I certainly agree with you about Maryland being a local level and not more significant than that. It's where my experience in teaching comes from, so I've only used specific examples from teaching in Maryland.
I'm sure you realize that curriculum in schools is only one of many factors that determine education quality. When I say "curriculum" I'm only referring to the choice, sequence, and schedule of topics. I think you may include the system of promotion and retention in your use of the term. The more that system favors the school as opposed to the student, the higher the level of achievement will be in a given grade level. When I say "favors the student" I mean the student's desire to go to the next grade level regardless of their actual performance. Students do have that desire. On my end, I assume that the school has no motivation to pass students who are not qualified. The more we abrogate the connection between performance and promotion, the less we actually serve the students' long term interests. You've said that in so many words, and I agree on that. I'm saying all this like you don't already know it but really I'm thinking through your point of view while typing. Don't take it as condescending.
I can see now why you contend that a national curriculum and nationwide elimination of social promotion would increase achievement nationwide. In fact, a national policy eliminating social promotion would really only work in support of a standard curriculum.
How this curriculum is developed and by whom is a separate issue. I think you overestimate the amount of control that teachers have over their school year. Teachers, in my experience, are often trapped in a day-to-day mentality like other public service such as health care or law enforcement. This insulates us from considering larger issues to some extent. It also has the effect of keeping us close to the students' interests in a way that experts are not. Personally, I tend to view teaching as a very specialized area that is not easily understood by anyone outside it. Maybe everyone views their own field that way. Thus, congress is an outside influence until they demonstrate some credibility, hell I even view the state legislature as outside influence. Last year, the MD General Assembly made it so that students had to be present for I think less than an hour to be counted present for a school day. I don't think the bureaucracy being federal would reduce the amount of asshattery it could enact. Maryland's "data analysis" portion of Algebra 1 was a response to NCLB, after all.
I don't think you and I really disagree about how education should work. Read The Electronic Sweatshop though. I think you'd find it interesting.
The attitude of business towards gamers is easily seen in the huge number of flash-based games pages. Even people who should know better seem to think that gamers want animation, music, and transition effects in their web pages. Even if it all comes at the expense of fast loading. It's like putting non-skippable cutscenes in the game itself or lots of transition effects in a dvd menu. Those same people designing a page for a business oriented product would never think to include that kind of effects unless they increased usability somehow.
I read that page too. In China, the students who are outperforming American students on tests of science and math achievement are the ones who did well enough to go on to an academic high school setting. It works the same way in Germany, as another example.
Lots of kids take Algebra 1 in middle school here too. I did. Let me ask you though what happens if a students doesn't want to repeat the year? Can they opt out of the education system entirely? Is there an alternative path to education? We don't have a comprehensive vocational study program in this country.
Well, since the enterprise of education is not for-profit, there is no money trickling to the top to speak of. Being able to replace teachers is a GOOD THING (tm). This is the crust of my argument. First of all, this guarantees that people can move around (which happens very often in this country) and not worry about their children being out of sync with what is taught in schools. Second, this guarantees that a local teacher cannot "wing" his idea of what to emphasize in a class room. Again, leave planing in the hands of experts. This would allow the developmental experts and experts in particular disciplines to decide what and what stage children should learn. A local teacher and even school board cannot possibly make a decision of whether it would be beneficial to teach (let's say) Geometry for 2 years and Algebra for 1 year or vice versa. They don't have enough data, experience, or expertise to draw on. A nation board would.
If you view teaching as a technical exercise, then I suppose this approach works. You could replace teachers with a videotape and a security guard. Teacher salary is one of the biggest expenses of a school district and school boards are always trying to keep costs down. Regardless of the motive, the effect is the same. Education is not a customer service enterprise. We're not here to give you what you want. People moving around without regard for their children's education are at fault, not schools. You mentioned in your earlier post that most people don't read classic texts. This would not change if someone else decided when and what texts to assign. We were assigned plenty of the great books, and many of my classmates never read them.
I think the crust of my argument is that developmental experts are out of touch with classroom reality in the same way that teachers are out of touch with the big picture. If we move planning too far to that side we wind up with different problems than we have now, but ones that are similar in scale.
A separate bureaucracy is also more susceptible to outside influence. Back when I was teaching middle school, we had a guest speaker from the state department of Ed. She mentioned something about the "business stakeholders in education" having made some curriculum decisions. Why are there business stakeholders? What do businesses have to do with the math sequence? Part of the problem with Algebra 1 in MD is the introduction of "data analysis" as a subtopic. The methods they teach in the data analysis part of the year are not algebraic methods, and would be better suited to their own course. If the state believes that students should learn statistics, then require statistics; don't be half-assed about it. That's my opinion anyway. It used to be that Algebra 1 was Algebra 1, and prepared you for Algebra 2, then Trig, then Calculus. Analysis is the branch with the most ready practical application I guess is why you see Calculus so much as the end of high school math. It could just as easily be topology or number theory if the goal was to increase rigor throughout your high school years. Now, the Algebra content of Algebra 1 has been reduced about 40% and kids have to make up the difference in Algebra 2. Mainly I see that kids used to at least have some experience with factoring from Algebra 1 and now they do not. Now, whose idea do you think it was to take the math out of Algebra 1? No teacher would shortchange their students that way, but the state of Maryland certainly would.
