but generally most who use the word "agnostic" assume that there is actually a positive stance on the matter, and not simply ignorance of the matter.
I would like him to be able to access Wikipedia unsupervised
And there's the meat of it. You want to give your kid the internet, but you don't trust him (rightfully so) to judge content.. but you also can't be bothered to do it yourself.
Umm, have you taken a few moments to think about how this would actually work in practice, assuming you allow your kid any freedom to want to explore anything? Child: "Daddy, I want to be a dentist. Can I search for some files on Wikipedia that might show me some pictures of toothbrushes?"
Dad: "Umm, sure..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=images&search=toothbrush&fulltext=Search
Dad: "Oh crap... uh, Jr., let Daddy just click back and..."
Your solution would require Dad to require Jr. to exit the room before just about any click on any link, so he can pre-screen any page on Wikipedia that Jr. might want to look at, even something innocuous like a search on "toothbrush."
So you want everyone else on the internet to spend their time and resources essentially babysitting your kid for you.
Well, I think a lot of parents out there would be interested in helping to police such things. It may not be perfect, and different parents may have somewhat different opinions, but a consensus can probably be reached for a lot of parents. (And if not, let them split into groups and make a couple different filters.) Let them create the filter and police it themselves if they want -- it can be crowdsourced among parents. If you don't like the darn thing, turn it off! How is this hurting you?
If you want your kid to be safe on the internet, then monitor his usage, just as you would (hopefully) monitor him in any other public setting.
Yeah, that's true. But in most public settings you don't generally have the expectation that if your child turns the knob and opens an unlocked door labeled with some innocuous word that he'll find people participating in some random sex act. Sure, you might say -- the parent should have looked behind the door first. Well, if you want to teach your child anything about independence and let him have the ability to explore a little bit, it's nice to have a relatively safe place where he can explore without worrying about random encounters with "bad" stuff (however that is defined). There are plenty of places people can take kids with the reasonable expectation that if they go around a corner or open a door, they won't happen upon random sex acts. Is it that unreasonable to let a group of people work on a filter that would at least allow the option for parents to treat Wikipedia as such a place?
I'm not saying that it would be easy to create such a thing or that everybody is going to agree about every image or whatever. But is the idea itself so completely ridiculous? Does it necessarily imply that anyone who would use it is a terrible parent who wants to shirk duties?
Before I even start, let me say -- the copyright system is broken, and the current laws are ridiculous. But that doesn't mean that "copyright" in a general sense is always bad.
And there's a reason why people don't think piracy is a serious crime, and it's because the private ownership is of a copy on their own bits and hard disks. The original remains the private property of the owner.
You do have a point here, but you have to admit that the system has changed just in the past decade or two. Before that, you might have to, say, go to the library and spend an hour photocopying a book to make your own copy; now you download it in a few seconds. Perhaps there is an analogy to be made for those who would photocopy a book for their private use in past years -- but it would be a different thing if that person then started offering copies of that copy to everybody on the street. In the past (and by that, I mean at least 500 years, since mass production as well as and copyright restrictions date back to the late 1400s), people would think that was immoral, even if they didn't think it was criminal. And this myth that protecting ideas even started with the printing press is nonsense, because medieval libraries and ancient libraries were often incredibly secretive and restrictive about their holdings, refusing permission to copy or even access manuscripts depending on who requested it.
I'm not saying any of this is the right way to think or will result in an ideal system, but the ideal of intellectual property goes a long way back in time. And nowadays when you don't even have to bother to photocopy a book or dub a tape or whatever before offering it up for thousands of other people to make more copies... you have to admit this has changed things.
I wonder if you understand the mentality of an artist? The classic artist feels the need to create even if nobody appreciates his work. It's an internal need, not a kind of narcissism. There are plenty of famous artists who never saw a lot of money in their own hands, or were appreciated in their lifetime.
This is a crock of BS dreamt up by a movement called "Romanticism" in the 19th century. Beethoven, Keats, blah, blah, blah.
Here's the reality: before Romanticism created the myth of the "starving artist," everybody had to work for money. Well, except people who were already rich and could spend their leisure time devoting themselves to "the arts." (Do you want to restrict artists to rich people?) The rest of people needed to work for a living. Bach directed music at a bunch of churches, taught a huge number of students, etc. He composed music because it was part of his job, and he was paid for it. Same with Haydn and most every musician who worked before about 1800. (Mozart and a few others tried to work off of commissions, but only major opera composers like Handel ever really made that work -- the rest of the schmucks, like Bach, had to work hard steadily creating music for someone else who paid them.) This is more-or-less true of other arts too: they were either employed by a rich person or a city or something and had a job with them to create art, or they were independently wealthy.
