I don't remember electing Monsanto. Perhaps we should be asking our elected officials why Monsanto is permitted to continue to exist after their numerous offenses against not just the citizens of the USA, but actually humanity. Even Wikipedia seems to have forgotten the contaminated agent orange thing:P
Because the elected official then turns around, quotes the Bible, and promises to lower your taxes, and you vote for him or her.
Anyone willing to limit corporate power is typically not elected, and not because Monsanto gave them money but because of tax-cut and deregulation fanaticism.
You cannot limit the entire field of education to "teacher". I have an MAEd and I'm not even qualified to teach! You cannot pick and choose ONE discipline of Education (secondary, elementary, curriculum, special, other, whatever) and then say the field of education lags in GRE scores
Well my point was that they shouldn't be losing to chemists even by 1 point! It's not a hard test, anyone with a college degree should be able to break at least 500 on it. ALL of the education fields listed lag in GRE scores as far as I'm concerned.
For crying out loud, we can all understand that it doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to teach third graders, can't we!? Get rid of those outliers, and I think you'd find that education degrees aren't as watered-down as you like to think.
It doesn't require a Rhodes scholar, but it's a professional career so each practitioner should have at least a basic understanding, especially since in most places teachers have to develop lesson plans (and I don't think "9:00AM-3:30PM: babysit children") counts. Children are complicated; you wouldn't want an unqualified child psychologist, would you? I understand that you're annoyed that people tend not to respect the academic discipline you chose, and by no means do I think it's a worthless degree or that the educational system in this country is irredeemably broken, I just think that education as a discipline has some shortcomings.
487 for Chemists, 486 for Secondary Education. I'm not sure that qualifies as significant.
437 for education--other according to that list. And 50 points is definitely significant.
Please don't equate my MAEd in Curriculum to a 4 year + elementary school teacher education program.
According to that list, the average GRE for people going into graduate programs in curriculum is 462. And, I believe many of the less highly regarded education programs don't even need GREs so that cuts out a lot of the poorer performers. Sure there are brilliant teachers, and for all I know you got a perfect score on the GRE, but the point seems to be that education programs on average produce scholars less able than other fields.
Not to disparage 3rd grade teachers everywhere, but I'm pretty sure you don't have to ace the SAT or GRE to be a good manager of 9 year olds' daily routines.
Well you can't have it both ways. Either education is a real academic field, or it's not. If it requires higher reasoning, then yes, its practitioners should be able to show at least a basic competency with the written language.
That's just your methodological or paradigmatic bias. Education is better suited towards qualitative research methods.
That's the NRC's bias, too; check out their 2002 report on rigor in educational research. There's nothing wrong with qualitative research if it's done correctly, but it's not an excuse for a researcher to play hunches or validate their own pet theories.
My background is actually in social sciences (undergrad degree in anthropology, grad degree in law), and I definitely do not have a pro-science/tech bias.
And from what I understand about the Ed.D. degree, is that it has less rigorous requirements than a PhD; for example, many don't even have a foreign language requirement.
And undergraduate education majors seem to perform very poorly in standardized tests (you would think majoring in education would make you especially effective at testing.) For example, here are GRE results by intended major. There is no excuse for someone who spent their undergraduate career presumably reading and writing to be outperformed significantly by chemists and engineers in verbal reasoning. I'm not saying a 437 verbal on the GRE means you're a bad person, but it certainly does mean that you are not ready for graduate education in a social science.
Additionally, the research done in education is notorious for its lack of rigor, especially it's reluctance to use control groups.
You know, when you translate phrases from other languages you're allowed to make them grammatically sound. World of Fighting would have, presumably, the same meaning but actually not sound quite as ridiculous in English.
Anyone who has followed the court at all knows perfectly well that justices frequently go against the wishes of the presidents who appointed them and the political parties which they are a member of. Look at Souter. The judges are more concerned with their own place in history rather than pleasing a president/party who, to put it in practical terms, can't really hurt or hinder their career anymore.
And if they chose violence anyway, beat them soundly and bring the survivors back to the negotiation table.
