EPTUS Politics Mega-thread - Page 3359
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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets. Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source. If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread | ||
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BlackJack
United States10574 Posts
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micronesia
United States24754 Posts
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Gorsameth
Netherlands22097 Posts
On November 06 2021 02:58 BlackJack wrote: I believe Kwarks point is that Who is saying that white kids are being stoned by black kids? school children are being told they are oppressors or oppressed, that they are privileged or inprivileged, they should have guilt for being the benefactors of slavery this not a democratic policy and if it actually happens at all its moronic school boards acting on their own accord and not something democrats are advocating for. | ||
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KwarK
United States43588 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26262 Posts
On November 06 2021 02:34 BlackJack wrote: The fact that people are mislabeling their concerns over what is being taught as "critical race theory" does not automatically mean their concerns are illegitmate. Even in the progressive city of San Francisco the school board is wildly unpopular and multiple members are facing recall. A poll from May found a 71% negative rating of the school board compared with just a 10% positive rating. Perhaps their most unpopular decision was deciding to end merit-based admissions to the prestigious Lowell High School and transition to a lottery system for the sake of "equity." The justification for this is to combat institutionalized racism and white supremacy but ironically at the time of that deicision the student body was only 18% white and incoming freshmans this year are only 16% white. White students aren't overrepesented. Asian students are overrepesented. These absurd ideas are propagating across the country. Math is racist. Standardized testing is white supremacist. Gifted and Talented programs need to be ended because they are not diverse enough. I think it's impossible to raise everyone up to the same level overnight so if you want equity the only solution is to drop everyone to the lowest common denominator. All these things happening in school is not much ado about nothing just because "nobody is teaching critical race theory." I do agree that we should stop letting ideologues hijack our language though. Sadly I think that ship is sailed. Now speech is violence. Silence is violence. Dave Chappelle is a transphobe. Jokes are hate speech. The NFL draft is akin to a slave auction. Almost anything and everything can be white supremacist or racist. Perhaps the only thing that can't be racist is actual discrimination against white people based on the color of their skin. Almost all of this is either basically fundamentally untrue, complete misreadings or, on occasion correct but a viewpoint of individual(s) and not symptomatic of real wider trends. Where there is a tangible, actual example sure let’s examine that, in a wider sense though? The (usually) conservatives claiming socialists are taking over and the progressives complaining fuck all of their policy platforms are implemented can’t both be right. The bar is so out of whack that people are demanding an end to CRT in schools when it isn’t even in there in the first place. People can just be wrong, let’s disavow them of some notions. Is maths racist? No, who’s claiming that? Is standardised testing white supremacist? No, who’s claiming that? The above two may advantage certain groups based on background, and at the extreme end some may advocate for a moving of focus to compensate, or ideally an equalisation of background in a wider sense Indeed, structurally formal education massively lags behind our current level of knowledge on how people best learn and engage, they’re very out of sync. I hope Drone will attest to this from his position. Any attempt to fundamentally reform usually gets shot down by angry boomers who, despite all the evidence to the contrary think rote testing is great and anything else is ‘dumbing down’. To absolutely clarify I don’t think everything you’re saying is entirely off, some aspects absolutely are a thing, but it ends up packaged in a manner where the prevalence and influence are grossly overstated. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15737 Posts
On November 06 2021 03:18 KwarK wrote: It’s as real as all the other made up persecution fantasies the right circle jerk over on Facebook. There isn’t a national problem of politically motivated persecution of white children in schools to address, just as there isn’t one of Christian persecution or conservative persecution or anything else. I mean for fucks sake, one of the examples of persecution you listed was limited spaces at a high demand school being given out using a lottery system in the name of fairness. So long as wine moms believe CRT is trying to make their kids feel ashamed of slavery, its a done deal. We don't get to choose the electorate, we can just work around it. Shaming white people is not a winning strategy. Just to be clear, my position is that CRT is very good and important and also a really bad idea because if you lose the election none of it matters. | ||
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KwarK
United States43588 Posts
