Yes, this is an interesting issue. As I recall the titanic was originally designed for Extreme separation of the classes, it would almost be physically impossible for steerage class and first class to ever see each other.
This strikes me as something to which Palmer wouldn't particularly object. He's not exactly known for his philanthropy or his interest in his common man.
I can't say that this situation is all that unusual. Parents, particularly parents who are stay-at-home, have way too much time on their hands and involve themselves up to their armpits in the lives of their children. I have worked at schools where parents arrive at the schoolgrounds at lunchtime, and hang around on campus until the end of the day. For several weeks, parents lined up against the windows of one of the classrooms and stared at their children in class for the hour and fifteen minutes from the end of lunch to the end of the day. This continued until the teacher posted artwork blocking the parents view into the classroom from those windows. The parents promptly complained to the principal, and the teacher was ordered to take them down. That teacher (and almost every other teacher at the school) refuses to teach in that exposed classroom.
I've been the subject of ridiculous complaints also. I was too hard on a kid when I separated him for calling one of the girls a "cheating dog" (for using a calculator during a maths activity where I had explicitly allowed the class to use calculators). I take the roll at the wrong time of the day. I set too much homework (and, conversely, I don't set enough homework; a complaint made by the same parent). I don't hand notes out (I prefer to lay out the notes at the front of the class, and the kids are meant to pick them up as they leave). I don't insist that someone's little baby (senior elementary student) wear a raincoat if it looks rainy outside, and I don't help that student to put that raincoat on. I drink Ginger Beer which comes in a bottle that looks like it's a bottle of real beer (that it isn't is beside the point also, because Ginger Beer has the word "beer" in it, and therefore, I'm setting a poor example to students). I advocate the use of facebook (which is actually Edmodo, which, I'll admit, does look a lot like facebook, but isn't). I am biased against or for particular students because I select them for debate teams, public speaking competitions or sport (sometimes I am still biased against particular students when I'm not involved at all in the selection or non-selection of them for various opportunities). On and on and on. Most of these complaints are, as other commenters have noted, housewives with too much time on their hands. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that I have had a good principal who, for the most part, only wastes a little bit of her and my time every so often to investigate and respond to these claims.
That being said, I think that teachers and educational institutions have to acknowledge some responsibility in allowing this to happen. We encourage a dialogue between parents and teachers on an equal level, and we don't say all that much when unqualified pundits make educational claims that are simply wrong. Anyone, no matter how unqualified, will happily make claims about education and expect that those claims have equal footing with qualified and experienced teachers. In addition to my teaching degree, I have an undergraduate degree, a masters, and a graduate certificate in my area of educational specialisation. I have over 10 years experience in teaching, including 3 years teaching teachers how to teach at a university level, and 6 years as a recognised expert in working with a particular area of education. And, yet, I have to constantly respond to e-mails, that are sometimes less than polite, demanding to know why I do some "maths stuff" while I'm teaching science, for example.
Educators have to put themselves forward as experts, because they are, and this is the only way to change the prevailing culture. How many times do you hear people questioning (and expecting to be taken seriously) the moment to moment decisions of doctors? Lawyers? Even unqualified mechanics are held in higher esteem than teacher. The reason why is that these professions put themselves forward as experts, and they allow questioning (or a "second opinion") only from other experts. This is how teachers should be.
Schools are not the "child police".
That's nice that you say that (and it's what I happen to believe as well), but, as a teacher, I can say that you're completely out of step with society's expectations of us. More and more, parents, educational authorities, everyone is expecting us to be pseudo-parents. My school has a cyberbullying policy, a transport/walk to school policy, a personal development program (i.e., sexual education), etc. We're required to have them, but if we didn't, the parents of our students would demonstrate their complete inability to cope. All of these things should be done by parents, but aren't.
