No. This is what teachers do. I know - mea culpa.
Summarised from
http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
Where you can find the complete text.
by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.
In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too.
I cannot help but be reminded by what Alberto Moravio said:
"The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write."
Alberto Moravia, The Observer, 1979
and while we're on the subject of Italians, let's never forget that Gore Vidal advised allowing the Bible Belt to teach fundamentalism and creationism on the basis that they would disappear within two generations. Galileo could happily remain under house arrest in Florence while seafarers sucessfully discarded charts based on Ptolemaic systems and navigated the Earth using Galilean methods. Why was Britain so succesful during the industrial revolution? It never allowed religion or ignorance to get in the way of making money using science.
Having read this I have decided to go ahead with an install on a old server I will be using on Monday morning. I admit I am going to stuff it full with Suse 10.2 bloat. The Joy! Oops! Managed to make a choice from one of the 7000 distros. On reflection, I could bring out my own distro... (sounds of mouse squeaking up to the Wikipedia search bar)
This news report is new and the experiment was conducted recently but because the information travelled back in time we all had to wait six years to read - hence the date!
Cool. The Voyage Home next and then First Contact!
The National Socialists specifically intended to replace all religion especially Christianity with a tailor-made version of pseudo-paganism where they would have greater control over the moral and ethical issues - so hardly atheist.
Stalinism had little differnce from any of the multitude of emperors in history who substitute a cult of their own personality for that of the established religion. Stalinism had its own holy trinity of Marx, Engels and Lenin Das Kapital (or possibly Third Plenary Session of The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics agenda!) was the bible, Father Stalin himself was Marx's sole representative on Earth and the purges and terror of Stalinism have their analogue in the Inquisition. There is a reasonable amount of evidence that Stalin became more Orthodox as he grew older or at times of his greatest insecurity. When Barbarosa began, Soviet citizens were quietly permitted to return to the churches.
Dare I mention the remarkable similarity between Karl Marx and Classical representations of God, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted by Michelangelo for example
One of the most cost effective ways of recruiting if you are a start up or a small business is to have students on a work experience program. For millions of European students this is an essential part of their university course and you have access to some very enthuisastic and intelligent people. Sure you have to hold their hand a little bit but they aren't on the payroll. If you tell them, they will come. The can work from three weeks to six months, and all you have to worry about is accommodation and some living allowance.
Hanging around waiting for Sow Joan on a Sunday.
She's never early,
she's always late,
the first thing you learn is you always have to wait...
Damn you turnips! Damn you all to
Understanding what the German attitude to games censorship requires a certain amount of anthropological observation. Germany is a society concerned with avoiding responsibility for negative things and constantly obsessing about the future. The need to be correct is overpowering and results in the often amusing three-minute lectures that student frequently provide in answer to a simple questions. A student's question is often not a question at all but simply a mini-lecture. Contrast this with the primary need of the English speaker to be polite and respectful.
The range of skill sets within any area of society (commerce, academia public service) is very narrow and there is less of the eclecticism common in English speaking countries. It is not unusual therefore, for people to rely heavily on "experts" to provide the necessary decision making information. Decision making is a process fraught with difficulty for the individual in German society. It is not unusual for the entire family to be involved in buying a car and for the process to be a long drawn out activity. My mother in law spent over a week "buying" a VW van whilst I took about 26 seconds to buy a new Toyota - behaviour regarded with incredulity here.
The excitement about games is a combination of a number of things including the most elderly population in Europe, moribund political arena and fear of being wrong. The model of television and print media is again very different from that of English speaking countries: The Janet Jackson Superbowl boob is fine example. In the US media, they pixelated her entire chest area. On the BBC they simply showed the clip uncensored and on German television they digitally zoomed in on the nipple. Germans find the Superbowl fiasco hilarious. Two American colleagues felt uncomfortable when I showed The English Patient in class - apparently it had some scenes of a sexual nature (Juliette Binoche washes her hair in the shower!)
