Not That Kind Of Diversity
Variations in human ability continue to frustrate those who would perfect us:
You see, if a problem can’t be solved, the next-best thing is to hide it:
The genius of the “equity-focussed” policies, also being advanced in California and elsewhere, is that they are likely to have negative consequences for both ends of the ability spectrum. The cognitively untalented will be spared the normal incentives to master at least the basics, even the basics of behaviour, while the gifted will be denied access to advanced material more suited to their abilities, resulting in boredom and demoralisation.
Again, hiding that bothersome unevenness in effort and ability.
Readers will note that the retreat from clear metrics into euphemism and pernicious fuzzwords – chief among which, “equity” – not only makes it difficult to determine pupils’ academic progress and actual competence, but also has a secondary effect of making it more difficult to identify the shortcomings of progressive educators and administrators. A coincidence, I’m sure.
The pernicious woo named “equity” – which roughly translates as equality of outcome regardless of inputs – has of course been mentioned here before.
If the examples linked above aren’t sufficiently striking, I do have more.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
[ Bus pulls up, passengers disembark. They stare at Muldoon. ]
[Stares briefly at Muldoon. Shades eyes from glare.]
[Topples backward, spills drink.]
[Stares briefly at Muldoon. Shades eyes from glare.]
Most people require welding goggles, if you can get by with blue blockers, you are lucky indeed.
[ Bus pulls up, passengers disembark. They stare at Muldoon. ]
The good news is that you are now eligible for one of those blue plaques. Might have to move the wheelie bins to make room for it, though.
First: I’m pretty sure everyone here agrees Harrison Bergeron was a prophecy.
Second: Education in the era of mass media is doomed.
The lure of somehow improving education means someone will always mess with the program. What to teach, how to teach it, etc. Something must be done. For the
grant moneychildren! Mass media means all of it is placed into a political framework so nobody who sets policy cares if anything is effective as long as it decenters whiteness, exposes children to degeneracy, or graduates more illiterate innumerate welfare sponges.And don’t forget education (and library science), as a degree field, is populated by the lower end of the university IQ pool.
So we’re stuck with mostly insignificant intellects teaching similarly gifted university students how to advance the goals of education by doing something — as long as its different than what was done in the past. Then layer on a large portion of genetically disadvantaged students and an oversized representation of women who, generally, cannot stand failing anyone.
We have graduates who learned more about speaking, reading, and writing from social media than they ever got from class. These people are somehow being admitted to universities where professors are regularly complaining that most of their students cannot write simple emails or even understand the papers they’ve turned in themselves. And, finally, we have government regulators crawling up the ass of every company they can find who is not hiring “equitably”. I am not optimistic about the future of western civilization.
the Chabot School Equity and Inclusion Committee hosted a “Playdate Social”, but only “if your family identifies as black, brown, or API…”
Application Programming Interface? I have to make an API token from the Cloud website where my weather station and sensor data is stored so my collaborator’s app can access it and use it to calculate water use. But what does all that have to do with DIE?
Application Programming Interface?
I think they meant AAPI for Asian American and Pacific Islander, but being progressives “American” was probably offensive.
The hostility towards precocious pupils – who, simply by existing, contradict progressive assumptions – has been noted here many times. And so, for instance, we see the educational Mao-lings in Vancouver and California shutting down advanced courses and honours programmes, in English, maths and science, because of what such programmes reveal.
And this is done gleefully, triumphantly, all in the name of “inclusion.” Our self-imagined betters, our bitter little Mao-lings, are somehow granting access – by taking it away.
It’s a world of Orwellian inversion and perversity, in which vindictive bedlamites, such as Ms Alison Collins, disdain pupils of Chinese or Korean ancestry as “white” or white-adjacent, and therefore suspect, and in which a parental preference for academic rigour is denounced as “racist.”
It’s a world in which “suspending proficiency requirements” is a good thing. And in which the way to fight for “high-quality schools” is to abandon even the most basic expectations of competence.
And when parents object, as well they might, they are smeared by the same educational Mao-lings as obstructions to progress. And of course as racist. As white supremacists.
Jesus wept. That was a hell of a rabbit hole…
The illogic is quite something. Ditto the dishonesty. You couldn’t make it up. It’s mirror-universe stuff. And it scarcely needs saying, given their influence, their power over children, these clowns are intellectually unfit. And morally unfit.
In which Theodore Dalrymple explains how our failing service economy requires foreign workers because the speak better English than the English.
Frédéric Bastiat: “The state is the means by which everyone tries to live at everyone else’s expense.”
Sounds about right.
“Theodore Dalrymple explains”
I suspect that Mr. Dalrymple knows the “endgame”, as he’s likely to have perused a book on history oncetuponatime. Or maybe more than one…
Hint: It doesn’t end well.
You couldn’t make it up.
Speaking of which, a couple three years ago this headline couldn’t have been, now, alas, it makes perfect sense.
