I've taught, and am currently not in teaching only because my subject, social studies, has a glut. You're right: it isn't about the money. Number one could go. I would replace it, however, with a point designed to guard against burnout. Teachers should be able to eject the chronically disruptive from their class, permanently. I'm fine with the average uninspired teenager; but classrooms today are filled with the emotionally disturbed -- just as our streets are filled with "homeless" who are in many instances mental cases.
Years ago, you could keep an adult nut locked up and throw a teenage nut out of school; but alas, no more. The homeless, at least, don't go throwing a monkey wrench into the productive endeavors of the working folk. The nutty students? That's another story.
That's awesome -- really awesome. If you ever wondered why such people are called trolls, you need only recall the parent posting. Who in his self-righteous mind hangs out on Slashdot? This guy must really have been living under a bridge, waiting for an opportunity like this.
Taleb's writing style is really disappointing. Believe me, I'm with you there. I would say some philosophers design their writing to be obscure on purpose as part of their con: they're hoping the reader will think what they're writing is deep if they can't understand it. Now, Taleb is no philosopher, merely an intellectual; so, I wouldn't even give him that much credit. I would say his writing is a product of his self-infatuation and a kind of laziness. He thinks he's getting away with his meandering and conceit by calling his book an "essay."
That said, I think his one great idea is to combine the ideas of evolutionary psychology with philosophical skepticism, as an argument for skepticism. I find it intriguing to think that our minds evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years within the context of one environment; only now we have been living for the past 4,000 years -- and especially the last 100 or so years -- in an environment radically different from the one in which our minds evolved. That's just one notion in evolutionary psychology that points out the difficulties we may be facing, cognitively, in trying to deal with the world around us: the cognitive "traps" that await us, so to speak.
I'm going to think about what you said regarding Taleb's explanation for our present financial crisis. I'm no financial whiz, but I believe that when you see an economic phenomenon where it seems like every idiot is making a ton of money, certainly then things are headed for a big fall. I think Taleb is trying to explain why so many people are willing and able to delude themselves into ignoring the maxim I just stated.
Perhaps the answer is no more complicated than the old adage, "You can't fool an honest man."
The article makes me think of an idea that I believe is found in the book, The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb. If it's not there, it's in his earlier book.
The idea is that human thinking is prone to several faults. It's a flaw in the construction of our brain. I believe this is something evolutionary psychology talks about. Anyway, Taleb says that human beings are woefully prone to looking at the past and convincing themselves that past data is a sure guide to what the future will bring. His idea is not just that we are prone to this mistake, but that in effect we love making this mistake -- or perhaps closer to his point, we feel great when we are making this mistake.
Putting Dvorak's article in this context, people look at spreadsheets -- and at all the wonderful graphs and charts you can make from the data contained therein -- and are lured, cognitively, into painting a particular picture of the future. To the natural inclination of our minds, this picture is so beautifully convincing that we have to actively work to resist its charms. It's almost as if we can't help buying into the future our inclinations, with the help of our spreadsheets, sell to us.
This is a small example from what is a larger problem in economics, which only some schools of economics recognize: namely, economic history is a poor guide to the future. (By contrast, the entire field of econometrics posits itself on making "mathematical predictions" based on economic history.)
Dvorak's an ass, in my opinion; but I think he may have stumbled onto something here.
You don't define socialism using normative criteria. I am very willing to believe that "most right-wing parties in the rest of the world" are to the left of Obama. That means nothing.
The great shame is that people throw around words like capitalism and socialism without having any idea what those words mean. Case in point, the US political-economic system is nowhere near capitalism -- even when you compare it to the rest of the world.
Yet legislation locking in a particular standard for searches would have a dangerous, chilling effect as officers' often split-second assessments are second-guessed.[Emphasis, mine]
These are Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertof's words on why Congress should place no limits on an officer's authority to confiscate laptops, and other items. Up until now, the phrase "chilling effect" was used to criticize a government's abrigement of its citizens rights. Now, this has been turned completely on its head.
An individual's rights now has a chilling effect on the poor defenseless government.
Exactly! Now they can force people to buy expensive IDE's and servers to run the new version of Python, and strong-arm people into purchasing licenses to use the language for commercial purposes. It's just a money making ploy.
Oh, wait a minute. All the old versions are going to continue to be available -- even the source code. And it will remain free for commercial use. Hmmmm.
Sorry, but I fail to see how what they are doing is at all like Microsoft.
