If you haven't seen it, dig up the (free) documentary The Corporation, done by some Canadian folks. I think it's hosted on archive.org somewhere. The segment in it about the studies done on increasing the parental begging by children to sell products is exceptionally horrifying.
It's a lot harder to highlight, dog-ear, and scribble notes in the margin of a pdf. And besides, I read pdfs of journal articles day-in and day-out. It's often nice to not stare at something glowing.
Plus, in class, it's GOOD not to have a laptop. Taking notes by hand sucks, but your pen and paper aren't prone to distracting you from the lesson at hand. Plus it's a lot easier to make quick graphs and charts, along with all the evil greek letters that science and math are prone to use.
I came here to laugh at the posts. I'm now a PhD student doing some pretty hardcore computer modeling. I use linux at home, and to run our model, and OSX to do analysis on.
I've got a windows boot to play games on, but that's it for windows. And that makes me happier than I've been in ages.
I really wish the rest of the world would stop using windows for shit that matters. It's far easier and cheaper to use something else. My non-windows OSes run like they're on fire, since I have far more hardware than is needed to run them. My single windows intall runs fantastically as well, since it's got no AV and no anti-spyware. I figure if I never use a browser on it, and just play games, I should be pretty safe. So far, that's working for me.
Don't listen to the parent. He's exaggerating a fair bit. The cost of textbooks is dependent on what field you go into. If it's science/engineering based, there's a fair chance that your textbooks will cost a ton. However, there's also a pretty good chance that you'll use them for many years.
I just started a PhD in a science field, and spent about $500 on textbooks. However, that's for 7 or 8 books, of which, I'll probably use 3-4 of them for the next 5-6 years.
The parent, (Seriously, Mr. Freeman?) does exaggerate the costs a bit. However, the rest is pretty spot on, especially for popular texts.
I taught HS Physics for 5 years, and managed to get 4 copies of a couple textbooks. The editions changed, but the content was nearly the same. As Mr. Freeman points out, the online content sucked, and some did just fuck up the flow of their book by swapping chapters to sell a new edition. However, to extrapolate that to all textbooks is absurd.
As researchers, we learn from others. We have others critique our works. There are TONS of college researchers who HATE that their research and educational material get locked away in pay-per-article journals or pay-through-the-nose textbooks. They also hate that they can't easily access other people's research and educational materials.
As it is now, Universities generally set up some sort of portal through which students can access all the publishers they're subscribed to. Generally, these portals blow. My standard procedure is to google what I'm looking for, then when I find the exact title, issue, page, head to my college library portal.
It would be a ton easier for all us researchers if we could just let one place (google, or other, as long as they do it well) index and serve research and textbooks.
This semester, I've got a professor who wrote his own textbook. He was unable to get the publisher to sell it at his price. The publisher wants $60 for a ~200 page paperback, 4"x6", first edition, with a fair amount of errors, we're finding out. In the contract, he worked out a deal where he can buy unlimited personal copies for the price of printing, binding, and shipping. So his deal is to just buy his own textbook by the case, and sell it to his students for an even $20.
This guy never wanted to get rich on his textbook - he was frustrated that there was no textbook which served his needs. When he wrote one and tried to get it printed, he wasn't ALLOWED to set the profit margin. (As you can tell, he wanted it very low.) The company he settled on for printing was the one which (somewhat naively) allowed him the option to purchase unlimited copies for himself at near cost. I bet if he had the option for an easy, open method for publication, he, and many others, would jump on it.
It's a slippery slope, but I do wonder why advertisers don't at least put a "I won't buy this ever" button on ads. If you click it, you don't see an ad for that for a year or so. They then show you something else. It's not like there's a tiny pool of things to advertise to you.
It's not truly targeted, but it would help cut down on missing your target audience completely. Of course it would be abused, but you might actually be able to collect some really useful data that way.
I can't argue too much on most of your points, but on #3 you're dead wrong.
Our federal government mandated testing is done on one day, for one single class. It is never repeated. There is no "November vs March" comparison. The students are tested once, and are never tested again.
We test in 4th grade, 8th grade, and 11th grade. We don't look at growth between the grades, because the tests are completely different, and the student body has substantially changed.
We take one single test in November, and compare the raw average, ignoring any variance or standard deviation, to the raw average of the students who took it last year. (Yes, a completely different population of students!) It is truly a single data point.
One year on one test, my school pulled something like 1107, when the state cutoff was 1110. Due to this, we were placed in the "below average" category. Never mind that the test error bars are like 30-50 pts.
The standardized testing that the schools do for the NCLB act are truly a single data point, with no consideration for variance, spread, sample size, etc. Schools with 30 kids have their raw average compared to the class of 20 kids the year before, with no modifications. That same average is compared to schools with a class of 500 kids.
