gog
12d ago
I've worked in BC. It might be better, but you have to keep in mind that none of this is advertised or even visible unless your kid sucks at school or you go shopping for it. And I'm talking about high school- before high school, a lot of the problems are just passed along, year after year, because no one can fail. Once high school hits and suddenly kids can fail, the Goodharting begins.
gog
12d ago
I don't think my school's situation is extreme. I'd guess that it's about average for a suburban school. If you live around lots of immigrants the situation I describe will be less common.
Location wise, all I can say is that I'm somewhere east of BC.
gog
12d ago
I am a teacher in Canada, so I can't say much about the US Dept of Ed, but I can say a few things about how special ed works up here as a general reply to many of the comments below. Assume that whatever happens in Canada, it's probably worse in the US.
I work at a high school in a pretty affluent area. The affluence generally comes from remunerative blue collar work, not professional work. My school has over 1200 students and a third of them have special ed plans. There is virtually no violence at my school, no crime, students are polite and obedient. They just don't do or learn anything because of special ed plans.
These special ed plans are sometimes the result of tests carried out by private psychologists, sometimes the result of tests carried out by school psychologists, but are frequently ordered by family doctors. At least one was one sentence emailed by a paediatrician when the kid hadn't even been checked. None of these pathways is any worse than the others- they are all fraudulent.
They nearly all specify that the student needs extra time and a "quiet space" for tests because of anxiety.
The "quiet space" requirement is written up on demand because the kids know it will get them their own little room for tests. Everyone but the parents knows this, but if you try to tell the parents they freak out because the school isn't taking their child's special learning style seriously. Moreover, you can hear a pin drop during a test in even the rowdiest classes and so the requirement now demands "an alternative space." Last exam season, it was not possible to give every kid a private or semi-private room, so all the alternative space kids were sent to one big room, resulting in an "alternative space" that contained more students than any of the 4 exam rooms with containing the normal kids. All stakeholders found this acceptable.
The "extra time" requirement is invoked any time a kid starts to do poorly. "Well you didn't give her enough time to show what she really knows." This was originally intended for exams, although the extra time kids almost almost get the same 54% they would have gotten in half the time. By now, however, parents demand it for everything. If one attempts to explain that taking 40 minutes for a 20-minute assignment every day means 20 minutes of missed class time - a class wherein the student was already struggling- parents are baffled. Up until grade 10, it had never occurred to them that there might not be unlimited time in the school day. Any teacher who doesn't provide this time is summoned to A Meeting with the parents and the principal, and since the average teacher is Lisa Simpson, this prospect is so threatening that it never needs to happen.
The third most common "accomodation" is to have all written material read out loud by an aide. Since around 20% of 1200 students are officially entitled to this, it is not possible for a human aide to read to them all, and so text-to-speech programs are used. When text-to-speech is offered, students don't use it because the advantage of the human aide is that you can read the best aides for clues about the right answer and straight up ask the worst aides what they think the answer is. This is usually enough to get a passing mark. Refusing the text-to-speech but using an aide if available is an admission by the student that the whole thing was a scam from the start. Note that the most common exam to have read to you is the grade 12 English reading comprehension exam. All stakeholders find this acceptable.
The fourth most common accomodation is to have someone write out your essay for you as you dictate it, not because you are a poor handwriter (parents, students and other teachers react with horror at the suggestion that even a one-paragraph response could be completed by hand) but because you are a poor typist. When you ask the aides who do this what they did to help the student, they straight up admit to helping the student "organize their thoughts before putting them into words." The students find this to be the most helpful part of having a "scribe. " All stakeholders find this acceptable.
These are only the academic allowances. Almost every student with a special ed plan is entitled to "movement breaks." Weird in high school, but whatever. In practice this means that if they get bored they are allowed to wander the halls with their friends. Predictably, these sorts of kids get bored with schoolwork very quickly. They also get preferential seating. All are entitled to laptops to "help with notetaking" (no notes are ever taken). One specific kid must always have his computer and also no one is ever allowed to sit behind him. Doctor's orders. Any kid who appears to be indigenous is allowed to leave class literally whenever they want to get free cookies because "you can't learn if you're hungry." No other ethnicity is believed to get hungry.
