Fucking education! How does it work?

[LadyShea]

See, now that just kills me! If everyone gets awarded A's, then aren't there a lot of adults walking around thinking they are aweseomer than they actually are?

[JoeP]

[Janet]

Well, most adults walk around thinking they are more awesome than they are anyway, so that doesn't matter much. It even has a name, Self-serving Bias.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

See, now that just kills me! If everyone gets awarded A's, then aren't there a lot of adults walking around thinking they are aweseomer than they actually are?

I suppose in some circles the opposite could also a problem.

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by naturalist.atheist

I suppose in some circles the opposite could also a problem.

Dunning Kruger effect.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by LadyShea

Dunning Kruger effect.

The reverse Dunning Kruger effect?

[The Man]

The always indispensable Charlie Pierce, citing the equally indispensable Diane Ravitch, goes over a number of deplorable things that have happened at charter schools and suggests that perhaps running education like a business might not have the best outcomes for children.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by The Man

The always indispensable Charlie Pierce, citing the equally indispensable Diane Ravitch, goes over a number of deplorable things that have happened at charter schools and suggests that perhaps running education like a business might not have the best outcomes for children.

However at this time I don't see how running education as a public service is all that great either. Not that I have any idea of how it should be done. Since being on one of two sinking ships taking shots at each other is not where I think anyone would want to be.

[LadyShea]

Maine Voices: Compassion lacking as departing USM faculty get a thankless goodbye - The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram

This is a few months old, but turning schools into businesses is well underway in higher education, and that will continue to trickle down

[lisarea]

For some reason, I was just reading about that general topic recently enough that when I searched just now, the links were still purple.

I'm sure everyone will be SHOCKED to discover who was behind much of the privatization of education: It was Ronald Reagan.

From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education | Dissent Magazine

Ronald Reagan stuck it to millennials: A college debt history lesson no one tells - Salon.com

Not surprisingly, being a blithering fucking idiot, he seemed to have an especially pointed personal vendetta against higher education, maybe even more pronounced than his many other vendettas against basically anything done for the public good.

I mean, he privatized everything he could get his hands on, but he had a special hate-on for 'intellectual curiosity' that led to that sort of shortsighted vocational model of higher education we just take for granted now.

[naturalist.atheist]

When I went to school it was possible to work a second job and graduate debt free. Many of us then went on to create new businesses which helped drive the economy of the US. With all the debt that current graduates are servicing, forget about starting new businesses. Economists are now wondering why the percentage of new business startups is so low.

The New York Times

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014...08930399820764

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by lisarea

I mean, he privatized everything he could get his hands on, but he had a special hate-on for 'intellectual curiosity' that led to that sort of shortsighted vocational model of higher education we just take for granted now.

On which note:

Hating on the humanities: Academic job market schadenfreude comes from some unexpected places.

There has been a HUGE drift toward the attitude that humanities are pointless and frivolous that has been feeding on itself for as far back as I can remember. At this point, the rift has gotten increasingly bigger and more entrenched to the point of animosity.

A lot of the vocational training people are pushing kids into is just cranking out disposable functionaries, and their shelf life is getting shorter and shorter all the time. We should be focusing on humanities more, not less.

[Angakuk]

It really is a damn shame that higher education is progressively turning out less and less educated people.

[Ensign Steve]

For Shea:

Philadelphia dad responds to school's letter over kids' absences - 10News.com KGTV ABC10 San Diego

[wildernesse]

I saw that on fb and I am sympathetic to the school, although I think they could have worded their letter better. Don't add on to the form letter, people.

Not that I don't think the family vacation was educational, but whatever, take your hits...which in this case is just getting a letter from the school.

[livius drusus]

Also that rah rah triumph of the American spirit stuff was just gross.

[LadyShea]

Rossi clarified on his Facebook page that he isn't angry, he didn't ask for his kids' absences to be excused and that "we will take them out of class whenever we see fit

That's me mostly. The problem is we can actually be arrested and have to go to truancy court and pay fines. That shit is riduculous over missing a few days of school, especially if the kid catches up homework or does it ahead of time. Hell, I took off every Wednesday for two years in high school because it bored me. As long as my grades were good nobody cared.

Luckily Kiddo is beloved and the principal happily excused him to go on a trip with his grandparents.

[lisarea]

Probably a couple weeks into the school year once, I discovered that cops () had come to my house looking I guess to arrest me, TLM, or both of us for truancy because the shitassed home school he'd been assigned to somehow failed to make note of the fact that he had transferred and was going to a different school in the district.

It's scary to think what could have happened if he'd actually been home sick one of those days they came looking.

[BrotherMan]

What bugs me is that if he didn't want people to respond to it, why the fuck did he make it public? If he was just going to take his lumps couldn't he have done that privately? Plus all that hoorah, American boostrapping exceptionalism that isn't at all learned in stupid schools, the university of hard knocks does it all better bullshit.