In my school we had class sizes change by 15% in a year. My Master's thesis looked at the fact that 3 zeros could push us from passing to failing. Three kids could blow off the govt mandated test which didn't affect them, and because we only report a raw average with no error, they could cause us to fail.
Truly, it wouldn't be much worse to just make it a one question test.
Probably not. At bare minimum, this means more botnets members available to spam whatever email accounts you use.
Directly safe? Sure. Same as myself, and a lot of others. But indirectly, this doesn't help anyone but people running botnets. It's far more work to deny security updates to some users than it is to just give them to all users. And it's strategically a poor decision because of the INCREASED risk to the protected machines due to the attacks from the unprotected ones.
If this works, and you push it to everyone, you cut down on spam, attacks on your protected machines, and overall, you make the internet a little better place. And before anyone beats me to it, I know damn well that MS and "make the internet a little better place" don't belong in the same paragraph. Bitterly, I wonder if their goal of destroying the internet had any basis in this decision.
That, and those running legitimate versions of Windows who had to crack WGA due to false positives. I've helped fix a couple of installs now, which I KNOW were legitimate, but which got the black counterfeiting desktop of doom. One was an HP just out of warranty, run by a clueless user who hadn't done anything other than surf, email, and play solitaire.
When I get calls from a panicked friend because they did everything right, had a good AV, anti-spyware, used firefox, and never did anything risky, there's a big problem. When I can apply a crack in a matter of 2 minutes and fix it, that's a double WTF directed towards MS.
That's a damn good idea. Another one would be to teach nothing at all. Seriously.
There is sooooo much DYI tech that's been done floating around. Just expose them to it. HD video from the edge of space on a weather balloon. Multi-stage water-rockets which can go up 1km. Homebrew wifi antennas which can cover miles. Diesel-electric engines crammed into sedans. Ruben's tubes. Railguns.
Rather than teach, expose them. Show them what's been done. Challenge them to go beyond that. The point of DIY tech is it's...."do it YOURSELF!" It's not "have my teacher show me how to do it".
Seed their dreams, and let them figure the rest out.
I can't disagree with you there. Part of the reason kids actually liked me, even though I was a fairly rigorous teacher was that I was a bit of a rebel. I'd agree that this country could do with a bit more of it.
I don't know that it's misplaced hatred - I have yet to see a standardized test in education done well. The issue is that doing rigorous testing is hard, time-consuming, and costly. Our modern education system doesn't want to do any of those things.
I agree that standardized testing can be done well. The issue is that outside of a scientific body doing the test, it almost never is. We'd be FAR better off just scrapping our attempts to use them all together.
If you have a good teacher preparation program, and a good certification program, why can't you trust a teacher to do their job?
At issue here is that we've removed the ability and incentive for teachers to actually do their jobs well. I was required to prepare students for a poorly designed and poorly implemented standardized test. That's how my success was judged - a crappy test on one day, with minimal statistical significance, with no proper assessment or reporting of the results. I had the choice of actually being a good teacher and looking like a bad one, or being a bad one and looking like a good one.
The success of a school is whether or not students can go on from it and do something with what they've learned. Whether they or not they are prepared to actually make their way in the world. How did we go from that to a single number representing the gross mean of a class, on one day, on one test to determine the success of a school? It's mind boggling.
1) Because they are easy. It's hard to do good testing, but we've decided that we need to compare EVERYONE because.....well, we want to. Future success can't be used to assess past learning, it seems.
2)Increasingly, they are not. Several studies showed that grades in the last year of high school were a BETTER predictor of college performance than SAT/ACTs. Many schools are dropping those requirements.
3)You can't. Nor can you tell WITH a standardized test. Telling whether or not a teacher is doing a good job is very hard. Kids may hate them, but they could be a fantastic, and rigorous teacher. Kids could love them, and they could do nothing but tell jokes all day, and give out answer sheets with the homework. Assessing teaching is maddeningly frustrating. About the best you can do is look at whether kids can use what they learned later down the line.
4 and 5) Totally linked. Learning isn't memorization. It's only been that way for the last hundred years of so. Look into the philosophy of education and learning, for the last couple of thousand of years, and you'll find much differently.
Damn. You hit the other huge nail on the head. I don't suppose I can mod someone up who replied to one of my posts, can I?
Perhaps that's what separates college from high school. In college, the teacher is pretty much impenetrable. Parent's don't get to say shit about anything they do - the only real option is to send your kid to another school.
With that in mind, I agree that we probably need to do as you suggest. And I believe that we probably never will.
I'm atypical, and spent 9 years out before coming back. (I don't count the Masters, because I did it part-time, while working.) My observations:
1) The pay here sucks. But it's enough to get by on.
