Clinton's campaign manager is a horrible education reform guy.
Ugh. These people are ruining public education: it's almost as though they have deliberately set out to destroy the public school system (and then, when it doesn't work anymore, this will "prove" the need for private sector solutions). This is almost enough to push me into the Sanders camp, but probably not quite. Still. Ugh.
It seems like the stakes for kids in school just get way too high way too early these days. I don't know if it was this way when I was young or if my parents just shielded me from it, but it really does seem to have gotten a lot worse.
Podesta ran CAP, right? Did he get into politics for education reform or is it just something he supports? I guess it's not great either way, but if it's not his primary issue maybe it's not so bad.
What's that, I should read the article linked in the post? Ha!
I had no idea that I find any depiction of cunnilingus hilarious.
Podesta is the epitome, the very paragon of third-way Democrats. Education isn't specifically his thing, but he's right there with Hillary and Obama on "reform." That post sounds like it was written by someone who'd never heard of Podesta (or Obama, or Clinton).
but it really does seem to have gotten a lot worse.
Parents are now petitioning school boards to save recess. Which school boards, under enormous pressure from the high-stakes testing industry, are forced to resist, because jumping rope in the schoolyard (schoolyard? that space is now a computer lab) does not contribute to college- and career-readiness. For third-graders.
Yes, it has gotten a lot worse.
Recess, like lunch, is for learning to code. Learning to code will continue until test scores improve. After school programs are for learning to code. Homework is for learning to code. STEM stands for learning to code, if you can't tell how it spells that out, that just means you haven't learned to code yet. code code code code code
Dammit, 4 was me. FBI must have hacked my iphone.
I mostly just find those gifs depressing.
"Alan White is a senior reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in London."
Is there any point even bothering to respond to the intense misleadingitude? No there is not. WHAT A SELLOUT.
COMPROMISE=DEATH
FACTS=IDEOLOGY
NEWS=SOME PROPAGANDA PIECE ON SOME DUDE'S WEBSITE
REASON=WEAKNESS
PROGRESS=LOYALTY
REVOLUTION=FAITH
HYSTERIA=REALITY
Fuuuuuuuucccccckkkkkkk. Public school reformers are a big part of the reason we've not moved back to the US. Of that magic triangle of job for me/short commute/school I want to send my kid to, its the school part that is making it not work.
Did you mean to use == or did you just not spend enough time coding during recess?
Tigre's an old-skool Pascal programmer, so he uses := for assignment.
NEWS=SOME PROPAGANDA PIECE ON SOME DUDE'S WEBSITE
Jill Stein (Green Party) is the best candidate for president dude. Alas, Bernie too apparently wishes to pollute our children's vital bodily fluids.
At the moment, I think the Breitbart story is the highlight of the campaign. The Breitbart people proved to be so despicable that they were too despicable for Virgin Ben, one of the most despicable products of the Blogging Era.
But Andrew Breitbart would have wanted it that way.
11, 12
Just sitting here assigning one static public final int to another.
It's annoying that Stata makes you use two equal signs, like a programmer and SAS only requires one. Also, that Stata doesn't just ignore the semicolon you put at the end because you can't help it.
Programming languages tend to be nativist and xenophobic. A few have immigration policies, but most just build yuge walls and jeer at how "funny looking" and "stupid" other languages are.
The bashing of Podesta would be more effective IMO if they didn't also bash Common Core. Common Core is a good idea with some implementation problems, but at base it's needed. The real problem AFAICT is fetishization of testing. Some testing is necessary, but turning it into a tool for evaluating teachers if horribly fraught.
22: Common Core and the fetishization of testing are inextricably linked in minds of many (most?) people.
The fetishization of standardized testing is going to ruin porn.
A
C
D
A
A
B
D
'D' with the oval not completely filled it so it looks like it has a nipple
C
The biggest problem with CC is the way textbook manufacturers have mangled it, completely alienated parents and completely failed to reach out to parents and make any sort of interface which is parent-friendly.
