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Comments
I guess that's fundamentally why we won't agree. Every time I see a policy idea I ask about its real impacts and practical implications; you instead focus on its and its proponents' ideological lineage.
If I were to put this less charitably, I'd say I care about what something does, and you care about whose cooties are on it.
Bringing it up here since folks're claiming it's an insidious plot to promote gay ideology, figured you might want to discuss this issue.
I don't have any particular opinion on this change though. But I don't really see how this would be associated with the pride flag, as the pride flag is pretty specifically rainbow through six colors (red orange yellow green blue purple) while this one is only ever a subset of them. Perhaps if someone associated rainbows in general with gay pride, I could see that, but such an association is no more meaningful than a joke.
It's a barely yellow/purple/blue gradient, not a rainbow.
...
Man I want this to be true because it'd be hilarious but it isn't.
Anyways I don't know if you guys saw the last time I posted about it but Mozambique now has ISIS. ISIS.
I'm starting to wonder if this thread has magic "Speak of the Devil" powers because yesterday Patrice Cullors inked an overall deal with Warner Bros. TV to create "entertainment" for them.
McCarthyism was apparently looking in the right places after all (just the ones on the tail end)!
Moving to France, a teacher was beheaded in public for showing students caricatures of Mohammad to students in a lesson on free speech.
I have no doubt if there's anything that'll legitimately still be a thing in 20 years it'll be "you can't make fun of Mohammad if you want to keep living." Or at the very least, living without heavy security.
A few years ago there was a case when a town in the countryside commissioned an official town logo, and the local righties declared it satanic and gay. (As far as I remember it, it depicted the contour of the town's old square - looked a bit like a hand, which was declared an occult symbol and whatever - and some small detail on it had rainbow colouring.)
Perhaps they're making an association between that and homosexuality, but at any rate that's anything but a rainbow.
IIRC there was a push to make blue-purple gradient a bisexual thing but then everybody realized that was just how movies lit creepy bad-part-of-town scenes (and they couldn't just cancel all the movies).
I don't really devote my life to these sorts of things, but I'm pretty sure it still is. Unless you mean something much more specific than I, in which case refer to the first part of previous sentence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_flag
Maybe it's just quieted down lately where I check on this sort of thing.
Today I learned that DIE has been expanded into DEIB. That is Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
Belonging covers how included you feel despite other's efforts, and so surely won't be exploited at all in any way. Still, Equity remains on the throne as the most insidious of all of these.
Edit: oh screw it.
1. Where are these terms from?
2. Why is "Equity" (again with an unusual capitalization) "insidious"? It might be reasonably regarded as "misguided" or "overly idealistic", depending on how it's defined, but "insidious" is a strange way to think of another term for fairness.
Yale Nursing School guidelines.
Equity means, a dedication to at least parity of outcomes amongst race/sex/etc groups. For example, anti-racism wants parity in all areas of anything, and if there aren't that's racism.
That means creating policy in order to force said outcomes.
Like removing grades entirely and removing penalties for handing in work late.
It goes on to say;
Therefore, the teachers are engaging in systemic racism, and so;
Which means;
ie subjective grading
And just for funzies;
You're taking a statement about "racism is bad" to mean "people are not differentiable in any way", which is your own going way overboard with your interpretation.
FWIW, I did just notice that the quotes you picked out aren't from the Yale School of Nursing.
Meanwhile, from the article you linked about the San Diego school system: Yes, that's evidence of a problem; they need to be taught more effectively, rather than simply being left behind.
And you're missing the second half of this quote: Evil interpretation: "subjective grading", with the implication being "so teachers can inflate grades even for students who don't perform well"
Proper interpretation: "focus on evaluating how much people have learned, rather than penalizing them for not keeping up with the class early on"
Except somehow you seem to be unaware of, or have forgotten, how grades are calculated. If a student does have a slow start to the semester (or year, depending on how they're averaged, but my school did a semester average), then various amounts of bad grades from the beginning of the semester get baked in, even if the student later actually learns the material.
