My mother had been teaching full time for ten years when they first started the whole certificate thing in my state. She had the highest rating in her district. In fact, her supervisor wrote in his last report that she was the finest teacher he had ever seen.
One day they called her in and told her she had to get a Master of Education. She said, "Riiiiiiiiight!" They let her go.
Because she had a Bachelor of Fine Arts, ceramics, a specialty whose department she had created at her college; and thus wasn't qualified to show primary school children how to play with clay.
She became a photo journalist, travel. Had the time of her life and made more money with less grief. The only ones who really lost out were the children. Won't someone please think of. ..oh, wait, we're talking about "education." Nevermind. Children have nothing to do with that.
...at least, that's what my favorite math major does with all those 1337 calculus skillz.
Well yes, you've been modded a troll, but that's about the size of it really. Friend of mine used his PhD to . ..open a used book store.
You see, math is not a career, it's a study. An act of scholorship.
I know, I know, that word has disappeared from the lexicon, but there are a few weirdos, here and there, who can still only be legitimately labeled as "scholars."
Well, or "worthless bum," depending on your metaphysics. Or a teacher, but I repeat myself.
Thing is that if you're a math major, as others have pointed out, you don't look for a job in math, you look for a job in engineering, business, computing, insurance, etc. All of these enterprises hire people with math degrees for one reason or another.
And if they're not hiring, well, there always is Starbucks or Target. The pay is low, the conditions sort of suck, but it is honest work and nothing to be ashamed of doing.
Remember, this a classless society and nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go. . .
I took an Intermediate Calculus course this Spring as an elective, and I was the only non-Math major in the room . ..
Where were the physics/chem majors? In my undergraduate days we outnumbered the math majors in any calc course.
And the people after teaching certificates were why such courses always finished with about a third of the students they started with. They changed majors to English or Media studies, eventually got their certificates and went on the teach primary and secondary math anyways.
Remember the modern paradigm; you don't have to know the subject to teach it, because your specialty is teaching; and in any case people who know better than you do prepare all of the materials anyway.
Just take a look at the soaring rates of obesity in this country . ..
Ya ever notice that most obese kids have . . . obese parents?
What on earth makes you think the parents are more competent than the the kids? This is about regimentation, not competence. Regimentation to designed to reduce competence.
All of these "kids" are no more than a few years away from voting. Some of them only a few months.
By what magical process of transformation are they going to suddenly spring forth from the head of Zeus with the competence to chose the president if they aren't now competent to chose lunch?
Learning is accomplished by doing. If you wish to have competent adults you must first raise competent children. That's the way it works. They learn choice by being given choices. A parent's job is not to control their children, but to bring them to mature adulthood.
That's why we have compulsory schooling. To keep the kids a) from the parents and b) from competence.
School is designed to a) remove able bodied workers from the work force, b) keep them from working competence for as long as possible, c) spit them out properly regimented for dull, repetitive factory work, d) inveterate consumers who live for the output of those factories and e) take their opinions from media experts.
I'm not making this up. I'm old enough to have hung around with some of the people who engineered it. It used to be common knowledge. It was a subject of public debate and you can find all the arguments and the history of it in the public record. I first started digging deeper into the matter trying to understand the genesis of the Pilgram Fathers story, which did not (and does not) make any sense.
The story of the Pilgram Fathers was invented out of whole cloth to be taught as a national creation myth from the beginning of the public school system for the purposes of social engineering.
That's the truth. Don't take my word for it. Go research it yourself. The public school system has never been about "education" as that term is normally understood. It is about, and always has been about retarding education and retarding adult competence, hopefully . ..indefinately, and the transference of authority from parents to whoever is held up by "society" as "authority," at first for the benefit of industrialists (who are the actual orginal financiers of the school system) and then later for the benefit of the New Deal social engineers.
In other words, the schools are unAmerican; and once upon a time everyone knew that.
What on earth do you think prompted Orwell to write 1984 anyway? It was what he saw happening in the government schools. If you do not understand the schools you do not understand our culture. It's all about the schools.
There are only two reasons for this sad state of things: utter failure of the parents, and a modern american society based on stupidity and irresponsibility which emphasize the greatness of immaturity.
And where did these incompetent parents . . . go to school?
Yes. I've also been aboard square riggers. I've got a ship's lantern from the Charles W. Morgan sitting in the corner right over there. My family is New Bedford/Marblehead/Boston. My face isn't entirely unknown in Groton/New London/Woods Hole these days. I started hanging out with the crew of the Calypso when I was. ..12.
