Education isn't, or doesn't have to be, competitive. Your analogy isn't really about eating cake, it's about competition. Also I suggest you both look into cake-cutting algorithms. The short version of a cake-cutting algorithm is that not everyone likes icing. I first read about this in Freakonomics.
A homogeneous class by ability would group kids of the same ability together. What you have is a heterogeneous class (by ability.) I'm not sure how you were using the term.
Most parents don't want their kids in the not so smart class. Some parents are realistic or negligent and don't care, but as soon as you start creating homogeneous groups, parents will find a way to shoehorn their kids in over the school's objections and ruin the class for everyone else. Or ruin their kids self-esteem for no good reason by setting them up to fail. This happens to GT classes, to "honors" classes, and to AP classes.
I, like a few others in this thread, don't think of Mr. Russert as a journalist at all, let alone a tough incisive one. However, most of the people posting in the thread have only high praise for his objectivity. Can you direct me to any inteviews by Russert that demonstrate this? Asking questions about real issues that demanded thoughtful answers? Pressing guests in the face of evasive answers? Most of what I see from "tough" journalists is comprised of questions about what I'd call distractions. The questions may make the guests fidget, but they don't have merit.
Remember also that Iraq wasn't really part of the community of Muslim states in the region. Hussein had a woman in his cabinet. Iraq was the safe bet for invasion. In Saudi Arabia, there are public beheadings and you're bound by law to stop and witness it if you are in the area. That's not a case for regime change though.
You're only talking about the politics and expediency. Say what you want about Kucinich sucking at politics but I think that's one thing I like about him. He's held public office long enough to be well aware of the political situation; he just doesn't let that stop him. This explains his run for President as well.
Was it a waste of something to do this? Is there something else you want him to work on?
What if one of your employees was issued a congressional subpoena and you ordered them to ignore it? What would happen to you then? This isn't about Clinton at all. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19704513/
How does one go about getting 5 hours of testimony into the record otherwise? Whenever I've watched C-Span (in passing, I admit) it seems that time is very tightly controlled. Robert's Rules of Order are there.
Also, where are you getting "nutcase"? Kucinich saw an unidentified flying object once. If he had said he thought it was an angel people would have been happier I guess.
Over the years, the rigor and quality of the AP programs has deteriorated due to more kids enrolling in the classes. It's supposed to be a class at a college level, and in shocking news, many high school students are not ready for that starting in 10th grade. No matter how much better a high school teacher's pedagogy is than many college professors, there is such a thing as developmental readiness that parents and students ignore. Our school has, as a goal, enrollment of 65% of the student population in at least 1 AP class during their high school years. To meet this, we have to either live with that many students getting poor grades (we can live with it but they can't) and a gut check, or water down the classes. In shocking news, the classes get watered down.
Schools should stand up to parents and not allow students who aren't ready to take the classes, right? I'm sure you'd agree with schools making that kind of decision over parents' objections.
The difference between envirodems and the oil industry profiteers is that the oil folks have an interest in seeing the price go high enough but not so high that people start actually changing as in riding bikes instead of just buying a smaller car.
What has Bush tried to do that the current Congress hasn't allowed him to do? It's kind of a rhetorical question because I honestly believe there isn't anything. But if you've got something, I'd love to hear it.
FWIW in my school district (in Maryland, USA) there's a systemwide push towards students enrolling in AP classes. AP = Advanced Placement as determined by The College Board, a private entity. Currently, the only AP math classes we have at my school are Calculus I, II, and AP Statistics. There is a Discrete Math course available, but students who are interested enough to pursue math to that level in high school are corralled into AP classes. There are a number of incentives.
Personally I think privatizing parts of each department (the College Board has to approve your syllabus before you can use the letters AP and the county wants those letters) is a disservice to students. But that's another post.
At the same time, the non-cookie-cutter classes were made more viable by gear improvements and talent revisions. This was intended to make forming a raid easier, as many classes could fill the roles typically held by a single class. Instead of embracing this, the raiding population zeroed in on the unique benefits of each hybrid, and the "synergies" and raid composition became as boring and exclusive as it used to be.
Also FYI Blizzard has stated that in the expansion, raids will have a 10-player mode and a 25-player mode where completing one will unlock the other or something like that.
That's part of what pisses me off. I'm 34, long out of college, have a halfway decent job, turn on the radio and what do I hear?
I hear shit that's targeted to unemployed twelve year olds. And the RIAA complains about losing sales? How is someone with NO MONEY supposed to buy your crap?
Do they have any fucking idea how many LPs, cassettes, and CDs I've bought in the last 11 years since I got a paying job? And how shitty today's music is to my old-skool rap ears? The only mainstream band from this century I like is (hm I can't think of anything), and I wonder how they ever got a record contract. All today's shit is Simon Cowell Production-like, minor key wimpy emo shit they call "rock", "rap" (hint: any rapper with "li'l" in their name doesn't count), tuneless screaming hardcore, and the like.
