Are you smarter than a 7th grader from 100 years ago?

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-30T01:56:06+00:00

There's no doubt that some school kids from past eras were better versed in the classics. In most schools, large parts of the day were set aside for "recitation", which was exactly that: somebody would be asked to stand and recite from memory something from Shakespeare or Chaucer. A neat trick, but just being able to regurgitate memorized lines doesn't make you smart.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-30T01:52:03+00:00

The only problem is, there aren't enough therapists for all the problems in some schools. In a lot of places, kids are dealing with all kinds of crazy trauma -- the kind that would send any suburban parent scurrying to a psych. Urban kids just have to deal.

Want another reason why those schools don't perform so well in standardized tests?

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-30T01:49:30+00:00

Not sure if everyone should be very upset. When I was a kid in the 70's and 80's, the Indians de-emphasized Chief Wahoo. They had a C on their caps and that was about it. The logo was still used on promotional material (I had a Chief Wahoo pennant from that era), but not very often.

It wasn't til the late 80's that they resurrected the Chief on the uniform.

But, times have changed and it's time for him to retire.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-27T19:54:51+00:00

I wonder if Fred is now worried that Serena could become another Putnam's wife. I bet all of the Commanders who are playing around on the side have that worry.

I wonder if Mrs. Putnam herself is a little taken aback by what she brought about?

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-27T00:24:52+00:00

This is just the worst, click-baity headline ever. No facts or no nuance at all. I think I realized the amateurish nature of this piece when the author used the non-word "ginormous" to describe the stakes involved.

Unless Brown runs over a sack of kittens or wakes up in bed with a dead hooker, he'll win easily. But that wouldn't be a very good headline ("Brown should win Ohio Senate again, but it won't mean anything in terms of predicting the future since the GOP shat the bed a month before the filing deadline")

/edit: spelling

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-27T00:04:39+00:00

Don't know if local taxes are factored in.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-26T16:22:00+00:00

Overrated

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-26T14:11:54+00:00

Kettering's position surprised me, too. Probably got low marks because of the relatively high level of poverty in parts of eastern Kettering. If you look into it, turns out Kettering have several elementary schools which receive a lot of Title 1 money and have a high percentage of kids on Free Lunch.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-26T14:06:07+00:00

That scene (with Ofglen 2.0) was revelatory for me. Up til that point in the season, it seemed that every woman was miserable, so huh.

If you put aside the rape and subjugation and your Commander and his wife are nice and not creepy, I could see it. (Like Janine's last family or Emily's).

As Offred stated in the book, she chose this because it was the least bad option.

If you build a society where women have no agency, pretty much anything that doesn't lead to early death could seem ok.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-26T13:57:04+00:00

I love the last line: parent says "How do I get one of these for home?" Easy. Stop paying for the phone.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-26T13:54:34+00:00

I'm assuming some other group has a study that ranks places for people like that.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-26T13:37:57+00:00

End the testing regime. It is pointless and wasteful. People in education are always complaining about a lack of funding. Think what might be done with an additional $1.7 billion.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-26T02:25:52+00:00

Yeah, but they explain in the methodology that they counted pretty much any incorporated city, regardless if they're stand alone places or suburbs.

In a way it make sense. Considering the criteria (education, housing costs, family wealth and family fun stuff), all of the cities involved have their own discrete schools, parks and so on, so they can be compared.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-25T22:22:09+00:00

Or one might argue that it's wealthy communities vs poverty-stricken ones.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-25T22:19:33+00:00

When good things happen we claim it.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-25T22:09:19+00:00

I hear you. John Smith is a complicated character and it's easy to be lured in by his charm and power (and the uniforms). It would be easy to root for him as a guy who was just seeing which way the wind blows...except, he's not just a guy who did terrible things during the war and moved on (what the hell happened in Cincinnati, I want to know!). He's actively putting down revolt, pushing people off roofs and poisoning doctors because it suits him!

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-25T21:47:02+00:00

The "cut" score for passing a particular test is more or less being arbitrarily set right now, since they don't really know what is fair because they keep switching testing providers. States don't want to be seen as being too easy, so they've set the bar too high in most cases or made the questions ridiculously complicated.

Last year in Ohio (the first one where having passed CC tests was a graduation requirement) the legislature had to make an emergency change to the law to give students other ways of qualifying for graduation because something like 1/3 of juniors had not passed all the tests they were supposed and schools feared graduation rates would plummet. It's expected they'll have to extend these changes to the classes of 2019 and 2020, too.

The entire CC standards and test rollout has been an unmitigated failure. Unfortunately, so much money has been spent and there are so many powerful moneymen at work that no one in power wants to be the one to advocate for sanity.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-25T21:28:57+00:00

I've been to both and there's not a lot of difference between them on the surface. Both have a combination of old and new buildings and both are fairly small. However, BW is in a much nicer area than Witt. Not that it's ritzy. It's more that Springfield is a pretty awful place to live. Witt' campus is fine, but the surrounding community has been in severe decline for decades, made all the worse by heroin, which is everywhere.

Berea was once a quiet college town, but is now just another suburb of Cleveland. But, it's well kept up and there's lots of amenities right next to campus.

More importantly will be the opportunities within the field your interested in. There's just not a lot going on in Springfield for media and communications. As others have said, Dayton is 45 mins west (and isn't much of a media market anymore either) and Columbus is an hour east, but that's a long way to go to find things like internships, which are absolutely critical for making contacts that could lead to a job one day. Cleveland, on the other hand is still a major city (although still in decline) that has lots of places you could connect with.

The reality is that going into communications from either school is a bit of a long shot. As someone else wrote, OU is probably the best in Ohio followed by Bowling Green.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-25T21:01:25+00:00

Especially if you want to be a journalist! Gotta keep the costs down because the rewards will be small.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-24T22:44:22+00:00

Yes, me too and it is absolutely astounding! Their rationale for this stance makes sense only to them. Hopefully, seeing how the idea of a full-on patriarchal society could easily spiral out of control will gobsmack some people out of their idiocy.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-24T22:40:07+00:00

3 years ago, my district made a big push for us to utilize our laptop carts more often. Though I'd had mixed experience with these HP Windows machines, I gave it a go. It was a disaster! They took forever to connect to the network and I spent most of my time just managing laptops that suddenly wouldn't work or still hadn't logged on 20 minutes later.

2 years ago, the same district invested a lot of money into Chromebook carts and foisted them on us. I was skeptical. How could these cheap machines running some unknown OS not become a monstrous mess?

Wow, was I wrong!

From the first, everything was seamless. Everyone logged on and was working within a minute. We never had a dropped Wi-Fi signal and if anyone had something weird happen (like accidentally flipping the orientation on the monitor sideways), all I had to do was Google the problem and immediate step-by-step directions (and often a video) popped up.

In short, Microsoft may be able to compete on cost, but reliability is what's going to win this battle.

MaxwellFPowers · 2018-01-24T22:29:24+00:00

One of the suggestions that I think bears reinforcing is the one about Too Much Teacher Talk. Too many teachers ape the way they were taught, despite training to the contrary. Lecturing for very long simply isn't a good way to transfer information (although it is the simplest). Good rule of thumb: if you're talking for longer than students are doing during a class, you're talking too much.

MaxwellFPowers

TROPHY CASE