This is simply excellent. What a great story. I'm surprised no one has just stated that yet. Excellent.
More comments like these are needed here!
High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials
31–40 of 172 posts
Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials
#32It's time consuming to chase down credentials, especially as when you're hiring someone, it always feels more likely that they aren't making it up. After all, you have a great hiring process, right? My father-in-law is a doctor, and he tells me there's been several occasions where he's thought some colleague was really quite shockingly ill informed. He's always been too timid to call the bluff, but he says it's happe…
Can you explain more about the cigarette burn trick? I've never heard of it.
Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public schools serve one primary purpose. They free up women to work in the labour market. It turns out that having every kid attended to one-on-one by their mother was a terribly inefficient system compared to just shoving them all in a room and letting one person look after ~20. The fact that any sort of education happens is just a nice add-on after the fact. School also does a fantastic job of preparing you to sub…
Nice narrative, and especially the "bend and break the kids to conform with mainstream" rings a bell. Yet I don't believe the major driving force is to free up women as laborers - schools have been existing way before women had the right to work or vote. In my opinion schools and universities rather serve to breed out worker drones and the curriculums are based on corporate needs, not society's. And this has, especia…
I take it back. Public schools serve several primary societal purposes but none of them are altruistic education of the populace.
Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO, two reasons: - Adults are not super humans and can make mistakes - and 17 year olds are as capable as adults. In engineering people frequently ask - why nobody thought about it - well because nobody did.
Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way" Edit: was that person the only applicant? If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?
The key answer is in what you wrote: "whose job it was". People do jobs mostly to get paychecks, so like water flowing downhill, will avoid investing effort into anything they can avoid. The students OTOH, had a strong non-monetary motivation driving their efforts, so they obviously dug deeper and more thoroughly.
Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials
#35It's time consuming to chase down credentials, especially as when you're hiring someone, it always feels more likely that they aren't making it up. After all, you have a great hiring process, right? My father-in-law is a doctor, and he tells me there's been several occasions where he's thought some colleague was really quite shockingly ill informed. He's always been too timid to call the bluff, but he says it's happe…
One of the things that always stuck with me from learning about psychopaths, is that if you act confident, the majority of the time no one will question what you are doing.
Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public schools serve one primary purpose. They free up women to work in the labour market. It turns out that having every kid attended to one-on-one by their mother was a terribly inefficient system compared to just shoving them all in a room and letting one person look after ~20. The fact that any sort of education happens is just a nice add-on after the fact. School also does a fantastic job of preparing you to sub…
Nice narrative, and especially the "bend and break the kids to conform with mainstream" rings a bell. Yet I don't believe the major driving force is to free up women as laborers - schools have been existing way before women had the right to work or vote. In my opinion schools and universities rather serve to breed out worker drones and the curriculums are based on corporate needs, not society's. And this has, especia…
I look at it this way: schools may have existed a longer than universal suffrage, and maybe they even started with a desire to educate the population - but during their existence, they were found to be extremely useful as places to keep kids, so that their parents (both genders) could go to productive work. Like many things in life, schools seem to have changed their primary roles over time.
Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials
#37It's time consuming to chase down credentials, especially as when you're hiring someone, it always feels more likely that they aren't making it up. After all, you have a great hiring process, right? My father-in-law is a doctor, and he tells me there's been several occasions where he's thought some colleague was really quite shockingly ill informed. He's always been too timid to call the bluff, but he says it's happe…
Can you explain more about the cigarette burn trick? I've never heard of it.
Presumably, make the date illegible so that you can claim whatever date you like. I don't quite see how that gets you anywhere. Maybe somebody who only just got the degree is trying to claim they got it 20 years ago and have been gaining experience ever since?
Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials
#38It's time consuming to chase down credentials, especially as when you're hiring someone, it always feels more likely that they aren't making it up. After all, you have a great hiring process, right? My father-in-law is a doctor, and he tells me there's been several occasions where he's thought some colleague was really quite shockingly ill informed. He's always been too timid to call the bluff, but he says it's happe…
> Heck, I worked with someone with a mathematical PhD for years wondering how he'd never heard of Banach-Tarsky. Not that it's a specifically useful or necessary thing, just that you'd think a math-interested person would have come across it.
Math is huge. If he does have a Ph.D., he has probably forgotten more named theorems than either of us know. Banach-Tarski is one of those results that, for a pragmatic mathematician who doesn't know it's a meme-y theorem, could go in one ear and out the other.
I'd bet the average avid HN comment reader knows more about Goedel's incompleteness theorems than a big percentage of math phds.
> Or how it could be that he thought excel was a good platform for quantitative finance.
That's not surprising at all. Why would a math Ph.D. have any clue what-so-ever about how to build quantitative finance software?
Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials
#39This is how journalism should work. Not like the Washpo, acting as Jeff Bezos Anti-Trump propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong here, this is not a Trump fan writing, but I can't stand the biased bs media publishes these days.
Re: High school journalists investigated a new principal’s credentials
#40This is how journalism should work. Not like the Washpo, acting as Jeff Bezos Anti-Trump propaganda machine. Don't get me wrong here, this is not a Trump fan writing, but I can't stand the biased bs media publishes these days.
"these days."?
The media has always been biased.