As a HS teacher, I see similar things. In addition, you run into a few other issues:
1) How do you determine bad? What's your cutoff? Who judges? (Most assessments are done by administrators, who don't have a teaching license, and may have never taught.) How do you reduce the noise generated by small sample sizes? (20-30 students in a class) 2) And replace them with who? We're losing teachers all the time. Last I checked, the average age of teachers was like 55. We struggle to get ANYONE to teach. Is nobody/untrained/uncertified better than someone who sucks, but has a basic training?
Ultimately, we're screwed. We've been seduced by standardized testing as a way to assess student learning, when it's clear and well documented that it does not do this. We're requiring that the "expertise" of students be assessed, but refuse to hire experts to assess it. Into this void steps the snake-oil of standardized testing, and the mess we have today.
Ultimately, teaching isn't standard, nor is learning, nor are students. To assess these things requires creative, flexible experts, and those people cost money. We've decided we can't spend that sort of cash, so we've gone with standardized testing and any body, no matter how bad, to dispense content.
In short, as a teacher I'm being asked to prepare students for a standardized test. My teaching ability is determined based on how well they do on the state exam. Because I want to be a good teacher, I teach more methods than content. But if you judge me based on the state exam I very well may suck as a teacher. So do you fire me?
To piggyback on this, asking students to write somewhat unique and original reports (or even parts) is often enough to kill plagiarism dead. Ask for the x10^7 report on a subject, and students will just find one of the other (x10^7 -1) reports written on the same subject. Ask them to apply that information to a slightly different scenario, and you can quickly tell who plagiarizes and who knows their stuff.
Plagiarism would die if teachers, TAs, and professors asked for unique and thoughtful reports, and were involved in the writing process. I currently teach HS science, and nobody plagiarizes any assignments I give, BECAUSE THEY CAN'T! They are unique, and have their own feel, and their own twists. I just read an essay explaining Archimedes Principle based on a princess who was wading across a stream. I know DAMN well it wasn't plagiarized, because it was a unique topic, and I was involved in the writing process.
If you're running into plagiarism, it's your fault for being lazy.
I'm a little bit curious, because I've played all of one MMORPG, but have you tried Requiem:Bloodymare? (The reason it's my only MMORPG ever is that it's free to play, and I've always resisted shelling out $15 a month for a game. )
If you have, how would you rate its (fairly limited in number, I guess) dungeons?
Potentially there's some sort of trojan/DNS hacking going on there. My sister just ran into this, where her ISP's DNS server seemed to have been hijacked, and all her google search results were ad links. A switch to the OpenDNS server fixed that, and a couple of sweeps of her computer came up with nothing.
There are also a few trojans which will modify the hosts file, to point to a google-lookalike page, where every query comes up ads.
It's ahrd to evolve when your custmers are practically banging on your doors trying to throw money at you for a big gas guzzler.
And why is that? Do they really want/need one, or did the big US auto manufacturers, spend SUBSTANTIALLY more on marketing than on R&D in the last decade? The statement that "people want an SUV" is not clear at all, and what they want is very difficult to differentiate from what they're told they want.
Wow, are you a loud-mouthed idiot. Did it ever occur to you that in any given race, there might only be one other opponent? Sure, I'd love to vote Green every time, but in most of my state races, there aren't any Greens. If I'm a libertarian, how do I vote when there are 16 candidates for justice of the peace, and the only one non-democrat or republican is Unitarian?
While you are a stupid, judgmental motherfucker, I'm hoping you're smart enough to understand that maintaining the status-quo isn't a viable option. No single third party has a horse in every race, and so I can't pick one to vote for all the time.
Improving the power base for the Democrats or Republicans in any way is a loss. Thus the reason I vote for ANYONE else, and I don't care who. Sure, I have my preference, but lacking that, I'll vote for anyone else.
Thank you. I also teach physics for a living, and after a few drinks it didn't make a lick of sense to me. Sober, I bet I could have figured it out, but your teacherly explanation saved me from that fate.
Seems clear now - pretty much a FUD non-issue. But I bet it generated ad revenue.
Thank you, and to everyone else who made the same decision. A lot of people are surprised when they find out that my political position is "Not Republican or Democrat, because they are both crooks."
I'll happily vote for anyone else, be they Libertarian, Communist, Socialist, Green, or Pirate. My vote is a protest vote, but one I hope to have turned into a real vote if enough other people protest to form a majority.
