houseoftolstoy @[email protected]

And finally, we have the students themselves. Sometimes, you just have someone too stupid to succeed, no matter the other two factors.

The thing is, bringing up ANY of these factors as a cause for students not achieving and not learning is going to cause someone's feelings to be hurt.

"How dare you criticize teachers! They are heroes who are doing a wonderful job!"

"How dare you criticize single mothers! They are heroes doing their best!"

"My son is not stupid! The system is to blame!"

Therefore, attacking the standardized test as the root problem is a red herring. The root problem are the 3 factors.

With teachers, yes, we have some that just plain suck at their jobs. This will make it much harder for students to reach their full learning potential.

Though teachers (bad or not) are not able to be fully effective if the parents are not actively involved with their own children. We see many frustrated parents blaming the schools/teachers when they do nothing themselves.

We can look at overall aptitude without these sorts of tests. How well can students read, do math, write? These can be evaluated without an official "test." But the problem is, we are still back at square one when it comes to evaluating results. That is, we come to find out that through one or more factors of teachers, parents, or student inherent aptitude, the students still are not learning well even if you get rid of the use of standardized tests.

These standardized tests are meant to be a benchmark, a way to indicate how much students have learned.

Those that criticize the use of these tests do have a point that they are not all that good at determining if learning is going on, as well as the fact that "teaching to the test" is a common tactic used by some teachers/schools.

There is a problem though. What alternative benchmark do we have to work with? Usually, this is where the conversations stops, because opponents have no solutions.

An example of a failure to acknowledge reality leading to bad results: the whole standardized test debate with students.

There are a number of factors that could lead to good or bad test scores. The quality of teachers, the aptitude of students, the commitment by parents. All of these factors are necessary for students to be succeeding at learning. But how do we test this? An quick (though imperfect way) is the standardized tests.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow3ao6YsCgQ

Watched this video recently. The channel seems to have some interesting guests, and you could argue this one too. Though she spent quite a bit of time saying what could be said in shorter and simpler terms:

Women have unrealistic and idiotic standards for men. Women focus on a lot of stupid bullshit that is unimportant for finding a lasting relationship.

Granted, men can be guilty at times too, but not to the extent women are.

Just thought of something with the whole Indians supporting Israel posts. I don't think most Indians are fans of Jews or Israel, but they really don't like Muslims due to Pakistan being their enemy. So by proxy, they support whoever is on the other team.

Could be wrong, but otherwise I would expect them to be ambivalent about it.

I may have previously mentioned that I found many Jewish traditions a tad bit ridiculous (e.g. not being able to even use a regular light switch during Shabbat), but as far as I can observe, they are not the ones at the forefront of all the leftist garbage agenda worldwide (such as all the pride shit and drag queen shit). That would be the progressive Jews who are far less likely to be practicing their religion. Rather, they just find another set of religious practices, and force it on everyone.

Prior to the happening in Israel with Hamas, I heard about this little event where progressive Jews were ass mad about orthodox Jews wanting to keep with their traditions , which includes gender segregation for things like this.

"You can't do that! It's unfair that men and women are put into separate groups, because everyone is equal!"

Seeing this, I prefer the orthodox Jews to the lefty progressive ones, as the latter are the ones pushing their stupid bullshit on everyone else.

Every day I don't suddenly find out that shit hit the fan with nuclear war or don't find myself getting a draft notice is a day I can appreciate. I would like to think that everything will keep going on fine, but I cannot count on that.

I would much prefer a quieter "bad ending" where standards of living simply goes down across the board, but we shall see. The assholes in power are not to be trusted.

In retrospect, it looks like a lot of changes for the better are happening as a result of the election being stolen from Trump. Trump might have been competent enough to make sure that the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel would not happen. Only the Biden admin could screw up that hard.

Not that Trump was amazingly competent, but these events would probably had different outcomes with him still in office. And unfortunately those outcomes would be the US maintaining their GAE empire longer.