the longer you stare
(Source: archenland)
You get home from a long day at work and turn on the TV. It’s been a long week, so you think to yourself- maybe i’ll take the family to a movie on Saturday. Maybe we’ll even go on a vacation soon! We could visit museums and go to plays and see all sorts of fun attractions.
When you turned the TV on, nothing happened. There are no actors to entertain you.
When you went to the movie theater, nothing was showing. There were no advertisements to tell you that anything was showing, so you went to the theater to find out. Nothing playing. There is no one to film and create movies for you. Well at least your vacation will be fun, right? Not like there will be any plays to see and there won’t be anything in the art museums.
Well at least you have the shack you are living in that you made out of cardboard and sheets.
Not like you could find an architect to build you a house with all the money you’re making as an engineer.YEAH. FUCK YOU. That’s all. -.- There’s no such thing as a useless major. Every major has something that does affect your life in someway. As humans, we even rely on sanitary engineers to come around and take the trash every week. If there’s a job or career or major, there’s a reason and need for it. So no one has to judge you based on your job, career, or major. -_-
Actually guys… I’m a have to disagree with you on this one =\
Let me put it this way.
You don’t need a degree in Business, to do Business. You just go out, and do.
Granted, if you do go out and get the degree, you probably have a more structured understanding.
But like, I’m sure what they meant by useless was the level of difficulty associated with getting a job if that’s what you majored in.
And everyone knows that Fine Arts is so vague it means nothing nowadays. (And by means nothing, I mean your future employer knows nothing about what you were taught, or how you were taught, or what exactly you know, etc. etc.)
Not discrediting the majors, I’m just saying, you don’t need to go to school for some of these things…
(Although, I disagree with the appearance of Architecture and Graphic Design o.o)
I sort of like it when my architects know what they’re doing…
(Source: swyhis)
Oh AMSA. Why must you take over my life?
Over the past year, AMSA has grown from a teensy dying club of 3 members into a now flourishing organization of over 100 active members by the last count. For me, every day seems dominated by thoughts of my organization. How to expand, to keep steady, to inspire and to make a difference. It’s gotten so bad, I haven’t even always been able to study properly for my classes. I’ll admit however, that I’ve spent a decent amount of time playing video games and that I’m not actually failing any classes. It’s just… I really wanted straight A’s this quarter and it looks like I might actually get a B.
It wouldn’t be so bad if my officer team would put a teensy bit more effort though…
With the exception of Farhad, I sometimes feel like I can’t actually depend on them anymore. (P.S. Try not to get a big head while reading this) Over the last few months, I’ve partnered with the local hospital, an overseas medical clinic, set up every single general meeting, started an internship opportunity for my members, met with basically every single person on campus, done massive amounts of research to understand how to expand and build a club and helped start a literacy project for the community. It’s been a long, rocky road but the results are showing and people are happy.
All I asked my officers to do was…
1. Come up with ideas to help the community
2. Have one fundraiser a month
3. Have two social events a month
4. Keep a solid mailing list and publicize AMSA around campus
It’s honestly not that much. So far we’ve had… one fundraiser (organized by me)
a splattering of mini social events, some by me, a few by officers. Most of which were simply, “Hey, We’re eating at this restaurant at this time. Be there!” Nothing that should’ve taken more than 10 minutes to plan. Honestly, I’ve gotten so fed up with their lack of ability to plan events, that I’m doing the next one on my own.
We HAVE however, publicized well! Thank god for Andrieu, Muhammad and Farhad keeping up a solid emailing system and posting flyers/ facebook events. I just wish it hadn’t taken 7 weeks to get flyers up.
*sighs* So where am I going with all of this?
I have to re-elect the officers for the upcoming year. I’m not going to lie when I say that there are at least a handful of freshmen members that put more effort into AMSA than some of my officer team. MAYBE, it’s my fault for not being clear enough with what exactly I wanted them to do. I dont know… They’re all really great individuals and I want to keep them but I’m sort of conflicted right now. Bleh…
This is apparently coming out in 3 days.
In 3 days, I’m going to start to be a total jogging addict, I think
I’ve been beta testing it and I can confirm it’s actually the greatest app ever. Full iOS release date is as specified, Android release this Spring.
It’s so intense, at one point during the first mission when radio contact was lost, I could hear them trying to contact me “Can you hear us?!” and I literally grabbed the mic and shouted, “I CAN HEAR YOU WHAT DO I DO?” even though that’s not how it works.
I’m just glad nobody was near me.
I might actually start jogging when this comes out
This sounds amazing tbhWAH
(Source: listeningtociociosan, via mgamboa-the-aguila)
tobiornottobithatisthequestion:
Make a fist and put it in the center of this.
The dots appear to come faster.
this is what clark kent does at the office
That comment.
SCIENCE
YES SCIENCE
NO. MAGIC.
I love it when this comes on my dash
SCIENCE
NEVER. LOOKING. AWAY.
MADNESS
… The dots in the middle are moving slower and the dots on the outside are moving faster. So what do you think happens when you cover the slower ones?
