I take your point, although I submit that I've seen lots of problems in math textbooks from the 1800s that are basically still relevant--you skip a few weird problems and warn students about weird prices, and the books could work okay.
Better yet, just use the book for the basics and supplement with stuff from the voluminous free resources available online... as any good teacher should be doing today.
But to your "sizzle" -- frankly, I think it's nonsense. Why the devil does a MATH textbook need color? If a good teacher wants to keep students' attention, be a good teacher, utilize cool online resources, etc. Quadrupling the weight of a math textbook just to add color photos and "sizzle" is nonsense... that sort of static sizzle isn't going to be any better than a minimalistic B&W textbook in holding the attention of today's students.
As someone who taught in public secondary schools for a few years (and designed curricula within state standards), I am well aware of the bureaucratic state nonsense. And I'm sure there are other free textbooks available today that rival or are better than the textbooks of yesteryear... I certainly commend you for your work.
Admittedly, I was proposing a rational solution and simple solution to the situation identified in TFA. It might be reasonable for private school and home schooling... but you're absolutely right that I didn't go into bureaucratic barriers, because as far as I'm concerned, those bureaucracies are a primary cause of the very situation identified in TFA.
If anything languages are far more likely to have changed in 150 years than mathematics.
Agreed. But most of the basic grammatical structure of them hasn't, which, along with standard common phrases ("Hello!" "Good morning!" etc.), is the subject of most introductory language textbooks.
The colloquial usage of the languages in the book I mentioned has changed quite a bit, but there were many observations about the grammar that were still very relevant to modern languages.
In any case, my larger point was that the pedagogical methodology of 150 years ago seemed very useful to me. Updating the language examples to modern usage would just be a cosmetic change, rather than a pedagogical one (as the GP was discussing).
I absolutely agree that one can focus too much on basic arithmetic facts. On the other hand, if you can't do them at all, it's really hard to get anything out of higher math.
I used to teach high school math, and lots of students wanted to take math up through algebra II because it conferred a better standing in their graduation.
And I am not exaggerating when I say that I had a few students who did not know what 12 - 5 is without using a calculator. I worked with a few such students who were really struggling (how they got passed all the way to algebra II with such deficiencies is another issue).
Here's the problem: as someone who has taught classes with such students who lack memorization of basic facts, I can tell you that they struggle to even follow what's going on in class. How can you follow thr steps to solve an equation when you can't even follow the basic arithmetic manipulations required to do so?
Your personal solution seems to be to find other methods to get to the answers besides memorization. (In fact, good teachers often point out such things, but sadly most primary school teachers are afraid of math and don't know how to teach it other than memorization and standarf algorithms.) That's fine -- I don't care how you figure it out, but you need to be able to come up with the answer in a second or two. And if you can do that, you should be able to pass any test on whether you know multiplication tables or whatever.
Having Feynman's lectures during my introductory courses would have been a boon. Instead we got crappy state-sponsored books that barely taught anything.
As someone who has taught physics in high school, I absolutely agree that Feynman's lectures are an incredible resource, and they should be used more.
That said, the introductory material they contain often does require sifting for the average student -- most beginning physics students are not at the level of CalTech undergrads. In essence, they can be a great tool in the hands of an already good teacher.
While pedagogical techniques have changed over the years, basic math hasn't. And old textbooks written, say, more than about 50 years ago, didn't have much "filler" in terms of pedagogical methodology.
You just have a very brief explanation of definitions and concepts, followed by a set of problems. The pedagogical method is left to the teacher to fill in, as it should be. No necessity for glossy photos of random non-math things or muticultural scenes in a math textbook, as we fill pages and pages with today.
Perhaps languages are different in this regard, although I have to admit I personally learned more about foreign languages than from any other book after I picked up a comparative grammar of six languages designed for language instruction that was published in the 1860s. The advances is elementary language instruction pedagogy, as far as I can tell, have mostly to do with replacing competent teachers who can speak fluently with lots of recordings that have to be cued to the textbook... which seems like the primary driving force for new editions of language books... but I'm no expert. (I am, however, a certified secondary math and science teacher.)
The solution is simple: use PDFs of public domain textbooks. If you like, order a cheap bound copy of the PDF to be made.
Basic math hasn't changed much in a century, and there are numerous old textbooks out there that are generally proofread better than modern textbooks. I have found the problems are often better structured and designed as well.
Sure, there are minor changes in terminology, which any good teacher can address. But we should do this even just to save the backs of young kids -- those old textbooks are small, short, and therefore light to carry, rather than a 700-page glossy book that weighs 10 pounds (why the heck do we need this for math textbooks?).
When I was in junior high and high school, I picked up a lot of such old textbooks at used book sales for nothing. I think I learned more from them than I did from my actual math classes...
I don't understand this argument, unless a corporation is a Borg-like entity to which the component persons surrender their individual rights and indepedent intention.
The part you're missing is a century of caselaw that says that money = "speech." That's the real problem here, since it implies that any entity possessing money can have "speech."
That is not the case in our society, so granting "free speech" rights to corporations gives the leaders of those corporations all of their individual free-speech rights, plus extra free-speech privileges through the corporate structure.
Well, one could also argue that many people enter into corporations for the very purposes of "speaking" more loudly. For example, there are many non-profit corporations (like the ACLU, which was behind the Supreme Court ruling by the way) which exist primarily to "speak" for the viewpoints of those who are members of the corporation. Almost all political non-profit groups or issue groups (PETA, etc.) are corporations whose primary purpose is to "speak" for their members.
Also, roughly 97% of corporations are ones with capital of a few million dollars or less. Many small local businesses are "corporations" only in name because of the variety tax benefits, etc. the legal status provides. Effectively, these "corporations" only represent the owner or perhaps a small group of partners. When the vast majority of "corporations" want to speak, they are effectively speaking with the same voice as an individual.
