Failure of Education

College, How It’s Going

My wife is an adjunct professor at a college. She teaches online classes in finance, economics, and an intro course in the Microsoft Office suite. The Microsoft class is a good one, because the state of Florida requires one semester of computer education in order to graduate, so there are a lot of students who take those classes.

The policies of the courses are set by the college. Every professor has the same policy- no late work is allowed, no cheating, etc. This is to make sure that the lessons are the same for everyone to ensure consistency.

The class covers a different program every few weeks: Office, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. The assignments go as follows: they are taught how to use the features of the program, then are given a file that they have to make edits to. The edits that they must make are spelled out, the student then makes those edits, saves the file, and turns it in to the professor. The file has a digital watermark to ensure that students aren’t merely sharing the file and turning in each other’s work. They have two weeks to complete the assignment- it’s due on Sunday night at midnight.

In her Microsoft class, she has 90 students. The first assignment was due at the end of the second week, consisting of making 25 edits to an Excel Spreadsheet. It’s an intro class, so the edits aren’t difficult. Still, this is what happened:

  • fully 24 of them didn’t turn in the first assignment, and instead sent her an email asking for more time. Because the spreadsheet is being edited in the school’s environment, she can see how they are progressing. 21 of the 24 students didn’t even begin to work on the assignment until the day it was due.
  • Five students didn’t turn in an assignment, nor did they bother to message her as to why. They didn’t even attempt to work on it.
  • Another 6 students were caught turning in assignments with other students’ watermarks.
  • Then there was the student who takes the cake- he sent her an email complaining that he got an A on the first week’s assignment (introduce yourself to the class by posting an intro to the class discussion page), but now has a 23% in the class because he didn’t do the assignment, but that’s not fair because he doesn’t even OWN a PC or a Mac, and it’s not fair to penalize him for being poor and not owning a computer. In an online class about computers, when there are computers free for students to use in the campus library. He complained that the assignments should be able to be completed on a cell phone.

Fully 40% of the students in her classes are failing because they didn’t even TRY to get the assignment done in the two weeks that was allotted for them to complete it.

So my cranky assed wife spent the day dealing with students’ emails about why they didn’t get their work done, and why they are failing her class. For those of you in the workforce- these people are going to be working with you any time now, and this is the work ethic you will be dealing with.

By Divemedic, ago

“Scientists”

A group of scientists have declared that lobsters, shrimp, and cuttlefish are sentient and conscious. The specialties of the scientists?

A review of the signatories on this declaration indicates most of the expertise is in philosophy, psychology, and environmental studies.

They are no more qualified to comment on this than I am on any number of random subjects. By using the term “scientists,” they attempt to claim an expertise that they do not possess. It’s like that time a bunch of Doctors expounded on gun control.

Just because you have expertise in one field doesn’t mean that you have been granted any special wisdom in any other.

By Divemedic, ago

Your Money

This man racked up $250,000 in student loans going to college getting a Masters Degree in Music, Violin Performance. Then he chose to live a life pursing music as a professional meditation musician, but it didn’t pay him enough to make the payments on his student loans. In his own words he did not want to give up his dream of being a musician to get a job that would allow him to pay off his loans. (This is the perfect example of a useless college degree.) Here is his Linked In description of his job:

I am a meditator, musician, and web developer that is interested in finding ways these things can be combined and applied to make people’s lives more peaceful and fulfilling. My work in music technology and longterm cultural outreach has taught me just how great an impact opening perceived barriers to knowledge can have on individual lives and communities. It is meditation and this impact that motivate all of my work.

His “web developer” credentials, as posted on Linked In? He attended a single 18 week web developer boot camp. His job as a musician is for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in NYC:

I develop chamber music focused classes for public school children that introduce general musical concepts and highlight its contemporary relevance.

He also gives private violin lessons to kids that want to be just as successful as he is.

His student loan debt was just wiped clean by Joe Biden. With your tax dollars.

Now he is planning a sabbatical to study with his meditation teacher in India. It’s amazing what a $250,000 gift from the taxpayers of this country will enable a spoiled New Yorker to do with this spare time.

