Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Another good reason to home school
While I am not a lawyer, I read with some interest an law article pointed to by Instapundit: Decriminalizing Students with Disabilities, by Dean Hill Rivkin.
I am incompetent to judge the legal arguments Rivkin makes, but they all seem reasonable to me. Given the laws we've got, the consequences he outlines seem straightforward enough.
However, I am competent to judge whether or not those consequences are worthwhile.
They are not, and no one who has ever been in or near a public school and has the best interests of children at heart could possibly entertain the notion that they are. It follows, therefore, that Rivkin is either ignorant or hates children.
Everything that Rivkin advocates stems from the assumption that 'mainstreaming' -- that is, putting children of the same age together in the same room to be taught by the same person, no matter what -- is the summum bonum of education practice. In short, that whatever differences might exist between individuals should be summarily erased by our schools.
For a contrary argument, see Harrison Bergeron.
Basically, Rivkin argues that, once a child has been labeled 'disabled', he is permanently immune from all disciplinary and, especially, criminal consequences of his actions. Instead, any infraction of school rules is to be answered with revisions to the student's IEP (individualized education plan), which the Federal IDEA (Individuals With Disabilities Education Act) mandates that schools prepare for all disabled students.
As it happens, I have a little experience with IDEA. My eldest daughter went through the various procedures and received a diagnosis of ADD. Reading through the material, I concluded, and said to the principal of my daughter's school, "It looks like I can make you do absolutely anything I want."
He sighed and agreed.
Now, fortunately for him (and my daughter), I'm a reasonable guy and not given to litigation. However, an educational regime that depends on parental reasonableness in order to function is not going to be particularly stable.
I also have grave misgivings about the validity of ADD -- everyone I know and like has most or all of the 'symptoms', and anyone who did not have any of them would be incredibly dull company. But that's a completely different fight ....
Eventually -- and after my daughter was knocked down during a fight between two (undoubtedly 'disabled') miscreants, who were, of course, not punished in any way whatsoever -- we withdrew her from school and taught her at home. She ended up at a local community college instead of high school, getting an AA at the age her peers were getting their diplomas, got a second AA the next year from a four-year college, and is finishing her BFA this year, at the age of 20.
So it worked out well for us, but we have resources, both financial and intellectual, that the majority of families don't have.
It should be obvious, at least to all who stop to think, that the presence of even a single disruptive child in a classroom is sufficient to prevent all the rest from learning as they ought. The Rivkins of America are attempting to ensure that every American class will have at least one such student, and in this they have largely succeeded.
Perhaps you have noticed that American students are both stupider and more ignorant than their Asian and European peers? There just could be a connection ...
posted by vepxistqaosani 8:27 AM
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Language Help for Hillary
As everyone knows by now, Hillary embarrassed herself the other day with a little mistranslation. But what is one to do, if one is a monoglot?
Consider this a free advertisement for Google Translate.
I spent 2 minutes with Google Translate to figure out how to say 'reset' по-русский. I asked for a translation of "Push the reset button". You can see the result here.
You will see that 'перегрузка' doesn't appear. However, even if you ask for a translation of 'reset' by itself, you don't get that word back. See? On the other hand, if you search for 'overcharge', there it is: here, at noun #7. And if you back-translate перегрузка, you still don't get reset: here.
To make sure this is reasonably idiomatic, I then searched the web for the phrase "нажмите кнопку сброса" (push the reset button, remember?) and got more than a thousand hits: here.
So the word Hillary was groping for was probably "сброс" (spros). In fairness to Hillary (not that she ever bothers), 'сброс' has a bunch of other meanings not obviously related to the idea of resetting. Still, I'm reasonably confident in Google's results. If it's still wrong, it's at least not laughably wrong.
Now, make the usual effort to imagine the media's reaction to Condi Rice making such an error (not that she could, of course, being fluent in Russian).
Do you suppose I have a future as a linguist at the Department of State?
Seriously -- I am far, far from expert in Russian, and I could get a reasonable word pretty quickly; there are bound to be dozens, if not hundreds, of Russian speakers in our State Department (or at least I hope so ...). How is it remotely possible for Hillary's staff to allow her to make such an ass of herself? It only reinforces the world's image of Americans as ignorant monoglots.
As long as we don't all end up completely broke, this is going to be a fun four years!
posted by vepxistqaosani 4:07 PM
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Slashdot has a discussion of a paper by T. Ord et al. which attempts to demonstrate that the probability of a world-ending disaster at the Large Hadron Collider is much greater than previously thought.
They reach this conclusion by observing that 1 in 1,000 physics papers have to be withdrawn because of miscalculations. To be 'fair' to the LHC, they use a lower number: 1 in 10,000.
Let's demonstrate how this works:My calculations show that the probability the sun will rise tomorrow is 1; however, from Ord et al., we learn that there is a probability of 1 in 10,000 that physics calculations are wrong. It thus follows that there is a 1 in 10,000 chance that the sun will not rise tomorrow.
I expect to live another 50 years. Simple probability demonstrates that there is an 84% change that the sun will fail to rise during that time.But wait! In the 5000 years of recorded human history, the probability that the sun failed to rise at least once is asymptotically equal to 1.
Everything we think we know is wrong!Labels: Apocalypse, LHC
posted by vepxistqaosani 12:05 PM