2) The lack of responsibility is AWESOME! If I get drunk and don't go to class/work tomorrow, nobody gives a shit. If I did that in the real world, I'd be in all sorts of trouble. My stress level is pretty much flat compared to actually working real jobs. I no longer have to deal with stupid people. (Well, it's at least two orders of magnitude less stupid people here.)
3) There's shit to do in grad school. In the real world, not so much. Having to get to bed on time, sober, to get to work sucks. Putting in overtime sucks. Being on call sucks. Kids, a mortgage, and a car loan mean you don't get to have much fun. Commuting really sucks.
Seriously - stay in grad school as long as you can. I'm having more fun than I've had in years, on less than half the money. As long as you know not to take grad school seriously, it's all good. It's just a big fat hoop you have to get around to jumping through.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. If I were to pick a handful of major issues, in no major order:
1) School boards. They are made up of people who have immense power, but aren't required to have any educational background. I watched in my home town as a local boy was voted in over a woman with 10 years teaching experience, and a PhD in education. His platform? Lower taxes. We let the public oversee something they have absolutely no expertise in. How do you balance that with the fact that it's their kids that you're educating?
2) A culture of knowing vs showing. It's one thing to be able to recite your multiplication tables. It's an entirely different thing to be able to show someone how to multiply. If we can get away from rote memorization and into actual demonstration of mastery and skill, we'll be very much further ahead. This ties into....
3) Testing is hard. We've decided that one data point is sufficient for testing. Ask any scientist, engineer, or thinking person, and they can tell you that one data point is an anecdote. It can't tell you trends, averages, means, or anything like that. Yet the NCLB test is one test, on one day, (ok, more likely 2 sub-tests on two successive days, for an hour and a half a day, but still) and we treat it like it's some sort of useful data. As a fantastic example, the HS English portion is given once each year. The raw average score is then compared with the one from LAST YEAR! Yes, an entirely different test, different population, potentially different sample sizes, variance, etc. And these two data points are used to determine if the school is doing a good job. It gives scientists and statisticians fits.
4) One-sized fits all education. If you look at most of the really good educational systems in other countries, they tend to branch out as students go along. Many are criticized for tracking students too early, but in the US, we hardly do at all. Students going into the military, on to become doctors, farmers, construction workers, mechanics, lawyers, scientists, and hair dressers all take largely the same courses in high school. Why? Why was I tasked with teaching farmers about the life and death of stars? They needed soil science. Pathogen transmission. Basic metallurgy and engineering. Knowledge of nitrogen and phosphors cycles.
5) Theory classes. It sounds odd, coming from someone with a Physics degree and a minor in math, but we need to ditch math classes. Specifically, we teach math theory in school. What we need to be doing is teaching practical math. Few people go on to get a degree in math. And while the theory of math is good for a number of things, it's not good for 90% of the students to ONLY ever see it as theory. I'd love to see science classes co-taught by a math teacher and a science teacher. Let's use math to do something useful. Not a worksheet. The same goes for English. Team up with a historian, and look at what language tells us about history.
But, take my beer-drinking and rambling with a grain of salt. I'm probably highly unqualified to be making these sorts of statements. Because, "that's the way we've always done it, and if it worked for me, why won't it work for them?"
I highly doubt it. I just escaped 5 years of teaching, and without the break, you'd have a lot of pretty insane teachers.
You don't truly grasp the insanity of a public school as a kid in it. Herding teenagers wore me out like no other job I've ever done. It's amazing to be immersed in a pressure-cooker of immaturity, hormones, and lack of private space. Add in the tendency of youth to rebel against authority, push boundaries, and do stupid things, and you end up with probably one of the more stressful places outside of operating rooms. (If you've got pre-teens to teens, imagine a population-density of one per square meter in your house, 6 hrs a day. Now imagine trying to get them to do something useful that ENTIRE time.)
We don't have great teachers for a number of reasons:
First, the pay sucks. There's all sorts of public bitching about what teachers get paid, but it's really not that much. After 5 years of teaching, with a Master's degree in Education, I was making $40k. Not bad, except for the amount of school loans I had put into that.
Now, while I could have gotten something part-time in the summer, I had to take classes. Finishing a degree, moving to a Level 2 license, becoming eligible for equipment grants with training seminars, etc.
More importantly than the pay, I wasn't ALLOWED to be a good teacher. I was asked to teach stuff that was horrifically boring, in a boring way. Because success was determined based on how well kids filled in bubbles on a test. How do you demonstrate the ability to do science with a bubble-sheet? You don't. You demonstrate that you can MEMORIZE science facts.
