It seems that during the gaggle in Florida, Mittens came out strongly against the idea of smaller classroom sizes, telling the easily fooled residents of wingnutopia that it’s a teachers’ unions scam designed to force the hiring of more teachers. According to Mittens, efforts to reduce classroom size are not actually necessary.
Letting the markets decide how many kids can fit into a classroom is just the latest in new ideas from crazy town. Is 50 too many? How about 70? You could probably transfer a lot of revenue to corporate bottom lines if you privatized ALL education and let the market decide–without any regulations–the best way to generate a profit from the daily warehousing of these spoiled American kids. I saw a 3rd grade classroom the other day with only thirty kids in it. If you got rid of the desks and had them stand you could fit a hundred in there–easy.
It is a batshit crazy notion, and any parent with kids in school knows that the number of kids in a classroom matters a lot. To buy Mitt’s line-o-crap you would have to find folks without kids or a parent who cared more about glibertarian nonsense than their kids–but fortunately for Mittens, there is this guy:
My first thought was “what an asshole”, but that was soon replaced by the realization that Gillespie implies that he is a parent. If true, you’ve got to pity those poor kids. Still, if they have decent teachers and their dad decides to follow through and avoid any involvement in their education they just might have a chance.
And Mitt’s delusion that smaller classroom sizes are a pro-union scam wasn’t even close to the craziest thing said in tonight’s debate.
And with that let’s go to an Open Thread…
Cacti
What were the class sizes like at the private schools where Skip, Pip, Chip, and Dip Romney went to?
Pretty damn small, I’m guessing.
Mark S.
You’re assuming a lot of things in this post, such as Nick Gillespie has ever gotten laid.
ericblair
On the cosmic, there’s-more-out-there-than-asshole-goopers part of the universe, there’s some evidence that neutrinos (non-zero-mass particles) travel faster than the speed of light. Who knows, but the most important statement in science isn’t “eureka”, it’s “WTF was that?”
Mark S.
I also like how I just saw the title of the post and knew it was about Gillespie.
beltane
I’d like to think of these people as being degenerate scum, but that still doesn’t quite express how I feel about them.
beltane
@Cacti: Oh, that’s because future job creators need to be coddled in special schools lest their inherent genius is tainted by associating with the parasites.
Mark S.
@ericblair:
Wow, that could be a game changer. This blew my mind as well:
I guess neutrinos really don’t interact with shit. How the hell did anyone ever discover them?
Linda Featheringill
According to wiki, Mr. Gillespie is 48 years old and has two sons. Ages of the offspring wasn’t given, but they could be up and out by now, or nearly so.
Linda Featheringill
Neutrinos. Speedy little devils.
Love it when the study of physics gets all in a snit.
Cacti
@beltane:
Indeed.
Like their father before them, all of them had the good sense to be born rich. Hooray for the meritocracy.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Mark S.:
I think the Fonzi of Freedumb was assuming that everyone has baby goats like he does. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.
Mittens would love to see some version of for-profit education where each school has one large area for learning, two bathrooms and a self-serve cafeteria (vending machines fully stocked with the best that capitalism has to offer our kids!). Nothing else would be necessary and a waste on money. All you would need is a principal, a janitor and a teacher!
Think of the money
we would savethey would make!!Mnemosyne
Since this is doubling as an open thread, I just finished checking into my hotel for my knitting convention, which starts tomorrow.
That’s right, bitchez. Knitting convention. ‘Cause that’s how I roll. Hardcore.
BGinCHI
Question is, how can Gillespie breathe with that hooker’s cock in his mouth?
Linda Featheringill
@Mnemosyne: #12
Oooooh!
[hope you have fun and pick up some interesting ideas]
lacp
Mitt got his classroom-size business model from the way Big Ag raises poultry.
AkaDad
First thoughts are usually the correct ones.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Mnemosyne:
We’re (wife & I) heading off to Medford, Oregon tomorrow on our motorcycle. She’s ringing in our 25th anniversary by running the half-marathon there on Sunday. We’re making a bit of a trip out of it and visiting some friends up in Grants Pass. Weather is supposed to be nice (80’s) on the trip there but Sunday there is a cold front moving in that is expected to bring rain.
Time to test out the rain gear on the trip home…lol! It’s very good gear and keeps us warm and dry. The road back to the coast (Hwy 199) might suck with its twisties and hills while wet so that will really be the only potential suck. We talked about taking the car but decided that the bike is more fun.
Enjoy your travel fun (my wife would love to be at your convention as she is an avid knitter) and we will enjoy ours!
