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Unions are a more efficient way of forcing wages and other compensation to rise without the constant disruption of employees playing round robin until employers are forced to pay them better to retain their services.
Now imagine your kid goes through 3 math teachers and 4 English teachers per year. Fun?
Oh sure, let’s encourage every Chicago teacher to just walk away and find a new job. I’m sure the schools would still function without any teachers!
Unions are a more efficient way of forcing wages and other compensation to rise without the constant disruption of employees playing round robin until employers are forced to pay them better to retain their services.
Hey everybody: Have you heard of Kahn Academy?
It's Khan. And yes, it's a good supplemental educational tool. They had terrible stability issues couple of years ago to the point of being unusable.
Have you ever considered why public school books aren't available to, well you know, the public?
Huh? There are shitload of school books all over the eBay, Amazon and such. Both new and used.
I mean, these were created and paid for by taxpayer funds. Why do I have to pay for them? Why am I not able to just download them?
richwicks saysI mean, these were created and paid for by taxpayer funds. Why do I have to pay for them? Why am I not able to just download them?
I don't think the bolded is true.
There's a book called "Calculus Made Easy" by Silvanus P. Thomson. It was written for "5th form boys" in England, and I think the first edition was in 1910. This is out of copyright and easy to find online although there are updated editions using modern notation and eliminating some of the Englishness of the book that modern readers may be confused by.
"5th form boys" in England was roughly equivalent to our Junior High School but they were being taught what would be taught to a US senior. You probably aren't old enough, but when I was a kid, the joke was somebody's grandfather "had a 6th grade education!". My grandmother was a teacher when she was in her late teens, and she explained to me "that meant they were in pre-college level education today" - "today" at the time was the 1980s. A 6th grade education in 1920, was a legitimate education.
Public education textbooks are not generally used in private education because they are exclusively available to public schools. This is absolutely true in NY, otherwise students would just by the teacher's guide, which may as well be available to students anyhow.
Arm_HK_now saysrichwicks saysI mean, these were created and paid for by taxpayer funds. Why do I have to pay for them? Why am I not able to just download them?
I don't think the bolded is true.
Public education textbooks are not generally used in private education because they are exclusively available to public schools. This is absolutely true in NY, otherwise students would just by the teacher's guide, which may as well be available to students anyhow.
Seriously, how much has mathematics changed for education right up to the level of bachelor's of science changed in the last 200 years? It hasn't, yet every few years, new textbook - why? It's a scam. That's why I gave a link to Calculus Made Easy to demonstrate there's no need to recreate this stuff.
Perhaps grammar and spell...
Why do we wish to modify the teaching of mathe- matics in the schools? It is only if we see this clearly that we can judge whether or not the new books satisfy the need. Most people - grocery clerks, for example - use a great deal of simple arithmetic in their daily life. In addition, there are those who use mathematics of a higher form - engineers and sci- entists, statisticians, all types of economists, and business organizations with complex inventory sys- tems and tax problems. Then there are those who go directly into applied mathematics. And finally there are the relatively few pure mathematicians. When we plan for early training, then, we must pay attention not only to the everyday needs of al- most everyone, but also to this large and rapidly expanding class of users of more advanced mathe- matics. It must be the kind of training that encour- ages the type of thinking that such people will later find most useful.
Many of the books go into considerable detail on subjects that are only of interest to pure mathema- ticians. Furthermore, the attitude toward many sub- jects is that of a pure mathematician. But we must not plan only to prepare pure mathematicians. In the first place, there are very few pure mathema- ticians and, in the second place, pure mathematicians have a point of view about the subject which is quite different from that of the users of mathematics. A pure mathematician is very impractical; he is not interested - in fact, he is purposely dis- interested - in the meaning of the mathematical symbols and letters and ideas; he is only interested in logical interconnection of the axioms, while the user of mathematics has to understand the mnnec- tion of mathematics to the real world
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I hear a term called "new mathematics" used a great deal in connection with this program. That it's a new program of mathematics books is, of course, true, but whether it is wise to use "new," in the sense of very modern, mathematics is questionable. Mathematics which is used in engineering and sci- ence - in the design, for example, of radar antenna systems, in determining the position and orbits of the satellites, in inventory control, in the design of electrical machinery, in chemical research, and in the most esoteric forms of theoretical physics - is all really old mathematics, developed to a large ex- tent before 1920. A good deal of the mathematics which is used in the most advanced work of theoretical physics, for example, was not developed by mathematicians alone, but to a large extent by theoretical physicists themselves. Likewise, other people who use mathe- matics develop new ways to use it, and new forms of it. The pure mathematicians have in recent years (say, after 1920) turned to a large extent away from such applications and are instead deeply concerned with the basic definitions of number and line, and the interconnection of one branch of mathematics and another in a logical fashion. Great advances in this field have been made since 1920, but have had relatively little effect on applied, or useful, mathe- matics.
I hear a term called "new mathematics" used a great dealApparently it's not such a "new" idea after all. Thankfully I just missed it when I was in junior high:
I'm in CA. My kids have been to both private and public schools.
Arm_HK_now saysI'm in CA. My kids have been to both private and public schools.
My niece is in public high school in San Antonio. History textbooks must be checked out in class and can't leave the room. They don't want the parents to know what is in them.
I tell them to copy the ICBN# from the book and look it up online. Never failed so far.
No one else goes on strike, because everyone else just gets fired for stupid shit like that. Government employees in some sectors are way overly coddled and need some discipline IMHO.