All of these corporations were barred from free speech, not just the giant mega-corporations.
Put another way, the government (which creates corporations to begin with) could regulate the ever-livin' hell out of 'em, and that wouldn't affect an actual human-person's free-speech rights one whit.
Perhaps, and they do regulate corporations in a lot of ways.
The problem that the Supreme Court identified -- which is a REAL problem -- is that in today's world of mega-corporations and huge conglomerates, one group of corporations do have completely unfettered speech in the political arena, namely so-called "media" companies.
But why should Fox News get to run its propaganda before an election (just because it claims to be a "news" corporation), while the ACLU can't provide you with actual facts about candidates? The Supreme Court ruled that in this day and age there really isn't a good measure to differentiate between these so-called "media" corporations and some other mega-corporation with its own political interests.
This is a real problem, and if you think about it at all, things were pretty ambiguous and unfair before. I don't think we solve the problem by the Court's ruling, because the underlying issue is the legal assumption that money = speech.
Interesting-- so corporations are persons, according to the Supreme court
Incorrect. Corporations have some of the same rights as persons under the law (ability to enter into contracts, criminal liability for many actions, etc.), but they lack others (right to vote in elections, ability to prosecute the entire makeup of the corporation under criminal law -- e.g., if a corporation brings about a murder, all shareholders can't be executed for it).
The law has in the past held that corporations clearly have some First Amendment rights (e.g., right to free press), but there have been debates about limits on corporations' free speech.
The whole soundbite about how "the Supreme Court declared corporations to be persons" is just propaganda by those who don't like the ruling. (I personally have mixed feelings about the ruling, but here I'm just trying to get at the truth.)
Want proof? Listen to the oral arguments before the Supreme Court (or read the transcripts). No one on either side of the case was arguing that corporations do not possess first amendment protections to free speech. Neither side was claiming that corporations are not "persons" in that sense.
The argument was about the fact that there's a high standard for Congress to pass laws regulating free speech, and where the bar should be set for corporations. No one on either side said corporations didn't have free speech: the question was how far it could be regulated.
It's the pesky above average people who want to be rewarded based on their skills and/or performance.
Yeah, the only problem is choosing what categories we want to be rewarded for if we're above average in them. For engineers and scientists, it's often advanced problem-solving or technical skills. For business majors, it's often being able to get one over on the next guy. As far as I can tell, the only people who want IQ to be the main category for achievement are deadbeats who seemingly have no real-world skills but can manage to take entrance tests for high-IQ societies.
Everybody's above average at something, even if it's being above average in the number of categories you're below average in. (And, frankly, there are plenty of ways we often reward those people too... often with good reason.)
These people aren't uneducated. They went to school. They received an education.
There's a difference between "schooling" and "education."
A school is a place we use to lock up unruly teenagers and keep them from causing social problems since we decided that child labor was bad. It used to be Communists and socialists, now the threat would probably come from Ron Paul followers... whatever the perceived threat to the social order of the moment. The common characteristics of schooling are trends toward uniformity, obedience, and ability to perform repetitive (and often mindless) drills while memorizing useless (often nationalistic) facts.
An education is literally a "leading forth," where some learned persons help to guide those who are less learned toward a place a greater intellectual ability, understanding, and rigor. The common characteristics of education include encouragement of independent thought, creative analysis of novel problems, exposure to a wide variety of perspectives, ideologies, and methodologies from a broad set of disciplines, etc.
Many more people these days are "well-schooled," but few are "well-educated." And without the broader purposes of education, the drilling and repetitive exercises of schooling never seem to have any purpose and are quickly forgotten.
The person who can't make change without a calculator has forgotten his schooling. The person who can't evaluate the terms of a mortgage lacks education. The former is an inconvenience; the latter could ruin your life.
The real problem here is the lack of education, not schooling, because most students were never taught or encouraged to encounter real-world problems requiring numerical knowledge, which require not just computation but the ability to adapt and solve novel problems. A person may be able to do a lot of abstract math, including even complex (but algorithmic) differentiation or integration, and yet still not be able to evaluate the terms of a loan or a credit card.
That's the problem. It's not that these people are "stupid." They are perhaps "well-schooled," but most of them were never "educated." Without an education, simple computation skills give you very little to survive in the real world of numbers.
Absolutely agree that your scenario should lead to punishment.
Problem is -- it doesn't seem like that happened here, at least according to the New Yorker article. There was no recording, and there was no broadcast. At most (according to that article), one guy and a friend surreptitiously viewed two people across the hall making out (no sex) for a few seconds. There was some talk by the defendant about either potentially recording or making a wider viewing available on a subsequent occasion, but it never actually happened, both because those being spied on turned the computer off before it could happen AND (the defendant claims) he never intended to follow through.
The defendant may be a scum bag, and he certainly invaded his roommate's privacy. But he apparently (according to the New Yorker piece) did not do either of the more heinous acts you mention. If he did, he should be punished. If not, I think charging him with "being a peeping tom in the third degree" is probably a more appropriate charge, which still might deserve a punishment, but much more minimal.
If you can't work some material more naturally into the narrative than hyperlinks/footnotes/jarring parentheticals, then something is very wrong. It severely detracts from the enjoyment of the story if I stop mid sentence to read it. If I chose to defer reading the material, then some things may make no sense until I get to the footnote
This is poor footnote usage, plain and simple. The whole point of a footnote -- whether in a fictional or non-fictional context, and whether it's just a citation or an explanation or an entire separate argument -- is that the material is not necessary for understanding the main text. Its insertion would interrupt the flow, so it is moved to a footnote. A reader who is not interested in these subtleties has the option to skip them.
