Don't underestimate PR. There was an interesting piece on the radio today about "the Obama brand." Basically, if his brand were not as strong internationally, certain requests ("take this Guantanamo Bay prisoner") would be denied. Without getting too far into hope and change, it's certainly true to say that many people here in the US buy into it. They cut Mr. Obama a lot of slack even when his administration does things that the "base" used to oppose vehemently when Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney did them. The same thing is true to some extent for international politics.
So it doesn't matter that this has been said and demonstrated before. It matters that he's the one saying it.
Setting deadlines farther than a few months is a way for politicians to solicit contributions. So, moving CAFE up 4 years is a reward to someone for their largesse. Also, a shorter time frame makes it more difficult to change things or revise standards downward. However 2016 is still plenty of time to squeeze money or concessions out.
OK, let's throw in shoe bomber Richard Reid (?) and that guy who flew a plane into the IRS building in Austin, TX. I assume that you won't object to including Mr. Stack in the list even though he committed a crime with an airplane rather than on board one.
Schools start early because of sports and after school practice. I visited Austin TX a couple of years ago because I was thinking of moving there and teaching high school. Schools around there seemed to all start later and run later, but they have morning practice also, so again sports.
You'd think that elementary schools could be the ones that began early in the day and middle and high schools later because that seems to be the pattern for children and waking up. But no, sports.
Hey wait I haven't seen anyone lay this one at the feet of evil teachers' unions yet. Get on the ball, people.
It's important work, and it's important that the ones who do it care about it. That's what motivates me. If I absolutely couldn't survive on my salary, I might feel different, but right now it's fine. There are plenty of people in my building who had some other more lucrative career before they came here. They decided that they wanted to do something more fulfilling.
Besides, teaching kids is a lot of fun, in a way that teaching adults probably wouldn't be (for me, at least.) Spending all day doing something you enjoy makes they money less important. It's not as though I need to engage in expensive recreation activities to offset the drudgery of my day job.
But your question is not completely off the wall. My boss was having a hard time filling some positions in my department last year and I said "well no wonder - why would anyone want to do this?" I was playing devil's advocate, so to speak.
I think everyone calling for simpler firing is making one incorrect assumption. That is: only bad teachers are targeted for firing currently. Rationally, one would expect that there's no reason to fire a good teacher. They're performing, right? Why fire them? The main reason seems to be age. For women, the age comes earlier than for men. But eventually, just like any middle managers, administrators want to fire high cost employees and replace them with entry level workers who come at a fraction of the price. The protections are there for all teachers. Unions don't contend that there are no bad teachers: just that the burden of proof is on the administration.
There's also the effect of how school reform initiatives work. Every time the district latches on to a new thing in education, it's someone's pet project at the central office. Teachers who have been working long enough to see bullshit like Whole Language (can't spell a word? invent a spelling!) and Open Concept (no walls!) come and go may resist these initiatives. Then they're embarrassing and insubordinate.
Yeah let's do that. Let's play teachers against each other and remove cooperation from schools. That way, if your students do worse than mine, I get more money. No, I won't tell you how I got my kids to understand factoring, or the Krebs cycle.
Yes, it was the right thing. Yes, it was you or them. But all the justifications
Ah yes the central conceit of war. Put a bunch of young guys who have their whole lives ahead of them in a situation where it's them or the enemy. It doesn't matter whose interests are really served by their deployment. Because who will fault these guys for choosing their own life over someone else's? I can't blame them either and I'm about as anti-war as they come. So, then, the people whose interests are really served by the war make sure that we all understand that it's very important to support the troops and very important that we think only of them out there in the field in harm's way. It's like a marionette show.
Hey I don't know if this is your situation or not, but I used to have a similar problem with my cable internet. After months and months of Comcast sending a guy to reboot the modem, I finally got someone who understood that the problem was intermittent. It turned out that the signal was too loud. He put a splitter in between the wall and the modem, and this cut the signal down enough for stability. Hope that helps.
