Hitler was not a leftist. Just because the word socialist occurs in Nationalsozialismus doesn't mean that the Nazis were socialists. They were anti-communist, anti-collectivism, opposed to civil liberties and only promoted some very limited aspects of the social welfare state. Those aspects were the one collectivist aspect of fascism.
If you find yourself unconvinced by my few arguments, read the Wikipedia entry. It's not too bad, though it leaves out the influence on fascism of (Henry) Fordism and the eugenics movement (championed by Margaret Sanger, among many others). But, really, just because some guy writes a book about how the left is fascist doesn't mean it's true.
My wife is in tech support at a largish university (~30K students). Her work experience suggests that a significant proportion of the population, doesn't give a damn, wouldn't give one if it were provided free, and boggle at tasks like locating a thumb drive in the file manager. I think the idea that we can educate willful dolts is utopian at best.
Dorre, there are several thinkers who are onto the same idea as you. Sadly the only one I can remember this morning is Thomas Paine. Anyway, their basic argument generally goes along the lines of revealed religion is revealed in an unsharable experience. What Moses saw on the mountain has nothing to do with me because it wasn't revealed to me. You can see this as a product of of Enlightenment skepticism: anyone can claim revelation, but that anyone is your contaminant.
Stewart himself points out over and over again that TDS is comedy. Fox News bills itself as, well, news. Then again, why am I saying anything who says O'Reilly gives liberals a fair shake?
I use my cellphone to snap pix of the whiteboard or chalkboard after class so that students don't have to remember lists and diagrams. I also try to get classes (on some days, when it's appropriate) to help generate those lists and diagrams. So I'd much rather the attention be on creating and thinking rather than the note-taking. I try to do as much of that as I can for them, but of course that means some folks just zone out, thinking that my measly "screengrabs" will somehow take the place of applying brain to problem.
I was discussing the problems of being tired, distracted etc. with some students this semester when one of them volunteered that she'd done the math, and each class session cost her about $70. That made some eyes wide. I didn't, however, notice much of an impact on class sessions after that day.....
My students are current researching this issue for a paper. My wife is also studying in the field of education. So I think I have a few things to say. First, my dad retired as a teacher, and he was barely breaking $30k when he did. That was about ten years ago. Teachers in East Tennessee, good ones, well, some are making $35k, with an MA or MS. That's too little. Then again, I have a doctorate, with publications, and I'm making $32, teaching 116 students this semester. If I quit, I could be replaced right away with some other sucker. So maybe it's the same for K-12. Next thought. The education K-12 teachers get is a joke. Worse than a joke, complete crap. I've been in the education building, listened to the courses and the professors. I don't say this lightly: these are not the people you want teaching teachers. Fire them all. Burn the building. Salt the earth. Start over. No one should teach anything above 3rd grade without a BA/BS in that field. With an education minor. No one should be allowed to teach anything, nothing, with an education degree. No one should be allowed to teach teachers who has not taught in a classroom for 5-10 years. Period. Exclamation point. Another idea: how about some respect? In America, that means, in part money, but how about we laugh at any smug jerk who says "those who can do..."? How about we teach our kids to obey and respect teachers? (Of course, this will require clearing the unrespectable deadwood first.) Also, how about being able to actually fail kids, at least at the high school level? We should also teach how to govern one's emotions, require physical education, complete nutrition, and discipline. Finally, we should decouple school funding from the individual districts. Yep. If you're rich and you want your kids to have a special school, you'd better be able to ante up at the private school. Otherwise, one big pot per state, with a fat chunk of federal money. And no money for tons of computers and AV. One class on word processing and a few other things. Beyond that, chalk or white boards. Save the money. Read books; talk. The return on the vast expense for the computers and other rapidly-obsolete tech just isn't worth it right now.
Yes. I have colleagues who do the online teaching. One thing that goes missing is something like this: I'm in a lecture portion of class, setting up some ideas for discussion, I see a a few students starting to zone. So I insert an off-color or dumb joke, or stop at that point and ask a simple question, or just get up and move around. Students perk up, I proceed. In a classroom, you can actually see boredom, confusion, excitement, and so on.
