Well, define "sent." If the student is desperate enough to get attention, refusing to leave the room will get him/her a great deal more of it than leaving. Attention from your peers is worth much, much more than attention from a vice principal. This varies, of course, from student to student. In this girl's case, her line of "how did that get there?" seems to be designed to get a laugh from the audience. If this all happens in the classroom, then she becomes a badass. Who doesn't want to be seen as a badass?
So anyway the kid refuses to leave, maybe dramatically holding on to their desk and protesting that they just want to stay and learn or instructing the teacher to go back to teaching the class. What does the teacher do then? Get into a power struggle with a student by asking over and over for the student to leave? The only winning move in a power struggle with a student is not to play. The teacher can't physically remove the student. That's actually fine with me. I may be in loco parentis but I'm not their parent and there's a line between what I do and raising their child for them. And I think that's the issue here, really. Schools don't want to take on way more responsibility than their mandate to maintain a safe and orderly environment. Most people don't want schools to take on the actual role of parenting either, or at least that's what I've seen expressed here on/. plenty of times.
One parent one year actually gave me written permission to take her child and drag him out of the classroom by his ear. I said no thank you. It was funny though.
I thought of something else from abstract algebra. Composition of relations occurs all the time when people figure out how someone is related to them. Like the "cousin" relation is made up of three separate relations. I have my students make a family tree using relation notation as a project.
It's also very useful for showing that composition is not commutative and that relations don't always have inverses. You can actually get a lot of mileage out of it.
I teach high school and try to put in the some of the abstract algebra topics when I teach Algebra 2. Some of the students enjoy it but most of them get really pained looks and only stop me to ask if the material will be on the test. That's not a big deal all it means is I'm not presenting it right yet. It also has something to do with how they've been taught in the past. But to support your recommendation I want to share that I was able to get a review copy of the current edition of my abstract algebra book from the publisher. I think at the college level this is more common than in secondary schools. Teachers should consider this method to build their resources.
I also want to recommend Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell. The calc kids were very interested to know about Newton and Riemann's lives. Considering that most of what we do in middle and high school is actually math history, it seemed fitting to bring some of the personalities in.
I don't think I phrased myself very well. I wanted to say that he doesn't do anything that gives the lie to his public statements. That is, he doesn't say one thing and do something else as so many politicians do. He also doesn't say one thing and then later come back hemming and hawing about how a position he now holds is completely opposite what he's said in the past but it's OK because blah blah blah. It certainly helps that I agree with him on nearly everything, down to being vegan. I contributed to his re-election campaign and I live in Maryland:)
I was thinking the same thing; however newsrooms are continually shrinking these days. Maybe it will take longer for this to affect coverage of national matters. But already at the state level, regional newspapers are disappearing and the bigger organizations like NYT are abandoning their news desks in places that used to get coverage. With no scrutiny, these local politicians can run amok.
Actually, no. Parents' concerns are not of much interest to me except where they are about students learning (in my case) mathematics. Parents want their kids to play sports, go out every weekend, go on trips in the middle of the school year, miss half a day for doctor appointments, and other things as well. I understand that life doesn't begin and end with my class, but that almost has to be my position or the kids and parents will take it less seriously and their learning suffers. I'm speaking from my experience, since that's all I can rightly do. There's nothing magical about having kids that makes you a good parent.
Often the teachers that students dislike the most are the ones who convey the most to students. The factor, I think, is high standards. There's a principle in education (and elsewhere) that the more you ask for the more you will receive. That doesn't mean you'll get everything you wanted, but you'll get more than if you didn't ask at all. Translation: teachers who have higher standards will have students who learn more. That, of course, in the aggregate. That doesn't mean that every student will respond with enthusiasm.
It's hard for students sometimes to distinguish between good and bad teaching.
Beer sales are increasing now without any special bonuses for workers facing hard times. There was a story on the radio about this a couple of days ago. There was the owner of a liquor store saying that business was booming, and some other dude talking about how instead of going to a game, he was more likely to buy a case of beer and watch it at home.
I teach high school and am interested in helping my school system transition to as much FOSS software as possible. Currently we have windows of different versions on the desktop PCs in classrooms, windows on administrator's computers, and I'm not sure what's running on our server backend. I do know that we use Novell Zenworks and MS Office pretty much systemwide.
