dorchadas

> Teach children even if their parents don't care and don't challenge them to learn.

I saw the kids I taught five hours a week. Their families see them much more (hopefully, though often not because mom's single and working two/three jobs to keep Alice and her younger brother fed and clothed). Who do you think is going to win the influence battle? And, really, when Alice has to go work to help support the family, how much do you think she really cares about homework or school? I'd go so far as to wager that most educational problems in the State stem from socioeconomic ones.

School cannot overcome parents at home, sadly.

This isn't 'degrading education'. It's recognizing that education as we currently have it is biased towards those who have strong socioeconomic situations and stable backgrounds at home.

And to not penalize students (.i. homework grades) if they have to work to help support their family, or have so many other trauma issues. GP here really seems to have an idealized version of how school works, ignoring all facts that actually influence learning and stuff (.i. socioeconomic ones). Homework just compounds those problems, and I'd also say there's no such thing as "objective assessments" as well.

> Yeah, I'm one of them. And I too use to think it was all me and my aptitude and merit and hard work. Now, it makes me cringe how I could ever think that. With age I've realized how privileged I was, and how many people who really worked far harder than me and still didn't get ahead.

Same. For me, though, it took going back and becoming a teacher to see how privileged I was. Mom was a teacher, both parents at home and contributed to my education from an early age (like, doing math as soon as I could talk "How many people are in the car? What if your grandparents were here? Your uncle? What if we took the grandparents away?", etc), etc. My friend group was all in the same situation. Two parents at home, etc. It wasn't until I came back to the school that I realized how insulated I had been and how it wasn't me that was the reason I did so well (Valedictorian), but the support I had behind me that enabled me to do it.

This is the issue. At least in the States, even if a lot of parents want to encourage their kids and be involved in their education they can't because they're too busy just trying to survive. And then you have the kids who couldn't give two shits about school when they gotta get straight to work in order to help make the money to help keep their families fed. If we want to fix schools, we need to fix the underlying social issues.

Private schools would make things worse, honestly, unless they were banned from refusing to accept students. You'd have the "good" ones only accepting the good students, or the students with stable home backgrounds, and they'd excel. Then you'd have the "bad" ones with all the other students, and it'd be as bad or worse than what we have now, except the parents have to pay even more to send their kids there.

> Back to public schools. If I look at the international comparisons, American public education burns through a lot of money for mediocre results. This is your money; you should be more critical. Why isn't there any Silicon Valley for education?

Because, the fundamental issue with education isn't the quality of teachers. It's the home lives of the students. That's why there's such a big disparity in public education in the States. Until we fix the cultural and social issues, schools will continue to be at the level they are. If we want to fix education, we need to fix the underlying problems that cause some kids to not do well. And it's generally not the teachers (yes, there are bad teachers; but socioeconomic factors of the kids have much more impact)

As a teacher, I can name at least 50 that are uninterested in excelling. Mostly because they've been conditioned to be that way, usually by parents/community who see no value in education. You can work with them and get them interested, but it takes a lot to undo that conditioning (along with all the other stuff they've endured through their education years of being told "Well, you're just not an X person", etc.). It's also really hard to work with them and get them over that given the current way things are (seeing 150+ kids an hour a day).

> Yes private schools might run better. Shockingly richer and generally two parent families are going to have children that been primed to respect learning and have less trauma so much easier to deal with. Public schools teachers don’t have this luxury.

Exactly. OP acts as if it's such a great surprise they're run better. Obviously they would be, because they can pick and choose who they take and usually only get those kids who's families are well off enough to afford it; those kids already all have huge advantages when it comes to learning. It's exactly why the voucher system would do no good either -- it'd just make the public school worse as the private schools take those kids who are already borderline on affording it.

And often those same kids don't have time to dedicate to their studies, having to work after school to help support their family.

Teaching at the rural school I grew up in really changed my perspective. I was very abnormal when growing up there, and all my friends were too (I can only think of one good friend who's parents were divorced, and her mom and remarried when she was fairly young), and I was super insulated from the realities of things there. Coming back as a teacher made me see how much worse it is, and it's a clear difference between the kids; even those kids whose parents want them to do well struggle if the parents can't be at home.

But is it solely the chemical changes in the brain that "fix" the depression, or does it also have to do with integrating what you've seen and experienced into your worldview?

> This isn't like an SSRI. 25mg psilocybin isn't something you can just pop at the beginning of a workday. Your setting and "head space" matter a lot for how your "trip" (which we will now rebrand as "treatment") will go. This needs to be accounted for in future studies.

This is what I worry about. It's likely great, when done in the care of a licensed and trained therapist. It's not the mystical panacea many will make it out to be, and I worry that people will do it when they're not with the right people and it'll be a mess.

>rare books fro XIX century

The one thing I can truly say I "collect" is rare, first/early edition pre-standardization works from a specific Irish dialect. For me, though, it's not so much the collecting as having access to these books for the rich, natural (.i. non-standard) language that's contained in them. Eventually I might extend it to modern authors from the same dialect, but getting access to these older works is top priority.

> often taking the form of excessively literal readings that become weirdly and unhelpfully adversarial while failing to engage what the text was actually expressing

I see you, too, have seen people not understanding that Humbert Humbert is not supposed to be liked, and that the whole book is him trying to justify his actions. God, the number of people who misunderstand Lolita because they can't accept anything about it except at face value is way too high.