Eventually, after I was off my probation period, I started really teaching. I said fuck all to the standardized test, and we actually did science. However, coming down the pipe was the district-wide curriculum revamping, where we got to help formulate the approved curriculum which was aligned to the state standards. Once I saw that coming, I bailed to head back to grad school.
Standardized tests are blatantly anti-education. They measure the ability and motivation of a kid to memorize answers from other days, and fill in those answers on one day out of 180. Treating one day in the life of a teenager as equal to all the others is moronic, for anyone who's spent any time around teens. Do what most of the country does and place no student motivations in place to do well, and you've destroyed an already flawed test. (Most states never put NCLB test scores on report cards, transcripts, or even give them to teachers or parents. As if teens weren't apathetic enough already....)
There was a time when we had masters and apprentices. Where we actually taught kids what they needed to learn, what they wanted to learn. Those days are far gone. Today, we have factory-schools, like we have factory-farms. Stinking places crammed to the gills, where the livestock has shit jammed down their throats until the folks in charge deem they're ready. I was in a fairly extensive farming community, in a state well known for farming, but our state standards don't cover much in the way of soil science. So my success was judged based on whether I could convince multi-generation farmers to fill in bubbles about stellar life cycles on a test that didn't count, and which their parents would never see the results of. That's brilliant!
As long as we treat every student the same, and give them the same material, we're doomed to failure. We need to tear ass through the basics of reading, writing, and math, and then start giving kids what they NEED to learn. Not what some group of six retired teachers in a conference room somewhere thinks they should learn. Actual, relevant stuff. Then, we need to actually assess whether they've learned it, by watching them DO IT. Not see if they can logic away two answers out of four, and then guess one of the remaining two.
As far as I can tell, I was a pretty good teacher. And now I'm in grad school, doing actual science. Frankly, I should have done this earlier. I'm much happier out of that clusterfuck.
On the soda comment, my family has always made tons of stuff from scratch. Beer, wine, cordials, and of course, soda.
The two I most remember from growing up were the root beer, and the ginger ale. Both had AMAZING flavors. Strong, bold, vibrant flavors. Flavors to the point that you almost needed to water them down, coming from a mass-produced soda background.
I think it's partly because of this that I just don't drink soda. The other reason is that I'd rather spend that money on beer, so I drink water in place of soda.
Same here. I'm an oddball, and spent nine years in the "real world", making decent money, before I went back to grad school. I was used to buying nice liquor in moderate quantities, upgrading on a 2 year cycle, and eating out on a whim.
The last two years before I went back to school, I realized that I'd be losing well over 50% of my income by doing so. I got my ass in gear, and started churning out cheap dinners which could turn into "lunch for two days", and collected a bunch of good and cheap ideas for eating in.
So far, I'm +$400 on my first month of grad pay, despite spending in the area of $200 on beer, booze, and bar hopping. My food budget is in the same neighborhood, and I'm eating like a king. I found a bunch of frozen single-serving salmon fillets, on sale for $1 each. Pair those with some fresh vegis and some nice rice, and you've got a fantastic meal. On-sale boneless chicken breasts and thighs, some peppers and onions, and a cheap wrap -> spicy chicken fajitas. Cheap pork, a $2 box of rice pilaf, some fresh vegis, and a crock pot, and I've got 3-4 meals for all of $7-8, done in the time it takes me to drink a few beers while doing homework.
I really think poverty around here is tied to a lack of education. If I didn't know how to cook delicious stuff, on the cheap, I'd go eat fast food all the time. And by doing so, I'd be poorer. I think this ties nicely into smoking as well. I'm educated enough to understand that spending $5 a day on cigs is the same as paying $150 a month, $1825 a year for cancer. I'd rather save that $5 for a few days, and spend it going out with friends. That's a luxury that addicts don't have.
I idly wonder what would happen if you educated poor people on the basics of cooking. I've made some pretty good dinners with nothing but a cast-iron pot and a campfire. Cheap, easy, tasty meals are entirely possible. How much does education play into that?
By opening up, you can get a bunch of people working on your security to strengthen it, to help offset the few people who might be interested in breaking it.
But that only works for software you can fix, or you can get the vendor to fix. I highly doubt that's the case here.
Nobody is out to burn my house down, because nobody cares. But if I go out and shout, "My House is UNBURNABLE....MUAHHAHAHA!", there's a chance that some asshat will put a torch to it just to prove me wrong.
Security through obscurity doesn't work. Security through provoking asshats into action really doesn't work, unless you have the power to fix what they break.
Slashdot Mirror
If you haven't seen it, dig up the (free) documentary The Corporation, done by some Canadian folks. I think it's hosted on archive.org somewhere. The segment in it about the studies done on increasing the parental begging by children to sell products is exceptionally horrifying.
