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18 hours agoIndependent School District.
Although, given how my Houston ISD is being run after being hijacked by the state government…
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023
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Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?
The only serious method of evaluating critical thinking and creativity is through peer evaluation. But that’s a subjective scale thick with implicit bias, not a clean and logical discrete answer. It’s also not something you can really see in the moment, because true creativity and critical thinking will inevitably produce heterodox views and beliefs.
Only by individuals challenging and outperforming the status quo to you see the fruits of a critical and creative labor force. In the moment, these folks just look like they’re outliers who haven’t absorbed the received orthodoxy. And a lot of them are. You’ll get your share of Elizabeth Holmes-es and Sam Altmans alongside your Vincent Van Goghs and Nikolai Teslas.
I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers.
I agree that we’re flush with think-pieces. Incidentally, the NYT Op-Ed section has doubled in size over the last few years.
But that’s sort of the rub. You can’t get a well-defined answer to the question “Is Our Children Creative-ing?” because we only properly know it by the fruits of the system. Comically easy to walk into a school with a creative writing course and scream about how this or that student is doing creativity wrong. Comically easy to claim a school is Marxist or Fascist or too Pro/Anti-Religion or too banal and mainstream by singling out a few anecdotes in order to curtail the whole system.
The fundamental argument is that this kind of liberal arts education is wasteful. The output isn’t steady and measureable. The quality of the work isn’t easily defined as above or below the median. It doesn’t yield real consistent tangible economic value. So we need to abolish it in order to become more efficient.
And that’s what we’re creating. A society that is laser-focused on making economic numbers go up, without stopping to ask whether a larger GDP actually benefits anyone living in the country where all this fiscal labor is performed.
American education isn’t actually about education, but about creating compliant cogs for the machinery of the corporate oligarchy.
Well, historically that’s true.
But the modern American education system is about Stack Ranking to create the illusion of meritocracy. So the functional purpose of the system is to score better than the rest of your classmates. Since the actual lesson plan doesn’t matter and only the honors you get from completing the course are perceived to have value, you either want to cheat the hell out of every course to beat the herd. Or you want to find a degree plan where you can appear to be the Best Kid In Class, either through grade inflation or by participating in a class full of dropouts/fake students.
It does not value, measure, reinforce, or reward individual betterment… but rote memorization and how compliant you are under the arbitrary authoritarian structure of the system.
Rote memorization is easy to evaluate, because the answers are discrete and can be fed into a binary grading engine.
It’s also easy to cheat, because you don’t need to know how to solve the problems, just how to source the correct pattern of answers.
Students can cheat for free and no longer need to do anything, why would they study anymore?
In theory, they need to study in order to learn the skills necessary to be gainfully employed. But in practice, the promise of the future is “automate everything”, so might as well learn how to maximize the outputs of the Big Grifting Machine while you’re still young.
Why waste time mastering comprehensive writing when there won’t be any employers left to read what you wrote? Why waste time developing technical skills when everything gets outsourced to the lowest bidding firm in the South Pacific? Why waste time developing a talent for artistry, music, or cinema when we’ve decided the future of performative arts is whatever bot-farm best self-promotes AI slop to the top of the most trending Spotify playlist?
When I told them their code was bad (with mentoring and help, I’m not an asshole), they used another prompt that changed their whole code but it was still full of bugs.
Why do they care if the code is full of bugs? They’ll be changing jobs in another two years anyway, because that’s the only way to get a raise. They aren’t invested in the success of their current firm, much less the profitablility of the clients they work for (who are, themselves, likely going to be outsourcing this shit to India in another few years). And all this work is just about maximizing the bottom line for private equity anyway, so why does anyone care if the project succeeds? It’s not like my quality of life hinges on my ability to do useful productive work.
And if quality of life declines? Just find someone to blame. Migrants. The Wrong Politicians. China. Lizard People. Fuck, I’ll just ask ChatGPT why my life sucks and believe everything it tells me, because… why not? Its not like everyone else isn’t lying.
The corrupt cheapskates trying to nickel and dime every ISD in the country to bankruptcy absolutely fell over one another at the opportunity to fire staff and replace them with Clippy.
Twenty years ago, state officials were all fawning over the idea of turning every university in the country into a pile subscription based Udemy online courses. Ten years ago, letting Pearson hijack the lesson plan of every classroom in the country was the dream. This has been a long time coming.
No. No! I wanted to die! I was on the edge of bird Valhalla!
WHY HAVE YOU DENIED BUTTERCUP HER ETERNAL REWARD?!!
Bicyclists are two gender fluid people sharing a single peddle-powered contraption.
13·19 hours ago18-29 year olds being populist
Jesus. Imagine reading what I posted and reaching this conclusion.