And I'd like to offer a warning, too, about the promises of AV and remote education. In my experience, such systems have ALWAYS preceded an effort to reduce teaching staff. Teaching staff is the big expense. Even the most crummily-paid get $30k/yr for something around 120 students. If you can use tech to double that number of students, or triple it, miracles occur on the balance sheet. And the higher-ups always end up assuming that you can reduce the teachers because they still have this stupid idea that students are like machines you program by inserting data. And they desperately want bottom-line miracles so that they can build new parking lots, alumni halls, and give the dorms cable. Too frequently, then, something that could be really useful, these remote capacities and so on, ends up as just another way to take away students' opportunities to interact with the teacher. (Which is already low when you have a 100 or more students due to simple time constraints.)
If you want to do that, well, we've got a lot of people to hang, because pretty much everything presidents have done since 1947 has been unconstitutional, starting with executive orders founding the national security agencies, to executive orders themselves, to the rampant classification of documents used as a CYA tool.
Your capsule summary is way off. What about Dada? Futurism? Constructivism? Mondrian? Schwitters? None of these people or groups is doing quite what you claim for Modernism, yet they're all Modern. Then you have Postmodern people like Agnes Martin who are doing something like what you claim for the Moderns. The situation is far more complex and interesting than simple parody or a textbook glossary entry makes it appear. If you have time to check them out, Modern, PoMo, and contemporary plastic arts are pretty rewarding. And some of those "pretentious bullshit descriptions" can be pretty interesting and revelatory as well. The line about Modernism and universal ideals is almost fine for a sophomore college class, but it certainly ignores a wide, wide range of artists (and writers), and frankly that notion is highly politicized, emerging from the New Critics, Clement Greenberg, and Hugh Kenner. It's pretty dated.
I understand your position, but often underperforming or distracted students can change the atmosphere of an entire classroom. For example, a group giggling over a Digg item can distract several people, or make it difficult for several to hear. Frivolous or stupid questions, ones based in an adolescent desire to be cute or in a complete ignorance of the day's material, siphon away valuable class time. Keep in mind, too, that many faculty these days are untenured. I can't say to such students that they should be quiet, leave class, and so on. I can't even lower their participation grades without a threat to my livelihood. Our "performance" is evaluated on the the GPA of our courses and on "customer" satisfaction. Anyway, grumbling aside, the students' level of engagement changes radically from college to college. I previously taught at a Midwestern school and never imagined such problems. I'm now at a Southeastern school, and the students are frequently unprepared, frankly just lazy and complacent, and seem to regard university as something to coast through on the way to career that someone's just going to hand them on a plate. My points: a) if you don't understand why a faculty member complains about lazy students when you've never experienced them, it might because of a cultural difference in universities, and b) such students do detract from the learning of other students, if by no other avenue than soaking up faculty time that would be better offered to prepared and competent students.
I wish I had a fall-back like that. I can't tell you how hard it is to convey the need for a fall-back to my students who want to be the next great writer. They just can't understand--as I couldn't--that reality applies to them as well.
The Purdue Online Writing Lab has good resources. The old free edition of the Strunk and White is useful but olde-fashioned. You might also read "Politics and the English Language" by Orwell, flawed but useful.
There are many flaws in your assumptions. The first of which is that metal chassis protects you. You might do a search for a study that found that drivers of vehicles like SUVs are actually LESS safe because they FEEL more safe. This is based on data, and it's counterintuitive. And I'm sorry I don't have the link to the study for you.
