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[mainiac]

Decades of her husband's history, you mean.

No I do not.

Now are you trying to be as condescending as possible right now or does it just come naturally?

[wierd]

As a kid who was legally in the gifted program, I have reservations about No Child Left Behind.

On the one hand, it helps to ensure that children with learning disabilities get the extra care they need. On the other, it produces a trend toward the bottom to accomplish this, resulting in removed opportunities for those who are genuinely able to shine. (A 100% score on a test catered for the lowest common denominator does not capture the degree of excellence that the truly brilliant student is capable of demonstrating.)

I dont see a viable solution to this problem without segregating classes of students. The ultimate negative outcome of producing "Double standard" education seems to be the poison on the other side of that decision.

While I see the need for a truly standardized, single standard based, educational system-- I can't help but note that it can never be ideal, and that it would ultimately stifle academnic and intellectual growth of top performers.  It is very much a "Pick your poison" situation.

I truly wish there was a third option, that did not involve poison of some kind. Sadly, I dont see a logical means of accomplishing that. 

[Strife26]

It was a massive cluster fuck of a disaster that managed to bring the bottom up slightly by tanking everything else. I'd like to see federalism ring true, with federal oversight noting and taking action when states or cities have massive disparity on geographic or racial lines.

[smjjames]

I do laugh that when they claim Obama was born out of the US, they refuse to recognize de sanguines citizenship. When Cruz actually was born out of the US, it's a non-issue and everyone immediately accepts this fact.

Part of it might be because he has renounced the Canadian citizenship that he didn't know he had, plus his mom is American. But yeah, it's pretty wierd how Cruz was actually born outside the US and not on a military base (which is how McCain got a pass on it) that is outside the US and everybody's cool with it.

Not sure how many countries have that kind of requirement for their highest office.

[Strife26]

I don't recall reading about any the last time I was studying it (which was a few weeks ago, assuming memory serves). Modern definition, with the caveat that it's not really a thing that has much legal precedent in constitutional law, says that one qualifies as a natural born citizen if you were a citizen at birth.

[smjjames]

Theres several actually that have the clause or a slight variant of it, Columbia, Argentina, Mexico, Algeria, and Angola to name a bunch. There's a partial list on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidential_qualifications_by_country

Racism aside, whether you were born outside the country isn't quite a big deal as it was over 200 years ago. Also, Canada is like, our bro, so, it's really not THAT big a deal if Cruz is born in Canada.

[Shadowlord]

When I was in high school there were AP courses, and you had a choice - if you were in a school that had them - whether to take them or not. I was out before No Child Left Behind, though I saw or ran into two problems while I was in school:
Not every school had AP courses, or even good courses, and the quality of even the regular courses (and teachers) varied greatly in different schools,
And, if you failed to learn something, or forgot it, or it was never taught in the first place, and it turned out to be critical to a later course, you could end up being screwed by the time you realized.

It didn't help that our entire education system was (still is?) set up in a way that it seems to discourage permanently learning things. The summer break doesn't help. I won't guess about testing since that all changed with NCLB and will all be changing again. I had another reason, too: With math, for instance, if my teachers couldn't explain to me how anything was useful, I had no real incentive to learn it.

I remember in high school I often solved things using methods other than the way I was supposed to do it, too, because I saw a way to do it with what I already knew without needing to learn and memorize a bunch of new stuff that the book/class was trying to get us to learn. So I'd get the right answers and get full credit, but not actually learn what I was supposed to be learning. Of course that did mean that I continued to remember how to use the methods that I was using, whereas anything I learned and used just for a week would tend to be forgotten, so...

[wierd]

My educational experience was different.

I could only handle being taught the parts of speech SO MANY TIMES before I wanted to dope-slap the English teachers.  However, because we had people WHO COULD NOT READ in our class, EVER YEAR was remedial English. IMHO, the ideal solution is not to throw on the brakes of intellectual progress for everyone else while playing catchup with the people that think it is cool to not know how to read (Perfectly intellectually capable of reading, but actively choosing to simply not read-- I consider this significantly different from people with dyslexia and other learning disabilities-- My brother has severe dyslexia, I know what it does to people and how they respond when trying to read. This is not the case here, or at least was not the case in my school. Your mileage may vary.) but to instead segregate those students out from the rest of the class, so the majority of the classroom can progress at a significantly less painful pace.

