20 years ago we had drugs to treat TB. Now it's becoming resistant to all those drugs. When people are affected by multiple-drug resistant TB, they can't be treated, and they usually die. That's why it's a big deal.
99 illnesses is a lot. 13 deaths is a lot.
The main targets for TB are the homeless, people with AIDS, and people in prison. It can also affect newborns, and people being treated for cancer or autoimmune diseases (who can get infected in hospitals). The US is a tinderbox. We have people flying around the country on airplanes. We have illegal immigrants who aren't eligible for health care (and are afraid of the authorities besides). It could spread across the country, killing off large numbers of people in those groups.
About your quote and its relationship to the original, "Carthagio delenda est." You do know that later Romans consider their wanton destruction of Carthagio in the 3rd Punic War to be a pivotal event in the decline of their republic, don't you?
Probably not. Conservatives don't study Latin any more.
Not only that, the Republican legislators and Governor closed down the only hospital in Florida that was treating the poor, homeless, substance abusers and mentally ill people who are the main ones who get TB, according to TFA. The Republicans knew about the CDC report as they pushed to close the hospital. That's why they concealed it.
Now, even if they wanted to confine them, they would have no place to put them. Or rather -- they're putting them up now in motels. You realize that hospitals have special laundry equipment to sterilize the laundry. Motels don't.
This is a time bomb. They're growing drug-resistant TB, which is incurable.
Prisoners receive better medical care than most Americans, and it's illegal to let them go untreated. I don't know where you got your info, but it's fucked.
Nonsense. There was a series of articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Andrew Skolnick about prison medical care, which is basically terrible. There are similar investigative stories every year or so.
Prison doctors are the worst doctors in medicine. Many of them are criminals themselves. States used to have a practice of convicting doctors of crimes, and limiting their license to practice in prison.
Many prisoners have died because their nurses, or the prison guards, ignored basic care, like giving insulin to diabetic patients, or let them lie in a cell with a heart attack or stroke without examining them. There have been a few lawsuits, but they're not too successful. It's hard to get a big judgment (or any judgment) when the victim is a prisoner, and the courts are stacked against it.
You can search Google News and find cases every month of a prisoner who died for lack of medical care.
About That "83 Percent of Doctors Hate Obamacare So Much, They Might Quit" Poll By David Weigel Posted Monday, July 9, 2012, at 5:12 PM ET
"Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association."
What is the "Doctor Patient Medical Association"? Short answer: A bunch of right-wing Republican wackos, like Kathryn Serkes and Mark Schiller, who previously claimed Obamacare would kill off elderly sick people.
"The survey was conducted by fax and online from April 18 to May 22, 2012. DPMAF obtained the office fax numbers of 36,000 doctors in active clinical practice, and 16, 227 faxes were successfully delivered... The response rate was 4.3% for a total of 699 completed surveys."
Translation: 83% of 4.3% said they considered leaving under Obamacare. That's 3.6% of those polled.
But most people who have taken a college statistics course would throw a survey with a 4.3% response rate in the shredder.
They "considered" leaving medicine. What were they leaving medicine for? Real estate sales? Financial planning? Opening a restaurant? There aren't too many other occupations that can bring in a doctor's salary in the US. Doctors are always threatening to leave, but few do.
According to a few recent articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, the main reason TB is coming back is that the areas of the world with the greatest incidence are the areas that can't afford the drugs. TB is becoming resistant to the older, cheaper drugs. Some TB is resistant to every drug they've got, and there's no effective medical treatment. That resistance is due to over-use and inappropriate use of antibiotics. People take the drugs for a while and quit before the TB is eradicated. Or they buy drugs in the free market and get sub-therapeutic doses.
If anybody refused to get treated, health workers wouldn't force them. They can't afford enough drugs for everyone who needs it anyway.
Civil liberties had nothing to do with it. In those places with enough money, they keep TB patients in hospitals, and treat them directly, and those patients are often glad to have a comfortable place to live.