After failing to fix the heating system at a factory, management called an old-timer out of retirement to repair it. The old-timer went into the boiler room and returned an hour later. The problem was fixed and the system worked beautifully. A week later, he sent in his bill: $16,000.00.
Management balked and demanded an itemized invoice. A week later they got it:
We have Republicans in Congress propositioning their same-sex underage pages, others sleeping with prostitutes, and a Democrat president a few years back getting frisky with his intern and a box of (contraband) Cuban cigars -- and all this makes it onto the news.
Who's going to protect the children from being exposed to the examples from these pinnacles of morality?
The problem you refer to about disruptive students -- and I substitute teach and totally agree with your observations -- started long before No Child Left Behind. Sometime in 1975 laws were passed to accommodate the handicapped, and these laws have been "improved" several times since then. The problem is that chronically disruptive students have also been sheltered under the term, handicap. These students enjoy protection under the law to continue their bad behavior that undermines the learning of the other children, including the real handicap children in wheelchairs and so forth.
NCLB is a bad idea, and schools are suffering under it; but the problems in public schools that you mention didn't begin there.
Concerning Mozart, I'm relating this from the memory of something I read over 15 years ago, so I may not have it exact.
Mozart grew up in a musical house. His father claimed that as a toddler (2 or 3 years old), young Mozart used to sit at the piano and pick out intervals using two fingers. He was absolutely facinated by this, and even his musician father thought this remarkable. Obviously, he demonstrated some kind of interest and motivation that is rarely seen.
Later in life, as an adult, Mozart, in a letter, recounted how he felt misunderstood by the people that lauded him for his spectacular abilities. The passage, near as I can remember, went as follows.
"No one has worked harder than I have. There is not a major piece of music, nor a minor piece of music from a major composer, which I have not studied thoroughly and with which I am not intimately acquainted."
I don't know how to give a comprehensive explanation as to why little Mozart was so interested in music. Maybe there was some physical attribute he possessed making the actual sounds physically appealing to him. I don't think we have even scratched the surface concerning what "talent" is. But, I don't believe that Mozart, had he been given intensive training in writing, could have become a great writer (though his letters are certainly articulate and entertaining) -- unless, for what we would at this time have to call "some inexplicable reason," he, from an early age, had a passion for the written word.
So, if I understand your post correctly, I believe we're in agreement. What made the fundamental difference, at the start, was his "genuine love" (as you say) of music. Only because of that was the training and the resources available to him able to allow him to develop into what he was to become.
IF you want to hold The People to a standard, FIRST hold The Man to it.
I just wanted to say that this is a fantastic quote. If anything, what we are seeing is that government basically plays every trick in the book when it wants to -- and even throws the book out entirely, in some cases. "The Man" should be held to higher standards, because he is much more dangerous than any of us, or even many of us.
This podcasting politicians thing makes me think that if Congress allows ISP's to play favorites with what files get priority treatment, you can bet your last US dollar that there will be a law mandating that priority treatment be given to all use of the Internet by politicians spouting campaign propaganda, at no additional cost to the politicians. While we wait for Google to load, Senator so-and-so's daily video podcast will come flying onto our desktops.
I'm a New York State certified teacher of social studies. Currently, I work as a per-diem substitute. I'm in high schools and middle schools almost every day.
I do know what teachers put up with from students, parents, and government. All three groups can be real bastards. That doesn't change anything I've said. I think my posting was quite reasonable: I said that adults should be the ones in charge, but noted that in the hands of some adults, this authority could be abused, and that the results are hurtful to kids and detrimental to a free society.
You beat me to it, because I think this is the most important point of the whole issue.
Part of the purpose of school, and in raising kids in general, is to socialize them: meaning, to raise them so that they will be able to live in society. I am not for minors having the full-fledged rights of adults; but, we have to remember that how we raise them will affect what kind of adults they turn out to be. For kids, school is, to a great degree, society. The society we create for them in school is the society they will learn to live with.
When kids have to show ID at every turn, live out their day under the surveillance of security cameras, surrender their personal belongings on the whim of any authority figure, so on and so forth, it is far more likely that the great mass of them will grow up to be the kind of adults that will submit to an overbearing authority that allows them few rights.
It's one thing when this kind of policy is instituted in a private school. I still think it's a bad idea; but, the parents sent the kid there and had a choice as to where to send him. But, if we are talking about a government school (though, the euphamism in the US is "public" school), this presents, in my opinion, a serious threat to our future. Public schools in the US hold a near monopoly in education; and though I am not going to accuse the government of a concious conspiracy to indoctrinate the youth of america with anti-liberal ideas, the results, if such policies become widespread, will be no different.