All of this is million dollar (Canadian) Goodharting scheme. The point of special ed is to launder cheating so that students who would otherwise fail can pass classes that absolutely do not matter. The parents of an illiterate student in grade ten are more worried about her geography mark than about the fact that she can't read. When you ask the dedicated special ed teachers about this, they don't even understand the question because the idea of doing anything to a)verify that the special ed needs are legit and b)rectify or mitigate the disabilities that cause them is so far off their radar that they never imagine it. The special ed teacher's main job is compliance- making sure the other teachers give out the extra time and movement breaks.
Anti-school Motteposters might protest that school is hell/prison/etc and so if a kid can use these tricks to escape the drudgery and the power-tripping teachers then they should go for it. But these students are the ones schools are actually designed for. They are the lowest common denominator and will not learn to code (or whatever) with the time they save by gaming special ed. In fact, the special ed gaming costs them huge amounts of time. While sitting in class might be boring, sitting in the cheating room for 45 minutes so that no one questions why you finished the test so quickly is far more boring. Listening to a 50-year-old Phillipina immigrant trying to pronounce "deoxyribonucleic" on question 10 and realizing you have 50 questions left to endure is far more boring. Furthermore, the more one believes that school is a waste of time and money, the more one should rage at the fact that parents, whose attitude toward all of this reveals that they see school as no more than a daycare, continue to accept the billion-dollar form of daycare when they could just use the minimum-wage daycare across the street. And finally, the more you mistrust teachers (and you should) the more you should hate this system because it covers up their incompetence. When a third of kids show up in grade 10 apparently unable to read, no one goes to the grades 1-9 teachers to demand an explanation. "They all have special ed plans" is considered a sufficient explanation for everything.
gog
1mo ago
It's really the horror of arguments. Validity gets hard to check really fast. In geometry or deductive logic it's really easy, in law it's harder but maybe still feasible. But once you get to "I should not be taxed to raise funds for the care of the mentally retarded because of my natural right to property" it's basically impossible, and all that remains is persuasion. I grant that persuasion is largely also rhetorical, but good-faith persuasion seeks to persuade the interlocutor. Lawyer-arguing, (street-litigation?) is carried out, face-to-face, in what ordinary people would consider a personal conversation, as though there were a jury or judge listening, and so rhetoric and theatrics get deployed to sway onlookers, but there are no onlookers; there are only participants. The interlocutor becomes a means, where in good-faith argument he would be an end.
gog
1mo ago
Talk to some lawyers and see if you still think the LSAT weeds out bad-faith political arguments. Lawyers seem especially prone to bad-faith argument; I suspect it's because litigation depends so much on quibbles and rhetoric that they can't turn it off in other settings (or that the profession attracts people who think that quibbles and rhetoric are central). In any case, the LSAT doesn't cure them, although maybe they'd be even worse without it.
Studying for LSAT-type tests isn't part of the curriculum because so many people are bad it, and therefore it would have a disparate impact on various social groups. Teachers as a class hatehatehatehatehate (1)Quanitifiable metrics (due to a combination of incompetence, professional ass-covering and social justice theories) and (2)Anything that makes them feel dumb. See the various cheating scandals in Ontario for more on what happened when the government brought in a basic math test for teachers.
But even if that could be surmounted, you don't want a poll test. There is no way it would stay neutral. It would end up full of questions like "Since structural racism has entrenched white people in positions of power, which of the following analogies holds?" Passing such a test would be a 3-hour, registered, certificated "workers of the world, unite" sign.
And finally, just because a political argument is flawed doesn't mean its conclusion is wrong, so weeding out people who make or are fooled by such arguments wouldn't help much. Most political reasoning is post hoc anyway, so you'd bring in this testing system and go through all the hassle just to push the political problem back exactly one step from "bad argument" to "core values/ideology", which are not reliably responsive to argument.