So the way grades typically work is less a measure of "mastery of the material" (i.e. actual understanding) but instead more a measure of keeping pace with the class throughout the semester.
And just for funzies: Evil interpretation: "the board will excuse cheaters"
Proper interpretation: "the board will see whether cheating cases disproportionately affect certain types of people".
As someone who's actually dealt with academic integrity cases, I can definitely tell you that I had a disproportionate number of immigrant/ESOL students run into them. Cases of cheating were thankfully uncommon, but most of the few there were were people who simply didn't understand English well, but were asked to write a paper using it. In order to just get the work done, they plagiarized. They shouldn't have, and they faced the consequences for doing so. But, the following are true:
1. Throwing academic dishonesty consequences at someone (including blemishes on their record) doesn't actually help them learn the material that the class is trying to teach.
2. Forcing someone to turn in a plagiarized paper doesn't either.
I wish they'd sought help before they ended up turning in plagiarism, but they didn't. Then again, y'know, language barrier, and while a teacher of another subject shouldn't be responsible for teaching them English, this might instead be something that the ESOL English-teaching crew ought to be aware of and address. That's how to start improving things.
Not by going "hurr durr they just want equity of outcomes so cheating will be declared okay lel"
Then again, I don't know that many Native Americans.
I've said my piece, you've said yours. Let's move on.
I was unaware that you'd identified the problem, GMH, and it was that non-white children learn at a slower pace than white children, and so the grading system needs to change to stop those pesky fast-learning white kids from outpacing minorities, who all uniformly need more time than them to learn the material.
I was also unaware that not speaking English was a completely legitimate way of skipping all that stuff about morals and integrity because those of us who can speak it should feel bad enough not to punish you when you enter a playing field that's meant to be equal, no matter what skills were brought in beforehand.
Let alone the lack of proficiency tests required to get into this class that requires English skills (a tenet of equity, perhaps?).
And I'm not sure what you're even thinking with 'Before you try "no this is for everyone!"'. But oddly, you're saying "non-white children learn at a slower pace than white children", while also saying "this is explicitly about being anti-racist".
Anyhow, my point was simply to look at what students have learned.
And I think I made it pretty clear that keeping up continuously with a class is not the same as learning the material. Related? Yes. The same? No.
Again, do not misrepresent what I said.
The point of a class is to teach the material addressed in that class. If the class is a biology lab (for example), then the point isn't to teach "morals and integrty". Rather, it is assumed that people already know the appropriate morals and integrity not to cheat, and then we focus on the material, while anyone who cheats is simply thrown into the academic integrity system. Like I said, the academic integrity system isn't a way to help people learn the material of the class.
If you want morals and integrity to be part of the curriculum, then we can talk about incorporating that into the curriculum directly. That said, it is actually quite standard already for class syllabi to indicate that cases of academic misbehavior will be referred to a department that handles such things.
Also, education isn't about punishment. It's about learning. If punishment is part of the learning process, then it may be appropriate, but it's a completely fair question to ask whether any particular form of it produces the learning results intended. I want the classroom to be a place where people learn. What do you want it to be? A mechanism for weeding out the unworthy?
There actually are proficiency tests. The TOEFL is a standardized one, and many schools have their own proficiency requirements (albeit more typically in the form of prerequisites than tests).
I wrote this:
Somehow you interpreted this interpreted as:
You seem to be implying that I am excusing their cheating, except the fourth sentence in my quote says otherwise.
Meanwhile, you're focused on that, and focused on your contention that it is one of the negative consequences of "equity" as a goal, that you didn't even seem to notice that my point was about teaching the subject matter effectively.
Also, this talk about rewarding results reminds me of a debate on grades in physical education. Some folks believe students should be rewarded for how much of a difference they made during the year, rather than simply for results. Because obviously, the chads are going to always have better marks than scrawny nerds if the latter is the case, having done nothing in particular to achieve this. I wonder how much of this can be applied to more intellectual areas of study.
