gog
10mo 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
11mo ago
Teaching in a traditional setting is what convinced me that homeschooling is necessary.
gog
1yr 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
11mo ago
India also has, by Western standards, a very strong culture/very strong cultures and family structures. North America has basically no traditional culture at all and is extremely socially atomized, which makes school the chief influence on kids after Tiktok. So if you care about transmission of cultural values, public schools are unattractive and will in many cases actively work to subvert the values of the families whom teachers consider their culture war enemies. I am a teacher, and I see it every week, if not every day. Add to this the fact that schools in North America are expected to teach nearly nothing, and fail even at that, and homeschooling starts to look okay.
gog
1yr ago
I think you misunderstand the objection. It’s not that people “have issues” with changing sex, they way they might disapprove of gay sex or pirating movies or something. The contention is that, since they think sex is innate, and “gender” is such a motte-and-bailey of a concept as to be useless, changing your sex is totally, categorically impossible and any claim/affirmation that it has happened is at best an error and at worst a lie. You might as well ask “If there was an immortality pill, how far back along the line from that point would you accept someone’s claim that they will never die?”
gog
1yr ago
Okay- I see where the miscommunication is. The question was not "what is this image?" The question was "Now that the entire section on the French revolution is over, show that you understand the overall course of the revolution by saying something about this image, which you have never seen and know nothing about." These types of questions are popular here. If a kid said something like "Well, it looks like what the 3rd estate wanted, but the priest is now holding scales of justice and is happy, so the artist seems to like priests, but they killed a lot of priests in the Terror, and for some reason the noble is just accepting that he now supports the peasants, but there was a counter-revolution and a lot of exile" that would be great, and worse answers would be less great. But instead the kids say "Well, this is clearly the reverse of the image I HAVE seen, and the teacher told me that that was France before the revolution. This must therefore be France afterward." To reason like that shows no knowledge of the revolution at all, and even suggests ignorance, since the situation depicted, if it existed at all, only existed for a short time in the early stages. Such an answer is straight-up guessing the teacher's password. When you try to explain that to the teachers (not Lesswrong, but that the answers do not show understanding) they are unable to comprehend even the possibility of the problem, let alone specific instances of it.
gog
1yr ago
-I’m saying that people believe sex is innate, so they believe that whatever happens to you later is irrelevant. At best you would gain the “power of menstruation” or something, just as if you had functional wings grafted on you would gain the power of flight, but still not be a bird.
-My immortality thing is trying to point out that your question amounts to “does an imaginary world where something impossible is possible cause you to reconsider that possibility of the impossible thing in the actual world?”
gog
2mo ago
Yesterday, I heard a woman casually, as though it were self-evident, explain an undesirable outcome in her life with "because I'm a woman." I have heard this used by many women to explain: -Why they are not managers -Why their students cannot read -Why they follow pointless workplace rules that no one ever enforces and most employees don't follow -Why they live in fear of the disapproval of superiors -Why a waiter was rude to them -Why a waitress was rude to them -Why they must conform to community norms
Though the explanation sounds like a confession ( "I can't be a manager, I'm just a girl!"), in all cases it is an accusation, intended to imply that the patriarchy is manipulating things behind the scenes, or that "everyone knows" men never get punished/demoted/frowned upon, so only women have to actually worry about their behavior/reputations/whatever. I have been shocked both by how readily this explanation is confirmed/affirmed by other women present when it is offered, and also the wild confirmation bias on display. The women are not managers, but they never applied for the job, and their bosses are women. They have never been reprimanded at work, but neither has anyone else. The male students can't read, but neither can the female ones. None of this is considered. It boggles the mind.
Nevertheless, it is a fact about how a certain class of Western woman explains the world to herself. If people so privileged are so certain of how the deck is stacked against them, what hope is there for people with stronger evidence for that belief about themselves? How does a standard right-thinking (from "to right-think") respectable Westerner expect anyone else to transcend their culture or overcome oppression or break the cycle when their default, axiomatic explanation for why they only make 100k and three trips to Mexico per year is "society cheated me." What is a black kid supposed to think? Or a kid on a reservation? "I'll give it my best shot"? I have heard black dissidents make this argument against the idea of systemic racism- that even if it is real, thinking about it stops black people from trying things. But how can self-exculpatory models of the world be eradicated in people with somewhat credible claims to oppression when they are so popular even among the most privileged members of society? How do the "it's the culture" people expect the culture to change if the winning culture tells itself the same story as the losing one?
