You morans need go to collage
One of my phaves.
Wot, that's an innocent one that spell check won't catch. Go easy.
One of my phaves.
Wot, that's an innocent one that spell check won't catch. Go easy.
That's one of the main reasons that public education was established. But they didn't teach us that back in our school days.
Well, to sum things up, a couple of years after that party, I found out that that kid wound up on the wrong side of the law.
A friend sent me an email about it, and included the rap sheet including photo of the kid.
Seems he was stopped for speeding in Georgia, and had drugs in his car.
His mother had died years before my party, he inherited her estate, and blew it away on frivolis crap while enjoying "the fast lane" part of life.
Sad.... but so common.
Since at least the times of Plato, Socrates and Herodotus the old have been tsk, tsk, tsking over the young, their slip-slide into mediocrity and their corruption by the new things that the old didn't have to in their youth. My great grandparents were undoubtedly convinced that the telegraph and the locomotive were ruining their children, who were sure that the telephone, radio and automobiles were ruining their children, who were convinced that television was ruining their children, etc, etc, etc. It is folly to imagine that we are the last generation of human beings driving progress and a better future...it has always been so. The young are always wastrels and yet we continue to move forward. It is difficult to be objective about those who inherit the Earth while we prepare to be buried in it.
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No doubt, but the answer is simple: look at the data, not the emotions. Use the scientific method, rather than old wives tales and tea-leaf readings.
For example: there are standardized exams in more than one country that haven't changed in many decades, and statistical data is available on student performance over that entire period of time.
One such study I read - from the UK - summarized their results by saying that the median high-school graduate - at the time the study was conducted - had a functional IQ 25 points below the median student of 25 years earlier.
That conclusion was sufficiently controversial for the study to very quickly disappear off the Internet. However the objective data remains: median student scores were indeed far lower, on the same assessment exam, as the scores of students from twenty-five years earlier.
-Gnobuddy
The caricature always focuses on the long tail at the wrong end of the distribution. I spent the day today with my niece who is almost 40 and my great niece who is 12. My niece has 5 kids who are all sharp, disciplined and fun to be with, there is no way I could have handled her responsibilities at her age. My great niece has a smartphone and uses it responsibly. Imagining that the idiots eating Tide pods on You Tube are representative of their cohort is a serious mistake.
The reports involve a 0.5amp phone charger causing a 15amp or 20amp outlet to burn itself and sometimes the wall.
If those reports are true then we have an emergency.
As far as the kids go, well just remember some of what we did. Sure would be nice if we weren't doing it now. But, last week, I got ahold of the bean pot and the sink at the same time. Still finding beans. So, don't blame the kids.
If those reports are true then we have an emergency.
As far as the kids go, well just remember some of what we did. Sure would be nice if we weren't doing it now. But, last week, I got ahold of the bean pot and the sink at the same time. Still finding beans. So, don't blame the kids.
A possible explanation is that traditional measures of intelligence, such as the IQ test, might be outmoded in today's fast-paced world of constant technological change.
As time changes and youngsters are exposed to different intellectual experiences, such as changes in the use of technology, for example social media, the way intelligence is expressed also changes. Educational methods need to adapt to such changes.
IQ scores are falling and have been for decades - CNN
All readily available on Amazon. Saltpeter is good for plants. Sulfur powder is a diet supplement but you can buy bulk. Powdered aluminum is also sold in bags. I don't want to keep "shopping" or I'll be flooded with ads for nastier stuff.
Very interesting. Thanks for that link!
Here's another interesting article to look at; the methodology used to gather the data isn't described at all, and the conclusions may have been based on self-reported data (a method that is easy, but also known to be unreliable): UK 'has never been more addicted to smartphones' - BBC News
-Gnobuddy
Part of the decline in standardized test scores is the overcrowding in schools, multiple languages being spoken, and less than average teacher training. The education in any particular subject that my daughter received in high school in the late 90's was far less than what I got in the same classes and grade level in the late 60's, and I went to a rather lousy school.
Anyone that really wants to blow something up will have no problems finding materials and instructions. Big "firecrackers" can be made with nothing more than a few boxes of "strike anywhere" matches, a cardboard toilet paper tube, and lots of newspaper and Elmers glue for wrapping.....or some reinforced package tape.
It's pretty easy to pick up a box or two of shotgun shells at Walmart, take them apart and dump out the powder......ditto .22's
I found it far easier just to go to the local "hunting outfitter" and buy a large can of black powder, or Pyrodex ($20 /Lb at Cabelas)..….some "kids" never grow up.
The emotional coefficient is much more important for human happiness than the intellectual coefficient.