23: There is the whole branch of the anti-common core movement that is upset that they are now teaching kids multiple algorithms to solve the same math problem. I think a lot of those guys are just fine with extensive testing, as long as they use the exact same tests that were used 40 years ago.
I'm just happy that nobody seems to give a shit about teaching cursive to my kid. I never use it so why should he.
To be sure, they still teach it. They just don't require using it.
The biggest problem with Common Core is that the people who are most stridently opposed to it have no idea what it actually is.
Common core is sex ed. "I don't want anyone teaching any way of doing things that's not how I do it!"
27: Right, there's a large CHANGEBAD component to the opposition, and for some people that may be the entirety of their opposition. But my anecdotal sense is that most people thinks it's common core's fault that their kids are now learning nonsense hippie math AND are spending all their classroom time prepping for tests instead of, like, learning more or even having occasional recess. And it's the latter part of that which really riles most people up. But who knows... maybe my anecdotes are nonrepresentative.
Possibly, but the big anti-CC memes you see passed around (this astrophysicist couldn't do his kindergartner's homework!) are the former. Teaching kids what place values mean instead of just applying standard algorithms is the path to the Devil.
In this manner they may not be but, in general, I think they are.
But I agree there are a lot of people who seem to be opposed because they think it's some "progressive" idea that is basically just a re-run the the failed 1960s "New Math", even though most of those people have no idea about the contents of either common core or new math.
I think we had new math, but new math as interpreted by nuns born in 1920 wasn't very different from old math.
Anyway, my son is doing more pre-algebra type stuff than I ever did at his age, but nobody has ever forced him to drill multiplication tables. Or if they did, they didn't force him very well.
Common Core is a good idea with some implementation problems, but at base it's needed.
I support the idea of Common Core in principle, but the education reformers really should be made to fix all the damage they've done before they are be allowed to play with a new toy.
This article demonstrates how the issues are intermingled but certainly makes it sound like the focus of the complaints is on the testing and other ways that common core is thought to "remove joy" from the classroom. (I would block quote but the formatting of that article plus my iPad is making it impossible. (An increasingly common and frustrating experience.)) Students are walking out on the tests they that feel are unnecessary. Schools are cancelling longstanding traditions in order to accommodate the tests. Etc. That was the first article that came up when I googled "why do people hate common core"--scrolling through other results, they seem to have similar messages.
40 is also right--a lot of the opposition seems to come from people who don't really care what the contents of common core are all about--they are opposed because it's seen as the latest "reform" being pushed by privately -funded school "reformers" (Gates Foundation et al.), whose reforms have generally been misguided and have made things worse at every step. There's a lot of mistrust of the motives, and a bit of a "don't fix what isn't broken" aspect to it.
Students are walking out on the tests they that feel are unnecessary.
This warms my heart. The post-Millennial generation is alright.
Technical correction: I googled "why do people oppose common core", not "hate". Probably would turn up similar results either way.
Further to 41, who the fuck schedules common core testing on Dr. Seuss' birthday?
I'm just glad people stopped pushing for more music and art in school. Kids should have just enough of those to learn how much it sucks to make a pinch pot or play an instrument in band, but no more.
"Fuck that love of reading shit, you kids need to be assessed on your compliance with federally mandated learning standards!"
I'm a big fan of cuts to physical education myself.
Although the "you don't need recess, we have PE" movement needs to die.
My son likes recess when it rains because rain-recess is chromebook time.
All the math I ever needed I learned from a Sam Cooke song.
I mostly just find those gifs depressing.
You'll have sex again someday, young teo. I know you will.
4.2 isn't quite correct, in that Podesta's CAP has generally been opposed to Third Way. I mean, you can say "competition for the same market" or "narcissism of small differences," but the tone was always more "Third Way delenda est."
I think there really is/was a distinction between knee-jerk centrists ("D says sky is blue, R says it's yellow, must be green") and triangulators who see it as a strategy to achieve the left-most practical outcome. Not that the latter don't tend to be relatively centrist, but I don't think they're ideologically so.
IIRC Obama hired heavily from CAP.
I agree with 40 and 42. A lot of the hostility to CC is really hostility to the reform grifters and the damage they've done.
