Rant: Over indulgent parents strike again

Bownse wrote:

Brent P wrote:

In article ,
Charles Soto wrote:


Yup. Like it or not, even in a "tracked" classroom, the kids develop at
different rates and have achieved different levels. Good teaching
accepts this and accommodates it.

So instead of getting 50 minutes of calculus the advanced students
get a 5 minute share of the period. Same with all the rest.

Please don't ever take up teaching as a profession.


In other words you cannot explain how to deal with a wide gap in
the abilities of students when all in the same classroom.

Throttle the slow ones and improve the gene pool.

Get some of the ugly ones, while yer at it.

Charles

--
Charles Soto - Austin, TX *** 1999 GSF1200S, DoD No. "uno"

("Meepmeep" is "rr," as in "roadrunner.")

In article , toto wrote:
On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 18:15:12 GMT, (Brent P)
wrote:

No one, anywhere, is suggesting that the bullying behavior be tolerated.
However, if we can do simple things up front that make US the target
less, why not do them? Unless you get some sort of perverse
satisfaction out of being the victim . . .

How are they simple? You cannot even define them. Telling a shy kid
for instance don't be shy and people won't bother you. You might as
well have told him to change his skin color.

They worked for her son, therefore, they were something he could
change and they made him less of a target. The fact that kylie can't
define them doesn't mean they were undefined. Her son obviously
found them helpful and many kids do when the counsellors who
understand the dynamics work with them and point things out that
they never noticed before.

*sigh* You just don't get my point, no matter how many times I repeat
it in different forms. Several claims were made, without the specific
information, those claims are unsupported.

On 20 Jan 2004 09:51:56 -0800, Banty wrote:

I fail to understand why some of you are so offended by the notion that
some children may have mannerisms or behaviors that seem to invite
targeting, and that by helping them change those things, they can get
targeted less.

In one sense I agree (why I tell parents here to provide at least decently
fasionable clothes for their kids), but in another sense it really is a fine
line to tread between what you're saying and the blame that has always gotten
heaped on victims. If you've been beaten up and blamed for it by the whole
authority structure as well as your tormentors, one gets a bit gun-shy, y'know.

It's a very fine line, in that I agree.

There are similarities to those who blame a woman for being
raped if she wears sexy clothes or if she goes with a date to
his apartment. You cannot blame her for the actions of the rapist.

OTOH, you have to teach young women what situations may
become dangerous and how to avoid those. She can then
make a choice to go into a situation knowing that it may be
dangerous and prepared to defend herself or she may decide
to avoid certain situations altogether. You also want young women
to know how to stand up and defend themselves if they do get
into a dangerous situation.

The same thing goes for the victim of verbal and physical bullying.
You want to teach him how to be assertive and stand up for himself
and how to defend himself. You also want to teach him what
behaviors in himself may make him a target, especially if he is
being targeted frequently and by many bullies. He can choose to
change those behaviors or not to change them, but it's important
that he know what they are, so he can make that decision for
himself.




--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 20:19:11 GMT, (Brent P)
wrote:

In article , dragonlady wrote:

was feeling better about being who HE was. (Looking back, I think maybe
he STOPPED trying to be someone he wasn't, stopped trying to fit in, and
gained confidence in himself as NOT one of the "in" crowd.)

This makes the assumption of trying to fit in, in the first place.
It certainly wouldn't work with a kid who wasn't trying to fit and
just being himself from the get-go. Where that independence generated
a negative response from the 'group'.

Of course not. Each case is individual and the person who is targeted
because he is not trying to fit in should not have to change to try to
fit in or even to keep a lower profile.

Analyzing what *can* be changed doesn't mean that you have to change
anything at all, but that you look at the situation and see if there
is something you can do and want to do.


--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

"Banty" wrote in message
...

In one sense I agree (why I tell parents here to provide at least decently
fasionable clothes for their kids),

That's why my kids take karate. They wear fashionable clothes so that I
can borrow them.

On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 06:22:57 GMT, "Stephen!" wrote:

toto wrote in
:

I see, then why answer at all. Let the thread die if you don't
want to discuss the issues.


What... Let you have the last word?

I don't care if I have the last word or not frankly. That's not why
*I* post.