We should still have more standardized tests though, with the option to post your score on some public registry. It would solve a lot of other problems.
gog
3mo ago
Your injuries will heal . . .eventually. I'm certain I tore some kind of CL (mcl/acl/whatever) chasing a 500lb DL. I got stress fractures in my wrists chasing a 400lb BP. This was a 14 years ago when there was less info easily available. I scaled way back for like 2 years, then got back into it and got some kind of cramps in my back that put a sideways curve in my spine (visible to random strangers). That eventually went away when I scaled way back. I got back into it and hit the 500lb DL. Then I got tendonitis so bad that when I was playing music at a jam session, my biceps tendon popped back into place and the audience heard the crack over the music. Then I scaled way back. Then I got back into it and hit a 600lb DL. Then a 405 BP. Then I felt something tear in my lower back/upper glutes while doing . . . .super light rdls with an extreme range of motion and couldn't walk for like a week. It was the worst gym injury of them all. The fear of the pain hung like the barbell of Damocles over every workout, and I eventually tore it again. That was about 2 years ago. Now I'm all better, do a ton of cardio and pretty-boy machine work. I'm not as strong as I once was, but I'm in overall the best shape of my life.
I don't recommend my kamikaze approach to training, but I racked up enough injuries to be able to say that the fear that an injury won't heal is totally understandable and almost certainly unfounded. Play the long game; just keep doing something and you'll bounce back. Unless you're like 60.
PS: PT is only a half-step removed from chiro and aromatherapy. Kin tape is fake. Electric acupuncture is fake. Acoustic accupuncture is fake. Laser therapy to "break up the scar tissue" is fake. 5lb curls while standing on a wobbly board are fake. Massage for anything other than hedonistic purposes is fake. Strength and flexibility are real, but that's what the gym is for.
gog
4mo ago
What are the "world issues" of our age?
I am a high school social studies teacher (lame) and our curriculum is very old. As such, it is adamant that kids learn about the AIDS crisis, SARS, the Millennium poverty reduction goals, UN peacekeeping, third-world debt and the IMF, etc. It's all very Naomi Klein, Michael Moore-type stuff, and feels like teaching in 1992 with books written during the Cold War.
Most of those issues are still around, but they are obviously no longer as relevant to the globally-minded. Other than stuff like SARS, which has an obvious analog in COVID, what issues SHOULD we talking about. In 2007 you could pretty easily list the things that were considered "world issues" by the bien-pensant class. Has wokeism bulldozed all that? Are there constituencies out there who are still worried about this type of stuff? If so, what are they worrying about?
gog
1yr ago
Gymnastics or dance lessons are the standard answers for girls that age, but for a 5-year-old, just waking up is a pretty rich experience already. I wouldn't worry until she's 7 or 8.
gog
1yr ago
I'm not asking about how these sorts of people affect poor black kids. I'm asking how someone like a middle-class woman explains the wider world to themselves. There is a pretty big group of people who fall between the extremes of "systemic racism has totally rigged the game against the underclass" and "HBD is true and there is no hope for any of them." This group is not super ideological, feels bad for poor people most of the time, but thinks that if the underclass had fewer kids at 14 (via abstinence or abortion or whatever) and worked hard at school, etc, then many of them would rise into the middle class themselves. Does the thought process only go as far as entry into the middle class? In that, hard work and respectability gets you across the threshold, but then further advancement is obsructed by shadowy puppet-masters? Is it just brute Karenism, in that there is no wider world to them, or that it consists only of NPCs? Is it an aloof acceptance of the hard facts of life, and requires no explanation? I'm asking here because there is no polite way to ask these people in real life. I used middle-class women as an example, but as many of the comments have pointed out, lots of people make these sorts of excuses. They can't all be HBD realists or DEI ideologues, can they?
gog
1yr ago
Not that anyone is obligated to play along, but I'm not getting many answers to my question. There's lots of "no, women don't do that" and lots of "preach, king!" but the question stands. How does a run-of-the-mill progressive expect people with much more credible claims to oppression than middle-class women to talk themselves into striving when the highly privileged are so consistently talking themselves out of it? Anyone?
gog
1yr ago
Being imposing is absolutely a huge advantage when dealing with students in an anarchic environment. Even in Canada. But the complaints are never about that. They're about how some man got to go on (="he organized") a field trip, or how some guy rear-ended their car "but that would never happen to my husband" or whatever.