The only place I know that puts people into quarantine is Cuba. When AIDS hit Cuba, Castro quarantined everybody with AIDS in separated villages. They were kept very comfortable, well-fed, in nice houses, so they had little incentive to leave. Cuba successfully avoided an AIDS epidemic.
That's what you're advocating, right? Dictatorial power? No politically correct individual freedom for you.
Prosecutors write internal memos to tell each other the strengths and weaknesses of the case. Then they write indictments in which they leave out all the weaknesses. They often leave out exculpatory material, even during the trial.
They have millions of emails, and they've confiscated the servers so Dotcom and his lawyers can't go back and see what they actually wrote, and what happened before and after.
Dotcom can't even pay his lawyers because they confiscated all his money. If the federal prosecutors are so insistent on bringing justice for the poor entertainment companies, why don't they even up the contest by working without pay themselves?
He hasn't had a chance to defend himself. He can't defend himself, because they confiscated the money he needs to pay his lawyers to defend him.
There are lots of cases where prosecutors claimed someone was guilty, and he turned out to be innocent. In fact, there are lots of cases in which prosecutors (illegally) withheld evidence that would have proved the defendant was guilty.
If you've ever studied the law, then you know there are lots of cases in which someone seemed clearly guilty -- according to the prosecutor's indictment -- and at the end turned out to be completely innocent. Sometimes they wind up in jail before the facts come out.
When prosecutors write memos to themselves, they give the strengths and weaknesses of their case. When they write indictments, and when they present their case to the grand jury, they leave out the weaknesses.
Happens all the time. That's why we have jury trials. That's why we have a Bill of Rights.
Oh, Kim Dotcom hasn't had a jury trial yet, hasn't had a chance to see the evidence against him, and hasn't had a chance to defend himself against it? Then how do you know he's guilty?
In fact, why is it right for them to confiscate all his assets, even the money that he needs to pay his lawyers to defend him against these charges?
Combatants don't always have to wear uniforms. There's a provision in the Geneva convention that local forces defending their own country don't have to wear uniforms. In WWII, General Eisenhower warned the Germans that they should treat captured French resistance fighters as prisoners of war, and Germans who didn't do so would be prosecuted.
What scares me most is countries like the US and Israel, which instead of finding reasonable compromises and accommodations with their enemies and occupied entities, turn to bullying, aggressiveness, killing and exceptionalism.
That attitude leads to escalation. As Clausowitz said, war is unpredictable. You never can tell when the other side is going to come back at you with something you didn't expect. Like 9/11. Or the resistance to the US occupation of Iraq. The US war dead is now how many, 4,000? For what?
Then do us a favor and go live in Somalia, please.
That's a good point. Show us a country that you'd like to live in where the government gets less of the GDP in taxes than we do. There isn't any. We have the lowest taxes of any developed country, and we have the lowest taxes that we've ever had since before WWII.
We're cutting back on schools and libraries. The rich aren't even paying their fair share, and they're whining that they're still paying too much.
The amazing thing is that middle-class people fall for this anti-tax rhetoric even though it's against their own interest. I don't know how they do it -- saturation TV attack ads?
Government cannot create private sector jobs. Period.
Bullshit. The National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health spent billions on cancer research -- which included half the funding for research in molecular biology. As a result, they reduced the cancer death rate by about 25% since 1960. And they made a lot of money and created jobs. They generously (or foolishly, depending on your perspective) handed the results over to pharmaceutical companies to make further billions. And they created jobs for doctors, nurses, pharmacists, chemists, etc.
It really amazes me how people can just accept an article of faith like, "Government cannot create private sector jobs," without any evidence. Part of it seems to be that they don't know any history, particularly the history of technology. Part of it seems to be that they don't have the habit of turning their beliefs around and looking at the evidence for the other side. Part of it seems to be that they don't understand why it's necessary to look at supporting evidence behind their beliefs. Where do they get this from? Ayn Rand?
I agree with you generally, but I do believe that you can teach some chemistry to young children without much mathematics.
What struck me about science teaching is that there are lots of interesting and important ideas in science, and there is a subset of those ideas that children can understand and appreciate at almost any age.