What if there are no survivors because they are willing to die for their beliefs? And for every one of them you kill, 2 more witness it and take their place?
Is there some compelling reason to tax corporate profits? How about we adjust the personal income taxes on dividends and capital gains and just do away with corporate taxes altogether?
Because then countless people will form a single-shareholder corporation and have all their income go into it. Then live comfortably in their corporation-owned home, drive their corporation-owned car, and put up their mistress in their corporation-owned apartment.
The problem with textbooks is they're aimed at the lowest common denominator, because the publishers want to sell the books nationwide. Most of my teachers taught plenty of stuff that wasn't in the textbooks.
By the way, I apologize for the harsh tone of my reply, you didn't deserve that. I have been in these arguments before, and I sort of just leapt in assuming it was a continuation of former ones, but it's not, and you were good enough to not respond in kind.
Where I went to school the law stated that no matter what the circumstance, the teacher cannot strike a student. So, if the student is beating the crap out of the teacher, the teacher can't do anything about it if (s)he wants to keep his/her job and/or stay out of jail.
What jurisdiction is this? Self-defense laws don't lapse inside school grounds.
That is the worst possible way I can think of. High school students are ignorant. They'll tend to rate the teachers going by personal likes and dislikes rather than teaching effectiveness.
Are you ignorant? First of all, the "feel-good" curricula (wow, incorrect spelling and incorrect use of the plural, is that because all those mean liberals didn't teach you correctly?) was mainly a right-wing strawman. Secondly, NCLB is pretty much the opposite of feel-good curricula, and it hasn't really helped matters, eh?
Support the Fair Tax. http://fairtax.org/
Promote peace, kill more bad guys.
As a product of the public school system who is quite happy with the education he received, let me try and add some balance to the usual slashdot anti-teacher, anti-union, right-wing libertarian groupthink.
The purpose of tenure is to protect teachers from unfair termination, not to protect bad teachers. If a teacher is underperforming there is usually a process to get rid of them, even if tenured, only most administrators are too lazy to go through it. The whole system is designed precisely so a school principal can't just terminate someone because IN THEIR JUDGMENT, the teacher is doing a lousy job. Personally I'd trust the judgment of most teachers over most school administrators.
And when it comes to education, it's hard to create metrics to accurately measure success. And don't even try to argue that those idiotic standardized tests measure much. Are we going to punish a teacher because most of their students failed a standardized English test? What if more than half of their students don't SPEAK English? What if the teacher had to teach 40 kids in one classroom? There are bad teachers, but it's not always easy to measure which ones are bad, and which ones are just either lucky or unlucky.
And by the way, anyone who thinks that some all-powerful teacher's union is preventing success is just ignorant. The teacher's unions are constantly undercut and overwhelmed by legislatures and city and state governments. If the teacher's unions were so powerful, then why do teacher's make so little?
The geeks that use Linux often have influence over the technology selections of others and are more likely to recommend products from a company that, in their eyes, has done something good.
Uhhh....huh? A sysadmin is going to recommend to the CTO that the company migrate their database to Quake Wars?
Why on earth would any sane company make a linux port a priority? I mean, don't get me wrong, I play linux ports (of good games, like UT), but I am under no illusion that the companies are focusing more than a tiny fraction of their efforts on making them. Makes no business sense whatsoever.
It's like slashdot humor. Unless you're familiar with the memes, the subject matter, and the jokes that have come before, 3/4 of the jokes just won't be funny to you.
I am familiar with the memes, the subject matter, and the jokes that have come before, and 4/4 of them still aren't funny.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't remember electing Monsanto. Perhaps we should be asking our elected officials why Monsanto is permitted to continue to exist after their numerous offenses against not just the citizens of the USA, but actually humanity. Even Wikipedia seems to have forgotten the contaminated agent orange thing :P
Because the elected official then turns around, quotes the Bible, and promises to lower your taxes, and you vote for him or her.
Anyone willing to limit corporate power is typically not elected, and not because Monsanto gave them money but because of tax-cut and deregulation fanaticism.