Also, "Good idea with some implementation problems" = idea with problems. New math was a good idea with some implementation problems as well. I'm old enough to remember befuddled 3rd grade teachers trying to explain what I now recognize as basic ideas from set theory.
I still don't understand set theory, but I've never seen a reason to need to understand it.
I'm told that set theory is a tool of the devil to corrupt the minds of good christians, so that's probably for the best.
I don't understand set theory either, but I've seen enough of it to recognise it in passing and as AL says, it was a minor epiphany when I realised where all the disjointed crap I was seeing on chalkboards as a kid was coming from. I'm still not clear why it was considered a good thing to teach basic ideas from set theory to 11 year olds.
Just because you've never taken an interest in set theory doesn't mean set theory won't take an interest in you.
Nota bene: most people who teach maths to 11 year olds don't understand set theory either.
Somebody, probably here, told me that set theory is the basis of all math.
The intersection of people who teach math to eleven year olds and people who understand set theory is small?
That's set theory? A Venn diagram without the circles?
If you learn PROC SQL, you'll know all of finite set theory.
I think I would have been more likely to learn SQL if I didn't know that.
27 they are now teaching kids multiple algorithms to solve the same math problem
I had a (to me) plausible explanation of why (some) parents and (some) educators dislike the multi-algorithm approach to teaching math. Supposedly, the original ed-reform idea was not that every kid has to know every method of doing (e.g.) division, but that some methods will click with some kids, and some will click with others. If you learn a method that works for you, why do you have to learn and remember all of them? However, the lesson plans more and more assume you have to know them all, and the tests cover them all. (Not sure which came first; probably the tests, so: grifters). That means more teaching time and more questions on the test, and so on.
I know how to do traditional long division. I've seen some of the alternative methods being taught, because those are the ones my kids learned, and I see that they also work, but I see no reason why I should learn any of the new methods or they should learn traditional long division, if some other method works fine for them. It's not like they give different answers.
Consider the set of all goat videos that do not contain themselves through having been retweeted or made into gifs.
Seriously, videos of goats apparently talking or jumping around on things is mesmerizing. I'm putting together a venture-capital prospectus for a livestreaming app/ goat zoo, get in now on the ground floor. It'll be a cheap substitute for recess, and the anti-CC parents are how I will monetize.
63. Striving little finite set theory can't even deal with rational numbers. Sad.
If it's really true that the tests cover all methods, as 65 suggests, then I'm ready to go all in on full blown opposition to all things common core. That's such a fundamental inversion/perversion of the original purpose. There is nothing worth salvaging. The grift runs too deep. Throw it all away. Vote For Sanders. This is infuriating.
I don't think they say all methods but I have seen homework and tests that say show two different ways of doing this. I don't think that's unreasonable- if you know one way of doing it you get some credit but if you understand it enough to show two different ways you get more credit.
"I did this the regular way and the surly way."
68:CC does not say anything about testing. That's the textbook manufacturers.
Also, I strenuously disagree with the idea that knowing any one method is mastery. Knowing several methods and having facility to know which one to use in which context is mastery.
I guess that heebie's now in the pocket of the reform industry. Sad.
75- You're missing the declarative sentence in the middle to match the Trump format. "Heebie in the pocket of the reform industry. Blaming the textbook mfrs. Sad!"
The thing about Common Core is that it's implemented differently in every school district, even if the goals are the same nationwide. And the goals are basically good, I think. I know for my daughters, there's an expectation that they'll work through all the different solving methods as part of homework just so they get a chance to learn how to use them, but open-ended questions you're allowed to solve however you want.
How much value does "mastery" of a given mathematical operation add? Sure, you could learn how to do an operation five different ways. Or you could learn it one or two ways, and move on to another topic.
Then, when it comes time to use what you've learned it in the real world, you break out the calculator app on your smart phone.
Words cannot express how far I endorse 79, with the reservation that if there are five ways to do an operation each of which provides explicit insight into other, different topics, then that may be a useful way of introducing those topics.
