Category: Education

Think our basic education system isn’t crap? Read This!

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❝ Engineers in the Bay Area. Advertising managers in Chicago. Freight specialists in Arizona. The job listings keep piling up at Amazon, a company that is growing in many directions amid one of the tightest labor markets in memory.

On Monday, Amazon said it had 30,000 open positions in the United States, including full- and part-time jobs at headquarters offices, technology hubs and warehouses…

❝ …Last fall, Amazon raised the minimum wage at its warehouses to $15 an hour, and this past summer, it said it would spend $700 million to retrain about a third of its American workers to perform tasks that required advanced skills. The effort included a major push to improve the technical expertise of corporate and tech-focused employees, such as turning entry-level coders into data scientists.

We live in a nation where most of our politicians don’t consider education as critical as infrastructure…and the last time the latter was brought up-to-date the president was a retired general named Eisenhower.

Caribbean Vikings happy to leave Trump’s Amerika

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❝ President Donald Trump has been joking recently about trading Puerto Rico for Greenland. But now it’s Puerto Ricans who are the ones laughing — and many say they’d be happy with the trade.

Some called themselves the “Caribbean Vikings” and others shared all the benefits they would have if they stopped being a U.S. territory and became an autonomous Danish territory…

❝ “Denmark is the country with the best education in the world,” a man wrote on Twitter.

A Puerto Rican podcaster, known as Nieto, shared what some labeled as the Danish “Starter Kit.”

¡Hasta la victoria siempre!

Mississippi frat rats pose with their guns before a bullet-riddled civil rights memorial

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❝ First off, if you haven’t learned about – or are old enough that you should remember and don’t – here’s a link to the tale of Emmett Till. Tortured and murdered by racists in Mississippi in 1955.

❝ Second, here’s an article in ProPublica – the first place I saw mention, today, of an incident involving Ole Miss students posing with their guns in front of a bullet-riddled roadside memorial pointing out the site where Till’s body was discovered in 1955. Not a helluva lot changes in Mississippi, I guess.

This won’t get as much coverage in mainstream media as, say, our fake president’s just-as-evil twin being elected Prime Minister of the barely-United Kingdom of England, etc.by his obedient followers.

3 million US students don’t have access to internet at home

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❝ With no computer or internet at home, Raegan Byrd’s homework assignments present a nightly challenge: How much can she get done using just her smartphone?

On the tiny screen, she switches between web pages for research projects, losing track of tabs whenever friends send messages. She uses her thumbs to tap out school papers, but when glitches keep her from submitting assignments electronically, she writes them out by hand…

❝ She is among nearly 3 million students around the country who face struggles keeping up with their studies because they must make do without home internet. In classrooms, access to laptops and the internet is nearly universal. But at home, the cost of internet service and gaps in its availability create obstacles in urban areas and rural communities alike.

Please, don’t waste time patting yourself on the back because you did homework BITD by hand before the Internet existed, blah, blah, blah. I’m older than probably 99% of folks on the Web nowadays and I wouldn’t go back to what was available when I was a high school senior in 1954/55 on a bet.

I’ve been online for 36 years and I wouldn’t go back to all the previous means for information search and retrieval for any reason. Books are great, TV and film helps, any number of sources perform well – when available. And with decent broadband access, available means more information is ready to access than you can dream of. For a school age child, nowadays, the Web is the best choice there is.

Then you have to deal with all the reasons it isn’t available for lots of folks, lots of schoolchildren. Starting with cost.

Comeback of the Century

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❝ In the digital age, the printed book has experienced more than its share of obituaries. Among the most dismissive was one from Steve Jobs, who said in 2008, “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.”

True, nearly one in four adults in this country has not read a book in the last year. But the book — with a spine, a unique scent, crisp pages and a typeface that may date to Shakespeare’s day — is back. Defying all death notices, sales of printed books continue to rise to new highs, as do the number of independent stores stocked with these voices between covers, even as sales of electronic versions are declining.

❝ Nearly three times as many Americans read a book of history in 2017 as watched the first episode of the final season of “Game of Thrones.” The share of young adults who read poetry in that year more than doubled from five years earlier. A typical rage tweet by President Trump, misspelled and grammatically sad, may get him 100,000 “likes.” Compare that with the 28 million Americans who read a book of verse in the first year of Trump’s presidency, the highest share of the population in 15 years.

❝ So, even with a president who is a historic, borderline literate and would fail a sixth-grade reading comprehension test, something wonderful and unexpected is happening in the language arts. When the dominant culture goes low, the saviors of our senses go high.

RTFA. Short, to the point, illustrative.

I have personal feelings about the subversive reappearance and growth of documentary film, as well. I think this growth parallels the growth in books. Personally, I’m tired to death of all the Murphy Brown wannabes who think the only thing called news is in the “magazine format”. The same topics, of course, on every other magazine format “news” show the whole damned day.

I think some of us really miss learning stuff.