You can have people who've already learned one thing in a class with other people who haven't. And there's rarely ever a rule stopping someone who's already learned the material on their own, from taking the class with the rest of the students. In the case of electives, the only reason to do this would be to get an easy A or to satisfy some sort of elective count. In the case of required classes, though...well, imagine if your high school requires students to start at Algebra II at the highest (i.e. they can't just jump into Precalc or Calculus, and there are no ways to test out of Algebra II), and people who already mastered it just breeze through it. It's sort of a waste of time and money. (And, if the class happens to be graded on a "curve", then depending on how the curve is calculated, it may be unfair to other students, but that's because of the use of the curve, which is a whole nother issue.) Ideally there'd be ways for them to test out of that requirement, or test into or otherwise get approved to go into something higher.
Regarding grading based on improvement: I think it doesn't make sense to grade solely based on improvement. People who already get all questions right literally can't improve their performance any more, if the metric is getting questions right. If you had to cover both improvement and mastery in one single grade, I guess you could try to combine them as an either-or, but that's still fundamentally trying to smash two distinct data points together, and I don't really like that that much.
Besides, I still think that grades should primarily be on how well students have mastered the material by the end of the class, because the purpose of the class is to teach the material, and the purpose of the grade is to indicate how well a student has learned the material. Those who already know it will breeze through this evaluation; those who learned it well will also do well.
However, using improvement to encourage low-performing students may be a useful teaching tool, because increase student self-confidence may make (at least some of) them more engaged in the learning process. But you wanna do this early enough in the class that the learning results can actually bear fruit by said end of the class. In contrast, weighing early grades too heavily just ends up leaving people with a bad record of sucking at the beginning that they can't erase by doing better later.
As for giving different grades based on different levels of mastery, perhaps a more proper way to do this would be to simply split enrollment in levels -- for example you could have a painting "class" where different students are enrolled in Painting I and Painting II and are taught and graded differently based on their formal class enrollment, even while sharing the same classroom time/space.
I know I haven't really gotten into exactly how to increase the performance of low-performing students, though I do know that some students lack the confidence to approach the material, hence my addressing that particular concern. Obviously, different low-performing students have different reasons for their poor performance. For others it may be poor time management/self-discipline skills (or lack of discipline from their parents); for yet others it may just be that they need to work to supplement their family's finances. I doubt there's a one-size-fits-all solution.
If the prof reuses questions from old exams that's the prof's problem.
Cheating would be doing stuff like having notes open on a closed-book exam, sharing answers, going online to get help, or having someone else do the test for you.
Sometimes people may refer to some things as "cheating" that aren't officially considered cheating, such as being able to use a TI-89 for symbolic calculations (even differentiation and integration) on tests like the SAT or the AP Calculus exam. I've genuinely wondered whether the TI-89 does give people who use it an unfair advantage. Though, at sufficiently low levels, like the SAT (which doesn't go up through calculus, and barely touches trig), it may be the case (though I have not actually confirmed this in any way) that the people who would use a TI-89 are pretty much already so competent at the required math skills that there is no meaningful difference.
From this Racial Equity Glossary;
This is why grading had to go. For anti-racism.
I must have missed the train a bit on this one;
So, like, officially, what I think is racism is not what progressives think is racism. I just thought they added these new definitions, but they actually excised the old one too!
This one sounds okay until you realize Racist Ideas include Assimilation, and Cultural Racism (????).
I...yeah...
Now let's learn from one of my favorite Ibram X. Kendi Snippets; The Department of Anti-Racism;
(Which is itself quite dumb in the context of math, since it can at best help you remember an equation, and these tend to be on the concise and memorizable side; and in context of humanities you'd need a lot more text on it. And the time you spent researching the material to prepare a cheat sheet you could have spent just memorizing it instead.)
