Son of Random Stuff

[Dwip]

For the record, if you read actual Left-wing blogs, they super duper extra hate the dude.[edit] Ninja'd by Andalay, so:I'm honestly kind of with Sigurd on this one, though with several caveats:1. The best place to get kids all up into the various liberal arts would hopefully be HS. Most of us seem to end up appreciating somewhat despite the experience.2. IMHO, we'd all have gotten a lot more out of English classes if a better balance had been struck between having us read stuff that English majors wet their pants over and stuff we may have actually wanted to read, and yes The Old Man and the Sea means I'll never read any more Hemingway. Four years of English literature (which is what OR requires) is probably too much literature and not enough writing and critical thinking, but.3. I don't know how it is for you lot, but the OR requirement for history is a year of US history and a half year of US government. This is insanity, and pretty much forces teachers to teach the timeline because they don't have time for anything else. Expand to two years of US history, two years of European/World history so you can actually discuss the goddamn subject, and maybe keep the half year of civics or maybe expand it to a year. If you need some scheduling blocks, cut out a year of math or two. The last time most of us used advanced algebra or calculus for anything was never.4. I'm super biased because I'm a history major who was like a class away from an English minor, but yeah, almost all college-level history/English courses were a lot more palatable and taught by way better people than anything I ever had in HS. Even if that's your only exposure to the discipline, probably worth it for most people.

[Arthmoor]

For the record' date=' if you read actual Left-wing blogs, they super duper extra hate the dude.

That, from a blog that thinks John McCain is conservative... yeah. You've proven there are more extremist nutbags than your run of the mill American liberal.(Edited cause you ninja-edited a monster reply before me)

2. IMHO, we'd all have gotten a lot more out of English classes if a better balance had been struck between having us read stuff that English majors wet their pants over and stuff we may have actually wanted to read, and yes The Old Man and the Sea means I'll never read any more Hemingway. Four years of English literature (which is what OR requires) is probably too much literature and not enough writing and critical thinking, but.

4 YEARS? And here I thought CA was insane.

3. I don't know how it is for you lot, but the OR requirement for history is a year of US history and a half year of US government. This is insanity, and pretty much forces teachers to teach the timeline because they don't have time for anything else. Expand to two years of US history, two years of European/World history so you can actually discuss the goddamn subject, and maybe keep the half year of civics or maybe expand it to a year. If you need some scheduling blocks, cut out a year of math or two. The last time most of us used advanced algebra or calculus for anything was never.

You may find this quite the shock, but I'd say make it 2 years US, 2 years Euro/World, and ALSO 2 years specific to US Government with one year specifically devoted to the Constitution. With the caveat that it's taught using original sources and not the revisionist garbage they're teaching now, and by teachers who actually like the subject. I dare say you'd probably fit the bill here even. Come on, be a hero, reform the teaching of history in America! I'm also aware this means you'd have to run the history/government in parallel in separate classes at some point, but that's too bad. Too many people today have NO CLUE how our system works at all, or why.

[Dwip]

[AndalayBay]

1. The best place to get kids all up into the various liberal arts would hopefully be HS. Most of us seem to end up appreciating somewhat despite the experience.2. IMHO' date=' we'd all have gotten a lot more out of English classes if a better balance had been struck between having us read stuff that English majors wet their pants over and stuff we may have actually wanted to read, and yes [i']The Old Man and the Sea[/i] means I'll never read any more Hemingway. Four years of English literature (which is what OR requires) is probably too much literature and not enough writing and critical thinking, but.

God yes! And if possible, why not toss in a couple of other cultures? In Canada we're so afraid of losing our identity that we only get Canadian literature stuffed down our throats. Oh, and the Great Gatsby. I guess they deemed that one safe. We did study Shakespeare and I enjoyed most of that. It really helped when they brought the movie version in for us to watch. :tongue: Actually that reminds me of a funny story. As I said, once I met hubby, we started to explore the arts more. That included going to see MacBeth at Stratford (the Canadian Stratford theatre). Well I had never studied that one in school. I'm sitting through the first half and NOT understanding A THING. I realize that they are speaking English, sort of, but I have no clue what they are talking about. I turned to hubby during the intermission and asked him what the bloody hell was going on. Fortunately he had studied MacBeth and even though the director had taken some liberties with the story, he was able to explain it. :lmao:And when we visited London, we went to see a play at the Globe Theatre. Very cool. Unfortunately it was also 30C inside and we almost died of heat stroke.

