The world is changing... bad changes or good?

[Elder Math]

I can understand...often "retardation" as it used to be known is nothing more than problems with an above average iq.

When someone has something, like say high spatial reasoning, their brain can work a little different than most. They can confuse words, want to look at them from all angles(some people with dyslexia have an easier time reading thing upside down...and surely often have no trouble reading things from any direction/backwards), the problem is that things in society are done in specific orders and some problems become actual problems.

Someone with dyslexia will often mix things up, and confuse themselves when trying to do everyday tasks. But this is also usually a sign of extreme spatial reasoning.

Someone with dysgraphia is probably very similar in having exceptional spatial reasoning...

Other examples are people with ADHD(often stemming from an ability to be able to think to quickly), and OCD(often stemming from incredible intuitive and deductive abilities)

It's an interesting subject...I learned a lot about it, as it was something I was educated in when I was going to school. I had to have a lady I went to everyday who helped me to read today, and she explained why a lot of these problems occur.

[EricG1793]

Wow, I thought that I had wicked bad handwriting and needed help... but I couldn't even imagine my school giving me a computer to use. I have my own laptop, but if I were given an opportunity for the school to get me one, I'd accept, because I wouldn't want to put my computer in the dangers of school and the nasty peers that come with it.

I had been going to occupational therapy for my writing, and they taught me cursive early... I am bad at that, too.... In seventh grade they never forced us to write anything in cursive, so I've nearly forgotten it.... I ought to practice it every now and then so I don't completely forget it... because it'd probably be embarrassing if, at some point later in my life, I didn't know how to write in cursive and I had to for whatever reason....

[wizy123]

you think you have seen bad handwriting... you should see mine.. its horrible... like a chicken did itr for me... its gotten better but it still is bad,,, bet my spelling is worse...
but i mostly blame my spelling for the school system.... i figured that they just dont care about that kind of thing.... oh well.

[Dragon Writer]

not much is done in cursive, these days...they make you learn it, then they let you forget it, which is kind of stupid. saddly, while the school has to give me a computer...it's a school. it's slow. and unbearably so. Add to that my Adhd, causing me to go ultra fast while writing, and finding slowness in that field UNBEARABLY slow, and i've got handwriting just about NO teacher can read. (which is HORRID for my grades at the beginning of the year...but eventually they start being able to read it. Which is probably why i went from an 80 to a hundred in math, as the year went on...she finally figured out my handwriting.)

[christmas]

I'm sure you're handwriting is nothing compared to some of the stuff I've seen in my mom's classroom...she teaches Kindergarten though, so they have an excuse...

Speaking of classrooms, does anyone else find it as appalling as I do how horrible the school system is nowadays? I can't speak for other states, but I know in California, and especially where I live, it's just awful...

First off, teachers, who are educating the future of our nation, get paid hardly anything. My mom gets paid less than 50 thousand dollars a year, and she has one of the hardest jobs there is. And then you look at athletes, movie stars, and singers, who are all getting paid millions of dollars to basically play a game. There is something absolutely sickening about that; it's something I can't even believe we let happen in America.

Then there's Bush and his whole stupid "No Child Left Behind" laws, which are great in theory, but human nature keeps them from working. What I've discovered about schools is that instead of working with the less talented students to help them bring their test scores up, they work with the most talented student, hoping that a lot of really good test scores will bring up the average score enough for the school to meet their AYP goal, which may work in the shrot term, but in the long term it's a ridiculous approach. And besides, the government expects all the schools to be at 999 (every student in every school getting a nearly perfect score on every test) by 2012. Not only is that an impossible goal, it's stupid to even suggest it, let alone expect it to happen, especially when they also expect special needs students, some of whom can't even TALK, let alone take a test, to test, unaided, at grade level.

But by far the most sickening thing (to me at least) about our school system is how little they care for the performing arts (of course, being a band/theatre geek, I might be a tad bit biased). My high school has been awarded the most awards for theatre out of all the high schools in the county, but we have the crappiest theatre. If you can even call it a theatre. There's a stage, yes, but no backstage. We built a backdrop out of plywood to give ourselves wings, and we have a hallway that leads form backstage to the house where we can change. A hallway!!! If we aren't changing or about to go on, we are forced to wait outside in the cold because there's nowhere else to put us. And since we have to be almost silent, we have no one to tell us when we have to go on, we just have to know for ourselves. It's really a sad situation.

