dorchadas

Where I'm from, it's because of coal mines. They saw their parents and grandparents do reasonably well (financially; health is a-whole-nother story) in the mines without a degree or with only a basic degree and they accepted that school wasn't necessary. Now you have people telling them it is, and doing better because they had more education. It gets to the point where they see that as not trying to screw them over but as elitism, so they blame those people that the options of the past aren't there anymore, and look to try to make themselves feel better.

Though lots of America is fundamentally based in anti-intellectualism. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was an eye-opening read and helped explain a lot of what I saw around me in the rural Bible Belt.

Same, to be completely honest. Generally, if the parents care about education and are involved the kids will do fine. This is complicated when mom wants her kids to do well but has to work two jobs and older brother watches younger sister after school, but in general it's an easily predicted trend.

For my case, it was very school specific. Basically, our counselors were lazy and didn't want to deal with the scheduling headache of adding accelerated classes for science. We also had a good attached vocational school, which did wonders for a lot of kids; I had some graduate as fully certified welders and go make more money than me right out of high school. But there were still the issues in their other classes, sadly.

But, to answer the question more broadly, it's the 'equality' bit I think. I'm all for giving everyone equal opportunity, and the ability to move into accelerated pathways if you can prove you have the requisite knowledge to do so. But if you stick students with learning disabilities with accelerated students nobody is going to have a good time. It doesn't help either group and just harms them.

And, again, I say this as someone who didn't think California's math updates were all that terrible. Pushing kids to do stats as opposed to just the whole "everyone needs to aim towards calculus" attitude is a great thing and I stand behind that. But if we can differentiate classes, we can serve all groups of kids better and provide better outcomes for all. But the whole class needs to be differentiated; differentiation within a set of 30 kids is nigh impossible, especially when there's such a gap between abilities. For a personal story, the smartest kid I ever taught was in my last year teaching. He worked hard, if there was something he didn't understand he asked for more help and practice problems. The lowest kid I ever taught was in the same class. The kid was a freshman in high school and couldn't add single digit numbers without a calculator. There's no way that should ever be happening.

As a former teacher from the States (and maybe will go back to it one day, either internationally, or in another country permanently, depending on how life works out), I'd live to give my answers to some of this.

Note, I'm biased. My undergraduate degree was not in teaching but in physics. I did a masters programme in teaching to transition to becoming a teacher. I enjoyed teaching, but just ended up finding it boring teaching the same thing six times a day, so when an opportunity to do a new masters came along, I took it. I didn't leave because I got burnt out or hated it, I just wanted something a bit more challenging.

2) They are. The masters I did for teaching was a joke. I've seen high schoolers with better writing abilities than half my professors. And these are people with 'educational doctorates'. Also, this might be different at better universities, but at least in my state several are propped up by their online teaching masters (the state requires a masters) and they exist just to pump them out. If you don't get a 4.0 something is wrong. I've heard similar issues with the undergraduate programmes in the state.

3. Kids don't want to be at school. They want to be out doing kid things, which we are limiting more and more in school. They also don't want to necessarily sit and learn the stuff they're supposed to learn. It's a complex issue, but that's my take on it a lot.

4. Yep. This is, in my opinion, the number one issue facing American schools, and why private/charter (sometimes) do so much better. They can be picky about the students they take -- thus they only take those who are well behaved and who want to be there and have active parent involvement. Parent involvement is a huge predictor of school success. Until we fix that -- including the issues of poverty and not social safety net -- some schools won't improve. Kids need a safe place at home and at school if they're to truly learn and achieve what they can. Sadly, nobody talks about this issue, nor are any steps taken to change it or the culture around education. I'm from a rural area, there's people proud they dropped out and didn't get a degree and even more proud they didn't get a college one. It gets passed on.

