ROTFLMAO!! Oh man, is that the ultimate in poetic justice!! Perfect timing, man, just absofuckinglutely perfect!
And for losers who pull stunts like that, the details change but the story stays the same in every era. In the Olden Days, the dork who thought he'd 0wn3d the system might do something like steal the answer sheet for a test, then claim someone else planted it on him.
[eyeing original thread, involving implanting the damned things and poison ivy] If it ever does come down to required implants -- and I think the day is coming (I've read that some public figures already have themselves and/or their kids microchipped for "security" reasons) -- someday some kid is going to have an idiosyncratic reaction and die from it. And THEN won't there be a hoo-rah!!
Another medium, same principle: About five years ago, I tested a "pay per download" ebook vendor for a client. It required online authentication EVERY time the user wished to view the ebook.
Predictably, the service went out of business within a year or so, making the bought-and-paid-for ebook worthless.
Eeep... That sure lets their brilliance shine through, eh?
And the real test of determined ignorance? If you point out this security hole, instead of being thanked for finding it so they can fix it, you get in trouble. (Which pretty much applies to all of life, not just IT stupidity.)
The lack of realworld experience, and possession of the concomitant attitudes, makes it real obvious that most folk here are in the 14 to 24 age range, eh? Whoops, I used big words, they don't teach those anymore!!
When I was in the 5th grade (1964), the earliest feelgood crap started coming down the pipe, in the form of whole-word recognition reading (which teaches *everyone* to "read" by the method most dyslexics use -- I now support enough dyslexics to have a clue about that). By poor luck I was in the afflicted experimental class. And despite that we all had perfect scores (we'd known all the material since the 2nd grade!), we KNEW we were being shortchanged compared to the students in the standard tracks, and we resented it. (We were spelling words like "cat" and they were spelling words like "catatonic".) Result? No one in our class wanted to do spelling or reading anymore.
Fortunately I moved away in midyear, but one has to wonder if those perfect scores impressed stupid school board members enough to switch everyone to the new program.:(
If you can't tell, I can rant about *real* education vs "feelgood" bullshit for.. oh, I see it was two hours before I ran down and went away the first time:)
That completely sucks. Hope you manage to pull a decent grade regardless, and better luck next time!
Maybe the teacher was "just enforcing the rules". But education systems have become so admin-topheavy, and subsequently rulebound, that there is no longer any allowance for common sense. And that sort of thing gets worse as *experienced* teachers continue to leave the field.:(
Actually, that's kinda how it is all over. People who built a field and really know it are aging out or being pushed out; CEOs overly-beholden to stockholders have taken over, and as a result consumers suffer from poor service and poor products. Sure is a nasty parallel, eh?
Yes, and classrooms such as you describe are an impossible situation whether large or small, tho a larger class gives discipline problems more opportunity to get out of hand (and kids being sheep as much as adults, what one gets away with, the rest will usually follow). The worse when the teacher isn't really clueful to begin with.
But larger classes are not themselves to blame for the situation. Nor do smaller classes fix it, far as I've seen.
My previous tenant was a 9th grade teacher; she'd bitch about her classes being too large -- at a mere 16 to 20 students. But when pressed, she allowed as how the REAL problem is kids who have absolutely no respect for learning, let alone for teachers. She also said the issue was worse among children of illegal immigrants, as they completely lack respect for authority, particuarly if that authority is a woman.
When I was in school (I graduated from H.S. in 1972), discipline was much stricter than it is today. Even so, we only had to have hall passes and library passes if we were wandering around loose outside of normal times to do so. But if it was something like "go to the john", it was expected that we were responsible enough to manage that with neither paperwork** nor supervision. If we had to work on something outside of class, we just asked permission to use whatever; it was expected that if you were doing student-type things, you were behaving more or less responsibly and would take care of your own equipment.
And ya know what? we reacted accordingly. We could wipe our own asses and get back to class without being told, or tracked. We used lab equipment and whatever else, and cleaned up after ourselves. We were responsible for ourselves, to at least the degree that normal ordinary kids can be expected to be.
Between shit like RFID tracking and "soccer moms" who plan a kid's every minute, being a kid probably sucks now more than ever.:(
** I can just hear some wag saying, "Wow, you had to go to the john without any paper? Eugh...":)
Somewhere up above, I ranted about how I swear there's a Stupid Gene that gets turned on when people become parents, that makes them forget how much it sucked to be a kid.
About the time their kids grow up and have kids of their own, the Stupid Gene usually goes back into remission. At that point people again become capable of sane decisions wrt how to handle kids without causing kids undue stress (such as happens when kids have NO privacy or trust from adults).