Spaghetti Lee
If you want a vision of the future, imagine Nick Gillespie being a whiny pissant on Twitter…forever.
BGinCHI
@lacp: Party at Mitt’s house: bring your own…booze, food, and no, the bathrooms are not for guests.
Don’t forget the tip jar.
patrick II
It is amazing how much reality one has to deny to stay faithful to an ideology. Classroom size doesn’t matter, climate change isn’t happening, evolution is just one theory, Irag had weapons of mass destruction, we don’t torture — and if we did we don’t call that torture anymore, people who don’t have health insurance deserve to die — for some reason including children (maybe they sinned in their previous lives), cutting fire department budgets during a historic drought is reasonable, and Fox News is fair and balanced.
I think many of them were in very large classrooms. Not that it matters.
BGinCHI
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Medford is nice, but get down to Ashland too. Also wineries in the Rogue Valley. I like Troon, but there are other good ones right around there. Ride safe.
Mark S.
@Spaghetti Lee:
FTFY
KG
I still don’t get how people watch these things… Hell I’m still a registered Republican (laziness more than anything), and I can’t bring myself to watch mor than 60 seconds at a time. It just hurts my brain, terribly
sb
I just got back from back-to-school night at my son’s school. And after a busy day of teaching. So, pardon me for clarifying, Dennis, as I trust what you write but this:
kindness
The Other Half is a teacher. I can tell you, class size matters, a lot.
rikyrah
for Mittens.
1. where did HIS kids go to school
2. what is the class size at that school?
handsmile
@ericblair: #3, Mark S. #7, Linda Featheringill #9:
While I don’t possess the candle power to understand more than a quark-sized fragment of the implications of this research, this line from the Guardian article I found most enchanting to ponder:
“Scientists at the Gran Sasso facility will unveil evidence that raises the troubling possibility of a way to send information back in time, blurring the line between past and present and wreaking havoc with the fundamental principle of cause and effect.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/22/faster-than-light-particles-neutrinos
Makes that question about “f*cking magnets” rather trivial, don’t you think?
Can’t wait until the Republican Clown Posse gets ahold of this news. First, Darwin; now Einstein. More “intelligent design” classes should protect the children from the dangers of these scientific “theories.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Per Wiki:
also according to Wiki, Cranbrook has 785 students, and a faculty of 105. Sounds like their classrooms aren’t terribly overcrowded.
Frankensteinbeck
@Mark S.:
As I recall, they had some kind of ludicrous containment system designed to prevent all radiation, period, forget it, of any kind. And they were still getting radiation impact reactions inside and going ‘What in the Sun Pony’s name is CAUSING this?!’
AnotherBruce
Nick you sociopathic idiot*. You know what teachers aren’t paid to do? They aren’t paid to be parents. Part of a parent’s responsibility is to make sure that their children are getting a good education. A teacher isn’t a goddamn baby sitter, you fool.
*I mean idiot in the Greek sense of the word, by this definition all libertarians are idiots.
Helen
@KG: I got drunk. You should try it.
Martin
I’m going to have to dissent on this subject, at least a bit.
National average class size is about 20. Here in CA, it’s pushing 30. In my city of top-ranked schools, its north of 30. My daughter’s 5th grade class has 35. Last year it was 34. My son in 7th grade had a history class of 35 that would swell to 70 as the vice principal taught an adjoining class and they’d have to regularly combine so he could administrative duties.
The reason is that the teachers union made a deal with the state many years ago – due to the pace that the state was growing, the state was building one new school per day. Construction costs were killing the state budget, so the teachers offered to deal with larger classes in exchange for salary and benefits. It was cheaper, and was more flexible for districts as cities were routinely going through boom and bust cycles with specific age groups because they had more flexibility accommodating student populations.
The result has been that the state has attracted and retained quite good teachers. The achievement results are interesting – the weaker students surprisingly seem to do no worse. It’s the stronger students that do slightly poorer. Not a lot, just a bit. Basically, the thinking is that the weaker students weren’t benefitting from the smaller classes because the extra time actually allows the stronger students to reach out to the teacher, and that goes away. But the weaker students come out no different.
Now, the whole arrangement doesn’t improve matters because it’s set against a backdrop of declining budgets, so there are other factors working against achievement, but given better budgets it appears that expanding the curriculum – science, music, arts, etc. would have better outcomes given the somewhat overnarrow focus on math and reading and letting the larger class sizes stand so long as we can continue to retain the strongest teachers.
kth
Like an affluent suburban public school, with its Macs and elliptical machines in the gym, will ever have 50 kids in a class.
