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Escaping High School

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Re: Escaping High School

#211

Post by Izkata »

dragonwriter wrote: post #203
yardie wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15-20% == 80-85% What is a B average? "B" = 80-89% So, their standardized scores more or less lines up with their grades.

> 15-20% == 80-85% That's not how percentiles work. (The upthread 15-20 was %ile not %.) I mean, I can imagine a test where the 15th-20th %ile range happened to be a score of 80-85%, but that would be coincidence or design of the specific test, not a natural equivalence.

I figure this was the same mistake as the first other response, I made the same one initially when reading that comment and thought they were saying "B" was lower than it should have been, not higher than it should have been. How "percentile" actually works isn't something I've given any thought in like a decade or more, my first read was "top 15-20%" before going back and remembering it's actually more like "bottom 15-20%" (or more precisely something like "better than 15-20% of other takers").

Re: Escaping High School

#212

Post by mrguyorama »

guy98238710 wrote: post #183
dfxm12 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would that not utterly stratify social classes? Yes. This is one of the outcomes the anti-school crowd is after.

Don't be so cynical. There are serious problems with schools and there's no visible progress, so many people gave up. They concluded the problems are endemic and permanent and the only way to fix them is to dissolve the schools entirely.

Which is why they are pretty much universally funded by religious fundamentalists who spent their past years trying to force textbook writers to deny climate change or evolution as basic scientific facts.

This isn't disillusioned people looking to tear it all down and rebuild a wonderful new system, unless you think Betsy Devos is some sort of anarchist. These people have very specific complaints about the school system that rarely have to do with the actual problems of actual outcomes, because the people who by and large ARE getting actual bad outcomes from the public school system don't really have a voice.

Re: Escaping High School

#213

Post by jjav »

balaji1 wrote: post #178
dmvdoug wrote: post #144

> Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way. The disadvantages of this case are obvious, but there are a few advantages too; the…

99% of the time it is not hubris, just the author missing some viewpoint/info/awareness. The author seems to have put in a lot of thought. And would be open to putting in more thought if you illustrated where he is incorrect or missing info. Otherwise the content is appealing to a lot of people.

> 99% of the time it is not hubris, just the author missing some viewpoint/info/awareness.

That's sort of the definition of hubris. Coming to a topic they don't have anywhere near enough knowledge but assuming they know it all because they put some thought into it.

Re: Escaping High School

#214

Post by hindsightbias »

ModernMech wrote: post #106
fn-mote wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, don't we all hate it when people come into our job and tell us how to do it? I read this and was expecting /s but apparently not. Please address something concrete! In the US, there are significant problems with the educational system. It's ok to write a theoretical piece thinking about ways to do things differently. The author has some good ideas that do not deserve to be dismissed lightly. They can even be a…

Well, there are a couple things going on here. First is the blog post, which I can't really make sense of. It's 12,000 words on how to navigate high school without a single reference or citation. No evidence is presented whatsoever to support any of the assertions made. It purports to be a guide for 14 year olds but is written in a manner and published in a medium that is not accessible for 14 year olds; not many 14…

What this author's 14 year old self would say to their elder instantiation: "What's a computer, boomer?"

Always fascinating to see a forum with a population who see themselves as special outliers, but also think that they have some unique ability to speak authoritatively on what the other 99% should be doing.

Re: Escaping High School

#215

Post by jovial_cavalier »

mrguyorama wrote: post #209
jovial_cavalier wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Parents love to think that because they have had one child (or maybe a couple), they know how to educate children writ large. They don't care about how to educate children writ large. They care to the extent that they think you are failing their child, specifically. You would do well to remember that as an educator, you have a responsibility to the public. If you really find parents concerns to be beneath your digni…

>If you really find parents concerns to be beneath your dignity, perhaps you shouldn't be a teacher. As a person who does tech work, you are now sentenced to be forced to listen to every single asshole who wants to tell you their "super awesome app" idea that "should take like a weekend right" to make and "will get us rich", and you aren't allowed to complain or point out how they have no idea what they are talking a…

Those guys don't have any stake in anything except a half-baked idea, and furthermore they can clearly be shown not to know what they're talking about.

It is not comparable to a parent's concern for the welfare of their child. A teacher's duty to their student is obligate. Dismissing out-of-hand the input of the one or two human beings who know and care more for that child than anyone else on the planet should be considered malpractice in that line of work.

Re: Escaping High School

#216

Post by mrguyorama »

benji-york wrote: post #166
Nasrudith wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theory of mind.

