holy flurking shnit

"Trade in Books for cash!" $150 textbook- you get $50 back. PSH. I feel as if every system is very bloated, about to explode.

Or they say "Oops, looks like they're using the newest edition next semester, so we're not buying yours back."

Fucking assholes! Luckily, in my department (English), most of the books we buy aren't academic textbooks, but just regular books. So instead of buying As I Lay Dying for $20, I buy it for $2 on Amazon. This was the first semester in a long time I had to buy textbooks from the bookstore. I bought a book on the Romantics, Technical Writing, and a $50 access code for an online math class. Spent 300 fucking bucks.

I buy on amazon, and pay 1/4 of what the bookstores want. The closest to the price the bookstore wanted was $70 for a $100 book. You can find ways around the textbook scams.

Also, the test out classes have outrageously high priced books. Don't buy books for classes everyone has to take unless you really need them for the course. Don't buy books until after the first class if you can to see what you'll actually use. I've probably saved close to a thousand dollars by not just buying everything they've told me to.

Well, actually, I saved my mom the money, but I'm nice like that.

Not wanting to hear what I have to say doesn't make me wrong.

And I'd be happy to fetch you a burger only if you're willing to pay the market rate for me to either ship you one or my travel expenses in delivering it purposely.

I do have a degree, and have had a job, so that don't apply.

You could do better, tambien.

And I'm not a Randite.

You responded with cliches right off a pamphlet. You've always done better and I was disappointed. It had nothing to do with me agreeing with you or not. I do not however agree with you at all on this point.

I have morals and will not outsource work that can be done better locally.

You've got yours and screw everyone else?

Pretty well summarizes the whole Rand thing, no?

I never said screw everyone else.

This is crazy! At my university they just photocopy the shit out of the textbooks/novels/plays and give us the photocopies! What are they gonna do, sue? Haha, I'd like to see 'em try!

In effect, you did.

When the only educational option costs in excess of $100k/year, what will the regular people do? Follow this thought through for me.

My drama department in college was threatened with a lawsuit for not paying for the rights to "The Vagina Monologues." So...yes.

Living in a litigious society ftw!

What makes you think that it costs $100,000/year to educate a child?

That's like saying, "We'll starve when food prices hit $10 million/apple if we don't have government controlling food!' The state does not create knowledge.

Maybe I shoulda used the sarcasm font.

I think all these problems can be solved in battle-rap form. Who ever has the best flows, wins.

That.Just.Happened!
Aww shit, Six just got ill on the mic! who got skills to step up now yo?

Let me break this down for you
on the subject of employment and knowledge
we'll begin our speech way before college
since in America "college" means the same as "university"
or at the very least, post-secondary, community college
we're talking about a luxury item, man.

yes, it's not a luxury but a necessity
for many career options
so if you're professional-minded
my diction may sound like a contradiction,
but stay with me

university is a luxury relative to the lifestyle
of the poor. And private school, at any level, is out of the question.

what is not optional is a high school diploma or GED,
the officially tested general educational equivalency
of 12 years of schooling.

If you cannot produce evidence of your high school graduation or alternate GED you are effectively unemployable. (and not qualified to enter university, either)

These days you need that much proof of education to get a semi-skilled labor job in a warehouse that pays $10-$12 per hour.

You also need to have nothing more serious on your record
of the last seven years than minor traffic violations.
Nobody wants to hire a petty thief who is out on probation.
After all, your major mission could be to steal from your employer.

Now, follow this thought, you work hard at such a job because along with millions of other Americans, this is the level at which you qualify.

Your spouse works at the same level, and your preschooler stays with Gramma sometimes and with your wife's sister sometimes, even though they juggle too many other responsibilities to be consistently happy about it. But you cannot afford a daycare service.

It's almost time for the little guy to head off to public school. This would take care of both child care and education, whiz-bang.

Except there is no more "gov'ment education," so he will remain with half-reluctant babysitters who don't excel at providing home schooling.

The cheapest private school option in your community starts at $8,000 per term and so it just isn't an option. (if you think that's an inflated fantasy number, look some of them up)

Your child isn't getting an education, or he's getting a substandard one, at best.

Gramma sometimes plies him to look at a book instead of the television, but that isn't preparing him to someday pass the GED.

So he will likely fall below his parents level of education and income, instead of rising above it.