It's a lot harder to highlight, dog-ear, and scribble notes in the margin of a pdf. And besides, I read pdfs of journal articles day-in and day-out. It's often nice to not stare at something glowing.
Plus, in class, it's GOOD not to have a laptop. Taking notes by hand sucks, but your pen and paper aren't prone to distracting you from the lesson at hand. Plus it's a lot easier to make quick graphs and charts, along with all the evil greek letters that science and math are prone to use.
Well, I'm Welsh. I should be ok living there if it's just rocks falling on me.
I came here to laugh at the posts. I'm now a PhD student doing some pretty hardcore computer modeling. I use linux at home, and to run our model, and OSX to do analysis on.
I've got a windows boot to play games on, but that's it for windows. And that makes me happier than I've been in ages.
I really wish the rest of the world would stop using windows for shit that matters. It's far easier and cheaper to use something else. My non-windows OSes run like they're on fire, since I have far more hardware than is needed to run them. My single windows intall runs fantastically as well, since it's got no AV and no anti-spyware. I figure if I never use a browser on it, and just play games, I should be pretty safe. So far, that's working for me.
Surely Mr. Freeman, you're joking!
Don't listen to the parent. He's exaggerating a fair bit. The cost of textbooks is dependent on what field you go into. If it's science/engineering based, there's a fair chance that your textbooks will cost a ton. However, there's also a pretty good chance that you'll use them for many years.
I just started a PhD in a science field, and spent about $500 on textbooks. However, that's for 7 or 8 books, of which, I'll probably use 3-4 of them for the next 5-6 years.
The parent, (Seriously, Mr. Freeman?) does exaggerate the costs a bit. However, the rest is pretty spot on, especially for popular texts.
I taught HS Physics for 5 years, and managed to get 4 copies of a couple textbooks. The editions changed, but the content was nearly the same. As Mr. Freeman points out, the online content sucked, and some did just fuck up the flow of their book by swapping chapters to sell a new edition. However, to extrapolate that to all textbooks is absurd.
But of course, the only people who can make such a law are in congress.
If you had an endless supply of hookers and blow, and had the option to vote against it, would you?
And genes, hybrids, medical advances, new chemicals, energy storage systems....
Seriously - subsidize the US economy by dumping money into research universities. Then open all the shit that comes out to US companies.
Very good rebuttal. An addendum:
As researchers, we learn from others. We have others critique our works. There are TONS of college researchers who HATE that their research and educational material get locked away in pay-per-article journals or pay-through-the-nose textbooks. They also hate that they can't easily access other people's research and educational materials.
As it is now, Universities generally set up some sort of portal through which students can access all the publishers they're subscribed to. Generally, these portals blow. My standard procedure is to google what I'm looking for, then when I find the exact title, issue, page, head to my college library portal.
It would be a ton easier for all us researchers if we could just let one place (google, or other, as long as they do it well) index and serve research and textbooks.
This semester, I've got a professor who wrote his own textbook. He was unable to get the publisher to sell it at his price. The publisher wants $60 for a ~200 page paperback, 4"x6", first edition, with a fair amount of errors, we're finding out. In the contract, he worked out a deal where he can buy unlimited personal copies for the price of printing, binding, and shipping. So his deal is to just buy his own textbook by the case, and sell it to his students for an even $20.
This guy never wanted to get rich on his textbook - he was frustrated that there was no textbook which served his needs. When he wrote one and tried to get it printed, he wasn't ALLOWED to set the profit margin. (As you can tell, he wanted it very low.) The company he settled on for printing was the one which (somewhat naively) allowed him the option to purchase unlimited copies for himself at near cost. I bet if he had the option for an easy, open method for publication, he, and many others, would jump on it.
It's a slippery slope, but I do wonder why advertisers don't at least put a "I won't buy this ever" button on ads. If you click it, you don't see an ad for that for a year or so. They then show you something else. It's not like there's a tiny pool of things to advertise to you.
It's not truly targeted, but it would help cut down on missing your target audience completely. Of course it would be abused, but you might actually be able to collect some really useful data that way.
I can't argue too much on most of your points, but on #3 you're dead wrong.
Our federal government mandated testing is done on one day, for one single class. It is never repeated. There is no "November vs March" comparison. The students are tested once, and are never tested again.
We test in 4th grade, 8th grade, and 11th grade. We don't look at growth between the grades, because the tests are completely different, and the student body has substantially changed.
We take one single test in November, and compare the raw average, ignoring any variance or standard deviation, to the raw average of the students who took it last year. (Yes, a completely different population of students!) It is truly a single data point.
One year on one test, my school pulled something like 1107, when the state cutoff was 1110. Due to this, we were placed in the "below average" category. Never mind that the test error bars are like 30-50 pts.