3. I don't know how it is for you lot, but the OR requirement for history is a year of US history and a half year of US government. This is insanity, and pretty much forces teachers to teach the timeline because they don't have time for anything else. Expand to two years of US history, two years of European/World history so you can actually discuss the goddamn subject, and maybe keep the half year of civics or maybe expand it to a year. If you need some scheduling blocks, cut out a year of math or two. The last time most of us used advanced algebra or calculus for anything was never.

We used to get more history classes than that, but not much. I think we had a social studies class where they talked about different types of government - I really don't remember. You have to realize you are going back... about 35 years for me. Yep, I'm that old. :tongue: Anyway for us it was only Canadian history. Once again discussing a bit of world history would have been a lot more interesting. To demonstrate how sad our high school history course was, the teacher actually talked about what caused one of our prime ministers to get in hot water when he wanted to give one of our nuclear reactors away!!! That wasn't history - it was current events. History classes have gotten worse over the years. My husband is older than me and he can't believe how little actual history we were taught. He knows more about Canadian history than I do. He did go to school in Canada, but they had more history classes than we did.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

I think you're forgetting that "right wing" in Europe doesn't have any correlation to "right wing" in America. You're all leftists on our scale' date=' even Thatcher [/quote']He's probably right of Thatcher - he's the kind of guy who'd probably abolish the NHS on the grounds that if you can't afford to pay for healthcare you aren't of sufficient economic worth for the state to step in.The thing about a University education* is that its the first place you get actual facts and primary documents in most cases.For example: My field is medieval religious history in England, currently around the era of Richard II and Henry IV & V (1370-1430) - because of the subject area we get quite a few Evangelically inclined Christians coming through, and even more in the theology department.What they get at home from their parents/Sunday School/"Elders" is about 75% bullshit in terms of the history of Christianity or how other Christians think about things/what they believe.As far as I'm concerned, and I speak as a man of faith, if you teach you child a pack of lies about your religion and they go off to university and become atheists because they realise you fed them a pack of lies that's your fault - not mine. I can see how this can be spun as "indoctrination" but if I show my students an Orthodox (now considered "Roman Catholic" ) devotional text and someone pipes up and says, "but nobody believed that until Luthor came along and started the Reformation" my response will be the following:"Many of the ideas which later coalesed into Protestantism were actually pioneered by an Oxford theologian called John Wyclif and were actually not that contentious or controversial until Wyclif started directly attacking the Pope as litterally the Anti-Christ. In fact, King Richard II and his Uncle John of Gaunt were supporters of Wyclif and even after Gaunt died and Wyclif was vulnerable his conviction for heresy merely resulted in his expulsion from Oxford, whence he retired to his Parish and spent the rest of his life ministering to his congregation."That's a matter of historical fact - and if someone has had that kept from them for whatever reason it is not my responsibility to participate in the deception.Sorry - minor rant, but as I said, I am a man of faith and it irks me when people give their children crap information and then complain when someone else tries to pick up the pieces.*They're actually called Colleges in the US because they don't have their own Senates to confer degrees, but intead you do it at State level. In the UK each institution is a University in it's own right, unless it isn't and then it gets called a "College".

[Arthmoor]

He's probably right of Thatcher - he's the kind of guy who'd probably abolish the NHS on the grounds that if you can't afford to pay for healthcare you aren't of sufficient economic worth for the state to step in.

Which is still left wing ideology as no conservative (American type) would ever deny someone healthcare based on economic worth. That's Eugenics type bullshit that has no place in the Conservative movement. That person would get treatment regardless, because we have laws against denying people treatment whether they have insurance or not.As for the religious stuff, evangelical Christians are often surprised to find that *drumroll* Catholics are not Christians! Catholics have a number of things they teach that are not supported by scripture. The most obvious of them being that there is no Purgatory mentioned in the old or new testaments. And before you say I'm full of it, two of my friends have Masters and PHDs in biblical studies. Purgatory ain't in there.Catholicism is filled with all sorts of disguised Paganism if you want to get right down to it. Wyclif was obviously wrong about the Pope being the Anti-Christ, but he wasn't far off in his basis for going after the guy.

