Quote :

"I know you are an idiot because of how you get to those conclusions."

How on earth, after reading a few of my posts on a message board would you be able to figure out how I formed my opinions and reached my conclusions.

If people are able to get inside the brains of someone on the other side of the keyboard then yes, I am retarded. Until then, back up the claims you are making with evidence. You are simply making claims out of the blue without evidence so quite naturally, I would chalk it up to you being frustrated at disagreeing with me.

You've supported none of your wild claims.

12/8/2009 10:50:10 PM

haha, this just keeps getting better.

Your inability to process and evaluate an argument was made clear by the very post to which you just responded.

I said that some smart, reasonable people reach your conclusions. I said that you were not one of them.

Then, to prove I'm wrong, you point out smart, reasonable people who reach your conclusions.

Consider that Exhibit A.

12/8/2009 11:04:49 PM

you're still dodging the question of how you came to get inside my head and read my thought process while I was typing.

12/8/2009 11:09:19 PM

You thought something was a cogent counter-argument when, in fact, it showed you could not process a very simple distinction that was made for you multiple times.

I don't have to know your internal thought process before you posted that nonsense. You might believe fairies dropped that response in your head word by word. Or, you might have a very simple lack of training (or inherent lack of ability) in rhetoric and reading comprehension. I don't know.

But it was plainly stupid. You have done the same thing many times over in other threads.

What is the specific root cause of your specific brand of stupidity? That's not for me to figure out. All I can know is that, at the end of that process, when words come out on the page, the result says something is seriously wrong in your head.

12/8/2009 11:22:01 PM

Quote :

"haha, this just keeps getting better. "

This is all a game to you


When you made that statement, I assumed you knew I was not in the "doesn't have an ounce of intelligence" group seeing as you already know I got into the same school as you, graduated from college in 3 and half years and was hired but thats just me assuming you have an "ounce of intelligence" and can process information.

12/8/2009 11:27:36 PM

Quote :

"When you made that statement, I assumed you knew I was not in the "doesn't have an ounce of intelligence" group seeing as you already know I got into the same school as you, graduated from college in 3 and half years and was hired but thats just me assuming you have an "ounce of intelligence" and can process information."

It doesn't take intelligence to graduate from college, especially with an education degree. It doesn't take intelligence to do so in 3.5 years. And heaven knows it doesn't take intelligence to be hired as a teacher. I've been working with kids in government schools in Durham long enough to know that.

Those things do, however, require a non-negligible amount of discipline and hard work. I never denied you have those.

12/8/2009 11:40:33 PM

Quote :

"It doesn't take intelligence to graduate from college"

Good day, sir.

12/8/2009 11:48:01 PM

College, with most majors, measures the ability of a person to sit through boring lectures, complete asinine assignments in a somewhat timely manner, and not quit because they were too drunk or lazy to attend more than a few classes per semester. I held down a full-time day job while taking full-time day classes my last two semesters. At most, I went to each class on average every 3 or so weeks. Two of my profs thought I had dropped their classes when I showed up on the first test day. The fact that I still had all A's as an economics major shows how little that degree means about an individual who completes it. I am well aware that there are many programs at NC Sate where my approach would not fly.

In short, it's a good measure of how well a person will fare at an entry-level white collar job, because it measures your ability to put up with mindless drudgery, or your ability to pass despite refusing to go through the mindless drudgery.

[Edited on December 9, 2009 at 12:04 AM. Reason : a]

12/9/2009 12:02:56 AM

Ok mister college was so easy I only took the tests and still had a 4.0 smarty pants. get off your high horse and come back down here with us proles.

12/9/2009 12:05:06 AM

You are lumping yourself in with others who I look down on. Unfortunately, that has a false assumption. There are many in the Soap Box whose posts I read, and whose intelligence I respect. And there are even those who I know are smarter than me (Gasp!)

I'm not on a high horse relative to them. It's that we are all on a high horse relative to you.

12/9/2009 12:12:52 AM

Obviously you would be the ones on the high horse since I'm not claiming to have graduated college with a 4.0 while working a full time job and only going on campus to take tests because ncsu is too easy. I'm sure you're an extreme minority on that one.

[Edited on December 9, 2009 at 12:24 AM. Reason : So you probably think 99% of college students have no intelligence since they actually struggle]

12/9/2009 12:23:22 AM

Quote :

"h yes, the old argument that if you don't want to work in shitty conditions despite higher pay and benefits you just can't hack it"

"Hacking it" includes the ability to deal with the conditions inherent in teaching the public.