Or to rise above, he'll become a street smart kid and start dealing drugs.

By the time he has a couple of petty charges on his record, he'll have no option for going straight, because the starting line for halfway decent legit jobs will still require high school diploma or GED and a clean record. Your kid will flunk on all counts, because you weren't rich enough to send him to a private school.

This is how the poor stay poor and the criminal stay criminal in any world without "gov'ment education." You can tell yourself it's about indoctrination and control all you want, but I'm here to tell you that it's about subsidy and equity and a society worth living in.

You have no idea how much privilege you enjoy to imagine we could cut these systems loose without calamity.

Or you could luck out. Your uneducated or self-educated child could be the one-in-a-million genius with such a talent for music or entrepreneurship that school would have just held him back.

I'm even willing to concede that traditional education teaches compliance and conformity skills more than it teaches any specific content. Especially in the early grades. You get lots more practice sitting quietly in neat rows and raising your hand to shit than anything else.

But, man, what if your kid isn't a genius? What if he has to live like the 999,999 who do indisputably better if they go to school?

VP would be THAT much better if he spoke in Iambic Pentameter

I think where schools, especially K-12, go wrong is what they make their focus on. I think their primary focus should be two things, well three things actually. One, language/linguistics/reading, etc, make that a lot more in depth. It really starts to trail off after a few years. Two, the willingness to learn. There're far too many bland, boring, uninteresting teachers who create students that have no interest in learning. If you teach a kid great language skills AND an eagerness to continue to self-educate then the sky is the limit. Three, physical education. Huge lacking today. I've witnessed plenty of it and it is sad. There is no reason why physicality cannot blend perfectly with intellectuality.

A student's thirst for knowledge can't be attributed to only a student's teachers. Home life and peer influences were probably what shaped my educational experiences the most. I agree that there are things a GOOD teacher can do to help harvest a student, but having a negative home or peer structure can impact a student's willingness to learn far more than anything a teacher can do, in my opinion.

I didn't say it was ONLY attributed to a teachers ability. But I did say that it was extremely important. And because home life and peer influences were probably what shaped your experiences it doesn't make it absolute. And I'm not talking about good teachers, I'm talking about great teachers. Home life and peer influence can have an effect but ultimately integrity and identity have to take over.

A powerful teacher/mentor/coach can have an phenomenal effect on a pupil. Enough to overcome negative peer/home influence.

From K-12, and Freshman and Sophomore college years, I have had only 4 teachers, and one outside mentor, that really knew what they were doing and drove the points straight home. The rest were robots. Textbook education. These teachers helped me and many other students with the drive to self educate. A lot of those students were completely apathetic beforehand.

Exactly. IT's not profitable to hire great teachers. And unfortunately school boards who do the hiring don't give a damn about how a person teachers, they give a damn about they follow the rules of the state.

AAAAaaaaaannnddd cue Giggan.

I agree that parenting is a huge portion of the issue. But I'm not arguing that side. Parents aren't chosen and hired. Parents don't effect numerous kids over and over and over. It's a different type of mentoring and educating. I'm keeping my argument strictly on the lack of "education" in the educational system.

I am arguing that if you are measuring how a kid develops their capacity to retain and value knowledge, theses influences cannot be mutually exclusive.

There is too much emphasis on preparation for standardized testing. We've been through a recent era of bad educational reforms fueled on good intentions (No Child Left Behind Act). It produces an environment of "teaching to the test" to the neglect of deeper concerns. And when a public school receives its funding on a sliding scale, depending on how well its students perform, overall, on standardized testing, you can bet that creates undue pressure that will ultimately reward the teachers who drill the test material over and over again to the exclusion of all else. As flawed as that setup is, it's worth noting that it starts from the good intention of having every student in your classroom receive some bare minimum set of testable knowledge and skill. The "rules of the state" that teachers are so beholden to are the latest pedagogical criteria for maximum transfer of testable knowledge to a maximum number of students. It isn't something sinister, like instilling the "right" political ideology in students, it's something well-intended but partial in its effect.
As a system, it can't completely fill those gaps. But I think we can agree that it's better than no system at all. And the occasional outstanding and passionate teacher can make a real difference, even for a child from a troubled background; although by definition, "outstanding" can't be the expected norm.

