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axeil posted:And I suppose it would've been illegal 20 years ago when cryptography was considered a munition. It's still fairly restricted. If you distribute a program containing certain sorts of cryptography from the US, or from a server based in the US (like, oh, all the servers for Google Play and the Apple App Store), you need to get an export license from the US government. This includes the use of things as trivial and common as HTTPS, it appears.
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Jul 26, 2014 15:43
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Jesus Christ, what are they trying to do: make it the most like a prison that it can possibly be?
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Jul 26, 2014 17:11
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Stanos posted:Of course now she's dealing cards in a casino instead. That's a tipped position, and there's usually people around to respond immediately to any form of threat. A big improvement, actually.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:16
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SedanChair posted:That's my background; before I quit in disgust, I was a behavior intervention specialist working in an alternative school that was run by a psychiatric hospital. Whatever Orwellian scenes you are imagining, imagine more overt ones. That's really quite horrible. The worst I ever had to deal with was having the unmitigated audacity to stand in the hallway during lunch in Jr. High. The misanthropic teacher who was in charge of lunch supervision asked me if I wanted to go to the Principal's office. I said I didn't really care, as I'd not done anything wrong. Luckily, it being Canada, even having a less-than-clean record for other issues, nothing happened. I imagine if I were in America and, god forbid not white, I'd have been expelled. Now, on another subject, which I'm sure it going to cause no small amount of disquiet: I think we were honestly better off when schools were more easy-going and you could literally still hit kids with a big chunk o' wood if they pissed you off. I don't approve of that by any means, but I think ultimately even corporal punishment is less damaging than what's going on right now. The story I initially responded to sounded worse than poo poo I've seen on prison documentaries.
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Jul 27, 2014 04:57
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Main Paineframe posted:The problem with teacher assessment isn't the standards or methodology, it's the actions taken based on the results of the assessments. The dominant forces in school reform policy right now don't want to assess teachers in order to help them improve, they want to assess teachers so that they can fire a bunch of "bad teachers". It's not too much different from how No Child Left Behind addresses failing schools by cutting their funding and then firing all the staff. As long as reform policy is centered around punishment rather than helping to improve, teachers are going to resist teacher assessment to their dying breath, because it's being pushed in order to hurt them rather than help them. The thing that no one wants to address (probably because it will cost a lot of money to fix) is that education, at all levels, is a function that can't deal with lovely inputs. All the top-rated universities only produce such good output because they only accept the best input. During my academic career, I attended a very highly-rated university and a much more middling university (according to rankings); what I found was that the "middling" university had equal or better instructional quality across the board (though there were one or two really awesome profs at the top-rated university who were heads and shoulders above the rest; knowing what I know now, it was sheer luck that I got them and not some other humps), and they really did try harder. The reason their ratings suffered was only due to the fact that they were less selective with incoming students, because, in most other respects, the actual instruction was far superior, as was the course selection. Now, obviously, this applies to universities, where all the applicants have already been more or less vetted for quality; now, think about the differences one might see between public school in North America or around the world. To measure output with no reference to input is so monumentally ignorant that it boggles the mind as to how any sane, educated person could think it's a good metric. Either we need to figure out how to measure actual teaching ability without regard to the quality of the "raw materials" (sorry if that's an insensitive metaphor), or we need to give up on the concept altogether. Nothing good can come from measuring educational achievement alone.
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Jul 29, 2014 06:36
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Luigi Thirty posted:Parents? My friend is a teacher and she complains about Common Core new math being so stupid she can't understand it or teach it to the kids. I think this is an indictment of the old style of math education for sure. Some of the examples are a little confusing when you first look at them, but you really ought to be able to figure them out if you're even moderately numerate. Still, perhaps it would be worthwhile for someone involved in this to make a guide that explains the Common Core question styles, and vocabulary, so it's less taxing on parents/tutors/etc. to figure out what's going on -- because I think that's where a lot of the frustration is coming from.
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Sep 5, 2014 13:37
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Papercut posted:Just as an anecdote, my wife's current school has five reading intervention resource teachers and zero math resource teachers. If a kid is struggling to read it's loving Armageddon but if a kid isn't getting math it's basically "eh I wasn't good at math either". I think culturally and from a resource perspective the US doesn't take math illiteracy anywhere near as seriously as language illiteracy. Yeah, being illiterate is seen as shameful, whereas we basically allow even teachers to basically say, "oh, I'm not a math person, tee hee!" I had multiple teachers in middle school and jr. high that wouldn't have been able to calculate marks without a computerized system (I'm guessing even a calculator wouldn't have been enough). Can you imagine a person just saying, "oh, I'm not a 'words' person"?
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Sep 6, 2014 19:40
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MGTen posted:Yes. Not exactly in those terms, but it happens depressingly often in my experience. People claim that they're "not into reading" or "they don't read". A college English major even once admitted to me that she "didn't read" without any sort of self-awareness or shame. Lots of people don't read in their leisure time, but that doesn't mean they can't read. I'm not going to defend it as an excellent life choice, but it's better than basically being illiterate. Many people seem to revel in their innumeracy, though, which I find a little disturbing. On another point, I think you're spot on comparisons to other subject areas. In a sense, I think the problems with PE and the problems with math education are quite similar, at least in my experience. They both seem designed to cater to the people who already show a natural aptitude/inclination towards them. I was always good at math (arithmetic through discrete math, calculus, and some cryptography stuff in university), but I was always lovely at PE and out of shape (part of which has to do with a minor birth defect, but that shouldn't be an excuse). Now that I've started working out, and working on my balance, and everything, I've realized there was no reason for me to be lovely and out of shape for so long, it's just that the PE curriculum didn't really want to do much in the way of "education" in terms of helping me build up my basic level of fitness. As a result, I can't help but wonder if math education is so hosed up simply because we haven't come up with a good way to teach and re-enforce the fundamentals -- a problem which, as I see it, the Common Core reforms are meant to address.
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Sep 7, 2014 03:21
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:It is that bad. Yeah, I certainly know adults who can barely do basic arithmetic, and it's possible to graduate from high school in my province with nothing beyond basic arithmetic skills. I think a better criterion for whether a person is innumerate or illiterate is if their lack of literacy or numeracy impairs them in everyday life, and I would argue that a lot of people are seriously impaired by innumeracy even if they possess basic arithmetic skills.
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Sep 7, 2014 16:42
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