Besides, we all know Philadelphia is where AMERICA's heart is. Fucking patriots of the latter day saints can go fuck themselves with their damn flag pins.

[Janet]

I think it was my senior year in high school when they stopped excusing absences for any reason the parents' wanted and gave a list of acceptable reasons. Before that, when my mom let me stay home or wanted to take us to the race track (yes, that happened) or whatever, she would just say she kept us home for "family business."

My mom really, really hates to lie, but she is fine with being Sicilian about things and telling the truth so it sounds like a lie. Back then I would take a day off every December to help my sister decorate her library for Christmas. Since she worked in a hospital library my Mom wrote an excuse that, "Janet had to go to the hospital with her sister" and put it on a Christmas card. The office decided to send the card around to all my teachers, who had to sign off on excused absence slips, so I had to spend my whole day being asked how my sister was by concerned teachers.



One of my random smileys refuses to work. No fair!

[LadyShea]

I sound sufficiently like my mom that I could just call in and say "LadyShea won't be at school today". If a note was needed, well I have been able to forge her signature since I was 12. She knew all of this, BTW, I wasn't pulling a fast one on mom.

Anyway, that was Jr. and Sr. year I learned to be proactive and call in the morning. Prior to that, if we were absent from any class our name would be on a list and we had to go see the asst principal who would give you an excused or unexcused absence slip to take to the teacher. He would say "Hows your grades?" I would say "Good" he would write me an excuse slip. Point being attendance was an in school thing handled by a person who evaluated the students as individuals, not a statewide law enforcement issue with its own police and courts (yes even here in the sticks). I agree that attendance is important, but how well are kids going to learn that are only there under legal threat? What exactly are parents supposed to do to ensure their kids don't skip or whatever?

Also, truancy court here is required after a certain number of absences, even if they are excused doctor monitored illnesses. Anyone who has had Mono knows that shit is two weeks minimum. What purpose does criminalizing illness serve? Conversely, is it good to incentivize attendance even if there is illness? In Kiddo's little school zone (all the schools that feed to a specific high school) they give away discount cards and awards for perfect attendance...Kiddo loves awards and tried to haul his stupid ass to school with a fever and shit. That's not good either.

[lisarea]

The problem is that, if you leave things like that up to the discretion of teachers and administrators, their biases seep into their decisions too much. That's what zero tolerance policies were designed to combat. In practice, zero tolerance tends to suck pretty hard sometimes, and I don't know if they even could work or not, but so many times you see people complaining about those policies, it seems like their argument boils down to, "THIS isn't the type of child we invented the school to prison pipeline for!"

But fuck yes, those stupid attendance awards. It's just an extra sociopathic Puritan work ethic or something, and what are they actually rewarding? Either the kid, by dumb luck, is preternaturally healthy, or they're just going to school and getting other kids sick. Neither one of those things should be rewarded, and the latter should be punished.

[LadyShea]

Originally Posted by lisarea

The problem is that, if you leave things like that up to the discretion of teachers and administrators, their biases seep into their decisions too much. That's what zero tolerance policies were designed to combat. In practice, zero tolerance tends to suck pretty hard sometimes, and I don't know if they even could work or not, but so many times you see people complaining about those policies, it seems like their argument boils down to, "THIS isn't the type of child we invented the school to prison pipeline for!"

I know that too, but surely there is some sane and rational middle ground to be found. I hate the idea of school attendance being monitored by cops and parents decisions taking a back seat.

But fuck yes, those stupid attendance awards. It's just an extra sociopathic Puritan work ethic or something, and what are they actually rewarding? Either the kid, by dumb luck, is preternaturally healthy, or they're just going to school and getting other kids sick. Neither one of those things should be rewarded, and the latter should be punished.

Right? And get this, the discounts are aimed mostly at the parents, I talked to a lady who helped develop the program. I was all "That will just make kids who already go to school all the time want to go when they shouldn't. It won't do shit for those who are chronically absent and whose parents don't care". Seriously does getting 10% off shoes or whatever really make a parent go "Ya know, I don't normally care if little Johnny makes it to school or not, but discount at the mall! I am gonna make him go"

[Janet]

They tried to convince us to go for an attendance award at work. We discussed it at a union meeting and one of our members gave a great speech that I will never forget about how healthy people have no understanding of what it is to be ill. She was really hurt that we would even act like some trophy could overcome decades of illness, or that we would imply she chose to be sick. Fortunately, it nipped that stupid idea in the bud.

It's even more corrosive to push that idea on little kids. It's only going to kill any empathy the healthy kids might have developed for sick ones in a better system.

[wildernesse]

At issue: Rossi’s qualifying time of 3:11:45 at the Via Marathon in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on September 7, 2014, is inconsistent with all of Rossi’s other publicly available race results.

Oh dear, do the rules just not apply to him? hmm.