Find another Gang Starr. Find another Ultramagnetic MC's. Find another Public Enemy. Find another 3rd Bass. Find another Masta Ace. Find another Casual. Because we have money. Twelve year olds don't you damned cocaine-soaked idiots!
---
I don't mean to contradict your post completely, because I pretty much feel the same way as you but it's going back to the late 80's/early 90's in rap music. Sure, there was a lot of crap, but the classic rock period had its share of crap too. Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, et al have stood the test of time. I think my school newspaper (I teach high school) had the best rebuttal of modern "rap" by calling someone a "ringtone rapper" in an album review.
There was a game called Gods some time ago that is a whole lot of fun and very console looking. The Bitmap Brothers who produced that (and also Xenon 2 which is great) recently released their new Speedball game over Steam. You should get that too. I'm a fan of most of their stuff, as you might guess.
Also, since "RPG" covers so much ground these days, I will recommend Summoner (the first one) since it was a lot of fun but it's a "console RPG," as is Anachronox. I can highly recommend Anachronox also. It's funny in a way that most games try to be but are not.
Teaching particular skills and methods isn't enough. For students to go on and learn more math (as they need to or want to,) they have to have at least a not-negative view of it. Along with this, it's impossible to learn more math if you haven't understood the earlier stuff. E.g. people who don't understand negative numbers will never understand complex numbers.
Giving people a list of steps to follow and the certain conditions under which to follow them guarantees that they'll only know what to do in those certain conditions. Basically, you can forget a rule, but you can't forget an understanding.
Quia (http://www.quia.com) has a lot of web based games where you answer questions in order to take your turn in, say, Battleship. We have a projector/input board combo that simulates a touchscreen in my classroom and can do these as a whole class, but it would work just as well on a small screen.
There's an affective component of learning that's lost on the standardized test crowd which actually includes most teachers. Specific, measurable objectives are the order of the day and who's opposed to that? Such objectives re inherently limited and limiting. The elusive and prized "higher order thinking skills" (which I don't think is a correct usage of the term "higher order") are promoted by open ended inquiry, where a student can learn a great deal in the attempt and quite possibly produce no measurable output. Problems that cannot be solved are of little value on a multiple choice test.
I've been having a crisis for about 2 weeks now wherein I despair that all my teaching for the past 11 years has just been classical conditioning of the students. Stimulus-response. If you see conditions A and B, perform X method and bubble in the correct answer from a list of choices.
While stimulus-response is certainly the basis for a lot of descriptions of human behavior, I think that math as a bag of tricks or canned responses to situations only creates math students who are easily supervised. One of my colleagues just came from a private school and says he is "coming to grips" with this mentality because it wasn't there in the private schools. That is, when people tell me "hey, these kids are going to be running the country some day" I think: "no, the future leaders are being schooled elsewhere away from NCLB and tests of basic skills that are lauded as promoting high standards."
There certainly are other people responsible for Gore not winning, but the votes? Normally this kind of petty distinction wouldn't matter (i.e. getting the votes versus winning the election) but as you pointed out, the Supreme Court put a fine point on it. If Gore couldn't appeal to those voters who chose to vote for Nader, it's a reflection on Gore.
Like it or no, if science were part of the NCLB requirements, it would get more attention from school systems. On the other hand, looking at what NCLB has done to "Algebra I", I don't know if that would be a good thing. Our state's Algebra I test reduces math to a bag of tricks to perform on demand. Decode from the problem type which procedure to use, then choose the correct answer from a list. That's no more math than eating is cooking.
I stand corrected then, thank you. Maybe what I read was that EFF filed the firs such case and then I misinterpreted it.
I can't tell from a cursory examination whether any of these cases are of the kind that Bush alleges in his address. That is, a frivolous suit by an individual who wasn't really damaged in order to milk some funds from the government. I'll keep reading.
Yesterday, Bush barfed at us in his radio address:
WASHINGTON - President Bush said Saturday that Democratic leaders in the House are blocking key intelligence legislation so trial lawyers can sue phone companies that helped the government eavesdrop on suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks.
This is a fabrication, as the only case pending right now (am I wrong?) is the one by the EFF, hardly a bunch of trial lawyers looking to get rich. Gleen Greenwald interviewed Cindy Cohn, the lead counsel in EFF's case against AT&T in October of last year.
I wish someone would use deconstruct correctly once in a while. You don't deconstruct things. They deconstruct themselves. It goes back to the definition of reading, I would say. The process of reading is turning symbols on a page into meaning in your head. Deconstruction says that there is no such thing. I'm oversimplifying, or maybe I just have it wrong too. It's not an easy word to define, which kind of goes to demonstrate the concept.