I think rather than reject authority wholesale, as you seem to advocate, children need to learn more about the concept and how to ascribe it to people. Some people earn the trust that others place in them. They do this by demonstrating proficiency, or demonstrating caring, I'm sure you can think of other ways. However, they do not earn any trust by being placed in a position by someone else. So, while schools do a good job teaching kids to respect authority, they do a very poor job teaching kids to detect authority.
I didn't become a teacher to enforce a blind obedience to authority. I teach math, so I'm lucky in that everything I present as true has good reasons backing it up. Kids, however, shouldn't believe things are true because I said them. Rather, it's the other way around. It's difficult convincing them of this way of thinking. Kids are too pliant, in my opinion.
No, here's the scenario. I had a trig student some years ago who was monumentally lazy. That was really his only observable personality trait while he was in math class. Either that or he was simply not interested in math, in which case I wonder why he was taking one of the classes at the advanced end of the high school math spectrum. Actually, I do know why but I think you take my meaning. So, at registration time, I didn't recommend that he take Calculus. Students who want to take Calculus need a certain grade and their teacher's recommendation to get there. Failing that, they need a waiver saying they understand they are going against the teacher's recommendation so that if they do poorly, they don't come crying to us about their placement in a class that's too hard.
So dad calls me and says he feels like his son would be in a much stronger position going into calculus if I were to give him a recommendation. Just as a confidence builder, why couldn't I just go ahead and give him the recommendation?
Some parents want the appearance of success against a high standard. They are not necessarily interested in the standard or the actual success.
The majority of my parents are rational. The stories I remember just aren't about them.
Unstructured and ambiguous writing is sufficient for communication between friends. Really, it's sufficient for any communication that can be corrected in real time. If you text someone "your sisters hot" instead of "your sisters hat," it's not a problem because this can be cleared up immediately. Any writing where the reader isn't still in communication with you needs to be clearer than otherwise.
If you haven't already, you ought to read The Buyout of America by Josh Kosman. And then add Private Equity firm to your list. At least your list includes honest businesses. That is, they make no claims contrary to their true intention of only making money.
Private equity firms buy companies by giving them tax incentives for financing their own buyout. The company being bought puts up most of the money that is used to buy them. The PE company then takes a company that may have been about its products and reduces staff, R&D, and raises prices when they can, so that the loan can be paid off more quickly. It's this transition and the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders that has turned so many once-decent companies into hollow shells that can't deliver on the promise of their name. One great example is Kinko's. There are others. Like hospitals. People are willing to put up with a lot before they'll change doctors or hospitals.
I'm using "smart" as sort of a catch all since the real truth is so much more complicated and not really the point. I am not using the term "gifted" in that way. Gifted means specific things, and the cognitive ability has consequences, so to speak. Children who understand the world primarily through reasoning have a hard time accepting statements that don't make sense. This isn't really a deficiency, but can be problematic when children are not developmentally ready to understand a complete explanation.
To extend your ideas about ability in many different fields, you might like to read some Howard Gardner on his concept of Multiple Intelligences , and some Carol Dweck on what it means to be "smart." She had an interesting article in Scientific American a few years ago, and has written a book called Mindset.
At some point in my life, I came to understand that my gifts, such as they are, are not anything I worked for or earned. I don't have these gifts because I deserve them, they just are. The fact that other people do not possess them is similarly simply a fact. I used to scoff at the work that others had to put in to get to where I was. But the work deserves respect; you'll see some of this kind of thinking in Dweck as well. Now I view my advantage as an opportunity to help others get to where I am. I don't know how often that opportunity comes up in a homeschooling situation. I guess it's lucky for me that I became a teacher.
This may actually have been something I learned from Weight Training class. I was (and am) a pretty skinny guy, and some of the people in that class were surprised that I was in there at all. The more dedicated lifters, however, took the attitude "well, gotta start somewhere."