What teachers unions should oppose about national curriculum is that it moves decisions higher up in the hierarchy and into the hands of a smaller number of people. This kind of effect on industries is described in The Electronic Sweatshop by Barbara Garson. Regardless of whether you agree with anything I'm saying, you should read that book. Everyone should. The part I'm citing is the tendency in organizations to take decisions out of the hands of lower level employees. This results in lower training costs, shorter training time, and interchangeability of employees. When you can easily replace an employee, you can afford to treat them worse (and pay them less) because there's always someone else available who can do the job just as well. This frees up more of the money to go to the people at the top.
What I've found, though, is that no one opposes anything that comes down. The law is the law. As much as teachers and administrators may disagree aloud with things like NCLB or MSPAP or the Maryland HSA, or more to the point the Maryland VSC. It's called the Voluntary State Curriculum but the state examinations are based on it so no school is well advised to ignore the VSC. The problem you might find with the VSC is that it doesn't exist for all courses. Schools respond to the testing and VSC by throwing money and resources at the courses that are covered. Class sizes are down, even those smaller classes are 2 periods long and team taught, teachers who do well on the tests are Teacher of the Year, the whole schmeer.
Those resources come from someplace right? In Maryland the math test for high school is Algebra 1. I've been teaching Algebra 2 for a number of years now and it's been a long time since I had any oversight to speak of. My point here is that the resources to improve Algebra 1 have to come from someplace, and that's the rest of the math sequence. If we instead tried to throw those kind of resources at all courses equally, we'd have to vastly increase the resources going to education, or leave out a lot of students. What those other countries do is leave out a lot of students from the school program (and consequently the achievement testing.) Those kids go to vocational schools. In the US where vocational programs exist, they're voluntary.
I'm trying to reply to other posts but/. isn't letting me. The article states that any HD mvie/song/whatever that relies on (Intel's) HD Content Protection in hardware will be degraded by the system when that hardware feature is not present. The article mentions video card, but I'm guessing probably sound card and maybe the optical drive itself have to support HDCP. I have problems now when I try to play some DVDs I bought through my computer. Windows pops up some kind of error message about being unable to determine copyright something or other. This is more of the same. Or think of it like the old Macrovision method that made it harder to dub VHS tapes.
It's actually worse than that macrovision method. In that case you could still watch it on your TV, just any copy you made was crappy. In this case, Vista degrades the image at the DVI output. My monitor right now is connected by DVI. Do Microsoft and "Hollywood" expect that we'll be playing things other than physical HD media on our computers? Because I think a lot of that will be handled by external players or set top boxes of some kind for your TV. Streaming or net-delivered movies and TV? I guess that's growing.
If we expand the scope of the market to include government offices, it resolves some of the debate in this thread. That doesn't have to be anything as crass as lobbyists buying politicians. We can vote them out and they'll land on their feet just fine. It can be purely as crass as "whoever spends the most money to win an election wins." In a great many cases that's the way it goes.
That's one reason people are so surprised by Mike "I'm running for president to reclaim this nation for Christ" Huckabee coming in second in the Iowa Republican Straw Poll when he spent so little money and did so little marketing. It sure sounds folksy doesn't it? A straw poll? The election industry is like any other industry.
My school district emphasizes getting students into "advanced placement" classes as defined by The College Board. I resent this because we're basically funneling money into some company's pocket but no one else seems to see it that way. The consensus among the AP teachers is that this push dilutes what's supposed to be a rigorous program. More kids in AP classes makes the school look good to parents and newspapers and whoever else outside of teaching is paying attention. The truth is that a number of students take AP classes for the wrong reasons.
Our ratings (I teach math) are based on the state's NCLB test, which is a test of "Algebra and Data Analysis." Algebra I has long been a requirement to graduate high school in Maryland. In fact, Maryland recently increased the number of math courses required for graduation to 4, up from 3. To this end my school district has created a class called Algebra III, which is the first half of our Precalculus class, but spread out over an entire year. We're hoping to get the "D" students from Algebra II to take Algebra III instead of Precalc. I was at the meeting where the course was proposed and the rationale was that these students get frustrated by the pace of precalc and thus learn nothing. That's been my experience teaching precalc also. The class goes too fast, they learn nothing and get frustrated, I also get frustrated. It's not that they're not trying it's just the class moves too fast.
So it seems like we're doing the opposite of discouraging students from pursuing mathematics. Most of the classes we have are not what you'd call upper level though. This may be different even in other parts of Maryland.
Come on! This is rediculous. Come on now. Besides, mnemonic devices like refliprocal are used all the time in classrooms. I've never seen that one though.
While I applaud her good intentions, I have to wonder why such a thing was not necessary for girls like her to be interested in math? I am all for making learning fun, and math books are about as dull and boring as it gets, but I see no reason why it has to be dumbed down and made gender specific.
My 9 year old girl is great at math, without this.
Math books aren't just boring and dull, they're mostly useless to students except as problem banks. I've taught mathematics grades 6-12. In those 10 years of teaching, maybe 2 books were written in a way for students to understand if they didn't already. Math books seem to be written for people who already understand (me) to help others who are independently inclined to want to know. This, in my experience, is not the typical student.