Quote :

"So presumably since you're working in Forsyth as opposed to say Harlem NY, by your logic we could say you just can't hack it as an inner city school teacher? After all, NY will pay you on average 10k more per year to teach there than NC will."

Heck no I couldn't hack it in Harlem. And it's not even close to 10k more; more like double my current salary.

Quote :

"This was the article I read on it"

Here's the gist of it:

Quote :

"Still, I was intrigued to read of a well-designed study released today by the Center on Education Policy that challenges decades of research on the advantages of private schools. "Contrary to popular belief, we can find no evidence that private schools actually increase student performance," said Jack Jennings, the center's president and a former staffer in the Democratic-controlled House, in a press release. "Instead, it appears that private schools simply have higher percentages of students who would perform well in any environment based on their previous performance and background." The study suggests vouchers for private schools are unnecessary because — once you control for socioeconomic status — students at private schools aren't performing any better than those at public schools. The study says that it is "the kinds of economic and resource advantages their parents can give [students]" — as well as the level of parental involvement in their kids' education —that determines success or failure in high school. That's a message the teachers' unions and Democrats in general love: The problem isn't in the schools; it's with social inequality. Except that's not exactly what the data shows. It's true that controlling for socioeconomic status (SES) eliminates most of the public-school/private-school differences in achievement-test scores in math, reading, science and history. But even after you control for SES, Catholic schools run by holy orders (not those overseen by the local bishop) turned out to perform better than other schools studied."

Not exactly an endorsement of your argument. The study found that as a whole, even adjusted for SES, private schools did no better than public schools. This particular article emphasizes a couple exceptions to the rule.

Quote :

"You don't need to be a mechanic or have worked in shop to know if you have a crappy mechanic with a crappy shop. You don't need to be a doctor or have worked in a hospital to know if you have a crappy doctor and a shitty clinic. You don't need to be a cop to know your local police are corrupt, incompetent and the department is ineffective. You don't need to be a teacher to know if you have a crappy teacher or school."

Totally, but you look a little silly if you're looking over a mechanic's shoulder telling him how to fix your air conditioning.

12/9/2009 8:09:06 AM

Quote :

"with several elected officials."

yeah nancy pelosi, hillary clinton, al gore, dick cheney, and george bush. All of whom agree
with you that the federal government should play a bigger role in micromanaging your life and spending
your tax monies on the common good or national security. Nancy using it to provide every bum and illegal with
healthcare and cheney using it to beef up the DEA who will tap your phone lines to make sure you are not smoking pot.

12/9/2009 11:08:27 AM

bureaucrats can't even feed kids properly, let alone educate them.

Quote :

"http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-12-08-school-lunch-standards_N.htm Fast-food standards for meat top those for school lunches In the past three years, the government has provided the nation's schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that wouldn't meet the quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants, from Jack in the Box and other burger places to chicken chains such as KFC, a USA TODAY investigation found. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the meat it buys for the National School Lunch Program "meets or exceeds standards in commercial products." That isn't always the case. McDonald's, Burger King and Costco, for instance, are far more rigorous in checking for bacteria and dangerous pathogens. They test the ground beef they buy five to 10 times more often than the USDA tests beef made for schools during a typical production day. ..."

12/9/2009 11:30:16 AM

Quote :

""Hacking it" includes the ability to deal with the conditions inherent in teaching the public."

Perhaps then we should spend some time in figuring out why the conditions in public schools are such that teachers are willing to take pay cuts just to avoid them. And yes, I know your answer will be it's all about the students at the school, but there's more to the differences between public and private schools than just the students that attend them.

Quote :

"Not exactly an endorsement of your argument. The study found that as a whole, even adjusted for SES, private schools did no better than public schools. This particular article emphasizes a couple exceptions to the rule. "

Yes, the exceptions show that even controlling for SES, private schools still have better performance. Not as significant of an advantage as when you don't control for SES, but an advantage is an advantage, and it would do us a lot of good to examine where those advantages come from instead of writing them off.

Like I said, I'm not after your job, and I don't want to shut down public K12. I just want public K12 to be as good as it can be, which it clearly isn't.

Quote :

"Totally, but you look a little silly if you're looking over a mechanic's shoulder telling him how to fix your air conditioning."

Not if he's telling me there's no real difference between R-134 and R-12, because R-12 gets my car just as cool and that's all that matters.

12/9/2009 1:43:14 PM