I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus.
It’s obviously genetic, says the mathemetician.
I tried once to ask reddit’s Anthropologists about what cultural artifacts are affected by genetics e.g. how lactose intolerance can affect a local culture. The question was apparently racist and then taken down.
I once asked an obvious lead in to a racist argument and was called a racist. It must be a conspiracy.
[Generic pontificating on the nature of society from the fount of the infinite wisdom of my anus] (it’s multiple comment threads, and the free square on your HN bingo card)
You write web servers that need more boxes and serve less traffic than was standard 10 years ago. Why would anyone listen to you on any topic.
racist math teachers deserve the :gulag:
I had a teacher from the “good” side of town (:us-foreign-policy:) in 6th grade who absolutely fucked the entire grade over by being a frigid, insane racist bitch and literally no one learned any math at that critical junction because of some middle aged womans dumb hang ups regarding ethnicity and thus doomed an entire generation of brown kids to go and prove those stereotypes
only good thing she did was turn me on to the Talking Heads
Agree with you, in specific about the HN fascist:
This belief of mine is considered heretical amongst leftist colleagues (I’m a liberal myself on almost every issue). As a college we act as if everyone can pass. Years of administration telling the math department that our passing rate is too low have led me to pretty much pass everyone who takes the final exam. Last semester 80% passed but only around 50% deserved to.
When you get Finland with 90%+ rate of people finishing their STEM degrees, when you get applied math and science courses which do actually make people competent, when you get even slightly good results at Carnegie Mellon and VHS’s in Germany then it isn’t on the people you teach, but on you (and the system and the influence the system had on the people before). After you dealt with those problems we can gladly as institutions and teachers try to form councils in which the learners are experts in their own right and can learn and teach each other, till then those HN news claims are bullshit ideology and chauvinistic.
I have yet to have listened to courses of people who claim “It is the students faults! They are just not able to grasp things” - esp. when they say 50% of the people they teach! and not have it be the fault of them sucking at what they do.
There seems to be this common attitude that the students need to Earn their education, and that lots of failures is a sign that the Weak and Undeserving are being weeded out. It’s such a weird attitude - shouldn’t we be nurturing our next generation, trying to grow them into better people? Instead of pressing them against the grindstone of testing and credentializing, and then throwing them away like trash when so many of them fail.
I think it’s funnier that it literally makes them horny that the “undeserving” are weeded out, but once those people are shut out of society and then go and try to make a living by whatever means possible like beating and robbing the Mayos and Gusanos they go and complain
Ah yes, I love having a society based on dispensing arbitrary cruelty based on my toddler like gut instincts and the myriad of social problems it creates. Very cool!
shouldn’t we be nurturing our next generation, trying to grow them into better people? Instead of pressing them against the grindstone of testing and credentializing, and then throwing them away like trash when so many of them fail.
yes, but capitalism selects against empathy and nurturing behavior :(
When you get Finland with 90%+ rate of people finishing their STEM degrees
Oh well when you say that, they just say it’s that Finland (which is filled with Mongols when they’re not using the ethnostate line as a weap)on/Germany/etc. is an all white ethnostate and as such doesn’t have to “babysit” a bunch of savages and is better able to devote resources to a group of people who are inherently smarter to begin with
What’s funny is that I’ve been railroaded into remedial classes meant for breeding the underclass of people working at McDonalds and there were more than a few white kids in there, so I tend to wonder what they would do about that
I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus.
Clearly it’s a genetic issue and not 13 years of school teaching kids to hate math. 🙄
Clearly it’s a genetic issue and not 13 years of school teaching kids to hate math. 🙄
I am convinced that some people can’t learn algebra and calculus, just like some people are not able to read visually. However those cases are rare and when we properly have inclusion it doesn’t matter.
Totally with you in terms of the school system instilling fear and acting as filter against self motivated people who wouldn’t accept sitting in an office for 10 hours on end.
I liked an occasional browse of webshit weekly to see some good dunks on HN. They kinda have some ‘authority always bad’ shit takes though. Looks like they haven’t updated through august though.
Optimally, we could have a Marxist lens version in our c/technology community.
It’s a shame webshit weekly hasn’t been updating. It’s been a particularly wild couple of months on Hacker News.
As part of my news digestion, I have it filtered through Hexbear to some degree which is… ok, I guess. HN previously served this role. It is still good for seeing what’s hot in tech though usually very web focused which is…meh.
The tech news side of it has gotten fuzzier and less information-dense. These days I’m mostly on HN because of the opportunity for syndicalist agitation. There was a good period of a couple years where me and a handful of others were actually getting people to think seriously about unionizing. That’s died off since the pandemic started, but I still check the comments sometimes to see if there’s an opportunity. (But the site really has went through a hard right turn this year.)
“If you have trouble learning calculus at age 19 it’s genetic” says big brain boy
Genetics matters, if you have ape genetics you should be treated with dignity and respect. If you have the genetics of coronavirus not so much.
Edit: Ok to actually put on my stemlord hat, sure some day we may learn certain genotypes have a predisposition to learn better when using strategy a vs b or whatever… but we are so far away from making any such claims, not to mention we need to level the playfield with a little communism before we can really make fair assessments (and the actual implementation of policy no matter how fair the scientific foundation would of course be poisoned from the getgo under capitalism)