Lets make a similar math book for all the boys who aren't interested in math. It should feature GI Joe's using math to kill each other, aliens, and anything gross or violent. For the older boys lets throw in some soft core porn to get their eyes on the page (males are after all more visual, right?). I think you're missing the point. This isn't about getting girls to like math purely as a subject. Girls, starting around middle school, experience negative perception of their math efficacy, or sometimes this is called math self-concept (link). It's not like that in elementary school. Certainly some of this has to do with their experience in schools (most elementary ed majors I knew didn't like math, and it has to come out when you're teaching it.) The rest of it comes from somewhere else i.e. parents, peers, media, whatever else. By the time I see them in high school where I am now, a lot of them have given up on their ability to do math. This translates very easily into "I hate math." Ask adults they'll tell you the same thing.
And what's up with an "unlockable" end game class? Too lazy to balance the new class all the way through? I think this is something to encourage people to play the class. There's already a plate-wearing tank/dps hybrid (of sorts) in the game. Subjecting rerollers to 1-80 again would be a real disincentive. This is aggravated by poor itemization for many classes till you reach Outland. That's a sign of laziness and I agree with you that the midlevels need to be revised. That's one reason I left the game. I like the leveling process and don't really enjoy endgame raiding mentality, but dragging a mage or warlock through the low levels was a pain after experiencing much better item design from 60-70.
This is not censorship. No outside agency is requiring studios and telephone providers to use V-chips on their end to prevent you from seeing objectionable things. This is on your end to allow blocking of material based on standards you determine (to some extent.) On one hand, parents should take a specific interest in what their kids are watching. On the other hand, kids work every single gray area they can find. Including a V-chip in the TV set certainly would allow parents to block things while they're away and allow whatever while they're present to offer the guidance you're talking about. Or they could just leave it off. My TV has a vchip in it and I've never used it to block anything.
Disclaimer: my best source of knowledge on inner workings of law enforcement is The Wire.
Something's been bugging me about this story and I think you've hit it. Since I wasn't there, I don't know how much latitude the police had in this case. I think it depends on whom the theater manager called. If they're sufficiently high up, the actual arresting officer may not have much choice at all. Again this may not have happened in this case, but it's easy to imagine (suppose someone has a relative in the police department and just calls them when they have concerns.)
The problem seems to be how much time, money, and effort you still have to expend to get to see someone who has the bureaucratic freedom to recognize this case is meritless. Regardless of the eventual outcome in favor of this person.
Why are there separate categories for Action and Action/Adventure? This seems like a crass attempt to squeeze in more awards just for marketing reasons. Of course the whole thing is just marketing reasons so I guess I shouldn't complain.
Part of it is sheer incompetence. I've seen plenty of that in my 10 years teaching public school. The other part is attitudes like yours where parents feel some need to not protect their kids from shit. Personally, I think they identify with their kids and live vicariously. I don't like the idea of universal content monitoring and hope nothing like it is ever implemented. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that parents can be expected to step up if they aren't already.
The evidence I've seen so far (the TP Muckraker article in another post and the AP story in the original post) is pretty damning. It doesn't surprise me at all that our elected officials are using their positions to their advantage, and even selling us out.
I'm no fan of Ted Stevens. However, with monitoring by government agencies increasing in recent years, I'd say "being investigated" means less than it may have at one time. I am personally inclined to believe that Stevens is all manner of corrupt, and therefore I try to be cautious about presuming guilt. I was pulled over recently because I wasn't displaying a front license plate. It had been stolen and the replacements were on the way. That didn't stop some of my colleagues from wondering what I had done when I saw them at work the next day.
Democrat and Republican are useless categories. When an issue can be influenced by money, both of those parties are susceptible. Monied interests would like to push elections towards people they've already paid, but if it goes the other way they can handle that too. It's just more expensive.
That's true. Also don't forget about Bleem!, the Playstation emulator which Sony sued out of existence. Bleem! had a number of technical problems but they never used Sony's IP to make their product. So I don't think Sony had a case but the continuous litigation created enough expense that Bleem closed.
Here's the only actual legal opinion I can find about Sony versus Bleem: Sony says bleem cant use their screenshots. The court decides that there's no other way to convey the superiority of bleem graphics than to compare to actual screens rendered by an actual playstation. The court vacated a preliminary injuction that had been issued by a lower court. Every other search result I'm coming up with is reporting on the issue in general.
edit: I Googled "district court legal maneuvering" and found this article about antitrust litigation at Law.com so far. Any suggestions are still very welcome
Maybe the question is naive and the game of chess is obvious to everyone else. The submission says this ruling puts the ACLU in a difficult position. They are not permitted to know whether they are affected by the program or not. Perhaps the difficulty of the ACLU's current position is an unintended consequence, but that seems unlikely to me. What seems more likely is that the court did this as sort of a gotcha, as in "better luck next time, smart guy." I get this feeling every time I hear a lack-of-standing ruling. I understand that it's a valid concept it just sticks in my craw.
I admit that it's just a vague sense of the way things are in this country that leads me to believe this way. I wouldn't really know how to begin looking for other examples of this legal maneuvering in the recent past (or any past.) Can anyone give me some insight into this or a place to start reading?