Frankensteinbeck
@handsmile:
See, nothing I’ve read suggests these particles travel back in time. They seem to be clearly traced to start at point A and arrive at point B later, just faster than they ought. Particles already operate on a quantum level in ways that suggest they may be moving back in time. THIS is much weirder. These things are going faster than light and NOT crossing the divide-by-zero threshold Einstein said had to be there. So either Einstein’s wrong (which would blow our understanding of physics out of the water) or the speed of light’s not a constant (which would at least knock a few big holes in our understanding of physics) or the experiment is wrong. They’re kinda betting on that latter.
BGinCHI
@Martin: Martin, honestly, I hear you making the best of it, but I’ll tell you this: your “excellent teachers” are not going to be able to do it over the long haul. It’s like making your star pitcher start every game and throw 200 pitches.
It’s not sustainable.
And before anyone who isn’t a working teacher complains that “that’s just the way it is,” I urge you to put at least a decade or two into it and then see if you agree.
It’s way the fuck harder than it looks, especially to do well.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@BGinCHI:
My wife already has plans… I may drive but she leads…lol!
Ashland is nice, as is the whole area (traveling-wise). We’re looking at heading south into Cali on Sunday as we may be able to loop around much of the weather. I’m watching that now at that damned evil NOAA site that does nothing but provide useful information in exchange for some tax money.
How dare they!
Helen
Dunno if this is pro-thread or con-thread but; I am the first gen to get a degree (any degree). I am the daughter of an immigrant (who died when I was 12) with only an 8th grade education and a HS graduate. Dad worked in warehouses all his life. I got an Ivy league Masters degree at Columbia. One day a Prof asked us “how many of you went to public school?” Two people raised their hands; me and the kid who was the son of a prominent NYC Politian who was also a Prof at Columbia (that same Prof is now in jail). I swear right up until that moment it NEVER occurred to me that I was out of the ordinary. I just thought I “pulled myself up by my bootstraps”
Chris
Good Lord, this is gold.
I don’t know, asshole. Your party’s been telling us for ages that 1) no matter what we’re talking about, it’s ALL. ABOUT. the FAMILY and 2) personal responsibility! Don’t look to the state for what you yourself should be doing!
So yeah, we could be forgiven for thinking that you should be more involved in your kids’ education.
What’s more, I’ll bet a largish sum of money that you yourself have mouthed those words in the past. But that, of course, was in the abstract, in a general context of “damn liberals are attacking our families,” or perhaps “inner-city sluts should be raising their kids, I shouldn’t be paying for their education.” But then, when the teachers come around and say “dude, it’s not just black single mothers in the inner city, you need to be involved in your kid’s education too,” all of a sudden you ran straight to Twitter and whined about how it should all be the teacher (aka The Other Guy)’s responsibility.
It’s always different when it’s you, isn’t it? You and every other fucking teabagger who thinks Big Gubmint Spending on Lazy Deadbeats is ruining the country, but of course the government should just drop everything and help you with all of your problems, because after all, what good is a government if it’s not here for your personal convenience.
BGinCHI
@Odie Hugh Manatee: You could try Klamath Falls. Never rains there. But it’s also boring.
Next 5 days here: rain in the forecast. Just great. My De Rosa weeps.
suzanne
So, this week, to recap:
Got in car wreck, insurance company won’t pay for a car that I can actually USE so I am driving an old-man-mobile, the dog dug up my daughter’s kitten that we buried in the backyard and ate the corpse, R.E.M. broke up, and my desk at work is being moved so that I now sit between the only two people in the office that I don’t like.
AWESOME.
Digital Amish
Gillespie probably regales his kids with his thoughts like “Those goddamned overpaid teachers and their fucking union” and then complains that his Johnny isn’t getting a decent education because the teachers can’t even control the kids in their classroom.
Just an aside but when I’d get into classroom size discussions in the past I’d remember my elementary school classes seemed to be well over thirty kids. Then a couple years ago I ran across my third grade class picture (1958) and found out that the class numbered 52 kids. Of course my teacher was an old bony nun permanently clutching 18 inches of 3/4 inch hardwood dowel in a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt.
BGinCHI
Just to state the obvious in this thread. Didn’t conservatives used to complain that education was the key to success and cultural superiority? Wasn’t TV and sports and, well, most everything else (music, sex) an attack on education?
Even fucking Tipper Gore was for all that shit.
And now they want to end public education?
Aliens, what have you done with our dopey, dorky citizens!!??