Are they?
https://www.newsinenglish.no/2024/11/12/conservative-wave-rolls-over-norway/
Most startling is another new poll, conducted by research firm Ipsos for state broadcaster NRK, that showed how 47 percent of Norwegian men aged 18-29 said they would have voted for Trump if they’d had voting rights in the US. Among them is Herman Winther, a 23-year-old philosophy student at the University of Oslo who didn’t like Trump at all in 2016 but now sees value in what he described to Aftenposten this week as “conservative realism.”
1·1 day agothe argument you pulled out of no where
Who do you think promoted Microsoft to pull the ICC’s email access?
you build a strawman
You think Mossad is a strawman?
the actions of individual judges aren’t the actions of “The Democrats” or “The Libs”
When they are endorsed by the party?
No shortage of cop-fetishizers at the DLC. Hell, Eric Adams was floated as presidential material this time a year ago.
Meme creators just like to oversimplify the world.
Politicians, too, sadly. The party is run by people trapped in the 1990s, when running to the right of the Bush family was how they won elections.
WTF? Talk about a straw man argument!
That’s not what a strawman argument is.
but when they do happen it’s not “The Democrats” or “The Libs” making those rulings.
No Democrats in Washington State or Aurora, Colorado?
When the police are chanting “Yes we can” and getting away with it.
I gotta say. I’m remembering the Columbia / UCLA protests, the BLM rallies, and the anti-War marches. And I’m remembering the police response. The police did not appear to side with the “We Want Civil Rights” folks. In fact, quite a few of the police were - themselves - waving the MAGA flags.
It wasn’t the “We want to kill black people” group that cancelled. It wasn’t the reactionaries that got banned.
Do people really still need to be explained why proprietary software is bad?
The degree of overreach by a US company, in this instance, is shocking. Yes, you can go spill a gallon of ink talking about how American software companies have been the tip of the spear for intelligence gathering, propagandizing, and sabotage. But I would say that an international business with a huge future stake in European implementation of their software spiking a criminal court’s Outlook servers over prosecution of an ongoing genocide is a new low.
Open source proponents have tried to explain this simple fact for more than 20 years.
Open source is a far cry from bulletproof. We could just as easily see Mossad fucking with a poorly implemented Linux iteration of an email distribution agent. But then the assumption is that the Israelis - being heavily integrated into the European socio-economic system - are on Europe’s side. Similarly, Microsoft and Google are supposed to be agents of the Big Friendly American Security State. The thing that shields you from the evil Slavs and Huns and Muslims, not the thing that stabs you in the back.
Part of this is corruption (Big Tech lobbyists effectively bribing public official to adopt their software), part of it is laziness (corporate sales reps go out of their way to make early adoption relatively easy and backload the real costs until later), part of it is the networking effect (thanks to the above there is an abundance of Microsoft-centric IT companies and experienced users who have already adapted to the privatized frameworks).
But this isn’t a problem you can simply explain your way out of. Ultimately, you need a structural change in how these institutions do business. You need ICC that has insourced its IT and is capable of self-administration, rather than a bunch of outsourced flunkies who exist as a way to pad a contractor’s wallet. You need a public that is adopting good IT practices at the grade school level, rather than feeding at the trough of private subsidies and philanthropies to defer the up front cost of technical education. You need an IT community that is well-organized and unionized and hostile to the corporate model of development and distribution of for-profit systems. Not a bunch of freelancers that see Microsoft Certification as a meal ticket.
But 90% of people simply don’t care even just a little.
90% of people (honestly closer to 99.9% of people) don’t believe they have any say over IT policies at their own offices, much less at the scale of the a trans-national criminal court.
They do not genuinely believe they live in a democratic institution and roll over in compliance for fear of some form of reprisal, because that’s how they’ve been trained to behave from their earliest days of life.
It isn’t a matter of caring nearly so much as it is a matter of learned helplessness.
The shame of the Norwegian criminal justice system is not in how they treat their prisoners but in who they haven’t gotten around to imprisoning. White Wing nationalism absolutely tearing that country to shreds.
The “old people complaining about Shakespeare” was the thin end of the wedge intended to defund and dismantle public education. But the leverage comes from large groups of people who are sold the notion that children are just born dumb or smart and education has no material benefit.
A lot of this isn’t about teaching styles. It’s about public funding of education and the neo-confederate dream of a return to ethnic segregation.
A lot of these studies come out of public sector federal and state education departments that have been targeted by anti-public education lobbying groups. So what used to be a wealth of public research into the benefits of education has dried up significantly over the last generation.
What we get instead is a profit-motivated push for standardized testing, lionized by firms that directly benefit from public sector purchasing of test prep and testing services. And these tend to come via private think-tanks with ties back to firms invested in bulk privatization of education. So good luck in your research, but be careful when you see something from CATO or The Gates Foundation, particularly in light of the fact that more reliable and objective data has been deliberately purged from public records.