STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently-behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: -- Introibo ad altare Dei. Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely: -- Come up, Kinch. Come up, you fearful jesuit.
[vomits, then blacks out, wakes up half an hour later]
Forget "why he is considered a great writer," how about "I've never understood why he is considered a writer at all."
Gibberish isn't writing in my book. Then again, "my book" isn't taught at universities. Not sure if that counts for or against it.
1) Countries don't do an even job testing their students. In the US, everyone gets tested, even kids with severe emotional disabilities (meaning from broken homes and such). In some countries, only kids who are in the "college track" schools get tested. Yes, in some places young kids are tracked like that. In Germany students go to the Gymnasium, Hauptschule, or Realschulabschluss depending on ability. The Gymnasium is for kids who are going to university, the Realschulabschluss is for kids going directly in to the work force. Unless they changed it since last I checked, they only test kids in the Gymnasium with these higher level math tests.
That explains partially why the Germans appear to do better than us. What about everyone else?
3) Studies consistently show that the biggest factor in kids doing better in school is parental involvement. If their parents care, the kids do better. A simple measure of this is books. The more books parents have in their house when they have kids, the better the kids do. Not because the kids read the books, but because owning the books is heavily correlated with bright, involved parents and THAT produces better achieving kids. So what seems to be needed isn't more school, but more parental involvement.
The biggest factor but not the only factor, and therefore not the only way to improve education. Besides, how can the federal government make parents more involved?
It is callous, but my bigger problem with it is that it's stupid.
drop the ten% worst performers results from the US kids "math and science tests" and you may find that they don't suck after all.
First of all, unless you're going to be executing that 10%, I think you'll find they create problems. The chinese are willing to take the necessary steps to keep their dropouts in line, we are most definitely not.
Second, that goes against something intrinsically american. And for several good reasons, not the least of which being academic performance in grade school and high school doesn't exactly correlate with academic performance later on in education. Some of our best and brightest have been terrible middle schoolers. Dropping them would be a huge waste of talent.
The problem is not the length of the school year. It is the profound incompetence of the public school monopoly and the lack of accountability of the teachers unions.
There are hundreds of things you can point at and say "this is the problem, not whatever you're trying to fix," especially when you don't give any citations.
And that right there is probably one of the bigger reasons so much is wrong with our education system: so many differing opinions as to what exactly is wrong with education and the best way to fix it prevents ANY solution from going forward.
Studies cited above in other people's posts* and the summary suggest that one thing limiting the amount that students learn is that much of what they learn they forget over the summer. I don't see how fixing THAT problem will somehow affect any efforts to combat "incompetence of the public school monopoly" or "lack of accountability of the teachers unions." Especially when no one seems to be doing anything about those things anyway. Then again, I don't know what you're talking about with either one. Public school monopoly? There are, you know, private schools. Accountability of teachers unions? You mean lack of accountability THANKS TO teachers unions? Because teachers unions are accountable to their members, just the same as any other union. What are they to be accountable for? "Students are still not performing up to our expectations, so the teachers unions will be fined?" I'm missing something.
Is that really a major problem with education as a whole? If the pacing causes problems for, say 30% of the students in the class, either too fast or too slow, that is indeed what is needed. If on the other hand, the pacing works well for 98% of the students, then YOUR plan is a solution to the wrong problem.
If anything, get better teachers and better courses.
Maybe if teaching were a year-round job instead of a 9 month job, we might have better teachers?
Note that I have read exactly zero studies on this and am an educational expert only in that survived high school and college. Therefore the above could be an absurd statement and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Was that "stream of consciousness" or just trolling?
Let's see... off-topic, pointless, annoying, mind-numbingly stupid, a waste of time, pretentious, and made me want to kill. Yup: must be stream of consciousness.
Best buy and the geek squad are a bunch of thieves.
I'm on the extreme low end in computing knowledge on slashdot. With that admission I have to ask, who SHOULD I take my computer to if I have a problem with my home PC that I can't fix on my own. Let's also assume I don't know anyone personally who seems capable of fixing it.
It's also why you can walk into the kitchen on a cool day, and know where the stove is, just by the radiated heat. If however, the room was on fire, that trick wouldn't work.