Charles Cook from the National Review summed this up for me, and I can’t say it any better:

This year, though, I feel unusually great about paying my taxes, and for that I have to thank a 49-year-old American named Joel Lambdin, who, thanks to President Biden’s remarkable generosity with other people’s money, was recently given $250,000 from the Treasury as a reward for being a financially illiterate dilettante. As Business Insider reports, Lambdin left graduate school in 1998, but, since then, he has chosen to make almost no money. “The only way he could make a significant dent in his student loans,” Business Insider notes, “was by switching careers.” Lambdin “didn’t want to do that because he loved working in music.” So he didn’t.

He loved working in music so much, he didn’t want to pay his bills. Now that he has no bills, music can go fuck itself, he’s going meditating in India.

By Divemedic, ago

Facts Explaining Our Situation

We always wonder why the US has the problems that it has. Here are some facts that might explain it.

How can the people unable to read at a 6th grade level overlap with the people that have gone to, and in some cases graduated from, college? The answer is simple- education is failing us by charging money without delivering the finished product.

I am about to finish my latest Bachelor’s Degree. This one will be in nursing. The majority of the classes (all but one) had nothing to do with nursing or actually delivering health care. No, the college classes I took concentrated on the following the format of APA citations. Use a comma in a footnote, when you should have used a period? That gets you a C on the paper.

College is largely a useless waste of time. The only reason why I even bothered to get the BSN is that my employer paid for it, and promised me a 7% raise for finishing it.

By Divemedic, ago

Oregon: “Minorities too stupid to learn”

The state of Oregon says that proving proficiency in reading, writing, or math is no longer required to receive a high school diploma, has required it since 2020, and won’t require it at least through 2029. This makes an Oregon High School diploma completely worthless.

A little over a year ago, I put up a post on what the terms ‘licensure’ and ‘certification’ mean.

Certification is where an entity certifies that a person meets certain standards. The entity issuing the certification can be a private business or a government. The value of the certification lies with the reputation of the entity that issues it.

A diploma is a piece of paper that certifies the person named thereon has met the requirements put in place to receive that certification. It is, in this case, a statement from an Oregon school that the high school graduate has met all of the requirements that the state says need to be met in order to receive the diploma. That way a prospective employer can see that you have graduated from high school, knowing that the person named on that diploma has certain abilities and skills.

In Oregon’s case, just what are those requirements?

Higher rates of students of color, students learning English as a second language and students with disabilities ended up having to take intensive senior-year writing and math classes to prove they deserved a diploma. That denied those students the opportunity to take an elective, despite the lack of evidence the extra academic work helped them in the workplace or at college, they said.

Where is the evidence that a high school diploma helps a graduate in the workplace or college?

Board members underscored that state-mandated standardized tests will still be administered to most Oregon high school students – they just won’t be used to determine whether a student has the skills necessary to graduate.

I know high school students. Make them take an exam that doesn’t count as a grade and isn’t required for graduation, and they will not take it seriously, rushing through it so they can get back to interacting with social media on their cell phones.

Oregon lawmakers, however, have mandated that families be told each year that they can opt their student out of taking state tests – and one third of high school juniors didn’t take the tests last spring, meaning they and their families don’t necessarily know how they measure up against statewide academic standards.

Oh, wait. They don’t even have to take them. That’s how you hide your policy failures- simply stop measuring them. So why are they doing this?

Opponents argued that pausing the requirement devalues an Oregon diploma. Giving students with low academic skills extra instruction in writing and math, which most high schools did in response to the graduation rules, helped them, they have argued.

But leaders at the Oregon Department of Education and members of the state school board said requiring all students to pass one of several standardized tests or create an in-depth assignment their teacher judged as meeting state standards was a harmful hurdle for historically marginalized students, a misuse of state tests and did not translate to meaningful improvements in students’ post high school success.

So they are saying that black and Hispanic students are too stupid to learn reading, writing, and math, but then turn around and claim that those who demand that they learn these things are the racists.

By Divemedic, ago

Trying to Sound Smart

Watch this video:

No the time it takes to travel a distance is an easy formula. It is derived from the formula for speed, where speed is equal to distance divided by time. To calculate In the video, he draws a curved line to display the relationship, and his is wrong. Displaying that formula as a graph to display how long it takes to travel a known distance looks like this:

EDIT to add: The below graph is not a good representation of my point. You can ignore it, but I am leaving it here as a monument to my error. My point still stands: his claim that driving faster doesn’t make a difference is still false. If you go 70 mph versus 60, you are travelling about 16% faster, so you will get there 16% sooner. If you are travelling 20mph instead of 15mph, you are travelling 33% faster, so you will get there 33% sooner.
He is saying that it doesn’t pay to drive faster, which is false. The benefit to driving faster is directly proportional to the increase in speed.