And you could have the last word in your groups and I wouldn't
see it if you cut mk out of the mix. As long as you answer
and keep mk in, I will answer or not as I wish. That is the
way usenet works. If I was a proper troll, I could even sub
to your group and continue there, but I am not and I won't
bother reading what you say when you clip the headers.

As I said, I am interested in the issues. You will note that
I don't answer flame posts most of the time. Once in a
while, I do just for the hell of it. But mostly, flames are
ignored.

I am enjoying the perspective on the subject from regs in
the rec.motorcycle group when they are actually speaking
about the issues. I state my pov, I don't expect that they
will necessarily agree with it. If we were all the same, the
world would be mighty boring.

I don't think anyone from the auto group is answering,
though I leave in the xpost to that group because I don't
know that for sure.




--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

In other words you cannot explain how to deal with a wide gap in
the abilities of students when all in the same classroom.

Throttle the slow ones and improve the gene pool.

Get some of the ugly ones, while yer at it.
Charles

Just the oogly girls, though. Us good lukin gize need the remaining
gurlz to no jes hauw gud dey gotz eet!

Analyzing what *can* be changed doesn't mean that you have to change
anything at all, but that you look at the situation and see if there
is something you can do and want to do.

Which brings us full-circle to the room full of adult "authority
figures" intent on "suggesting" "courses of action" to the
already-pounded child. "Surely you WANT to be able to avoid this,
right?" "Surely you want to be able to prevent it from happening again,
right?" "Surely you want to alter yourself so as to prevent a situation
where us adults are forced into the same room with THAT bully, right?"

If any answer isn't toward conformity, then repeat the above for another
20 minutes.

On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 05:46:24 GMT, (Brent P)
wrote:

In article , toto wrote:
On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 16:05:29 GMT, (Brent P)
wrote:

In article , toto wrote:

Small rural schools, for example, won't have anyone
qualified to teach it and thus cannot offer it.

How about a math teacher who tought himself?
Or an english teacher that thought he knew everything but didn't
know much of anything.

I am not sure I understand what you are saying here.
A math teacher who taught himself math would most likely
not be hired, but he might actually be very good. You mean
a math teacher who taught himself to program? Might work,
might not. Depends on the teacher.

Yes, teachers already on the staff.

As I said, it would depend on the particular teacher.

One thing about
programming here. Back in the *old* days, programmers
often did a lot of coding that was pretty convoluted. We had
to *fit it into memory.* That made for lots of branches to
subroutines and convoluted logic.

I coded in the stoneage myself. I wouldn't call the logic convoluted.
It had to be tidy and not wasteful.

LOL. You should see some of the proggies I had to figure out
in assembler language. Branches to all kinds of subroutines
all over the place. Efficient code in each one, but a convoluted
main program that often had no order to it.

The programs worked,
but often they weren't well documented. Try maintaining
someone else's code after they have left the company
when there are only a few comments thrown into the proggy
here and there.

this is neither here nor there.

Well, it is a digression I agree.

Programming today is different at least in business.

It's big, wasteful and undocumented. And you'd be surprised
who's still using COBOL.

No, wouldn't be surprised. I had friends working on Y2K bugs
in COBOL programs. Many of them, however, were from India.
There weren't enough in-house COBOL programmers to make
the fixes on time and there weren't a lot of US programmers for
hire for that kind of thing on a contract basis.

There is less of the convoluted loops and backtracking that
used to be common.

I guess you never had the pleasure of sitting next to software
guys trying to figure out what other people had done.

I had to do it. Back in the mid-70s when I worked for a financial
company in-house maintaining COBOL programs.

Math teachers have
the logic, but sometimes that doesn't mean they will learn
to code in ways that are appropriate to today's world on
their own.

The basics of programing are the basics. Nobody is going to
leave HS to work as a programer, especially with the work going
to china and india. But like knowing how to multiply, the basics
of programming are quite useful. Even if the machine it's tought on
is old and the language even more so.

Structured programming is a much better way to code than what
was taught in my day - which was *wing it* by the seat of your
pants programming.

I am sorry you had a bad English teacher, but I don't see
how that is relevant to what I said about small rural schools
not being able to teach programming.

It was a joke, based on an english teacher who was really big on
computer use who didn't like that I knew more than he.