The problem with us, those of us who are rational "in extremis", is that we deliver power to the patients of various pathologies.
And they run the world. Young people are always victims of adults, and if you don't believe it, tell me why they go to war, not the old ones.
For physical strength? No, because they are easier for them not to resist, since they are already manipulated from birth.
They are the "crazy with a card" are those who have "the pan for the handle" as J.M.Serrat sang
An enlightening book:
Emotional intelligence - Wikipedia
YouTube
A server,
Joan Manuel Serrat,
married, of legal age,
neighbor of Camprodón, Girona,
son of Ángeles and Josep,
by profession singer
and natural of Barcelona,
according to work
in the Civil Registry,
today, Monday, April 20, 1981
with the forces at your disposal
Sincerely EXHIBIT
two points
That apples don't smell
that nobody knows the neighbor,
that the old people are separated
After having served us well.
That the sea is dying
that there is no one who trusts his brother,
that the earth fell into hands
Some crazy people with a card.
That the world is toll and experimental,
Everything is disposable and provisional.
That the accounts don't come out,
that the reforms never end,
that we are always late,
Where nothing ever happens.
Therefore
and many more deficiencies,
that in an annex are specified,
without it serving as precedent,
Respectfully
APPEAL
Please take action
and call those bunglers to order,
that leave everything lost
on behalf of the staff.
But do it urgently
so that they are not necessary,
more heroes or more miracles
to improve the premises.
There is no other time than the one who has "touched" us,
clarify who is in charge and who is the "mandao".
And if he didn't have in his hand
stop such excesses,
send them copy a hundred times
"These things are not done".
Grace you expect to deserve
from the straight proceed,
who is not usually called a hoax,
Whom God keeps many years.
A server,
Joan Manuel Serrat,
married, of legal age,
neighbor of Camprodón, Girona,
son of Ángeles and Josep,
by profession singer
and natural of Barcelona,
according to work
in the Civil Registry,
today, Monday, April 20, 1981
with the forces at your disposal
Sincerely EXHIBIT
two points
That apples don't smell
that nobody knows the neighbor,
that the old people are separated
After having served us well.
That the sea is dying
that there is no one who trusts his brother,
that the earth fell into hands
Some crazy people with a card.
That the world is toll and experimental,
Everything is disposable and provisional.
That the accounts don't come out,
that the reforms never end,
that we are always late,
Where nothing ever happens.
Therefore
and many more deficiencies,
that in an annex are specified,
without it serving as precedent,
Respectfully
APPEAL
Please take action
and call those bunglers to order,
that leave everything lost
on behalf of the staff.
But do it urgently
so that they are not necessary,
more heroes or more miracles
to improve the premises.
There is no other time than the one who has "touched" us,
clarify who is in charge and who is the "mandao".
And if he didn't have in his hand
stop such excesses,
send them copy a hundred times
"These things are not done".
Grace you expect to deserve
from the straight proceed,
who is not usually called a hoax,
Whom God keeps many years.
Looking from the other side of that divide, my wife taught in the Los Angeles public school system for many years. The majority of her students came from broken homes, often showing up at school without even having had any breakfast at home.
Most of the time, there was one single overworked, exhausted, undereducated parent in the picture, who rarely if ever asked her child if there was homework due, or was able to give any help or direction to her child with the kids schoolwork. Education wasn't a priority at home, and not surprisingly, few of the kids took it seriously, either.
Constantly worsening student performance led to steady increases in the amount of coursework needed to obtain a valid teaching credential in California. Teachers, in actuality, are having to get more and more training before they are considered qualified to teach in the public K12 system, at least in California.
Meantime, the typical student's ability and willingness to learn was steadily decreasing, so that many teachers were exhausted from the perpetual struggle that felt like trying to roll rocks uphill all day, every day. There was a steady increase in the percentage of students with learning disabilities and/or various degrees of autism, too. ( The Ongoing Rise in Autism: What in the World Is Going On? | Psychology Today Canada )
In my wife's classes, there were a small minority of students that excelled, winning city, county, state and even national awards in the subjects that my wife and her departmental colleagues taught. Yet, the average student's performance was depressingly poor. It was pretty clear that those who were able to study were getting all they needed from their teachers to excel - but the many students who were either uninterested, or struggling with a plethora of learning disabilities, were not.
This is absolutely true. The question is, why is this happening (the process is still ongoing)?
I taught the same group of six or seven courses at the same junior college for fourteen years. During that time, the ability of my students to learn and retain the material declined steadily, so that I repeatedly had to eliminate portions of the course content, and simplify what was left, so that at least some students would be able to pass.