[Ysne58]

I hated history in high school because I knew more about the subject than the teachers did. Of course I had gone to various libraries and museums and seen the original sources. The teachers hated me right back because I would raise my hand and correct them.Then there was the counselor who told me the only reason I should go to college/university was to get my "MRS" degree. WTF. Even in 1976, that was positively sexist, stupid, bigotted....

[Sigurð Stormhand]

I hated history in high school because I knew more about the subject than the teachers did. Of course I had gone to various libraries and museums and seen the original sources. The teachers hated me right back because I would raise my hand and correct them.

Then there was the counselor who told me the only reason I should go to college/university was to get my "MRS" degree. WTF. Even in 1976' date=' that was positively sexist, stupid, bigotted....[/quote']I had an English teacher who hated me - academically speaking he would now be my gimp.On a lighter note:Yahtzee's latest riff on being a hero:http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/5777-Diablo-3Just watch the first minute or so.

[Dwip]

We did study Shakespeare and I enjoyed most of that. It really helped when they brought the movie version in for us to watch.

Actually I think most of us kind of dug Shakespeare' date=' which was pretty much what senior English was all about. Culminated in going down to see [i']Othello[/i] at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which was super cool. Also Romeo and Juliet at the Globe when I lived in London, though my favorites from that period would have to be a tossup between Journey's End or the then brand new The History Boys at the National. OTOH, I could have done without Cyrano de Bergerac at the National.Which is all to say that The Pearl was not the best possible Steinbeck choice.Also, one of the cooler things I did in 6th grade, a year almost totally devoid of cool things, was play MacDuff. I was also one of Banquo's assassins, so I pretty much got to kill everybody. Wooden prop sword homicide is epic.

I hated history in high school because I knew more about the subject than the teachers did.

I was lucky in that regard. Teachers left me alone in history precisely because I probably knew more than they did. I didn't pontificate' date=' they let me do my own thing. Worked out for everybody.Re: Sigurd, a few primary sources would have been awfully nice in high school, but alas. OTOH, showing the entirity of Ken Burns' [i']The Civil War[/i] remains a really good idea.

[Arthmoor]

My experience mirrors more or less what Ysne has said. Dare to try and offer up a correction to bogus crap the teacher is feeding you and they would openly mock you in front of the rest of the class. One history teacher even flat out said primary sources were not to be trusted because later generations had not given them a proper interpretation!Dwip, you appear to have escaped most of the problems some of us have experienced firsthand. I suspect largely due to not having gone to grade school in the big cities where the roots of liberalism run deep.

[AndalayBay]

We did study Shakespeare and I enjoyed most of that. It really helped when they brought the movie version in for us to watch.

Actually I think most of us kind of dug Shakespeare' date=' which was pretty much what senior English was all about. Culminated in going down to see [i']Othello[/i] at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which was super cool. Also Romeo and Juliet at the Globe when I lived in London, though my favorites from that period would have to be a tossup between Journey's End or the then brand new The History Boys at the National. OTOH, I could have done without Cyrano de Bergerac at the National.

Especially when they started explaining all the sexual innuendo. They got my attention at that point... I think the first example was when we studied Merchants of Venice in grade 9. IIRC, there was a comment about lips and a cherry...

[Ysne58]

You keep boiling things down to "liberalism" v. you. Nothing is that simple.

[AndalayBay]

My experience mirrors more or less what Ysne has said. Dare to try and offer up a correction to bogus crap the teacher is feeding you and they would openly mock you in front of the rest of the class. One history teacher even flat out said primary sources were not to be trusted because later generations had not given them a proper interpretation!

