Category: Education

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Tar Him, Feather Him and Give Him a Box of Matches to Play With

Read:

When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids

and

Revealed: School board member who took standardized test

And get back with me. I’ll be playing the Jeopardy Theme…

Back now?

I got hold of a pdf of the “test” this moron with 2 masters degrees (in education, of course) took. His carping (from a summation by his interviewer), “The math section, he said, tests information that most people don’t need when they get out of school,” is typical. Of COURSE most people will never NEED to have at their fingertips the information that there are 360 degrees in a circle and that the hours of a clock face (obviously–duh: 360/12) divide those degrees up into 30-degree chunks. (see pic below) That’s just ONE way to get the correct answer, without guessing, to one of the easy-peasy questions on the maths test. But, as Lovely Daughter pointed out to me in email, such problems as that particular question posed ARE easily answered with very simple reasoning, no math needed.

*sigh*

And so it proved for the entire math test. Indeed, most of those questions that weren’t simple addition, subtraction, multiplication or division (4th grade stuff, at best) HAD THE FORMULAS PROVIDED TO SOLVE THEM! The rest? Any formulas or processes were blatantly obvious to anyone competent in sixth to eighth grade math.

All the unthinking test taker needed to do with such fare would be to plug the data into their (provided) calculator.

Simple, basic reasoning ability and the ability to read simple text and follow directions: that’s ALL the test measured.

His gripe about the math test is that no one he knows needs to know any of that information, so kids shouldn’t be tested on it? Well, they’re not. The test is a math test like a “driver’s test” at a kiddie bumper-car ride is Le Mans. The test is simply a test of whether those taking it can think their way out of a wet paper bag.

And the guy’s gripe about the reading test?

“On the FCAT, they are reading material they didn’t choose. They are given four possible answers and three out of the four are pretty good. One is the best answer but kids don’t get points for only a pretty good answer. They get zero points, the same for the absolute wrong answer…”

Well, duh. It’s a TEST, dumbass! Do employees choose all their reading material at work, or do they have to follow directions? Do people really WANT to read the directions for taking a prescription medication? Is “reading” but not comprehending such material really a Good Thing? OF COURSE reading COMPREHENSION is a survival and success attribute, but this guy thinks kids should only be quizzed on whatever they WANT to read, and that getting wrong answers is just as good as actually understanding the printed word and being able to use information thus transmitted to get correct answers.

This guy’s a perfect example of those things that are wrong with education in America. We’d all be better of if he and his ilk were placed on chain gangs making little rocks out of big ones. For life.

Note: while I am absolutely convinced that there is ample evidence to assert that “education departments” of colleges and universities are intellectual wastelands largely populated by the least intellectually gifted attending college or university, I also know a number of standout exceptions to that rule. There are good teachers who are bright, capable and hard-working. Unfortunately, I think the evidence is strong that those who combine those characteristics are not the norm in education.

My hat’s off to good teachers everywhere. Sadly, I don’t feel I need tip it all that often.

Continue reading “Tar Him, Feather Him and Give Him a Box of Matches to Play With”

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*sigh* eWeek Can’t Issue a Simple Warning About Malware Without Screwing Up the Lede

FBI Issues Warning about Phishing Attack. That’s a good thing to pass around, but eWeek’s Fahmida Y. Rashid needs to take some remedial English classes. Note the lede:

“FBI warned of a new spear-phishing campaign that tricks users into downloading Zeus malware and then looting their bank accounts.”

While one can infer that the author meant to say that the malware seeks to loot users’ bank accounts, that’s not what the sentence says. The lil “and” indicates the two linked phrases are equivalents referring to the phishing campaign” that “tricks users” into two actions: “downloading” and “looting”. While that’s obviously not what the author intended to say, it’d help promote literacy if the author would say what she means, viz.,

“FBI warned of a new spear-phishing campaign that tricks users into downloading Zeus malware which then attempts to loot their bank accounts.”

But, in terms of the warning, only very (very) stupid people will be fooled by this phishing malware attempt. Would YOU click on a link in a (SPAM!) message that purports to come from “the National Automated Clearing House Assocation (NACHA)” and tells you the link is to reset your banking credentials? If so, I have some great ocean front property in New Mexico I’d like to sell you and a bridge located in Brooklyn I just know would interest you.

Oh, and this absolutely stupid comment from another eWeek article by the same author really takes the cake:

It’s difficult for the savviest Internet user to identify some of the latest scams.

That was in the context of email inbox filtering to filter out dangerous attachments and other email. Really? It’s difficult for anyone with more active brain cells than a 10-year-old cracked crock of spoiled kimchi to identify some of the latest scams? Really? Ocean front property and a bridge in Brooklyn…

And the author follows that statement, in a paragraph “debunking” the idea that training users will enhance network security, with this:

While technology can be patched, the human brain can’t.