What you're describing is some idiot author who puts material in footnotes and then assumes you've read them in order to understand stuff that occurs later in the text. That's antithetical to the whole concept of a footnote. If the main text cannot stand by itself and have a complete argument/narrative/whatever, you need to move some of that footnote material into the text.
The problem isn't the discursive footnotes -- it's that the authors you describe apparently don't know how to use them.
The sales tax you don't pay (because the online retailer isn't using state and local services such as police/fire protection, roads (UPS and USPS pay for those on Amazon deliveries), utilities, or any other service is rather offset by the delivery charge that you do pay.
I'm not going to take a position about the validity of this tax, but the last part of this argument is stupid. Do you really pay delivery charges from Amazon? I can't recall the last time I bought something from Amazon itself (not a 3rd-party seller on Amazon) and paid a delivery charge. Why would you, given how easy it usually is to get free shipping from them (and has been for years)?
And besides, how do you think the merchandise gets to your brick and mortar store? Magic?? They pay suppliers too, who obviously factor in cost of delivery into their pricing scheme. Granted, stores obviously pay less for shipping in bulk, but then again, Amazon has deals with the shipping companies to get discounts too...
There may be other reasons to oppose this tax, but the idea that it is made up for in delivery charges is not one of them -- at least in the case of Amazon. Perhaps for other (smaller) online retailers to some extent...
Actually, here's a good overview of the origin at MIT, from someone who was writing about it in the mid-80s, when "hacker" first had gained significant media currency in the negative sense:
A ``hacker'' is... someone who never goes to class, who in fact sleeps all day, and who spends the night pursuing recreational activities rather than studying.
What does this have to do with computers? Originally, nothing. But there are standards for success as a hacker, just as grades form a standard for success as a tool. The true hacker can't just sit around all night; he must pursue some hobby with dedication and flair. It can be telephones, or railroads (model, real, or both), or science fiction fandom, or ham radio, or broadcast radio. It can be more than one of these. Or it can be computers.
Hacking: Using your capabilities to gain access and explore an unknown programmable system.
Actually, for old-timers (and many still at MIT), hacking can imply getting access and exploring just about any kind of system, even gaining physical access and exploring. (Hence, the "hacks" at MIT which have involve placing objects in inaccessible places, etc., which comes from a culture of "hacking" (i.e., exploring) the rooftops, basement tunnels, and other parts of MIT campus.)
But "hacking" in the early days did seem to be associated with certain types of electronic systems, notably telephones and the MIT model railroad club.
In any case, it should be noted that a negative connotation could apparently be attached to the word even in its earliest usages. One of the earliest known citation of the word in print (from the MIT newspaper) from the early 1960s actually refers to disruptive hacking of phone systems:
What we need in this country is to go back to the guild/apprenticeship model for people that plan to work. If you want to teach, want to do research, then let the universities focus on that. But if a person wants to implement, let OJT be the way to go. Stop requiring 4 year college degrees and stop penalizing highly skilled practitioners who learned their trade instead of sitting in classroom.
Absolutely. College is not supposed to be a glorified trade school. I repeat: college is not supposed to be a glorified trade school.
Centuries ago, college existed to teach the "liberal arts." You were training for a specific trade, but rather being generally educated in a wide variety of knowledge and ideas. Exposure to lots of things that are unfamiliar will always be of a greater long-term usefulness than a bunch of specific facts, especially when you aren't using those facts for anything at the moment (as most students aren't while in college). If you have had to confront lots of problems and questions and ideas from a lot of unfamiliar territory, you might be better prepared to deal with new problems when you go out into the real world.
In the past couple centuries, college retained that function but also became a sort of credentialing vehicle for the rich -- somewhere for young men to go and hopefully learn something broader while "sowing their wild oats" and whatever else young men wanted to do when they had lots of money.
Then, in the past 50 years or so, the liberal arts were all but forgotten at most schools. Sure, there are still gen ed requirements, but very few students -- rich or poor -- take them seriously. The "major" became more important than the broad education.
In essence, college became a glorified trade school. Except, it wasn't (and isn't) a very good one, because rather than acting like a trade school, it held over all of the teaching and learning and class models from the old system for broader education, where direct application of individual facts was less important.
If you want to be able to do something practical, on the job training is by far better than sitting in a classroom or doing some sort of abstract assignment. If you want to broaden your mind and open yourself up to wider possibilities and great potential for problem-solving and thinking about deeper problems, focusing only on one area is probably not the best use of your time as a young person.
Essentially, we took the glorified credentialing/partying system of the rich of past generations, and now we've given modern young people a place to continue to act like kids while forcing information on them in an ineffective abstract way... but then we assume they are credentialed and competent for practical work.
We just need to dump the insurance bureaucracy that is costing so much overhead.
THIS.
We can debate "health care" all we want to, but the current political arguments in the U.S. have little to do with that.
We're currently locked into a debate about whether people should have universal health insurance, which is not the same as health care. Granted, whether private business or government handles it, there will be some layer of bureaucracy. But anyone who thinks the current legislation to provide universal "health care" (i.e., insurance) won't be manipulated by the insurance industry to guarantee even greater future profits is hopelessly naive.
This particular change doesn't seem to significantly change privacy, but...
You just have to be smart with what information you enter, and what you do with it, and there, no risk at all.
No "risk" of what, exactly?
The studies on what you can gather from Facebook data are shocking. Simply based on who you are friends with, researchers have shown they can accurately guess whether you're gay, where your hometown is, what your approximately birthdate is, etc., even if you don't make those facts available on your profile. With an extrapolated hometown and approximate birthdate, they can pretty accurately figure out the first five digits of your Social Security number (something like 30% of the time). If someone had a large sample of data, they could probably predict the other digits as well.
With face recognition software, someone could snap a picture of you and get to a probable SS# and other personal details in a matter of seconds.