You can have both. I think it's an obvious example, but look at Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. One difference between your fireworks example and this movie is that fireworks shows are ephemeral. The movie, as opposed to being a one-off, is going to be around for a long time.
At the beginning, I was a little irritated by the guys' derision for Spanish. I put it aside and thought "ok maybe it'll come back and bite them in the ass later" but I don't remember that happening. What do you expect from this kind of movie though, right? No, I expect better from anyone living in modern society. The existence of other, better action movies makes this one less.
It's possible, as you say, to just enjoy the show. I did, and I hope there's another one. Transformers would have been an even better movie that stands up to repeated viewings if there had been some more coherence and focus. Michael Bay said in an interview that he wasn't really interested in making a movie about some toys from the 80's. I can respect that. Spielberg didn't approach it that way: he said "this is a movie about a boy getting his first car." It was the simplicity and human interest that attracted Bay to the concept. IMO that was lost in the shuffle.
Maybe 20 years ago I remember the Army did something similar for my dad. That is, he was a "resident alien" in a government job and that didn't sit well with someone. He had been working at his job for about 10 years and then some new law was going to require that he be replaced with a US Citizen if any could be found. Or maybe it wasn't a new law but a new person caring about an old law. I'm not familiar with the details. What I do recall is that they took out ads in some trade publications that were very very specific to what my dad did at the time and his specific background in the field.
I oppose the actions and philosophy of this law firm and so I'm having a hard time reconciling it with the same practice used in my dad's favor. At the very least, this kind of thing has been going on for a long time.
I wish posts could get a score higher than 5. This is exactly why I avoid voice comm except in a raid situation. In a raid, someone is in charge and there's a reason to avoid idle chatter. More about that later.
Who has that much idle chatter stored up in their brain?
I don't think they have it stored up. It's a feature of hyperactivity that people (especially children) talk "too much." I've had students like that before. With one kid, I was talking to his mother and she said she drives him home and it takes 20 minutes and he talks the whole way home about stuff that happened to him that day. The difficulty you have filtering it is the same difficulty they have. You'd think they can do this without their mic open but then they're sitting at a computer talking to themselves. Who wants to be that guy?
The usefull information and orders are intermixed with information about some guys hernia operation or fluffy kitty. Not to mention the pre pubescent people SCREAMING into the mic for attention, girls flirting with everyone, etc. Nothing makes me cringe more than hearing nasily wow players flirting with girls over vent. I especially hated that when I played wow. It completely ruins the fantasy mood but was required for endgame raiding. I dont want to be slaying dragons with the pimple faced kid from the simpsons. Id much rather picture peoples characters than the "character" that their voice reminds me of.
I disagree with you about people talking about personal things on vent. If someone just had an operation or they were in a car accident I'd want to hear about it and maybe wish them well and know they were OK. I'm sure you would too. As for the teenybopper stuff: one of the better raid leaders I've had responded well to this on vent. We had this one kid who just never shut up about anything. So the leader says to him one day: "Look, if you were talking about something like having a conversation that other people could participate in, that would be fine. I mean that's why we have vent is so that people can get to know each other and have a good time. But talking to yourself about things that aren't related to anyone else is just annoying." Then we all had a conversation about cereal. Froot loops tear up your mouth. Things like that. It was fun. People on vent like you describe tend to talk about stuff they wouldn't want you eavesdropping on but there's no way to avoid it.
Nearly the exact same thing can be said about NCLB as a response to "failing schools." Maybe I'm biased because I teach high school. Aside from a vague notion of school failure, nobody has specific things they think schools (read: teachers) are doing wrong. Still, NCLB provides a suite of tests and measurements to detect failures. Since the tests are concrete we can point to them as specific criteria, but some of the requirements are as absurd as 3 oz of hand soap. Let me find an example:
3.1.1 The student will design and/or conduct an investigation that uses statistical methods to analyze data and communicate results.
Assessment limits:
* The student will design investigations stating how data will be collected and justify the method.
* Types of investigations may include: simple random sampling, representative sampling, and probability simulations.
* Probability simulations may include the use of spinners, number cubes, or random number generators.
* In simple random sampling each member of the population is equally likely to be chosen and the members of the sample are chosen independently of each other. Sample size will be given for these investigations.
This is from Maryland's NCLB compliance test for mathematics. It looks nice but there are a few problems in the implementation. The one that sticks in my craw the most is the use of stem-and-leaf plots as a method of visualization. There are other examples like line plots. I have yet to see one of these in actual use and they're not especially interesting as a math topics. A bigger problem (that somehow doesn't stick in my craw) is the one of simple random sampling. It's called "simple" so people think it's simple but there's some subtlety to the concept. I've been at workshops where we review and revise potential test questions. The concept of simple random sampling is subtle enough that it's very easy to come up with multiple choice questions about it that have no correct answer. At the workshop that day, we brought this up and the state representatives didn't really understand and resorted to "well, write that on there and we'll review it later."
The idea of tests to measure progress is a very old one and not terrible. It's a problem of bureaucracy that leads us to tests with low validity and pointless questions. There is a completely separate group of issues surrounding special education and these tests. They don't have an analogy with DHS that I can see.