One of the important lessons of science is observation. It might be easier to raise questions with 5-year-olds than to give them answers, but those questions will prepare them for the answers that they get later on.
Take cooking. Baking bread is not chemistry. But suppose you bake bread, and leave out the yeast. What happens? What did the yeast do? Is there something about yeast that causes bread to rise? That's a legitimate scientific observation and experiment. I wouldn't try to explain microorganisms to a 5-year-old, because it's too difficult for them to understand, but they'll be primed to understand it later.
There's a science writer named Seymour Simon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Simon_(author) who specializes in writing science books for children, starting with preschool. He writes these little books that have some very simple but very important science concepts. He's very popular among children's librarians and science teachers. Simon does have a book called Chemistry in the Kitchen, so it can be done.
I think the American Chemical Society would agree with me.
I don't understand who "we" is. You sound like you've organized a group of parents, and you've hired "teachers who care." Is this home schooling or a private school?
If you can organize parents to run a private school, you should be able to organize parents to sit on the local school board and run a public school.
I agree that if you have parents who are qualified to teach, home schooling can be successful. I read an essay by a mother about how successfully she had home-schooled her children. She had a PhD in education, and her husband had a PhD in physics. Of course she was successful. With parents like that, any child will succeed. There are lots of home-school success stories.
But how many parents are qualified to teach any subject, much less 5 or 6? It's difficult to teach science. First you have to understand science. Then you have to understand how children understand science, what concepts are important, what concepts they're capable of learning at a particular age, and how to teach those concepts.
Science magazine writes about science education, and I'm very impressed by the successful programs and how cleverly they solve these problems. Some programs work, and some don't. It's not obvious until you try them out.
You say you have a well-researched program. That might work. I assume you don't mean did your own research, but that educational researchers have evaluated the program with controlled studies and found that it works.
I was also impressed by the bad science education that teaches young children about DNA. It looks as if they're learning something, but when I asked the kids questions, they didn't understand it at all. They were just matching colors. When kids come into high school biology or chemistry, it's much easier for them if they've been prepared for science in the earlier grades. Bad elementary education is no help. "I played the DNA game." Well, science isn't about matching colors.
I don't understand how parents who don't understand chemistry themselves can home-school a child in chemistry. I don't think it's possible.
I haven't seen any reviews of these home schooling programs so I can't comment on them further. I'd like to see a review. I'm sure that some parents can home-school their children. I'm also sure that some parents can't do it. I know there are a lot of religious schools that don't teach children science. I'd like to know what the numbers are. I'd like to see evaluations. At the very least I'd expect that home-schooled children would be required to pass standardized tests, but given the politics, they might not have to.
I'd like to see a strong, well-supported public school system. Then, if parents want to home-school their kids, they should have that right -- as long as public officials are monitoring the situation to make sure that the kids are getting an education at least as good as the public schools, and as long as the kids are getting the other things that public schools provide, such as social interaction. That's not an easy standard. I don't think most people can just pull kids out of the public schools and teach them yourself. But I'd like to see the data.
Cooking IS NOT chemistry. Cooking is mixing things together according to authority.
Most cooks don't use any scientific principles in cooking. Cooks were using yeast long before anyone understood microorganisms. They didn't know whether yeast or goblins made bread rise, and they had no reason to investigate why.
You can use the methods of science -- observation, hypothesis forming, testing, etc. -- with the materials of cooking, but most cooks don't do it.
You don't need chemistry teachers to teach chemistry to 10-year-olds. Chemistry can be taught with the rest of the elementary school curriculum. And they should teach the age-appropriate basics, like the different forms of matter.
In order to teach my nine year old chemistry, I do not have to be an expert chemist. I simply have to know more than a nine year old does about chemistry. It really isn't that hard, and it has been fun for all of us to expand our knowledge.
That's not true. Science teaching is one of the hardest jobs in the public schools. When you teach a 9-year-old chemistry, the purpose is to prepare him for the science courses he'll have to understand later. So you have to know the advanced courses too. a 9-year-old will be facing work 15 years from now, and you have to know what chemistry he will need at that time.