The standardized testing that the schools do for the NCLB act are truly a single data point, with no consideration for variance, spread, sample size, etc. Schools with 30 kids have their raw average compared to the class of 20 kids the year before, with no modifications. That same average is compared to schools with a class of 500 kids.
In my school we had class sizes change by 15% in a year. My Master's thesis looked at the fact that 3 zeros could push us from passing to failing. Three kids could blow off the govt mandated test which didn't affect them, and because we only report a raw average with no error, they could cause us to fail.
Truly, it wouldn't be much worse to just make it a one question test.
Probably not. At bare minimum, this means more botnets members available to spam whatever email accounts you use.
Directly safe? Sure. Same as myself, and a lot of others. But indirectly, this doesn't help anyone but people running botnets. It's far more work to deny security updates to some users than it is to just give them to all users. And it's strategically a poor decision because of the INCREASED risk to the protected machines due to the attacks from the unprotected ones.
If this works, and you push it to everyone, you cut down on spam, attacks on your protected machines, and overall, you make the internet a little better place. And before anyone beats me to it, I know damn well that MS and "make the internet a little better place" don't belong in the same paragraph. Bitterly, I wonder if their goal of destroying the internet had any basis in this decision.
That, and those running legitimate versions of Windows who had to crack WGA due to false positives. I've helped fix a couple of installs now, which I KNOW were legitimate, but which got the black counterfeiting desktop of doom. One was an HP just out of warranty, run by a clueless user who hadn't done anything other than surf, email, and play solitaire.
When I get calls from a panicked friend because they did everything right, had a good AV, anti-spyware, used firefox, and never did anything risky, there's a big problem. When I can apply a crack in a matter of 2 minutes and fix it, that's a double WTF directed towards MS.
I almost did. Then I remembered that I just quit and wasn't responsible for lesson plans anymore. Old habits die hard, for sure....
That's a damn good idea. Another one would be to teach nothing at all. Seriously.
There is sooooo much DYI tech that's been done floating around. Just expose them to it. HD video from the edge of space on a weather balloon. Multi-stage water-rockets which can go up 1km. Homebrew wifi antennas which can cover miles. Diesel-electric engines crammed into sedans. Ruben's tubes. Railguns.
Rather than teach, expose them. Show them what's been done. Challenge them to go beyond that. The point of DIY tech is it's...."do it YOURSELF!" It's not "have my teacher show me how to do it".
Seed their dreams, and let them figure the rest out.
I can't disagree with you there. Part of the reason kids actually liked me, even though I was a fairly rigorous teacher was that I was a bit of a rebel. I'd agree that this country could do with a bit more of it.
I don't know that it's misplaced hatred - I have yet to see a standardized test in education done well. The issue is that doing rigorous testing is hard, time-consuming, and costly. Our modern education system doesn't want to do any of those things.
I agree that standardized testing can be done well. The issue is that outside of a scientific body doing the test, it almost never is. We'd be FAR better off just scrapping our attempts to use them all together.
If you have a good teacher preparation program, and a good certification program, why can't you trust a teacher to do their job?
At issue here is that we've removed the ability and incentive for teachers to actually do their jobs well. I was required to prepare students for a poorly designed and poorly implemented standardized test. That's how my success was judged - a crappy test on one day, with minimal statistical significance, with no proper assessment or reporting of the results. I had the choice of actually being a good teacher and looking like a bad one, or being a bad one and looking like a good one.
The success of a school is whether or not students can go on from it and do something with what they've learned. Whether they or not they are prepared to actually make their way in the world. How did we go from that to a single number representing the gross mean of a class, on one day, on one test to determine the success of a school? It's mind boggling.
1) Because they are easy. It's hard to do good testing, but we've decided that we need to compare EVERYONE because.....well, we want to. Future success can't be used to assess past learning, it seems.
2)Increasingly, they are not. Several studies showed that grades in the last year of high school were a BETTER predictor of college performance than SAT/ACTs. Many schools are dropping those requirements.
3)You can't. Nor can you tell WITH a standardized test. Telling whether or not a teacher is doing a good job is very hard. Kids may hate them, but they could be a fantastic, and rigorous teacher. Kids could love them, and they could do nothing but tell jokes all day, and give out answer sheets with the homework. Assessing teaching is maddeningly frustrating. About the best you can do is look at whether kids can use what they learned later down the line.
4 and 5) Totally linked. Learning isn't memorization. It's only been that way for the last hundred years of so. Look into the philosophy of education and learning, for the last couple of thousand of years, and you'll find much differently.
Damn. You hit the other huge nail on the head. I don't suppose I can mod someone up who replied to one of my posts, can I?
Perhaps that's what separates college from high school. In college, the teacher is pretty much impenetrable. Parent's don't get to say shit about anything they do - the only real option is to send your kid to another school.