Note that the graph is a straight line. He is either stupid or deliberately lying. The difference between 5 mph and 10 mph will get you there in half the time, because you are travelling twice as fast. The reason why you only save a few seconds when you drive at 65 versus 60 mph is that 65 is not even ten percent faster than 60.

By Divemedic, ago

Get Your Kids Out

A pair of Colorado parents are suing a school district for making their 11 year old daughter sleep in the same bed with a boy while on a school trip. Of course, those on the left think that the parents are being discriminatory because identifies as or something.

At the same time, they see no problem with this mom prioritizing play time and swim lessons over homework.

These two stories illustrate that, to the left, schools are more important as indoctrination centers than they are about education.

By Divemedic, ago

Schools

Speaking of schools-

As I have said before- the only place that most Americans experience violence in their entire lives is while they attend public school. Why? It’s the only place where they are forced to spend time with blacks who are at the middle and left of the Bell curve.

Get your kids out of public schools, and avoid blacks as much as you can.

By Divemedic, ago

Astroturfed Walkout for Whitewashing

This morning, I posted about the teachers and staffers at a Broward County high school that are being investigated for violations of state law for allowing a tranny to play girls’ volleyball. Now NBC news is reporting that “Students staged a walkout while some held signs in favor of trans rights, while others chanted “trans lives matter.” Watch this report on the supposed “student outrage.”

Bullshit. Let’s see what REALLY happened:

There are eight students and 5 school employees in this picture. The only person holding a sign is obviously NOT a high school student. Take a good look at that sign, because here is the SAME sign, this time being held by a student.

This so-called student staged walkout is nothing of the sort. It was led and organized by the teachers and staff. These sorts of walkouts usually are. The reassignment of the staffers was announced at the end of the day on Monday, and by noon on Tuesday, the walkout had been organized, complete with handmade signs, and was taking place. This wasn’t a grass roots student protest. This was obviously orchestrated by teachers and staff.

Back in 2018, Miguel over at Gunfreezone did a story about walkouts being staged in Marion County, Florida in support of gun control. A well placed anonymous source told him that teachers and county staffers had organized the walkout. Now that I am no longer a teacher and no longer employed by Marion county, I can tell you that I was that anonymous source. That tip that I made to his blog was how Miguel and I became friends IRL. I had read his blog for years and trusted his writing, and knew that I couldn’t post about my employer on my own blog, so he was kind enough to keep my name out of it.

Any teacher or staffer who organized, participated in, or encouraged students to leave class for this activity needs to be fired and have their Florida teaching credentials revoked. Any parent whose child is being subjected to this use of them as a political pawn should immediately sue the school district. The state department of education needs to immediately step in and investigate the entire county. If it is found that the Superintendent (who in FL is elected) was involved in the planning of this astroturfed walkout, that would be illegal and the Governor needs to remove him from office and appoint a replacement.

The left is claiming that the student was “outed” by adults who complained. Uh, a boy openly playing on a girls’ sports team is not closeted. This is total fake outrage and child grooming that is being staged by public employees who are doing this during their taxpayer funded workday. Public employees are prohibited by law from participating in political activism while “on the clock” and are also prohibited from grooming students for this kind of thing.

Anna Fusco, president of the Broward Teachers Union, suggested that the staffers being reassigned might not have known they were breaking the law by allowing the trans student to compete on the team.

“It’s getting harder and harder for our educators to really understand everything that’s happening,” she said. “Our teachers don’t always understand new laws that come out, old laws that have been out.”…

[The school district’s Superintendent] said it is unclear if the principal or staffers were aware they were breaking the law, which will be a part of their investigation.

This is also bullshit. If a gunowner gets arrested for having a braced pistol, will they be permitted to walk away because they didn’t know that their formerly legal pistol had been declared illegal by bureaucratic fiat? Of course not. As a teacher’s union president and the school superintendent, it is YOUR responsibility to inform your members and employees of any changes in the law that affect their employment. The law prohibiting trannies from playing girls’ sports isn’t a new law, it’s been in place for more than two years.

Public education has been nothing more than a leftist indoctrination center for decades. Schools are being used to groom children as sexual objects and future communists. Get your kids out of public schools, now. It is time that we as taxpayers demand that we stop funding the political action centers called public schools.

By Divemedic, ago