I am absolutely certain that he knows. This is based on reading his books and essays and on the fact that he is an unusually avid reader of literature and history.
The juxtaposition of “Ukraine” and “Lesbian birth control” is damned fine clickbait.
…damned fine clickbait.
True enough, with the recent explosion of girldick the birth control was not surprising, but being the WTF lesbian bar in a Ukrainian village was a fine hook.
Apparently there’s something special about Ukrainian lesbians.
Apparently there’s something special about Ukrainian lesbians.
Forget it Jake, they’re Chicago lesbians.
The people who failed to stand up to them, especially the people who criticized those who did stand up to them
You get more of the behaviour you reward, and less of the behaviour you punish. The feminization of society has vilified the notions of consequences and accountability.
what the hell are you pasting into it?
Many browsers are now defaulting to copying the HTML code of any text you select instead of just the plain text. This is an absolute dumpster fire of bad UX driven by the kind of people who use Macbooks as their daily driver.
They cannot accept that their “solutions” could have proved to wrong, as that would threaten their entire world view. Worse, it would threaten their sense of self worth and moral authority.
Not to turn this into Daniel’s Gaming Blog again, but this is the exact dynamic I’ve seen in the gaming/nerd communities. The hobby – in this case progressive politics – is a way of hiding from a real world of scary adult responsibilities and consequences they can’t cope with, and the hobby is not experienced as it is but rather constructed by the hobbyist to assuage their anxieties. D&D teaches social skills and project management. Progressive policies never have any unintended side effects. The hobby becomes the identity and the ego, and so anything that threatens the hobby threatens the ego and identity.
by default there is a maximum file path number of characters in Windows.
Hasn’t been true since 2017, and is irrelevant to browser URLs anyway. URL-encoded strings have nothing to do with the Win32 API MAX_PATH constant.
advance the goals of education by doing something — as long as its different than what was done in the past
I’ve told this story here before: I once knew an elementary school teacher who bragged about her method for rocketing up the career track in public education. She noticed that fads in pedagogy cycled every ten years or so, and that career advancement depended on presenting papers at education conferences, so she’d dig up papers from ten years prior, lightly rewrite them, and present them as original material. So 1) plagiarism, 2) that no one noticed or cared about, 3) that indicates that either none of these pedagogies are better than any other, or that no one in the field cares which pedagogy is better, since they just keep rotating them every decade.
Never blame on a clipboard error that which can be blamed on demented millennial and Gen Z code monkeys
The only consistent factor in all your failed <del>relationships</del> links is you.
Interesting. I seem to avoid that problem in two ways:
First: Copy-paste by way of Notepad. Second: Separately get the text with select-copy and the links with right-click-copy-link.
But maybe some of my occasional failures have to do with what you describe.
Still relevant in some older apps, though, I’ll bet. In fact, I once had to work with an app in which the maximum was about 40 characters.
Tomorrow’s Ephemera has been compiled and will materialise just after midnight.
Excuse me while I slip into something a little more ostentatious.
…and we see why David’s laundry service now charges extra for starch.
Excuse me while I slip into something a little more ostentatious.
Perfect for a grand entrance into a Ukrainian Village lesbian bar for henchlesbian recruitment.
Ah. So that explains the need for condoms…
Excuse me while I slip into something a little more ostentatious.
On the one hand, making Strange into a low-rent magical Tony Stark was an utter waste of Cumberbatch’s talent and an example of why the WGA strike can’t destroy Hollywood fast enough.
On the other, I’m not sure there’s any place for the solemn Vincent Price-inspired theosophist Dr. Strange in the WhedonVerse MCU.
MCU? Joss Whedon has gone full retro-commie? 😉
This thread is getting far too arcane for me to follow so I’ll leave it to everyone else to bicker appropriately.
As Marvel seem determined to continue demolishing their own business, I suppose it’s academic. The odds of my being tempted into a cinema are, I think, rather slim. That ship has sailed. And is currently on fire.
That said, there were, I think, glimpses of them getting it right. The fight with Thanos, for instance, especially the butterflies. I rather think that’s how the sorcery should be depicted – as off-the-wall and boggling.
Felicity Ace or Viking lord funeral?
It’s not just the crap that Hollywood churns out; it’s also the crap people that may be found even in suburban cinemas. There are enough fine old movies on DVD to keep me entertained in the comfort of my home for the rest of my life.
FTFY
Oppenheimer was pretty good & Napoleon looks to be interesting.
The CGI extravaganzas are too formulaic to be interesting.
The subject matter intrigues, but I’m not a fan of Chris Nolan films. They often have set pieces that are technically impressive, but I can’t think of a Nolan film that I’ve wanted to watch a second time.
The first part of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning was entertaining, though not as satisfying as Fallout. But it’s hard to judge it properly as it’s only the first half of the story.
There’s nothing else on my cinema radar at the moment. Though, in fairness, I haven’t been paying much attention recently.
Not entirely unrelated.
“Forget it Jake, they’re Chicago lesbians”.
Lori Lightfoot?
Chicago lesbian fish?
It’s childish to make fun of somebody’s appearance, but I couldn’t resist. She is, after all, vile enough to deserve cruel mockery.
But what, then, should we conclude about the voters who elected her? /rhetorical question
I can’t put my finger directly on it but there’s always been something about geek stuff that, while being something of a geek myself as far as being math/logic/hard(ish) science oriented I am drawn to yet also being fairly active, fairly athletic, more competitive than most that repels me. I suspect it’s that ‘hiding from the real world aspect’ that you speak of. Probably why I am both drawn to and repulsed by being around smart…”smart” people. Once the hobby becomes the identity and the ego, one’s goose is cooked but one can go to their grave without ever having to acknowledge that reality. Personally, as competitive as I may be, I would rather fight and lose than fight and never know, or to pretend to have won.
I might add that rye whiskey passing through the nose is an unpleasant experience as well. And now comes the tears. Thx.
Getting rid of failing grades is like the Hawaiian commissar who kept the fire alarms from going off. It robs people of a useful signal.
There are students who need to see that they are failing at something, so they can change direction. Correct feedback can help us avoid catastrophes and inconveniences and embarrassment.
In fact, every student needs negative feedback, to know when they need to improve.
Lying to young students is an evil betrayal.
It’s not the guns, it’s the culture.
Everybody close your eyes to reality and sing along with me.
Educators follow fads. What they do not follow is methods that work. If anything they hate those methods. Examples: 1. Charter schools and private schools often have students with the same demographic as the nearby public school (e.g., poor black, or hispanic) but outperform the public school. Do teachers try to emulate it? No. They try to shut it down. 2. It has been known for a long time that boys will get engaged in reading if you give them books they enjoy (sports, war stories, adventures, spy novels). Instead kids get books that female english teachers enjoyed. Anne of green gables my ass. 3) discipline is fundamental to learning. and so on
I actually read Harrison Bergeron when it first came out. It was in an anthology. Horrifying then, horrifying now. What these educators are actually saying by their actions is that they do not believe POC can succeed at anything without white people giving them excuses.
I am an example of a kid that teachers ignored and who was bored to death as a result. Once I got to college–boom honor role and a Ph.D.
Grades: in college my first test in Chem I got a C-. It was a big wakeup call. These people seem determined to remove all the indicators that there are problems (fudging the employment numbers, hiding crime stats, denying about trans in female spaces and so on). My room-mate’s naive MD dad visited us and went to a bad part of town for dinner and took a shortcut down an alley. Yep. Mugged and relieved of his Rolex. Naive is not a survival skill.
Fads are fun and confer status. The old tried-and-true methods are boring and yield no status points–at least not from other “educators”.
4) Open Schools/classrooms, a problem baked into the very structure/design of the buildings such that it is still a problem 50 years later in many places. Think of that. Think how bloody f’n stupid that is. Not just ‘was’ but still is. And no one paid a price for it, nor is it mentioned much, not even by conservative…”conservative” loser school reformers. Half a century of bloody f’n stupid that everyone went along with. Except maybe my mother and a few others who drove private school enrollment up back then.
5) The year-round schooling that was an early 90’s(?) thing. Disrupted schedules, disrupted family time, disrupted summer jobs. And it echoes today as well. Summer break has been eaten up by week long Thanksgiving, week long other breaks in addition to traditional Christmas and Easter/spring breaks such that school in many places starts in early August, nearly a month after traditional Labor Day. All for nothing. Nothing has gotten any better in education. It does help with the indoctrination though. Fewer kids getting longer summer jobs where they might actually learn something useful about how real business is done.
These are not fads. These are deliberate decisions made to destroy our country. They may be sold to the mid-wits as fads but like wide lapels, fat ties and bellbottom jeans, fads eventually go away.
Nearly “a month before traditional Labor Day”. I see the edit function, one of my favorites in the new world, is still buggered. This is the way of technology now. Like everything else you’ve just supposed to accept it. I could tell an interesting story about how a large, very well know financial services company buggered up a trade of mine recently. Basic stuff is getting f’d up likely because middleware, or whatever the so-called cool kids call tech infrastructure these days, must always be “improved” regardless of the fact that there is no way to properly test it. At least that’s my not so humble explanation. For some of it anyway.
I just literature in a tiny private school. Because of this I have great freedom when I develop my curriculum. And so I have filled my classes with stories of monsters and murder, which I find the boys can get interested in–and also the girls, who don’t mind the monsters, either.
We do have the kids reading Middlemarch, however, which is written by George Eliot, a woman. And it’s a rough sell! Without Grendel getting his arm ripped off and bleeding out, or an invisible man going crazy, it’s difficult to keep the boys interested. But they do manage to survive.