It seems to me that many of your complaints with formal education would apply equally well to any given private school. It's a difficult problem for teachers when we get a student who is smarter than we are. Private schools and teachers are not immune because they have marketing, branding, and upsell. Gifted and Talented (GT) education is special ed just as much as teaching kids with learning disabilities. GT students often have very frustrating personality traits that one can be trained to recognize and adapt to, but people usually aren't. GT students require smaller classes, and often a different approach to rules and structure. This doesn't only apply to schools, by the way. Try, as a parent, to get your GT child to accept "because I said so" as a reason for anything. (I don't mean you in particular, since I haven't met you or your son, GT is the nearest I can figure from reading your post.) Again, private school teachers (the ones I know) are not any more or less motivated than "part time government employees" to seek out this kind of information. Private schools don't necessarily have the resources to acquire specially trained personnel and have small (5-6 students) classes to meet this need.
Schools don't treat gifted students nearly equally, because standards-based school measurement involves having a percentage of students perform acceptably well, and the ones with the greatest difficulties require the most support to meet this. Spending more money on students who can already meet this baseline doesn't make sense to a lot of school systems, schools, school improvement teams, etc. This attitude is not inherent to the fact that a school is part of a system. An independent school is not automatically more likely to adopt an approach that focuses on the personal growth of each child, and any one that does do that is likely to cost significantly more per pupil than what we see in public schools. Not that the children are not worth the money. I know that and you know that.
Homeschooling is a very good answer to this. A few years ago, I worked with some homeschooled kids whose parents ran out of math expertise and so they hired me to teach Calculus to their 13 and 15 year old boys. Their impetus was their experience in elementary school. The younger son sort of discovered exponents and his teacher was annoyed and frustrated. It wasn't just one incident, of course. This anecdote goes along with your experience of dwindling numbers of religious fanatics as homeschoolers, but none of this is conclusive. This USA Today article is a little better, and supports your case as well.
In the handful of cases where I've had truly gifted students (no, enrollment in "Honors" or AP classes doesn't make you gifted), I've observed that while they're very good with the math, they have other social things to learn from a classroom, like how not to be an ass about their superior intellect. I hope you consider addressing this with your son, because the hard way of learning this is very hard. You may need to learn it yourself first. My sister is homeschooling her daughter, and while she's extremely intelligent and articulate, she's not especially nice, and has a hard time admitting when she's wrong. There's value in those things too.
The leftie in me wants to demand that Mr. Beck show equal outrage with any political figure who abuses public trust. I know that's not going to happen. Besides, he's not the only man on TV and there are only so many hours in a day.
However, if he reports that Mrs. Pelosi uses $500k of public money every month to fly back and forth from CA, and that's true, then yes that's worth knowing. We deserve to know.
I'm talking more about promotion of a product. Somewhere in this post thread, someone mentioned that Mr. Beck promotes a book, as a refutation of the quality of the book. I took that to mean that if the main person talking up your product is a man who can be paid to say anything, that doesn't speak well of the product.
I don't think it's a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with Mr. Beck's political views. The problem lies in discerning what those views actually are.
I've never actually watched Mr. Beck or listened to his radio show. I've only ever seen him on The Daily Show where he is shown doing paid commercials for gold vendors, and also doing unpaid promotion for it on his Fox News show. Or where he says that Mr. Obama is a racist who hates white people and then 45s later says he's not saying that Mr. Obama hates white people. Or the topper - Mr. Beck emerged from the hospital with nothing good to say about the health care industry "In this country, trying to get well could actually kill you" and then moved from CNN to Fox and now has only good things to say about the health care industry. "We already have the greatest health care in the world, and we're going to lose it if the government gets involved," things of that nature.
It seems from all this that Mr. Beck's opinion is for sale. I don't know how one would go about determining if he was promoting things in good faith or not. I welcome any references you can provide that can correct my image of him.
He is, after all, welcome to believe whatever he wants, and to say whatever he believes on TV. In fact, he's welcome to say whatever someone pays him to say on TV, but blurring the lines between honest opinion and paid opinion destroys credibility.
Slashdot Mirror
So it doesn't matter that this has been said and demonstrated before. It matters that he's the one saying it.
Setting deadlines farther than a few months is a way for politicians to solicit contributions. So, moving CAFE up 4 years is a reward to someone for their largesse. Also, a shorter time frame makes it more difficult to change things or revise standards downward. However 2016 is still plenty of time to squeeze money or concessions out.
