The problem is that the concept of "doing" is ill-defined. Does one need to be a published author to qualify to teach a 10th grade English class? How about an Erdos number to teach an Algebra I class? One of my colleagues specializes in teaching "lower level" math kids. He's great at maintaining discipline in his classroom, and many of his students actually experience some success in math. It has been 20 years since he's taken Calculus, and he really doesn't know integration-by-parts any more. Should he be fired for his inability to "do"?

The cliche is fun to bust out whenever bad education news hits the airwaves, but I think it distracts from some of the real issues surrounding education and good vs bad teachers.

While these are all very good ideas, you're way overselling your case by saying that Black Friday is irrelevant to the US economy. The US economy does not solely consist of manufacturing. We've lost a lot of manufacturing over the years, and that has hurt us.

Nevertheless, you're forgetting about the people working the retail floor in some capacity, management at the store level (and above), support staff for management, warehouse workers, their management (and support staff), shippers (like truck drivers), their management (and support staff), marketing folks, etc etc etc.

Retail drives a significant portion of our economy and employs a large number of people. We can debate whether that it good or bad, but that's a lot of people hoping for strong Black Friday sales.

The difference is that what made the Amiga so revolutionary was it's ability to get mid-90s quality media and performance from mid-80s hardware. While the OS doubtlessly played a role in this, the question of the relevancy of AmigaOS in 2009 goes back to that same issue: does Amiga have the potential to out-perform contemporary hardware to the same degree that it did back in 1985?

Given the people at the helm today and the rate of development of modern PC hardware, I would be kind of surprised if they could. It's a shame, because I upgraded from a Commodore 64 to an Amiga 500 back in 1987, and used it faithfully for several years until I went to college.

Amiga had its chance to make its mark in the mid-80s, and Commodore unfortunately squandered that opportunity.

Sorry, but my results differ

http://qntm.org/?board

This was also done with , which is still under active development, though gameplay has many of the same issues as you pointed out in Natural Selection -- you needed a good commander. Additionally, you also need good teammates who will do what the commander asks (and doesn't).

Nothing is more frustrating (for a player and a commander) than to see a team disintegrate simply because half of the team wants run around and shoot things rather than work together to accomplish a goal.

This is really good advice here. I've used a rebranded (Smart) Wacom tablet in my classrooms for several years now. It takes about a week to get used to, and you sometimes need to push/encourage newbies to keep using it. Once they get used to writing on it, it's fantastic. Beyond that, you aren't tethered to one spot in the room.

The only downside is, because of the surface, drawing accurate curves (ie. graphing anything that's not linear) is pretty hard. I have a whiteboard that is pretty low glare, so I project directly to the white board, and use a marker to draw over the projection when I have to graph.

I just bought a tablet this year, and there are some nice things about it, but a wireless tablet is a great low cost (around $300/each) solution.

This is somewhat of an apples/oranges comparison. Linux proper is principally the kernel, while the development teams for most *BSD variants manage both the BSD kernel and the userland. While it may be the case (and I don't know for sure honestly) that there are no viable forks of the Linux kernel, that really doesn't provide a fair basis for comparison.

I would suggest that a BSD variant (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc) is much more analogous to a Linux distribution than just the Linux kernel. When you frame it that way, I think it is safe to say that there is much more fragmentation in the Linux world than the BSD world.

I'm sorry, but this is a little bit bigger than "bad ol Mr. Teacher yelled at my little snowflake for misbehaving, and scared him for life."

These kids were 7, and made to believe that a hostile alien force was camped outside of the school and kidnapping teachers. As far as believability vs age, this would be about equivalent to fooling the students at a junior high school that terrorists had taken over the school and taken teachers hostage.

Both scenarios are wildly inappropriate.

I've personally been involved in situations where a student's refusal to cooperate lead to the situation escalating far beyond what was necessary. I think sometimes they believe that if they dig in their heels, nothing bad will happen and the adult will let up. They don't understand that digging in just escalates the situation. When I encounter such a student, I usually have to explain the complete consequences of their actions (including ultimately getting cuffed and hauled out if need be), before they relent.

From reading the report, it's pretty clear that the student had multiple opportunities to come clean before being arrested, and refused to take advantage of them. Yes, I agree that arresting the girl was overkill, but the report mentions that the officer had prior [negative] dealings with the student before, so I would suspect that there is a story here that goes back a little farther than "ZOMG STUDENT ARRESTED FOR TEXTING." Arresting the girl was overkill *if* this was her first disciplinary issue. If this is one of a long string of issues, it's a different story. When sane, measured discipline isn't getting through to a kid, it may be a good time to over-react and try to get the kid's attention.

I don't know the kid, and I don't know her history, so I can't judge whether or not the officer was out of line. I can imagine plenty of scenarios where it is, and plenty where it isn't. I've had students get in a disproportionate amount of trouble for similarly stupid reasons, and it usually plays out the same way: a student with a long disciplinary history tries to press their luck over something moronic, and comes up with the short straw.

We're almost to this article's end-of-life as it gets pushed to the bottom. I easily have 40 recommendations here, and I can't thank you all enough. Now my only problem is I have to read all of these books!

Many thanks!
-T

God help us if the SAT is "life".

Fortunately, most of my students have completed the SAT before I get them.

And here I thought "Extreme Hosting" was just a slogan.