Item One: I teach four classes a semester in English literature and composition at a major state university. I bring home 2,000/month. Anyone choosing such a career is an idiot. I'll confess: I'm an idiot. I have a doctorate degree, a nearly-complete book manuscript, published poems, published interviews with major poets, and a chapter in a forthcoming book of literary criticism. I can't get a better job. There are simply too many people with doctorates in English. We're all idiots. Item II: My dad was a HS teacher, and anyone who will take the sort of crap he did from parents for years and years is also an idiot. He worked very hard, grading, taking night classes for further certification. We were never able to live in a better neighborhood. People were shot in our back yard. Dad got death threats for failing a football player. Item C: my wife is getting an MS in instructional technology. A couple of women in one of her courses bragged about never having found it necessary to set foot in the university library. Item IV: during my first semester here at Big Football U., I had an honors student whose grammar was so bad that I could understand about one sentence in every three. Mind you, I also have training in English as a Second Language and how to recognize the signs of disability in writing, and this young woman was an intelligent native speaker, yet her writing was still like drunken Dada raving to me. I asked her what her about her family. Her dad is an English professor at Second Rate U. over in our state capitol. Awesome. Oh, P.S.: I was a National Merit Scholar and went to university on a full-ride academic scholarship and graduated cum laude. I have wasted my talent and potential trying to teach others. I am an idiot.
I tire of the “won’t someone think of the children” rhetoric. This article is complaining about “lock-down” on media devices, not on PCs. If I wanted to, it’s even easier to tinker with a Mac today than it was 20 years ago. I’ve got Terminal, AppleScript, Automator, and the Developer Tools. If I want to look at the sort of thing I used to need Resedit for, I just control click an application to show package contents. Sure, I don’t have much access to specific registers of memory, but I don’t really need that to do very exciting things because of the level of horsepower I have at hand on a modern machine. Getting upset over the “closedness” of the iPad or iPod is like getting cranky because you can’t write software for your TV. It’s a device for people who want to passively consume. They don’t even have the most basic input devices of keyboard and mouse. That right there shows you that they’re for consumers, not creators.
It's hard to ask this without seeming offensive. Isn't teaching fear of witches a form of abuse? What about teaching kids shame about sex? I know those are the parents' values, but aren't they abusive? My parents were bigots, serious bigots. I'm glad that I learned an alternative perspective in school. I'm considering home schooling kids myself because, well, the schools where I live aren't good enough. So I'm not hostile to home-schooling, but isn't there something to be said for children having input from adults other than their parents?
Also, since you know the family, why couldn't they find someone to examine their children? Or is it just they didn't want their children tested on knowledge of Islam, Buddhism, and so on? I have close family who are Germans, and I have a fair idea of the curriculum and how it was designed to head off the problems that cropped up there in the 30s. It's not draconian by any stretch.
I know the invention: reduce the number of students for which a student is responsible. Then he or she can interact more with the students. I need to get a patent on this process.
Question 1: Does consuming and/or displaying ANY product demonstrate "free-thinking"? Question 2: What the hell is free thinking and is it an intrinsically good thing?
Please note that this was a technical magnet school. Surely the principal of such a school should be able to make the most basic of calls, like "hmm, there's no ignition device." Or, at the very least, not wet himself the first time he sees a gadget with wires.
Um, my dad was a schoolteacher for 30 years, my mom a schoolboard member for 10. Based on the tales they told around the dinner table, it probably is stupidity. And I'll just add that my wife is pursuing a degree in instructional technology, so she takes classes with education people. In one class of graduate students two women were bragging about never having had to set foot in the library for their BAs. That's not just lazy; it's also stupid, failing to realize that the professor and half the class had just overlaid an "idiot" label on their faces. You might also stroll through an education department sometime at a major university. Those posters that look like children's junior high work? Those are graduate projects. And what really gets my goat is that most of these people are paid twice what doctorate-holding lecturers are paid at universities. And people with graduate degrees in biology, English, math, and so on aren't eligible to teach in high schools because they haven't taken those moronic education classes where you learn about "secret sharing" and how to make posters about Piaget's theories of development.... Anyone who can get a master's in anything other education could learn all that stuff in one semester-long class.