I can believe that. Actually, many teachers still don't know as much
about computers as they should given that computers are common.
OTOH, how many people really know that much about how their
cars run (I know the people in you group do, but I don't think many
people know or care)?

I'm pretty lazy about learning computer stuff now because the
interfaces are so user-friendly. Keep saying I need to install
linux, but haven't gotten around to that. And while I played around
with HTML a little, I haven't even looked at C++ or other programming
languages that are newer.

Didn't someone already mention AP calculus at an inner city school?
Yes, I think so. It was considered the inferior choice to offering
the students real college course as some north suburban school did.

It wasn't that the course was an inferior choice. It was simply
that most of the kids didn't pass the AP test because they either
didn't take the test (which costs a significant amount of money
for those students) or they failed or got the lowest passing grade
which didn't do them much good since colleges made them take
the class over anyway. The fault was not in the class though, it
was in the case of Benito Juarez in the particular man who was
teaching it.

Each time a little more comes out....

?????
I never said that all teachers were perfect or even that all were
good. There were 15 math teachers at that school. 13 were
good to excellent. The one who was teaching AP calculus had
it because he started the class, but he was not a good teacher
and he was not qualified to teach the course. The department
chairman and he were buddies - the two worst math teachers
in the school, but politically savvy. His degree, btw, was actually
in Law, but he never practiced Law and was teaching math - I
am not sure what his certification credentials were.

Actually, we had several teachers who were provisional math
teachers who were really good. They hadn't completed the
courses they needed for certification, but were much better than
the man above who had.

ETHS and New Trier offered PASCAL and BASIC and
some other languages when my kids were in school,
but Clemente and Benito Juarez while they offered computer
literacy (taught by people who taught the business classes)
did not offer programming. ETHS and New Trier offered
CAD courses too. Most city schools don't have those either.

How many shop classes did one have to take before taking the CAD
class? (or was that just one particular idiotic school)

I don't know what the requirements were when my kids were there.
I looked it up online and it appears to be in an engineering/technical
strand in applied science. It's apparently not a separate course of
it's own. It's a junior year class which includes robotics,
programmable controllers, CAD, computerized numerical control,
fiber optics, lasers, hydraulics, pneumatics and microprocessors.
It's an honors course. And it requires 2 years of mathematics and
2 years of science as prerequisites. It's two semesters. It sounds
pretty intense.

the idiots who ran the HS I went to required shop classes before taking
any cad classes. In the same idiotic way they demanded typing before
programming.

Well, I don't consider typing a waste of time. Nor do I think shop
classes are a bad thing. OTOH, I don't see that shop classes need
to be tied to CAD classes. My dd had to learn to hand draft, though,
I think, before she could use CAD to do her drafte work in college.

Interestingly, they now offer computer maintenance, computer
networking, HTML webpage design, graphic design as well
as auto mechanics classes, electricity classes and business
management and computer keyboarding and... well, it seems
the tech prep department has expanded well beyond what it
was when my kids attended in the late 80s and early 90s.

I wonder if I can my '73 painted inexpensively

They used to repair cars pretty inexpensively. Don't know about
paint jobs... Are you willing to let them have it for a good long
while and take it apart before they give it back to you? g


--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

On Tue, 20 Jan 2004 07:41:04 GMT, "Margaret M."
wrote:

"Brent P" wrote

The basics of programing are the basics. Nobody is going to
leave HS to work as a programer, especially with the work going
to china and india.

I'm not quite sure exactly how you mean that, but my son started
working as a programmer right out of high school. Of course, he was
proficient in many prog languages, including assembly; and his cs
teacher, who did freelance programming on the side, used to pull him
out of his bull**** classes to work on large projects with her. He
was more than happy about that. Out of the others in his CS classes,
only a tiny fraction of them actually got work in the computer field.

Back in my son's day, we had a couple of kids who were writing
programs for HP calculators and making good money at it too.

So, anyway, back to the beginning of this thread...did any of you over
indulgent parents actually buy those little electric scooters for your
kids for Christmas? Did you also buy them a helmet and give them
safety instruction with it? Are you around when they ride it?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Mag

LOL. Well, no... My kids are grown and my granddaughter is only
18 months old. She just started walking, I don't think a scooter
would cut it.


--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits