Trump just won the election

[Vort]

7 minutes ago, estradling75 said:

If you could wave a magic wand and make public schools go away you would not solve the problem, because parents would still fail.

Yep. I have never advocated for the dismantling of public education, though I have recently lost all faith in public schooling and despaired of it actually improving. Our fundamental problem is not the failure of public schools, but the failure of parents. And our society keeps insisting on removing both authority and accountability from parents, insuring the continuation of the death spiral. I see no other solution than that parents insist on accepting both the power and the accountability for that power. At this time, that option looks to me like alternative schooling, including and especially homeschooling.

[Backroads]

17 hours ago, Suzie said:

I'm reading more information about the shooter and as I suspected, another loner....another student who was bullied daily. This is NOT to justify what he has done AT ALL. This is to say that I am SICK AND TIRED of mass shooters and MOST of them have the same characteristics in common. WHEN are we going to deal with the SERIOUS issue of bullying in schools??? When are teachers and administrators going to take bullying SERIOUSLY??? How involved are parents in their children's lives for them to become nothing but beings who ENJOY torturing others and make their lives a living hell???

Sorry, but I am so disgusted and angry.

Speaker as a teacher, I do think schools ought to and can do a lot more. I won't deny that.

But I will share the biggest barrier to dealing with bullies in schools: parents and red tape. For every parent who says they'd teach their kid a thing or two if said kid was found to be the bully, there are ten parents who will defend said kid to no end. A shockingly high number of bullies also fall under the special education umbrella, who adds another barrier to properly dealing with them.

I think there's plenty more schools can do, but I wish parents would do much more than defending their little bullies.

On another note, I teach for a virtual school. I swear, every kid who is is enrolled due to "bullying issues" often leads me thinking "you were the bully, weren't you?"

[Jamie123]

22 minutes ago, estradling75 said:

Should.... being the million dollar word in that phrase...   Do you know why public schools came into existence in the first place?  Because home schooling had failures...  Failures stemming in large part to parents failing to educate their kids.  Look at the numbers...  The numbers show that a successful kid is a kid who had parents actively supporting them.. it really does not matter how they got the education as long as the parent was actively involved.  Are there exceptions to this?   Of course... but they are just that exceptions.  Home schooling is not some magic panacea that will solve the problem.  Parental involvement is.  If you could wave a magic wand and make public schools go away you would not solve the problem, because parents would still fail.   All that you would do is remove the scape goat that everyone find so easy to blame.

I was thinking also, the Internet is a wonderful learning tool but its full of misinformation too. A few years ago someone thought of creating "Conservapedia" - a more tightly controlled Wikipedia - with a view to creating a source parents could trust, without Wikipedia's supposed "left leaning bias". A worthy idea perhaps, but it was pretty soon teaching us that all evolutionists are obese and that Einstein's theory of relativity is an attempt to push moral relativism. It had all the same faults as Wikipedia (or worse) in the opposite direction.

Edit: I'm exaggerating of course. But not much!

Edited July 15, 2024 by Jamie123

[Phoenix_person]

Another massive win for Trump, just in time for the RNC.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-classified-documents-smith-c66d5ffb7ba86c1b991f95e89bdeba0c

 

[Backroads]

14 hours ago, Vort said:

My observation is that private schools are usually not much better.

Disclaimer: I consider myself a huge proponent of school choice. Families should have every right to choose how their kids should be educated. I thusly support the existence of private schools.

But my opinion is that many if not most private schools are skirting by largely on the mere fact they are private schools when at the end of the day all that means is, well, they're private. The best thing is that a choice and effort must be made to get into a private school, which implies the parents are involved with their kids to some extent. 

I've just heard too many horror stories to put private schools on a pedestal. Too much catering to parents/grade buying over actual education, pure chaos, etc.

There's a similar issue with charter schools. The number of people who think they're free private schools and then pitch a fit when they find out they're public, I swear.

I think parents have good intentions but forget to properly school shop. 

Just last week I ran into a mom asking for charter school recommendations to help her child who needs lots of freedom and little structure. A general rule of thumb is that if a charter school has "academy" in its name, it's going to be very rigid. And most charter schools in our area have academy in they name. The golden child one is known to be super strict and the more loosey-goosey ones are in the verge of closing. This left the mom very confused about what would be a good fit for her freedom-needing kid.

 

Edited July 15, 2024 by Backroads

[mikbone]

4 minutes ago, Phoenix_person said:

Another massive win for Trump, just in time for the RNC.

The dems are in full freak-out mode.

This reminds me of the evening commentary of the Hillary Clinton presidential loss.  All woe is me.  The sky is falling.  And how could this happen here.

My heart grew 3 sizes that night.  Not because Trump won.  But because Hillary and her supporters lost.

 

[Vort]

12 minutes ago, Jamie123 said:

without Wikipedia's supposed "left leaning bias"

Nothing supposed about it. But any publically editable site will suffer from the same problem.