When I eventually quit that job to move to Canada, I looked back over my lecture materials, and found that over a period of fourteen years I had been forced to eliminate about half of my course material - that's how much my average student's ability to learn and retain material had declined.
Regardless of the year, approximately ten percent - typically three to four students out of a class of 35 - of my students had what I would consider normal or better learning ability, which means they could learn two to three times as much material as their classmates in the same time, and at a deeper level. I used to offer these students the chance to do independent study, giving them additional learning resources and additional lab and self-study projects, and helping them as they went along, so that they were not held back by the glacial learning abilities of the majority of their classmates.
This usually doubled or tripled my already heavy teaching workload, but I could not stand the alternative, which was to have the few capable students wasting their time and intellectual abilities.
For those of you who have not taught in the public education system, consider these statistics. I had about a hundred to a hundred and fifty students during the average semester, and five hours of scheduled office / conference time when I was available to help my students one-on-one. Five hours is only 300 minutes, so it only takes a moment to compute that I had, on average, TWO MINUTES of time per student for one-on-one help.
If I'd only had five struggling students, there would have been no problem - I could give each one an hour of one-on-one help a week, and bring them up to speed. But when I had a hundred struggling students, I now only had an average of three minutes per student per week to help them - and this was completely inadequate. I always ended up putting in far more than the required five hours per week of office hours / conference hours, unpaid for my time, but it was never enough to help all the students who needed it.
(How many minutes a week of help does a student need who cannot even read a ruler by age 18? I stopped teaching the precision/accuracy lecture/lab when about half my young adult students became unable to measure the diameter of a finger-sized aluminum rod with a common ruler, mistaking 0.4 inches for 4 inches.)
And my wife? Teaching in the K12 system, she had typically about two hundred different students a week in her classes. And K-12 teachers do not have any conference hours / office hours scheduled into their working day - they are only paid for the hours they actually teach, and maybe one additional hour of prep time per day, which is usually spent doing mandatory paperwork such as daily attendance reports and grading.
Like most public schools, classes ran for approximately 8 hours a day, five days a week, so about 40 hours total. A teacher's work is never finished, but many teachers gave up as many as four or five unpaid hours a week to help their struggling students. But with 200 struggling students apiece, even working for four unpaid additional hours every week still only allows you an average of 72 seconds per student.
With the best will in the world, then, a public school student in Los Angeles is unlikely to be able to get more than a few minutes per week of individual, one-on-one help from his/her terribly overworked teacher. The rest of the help is going to have to come from parents and family, as it always has. Parents have to do the work of parents; the teacher can't do the job of both teaching and parenting the two hundred students she's dealing with, and it's absurd to believe otherwise.
-Gnobuddy
The real question in my mind is why people place so much emphasis on standardized testing. In my opinion (and I'm definitely not alone in saying this), it is a very poor way to gauge the intelligence of kids.
I've taken plenty of them. I did extremely well on most of the ACT. I know some extremely brilliant people (far more so than me) who's performance was absolutely abysmal.
When I took it, the prompt for the written portion was one that drastically favored people who pay attention to the lives of celebrities and pop culture. This is great for 95% of the students who take it. It made that section very difficult for me since I avoid social media when I can.
What's really being tested is how well a student can answer unusual test questions while being under some of the most intense pressure they'll ever face.
Some of this is an issue of how the test is written, but more of it is an issue with the methodology in general. Standardized tests seem to fall into one of two categories these days:
1) It doesn't affect the kid's future in any way, only the funding to their school. In this case, they will likely skip any questions that require effort to answer.
2) They are told that their future depends on this one test. If they do poorly, they will be held back a year (or even worse, never go to college). Some of this may not be entirely true (I believe you can take the ACT up to 12 times), but in an effort to make kids take it seriously, most teachers try to make it out as being a one-shot-at-life thing. This kind of pressure and anxiety means that you are testing less on knowledge/understanding/intelligence and more on the student's ability to take a test under extreme pressure.
This is just my personal opinion on the subject, as someone who recently (last 10 years) went through that system.
I've taken plenty of them. I did extremely well on most of the ACT. I know some extremely brilliant people (far more so than me) who's performance was absolutely abysmal.
When I took it, the prompt for the written portion was one that drastically favored people who pay attention to the lives of celebrities and pop culture. This is great for 95% of the students who take it. It made that section very difficult for me since I avoid social media when I can.
What's really being tested is how well a student can answer unusual test questions while being under some of the most intense pressure they'll ever face.
Some of this is an issue of how the test is written, but more of it is an issue with the methodology in general. Standardized tests seem to fall into one of two categories these days:
1) It doesn't affect the kid's future in any way, only the funding to their school. In this case, they will likely skip any questions that require effort to answer.