On November 06 2021 03:58 Mohdoo wrote: So long as wine moms believe CRT is trying to make their kids feel ashamed of slavery, its a done deal. We don't get to choose the electorate, we can just work around it. Shaming white people is not a winning strategy. Just to be clear, my position is that CRT is very good and important and also a really bad idea because if you lose the election none of it matters. Either I’m missing your point or you’re missing mine. My point was that there’s fuck all the Democrats can do about this kind of attack and the ridiculousness of the CRT attack angle proves that. The right wing idea of CRT is a persecution fantasy with no basis in reality and no support from the Democrats and yet they’re still getting fucked by it. There’s nothing they could have done because it’s all made up and the people who believe in this stuff are never going to care what the Democrats officially say on the matter. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26262 Posts
On November 06 2021 03:58 Mohdoo wrote: So long as wine moms believe CRT is trying to make their kids feel ashamed of slavery, its a done deal. We don't get to choose the electorate, we can just work around it. Shaming white people is not a winning strategy. Just to be clear, my position is that CRT is very good and important and also a really bad idea because if you lose the election none of it matters. What is palatable at this point though? Just put up with ridiculously sensitive sensibilities in perpetuity and don’t attempt to do anything ever? I think yes, if CRT was actually being pushed as is being billed and little Billy is being told he should be ashamed for being white by his teacher, then yes I’m in agreement on messaging 100% ‘So long as x believes’ is a good maxim to go by if there’s some problem in communication that can reasonably be solved by better communication. To a point that is where x’s beliefs aren’t particularly reasonably held even after attempts at clarification. It people wish to object to ‘CRT’ based on what’s actually proposed and implemented, that’s their prerogative but we’re in a position of defending policies that well, basically don’t exist in the first place in the way people conceive, and even when corrected they’ll still double down. I mean not just here, should we not have passed the ACA because people believed there’d be death panels for the elderly, or more contemporaneously should we not roll out a vaccine program with mandates because some people don’t believe in vaccines, or hell Covid existing? There is also the other side of the ledger. Symbolic or structural tackling of racial inequity may get a whole load of blowback, but equally abandoning it will be very unpopular in other quarters. | ||
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BlackJack
United States10574 Posts
On November 06 2021 03:18 KwarK wrote: It’s as real as all the other made up persecution fantasies the right circle jerk over on Facebook. There isn’t a national problem of politically motivated persecution of white children in schools to address, just as there isn’t one of Christian persecution or conservative persecution or anything else. I mean for fucks sake, one of the examples of persecution you listed was limited spaces at a high demand school being given out using a lottery system in the name of fairness. I definitely didn't list that as an "example of persecution." I listed it as something that's just a bad idea caused by a desire for equity. It's a bad idea to just eliminate merit-based placement in schools and gifted programs for the sake of equity. Students in a class need to be on the same level, if not either the bottom half will fall behind or you have to dumb down the curriculum and the top half doesn't learn anything. Then you have examples like this where 8 year olds were instructed to rank themselves according to their "power and privilege" based on their identities. https://www.city-journal.org/identity-politics-in-cupertino-california-elementary-school Next, reading from This Book Is Antiracist, the students learned that “those with privilege have power over others” and that “folx who do not benefit from their social identities, who are in the subordinate culture, have little to no privilege and power.” Still, nothing to do with persecution. Just a bad idea. I'd even argue that this is more harmful for black students that are being told that they are unempowered and society is going to stand in the way of their success. | ||
Liquid`Drone
Norway28742 Posts
Indeed, structurally formal education massively lags behind our current level of knowledge on how people best learn and engage, they’re very out of sync. I mean, I do agree, but it's such a complex topic. Different people learn best in different ways, different subjects are best taught in somewhat different ways - I'm not a math teacher but math teachers I know and respect seem to have a different attitude towards testing than I do (as more of a sociology/history/language teacher) because the knowledge can/must be installed more linearly. However, some things seem like fairly ubiquitous failings of school systems - some countries do well in some of these areas, none do well everywhere: 1: Have smaller classes. Everybody knows this, but it's a matter of money/infrastructure. I've had the blessing of teaching some classes with fewer than 10 students in them, and the potential to guide/tailor individually is monumentally different from teaching classes with 30 students in them. 2: 'Have better teachers, more of them, and give them significant autonomy in how they choose to teach'. (Same issue as 1: - it takes a long time to develop a good teacher. Way, way more money would have to be spent to accomplish this.) The question of autonomy is one where there's an interesting dynamic, in that you don't necessarily want a bad teacher to have all that much autonomy - but many teachers will be better teachers with more autonomy.. Not all teachers excel at the same things - they must be allowed to play to their own strengths. 