This is not a small-scale question.
But anyway,
(1) An external motivation to act rightly. In the old internet-atheist days, there was lots of indignation at the perceived attitude of the religious that atheists can’t be good people. That was always a strawman, though. There are lots of good atheists. The question is why there should be. Penn Jilette famously protested that he doesn’t need religious belief to keep him in line, since he already rapes and murders everyone he wants to, it’s just that he never wants to. I admire his purity, and grant that in a society as decadent as ours rape and murder are less tempting than they might once have been. And maybe Penn Jilette has never reflexively blurted out a self-exculpatory fib, or fumed internally about some kid getting the last burger at a barbecue, but it would appear that a lot of people have, and it would be surprising if the rest of humanity had jumped straight to Einsatzgruppen and Congolese rape-battalions without passing through lower levels of immorality.
We can Euthyphro this all day but even setting aside questions of the One True Good, the loss of that external nudge has been disastrous. Law cannot fill the gap- there can be no law against selfishness or contempt, for example.
(2) A prescribed human identity. Religions tell people who they are. Muslim women know exactly what they are supposed to do. Orthodox Jewish men know exactly who they are supposed to be. Suicide bombers know. The vast majority of people are incapable of forming an identity from scratch. Religion offers/offered identities that had many drawbacks and did not adequately serve a lot of people, but they did the job for the vast majority. Among the truly religious, there is no self-expression-by-buying-tattoos, no retail therapy, no do-it-for-the-gram; indeed such narcissistic paroxysm is a sign that someone is on their way out of the religion. Religious people have/create lots of problems for themselves and others, but the defining problem of our age, lack of identity, is the result of the loss of religion. No such broadly effective alternative source of identity has yet appeared.
gog
1yr ago
Oh, I barely move in any social circles at all. This is all at work, which is a high school, and therefore maybe selects for people without much ambition . . .
gog
1yr ago
Yesterday, I heard a woman casually, as though it were self-evident, explain an undesirable outcome in her life with "because I'm a woman." I have heard this used by many women to explain: -Why they are not managers -Why their students cannot read -Why they follow pointless workplace rules that no one ever enforces and most employees don't follow -Why they live in fear of the disapproval of superiors -Why a waiter was rude to them -Why a waitress was rude to them -Why they must conform to community norms
Though the explanation sounds like a confession ( "I can't be a manager, I'm just a girl!"), in all cases it is an accusation, intended to imply that the patriarchy is manipulating things behind the scenes, or that "everyone knows" men never get punished/demoted/frowned upon, so only women have to actually worry about their behavior/reputations/whatever. I have been shocked both by how readily this explanation is confirmed/affirmed by other women present when it is offered, and also the wild confirmation bias on display. The women are not managers, but they never applied for the job, and their bosses are women. They have never been reprimanded at work, but neither has anyone else. The male students can't read, but neither can the female ones. None of this is considered. It boggles the mind.