At about 11 am every day most TV shows have some sequence with men's naked bums in shot (I have no idea why! They're not attractive!) and from 5:45 pm to about 6:30 pm news magazine shows often find some reason to have bare breasts on show. German newspapers don't have a page three - they have a page one. Sex is not anything anyone is at all concerned with and sexual attitudes are almost completely liberal, the sex industry is legal and subject to state regulations (the local brothel is opposite the supermarket next to the DIY store, a concept that always makes me smile).
Germans however are very concerned about the depiction of violence and have a rating system for games and DVD's and other media based on the American Hays Code known as Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft or FSK. This rating system is voluntary and self-regulating and was deliberately intended to remove the state from the control of censorship after 1945. Gore fest movies are rated as Keine Jugendfreigabe (not for under 18's)
Violence in games is or was a big issue when some nut job who shot up a school was found to be a Counter Strike fan. and blaming all of this on that keeps things nice and simple.
Don't imagine for a moment that any of this self regulation is regarded as sinister or anti-democratic it isn't, it is thought of as a sensible approach to creating a healthy environment for children.
Some points about the war. Anyone who was 18 at the end of the war would be 80 years old today. Most of the area where I live in Germany lost 75% of the buildings and population so most of the Germans here are new, born after the war and a significant proportion are about as German as me. Here we celebrate the German resistance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance
Finally it is all rather hyped-up to be honest. A survey of my computing students put Counter-Strike near the top of their favourites but not as high as anything with a Ferrari in it. My German copy of Panzer Elite Action Field
Aren't we officially calling The Wikipedia "TSPWSATU" - The Site Popular With Students And the Unemployed? You could run a small city from the electricity used to edit the slashdot entry. Number one coffee table asset and origin of the verb To Wiki. A student once submitted an assignment to me which consisted of the entire text of the wikipedia entry on tea. Including links. The student was very surprised to be awarded zero. Even asked me if they could re-submit it!
business model does not involve producing medicines to cure illness and disease. It is engaged in the research and development of drugs which will be used to treat acute conditions over a long period that produce vast profits. This is why there has been no development by any Pharmaceutical company of a new anti-bacterial agent. The American Military almost single-handedly worked on strategies to tackle the problem of malaria and the development of the antibiotic pencillin, was conceived as having a strategic advantage during WWII when the very first batch of it was used to treat soldiers with STD's and almost instantly restored them to full battle readiness. The Pharmaceutical industry has a long history of encouraging people to believe that they research cures - the truth is that they do not. A very large part of the industry produces belief-based products such as homeopathy. The barriers constructed through the patenting of medicines creates an artificial market where the cost/benefits and profits are found in the sole ownership of something really essential - such as sildenafil citrate. Compare this to the amount of effort that went into not mentioning the fact that in 1979 two Australian doctors, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall re-discovered(!) the cause and treatment of stomach ulcers was a) the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, and b) low cost generic anti-biotics.
lot of us simply enjoy coffee because we like the taste. YouTube is a new media in what we all consider our sphere of interest and when organisations such as Oxfam, a dreary bunch of well-intentioned old farts and Starbucks, a dreary bunch of self-interested old capitalist farts hold a mini-deathmatch it is a marvellous opportunity for us all to indulge in another of our favourite activities - review - critical, reasoned or otherwise. Pretty much the foundation of the democratic process, which of course is a good thing or we wouldn't all read it.
On the critical judgement side, while my family and friends are happy to queue for hours, or swim through a trench filled with snot and vomit to get a cup of the old two-tailed mermaid's brew, I don't particularly like it. This is because I drink it black without sweetener and I can tell that a cup of coffee from any of the other fast food chains is slightly more palatable.
Starbucks obsession with daft trademarked adjectives is also amusing particulary since I live in mainland Europe and the difference is not immediately apparent to the staff who's first language is not necessarily that of Starbucks Standard English. Their coffee reminds me of that old standard of travellers - British Rail Tea, a beverage infamous because it could not be distinguished from British Rail Coffee or British Rail Beef Tea.
Slashdot Mirror
would like to welcome our new, improved, prosumer-friendly, linux-powered, intel-device sort-of-pda-thingy, finger-friendly overlords.
No. This is what teachers do. I know - mea culpa. Summarised from http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html Where you can find the complete text. by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation, competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single percentage point -- how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.