Thanks for posting that link, it's fascinating stuff. Makes me feel guilty that I talked to the police when they stopped me a few weeks ago.
"Arrest" in legal terms means basically any deprivation of your physical freedom.
You cannot limit the entire field of education to "teacher". I have an MAEd and I'm not even qualified to teach! You cannot pick and choose ONE discipline of Education (secondary, elementary, curriculum, special, other, whatever) and then say the field of education lags in GRE scores
Well my point was that they shouldn't be losing to chemists even by 1 point! It's not a hard test, anyone with a college degree should be able to break at least 500 on it. ALL of the education fields listed lag in GRE scores as far as I'm concerned.
For crying out loud, we can all understand that it doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to teach third graders, can't we!? Get rid of those outliers, and I think you'd find that education degrees aren't as watered-down as you like to think.
It doesn't require a Rhodes scholar, but it's a professional career so each practitioner should have at least a basic understanding, especially since in most places teachers have to develop lesson plans (and I don't think "9:00AM-3:30PM: babysit children") counts. Children are complicated; you wouldn't want an unqualified child psychologist, would you? I understand that you're annoyed that people tend not to respect the academic discipline you chose, and by no means do I think it's a worthless degree or that the educational system in this country is irredeemably broken, I just think that education as a discipline has some shortcomings.
487 for Chemists, 486 for Secondary Education. I'm not sure that qualifies as significant.
437 for education--other according to that list. And 50 points is definitely significant.
Please don't equate my MAEd in Curriculum to a 4 year + elementary school teacher education program.
According to that list, the average GRE for people going into graduate programs in curriculum is 462. And, I believe many of the less highly regarded education programs don't even need GREs so that cuts out a lot of the poorer performers. Sure there are brilliant teachers, and for all I know you got a perfect score on the GRE, but the point seems to be that education programs on average produce scholars less able than other fields.
Not to disparage 3rd grade teachers everywhere, but I'm pretty sure you don't have to ace the SAT or GRE to be a good manager of 9 year olds' daily routines.
Well you can't have it both ways. Either education is a real academic field, or it's not. If it requires higher reasoning, then yes, its practitioners should be able to show at least a basic competency with the written language.
That's just your methodological or paradigmatic bias. Education is better suited towards qualitative research methods.
That's the NRC's bias, too; check out their 2002 report on rigor in educational research. There's nothing wrong with qualitative research if it's done correctly, but it's not an excuse for a researcher to play hunches or validate their own pet theories.
My background is actually in social sciences (undergrad degree in anthropology, grad degree in law), and I definitely do not have a pro-science/tech bias.
And from what I understand about the Ed.D. degree, is that it has less rigorous requirements than a PhD; for example, many don't even have a foreign language requirement.
And undergraduate education majors seem to perform very poorly in standardized tests (you would think majoring in education would make you especially effective at testing.) For example, here are GRE results by intended major. There is no excuse for someone who spent their undergraduate career presumably reading and writing to be outperformed significantly by chemists and engineers in verbal reasoning. I'm not saying a 437 verbal on the GRE means you're a bad person, but it certainly does mean that you are not ready for graduate education in a social science.
Additionally, the research done in education is notorious for its lack of rigor, especially it's reluctance to use control groups.
Are you getting a cut of the profits?
If you're lucky most of your education professors will have PhDs. Most education teachers have Ed.D.s I think, which are pretty lightweight.
You know, when you translate phrases from other languages you're allowed to make them grammatically sound. World of Fighting would have, presumably, the same meaning but actually not sound quite as ridiculous in English.
Anyone who has followed the court at all knows perfectly well that justices frequently go against the wishes of the presidents who appointed them and the political parties which they are a member of. Look at Souter. The judges are more concerned with their own place in history rather than pleasing a president/party who, to put it in practical terms, can't really hurt or hinder their career anymore.
Um you might be wrong, unfortunately. Obama has four justices that will rubber stamp anything he signs.
Where on earth did you come up with that craziness? Do you have any evidence for this astounding assertion?