With that in mind, I agree that we probably need to do as you suggest. And I believe that we probably never will.
I'm atypical, and spent 9 years out before coming back. (I don't count the Masters, because I did it part-time, while working.) My observations:
1) The pay here sucks. But it's enough to get by on.
2) The lack of responsibility is AWESOME! If I get drunk and don't go to class/work tomorrow, nobody gives a shit. If I did that in the real world, I'd be in all sorts of trouble. My stress level is pretty much flat compared to actually working real jobs. I no longer have to deal with stupid people. (Well, it's at least two orders of magnitude less stupid people here.)
3) There's shit to do in grad school. In the real world, not so much. Having to get to bed on time, sober, to get to work sucks. Putting in overtime sucks. Being on call sucks. Kids, a mortgage, and a car loan mean you don't get to have much fun. Commuting really sucks.
Seriously - stay in grad school as long as you can. I'm having more fun than I've had in years, on less than half the money. As long as you know not to take grad school seriously, it's all good. It's just a big fat hoop you have to get around to jumping through.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. If I were to pick a handful of major issues, in no major order:
1) School boards. They are made up of people who have immense power, but aren't required to have any educational background. I watched in my home town as a local boy was voted in over a woman with 10 years teaching experience, and a PhD in education. His platform? Lower taxes. We let the public oversee something they have absolutely no expertise in. How do you balance that with the fact that it's their kids that you're educating?
2) A culture of knowing vs showing. It's one thing to be able to recite your multiplication tables. It's an entirely different thing to be able to show someone how to multiply. If we can get away from rote memorization and into actual demonstration of mastery and skill, we'll be very much further ahead. This ties into....
3) Testing is hard. We've decided that one data point is sufficient for testing. Ask any scientist, engineer, or thinking person, and they can tell you that one data point is an anecdote. It can't tell you trends, averages, means, or anything like that. Yet the NCLB test is one test, on one day, (ok, more likely 2 sub-tests on two successive days, for an hour and a half a day, but still) and we treat it like it's some sort of useful data. As a fantastic example, the HS English portion is given once each year. The raw average score is then compared with the one from LAST YEAR! Yes, an entirely different test, different population, potentially different sample sizes, variance, etc. And these two data points are used to determine if the school is doing a good job. It gives scientists and statisticians fits.
4) One-sized fits all education. If you look at most of the really good educational systems in other countries, they tend to branch out as students go along. Many are criticized for tracking students too early, but in the US, we hardly do at all. Students going into the military, on to become doctors, farmers, construction workers, mechanics, lawyers, scientists, and hair dressers all take largely the same courses in high school. Why? Why was I tasked with teaching farmers about the life and death of stars? They needed soil science. Pathogen transmission. Basic metallurgy and engineering. Knowledge of nitrogen and phosphors cycles.
5) Theory classes. It sounds odd, coming from someone with a Physics degree and a minor in math, but we need to ditch math classes. Specifically, we teach math theory in school. What we need to be doing is teaching practical math. Few people go on to get a degree in math. And while the theory of math is good for a number of things, it's not good for 90% of the students to ONLY ever see it as theory. I'd love to see science classes co-taught by a math teacher and a science teacher. Let's use math to do something useful. Not a worksheet. The same goes for English. Team up with a historian, and look at what language tells us about history.
But, take my beer-drinking and rambling with a grain of salt. I'm probably highly unqualified to be making these sorts of statements. Because, "that's the way we've always done it, and if it worked for me, why won't it work for them?"
I highly doubt it. I just escaped 5 years of teaching, and without the break, you'd have a lot of pretty insane teachers.
You don't truly grasp the insanity of a public school as a kid in it. Herding teenagers wore me out like no other job I've ever done. It's amazing to be immersed in a pressure-cooker of immaturity, hormones, and lack of private space. Add in the tendency of youth to rebel against authority, push boundaries, and do stupid things, and you end up with probably one of the more stressful places outside of operating rooms. (If you've got pre-teens to teens, imagine a population-density of one per square meter in your house, 6 hrs a day. Now imagine trying to get them to do something useful that ENTIRE time.)
We don't have great teachers for a number of reasons:
First, the pay sucks. There's all sorts of public bitching about what teachers get paid, but it's really not that much. After 5 years of teaching, with a Master's degree in Education, I was making $40k. Not bad, except for the amount of school loans I had put into that.
Now, while I could have gotten something part-time in the summer, I had to take classes. Finishing a degree, moving to a Level 2 license, becoming eligible for equipment grants with training seminars, etc.
More importantly than the pay, I wasn't ALLOWED to be a good teacher. I was asked to teach stuff that was horrifically boring, in a boring way. Because success was determined based on how well kids filled in bubbles on a test. How do you demonstrate the ability to do science with a bubble-sheet? You don't. You demonstrate that you can MEMORIZE science facts.