So, assuming that jettisoning the MS products would save money (who knows, based on the deals and the cost of retraining?), does anyone have suggestions on how to broach the subject? I am acquainted with the county's IT director. I was thinking of trying to get a computer that was scheduled for discard (it happens here from time to time) and getting permission to try and get it set up to interact with the school network, but with FOSS products. This is interesting enough for me to want to try this on my own time.
I feel as though asking this in the wrong way the first time will make it near impossible to get approval if I ask again.
Has anyone had experience with this kind of endeavor that they could share?
The thing I love about free products is that I can easily recommend them to my students. I can't do that with commercial software. This is because a) software vendors do their own advertising, and b) it's very easy for me to sit there and spend kids' money that they may or may not have. The ability to recommend software to students would be a big plus for any teacher I know. I think it should be presented that way to teachers. Now of course this applies to the higher level applications, not so much to OS, but it's a start. Once all the high level applications are platform agnostic, it becomes a simple transition (for the end user) to change the OS.
I've got a number of kids who are really into GIMP now, and a couple who are dual booting. It's a start.
No, I'm saying cursing doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Curse or not, I don't care. But don't delude yourself (not you in particular) into thinking it's a shocking act of independence and free thought. Using "bad" words for shock value means you bought into the notion that some words shouldn't be spoken. I have students answering questions like "how do we know x + 2 the same as 2 + x?" with "because you said so." Yeah, I'm sure I did say that, and it is true, but it's not true because I said so. These are the ninth graders in algebra 2 but it scales up to Calculus (I teach high school.) Students are also wary of this kind of line from a teacher because some of us only pay lip service to independent thinking but then switch to standard authoritarian on a whim. I try not to be one of those.
Yeah I think you're mostly right. This is often reinforced at home where parents demand the same kind of blind obedience to themselves (parents), teachers, police, your boss, your commanding officer, etc.
The problem is certainly present in schools but is not confined to them.
It's expensive and labor intensive to develop and score tests without simple and definite answers. Even then the tests suffer from poor interscorer reliability. Machine-scored tests have very high interscorer reliability and the tradeoff of poor validity isn't even a blip on the radar. This is why you won't see an emphasis on abstract thinking in education reform. This is brought about by the nature of education's "big picture" which is entirely the province of people outside of classrooms. You know the adage "those who can, do; those who can't, teach"? What about those who can't teach? They go and work for the state board of education.
No one is saying we have to introduce creationism or try to make evolution appear only as a theory (which some might argue it still is), but there is no reason we need to teach our students to blindly accept it as fact, without doubt or admission of weakness.
Some people are saying exactly that. However, I accept that you are not. Your use of the phrase "only a theory" suggests that you do not understand what constitutes a scientific theory. A theory explains the available facts. Fact by themselves mean very litte. Consider "the car is red," which is a fact, versus "red cars get pulled over more frequently than other colors because etc" which is a theory. Clearly the theory means more and is more useful than the fact alone.
Beyond this, the word "evolution" has had its meaning confused. It is used simultaneously to refer to Darwin's theory of natural selection and to refer to the observable fact of evolution. Evolution can be observed, say, in bacteria. There can be a competing theory to explain why and how evolution occurs, but theories that disregard the observed facts are worthless.
I would go further and say not stupid but compliant. Students are becoming more and more compliant. It makes my job easier in some cases, but blind obedience to authority doesn't really mesh with my subject matter (mathematics.) It takes fully half the year before students understand that things aren't true just because I said they are.
Kids are still rebellious, to be sure, but they express their rebellion in stupid, unimportant ways like abusing drugs and alcohol or using the "wrong" words that they know adults don't want them to say. I'd much rather they rebelled by not accepting statements without proof.
In my opinion, the schools' function of teaching kids to respect authority is at fault because alongside this they need to learn to detect authority. Anyone can be handed a title that they don't deserve. Authority is earned.
I think the only reason this didn't work is that the people giving the orders were never brought to justice. There's been some debate in this topic about whether the lowest level of soldier can reasonably be expected to disobey orders. The question of culpability is, as another poster noted, already settled by international law.
However, the US response seems to be that only the lowest level soldiers are culpable. Giving the orders was irrelevant, getting legal opinions from the likes of John Yoo, or actually writing those legal opinions are irrelevant. Until and unless the entire chain of decisions is brought to light, those pictures are just a contextless irritant. The solution to this is to establish the context by more disclosures, not ignore the irritant.