OK, let's throw in shoe bomber Richard Reid (?) and that guy who flew a plane into the IRS building in Austin, TX. I assume that you won't object to including Mr. Stack in the list even though he committed a crime with an airplane rather than on board one.
Schools start early because of sports and after school practice. I visited Austin TX a couple of years ago because I was thinking of moving there and teaching high school. Schools around there seemed to all start later and run later, but they have morning practice also, so again sports.
You'd think that elementary schools could be the ones that began early in the day and middle and high schools later because that seems to be the pattern for children and waking up. But no, sports.
Hey wait I haven't seen anyone lay this one at the feet of evil teachers' unions yet. Get on the ball, people.
It's still protected and worth protecting. It's just not anyone's patriotic duty to spread FUD etc.
Opponents of "political correctness" want to be able to say anything, but don't want others to be able to call them on it.
It's important work, and it's important that the ones who do it care about it. That's what motivates me. If I absolutely couldn't survive on my salary, I might feel different, but right now it's fine. There are plenty of people in my building who had some other more lucrative career before they came here. They decided that they wanted to do something more fulfilling.
Besides, teaching kids is a lot of fun, in a way that teaching adults probably wouldn't be (for me, at least.) Spending all day doing something you enjoy makes they money less important. It's not as though I need to engage in expensive recreation activities to offset the drudgery of my day job.
But your question is not completely off the wall. My boss was having a hard time filling some positions in my department last year and I said "well no wonder - why would anyone want to do this?" I was playing devil's advocate, so to speak.
They also can't let teachers continue to teach if the allegations turn out to be untrue. This is a feature of society trusting people with children.
I think everyone calling for simpler firing is making one incorrect assumption. That is: only bad teachers are targeted for firing currently. Rationally, one would expect that there's no reason to fire a good teacher. They're performing, right? Why fire them? The main reason seems to be age. For women, the age comes earlier than for men. But eventually, just like any middle managers, administrators want to fire high cost employees and replace them with entry level workers who come at a fraction of the price. The protections are there for all teachers. Unions don't contend that there are no bad teachers: just that the burden of proof is on the administration.
There's also the effect of how school reform initiatives work. Every time the district latches on to a new thing in education, it's someone's pet project at the central office. Teachers who have been working long enough to see bullshit like Whole Language (can't spell a word? invent a spelling!) and Open Concept (no walls!) come and go may resist these initiatives. Then they're embarrassing and insubordinate.
You think that reducing job security across the board will improve education.
You're kidding yourself if you think that you're dividing by the correct number of hours to determine that wage.
Yeah let's do that. Let's play teachers against each other and remove cooperation from schools. That way, if your students do worse than mine, I get more money. No, I won't tell you how I got my kids to understand factoring, or the Krebs cycle.
Yes, it was the right thing. Yes, it was you or them. But all the justifications
Ah yes the central conceit of war. Put a bunch of young guys who have their whole lives ahead of them in a situation where it's them or the enemy. It doesn't matter whose interests are really served by their deployment. Because who will fault these guys for choosing their own life over someone else's? I can't blame them either and I'm about as anti-war as they come. So, then, the people whose interests are really served by the war make sure that we all understand that it's very important to support the troops and very important that we think only of them out there in the field in harm's way. It's like a marionette show.
Hey I don't know if this is your situation or not, but I used to have a similar problem with my cable internet. After months and months of Comcast sending a guy to reboot the modem, I finally got someone who understood that the problem was intermittent. It turned out that the signal was too loud. He put a splitter in between the wall and the modem, and this cut the signal down enough for stability. Hope that helps.
I think rather than reject authority wholesale, as you seem to advocate, children need to learn more about the concept and how to ascribe it to people. Some people earn the trust that others place in them. They do this by demonstrating proficiency, or demonstrating caring, I'm sure you can think of other ways. However, they do not earn any trust by being placed in a position by someone else. So, while schools do a good job teaching kids to respect authority, they do a very poor job teaching kids to detect authority.