And if they chose violence anyway, beat them soundly and bring the survivors back to the negotiation table.
What if there are no survivors because they are willing to die for their beliefs? And for every one of them you kill, 2 more witness it and take their place?
Ummm...since when is Latin a secret language? And what rituals have to be in Latin anyway?
Slashdotters are too small to be a cult - they're the crazy guy muttering to himself on a street corner.
Only with less dignity...
Is there some compelling reason to tax corporate profits? How about we adjust the personal income taxes on dividends and capital gains and just do away with corporate taxes altogether?
Because then countless people will form a single-shareholder corporation and have all their income go into it. Then live comfortably in their corporation-owned home, drive their corporation-owned car, and put up their mistress in their corporation-owned apartment.
The problem with textbooks is they're aimed at the lowest common denominator, because the publishers want to sell the books nationwide. Most of my teachers taught plenty of stuff that wasn't in the textbooks.
By the way, I apologize for the harsh tone of my reply, you didn't deserve that. I have been in these arguments before, and I sort of just leapt in assuming it was a continuation of former ones, but it's not, and you were good enough to not respond in kind.
The only educational idea we should adopt from Starship Troopers is co-ed showers...
Where I went to school the law stated that no matter what the circumstance, the teacher cannot strike a student. So, if the student is beating the crap out of the teacher, the teacher can't do anything about it if (s)he wants to keep his/her job and/or stay out of jail.
What jurisdiction is this? Self-defense laws don't lapse inside school grounds.
Simple: have the students rate the teachers.
That is the worst possible way I can think of. High school students are ignorant. They'll tend to rate the teachers going by personal likes and dislikes rather than teaching effectiveness.
Leftist feel-good cirriculums dominate
Are you ignorant? First of all, the "feel-good" curricula (wow, incorrect spelling and incorrect use of the plural, is that because all those mean liberals didn't teach you correctly?) was mainly a right-wing strawman. Secondly, NCLB is pretty much the opposite of feel-good curricula, and it hasn't really helped matters, eh?
Support the Fair Tax. http://fairtax.org/ Promote peace, kill more bad guys.
Oh, guess you ARE ignorant.
As a product of the public school system who is quite happy with the education he received, let me try and add some balance to the usual slashdot anti-teacher, anti-union, right-wing libertarian groupthink.
The purpose of tenure is to protect teachers from unfair termination, not to protect bad teachers. If a teacher is underperforming there is usually a process to get rid of them, even if tenured, only most administrators are too lazy to go through it. The whole system is designed precisely so a school principal can't just terminate someone because IN THEIR JUDGMENT, the teacher is doing a lousy job. Personally I'd trust the judgment of most teachers over most school administrators.
And when it comes to education, it's hard to create metrics to accurately measure success. And don't even try to argue that those idiotic standardized tests measure much. Are we going to punish a teacher because most of their students failed a standardized English test? What if more than half of their students don't SPEAK English? What if the teacher had to teach 40 kids in one classroom? There are bad teachers, but it's not always easy to measure which ones are bad, and which ones are just either lucky or unlucky.
And by the way, anyone who thinks that some all-powerful teacher's union is preventing success is just ignorant. The teacher's unions are constantly undercut and overwhelmed by legislatures and city and state governments. If the teacher's unions were so powerful, then why do teacher's make so little?
The geeks that use Linux often have influence over the technology selections of others and are more likely to recommend products from a company that, in their eyes, has done something good.
Uhhh....huh? A sysadmin is going to recommend to the CTO that the company migrate their database to Quake Wars?
Why on earth would any sane company make a linux port a priority? I mean, don't get me wrong, I play linux ports (of good games, like UT), but I am under no illusion that the companies are focusing more than a tiny fraction of their efforts on making them. Makes no business sense whatsoever.
It's like slashdot humor. Unless you're familiar with the memes, the subject matter, and the jokes that have come before, 3/4 of the jokes just won't be funny to you.
I am familiar with the memes, the subject matter, and the jokes that have come before, and 4/4 of them still aren't funny.