- A limitation of written exams is in distance education, which simply was hardly a thing for the hundreds of years exams were used. Just like WFH is a new practice employers have to learn to deal with, study from home (SFH) is a phenomenon that is going to affect education.
The objections to SFH exist and are strikingly similar to objections to WFH, but the economics are different. Some universities already see value in offering that option, and they (of course) leave it to the faculty to deal with the consequences.
- Being obnoxious works well. Obnoxious people get elected to power. Obnoxious companies (and CEOs) generate hype that increases stock prices. Obnoxious youtubers call themselves influencers and make a good living out of it.
Or more charitably it is difficult to be successful without annoying many people.
- > a bit more time actually parenting
Well, "blame the parents" is as hypocritical as "think of the children". It just displaces the responsibility of excluding kids from society from the community to the parents.
Creating a safe society for everyone is one of the roles of the state/government. That is why they are granted a monopoly on violence. As you rightly say, children are members of the society and therefore they are included in that responsibility.
The Australian government should be rightly criticized for passing a law that makes being online less safe for adults. However, that doesn't mean we should dismiss the alleged aim of the law, protecting children from harmful online content. It is a real problem that deserves serious attention.
- > It should be one component of all the tools available to the programmer.
> All text editors worth using have a way to open a terminal for that one time you need it.
Is this not somewhat self-contradictory? Having the terminal in the editor or having the editor in the terminal are both about having one tool that rules the others. The only difference is which one you choose to be the ruler.
- You got a bunch of responses already, here is an intuitive reason.
In similar triangles all distances are scaled by a factor k, by definition. Then, intuitively the areas are scaled by a factor of k^2, since you obtain an area by multiplying two distances.
So the ratio of the area over the hypothenuse is scaled by a factor of k^2/k=k.
It is not hard to confirm the intuition that the areas are scaled by a factor of k^2, since it is precisely the product of the lengths of the two sides adjacent to the right angle.
- Here is a quote from your original message which I have read and suspect others have too:
> In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.
> Duralex already went bankrupt several times and they are heading for it again. What's in the article is nice but it's charity not business so unfortunately I am not optimistic.
These two paragraphs following each other do make it seem like you are making a connection between the two, coops being unpropitious for hard decisions and this particular coop heading for bankruptcy.
That original comment was primarily made up of three paragraphs criticising coops, and readers naturally assume that the final concluding paragraph (this place is likely going bankrupt) is linked to the first three.
> just rush to condemn me for blaspheming.
Nobody has accused you of blasphemy. They just disagree with you. You are not being victimised, and nobody has pretended you were not allowed to think as you think. There is just a discussion taking place between disagreeing people.
- Except that these employees had been put on temporary unemployment (chômage partiel) [0] and their difficulties have been going on for much longer than 10 years.
Ultimately all I am saying is that other structures have not fared better than the COOP. Claiming that the potential current failure is because the COOP prevents hard decisions to be made while ignoring the fact that the previous owner lasted 3 years before failing (in spite of the temporary unemployment decisions) is not logical.
[0] https://www.novethic.fr/economie-et-social/business-model-en...
- > Were they a coop when they went bankrupt?
They were not. In fact they went through series of mass-redundancy episodes that were supposed to save them from bankruptcy, soon followed by yet another bankruptcy.
The COOP might fail. Indeed the call for contributions discussed in the article was motivated by that risk. But it won't fail because it was a COOP, because every CEO who tried also failed to save it. The COOP structure is this company's last chance, literally.
- > Only half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German.
The article claims different proportions: "Half of all English vocabulary comes from those three Romance roots, compared to less than a third that comes from Germanic sources."
Still only half correct, but based of those proportions it is more correct than claiming English is a Germanic language.
It's not clear where the quite significant remaining proportion of the English language comes from. Colonial languages?
The real point of the essay discussed in the article is that the French origin of (part of) the English language is Norman French, which was distinctly different from Parisian French and has pretty much vanished from Normandy since. So the argument is that English might be as close to Norman French as French is. The influence of Norman French on the English language was downplayed for political reasons, argues the author.
Ultimately words of Germanic origins might be fewer but more frequently used. The grammar is also potentially closer to the Germanic origins than to the French ones? Let the linguists debate this forever I guess.
- OP's point is that French prisons are famously derelict. They are overcrowded, dirty, dangerous. Regular prisoners do not enjoy the luxury of a VIP cell.
Sarkozy played no small part in making this happen.
We should absolutely wish for all prisoners to be treated decently, and it is a terrible thing that the matter is only brought up when someone like Sarkozy has to ensure a portion of what regular prisoners endure.
And worst of all, his political followers are all lamenting about the conditions he is in while remaining hardliners for the rest of the prisoners. You are right that OP should not wish ill on Sarkozy, whose distress is real and painful to see. But OP's frustration is understandable to anyone who cares even a little for the welfare of regular prisoners in France.
- It is not political play. This is FUD spread by his political supporters.
The "exécution provisoire" is a measure that was introduced when his own party was in power, to make sure that terrorists were jailed immediately. He happened to be condemned for breaching the same law (association de malfaiteurs) that is used against terrorists.
I once read a comment by a lawyer that he was amazed by the number of politicians who ended up being caught by laws they had voted for. This is what happened here.
In fact when he was president he implemented another law, on minimum mandatory sanctions for repeated offenders (peines plancher) which was repelled by the subsequent administration. He would have been caught by that too otherwise.
- > I love when people label politics they disagree with as “ethical” problems.
This is a disingenious portrayal of what people you disagree with are saying. It is not like someone is calling pro-capitalist or socialist views unethical.