I didn't become a teacher to enforce a blind obedience to authority. I teach math, so I'm lucky in that everything I present as true has good reasons backing it up. Kids, however, shouldn't believe things are true because I said them. Rather, it's the other way around. It's difficult convincing them of this way of thinking. Kids are too pliant, in my opinion.
No, here's the scenario. I had a trig student some years ago who was monumentally lazy. That was really his only observable personality trait while he was in math class. Either that or he was simply not interested in math, in which case I wonder why he was taking one of the classes at the advanced end of the high school math spectrum. Actually, I do know why but I think you take my meaning. So, at registration time, I didn't recommend that he take Calculus. Students who want to take Calculus need a certain grade and their teacher's recommendation to get there. Failing that, they need a waiver saying they understand they are going against the teacher's recommendation so that if they do poorly, they don't come crying to us about their placement in a class that's too hard.
So dad calls me and says he feels like his son would be in a much stronger position going into calculus if I were to give him a recommendation. Just as a confidence builder, why couldn't I just go ahead and give him the recommendation?
Some parents want the appearance of success against a high standard. They are not necessarily interested in the standard or the actual success.
The majority of my parents are rational. The stories I remember just aren't about them.
Unstructured and ambiguous writing is sufficient for communication between friends. Really, it's sufficient for any communication that can be corrected in real time. If you text someone "your sisters hot" instead of "your sisters hat," it's not a problem because this can be cleared up immediately. Any writing where the reader isn't still in communication with you needs to be clearer than otherwise.
I appreciate this post. If you haven't already, you should read The Elephant and the Dragon and I can't remember the author's name. Robin something.
If you haven't already, you ought to read The Buyout of America by Josh Kosman. And then add Private Equity firm to your list. At least your list includes honest businesses. That is, they make no claims contrary to their true intention of only making money.
Private equity firms buy companies by giving them tax incentives for financing their own buyout. The company being bought puts up most of the money that is used to buy them. The PE company then takes a company that may have been about its products and reduces staff, R&D, and raises prices when they can, so that the loan can be paid off more quickly. It's this transition and the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders that has turned so many once-decent companies into hollow shells that can't deliver on the promise of their name. One great example is Kinko's. There are others. Like hospitals. People are willing to put up with a lot before they'll change doctors or hospitals.
I'm using "smart" as sort of a catch all since the real truth is so much more complicated and not really the point. I am not using the term "gifted" in that way. Gifted means specific things, and the cognitive ability has consequences, so to speak. Children who understand the world primarily through reasoning have a hard time accepting statements that don't make sense. This isn't really a deficiency, but can be problematic when children are not developmentally ready to understand a complete explanation.
To extend your ideas about ability in many different fields, you might like to read some Howard Gardner on his concept of Multiple Intelligences , and some Carol Dweck on what it means to be "smart." She had an interesting article in Scientific American a few years ago, and has written a book called Mindset.
At some point in my life, I came to understand that my gifts, such as they are, are not anything I worked for or earned. I don't have these gifts because I deserve them, they just are. The fact that other people do not possess them is similarly simply a fact. I used to scoff at the work that others had to put in to get to where I was. But the work deserves respect; you'll see some of this kind of thinking in Dweck as well. Now I view my advantage as an opportunity to help others get to where I am. I don't know how often that opportunity comes up in a homeschooling situation. I guess it's lucky for me that I became a teacher.
This may actually have been something I learned from Weight Training class. I was (and am) a pretty skinny guy, and some of the people in that class were surprised that I was in there at all. The more dedicated lifters, however, took the attitude "well, gotta start somewhere."