3: Identify missing basic skills early on, and work hard on helping pupils that struggle from an early age. Countries that have performed well on PISA tests (I don't want to focus too much on these, because they certainly don't measure everything that schools need to focus on - but they do have some importance) aren't really a uniform bunch (and I haven't looked into data from the past couple years), but historically, Finland has been a positive outlier among western countries. (A country like South Korea has also performed really well - but for them, the work ethic and time spent in school is a quality that can't easily be replicated). Part of the explanation for their success has, to my understanding, been that they have very highly educated teachers working in elementary schools (master's degree being the norm), and that they work really hard to ensure that children who struggle with reading/basic math get help at a young age, before they end up developing insurmountable knowledge gaps. Questions relating to pedagogical practices - whether a teacher should be 'a sage on a stage' or 'a guide on the side' are less settled, although my understanding is certainly that we lean too much towards the former and not enough towards the latter, but this also depends on the individual teacher - as well as the subject, as well as the size of the class, the design of the classroom, if there are multiple different rooms where children/students can work in smaller groups, loads of different factors. Flipped classroom is one method with extremely promising results - especially at higher levels - but it would require a pretty fundamental restructuring to implement on a large scale (rather than just individual teachers giving it a go). | ||
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States45285 Posts
On November 06 2021 02:34 BlackJack wrote: The fact that people are mislabeling their concerns over what is being taught as "critical race theory" does not automatically mean their concerns are illegitmate. While that's true, I haven't heard a single person who hates CRT accurately explain what it is in the first place. What they hate is an unfortunate strawman of CRT (either fabricated by them or pushed by whoever they're watching on television). Every time I ask them to clarify what they mean by CRT, they talk about something irrelevant to CRT. | ||
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Liquid`Drone
Norway28742 Posts
On November 06 2021 05:29 BlackJack wrote: It's a bad idea to just eliminate merit-based placement in schools and gifted programs for the sake of equity. Students in a class need to be on the same level, if not either the bottom half will fall behind or you have to dumb down the curriculum and the top half doesn't learn anything. While I understand this sentiment and partially agree with it, my experience is that this is a very complex issue, where you lose out on something either way. I've taught classes that were separated according to ability, and I've taught English in classes where the top students were entirely fluent and where the worst students were borderline illiterate. I will agree that a merit-based distribution of students is usually really convenient for the teacher (so - assuming there are 30 students rather than a much more sensible 15, it's one way to make it more manageable), and from an academic point of view, somewhat beneficial for the better students. However, I've also experienced first-hand that it can be really detrimental towards the students that are placed in the 'bottom' half. I've seen 14 year olds become incredibly demotivated through being placed in what they themselves described as 'the retard class', to the point where there's no question it largely ruined their school experience. Furthermore, school is not just an academic institution. It's also an arena for socialization, and one where people should learn to interact and cooperate with a wide range of different people. Imo, this really isn't a question where you can state that one is necessarily 'better' than the other, rather, it's a matter of political choice in what you consider more important that children/students end up learning, and whether you want to prioritize the stronger or the weaker students. | ||
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micronesia
United States24754 Posts
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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Liquid`Drone
Norway28742 Posts
On November 06 2021 05:59 micronesia wrote: I think the benefits of integration (varying ability levels in the same class) vs organizing by performance depend a great deal on the nature of the class/discipline. For physics, I don't find integration to be particularly helpful to students at either end of the spectrum. For some other classes, that may not be the case. However, placing students into gifted programs is different than placing students into individual classes, so they are kind of separate topics. Ya, I agree with this. As mentioned in the bigger post above, different approaches make sense for both different age levels and different subjects. I'm more positive/less critical of gifted programs/merit based distribution for STEM subjects than I am for sociology/language subjects, and more positive/less critical the older the students are. | ||