In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too.
I cannot help but be reminded by what Alberto Moravio said:
"The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write."
Alberto Moravia, The Observer, 1979
and while we're on the subject of Italians, let's never forget that Gore Vidal advised allowing the Bible Belt to teach fundamentalism and creationism on the basis that they would disappear within two generations.
Galileo could happily remain under house arrest in Florence while seafarers sucessfully discarded charts based on Ptolemaic systems and navigated the Earth using Galilean methods.
Why was Britain so succesful during the industrial revolution? It never allowed religion or ignorance to get in the way of making money using science.
Apparently the correct term for this (according to University Challenge, broadcast 19th March BBC2) is: Rainbow Coalition.
http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/ so much that they have declared war on Sony?
Having read this I have decided to go ahead with an install on a old server I will be using on Monday morning. I admit I am going to stuff it full with Suse 10.2 bloat. The Joy! Oops! Managed to make a choice from one of the 7000 distros. On reflection, I could bring out my own distro... (sounds of mouse squeaking up to the Wikipedia search bar)
This news report is new and the experiment was conducted recently but because the information travelled back in time we all had to wait six years to read - hence the date!
Cool. The Voyage Home next and then First Contact!
The National Socialists specifically intended to replace all religion especially Christianity with a tailor-made version of pseudo-paganism where they would have greater control over the moral and ethical issues - so hardly atheist. Stalinism had little differnce from any of the multitude of emperors in history who substitute a cult of their own personality for that of the established religion. Stalinism had its own holy trinity of Marx, Engels and Lenin Das Kapital (or possibly Third Plenary Session of The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics agenda!) was the bible, Father Stalin himself was Marx's sole representative on Earth and the purges and terror of Stalinism have their analogue in the Inquisition. There is a reasonable amount of evidence that Stalin became more Orthodox as he grew older or at times of his greatest insecurity. When Barbarosa began, Soviet citizens were quietly permitted to return to the churches. Dare I mention the remarkable similarity between Karl Marx and Classical representations of God, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted by Michelangelo for example
Release the flying monk... Oh well, back to the drawing board.
One of the most cost effective ways of recruiting if you are a start up or a small business is to have students on a work experience program. For millions of European students this is an essential part of their university course and you have access to some very enthuisastic and intelligent people. Sure you have to hold their hand a little bit but they aren't on the payroll. If you tell them, they will come. The can work from three weeks to six months, and all you have to worry about is accommodation and some living allowance.
Hanging around waiting for Sow Joan on a Sunday.
She's never early,
she's always late,
the first thing you learn is you always have to wait...
Damn you turnips! Damn you all to
Understanding what the German attitude to games censorship requires a certain amount of anthropological observation. Germany is a society concerned with avoiding responsibility for negative things and constantly obsessing about the future. The need to be correct is overpowering and results in the often amusing three-minute lectures that student frequently provide in answer to a simple questions. A student's question is often not a question at all but simply a mini-lecture. Contrast this with the primary need of the English speaker to be polite and respectful.
The range of skill sets within any area of society (commerce, academia public service) is very narrow and there is less of the eclecticism common in English speaking countries. It is not unusual therefore, for people to rely heavily on "experts" to provide the necessary decision making information. Decision making is a process fraught with difficulty for the individual in German society. It is not unusual for the entire family to be involved in buying a car and for the process to be a long drawn out activity. My mother in law spent over a week "buying" a VW van whilst I took about 26 seconds to buy a new Toyota - behaviour regarded with incredulity here.
The excitement about games is a combination of a number of things including the most elderly population in Europe, moribund political arena and fear of being wrong. The model of television and print media is again very different from that of English speaking countries: The Janet Jackson Superbowl boob is fine example. In the US media, they pixelated her entire chest area. On the BBC they simply showed the clip uncensored and on German television they digitally zoomed in on the nipple. Germans find the Superbowl fiasco hilarious. Two American colleagues felt uncomfortable when I showed The English Patient in class - apparently it had some scenes of a sexual nature (Juliette Binoche washes her hair in the shower!)