I don't know, I think the reason I can't tell if the oven is on if the room is on fire is because I'm usually running from said fire. Nothing to do with contrast....slashdotters, resist the temptation to test this theory in your own kitchen...
Oh, I forgot about the price fixing altogether! The link to wiki was talking about ethanol subsidies, about how we've wasted billions on ADM and still for every dollar they make on ethanol, the taxpayer has given $10. That's the bigger ripoff that I was talking about.
Also their corn syrup has really damaged our health, but they're far from the only ones complicit in that.
I think I've been saying what you're saying since the beginning, aside from...
Therefore while there is no guarantee that the researcher would manage the tax money better than the executive, it is more likely the research will spend it on something that only benefits his/herself.
It sounded like you meant to put executive there, or else you made quite the leap in logic.
Obviously not, I just said I don't normally THINK of them as being greedy unethical liars. Not anything about scientists and moral ground. Now that you mention it though, I would still trust my tax money more with a researcher at a university than an executive of a major international company.
The guy is and has always been a compulsive liar and he is still getting an executive job on his way out of prison.
Makes you think, doesn't it.
For me, the much more thought provoking bit is that he first managed to get his PhD in biochemistry. In contrast to executives, I don't normally think of chemists as being greedy unethical liars
/patiently wates for some idiot to ignore the fact that road deaths are consistently going down in absolute terms, and in per-vehicle-mile terms; and to claim that dangerous cars/roads are 'safer', that everyone overcompansates for advances in safety, and that cars should have a spike on the steering wheel.
Uh... citation needed? I mean, I WANT to believe that's an established fact due to the fact that every car would be at least 20% more METAL!...like as in heavy metal, with the throwing up the horns and such. Not actual metal, the material, although it would probably have more metal to make the spike, so...
If you make the car 100% rigid and ensure that the driver is tightly secured - as some NASCAR feeder series cars were in the late 80s and early 90s - then that energy is fed into the occupants. Subject them to 50Gs and you start ripping hearts loose in chest cavities and inducing massive concussions as the front of the skull decelerates the brain. This is suboptimal for survival.
But is much more optimal for entertainment. I might watch NASCAR if they had more hearts, brains, and guts popping out of windshields.
Hell, I'll bet you dollars to donuts any man from the 50's driving that Bel-Air would have jumped right out of that wreck to help the crying sissy-boy with a cut lip driving that Malibu.
But your argument makes no sense. By that rule, child raping chainsaw murdering Arabian black Jewish gay Nazi women [radiantempire.com] would be the best, and make us smile the most, because they are so rare.;)
And yet I DID laugh at the thought of one of those people, AND you even included an emoticon smiling! So we've proven that his argument was right.
The straight 6 engines in those cars offered no protection in an offset crash, and just smashed back through the dash killing the occupants, who were dead anyway.
I was in an accident in it, a guy in a 1981 Toyota ran a red light and I t-boned him, going about 30mph. His frame was bent, axles were snapped, all side windows, the windshield, and rear window were broken. The frame damage snapped a few of his engine mounts, and also broke his radiator. His car was totaled. My car had the frame holding the headlight pushed back about half an inch, and scuffed the chrome bumper.
The lesson here is clear: only run a red light if there is NOT a classic car waiting to go.
Good news for the Bel Air owner though: the fuzzy dice looked like they survived mostly intact, although I think the string connecting them got ripped or cut.
Seriously, points to IIHS for including the dice. You can see them flying around the cockpit at 1:03 to 1:09. They look like they might present a hazard of as you are crashing, they might hit you in the eye, potentially causing you to blink and miss the carnage right before you die.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... sounds like you're a -BIG- fan of no child left behind.
Kidding. Would you say that the biggest (or one of the biggest) problem with education is the effect that NCLB is having on teaching?
I've never understood why he is considered a great writer.
Have you tried reading his books?
In fact, I have never had the pleasure of reading Ulysses. Let me give it a try from the beginning...
[vomits, then blacks out, wakes up half an hour later]
Forget "why he is considered a great writer," how about "I've never understood why he is considered a writer at all."
Gibberish isn't writing in my book. Then again, "my book" isn't taught at universities. Not sure if that counts for or against it.