I have a 2,000-page high school biology textbook, and it intimidates me sometimes. One of the main skills of a science teacher is knowing what in that book is important, since high school kids can't learn it all. In order to teach chemistry, you have to know what part of chemistry will be necessary to learn biology. For example, fatty acids seem to be pretty important.
Science toys are fun but they're not science education. You can spend a year making volcanoes and mixing vinegar and baking soda, and still not teach any meaningful chemistry, or any preparation for the chemistry your kid will need to know in his later courses and adult career.
I'm glad to see, judging by all the "Anonymous Coward" comments, that I'm not the only one who believes that parents that aren't specifically trained to replace the teachers their children would normally encounter in a public/private school *shouldn't* be allowed to home school.
I was surprised at how difficult it is to teach children about science.
Even if you understand science very well, you still may not know how to teach it to children. One major problem is developmental readiness. Children can understand some concepts very well, but can't understand other concepts at all until they get old enough.
For example, science teachers told me that middle-school students can't understand atoms and molecules. I was in a museum with exhibits of DNA, and I started asking the kids I was with to explain it to me. The teachers were right. The kids didn't understand it at all. You can teach kids DNA games, but they won't understand what they're doing, and they won't understand how it relates to real molecules. That makes sense. It wasn't until, when, the 17th and 18th century that adult scientist understood molecules. The concepts aren't intuitive. And science is about the scientific method, of observation and drawing conclusions. Kids can't observe molecules. You're not teaching science, you're teaching them to parrot phrases. You might as well be teaching them Pokemon. There are entire trendy science books and museum workshops for children that purport to teach them things that they don't understand.
OTOH, even very young children can learn about the important scientific concept of observation. For example, in one program, described in Science magazine, elementary school children were given little packages, containing objects like seeds and pebbles. The teacher asked them what the difference was between seeds and pebbles. Then they planted the seeds and pebbles, and waited to see what happened.
Science teachers know things like that. Your friendly PhD chemist down the street might not. People who understand science, but don't understand teaching, will lecture. They'll try to explain concepts that are over the kids' heads.
(Here's an example of how non-teachers get things wrong. Somebody here said that cooking is chemistry. Cooking is not chemistry. Cooking is, well, cookbook. Cooks don't usually experiment significantly. Maybe if you experimented and baked batches of bread by omitting major ingredients like yeast, to see what happened, that would be science. Why does bread rise? Well, to understand that, you have to understand molecules. And kids don't understand molecules.)
That's why we have public schools. It's true that there are good teachers and bad teachers in public schools. But there are good and bad home-schooling parents. And parents aren't trained to teach.
You're right, the only way to do it is to have intelligent parents active in their local school board.
If we have political activists attacking the public school system, and dropping out to home-school their kids, we just won't have educated children.
Did this include seamen who only sailed the ocean within their own state, or did it apply only to seamen who sailed the ocean between states and/or between the US and other countries?
Yes, Larry David is very funny but I find it very easy to open a plastic package with a mini-box knife. X-Acto knives cost too much.
Although there are some people who do have trouble using a scissors. The world is full of klutzes. How come we don't have tv comedies making fun of them?
Others argue that the Constitution's framers could not possibly have envisioned a congressional power to force purchases. However, in 1790, the first Congress, which was packed with framers, required all ship owners to provide medical insurance for seamen; in 1798, Congress also required seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. In 1792, Congress enacted a law mandating that all able-bodied citizens obtain a firearm. This history negates any claim that forcing the purchase of insurance or other products is unprecedented or contrary to any possible intention of the framers.
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20 years ago we had drugs to treat TB. Now it's becoming resistant to all those drugs. When people are affected by multiple-drug resistant TB, they can't be treated, and they usually die. That's why it's a big deal.
99 illnesses is a lot. 13 deaths is a lot.
The main targets for TB are the homeless, people with AIDS, and people in prison. It can also affect newborns, and people being treated for cancer or autoimmune diseases (who can get infected in hospitals). The US is a tinderbox. We have people flying around the country on airplanes. We have illegal immigrants who aren't eligible for health care (and are afraid of the authorities besides). It could spread across the country, killing off large numbers of people in those groups.
