thinklarge's comments

Wow this is an awesome step and please keep us appraised of how things are going or if more help is needed. It is this kind of optimism that demands changes from the government.

Sometimes it takes the people speaking up about an issue for the government to get a sense of what the people want.

Now for anyone else tho is on here call your congressmen and senators! They really do care what you think and about the public opinion even above what lobbyists have to say.

I'd also like to add that this may have been a class of students who were in a sign-language class...

I did an experiment similar to this in highschool where we were supposed to go without hearing, sight, or speech for a few days. The specifics are fuzzed but there were a lot of kids walking around with things covering their eyes.

It was a cool little experiment and it sounds like this teacher took it a little further. It also sounds like most good stories that I know, mostly fact but a little fiction in there to spice it up rather than saying... well shit I just don't remember that detail...

I work on a government contract. I've seen how much money the government can waste in general and I think this is the wrong solution.

If we do go to a government based system we need a way to make the government accountable for KEEPING costs down while still providing the best care they can to everyone. I don't think that just saying "let the government handle it" is the right mentality. We must first establish a mission for that (emerging) department of the government and keep them to it.

Also, how can we switch to a national health service, while we are over budget by about 40%? Sure, let's do it, but that would mean a reduction of government elsewhere by 40% first and THEN we could being to take other parts away while adding a national health service...

Thank you for saving me the time of writing this retort :-) Great post.

I have to say that I think defining set curriculum and test goals for students DOES constrain good teachers. They are attempting to prepare their students to pass a test. So what do they do, they focus on that test and attempt to prepare them to pass with a certain disregard for what actually should be taught.

I think that this limits the scope and types of tests that teachers can give their students to really prepare them for these tests.

I think that we need to create a better metric for testing teachers and students, because our metrics are broken. I (as a student) see the education that is given post NCLB as detrimental to the future of our nation. It has taken a few steps back in the fact that we no longer allow extraordinary teachers to set the pace, but we allow the state to regulate what pace we need.

EDIT: It doesn't constrain teachers, but it does pressure teachers to teach to the test rather than teaching for college and education in general.

Very nicely done. It was cool that you outlined this in a lesson format and pointed to how things could have been done differently and attempted to show the perspective of the commenter. Talk about constructive input.