Martin
Neutrinos do interact with stuff but very weakly, so detection is damn hard. We discovered them like most other particles – the theoretical boys and girls said “Hey, there should be particles like this that interact with stuff in that way” and then the experimental boys and girls say ‘Ok, well if we build this big fucking tank of heavy water down in a salt mine and surround it with detectors we should get lucky and eventually catch a neutrino flying through the planet, hitting it, and generating a byproduct particle that we can detect’. And that’s what happened.
The speed of light result isn’t terribly novel. We’ve known that theory supports it, and there have been a number of previous experiments that have shown it as well, but it manifests under very specific circumstances, and the ability to manipulate those circumstances leads to VERY interesting and useful things. So, what’s exciting is the new circumstances moreso than we saw something going faster than light.
Martin
@kth:
Hate to point it out, but I live in the 6th wealthiest city in the US, and we have some of the largest class sizes in the nation. No Macs, no gym, no cafeteria, no buses. We put the overwhelming amount of our education money into the hands of teachers through one mechanism or another.
Elliecat
@Martin:
Of course, weak students doing “no worse” when we still have NCLB escalating the standards every year does nothing to help schools that are “failing.”
Not to mention, the “weaker students” in the classrooms where I’ve volunteered over the last decade are kids who are barely getting by. So I really can’t find any comfort in them doing “no worse.” (Not to mention, being the parent of a strong student who was often neglected by teachers who were delighted to have a student who was already “up to standard” so they could concentrate most of their time on the many who were nowhere close.
edited for clarity
Frankensteinbeck
@Martin:
There are already known circumstances where the constant changes? That’s new to me… but it’s no surprise it’s new to me. I’m longer out of date than I’d care to admit I’m alive.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@BGinCHI:
I’ve traveled extensively throughout the northwest (WA, OR, ID, MT & northern CA) and I absolutely love all of it. The large open areas and scattered towns and cities make for lots of scenery in between that is there for the viewing. Central Oregon (border to border) is some of the prettiest land to travel on, great for motorcycle travel from late spring to early fall.
We haven’t done much riding this year between the bike being down for repairs and our work (once it was repaired). It’s good to get in at least one more trip on it before the weather turns sour. We may take one more trip to Coos Bay in early October if the weather holds out.
Martin
@BGinCHI:
Yeah, but there are other solutions to that problem. Have a dedicated PE teacher, a dedicated art teacher, a dedicated music teacher – give the classroom teacher a break for part of the day, but trade out the smaller classes for a music professional, etc.
BGinCHI
@Odie Hugh Manatee: If nothing else, just a day trip to the Tillamook cheese factory for grilled cheese with bacon and some mountain huckleberry ice cream. Then up to Garibaldi for some fresh seafood at the marina (when we were there in August fresh tuna was running 8 bucks a lb). Or get a perfect sandwich at the little grocery in Manzanita: weighs several lbs and costs about nothing.
Man, I love the OR coast.
Elizabelle
@patrick II:
My favorite is that Obamacare would have killed Herman Cain, pizza millionaire. ‘Cause he wouldn’t have gotten the quality of care and might have had to wait.
A$$hole.
Good on him for surviving Stage 4 colon and liver cancer.
Rot to all of them for acting like the president is trying to bankrupt and kill this country through providing healthcare to more Americans.
I hope those young people who have insurance because they’re younger than 26 and on their parents’ policies vote.
JGabriel
Martin:
Okay, but, if a non-zero mass particle can go faster than the speed of light when, theoretically, it should hit infinite mass at light-speed, then why are clocks slowing down as they get closer to light-speed in accordance with the special theory of relativity?
In other words, is there still a universal speed limit, just a little faster than we previously thought, but close enough to it that the Lorentz equations still hold? Or is there something more basic wrong with the theory of special relativity?
.
Mark S.
@Elizabelle:
Ugh, I caught about 5 minutes of the debate at the gym, and that was the part I saw. That and some stupidity from Bachmann.
BGinCHI
@Martin: Agreed. If there are resources for that then of course, that’s the way to go.
I’m just saying, can’t get more and more blood out of a turnip.
Applying the factory model to schools will only get you so far. My guess is that your schools is doing really well with the resources that it has, but even that will go off the rails if the stress gets too great.
Schools can’t be the dumping ground for a society that doesn’t want to educate children, or at least pay attention to them. Orange Co is lucky to have some pretty good schools. My friends’ kids are around Trabuco and it’s pretty good.
JGabriel
@Elizabelle:
Apparently God saved Cain so he could rail against health care for people in need. You don’t save Cain to be his brother’s keeper, after all.
.
BGinCHI
@JGabriel: I thought it was 2.21 jigawatts?
Maybe my flux capacitor is broken. Sheeit.