Dwip' date=' you appear to have escaped most of the problems some of us have experienced firsthand. I suspect largely due to not having gone to grade school in the big cities where the roots of liberalism run deep.[/quote']Not sure about the liberalism part, but same here. I went to school in Toronto and my husband said that they always laughed at the Toronto schools. He went to school in King City (small town outside TO) and they would whip Toronto students in any competition. I actually flunked out of Engineering Science because my high school didn't teach integrals (calculus) and matrix calculations (algebra). My high school also spoon fed us so I had lousy study habits.The problem we had was that high schools were rated on how many students were accepted into university. You needed a 90% average to get into Eng. Sci. The previous year had a lot of students not getting accepted into universities, and not just engineering - they couldn't get into science or the other disciplines either. So they made the curriculum easier the year I was in grade 13 (we had 5 years of high school at that time). So great, I had a 90+% average. But it was meaningless.They finally changed things a few years ago by implementing province-wide testing. Even public schools have them. I think the first tests occur in grade 3, then 6 and so on. That really made some schools clean up their act and now if a school reports a high acceptance rate, you can have some faith in the statistics.

[Dwip]

You keep boiling things down to "liberalism" v. you. Nothing is that simple.

Yes.

Dwip' date=' you appear to have escaped most of the problems some of us have experienced firsthand. I suspect largely due to not having gone to grade school in the big cities where the roots of liberalism run deep.[/quote']I don't really know how many times I can talk about how I didn't have a history class worth having until I got to college' date=' but like I talked about before, there was literally nothing K-12 history was going to teach me that I didn't already know. We may or may not have even had a discussion about primary sources before 11th grade, I don't remember. I'm right on board the K-12 history education is shit train, and it's the main part of my argument.Of course, the other part is that college bears no actual relation to any of that, so, you know.As to the correcting teachers thing, well. It's a little simplistic to say that my correcting my incompetent 6th grade teacher on elementary physics [i']caused[/i] the first year-long war between several families and the school administration over the forementioned 6th grade teacher being an idiot, but it was definitely a part of the year-long guerilla war I had to wage against him (see also The Battle of the MRE Crackers, The Winter War, the Attack of the Koosh Ball, and more), and it was definitely a part of the subsequent three year war against the school administration, and that's without going so far as to discuss the various skirmishes in high school, but no, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that as far as the whole Fight the (Teacher) Power thing goes, I had a whole lot more of it than most people.Just, you know, not in college.

Especially when they started explaining all the sexual innuendo.

Shakespeare was the goddamn innuendo MASTER. Yes.

[Arthmoor]

You keep boiling things down to "liberalism" v. you. Nothing is that simple.

Well' date=' that's because it really is that simple, but of course nobody wants to believe that. Dwip can attest to the number of times I've made that case, though he'll of course claim I never have any evidence to back it up

They finally changed things a few years ago by implementing province-wide testing. Even public schools have them. I think the first tests occur in grade 3' date=' then 6 and so on. That really made some schools clean up their act and now if a school reports a high acceptance rate, you can have some faith in the statistics.[/quote']Yeah, we have standardized testing here too. California excels at lowering the standard to pass year after year so they too can keep up their graduation rates from day care high school. Which, you know, is really bad for the labor pool when these kids graduate and can't get work because they don't actually know anything. College rarely helps them in this regard these days either.

[Dwip]

1. (I think you know what I'm going to say here)2. We could probably argue standardized testing all day, though I think there's a relatively broad consensus here that at least in the US it kind of jumped the shark somewhere in the NCLB era. I was in the last cohort before they really got for serious about standards in Oregon, and...I dunno. My class had something like 90% college attendence, the class after us was a bunch of epic fuckups, and standards didn't really help much with that. Then again, when I was back for a bit in 2005 it looked like maybe things had gotten better, but who knows.

[Arthmoor]

Oh, in CA the standards devolved long before NCLB (which, for the record, was one of Bush's two biggest fuckups ever) and their decline only accelerated upon it's passage. As California goes, so goes the nation. Sometimes I weep for the nation because of what we do here.

[Thomas Kaira]

Yeah' date=' we have standardized testing here too. California excels at lowering the standard to pass year after year so they too can keep up their graduation rates from [s']day care[/s] high school. Which, you know, is really bad for the labor pool when these kids graduate and can't get work because they don't actually know anything. College rarely helps them in this regard these days either.

Yeah, sure. Let me know when it hits New Mexico standards, will ya? Then we'll talk educational problems.

[Arthmoor]

Trust me, we're working on it!