To my mind, adults act as the custodians for the rights of kids: releasing various rights to kids as they become able to handle them responsibly. I'm all for adults being in charge; but any responsible adult realizes the grave responsibility he has towards the kids with which he has been given charge, and weilds that power in the service of raising kids to be responsible adults jealous of their liberty, rather than cowed wretches with no backbone in the face of authority.
Kids deserve respect above all; and this needs to trump the illiberal policies instituted under the cover of promoting "safe schools."
What property owners need is to put up signs amounting to an EULA stating that all those stepping onto their property, by the act of doing so, give their permission to be video taped and have any audio they produce recorded.
According the the New York City Police Department's Web site, there are currently 39,110 officers on duty. Using your estimate, there are approximately 391 city cops that are out there busting everyone else's hump.
You're right, it would be interesting to read the objections of the original examiner and to see what changes Creative made. I wonder about the "category --> subcategory --> item" jazz, though.
I used to work in a record store. (Yes, I said "record" -- it was a while ago.) We separated the records first into categories: Jazz, Pop, County, etc; then into subcategories: artists whose names began with the letter "A," then "B," and so on; finally, after navigating through category and subcategory, a "user" could choose and individual item.
When I went to college, the girls were organized under the same three-tiered system. (As a guy, this was of particular interest to me.) First, by dormitory type: freshmen all-girls dorms, or upperclassmen co-ed dorms. Then, by hallway: girls in the quiet hall, or girls in the "un-quiet" hall (my personal preference). Finally, after navigating this interface, you could "choose" an individual girl (provided, of course, she was agreeable to all this).
To me, it doesn't take a genius to come up with a "three-tiered" system -- we find such systems all around us. It's ridiculous that people can take something obvious, obfusticate it with mind-numbing legalese, and be awarded a patent. If only I had the talent, every residential college in the country would be paying me royalties, and with that kind of money, I'd be dating all the ladies:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I've taught, and am currently not in teaching only because my subject, social studies, has a glut. You're right: it isn't about the money. Number one could go. I would replace it, however, with a point designed to guard against burnout. Teachers should be able to eject the chronically disruptive from their class, permanently. I'm fine with the average uninspired teenager; but classrooms today are filled with the emotionally disturbed -- just as our streets are filled with "homeless" who are in many instances mental cases.
Years ago, you could keep an adult nut locked up and throw a teenage nut out of school; but alas, no more. The homeless, at least, don't go throwing a monkey wrench into the productive endeavors of the working folk. The nutty students? That's another story.
That's awesome -- really awesome. If you ever wondered why such people are called trolls, you need only recall the parent posting. Who in his self-righteous mind hangs out on Slashdot? This guy must really have been living under a bridge, waiting for an opportunity like this.
Dude, I hope they have bridges in Hell.
Taleb's writing style is really disappointing. Believe me, I'm with you there. I would say some philosophers design their writing to be obscure on purpose as part of their con: they're hoping the reader will think what they're writing is deep if they can't understand it. Now, Taleb is no philosopher, merely an intellectual; so, I wouldn't even give him that much credit. I would say his writing is a product of his self-infatuation and a kind of laziness. He thinks he's getting away with his meandering and conceit by calling his book an "essay."
That said, I think his one great idea is to combine the ideas of evolutionary psychology with philosophical skepticism, as an argument for skepticism. I find it intriguing to think that our minds evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years within the context of one environment; only now we have been living for the past 4,000 years -- and especially the last 100 or so years -- in an environment radically different from the one in which our minds evolved. That's just one notion in evolutionary psychology that points out the difficulties we may be facing, cognitively, in trying to deal with the world around us: the cognitive "traps" that await us, so to speak.
I'm going to think about what you said regarding Taleb's explanation for our present financial crisis. I'm no financial whiz, but I believe that when you see an economic phenomenon where it seems like every idiot is making a ton of money, certainly then things are headed for a big fall. I think Taleb is trying to explain why so many people are willing and able to delude themselves into ignoring the maxim I just stated.
Perhaps the answer is no more complicated than the old adage, "You can't fool an honest man."
The article makes me think of an idea that I believe is found in the book, The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb. If it's not there, it's in his earlier book.
The idea is that human thinking is prone to several faults. It's a flaw in the construction of our brain. I believe this is something evolutionary psychology talks about. Anyway, Taleb says that human beings are woefully prone to looking at the past and convincing themselves that past data is a sure guide to what the future will bring. His idea is not just that we are prone to this mistake, but that in effect we love making this mistake -- or perhaps closer to his point, we feel great when we are making this mistake.