One might ask what the interest is in creating (another?) huge bureaucracy with an impossibly broad mandate in education. It's generally accepted in some circles (my bias here) that NCLB is designed to take money out of public schools by making the system more intrusive on regular classroom education and thus disruptive and distasteful. Either people object to the level of testing in favor of education and take their kids out, or the schools start "failing" and parents want to take their kids out. Fewer students = less funding and rightly so. Opting out of the system for private interests is something our government does (see: Kyoto Protocol) so why not do the same thing with your children?
The last thing I'll say about the Maryland Mathematics High School Assessment is that it's caused problems for the math sequence. That's my bias I guess is towards the math sequence leading to Calculus. Our NCLB test is tied to the Algebra I course, which used to actually be Algebra I. Now it's about 60% math and the rest is "data analysis." The course is usually taken in eighth or ninth grade. One of my colleagues who teaches Algebra I was telling me that she feels very bad about not preparing the kids for Algebra II, and she knows they're going to run into trouble there. I had some of those kids th
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I certainly agree with you about Maryland being a local level and not more significant than that. It's where my experience in teaching comes from, so I've only used specific examples from teaching in Maryland.
I'm sure you realize that curriculum in schools is only one of many factors that determine education quality. When I say "curriculum" I'm only referring to the choice, sequence, and schedule of topics. I think you may include the system of promotion and retention in your use of the term. The more that system favors the school as opposed to the student, the higher the level of achievement will be in a given grade level. When I say "favors the student" I mean the student's desire to go to the next grade level regardless of their actual performance. Students do have that desire. On my end, I assume that the school has no motivation to pass students who are not qualified. The more we abrogate the connection between performance and promotion, the less we actually serve the students' long term interests. You've said that in so many words, and I agree on that. I'm saying all this like you don't already know it but really I'm thinking through your point of view while typing. Don't take it as condescending.
I can see now why you contend that a national curriculum and nationwide elimination of social promotion would increase achievement nationwide. In fact, a national policy eliminating social promotion would really only work in support of a standard curriculum.
How this curriculum is developed and by whom is a separate issue. I think you overestimate the amount of control that teachers have over their school year. Teachers, in my experience, are often trapped in a day-to-day mentality like other public service such as health care or law enforcement. This insulates us from considering larger issues to some extent. It also has the effect of keeping us close to the students' interests in a way that experts are not. Personally, I tend to view teaching as a very specialized area that is not easily understood by anyone outside it. Maybe everyone views their own field that way. Thus, congress is an outside influence until they demonstrate some credibility, hell I even view the state legislature as outside influence. Last year, the MD General Assembly made it so that students had to be present for I think less than an hour to be counted present for a school day. I don't think the bureaucracy being federal would reduce the amount of asshattery it could enact. Maryland's "data analysis" portion of Algebra 1 was a response to NCLB, after all.
I don't think you and I really disagree about how education should work. Read The Electronic Sweatshop though. I think you'd find it interesting.
The attitude of business towards gamers is easily seen in the huge number of flash-based games pages. Even people who should know better seem to think that gamers want animation, music, and transition effects in their web pages. Even if it all comes at the expense of fast loading. It's like putting non-skippable cutscenes in the game itself or lots of transition effects in a dvd menu. Those same people designing a page for a business oriented product would never think to include that kind of effects unless they increased usability somehow.
I read that page too. In China, the students who are outperforming American students on tests of science and math achievement are the ones who did well enough to go on to an academic high school setting. It works the same way in Germany, as another example.
Lots of kids take Algebra 1 in middle school here too. I did. Let me ask you though what happens if a students doesn't want to repeat the year? Can they opt out of the education system entirely? Is there an alternative path to education? We don't have a comprehensive vocational study program in this country.
If you view teaching as a technical exercise, then I suppose this approach works. You could replace teachers with a videotape and a security guard. Teacher salary is one of the biggest expenses of a school district and school boards are always trying to keep costs down. Regardless of the motive, the effect is the same. Education is not a customer service enterprise. We're not here to give you what you want. People moving around without regard for their children's education are at fault, not schools. You mentioned in your earlier post that most people don't read classic texts. This would not change if someone else decided when and what texts to assign. We were assigned plenty of the great books, and many of my classmates never read them.
I think the crust of my argument is that developmental experts are out of touch with classroom reality in the same way that teachers are out of touch with the big picture. If we move planning too far to that side we wind up with different problems than we have now, but ones that are similar in scale.
A separate bureaucracy is also more susceptible to outside influence. Back when I was teaching middle school, we had a guest speaker from the state department of Ed. She mentioned something about the "business stakeholders in education" having made some curriculum decisions. Why are there business stakeholders? What do businesses have to do with the math sequence? Part of the problem with Algebra 1 in MD is the introduction of "data analysis" as a subtopic. The methods they teach in the data analysis part of the year are not algebraic methods, and would be better suited to their own course. If the state believes that students should learn statistics, then require statistics; don't be half-assed about it. That's my opinion anyway. It used to be that Algebra 1 was Algebra 1, and prepared you for Algebra 2, then Trig, then Calculus. Analysis is the branch with the most ready practical application I guess is why you see Calculus so much as the end of high school math. It could just as easily be topology or number theory if the goal was to increase rigor throughout your high school years. Now, the Algebra content of Algebra 1 has been reduced about 40% and kids have to make up the difference in Algebra 2. Mainly I see that kids used to at least have some experience with factoring from Algebra 1 and now they do not. Now, whose idea do you think it was to take the math out of Algebra 1? No teacher would shortchange their students that way, but the state of Maryland certainly would.
