Official Derailed thread... Wait, what?

but that is a candy bar. not a stick of butter. a stick of butter would probably be disgusting.

 

The teachers and former teachers who are now overseeing policies about education are increasingly steering away from standardized memory tests and towards tests where in order to do well you have to both know the stuff covered by your education but also make an insight about the question in hand. There's heavy emphasis on "understand what was asked" and so.

For example maths, chemistry and physics tests have a standardized book that contains all the important constants, formulas and such, since you can't possibly memorize them all by heart in a few years and even the best engineers tend to use references a lot to check stuff instead of "iirc the melting point of Cu is..." or "I think our steel should withstand that and I'm not going to do the math".

So, in those subjects it's about knowing how to access references and finish required number of questions in given time.

I liked history etc., it wasn't anything about remembering dates and it was all about making arguments and supporting them with facts and examples that you remember. So, you could argue anything and you'd get full points if you built a solid case using historical examples in a well structured manner.

 

MISTÄ?!

KERROHETI!

 

math and stuff should be about how to find what you need to do to figure out the problem not memorizing shit. also math here (in all my classes) was heavy on theory and low on pracitality. we did alot of problems but never in any practical way as in we were never using it to solve some practical problem (that would have been a theoretical situation of course) but I mean a real world problem.

All my history classes (love history) were knowing how to discuss what happened, knowing what happened and rarely knowing any dates. any dates we had to know were just the years never specifics (like december 7 or anything like that). pearl harbor we just need to know the year.

 

We had two lines of maths since highschool after which you either go to vocational education or university.
The "long maths" was all about abstract, no application and the "short maths" had fewer courses and didn't go as deep to things you need in engineering but what it did cover was great, stuff like calculating tax percentages and how much taxes you end up paying, how much watts your household consumes etc, and things like if you put a sphere shaped rock into a hollow cylinder, what is the lowest amount of water to fill the cylinder with the cylinder shaped so that the sphere fits inside it?

I loved that stuff even if it meant skipping integrals and stuff like that. Heck, I've made all sorts of gravitational calculations and programming and I've still never needed more than what I learned at HS. The practical approach to vectors and statistics & probability were awesome.

Didn't like chemistry back then and I regret that. When the course started and one of our first calculations filled 2-3 full A4 pages I said "goodbye" and dropped off non mandatory chemistry. Nowadays I've been having to catch up on my own. Sigh.

 

It is 68F out right now, in February (our supposedly coldest month). For the record I live on the western warmer side of Colorado.

 

I hate you. it's all of 24 degrees here in north carolina. and I'm not in the mountains.

 

Yea so it gets over 120 in the summer here so here in 4 months when I am crying about dying of heat stroke inside with the cooler on you will feel much better about the situation.

 

well if this summer is like last summer where it rarely got over 90 degrees sure. but its gotten to 110 here.

 

East TN high hit 16F today.

 

6F here.

 

I thought everyday was national hate florida day. because the state sucks.

 

I like living in Florida, just not the people who live and visit here.

 

well yeah. i'll give you that. it's the people that make the state suck.

 

Derailed weather is derailed.