Tag: education

Homeschool or die, homogamy edition

And this is why every sensible parent is rightfully wary of those super-caring male teachers:

Police continue to investigate sexual abuse allegations by three teenage victims assaulted by a South St. Paul teacher and his “husband”[sic] found dead in Washington last week.

Aric Babbitt, 40, and Matthew Deyo, 36, knew they were being investigated by police when they left town in mid August, according to court documents recently made public. Their bodies were found on a beach on Lopez Island by a kayaker Aug. 25. Police later discovered a suicide note.

One of the victims came forward to the police Aug. 14. Like the others, Babbitt and Deyo were friends with the teen’s parents and acted as mentors to them, the documents said. They would take them on trips, sometimes getting them drunk or high and then have sex with them, the documents said.

Never forget that gay men are 14 times more likely to sexually abuse children than straight men. That doesn’t mean all of them are chickenhawks, but it is something you should probably keep in mind when that super-dedicated drama teacher with the mustache is really, really insistent about how your 13-year-old son would absolutely benefit from taking part in the big weekend trip to the state convention.

And, according to my gay acquaintances, more than a few gay “marriages” would be better described as “conspiracies to commit statutory rape”.

As for male teachers, think about what kind of man is capable of surviving, let alone thriving, in the SJW-converged environment of public school teaching.

“Babbitt’s Youtube channel depicts a highly-involved teacher who cared about his students.”

Highly-involved. You don’t say.

“According to the report, Babbitt became the boy’s mentor after he came out of the closet to his family.”

Mentor. Right.

Mailvox: teaching 4GW

William S. Lind and LtCol Thiele are improving the state of American university education:

I teach undergraduate courses in Political Science and after reading Lind’s Four Generations of Modern War on your recommendation, I had to throw out two whole lectures on war and terrorism.  I’ve gone two semesters with new lectures and I’m looking to expand on this theme in my Intro course through some form of non-lecture activity.  After reading an article from Jeffro on wargaming in the classroom, I’m considering introducing a game which would demonstrate thematic concepts on 4GW, but I have little experience in wargaming beyond Risk and PC gaming. 

Could you recommend an appropriate game?  My classroom size is approximately 10-12, making 2 or 3 person teams possible, and I can probably devote two 1.5 hour sessions to this activity.  Andean Abyss and Cuba Libre have come up but I can’t afford to buy multiple games in a trial-and-error fashion.  Thank you.

Interesting question. Let’s throw this out to everyone and discuss the matter. My first thought was Junta, but that’s probably too focused on the traditional civil unrest. And it has made me think that perhaps it would be worthwhile to design a game around the core 4GW concepts. It wouldn’t be too hard, the first question would be deciding whether to make it totally theoretical or utilizing real and/or historical settings.

Another possibility would be Fallujah 2004: City Fighting in Iraq. This wouldn’t teach 4GW concepts per se, but would help illustrate some of the challenges involved. However, it’s a solitaire game, which could be seen as a positive or a negative, depending upon the professor’s perspective. Decision Iraq is a two-player game that deals directly with the insurgency, so I’d probably take a close look at that one. The rules can be found on the Decision Games site here in RTF format.

Affirmative action in action

This sort of affirmative-action-related meltdown happens far more often at the better schools than anyone would credit:

Throughout elementary, middle and high school, Kidd’s talent for science showed. She was accepted into the highly competitive Thacher School, a private boarding high school in California where she promptly earned the nickname “The Science Girl.”

The teachers loved her and lavished her with praise, Kidd wrote, using her homework as an example for other students. When she was a sophomore, her chemistry teachers announced before 240 classmates that Kidd had garnered the highest score in a national chemistry competition.

These accolades only fueled Kidd’s drive to succeed, and it culminated in her acceptance to an Ivy League university.

“The ultimate climax was when I got into Columbia,” Kidd wrote. “Because it’s such a prestigious school, it made me feel like I had proven to myself, and everyone around me, that I made it.”

When she got on campus, she decided, naturally, that she would study science. But things didn’t go smoothly.

The day she moved in was her birthday. “I felt really alienated and alone and didn’t find the Columbia students very welcoming,” Kidd wrote. “During my freshman year, I quickly went from star student to slacker.”