Elizabelle
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Enjoy. The Oregon coast is magical. Have some Tillamook for me!
piratedan
@suzanne: but Suzanne, it looks like the D’Backs are going to be playing in the postseason!!!!!!!!!
piratedan
@BGinCHI: I gotta say that my preference is the Marionberry Pie…. what I don’t understand is why they don’t distribute that Ice Cream more widely, it is teh AWESOME!!!!!
and before I forget…. The Otis Cafe rules!!!!!!!
handsmile
Evidently the physicists in this neighborhood (Frankensteinbeck, Martin, JGabriel) come out at night.
With the staggering implications of the initial findings, “a massive, massive event” (Alex Kostelecky, Indiana University particle expert), of course the CERN researchers are being cautious with their announcement. Research teams in the US and Japan are now seeking to replicate the experiment.
Nevertheless, measurements compiled over three years that indicate neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light did provoke this hilariously eloquent remark from Subir Sarkar, head of particle theory at Oxford University: “The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding of space and time and causality, which is the fact that cause comes before effect….If we do not have causality, we are buggered.”
I think Calvino’s CosmicComics might be in order for tonight’s bedtime reading.
Irony Abounds
My wife teaches kindergarten and has 28 kids in her class because of budget cuts. That’s 28 5 year olds, with vastly different levels of maturity, and vastly different levels of behavior. All it takes is one or two students who are off task and it disrupts the entire classroom. Now, my wife is a bit old school and expects all the kids to behave appropriately, and it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep 28 5 yr olds in check. I suppose she could just give up and let anarchy prevail, but that simply isn’t in her nature. The kids definitely suffer and the teacher burnout accelerated. Mitt can kiss my ass.
cckids
You know, my sister has been a teacher for 7 years now. Started with 2nd grade, got moved to 4th grade, this year she started with 5th grade. She’s had a class size of 22-28 kids until this year. Because of budget cuts, her town closed one of their 3 elementary schools. Now she has 39 fifth graders.
She is one of those inspired teachers, the ones you remember all your life. It is a calling for her, something she loves & needs to do. And dealing with a class this size makes her want to quit. She can’t do what she needs to do for the kids, and that makes her nuts. All she can do is her best, and she knows it is not really enough. Because she cares, it is killing her to short the kids the way she has to just to get through the days.
Spaghetti Lee
@Helen:
That’s an interesting anecdote. Maybe it’s not statistically typical, but I didn’t know it was that unbalanced.
Problem is, I know what the glibertarian response would be to that: “See, that proves that public schools are inadequate! We should privatize them!” It never even crosses their minds that the public schools are fighting a losing battle in terms of resources, or the reason the private schools got so prestigious is because they’re able to turn away all the people that then end up in the public schools. And the gap in places like New York is wider than most, with all those grand old prep schools comparing themselves to a public system worth of several million students, many of them immigrants. I mean, Jesus, talk about your asymmetrical markets! But it never even occurs to them that they’re basing their free-market argument on something that doesn’t even resemble a free market.
Elie
@suzanne:
Don’t know if you are still awake, but after such a week, you need happy music. I like this anyway…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK3wwZFdKnc
The dog dug up the dead kitten? Ugh….
oldswede
According to http://www.prepreview.com, a school evaluation service, the Cranbrook School where Mitt prepped currently has an average class size of 16.
The school’s website is http://schools.cranbrook.edu/
Not your public school environment.
oldswede
Anne Laurie
@suzanne: Maybe you should buy a lottery ticket — sounds like Kharma owes you something on the positive side of the balance!
I hope your week improves, in any case.
Martin
@JGabriel: The problem with these experiments is that they’re happening at the quantum level, so things get pretty dodgy when we try to measure things relative to constants. Neutrinos were measured to travel slightly faster than the speed of light almost 30 years ago, but when you work in uncertainty principles you really end up with a range of possible speeds that spans c. So, rather than set a definitive speed, you get a statistical result with upper and lower bounds. It’s these experiments that open up the possibility that neutrinos travel faster (or slower) than light, but really are setting a lower bound on the speed of the particle, and therefore setting an upper bound on the mass of the particle.
But neutrinos have also been observed with another behavior – one where it’s spin appears to flip, oscillating between a neutrino and an anti-neutrino and in this oscillation it can break Lorentz invariance. Like I said, there’s a number of specific circumstances where faster than light has been theorized and measured. The issue is whether we’re measuring something that is outside of theory or not. CERN seems to think they may have. I’m sure as fuck not going to argue with them, but stuff like this does pop up now and then, and pretty much everything surrounding neutrinos is either uncertain or controversial in some way, so we’ll need to see where it goes.