1) Countries don't do an even job testing their students. In the US, everyone gets tested, even kids with severe emotional disabilities (meaning from broken homes and such). In some countries, only kids who are in the "college track" schools get tested. Yes, in some places young kids are tracked like that. In Germany students go to the Gymnasium, Hauptschule, or Realschulabschluss depending on ability. The Gymnasium is for kids who are going to university, the Realschulabschluss is for kids going directly in to the work force. Unless they changed it since last I checked, they only test kids in the Gymnasium with these higher level math tests.
That explains partially why the Germans appear to do better than us. What about everyone else?
3) Studies consistently show that the biggest factor in kids doing better in school is parental involvement. If their parents care, the kids do better. A simple measure of this is books. The more books parents have in their house when they have kids, the better the kids do. Not because the kids read the books, but because owning the books is heavily correlated with bright, involved parents and THAT produces better achieving kids. So what seems to be needed isn't more school, but more parental involvement.
The biggest factor but not the only factor, and therefore not the only way to improve education. Besides, how can the federal government make parents more involved?
LEAVE SOME CHILDREN BEHIND
sorry- is that too callous?
It is callous, but my bigger problem with it is that it's stupid.
drop the ten% worst performers results from the US kids "math and science tests" and you may find that they don't suck after all.
First of all, unless you're going to be executing that 10%, I think you'll find they create problems. The chinese are willing to take the necessary steps to keep their dropouts in line, we are most definitely not.
Second, that goes against something intrinsically american. And for several good reasons, not the least of which being academic performance in grade school and high school doesn't exactly correlate with academic performance later on in education. Some of our best and brightest have been terrible middle schoolers. Dropping them would be a huge waste of talent.
The problem is not the length of the school year. It is the profound incompetence of the public school monopoly and the lack of accountability of the teachers unions.
There are hundreds of things you can point at and say "this is the problem, not whatever you're trying to fix," especially when you don't give any citations.
And that right there is probably one of the bigger reasons so much is wrong with our education system: so many differing opinions as to what exactly is wrong with education and the best way to fix it prevents ANY solution from going forward.
Studies cited above in other people's posts* and the summary suggest that one thing limiting the amount that students learn is that much of what they learn they forget over the summer. I don't see how fixing THAT problem will somehow affect any efforts to combat "incompetence of the public school monopoly" or "lack of accountability of the teachers unions." Especially when no one seems to be doing anything about those things anyway. Then again, I don't know what you're talking about with either one. Public school monopoly? There are, you know, private schools. Accountability of teachers unions? You mean lack of accountability THANKS TO teachers unions? Because teachers unions are accountable to their members, just the same as any other union. What are they to be accountable for? "Students are still not performing up to our expectations, so the teachers unions will be fined?" I'm missing something.
* You down with OPP? Yeah, you know me.
I'm not convinced our education system has only ONE problem, nor am I convinced that there is only ONE solution to all of it's problems.
Is that really a major problem with education as a whole? If the pacing causes problems for, say 30% of the students in the class, either too fast or too slow, that is indeed what is needed. If on the other hand, the pacing works well for 98% of the students, then YOUR plan is a solution to the wrong problem.
If anything, get better teachers and better courses.
Maybe if teaching were a year-round job instead of a 9 month job, we might have better teachers?
Note that I have read exactly zero studies on this and am an educational expert only in that survived high school and college. Therefore the above could be an absurd statement and should be taken with a grain of salt.
Was that "stream of consciousness" or just trolling?
Let's see... off-topic, pointless, annoying, mind-numbingly stupid, a waste of time, pretentious, and made me want to kill. Yup: must be stream of consciousness.
Best buy and the geek squad are a bunch of thieves.
I'm on the extreme low end in computing knowledge on slashdot. With that admission I have to ask, who SHOULD I take my computer to if I have a problem with my home PC that I can't fix on my own. Let's also assume I don't know anyone personally who seems capable of fixing it.
It's also why you can walk into the kitchen on a cool day, and know where the stove is, just by the radiated heat. If however, the room was on fire, that trick wouldn't work.
