I have known many people who dropped out of high school, and intelligence seemed to have nothing to do with whether a person drops out or not, as the intelligence levels of the people I knew seemed to be across the board.
Also, the only benefit that a GED has over a diploma is if you are trying to go to a college directly out of high school. Seriously, if you think a job cares, just lie. No one goes to check your HS diploma unless they are going to fire you anyway, and are desperately looking for a reason not to pay unemployment benefits. Even then, they are unlikely to look for a faked HS diploma, as even people with IQs of 65 can get one. The odds of them finding that as an excuse to fire you with cause is too small for them to consider.
If we took 10% of our defense budget and put it into education I believe we would solve a lot of our problems. This would only make the problem worse. We are already throwing tons of money at our "educational" system. That money is being used to "Socialize" our children. It is not being used to teach them critical thinking. Just look at the home school/public school debate. It isn't about kids getting a good education, as it has been clearly shown that home schooling is superior in that regard. It is about the "socialization". Our public schools have become public orphanages. Many, if not most kids, now spend more time under the care of the state than they do their biological "parents". These public schools/orphanages see themselves as the the social trainers of the nation. The trend is even to take on more and more of the role of food provider. School lunch programs keep expanding, and now the school breakfast programs are taking off. So, if a kid is in the custody of the state more than their biological parents, and are fed as many meals by the state, who is really the parent? Given the job that our public school system has done at raising the last couple of generations, do you really want to give them even more resources? Ignorance and the spewing of American propaganda would only become worse.
Before you start throwing more money at an already well funded "educational" system, you had better first make sure that it is actually teaching the things you want taught.
I say we cap the legal fees at 50% of the final settlement - IE for each $5 'settlement' received they get $5. Only if each $5 is required to be requested on a hand filled form, and sent in an individual envelope with a self addressed stamped envelope inside for the return check.
That is just wrong. Backward compatibility has absolutely nothing to do with MS not rewriting from scratch. MS owns VirtualPC. MS owns every version of Windows back to 1.0, and all the MS-Dos versions before that. There is absolutely no reason that MS could not have a ground up build, AND 100% backward compatibility. The problem for MS is that they wrote a kludgy crappy OS, and successfully sold it to IBM for their 'toy' computers. This gave their crappy OS legitimacy and a dominant position in the business world. From there it was dirty tricks, cheap upgrades, and a blind eye to piracy to gain market share.
Well, it's a different world today. Their competition is either cooler or cheaper. They are being watched closer for dirty tricks, and they have long run out of large numbers of new people who will pay for their OS if they don't use some kind of copy protection.
I don't think MS has the corporate culture to write a new OS from the ground up that can compete with XP, OSX, or Linux. So, they keep with what they know, and hope the ship stays above water for one more day.
I don't know about predator/prey diet affecting hunger, but protein and fat take way longer to digest and process, so a high fat/protein meal will give you a (for lack of a better term) time release meal. Whereas sugar (that includes all carbohydrates) processes quickly through your system. So, if you eat a high sugar diet, you would want to eat lots of tiny meals, so that your body doesn't dump all that extra energy into fat. If you eat a protein and fat meal, your digestive system will space out it's usage for you. This will make you hungry less often.
That's what a lot of people miss. Collectibles like Franklin Mint plates are never going to yield the increase in value that an item everybody owned, but most destroyed will yield. It's the fact that everybody had one, and now they don't that creates the huge demand and small supply that makes most collectibles valuable.
That is what is called a half lie. Most people are topping out the "overweight" category due to genetics. They push into the "obese" category if they don't spend all day every day working out. I know that to break into the "normal" category, I would have to be incredibly unhealthy, and my body type is just not that uncommon.
While I definitely agree that electrical wiring just isn't that hard, I disagree that you can count on the inspector to make sure your work won't burn your house down. In my local, they are very clear on the permits that they do not provide that service. It is much better to just make sure you do the job right. There is plenty of information on how to do house wiring correctly. It isn't rocket science after all.
I always thought that the profiles feature was in preparation for Netflix to introduce video games and porn. maybe they have finally decided that they will never offer games and porn, so they are now discontinuing the code base.
And this is why we can never expect the public school system to work. As long as there is a large portion of the population that believes that "academic institution shouldn't put academic achievement above everything else." schools will fail. Just to be clear, academic achievement is ALL that academic institutions should be concerned about.
That is a piece that most people miss. Not everyone cares about, or has a use for higher education. Here in the US, if you question most adults, you will find that they have what amounts to about a 7th grade education. Sure they have life experiences that go beyond that, but that is with stuff that is unrelated to school, so isn't relevant. It is not uncommon for adults not to be able to figure out percentages, to know what an adverb is, or be able to tell you the difference between a Democrat or a Republican ( I know, most of us smart asses would say that there isn't one. ) You would be amazed at the number of people that cannot even identify what party their current president and vice president belong to.
Given this, for most of the population, the last 5 years of school is a total and complete waste. So, not only are they being, for all intents and purposes, incarcerated, the rest of the students that DO want to learn, and Do have the aptitude to learn, are being dragged down by being held in the same facilities as those that don't. Having separate schools that will train those that are not going to get "a high school education" anyway (irrelevant as to what the diploma says) is at least a half step in the right direction.
I just made sure I came off as the batshit crazy type. That worked pretty well for me. I diffused several high school fights by explaining very dispassionately that I would lose the fight if attacked. That I wouldn't even fight back, but that the attacker would be alone at night sometime in his life. I would then in great detail explain exactly how I would subdue him before he would even realize that he was in trouble, as well as giving him very fine details as to the horrific tortures that he would endure. My favorite was explaining how you could blow off a mans skin with a small incision and an air compressor. It worked best when you would get all wistful when you got to the most horrible parts.
You would have to be careful today, as they arrest students for saying that kind of stuff now.
Your post points out why the public school system will never be fixed. You point fingers away from teachers and at other levels of the public education industry. The fact is, the public school system is broken on every level, and that includes teachers. Most of us knew who the good teachers were, and who the bad ones were when we were in school. At best, 20% of the teachers were actually good. 30% were actively bad, and the other half were just punching a time clock. Claiming that teachers are not a problem is simply untrue when only 20% could be counted as good. Irrelevent to whether you are in the 20% group or the 80% group.
This isn't to say that teachers are THE problem. The public schools are broken on every level.
Parents that use the public schools as an orphanage/daycare
Teachers that suck for various reasons
Teachers Unions who's business is to make sure that teachers always feel like they are being abused and taken advantage of
School administrators that siphon money into pet projects instead of education and create huge bureaucracies for personal gain
School boards that make poor choices for all sorts of personal reasons
State politicians that place crappy restrictions on the schools and teachers in an attempt to pander for votes (votes of the bad parents who are more concerned about having a daycare/orphanage to send their kids to than having their kids actually educated)
Federal politicians that do the same
All the way to the President of the United States, who referred to the smart kids as "The nerd patrol" in a nationally televised speech.
The problem is that every level does exactly what you did. They point out the other guy that is screwing up as a way to rationalize that their group isn't. Since the statement that the other guy is screwing up is true, many people are fooled by it. The problem is that because the public school system is broken on every level, fixing one or two would still not solve the problem.
Oh, and one other thing: YOU MAKE SURE THEY DON'T GET BEAT UP. It's hard to stay motivated to do well in school when you get the crap beat out of you on a daily basis That's called 'socialization'. It's that really important skill that is used to rationalize public schools when the homeschool/public school debate turns to who has better academic achievements. And as much as I say that with SOME tongue in cheek, you would be amazed at how many people honestly believe that being beaten in school by other students is a good thing that teaches important life lessons.
Sorry, but the way you solve the problem of social promotion is not to screw the smart kids. You stop the problem of social promotion by just "STOP DOING THAT!" It is asinine to think that every kid is going to be able to be taught the same amount of information in 13 years. It's not even reasonable to expect every kid to learn the same amount in 1 year. Each year after that, the gap will grow.
NCLB IS social promotion. It is clearly a law that says no matter what resources have to be expended, we will not let any kid be more than 1 educational level below any other kid that is the same age.
The idea of putting the dumb students in with the smart students would likely work if we still had the one room school house, where you had every grade level from 1st through 12th all in the same room. Then the slow students would do the work with the younger kids, and the smart students would do the work with the older kids. Part of this whole problem stems from our extreme age segregation in the classrooms.
Seriously, if you are already going to be doing the teaching outside of the classroom, you should stop wasting your kids time and just home school. It would only take 2 or 3 hours of home schooling time to far out pace what your kid gets in an 8 hour day under the "No child get ahead" program. I know it is expensive to give up the free state run daycare, but good education often is expensive.
I think your sarcasm detector is off a little. The reason that 'Think of the children' is in quotes is because we all know that what it really means is pander for more votes.
Slashdot Mirror
I have known many people who dropped out of high school, and intelligence seemed to have nothing to do with whether a person drops out or not, as the intelligence levels of the people I knew seemed to be across the board.
Also, the only benefit that a GED has over a diploma is if you are trying to go to a college directly out of high school. Seriously, if you think a job cares, just lie. No one goes to check your HS diploma unless they are going to fire you anyway, and are desperately looking for a reason not to pay unemployment benefits. Even then, they are unlikely to look for a faked HS diploma, as even people with IQs of 65 can get one. The odds of them finding that as an excuse to fire you with cause is too small for them to consider.
Before you start throwing more money at an already well funded "educational" system, you had better first make sure that it is actually teaching the things you want taught.
We can talk about that after we can get their radio records, and voice recordings of any conversations that take place in the car...
Now that we have resolved that issue, maybe we won't have to hear people whine about their prudish sexual hangups... Yeah... I didn't think so either.
No, you want to look a gift horse in the belly.
That is just wrong. Backward compatibility has absolutely nothing to do with MS not rewriting from scratch. MS owns VirtualPC. MS owns every version of Windows back to 1.0, and all the MS-Dos versions before that. There is absolutely no reason that MS could not have a ground up build, AND 100% backward compatibility. The problem for MS is that they wrote a kludgy crappy OS, and successfully sold it to IBM for their 'toy' computers. This gave their crappy OS legitimacy and a dominant position in the business world. From there it was dirty tricks, cheap upgrades, and a blind eye to piracy to gain market share.
Well, it's a different world today. Their competition is either cooler or cheaper. They are being watched closer for dirty tricks, and they have long run out of large numbers of new people who will pay for their OS if they don't use some kind of copy protection.
I don't think MS has the corporate culture to write a new OS from the ground up that can compete with XP, OSX, or Linux. So, they keep with what they know, and hope the ship stays above water for one more day.
Obviously they need to upgrade their equipment.
Try to solve chess.
I don't know about predator/prey diet affecting hunger, but protein and fat take way longer to digest and process, so a high fat/protein meal will give you a (for lack of a better term) time release meal. Whereas sugar (that includes all carbohydrates) processes quickly through your system. So, if you eat a high sugar diet, you would want to eat lots of tiny meals, so that your body doesn't dump all that extra energy into fat. If you eat a protein and fat meal, your digestive system will space out it's usage for you. This will make you hungry less often.
That's easy to beat. I had a girlfriend once. Of course, you wouldn't know her. She moved in Canada.
That's what a lot of people miss. Collectibles like Franklin Mint plates are never going to yield the increase in value that an item everybody owned, but most destroyed will yield. It's the fact that everybody had one, and now they don't that creates the huge demand and small supply that makes most collectibles valuable.
That is what is called a half lie. Most people are topping out the "overweight" category due to genetics. They push into the "obese" category if they don't spend all day every day working out. I know that to break into the "normal" category, I would have to be incredibly unhealthy, and my body type is just not that uncommon.
While I definitely agree that electrical wiring just isn't that hard, I disagree that you can count on the inspector to make sure your work won't burn your house down. In my local, they are very clear on the permits that they do not provide that service. It is much better to just make sure you do the job right. There is plenty of information on how to do house wiring correctly. It isn't rocket science after all.