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DarkPlasmaBall
United States45285 Posts
On November 06 2021 05:33 Liquid`Drone wrote: I've been summoned to talk about school! hooray! I mean, I do agree, but it's such a complex topic. Different people learn best in different ways, different subjects are best taught in somewhat different ways - I'm not a math teacher but math teachers I know and respect seem to have a different attitude towards testing than I do (as more of a sociology/history/language teacher) because the knowledge can/must be installed more linearly. I guess that's my cue! In math education, there's some disagreement on how important summative assessments are, but most math teachers tend to agree that those kinds of formal tests are relatively less important than organic, in-the-moment, formative feedback that a teacher can identify while students are actively learning and collaborating and questioning the material. There are very few things that a high-stakes test can do better than a well-organized lesson; in fact, I think the primary thing that a high-stakes test does better is, tautologically, show which students have better test-taking skills. Eliciting problem solving, checking prerequisite knowledge, synthesizing information, and justifying answers are things that I'd much rather have students experience in a low-risk, it's-okay-to-take-chances-and-make-mistakes-because-that's-how-you-learn classroom setting than a stressful testing environment. It's just sometimes really hard to quantify and grade the learning process unless you give them an official quiz of some sort, which can't tell the whole story of the student. However, some things seem like fairly ubiquitous failings of school systems - some countries do well in some of these areas, none do well everywhere: 1: Have smaller classes. Everybody knows this, but it's a matter of money/infrastructure. I've had the blessing of teaching some classes with fewer than 10 students in them, and the potential to guide/tailor individually is monumentally different from teaching classes with 30 students in them. When I taught at a private school, I taught a class (AP Statistics) that had five students. In other words, those students basically had a private tutoring lesson with me every day, which is leaps and bounds more effective and more personalized than having a classroom of 30 and spending most of the time teaching to the class as an aggregate, rather than teaching to individuals. Questions relating to pedagogical practices - whether a teacher should be 'a sage on a stage' or 'a guide on the side' are less settled, although my understanding is certainly that we lean too much towards the former and not enough towards the latter, but this also depends on the individual teacher - as well as the subject, as well as the size of the class, the design of the classroom, if there are multiple different rooms where children/students can work in smaller groups, loads of different factors. That's my understanding as well (too much "sage" and too little "guide", in general), and I agree with you that there are a ton of variables that shape how much teacher-centered instruction vs. student-centered learning ought to happen on any given day with any given class. Being a good "guide" definitely takes a lot of practice, as you're actively looking and listening for key things from students, and you need to be prepared with the right prompts and questions to assist the students when necessary. Flipped classroom is one method with extremely promising results - especially at higher levels - but it would require a pretty fundamental restructuring to implement on a large scale (rather than just individual teachers giving it a go). I've had much more success implementing flipped classroom structures with advanced, engaged students than with students who simply won't do the reading or watch the prerequisite videos ahead of time. It can be really tough, but it can also be rewarding. It also takes time to educate students and parents on what this strategy actually means, because everyone thinks that the teacher is refusing to teach / forcing the students to learn everything on their own! | ||
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Liquid`Drone
Norway28742 Posts
On November 06 2021 06:10 JimmiC wrote: Age as well. For hockey (and I know it is not the same but my point of reference), they used to tier the children right away and now they wait until 10. It is pretty amazing to watch some of the ones who can barely skate catch up to the ones who are ripping around on day one within a couple of months. the top 5 year olds and the top 10 year olds are usually a pretty different group. But then at some point (not 100% sure 10 is the right age) it becomes hard to teach the skills and nuances to some while others struggle to skate, all the drills take longer and so on. And while some people will say of course, every year there is a fight about tiering the kids right from the start and it often comes down to a vote so it has moved around. While Norway is not #1 at school, we actually are #1 at sports. Counter-intuitively to many, the foundation of our sporting excellence is that we wait far longer than most with skill-based separation of athletes, and indeed - only giving participation-awards for children younger than 12. source source2 | ||
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BlackJack
United States10574 Posts