So yes, I agree -- PARENTS are not the best ones to decide how schools should be run; they're too prone to emotional reactions that have nothing to do with safety or education. KIDS aren't either, because they don't have enough world experience to know what's necessary or not.
Children don't have the same legal rights as adults, and for good reason (if you think they should have such rights, it's time to reread LORD OF THE FLIES) but that is no reason to treat kids like *criminals*.
When I was in public school in MT and MN (1960-1972), our nationally top-rated schools had uniformly "oversized" classes, 30 to 32 students -- clearly, class size didn't negatively impact performance. And we had a near-zero dropout rate.
"Smaller classes" isn't going to fix anything if the whole system is broken, and in my experience makes absolutely no difference regardless.
Or maybe teachers nowadays aren't as competent as they used to be (d'oh!) Ours certainly had no trouble teaching 30+ students.
You're correct in that children haven't got the same legal rights as adults do. However, the best way to teach a kid to sneak, is to never give that kid any privacy. The best way to teach a kid to lie, is to demonstrate that you don't trust him.
RFID'ing kids demonstrates to a kid that he has no privacy, and is not trusted.
So it's not a matter of rights. It's a matter of how kids react negatively to having no privacy or trust from adults. To teach a child to be self-responsible, and to not abuse privileges of privacy and personal trust, adults must demonstrate some level of trust that he CAN be responsible. Yes, it's not the same level as you'd give another adult -- kids don't have the world-experience to cope with that. But if you restrict it totally, the kid either winds up emotionally crippled, or rebels.
Besides, the whole idea is to raise kids into adults, not to keep them children forever. How are they ever going to become self-responsible adults, capable of making sane decisions about privacy and trust, if not given a chance to grow into it?
Likewise... I remember how we used to bait poor Mr.Hackman, who would bend over backwards to help any student with the slightest need or interest. Every day he'd faithfully write our algebra homework on the blackboard, and we'd follow along... until he hit some point that could be done different ways, or made a mistake (even teachers are not infallible:) Then there'd be questions from the students, leading to a discussion that very likely would launch off into some topic well beyond the day's lesson. It kept everyone interested, if only for the chance to catch the poor fellow in a mistake. And I think it helped the slower learners digest the lesson, too.
We had very, very good teachers in that public system, most of whom were happy to encourage lesson expansion in any way that presented itself. Students commonly stayed after school voluntarily, whether to work on some private project, or to get personalized help, or just because it was a nice environment to hang out in.
Exactly right. You may not think you need that boring antiquated subject at the time, but someday you'll feel the lack. My neighbour was home-schooled and was allowed to largely "self-motivate". The result? Huge gaps in her basic knowledge, that restrict her ability to intelligently interact with the world, and sometimes put her at a functional disadvantage.
Fact is, NO ONE is "self-motivated" to learn unless it's a topic they are *already interested in*.
Oddly enough, being forced to rote-learn stuff (that is, structured non-optional learning) is frequently how a student is introduced to stuff they'd never have looked at on their own, but that over time becomes a passion.
Frex, I trace my love of words back to 6 years of often-boring English classes required by the public school system. At the time I wasn't the least bit interested in writing, let alone the nuances of grammar and how to use it to best effect (tho diagramming sentences can be fun). Now I write fiction, and edit other folks' stuff. How'd that happen?:)
In my high school of previous rant, indeed, throughout that entire public school system, a student who was "too far ahead" in an undifferentiated class would get assigned some advanced work. Bored? Here's an extra credit project. Hop to it, it's now part of your required classwork.
I'm reminded that in the 7th grade, any student with an A or B grade in English was *required* to write a short story and submit it to a contest (which included all such students in both junior high schools). Yeah, some of the results sucked (not everyone has a talent for writing fiction!) but that was our "advanced work" for the quarter, and lo and behold, everyone came through.
Oh yeah... I won the contest. The kid who sat behind me in English class got 3rd place. I guess Mrs. Neuschwander must have been doing *something* right.:)
I graduated from high school in 1972, so... back then, feelgood education hadn't yet taken hold, and skipping class was almost unheard-of. We had only two dropouts in my class of 572 seniors (and none that I know of in the 1000 or so other students). Most education was still handled by rote learning. And we LEARNED, like it or not.
As to differences in learning speed -- in the fields of math, sciences, and English, we had advanced classes for advanced students, and remedial classes for laggards. In regular classes, homework was often adjusted according to whether you'd demonstrated that you knew the material. If you were pulling A or B grades in a given class, chances were that you'd not be required to do much of its homework.