Have you tried practicing what you preach yet??i>
I left the public schools when I was 11. There are a few, here and there, who aver that I'm reasonably well educated. Some of them have Nobels and Pulitzers.
I had something called a "library card" and the time to make use of it, because. ..I wasn't wasting my time in school.
The question is, why didn't you learn those at home before you entered grade school, as most in previous ages had?
I cannot remember a time at which I could not read. In fact, by the age of about 6 I could read the English vernacular of many centuries and many English subcultures, simply because, in my home. ..we read.
When you say you're "all grown up" I'll assume you're at least in your 30s.
I didn't say I was "all grown up." Do some math to figure out what I'm "at least."
What the fuck have you> done with your life?
When I was 12 I was going on archeological digs in a foreign country and hanging out with the crew of the Calypso. I was also often choosing what my parents had for lunch. I did the shopping and was a better cook than they were.
I entered college at 14, which in former times would not have been exceptional, and instead of spending ten minutes on some "reading exercise" about Bucky Fuller I was arguing with him. I could do so as nearly an equal because at that point I had already designed and built sailboats, motor cars and unpowered aircraft entirely on my own. No adult input, supervision or help at all (I even raised the money and learned to scrounge what I couldn't afford to buy).
Yes, I'm a bit smarter than the average bear, but that isn't what makes me "exceptional." What makes me exceptional is simply that I was allowed to do these things. Damn near any kid is perfectly capable of them.
Just as he is perfectly capable of deciding what he wants for lunch.
And Mozart wrote his first compositions when he was five, and performed at the Imperial Court in Vienna when he was six years old . ..
I wrote my first compostions at 6. I was a "late bloomer" due to family financial problems. We didn't have cheap, electronic keyboards back then. I didn't have the benefit of a musician father either: That is the explanation of Mozart. He picked it up at his father's knee, as could any child. As any child in a Suzuki program does. As any child can pick up anything, including that dearly complicated, technological activity: "Deciding what to have for lunch."
it's not a good idea to draw conclusions about a group based on cherry-picked atypical single cases.
I cherry picked an obvious example, not because it was particularly exceptional, but because it was simply what came first to mind. Farrugut was "precocious" by . . . about a year.
You don't need a bachelor's degree to command a pre-industrial ship. ..
Exactly!
Go read Stephen Leacock's (Professor of Economics; McGill) book: Too Much College, copyright . . . 1939.
If you somehow think "technology" makes a difference, it doesn't take a bachelor's degree to command a tank battlion either. Funny how when they're safe at home they're "merely children," but when it comes time to throw their lives away on complete bullshit they're the epitome of the American Superman, innit?
In his day George Washington was considered woefully uneducated. He read Cicero in Latin. He "picked it up" on his own; as did most "kids."
Today's bachelor's degree isn't worth squat compared to what the average young teen knew in former times (in his young teens Washington was earning $100,000 in real dollars a year as a surveyor. The mathematics of this calling were the same then as they are now. He had a total of two years of school).
It is my own experience as a remdial undergraduate tutor that I can teach a full semester of physics in an hour or two, one on one away from the lecture hall.
Our educational system is very efficient at containing bodies ( I'm not sure if you're aware that that is all it was really originally designed for, to reduce the number of able bodied workers available; and eventually spit them out suited for factory work. "Education" and "Children's Rights" had nothing to do with it at all. Those are modern, post hoc explanations), but it is very poor at educating.
You learned to speak a language with no experience of language at all, no experience of anything really, almost entirely on your own, simply through observation and imitation.
Think about that. Think about that really, really hard. Now think about how much language you're likely to walk away from after four years of "studying" one in college.
Go get a copy of Cervantes in Spanish. Go get a Spanish language reference. Work your way through the book. By the time you are finished you will know how to read and translate Spanish; all without attending a single class.
People are smart. School is stupid. Go read some John Holt.
Kids of the 19th century would have had more parental control over their diet, not less. You think kids would be supermen or full adults were it not for our evil educational system? Hah. Keep on dreaming.
You sir/madam, are out to lunch.
In the nineteenth century kids were rarely even still living at home at 16, they were considered full adults and struck out on their own, not unseldom with their spouses; and as recently as the 1960s the average parent didn't even know where their 6 years olds were at lunchtime and were just damned glad that someone else must be footing the bill.