Nevertheless, it is a fact about how a certain class of Western woman explains the world to herself. If people so privileged are so certain of how the deck is stacked against them, what hope is there for people with stronger evidence for that belief about themselves? How does a standard right-thinking (from "to right-think") respectable Westerner expect anyone else to transcend their culture or overcome oppression or break the cycle when their default, axiomatic explanation for why they only make 100k and three trips to Mexico per year is "society cheated me." What is a black kid supposed to think? Or a kid on a reservation? "I'll give it my best shot"? I have heard black dissidents make this argument against the idea of systemic racism- that even if it is real, thinking about it stops black people from trying things. But how can self-exculpatory models of the world be eradicated in people with somewhat credible claims to oppression when they are so popular even among the most privileged members of society? How do the "it's the culture" people expect the culture to change if the winning culture tells itself the same story as the losing one?
gog
1yr ago
This makes sense. I am a teacher, and it's worse than that, though. The teachers hate KIDS because the kid has an Audi that his dad bought him.
gog
1yr ago
But did the Red Tribe do something to obstruct the path to Utopia? I'm not talking about Ronald Reagan- I mean did cousin Merle on his camo 4-wheeler do something?
gog
1yr ago
Sure, but why? Whence the universalism? Is it a holdover from Christianity? From Communism? They don't seem to care about what happens in Mali, for example, the way Christians and Communists do.
gog
1yr ago
This is at least AN answer. Can you expand upon the leftist impulse to erase all distinctions, or point me to someone who already has?
gog
1yr ago
This goes back to waaaaaay before Covid, though. I feel your pain, but it's not an answer to the question.
gog
1yr ago
Okay, but then why do the classes hate each other. It's not like Marxism- their class interests aren't necessarily opposed.
gog
1yr ago
Those examples are from a culture war in full swing, like saying "we hate the other soldiers because they shot a bunch of our guys in the last battle." My question is why is there even a war going on.
gog
1yr ago
WHY is there a culture war?
I think most people around here accept the existence of a red tribe and a blue tribe, and accept that most of what happens in western society and politics, from George Floyd to Taylor Swift, follows from those two tribes trying to weaponize events and ideas in order to dunk on their enemies. As a description of the world, our culture war theory works very well. But as an explanation, maybe not. Yes, yes, there are these two tribes, but WHY do these tribes hate each so much? It seems obvious to me that the red tribe is currently on the defensive, and so fights on out of a spirit of plucky individualism/puerile defiance (you choose). They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the red tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.
But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much? One could point back to Trump and say "Look at all the damage the red tribe did!" but Trump himself seems to have been the red tribe lashing out at blue tribe condescension/scorn. Do they just want revenge for the 80s? The 50s? In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, the suggestion is that the tribes are too similar, and so therefore hatred is somehow inevitable. He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.
So: 1)Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively? 2)If it is naive, why does the red tribe hate the blue tribe? 3) Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?
It's not 50%. It's like 20%. At school-wide exam time, in five exam rooms of 30 kids, if each room loses 6, then the "alternate space" contains 30 and each normal room contains 24. For regular tests it's 2 or 3 here and there.
As far as retaking tests, if you can retake them there is little incentive to study, so you can just blow them and it doesn't matter. Since it's a massive pain to make fair tests (about 8 hours for the kind of history tests that are expected in my region, for example) there are usually only two versions, so by the third attempt the kid has already seen all the questions and discussed them with everyone else. Besides the obvious problems, this also makes it impossible to go through the tests with the students and explain why the correct answers are correct, point out the tricky bits, etc.
Late homework is just as bad. Of course marks should just be a reflection of how well the kid knows things, but culturally this is an impossible attitude. Marks are the currency we use to pay students. The point of the homework (we can debate the effectiveness, but this is the intent) is to learn something at a certain point in the course sequence. The mark you get for the homework is the currency the school uses to get you to learn it at the correct time. (The mark you get on the test is the currency the school pays you for having actually learned it). When there is no penalty for late homework, kids let it pile up until literally the last day of the year, after the exam is complete, and then show up and try to desperately churn out a bunch of work from the first week to see what happens to their mark (no matter how many times you explain the math, they won't/can't calculate the effect). So the teacher can just waive the homework. This is the easiest option, but not fair to the kids who played along, and also punishes the kid trying to hand it in late, because now his tests count for much more (and he's no genius and he didn't do the homework, so his test marks are low). Or the teacher can accept all the homework, which is annoying because it is pointless. The tests and exams are over- the proof of learning is complete, so the evidence of the learning process is useless.
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