At about 11 am every day most TV shows have some sequence with men's naked bums in shot (I have no idea why! They're not attractive!) and from 5:45 pm to about 6:30 pm news magazine shows often find some reason to have bare breasts on show. German newspapers don't have a page three - they have a page one. Sex is not anything anyone is at all concerned with and sexual attitudes are almost completely liberal, the sex industry is legal and subject to state regulations (the local brothel is opposite the supermarket next to the DIY store, a concept that always makes me smile).
Germans however are very concerned about the depiction of violence and have a rating system for games and DVD's and other media based on the American Hays Code known as Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft or FSK. This rating system is voluntary and self-regulating and was deliberately intended to remove the state from the control of censorship after 1945. Gore fest movies are rated as Keine Jugendfreigabe (not for under 18's)
Violence in games is or was a big issue when some nut job who shot up a school was found to be a Counter Strike fan. and blaming all of this on that keeps things nice and simple.
Don't imagine for a moment that any of this self regulation is regarded as sinister or anti-democratic it isn't, it is thought of as a sensible approach to creating a healthy environment for children.
Some points about the war. Anyone who was 18 at the end of the war would be 80 years old today. Most of the area where I live in Germany lost 75% of the buildings and population so most of the Germans here are new, born after the war and a significant proportion are about as German as me. Here we celebrate the German resistance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_resistance
Finally it is all rather hyped-up to be honest. A survey of my computing students put Counter-Strike near the top of their favourites but not as high as anything with a Ferrari in it. My German copy of Panzer Elite Action Field
they can get a beer at McDonalds and almost all of the girls at their schools are French.
Aren't we officially calling The Wikipedia "TSPWSATU" - The Site Popular With Students And the Unemployed? You could run a small city from the electricity used to edit the slashdot entry. Number one coffee table asset and origin of the verb To Wiki. A student once submitted an assignment to me which consisted of the entire text of the wikipedia entry on tea. Including links. The student was very surprised to be awarded zero. Even asked me if they could re-submit it!
business model does not involve producing medicines to cure illness and disease. It is engaged in the research and development of drugs which will be used to treat acute conditions over a long period that produce vast profits. This is why there has been no development by any Pharmaceutical company of a new anti-bacterial agent. The American Military almost single-handedly worked on strategies to tackle the problem of malaria and the development of the antibiotic pencillin, was conceived as having a strategic advantage during WWII when the very first batch of it was used to treat soldiers with STD's and almost instantly restored them to full battle readiness. The Pharmaceutical industry has a long history of encouraging people to believe that they research cures - the truth is that they do not. A very large part of the industry produces belief-based products such as homeopathy. The barriers constructed through the patenting of medicines creates an artificial market where the cost/benefits and profits are found in the sole ownership of something really essential - such as sildenafil citrate. Compare this to the amount of effort that went into not mentioning the fact that in 1979 two Australian doctors, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall re-discovered(!) the cause and treatment of stomach ulcers was a) the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, and b) low cost generic anti-biotics.
lot of us simply enjoy coffee because we like the taste. YouTube is a new media in what we all consider our sphere of interest and when organisations such as Oxfam, a dreary bunch of well-intentioned old farts and Starbucks, a dreary bunch of self-interested old capitalist farts hold a mini-deathmatch it is a marvellous opportunity for us all to indulge in another of our favourite activities - review - critical, reasoned or otherwise. Pretty much the foundation of the democratic process, which of course is a good thing or we wouldn't all read it. On the critical judgement side, while my family and friends are happy to queue for hours, or swim through a trench filled with snot and vomit to get a cup of the old two-tailed mermaid's brew, I don't particularly like it. This is because I drink it black without sweetener and I can tell that a cup of coffee from any of the other fast food chains is slightly more palatable. Starbucks obsession with daft trademarked adjectives is also amusing particulary since I live in mainland Europe and the difference is not immediately apparent to the staff who's first language is not necessarily that of Starbucks Standard English. Their coffee reminds me of that old standard of travellers - British Rail Tea, a beverage infamous because it could not be distinguished from British Rail Coffee or British Rail Beef Tea.
wish to be the first to welcome our new, giant diesel engine overlords...
Canadians were of course the very first people to have satellite television transmissions. So it's not just about beer.