OK, I may have to give him that one. In fact, I’ll admit that he’s a good data point in support of the assertion.

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“…but most of it is dreck”

Eric Schmidt: Every 2 Days We Create As Much Information As We Did Up To 2003

Of course, to Schmidt, “information” is just bits ‘n’ bytes of data crunched by Google. But still, our society is awash in information. Most of it, IMO, is misinformation, disinformation and just plain uninteresting or completely trivial.

Take Twitter. Please. The “information” channel for twits*.

Far too many people “know” things that are simply untrue, fallacious, destructive and harmful. They’ve heard these things from “friends” (though few seem to know what a friend is) and acquaintances, seen these things on TV, heard them on the radio or, in rare cases, read them in newspapers or more likely on Farcebook, Twitter or blogs… written by other subliterate, ill-informed, misinformed, DISinformed, or simply self-lobotomized sheeple, dumbasses and liars.

How to sift the wheat from the chaff, separate the meat from the sizzle, refine the gold from the crap?

First, by attempting to become really literate. Seriously. No, not able to laboriously puzzle out those funny squiggles and put words to them or even to (mostly) understand some of those words’ primary meanings, as known to today’s subliterate culture. No, a literate person–or even one who’s made serious efforts to become literate–just automatically performs historical-critical analysis of what he reads and has multiple primary or other relatively reliable sources and resources to draw on in understanding a text.

Start with any of the “100 must-read books” lists that abound. Sure, they’ll all contain multiple instances of propaganda masquerading as history or historical novels like “The Grapes of Wrath” or many of the ancient historians like Thucydides or darned near all modern historians (though the classical histories are less arrogant and sneering than the modern propaganda papers), but they are at least well-written, for the most part, and as close to primary documents for their respective ages as can be found.

BTW, look askance at any “must read” list that doesn’t include The Bible and ALL of Shakespeare’s works. Lists that don’t include those two things are likely to be wanting throughout. In fact, I’d suggest reading the King James Version until you understand the language there at least as well as you understand contemporary English. It will serve you well both in reading many of the classics and in grasping the many, many cultural memes still expressed with biblical expressions.

Add to those lists some books and other resources that are often missing, such as The American State Papers (including The Organic Law of the United States), Ortega’s “Revolt of the Masses” and the modern “classic”, The Founders’ Constitution, and you’d have a good strong base of reasoning ability and knowledge from which to become more literate and able to at least evaluate the masses of infrmation flowing from various media nowadays.

Just sayin’.

*1twit noun \?twit\

Definition of TWIT…

2: a silly annoying person: fool

Continue reading ““…but most of it is dreck””

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I Just Hate This Kind of Stuff

Got an email from a politician. OK, I don’t mind that so much, since I solicit comments from politicians. What I disliked so intensely was the subject line:

Can I send you my book?

*feh* This is a politician who will not get my support. Of course someone on this pol’s staff actually wrote the email and that stupid subject line, but the pol’s responsible for the stupidity of “its” (my fav “gender neutral” pronoun *heh*) staff.

My answer, should the pol or its stupid staff care to read my reply email is, “Of course you CAN send me your book. You already have my contact information. You don’t NEED to ask if you CAN send it, dumbass. But since you ask such a stupid question, I’ll answer the question you ought to have asked instead. You MAY NOT send me your book, and if you do I’ll burn the thing rather than read something written by (or for) such a dumbass.”

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Sure, Despair Is a Sin

…but things like this make one wonder if it’s sometimes just being aware of reality. *sigh*

“In one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college.”
— Joseph Sobran

Remedial English, dumb-dumb “math” (counting past fingers and toes?) and “wymyn’s studies”. This is supposedly among the best and brightest we have to offer? Is it any wonder the primary influences in our society today are illiterate, innumerate, self-lobotomized Mass MEdia Podpeople, Hollyweird celebrities and tone-deaf “musicians”?

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NOT Part of the Solution

First, a couple of graphics, then a brief (not quite *heh*) disquisition.

And a fuzzy blow-up of part of that screencap:

Now, the problems:

1. The graphics are the result of a screencap from a talk given by Sir Ken Robinson to a group of “more than one hundred school superintendents from around the world” at the 2008 Apple Education Leadership Summit.

2. School administrators, in the US at least, are arguably the stupidest people in education (Check their scores on the GRE, for example: bottom of the barrel.)

3. The talk in the video linked is about creativity and education, and in particular the links to divergent thinking. Sloppy thinking and presentation creates a false dichotomy between divergent and linear thought (something Robinson also does in his book, “Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative,” IIRC).