And, despite the myth, most artists since have still had to work for money -- many of those "great composers" of the 1800s like Chopin, etc. vied for publishing contracts. They had to, because rich people were no longer as willing to employ private artists. How else were artists to make any money, which they had to, to... well, eat and stuff.
Now, I'll grant you that many of these people, both present and past, may have had this "need to create" that you talk about. But it's not different from a doctor's desire to heal, an engineer's desire to build stuff and make stuff work, etc.
Lots of people enjoy their work in other professions, too. And many would say they got into them because they had a "calling" (a "vocation") to do so. Should we also not pay t
When you throw around words like "treasonous" in casual conversation about copyright, you demonstrate an utterly extremist view that is easy to ignore.
I do agree with your general point. Inflated rhetoric often tends to alienate people on the other side of an argument, rather than convincing them.
On the other hand, "treasonous" is a perfectly legitimate word to use in a metaphorical sense here. In the U.S., we have a limited legal concept of "treason," given that it is explicitly defined in the Constitution as levying war against the U.S. or aiding those who would do so.
However, we clearly use the word "traitor," which is derived from the same root, to describe all sorts of betrayals all the time. Indeed, the words "traitor" and "treason" both come from Latin "traditur," a verb which means "to hand over," as Judas handed over Jesus to his enemies (which was often the original use of the word).
Given that many special interest groups interested in restricting copyright have effectively declared a sort of legal "war" on American consumers by suing an individual they can find for hundreds of thousands of dollars just for a non-commercial infringement act, I'd say that any person who aids them in their "war" for monetary gain (as is true with a lot of lobbying, directly or indirectly) is, metaphorically, a "traitor" against American consumers.
Hence, "treasonous." If it weren't for the fact that "treason" is often considered a sort of legal jargon in the U.S. due to its Constitutional definition (which actually limited the use of the term to a more narrow meaning at the time), the word wouldn't have inflated connotations at all. It does have those connotations, but its metaphorical use here is perfectly legitimate.
Now, if the GP was actually suggesting that the officials in question are guilty of "treason" according to the legal definition, that's a different issue -- and in that case, he is "off his rocker."
With an MS, you can teach at a community college. A lot of the students there are really trying to learn.
I agree that you may be likely to find more motivated students at some community colleges than at many public schools. Often students at community colleges are really trying to get ahead in life.
my roommate 23 years ago was a computer engineer who graduated near the top of his class at VPI... who did 2 years at a community college, and then 2 years at VPI. Now he has a PhD.
While, this does happen, it is rare. Most community college students never complete a 2-year degree, let alone go on to a 4-year school or a Ph.D.
Arguably the job teaching at a community college is better than that at a 4 year institution,
Only if you want to teach 6-8 courses per semester and still get paid 1/3 of what a tenured prof. at a 4-year college earns to teach 2-3 classes per semester. Don't get me wrong: I admire those who teach at community colleges, and I think it's a great vocation for those dedicated to it. And I think there's a lot less administrative bureaucracy at many community colleges, compared to universities and 4-year colleges. But at the majority of community colleges, you'd be challenged to earn as much as many public school teachers earn with the same credentials, even with twice the teaching load as public schools.
especially if you use your time for such things as textbook / study guide creation. You write the handwritten pages and sketches, and let the publishing company pay for a person to do the compositing / typing / proofing / photoready copy, and you can do quite well.
What the heck are you talking about? Most publishers these days barely bother to proofread properly, let alone type in a book for you. I have no clue what they'd think if someone from a random community college started mailing them handwritten pages and handdrawn sketches.
I seriously doubt that most young people (i.e. the ones who aren't tech majors) even understand what this means.
Yeah, seriously, who wrote the summary crap? Does anyone really think that most Yahoo mail users under 25 have conversations like this:
-- Reginald, I'm signing up for a new Yahoo account. I must design a new password.
-- Well, Theodore, I read in my issue of Network Security Weekly that lots of account information is compromised everywhere.
-- You know, Reginald, I never thought about thought about it that way. I am feeling rather cynical about strong passwords, given this era of large-scale user-database compromises. As an existential protest against the very concept of password protection in such an age, I think I'll just make my password "password" or maybe "123."
-- Good show, Theodore! Let's celebrate the anarchy of the internet by joining in a medley of Gilbert and Sullivan tunes from HMS Pinafore. Tally ho!
Umm, no. Actual conversations are more like:
-- Yo, Bob, I need a new email. Gonna go with Yahoo, even though it's kinda crap. Damn... I need a password.