So yeah, sorry for the rant, I just had to get it out.

[Rubywolf]

Then there's Bush and his whole stupid "No Child Left Behind" laws, which are great in theory, but human nature keeps them from working. What I've discovered about schools is that instead of working with the less talented students to help them bring their test scores up, they work with the most talented student, hoping that a lot of really good test scores will bring up the average score enough for the school to meet their AYP goal, which may work in the shrot term, but in the long term it's a ridiculous approach. And besides, the government expects all the schools to be at 999 (every student in every school getting a nearly perfect score on every test) by 2012. Not only is that an impossible goal, it's stupid to even suggest it, let alone expect it to happen, especially when they also expect special needs students, some of whom can't even TALK, let alone take a test, to test, unaided, at grade level.

I've found the opposite. When I was at school, not bragging here, I was probably one of, if not the most intelligent person in my grade. And that's going beyond math grades. When we spent a week, two hours a day, going over those *is tired and can't think of the word* "an apple is to fruit as a chicken is to _______", I knew that we were in trouble. This was in the seventh grade, and most of the kids in the class were having trouble reading the same books as my brother, who is five. The "No child left behind act" has created a pandemic of teachers teaching to the slowest kid in the class, leaving those who are actually inteligent to rot in boredom. What this does is dumb kids down, not letting them reach their full potential. If half the class is bored, then they are going to have a negative feelings toward all forms of education, including books and such. Bush should just have left the education system alone, because, like Midas, everything he touches gets messed up.


Woah-less than fiftythousand a year?! My dad is a college instructor, at a state university, and he gets paid around twenty eight thousand a year! Of course, that's Louisiana for you. When the poll results for the worst state in the union came out, Louisiana was #49, #1 being best. Everyone was having bitter-sweet parties and shooting fireworks, yelling "Thank God for Mississsippi!"

Good times, good times....

[Rubywolf]

Handwriting is one of the things that I find very important. i've worked for years, finding a fast, easy, readable, and pretty handwriting to use. I must say myself that I have an excelent handwriting. Caligraphy is one of my hobbies, and I'm good at that to. Now, if I could only learn to type correctly....

[EricG1793]

Originally posted by christmas:
Speaking of classrooms, does anyone else find it as appalling as I do how horrible the school system is nowadays? I can't speak for other states, but I know in California, and especially where I live, it's just awful...

First off, teachers, who are educating the future of our nation, get paid hardly anything. My mom gets paid less than 50 thousand dollars a year, and she has one of the hardest jobs there is. And then you look at athletes, movie stars, and singers, who are all getting paid millions of dollars to basically play a game. There is something absolutely sickening about that; it's something I can't even believe we let happen in America.

Check out the previous posts; we were talking about the bad school systems before. Then Young Reader started talking about about his school owing a computer to him, and it took ages for them to get it to him, and the computer they eventually got always broke down. Then we started talking about the handwriting. Go towards the middle of page three; spyells started talking about bad education there.

Then briefly we were talking about money issues and cheap foreign labor because of our defective dishwashers. I said in the Topic of Great Randomness that the second dishwasher had a crack in the frame, where springs were connected, so eventually spring would pull, leg would break off. The third one is coming today. My dad's going to try and convince them to install it for free because we've been through two dishwashers and a week and a half without a functioning one.

I agree that it's sickening that the people who most likely have the most important jobs in the country are payed nearly in the least. And indeed, people who play games and be famous get paid millions. How much sense does that make?! Although this is America; we let a lot of bad things happen.

[Dragon Writer]

schools ARE getting bad...and my handwriting is probably the worst of all, as far as i'm concerned, considering teachers have been known to fail me in tests because they couldn't read a word i said. (othertimes, they manage to decipher it, and i get hundreds. :P) thankfully, as the year goes on, they finally sort themsleves out, allowing me to get good grades, and even WITH the handwriting, i've never failed...but still. I could do a lot better, if people could just manage to understand what i'm writing!

[Rubywolf]

This thread gets me slightly depressed, which hasn't been so hard lately, so I think I'll have to leave it for a while....