Putting Dvorak's article in this context, people look at spreadsheets -- and at all the wonderful graphs and charts you can make from the data contained therein -- and are lured, cognitively, into painting a particular picture of the future. To the natural inclination of our minds, this picture is so beautifully convincing that we have to actively work to resist its charms. It's almost as if we can't help buying into the future our inclinations, with the help of our spreadsheets, sell to us.
This is a small example from what is a larger problem in economics, which only some schools of economics recognize: namely, economic history is a poor guide to the future. (By contrast, the entire field of econometrics posits itself on making "mathematical predictions" based on economic history.)
Dvorak's an ass, in my opinion; but I think he may have stumbled onto something here.
An idea is a long way from an implementation. Were they alive today, should Jules Verne be paid for the submarine, or Da Vinci for the helicopter?
You don't define socialism using normative criteria. I am very willing to believe that "most right-wing parties in the rest of the world" are to the left of Obama. That means nothing.
The great shame is that people throw around words like capitalism and socialism without having any idea what those words mean. Case in point, the US political-economic system is nowhere near capitalism -- even when you compare it to the rest of the world.
How's this for irony:
These are Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertof's words on why Congress should place no limits on an officer's authority to confiscate laptops, and other items. Up until now, the phrase "chilling effect" was used to criticize a government's abrigement of its citizens rights. Now, this has been turned completely on its head.
An individual's rights now has a chilling effect on the poor defenseless government.
Yes, and in only 10 years.
Exactly! Now they can force people to buy expensive IDE's and servers to run the new version of Python, and strong-arm people into purchasing licenses to use the language for commercial purposes. It's just a money making ploy.
Oh, wait a minute. All the old versions are going to continue to be available -- even the source code. And it will remain free for commercial use. Hmmmm.
Sorry, but I fail to see how what they are doing is at all like Microsoft.
Are the same people who managed to put a man on the moon in charge on this project? I suspect no.
It's called a hack. Is a manufacturer supposed to work around your hack?!
These people need to get over it.
After failing to fix the heating system at a factory, management called an old-timer out of retirement to repair it. The old-timer went into the boiler room and returned an hour later. The problem was fixed and the system worked beautifully. A week later, he sent in his bill: $16,000.00.
Management balked and demanded an itemized invoice. A week later they got it:
Why do I continue to be surprised?! Thanks!
We have Republicans in Congress propositioning their same-sex underage pages, others sleeping with prostitutes, and a Democrat president a few years back getting frisky with his intern and a box of (contraband) Cuban cigars -- and all this makes it onto the news.
Who's going to protect the children from being exposed to the examples from these pinnacles of morality?
There's a book I've been meaning to read that you may be interested in: Last Child In The Woods.
I think the title alone gives you a pretty good idea of what it's about.
The problem you refer to about disruptive students -- and I substitute teach and totally agree with your observations -- started long before No Child Left Behind. Sometime in 1975 laws were passed to accommodate the handicapped, and these laws have been "improved" several times since then. The problem is that chronically disruptive students have also been sheltered under the term, handicap. These students enjoy protection under the law to continue their bad behavior that undermines the learning of the other children, including the real handicap children in wheelchairs and so forth.
NCLB is a bad idea, and schools are suffering under it; but the problems in public schools that you mention didn't begin there.
A woman I know says, "My ex-husband was a cop. I think I've given enough." The caller invariably hangs up after a laugh and wishing her good day.
Concerning Mozart, I'm relating this from the memory of something I read over 15 years ago, so I may not have it exact.
Mozart grew up in a musical house. His father claimed that as a toddler (2 or 3 years old), young Mozart used to sit at the piano and pick out intervals using two fingers. He was absolutely facinated by this, and even his musician father thought this remarkable. Obviously, he demonstrated some kind of interest and motivation that is rarely seen.
Later in life, as an adult, Mozart, in a letter, recounted how he felt misunderstood by the people that lauded him for his spectacular abilities. The passage, near as I can remember, went as follows.
"No one has worked harder than I have. There is not a major piece of music, nor a minor piece of music from a major composer, which I have not studied thoroughly and with which I am not intimately acquainted."