While I appreciate that this situation is outright silly (on the part of the school), ACLU's action here seems a little foolhardy. If schools can't discipline kids for what they say on social media, etc., then how are they meant to respond to cyber bullying such as that has led to however many teen suicides? What about defamation of teachers/students (I'm not talking about the usual Mr. So-and-so is a poopoohead, but what about calling him a pedo or something)? What about cyber-stalking or threats of physical violence against teachers/students?
The alternative would be to deal with those issues through more judicial means, and that isn't necessarily better.
Cheers! =) My students are lots of fun also, so it's win-win.
I don't think that you need to go out and hire experts in all fields in order to fill out your staff pool. But putting an education student in the motivation and health section was stupid. I didn't mention it above, but it was similarly stupid putting a nursing student into the biographies section (she didn't read those books either, but spent her break times going through the relationships shelf in my section, which apparently escaped the notice of my PHB's). Their HR approach was to put people into areas according to moment to moment need, and then leave them there. When I was hired, there were two spots open in health & motivation, so that was where I was allocated and where I stayed. It's an approach to HR that's better suited to places like Walmart and McDonald's, and it's lazy.
This is one of the reasons why chain bookstores are dying.
Doesn't surprise me. I worked for a chain bookstore (not Borders) when I was at uni, and they put me in the Motivation and Health section. By the way, let me introduce myself, I'm a teacher who specialises in working with gifted kids, and one of the things that I'm really good at is picking good, relatively advanced books for young kids who are beyond the books that their librarians and teachers use for other children. I read a lot of kids and YA fiction, and textbooks and educational texts, of course, but also scifi, fantasy and historical fiction, as well as non-fiction books in a number of areas. Notice something missing? I don't fucking read Motivation or Health! I can't even take those fucking books seriously, let alone sell them!
This wouldn't have been a problem, if it weren't for the rigidity of the PHB's that ran the place. My role was to stand by a shelf, and only help people who needed help with that section. One of my colleagues' spot was to stand by the self-service information computer behind a shelf, and almost literally jump out at people if they were having trouble with the search functionality (which only googled the bookstore's public website). As much as possible, I wasn't to move, and I had to do things as quickly as possible. One day, I spent 20 minutes upselling ~$150 worth of photo books and Australian kids' books to a tourist and I got a formal warning for walking away from my section and leaving it in the hands of two of my colleagues.
Let's talk about my colleagues, though. There was a guy hired at the same time as me who I was speaking to one day... Me: "So, what books do you read?"; Him: "Oh, I don't."; Me: "You don't... Read books?"; Him: "Yeah, they're boring." Awesome. He was Employee of the Month at some point after I left. I haven't been back there in a while, but I think he's probably still working there.
Their buying policy was brilliant, also. They bought hundreds of copies of things that they thought fit with the Australian psyche, i.e., obsessed with sport. So we were always left with hundreds of copies of the latest ghost written biography of some cricketer that we could literally not give away in the end. These books were always such an albatross around our necks that our PHB's were insisting that we keep them on the shelves, and sending newer, more popular books to storage or to the warehouse. If you wanted one of those newer more interesting books? You have to wait for it to be retrieved (a couple of days, usually), but please take a heavily discounted the 3rd volume of Warwick Smythe's test cricket antics that he paid someone from South Africa to write.
I shouldn't complain too much though. The 50% employee discount was awesome. Most of the long term employees were great people. Some of the supervisors were genuinely cool people. I laugh as I remember back to thinking back over having to help people "find a book, it has like a blue cover and words, I think", or "choose a motivation book for me, I don't know which one to choose."
These book chains are dying because they're trying to do business as if nothing has changed. They're hiring the cheapest, dumbest possible labour when people are only willing to go to a bookstore and pay a bit more than they would at Amazon because they want to talk to someone knowledgeable and well-read about books.
The guy next door has Rick Astly blasting "on 11" 24/7, thus providing both sleep deprivation and loud music. Can I really prosecute him for TORTURE?
Can you escape the noise by walking away? Or are you confined to your house in some way? Do you have the protection of local planning laws or do you live in some sort of anarchic community?
Pffft.
In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks) are to be treated as variables.