2) They are told that their future depends on this one test. If they do poorly, they will be held back a year (or even worse, never go to college). Some of this may not be entirely true (I believe you can take the ACT up to 12 times), but in an effort to make kids take it seriously, most teachers try to make it out as being a one-shot-at-life thing. This kind of pressure and anxiety means that you are testing less on knowledge/understanding/intelligence and more on the student's ability to take a test under extreme pressure.
This is just my personal opinion on the subject, as someone who recently (last 10 years) went through that system.
The people running the system need metrics, and this is what they have used for 50+ years. It's difficult to effect change in any well entrenched system.
Where the system got really stupid is when the state of Florida used these scores to assign a letter grade to each school. Kid's don't get to choose the school that they go to, the "system" does. The choice often depends on socio-economic status, rather than distance or number of students. I was bussed 5.5 miles to a crappy school without air conditioning, yet I lived 1.5 miles from a decent school in an upper class neighborhood. I lived on the wrong side of the boundary by two blocks.
The garage band that I was a member of all through middle school broke up because the 4 of us would get assigned to 3 different high schools despite living within 3 blocks of each other.
#3 Someone like myself with a better than average intelligence doesn't learn the subject material, he learns how to take the tests, and score good enough to "pass" without a good knowledge of the subject material. EX:
I walk into the college I was attending and sign up for 7 CLEP tests all to be taken in a two day period at a cost of $35 each. I did this to satisfy two elective requirements to get my BS degree. They said that I was wasting my money and time. I passed three of them, one more than I needed. I got out of two $600 classes.
There is a GRE test needed to get into the masters degree program. I enquire, they say it's being offered this weekend, and once every other month thereafter. They recommended that I sign up for the test that's 4 months out, and try to sell me a $75 study guide. I sign up for the test that's 4 days out and do nothing, but get a very good score....and a masters degree in electrical engineering a few years later. Passed the PHD qualifying exam (that one WAS hard), but bailed when Motorola pulled the funding for PHDs.
When I was in high school (1967-1970) the Miami school system was severely overloaded with the "boomer" kids, and a large immigration from Cuba. The school I went to had teachers doing jobs that they were NEVER qualified to do. My chemistry teacher was a girls phys-ed coach. She didn't know what a mole or gram were. She read us the class notes or played audio tapes from the regular chemistry teacher, and gave us his tests. Virtually nobody could pass his tests, so they were graded on a curve, independent of the other class. I got an "A" on a test with a score of 35%.
My parents (and about a dozen others) attempted to intervene, with zero success. Did ANYONE learn chemistry here? NO.
Ditto, senior English class which was all about old English literature. The teacher quit about halfway through the school year and was replaced by someone who was not qualified in the subject matter. She made the mistake of failing the nose tackle on the football team, which got him benched.
Bedlam ensued to the point I mentioned about wrapping the plug with solder, spontaneous fires, and even firecrackers in class. A meeting with school officials got 7 of excused from the class permanently with passing grades. This probably helped the few remaining in the class that wanted to learn, and had the capacity to do so without much valid instruction.
Fast forward to 1999. My daughter in in high school. So is the kid across the street. The school is on the standardized testing grading system and gets an "F". The kid across the street is good at fixing cars, so he is in the automotive shop class at school, where he does well. He gets failing grades in most of his other classes.
Many kids in this situation simply walk away, "drop out." The school is in danger of funding loss, and so is the whole system, so they invent the "Dropout Prevention Program." They remove him from all of his classes and put him in the program which is a concentrated effort to teach him just what he needs to know to pass the competency test.
Those who pass get a High School DIPLOMA (not a GED), and leave school as soon as they pass. Many kids took this shortcut out of school, and since they left with a diploma instead of dropping out, the graduation rate improved, and the "F" school became a "D" school. How did this serve the kids? The kid across the street bounced from job to job for 6 or 8 years before finding a job at Mercury Marine near Orlando where he still works. Others were not so fortunate.
Do children 'over the pond' have to learn their multiplication tables off by heart?
The National Curriculum in Scotland still insists that primary school children learn their 'times tables' up to 12 times 12 rather than 10 times 10.
Is this is an example of the educational system being slow to adapt to change?
It's been nearly 50 years since the UK ended the pre-decimal coinage system of 12 pennies in a shilling!
The National Curriculum in Scotland still insists that primary school children learn their 'times tables' up to 12 times 12 rather than 10 times 10.
Is this is an example of the educational system being slow to adapt to change?
It's been nearly 50 years since the UK ended the pre-decimal coinage system of 12 pennies in a shilling!