Likewise with mathematics. I could only handle being drilled about the distributive property SO MANY TIMES before I wanted to dope-slap the math teacher.

Every year, half the year was spent in remedial education.  Every year, for half the year, my brain was suffering intellectual atrophy.

It was horrible.

[smjjames]

Also, interesting article that I came across while looking for info on the native-born requirement: http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/opinion/report/051711_obama_birthing/natural-born-leaders-not-requirement-other-countries/

[TheBiggerFish]

Yeah.  To both of wierd and Shadowlord.

[smjjames]

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/loretta-sanchez-muslims-caliphate-terrorism-216656

*facepalm*

She's a democrat btw. I did not expect democrats to buy into the islamophobia crap, and would like to know her source. Also, she's lost my vote for California senator to replace Barbara Boxer.

[Frumple]

Honestly, our best hope in the near future is probably continuing educational software development. Another two or three decades and effective artificial teachers aides (if not outright teachers) and we would have a lot of the issues our current system has just kinda' disappear. Probably 75-90% of the problems I've seen in classrooms (both as a student, and from hearing the teachers perspectives -- a good chunk of my family either are or have been involved in the school system) over the years all boil down to teachers just not having the fucking support staff and time they need to properly teach, and the students having similar issues.

We could probably do the same thing with more manpower and better resource investiture/allocation, but it's fairly goddamn obvious we're not going to, so working towards a technological solution is probably about the best bet our society has...

[Aklyon]

I'm gonna agree with weird there. English was the class where you learn absolutely nothing because its the exact same bloody class you had last year, but with different books. And apparently they shifted the maths around the year after I left, so i dunno how that turned out now.

[RedKing]

Decades of her husband's history, you mean.

No I do not.

Now are you trying to be as condescending as possible right now or does it just come naturally?

When talking to you, it seems to come naturally. 

And I would love to see these decades of Hillary Clinton's history as a civil rights crusader -- starting with her volunteering for Barry Goldwater, perhaps? And then continuing to her Jenny-come-lately support of gay marriage, after the rest of the country had already moved in that direction? Or maybe her not making a single statement about what went down in Ferguson until three weeks later?

She's a pure politician -- she won't so much as take a shit without checking first to see if the polls support it. And then she'll try and convince everyone that she was for what everyone else was for all along. She reminds me a hell of a lot of our previous NC governor, Beverly Perdue. Perdue wouldn't take a stand on anything because she didn't want to alienate any particular group (and instead alienated ALL of them). When she finally did grow a pair, it was after the GOP had developed enough of a stranglehold on the state legislature that it didn't matter -- she could take principled veto stands all day because they were going to be overridden.

[Shadowlord]

My educational experience was different.

I could only handle being taught the parts of speech SO MANY TIMES before I wanted to dope-slap the English teachers.  However, because we had people WHO COULD NOT READ in our class, EVER YEAR was remedial English. IMHO, the ideal solution is not to throw on the brakes of intellectual progress for everyone else while playing catchup with the people that think it is cool to not know how to read (Perfectly intellectually capable of reading, but actively choosing to simply not read-- I consider this significantly different from people with dyslexia and other learning disabilities-- My brother has severe dyslexia, I know what it does to people and how they respond when trying to read. This is not the case here, or at least was not the case in my school. Your mileage may vary.) but to instead segregate those students out from the rest of the class, so the majority of the classroom can progress at a significantly less painful pace.

Likewise with mathematics. I could only handle being drilled about the distributive property SO MANY TIMES before I wanted to dope-slap the math teacher.

Every year, half the year was spent in remedial education.  Every year, for half the year, my brain was suffering intellectual atrophy.

It was horrible.

I had a similar experience to that in English, but just in English - It seemed like English class was exactly the same every year from 5th through 9th grade or so.