About your quote and its relationship to the original, "Carthagio delenda est." You do know that later Romans consider their wanton destruction of Carthagio in the 3rd Punic War to be a pivotal event in the decline of their republic, don't you?
Probably not. Conservatives don't study Latin any more.
Either you keep the population healthy, or you die. All. Of. You. It really is just that simple.
That's why Adam Smith said that health care was a proper government role, in Wealth of Nations.
Not only that, the Republican legislators and Governor closed down the only hospital in Florida that was treating the poor, homeless, substance abusers and mentally ill people who are the main ones who get TB, according to TFA. The Republicans knew about the CDC report as they pushed to close the hospital. That's why they concealed it.
Now, even if they wanted to confine them, they would have no place to put them. Or rather -- they're putting them up now in motels. You realize that hospitals have special laundry equipment to sterilize the laundry. Motels don't.
This is a time bomb. They're growing drug-resistant TB, which is incurable.
Prisoners receive better medical care than most Americans, and it's illegal to let them go untreated. I don't know where you got your info, but it's fucked.
Nonsense. There was a series of articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Andrew Skolnick about prison medical care, which is basically terrible. There are similar investigative stories every year or so.
Prison doctors are the worst doctors in medicine. Many of them are criminals themselves. States used to have a practice of convicting doctors of crimes, and limiting their license to practice in prison.
Many prisoners have died because their nurses, or the prison guards, ignored basic care, like giving insulin to diabetic patients, or let them lie in a cell with a heart attack or stroke without examining them. There have been a few lawsuits, but they're not too successful. It's hard to get a big judgment (or any judgment) when the victim is a prisoner, and the courts are stacked against it.
You can search Google News and find cases every month of a prisoner who died for lack of medical care.
83% of doctors have considered quitting over obamacare.
That story about 83% of doctors threatening to quit under Obamacare is bullshit.
Slate had a nice story about it. http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/07/09/about_that_83_percent_of_doctors_hate_obamacare_so_much_they_might_quit_poll.html
About That "83 Percent of Doctors Hate Obamacare So Much, They Might Quit" Poll
By David Weigel
Posted Monday, July 9, 2012, at 5:12 PM ET
"Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association."
What is the "Doctor Patient Medical Association"? Short answer: A bunch of right-wing Republican wackos, like Kathryn Serkes and Mark Schiller, who previously claimed Obamacare would kill off elderly sick people.
"The survey was conducted by fax and online from April 18 to May 22, 2012. DPMAF obtained the office fax numbers of 36,000 doctors in active clinical practice, and 16, 227 faxes were successfully delivered... The response rate was 4.3% for a total of 699 completed surveys."
Translation: 83% of 4.3% said they considered leaving under Obamacare. That's 3.6% of those polled.
But most people who have taken a college statistics course would throw a survey with a 4.3% response rate in the shredder.
They "considered" leaving medicine. What were they leaving medicine for? Real estate sales? Financial planning? Opening a restaurant? There aren't too many other occupations that can bring in a doctor's salary in the US. Doctors are always threatening to leave, but few do.
According to a few recent articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, the main reason TB is coming back is that the areas of the world with the greatest incidence are the areas that can't afford the drugs. TB is becoming resistant to the older, cheaper drugs. Some TB is resistant to every drug they've got, and there's no effective medical treatment. That resistance is due to over-use and inappropriate use of antibiotics. People take the drugs for a while and quit before the TB is eradicated. Or they buy drugs in the free market and get sub-therapeutic doses.
If anybody refused to get treated, health workers wouldn't force them. They can't afford enough drugs for everyone who needs it anyway.
Civil liberties had nothing to do with it. In those places with enough money, they keep TB patients in hospitals, and treat them directly, and those patients are often glad to have a comfortable place to live.
The only place I know that puts people into quarantine is Cuba. When AIDS hit Cuba, Castro quarantined everybody with AIDS in separated villages. They were kept very comfortable, well-fed, in nice houses, so they had little incentive to leave. Cuba successfully avoided an AIDS epidemic.