Granted, this doesn't work all the time. But even if your profile is empty, facts about your friends may allow someone to predict a lot of stuff about you. That's the power of statistics and aggregate data.
My fellow undergrads were spouting off their own ill-informed ideas (as was I, to get credit). Complete waste of time. We'd have been better served to spend those 8-10 hours a week reading.
Sounds like your teachers were doing it wrong (as most teachers do when they lead discussion sections).
First off, you should have been spending 8-10 hours per week reading, in order to prepare informed comments for discussion. Second, your section leaders should have been guiding the discussion in such a way as to make sure salient points were made about the material. For example, if you had two readings that week on similar material, the instructor could be keeping track of differences brought up in discussion. If those were then summarized by the instructor, it could lead to a more critical discussion on the respective positions of the two readings, why they complement each other, why the class might think one reading is better than another, etc.
The point of discussion sections is supposed to be that you require a greater understanding of material to speak an opinion of it aloud in class than you do to passively sit and listen to a lecture. The instructor's role is to guide those comments in such a way as to make important pedagogical points (while also allowing some freedom for the discussion to meander into areas the class finds interesting). If no one is making the relevant pedagogical points, the instructor should step in an make them him/herself, or ask a leading question to get things back on track.
I've been in classes where students are just spouting random naive opinions too. In such cases, it's the instructor's fault that the class was useless. (It may be the students' fault too for not doing the reading or whatever, but in that case, the instructor needs to come up with a way to force students to do the reading and be prepared for discussion, or else shift to a different class meeting structure.)
In other words, many, many students are able to achieve a fairly high level of success on stereotyped mathematical textbook problems without understanding the meaning of a damn thing they're doing.
This is actually one of the most important points, and what's wrong with a lot of math and science teaching in secondary school and in colleges. At the primary level, it's okay to teach simple algorithms to do basic operations or just spit back information (although even there, it would be better if teachers were open to a deeper appreciation of the rationale behind the algorithms for solving problems).
But once you get to high school or college, you need to be tested primarily with problems unlike any you've ever seen before, if you expect to test true understanding. At a simple level, these can require basic comprehension skills, like the dreaded "word problems" that most secondary math teachers avoid. By the time you get a college level course, you should be prepared to be thrown all sorts of curve balls on problem sets and exams. Otherwise, math and any mathematical application classes (physics, other sciences, engineering) devolve into the equivalent of a poorly taught high school algebra class: identify the type of equation (hint, it's probably something you've learned about in the past couple weeks), then perform steps X, Y, and Z to find the solution for that problem type. No actual analysis or thought required.
This review of the literature finds no support for the notion of matching instruction to learning styles. The whole thing was hogwash and wishful thinking.
Umm... that's not what the summary at your link says. Your link says that there hasn't been a lot of experimental testing, and many of the studies done with experimental testing have methodological flaws. Of the few that have good methodology, "several" have evidence that disputes learning style matching. That implies that some produce evidence that it is effective.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There haven't been a lot of good studies, and more are needed to decide whether or not it is "hogwash." In fact, the penultimate sentence of your link says exactly that:
However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all.
I think a lot of the "learning styles" stuff is probably crap too. But your link mostly says we lack good enough evidence to really evaluate it yet.
And by the way, before anyone starts pointing out that there was a "free market" for making copies before the printing press, that is absolutely true... as long as you could actually find someone else with the book.
I will grant that modern copyright tries to create "artificial scarcity" of "authorized" copies, but that's all it does. Paying for the privilege of making a copy (or having one made) is nothing new, though.
People had also been copying written texts for a few thousand years before copyright was invented. Examples: everything written by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, and all other civilizations with the ability to write before the 17th century.
I am not defending nor arguing against copyright here, but I do wish some people would bother to learn something about history before citing it.
First of all, modern copyright was invented just as soon as the technological means arose that created the supposed problem with "intellectual property," i.e., as soon as the printing press really got going in the late 1400s. There were quite a few copyrights granted and lawsuits filed in many cities in Italy, Germany, and other places in Europe by the early 1500s.
However, the first copyright "lawsuit," I believe, was over a copy of an Irish manuscript in the 6th century or so. Generally, if you wanted a copy of a manuscript from a monastic library during medieval times, you would be charged a significant fee. Obviously, much of that went to pay for the fact that scribes had to make and copy the book by hand, but monasteries were known to charge a lot for the privilege of copying a particularly interesting or rare manuscript.
As for ancient Rome, Greece, etc., generally a slave would be paid to copy a manuscript, and usually one needed to pay the owner of said manuscript at least for the cost of that slaves' work, and a reluctant owner of a rare manuscript certainly might charge a fee just for the privilege of making a copy.
You may not think of all these things as "copyright," but they are effectively the same thing as modern copyright was established as -- a way to pay for the medium and cost of copying an item.
Whether you're paying a slave to copy a manuscript, or a monk, or a scribe, or you're paying a publisher of an early press to typeset or engrave the plates to be copied and bound, you're paying for the copying process. Payment to the author or whatever was a secondary concern and only became significant once it became fairly cheap and universal to use the printing press... however, payment to the owner of the thing being copied has been around since ancient times.
Our copyright system is of course more pervasive and differently structured today, but pretending it didn't exist in any form before the 17th century is a stupid and ignorant statement that betrays your allegiance to the anti-copyright propaganda, rather than a knowledge of actual history.
Setting aside the matter that the violin was supposedly authenticated by an expert before the seller offered the item...
if it is a fake, then presumably there'd be no great loss in destroying it.
Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on what sort of "fake" it is. A seller might claim that it is a violin by great violin-maker X, but it might instead be a centuries-old violin made by pretty good violin-maker Y. In that case, destroying the "fake" could still very well be destroying a significant piece of history.