Aside from the fact that Cheney admitted to war crimes on ABC News, why should we make any allowances for these people? As I understand truth and reconciliation, the purpose is to recognize that in a crazy and irrational time, people can be forgiven for going too far in the pursuit of the moral good. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 some people can claim to be caught up in the emotion of responding. However, for the succeeding seven years, no such claim can be made. However, this is what the criminals at issue here continuously claim. 9/11 changed everything, and wartime validates everything they did. I guess in their mind there's no such thing as a war crime.
Do I have the concept of truth commissions wrong maybe? I'm not that familiar with the situation.
On the other hand, some kind of amnesty or clemency may allow the truth to come out in a way that it wouldn't if people were busy lawyering up.
I generally agree with your assessment of political theater. The current objections from the likes of Boehner are still along that vein I think. However, for the particular bills that constituted deregulation: were they passed by Republicans over Democratic objections? More importantly, over actual "no" votes? In that case you're entirely correct. Certainly the Democratic party lacks the spine to stand up for the right thing most of the time. Instead, I suspect that all this deregulation was done without much public input, and with a high degree of cooperation from both major parties. I'm not a Republican or republican apologist by any means. I'm to the left of basically everyone but Kucinich, and thus feel sold out by the Democratic party that either sits around and gets walked on or goes along with things like warrantless wiretapping and torture.
I'm sure the bills and their votes are at vote-smart.org but I wouldn't even know what to look for in the names of the bills.
I see the "republicans" tag on this story and am having a hard time making the connection. If I remember right, a large number of republican members of congress didn't like the idea of the bailout and continue to speak against the release of the second half of the money. We need a tag called "bipartisans." I think part of Obama's appeal to monied interests is "All this partisan bickering is getting in the way of what we can really do for this country: get paid."
You might be interested in a book I'm reading called Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill. Also, he has a company that counts the sort of thing you're talking about with respect to books and marketing.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, define "sent." If the student is desperate enough to get attention, refusing to leave the room will get him/her a great deal more of it than leaving. Attention from your peers is worth much, much more than attention from a vice principal. This varies, of course, from student to student. In this girl's case, her line of "how did that get there?" seems to be designed to get a laugh from the audience. If this all happens in the classroom, then she becomes a badass. Who doesn't want to be seen as a badass?
So anyway the kid refuses to leave, maybe dramatically holding on to their desk and protesting that they just want to stay and learn or instructing the teacher to go back to teaching the class. What does the teacher do then? Get into a power struggle with a student by asking over and over for the student to leave? The only winning move in a power struggle with a student is not to play. The teacher can't physically remove the student. That's actually fine with me. I may be in loco parentis but I'm not their parent and there's a line between what I do and raising their child for them. And I think that's the issue here, really. Schools don't want to take on way more responsibility than their mandate to maintain a safe and orderly environment. Most people don't want schools to take on the actual role of parenting either, or at least that's what I've seen expressed here on /. plenty of times.
One parent one year actually gave me written permission to take her child and drag him out of the classroom by his ear. I said no thank you. It was funny though.
I've only read articles by Morris Kline and never an entire book. I'll check and see if I can find a copy of that. Thanks!
Is there a history that you recommend?
I thought of something else from abstract algebra. Composition of relations occurs all the time when people figure out how someone is related to them. Like the "cousin" relation is made up of three separate relations. I have my students make a family tree using relation notation as a project.
It's also very useful for showing that composition is not commutative and that relations don't always have inverses. You can actually get a lot of mileage out of it.
I teach high school and try to put in the some of the abstract algebra topics when I teach Algebra 2. Some of the students enjoy it but most of them get really pained looks and only stop me to ask if the material will be on the test. That's not a big deal all it means is I'm not presenting it right yet. It also has something to do with how they've been taught in the past. But to support your recommendation I want to share that I was able to get a review copy of the current edition of my abstract algebra book from the publisher. I think at the college level this is more common than in secondary schools. Teachers should consider this method to build their resources.
I also want to recommend Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell. The calc kids were very interested to know about Newton and Riemann's lives. Considering that most of what we do in middle and high school is actually math history, it seemed fitting to bring some of the personalities in.