That's what you're advocating, right? Dictatorial power? No politically correct individual freedom for you.
Prosecutors write internal memos to tell each other the strengths and weaknesses of the case. Then they write indictments in which they leave out all the weaknesses. They often leave out exculpatory material, even during the trial.
They have millions of emails, and they've confiscated the servers so Dotcom and his lawyers can't go back and see what they actually wrote, and what happened before and after.
Dotcom can't even pay his lawyers because they confiscated all his money. If the federal prosecutors are so insistent on bringing justice for the poor entertainment companies, why don't they even up the contest by working without pay themselves?
It claims.
He hasn't had a chance to defend himself. He can't defend himself, because they confiscated the money he needs to pay his lawyers to defend him.
There are lots of cases where prosecutors claimed someone was guilty, and he turned out to be innocent. In fact, there are lots of cases in which prosecutors (illegally) withheld evidence that would have proved the defendant was guilty.
If you've ever studied the law, then you know there are lots of cases in which someone seemed clearly guilty -- according to the prosecutor's indictment -- and at the end turned out to be completely innocent. Sometimes they wind up in jail before the facts come out.
When prosecutors write memos to themselves, they give the strengths and weaknesses of their case. When they write indictments, and when they present their case to the grand jury, they leave out the weaknesses.
Happens all the time. That's why we have jury trials. That's why we have a Bill of Rights.
Oh, Kim Dotcom hasn't had a jury trial yet, hasn't had a chance to see the evidence against him, and hasn't had a chance to defend himself against it? Then how do you know he's guilty?
In fact, why is it right for them to confiscate all his assets, even the money that he needs to pay his lawyers to defend him against these charges?
Point of fact:
Combatants don't always have to wear uniforms. There's a provision in the Geneva convention that local forces defending their own country don't have to wear uniforms. In WWII, General Eisenhower warned the Germans that they should treat captured French resistance fighters as prisoners of war, and Germans who didn't do so would be prosecuted.
What scares me most is countries like the US and Israel, which instead of finding reasonable compromises and accommodations with their enemies and occupied entities, turn to bullying, aggressiveness, killing and exceptionalism.
That attitude leads to escalation. As Clausowitz said, war is unpredictable. You never can tell when the other side is going to come back at you with something you didn't expect. Like 9/11. Or the resistance to the US occupation of Iraq. The US war dead is now how many, 4,000? For what?
Then do us a favor and go live in Somalia, please.
That's a good point. Show us a country that you'd like to live in where the government gets less of the GDP in taxes than we do. There isn't any. We have the lowest taxes of any developed country, and we have the lowest taxes that we've ever had since before WWII.
We're cutting back on schools and libraries. The rich aren't even paying their fair share, and they're whining that they're still paying too much.
The amazing thing is that middle-class people fall for this anti-tax rhetoric even though it's against their own interest. I don't know how they do it -- saturation TV attack ads?
Government cannot create private sector jobs. Period.
Bullshit. The National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health spent billions on cancer research -- which included half the funding for research in molecular biology. As a result, they reduced the cancer death rate by about 25% since 1960. And they made a lot of money and created jobs. They generously (or foolishly, depending on your perspective) handed the results over to pharmaceutical companies to make further billions. And they created jobs for doctors, nurses, pharmacists, chemists, etc.
It really amazes me how people can just accept an article of faith like, "Government cannot create private sector jobs," without any evidence. Part of it seems to be that they don't know any history, particularly the history of technology. Part of it seems to be that they don't have the habit of turning their beliefs around and looking at the evidence for the other side. Part of it seems to be that they don't understand why it's necessary to look at supporting evidence behind their beliefs. Where do they get this from? Ayn Rand?
I agree with you generally, but I do believe that you can teach some chemistry to young children without much mathematics.
What struck me about science teaching is that there are lots of interesting and important ideas in science, and there is a subset of those ideas that children can understand and appreciate at almost any age.
One of the important lessons of science is observation. It might be easier to raise questions with 5-year-olds than to give them answers, but those questions will prepare them for the answers that they get later on.
