by leavingwt 23 Replies latest social current
Rahm Emmanuel walks in and begins calling Ruth Bader Ginsberg a "fucking scumbag." What a card.
Obama is announced. He is shirtless and wears only a jaunty crimson sash and a pirate cutlass, which cleverly hides his genitals. Which Juan Williams comments aren't "all that."
This really pisses me off. I had wanted to watch Gossip Girl and all I get is this crap.
Is this what passes for intelligent political discourse now?
Bobby Jindal needs some practice - he's prepping for a run in 4 years so he needs to tell his own story and praise his party. Shame they couldn't step up to the plate and do something while Bush was in office. It was quite sad really, watching him try and say something motivating about the party that represented torture, war, debt and corruption...and it was really hard to watch him stumble after such an eloquent speaker as Obama.
Jindal would be a likeable guy if he weren't full of republican ideology.....sammieswife.
Is this what passes for intelligent political discourse now?
No this is what passes for jeering from the peanut gallery. And highly hilarious jeering it is. I said/ I was going to have fun these 4 years while the Messiah and his mindless minions muck up the country and pick our collective carcasses bare What do you want me to do, get depressed? Better to laugh.
Wow, when I post in bold I feel so..... powerful!
BTS
Jindal was weak as phrack.
BTS
When they are supposed to clap. They are too stupid to get it on cue.
Congress:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji0_CA-C3Mk
disclaimer: I voted for Obama. Now I can complain when I want.
Snakes ()
With what the government has done with Public Education, people need to go back to first grade after graduation and play catch up.BTS
Oh I don't know about that. Julian is in 6th grade and is doing algebra more complicated than we did in 9th grade. School is a lot harder now than it was for people my age.
If children were taught correctly from the beginning, they would not need college degrees. The truth is, how much time and energy is wasted in learning things the wrong way.
To start, reading. I picked up on phonics before kindergarten. There are only 44 sounds and 26 letters--these need to be memorized by rote. After that, it is a matter of putting them together in different combinations, creating words and sentences. Everyone else had to learn to read by memorizing each word as if it were totally new, which wasted a lot of time. In first grade, I was the only one that was able to fluently read aloud from a book. That is because I took the time to learn phonics before. And it was not a drudgery--it was actually fun to take the different letters and sounds and play with different combinations.
I believe too much time is wasted in forcing children to remember each word. That also makes it a drudgery. It is also extra work--I remember a time when, in spelling, I got too far ahead of everyone else. As a "punishment", they gave me 50 words a week to remember, instead of the 20 that everyone else got, and I still got decent scores on spelling tests. That was because I remembered a few simple rules and applied them to the spelling lists. Everyone else had to remember them the hard way, and they wound up getting behind. (Many people graduating from high school still don't know how to spell common words.) They had to stop that when I got so far ahead that I was in danger of running out of words.
Math was a joke for me. There are only 10 digits to remember--you need rote memorization to remember those digits and their order. After that, addition and subtraction is quick. Multiplication and division are a joke, too. I remember doing that both the easy way and the hard way--I learned it the easy way by integrating the concepts of multiplication and constructing my times tables to 12 X 12 = 144. Then I had to go along with the System, wasting the time and math paper copying my times tables, while everyone else had to remember them by rote memory (wasting much time). That was a fine waste of 2 years of learning time, plus it's a drudgery to have to remember things that way when I already constructed my times tables. No wonder people wind up flying paper airplanes and spending most of their time with their heads down.
I believe that, if we would deep-six the regulations and just do things the most efficient way possible, the average child should be able to read and write. First graders would know phonics, and even kindergarteners would be able to write (albeit messy) papers and learn to recognize most common words (though they would still be playing around a lot, which would eventually lead someone to coin new words and express new concepts). Learning to read and write would be effectively done by the end of first grade (even though they would still have messy penmanship until they learn to get the letters written neatly).
Arithmetic would be even easier. Once the digits are memorized, putting them together is easier. After they remember the tens (and beyond) places, counting would be easy. Learn to count to 10 (which is actually the hard part, since you have to remember the digits in order), and you can learn to count infinitely. Addition and subtraction could be mastered in seconds, not years, because they are so simple. Children would learn to borrow and carry, and use negative numbers (I learned those on my own, against the curriculum, in first grade). Multiplication and division are also easy--fully integrated learning takes only ten seconds to get these down. (They intentionally make it difficult to dumb down children.) By first grade's end, children would learn addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, and percent (I did, except multiplication and division which wasn't even an option in first grade).
Beyond that, children would have fun playing with numbers. They could learn the concepts that lead to algebra, geometry, and calculus. And they would be reading advanced books, because they don't have to waste all that time learning each word separately.
Is this really such a drudgery? No--children instinctively learn from the beginning. When things fit in, they want to continue exploring. Very little is forgotten during vacations--if anything, new things are integrated. Rather, the time and energy wasted on rote memorization is what is a drudgery--that is when the paper airplanes start flying, and the heads go down (for disruption). Most of that time is wasted on teaching factoids that have to be memorized, which could and should instead be spent going into new territory. And, we would be starting to see a lot of children in the 8th grade, running out of math and science, and having to progress into new territory. Who knows--someone in the 9th and 10th grade might be the one that puts us into the 4th dimension, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt how we got here and where we are going, and that Jehovah God is nothing more than a mean-spirited Almighty Lowlife Scumbag.
Changing economic needs will steer more and more Americans to college education. Access to knowledge may have a large impact on US conservatives.
Wizard, you are a hoot, but I agree with you ... well, not the scumbag part, but that's neither here nor there.
Using the phonics method, my papa started me reading when I was 2 years of age.
Because I had become an expert at decoding words, I was far ahead of other kids when I started school.
At the age of 6, I was spelling words like Fahrenheit and Czechslovakia.
Sylvia
Sylvia...I bet you probably could find CANADA on a globe too! :) My sister and I used to use a globe for games spinning it and closing our eyes and finding a country...then we would say "Im thinking of a country that begins with 'T'!" And the other person would have to find it.
I do agree that ejumakashun starts with PARENTS. It would be nice if more took the time to read to their kids at minimum (and not just mindless religious literature). My two youngest LOVE to read and it has done them a lot of good in school to have that love. We used to not only read to them, we had computer word games to help them spell, flash cards for math, and everything was a learning opportunity when we were out, making it fun. They are all honor students. I screwed up becoming a JW but I rectified that....and they are ALL headed for college. (even though they will be paying for the education until they retire now :) Florida has a lotto supported scholarship program that pays 100% of tuition at community colleges and 75-100% of tuition at state universities, and THAT is how they will be able to go!