4. No matter that Robinson does briefly allude to the fact that divergent thinking is but a part of creativity and “genius” (he’s remarkably chary in his description of either) notice the graphic accompanying his talk on the decline of divergent thinking from ages 3-5 to ages 13-15. That’s right. Although his words say he’s talking about divergent thinking, his graphics say he’s talking about “genius”–whatever that is. And remember: he’s talking to what is likely a group of the dumbest people in education…

5. Robinson also makes absolutely stupid and false comments like, “…all children are born artists…” *faugh!* Not even all children are born with enough creative spark to be artists, and NONE of them are born with the talent AND the disciplined training, practice and experience to BE artists. It’s comments like this that encourage idiots to admire their own inartful scribblings, ugly dabblings and awful screechings as though they were art, and also encourage the appreciation of such crap by dullards made even duller by people who buy into Robinson’s stupid meme.

Mozart wasn’t BORN a creative genius. He was born with the POTENTIAL to BECOME a creative genius, and by means of his father’s (often harsh, excessively so, perhaps, if my reading of Mozart’s upbringing and the record itself is accurate*) tutelage, developed that potential to amazing heights.

I could go on and on (and on), but the point is simple: school administrators–as a general class–don’t need to hear this kind of poorly thought out tripe. They’ve already heard too much of this stuff over the years and from the evidence do not have the mental capacity to filter it for nuggets of wisdom or even understand them if they could do so.

Continue reading “NOT Part of the Solution”

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Dogs and Bones

I recommend this post highly. Its subject matter is extremely important in almost every area that impacts our lives today, but since it seems to lie outside the issues that are most loudly trumpeted as urgent, critical issues, the fact that the “half-educated” it refers to (or less, actually) are mostly creating the problems that face us mostly disappears in the noise.

The author of the linked post applies the problem of people who think they know more than they do to the influence such people have exerted to bring about the current economic woes we face, but that only touches the very tip-top 1/4 inch of the iceberg, leaving the rest (including that which is submerged*) to bedevil us.

Always remember the importance of a well-informed (as opposed to ignorant or misinformed or DISinformed) electorate in a representative republic, especially one with far too many democratic elements.

“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”

Continue reading “Dogs and Bones”

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Sometimes, I Just Have to Say, “No”

A while back, I decided to give a Windows “news and tips” site a whirl and submitted a secondary email address in order to receive notices of site updates. Since then, it’s yielded a few interesting tidbits, but sometimes, “a few interesting tidbits” just doesn’t cut it.

Recently, a portion of a topic line stood out, as at least 2/3 of the topic lines received in updates from the site have. Again, not in a positive light. The portion–this time–that made me wince: “The reason behind its name revealed !”

WTF is with the (usual and customary, from this source) space between the last word and the punctuation? It’s stupid. And, as I said, usual from this source. But that’s just the normal quality of punctuation usage from this source. What about word usage and grammar?

In the same email update: “Not why it a browser.”

?!? Yes, that’s the entire sentence fragment posing as a sentence. Where’s the verb?

And then, “…to make it running as fast and stable as new.” No, dumbasses, “to make it RUN as fast and stable as new” would at least be marginally acceptable, although “fast and stable” in this context is problematic.

“Since the last couple of days I’m seeing… ” Obviously English is a second language for the writer. Either that or the writer is a recent American college graduate.

I’ve only scratched the surface of the ear-grinding English constructions in just this one email. I can’t take it anymore. Unsubscribing, with prejudice. *heh*

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Every! Single! Time!

A question posed in an online forum has resulted in all the usual suspects churning the aether… The question: “Are Homosexuals Discriminated Against?”

Lots of discussion, much of it from advocates of “normalizing” and mainstreaming homosexual behavior, including many, many who assert that not allowing homosexuals to “marry” is adverse discrimination and others who assert that special protections and privileges for homosexuals is a worse problem.

One thing I’ve noticed in the discussion is that advocates of what are, in fact, special, society-altering privileges for homosexuals both claim absolute moral authority and superior reason to be on their side. Unfortunately, to this point, none of this group has been able to marshall anything but argument by assertion (with no supporting facts) and continual dropping of the “homophobe bomb”.

And then there are the relatively calm advocates of homosexuals being granted special privileges and protections who assert their best arguments so:

“Homosexuality doesn’t change society, it’s apart of it.”

*sigh*

Really? He either meant “apart FROM it” or “A PART of it”. Frankly, since practicing, AND admitting but not practicing, homosexuals make up only about 3% of society, and are a dead end, “apart from it” is probably closer to the truth, but probably not what he meant to say. Continue reading “Every! Single! Time!”