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[Graknorke]

Walking Dead adventure game has the achievements for chapter 3.
Update is on its way choo choo.

[AlleeCat]

It's hard to actually look up anything for it because its official name is The Walking Dead Season 2 Episode 3, which just turns up episode 203 of the TV show.

[lemon10]

Watched White House Down last night (aka the one where the president gets a rocket launcher). It was a pretty awesome movie.

I did have some quibbles about the plot and some specific things (eg. The US nuclear launch system doesn't work that way, That isn't what the army would do under those circumstances, They wouldn't kick the president out of office for nothing like they did; especially when he hasn't even been captured yet). But overall it was a fun movie, and the negatives were far outweighed by the fun parts.

[Harry Baldman]

Because they teach you things that are absolutely counterproductive to think.
Remainders and "there are no negative numbers" are the two I can think of immediately.

Ah. I suppose it's all a matter of priorities. The whole idea of elementary school is to teach you basic methods of functioning and general definitions of things that exist rather than show you how to think, I believe, and to basically make sure that, whether you learn to think appropriately or not (not something that's particularly easy to teach, given the sheer number of teachers of varying quality one goes through), you can do arithmetic, write words and compose sentences, talk a bit and know some basic facts about life, plus have a decent grasp of socialization. A modest goal, of course, but, in my opinion, one should not expose children to too many unnecessary complexities, even if, looking back as adults, we think of the simplifications as obstacles to further learning.

Because it's completely and utterly against everything they're going to teach you in no less than 5 years, they teach you things that you're going to have to forget as part of the curriculum and believe it or not MATH IS PRETTY IMPORTANT FOR A LOT OF THINGS

On the bright side, one could learn about adaptability and questioning one's beliefs that way. And math is pretty important for a lot of things for a certain, some would say small segment of the population, while basic arithmetic, which elementary school simplifications help learn, is a lot more crucial. And if you don't learn algebra or geometry in middle/primary/high/whatever the hell kind of school, just like if you don't learn Spanish or singing, you can pretty safely deal with life without it, it's no big deal. You have to pace the information and layer white lies together with basic truths. It's not like knowing that negative, irrational and complex numbers exist, or strictly proper mathematical notation, or any other piece of such trivia really helps you in any way when learning arithmetic - it just makes things more confusing instead. In short, just because you'd find it convenient as a thinking human being right now doesn't mean it'd help a developing mind in any way. But I'm hardly an educator myself, really, so that's merely an opinion not backed by any real research.

[Graknorke]

It's hard to actually look up anything for it because its official name is The Walking Dead Season 2 Episode 3, which just turns up episode 203 of the TV show.

Please tell me that's a numbering convention rather than actually how many episodes there are.
That seems like a lot, but at the same time most American TV shows seem to have a lot of episodes per series to me.

[Graknorke]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Wow Colbert should watch his privilege making fun of self esteem issues.
#cancelcolbert

[Mictlantecuhtli]

He's too damn handsome to comprehend 'self esteem' and issues therein, gah.

[AlleeCat]

It's hard to actually look up anything for it because its official name is The Walking Dead Season 2 Episode 3, which just turns up episode 203 of the TV show.

Please tell me that's a numbering convention rather than actually how many episodes there are.
That seems like a lot, but at the same time most American TV shows seem to have a lot of episodes per series to me.

It's a numbering convention. Season 2, episode 03. It's the official numbering convention for American TV shows.

[10ebbor10]

It's for that reason that American series never have more than 99 episodes, or rational seasons.

[AlleeCat]

The Simpsons has 550+ episodes. Unless you're referring to seasons, in which case 99+ seems a bit excessive for one season, don't you think?

[DeKaFu]

Re: The math stuff, it immediately put me in mind of a concept presented in the Science of Discworld book. The idea that in teaching science, the learner must be presented with a progressively less-wrong series of right-sounding lies. It used "rainbows are caused by light shining through raindrops like a prism" as an example, which is what we're told despite it being a completely inadequate explanation (doesn't explain the shape, for example). Evolution's also a big one. Think "animals evolve to become better suited to their environment and improve their chances of survival" which they were still trying to un-teach people for my entire Biology undergrad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children

Lies-to-children is simply a prevalent and necessary kind of lie. Universities are very familiar with bright, qualified school-leavers who arrive and then go into shock on finding out that biology or physics isn't quite what they've been taught so far. 'Yes, but you needed to understand that,' they are told, 'so that now we can tell you why it isn't exactly true.'

The flip side being, of course, that if you don't get the more-correct version down the line, you end up with a muddled and technically wrong idea of the thing for the rest of your life. Which probably helps to explain a lot of scientific ignorance out there, sadly, as well as why some people get the idea that scientists don't know what they're doing ("Why can't they figure out the answer to this scientific question when I learned it in 10th grade biology?").

[SealyStar]

This cheesy-catchy-badass disco song.

Sometimes I wonder if Kanye West should retire as a musician and just pick songs for a cool-music-of-the-month club.

[AlleeCat]

On one hand, I hate the American public school system, but on the other hand, I kind of worry about the social aspect of being homeschooled. I guess it doesn't really matter if you live in a really social neighborhood with a lot of kids. But I wouldn't know what that's like, seeing as how the only kids in my neighborhood growing up only lived there half the year because their parents were divorced and each had custody every other week.
I say all this because I want to have kids some day, but I don't want them to go through the same hell I went through with public schooling.

[MagmaMcFry]

I don't see why lies to children are necessary, especially in mathematics. Instead of saying "There are no negative numbers", you could just say "Here's a few numbers (the positive integers), let's learn how to calculate with those. There are other numbers too, but we don't need those yet". Instead of saying "Division gives you a quotient and a remainder", you could just say "Since we only know integers yet, we can't always divide every number by every other number perfectly, so we have to find a way to describe [noninteger quotients], and we'll do that using remainders".

[Aklyon]

And now a fire emblem-related interruption, because its one of the awesome songs.