[Jamie123]

15 minutes ago, Vort said:

Nothing supposed about it. But any publically editable site will suffer from the same problem.

Well if its publically editable you could argue it's a "whatever most people think" bias. But perhaps that's being naive. I've been involved in Wikipedia and Wikihow edit-wars, and it's whoever keeps going till the other guy gives up who wins the edit. It could be the leftists are better at that.

Edited July 15, 2024 by Jamie123

[mikbone]

The dems are doing everything they can spin the narrative.

Oh, there is no way he got hit by a bullet.  It was probably just a shard of glass from the teleprompter.

Looks like a bullet to me.

[mikbone]

Just to be clear, I don’t think that this assassination attempt was an attack on democracy.  

More likely just a confused 20 year old with some mental health issues hoping to get some attention.

But the vitriol and incendiary political commentary should chill out.

Im not happy with either choice.  But our country will weather the storm.

[Vort]

18 minutes ago, Jamie123 said:

Well if its publically editable you could argue it's a "whatever most people think" bias. But perhaps that's being naive. I've been involved in Wikipedia and Wikihow edit-wars, and it's whoever keeps going till the other guy gives up who wins the edit. It could be the leftists are better at that.

I had what I thought was a principled discussion with another Wikipedia editor, which seemed a good discussion to me (and one in which I certainly had the stronger argument) until I found myself suspended without explanation. The bias is pretty shameless.

[LDSGator]

3 minutes ago, mikbone said:

But the vitriol and incendiary political commentary should chill out.

It’ll never happen. That means one side has to have the maturity to walk away without getting the last word or trying to point fingers. We can’t do that here. Much less in the political world.  

[mikbone]

9 minutes ago, LDSGator said:

It’ll never happen. That means one side has to have the maturity to walk away without getting the last word or trying to point fingers. We can’t do that here. Much less in the political world.  

We can do it here. 

[LDSGator]

4 minutes ago, mikbone said:

We can do it here. 

I wish you the best of luck, but you have no chance of changing people. 

[mikbone]

1 minute ago, LDSGator said:

I wish you the best of luck, but you have no chance of changing people. 

I don’t try to change people.

I work on making a better me.

[LDSGator]

1 minute ago, mikbone said:

I don’t try to change people.

I work on making a better me.

Very noble of you, but that proves my point. Do you think the people on the right who blame the left for everything have the ability to be self reflexive and ask if they are the problem? Of course not. And here’s why:

When they read this post, their first reaction will be to say “Tim, now say that about the left! They are horrible people too! Ha ha! I win! Ha ha ha ha.” And they’ll move on. 
 

that’s the problem right there 

[NeuroTypical]

1 hour ago, estradling75 said:

Do you know why public schools came into existence in the first place?  Because home schooling had failures...  Failures stemming in large part to parents failing to educate their kids.  Look at the numbers...  The numbers show that a successful kid is a kid who had parents actively supporting them.. it really does not matter how they got the education as long as the parent was actively involved.

Heh.  Yeah, it's been a while and I lost the link, but some archaeological magazine had an interesting article.  "World's oldest Meeting Minutes discovered in ancient Greece".  (I think it was Greece, but it could have been Rome, or even somewhere in Mesopotamia.  But I remember the year was BCE, not AD/CE.)

Guess what the world's oldest meeting minutes were about!  They were notes taken at a meeting where parents were meeting with the community educators.  The issues discussed were revolving around quality of education.  The parents were unhappy that the kids weren't learning enough, and also were being taught wrong things, and they blamed the educators.  The educators were unhappy that they didn't have the resources and funding necessary to do a better job, and were blaming the parents for not supporting increased funding.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

And, if you were homeschooled, you would have learned from the Little House on the Prairie books that public schools came into play on a local community-by-community level as folks banded together to make sure the kids "learned their letters" in ways that would keep them out of the way so everyone 13 and older could focus on getting the crops planted and then harvested.

Yeah, humans have been trying to find the right balance between individual rights and public duty for a long time, and it's been fought out in school policy ever since there have been humans.  

Anyway, "I looked at the numbers" 20 years ago, when wife and I began researching homeschooling.   In the 2000's, the nation's cultural landscape was not particularly friendly to homeschooling.  It's very much a state-by-state thing as to how possible or legal it is in the first place.

The studies looked at kids who went to public school, private school, or were homeschooled.  The results amazed me (and plenty of other people), because pretty much every single study that came out, pointed to the utter superiority of homeschooled kids over everyone else.  And we're not just talking standardized test scores, we're also talking stuff like college admittance, graduation rates, and rates of getting in trouble with the law.  And (here's a surprise for many), also every time someone studied socialization or extracurricular activities, homeschoolers had a small advantage over public and private. 