In the words of Bill Cosby:
"One time I ate a dead frog. I didn't frow up or 'nothin'."
He made this joke in the early 60s, talking about growing up in the 40s and 50s, when such behavior was the common experience of young, urban men. You might not believe what those of us who spent some time growing up in "the sticks" ate for lunch. Our parents were wise enough to teach us not to eat the poison ivy and then left us to it.
Overprotective? I don't think so. Just common sense.
Jesus, all of a sudden I'm glad I'm old and don't have to grow up with this crap. Admiral Farragut was given his first command (a prize ship) during the War of 1812 when he was twelve years old. He not only brought the ship to port successfully, but had to put down a threatend armed revolt by the ship's original captain to do it.
If high school kids today are such kids that they can't even be trusted to buy their own lunch (when many of them are actually old enough to leave home) the only possible reason for it is . ..High School. They've been taught incompetence.
The "repressed" 50s look like Shangri-fucking-La in comparison.
What do you bet the end result of this is going to be nothing more than a shitload of innocent people getting put on "The List" because of false positives?
. ..you could say that the police have a right to privacy . ..
No, I could not. The second a police officer puts on a uniform and a badge he is a public officer, ostensibly working in the public's interest and certainly paid from the public's coffers.
And as a branch of the government requiring oversight it is the public that provides it.
Slashdot Mirror
My mother had been teaching full time for ten years when they first started the whole certificate thing in my state. She had the highest rating in her district. In fact, her supervisor wrote in his last report that she was the finest teacher he had ever seen.
.oh, wait, we're talking about "education." Nevermind. Children have nothing to do with that.
One day they called her in and told her she had to get a Master of Education. She said, "Riiiiiiiiight!" They let her go.
Because she had a Bachelor of Fine Arts, ceramics, a specialty whose department she had created at her college; and thus wasn't qualified to show primary school children how to play with clay.
She became a photo journalist, travel. Had the time of her life and made more money with less grief. The only ones who really lost out were the children. Won't someone please think of. .
KFG
...at least, that's what my favorite math major does with all those 1337 calculus skillz.
.open a used book store.
Well yes, you've been modded a troll, but that's about the size of it really. Friend of mine used his PhD to . .
You see, math is not a career, it's a study. An act of scholorship.
I know, I know, that word has disappeared from the lexicon, but there are a few weirdos, here and there, who can still only be legitimately labeled as "scholars."
Well, or "worthless bum," depending on your metaphysics. Or a teacher, but I repeat myself.
Thing is that if you're a math major, as others have pointed out, you don't look for a job in math, you look for a job in engineering, business, computing, insurance, etc. All of these enterprises hire people with math degrees for one reason or another.
And if they're not hiring, well, there always is Starbucks or Target. The pay is low, the conditions sort of suck, but it is honest work and nothing to be ashamed of doing.
Remember, this a classless society and nothing can go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go. . .
KFG
I took an Intermediate Calculus course this Spring as an elective, and I was the only non-Math major in the room . . .
Where were the physics/chem majors? In my undergraduate days we outnumbered the math majors in any calc course.
And the people after teaching certificates were why such courses always finished with about a third of the students they started with. They changed majors to English or Media studies, eventually got their certificates and went on the teach primary and secondary math anyways.
Remember the modern paradigm; you don't have to know the subject to teach it, because your specialty is teaching; and in any case people who know better than you do prepare all of the materials anyway.
Just follow the curriculum.
KFG
Just take a look at the soaring rates of obesity in this country . . .
.indefinately, and the transference of authority from parents to whoever is held up by "society" as "authority," at first for the benefit of industrialists (who are the actual orginal financiers of the school system) and then later for the benefit of the New Deal social engineers.
Ya ever notice that most obese kids have . . . obese parents?
What on earth makes you think the parents are more competent than the the kids? This is about regimentation, not competence. Regimentation to designed to reduce competence.
All of these "kids" are no more than a few years away from voting. Some of them only a few months.
By what magical process of transformation are they going to suddenly spring forth from the head of Zeus with the competence to chose the president if they aren't now competent to chose lunch?
Learning is accomplished by doing. If you wish to have competent adults you must first raise competent children. That's the way it works. They learn choice by being given choices. A parent's job is not to control their children, but to bring them to mature adulthood.