Slashdot Mirror
Education isn't, or doesn't have to be, competitive. Your analogy isn't really about eating cake, it's about competition. Also I suggest you both look into cake-cutting algorithms. The short version of a cake-cutting algorithm is that not everyone likes icing. I first read about this in Freakonomics.
A homogeneous class by ability would group kids of the same ability together. What you have is a heterogeneous class (by ability.) I'm not sure how you were using the term.
Most parents don't want their kids in the not so smart class. Some parents are realistic or negligent and don't care, but as soon as you start creating homogeneous groups, parents will find a way to shoehorn their kids in over the school's objections and ruin the class for everyone else. Or ruin their kids self-esteem for no good reason by setting them up to fail. This happens to GT classes, to "honors" classes, and to AP classes.
SPOILER ALERT
He's been watching the DVDSCR of the Extra Special Edition where Vader insults Tarkin first.
I, like a few others in this thread, don't think of Mr. Russert as a journalist at all, let alone a tough incisive one. However, most of the people posting in the thread have only high praise for his objectivity. Can you direct me to any inteviews by Russert that demonstrate this? Asking questions about real issues that demanded thoughtful answers? Pressing guests in the face of evasive answers? Most of what I see from "tough" journalists is comprised of questions about what I'd call distractions. The questions may make the guests fidget, but they don't have merit.
Remember also that Iraq wasn't really part of the community of Muslim states in the region. Hussein had a woman in his cabinet. Iraq was the safe bet for invasion. In Saudi Arabia, there are public beheadings and you're bound by law to stop and witness it if you are in the area. That's not a case for regime change though.
You're only talking about the politics and expediency. Say what you want about Kucinich sucking at politics but I think that's one thing I like about him. He's held public office long enough to be well aware of the political situation; he just doesn't let that stop him. This explains his run for President as well.
Was it a waste of something to do this? Is there something else you want him to work on?
What if one of your employees was issued a congressional subpoena and you ordered them to ignore it? What would happen to you then? This isn't about Clinton at all.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19704513/
How does one go about getting 5 hours of testimony into the record otherwise? Whenever I've watched C-Span (in passing, I admit) it seems that time is very tightly controlled. Robert's Rules of Order are there.
Also, where are you getting "nutcase"? Kucinich saw an unidentified flying object once. If he had said he thought it was an angel people would have been happier I guess.
Over the years, the rigor and quality of the AP programs has deteriorated due to more kids enrolling in the classes. It's supposed to be a class at a college level, and in shocking news, many high school students are not ready for that starting in 10th grade. No matter how much better a high school teacher's pedagogy is than many college professors, there is such a thing as developmental readiness that parents and students ignore. Our school has, as a goal, enrollment of 65% of the student population in at least 1 AP class during their high school years. To meet this, we have to either live with that many students getting poor grades (we can live with it but they can't) and a gut check, or water down the classes. In shocking news, the classes get watered down.
Schools should stand up to parents and not allow students who aren't ready to take the classes, right? I'm sure you'd agree with schools making that kind of decision over parents' objections.
The difference between envirodems and the oil industry profiteers is that the oil folks have an interest in seeing the price go high enough but not so high that people start actually changing as in riding bikes instead of just buying a smaller car.
What has Bush tried to do that the current Congress hasn't allowed him to do? It's kind of a rhetorical question because I honestly believe there isn't anything. But if you've got something, I'd love to hear it.
.FWIW in my school district (in Maryland, USA) there's a systemwide push towards students enrolling in AP classes. AP = Advanced Placement as determined by The College Board, a private entity. Currently, the only AP math classes we have at my school are Calculus I, II, and AP Statistics. There is a Discrete Math course available, but students who are interested enough to pursue math to that level in high school are corralled into AP classes. There are a number of incentives.
Personally I think privatizing parts of each department (the College Board has to approve your syllabus before you can use the letters AP and the county wants those letters) is a disservice to students. But that's another post.
At the same time, the non-cookie-cutter classes were made more viable by gear improvements and talent revisions. This was intended to make forming a raid easier, as many classes could fill the roles typically held by a single class. Instead of embracing this, the raiding population zeroed in on the unique benefits of each hybrid, and the "synergies" and raid composition became as boring and exclusive as it used to be.
Also FYI Blizzard has stated that in the expansion, raids will have a 10-player mode and a 25-player mode where completing one will unlock the other or something like that.
This will all be true even if you go to see it in a theater.
That's part of what pisses me off. I'm 34, long out of college, have a halfway decent job, turn on the radio and what do I hear?
I hear shit that's targeted to unemployed twelve year olds. And the RIAA complains about losing sales? How is someone with NO MONEY supposed to buy your crap?
