patrick.net

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.

Isn't 'Chicago Teacher' an oxymoron?

Quigley says

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.

This. Fucking tech has become a fucking circus with people jumping around like fucking grasshoppers. Now imagine your kid goes through 3 math teachers and 4 English teachers per year. Fun?

Arm_HK_now says

Now imagine your kid goes through 3 math teachers and 4 English teachers per year. Fun?

For the last couple of years, my son has had just such disruptions in his classrooms. Fourth grade his teacher (whom he really liked) died suddenly. I had the unenviable task of informing him that his favorite teacher ever had passed away. The next year found him with another great teacher but she got the cancer bad and was out for most of the year with surgeries and chemotherapy. She came back for the last month, and is doing better.

My wife also teaches at the college level and she’s in a union. Her last professor job wasn’t Union, and even the full long-term professors there made less than she started at with the new place.
Unions also raise the bar for compensation for non-union workers, as the employers know that if they dick around with shorting their workers, the workers will either unionize or move on.
It’s part of the structure that makes capitalism work long term, instead of spinning out into social disorder and chaos after a few decades of extreme inequality. Unfettered capitalism does work but it isn’t stable, and will create a revolution of disgruntled workers if allowed to reach its final extremes.

In a large way, Trumpism is a workers’ revolution against the elites’ political policies which have allowed capitalism to run roughshod over the working class.

My place pulled this shit on us:

"The raises for un-unionized is limited to 3%" Of course the inflation rate is 1.7%, so basically the best raise you can possibly earn is 1.3%

That was on a Monday. By Wednesday, the Union decided to strike for the Unionized personnel.

Next day, org tells us "Whoever wants to volunteer (unpaid) to help us get over the strike, please contact the office..."

Totally Tone-Deaf.

Quigley says

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.

What do you mean encourage? They are free to choose.

If they don't like their job, find another one. Why is that such a hard concept these days?

I'm okay with unions at private companies that aren't monopolies. Fuck government union workers!

I can buy a Toyota instead of GM..

Hey everybody: Have you heard of Khan Academy?

Publik schools are obsolete.

Khan Academy is a good resource for parents that actually care about their kids.

Stop whining that public employees are garbage - we all know that. Don't let your kid waste their early childhood learning nothing from these government robots. I'm an electrical engineer, guess what I am not allowed to do? I can't teach math or science, because I'm not qualified...

That's your edumacation system today. In Silicon Valley, people in high tech send their kids to private school.

richwicks says

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.

Looks like they fixed that.

BTW, schools around here use both Khan Academy and IXL as educational tools.

Arm_HK_now says

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.

Oh, corrected my misspelling, sorry about htat.

It's a little site, I'm not surprised they have stability issues.

Have you ever considered why public school books aren't available to, well you know, the public? This is to prevent correction of them, from improving upon them, and also, to make certain the publisher makes money. Trust me, this scam is ending. A LOT of scams will be ending.

richwicks says

Have you ever considered why public school books aren't available to, well you know, the public?

Huh? There are shitloads of school books all over the eBay, Amazon and such. Both new and used. We sometimes buy an extra copies for our kids so they don't have to lug heavy books too and from school.

Arm_HK_now says

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?

This is why Khan academy was created. It's a grass roots effort to reform education.

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.

If you read some of the old education books from the early 1900's from the "one room schoolhouses" - it's a better general education then, than what many "good" schools produce today.

Private sector unions are fine. I'm opposed to public sector unions because the union members vote for the politicians who in turn give handouts to the members. It's a quid-pro-quo.

In the private sector, the managers of the corporation have no incentive to give into union demands other then they have no choice because they can't find replacement workers and need to make a product.

richwicks says

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?

I don't think the bolded is true.

PS. Stuff truly paid for by taxpayers, like army survival manuals and such is available for download for exactly that reason.

Arm_HK_now says

richwicks says

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?

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 spelling books need to be updated. History might as well be done away with, it's all propaganda anyhow.

I could easily construct a wonderful set of books on everything from basic arithmetic up to differential equations that covers each sub subject in a multitude of ways for $10 million - EASILY, that could be used by 35 million students from K to 12 - that initiative will never happen. No copyright needed, available to anybody, can be printed up for a couple dollars - $10 max to have it professional bound. Why do you think that will never happen?

Well, it's going to happen anyhow, but the state won't create it, individuals will.

Many students tell me they do not like Khan Academy.

If every teacher walked away then who would be left to teach? Who would want to teach?

richwicks says

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.

Thank you for this.

Unlike modern US textbooks, these were written by greats in their Field, not ghost written by English Majors. Look at any STEM facility and look at who knows their shit - the Russians. Real Indians and Chinese also use and/or translate these books. I believe Rin first talked about these:

https://archive.org/details/glinkageneralchemistryvol1mir1986

richwicks says

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.

I'm in CA. My kids have been to both private and public schools. At no time did I have a problem buying texbooks they were using. Can't comment wrt NY. I don't think buying teacher's guide is a problem either, but will need to check with my wife who usually handles this stuff. I don't remember ever needing one though in order to help my kids with their homework.

Khan Academy is woefully inadequate at delivering an effective curriculum. The only guy to ever do a course worth watching in my opinion was Walter Lewin's MIT Physics lectures. They are legendary. It was taken down when he tried to start a relationship with a student in his online course.

If you want quality textbooks for free, you might want to try Openstax.

https://openstax.org

I can't speak for the others but the Physics and Chemistry textbooks are phenomenal. Every public school should be considering them based on the fact that they are free.

richwicks says

Arm_HK_now says

richwicks says

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?

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...

The math textbooks now are actually much different than they were back in the day. With that being said, the math textbooks now are absolute shit and anyone who has old textbooks from the 70s, they are gold IMO.

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
...
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.

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/2362/1/feynman.pdf

Feynman's critique of Math Textbooks as a member of the California State Curriculum Commission.

The dirty little secret is that the Russians, Indians, and Chinese teach late 19th-early 20th century mathematics as traditionally taught in the west.

Cc says

Many students tell me they do not like Khan Academy.

Many students don't like math.

A few years back (2012) the Chancellor at the University of Virginia was fired for putting courses online. The Board was very upset that the Chancellor thought the purpose of UVa was to educate the public, and not be a lucrative workfare for professors and other academic officials.

NoCoupForYou says

I hear a term called "new mathematics" used a great deal

Apparently it's not such a "new" idea after all. Thankfully I just missed it when I was in junior high:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

"The phrase is often used now to describe any short-lived fad which quickly becomes highly discredited."

Arm_HK_now says

I'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.

just_dregalicious says

Arm_HK_now says

I'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.

Nice. When my kids are directed to leave the book at school (happened once or twice over the years) I tell them to copy the ICBN# from the book and look it up online. Never failed so far.

They endure a lot of shit, they do it for the pay and benefits.

Arm_HK_now says

I tell them to copy the ICBN# from the book and look it up online. Never failed so far.

Yep. That's what we did. Leave the school's copy in the locker so they don't have to lug it home in overweighted backpacks. Have the home copy they can mark up all they want.