On November 06 2021 04:52 WombaT wrote: What is palatable at this point though? Just put up with ridiculously sensitive sensibilities in perpetuity and don’t attempt to do anything ever? I think yes, if CRT was actually being pushed as is being billed and little Billy is being told he should be ashamed for being white by his teacher, then yes I’m in agreement on messaging 100% ‘So long as x believes’ is a good maxim to go by if there’s some problem in communication that can reasonably be solved by better communication. To a point that is where x’s beliefs aren’t particularly reasonably held even after attempts at clarification. It people wish to object to ‘CRT’ based on what’s actually proposed and implemented, that’s their prerogative but we’re in a position of defending policies that well, basically don’t exist in the first place in the way people conceive, and even when corrected they’ll still double down. I mean not just here, should we not have passed the ACA because people believed there’d be death panels for the elderly, or more contemporaneously should we not roll out a vaccine program with mandates because some people don’t believe in vaccines, or hell Covid existing? There is also the other side of the ledger. Symbolic or structural tackling of racial inequity may get a whole load of blowback, but equally abandoning it will be very unpopular in other quarters. https://www.seattletimes.com/education-lab/new-course-outlines-prompt-conversations-about-identity-race-in-seattle-classrooms-even-in-math/ Seattle public schools proposal to implement ethnic studies into their math class In math, lessons are more theoretical. Seattle’s recently released proposal includes questions like, “Where does Power and Oppression show up in our math experiences?” and “How is math manipulated to allow inequality and oppression to persist?” This is the crux of the issue - everything has to be seen through this lens of race, oppressors vs oppressed, privileged vs unprivilged, even in math class. It's what people are objecting to. | ||
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BlackJack
United States10574 Posts
On November 06 2021 05:52 Liquid`Drone wrote: While I understand this sentiment and partially agree with it, my experience is that this is a very complex issue, where you lose out on something either way. I've taught classes that were separated according to ability, and I've taught English in classes where the top students were entirely fluent and where the worst students were borderline illiterate. I will agree that a merit-based distribution of students is usually really convenient for the teacher (so - assuming there are 30 students rather than a much more sensible 15, it's one way to make it more manageable), and from an academic point of view, somewhat beneficial for the better students. However, I've also experienced first-hand that it can be really detrimental towards the students that are placed in the 'bottom' half. I've seen 14 year olds become incredibly demotivated through being placed in what they themselves described as 'the retard class', to the point where there's no question it largely ruined their school experience. Furthermore, school is not just an academic institution. It's also an arena for socialization, and one where people should learn to interact and cooperate with a wide range of different people. Imo, this really isn't a question where you can state that one is necessarily 'better' than the other, rather, it's a matter of political choice in what you consider more important that children/students end up learning, and whether you want to prioritize the stronger or the weaker students. I can understand that detrimental affect but it would only present at the bottom. I was wrong to use such broad language but in this specific instance where we are talking about gifted programs and prestigious schools, this detrimental affect wouldn't be applicable. | ||
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KwarK
United States43588 Posts
On November 06 2021 06:10 JimmiC wrote: Age as well. For hockey (and I know it is not the same but my point of reference), they used to tier the children right away and now they wait until 10. It is pretty amazing to watch some of the ones who can barely skate catch up to the ones who are ripping around on day one within a couple of months. the top 5 year olds and the top 10 year olds are usually a pretty different group. But then at some point (not 100% sure 10 is the right age) it becomes hard to teach the skills and nuances to some while others struggle to skate, all the drills take longer and so on. And while some people will say of course, every year there is a fight about tiering the kids right from the start and it often comes down to a vote so it has moved around. I read that athletic achievement within a given school grade group correlates very strongly to age. In the UK August 31st is the cutoff so you have kids born on September 1 in the same age group at school as kids born August 31. The August 31 kids will naturally underperform significantly compared to their older peers but won’t realize that they’re just younger. Over time the older kids that are mistaken for being more gifted get more practice, more confidence, more encouragement etc. to the point that college level players that are physically grown still show a strong bias towards older birthdays. It’s kinda crazy but if you’re considering becoming a parent you should legitimately aim for a birthday towards the start of the school year. It has a measurable impact on life outcomes. | ||
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