I agree more with 73 than 79. You can never have enough methods.
73: Is mastery the goal? Isn't minimal competence a sufficiently ambitious goal in most cases?
80.last: Again, I can only speak to the school district I know, but that's definitely the goal. Nia's class (third grade, so 8 and 9 year olds) had been working on basic multiplication and division about a month ago, using several different techniques to find answers. Then there was a very short section on symmetry and dividing shapes equally, which she really enjoyed. Then they switched to fractions, which she thought was a completely different thing until she realized that as they were doing things like drawing 24/4 she was seeing another way to do the problems she'd worked on before and that symmetry was involved in drawing fractions too. Her math sophistication has increased a lot this year, I think because she's not doing rote learning where she tends to tune out and then end up miserable because she can't do what she's supposed to be able to do.
Four sex-related comments, 80 education policy comments. What the hell happened to this place?
I really liked common core, or what I understood to be the common core part of the curriculum at the public school. Now I spend approximately $1m/year for fancy private school. While FancyPantsSchool does a lot of things very well and is ultimately a much better place for my kid for a bunch of reasons, it's not clearly better at doing the kind of basic academic instruction in reading and math that common core did in a 90% low income school. And for sure common core, as I understood it anyway, did a way way way way better job of setting things up for kids without a lot of parental resources in a big classroom setting, and seemed to teach those kids extremely well. I have a hard time not seeing common core as a basically awesome thing for social progress, whatever textbook manufacturers and education grifters think about it.
I don't know, the goat thing squicked me out.
There were multiple goat things, but I'm on board with that description for all of them.
I'm basically with 87, without the $1m/year private school (my daughters go to a public, charter arts-magnet middle school). Textbook-manufacture grifting is education poison, and needs to be dealt with directly.
79. Often mastery adds a lot over mere competence. Consider how to divide objects more complicated than numbers by each other, say matrices or series.
A smorgasbord of methods "taught" by someone who doesn't really get them or know much math is unlikely to lead to mastery though.
In child's experience the French are great at teaching maths as opposed to arithmetic. He is also taking on board a vast arsenal of memorized French literary bric a brac and an extensive array of formal structures for laying out a textual analysis, so his lifetime supply of bullshitting material will be tip top come baccalaureate-taking season. Luckily, they have Am lit teachers as well so he'll be able to think his way out of a paper bag.
66. At least there were no capybara my-first-time gifs.
The French also get children to eat their vegetables, so who knows what kind of voodoo they've tapped into.
re: 95
My child loves his vegetables, and I don't think we have any Frenchy-fu.
"You'll eat your broccoli or my savate. Your choice."
when the vegetables are neeps that adds like 300 difficulty points, so congrats to Ttam.
And looking up neeps led me to the fact that there's a Wikipedia in Scots. From now on I'm going to source my knowledge as much as possible from Scots Wikipedia. "Walcome tae Wikipaedia,
the free encyclopaedia that awbody can eedit."
9: I got a for real press release the other day telling me that "Chel\sey Pip\pin has been appointed senior lifestyle writer at BuzzFeed"
Could any byline be more perfect for the job?
(And does it involve writing about the lifestyle of elderly people, since they have the money that advertisers want?)
This children eating veggies thing can backfire. As I was innocently helping myself to the artichokes the other night a hungry and suspicious 15 year old starting haranguing me about not taking more than my fair share. It was after a pretty strenuous dance class, but still, was a bit much!
Artichokes don't seem like a very good post-strenuousness food.
There was a LIT on offer in addition. Pig cheek bourguignon! Mashed potatoes! Great lashing of green salad! Various cheeses! Thickly buttered bread! A gigantesque glass of milk!
So why was he grudging you some barely edible thistles?
I wish to register my strong opposition, however, to describing salad as something that can come in "lashings".
106.2: Do you feel it should be limited to liquids? Or do you mislike the association of salad with abundance?
Artichokes are objectively delicious but too often there aren't enough to go around due to being a mild pain in the ass yo prep so I sympathize with his impulse but still it was rude to actually *count* how many I took vs how many left in serving dish. This was discussed, he got my point, meal passed pleasantly.