Take cooking. Baking bread is not chemistry. But suppose you bake bread, and leave out the yeast. What happens? What did the yeast do? Is there something about yeast that causes bread to rise? That's a legitimate scientific observation and experiment. I wouldn't try to explain microorganisms to a 5-year-old, because it's too difficult for them to understand, but they'll be primed to understand it later.
There's a science writer named Seymour Simon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Simon_(author) who specializes in writing science books for children, starting with preschool. He writes these little books that have some very simple but very important science concepts. He's very popular among children's librarians and science teachers. Simon does have a book called Chemistry in the Kitchen, so it can be done.
I think the American Chemical Society would agree with me.
I don't understand who "we" is. You sound like you've organized a group of parents, and you've hired "teachers who care." Is this home schooling or a private school?
If you can organize parents to run a private school, you should be able to organize parents to sit on the local school board and run a public school.
I agree that if you have parents who are qualified to teach, home schooling can be successful. I read an essay by a mother about how successfully she had home-schooled her children. She had a PhD in education, and her husband had a PhD in physics. Of course she was successful. With parents like that, any child will succeed. There are lots of home-school success stories.
But how many parents are qualified to teach any subject, much less 5 or 6? It's difficult to teach science. First you have to understand science. Then you have to understand how children understand science, what concepts are important, what concepts they're capable of learning at a particular age, and how to teach those concepts.
Science magazine writes about science education, and I'm very impressed by the successful programs and how cleverly they solve these problems. Some programs work, and some don't. It's not obvious until you try them out.
You say you have a well-researched program. That might work. I assume you don't mean did your own research, but that educational researchers have evaluated the program with controlled studies and found that it works.
I was also impressed by the bad science education that teaches young children about DNA. It looks as if they're learning something, but when I asked the kids questions, they didn't understand it at all. They were just matching colors. When kids come into high school biology or chemistry, it's much easier for them if they've been prepared for science in the earlier grades. Bad elementary education is no help. "I played the DNA game." Well, science isn't about matching colors.
I don't understand how parents who don't understand chemistry themselves can home-school a child in chemistry. I don't think it's possible.
I haven't seen any reviews of these home schooling programs so I can't comment on them further. I'd like to see a review. I'm sure that some parents can home-school their children. I'm also sure that some parents can't do it. I know there are a lot of religious schools that don't teach children science. I'd like to know what the numbers are. I'd like to see evaluations. At the very least I'd expect that home-schooled children would be required to pass standardized tests, but given the politics, they might not have to.
I'd like to see a strong, well-supported public school system. Then, if parents want to home-school their kids, they should have that right -- as long as public officials are monitoring the situation to make sure that the kids are getting an education at least as good as the public schools, and as long as the kids are getting the other things that public schools provide, such as social interaction. That's not an easy standard. I don't think most people can just pull kids out of the public schools and teach them yourself. But I'd like to see the data.
Cooking IS NOT chemistry. Cooking is mixing things together according to authority.
Most cooks don't use any scientific principles in cooking. Cooks were using yeast long before anyone understood microorganisms. They didn't know whether yeast or goblins made bread rise, and they had no reason to investigate why.
You can use the methods of science -- observation, hypothesis forming, testing, etc. -- with the materials of cooking, but most cooks don't do it.
You don't need chemistry teachers to teach chemistry to 10-year-olds. Chemistry can be taught with the rest of the elementary school curriculum. And they should teach the age-appropriate basics, like the different forms of matter.
In order to teach my nine year old chemistry, I do not have to be an expert chemist. I simply have to know more than a nine year old does about chemistry. It really isn't that hard, and it has been fun for all of us to expand our knowledge.
That's not true. Science teaching is one of the hardest jobs in the public schools. When you teach a 9-year-old chemistry, the purpose is to prepare him for the science courses he'll have to understand later. So you have to know the advanced courses too. a 9-year-old will be facing work 15 years from now, and you have to know what chemistry he will need at that time.