VP- couldn't you agree that the testing is not the testing that should be done? Or at the very least the methods of testing are? I see classrooms as a systematic nightmare. Forcing children to sit in a conformed environment and to understand "AaBbCc" etc. I've found that the best way to teach an ENORMOUS amount of material ranging from literature to athletics, is systemically. Learn by doing.

Also, Iambic Pentameter, dude. Iambic Pentameter.

It's obvious that the educational system has evolved over the past 40-50 years in this country, mostly in regards to curriculum assessments and standardized testing. I have always assumed that it is a result of it being diversified (at least attempted to be) from past generations. But that has been largely a baseless assumption.

My case is that the educational system has evolved as fast as it can, reactionary to what is seen to be needed at the time. But it cannot keep up with the degrading of the American family, which was the rock foundation of generations past-- in which this entire educational system, and what is taught, is abstractly built upon.

I have no faith in my parents. I have no faith in the schools. I am doomed.

The problem with the testing isn't the vetting of what specific material to include or to leave out. That can be fought over and refined endlessly. And will be. Curricula change as institutions change and as the perceived needs of the society change.

There was a time in Western culture when you weren't considered educated if you weren't fluent in Latin and halfway or better schooled in Greek. You could be from Italy and Italian was the language you spoke at home, the language of peasants. Latin was the language you learned in school. And even if you lived in France or in the British Isles, you weren't considered educated if you couldn't read Plato, Aeschylus, and Sophocles in the original, or at the very least, in the best Latin translation from the Greek. The words of philosophers and tragedians didn't need translation into the vulgar tongue of your own region.

After all, the peasants didn't need to hear, in their own coarse language, translations of things they could never contemplate anyway. And scholars had better things to do than stand and read it to them. The peasants could all go to Mass on Sunday and be blessed just by hearing a bunch of Latin they would never comprehend.

If you understand how completely radical it is that English Literature is now considered a subject fit for study in universities, then you know how much education can change.

No, the problem for primary and secondary education through grade 12 isn't the vetting and selection of material, it's the strained over-emphasis on testing of any kind. This emphasis doesn't leave breathing room for questions from students that arise from genuine curiosity and might lead to places too far removed from the approved curriculum, digressions that teachers treat briefly and keep short, because of the pressures. Education, in such an environment, gets reduced to training, to rote memorization, to force-feeding. Even for teachers who perceive the disparity and feel the regret on a daily basis.

And this doesn't even begin to pick up the problem of diverse learning styles and students who simply won't do well if forced to sit still and cram things in all day. Absolutely, we need real physical education and more respect for kinesthetic learning strategies, but that's over and above so many untreated concerns.

THis is exactly what I'm talking about. Especially when it comes to "black & white" teaching with no room for grey. Everything is so objective when in reality, nothing is objective. Everything depends of a point of view. And kids asking the questions is extremely important.

Precisely. If kids experience school as a relentless cram session where their whole future supposedly depends upon their ability to recite the correct answer on demand to a nearly unlimited set of questions, then only the kids who excel naturally at "quick recall" type games, only the future Jeopardy contestants, will have any fun. And people get the idea that rote memorization and quick recall sum up the activities of being an intelligent person.

What about emotional and social intelligence? What about musical intelligence? What about the abstract intelligence of an artistic child allowed to model things in clay all day? And what about the philosophical child who might generate a better set of questions to ask if not consumed in memorization and rewarded only for spitting out (the "right") answers? It's sad when open questions and exploratory processes come to feel like a distraction against the demands for internalizing a content set.

Kids need to be learning how to learn, and part of that deeper learning rests in the ability to take your own approach to things, and to enjoy it.

I have no idea where I heard this, maybe it was from here or an interview somewhere. Bakc in the 40's, be ADD and ADHD were "labeled" or "invented", a psychiatrist had a difficult case of a young girl who couldn't stay still, focus, learn, etc. One day he noticed, while playing jazz in the background, she started to get up, move around, and flow to the music. He noted that while she did this, she was entirely coherent and focused on discussion and learning. Today, someone would have called it ADD and given her a pill.

I think the sign of a great teacher/mentor/coach is about helping the pupil find the right medium of learning for the student.

VP, I'll bet you I can get you to write a one sentence post.

Nope, only dudes like Frank, Kirk, or Tuffy can do that.

Oh, dammit, it almost worked! So clever.

Fucker.