We DIDN'T have "reduced class sizes" (standard was 30, but 32 was common), or any fancy equipment. We had dead-minimum budgets, because homeowners routinely voted down the "mill levies" for increased school funding. We DID have good standard textbooks, basic laboratories for the advanced science classes, blackboards, pen and paper, and teachers who knew their job was to TEACH. Whether the student *enjoyed* learning wasn't an issue. You learned whether you liked it or not. And funny thing, most of us liked it well enough to lust after advanced classes in our individual fields of interest.
Perhaps as a direct side effect, the most popular kids in school were the eggheads.
The result of this "old-fashioned" system? Even our "laggards" graduated with a better education than many of today's "A" students.:(
"...but there is a pervasive culture that releases the common American from responsiblity for his/her
actions."
Bingo!!
And that's why we have feelgood solutions like RFID tags for kids.
Gods forbid that parents should be responsible for teaching their kids to be responsible, or that kids should be self-responsible for going to class or letting their parents know if they'll be late. THAT would put the onus of failure on the individual, and we can't have THAT!
"Kids that are allowed a certain freedom and have some possibility of opposing authority grow up far more interesting."
I would have phrased it "...grow up to be far more responsible." They learn to THINK about what personal freedom really is, and cherish the right and the responsibility, instead of just blindly rebelling against painfully-tight restrictions. Thus do they learn which rules can or should be bent, and which must not be.
See also my rant above about how kids need privacy (which implies trust) more than anything else.
(I guess the Stupid Gene stayed dormant in your case:)
Slashdot Mirror
If y'all were in California, there'd be nuts and flakes to go with that fruit ;)
Hmmm.... if brilliance is as brilliance does, this fellow is well on his way to becoming a black hole ;)
ROTFLMAO!! Oh man, is that the ultimate in poetic justice!! Perfect timing, man, just absofuckinglutely perfect!
And for losers who pull stunts like that, the details change but the story stays the same in every era. In the Olden Days, the dork who thought he'd 0wn3d the system might do something like steal the answer sheet for a test, then claim someone else planted it on him.
[eyeing original thread, involving implanting the damned things and poison ivy] If it ever does come down to required implants -- and I think the day is coming (I've read that some public figures already have themselves and/or their kids microchipped for "security" reasons) -- someday some kid is going to have an idiosyncratic reaction and die from it. And THEN won't there be a hoo-rah!!
According to this work hat I got at the 99 Cent Store, it's "Girls Raised In The South". I thought it was a failed girl-band or something, but nooo...
Several years later, I found a book about the culture of the southern belle, bearing the same title and an identical logo!
And here all *I* wanted from hot grits was breakfast!!
Another medium, same principle: About five years ago, I tested a "pay per download" ebook vendor for a client. It required online authentication EVERY time the user wished to view the ebook.
Predictably, the service went out of business within a year or so, making the bought-and-paid-for ebook worthless.
Eeep... That sure lets their brilliance shine through, eh?
And the real test of determined ignorance? If you point out this security hole, instead of being thanked for finding it so they can fix it, you get in trouble. (Which pretty much applies to all of life, not just IT stupidity.)
The lack of realworld experience, and possession of the concomitant attitudes, makes it real obvious that most folk here are in the 14 to 24 age range, eh? Whoops, I used big words, they don't teach those anymore!!
:(
.. oh, I see it was two hours before I ran down and went away the first time :)
When I was in the 5th grade (1964), the earliest feelgood crap started coming down the pipe, in the form of whole-word recognition reading (which teaches *everyone* to "read" by the method most dyslexics use -- I now support enough dyslexics to have a clue about that). By poor luck I was in the afflicted experimental class. And despite that we all had perfect scores (we'd known all the material since the 2nd grade!), we KNEW we were being shortchanged compared to the students in the standard tracks, and we resented it. (We were spelling words like "cat" and they were spelling words like "catatonic".) Result? No one in our class wanted to do spelling or reading anymore.
Fortunately I moved away in midyear, but one has to wonder if those perfect scores impressed stupid school board members enough to switch everyone to the new program.
If you can't tell, I can rant about *real* education vs "feelgood" bullshit for
That completely sucks. Hope you manage to pull a decent grade regardless, and better luck next time!
:(
Maybe the teacher was "just enforcing the rules". But education systems have become so admin-topheavy, and subsequently rulebound, that there is no longer any allowance for common sense. And that sort of thing gets worse as *experienced* teachers continue to leave the field.