Just because an item isn't exactly what someone said it was doesn't mean that it's completely worthless. Merchandise may not live up to expectations, but unless there is a provable case for fraud (which there seems to be no evidence of here), it should not even be a candidate for destruction... and if there were serious evidence of fraud, it should have been turned over to the police anyway.
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I take your point, although I submit that I've seen lots of problems in math textbooks from the 1800s that are basically still relevant--you skip a few weird problems and warn students about weird prices, and the books could work okay.
Better yet, just use the book for the basics and supplement with stuff from the voluminous free resources available online... as any good teacher should be doing today.
But to your "sizzle" -- frankly, I think it's nonsense. Why the devil does a MATH textbook need color? If a good teacher wants to keep students' attention, be a good teacher, utilize cool online resources, etc. Quadrupling the weight of a math textbook just to add color photos and "sizzle" is nonsense... that sort of static sizzle isn't going to be any better than a minimalistic B&W textbook in holding the attention of today's students.
Admittedly, I was proposing a rational solution and simple solution to the situation identified in TFA. It might be reasonable for private school and home schooling... but you're absolutely right that I didn't go into bureaucratic barriers, because as far as I'm concerned, those bureaucracies are a primary cause of the very situation identified in TFA.
If anything languages are far more likely to have changed in 150 years than mathematics.
Agreed. But most of the basic grammatical structure of them hasn't, which, along with standard common phrases ("Hello!" "Good morning!" etc.), is the subject of most introductory language textbooks.
The colloquial usage of the languages in the book I mentioned has changed quite a bit, but there were many observations about the grammar that were still very relevant to modern languages.
In any case, my larger point was that the pedagogical methodology of 150 years ago seemed very useful to me. Updating the language examples to modern usage would just be a cosmetic change, rather than a pedagogical one (as the GP was discussing).
I absolutely agree that one can focus too much on basic arithmetic facts. On the other hand, if you can't do them at all, it's really hard to get anything out of higher math.
I used to teach high school math, and lots of students wanted to take math up through algebra II because it conferred a better standing in their graduation.
And I am not exaggerating when I say that I had a few students who did not know what 12 - 5 is without using a calculator. I worked with a few such students who were really struggling (how they got passed all the way to algebra II with such deficiencies is another issue).
Here's the problem: as someone who has taught classes with such students who lack memorization of basic facts, I can tell you that they struggle to even follow what's going on in class. How can you follow thr steps to solve an equation when you can't even follow the basic arithmetic manipulations required to do so?
Your personal solution seems to be to find other methods to get to the answers besides memorization. (In fact, good teachers often point out such things, but sadly most primary school teachers are afraid of math and don't know how to teach it other than memorization and standarf algorithms.) That's fine -- I don't care how you figure it out, but you need to be able to come up with the answer in a second or two. And if you can do that, you should be able to pass any test on whether you know multiplication tables or whatever.
Having Feynman's lectures during my introductory courses would have been a boon. Instead we got crappy state-sponsored books that barely taught anything.
As someone who has taught physics in high school, I absolutely agree that Feynman's lectures are an incredible resource, and they should be used more.
That said, the introductory material they contain often does require sifting for the average student -- most beginning physics students are not at the level of CalTech undergrads. In essence, they can be a great tool in the hands of an already good teacher.
While pedagogical techniques have changed over the years, basic math hasn't. And old textbooks written, say, more than about 50 years ago, didn't have much "filler" in terms of pedagogical methodology.
You just have a very brief explanation of definitions and concepts, followed by a set of problems. The pedagogical method is left to the teacher to fill in, as it should be. No necessity for glossy photos of random non-math things or muticultural scenes in a math textbook, as we fill pages and pages with today.
Perhaps languages are different in this regard, although I have to admit I personally learned more about foreign languages than from any other book after I picked up a comparative grammar of six languages designed for language instruction that was published in the 1860s. The advances is elementary language instruction pedagogy, as far as I can tell, have mostly to do with replacing competent teachers who can speak fluently with lots of recordings that have to be cued to the textbook... which seems like the primary driving force for new editions of language books... but I'm no expert. (I am, however, a certified secondary math and science teacher.)
The solution is simple: use PDFs of public domain textbooks. If you like, order a cheap bound copy of the PDF to be made.
Basic math hasn't changed much in a century, and there are numerous old textbooks out there that are generally proofread better than modern textbooks. I have found the problems are often better structured and designed as well.
Sure, there are minor changes in terminology, which any good teacher can address. But we should do this even just to save the backs of young kids -- those old textbooks are small, short, and therefore light to carry, rather than a 700-page glossy book that weighs 10 pounds (why the heck do we need this for math textbooks?).
When I was in junior high and high school, I picked up a lot of such old textbooks at used book sales for nothing. I think I learned more from them than I did from my actual math classes...
I don't understand this argument, unless a corporation is a Borg-like entity to which the component persons surrender their individual rights and indepedent intention.
The part you're missing is a century of caselaw that says that money = "speech." That's the real problem here, since it implies that any entity possessing money can have "speech."
That is not the case in our society, so granting "free speech" rights to corporations gives the leaders of those corporations all of their individual free-speech rights, plus extra free-speech privileges through the corporate structure.
Well, one could also argue that many people enter into corporations for the very purposes of "speaking" more loudly. For example, there are many non-profit corporations (like the ACLU, which was behind the Supreme Court ruling by the way) which exist primarily to "speak" for the viewpoints of those who are members of the corporation. Almost all political non-profit groups or issue groups (PETA, etc.) are corporations whose primary purpose is to "speak" for their members.
Also, roughly 97% of corporations are ones with capital of a few million dollars or less. Many small local businesses are "corporations" only in name because of the variety tax benefits, etc. the legal status provides. Effectively, these "corporations" only represent the owner or perhaps a small group of partners. When the vast majority of "corporations" want to speak, they are effectively speaking with the same voice as an individual. All of these corporations were barred from free speech, not just the giant mega-corporations.
