From: "Tim" <ignored_mailbox@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 05:15 -0700, Antonio Olivares wrote:
Nowadays, looks like the same thing is happening.
With all that damn testing, and "No Child Left
Behind", teachers are just trying to "rat train"
students to pass the tests. No life skills are
learned.
The ironies of this are that we dumb down things, so all can "pass", but
we also push high academics on students more than we should (the
extremes, with no between). We do both badly. Yet the real basics,
which could be taught to nearly everyone, and be useful, get ignored.
We can teach kids to speak and write reasonably, and that's more
important than failing to make *everyone* a scholar. But we settle for
merely occupying the underachievers with something to do during the day.
We could do better. I convinced one teacher to teach a student rather
than find them something else to do, instead. It was worth the effort,
for all involved. I always preferred the non-mainstream work, it was
more interesting, and generally more practical. More like old fashioned
personal mentoring than preaching to a herd that ignores or doesn't
understand you.
Grasping at a straw to not go completely off-topic: It's Windows versus
Linux. ;-) One is a dumbed down bit of expensive eye-candy, that's
mostly useless and a time waster. The other is a capable tool, given
the chance and interest.
As is general with runaway advocacy, political or religious, there is
an appropriate question here, "Which one is which?" I can point you to
items over which Linux stumbles; and I can point you to items over
which Windows stumbles. Pick the program or set of programs that does
what YOU need best then pick the OS on which they run best. I'd not
think a femto-second about replacing Linux for what it is doing well
with Windows. (I am contemplating FreeBSD, however.) I'd not think a
femto-second about moving other tasks I perform with Windows over to
either FreeBSD or Linux. At this time the respective tasks have no
serious capability on the "other" platform. But then, I have strange
needs that really do require Windows - strictly due to a combination
of licensing issues and the cost of porting an adequate equivalent of
megabucks of DirectShow code over to ANYTHING else - um and a hardware
vendor who'd have to do the porting and is utterly uninterested.
{^_-} I'll say no more than this (in this thread) about the
advocacy issue. It's too "religious/political" in nature.