What teachers unions should oppose about national curriculum is that it moves decisions higher up in the hierarchy and into the hands of a smaller number of people. This kind of effect on industries is described in The Electronic Sweatshop by Barbara Garson. Regardless of whether you agree with anything I'm saying, you should read that book. Everyone should. The part I'm citing is the tendency in organizations to take decisions out of the hands of lower level employees. This results in lower training costs, shorter training time, and interchangeability of employees. When you can easily replace an employee, you can afford to treat them worse (and pay them less) because there's always someone else available who can do the job just as well. This frees up more of the money to go to the people at the top.
What I've found, though, is that no one opposes anything that comes down. The law is the law. As much as teachers and administrators may disagree aloud with things like NCLB or MSPAP or the Maryland HSA, or more to the point the Maryland VSC. It's called the Voluntary State Curriculum but the state examinations are based on it so no school is well advised to ignore the VSC. The problem you might find with the VSC is that it doesn't exist for all courses. Schools respond to the testing and VSC by throwing money and resources at the courses that are covered. Class sizes are down, even those smaller classes are 2 periods long and team taught, teachers who do well on the tests are Teacher of the Year, the whole schmeer.
Those resources come from someplace right? In Maryland the math test for high school is Algebra 1. I've been teaching Algebra 2 for a number of years now and it's been a long time since I had any oversight to speak of. My point here is that the resources to improve Algebra 1 have to come from someplace, and that's the rest of the math sequence. If we instead tried to throw those kind of resources at all courses equally, we'd have to vastly increase the resources going to education, or leave out a lot of students. What those other countries do is leave out a lot of students from the school program (and consequently the achievement testing.) Those kids go to vocational schools. In the US where vocational programs exist, they're voluntary.
I'm trying to reply to other posts but /. isn't letting me. The article states that any HD mvie/song/whatever that relies on (Intel's) HD Content Protection in hardware will be degraded by the system when that hardware feature is not present. The article mentions video card, but I'm guessing probably sound card and maybe the optical drive itself have to support HDCP. I have problems now when I try to play some DVDs I bought through my computer. Windows pops up some kind of error message about being unable to determine copyright something or other. This is more of the same. Or think of it like the old Macrovision method that made it harder to dub VHS tapes.
It's actually worse than that macrovision method. In that case you could still watch it on your TV, just any copy you made was crappy. In this case, Vista degrades the image at the DVI output. My monitor right now is connected by DVI. Do Microsoft and "Hollywood" expect that we'll be playing things other than physical HD media on our computers? Because I think a lot of that will be handled by external players or set top boxes of some kind for your TV. Streaming or net-delivered movies and TV? I guess that's growing.
If we expand the scope of the market to include government offices, it resolves some of the debate in this thread. That doesn't have to be anything as crass as lobbyists buying politicians. We can vote them out and they'll land on their feet just fine. It can be purely as crass as "whoever spends the most money to win an election wins." In a great many cases that's the way it goes.
That's one reason people are so surprised by Mike "I'm running for president to reclaim this nation for Christ" Huckabee coming in second in the Iowa Republican Straw Poll when he spent so little money and did so little marketing. It sure sounds folksy doesn't it? A straw poll? The election industry is like any other industry.
My school district emphasizes getting students into "advanced placement" classes as defined by The College Board. I resent this because we're basically funneling money into some company's pocket but no one else seems to see it that way. The consensus among the AP teachers is that this push dilutes what's supposed to be a rigorous program. More kids in AP classes makes the school look good to parents and newspapers and whoever else outside of teaching is paying attention. The truth is that a number of students take AP classes for the wrong reasons.
Our ratings (I teach math) are based on the state's NCLB test, which is a test of "Algebra and Data Analysis." Algebra I has long been a requirement to graduate high school in Maryland. In fact, Maryland recently increased the number of math courses required for graduation to 4, up from 3. To this end my school district has created a class called Algebra III, which is the first half of our Precalculus class, but spread out over an entire year. We're hoping to get the "D" students from Algebra II to take Algebra III instead of Precalc. I was at the meeting where the course was proposed and the rationale was that these students get frustrated by the pace of precalc and thus learn nothing. That's been my experience teaching precalc also. The class goes too fast, they learn nothing and get frustrated, I also get frustrated. It's not that they're not trying it's just the class moves too fast.
So it seems like we're doing the opposite of discouraging students from pursuing mathematics. Most of the classes we have are not what you'd call upper level though. This may be different even in other parts of Maryland.
Come on! This is rediculous.
Come on now. Besides, mnemonic devices like refliprocal are used all the time in classrooms. I've never seen that one though. While I applaud her good intentions, I have to wonder why such a thing was not necessary for girls like her to be interested in math? I am all for making learning fun, and math books are about as dull and boring as it gets, but I see no reason why it has to be dumbed down and made gender specific.
My 9 year old girl is great at math, without this.
Math books aren't just boring and dull, they're mostly useless to students except as problem banks. I've taught mathematics grades 6-12. In those 10 years of teaching, maybe 2 books were written in a way for students to understand if they didn't already. Math books seem to be written for people who already understand (me) to help others who are independently inclined to want to know. This, in my experience, is not the typical student.