"Politics they disagree with" means racism, homophobia and ableism. There certainly is an argument that each of those is ethically problematic, because each denies some human beings' basic rights to be considered human.
You may well argue that dhh doesn't hold those views, or argue that the community should accept that some members have toxic views and move on. It is best to avoid claiming that racism is just another respectable political opinion.
- Mastery Learning, which Bloom advocates for in the two sigma problem paper, is an alternative to 1 on 1, not a way to achieve it.
What you describe seems to be a very poor implementation of mastery learning. But if the tutor is completely disengaged even 1 on 1 tutoring is unlikely to have good effects.
- You mean that you believe that Black and Hispanic kids are being blocked from taking Algebra in middle school because Blacks and Latinos are bad at Algebra compared to Whites, just as women cannot bench press as much as men?
Surely you can't be surprised that not everyone shares that belief??
- They did not treat "results" as a binary "good" vs "bad" variable. In the article they take pains to justify their methodology in assessing students' chances of success in 8th grade algebra as a continuous variable:
> EVAAS is a statistical tool that could predict with remarkable accuracy which students would succeed in advanced courses.
Then
> The table demonstrates a strong correlation between EVAAS predictions and actual student performance. Students were grouped into probability ranges based on their predicted likelihood of success in 8th grade Algebra I, and their actual performance was then tracked.
So both the input (EVAAS predictor) and output (success in 8th grade algebra) are continuous variables (as shown in the first and last columns of the table mentioned in the quote), and they use this strong correlation to study access to 8th grade algebra against non-academic factors by using the EVAAS predictor as a control variable. I am not a professional statistician but honestly it looks pretty solid to me, or at least far more rigorous than most education science I have come across.
What they are then saying is that if you control for probability of success, Black and Hispanic children are significantly less likely to be admitted in 8th grade Algebra than White and Asian students. Looking at racial differences is not a particularly contentious way of studying bias in American society.
Of course they could have looked at other factors: economic and social class, gender, etc. This is the tragedy of sociology: you can't study social bias without being accused of introducing bias in how you study it...
- From the article:
> Research in the 1990s found that in California, Latino students scoring above the 90th percentile on standardized tests had only about a 50% chance of being placed in college preparatory classes, while Asian and white students with similar scores had more than a 90% chance.
The data is split by community ( Black, Latino, White, ...). Whites and Asians fare the best (see also their fig. 6.1). Kids from other communities are prevented from getting the same opportunities as kids from these two communities performing equivalently.
So it is not that Asian kids don't matter, it is that the data indicates that Asian kids already seem to be treated reasonably well.
- Beware the logical fallacy. "A implies B" does not mean that "not A implies not B".
Workers who earn too little to pay taxes (A) will not benefit from a tax cut (B).
But workers who earn enough (not A) may still not benefit (not B), for example because their employer indirectly pockets the difference. That is actually being argued in the article.
So this is indeed the appropriate way of formulating the statement: at least 40% of workers will demonstrably not benefit from this.
- I did not mean that the words "middle age mothers" are mysoginic or ageist in themselves. I was referring to the singling out of this particular identity group within the context of OP's message.
I should have quoted a longer part of that message for better clarity. I incorrectly assumed that my full comment was enough to contextualise what I meant.
- > Ask students to solve harder problems, assuming they will use AI to learn more effectively.
What does this look like? Like asking children learning to read to demonstrate they can read Shakespeare?
A staple of modern education is scaffolding learning, where skills are incrementally learnt and build on previously learnt simpler skills. Much of what students learn in high school and early on at university is meant as a stepping stone to acquiring more applicable skills. Just like you can't start assessing learning abilities from Shakespeare, students simply need to be told whether they master those simpler skills before moving up. Doing away with assessing simpler skills just because AI can now perform them isn't the solution to addressing a lack of critical thinking.
What will need to happen is that early subjects will need to stop being used for gatekeeping. Rather than treating education as an adversarial game, we should make it a collaborative one and instead of trying to make it more difficult for students to pass assessments with AI (and mechanically making it harder to pass them without as well), we should give students a stake in learning what they need to learn.
- > what is fulfilling in your job as a math teacher?
Many things. The most fulfilling for me is taking a student from hating maths to enjoying it. Or when they realise that in fact they're not bad at maths. Students changing their opinions about themselves or about maths is such a fulfilling experience that it's my main motivation.
Then working with students who likes and are good at maths and challenging them a bit to expand their horizon is a lot of fun.
> When students learn?
At a high level yes (that maths can be fun, enjoyable, doable). Them learning "stuff" not so much, it's part of the job.
> When they're assigned grades that accurately reflect their performance?
Yes but not through a system based on counting how many mistakes they make, like exams do. If I can design a task that enables a student to showcase competency accurately it's great. A task that enables the best ones to extend themselves (and achieve higher marks) is great.
> When they learn something with minimal as opposed to significant effort?
Not at all. If there is no effort I don't believe much learning is happening. I like to give an opportunity for all students to work hard and learn something in the process no matter where they start from.
I only care about the grade as feedback to students. It is a way for me to tell them how far they've come.
It is about a third of the students I teach, which amounts to several hundreds per term. It may be niche, but it is not insignificant, and definitely a problem for some of us.
> Even for distance education though, proctored testing centers have been around longer than the internet.
I don't know how much experience you have with those. Mine is extensive enough that I have a personal opinion that they are not scalable (which is the focus of the comment I was replying to). If you have hundreds of students disseminated around the world, organising a proctored exam is a logistical challenge.
It is not a problem at many universities yet, because they haven't jumped on the bandwagon. However domestic markets are becoming saturated, visas are harder to get for international students, and there is a demand for online education. I would be surprised that it doesn't develop more in the near future.