It seems to me that many of your complaints with formal education would apply equally well to any given private school. It's a difficult problem for teachers when we get a student who is smarter than we are. Private schools and teachers are not immune because they have marketing, branding, and upsell. Gifted and Talented (GT) education is special ed just as much as teaching kids with learning disabilities. GT students often have very frustrating personality traits that one can be trained to recognize and adapt to, but people usually aren't. GT students require smaller classes, and often a different approach to rules and structure. This doesn't only apply to schools, by the way. Try, as a parent, to get your GT child to accept "because I said so" as a reason for anything. (I don't mean you in particular, since I haven't met you or your son, GT is the nearest I can figure from reading your post.) Again, private school teachers (the ones I know) are not any more or less motivated than "part time government employees" to seek out this kind of information. Private schools don't necessarily have the resources to acquire specially trained personnel and have small (5-6 students) classes to meet this need.
Schools don't treat gifted students nearly equally, because standards-based school measurement involves having a percentage of students perform acceptably well, and the ones with the greatest difficulties require the most support to meet this. Spending more money on students who can already meet this baseline doesn't make sense to a lot of school systems, schools, school improvement teams, etc. This attitude is not inherent to the fact that a school is part of a system. An independent school is not automatically more likely to adopt an approach that focuses on the personal growth of each child, and any one that does do that is likely to cost significantly more per pupil than what we see in public schools. Not that the children are not worth the money. I know that and you know that.
Homeschooling is a very good answer to this. A few years ago, I worked with some homeschooled kids whose parents ran out of math expertise and so they hired me to teach Calculus to their 13 and 15 year old boys. Their impetus was their experience in elementary school. The younger son sort of discovered exponents and his teacher was annoyed and frustrated. It wasn't just one incident, of course. This anecdote goes along with your experience of dwindling numbers of religious fanatics as homeschoolers, but none of this is conclusive. This USA Today article is a little better, and supports your case as well.
In the handful of cases where I've had truly gifted students (no, enrollment in "Honors" or AP classes doesn't make you gifted), I've observed that while they're very good with the math, they have other social things to learn from a classroom, like how not to be an ass about their superior intellect. I hope you consider addressing this with your son, because the hard way of learning this is very hard. You may need to learn it yourself first. My sister is homeschooling her daughter, and while she's extremely intelligent and articulate, she's not especially nice, and has a hard time admitting when she's wrong. There's value in those things too.
Well, that's fair enough. This has gone pretty far afield (my fault really) but I see what you meant.
When you say interest, do you mean a financial interest? If not, then his statement that he's a customer is at best just more promotion.
Here is the The Daily Show video I mentioned. It doesn't seem like Mr. Beck is a victim of editing tricks in this, but of course I can't be 100%.
The leftie in me wants to demand that Mr. Beck show equal outrage with any political figure who abuses public trust. I know that's not going to happen. Besides, he's not the only man on TV and there are only so many hours in a day.
However, if he reports that Mrs. Pelosi uses $500k of public money every month to fly back and forth from CA, and that's true, then yes that's worth knowing. We deserve to know.
I'm talking more about promotion of a product. Somewhere in this post thread, someone mentioned that Mr. Beck promotes a book, as a refutation of the quality of the book. I took that to mean that if the main person talking up your product is a man who can be paid to say anything, that doesn't speak well of the product.
I don't think it's a matter of agreeing or disagreeing with Mr. Beck's political views. The problem lies in discerning what those views actually are.
I've never actually watched Mr. Beck or listened to his radio show. I've only ever seen him on The Daily Show where he is shown doing paid commercials for gold vendors, and also doing unpaid promotion for it on his Fox News show. Or where he says that Mr. Obama is a racist who hates white people and then 45s later says he's not saying that Mr. Obama hates white people. Or the topper - Mr. Beck emerged from the hospital with nothing good to say about the health care industry "In this country, trying to get well could actually kill you" and then moved from CNN to Fox and now has only good things to say about the health care industry. "We already have the greatest health care in the world, and we're going to lose it if the government gets involved," things of that nature.
It seems from all this that Mr. Beck's opinion is for sale. I don't know how one would go about determining if he was promoting things in good faith or not. I welcome any references you can provide that can correct my image of him.
He is, after all, welcome to believe whatever he wants, and to say whatever he believes on TV. In fact, he's welcome to say whatever someone pays him to say on TV, but blurring the lines between honest opinion and paid opinion destroys credibility.
It works for pro sports.