> I have a suspicion that readers who are that bad are not, in fact, extremely common, but are just, for whatever reason, unusually likely to engage in Web discussions

Sadly, bad readers are that common. I taught at a high school, and even some of the other teachers were bad readers, and most the students couldn't get anything but a very literal interpretation out of any text they read.

Thank you! I loved StumbleUpon, so I'm glad to see this around.

It's hard to reduce pedestrian-vehicle contact, in my opinion, when you have vehicles where the drivers are just so much more powerful than the pedestrian. Part of the reason people even buy those is to sit up higher, and be bigger than the others, and there's no way to reconcile that with pedestrian safety imo. Especially when speeding and reckless driving is so damn common in America. People feel untouchable in them, and that means there's an increase in the contact rates regardless of whether pedestrians have right-away or not.

And that's what I think OP was alluding to about it being "inextricably connected to capitalism". As long as we treat housing like an asset, we'll have this problem. And I don't see how there's any other way to treat housing under a capitalist system.

Somewhat similar anecdote, but my uncle had an aneurysm and he swears to this day he saw his dead mother there telling him he didn't have time to call 911 or his wife and that she helped him drive to the hospital somehow and that was the only way he survived it.

That's what seems to have happened in Dublin too. Last August saw a doubling of long-term rentals, most in the areas most hard hit by AirBnB. I don't think it's lasted, given how bad things currently are here, sadly. Something really needs to be done to move them and keep them on the long-term market where they belong.

And didn't AirBnB start out in dubious circumstances too? I seem to recall reading something about it, but can't find it now.

Yeah, I know how bad it was when I was trying to find a spot in 2016; I can only imagine now. I actually dread trying to stay in Dublin after I finish this masters (I'm an international post-grad, so I was able to avail of UCD's scheme for on-campus living thankfully), but I almost dread going to Galway more (though ideally, that's where I'll be).

The difference is that there are areas specifically zoned for hotels, for tourists, and they're included in city planning. What is happening with AirBnB, and short-term rentals like it, is that areas that weren't included for tourists in city planning are now being turned for that purpose, at the expense of the locals who they are planed/zoned for. It's two very different dynamics, and even comes into play with city planning, and AirBnB is completely ruining it, and thus ruining it for the locals. Hotels are already included in planning, and are not taking away places where the locals could live.

> It doesn't make sense to ban short-term rentals but continue to build hotels and run advertising campaigns promoting tourism to Amsterdam

Why doesn't it? Why should tourists get to say in the same type of places as locals, often at the expense of locals? To me, it makes perfect sense to ban short-term rentals but still let tourists stay in hotels and places meant for them, without taking up real estate that can be used for residences.

Hopefully to the long-term market.

> how a few individuals can flood the short-term rental market in an area.

And, if it's like some cities (Dublin, Galway), they do this at the expense of the long-term rental market.

I'm glad your school did that. My mom had to fight against my elementary school because they wanted to keep me back a year in kindergarten because I wasn't mature enough. Likely, I was just bored. I went in to school reading and could do basic arithmetic already (even knew some basic multiplication), but they wanted to keep me back. Also happened going into middle school when I tested out of prealgebra (the accelerated math class they offered) but the new principal wanted to keep everyone the same. Thankfully I had good elementary school teachers through 3rd grade who recognized this and gave me challenging stuff instead (never made me read what the other kids read, harder msthh practice sheets, etc).

Thank you! I did a Masters of Arts in Teaching because it was required for me to teach without an education degree (physics) and man were those studies such bullshit, and the generalizations they drew were so bad. Glad I'm not the only one who sees it.

This is the issue at the school I taught at. Our guidance officers and previous admin have actively been working to gut accelerated and honors classes. All this does is harm those kids (I was one myself at the same school; I took more AP classes my junior year than they even offer now), as well as the lower level kids who you have to try to balance out the others for.

Hell, I've had collab classes where half the students have an IEP and the other half are in whatever honors classes are left (not science sadly!) because our guidance doesn't care. They also actively tell kids not to challenge themselves and do whatever's easiest. Actively ruining the school because they don't give a shit about education. Hopefully the new admin changes that

Very good points on linguistic relativity. I'd also be interested in if any of the studies have been replicated or not. One of the big proponents of linguistic relativity is Lera Boroditsky, author of the famed 'bridge gender study' (that was never actually published!). However, someone tried to replicate that study and they found no statistically meaningful results. I'd be very interested in seeing it for other 'weak linguistic relativity' studies. I'd also be interested to see the debate between language and culture. Is it the culture noticing something that causes the language to develop that way, and influences things? In my view, that's more likely the source of any differences, though I'm still not sure they actually exist.

In this case, there's multiple issues going on here. First 'gorm' in the case of 'fear gorm' didn't mean blue. It meant 'dusky', 'swarthy'. Also, 'fear dubh' refers to a black-haired person; 'An Fear Dubh' refers to the devil. 'Fear bán' would likely refer to hair color. Irish traditionally classified people on their hair color (thus 'Roisín dubh' was 'Roisín of the dark hair', not that she was dark complected).

Another big issue is Irish colors don't match up to English ones, at all. So many seem to think 'gorm' matches up to English 'blue', when it doesn't. It's different. Same with 'glas' and 'green', which is why you can have 'capall glas' or a 'green horse', but really it's a different color split that English. Same with 'spéir glas' to describe a 'grey sky'. It's a huge problem among learners who learn the language incorrectly (most in Ireland, sadly).