Lets make a similar math book for all the boys who aren't interested in math. It should feature GI Joe's using math to kill each other, aliens, and anything gross or violent. For the older boys lets throw in some soft core porn to get their eyes on the page (males are after all more visual, right?).I think you're missing the point. This isn't about getting girls to like math purely as a subject. Girls, starting around middle school, experience negative perception of their math efficacy, or sometimes this is called math self-concept (link). It's not like that in elementary school. Certainly some of this has to do with their experience in schools (most elementary ed majors I knew didn't like math, and it has to come out when you're teaching it.) The rest of it comes from somewhere else i.e. parents, peers, media, whatever else. By the time I see them in high school where I am now, a lot of them have given up on their ability to do math. This translates very easily into "I hate math." Ask adults they'll tell you the same thing.
This is not censorship. No outside agency is requiring studios and telephone providers to use V-chips on their end to prevent you from seeing objectionable things. This is on your end to allow blocking of material based on standards you determine (to some extent.) On one hand, parents should take a specific interest in what their kids are watching. On the other hand, kids work every single gray area they can find. Including a V-chip in the TV set certainly would allow parents to block things while they're away and allow whatever while they're present to offer the guidance you're talking about. Or they could just leave it off. My TV has a vchip in it and I've never used it to block anything.
Disclaimer: my best source of knowledge on inner workings of law enforcement is The Wire.
Something's been bugging me about this story and I think you've hit it. Since I wasn't there, I don't know how much latitude the police had in this case. I think it depends on whom the theater manager called. If they're sufficiently high up, the actual arresting officer may not have much choice at all. Again this may not have happened in this case, but it's easy to imagine (suppose someone has a relative in the police department and just calls them when they have concerns.)
The problem seems to be how much time, money, and effort you still have to expend to get to see someone who has the bureaucratic freedom to recognize this case is meritless. Regardless of the eventual outcome in favor of this person.
Why are there separate categories for Action and Action/Adventure? This seems like a crass attempt to squeeze in more awards just for marketing reasons. Of course the whole thing is just marketing reasons so I guess I shouldn't complain.
Watch it be the Nintendo DS version.
Parents don't. It's sad and also true.
Part of it is sheer incompetence. I've seen plenty of that in my 10 years teaching public school. The other part is attitudes like yours where parents feel some need to not protect their kids from shit. Personally, I think they identify with their kids and live vicariously. I don't like the idea of universal content monitoring and hope nothing like it is ever implemented. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking that parents can be expected to step up if they aren't already.
The evidence I've seen so far (the TP Muckraker article in another post and the AP story in the original post) is pretty damning. It doesn't surprise me at all that our elected officials are using their positions to their advantage, and even selling us out.
I'm no fan of Ted Stevens. However, with monitoring by government agencies increasing in recent years, I'd say "being investigated" means less than it may have at one time. I am personally inclined to believe that Stevens is all manner of corrupt, and therefore I try to be cautious about presuming guilt. I was pulled over recently because I wasn't displaying a front license plate. It had been stolen and the replacements were on the way. That didn't stop some of my colleagues from wondering what I had done when I saw them at work the next day.
Democrat and Republican are useless categories. When an issue can be influenced by money, both of those parties are susceptible. Monied interests would like to push elections towards people they've already paid, but if it goes the other way they can handle that too. It's just more expensive.
That's true. Also don't forget about Bleem!, the Playstation emulator which Sony sued out of existence. Bleem! had a number of technical problems but they never used Sony's IP to make their product. So I don't think Sony had a case but the continuous litigation created enough expense that Bleem closed.
Here's the only actual legal opinion I can find about Sony versus Bleem: Sony says bleem cant use their screenshots. The court decides that there's no other way to convey the superiority of bleem graphics than to compare to actual screens rendered by an actual playstation. The court vacated a preliminary injuction that had been issued by a lower court. Every other search result I'm coming up with is reporting on the issue in general.
edit: I Googled "district court legal maneuvering" and found this article about antitrust litigation at Law.com so far. Any suggestions are still very welcome
Maybe the question is naive and the game of chess is obvious to everyone else. The submission says this ruling puts the ACLU in a difficult position. They are not permitted to know whether they are affected by the program or not. Perhaps the difficulty of the ACLU's current position is an unintended consequence, but that seems unlikely to me. What seems more likely is that the court did this as sort of a gotcha, as in "better luck next time, smart guy." I get this feeling every time I hear a lack-of-standing ruling. I understand that it's a valid concept it just sticks in my craw.
I admit that it's just a vague sense of the way things are in this country that leads me to believe this way. I wouldn't really know how to begin looking for other examples of this legal maneuvering in the recent past (or any past.) Can anyone give me some insight into this or a place to start reading?
You can have both. I think it's an obvious example, but look at Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. One difference between your fireworks example and this movie is that fireworks shows are ephemeral. The movie, as opposed to being a one-off, is going to be around for a long time.
At the beginning, I was a little irritated by the guys' derision for Spanish. I put it aside and thought "ok maybe it'll come back and bite them in the ass later" but I don't remember that happening. What do you expect from this kind of movie though, right? No, I expect better from anyone living in modern society. The existence of other, better action movies makes this one less.