In contrast to the tight-knit community at Thacher, Kidd said, “at Columbia I was lucky if a teacher talked to me.” The lack of close connections with her teachers discouraged her from engaging with her schoolwork.

“Even though I was wired to be a good student,” Kidd said, “I didn’t feel inspired. I got through the year, getting B’s and C’s, but I didn’t care. I was just happy the summer arrived.”

Upon her return to classes in September, Kidd signed up for computer-science classes and “hated every minute of it.”

One morning in April, she woke up and realized she needed to make a change and “started plotting [her] escape.”

She probably would have been a star at a second-tier school. But it’s not only unreasonable, it is cruel to be throwing kids like this into situations where mediocrity is the best possible outcome and failure is the most probable one.

Anyhow, she’s better off doing what she actually wants to do than what everyone else expects of her. It’s neither right nor fair to put the weight of a race on one young kid who happens to be an outlier.

Wait, the rules apply to US?

Even people who claim to seek equality don’t believe in it:

Last week, Harvard announced that they were cracking down on “privilege” within their student community by banning members of single-gender organizations from holding school leadership positions.

But when Harvard announced its new policy, it stressed that the sanctions applied to both male and female single-gender organizations equally, since both male and female single-gender organizations thrived on their “privilege.”

Harvard’s resident feminists claim that all-female organizations, while just as gender-biased, are beneficial to the school’s community, whereas all-male organizations are merely breeding grounds for the present and future perpetrators of sexual crime.

On Monday, they demonstrated, accusing Harvard of, among other things, perpetuating the marginalization of female voices. “My women’s organization has been more than a social organization,” one student told the Boston Globe. “It has been a mental health respite, a place to discuss sexual assaults . . . where I became a feminist, and where I refound my voice.”

The students claimed that female-only clubs were more important than male-only clubs because women experience systematic oppression, and they repeated claims that such clubs were necessary because women “earn less” than male counterparts and because women are “targeted and shamed” for their sexuality.

Stop falling for appeals to equality. You might as reasonably be persuaded by appeals to unicorns, lumberjacks, or the Labor Theory of Value. Even those who make appeals to equality observably don’t believe in it.

Homeschool or Die: 2016 edition

Now even the girls are killing each other in the public schools:

A 16-year-old girl died Thursday after fighting with other girls in a bathroom at Howard High School of Technology in Wilmington, Delaware, authorities said.

“There was an altercation that initially started between two people, and my understanding is that additional individuals joined in against the one person,” said Gary Fullman, chief of staff to the Wilmington mayor.

The student was badly injured and transported by helicopter to A.I. DuPont Hospital for Children, where she died, Fullman said.

Any bets on the races involved?

Brainstorm: the courses

In light of the numerous requests that have been made concerning an expansion of the Brainstorm concept into subjects beyond game development, we are expanding it to include actual online courses, complete with tests, grades, and achievement badges, for those who are interested in continuing their educations. These courses are not accredited in any way, shape, or form, as they are solely concerned with the acquisition of knowledge and the deepening of understanding rather than academic credentials.

Although it may not be the first course we actually schedule, the lead course will be ASTRONOMY with Dr. Sarah Salviander. Dr. Salviander is no stranger to many on this blog, although not everyone may know that she is a noted astrophysicist whose specialty is black holes. While most of her publications, such as Fe II Emission in Active Galactic Nuclei: The Role of Total and Gas-Phase Iron Abundance and Accretion Disk Temperatures of QSOs: Constraints from the Emission Lines are completely beyond, well, pretty much everyone here, including me, she is the author of Castalia House’s Astronomy & Astrophysics homeschool curriculum and is eminently qualified to teach the Astronomy course as a subject matter expert. The course will consist of 10 weekly lectures and will cost $200. Brainstorm members will receive a 50 percent discount. A date has not yet been established, but it will take place in the fall.

The other course is one that has long been in the making, but finally came together when I put together a homeschool curriculum for my own kids. ECONOMICS with Vox Day will consist of 10 biweekly lectures, will cost $100, and will be free for all Brainstorm members. I’m still sorting out the details of when it will begin, as I have to schedule it around the next GameDev course that will begin on May 21st, but it will definitely be this year. We also expect to announce other courses with other subject matter experts in the near future.