5. Absolutely. It's incredibly difficult to teach 30+ kids at once, of various levels. Especially when they refuse to create differentiated classes. I had some classes that ran the gamut from kids who needed extra assistance and had learning disabilities to kids who would literally be in the running for valedictorian and had all accelerated classes in the subjects that had it. If I spend time on one subset of those kids, it immediately hurts the other. Now, this is a school-specific problem and lazy guidance counselors and a principal who just didn't give a shit about academically gifted students, but I had a cousin leave the school just this year because they don't care about academics because they're too worried about passing the weaker ones (not catching them up, but just making sure they can squeak by with the bare minimum). Not entirely the dehumanisation and alienation you mentioned, but I think it leads to it when the classes can't be catered towards them.

This is the one thing where I think more money could help -- get more teachers and get smaller class sizes. It'd also be nice I think to have a teacher go all four years with the students in high school, unless there's major issues, so the students get to truly know the teacher and feel like they can trust them. It could work in my state, except for science because each subject has its own certification as opposed to just one for 'math'.

At least in Kerry, there's a tendency for /mna:/ (Ó Sé Gaeilge Chorca Dhuibhne, 33) and he explicitly states (32) that both /mn/ and /m'n'/ are legal consonant clusters at the beginning of words, no epenthesis (he gives 'don mbeannacht' as an example for the other, where the vowel is dropped). I'd suspect the rest of Munster to be the same.

The - mn - cluster is legal in Irish -- the plural of bean (woman) is mná even. It occurs a few other places too, though some dialects have gone away (though any Cn has become Cr unless it's sn, so not just mn) from it.

> I think the only way Irish can survive in the long term is in a semi-creolized form with a lot of English influence.

Then that's not Irish. It's a Neo-Irish creole. Which is fine -- great even! -- but let's call it what it is.

> See English: a Germanic language with much of its vocabulary derived from Norman French, Latin, and Greek, and a loss of almost all inflection save for some irregular verbs, and referring to ships in the feminine.

There's a huge difference between what's going on with Irish and what happened with English under Norman rule. For instance, the sound system is still fairly Germanic, the grammar most definitely is. Both these things are being lost in Neo-Irish.

> Look, I'd like as much as the next person to preserve Irish as native speakers speak it, but the chance to do that died over a century ago.

I think there is still a chance, if radical steps are taken. Sadly, you're right; they won't be taken.

I'm fine with something surviving, but we need to be honest about what it is, and how the State has failed those who actually speak traditional Irish and all but guaranteed its death, thanks, in part, to the way it implemented it in the schools. It should've always been a Gaeltacht outward revival.

> Do you want to have the language as a living language or as a fossilized relic?

I want to see it remain a living language. I don't want to see it becoming, as it is in idiom, sounds and grammar, "English in Irish drag" (quoting a prominent linguist on the matter). It's not Irish. It's people substituting Irish words into English grammar, using English sounds and idioms to do so. That's the death of Irish.

> It's long been a complaint of the gaelgoir crowd that Irish people do not use the Irish language and they're losing touch with the culture.

There's a huge difference between the 'gaelgoir' crowd and native speakers (none of whom would call themselves Gaeilgeoirí -- those are specifically the learners who come in with notebooks or to the summer schools).

> A consequence of the push for more widespread usage of the language that came from that is that a language in use evolves. Even English language media from 50 years ago is markedly different in the way the language is used.

There's a difference between language evolution and language death. There's also a difference between learners not learning properly and native speakers changing the language naturally (.i. not under conditions of language death)

> So I feel the influence of the Duolingo/meetup generation of Irish language speakers is both inevitable and arguably a sign of the increased uptake of the language - if such people were small in number compared to the traditional speakers, they could not have had this outsized influence.

The problem is the shitty level of Irish held by most school teachers, even those in the Gaelscoileanna. And their ignorance on proper Irish idiom, grammar and sounds that then gets passed on.

> Also in the case of Tá/Níl as Yes/No in particular, the roots of that probably also have something to do with bilingual government forms adopting it as a space saving measure, so these new speakers have a lifetime of seeing Tá/Yes and Níl/No options on professionally translated forms that may also have primed this development.

And those forms are purposefully translated so that Tá/Yes Níl/No is an answer to an "An bhfuil" question, following proper Irish grammar (usually "An bhfuil tú i bhfábhar ...").

