Comments on: #93 Weird Science

By: Psymon

Psymon — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:38:41 +0000

Yes, it was a weak excuse. I have trouble responding seriously.

By: chaospet

chaospet — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 06:02:12 +0000

I’m aware that it can be very difficult to find quality high school teachers due to the substandard pay and rigors of the job. But unless you have some specific evidence to the contrary (and if so I’d be interested), the claim that in 21 years they couldn’t find someone at least minimally more competent than this fellow sounds like a pretty weak excuse.

By: Psymon

Psymon — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 04:57:49 +0000

High school teacher is a low-paying, underappreciated, and very difficult job. It took so long to fire the nutcase because they couldn’t get a replacement for him. (Yes, it took longer than 21 years to find a replacement for him.) As for myself, you couldn’t pay me enough to deal with the abuse teachers receive on a daily basis.
I took the pure math track, because there was absolutely no way I was going to become a math teacher (I suck at explaining things–the concepts come too easily to me, so my teaching would be an exercise in futility and frustration for everyone involved), and a few of the applied classes frightened me off.

By: chaos872

chaos872 — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:55:31 +0000

Jumping from a discussion about religion in a classroom to the (generally accepted as rare) assumption that this would engender a desire to destroy religion itself is blatantly over the top, re-reading i guess i can see your valid points on against banning religion but thats kinda not the issue i under the impression that we were discussing
“a small minority of people do bad things doesn’t mean that we should kill off Christianity”
My inference that you were defending allowing religion in school was aparently incorrect, for that im sorry

By: Raijinili

Raijinili — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:27:00 +0000

chaos872: chaospet got it right. In fact, I’m an atheist. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t speak out on the “side” of religion.

I made two statements, one addressed to each side. Perhaps your own bias made you think that because I said something that can be viewed as “pro-Christianity”, I must be a Christian. Since you’re on a philosophy fansite, you should ponder on whether your bias creates unnecessary hatred and taints your judgement.

As for my view on religion in school, I say that most Christian parents have the choice to send their kids to schools which aren’t publicly funded. In my experience, the vast majority of people who argue against teaching kids science in schools, or for teaching intelligent design in the schools, don’t understand science.

Regarding teachers: On the one hand, it’s the fault of the government for not recruiting more smart people to become teachers, to increase the options of the schools. On the other hand, the teacher unions (in NYC at least) insist on having in teacher contracts provisions that, in effect, make it difficult to fire bad and even harmful teachers.

Again on the other hand, I’m not sure I can blame the government, since it isn’t like they’re not trying (again, in NYC). Maybe we should blame colleges, since, when I got to college, I found that many of the future high school math teachers decided to major in high school math because they thought pure or applied math would be too hard, and they tended to take the easy classes. I lost a lot of my respect for my high school teachers that day.

Sorry for the long post.