I feel your pain. The fear of "not fingerprinted and had a background check on them done" adults in school is pervasive through this country now. It kills me that we throw away valuable resources such as yourself, on the 1,000,000/1 chance that the person in question is a Bad Person.
At least in my district, it all comes down to a fear of lawsuits. Our Superintendent/School Board will do ANYTHING to avoid any chance of a lawsuit. Despite the fact that we're in a very face-to-face, everybody-knows-everybody rural area, our school has the doors locked throughout the day, and a camera outside the door in the office with a buzzer. We practice lockdown drills in the case someone storms the building with a gun, despite the fact that in my state, there's been ONE school gun fatality in 20 years.
With a million benefits of allowing people like yourself to help out, the Administration is afraid of the one-in-a-million chance you might cause a lawsuit.
It's one of the reasons I'm on the verge of leaving public education. The second lies within your sig, and my responsibility to educate EVERY STUDENT, equally.
As a science teacher, I can confirm this. 99% of students lack the background knowledge to do a minimal experiment, and lack the ambition to obtain that knowledge on their own. We patrol our (mandated, although we're not allowed to spend any major amount of time on it, due to our standardized state test content guidelines) Science Fair and look for the "least worst" projects to send to the state science fair. It's rare that we send a great project. Mostly, we aim for "doesn't suck too much, and won't completely embarrass the school".
For me to get students involved in real science, I'd need 3 things:
1) Freedom from "teaching to the test". 2) Money. 3) The ability for uninterested students to do something else.
At the moment, my school lacks the balls for #1, the tax base for #2, and is hogtied by the phrase "free and equal education" in regards to #3.
I don't see another logical possibility addressed here either:
If you have no god, there is nobody to save you. Thus, you're already fucked, and there's no postponing the inevitable.
If you have a god, and you think you've been pretty good, he might work a miracle and save you. Best you hold on for as long as possible to see if that happens.
Isn't amazing that Epic was able to take nearly ALL of the good things about the game and ruin them? I've been a rabid fan of UT from the start. We've run a little UT clan for 9 years now.
And after UT3, I don't know that I'll buy another UT game. It would take a very, VERY large amount of positive press for me to send Epic another cent. I truly don't understand how anyone familiar with previous UT versions could have released UT3.
A recent study indicated just that. In order for students to be successful in higher level sciences, they need depth and methodology rather than wrote memory of facts.
Unfortunately, (and I say this a as high school science teacher) our school system is set up in such a way as to mandate the teaching of broad facts. Thanks to No Child Left Behind, we are now rigorously tested on the breadth of what we teach.
This leaves us with an interesting quandary: Do we teach so that students can be successful, or do we teach so that the school can be successful? For the students, we need to teach depth. For the school, we need to teach breadth.
Ideally, we'd do what the students need. Realistically, we do what the school requires, since to fail to do this means a loss of jobs.
...could casuse Amazon to back down. Best case, Amazon loks like a bully, and people hate that....you qwould...The rest acan eb a public fight...
WTF happened to you? I friended you because you often posted insightful comments. Yet today, you've been typing like you're drunk, half blind, with two fingers in a cast. And this isn't the only garbled post today either....
Even if it was a "horrible DRM nightmare instead of a convienient update center" it would be better than windows is now. I HATE that a hundred different programs throw up popups and notifications up all the time demanding to be updated. At work, it drives me nuts. At home, I run linux, and it's not an issue.
At the same time, and outside the topic of this thread, I recently set my linux desktop to a 'minimal' setting on "focus stealing". When will Windows have something like this? Now that I've finally found this, sanity has come back to my life. Except when I use windows. Then EVERYTHING steals focus, ALL THE TIME. It's god damned annoying, and there seems to be no fix for it.
Thank you. I'd mod you up, but you're at +5 already. It took me a few months, but my mom on Kubuntu now realizes that almost everything she could want, plus a ton of shit she didn't even know existed, is in the "add/remove programs" GUI.
She at first did what this reviewer did, and downloaded random shit and tried to install it. That's the windows mentality kicking in. As you point out, Linux is '"App Store" except they're all free.'
This is where I see Linux going. It's the free version of OSX, which you can use to replace your virus ridden Windows install. For most general users, that's what Linux is. And for most users, it works GREAT filling such a niche, provided there is a minimum education to go along with it. My minimum requirements are:
This is not Windows. You can't run Windows programs on it, but it comes with lots of programs very similar (or better) than most Windows programs. You find them *here*. (Post-it note with instructions to Add/Remove Programs menu.)