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Hitler was not a leftist. Just because the word socialist occurs in Nationalsozialismus doesn't mean that the Nazis were socialists. They were anti-communist, anti-collectivism, opposed to civil liberties and only promoted some very limited aspects of the social welfare state. Those aspects were the one collectivist aspect of fascism. If you find yourself unconvinced by my few arguments, read the Wikipedia entry. It's not too bad, though it leaves out the influence on fascism of (Henry) Fordism and the eugenics movement (championed by Margaret Sanger, among many others). But, really, just because some guy writes a book about how the left is fascist doesn't mean it's true.
My wife is in tech support at a largish university (~30K students). Her work experience suggests that a significant proportion of the population, doesn't give a damn, wouldn't give one if it were provided free, and boggle at tasks like locating a thumb drive in the file manager. I think the idea that we can educate willful dolts is utopian at best.
Dorre, there are several thinkers who are onto the same idea as you. Sadly the only one I can remember this morning is Thomas Paine. Anyway, their basic argument generally goes along the lines of revealed religion is revealed in an unsharable experience. What Moses saw on the mountain has nothing to do with me because it wasn't revealed to me. You can see this as a product of of Enlightenment skepticism: anyone can claim revelation, but that anyone is your contaminant.
Stewart himself points out over and over again that TDS is comedy. Fox News bills itself as, well, news. Then again, why am I saying anything who says O'Reilly gives liberals a fair shake?
I use my cellphone to snap pix of the whiteboard or chalkboard after class so that students don't have to remember lists and diagrams. I also try to get classes (on some days, when it's appropriate) to help generate those lists and diagrams. So I'd much rather the attention be on creating and thinking rather than the note-taking. I try to do as much of that as I can for them, but of course that means some folks just zone out, thinking that my measly "screengrabs" will somehow take the place of applying brain to problem.
I was discussing the problems of being tired, distracted etc. with some students this semester when one of them volunteered that she'd done the math, and each class session cost her about $70. That made some eyes wide. I didn't, however, notice much of an impact on class sessions after that day.....
My students are current researching this issue for a paper. My wife is also studying in the field of education. So I think I have a few things to say. First, my dad retired as a teacher, and he was barely breaking $30k when he did. That was about ten years ago. Teachers in East Tennessee, good ones, well, some are making $35k, with an MA or MS. That's too little. Then again, I have a doctorate, with publications, and I'm making $32, teaching 116 students this semester. If I quit, I could be replaced right away with some other sucker. So maybe it's the same for K-12. Next thought. The education K-12 teachers get is a joke. Worse than a joke, complete crap. I've been in the education building, listened to the courses and the professors. I don't say this lightly: these are not the people you want teaching teachers. Fire them all. Burn the building. Salt the earth. Start over. No one should teach anything above 3rd grade without a BA/BS in that field. With an education minor. No one should be allowed to teach anything, nothing, with an education degree. No one should be allowed to teach teachers who has not taught in a classroom for 5-10 years. Period. Exclamation point. Another idea: how about some respect? In America, that means, in part money, but how about we laugh at any smug jerk who says "those who can do..."? How about we teach our kids to obey and respect teachers? (Of course, this will require clearing the unrespectable deadwood first.) Also, how about being able to actually fail kids, at least at the high school level? We should also teach how to govern one's emotions, require physical education, complete nutrition, and discipline. Finally, we should decouple school funding from the individual districts. Yep. If you're rich and you want your kids to have a special school, you'd better be able to ante up at the private school. Otherwise, one big pot per state, with a fat chunk of federal money. And no money for tons of computers and AV. One class on word processing and a few other things. Beyond that, chalk or white boards. Save the money. Read books; talk. The return on the vast expense for the computers and other rapidly-obsolete tech just isn't worth it right now.