I don't think I phrased myself very well. I wanted to say that he doesn't do anything that gives the lie to his public statements. That is, he doesn't say one thing and do something else as so many politicians do. He also doesn't say one thing and then later come back hemming and hawing about how a position he now holds is completely opposite what he's said in the past but it's OK because blah blah blah. It certainly helps that I agree with him on nearly everything, down to being vegan. I contributed to his re-election campaign and I live in Maryland :)
I was thinking the same thing; however newsrooms are continually shrinking these days. Maybe it will take longer for this to affect coverage of national matters. But already at the state level, regional newspapers are disappearing and the bigger organizations like NYT are abandoning their news desks in places that used to get coverage. With no scrutiny, these local politicians can run amok.
This sounds like a job for Dennis Kucinich. Say what you want about the man but it doesn't seem possible to embarrass him.
Actually, no. Parents' concerns are not of much interest to me except where they are about students learning (in my case) mathematics. Parents want their kids to play sports, go out every weekend, go on trips in the middle of the school year, miss half a day for doctor appointments, and other things as well. I understand that life doesn't begin and end with my class, but that almost has to be my position or the kids and parents will take it less seriously and their learning suffers. I'm speaking from my experience, since that's all I can rightly do. There's nothing magical about having kids that makes you a good parent.
Often the teachers that students dislike the most are the ones who convey the most to students. The factor, I think, is high standards. There's a principle in education (and elsewhere) that the more you ask for the more you will receive. That doesn't mean you'll get everything you wanted, but you'll get more than if you didn't ask at all. Translation: teachers who have higher standards will have students who learn more. That, of course, in the aggregate. That doesn't mean that every student will respond with enthusiasm.
It's hard for students sometimes to distinguish between good and bad teaching.
Beer sales are increasing now without any special bonuses for workers facing hard times. There was a story on the radio about this a couple of days ago. There was the owner of a liquor store saying that business was booming, and some other dude talking about how instead of going to a game, he was more likely to buy a case of beer and watch it at home.
One day, your security arrangements will be a bigass table.
I need some help.
I teach high school and am interested in helping my school system transition to as much FOSS software as possible. Currently we have windows of different versions on the desktop PCs in classrooms, windows on administrator's computers, and I'm not sure what's running on our server backend. I do know that we use Novell Zenworks and MS Office pretty much systemwide.
So, assuming that jettisoning the MS products would save money (who knows, based on the deals and the cost of retraining?), does anyone have suggestions on how to broach the subject? I am acquainted with the county's IT director. I was thinking of trying to get a computer that was scheduled for discard (it happens here from time to time) and getting permission to try and get it set up to interact with the school network, but with FOSS products. This is interesting enough for me to want to try this on my own time.
I feel as though asking this in the wrong way the first time will make it near impossible to get approval if I ask again.
Has anyone had experience with this kind of endeavor that they could share?
The thing I love about free products is that I can easily recommend them to my students. I can't do that with commercial software. This is because a) software vendors do their own advertising, and b) it's very easy for me to sit there and spend kids' money that they may or may not have. The ability to recommend software to students would be a big plus for any teacher I know. I think it should be presented that way to teachers. Now of course this applies to the higher level applications, not so much to OS, but it's a start. Once all the high level applications are platform agnostic, it becomes a simple transition (for the end user) to change the OS.
I've got a number of kids who are really into GIMP now, and a couple who are dual booting. It's a start.
You might find this article at Scientific American interesting.
No, I'm saying cursing doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Curse or not, I don't care. But don't delude yourself (not you in particular) into thinking it's a shocking act of independence and free thought. Using "bad" words for shock value means you bought into the notion that some words shouldn't be spoken. I have students answering questions like "how do we know x + 2 the same as 2 + x?" with "because you said so." Yeah, I'm sure I did say that, and it is true, but it's not true because I said so. These are the ninth graders in algebra 2 but it scales up to Calculus (I teach high school.) Students are also wary of this kind of line from a teacher because some of us only pay lip service to independent thinking but then switch to standard authoritarian on a whim. I try not to be one of those.
So I guess I'm part of the problem then.
Yeah I think you're mostly right. This is often reinforced at home where parents demand the same kind of blind obedience to themselves (parents), teachers, police, your boss, your commanding officer, etc.
The problem is certainly present in schools but is not confined to them.