Put another way, the government (which creates corporations to begin with) could regulate the ever-livin' hell out of 'em, and that wouldn't affect an actual human-person's free-speech rights one whit.
Perhaps, and they do regulate corporations in a lot of ways.
The problem that the Supreme Court identified -- which is a REAL problem -- is that in today's world of mega-corporations and huge conglomerates, one group of corporations do have completely unfettered speech in the political arena, namely so-called "media" companies.
But why should Fox News get to run its propaganda before an election (just because it claims to be a "news" corporation), while the ACLU can't provide you with actual facts about candidates? The Supreme Court ruled that in this day and age there really isn't a good measure to differentiate between these so-called "media" corporations and some other mega-corporation with its own political interests.
This is a real problem, and if you think about it at all, things were pretty ambiguous and unfair before. I don't think we solve the problem by the Court's ruling, because the underlying issue is the legal assumption that money = speech.
Interesting-- so corporations are persons, according to the Supreme court
Incorrect. Corporations have some of the same rights as persons under the law (ability to enter into contracts, criminal liability for many actions, etc.), but they lack others (right to vote in elections, ability to prosecute the entire makeup of the corporation under criminal law -- e.g., if a corporation brings about a murder, all shareholders can't be executed for it).
The law has in the past held that corporations clearly have some First Amendment rights (e.g., right to free press), but there have been debates about limits on corporations' free speech.
The whole soundbite about how "the Supreme Court declared corporations to be persons" is just propaganda by those who don't like the ruling. (I personally have mixed feelings about the ruling, but here I'm just trying to get at the truth.)
Want proof? Listen to the oral arguments before the Supreme Court (or read the transcripts). No one on either side of the case was arguing that corporations do not possess first amendment protections to free speech. Neither side was claiming that corporations are not "persons" in that sense.
The argument was about the fact that there's a high standard for Congress to pass laws regulating free speech, and where the bar should be set for corporations. No one on either side said corporations didn't have free speech: the question was how far it could be regulated.
It's the pesky above average people who want to be rewarded based on their skills and/or performance.
Yeah, the only problem is choosing what categories we want to be rewarded for if we're above average in them. For engineers and scientists, it's often advanced problem-solving or technical skills. For business majors, it's often being able to get one over on the next guy. As far as I can tell, the only people who want IQ to be the main category for achievement are deadbeats who seemingly have no real-world skills but can manage to take entrance tests for high-IQ societies.
Everybody's above average at something, even if it's being above average in the number of categories you're below average in. (And, frankly, there are plenty of ways we often reward those people too... often with good reason.)
These people aren't uneducated. They went to school. They received an education.
There's a difference between "schooling" and "education."
A school is a place we use to lock up unruly teenagers and keep them from causing social problems since we decided that child labor was bad. It used to be Communists and socialists, now the threat would probably come from Ron Paul followers... whatever the perceived threat to the social order of the moment. The common characteristics of schooling are trends toward uniformity, obedience, and ability to perform repetitive (and often mindless) drills while memorizing useless (often nationalistic) facts.
An education is literally a "leading forth," where some learned persons help to guide those who are less learned toward a place a greater intellectual ability, understanding, and rigor. The common characteristics of education include encouragement of independent thought, creative analysis of novel problems, exposure to a wide variety of perspectives, ideologies, and methodologies from a broad set of disciplines, etc.
Many more people these days are "well-schooled," but few are "well-educated." And without the broader purposes of education, the drilling and repetitive exercises of schooling never seem to have any purpose and are quickly forgotten.
The person who can't make change without a calculator has forgotten his schooling. The person who can't evaluate the terms of a mortgage lacks education. The former is an inconvenience; the latter could ruin your life.
The real problem here is the lack of education, not schooling, because most students were never taught or encouraged to encounter real-world problems requiring numerical knowledge, which require not just computation but the ability to adapt and solve novel problems. A person may be able to do a lot of abstract math, including even complex (but algorithmic) differentiation or integration, and yet still not be able to evaluate the terms of a loan or a credit card.
That's the problem. It's not that these people are "stupid." They are perhaps "well-schooled," but most of them were never "educated." Without an education, simple computation skills give you very little to survive in the real world of numbers.
Absolutely agree that your scenario should lead to punishment.
Problem is -- it doesn't seem like that happened here, at least according to the New Yorker article. There was no recording, and there was no broadcast. At most (according to that article), one guy and a friend surreptitiously viewed two people across the hall making out (no sex) for a few seconds. There was some talk by the defendant about either potentially recording or making a wider viewing available on a subsequent occasion, but it never actually happened, both because those being spied on turned the computer off before it could happen AND (the defendant claims) he never intended to follow through.
The defendant may be a scum bag, and he certainly invaded his roommate's privacy. But he apparently (according to the New Yorker piece) did not do either of the more heinous acts you mention. If he did, he should be punished. If not, I think charging him with "being a peeping tom in the third degree" is probably a more appropriate charge, which still might deserve a punishment, but much more minimal.
If you can't work some material more naturally into the narrative than hyperlinks/footnotes/jarring parentheticals, then something is very wrong. It severely detracts from the enjoyment of the story if I stop mid sentence to read it. If I chose to defer reading the material, then some things may make no sense until I get to the footnote
This is poor footnote usage, plain and simple. The whole point of a footnote -- whether in a fictional or non-fictional context, and whether it's just a citation or an explanation or an entire separate argument -- is that the material is not necessary for understanding the main text. Its insertion would interrupt the flow, so it is moved to a footnote. A reader who is not interested in these subtleties has the option to skip them.