It's possible, as you say, to just enjoy the show. I did, and I hope there's another one. Transformers would have been an even better movie that stands up to repeated viewings if there had been some more coherence and focus. Michael Bay said in an interview that he wasn't really interested in making a movie about some toys from the 80's. I can respect that. Spielberg didn't approach it that way: he said "this is a movie about a boy getting his first car." It was the simplicity and human interest that attracted Bay to the concept. IMO that was lost in the shuffle.
Maybe 20 years ago I remember the Army did something similar for my dad. That is, he was a "resident alien" in a government job and that didn't sit well with someone. He had been working at his job for about 10 years and then some new law was going to require that he be replaced with a US Citizen if any could be found. Or maybe it wasn't a new law but a new person caring about an old law. I'm not familiar with the details. What I do recall is that they took out ads in some trade publications that were very very specific to what my dad did at the time and his specific background in the field.
I oppose the actions and philosophy of this law firm and so I'm having a hard time reconciling it with the same practice used in my dad's favor. At the very least, this kind of thing has been going on for a long time.
I wish posts could get a score higher than 5. This is exactly why I avoid voice comm except in a raid situation. In a raid, someone is in charge and there's a reason to avoid idle chatter. More about that later.
Who has that much idle chatter stored up in their brain?I don't think they have it stored up. It's a feature of hyperactivity that people (especially children) talk "too much." I've had students like that before. With one kid, I was talking to his mother and she said she drives him home and it takes 20 minutes and he talks the whole way home about stuff that happened to him that day. The difficulty you have filtering it is the same difficulty they have. You'd think they can do this without their mic open but then they're sitting at a computer talking to themselves. Who wants to be that guy?
The usefull information and orders are intermixed with information about some guys hernia operation or fluffy kitty. Not to mention the pre pubescent people SCREAMING into the mic for attention, girls flirting with everyone, etc. Nothing makes me cringe more than hearing nasily wow players flirting with girls over vent. I especially hated that when I played wow. It completely ruins the fantasy mood but was required for endgame raiding. I dont want to be slaying dragons with the pimple faced kid from the simpsons. Id much rather picture peoples characters than the "character" that their voice reminds me of.
I disagree with you about people talking about personal things on vent. If someone just had an operation or they were in a car accident I'd want to hear about it and maybe wish them well and know they were OK. I'm sure you would too. As for the teenybopper stuff: one of the better raid leaders I've had responded well to this on vent. We had this one kid who just never shut up about anything. So the leader says to him one day: "Look, if you were talking about something like having a conversation that other people could participate in, that would be fine. I mean that's why we have vent is so that people can get to know each other and have a good time. But talking to yourself about things that aren't related to anyone else is just annoying." Then we all had a conversation about cereal. Froot loops tear up your mouth. Things like that. It was fun. People on vent like you describe tend to talk about stuff they wouldn't want you eavesdropping on but there's no way to avoid it.
Nearly the exact same thing can be said about NCLB as a response to "failing schools." Maybe I'm biased because I teach high school. Aside from a vague notion of school failure, nobody has specific things they think schools (read: teachers) are doing wrong. Still, NCLB provides a suite of tests and measurements to detect failures. Since the tests are concrete we can point to them as specific criteria, but some of the requirements are as absurd as 3 oz of hand soap. Let me find an example:
This is from Maryland's NCLB compliance test for mathematics. It looks nice but there are a few problems in the implementation. The one that sticks in my craw the most is the use of stem-and-leaf plots as a method of visualization. There are other examples like line plots. I have yet to see one of these in actual use and they're not especially interesting as a math topics. A bigger problem (that somehow doesn't stick in my craw) is the one of simple random sampling. It's called "simple" so people think it's simple but there's some subtlety to the concept. I've been at workshops where we review and revise potential test questions. The concept of simple random sampling is subtle enough that it's very easy to come up with multiple choice questions about it that have no correct answer. At the workshop that day, we brought this up and the state representatives didn't really understand and resorted to "well, write that on there and we'll review it later."
The idea of tests to measure progress is a very old one and not terrible. It's a problem of bureaucracy that leads us to tests with low validity and pointless questions. There is a completely separate group of issues surrounding special education and these tests. They don't have an analogy with DHS that I can see.
One might ask what the interest is in creating (another?) huge bureaucracy with an impossibly broad mandate in education. It's generally accepted in some circles (my bias here) that NCLB is designed to take money out of public schools by making the system more intrusive on regular classroom education and thus disruptive and distasteful. Either people object to the level of testing in favor of education and take their kids out, or the schools start "failing" and parents want to take their kids out. Fewer students = less funding and rightly so. Opting out of the system for private interests is something our government does (see: Kyoto Protocol) so why not do the same thing with your children?
The last thing I'll say about the Maryland Mathematics High School Assessment is that it's caused problems for the math sequence. That's my bias I guess is towards the math sequence leading to Calculus. Our NCLB test is tied to the Algebra I course, which used to actually be Algebra I. Now it's about 60% math and the rest is "data analysis." The course is usually taken in eighth or ninth grade. One of my colleagues who teaches Algebra I was telling me that she feels very bad about not preparing the kids for Algebra II, and she knows they're going to run into trouble there. I had some of those kids th