Do they have any fucking idea how many LPs, cassettes, and CDs I've bought in the last 11 years since I got a paying job? And how shitty today's music is to my old-skool rap ears? The only mainstream band from this century I like is (hm I can't think of anything), and I wonder how they ever got a record contract. All today's shit is Simon Cowell Production-like, minor key wimpy emo shit they call "rock", "rap" (hint: any rapper with "li'l" in their name doesn't count), tuneless screaming hardcore, and the like.
Find another Gang Starr. Find another Ultramagnetic MC's. Find another Public Enemy. Find another 3rd Bass. Find another Masta Ace. Find another Casual. Because we have money. Twelve year olds don't you damned cocaine-soaked idiots!
---I don't mean to contradict your post completely, because I pretty much feel the same way as you but it's going back to the late 80's/early 90's in rap music. Sure, there was a lot of crap, but the classic rock period had its share of crap too. Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, et al have stood the test of time. I think my school newspaper (I teach high school) had the best rebuttal of modern "rap" by calling someone a "ringtone rapper" in an album review.
There was a game called Gods some time ago that is a whole lot of fun and very console looking. The Bitmap Brothers who produced that (and also Xenon 2 which is great) recently released their new Speedball game over Steam. You should get that too. I'm a fan of most of their stuff, as you might guess.
Also, since "RPG" covers so much ground these days, I will recommend Summoner (the first one) since it was a lot of fun but it's a "console RPG," as is Anachronox. I can highly recommend Anachronox also. It's funny in a way that most games try to be but are not.
Teaching particular skills and methods isn't enough. For students to go on and learn more math (as they need to or want to,) they have to have at least a not-negative view of it. Along with this, it's impossible to learn more math if you haven't understood the earlier stuff. E.g. people who don't understand negative numbers will never understand complex numbers.
Giving people a list of steps to follow and the certain conditions under which to follow them guarantees that they'll only know what to do in those certain conditions. Basically, you can forget a rule, but you can't forget an understanding.
So I want them to understand, and enjoy math.
Quia (http://www.quia.com) has a lot of web based games where you answer questions in order to take your turn in, say, Battleship. We have a projector/input board combo that simulates a touchscreen in my classroom and can do these as a whole class, but it would work just as well on a small screen.
There's an affective component of learning that's lost on the standardized test crowd which actually includes most teachers. Specific, measurable objectives are the order of the day and who's opposed to that? Such objectives re inherently limited and limiting. The elusive and prized "higher order thinking skills" (which I don't think is a correct usage of the term "higher order") are promoted by open ended inquiry, where a student can learn a great deal in the attempt and quite possibly produce no measurable output. Problems that cannot be solved are of little value on a multiple choice test.
I've been having a crisis for about 2 weeks now wherein I despair that all my teaching for the past 11 years has just been classical conditioning of the students. Stimulus-response. If you see conditions A and B, perform X method and bubble in the correct answer from a list of choices.
While stimulus-response is certainly the basis for a lot of descriptions of human behavior, I think that math as a bag of tricks or canned responses to situations only creates math students who are easily supervised. One of my colleagues just came from a private school and says he is "coming to grips" with this mentality because it wasn't there in the private schools. That is, when people tell me "hey, these kids are going to be running the country some day" I think: "no, the future leaders are being schooled elsewhere away from NCLB and tests of basic skills that are lauded as promoting high standards."
Because sometimes, regardless of which side you favor, your side is lying about something.
There certainly are other people responsible for Gore not winning, but the votes? Normally this kind of petty distinction wouldn't matter (i.e. getting the votes versus winning the election) but as you pointed out, the Supreme Court put a fine point on it. If Gore couldn't appeal to those voters who chose to vote for Nader, it's a reflection on Gore.
Like it or no, if science were part of the NCLB requirements, it would get more attention from school systems. On the other hand, looking at what NCLB has done to "Algebra I", I don't know if that would be a good thing. Our state's Algebra I test reduces math to a bag of tricks to perform on demand. Decode from the problem type which procedure to use, then choose the correct answer from a list. That's no more math than eating is cooking.
I stand corrected then, thank you. Maybe what I read was that EFF filed the firs such case and then I misinterpreted it.
I can't tell from a cursory examination whether any of these cases are of the kind that Bush alleges in his address. That is, a frivolous suit by an individual who wasn't really damaged in order to milk some funds from the government. I'll keep reading.
I wish someone would use deconstruct correctly once in a while. You don't deconstruct things. They deconstruct themselves. It goes back to the definition of reading, I would say. The process of reading is turning symbols on a page into meaning in your head. Deconstruction says that there is no such thing. I'm oversimplifying, or maybe I just have it wrong too. It's not an easy word to define, which kind of goes to demonstrate the concept.
The word Thompson wants is "dismantle."