What you're describing is some idiot author who puts material in footnotes and then assumes you've read them in order to understand stuff that occurs later in the text. That's antithetical to the whole concept of a footnote. If the main text cannot stand by itself and have a complete argument/narrative/whatever, you need to move some of that footnote material into the text.
The problem isn't the discursive footnotes -- it's that the authors you describe apparently don't know how to use them.
The sales tax you don't pay (because the online retailer isn't using state and local services such as police/fire protection, roads (UPS and USPS pay for those on Amazon deliveries), utilities, or any other service is rather offset by the delivery charge that you do pay.
I'm not going to take a position about the validity of this tax, but the last part of this argument is stupid. Do you really pay delivery charges from Amazon? I can't recall the last time I bought something from Amazon itself (not a 3rd-party seller on Amazon) and paid a delivery charge. Why would you, given how easy it usually is to get free shipping from them (and has been for years)?
And besides, how do you think the merchandise gets to your brick and mortar store? Magic?? They pay suppliers too, who obviously factor in cost of delivery into their pricing scheme. Granted, stores obviously pay less for shipping in bulk, but then again, Amazon has deals with the shipping companies to get discounts too...
There may be other reasons to oppose this tax, but the idea that it is made up for in delivery charges is not one of them -- at least in the case of Amazon. Perhaps for other (smaller) online retailers to some extent...
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hacker.html
A ``hacker'' is... someone who never goes to class, who in fact sleeps all day, and who spends the night pursuing recreational activities rather than studying.
What does this have to do with computers? Originally, nothing. But there are standards for success as a hacker, just as grades form a standard for success as a tool. The true hacker can't just sit around all night; he must pursue some hobby with dedication and flair. It can be telephones, or railroads (model, real, or both), or science fiction fandom, or ham radio, or broadcast radio. It can be more than one of these. Or it can be computers.
Hacking: Using your capabilities to gain access and explore an unknown programmable system.
Actually, for old-timers (and many still at MIT), hacking can imply getting access and exploring just about any kind of system, even gaining physical access and exploring. (Hence, the "hacks" at MIT which have involve placing objects in inaccessible places, etc., which comes from a culture of "hacking" (i.e., exploring) the rooftops, basement tunnels, and other parts of MIT campus.)
But "hacking" in the early days did seem to be associated with certain types of electronic systems, notably telephones and the MIT model railroad club.
In any case, it should be noted that a negative connotation could apparently be attached to the word even in its earliest usages. One of the earliest known citation of the word in print (from the MIT newspaper) from the early 1960s actually refers to disruptive hacking of phone systems:
http://imranontech.com/2008/04/01/the-origin-of-hacker/
What we need in this country is to go back to the guild/apprenticeship model for people that plan to work. If you want to teach, want to do research, then let the universities focus on that. But if a person wants to implement, let OJT be the way to go. Stop requiring 4 year college degrees and stop penalizing highly skilled practitioners who learned their trade instead of sitting in classroom.
Absolutely. College is not supposed to be a glorified trade school. I repeat: college is not supposed to be a glorified trade school.
Centuries ago, college existed to teach the "liberal arts." You were training for a specific trade, but rather being generally educated in a wide variety of knowledge and ideas. Exposure to lots of things that are unfamiliar will always be of a greater long-term usefulness than a bunch of specific facts, especially when you aren't using those facts for anything at the moment (as most students aren't while in college). If you have had to confront lots of problems and questions and ideas from a lot of unfamiliar territory, you might be better prepared to deal with new problems when you go out into the real world.
In the past couple centuries, college retained that function but also became a sort of credentialing vehicle for the rich -- somewhere for young men to go and hopefully learn something broader while "sowing their wild oats" and whatever else young men wanted to do when they had lots of money.
Then, in the past 50 years or so, the liberal arts were all but forgotten at most schools. Sure, there are still gen ed requirements, but very few students -- rich or poor -- take them seriously. The "major" became more important than the broad education.
In essence, college became a glorified trade school. Except, it wasn't (and isn't) a very good one, because rather than acting like a trade school, it held over all of the teaching and learning and class models from the old system for broader education, where direct application of individual facts was less important.
If you want to be able to do something practical, on the job training is by far better than sitting in a classroom or doing some sort of abstract assignment. If you want to broaden your mind and open yourself up to wider possibilities and great potential for problem-solving and thinking about deeper problems, focusing only on one area is probably not the best use of your time as a young person.
Essentially, we took the glorified credentialing/partying system of the rich of past generations, and now we've given modern young people a place to continue to act like kids while forcing information on them in an ineffective abstract way... but then we assume they are credentialed and competent for practical work.
It's all stupid.
We just need to dump the insurance bureaucracy that is costing so much overhead.
THIS.
We can debate "health care" all we want to, but the current political arguments in the U.S. have little to do with that.
We're currently locked into a debate about whether people should have universal health insurance, which is not the same as health care. Granted, whether private business or government handles it, there will be some layer of bureaucracy. But anyone who thinks the current legislation to provide universal "health care" (i.e., insurance) won't be manipulated by the insurance industry to guarantee even greater future profits is hopelessly naive.
This particular change doesn't seem to significantly change privacy, but...
You just have to be smart with what information you enter, and what you do with it, and there, no risk at all.
No "risk" of what, exactly?
The studies on what you can gather from Facebook data are shocking. Simply based on who you are friends with, researchers have shown they can accurately guess whether you're gay, where your hometown is, what your approximately birthdate is, etc., even if you don't make those facts available on your profile. With an extrapolated hometown and approximate birthdate, they can pretty accurately figure out the first five digits of your Social Security number (something like 30% of the time). If someone had a large sample of data, they could probably predict the other digits as well.
With face recognition software, someone could snap a picture of you and get to a probable SS# and other personal details in a matter of seconds.
