Someone above recommended devd, and it looks pretty nice. https://github.com/cortesi/devd
501 karma · joined April 21, 2017
The way I estimate the situation (and I admit this is not a rigorous scientific conjecture), is the following (for public schools in the US in the average):
Early years: bad pedagogy, bad retention rates (ie, quitting after 5th grade to go work on the farm, bad average results, basically only the top 10% learned deeply and went on to intellectual pursuits
1900s - 1980s: Decent and improving pedagogy (the aforementioned procedure-first style for math), good and increasing retention rates, good parental and societal pressures to perform, great average results, top 50% or more went on to intellectual pursuits.
1980s - 2010s: Same math pedagogy, but with rapidly deteriorating parental pressure to perform, leading to worse results. A truly terrible detour for reading instruction (from phonics to context-based reading) that decimated the average reading level of those currently under 40. Currently being fixed but not yet replaced in all schools. See: "the science of reading".
2020 - 2024: an earnest effort, gaining traction and fast-tracked after the educational disaster that was COVID, to find curricula that actually work with current students.
The concept-first, teach-them-how to think approach for math really is pretty new, and only just now being rolled out in a lot of states.
In reality, a vanishingly-small subset of American students has ever been given an entire education using evidence-based instruction and curricula. Looking at what actually works and trying to synthesize it and scale it up state- or nationwide is truly a brand new experiment, and one the decentralized US education system is sort of designed to prevent. So we'll see.
In previous eras in the US, we taught primarily procedure and facts, and assigned lots of practice work. The average kid did _all_ the practice work, for societal reasons that have eroded but are still present in other cultures.
In the course of grappling with all the practice work, the human brain couldn't help but recognize patterns and start to make broader conceptual connections, which led to deep understanding.
Today in the US, teaching facts and procedure first doesn't work, because very few kids get enough practice to start to draw deeper connections. So we are teaching conceptual understanding first, and then layering procedure on top.
But I don't think this is worse. There is some research showing that it works better than the alternatives, and in my experience the top 10% of students (the ones who would have learned well the old way) are still doing quite well and honestly just getting to the "math is fun and interesting" part of the journey a lot earlier in their school careers.
The seal absolutely failed, in the way that any reasonable person would interpret that phrase. A seal prevents things from getting past it, and it did not do that.
Some alternate phrasings that I believe make the (valid) point without this semantic flaw:
- The Challenger did not explode because of a simple or unexpected seal failure.
- The seal failure was merely a symptom of a larger, harder to fix, much more troubling failure.
- The seal failed, but that was not the failure that mattered.
It was really great for that one use case: something the recipient could click through and continuously be surprised by the complexity of without having to know the tool. Click. Wow! It got bigger. Click. Woah! It got bigger and rotated!
"...which GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy had been [building] for over a decade in Japan."
"Of course now that the AP1000 has been [built] twice..."
I would not comment just to "catch" you making a typo. I really think it's interesting that your brain slipped over the same idea twice in such a short span.
But I can't. In order to let a student leave my classroom, I am required to personally create a pass in the system, which means I have to stop teaching and bring whatever is happening to a screeching halt. I don't mean to imply that class is always more important than physical needs. I know that it isn't. But because bathroom breaks have been turned by policy into major interruptions, it really intensifies the issue.
For me, it's not about controlling kids. It's about trying to maintain some semblance of order/quiet/concentration so that learning can happen. (Yes, I know that the pass policy as a whole is mostly about controlling kids.)
I've only been teaching for 2 years after decades in private industry. Stuff like this is my least favorite part of the job. I have no idea how to solve it, but FYI I have never said no to a student who asked me quietly or pulled me aside.
P.S. (I think that as a fellow former rule-following middle schooler, you would be blown away by how few of us there are left, by how little intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and desire to please others the median middle schooler currently seems to have, and by how badly it messes up the whole idea of productive/fun learning environments. I came into this in 2022 as a resolute idealist and have quickly been ground down into something less than that, although I still think it's maybe the most worthwhile way someone who has retired young can spend their time.)
Without some sort of structure in place (the simplest of which is "no bathroom breaks in my class, period"), a significant portion of class time is taken up by students asking to leave or asking to be let back in (the doors are required to be locked at all times in case a wild shooter appears).
So something that lets kids go a couple of times a day during classes but prevents "abuse" might relieve some of the time and cognitive overhead of dealing with bathroom breaks for teachers.
Now that we have the question, how to we decide the answer? I think there are several possibilities, but one that comes to mind is happiness. A subjective and flawed metric to be sure, but a metric all the same.
Thankfully, we do not have to resign ourselves to thought experiments with no opportunity for real data collection, as in "Would the average US citizen be happier or less happy if taxes were 10% lower?" We don't even have to settle for logical exercises such as you pose here: "What is more likely, that corruption inevitably makes more government worse than less government, or vice versa?"
Instead, we can examine the beautifully diverse set of data-rich, large scale experiments known as sovereign nations to find how well taxation correlates to happiness.
And voila, your criticism of the article is an argument in favor of the article.
1. Owner[s] sell their stock to the company (note the company needs to be fairly successful to have the cash to buy the shares. Sometimes it's bought all at once, but often on some sort of multi-year payment plan. Bob's Red Mill took approx. 10 years to buy out Bob and his partners.)
2. The company puts the stock into a trust held for the benefit of employees.
3. A portion of shares may be immediately distributed to employees based on key status, years of service, etc.
4. The shares are used as part of benefit packages. It's sort of like a 401k that the employees don't actually have to pay anything to participate in. The longer you're there, and the more important your role (generally), the more you end up owning, and it's generally treated like employer 401k matches in terms of income tax.
Usually after you reach a certain threshold, you're allowed to sell your shares to others or back to the company in order to diversify.
A long time ago I read that if you are awakened and want to fall back asleep, you should picture yourself turning around, going through a door to your basement stairway and descending the steps towards the dark basement.
I tried forever to do this and couldn't, and thought it was something about this scenario specifically. But then years later, I learned about aphantasia and realized I can't actually picture anything at all. The doorway wasn't special.