Yes. I have colleagues who do the online teaching. One thing that goes missing is something like this: I'm in a lecture portion of class, setting up some ideas for discussion, I see a a few students starting to zone. So I insert an off-color or dumb joke, or stop at that point and ask a simple question, or just get up and move around. Students perk up, I proceed. In a classroom, you can actually see boredom, confusion, excitement, and so on. And I'd like to offer a warning, too, about the promises of AV and remote education. In my experience, such systems have ALWAYS preceded an effort to reduce teaching staff. Teaching staff is the big expense. Even the most crummily-paid get $30k/yr for something around 120 students. If you can use tech to double that number of students, or triple it, miracles occur on the balance sheet. And the higher-ups always end up assuming that you can reduce the teachers because they still have this stupid idea that students are like machines you program by inserting data. And they desperately want bottom-line miracles so that they can build new parking lots, alumni halls, and give the dorms cable. Too frequently, then, something that could be really useful, these remote capacities and so on, ends up as just another way to take away students' opportunities to interact with the teacher. (Which is already low when you have a 100 or more students due to simple time constraints.)
If you want to do that, well, we've got a lot of people to hang, because pretty much everything presidents have done since 1947 has been unconstitutional, starting with executive orders founding the national security agencies, to executive orders themselves, to the rampant classification of documents used as a CYA tool.
Your capsule summary is way off. What about Dada? Futurism? Constructivism? Mondrian? Schwitters? None of these people or groups is doing quite what you claim for Modernism, yet they're all Modern. Then you have Postmodern people like Agnes Martin who are doing something like what you claim for the Moderns. The situation is far more complex and interesting than simple parody or a textbook glossary entry makes it appear. If you have time to check them out, Modern, PoMo, and contemporary plastic arts are pretty rewarding. And some of those "pretentious bullshit descriptions" can be pretty interesting and revelatory as well. The line about Modernism and universal ideals is almost fine for a sophomore college class, but it certainly ignores a wide, wide range of artists (and writers), and frankly that notion is highly politicized, emerging from the New Critics, Clement Greenberg, and Hugh Kenner. It's pretty dated.
I understand your position, but often underperforming or distracted students can change the atmosphere of an entire classroom. For example, a group giggling over a Digg item can distract several people, or make it difficult for several to hear. Frivolous or stupid questions, ones based in an adolescent desire to be cute or in a complete ignorance of the day's material, siphon away valuable class time. Keep in mind, too, that many faculty these days are untenured. I can't say to such students that they should be quiet, leave class, and so on. I can't even lower their participation grades without a threat to my livelihood. Our "performance" is evaluated on the the GPA of our courses and on "customer" satisfaction. Anyway, grumbling aside, the students' level of engagement changes radically from college to college. I previously taught at a Midwestern school and never imagined such problems. I'm now at a Southeastern school, and the students are frequently unprepared, frankly just lazy and complacent, and seem to regard university as something to coast through on the way to career that someone's just going to hand them on a plate. My points: a) if you don't understand why a faculty member complains about lazy students when you've never experienced them, it might because of a cultural difference in universities, and b) such students do detract from the learning of other students, if by no other avenue than soaking up faculty time that would be better offered to prepared and competent students.
You are my dream student. Way to go!
Yes. I did realize that.
I wish I had a fall-back like that. I can't tell you how hard it is to convey the need for a fall-back to my students who want to be the next great writer. They just can't understand--as I couldn't--that reality applies to them as well.
The Purdue Online Writing Lab has good resources. The old free edition of the Strunk and White is useful but olde-fashioned. You might also read "Politics and the English Language" by Orwell, flawed but useful.
There are many flaws in your assumptions. The first of which is that metal chassis protects you. You might do a search for a study that found that drivers of vehicles like SUVs are actually LESS safe because they FEEL more safe. This is based on data, and it's counterintuitive. And I'm sorry I don't have the link to the study for you.
If you ever meet an editor ask him, or her, what the pay's like. The answer will be something like "nothing plus a little bit."
Item One: I teach four classes a semester in English literature and composition at a major state university. I bring home 2,000/month. Anyone choosing such a career is an idiot. I'll confess: I'm an idiot. I have a doctorate degree, a nearly-complete book manuscript, published poems, published interviews with major poets, and a chapter in a forthcoming book of literary criticism. I can't get a better job. There are simply too many people with doctorates in English. We're all idiots. Item II: My dad was a HS teacher, and anyone who will take the sort of crap he did from parents for years and years is also an idiot. He worked very hard, grading, taking night classes for further certification. We were never able to live in a better neighborhood. People were shot in our back yard. Dad got death threats for failing a football player. Item C: my wife is getting an MS in instructional technology. A couple of women in one of her courses bragged about never having found it necessary to set foot in the university library. Item IV: during my first semester here at Big Football U., I had an honors student whose grammar was so bad that I could understand about one sentence in every three. Mind you, I also have training in English as a Second Language and how to recognize the signs of disability in writing, and this young woman was an intelligent native speaker, yet her writing was still like drunken Dada raving to me. I asked her what her about her family. Her dad is an English professor at Second Rate U. over in our state capitol. Awesome. Oh, P.S.: I was a National Merit Scholar and went to university on a full-ride academic scholarship and graduated cum laude. I have wasted my talent and potential trying to teach others. I am an idiot.
I tire of the “won’t someone think of the children” rhetoric. This article is complaining about “lock-down” on media devices, not on PCs. If I wanted to, it’s even easier to tinker with a Mac today than it was 20 years ago. I’ve got Terminal, AppleScript, Automator, and the Developer Tools. If I want to look at the sort of thing I used to need Resedit for, I just control click an application to show package contents. Sure, I don’t have much access to specific registers of memory, but I don’t really need that to do very exciting things because of the level of horsepower I have at hand on a modern machine. Getting upset over the “closedness” of the iPad or iPod is like getting cranky because you can’t write software for your TV. It’s a device for people who want to passively consume. They don’t even have the most basic input devices of keyboard and mouse. That right there shows you that they’re for consumers, not creators.
It's hard to ask this without seeming offensive. Isn't teaching fear of witches a form of abuse? What about teaching kids shame about sex? I know those are the parents' values, but aren't they abusive? My parents were bigots, serious bigots. I'm glad that I learned an alternative perspective in school. I'm considering home schooling kids myself because, well, the schools where I live aren't good enough. So I'm not hostile to home-schooling, but isn't there something to be said for children having input from adults other than their parents? Also, since you know the family, why couldn't they find someone to examine their children? Or is it just they didn't want their children tested on knowledge of Islam, Buddhism, and so on? I have close family who are Germans, and I have a fair idea of the curriculum and how it was designed to head off the problems that cropped up there in the 30s. It's not draconian by any stretch.
You do know that those are teachers hired to write the textbooks, right? In some cases, sad. But still true.
I know the invention: reduce the number of students for which a student is responsible. Then he or she can interact more with the students. I need to get a patent on this process.
Question 1: Does consuming and/or displaying ANY product demonstrate "free-thinking"? Question 2: What the hell is free thinking and is it an intrinsically good thing?
Please note that this was a technical magnet school. Surely the principal of such a school should be able to make the most basic of calls, like "hmm, there's no ignition device." Or, at the very least, not wet himself the first time he sees a gadget with wires.
Um, my dad was a schoolteacher for 30 years, my mom a schoolboard member for 10. Based on the tales they told around the dinner table, it probably is stupidity. And I'll just add that my wife is pursuing a degree in instructional technology, so she takes classes with education people. In one class of graduate students two women were bragging about never having had to set foot in the library for their BAs. That's not just lazy; it's also stupid, failing to realize that the professor and half the class had just overlaid an "idiot" label on their faces. You might also stroll through an education department sometime at a major university. Those posters that look like children's junior high work? Those are graduate projects. And what really gets my goat is that most of these people are paid twice what doctorate-holding lecturers are paid at universities. And people with graduate degrees in biology, English, math, and so on aren't eligible to teach in high schools because they haven't taken those moronic education classes where you learn about "secret sharing" and how to make posters about Piaget's theories of development.... Anyone who can get a master's in anything other education could learn all that stuff in one semester-long class.