gog
3mo ago
I don't think my school's situation is extreme. I'd guess that it's about average for a suburban school. If you live around lots of immigrants the situation I describe will be less common.
Location wise, all I can say is that I'm somewhere east of BC.
gog
1yr ago
But did the Red Tribe do something to obstruct the path to Utopia? I'm not talking about Ronald Reagan- I mean did cousin Merle on his camo 4-wheeler do something?
gog
1yr ago
Okay, but then why do the classes hate each other. It's not like Marxism- their class interests aren't necessarily opposed.
gog
1yr ago
I’m not sure you do either of those things in the way that Big Teacher wants to be true.
To teach a kid to read you just go over the sounds again and again, then go over words (which is the same thing). Eventually they get good at it. Big Teacher wants it to be the case that if that doesn’t work, then you move to some plan B that depends on esoteric that only Trained Professionals know about, but there is no plan B that works, which is why you have legions of functionally illiterate people. Plan A (“I make you practice and you will thereby learn automatically”) is not the type of thing they make movies out of.
Arithmetic is almost the same. At some point you see 1 and 1 making 2, and it just sticks. Same for subtraction. Smart kids grasp it after few examples, less smart kids grasp it after more examples. For something more complicated, like long division, the kid is still either remembering the steps or he isn’t (virtually no 9-year old actually understands what the steps are doing). There is no stronger tool or one weird trick- all you have are more examples. This is why patience is so often lauded in teachers. The good ones just grind out more and more examples without getting exasperated.
So kids learn to read and do arithmetic, but is that because adults do something to put the knowledge in the kid’s head (which is what most people mean by “to teach”) or just because the adults make the kid learn it himself?
gog
2yr ago
Thanks for engaging. It sounds like you agree with me that CT can't really be taught and that it's just subject matter knowledge.
I have some questions!
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When you say "objective," do you mean "impartial" or "in touch with noumenal reality," or something else?
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If you think, to take the mechanic example, that it's some blend of creativity/counterfactuals or whatever which exists on top of just brute knowledge, is there anything an omniscient car mechanic would be unable to do (with a car) if he lacked only the power of critical thought? Is critical thought an easier substitute for knowledge? A harder substitute?
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Paths from Status Quo A to SQ B seems too narrow a definition. Critical Thinking is invoked most often as a synonym for "epistemology," but that doesn't involve any transit from one SQ to another- it just tries to figure out what SQ A is. Is that use of the term "critical thinking" a mistake?
I fully endorse voting with your money with regard to woke art, but if the movie isn’t ideological (which remains to be seen), why do you care about the producer? I don’t know about film crew ranks, but if the best boy (whatever that is) held values antithetical to yours would you be bothered? What about the key grip (again, whatever that is)? Costume designer? Casting director? Keep moving up the chain until it matters. Why is that the point where a worker’s political beliefs ruin the movie for you?
In the old Christian view of the world, everyone was equally evil and equally deserving of damnation, but I think that worldview allowed for greater nuance in weighing people’s moral worth. You either had to bite the bullet and say that no one had any moral worth, or make pretty fine distinctions, along the lines of “OF COURSE we’re all equally bad, but we kill people in battle, and that other guy kills prisoners.” Nowadays, though, without that blanket condemnation of every human, it’s easy to fall into “but that guy is BAD and I don’t want to help him/pay him/give him a platform/etc.”
My brother in Christ, EVERYONE is bad. Your plumber cheats on his wife, your mechanic watches child porn, your hairdresser spreads rumours, your kid tortures frogs. You give them all money without a second thought. It sucks, but it is the fallen nature of humanity. If the movie is a wokefest, skip it no matter what the producer thinks, but if this specific bad executive producer can executively produce a good movie, why the isolated demand for purity?
On another note, yousaid it was an ethical dilemma, but ethical dilemmas involve competing obligations. You have only one obligation- to not support this guy, but mentioned shame and feeing emasculated. That’s not an ethical dilemma, it’s a psychological one. It sounds (sounds, that’s all), like you’re trying to preserve an ideal of who you are as resisting in some measure the decline of western society. A noble goal, but we’re fretting over a spiderman cartoon, so the battle is lost. They’ve gotten into your head, and whether you see the movie or not, you think watching spider man movies is really important, which is a win for Marvel marketing over the long run. Do not resist the decline, propel the recovery. Step one is to stop watching marvel movies and go out and act on the world. . If you already act, act more.
gog
2yr ago
I can’t believe this has elicited such a response. Thanks for finding the original and clearing up the intent of the image. Looks like the idealism was because the revolution had just begun- not a cynic’s take, but the dream of a true believer. “The summer of 1789,” though, is in no way “France after the revolution,” any more than “The autumn of 1939” is “Germany after the Second World War.” “This is how things stood in France after the revolution was all over” is not a correct explanation of the picture, but that was the agreed-upon answer for 17 years.
gog
2yr ago
-Pensées, by Blaise Pascal gets poo-pooed because the stock objection to the Wager is easy to understand, but it's a good trip through the mind of someone honestly grappling with religious questions.
-Notes From the Underground should be required reading for every teenaged boy who suspects he is smarter than other people (this means you, probably, if you're here)
-Alexandria, by Paul Kingsnorth is the best post-apocalyptic story I've ever read, and I've read all the canonical ones.
-Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent history of ideas about magic. Academic enough to be serious, but popular enough to be readable.
gog
3mo ago
I've worked in BC. It might be better, but you have to keep in mind that none of this is advertised or even visible unless your kid sucks at school or you go shopping for it. And I'm talking about high school- before high school, a lot of the problems are just passed along, year after year, because no one can fail. Once high school hits and suddenly kids can fail, the Goodharting begins.
gog
1yr ago
Gymnastics or dance lessons are the standard answers for girls that age, but for a 5-year-old, just waking up is a pretty rich experience already. I wouldn't worry until she's 7 or 8.
gog
1yr ago
I'm not asking about how these sorts of people affect poor black kids. I'm asking how someone like a middle-class woman explains the wider world to themselves. There is a pretty big group of people who fall between the extremes of "systemic racism has totally rigged the game against the underclass" and "HBD is true and there is no hope for any of them." This group is not super ideological, feels bad for poor people most of the time, but thinks that if the underclass had fewer kids at 14 (via abstinence or abortion or whatever) and worked hard at school, etc, then many of them would rise into the middle class themselves. Does the thought process only go as far as entry into the middle class? In that, hard work and respectability gets you across the threshold, but then further advancement is obsructed by shadowy puppet-masters? Is it just brute Karenism, in that there is no wider world to them, or that it consists only of NPCs? Is it an aloof acceptance of the hard facts of life, and requires no explanation? I'm asking here because there is no polite way to ask these people in real life. I used middle-class women as an example, but as many of the comments have pointed out, lots of people make these sorts of excuses. They can't all be HBD realists or DEI ideologues, can they?
gog
1yr ago
Oh, I barely move in any social circles at all. This is all at work, which is a high school, and therefore maybe selects for people without much ambition . . .
gog
1yr ago
Those examples are from a culture war in full swing, like saying "we hate the other soldiers because they shot a bunch of our guys in the last battle." My question is why is there even a war going on.
gog
2yr ago
Teaching in a traditional setting is what convinced me that homeschooling is necessary.
gog
2yr ago
“Functionally illiterate” means the exact opposite: that you CAN pass literacy tests (they kind they give up to grade 6, anyway) but can’t read well enough to read and understand something in day-to-day life.
gog
2yr ago
Scott Alexander’s Paranoid Rant sounds like the type of thing you’re talking about, but it wasn’t posted on NR. I can’t find it online, but someone around here must have it saved.
gog
2mo ago
You don’t want to “bulk.” You want to eat like 200 calories more per day than you need to, otherwise you’ll get fatter way faster than you get stronger. They say 0.82 grams of protein per lb of body weight is optimal; after that, returns diminish.
To be sure about both of those, you need to track calories and macros. Track what you normally eat for like 2 weeks and see how your weight changes, then adjust up or down accordingly. I was stalled for years because “I eat a lot of meat,” but when I started actually tracking it I was shocked at how little protein I was actually getting. I use MyFitnessPal, but there are lots of apps.
gog
6mo ago
Your injuries will heal . . .eventually. I'm certain I tore some kind of CL (mcl/acl/whatever) chasing a 500lb DL. I got stress fractures in my wrists chasing a 400lb BP. This was a 14 years ago when there was less info easily available. I scaled way back for like 2 years, then got back into it and got some kind of cramps in my back that put a sideways curve in my spine (visible to random strangers). That eventually went away when I scaled way back. I got back into it and hit the 500lb DL. Then I got tendonitis so bad that when I was playing music at a jam session, my biceps tendon popped back into place and the audience heard the crack over the music. Then I scaled way back. Then I got back into it and hit a 600lb DL. Then a 405 BP. Then I felt something tear in my lower back/upper glutes while doing . . . .super light rdls with an extreme range of motion and couldn't walk for like a week. It was the worst gym injury of them all. The fear of the pain hung like the barbell of Damocles over every workout, and I eventually tore it again. That was about 2 years ago. Now I'm all better, do a ton of cardio and pretty-boy machine work. I'm not as strong as I once was, but I'm in overall the best shape of my life.
I don't recommend my kamikaze approach to training, but I racked up enough injuries to be able to say that the fear that an injury won't heal is totally understandable and almost certainly unfounded. Play the long game; just keep doing something and you'll bounce back. Unless you're like 60.
PS: PT is only a half-step removed from chiro and aromatherapy. Kin tape is fake. Electric acupuncture is fake. Acoustic accupuncture is fake. Laser therapy to "break up the scar tissue" is fake. 5lb curls while standing on a wobbly board are fake. Massage for anything other than hedonistic purposes is fake. Strength and flexibility are real, but that's what the gym is for.
gog
1yr ago
This is at least AN answer. Can you expand upon the leftist impulse to erase all distinctions, or point me to someone who already has?
gog
2yr ago
Would you be willing to summarize one of the cases you use to teach critical thinking, just as an example of the sort of lessons you’re talking about?
gog
2yr ago
Just checked my kid's copy of The Giant Peach. The centipede sings about the fat aunt. We got it at Costco, in a boxed set. They still seem to be selling it sometimes. Act now!
Maybe he phrased it churlishly, but I see what he means. The trads are less defying authority than they are preferring one authority over another. Among the traditionally-minded there are many highly intelligent people. In my little homeschooling circle there are computer programmers, a guy with a phd in engineering physics, a woman with a masters in musical accompaniment, etc. They are also all evangelical Christians. Normally we don’t think of evangelicals as highly-educated, but these people border on hyper-educated. Except that both their education and religious inclination depend on strict adherence to agreed-upon truths. I, a de facto wordcel, show up and try to make conversation about ideas- their ideas! Physics! Music! Code! and it’s the embodiment of the NPC meme. They absolutely cannot think outside their boxes, and even thinking inside their boxes takes the form of mere recitation of principles. If the regeneration of the West ever comes, it will come after the traditionalists’ descendants recreate something like worst aspects of the middle ages. So expect it in 400 years, not 200.
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