I've been teaching for 5 years, and this is my last one. It's become clearer and clearer to me that this is the entire point of public school in the US.
Give all the kids the same (standardized) coursework, give them the same (standardized) test, and make them all functional cogs to work in this society. Teach them to turn on at the bell, and turn off at the bell. Teach them to bow to authority. Teach them that to fit in they must be a consumer, with an iPod, texting plan, AE or Hollander clothes, etc. Teach them that everyone listens to the same bands, and everyone watches the same videos on youtube.
As Einstein said, "The only thing which gets in the way of my learning is my education." I'm done working on the standardization of students. It wasn't what I wanted to do with my life, and it's not something I can do without becoming (more of) a bitter alcoholic. I'm off to teach college, where I can actually ask my students to learn something. Where they can have some small amount of self determination, and self motivation.
If my kids attend a public school, they'll at least do it with a healthy dose of cynicism and background on what it's actually for.
You cannot give a download as a (Christmas) present.
Why can't you? I sure did. I gave out three copies of World of Goo to friends and family this past Christmas. The company is so web-friendly that they even gave me a customizable download page to write whatever I wanted those receiving the gifts to see. All I had to do was email them the link, with the note that "clicking = unwrapping".
That was my plan all along. Then, at some point, my newsletter will morph into a brilliant plan to sterilize everyone at 12. Because what's safer and cheaper than kids in a bunker? Distributing their genetic code so that it's not all in the same place at once.
The adverts in my newsletter will also be for study guides to help you pass the test required to have kids at a later date.
Slashdot Mirror
As a HS teacher, I see similar things. In addition, you run into a few other issues:
1) How do you determine bad? What's your cutoff? Who judges? (Most assessments are done by administrators, who don't have a teaching license, and may have never taught.) How do you reduce the noise generated by small sample sizes? (20-30 students in a class)
2) And replace them with who? We're losing teachers all the time. Last I checked, the average age of teachers was like 55. We struggle to get ANYONE to teach. Is nobody/untrained/uncertified better than someone who sucks, but has a basic training?
Ultimately, we're screwed. We've been seduced by standardized testing as a way to assess student learning, when it's clear and well documented that it does not do this. We're requiring that the "expertise" of students be assessed, but refuse to hire experts to assess it. Into this void steps the snake-oil of standardized testing, and the mess we have today.
Ultimately, teaching isn't standard, nor is learning, nor are students. To assess these things requires creative, flexible experts, and those people cost money. We've decided we can't spend that sort of cash, so we've gone with standardized testing and any body, no matter how bad, to dispense content.
In short, as a teacher I'm being asked to prepare students for a standardized test. My teaching ability is determined based on how well they do on the state exam. Because I want to be a good teacher, I teach more methods than content. But if you judge me based on the state exam I very well may suck as a teacher. So do you fire me?
To piggyback on this, asking students to write somewhat unique and original reports (or even parts) is often enough to kill plagiarism dead. Ask for the x10^7 report on a subject, and students will just find one of the other (x10^7 -1) reports written on the same subject. Ask them to apply that information to a slightly different scenario, and you can quickly tell who plagiarizes and who knows their stuff.
Plagiarism would die if teachers, TAs, and professors asked for unique and thoughtful reports, and were involved in the writing process. I currently teach HS science, and nobody plagiarizes any assignments I give, BECAUSE THEY CAN'T! They are unique, and have their own feel, and their own twists. I just read an essay explaining Archimedes Principle based on a princess who was wading across a stream. I know DAMN well it wasn't plagiarized, because it was a unique topic, and I was involved in the writing process.
If you're running into plagiarism, it's your fault for being lazy.
I'm a little bit curious, because I've played all of one MMORPG, but have you tried Requiem:Bloodymare? (The reason it's my only MMORPG ever is that it's free to play, and I've always resisted shelling out $15 a month for a game. )
If you have, how would you rate its (fairly limited in number, I guess) dungeons?
My first time wasn't even an install either.....I think the install came during try #6 or something.
What was the first thing I did with Linux? Fail. Fail and give up.
Of course, I always got pissed at Windows a month later, and tried another flavor. On and off for two years, until I did the unthinkable....
I did a Gentoo minimal install.