But, natural language change is not what's happening with Irish. Instead, we're seeing a split between the traditional Gaeltacht raised native speakers and a pidgin/creole forming in the urban areas. Sadly, only one can survive and it's less and less likely it'll be traditional Irish. Instead, we'll be left with something that calls itself Irish, but is really no different from English in the way it expresses concepts, the sounds it uses to express those concepts and, outside perhaps the very basics, the grammar it uses to express those concepts. The only thing different is the words it uses. That's not Irish.

You'd never see this happening with any majority language -- French speakers would be rightfully up in arms if someone spoke French with English sounds, used English grammar and then claimed their French was just as authentic as the natives'. Sadly, we accept it -- praise it -- for Irish. At the expense of the traditional, rich native language and the Gaelic worldview (assuming linguistic relativity and/or cognitive metaphors shape the way we think; I lean towards the latter)

Honestly, most people don't know and don't care. They use their little phrase 'Broken Irish is better than clever English' to hide/dismiss any concerns as well. It's a huge issue though -- the native sounds are dying, and learners are killing them. Put off by saying "Oh, it's just my dialect" (it's not, you're not a native speaker; you don't have a dialect!)

No, the synthetic first person singular present tense is still more prevalent, even in Donegal. Overall, yes, Donegal (the only living Ulster dialects, as I'm sure you're aware) tends towards analytic, but they're not that common in some tenses. An Teanga Bheo: Gaeilge Uladh (horrible name, East Ulster was very different from Donegal!) mentions that you can say canann mé but that canaim is still preferred. Same with a few of the persons in the conditional mood.

> but languages change over time.

I would argue there's a difference between natural language change among natives and language change because learners can't/won't learn something right. What we're actually seeing isn't language change, but language shift (in the Gaeltacht), where Irish loses all that separates it from English as English creeps in, and language formation (outside the Gaeltacht) as a sort of Gaelo-Anglo pidgin/creole is being formed.

Apart from Donegal, you won't really find the analytic first person singular present anywhere outside of the verbs tá and bíonn. Even in Donegal, the synthetic is best.

Also, you don't have to repeat the pronoun (unless it is one with the analytic form).

An gcanann sé? Canann.

> There's some anecdotal evidence that with the number of non-native speakers learning the language, that Tá/Níl and Sea/Ní hea are starting to fill that gap in Irish.

Only among non-natives or natives of the Neo-Irish that is starting to form outside the Gaeltacht. This is not a change that is happening, from my experience, in the Gaeltacht raised with traditional Irish speaking parents. It's really a sign of the weakening of the language.

I would argue that as long as our health insurance is tied to our current job we are basically slaves of that job. I can't choose to quit if I need insurance to cover chronic problems, or to cover kids, etc. Not to mention all the aspects of not everyone can afford to take the time off to search for other employers, or move to wherever a new employer might be even if they wanted to. Quitting is only for the privileged.

Maybe it comes down to a difference of how people approach books? Do you think that everything in a book should ultimately have an effect on the story? Do you think Hugo's descriptions in Les Misérables contribute to the story, or that it should only ever be read in an abridged version?

Personally, I think those things (and Tom!) do contribute a lot to the story, so maybe that's why I liked Tom. There's more to writing than simply telling a story and making everything pertinent to that, and thus there's more to reading. Of course, I also like worldbuilding and would read D&D manuals simply for that, without ever playing sometimes, so another reason why I liked Tom, but I can't help but wonder if it's split into two camps because of how people approach reading and literature.

It actually does make me wonder if we can see a connection between what's happening now and what happened when Protestant Christianity started spreading with the whole "priesthood of the believer" deal where everyone can read the Bible in whatever translation and interpret it just as well, supposedly, as those who are trained in Greek/Hebrew/Latin and actually studied the historical context of it. Seems very similar, in some ways, on a rough look.

This might be highly dependent on where you're at. I know many in Dublin who still live with their parents because there's nowhere available (everything's gone to short-term lets) at anything reasonably resembling a decent price.