It's expensive and labor intensive to develop and score tests without simple and definite answers. Even then the tests suffer from poor interscorer reliability. Machine-scored tests have very high interscorer reliability and the tradeoff of poor validity isn't even a blip on the radar. This is why you won't see an emphasis on abstract thinking in education reform. This is brought about by the nature of education's "big picture" which is entirely the province of people outside of classrooms. You know the adage "those who can, do; those who can't, teach"? What about those who can't teach? They go and work for the state board of education.
No one is saying we have to introduce creationism or try to make evolution appear only as a theory (which some might argue it still is), but there is no reason we need to teach our students to blindly accept it as fact, without doubt or admission of weakness.
Some people are saying exactly that. However, I accept that you are not. Your use of the phrase "only a theory" suggests that you do not understand what constitutes a scientific theory. A theory explains the available facts. Fact by themselves mean very litte. Consider "the car is red," which is a fact, versus "red cars get pulled over more frequently than other colors because etc" which is a theory. Clearly the theory means more and is more useful than the fact alone.
Beyond this, the word "evolution" has had its meaning confused. It is used simultaneously to refer to Darwin's theory of natural selection and to refer to the observable fact of evolution. Evolution can be observed, say, in bacteria. There can be a competing theory to explain why and how evolution occurs, but theories that disregard the observed facts are worthless.
Here is a much better explanation of Evolution as Fact and Theory by Stephen Jay Gould.
I would go further and say not stupid but compliant. Students are becoming more and more compliant. It makes my job easier in some cases, but blind obedience to authority doesn't really mesh with my subject matter (mathematics.) It takes fully half the year before students understand that things aren't true just because I said they are.
Kids are still rebellious, to be sure, but they express their rebellion in stupid, unimportant ways like abusing drugs and alcohol or using the "wrong" words that they know adults don't want them to say. I'd much rather they rebelled by not accepting statements without proof.
In my opinion, the schools' function of teaching kids to respect authority is at fault because alongside this they need to learn to detect authority. Anyone can be handed a title that they don't deserve. Authority is earned.
I think the only reason this didn't work is that the people giving the orders were never brought to justice. There's been some debate in this topic about whether the lowest level of soldier can reasonably be expected to disobey orders. The question of culpability is, as another poster noted, already settled by international law.
However, the US response seems to be that only the lowest level soldiers are culpable. Giving the orders was irrelevant, getting legal opinions from the likes of John Yoo, or actually writing those legal opinions are irrelevant. Until and unless the entire chain of decisions is brought to light, those pictures are just a contextless irritant. The solution to this is to establish the context by more disclosures, not ignore the irritant.
Aside from the fact that Cheney admitted to war crimes on ABC News, why should we make any allowances for these people? As I understand truth and reconciliation, the purpose is to recognize that in a crazy and irrational time, people can be forgiven for going too far in the pursuit of the moral good. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 some people can claim to be caught up in the emotion of responding. However, for the succeeding seven years, no such claim can be made. However, this is what the criminals at issue here continuously claim. 9/11 changed everything, and wartime validates everything they did. I guess in their mind there's no such thing as a war crime.
Do I have the concept of truth commissions wrong maybe? I'm not that familiar with the situation.
On the other hand, some kind of amnesty or clemency may allow the truth to come out in a way that it wouldn't if people were busy lawyering up.
I generally agree with your assessment of political theater. The current objections from the likes of Boehner are still along that vein I think. However, for the particular bills that constituted deregulation: were they passed by Republicans over Democratic objections? More importantly, over actual "no" votes? In that case you're entirely correct. Certainly the Democratic party lacks the spine to stand up for the right thing most of the time. Instead, I suspect that all this deregulation was done without much public input, and with a high degree of cooperation from both major parties. I'm not a Republican or republican apologist by any means. I'm to the left of basically everyone but Kucinich, and thus feel sold out by the Democratic party that either sits around and gets walked on or goes along with things like warrantless wiretapping and torture.
I'm sure the bills and their votes are at vote-smart.org but I wouldn't even know what to look for in the names of the bills.
I see the "republicans" tag on this story and am having a hard time making the connection. If I remember right, a large number of republican members of congress didn't like the idea of the bailout and continue to speak against the release of the second half of the money. We need a tag called "bipartisans." I think part of Obama's appeal to monied interests is "All this partisan bickering is getting in the way of what we can really do for this country: get paid."
You might be interested in a book I'm reading called Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill. Also, he has a company that counts the sort of thing you're talking about with respect to books and marketing.