[AndalayBay]

To quote Arthmoor from the EE thread on Beth:

Actually it was an early release of Gecko that mangled some other mod of his. TES4Edit did precisely what it was supposed to and worked. He just thought it was arrogant of someone to assume his licensing terms at the time actually meant what he'd written.But yes, let us not continue down this line, for it leads to Bad Placesâ„¢.

So should I send him a preliminary version of Gecko for old time's sake? We'll have to add something special so it gobbles your plugin though...

[Ysne58]

To quote Arthmoor from the EE thread on Beth:

Actually it was an early release of Gecko that mangled some other mod of his. TES4Edit did precisely what it was supposed to and worked. He just thought it was arrogant of someone to assume his licensing terms at the time actually meant what he'd written.

But yes' date=' let us not continue down this line, for it leads to Bad Placesâ„¢.

[/quote']

So should I send him a preliminary version of Gecko for old time's sake? We'll have to add something special so it gobbles your plugin though...

Can you send it to the Drama Queen anonymously?

[AndalayBay]

[Sigurð Stormhand]

As for the religious stuff' date=' evangelical Christians are often surprised to find that *drumroll* Catholics are not Christians! Catholics have a number of things they teach that are not supported by scripture. The most obvious of them being that there is no Purgatory mentioned in the old or new testaments. And before you say I'm full of it, two of my friends have Masters and PHDs in biblical studies. Purgatory ain't in there.Catholicism is filled with all sorts of disguised Paganism if you want to get right down to it. Wyclif was obviously wrong about the Pope being the Anti-Christ, but he wasn't far off in his basis for going after the guy.[/quote']This is the sort of thing I'm talking about.Who told you that?It's wrong, it's based on a misinterpretation of Roman Catholic doctrine and Lutheran rhetoric and a mistranslation of scripture - usually of the King James Bible which is a deaply flawed and partisan text anyway.This is the number two fallacy we get from students - number one being "the Bible is the litteral word of God" which it says nowhere in the Bible (except about the Ten Commandments) and that idea is based on a misreading of one of Paul's remarks and a lack of appreciation of the transmission of the manuscripts - which are replete with erros for one thing.

[Arthmoor]

So then I suppose you can tell me, chapter and verse, where Purgatory is specifically mentioned then? None of my Bible beating friends can seem to find it, including the two with actual degrees.They CAN however provide me with a very compelling case for Catholicism being nothing more than Paganism in disguise.

[Sigurð Stormhand]

So then I suppose you can tell me' date=' chapter and verse, where Purgatory is specifically mentioned then? None of my Bible beating friends can seem to find it, including the two with actual degrees.[/quote']Purgatory is a fairly minor element of Roman doctrine, if I went and looked I could find you the passage where Paul says that you must be purified in "fire", which is the kernal of the idea.Pope John Paul II had a rather neat formulation, if you care to read it: http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp2heavn.htmThe doctrine signifies only that when one dies one is not "perfect" and therefore must be "purified". The Roman interpretation of this has, in the past, been excessively temporal - Purgatory was over-charactarised as a place of scourging where time was described as passing - so it might be said that a Crusader who died in 1100 finally entered heaven in 1230 after all he had been cleansed of all his sins. The over interpretation of the allegory is just that though, overinterpretation.A Catholic ranting on exactly this point: http://www.kathyschley.com/Catholic_Churc/WhatIsPurgatox.html just read the first two paragraphs.You don't have to believe in it, but the doctrine is an attempt to reconcile different ideas which are not directly synthesised in the Canonical Scriptures.If you want to talk about things not explicitely mentioned in scripture though, here are some Protestant ones:1. Biblical infallability - the Big Idea of Evangelical Protestantism, variously formulated, is totally indefensible when one reads the Gospels in the parralel. Worse, there are books (Enoch) quoted in the epistles which are not recognised even as Protestant Canon.2. The Holy Trinity. It just isn't in there - the idea of one God in three equal aspects is a fudge from the Council of Nicea in 323 AD.3. Priesthood of all believers/lack of a need for laying on of hands from a priest or bishop.4. Eternal Damnation (as understood in some Protestant Churches).5. Predeterminism OR Free Will - the jury is totally out on this one if you just read the scriptures there is no answer.