You should see the enormous salads we make in order to stake some reasonable claim for parental portions. Kid likes his salad.
Liquids or semiliquid things (such as butter).
Ah well if that's your objection I've less than zero compunction! La la la lashings of salad served with rivers of alpage cheese 😊.
You can get rivers of cheese, but only the kind that comes out of an spray can. I assume that's what "alpage" means.
Fractions is the best example - understanding fractions and ratios in different contexts is very hard, and the framework for understanding fractions in one context doesn't work in another. Dividing pies up is a good way to represent fractions, but it's not going to help you with fractional division. What does "dividing by 1/2" actually mean, and how do you explain it? But having many approaches to fractions is crucial for calculus. Kids that convert everything to decimals because they are uncomfortable with fractions get creamed in calculus.
Further to 85: People get to use emoticons now? The fuck?
112 is right, except that you don't need to get as far as calculus to hit problems with fractions if you can't understand them a couple of different ways.
114: ♪♪♪ la, la, la. I can't hear you. ♪♪♪
★☆☻☆★
Wait, someone used an emoticon? They must be stopped.
My wife just sends me random emojis now to annoy me. She sent me a cow emoji yesterday. Why is there a cow emoji? What purpose does it serve that word "cow" does not? What is happening to civilization? We deserve Trump.
Alpage veut dire: 🌄➕🌷🌼🌹➕ 🐄=👑 fromage
A world with emoticons but without .gifs or memes is the worst of all internet worlds. All or nothing. .gifs and memes are great, although of course they're making us even stupider.
Note that the last comment was on topic. In the future, we'll all be pit bulls who barf on our mates. Which doesn't really seem that bad tbh.
That wasn't intended as a comment on my mate, just about the potential joy of being a pit bull.
Looking at the source, I have no idea how she's doing that.
Emoticons are fine. Emojis are the devil.
I think that having sex and then throwing up on your partner is gross and at all sexy or erotic, so I'd never want to do it as a fetish thing. But, with that said, it does kind of feel like the ultimate decadence. You pretty much know you're living a next-level roman orgy lifestyle when you can have sex and then throw up without shame. "Done with sex, blrghhhhhhhh, OK onto the next thing." How is that not awesome? And pit bulls not only can do that but don't have to work.
Looking at the source, I have no idea how she's doing that.
Unicode has been debased and now allows fonts to support all sorts of this crap.
Note that emojis are directly the fault of Japan -- they were added to the Unicode standard because they were a popular feature on Japanese cell phones. If Trump would promise to build a wall to keep out emojis, I would have to reconsider my view of him.
126. Except that rendering support is nonuniform-- Chrome doesn't render one of dq's characters, 1F404, I need to copy and then some website tells me it can be rendered as a cow.
There are a bunch of Unicode chars that are tricky to support correctly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-left_mark
Like, here's what I'm thinking. Imagine a night where you eat 50 oysters, down a bottle of expensive wine, briefly have sex with your partner, throw up all over the ground, and instead of feeling bad shrug your shoulders and go for a pleasant walk. Onto the next thing, you say. Yes, that's not at all erotic or pleasant. It probably would not please your partner, at all. But how is it not awesome? You're living la vida pit bull. You are the kind of person who can throw up after sex and shrug it off. Isn't that actually more memorable, more decadent, maybe even ultimately more personally satisfying, than sex that's pleasurable qua sex?
In a post-feminist world, we're rightly focused on mandating that sex be pleasurable for both partners. But maybe there's a limited space for sexual encounters that are unpleasant and non-enjoyable for both halves of the couple, but still awesome. I feel like this is an underexplored and undertheorized issue.
Rendering a cow usually smell pretty bad.
100: My favorite Scots Wikipedia entry is Haingles. "A type o haingles is Bird haingles... There is a vaccine agin the haingles."
There's also Gothic Wikipedia, in case an Internet connection falls through a time vortex and comes out in 5th century Germany.