[Rhi]

I still prefer to keep my own spirits up by remaining firm in my belief that humankind has immense potential for doing good things, even though we make mistakes. Our world is not spiraling into untold blackness; that would be the Dark Ages that you are thinking of, and those are long in the past The future looks bright; yes there are problems but there have always been problems and always will be. Perceptions will always be different and this will cause both tension but also learning opportunities in this wonderful journey called Life. Why depress ourselves by forming our philosophies around the viewpoint that the world is bad? That is a dark glass indeed to see the world through. I will choose instead to look at Life and see good amidst the bad; Light shining through darkness and being all the brighter for it...

There, Rubywolf, a bit of optimism for you

[Dragon Writer]

the world isn't bad...not in my oppinion. it's just that people are kinda stupid, sometimes...but that's something that can change. the world still has hope...we just have to make people REALIZE that before they blow themselves up.

[EricG1793]

Originally posted by Rubywolf:
This thread gets me slightly depressed, which hasn't been so hard lately, so I think I'll have to leave it for a while....

It depresses me too.

However we need to face the fact that this is the way our world is going, how much it's changed even over the last ten years, and what it's going to be like.

For some reason the thread about philosophy, talking about the universe and it's boundary (if there is one) and stuff like that... for some reason it depresses me, too. I don't know why. Although when we discuss to the point that there's nothing more to discuss for that topic, I'll make my speech about... I won't say it here. I don't feel like typing so much right now.

[wizy123]

you know what rubywolf... your right about this getting mildly depressing but ytou have to think of it this way, it happens around us every day but we libe our life like it doesnt happen. now what is sad is the fact that when we talk about it on this forum it finnally gets to people and that they finally realize that what is going on around them is not good. i personally belive you have to look to the good in everything. i know this one of the hardest things to do in life but as long as you try its more likely to help you in the long run.

now on to the subject about school...
i find it extreammly sad that teachers on one of the most under paid people in the world, i find they work the hardest in our own world they should get paid a whole lot more than they do but all my teachers tell me that they dont teach for the money if they wanted money they would work somewhere else entirely. i cannt wait to become a teacher when i get older, im not looking forword to the pay but i love kids.

"no child is left behined"
ha ha ah ha ha *choking cannt breath.*ok sorry i just thout this is funny. you know this is comming from the guy who doesnt mind killing hundreds of kids in iraq. (just a sidenote. i was watching somthing on the history channle that they [reasercher] dont belive that iraq did acually cause 9/11. they were examining pictures taken of the differnt air planes and the planes that his the towers and other places were not acually the commertal planes that they were suppost to be.) now the thought i agree is acually quite good in theroy if only we could act on it and not kill everything we see. i mean pretty soon its possible we are going to end up having a nuclear war.

[Rhi]

I mean pretty soon its possible we are going to end up having a nuclear war

I was just talking about that to my mom a few days ago. I had mentioned that World War 2 had ended when we dropped the nuke on Hiroshima and that other city I can't remember and what if that was going to happen to Iraq. My mom said that at one time, yes the world had a lot of nukes, but since then we've been disarming them. We may not even have a nuke to drop on the terrorists. And a nuke wouldn't even work; the terrorists are spread out all over many countries-to nuke them we would kill many times as many innocents as terrorists. Nuclear warfare doesn't really seem as though it's going to happen; it would be quite inefficient and we all know that the govt. hates inefficiency *wicked grin* a bit of irony there.

It's possible to look at our world and see good things, just think about all the good things people are doing. What about the campaigns for AIDS relief in Africa? Who would have thought our seemingly shallow celebrities could use all those millions of dollars to make a difference in the world? And the No Child Left Behind Act is at least an attempt to help the children of the United States...You mentioned teacher's low salaries, Wizy, but money isn't everything even though it does seem unfair. But along the teacher's track, Teach Across America is sending wonderfully gifted teachers to needy areas, even my own town. For every act of evil, there are acts of good that try to even the balance once and for all.

I've spoken mainly of American organizations simply for the reason America is what I'm most familiar with. There are other attempts for good all over the world. I would like to issue a challenge for those who reply on this thread: for every bad change you list, try to find a good change to balance it. Realism doesn't mean just reporting the evils of the world and ignoring the good in it- the world doesn't have to depress you.