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Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

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Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

#101

Post by _rpd »

VLM wrote: post #94
_rpd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> home school seems like the the only real solution Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas. There are good schools, but they are rare and often expensive. Schooling co-ops are an interesting option, but again I think you have to get lucky with the available talent pool.

Parental involvement in education is kind of like eating healthy, in that its expensive and time consuming and not always fun, but the alternative being failure and disaster and death is kind of motivational. The stick is mightier than the carrot. That also assumes a modern curriculum is good. It is highly optimized, but optimized to what? Like all group activities the odds of the group goals matching your own is ver…

Well said.

Of course, the goal should be to instruct the student as they would have wished from the perspective of their older selves. A damnably hard goal set to estimate. To enable fluid interaction with the bulk of society, however, my estimation is that the goals should include at least knowledge of the most popular curriculums, as taught to other students. There are a lot of socially valuable games set up around such curriculums and a student may be justifiably resentful if they are not competitive. A capable educator will go beyond that and treat the curriculums themselves as objects of study, but here the capabilities of the student come into play, since most are out of middle school before being able to comfortably make such distinctions.

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

#102

Post by Trill-I-Am »

VLM wrote: post #94
_rpd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> home school seems like the the only real solution Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas. There are good schools, but they are rare and often expensive. Schooling co-ops are an interesting option, but again I think you have to get lucky with the available talent pool.

Parental involvement in education is kind of like eating healthy, in that its expensive and time consuming and not always fun, but the alternative being failure and disaster and death is kind of motivational. The stick is mightier than the carrot. That also assumes a modern curriculum is good. It is highly optimized, but optimized to what? Like all group activities the odds of the group goals matching your own is ver…

What do you take away from the fact that many, many people in America don't eat healthy?

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

#103

Post by vivekd »

_rpd wrote: post #74
vivekd wrote: post #40

This stuff seems to me to be inherent to institutionalized education. When you have an instituion with lots of kids to teach, what option is there but to have them all sit down all day and be passive. Also dealing with lots of kids and their misbehavior and having to get through a lesson plan at the same time would make adults feel like they have to be strict and direct "shh" towards the kids. When this organization…

> home school seems like the the only real solution Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas. There are good schools, but they are rare and often expensive. Schooling co-ops are an interesting option, but again I think you have to get lucky with the available talent pool.

>Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas.

At least for the first few years of a child's life, I think a parent can handle the curriculum. And it doesn't necessarily have to be time consuming. I think kids will pick things up faster when being taught one on one by a parent as opposed to a stranger. Also, they can go at their own pace rather than at the pace of the class which should allow for a lot more to be crammed into much shorter periods of time.

Maybe in higher grades there will be things that parents cannot adequately teach, but these can be supplemented through means much less drastic than locking kids up for hours and hours in a school environment.

It will require one parent to stay at home with the kids . . . but I don't think that was ever really optional, our society has just chosen to pretend that it was an option because we seem to have our values misplaced.

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

#104

Post by vivekd »

thesuitonym wrote: post #77
vivekd wrote: post #40

This stuff seems to me to be inherent to institutionalized education. When you have an instituion with lots of kids to teach, what option is there but to have them all sit down all day and be passive. Also dealing with lots of kids and their misbehavior and having to get through a lesson plan at the same time would make adults feel like they have to be strict and direct "shh" towards the kids. When this organization…

I wasn't are that the Department of Transportation ran the schools, or are you honestly implying that the same sort of organizational structure is at place because they're both "the gubment"?

is that snark and sarcasm I hear? ;)

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

#105

Post by logfromblammo »

ashark wrote: post #82
logfromblammo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned more about technical writing from The Elements of Style and a one-semester university course that I ever did from 13 years of public schooling. I learned more about creative writing from being an immortal on a MUD and contributing to the underground newspaper than from anything I ever did in classes. What I learned from the public school system was that I was not a good writer, and didn't know how to apprec…

> But I consider Planescape: Torment to be a better work of art. It isn't in a standard poetic form, though. Mmm. There's some of that, yes, but I think it'd fail for not being so entirely sublime as the best canonical works of prose and poetry (and art, generally). It avoids some of the drudgery of its genre, yes, but while much of the "waiting for the pathfinding to take The Nameless One from one side of this room…

But that's just it. Different art says different things to different people.

To me, Inferno read like historical fan-fiction, where Dante put some well-known figures and some people that he just had some personal grudge against into his own version of Hell. The words were well chosen, but I didn't like it. Yet there it was, in my Norton Anthology. Someone liked it well enough to decide that I had to not only read it, but also dissect it and write BS essays about it.