-- Woah, Sam, who cares? Pass me a beer.
-- Yeah, you're right. Hell... I'm just gonna type "123." Pass me a beer, too.
-- Awesome, Sam. LOL. Where did that keg go?
Yeah, you can usually still get through from what I understand. But unlike the situation before 2008 or so, the TSA no longer guarantees that they will let you travel without ID. And you'll usually be forced to submit to some "ID verification" steps where they ask you questions to verify who you say you are.
Are you saying that you guys *don't* have to show your ID and boarding pass again at the departure gate immediately before boarding the plane?
It's funny (and not widely known), but you actually didn't need a photo ID to fly domestically in the U.S. until maybe the past couple years. For quite a few years after 9/11, you could just say "Oh, I forgot it," and they'd stick you in an alternate line that usually got you through security faster (though often with an extra patdown).
Technically, there was a legal principle that you had a right to travel freely within the U.S. without having to present "papers" (a la Nazi Germany). People who "forgot" their IDs were usually fine, but the TSA started harassing those who just refused to show ID.
Around four years ago, it started to get harder -- they'd ask for any sort of ID even without a photo: credit card, whatever, and then they'd make mysterious phone calls and generally let you through.
But then around the time of the nude scanner crap, the TSA finally decided it was just going to ignore people's right to free travel and just officially admit that we've descended into the likes of Nazi Germany if we want to travel any distance within the U.S.
For all the harassment that has been shown to people by the TSA, most people are shocked that for about 8-9 years after 9/11, you still didn't even need ID to get on a domestic flight.
One correction: "It's because white flour can be stored longer. It doesn't go rancid as fast because it contains all those fatty acids and other nutrients."
I obviously meant "[White flour] doesn't go rancid as fast because it doesn't contain all those fatty acids and other nutrients found in the whole grain version.
I'm sorry. I thought you actually had a clue about what you were talking about. That's why I actually bothered to have a conversation. Now I'm not so sure.
Bran (what makes grains brown, like brown rice or wheat bread), is fiber. It's what makes grains hard to digest, and completely, 100%, without nutritional benefit.
Umm, wheat bran contains a bunch of B vitamins, among other things. That's, in fact, why white flour is fortified with all those B vitamins in the first place: scientists know they are lost in white flour, and so they are added back in (even more than is usually there). There are also essential fatty acids and other things there. If you ate a whole wheat berry (which wouldn't be pleasant), you'd probably get very little nutrition out of it. But when you grind it up, which is how everyone eats it, you can get some of the nutrients out of it.
The germ, which is also removed from white flour, is fattier and less nutritionally dense than the endosperm.
Nope. Wrong again. This is actually where the most vitamins and minerals in wheat are concentrated, and it is also high in fatty acids.
Seriously, go to any nutrition website and look these things up. It's not that hard. Heck, even take the time to note why the bran and germ are generally removed even today -- it's not for nutritional reasons. It's because white flour can be stored longer. It doesn't go rancid as fast because it contains all those fatty acids and other nutrients. I don't know how dense or brainwashed someone has to be to believe this nonsense.
What's worse, whole grain has the best part, the endosperm, locked away behind a bran coating from being digest, which is what it's there for, to protect the seed (the grass's offspring) in the first place.
No, no, no. Nobody eats whole wheat berries. You grind the damn thing up. That's how you get access to the endosperm, the germ, and everything else. As for other grains, if they aren't ground, they are either spouted or soaked and cooked until they swell and release their interior.
I'll state it outright: aside from calories, and the impact on bowel movement, there's absolutely zero benefit to eating whole grains over processed white flour, in terms of nutrition.
Give me a single citation of a scientific resource where they have actually chemically measured the nutrients in grains where this is shown to be the case. You can't.
By sugar, of course you mean glucose. The benefit isn't in any of the germ or the bran, it's simply in eating less glucose (and I'm not against glucose, but too much is known to be correlated with diabetes). But this only comes into play when one is eating too much glucose and fructose in the first place. A better hedge against diabetes is to be more thoughtful about that than replacing refined grains with whole grains.
Glucose response in the bloodstream is greatly affected by the mix of foods you eat at any given time, not just the sheer quantity of any particular sugar. The glycemic response to whole grains is significantly lower than to "white" grains, presumably because of the mix of other stuff. Regardless of whether this other stuff has significant nutritional value (which it does), the fact is that it significantly changes the way our bodies digest the food, probably in a way that is beneficial.
