A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.
—Theodore Roosevelt
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Category Archives: Education
Quote of the Day
We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
—B. F. Skinner
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True, a little learning is a dangerous thing, but it still beats total ignorance.
—Abigail Van Buren
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No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
STEM v. LGBTQ
The NY Post has an article headlined Researchers condemn rise of ‘fascist ideologues’ after students send mocking responses to LGBTQ survey.
Academic researchers condemned students’ irreverent and offensive responses to an LGBTQ survey, claiming the pushback indicates “fascist ideologues” are “living ‘inside the house’ of engineering and computer science.”
In an article for the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, academics from Oregon State University wrote about their shock at receiving sarcasm and mockery in response to their research into undergraduate LGBTQ students studying in STEM fields.
The researchers were bothered by the responses on 50 out of 349 questionnaires.
STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. While math can be a theoretical exercise, the other three are grounded in the Real World. If the Real World results of an experiment fail, the Scientific Method sends you back to refine your hypothesis, and engineers and technologists can’t use wishful thinking to force a design to work in spite of the limits imposed by Nature. As Scotty observed, “Ye cannae change the Laws of Physics.”
Transgenderism clearly rejects the biological basis of sex. It is anti-scientific, so I’m not surprised that many of the STEM students responding to the survey were derisive.
The research team declared that the mockery they received “had a profound impact on morale and mental health,” particularly for one transgender researcher who was “already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric.”
Profound impact on mental health? Really? On a transgender person who denies the objective reality of his or her DNA?
The scholars concluded the “malicious responses” indicate that fascism has become a common ideology in engineering and computer science academia.
So it’s now fascism to believe the Real World limits biology places on our lives.
The Truth is out there, but I doubt that it can be found in the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies.
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When everything is easy one quickly gets stupid.
—Maxim Gorky
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You learn more from the flops than from the hits.
—Theodore Bikel
Electrons and Guys Over 50
It’s being reported that the electrical system of the submarine recently lost on a tourist dive to the wreck of the Titanic had been designed by a college intern. It had been previously reported that the CEO of OceanGate, the company that operated the sub, didn’t want to hire “white guys over 50.”
I’m currently working on the power systems for a couple projects for NASA. One is a robot that will be used to refuel satellites on orbit. The other is a lidar system what will used by autonomous vehicles for close-in maneuvering. While most of members of the teams working on these systems are young engineers under 30, there are at least a couple over-50 engineers and technicians on both teams. One of us is 70. I’m 75. We’re there as mentors.
It’s been said that most of us need about 10,000 hours of experience to fully master a skill. (Think of all the time Michael Jordan spent shooting baskets.) The young men and women I work with are smart and talented, but only part way up their learning curves. We geezers are there to coach them and to help them avoid mistakes we have already made.
In Re Affirmative Action
Karine Jean-Pierre was unavailable for comment.
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Fluency in even one other language would be fantastic.
—Jim Broadbent
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There’s no shortcut to learning a craft; you just have to put the years in.
—Kylie Minogue
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Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.
—Quintilian
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“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” Benefits of a classical education.
—Hans Gruber
Fact Checking the Fact Chekists
Teacher union president Randi Weingarten has been trying to respin The Narrative to make it seem that she wasn’t in favor of keeping schools closed for as long as she did. He claims were challenged on Twitter by comments on its recently adopted Community Notes feature. PolitiFact has tried to “fact check” those comments.
PolitFact has been fact checked via Community Notes.
Heh.
Quote of the Day
What’s done to children, they will do to society.
—Karl A. Menninger
Whose Children?
I was going to post a comment about Biden’s remark about children in “our” democracy, but Laughing Wolf beat me to it.
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The life so short, the crafts so long to learn.
—Geoffrey Chaucer
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Play the game for more than you can afford to lose … only then will you learn the game.
—Winston Churchill
When Seconds Count, …
… the police are only minutes away.
The Nashville Metro Police officers who responded to yesterday’s school shooting didn’t waste any time. They responded as quickly as they could, moved into the building even though they had come under fire while still in the parking lot, and took out the shooter. But 14 minutes elapsed between the 911 call and the killer being killed.
We need to adopt a more robust way to protect our children.
Schools, Guns, and Nashville
The school shooting today would have been unimaginable when I was in elementary school in Nashville in the ’50s. Here’s part of a post about Teachers and Guns that I posted five years ago this month.
* * * * *
That got me to thinking about my teachers and which ones I would trust with a gun.
Mr. Brown, the 8th grade teacher, and Coach Warfield were WWII veterans. I suspect they would have handled the responsibility. The principal Mrs. Mathis and my 4th grade teacher Mrs. Thomson probably would have also done well.
My high school was part of a college, so we had an armed campus cop assigned to our building and grounds. Additionally, several members of the faculty were veterans, including one of my French teachers who had come to America as a war bride after serving in the Resistance. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that the American History teacher Dr. Holden was armed.
It was a different time and place.
* * * * *
A very different place and time—one where the idea of a school shooting was so crazy that no one would be insane enough to try it.
Quote of the Day
There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.
—Leonardo da Vinci
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
The Stanford Law School students who shouted down Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan last week don’t want their names or photos to appear in any news reports about the incident. They are claiming a right to privacy while acting in a public space.
They are about to experience a bit of learning the hard way.
The tuition at Stanford Law School is currently $22,308 per quarter, but many students receive some sort of financial aid. The school of hard knocks always charges full fare.
Quote of the Day
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
—Bertrand Russell
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Experience teaches only the teachable.
—Aldous Huxley
Don’t Know Much Biology
Do the schools in Minnesota admits students from a species other than homo sapiens?