I can't speak for the guy in the story, because, you know, friend-of-a-friend, but the way my friend described the encounter made me assume the guy was thinking about this kind of cheating. I cannot say anything about researching past questions and stuff in this context. As for me, I know of at least one American university publishing the exams to its PhD program in physics, along with the suggested solutions, so I'd assume it doesn't count as cheating in the US. (It also helps keep my sense of worth low, on a good day I can solve like half of classical mechanics.)
^ I'unno, we studied stuff where your typical problem has non-obvious steps, catches and so on that require either understanding the material or checking up some similar problem or notes. IIRC those weren't in pure math, tho.
So... truce?
^ Whelp, you posted that before I got around to posting the reply I wrote up last night.
I don't feel like all that effort going down the drain so I'll just stick it behind the following togglebox.
2. Also I dunno if you noticed but your post barely mentions education and is basically piggybacking off of a mention of racism in order to complain about anti-racism. Not wrong per se, but rather indicative of your priorities, I'd say.
2'.
> bunch of unrelated complaints about anti-racism
> "this is why grading had to go"
3. What's wrong with those first four quotes? The point is that race ought not to matter in determining one's ability to succeed in life. That's not to say there are no or should be no ways for any particular person to fuck up; rather, it says that glaring imbalances in overall (i.e. "statistical") fuckup rates between different ethnicities tells us someting ain't right, regarding the circumstances they face.
4. The fifth quote is basically trying to differentiate between merely having prejudices vs. actually acting on them. I'm not sure this is all that meaningful of a difference, since (1) we can't read minds, and (2) actions and results are what's important anyway.
As a sidenote, I never liked the practice of calling people racists anyway, as opposed to saying that they're being racist by doing a certain thing -- i.e. the distinction between the nature of something vs. its current action/situation.
Meanwhile I dunno what definitions you're referring to. Doesn't really matter though.
5. With regards to the things you made a point of with the sixth quote: (N.B. the thing you linked wasn't "assimilation" but "assimilationist".)
Well, yeah, it's definitely a racist idea to say that "[racial group] is a bunch of stupidheads and we need to re-educate them to be useful to society".
I might complain that this thing spends only 1/3 of its time defining the term and the rest elaborating on/explaining it. Anyhow...
There definitely are ideas of "normal" here in the US that use white people as the default norm. If I were to suggest to someone to picture a typical American family in TV advertising, chances are they're almost invariably white. Long, flowing hair and lighter skin tones are definitely also generally considered attractive for females. The stereotypical military veteran is an old white dude with various military uniform clothing. And so on. Bottom line is, the default American is white.
I'm not sure I'd use the label "racism" or "racist" for these sorts of things -- I'd just call them stereotypes of various sorts. But what makes them harmful is when people socially pressure other people to conform to a stereotype, in order to look "American". For example:
* "They're not really American; they wear funny hats." (could be said of yarmulkes or turbans)
* "They're not really American; they're...brown of some sort."
* "They're not really American; they don't celebrate the same holidays we do."
* "They're not really American; they don't eat meat/pork/beef/[whatever food]."
...and then people might use (and have indeed used, at various times and places) such sentiments to harass others.
6. Regarding the definition of white supremacy, that definition is...technically not wrong? I guess you could read the statement as implying that such ideas are very widespread, which I agree is up for debate, but even if they aren't widespread, they are still noticeably present in various parts of this country.
That said, granted, the term "white supremacy" is more typically used to refer to particular actions done to harm or intimidate minorities.
7. The last quote is something that might sound good on paper but I have my doubts that it's actually workable, because it's too vague and broad. (Then again, it's not like our constitution's existing amendments were all properly worded when passed...)
BOTTOM LINE: For something you suggest is so outrageous, you've certainly found milquetoast material to be outraged over.
'splodes
okay, yeah, truce
Heh, I was trying to come up with an English translation for a term I had in mind. But yeah, the word is sometimes used tongue-in-cheek for such allowed notes, although I've a feeling it's still a lot more tongue-in-cheek than "cheat sheet" is for you guys.