But as a larger point, of course reducing actual sugar is important first and foremost. Yet, our bodies respond to things like white wheat flour, white rice, potato starch, etc. in ways that are almost equal to a response to sucrose. (Most people don't encounter glucose by itself, except when in a fructose/glucose mix like honey, or when they are bonded together as in sucrose.)
Anyhow...
From the absolute nonsense in your last post, I have to conclude that you are either a troll or are hopelessly lost to some propaganda, so I'm signing off.
Cheers.
It's a myth that whole grains are notably more nutritious than processed white flour.
Hmm... do you have a reliable citation for this claim? Not some paleo or Atkins diet page or something, but something, say, peer-reviewed?
And, yes, in a raw form, whole grains often are hard to digest and release nutrients, but if they are cooked, soaked, or spouted, it gets easier to absorb these things. Regardless, I'd hardly say it's a "myth" that whole grains are more nutritious than processed counterparts. Except for the few vitamins that processed wheat and rice tend to be specifically fortified with, whole grains generally contain more vitamins, minerals, protein, other useful fats, etc. If you eat them raw, you won't absorb most of them, but if you break down the grain by grinding or cooking or soaking (as almost everyone does), you'll get more of the nutrients out.
The primary basis for this assertion is observational studies where people who eat whole grains over processed grains live longer. This shows a correlation, but not a causation.
Okay, fine. I'm on board with your "this is only a correlation" business. Yet, your alternative proposed explanations are again only hypotheses: they don't mean that whole grains don't have any benefits over refined ones.
But, ultimately, grains can't hold a candle to meat when it comes to nutrients
You're comparing apples to oranges here. Grains shouldn't be seen as replacing meat in a diet. If you switch from an omniverous diet to a vegan diet, grains aren't where you need to add foods to replace the meat. Instead, you need to consume many more nutritious vegetables, fruits, legumes, seeds, and nuts, all of which are much more nutritious (in terms of providing vitamins, minerals, and other trace nutrients) than grains. And, notably, most of these are just as or more nutritious by this standard than meat is.
Meat is best at certain vitamins and minerals, as well as a good source for complete protein. If high in fat, it is also a good calorie source. But, with the exception of B12, you can get those vitamins and minerals in plant sources (though admittedly you have to work harder for some of them, particularly if you won't drink milk or eat any eggs). As for protein, a mix of grains, legumes, seeds, and nuts will give you a pretty good source of protein too. For the rest of the trace nutrients, vegetables and fruits are better than meat or grains.
That's why flour and bread in America are generally fortified. Back at the turn of the century, Americans were extremely malnourished, and bread was the primary culprit.
I'm not sure why you bring up this nice story, which I'm well aware of. But it has nothing to do with a discussion of whole grains, since Americans (even poor ones) had mostly been eating white flour for long before 1900. This malnutrition says nothing about whether whole grains are better or worse.
If you want to argue that placing too much emphasis on grains in the diet is a problem, I'll gladly agree with you. Grains are mostly for calories, not for (most) nutrients. But if you are going to eat grains, which most hard-working people in the past had to do to get enough calories, whole grains are probably better in part because they are harder to digest. While some of the benefits of whole grains are in question or unproven, I do think a link between diabetes and processed grains makes a lot of sense, given the way processed white flour and rice is almost like pure sugar in the way it screws with our body chemistry. For that reason alone, I'd say whole grains are usually a better choice.
So, when I say "fake processed shit", I'm including things you might be mistaking for being healthy.
Great. So, the fact that I bake my own bread, which generally includes at least a half dozen whole grains plus some seeds or some other stuff is no better than Wonderbread. Forget about cooking up some quinoa -- I'm just as good eating that cheap white rice. Thanks for educating me.
well, perhaps that's the moral. or perhaps it should be that a vegan that won't eat carrots doesn't represent the vegan community at all.
Or perhaps the moral is that we generally eat food that was previously alive. Where we draw lines about exploiting that "life" is usually based on arbitrary divisions projecting human feelings and morals onto things that have a very different experience of the world.
For most of the vegans I know who have a problem eating honey, I think the carrot really represents a conundrum. It is really a greater problem to exploit the work of bees than it is to rip a living organism out of the ground and kill it completely to consume it? Some people say that the bees still have a nervous system that can feel pain or something and harming or exploiting them is a problem... but have you never had a garden and stepped on a plant, or tore a leaf, or made some sort of other damage or barrier or whatever to the plant's growth? The plant will respond (albeit more slowly). It is a living thing, and it has systems designed to react to the environment, as all animals do.
The line is always arbitrary. For most people in my experience, it's primarily about "cute and cuddly" things more than anything else... and I'm not sure that's a good thing to build a moral philosophy on.