Look at some CEFR ones next!

Just know the experience is great for you. I can guarantee it's probably pretty bad for the actual residents of the places you're visiting, who now have one less house/apartment on the long-term market because someone decided to AirBnB it to tourists who don't want to stay in hotels. Causes their rents to raise, as well as makes it even more difficult to find a place. AirBnB is a net negative to society, and needs to be shut down yesterday.

Yep. AirBnB is directly responsible for exacerbating housing crises and ruining neighborhoods world wide by making it easy to break the law and providing perverse incentives to do so. A negative externality of society if there ever was one.

OP shouldn't have to take steps. They live in a residential neighborhood, and the incentives given by AirBnB have started to ruin it, as they have countless neighborhoods and cities all over the world. AirBnB is a net negative to the world, as it just increases rents and exacerbates housing crises all so tourists can feel like they 'live' in a city at the expense of its actual inhabitants.

I'm also in this server. It's honestly the single best place, with the one caveat that you must be serious about it. I've gone through proofs, basic algebra, basic analysis, linear algebra, metric spaces, and am currently doing deeper work on Ring Theory, Statistics and Set Theory, all under the PhD's guidance, and it's literally worth its weight in gold.

What constitutes a "better thing"? Anything that pays better? Is working in ad tech somehow "better" than being a musician? I think it shows the priorities of our society, and I think that's part of the problem (if you can't make money, you don't deserve to exist)

Location: Ireland / Remote US

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Perhaps

Technologies: Python various data science libraries; SQL, R (basic, improving)

CV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/wxfzkb3e6oznec1/CV.pdf?dl=0

Currently doing a masters degree in Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Ireland, would like to stay here on the 1G or critical needs visa. If not, remote in the US. Anything Python oriented. I've also dabbled with some other programming languages and web-dev stuff.

Also looking for any feedback on CV and things I can do to help improve job hunt (profile projects, basically). Thanks!

I am living in Ireland, currently doing said masters. Should've been more explicit in that.

This is something worrying me, looking for a junior role. I was a teacher for 5 years (math and physics) and recently went back to get a masters in Theoretical Physics and Applied Maths, mostly leaning towards the latter. Lots of data science-y stuff and mathematical modelling. Been applying to jobs for a while now, and no luck unfortunately. Wondering if I should just give up and go back to teaching, especially as I can return to my old school which was laid back and not horrible (and I didn't hate teaching), or keep pushing through. I've got a runway of about a year, depending on how reasonable the housing I can find in Ireland is (not very).

Part of my issue is I'm also looking in Ireland, where I'll require a visa, even if it's a critical needs job so they're easier to get. Does hurt, but I haven't had any luck with my applications in America either.

It depends on what you think the 'purpose of universities' is. To me, it's either preparing someone for further research in a field or to understand the human nature, so something more along the lines with what the history of university was. Universities should not be for vocational training -- that should either be trade school or on the job learning. But a lot of companies have realized they can outsource some stuff they used to teach on the job to universities, and students thus expect universities to cater towards that. It's a problem, imo.

> but that class is kinda dumb if 95%+ of jobs now will be front end javascript level work.

I think this sentence sums it up more than relating it to publish-or-perish. It comes down to what is the purpose of university. Is it job training, as companies want it to be (because why should they train their employees when they can outsource it; this has led students to expect it to be job training too), or is it actually about learning the fundamentals of why things work, in preparation to go further on in said field. Or just about learning about 'humanity' in general (as universities were more in the past; humanities oriented). I think this is the root issue. To me, university should be (2) and (3), not (1). But companies want it to be (1), and students expect it to be (1), whereas professors want (2) and (3) depending on field, and that's where part of the problem lies.

This is because companies have basically made university vocational training. They don't want to train their employees, so they want the universities to do it. This harms both universities (as institutes of learning) and students, imo, but the companies come out ahead so it pushes on sadly.

If they get rid of old reddit, I'm gone. I've said so for years, and if this post is true (I was still able to comment without a problem), it's coming soon. SO much for 10 years on Reddit.