I don't know, I think the reason I can't tell if the oven is on if the room is on fire is because I'm usually running from said fire. Nothing to do with contrast. ...slashdotters, resist the temptation to test this theory in your own kitchen...
Oh, I forgot about the price fixing altogether! The link to wiki was talking about ethanol subsidies, about how we've wasted billions on ADM and still for every dollar they make on ethanol, the taxpayer has given $10. That's the bigger ripoff that I was talking about.
Also their corn syrup has really damaged our health, but they're far from the only ones complicit in that.
I think I've been saying what you're saying since the beginning, aside from...
Therefore while there is no guarantee that the researcher would manage the tax money better than the executive, it is more likely the research will spend it on something that only benefits his/herself.
It sounded like you meant to put executive there, or else you made quite the leap in logic.
Obviously not, I just said I don't normally THINK of them as being greedy unethical liars. Not anything about scientists and moral ground. Now that you mention it though, I would still trust my tax money more with a researcher at a university than an executive of a major international company.
The guy is and has always been a compulsive liar and he is still getting an executive job on his way out of prison.
Makes you think, doesn't it.
For me, the much more thought provoking bit is that he first managed to get his PhD in biochemistry. In contrast to executives, I don't normally think of chemists as being greedy unethical liars
Maybe repay the people he ripped off? I know. Completely unreasonable isn't it.
I say start pestering him for that 9 million right after ADM pays the taxpayers back their billions and billions of dollars.
/patiently wates for some idiot to ignore the fact that road deaths are consistently going down in absolute terms, and in per-vehicle-mile terms; and to claim that dangerous cars/roads are 'safer', that everyone overcompansates for advances in safety, and that cars should have a spike on the steering wheel.
Uh... citation needed? I mean, I WANT to believe that's an established fact due to the fact that every car would be at least 20% more METAL! ...like as in heavy metal, with the throwing up the horns and such. Not actual metal, the material, although it would probably have more metal to make the spike, so...
If you make the car 100% rigid and ensure that the driver is tightly secured - as some NASCAR feeder series cars were in the late 80s and early 90s - then that energy is fed into the occupants. Subject them to 50Gs and you start ripping hearts loose in chest cavities and inducing massive concussions as the front of the skull decelerates the brain. This is suboptimal for survival.
But is much more optimal for entertainment. I might watch NASCAR if they had more hearts, brains, and guts popping out of windshields.
Hell, I'll bet you dollars to donuts any man from the 50's driving that Bel-Air would have jumped right out of that wreck to help the crying sissy-boy with a cut lip driving that Malibu.
A 1981 Malibu? In the '50s? More like a DeLorean.
How often do two vehicles on the highway hit each other dead-center head on?
It happens with pretty high frequency when I see someone in the oncoming lane with a stupid vanity plate.
Friends don't let friends put plates on their cars that say things like "swinga."
But your argument makes no sense. By that rule, child raping chainsaw murdering Arabian black Jewish gay Nazi women [radiantempire.com] would be the best, and make us smile the most, because they are so rare. ;)
And yet I DID laugh at the thought of one of those people, AND you even included an emoticon smiling! So we've proven that his argument was right.
But youtube commenter marcsiry did make it worthwhile:
Even worse, the guy in the Belï Air was texting at the time.
The straight 6 engines in those cars offered no protection in an offset crash, and just smashed back through the dash killing the occupants, who were dead anyway.
Fucking classic-car-driving zombies...
I was in an accident in it, a guy in a 1981 Toyota ran a red light and I t-boned him, going about 30mph. His frame was bent, axles were snapped, all side windows, the windshield, and rear window were broken. The frame damage snapped a few of his engine mounts, and also broke his radiator. His car was totaled. My car had the frame holding the headlight pushed back about half an inch, and scuffed the chrome bumper.
The lesson here is clear: only run a red light if there is NOT a classic car waiting to go.
Good news for the Bel Air owner though: the fuzzy dice looked like they survived mostly intact, although I think the string connecting them got ripped or cut.
Seriously, points to IIHS for including the dice. You can see them flying around the cockpit at 1:03 to 1:09. They look like they might present a hazard of as you are crashing, they might hit you in the eye, potentially causing you to blink and miss the carnage right before you die.