Most utterly astounding, was a large 10 year study comparing these results for people of different race, family income, and other socioeconomic factors.  Holy crap did it blow me away-  Standardized test scores for black, single-mother, low income, inner city youth.   Public school scores was a single digit (out of 100).  Private school score was a double digit, somewhere around 50%.   Homeschooled kids in that situation were in the 80's.   Probably a low sample size, but yes indeed, the poor black single moms that figured out a way to homeschool had kids perform as well as upper-middle-class white kids with two parents.  

@estradling75 is correct.  Kids do better when they have parents who are invested in their kids, no matter how the kids are schooled.  And when they're so invested that they homeschool, odds are (again depending on state and curriculum and legal requirements) that the kids will do better. 

 

There's a notion out there that homeschooled kids fall through the cracks and are off being neglected and abused and sold into sex slavery and turned into drug dealers and all that.  In reality, you can always find kids falling through cracks - especially - at much higher rates - in many public schools. 

 

[NeuroTypical]

1 hour ago, Vort said:

Our fundamental problem is not the failure of public schools, but the failure of parents.

The church isn't being hyperbolic when it pushes the family as the bedrock of society and our best hope to solve all the world's ills.  

Wanna fix public schools?  Do your member missionary work.  

It's not a new roadmap. 

[LDSGator]

14 minutes ago, mikbone said:

I don’t try to change people.

I work on making a better me.

Forgot one more thing: 

Those on the hard left/hard right always view themselves as incredibly decent, and more importantly, they view the other guys are Ungodly evil. When you do that, you place yourself on a higher level than the other side. So you don’t have to ask yourself tough questions when you are debating people who you think are demonic.

 

[Jamie123]

1 hour ago, Vort said:

I had what I thought was a principled discussion with another Wikipedia editor, which seemed a good discussion to me (and one in which I certainly had the stronger argument) until I found myself suspended without explanation. The bias is pretty shameless.

You may not know Thunderf00t (real name Phil Mason) on YouTube. I lost interest in him a couple of years back, but before then I used to follow him quite a lot. His videos on tanks, battleships and bee-keeping were worth watching.

At one point he was invited by P.Z. Myers to be a regular contributor to "Freethought Blogs". He lasted about a month. At the end of that time he was chucked out, essentially for expressing "free thoughts". The problem was that Thunderf00t's "free thoughts" were not the same "free thoughts" that Myers and his Merry Men were "freely" thinking.

Myers' "free thought" was only "free" in the sense that it was free from a mode of thought which hadn't been mainstream for about 30 years. Mason - though an atheist - was too conservative for the "free thought" crowd, so out he went!

Edited July 15, 2024 by Jamie123

[laronius]

51 minutes ago, LDSGator said:

Forgot one more thing: 

Those on the hard left/hard right always view themselves as incredibly decent, and more importantly, they view the other guys are Ungodly evil. When you do that, you place yourself on a higher level than the other side. So you don’t have to ask yourself tough questions when you are debating people who you think are demonic.

 

It's exactly these kind of people who make it out of the primaries (generally speaking) and then who consequently get elected. So while I don't think the run of the mill members of the other party are evil, I do feel that way about many who do get elected. Not all of them of course, but it seems the ones with greatest influence tend to be rather diabolical. 

[Vort]

1 hour ago, LDSGator said:

Those on the hard left/hard right always view themselves as incredibly decent, and more importantly, they view the other guys are Ungodly evil. When you do that, you place yourself on a higher level than the other side. So you don’t have to ask yourself tough questions when you are debating people who you think are demonic.

I'm deeply grateful that I'm not like those stupid leftists you mention above.

[LDSGator]

2 minutes ago, Vort said:

I'm deeply grateful that I'm not like those stupid leftists you mention above.

And all this time I pegged you as a Bernie supporter. 😉 

[Vort]

The man simply cannot help himself. I have maintained for years that, barring exceptional revelations, I will certainly vote for Trump over whoever the Democrats can dredge up, and especially over Biden/Harris. But if Trump maintains this "called-of-God" attitude, I will not vote for him. I will vote for Kennedy. Not that my vote makes a particle of difference, but enough is enough. Selling Bibles for profit is distasteful enough. This Jesus Complex thing is several steps too far.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-breaks-silence-assassination-attempt-im-not-supposed-here

Trump, reacting to images of him raising his fist and being surrounded by Secret Service agents in the seconds following the shooting, said, "A lot of people say it’s the most iconic photo they’ve ever seen." 

"They’re right and I didn’t die. Usually you have to die to have an iconic picture," he added. "I just wanted to keep speaking, but I just got shot." 

[LDSGator]

1 minute ago, Vort said:

Selling Bibles for profit is distasteful enough.

We agree totally there. It’s certainly not illegal but it makes me very uncomfortable. 
 

It’s also a bit weird. 99% of churches out there will be thrilled just to give you a bible.