I don't know how to give a comprehensive explanation as to why little Mozart was so interested in music. Maybe there was some physical attribute he possessed making the actual sounds physically appealing to him. I don't think we have even scratched the surface concerning what "talent" is. But, I don't believe that Mozart, had he been given intensive training in writing, could have become a great writer (though his letters are certainly articulate and entertaining) -- unless, for what we would at this time have to call "some inexplicable reason," he, from an early age, had a passion for the written word.
So, if I understand your post correctly, I believe we're in agreement. What made the fundamental difference, at the start, was his "genuine love" (as you say) of music. Only because of that was the training and the resources available to him able to allow him to develop into what he was to become.
I just wanted to say that this is a fantastic quote. If anything, what we are seeing is that government basically plays every trick in the book when it wants to -- and even throws the book out entirely, in some cases. "The Man" should be held to higher standards, because he is much more dangerous than any of us, or even many of us.
This podcasting politicians thing makes me think that if Congress allows ISP's to play favorites with what files get priority treatment, you can bet your last US dollar that there will be a law mandating that priority treatment be given to all use of the Internet by politicians spouting campaign propaganda, at no additional cost to the politicians. While we wait for Google to load, Senator so-and-so's daily video podcast will come flying onto our desktops.
I'm a New York State certified teacher of social studies. Currently, I work as a per-diem substitute. I'm in high schools and middle schools almost every day.
I do know what teachers put up with from students, parents, and government. All three groups can be real bastards. That doesn't change anything I've said. I think my posting was quite reasonable: I said that adults should be the ones in charge, but noted that in the hands of some adults, this authority could be abused, and that the results are hurtful to kids and detrimental to a free society.
Give me a break.
You beat me to it, because I think this is the most important point of the whole issue.
Part of the purpose of school, and in raising kids in general, is to socialize them: meaning, to raise them so that they will be able to live in society. I am not for minors having the full-fledged rights of adults; but, we have to remember that how we raise them will affect what kind of adults they turn out to be. For kids, school is, to a great degree, society. The society we create for them in school is the society they will learn to live with.
When kids have to show ID at every turn, live out their day under the surveillance of security cameras, surrender their personal belongings on the whim of any authority figure, so on and so forth, it is far more likely that the great mass of them will grow up to be the kind of adults that will submit to an overbearing authority that allows them few rights.
It's one thing when this kind of policy is instituted in a private school. I still think it's a bad idea; but, the parents sent the kid there and had a choice as to where to send him. But, if we are talking about a government school (though, the euphamism in the US is "public" school), this presents, in my opinion, a serious threat to our future. Public schools in the US hold a near monopoly in education; and though I am not going to accuse the government of a concious conspiracy to indoctrinate the youth of america with anti-liberal ideas, the results, if such policies become widespread, will be no different.
To my mind, adults act as the custodians for the rights of kids: releasing various rights to kids as they become able to handle them responsibly. I'm all for adults being in charge; but any responsible adult realizes the grave responsibility he has towards the kids with which he has been given charge, and weilds that power in the service of raising kids to be responsible adults jealous of their liberty, rather than cowed wretches with no backbone in the face of authority.
Kids deserve respect above all; and this needs to trump the illiberal policies instituted under the cover of promoting "safe schools."
What property owners need is to put up signs amounting to an EULA stating that all those stepping onto their property, by the act of doing so, give their permission to be video taped and have any audio they produce recorded.
According the the New York City Police Department's Web site, there are currently 39,110 officers on duty. Using your estimate, there are approximately 391 city cops that are out there busting everyone else's hump.
You're right, it would be interesting to read the objections of the original examiner and to see what changes Creative made. I wonder about the "category --> subcategory --> item" jazz, though.
I used to work in a record store. (Yes, I said "record" -- it was a while ago.) We separated the records first into categories: Jazz, Pop, County, etc; then into subcategories: artists whose names began with the letter "A," then "B," and so on; finally, after navigating through category and subcategory, a "user" could choose and individual item.
When I went to college, the girls were organized under the same three-tiered system. (As a guy, this was of particular interest to me.) First, by dormitory type: freshmen all-girls dorms, or upperclassmen co-ed dorms. Then, by hallway: girls in the quiet hall, or girls in the "un-quiet" hall (my personal preference). Finally, after navigating this interface, you could "choose" an individual girl (provided, of course, she was agreeable to all this).
To me, it doesn't take a genius to come up with a "three-tiered" system -- we find such systems all around us. It's ridiculous that people can take something obvious, obfusticate it with mind-numbing legalese, and be awarded a patent. If only I had the talent, every residential college in the country would be paying me royalties, and with that kind of money, I'd be dating all the ladies :-)