So I guess the first thing I did with linux was watch Gentoo compile. (Guess that's the last thing I'll also do with linux, eh?)
Wow. This thread is rushing to a singularity of suckage. I will now turn my back on this monster.
Potentially there's some sort of trojan/DNS hacking going on there. My sister just ran into this, where her ISP's DNS server seemed to have been hijacked, and all her google search results were ad links. A switch to the OpenDNS server fixed that, and a couple of sweeps of her computer came up with nothing.
There are also a few trojans which will modify the hosts file, to point to a google-lookalike page, where every query comes up ads.
It's ahrd to evolve when your custmers are practically banging on your doors trying to throw money at you for a big gas guzzler.
And why is that? Do they really want/need one, or did the big US auto manufacturers, spend SUBSTANTIALLY more on marketing than on R&D in the last decade? The statement that "people want an SUV" is not clear at all, and what they want is very difficult to differentiate from what they're told they want.
Wow, are you a loud-mouthed idiot. Did it ever occur to you that in any given race, there might only be one other opponent? Sure, I'd love to vote Green every time, but in most of my state races, there aren't any Greens. If I'm a libertarian, how do I vote when there are 16 candidates for justice of the peace, and the only one non-democrat or republican is Unitarian?
While you are a stupid, judgmental motherfucker, I'm hoping you're smart enough to understand that maintaining the status-quo isn't a viable option. No single third party has a horse in every race, and so I can't pick one to vote for all the time.
Improving the power base for the Democrats or Republicans in any way is a loss. Thus the reason I vote for ANYONE else, and I don't care who. Sure, I have my preference, but lacking that, I'll vote for anyone else.
Thank you. I also teach physics for a living, and after a few drinks it didn't make a lick of sense to me. Sober, I bet I could have figured it out, but your teacherly explanation saved me from that fate.
Seems clear now - pretty much a FUD non-issue. But I bet it generated ad revenue.
Thank you, and to everyone else who made the same decision. A lot of people are surprised when they find out that my political position is "Not Republican or Democrat, because they are both crooks."
I'll happily vote for anyone else, be they Libertarian, Communist, Socialist, Green, or Pirate. My vote is a protest vote, but one I hope to have turned into a real vote if enough other people protest to form a majority.
This is important because the sea level change will happen in a matter of days, right?
Thank you. That is now my sig on another forum, for at least a little while.
Very nice way to show how RIDICULOUS the monetary value placed on electronic goods is. Thank you once again.
I'd think "insightful troll" and "funny flamebait" would be near the top of the list. (Weeeee! I think I'm going to Achieve something today!)
I feel your pain. The fear of "not fingerprinted and had a background check on them done" adults in school is pervasive through this country now. It kills me that we throw away valuable resources such as yourself, on the 1,000,000/1 chance that the person in question is a Bad Person.
At least in my district, it all comes down to a fear of lawsuits. Our Superintendent/School Board will do ANYTHING to avoid any chance of a lawsuit. Despite the fact that we're in a very face-to-face, everybody-knows-everybody rural area, our school has the doors locked throughout the day, and a camera outside the door in the office with a buzzer. We practice lockdown drills in the case someone storms the building with a gun, despite the fact that in my state, there's been ONE school gun fatality in 20 years.
With a million benefits of allowing people like yourself to help out, the Administration is afraid of the one-in-a-million chance you might cause a lawsuit.
It's one of the reasons I'm on the verge of leaving public education. The second lies within your sig, and my responsibility to educate EVERY STUDENT, equally.
DING! You win the prize!
As a science teacher, I can confirm this. 99% of students lack the background knowledge to do a minimal experiment, and lack the ambition to obtain that knowledge on their own. We patrol our (mandated, although we're not allowed to spend any major amount of time on it, due to our standardized state test content guidelines) Science Fair and look for the "least worst" projects to send to the state science fair. It's rare that we send a great project. Mostly, we aim for "doesn't suck too much, and won't completely embarrass the school".
For me to get students involved in real science, I'd need 3 things:
1) Freedom from "teaching to the test".
2) Money.
3) The ability for uninterested students to do something else.
At the moment, my school lacks the balls for #1, the tax base for #2, and is hogtied by the phrase "free and equal education" in regards to #3.
I don't see another logical possibility addressed here either:
If you have no god, there is nobody to save you. Thus, you're already fucked, and there's no postponing the inevitable.
If you have a god, and you think you've been pretty good, he might work a miracle and save you. Best you hold on for as long as possible to see if that happens.