I always thought that the profiles feature was in preparation for Netflix to introduce video games and porn. maybe they have finally decided that they will never offer games and porn, so they are now discontinuing the code base.
And this is why we can never expect the public school system to work. As long as there is a large portion of the population that believes that "academic institution shouldn't put academic achievement above everything else." schools will fail. Just to be clear, academic achievement is ALL that academic institutions should be concerned about.
That is a piece that most people miss. Not everyone cares about, or has a use for higher education. Here in the US, if you question most adults, you will find that they have what amounts to about a 7th grade education. Sure they have life experiences that go beyond that, but that is with stuff that is unrelated to school, so isn't relevant. It is not uncommon for adults not to be able to figure out percentages, to know what an adverb is, or be able to tell you the difference between a Democrat or a Republican ( I know, most of us smart asses would say that there isn't one. ) You would be amazed at the number of people that cannot even identify what party their current president and vice president belong to.
Given this, for most of the population, the last 5 years of school is a total and complete waste. So, not only are they being, for all intents and purposes, incarcerated, the rest of the students that DO want to learn, and Do have the aptitude to learn, are being dragged down by being held in the same facilities as those that don't. Having separate schools that will train those that are not going to get "a high school education" anyway (irrelevant as to what the diploma says) is at least a half step in the right direction.
You would have to be careful today, as they arrest students for saying that kind of stuff now.
Well, there is a bright side to public schools that hasn't been brought up yet. Gangs!
Your post points out why the public school system will never be fixed. You point fingers away from teachers and at other levels of the public education industry. The fact is, the public school system is broken on every level, and that includes teachers. Most of us knew who the good teachers were, and who the bad ones were when we were in school. At best, 20% of the teachers were actually good. 30% were actively bad, and the other half were just punching a time clock. Claiming that teachers are not a problem is simply untrue when only 20% could be counted as good. Irrelevent to whether you are in the 20% group or the 80% group.
This isn't to say that teachers are THE problem. The public schools are broken on every level.
Parents that use the public schools as an orphanage/daycare
Teachers that suck for various reasons
Teachers Unions who's business is to make sure that teachers always feel like they are being abused and taken advantage of
School administrators that siphon money into pet projects instead of education and create huge bureaucracies for personal gain
School boards that make poor choices for all sorts of personal reasons
State politicians that place crappy restrictions on the schools and teachers in an attempt to pander for votes (votes of the bad parents who are more concerned about having a daycare/orphanage to send their kids to than having their kids actually educated)
Federal politicians that do the same
All the way to the President of the United States, who referred to the smart kids as "The nerd patrol" in a nationally televised speech.
The problem is that every level does exactly what you did. They point out the other guy that is screwing up as a way to rationalize that their group isn't. Since the statement that the other guy is screwing up is true, many people are fooled by it. The problem is that because the public school system is broken on every level, fixing one or two would still not solve the problem.
Sorry, but the way you solve the problem of social promotion is not to screw the smart kids. You stop the problem of social promotion by just "STOP DOING THAT!" It is asinine to think that every kid is going to be able to be taught the same amount of information in 13 years. It's not even reasonable to expect every kid to learn the same amount in 1 year. Each year after that, the gap will grow.
NCLB IS social promotion. It is clearly a law that says no matter what resources have to be expended, we will not let any kid be more than 1 educational level below any other kid that is the same age.
The idea of putting the dumb students in with the smart students would likely work if we still had the one room school house, where you had every grade level from 1st through 12th all in the same room. Then the slow students would do the work with the younger kids, and the smart students would do the work with the older kids. Part of this whole problem stems from our extreme age segregation in the classrooms.
Seriously, if you are already going to be doing the teaching outside of the classroom, you should stop wasting your kids time and just home school. It would only take 2 or 3 hours of home schooling time to far out pace what your kid gets in an 8 hour day under the "No child get ahead" program. I know it is expensive to give up the free state run daycare, but good education often is expensive.
I think your sarcasm detector is off a little. The reason that 'Think of the children' is in quotes is because we all know that what it really means is pander for more votes.