I'm not really sure where 125 and 129 came from but they interest me. R Tigre may want to look into the story that MFK Fisher relates about the young man who ate too many oysters and the valet who comforted him.
"It is smittle, sae it passes frae ae body tae anither gey eith. For ordinar, it spreids athort the warld in saisonal epidemics. In the 20t century, there wis three muckle epidemics (cried pandemics an aw) that kilt millions o fowk. A type o haingles is Bird haingles."
Yay.
The porter, not the valet. The young man was "not quite a virgin".
I'm not really sure where 125 and 129 came from
From the .gif pit bulls having sex, and then throwing up, linked in the original post as the last .gif. It prompted some questions about sexuality, and is well worth watching.
You should have Björk's "Big Time Sensuality" playing while 129 is happening.
I'm totally failing to find in this list the 1992-ish interview I read with Al Jourgensen where he says that, after losing his virginity, he threw up all over the place. "It was an amazing experience." "The vomiting?" "Well, no, but vomiting is a very close second." It must be there somewhere, or I'm misattributing the story. Pretty sure it was him, though.
His comparison seems faulty. If you've only had sex once, but (presumably) vomited many times, you can only estimate the standard deviation of your utility for vomiting, not sex.
Common Core sex ed requires mastery of at least two ways of barfing during sex. You can't get away with just doing it pitbull style.
I just managed to crash SAS. Haven't done that in a while. I blame Proc SQL even though it worked perfectly for me and PHREG was running when it crashed.
Chrome doesn't render one of dq's characters, 1F404
My Chrome does. It probably goes by operating system since that's where the fonts live. Windows 10 here.
Honestly, the question at the end of the day is what makes you feel worse about yourself. Obviously, it's bad to unintentionally and without panache barf on your partner during or immediately after sex. That could even be traumatic. But to navigate such a potentially humiliating moment with panache, even indifference, so it's just sex, barf, move on, I'm cool --- that would be an accomplishment worth a lot.
re: 97
He's 3 in about a week. He loves chocolate, ice-cream and all kinds of crap, too, but he has always liked most vegetables, from the minute he started on solid food.
re: 134
Scots Wikipedia is pretty cool, but it does go to tortured lengths to avoid using words where the Scots word and the English word are the same. I'd be surprised if there are really any people who speak Scots as a live dialect who use all of the words that crop up.
The register it uses is often wrong, too. I don't think anyone would use 'an aw' in formal speech, anymore than one would write, 'called pandemics, and all' in formal English. They'd write 'also called pandemics' or 'also known as pandemics' and you could easily write that in Scots, 'alsae cried pandemics' or 'alsae kent as pandemics'.
R tigre, isn't this a conversation you should be having with your wife?
R tigre, isn't this a conversation you should be having with your wife?
Well, in theory, but in practice maybe not such a good idea.
147
What is the Scots' position on "well" as an intensifier, as used in northern England? (Not unlike "wicked" in MA and nearby locales.)
150: Typical. All talk, no action. Fucking modern degenerates.
so it's just sex, barf, move on, I'm cool
More like "Barf, barf, masturbate, cry"
re: 151
I don't think you'd use it. You mean as 'she was well fit', or 'it was well bad'?
I think of that as a northern English construction. The Scots equivalent, at least in my* dialect would be 'gey'.
http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/gey
but there are loads of others.
'Sare' etc.
http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/sare_adv
* it feels slightly fraudulent to talk about _my_ Scots dialect, since I rarely use many Scots words these days, living in London, and I'm not sure how successfully I could code switch into very broad Scots. But the dialect I used to speak some of the time ...
Surely "well", pronounced we;w, is a market of estuary English? Well fit, well out of order, well at it, etc
re: 155
That, too, I suppose. I also associated with Manchester, and other places 'north'. Maybe someone from up that way[-ish] (Alex?) can correct?
Also, an old favourite: well good, well better -- though I have never heard "well best"
You hear it occasionally in Sheffield, but it's not a marker.
I certainly remember it as being something we all said when we were 12 or thereabouts. "*Well* cool!", the ultimate accolade. Not sure how authentically Yorkshire it was.