Eventually, after I was off my probation period, I started really teaching. I said fuck all to the standardized test, and we actually did science. However, coming down the pipe was the district-wide curriculum revamping, where we got to help formulate the approved curriculum which was aligned to the state standards. Once I saw that coming, I bailed to head back to grad school.
Standardized tests are blatantly anti-education. They measure the ability and motivation of a kid to memorize answers from other days, and fill in those answers on one day out of 180. Treating one day in the life of a teenager as equal to all the others is moronic, for anyone who's spent any time around teens. Do what most of the country does and place no student motivations in place to do well, and you've destroyed an already flawed test. (Most states never put NCLB test scores on report cards, transcripts, or even give them to teachers or parents. As if teens weren't apathetic enough already....)
There was a time when we had masters and apprentices. Where we actually taught kids what they needed to learn, what they wanted to learn. Those days are far gone. Today, we have factory-schools, like we have factory-farms. Stinking places crammed to the gills, where the livestock has shit jammed down their throats until the folks in charge deem they're ready. I was in a fairly extensive farming community, in a state well known for farming, but our state standards don't cover much in the way of soil science. So my success was judged based on whether I could convince multi-generation farmers to fill in bubbles about stellar life cycles on a test that didn't count, and which their parents would never see the results of. That's brilliant!
As long as we treat every student the same, and give them the same material, we're doomed to failure. We need to tear ass through the basics of reading, writing, and math, and then start giving kids what they NEED to learn. Not what some group of six retired teachers in a conference room somewhere thinks they should learn. Actual, relevant stuff. Then, we need to actually assess whether they've learned it, by watching them DO IT. Not see if they can logic away two answers out of four, and then guess one of the remaining two.
As far as I can tell, I was a pretty good teacher. And now I'm in grad school, doing actual science. Frankly, I should have done this earlier. I'm much happier out of that clusterfuck.
On the soda comment, my family has always made tons of stuff from scratch. Beer, wine, cordials, and of course, soda.
The two I most remember from growing up were the root beer, and the ginger ale. Both had AMAZING flavors. Strong, bold, vibrant flavors. Flavors to the point that you almost needed to water them down, coming from a mass-produced soda background.
I think it's partly because of this that I just don't drink soda. The other reason is that I'd rather spend that money on beer, so I drink water in place of soda.
Same here. I'm an oddball, and spent nine years in the "real world", making decent money, before I went back to grad school. I was used to buying nice liquor in moderate quantities, upgrading on a 2 year cycle, and eating out on a whim.
The last two years before I went back to school, I realized that I'd be losing well over 50% of my income by doing so. I got my ass in gear, and started churning out cheap dinners which could turn into "lunch for two days", and collected a bunch of good and cheap ideas for eating in.
So far, I'm +$400 on my first month of grad pay, despite spending in the area of $200 on beer, booze, and bar hopping. My food budget is in the same neighborhood, and I'm eating like a king. I found a bunch of frozen single-serving salmon fillets, on sale for $1 each. Pair those with some fresh vegis and some nice rice, and you've got a fantastic meal. On-sale boneless chicken breasts and thighs, some peppers and onions, and a cheap wrap -> spicy chicken fajitas. Cheap pork, a $2 box of rice pilaf, some fresh vegis, and a crock pot, and I've got 3-4 meals for all of $7-8, done in the time it takes me to drink a few beers while doing homework.
I really think poverty around here is tied to a lack of education. If I didn't know how to cook delicious stuff, on the cheap, I'd go eat fast food all the time. And by doing so, I'd be poorer. I think this ties nicely into smoking as well. I'm educated enough to understand that spending $5 a day on cigs is the same as paying $150 a month, $1825 a year for cancer. I'd rather save that $5 for a few days, and spend it going out with friends. That's a luxury that addicts don't have.
I idly wonder what would happen if you educated poor people on the basics of cooking. I've made some pretty good dinners with nothing but a cast-iron pot and a campfire. Cheap, easy, tasty meals are entirely possible. How much does education play into that?
By opening up, you can get a bunch of people working on your security to strengthen it, to help offset the few people who might be interested in breaking it.
But that only works for software you can fix, or you can get the vendor to fix. I highly doubt that's the case here.
Nobody is out to burn my house down, because nobody cares. But if I go out and shout, "My House is UNBURNABLE....MUAHHAHAHA!", there's a chance that some asshat will put a torch to it just to prove me wrong.
Security through obscurity doesn't work. Security through provoking asshats into action really doesn't work, unless you have the power to fix what they break.
Um, no. You can definitely hack those into thermite....