That's why we have compulsory schooling. To keep the kids a) from the parents and b) from competence.
School is designed to a) remove able bodied workers from the work force, b) keep them from working competence for as long as possible, c) spit them out properly regimented for dull, repetitive factory work, d) inveterate consumers who live for the output of those factories and e) take their opinions from media experts.
I'm not making this up. I'm old enough to have hung around with some of the people who engineered it. It used to be common knowledge. It was a subject of public debate and you can find all the arguments and the history of it in the public record. I first started digging deeper into the matter trying to understand the genesis of the Pilgram Fathers story, which did not (and does not) make any sense.
The story of the Pilgram Fathers was invented out of whole cloth to be taught as a national creation myth from the beginning of the public school system for the purposes of social engineering.
That's the truth. Don't take my word for it. Go research it yourself. The public school system has never been about "education" as that term is normally understood. It is about, and always has been about retarding education and retarding adult competence, hopefully . .
In other words, the schools are unAmerican; and once upon a time everyone knew that.
What on earth do you think prompted Orwell to write 1984 anyway? It was what he saw happening in the government schools. If you do not understand the schools you do not understand our culture. It's all about the schools.
KFG
There are only two reasons for this sad state of things: utter failure of the parents, and a modern american society based on stupidity and irresponsibility which emphasize the greatness of immaturity.
And where did these incompetent parents . . . go to school?
KFG
Have you been aboard any modern ships?
.12.
.I wasn't wasting my time in school.
Yes. I've also been aboard square riggers. I've got a ship's lantern from the Charles W. Morgan sitting in the corner right over there. My family is New Bedford/Marblehead/Boston. My face isn't entirely unknown in Groton/New London/Woods Hole these days. I started hanging out with the crew of the Calypso when I was. .
Have you tried practicing what you preach yet??i>
I left the public schools when I was 11. There are a few, here and there, who aver that I'm reasonably well educated. Some of them have Nobels and Pulitzers.
I had something called a "library card" and the time to make use of it, because. .
KFG
. . .bussed to special schools to learn nothing.
Bingo! We have a winner.
KFG
Go read Crystallizing Public Opinion; Edward L. Bernays, copyright 1928.
KFG
I had to go to college to learn my three R's.
.we read.
The question is, why didn't you learn those at home before you entered grade school, as most in previous ages had?
I cannot remember a time at which I could not read. In fact, by the age of about 6 I could read the English vernacular of many centuries and many English subcultures, simply because, in my home. .
KFG
OMG, I am so 1337! C my l337 grammer skilz!
A perfectly lucid sentence.
KFG
I've never seen any of those parts of the English language being butchered by netspeak.
Because it arrived prebutchered.
S'ok, if you think it's bad now, you should have seen what was happening to it in the 1500s.
KFG
Use common sense.
I'm not that stupid.
KFG
When you say you're "all grown up" I'll assume you're at least in your 30s.
I didn't say I was "all grown up." Do some math to figure out what I'm "at least."
What the fuck have you> done with your life?
When I was 12 I was going on archeological digs in a foreign country and hanging out with the crew of the Calypso. I was also often choosing what my parents had for lunch. I did the shopping and was a better cook than they were.
I entered college at 14, which in former times would not have been exceptional, and instead of spending ten minutes on some "reading exercise" about Bucky Fuller I was arguing with him. I could do so as nearly an equal because at that point I had already designed and built sailboats, motor cars and unpowered aircraft entirely on my own. No adult input, supervision or help at all (I even raised the money and learned to scrounge what I couldn't afford to buy).
Yes, I'm a bit smarter than the average bear, but that isn't what makes me "exceptional." What makes me exceptional is simply that I was allowed to do these things. Damn near any kid is perfectly capable of them.
Just as he is perfectly capable of deciding what he wants for lunch.
KFG
And Mozart wrote his first compositions when he was five, and performed at the Imperial Court in Vienna when he was six years old . . .
I wrote my first compostions at 6. I was a "late bloomer" due to family financial problems. We didn't have cheap, electronic keyboards back then. I didn't have the benefit of a musician father either: That is the explanation of Mozart. He picked it up at his father's knee, as could any child. As any child in a Suzuki program does. As any child can pick up anything, including that dearly complicated, technological activity: "Deciding what to have for lunch."
it's not a good idea to draw conclusions about a group based on cherry-picked atypical single cases.