Actually, that's kinda how it is all over. People who built a field and really know it are aging out or being pushed out; CEOs overly-beholden to stockholders have taken over, and as a result consumers suffer from poor service and poor products. Sure is a nasty parallel, eh?
Hmm. You've got a point... I know! I'm here to set a shining example for others to emulate!! [tapping foot] Okay, where's the "emulation"?? ;)
Yes, and classrooms such as you describe are an impossible situation whether large or small, tho a larger class gives discipline problems more opportunity to get out of hand (and kids being sheep as much as adults, what one gets away with, the rest will usually follow). The worse when the teacher isn't really clueful to begin with.
But larger classes are not themselves to blame for the situation. Nor do smaller classes fix it, far as I've seen.
My previous tenant was a 9th grade teacher; she'd bitch about her classes being too large -- at a mere 16 to 20 students. But when pressed, she allowed as how the REAL problem is kids who have absolutely no respect for learning, let alone for teachers. She also said the issue was worse among children of illegal immigrants, as they completely lack respect for authority, particuarly if that authority is a woman.
When I was in school (I graduated from H.S. in 1972), discipline was much stricter than it is today. Even so, we only had to have hall passes and library passes if we were wandering around loose outside of normal times to do so. But if it was something like "go to the john", it was expected that we were responsible enough to manage that with neither paperwork** nor supervision. If we had to work on something outside of class, we just asked permission to use whatever; it was expected that if you were doing student-type things, you were behaving more or less responsibly and would take care of your own equipment.
:(
:)
And ya know what? we reacted accordingly. We could wipe our own asses and get back to class without being told, or tracked. We used lab equipment and whatever else, and cleaned up after ourselves. We were responsible for ourselves, to at least the degree that normal ordinary kids can be expected to be.
Between shit like RFID tracking and "soccer moms" who plan a kid's every minute, being a kid probably sucks now more than ever.
** I can just hear some wag saying, "Wow, you had to go to the john without any paper? Eugh..."
Actually, that's a good point. Perhaps it should be required reading for PETA wannabes.
Sometimes satire is more real than reality.
Oh, it works very well as a predictor of how unsupervised (that is, fully rights-enabled) children behave, too...
Better yet, view either of the made-for-TV versions (especially the 2nd one). Very, very scary.
Somewhere up above, I ranted about how I swear there's a Stupid Gene that gets turned on when people become parents, that makes them forget how much it sucked to be a kid.
About the time their kids grow up and have kids of their own, the Stupid Gene usually goes back into remission. At that point people again become capable of sane decisions wrt how to handle kids without causing kids undue stress (such as happens when kids have NO privacy or trust from adults).
So yes, I agree -- PARENTS are not the best ones to decide how schools should be run; they're too prone to emotional reactions that have nothing to do with safety or education. KIDS aren't either, because they don't have enough world experience to know what's necessary or not.
Children don't have the same legal rights as adults, and for good reason (if you think they should have such rights, it's time to reread LORD OF THE FLIES) but that is no reason to treat kids like *criminals*.
When I was in public school in MT and MN (1960-1972), our nationally top-rated schools had uniformly "oversized" classes, 30 to 32 students -- clearly, class size didn't negatively impact performance. And we had a near-zero dropout rate.
"Smaller classes" isn't going to fix anything if the whole system is broken, and in my experience makes absolutely no difference regardless.
Or maybe teachers nowadays aren't as competent as they used to be (d'oh!) Ours certainly had no trouble teaching 30+ students.
You're correct in that children haven't got the same legal rights as adults do. However, the best way to teach a kid to sneak, is to never give that kid any privacy. The best way to teach a kid to lie, is to demonstrate that you don't trust him.
RFID'ing kids demonstrates to a kid that he has no privacy, and is not trusted.
So it's not a matter of rights. It's a matter of how kids react negatively to having no privacy or trust from adults. To teach a child to be self-responsible, and to not abuse privileges of privacy and personal trust, adults must demonstrate some level of trust that he CAN be responsible. Yes, it's not the same level as you'd give another adult -- kids don't have the world-experience to cope with that. But if you restrict it totally, the kid either winds up emotionally crippled, or rebels.
Besides, the whole idea is to raise kids into adults, not to keep them children forever. How are they ever going to become self-responsible adults, capable of making sane decisions about privacy and trust, if not given a chance to grow into it?