That's a horrible enough thing to do to art you actually enjoy, but to chop up and rehash something you feel nothing for is even worse.

From my perspective now, as 2017-me, I wouldn't say that Planescape: Torment was "sublime". But 1999-me thought it was just the best thing to ever grace my hard drive. And 1999-me was able to look back on 1994-me and think "This is way better than Dante's Inferno." Dante took the concept of Gehennom from the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious tradition and turned it into an epic poem. Black Isle Studios took the Planescape campaign setting from D&D 2nd Ed. (aka AD&D) and turned it into an epic CRPG. In it, the ordered layers of Hell had to be renamed to Baator because of the moral panic from D&D 1st Ed. When Nameless One actually (re-)visited renamed Hell, I thought that the pillar of skulls was at least as good as anything Dante ever dreamed up, and the protagonist actually had a plot-essential reason to see it.

I think I actually need the gamey bits. I have tried the artsy walking-simulator games where the story is on rails, and I don't like them. For me, an essential part of enjoying the art is in the discovery. I tend to like it more if I had to work to get it. So as tell-a-story games go, I much prefer something like The Stanley Parable over something like Dear Esther.

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

#106

Post by logfromblammo »

VLM wrote: post #99
logfromblammo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned more about technical writing from The Elements of Style and a one-semester university course that I ever did from 13 years of public schooling. I learned more about creative writing from being an immortal on a MUD and contributing to the underground newspaper than from anything I ever did in classes. What I learned from the public school system was that I was not a good writer, and didn't know how to apprec…

"canonical masterwork" Not a constant, there isn't even an ideal. I had the worst stereotype of a 9th grade history teacher you can imagine with a curriculum of a dumbed down textbook written at about 80 IQ level to maximize sales and tests consisting mostly of matching names and dates. I almost failed that class... We can't teach dead white male texts for political reasons anymore. Nothing motivates a white male tee…

Are you kidding?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon#Literary_canon

There is literally a literary canon. It has certainly evolved over time, but almost everything I was assigned to read in my high school literature classes was in it. My personal opinion is that no one would bother reading Inferno today if it wasn't in the canon.

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

#107

Post by white-flame »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #91
VLM wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the open office, the clock is the definition of successful working, authoritarian discipline. Add in a social / political culture that is right out of middle school behavior at the worse employers...

I think if that's not what your job is like, then you're probably in the vast minority in the world, probably even in Western culture unless you're a standard deviation above the norm in IQ or generational wealth.

If you have no tolerance for such BS, you'll eventually find your place without it. There are literally millions of companies to work for, as well as other non-direct-employment opportunities which is something like 30% of the workforce now.

Accepting these problems as a necessary burden is your own personal choice.

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

#108

Post by white-flame »

vivekd wrote: post #103
_rpd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> home school seems like the the only real solution Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas. There are good schools, but they are rare and often expensive. Schooling co-ops are an interesting option, but again I think you have to get lucky with the available talent pool.

>Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas. At least for the first few years of a child's life, I think a parent can handle the curriculum. And it doesn't necessarily have to be time consuming. I think kids will pick things up faster when being taught one on one by a parent as opposed to a stranger. Also, they can go at their own pace rath…

> I think kids will pick things up faster when being taught one on one by a parent as opposed to a stranger.

I would actually disagree with that. To a kid, a teacher is its own mythical authoritative being solely focused on instruction and keeping the class orderly. (ymmv for poor unruly schools) It's always world-shattering for a little one to see their teacher in "normal life" at the store or wherever.

A parent is more familiar, and is somebody that you have arguments with. Being at home also has its own distractions, because you're usually not locked down to one thing in your own house.

I agree that factory-style education is pretty terrible, but some of the nuggets are useful, like getting away from the home to a dedicated place & people of learning.

Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)

#109

Post by pdimitar »

white-flame wrote: post #107
Consultant32452 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if that's not what your job is like, then you're probably in the vast minority in the world, probably even in Western culture unless you're a standard deviation above the norm in IQ or generational wealth.

If you have no tolerance for such BS, you'll eventually find your place without it. There are literally millions of companies to work for, as well as other non-direct-employment opportunities which is something like 30% of the workforce now. Accepting these problems as a necessary burden is your own personal choice.

As a guy who almost thought about committing a suicide due to working in offices, and as a guy who eventually found his way to stable remote work, I still think you're being too harsh.

People get tired. People get burned out. People need to switch an active and hectic period with a period of stability and tranquility. Having someone who needs such a more relaxing period to NEVER engage it to continuously chase the ideal employer is a recipe for a suicide.

Moving between companies is harder than it should be.

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