I cherry picked an obvious example, not because it was particularly exceptional, but because it was simply what came first to mind. Farrugut was "precocious" by . . . about a year.
KFG
You don't need a bachelor's degree to command a pre-industrial ship. . .
Exactly!
Go read Stephen Leacock's (Professor of Economics; McGill) book: Too Much College, copyright . . . 1939.
If you somehow think "technology" makes a difference, it doesn't take a bachelor's degree to command a tank battlion either. Funny how when they're safe at home they're "merely children," but when it comes time to throw their lives away on complete bullshit they're the epitome of the American Superman, innit?
In his day George Washington was considered woefully uneducated. He read Cicero in Latin. He "picked it up" on his own; as did most "kids."
Today's bachelor's degree isn't worth squat compared to what the average young teen knew in former times (in his young teens Washington was earning $100,000 in real dollars a year as a surveyor. The mathematics of this calling were the same then as they are now. He had a total of two years of school).
It is my own experience as a remdial undergraduate tutor that I can teach a full semester of physics in an hour or two, one on one away from the lecture hall.
Our educational system is very efficient at containing bodies ( I'm not sure if you're aware that that is all it was really originally designed for, to reduce the number of able bodied workers available; and eventually spit them out suited for factory work. "Education" and "Children's Rights" had nothing to do with it at all. Those are modern, post hoc explanations), but it is very poor at educating.
You learned to speak a language with no experience of language at all, no experience of anything really, almost entirely on your own, simply through observation and imitation.
Think about that. Think about that really, really hard. Now think about how much language you're likely to walk away from after four years of "studying" one in college.
Go get a copy of Cervantes in Spanish. Go get a Spanish language reference. Work your way through the book. By the time you are finished you will know how to read and translate Spanish; all without attending a single class.
People are smart. School is stupid. Go read some John Holt.
KFG
Kids of the 19th century would have had more parental control over their diet, not less. You think kids would be supermen or full adults were it not for our evil educational system? Hah. Keep on dreaming.
You sir/madam, are out to lunch.
In the nineteenth century kids were rarely even still living at home at 16, they were considered full adults and struck out on their own, not unseldom with their spouses; and as recently as the 1960s the average parent didn't even know where their 6 years olds were at lunchtime and were just damned glad that someone else must be footing the bill.
In the words of Bill Cosby:
"One time I ate a dead frog. I didn't frow up or 'nothin'."
He made this joke in the early 60s, talking about growing up in the 40s and 50s, when such behavior was the common experience of young, urban men. You might not believe what those of us who spent some time growing up in "the sticks" ate for lunch. Our parents were wise enough to teach us not to eat the poison ivy and then left us to it.
KFG
. . . their names would be something like Steve and Nancy . . .
And habitually walked around armed, even in school. You've been watching too much Leave it to Beaver. Go watch West Side Story.
Better yet, go read some Kerouac.
KFG
Overprotective? I don't think so. Just common sense.
.High School. They've been taught incompetence.
Jesus, all of a sudden I'm glad I'm old and don't have to grow up with this crap. Admiral Farragut was given his first command (a prize ship) during the War of 1812 when he was twelve years old. He not only brought the ship to port successfully, but had to put down a threatend armed revolt by the ship's original captain to do it.
If high school kids today are such kids that they can't even be trusted to buy their own lunch (when many of them are actually old enough to leave home) the only possible reason for it is . .
The "repressed" 50s look like Shangri-fucking-La in comparison.
KFG
We're running around banning knitting needles . . .
Sweaters can cause itch and afghans kill.
KFG
"Could" is a word of so many possibilities. It is totaly unlike its lesser cousin, the word "will"
Have faith.
KFG
Hey, those nano bombs can sting!
What do you bet the end result of this is going to be nothing more than a shitload of innocent people getting put on "The List" because of false positives?
There's such a thing as over measurement.
KFG
. . . It's an unbreachable law . . .
Tell it to my lawyer.
KFG
. . . you better give up on all technology . . .
You can have my pointy stick when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
KFG
. . .you could say that the police have a right to privacy . . .
No, I could not. The second a police officer puts on a uniform and a badge he is a public officer, ostensibly working in the public's interest and certainly paid from the public's coffers.
And as a branch of the government requiring oversight it is the public that provides it.
KFG
Patch it up and it'll be fine.
Coming soon; Ted Williams 2: The Bigger Dig
In development; Ted Williams: Digging Forever
KFG