Likewise... I remember how we used to bait poor Mr.Hackman, who would bend over backwards to help any student with the slightest need or interest. Every day he'd faithfully write our algebra homework on the blackboard, and we'd follow along ... until he hit some point that could be done different ways, or made a mistake (even teachers are not infallible :) Then there'd be questions from the students, leading to a discussion that very likely would launch off into some topic well beyond the day's lesson. It kept everyone interested, if only for the chance to catch the poor fellow in a mistake. And I think it helped the slower learners digest the lesson, too.
We had very, very good teachers in that public system, most of whom were happy to encourage lesson expansion in any way that presented itself. Students commonly stayed after school voluntarily, whether to work on some private project, or to get personalized help, or just because it was a nice environment to hang out in.
[laughing] My fingers sometimes make homophonic errors, such as typing "won" instead of "one". They do this without bothering to consult my brain. :)
Exactly right. You may not think you need that boring antiquated subject at the time, but someday you'll feel the lack. My neighbour was home-schooled and was allowed to largely "self-motivate". The result? Huge gaps in her basic knowledge, that restrict her ability to intelligently interact with the world, and sometimes put her at a functional disadvantage.
:)
Fact is, NO ONE is "self-motivated" to learn unless it's a topic they are *already interested in*.
Oddly enough, being forced to rote-learn stuff (that is, structured non-optional learning) is frequently how a student is introduced to stuff they'd never have looked at on their own, but that over time becomes a passion.
Frex, I trace my love of words back to 6 years of often-boring English classes required by the public school system. At the time I wasn't the least bit interested in writing, let alone the nuances of grammar and how to use it to best effect (tho diagramming sentences can be fun). Now I write fiction, and edit other folks' stuff. How'd that happen?
In my high school of previous rant, indeed, throughout that entire public school system, a student who was "too far ahead" in an undifferentiated class would get assigned some advanced work. Bored? Here's an extra credit project. Hop to it, it's now part of your required classwork.
:)
I'm reminded that in the 7th grade, any student with an A or B grade in English was *required* to write a short story and submit it to a contest (which included all such students in both junior high schools). Yeah, some of the results sucked (not everyone has a talent for writing fiction!) but that was our "advanced work" for the quarter, and lo and behold, everyone came through.
Oh yeah... I won the contest. The kid who sat behind me in English class got 3rd place. I guess Mrs. Neuschwander must have been doing *something* right.
I graduated from high school in 1972, so... back then, feelgood education hadn't yet taken hold, and skipping class was almost unheard-of. We had only two dropouts in my class of 572 seniors (and none that I know of in the 1000 or so other students). Most education was still handled by rote learning. And we LEARNED, like it or not.
:(
As to differences in learning speed -- in the fields of math, sciences, and English, we had advanced classes for advanced students, and remedial classes for laggards. In regular classes, homework was often adjusted according to whether you'd demonstrated that you knew the material. If you were pulling A or B grades in a given class, chances were that you'd not be required to do much of its homework.
We DIDN'T have "reduced class sizes" (standard was 30, but 32 was common), or any fancy equipment. We had dead-minimum budgets, because homeowners routinely voted down the "mill levies" for increased school funding. We DID have good standard textbooks, basic laboratories for the advanced science classes, blackboards, pen and paper, and teachers who knew their job was to TEACH. Whether the student *enjoyed* learning wasn't an issue. You learned whether you liked it or not. And funny thing, most of us liked it well enough to lust after advanced classes in our individual fields of interest.
Perhaps as a direct side effect, the most popular kids in school were the eggheads.
The result of this "old-fashioned" system? Even our "laggards" graduated with a better education than many of today's "A" students.
Too late, I already bought the boxed set of DVDs... oh dear. Maybe I should check 'em for hidden RFID chips. ;)
"...but there is a pervasive culture that releases the common American from responsiblity for his/her
actions."
Bingo!!
And that's why we have feelgood solutions like RFID tags for kids.
Gods forbid that parents should be responsible for teaching their kids to be responsible, or that kids should be self-responsible for going to class or letting their parents know if they'll be late. THAT would put the onus of failure on the individual, and we can't have THAT!
The difference is, running a marathon is completely voluntary. If a runner doesn't like being RFID'd, they need not run the marathon.
Going to school is mandatory. If the student doesn't like being RFID'd, tough shit for them.
"Kids that are allowed a certain freedom and have some possibility of opposing authority grow up far more interesting."
:)
I would have phrased it "...grow up to be far more responsible." They learn to THINK about what personal freedom really is, and cherish the right and the responsibility, instead of just blindly rebelling against painfully-tight restrictions. Thus do they learn which rules can or should be bent, and which must not be.
See also my rant above about how kids need privacy (which implies trust) more than anything else.
(I guess the Stupid Gene stayed dormant in your case