Isn't amazing that Epic was able to take nearly ALL of the good things about the game and ruin them? I've been a rabid fan of UT from the start. We've run a little UT clan for 9 years now.
And after UT3, I don't know that I'll buy another UT game. It would take a very, VERY large amount of positive press for me to send Epic another cent. I truly don't understand how anyone familiar with previous UT versions could have released UT3.
Check out the APT Tax. Not sure how feasible it is, but it's an intriguing idea.
A recent study indicated just that. In order for students to be successful in higher level sciences, they need depth and methodology rather than wrote memory of facts.
Unfortunately, (and I say this a as high school science teacher) our school system is set up in such a way as to mandate the teaching of broad facts. Thanks to No Child Left Behind, we are now rigorously tested on the breadth of what we teach.
This leaves us with an interesting quandary: Do we teach so that students can be successful, or do we teach so that the school can be successful? For the students, we need to teach depth. For the school, we need to teach breadth.
Ideally, we'd do what the students need. Realistically, we do what the school requires, since to fail to do this means a loss of jobs.
...could casuse Amazon to back down. Best case, Amazon loks like a bully, and people hate that....you qwould ...The rest acan eb a public fight...
WTF happened to you? I friended you because you often posted insightful comments. Yet today, you've been typing like you're drunk, half blind, with two fingers in a cast. And this isn't the only garbled post today either....
Even if it was a "horrible DRM nightmare instead of a convienient update center" it would be better than windows is now. I HATE that a hundred different programs throw up popups and notifications up all the time demanding to be updated. At work, it drives me nuts. At home, I run linux, and it's not an issue.
At the same time, and outside the topic of this thread, I recently set my linux desktop to a 'minimal' setting on "focus stealing". When will Windows have something like this? Now that I've finally found this, sanity has come back to my life. Except when I use windows. Then EVERYTHING steals focus, ALL THE TIME. It's god damned annoying, and there seems to be no fix for it.
Thank you. I'd mod you up, but you're at +5 already. It took me a few months, but my mom on Kubuntu now realizes that almost everything she could want, plus a ton of shit she didn't even know existed, is in the "add/remove programs" GUI.
She at first did what this reviewer did, and downloaded random shit and tried to install it. That's the windows mentality kicking in. As you point out, Linux is '"App Store" except they're all free.'
This is where I see Linux going. It's the free version of OSX, which you can use to replace your virus ridden Windows install. For most general users, that's what Linux is. And for most users, it works GREAT filling such a niche, provided there is a minimum education to go along with it. My minimum requirements are:
This is not Windows.
You can't run Windows programs on it, but it comes with lots of programs very similar (or better) than most Windows programs. You find them *here*. (Post-it note with instructions to Add/Remove Programs menu.)
Oh shut the fuck up. That tired fucking meme...
And you're absolutely correct.
I've been teaching for 5 years, and this is my last one. It's become clearer and clearer to me that this is the entire point of public school in the US.
Give all the kids the same (standardized) coursework, give them the same (standardized) test, and make them all functional cogs to work in this society. Teach them to turn on at the bell, and turn off at the bell. Teach them to bow to authority. Teach them that to fit in they must be a consumer, with an iPod, texting plan, AE or Hollander clothes, etc. Teach them that everyone listens to the same bands, and everyone watches the same videos on youtube.
As Einstein said, "The only thing which gets in the way of my learning is my education." I'm done working on the standardization of students. It wasn't what I wanted to do with my life, and it's not something I can do without becoming (more of) a bitter alcoholic. I'm off to teach college, where I can actually ask my students to learn something. Where they can have some small amount of self determination, and self motivation.
If my kids attend a public school, they'll at least do it with a healthy dose of cynicism and background on what it's actually for.
You cannot give a download as a (Christmas) present.
Why can't you? I sure did. I gave out three copies of World of Goo to friends and family this past Christmas. The company is so web-friendly that they even gave me a customizable download page to write whatever I wanted those receiving the gifts to see. All I had to do was email them the link, with the note that "clicking = unwrapping".
And for the record, it was very well received.
That was my plan all along. Then, at some point, my newsletter will morph into a brilliant plan to sterilize everyone at 12. Because what's safer and cheaper than kids in a bunker? Distributing their genetic code so that it's not all in the same place at once.
The adverts in my newsletter will also be for study guides to help you pass the test required to have kids at a later date.