Granted, this doesn't work all the time. But even if your profile is empty, facts about your friends may allow someone to predict a lot of stuff about you. That's the power of statistics and aggregate data.
My fellow undergrads were spouting off their own ill-informed ideas (as was I, to get credit). Complete waste of time. We'd have been better served to spend those 8-10 hours a week reading.
Sounds like your teachers were doing it wrong (as most teachers do when they lead discussion sections).
First off, you should have been spending 8-10 hours per week reading, in order to prepare informed comments for discussion. Second, your section leaders should have been guiding the discussion in such a way as to make sure salient points were made about the material. For example, if you had two readings that week on similar material, the instructor could be keeping track of differences brought up in discussion. If those were then summarized by the instructor, it could lead to a more critical discussion on the respective positions of the two readings, why they complement each other, why the class might think one reading is better than another, etc.
The point of discussion sections is supposed to be that you require a greater understanding of material to speak an opinion of it aloud in class than you do to passively sit and listen to a lecture. The instructor's role is to guide those comments in such a way as to make important pedagogical points (while also allowing some freedom for the discussion to meander into areas the class finds interesting). If no one is making the relevant pedagogical points, the instructor should step in an make them him/herself, or ask a leading question to get things back on track.
I've been in classes where students are just spouting random naive opinions too. In such cases, it's the instructor's fault that the class was useless. (It may be the students' fault too for not doing the reading or whatever, but in that case, the instructor needs to come up with a way to force students to do the reading and be prepared for discussion, or else shift to a different class meeting structure.)
In other words, many, many students are able to achieve a fairly high level of success on stereotyped mathematical textbook problems without understanding the meaning of a damn thing they're doing.
This is actually one of the most important points, and what's wrong with a lot of math and science teaching in secondary school and in colleges. At the primary level, it's okay to teach simple algorithms to do basic operations or just spit back information (although even there, it would be better if teachers were open to a deeper appreciation of the rationale behind the algorithms for solving problems).
But once you get to high school or college, you need to be tested primarily with problems unlike any you've ever seen before, if you expect to test true understanding. At a simple level, these can require basic comprehension skills, like the dreaded "word problems" that most secondary math teachers avoid. By the time you get a college level course, you should be prepared to be thrown all sorts of curve balls on problem sets and exams. Otherwise, math and any mathematical application classes (physics, other sciences, engineering) devolve into the equivalent of a poorly taught high school algebra class: identify the type of equation (hint, it's probably something you've learned about in the past couple weeks), then perform steps X, Y, and Z to find the solution for that problem type. No actual analysis or thought required.
This review of the literature finds no support for the notion of matching instruction to learning styles. The whole thing was hogwash and wishful thinking.
Umm... that's not what the summary at your link says. Your link says that there hasn't been a lot of experimental testing, and many of the studies done with experimental testing have methodological flaws. Of the few that have good methodology, "several" have evidence that disputes learning style matching. That implies that some produce evidence that it is effective.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There haven't been a lot of good studies, and more are needed to decide whether or not it is "hogwash." In fact, the penultimate sentence of your link says exactly that:
However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all.
I think a lot of the "learning styles" stuff is probably crap too. But your link mostly says we lack good enough evidence to really evaluate it yet.
I will grant that modern copyright tries to create "artificial scarcity" of "authorized" copies, but that's all it does. Paying for the privilege of making a copy (or having one made) is nothing new, though.
People had also been copying written texts for a few thousand years before copyright was invented. Examples: everything written by the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, and all other civilizations with the ability to write before the 17th century.
I am not defending nor arguing against copyright here, but I do wish some people would bother to learn something about history before citing it.
First of all, modern copyright was invented just as soon as the technological means arose that created the supposed problem with "intellectual property," i.e., as soon as the printing press really got going in the late 1400s. There were quite a few copyrights granted and lawsuits filed in many cities in Italy, Germany, and other places in Europe by the early 1500s.
However, the first copyright "lawsuit," I believe, was over a copy of an Irish manuscript in the 6th century or so. Generally, if you wanted a copy of a manuscript from a monastic library during medieval times, you would be charged a significant fee. Obviously, much of that went to pay for the fact that scribes had to make and copy the book by hand, but monasteries were known to charge a lot for the privilege of copying a particularly interesting or rare manuscript.
As for ancient Rome, Greece, etc., generally a slave would be paid to copy a manuscript, and usually one needed to pay the owner of said manuscript at least for the cost of that slaves' work, and a reluctant owner of a rare manuscript certainly might charge a fee just for the privilege of making a copy.
You may not think of all these things as "copyright," but they are effectively the same thing as modern copyright was established as -- a way to pay for the medium and cost of copying an item.
Whether you're paying a slave to copy a manuscript, or a monk, or a scribe, or you're paying a publisher of an early press to typeset or engrave the plates to be copied and bound, you're paying for the copying process. Payment to the author or whatever was a secondary concern and only became significant once it became fairly cheap and universal to use the printing press... however, payment to the owner of the thing being copied has been around since ancient times.
Our copyright system is of course more pervasive and differently structured today, but pretending it didn't exist in any form before the 17th century is a stupid and ignorant statement that betrays your allegiance to the anti-copyright propaganda, rather than a knowledge of actual history.
if it is a fake, then presumably there'd be no great loss in destroying it.
Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on what sort of "fake" it is. A seller might claim that it is a violin by great violin-maker X, but it might instead be a centuries-old violin made by pretty good violin-maker Y. In that case, destroying the "fake" could still very well be destroying a significant piece of history.
Just because an item isn't exactly what someone said it was doesn't mean that it's completely worthless. Merchandise may not live up to expectations, but unless there is a provable case for fraud (which there seems to be no evidence of here), it should not even be a candidate for destruction... and if there were serious evidence of fraud, it should have been turned over to the police anyway.