I see where you were going, but I don't think Theory of Mind quite fits. ToM says that a person understands someone else to have their own knowledge, ideas, motivations, etc. But this behavior is not simply understanding that others have their own motivations, but imputing negative motivations onto others.

It's estimates of future behavior from past public behavior and public statements and documented funding. Ask a teacher how they feel about Betsy Devos and you will get two very very very different answers largely depending on political ideologies that have nothing to do with teaching because of her history and "friends".

She isn't exactly friendly to public education, and a lot of the funding for pushing for voucher programs comes from religious organizations.

For a concrete example, our state has had vouchers for decades, and it has done jack, diddly, and squat for improving public schools in the area, because it turns out letting the rich kids go to a school only they can go to just means they have an easier time neglecting the other hundred thousand kids in the state that weren't born to the local power family. Meanwhile up north where there isn't enough density to support a school as a private business and not enough rich families to want it anyway, everyone is put into the same couple schools which struggle to ever have enough money to do even the basics but the teachers are good and the material is good and the effort is there, so for the kids that want education, there's a perfectly good one for all to have. I was classmates with a famous Senator's niece, and we had the same teachers and it turns out the world doesn't end when you let the poors learn stuff.

Re: Escaping High School

#217

Post by WalterBright »

gumby wrote: post #127
jabroni_salad wrote: post #85

Something that bugs me today is the way music education was handled at my school, and probably other schools. I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Maybe some of that is my bad, but I switched to keys after highschool and when I show up to jam, most wind players seem like musical cripples without a lead sheet, and my fakesheets…

> I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Without commenting on the dire state of music (and arts) education in the schools, the same is true of all subjects. Mathematics is mostly taught as syntactic manipulation; physics as memorizing a bunch of "laws" and doing "experiments" that have a right or wrong answer (chemistry and biol…

Mathematics and science do have right and wrong answers. That's why physics, chemistry, etc. are "science" and not "religion" or "ideology".

> teach to the test

How are you going to teach to the test when the test has questions like: "what is the sum of 647 and 296?"

> standardized testing

There's nothing cultural about math and science. Standardized testing is the only way to objectively measure progress and mastery of them.

Re: Escaping High School

#218

Post by mrguyorama »

Mezzie wrote: post #38
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I read the parent's point, I think he is advocating for kids seeing their parents work more often. As it is, kids in US don't experience the reality often. More than that, parents shield them from the reality as long as it is possible, because the reality mostly sucks. I would think of it as 'take your kids to work', but more often. I am not a big fan. I was coming to my dad's car shop after school and I can't hon…

They probably expect the kids to be involved/help, but that depends a lot on the parents' jobs. Like I was of some help to my dad in elementary school (helped him with basic IT/networking/data stuff), but my mom worked with biohazards that had very good reason for not wanting children around so any time we had to go to mom's work we were locked in a break room for hours.

My mom was a teacher and for some reason I ended up the entire school's IT dept as a preteen, despite the school's IT dept being acceptable, just not staffed 100% of the time. I did pretty well at running a photocopier and stuff, though when I was older I eventually realized that letting a ten year old run and DIAGNOSE AND FIX the photocopier was not something that should have happened.

My mom was single and poor so I also got to spend from 3pm to 7pm most evenings sitting in her classroom, which for some years was an actual server closet, desperately trying to note die of boredom while my mother had meetings and graded papers.

This was so useful, important, and necessary for my future /s

Re: Escaping High School

#219

Post by WalterBright »

tristor wrote: post #76

Interestingly, the advice in this article pretty much aligns with what I did, although I can't claim I did what I did with any grand strategic vision. I mostly blew off high school doing the bare minimum necessary to graduate, while spending as much time as possible in-person and online with adults who worked in tech and would mentor me, working on side projects, and volunteering on open source. I went to college, bu…

You're right that today's high school diploma has little meaning. There's nothing wrong with the idea of the diploma, but plenty wrong with the institution that issues it.

For example, you found tech certifications to be valuable to you, and indicated a GED was valuable as well.

Re: Escaping High School

#220

Post by mrguyorama »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #105
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is almost certainly not worth your time to try to be in the top 10 in your class. Nearly everyone is much better off doing other things with their time than studying to try to get an elite college for a good deal. There's little evidence that where you go to school matters. If you take Albert Einstein and you put him in a community college, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and you're still going to just be…

> It is almost certainly not worth your time to try to be in the top 10 in your class. In Louisiana, it literally gets you a free public college education.

Which for a depressing number of kids in Louisiana, is one of their only hopes of breaking a cycle of poverty.
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