Particle physics isn’t really my thing, relativity was my strength – particularly the math side. The experimental stuff would just drive me batshit. I’m good with my hands and building stuff, but dedicating a career to just adding another digit to some constant just struck me as insane.
Anne Laurie
@Digital Amish:
Fifty-four in my first-grade class (1961), including at least one diagnosed special-needs student (severe hearing loss; he wasn’t eligible for public school in those pre-ADA days, but his parents were major contributors to the parish). And one beleagured Dominican nun, although Sister Jane Edwards was roly-poly not boney (still meaner than most drill sargeants, though). Such were the ‘joys’ of being a back-end Boomer. And the Gen-Xers wonder why I don’t appreciate being lectured about how lucky we were…
Whatever the optimal number of students per class, I will second the statement that “more than fifty” ain’t it.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@BGinCHI:
That’s why we moved down here long ago, there’s all kinds of small places to stop at along the Oregon coast and we don’t have to go far to get there. We make a point of finding new places to visit on each trip and after twenty years we still have tons of places that we haven’t hit yet.
Tillamook is a real pretty town (and their cheese is excellent!) though the cow pastures east of there (heading inland towards Portland) can be rather aromatic in warm weather. We once saw a beach house buried up to its eaves in Garibaldi. There’s a nice jam & syrup place just south of Bandon that we hit up every time we pass through. They make it there and it smells like heaven. They also have flavored honey that is excellent.
Mo’s is the place to go for chowder, hands down. Makes my mouth water thinking about it…lol!
@Elizabelle:
I know, I live here! :)
The cheese is the best. Tillamook cheddar is all the wife buys. Mmmmm! Can’t forget the pepperjack either!
Elie
@Martin:
Its fascinating reading your comments and seeing — again manifest — the wonder of nature and how much our “rules” are just evolving interim things. Nature seems to be much more interesting…
If I am reading between the lines, the practical impacts of this may one day be immense — light and time being interwoven so tightly in our understanding of space and matter.
I am not a good enough thinker or mathematician to understand physics at a deep level — but I do enjoy it and its cousins, astronomy and astrophysics sincerely and have always been fascinated and interested in the immensity and complexity of the macro and micro…
Thanks for sharing your knowledge so openly.
Spaghetti Lee
I think “Jackass In Leather” was the Velvets’ less-successful B-side for “Venus in Furs.”
Joey Maloney
That doofus is forty-eight and he still dresses like an extra from West Side Story? What a maroon.
licensed to kill time
I love how this thread meanders from class size to time-traveling neutrinos to travel tips for the Oregon coast to knitting conventions to a dug-up dead kitty to overworked teacher stories and bony vs. roly-poly nuns clutching instruments of torture in meaty hands to finding out that if we don’t have causality we are buggered.
Balloon Juice is such a special place :)
Jebediah
@Spaghetti Lee:
Was that the one where Lou Reed was experimenting with kazoos?
andy
The above put me in mind of the classic Salon article about the kid who was raised in an Objectivist household:
Jebediah
@andy:
I just read the Salon article. As much as I think objectivists/Randians/Aynstains are dickheads, I was a little surprised at Dad asking his daughter to emancipate herself and start paying him rent. I am so glad my parents weren’t fucksticks.
Death Panel Truck
@Odie Hugh Manatee: Yes to Tillamook being a beautiful place. My wife and I live in Pasco, Washington. We rent a house at Oceanside every August, so we spend a lot of time in Tillamook and environs.
No to Mo’s clam chowder. My father-in-law can eat it by the gallon; I don’t get the appeal at all. My wife hates it, too.
Shlemizel - was Alwhite
@Martin:
DING!DING!DING!DING!DING!
Give the man sea-gar! Money changes everything, to quote the philosopher Cindi Lauper. Children from higher income homes do better for a lot of reasons, few of which schools can affect in a big way.
My wife works Special Ed in a school where 70+% get free or reduced lunches, many are first gen or the children of first gen who are learning English as they go. They start well behind & need more attention to gain ground. There are 35 kids per room (I question your “national average of 20” as that seems way too low) but the classrooms were designed to only hold 20-25 so the desks are literally jammed together with no space. It is impossible for a teacher to work one-on-one with any of them.
More attention from the teacher would make a huge difference in these kids education but we only fund schools at about half (adjusted for inflation) of what we did just 30 years ago.
R-Jud
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
A very happy anniversary to you and the Mrs. I’m burning with envy that she’s running. I was training for a half when I tripped and broke my leg last month.