I fucked up :/
Broke one of my roommate’s memento’s.
I honestly should have noticed there was something different about the cup and god… I don’t even know. I know how depressed I’d be if one my mementos got broken, let alone by someone else.
It’s not like there’s even any real way to fix this one. I feel like I broke more than a cup. I broke memories. It’s not even like a replacement would fix this kind of thing. Man… I don’t even know where to start.
So Little Time.: Zuckerberg Warns Facebook Users to Stop Ranting About Finals
PALO ALTO, CA – Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and President of Facebook, has stated publicly this week that he is “extremely pissed off” about the amount of Facebook posts and status updates relating to college students’ distress over final exams.
“It’s gotten so bad that the site has almost crashed…
Despite being a relatively amusing post, MiamiFlipside’s fake report hasn’t seemed to do much more than tick off a few unsuspecting college students. Just making sure that everyone is aware that this article is a work of fiction and that, like The Onion, the article is simply a work of satire and nothing more. Note the source as MiamiFlipside, a news humor website, and that no public statement from Zuckerberg actually exists
(Source: miamiflipside.com)
When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids
wow and oy!
This was written by Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.
By Marion Brady
A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.
By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.
He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.
“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.
He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.
“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.
“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.
“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”
Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:
“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.
“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”
“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”
There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.
Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.
All that without so much as a pilot program to see if their simplistic, worn-out ideas work, and without a single procedure in place that imposes on them what they demand of teachers: accountability.
But maybe there’s hope. As I write, a New York Times story by Michael Winerip makes my day. The stupidity of the current test-based thrust of reform has triggered the first revolt of school principals.
Winerip writes: “As of last night, 658 principals around the state (New York) had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.”
One of those school principals, Winerip says, is Bernard Kaplan. Kaplan runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, but is required to attend 10 training sessions.
“It’s education by humiliation,” Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”
Carol Burris, named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, has to attend those 10 training sessions.
Katie Zahedi, another principal, said the session she attended was “two days of total nonsense. I have a Ph.D., I’m in a school every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to do evaluations.”
A fourth principal, Mario Fernandez, called the evaluation process a product of “ludicrous, shallow thinking. They’re expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand new Mercedes pop up.”
My school board member-friend concluded his email with this: “I can’t escape the conclusion that those of us who are expected to follow through on decisions that have been made for us are doing something ethically questionable.”
He’s wrong. What they’re being made to do isn’t ethically questionable. It’s ethically unacceptable. Ethically reprehensible. Ethically indefensible.
How many of the approximately 100,000 school principals in the U.S. would join the revolt if their ethical principles trumped their fears of retribution? Why haven’t they been asked?
Worth it to read the whole thing!
Multiple choice tests are bullshit. Nothing is as simple as A, B, C or D.
This hits the spot.
It’s people like these that are ruining our country.
The importance of high school exams isn’t simply to make sure that kids understand algebra or grammar. It’s too make sure that they have a basic understanding of how to learn and retain material. If we lower our standards for the children of America, we’re lowering the standards for ourselves as a country. We’re already the laughing stock of the world. Would you really have us degrade any further?
The other point is that the material learned in high school isn’t relevant to your life outside school. I again, beg to disagree. What is “math”? Math is simply taking some fundamental formulas and modifying them to fit your needs. Math is CREATIVE LOGIC. Learning to use math is the classroom’s attempt at teaching you to creatively mold your surroundings to solve your problems. Math is also the fundamental building blocks needed to understand higher level learning. How many of us thought multiplication was important when we were taught it? None of us. How many of us have since needed to use it to understand bigger concepts? All of us.
Please Mr. Principals. Don’t punish the education systems of America anymore than they need to be. Change the curriculum to be more suited to blue collar/ white collar work. Change the curriculum so that it has less to do with the fundamentals of college education and more with getting people in the workforce. But NEVER lower you standards for the future
9gag:
Emotionally intense images of retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis - who has joined the #OccupyWallStreet protests - being arrested by the NYPD.
Captain Lewis has been outspoken against the NYPD’s wrongful use of violence against peaceful protesters.
From what I have seen, Ray Lewis’ conduct defines honor, bravery, and dignity.
There is a media blackout on images of his participation in the protest, and on his arrest:
It’s proved impossible for me to get this shot of former Philadelphia Police Cpt. Ray Lewis being arrested, published anywhere. I was adamantly rebuffed by the Philadelphia Inquirer, NYT, local NY papers, and Newsweek, before even looking at the photograph. One of the only published photos of this paradoxical and intense event is located here at the NYC Observer:
http://www.observer.com/2011/11/former-philadelphia-police-captain-ray-lewis-arrested-ows/
Make this viral and they will come.
Ray Lewis gets 2 posts this morning, because this needs to be seen. I’m not even sure why, but this pair of photos made me cry hysterically.
oh my god. so much props to this man. this country has turned into utter fucking insanity.
I have so much respect for this man.
Always reblog Cpt. Ray Lewis.
That’s some real shit there.
gangster shit.
(via mgamboa-the-aguila)