I have a 2,000-page high school biology textbook, and it intimidates me sometimes. One of the main skills of a science teacher is knowing what in that book is important, since high school kids can't learn it all. In order to teach chemistry, you have to know what part of chemistry will be necessary to learn biology. For example, fatty acids seem to be pretty important.
Science toys are fun but they're not science education. You can spend a year making volcanoes and mixing vinegar and baking soda, and still not teach any meaningful chemistry, or any preparation for the chemistry your kid will need to know in his later courses and adult career.
I'm glad to see, judging by all the "Anonymous Coward" comments, that I'm not the only one who believes that parents that aren't specifically trained to replace the teachers their children would normally encounter in a public/private school *shouldn't* be allowed to home school.
I was surprised at how difficult it is to teach children about science.
Even if you understand science very well, you still may not know how to teach it to children. One major problem is developmental readiness. Children can understand some concepts very well, but can't understand other concepts at all until they get old enough.
For example, science teachers told me that middle-school students can't understand atoms and molecules. I was in a museum with exhibits of DNA, and I started asking the kids I was with to explain it to me. The teachers were right. The kids didn't understand it at all. You can teach kids DNA games, but they won't understand what they're doing, and they won't understand how it relates to real molecules. That makes sense. It wasn't until, when, the 17th and 18th century that adult scientist understood molecules. The concepts aren't intuitive. And science is about the scientific method, of observation and drawing conclusions. Kids can't observe molecules. You're not teaching science, you're teaching them to parrot phrases. You might as well be teaching them Pokemon. There are entire trendy science books and museum workshops for children that purport to teach them things that they don't understand.
OTOH, even very young children can learn about the important scientific concept of observation. For example, in one program, described in Science magazine, elementary school children were given little packages, containing objects like seeds and pebbles. The teacher asked them what the difference was between seeds and pebbles. Then they planted the seeds and pebbles, and waited to see what happened.
Science teachers know things like that. Your friendly PhD chemist down the street might not. People who understand science, but don't understand teaching, will lecture. They'll try to explain concepts that are over the kids' heads.
(Here's an example of how non-teachers get things wrong. Somebody here said that cooking is chemistry. Cooking is not chemistry. Cooking is, well, cookbook. Cooks don't usually experiment significantly. Maybe if you experimented and baked batches of bread by omitting major ingredients like yeast, to see what happened, that would be science. Why does bread rise? Well, to understand that, you have to understand molecules. And kids don't understand molecules.)
That's why we have public schools. It's true that there are good teachers and bad teachers in public schools. But there are good and bad home-schooling parents. And parents aren't trained to teach.
You're right, the only way to do it is to have intelligent parents active in their local school board.
If we have political activists attacking the public school system, and dropping out to home-school their kids, we just won't have educated children.
OK, we'll take away your property, since you don't deserve anything.
Did this include seamen who only sailed the ocean within their own state, or did it apply only to seamen who sailed the ocean between states and/or between the US and other countries?
Outside the United States.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=001/llsl001.db&recNum=257
Come to think of it, you can't open a Gillette razor with a Gillette razor.
Use an X-Acto knife.
Yes, Larry David is very funny but I find it very easy to open a plastic package with a mini-box knife. X-Acto knives cost too much.
Although there are some people who do have trouble using a scissors. The world is full of klutzes. How come we don't have tv comedies making fun of them?
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113618
The Irrelevance of the Broccoli Argument against the Insurance Mandate
Einer Elhauge, J.D.
N Engl J Med 2012; 366:e1January 5, 2012
Others argue that the Constitution's framers could not possibly have envisioned a congressional power to force purchases. However, in 1790, the first Congress, which was packed with framers, required all ship owners to provide medical insurance for seamen; in 1798, Congress also required seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. In 1792, Congress enacted a law mandating that all able-bodied citizens obtain a firearm. This history negates any claim that forcing the purchase of insurance or other products is unprecedented or contrary to any possible intention of the framers.
If Democrats (or socialists) don't like it then they should amend the constitution
Anybody who refers to any member of Congress (except for Bernie Saunders) as a "socialist" is beyond the bounds of fact and reason.