Watching other people bounding along the roads in the mellow autumn sunshine is making me so antsy. Argh.
harlana
@Cacti:
but, but someday those people will be able to afford to send their kids to private school, some day … oh wait
SRW1
You know, if you think about it, maybe the Mittens is on to something. Let’s say you double class size, but replace one teacher by an armed security guard. You’d need only pay that guard minimum wage and if he’s any good at his job, he’d sure as hell instill discipline in them little folks.
Voila, savings! Voila, more tax cuts for job creators!. What’s not to love?
Johannes
Time-traveling neutrinos meanz I can haz Tardis naow?
Oh, and Mittens is every bit as nasty as his compeers, just less frothingly obvious about it.
Donut
@andy:
That article was one of the most depressing things I have read in a long while. Objectivism is such a cheap design, in its epistemology, as in, it is a set of rules that provide emotionally stunted people an excuse to proclaim that their most base, ignorant desires are paramount. Their rules are your rules, and the rules change when they say so. It boils down to functioning as a license to behave like a sociopath. If you start from a place that says your individual perception is basically infallible, you don’t have a lot of other places to go other than to disdain for other human beings, let alone the rest of the planet. Mix that with nut-job religiosity, and you have a bunch of fucking crazy people screeching at each other in a manic code-language that is completely untethered from reality; in other words, the GOP debate last night. I have been paying close attention to politics for 30 years, the first presidential debates I really remember well are from 1980 election…Reagan/Carter…and what I saw last night (and at previous debates this year) was stunning in its absolute stupidity.
A Mom Anon
Mitt can kiss my ass. What an assinine thing to say. The stupidity of that statement has already been covered so I’ll just rant silently. May he return in his next life as a poor,orphaned minority child in a neighborhood with no school. Fuck him with a rusty farm implement.
Gillespe is just a moron. I hate to break it to him but when you have kids there’s a little something called PARENTING that goes with the deal. I almost want to meet him in person just so I can kick him repeatedly. Dear god,even HE wouldn’t like the world he envisions and wants to foist on the rest of us. I hate glibertarians. It’s a freaking sickness.
alix
I have a friend who teaches gym in a CA public school (remember when they used to have good schools?). This year, he has a class of 57 seventh-graders. Imagine taking 57 seventh-graders outside and even keeping them all from escaping to skip school, much less getting them to engage in some healthy physical activity. No aide. All aides have been laid off.
Sometimes I wonder if any of these people have actually been around kids without their wives or nannies to corral them.
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
@AnotherBruce: My daughter’s Grade 1 teacher is, uh, shall we say, assertive, in making sure that the parents are involved. In Nick’s case, she’d probably say, “You should be less involved.”
Chinn Romney
nickg’s short little tweet is easily the worst thing I’ve read on these internets in a long,long time.
schlemizel - was Alwhite
@alix:
When I was in High School Phy Ed had about 100 boys in it. The teacher hardly ever spent time with the class if it was during a season they coached a sport in. What they had was about a dozen Senior jocks who ran the drills or games assigned by the coach with all the humanity you would expect the privileged few to show underclassmen.
We read “Lord Of the Flies” in English and I had no problem believing the story.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anne Laurie: Up hill both ways, snow, cardboard box at the bottom of a lake, glad to have it, kids these days. Did I miss anything? Oh, yeah, get off my lawn, you stupid Gen-Xers.
Surly Duff
@Martin:
There is something in here that is probably extremely relevant to the outcomes of the students at your school, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…
Dennis G.
@sb: Transcripts are now up and here is the exact quote from Mittens:
Yep, he really said it. I’m sure that this will really help him when the word gets out. What an elitist ass.
El Cid
Class size is irrelevant — look how many kids can fit in the mall food courts!
gnomedad
@Martin:
Is there a simple “thought experiment” that demonstrates how FTL travel or signalling results in a causality violation (or time travel)? I’ve never been able to get an intuitive grasp of this. Too much Star Trek, maybe.
lol
@Donut:
If you want another… uhm… “interesting” article from the same author, check out the mini-scandal regarding something she wrote for Gizmodo.
Ash Can
Mittens is an ignorant shithead. And let me echo the sentiment that the less Nick Gillespie is involved in his kids’ entire upbringing, let alone their education, the better. People like him should not have kids, period.
bemused
@ericblair:
There is an underground lab studying neutrinos in my neck of the north woods, Soudan Underground Mine State Park. MINOS project. We toured the undeground mine a few years ago, very interesting.
norbizness
When you realize that Nick Gillespie has undergone extensive cosmetic surgery and hair-dyeing to look like Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, you should realize who Reason’s moral hero is.
ericblair
@bemused:
Sounds like an interesting trip. To get political about this, the wingnuts would assume that scientists would cover up any weird readings to protect our Holy Textbooks and make sure it looks like we were never wrong about anything. The idea that finding something that violates the core of our knowledge would make scientists piss themselves with excitement is alien to them.
flukebucket
That has to be without question the dumbest fucking tweet I have ever seen. Any brain dead dumb ass knows that parental involvement is the single most important thing for the education of children.