If you are seriously interested in taking either course, please indicate as much in the comments. And if this incentivizes you to sign up for Brainstorm, you can do so here. Speaking of Brainstorm, there will be a closed session on Saturday, the 23rd, at 7 PM Eastern, and an open Hugo Awards Nomination Party at 12:30 PM Eastern on Tuesday, the 26th, whenever the announcements take place.
 Invitations for the former will be sent out tonight and a registration link for the latter will be provide a day or two before the event.

The cost of convergence

Some people doubted the veracity of my claim that the purpose of the SJW list is to help SJWs find employment at SJW-converged companies. What they fail to understand is that there is no better way to legally ensure the segregation of those individuals from the sane elements of society as well as ensuring that the converged companies more quickly experience the full consequences of their embrace of social justice:

The University of Missouri will be shaggier and dirtier and faculty will be responsible for taking their own trash to dumpsters under the plan for cutting 50 jobs in campus operations detailed in an email memo sent Friday by Vice Chancellor Gary Ward.

Landscaping operations will be cut back so sidewalk edges are trimmed no more than twice a year and only in the most visible locations, Ward wrote. After Saturday football games, the debris left by tailgaters will not be picked up until Monday, he wrote.

Custodial staff no longer will clean or remove trash or recyclables from offices, Ward wrote. “This frees up custodians to assist with recycling, which, previously, has been a volunteer effort,” Ward wrote.

The plan to save $5.47 million in the MU Operations division that employs 842 people exempts the MU Police Department and MU Environmental Health and Safety. Ward warned it likely means slower response time for maintenance issues, less overtime and slower snow removal.

In the email, Ward warned that “we will be unable to sustain the level of service for which you have become accustomed. I do not anticipate that changes beginning July 1, 2016, will inhibit the academic mission at Mizzou, nor is it my intention for that to ever happen.”

Ward’s email is his response to a March 9 directive for a 5 percent cut to general fund budgets from interim Chancellor Hank Foley. The directive imposed a hiring freeze and warned there would be no salary increases.

The Columbia campus is trying to cover $22 million of an expected $32.5 million shortfall because of declining enrollment and new commitments such as the new Division of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity, spokesman Christian Basi said. The cuts do not take into account possible state budget reductions or increases.

Notice that this $32.5 million shortfall is not only the result of their target market’s negative reaction to SJW activity at the university, but also due to the fact that the SJWs running the institution would rather pay for the Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity than pay custodians to prevent them from living in filth.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that common sense aversion to negative consequences will suffice to prevent SJWs from pursuing total societal convergence. The decisions of the SJWs at the University of Missouri should suffice to disabuse them of that notion. It won’t, but it should.

Diversity is educational

A freshman at the University of Texas receives a Very Important Lesson in diversity:

University of Texas freshman Haruka Weiser wrapped up a class at the drama building about 9:30 p.m. She called a friend to say she was on her way, according to an Austin police affidavit.

She never made it.

The remains of Weiser, a first-year theater and dance major, were found about 10:30 a.m. Tuesday in a creek near the Etter-Harbin Alumni Center, on the university campus in Austin, not far from the school’s football stadium, officials said. An autopsy noted trauma to the body and the death was termed a homicide.

Investigators “don’t have a clue what the motive” was for the homicide, Acevedo said….

Not a clue. No idea at all. Who could possibly figure out what might have led to the first murder on the UT campus since 1966? I guess we’ll never know.

Say what you will about diversity on campus, but you cannot deny that it is educational.

DEVGAME developments

It’s time to start thinking about the next DEVGAME course, but even though the recent course is over, the learning doesn’t stop. I’ve put up a post about putting my own production principles into action, which worked out rather well in the case of Art of Sword, and the game’s lead programmer has put up sample code to duplicate and order 2D animation sprites in Unity.

There are also other posts by programmers, artists, and even musicians. It’s rapidly turning into a great resource for neophyte game developers. If you’re interested in attending, or you know someone who might be interested, let them know about the DEVGAME blog before the next session begins in May.

In other news, we’re looking at offering additional advanced education courses, including Astronomy and Economics, about which more soon.