gog
1yr ago
I'm not @urquan, but my mom died at 58 under similar circumstances, having to choose between starving to death or dying of bowel obstruction. People have come to understand dying with dignity as meaning dying on your own terms, or dying without a lot of suffering or something, but there is something to be said for equating dignity with triumph, in the sense that you can whip slaves all you like, but they can still stand tall and ask for more, thereby denying you the victory of degrading them. As painful as it is to see someone suffer, it also painful to see someone reduced to bemoaning their state and begging to be put out of their misery, not because it fills one with pity, but because it fills one with scorn. By the end of someone's life, it is perhaps too late to inculcate stoicism, but in my mom's case I basically told her to man up and quit being a pussy, that she would soon be dead, but everyone but her would have to live with the memory of her final days, so she should consider pulling whatever victory she could out of the situation. And she did. She did it out of maternal love for me, rather than out of any attachment to airy principles, but even still, in dying she left the gift of an example of courage and forbearance in the face of certain defeat. It doesn't get much more dignified than that.
gog
1yr ago
I meant that these "trans" kids have zero masculine qualities. Nowadays, there's nothing girlier than saying you're a boy. One of them skipped my class, and when asked where they had been, replied "Home Depot." I felt bad, because I had judged this kid to be most unconvincing. But Home Depot? Perhaps I had been blinded by bias. "What did you buy there?," I asked. The reply? "This potted pansy! It's gardening day!"
gog
1yr ago
Most of the true believers were poorly-educated themselves, and usually have no extracurricular skills, so they have no frame of reference for what excellence would actually look like (except high marks in school). Therefore, they can believe truly without having any idea of what to actually do to achieve their goals.
gog
2mo ago
This goes back to waaaaaay before Covid, though. I feel your pain, but it's not an answer to the question.
gog
4mo ago
Yes, IQ is the legible component of intelligence, and your vocabulary, ability to do logic problems, etc is what makes it legible to the test, to others, and to the world we live in. So you might have a really high innate intelligence but it would do you little good if you were never exposed to the sorts of challenges for which IQ score is the proxy.
gog
9mo ago
I’m a teacher in Canada, where salaries often top out around 105k CAD. Teachers here are also distressingly low-g, low curiosity, low nuance. Realistic raises aren’t going to fix it.
gog
9mo ago
I’m coming around to this one too. In schools it’s pretty clear that you either remember the information or you don’t, and that depends on you. Maybe the teacher tells you some mnemonic, but that’s about it. For most subjects there aren’t even multiple ways of explaining a concept. I’ve taught music, and families are just paying for a threat they can use to make the kid practice. Even teaching my kid to ride a bike involved (for Baby Genius) telling her that we weren’t going home until she figured it out, and I’ll be on that bench over there. For Baby Average, it involves making her practice every day. Extra help in something like math usually involves a face-to-face explanation that can’t be tuned out. In each of these cases learning is either automatic or self-directed. In the gym at 6am I can’t think of a counter-example. Somebody dogpile me!
Maybe the place for teacher influence is in the selection of the tasks to be practiced or the info to be learned, which is where Egan seems to offer hope; he has a specific plan, just not a fully developed one. He has decided what kids should learn- schools have decided how LONG kids will learn and then filled that time with busywork.
gog
1yr ago
C.S. Lewis pointed out that no technology increases human power over nature- it only increases the powers of SOME humans over nature, with the rest of the humans making up part of that nature. Whatever happens with technological progress, the delusion is that we will all share equally in it.
gog
1yr ago
I am a high school teacher in Canada, and I see this type of thing all the time. We have a token gay teacher at my school who runs the GSA (formerly the gay-straight alliance, but now the gender and sexuality alliance) but the flag is really waved by straight, childless women who crave the trappings of emotional intimacy that come with long, private discussions about sexuality, gender, coming out and whatever else. So they co-op the GSA (which has itself been co-opted by homely “trans” girls, and contains very few gay kids) and get to emotionally masturbate and play confidante every lunch hour with the neediest kids, and feel just like cool moms! They really are using these kids for their own purposes, those purposes just aren’t sexual, and they cheerlead (“affirm”) the girls who come to them relentlessly, so it’s not weird to see the explosion of trans-identifying girls as a partial result of this. It’s maybe a tortured definition of grooming, but it is damaging kids for personal gain, and it’s definitely a bad thing.
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They trenders are 16. If you don’t hang around teenagers you won’t meet them.
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It’s probably a nightmare if you really are trans. What is crystal clear, though, is that almost none of the kids who say they are, actually are. That’s why it’s all girls. If a guy is trans he has to bear a lot of costs: get new clothes, look weird, change his voice, etc. A girl can change nothing, not even her clothes, (changing your name is really something you make everyone else change)and everyone will cheer-lead her bravery, and fall in line to affirm her new name and identity. The costs are borne by everyone else. It’s a cost-free power move, so it’s not surprising that kids are drawn to it.
gog
2mo 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 . . .
Being imposing is absolutely a huge advantage when dealing with students in an anarchic environment. Even in Canada. But the complaints are never about that. They're about how some man got to go on (="he organized") a field trip, or how some guy rear-ended their car "but that would never happen to my husband" or whatever.
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