Karounie
I live in Downtown Manhattan. The majority of families in my daughter’s public elementary school have at least one member who works on Wall Street – not the CEOs, but folks in that $250 – $500K/year demo that the New York Times is so worried about these days.
“Parental involvement” is the coin we use to buy our kids a good education. Everything that the Board of Education will allow parents to pay for directly, we buy. All labor that parents are allowed to provide, we volunteer for. In this way, the school can devote nearly all of its official budget to teacher salaries, and class sizes are semi-reasonable in schools that are packed and have waiting lists. The PTA fundraises harder than an Ivy League College.
The parent calculus is – you put in the time and $1K or 2 or 3 each year or you pay the $35K and send your kids to private schools. Having a parent who can stay home and join the PTA (also having 3 or more kids) is higher status than 2 parents who work full time. Also, too, some of us went to public schools ourselves and kinda like ’em.
If Gillespie is feeling guilty about the involvement pressure, he should send his kids to private school. If he is sending them to private school, he isn’t getting his money’s worth and the market is telling him to look elsewhere for a better deal.
Gilles de Rais
Let’s ask my wife. She’s got 55 per classroom this year.
Well, I really can’t print what she says. The parts that aren’t weeping are unprintable profanity.
bemused
@ericblair:
I haven’t noticed our local teaparty wingnuts screeching about gov’t spending on the lab in all the years it’s been there even though Rep Oberstar always supported it. The rightwingers here are still livid about bike trails which Oberstar worked to fund. However, if their rightwing news spin sources told them the underground lab was another evil plot to steal their money and push science down their throats, I’m sure they’d be right on it.
lou
It’s not just Romney, but Bill Gates.
What slays me about the claim that average class size is 20 is nope, it’s not. that’s averaging special ed classes in with regular classes. that’s adding in teachers who don’t actually teach classes but are reading coaches, or provide other non-classroom related services.
bemused
@ericblair:
btw, if you ever plan to visit the underground mine, the tours are available from around Mem Day to Labor Day, iirc.
The painting is amazing. It’s 60ft wide by 25ft high, painted on the very rough mine wall by MN artist Joseph Gianetti and has to be viewed from the opposite platform. The mine wall juts in and out so painting a mural on that surface must have been a challenge.
Annelid Gustator
@Odie Hugh Manatee: The old natural history museum near Tillamook was great. Spectacular collection for where it was.
IrishGirl
WTF?! I didn’t watch the debate, it makes me nauseous to hear them. But this quote is too bizarre for words.
I thought free marketers believed in science! There is absolutely TONS of research that shows smaller class size is directly correlated to better learning outcomes.
Not to mention the TONS of anecdotal evidence any teacher/professor can share. I myself have taught college age students for several years. My class sizes ranged from 5 to over 70. After a certain number, my ability to reach students and really engage them in a meaningful way was definitely prohibited. For me, teaching computer courses with a lab that number was around 20 to 25 students. Now think about how that works in K-12 where the younger a kid is the more hands on help they need. In Kindergarten the teacher probably has to help each child with multiple tasks every day. As they get to middle school the issue of controlling that many students becomes paramount.
The thought that these GOP idjits want to turn our kids into ignorant sardines in the name of profit should worry and motivate Democratic voters.
dcdl
Due to budget cuts like everywhere else, two elementary schools closed, class sizes are 30 to 38, and the kids basically go to school 4 days a week.
For the ones talking about OR, from there and love it, have you stopped at Oswald State Park and hiked in or stop at Florence and that area to go to the sand dunes?
uptown
Because with our current shortage of jobs for young educated workers and an aging teacher pool, that would be a bad thing how?
DougW
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Also, go to Washington State University Creamery for their ice cream (Ferdinand’s)and the school cheese (Cougar Gold). Cougar Gold is in my opinion, the best cheese from the USA.
Older
@Omnes Omnibus: So do you disbelieve these anecdotes, or what is your problem exactly? When I was in school in the 40’s and 50’s the limit on class size was how many chairs they could squeeze into the room. Not even desks, although there were usually desks up front.
I am really sorry to hear we’re returning to those methods. I’m glad I no longer have any kids in school.