This may seem like a silly question, but I've never worked in a large company before. I understand that the rank and file often get evaluated for their productivity and value to the company, but does management ever get evaluated in a similar fashion? It seems to me that unless the shareholders are screaming for blood, management often appears to have carte blanche to just... do whatever they want to do.

Well, yes, but their initial assumption is that by making the richest people even richer, everyone else will also get richer as a result. This does not appear to be especially true; indeed, it often seems to be the rich getting richer without regard to the poor.

Both the left and the right wing are trying to solve the same problem: we are, all of us, trying to ensure a reasonable standard of living for as many people as we can. Gross inequality is a bad thing, and arbitrarily moving money from one place to another is also a bad thing.

I won't say that the folks on the right are bad, because honestly, I think their motives are good. Ditto for the fellows on the left. It's a matter of implementation: we obviously can't change human nature, so how can we change the system to be more equitable for everyone involved?

It irks me to have to lift my hands from the keyboard to mouse around. I was thinking about a new design - how about a new combined mouse/keyboard system?

I'm imagining two chording modules; one for each hand. But each module is meant to be placed on the desk, with an optical sensor on the bottom. Not only do you get to mouse without lifting your hands off the 'keyboard', but you could open up a whole new library of gesture-based commands.

You're joking, but you're more right than you realize. I've visited Akihabara - supposedly Tokyo's electronics area - a few times, and by far, it seems like PC games are where the smut games are, and 'real' games are on consoles. It appears to be a very clear division.

By your logic, no one could need a cell phone, ever, because adults work in places with fixed landlines, and kids are in schools. But, you know, life gets in the way.

I don't appreciate students using their phones in class, but that doesn't mean they don't need them. It depends on how full their plates are - some students go right home after school, yes, but some students have a wide variety of after-school or weekend activities, and the utility of having some means of contact and communication while in transit is pretty clear. It's true that when they arrive at their destination, they are probably contactable, but you know, buses get flat tires, or sometimes there's traffic, or maybe the kid gets on the wrong train, or whatever. It's nice to have a backup in case of unforeseen circumstances.

A reasonable middle ground might be to ban cell phones when the student is under the immediate supervision of a teacher or other responsible adult. You clearly want kids to be able to call 911 in an emergency, after all, but if a teacher is around, that job should really fall to the them.

I could answer your question, but since it appears to be coming out of left field (that is, gf's post asserted that students playing with cell phones is a non-issue for the class, I disagreed - your question relates to the necessity of entertainment), answering your question would only derail the discussion.

I will also assume that you, geekmux, meant a general 'you', instead of an actual, personalized you, because I, personally, certainly didn't suggest allowing students the free use of cell phones. As a matter of fact, students in my classes get one warning before the cell phone takes up residence on my desk for the remainder of the class.

You're making a huge assumption here. Why would the kid playing with his cell phone necessarily be bored? In my experience, kids who play with their phones in class are equally likely to be high achievers as low achievers.

You're also assuming that it's the fault of the teacher. This is not always true; the curriculum may have something to do with it, or just the randomization of students - it's possible that you could get a class with an abnormally high number of under-achievers. It happens.

If you've never tried teaching, then don't presume to give front-line teachers advice. ...and if you have tried teaching and it turns out that you can uniformly turn all your students into A+ super-achievers, well... tell us, your lesser colleagues, what your secret is. 'cause brother, it ain't always easy out here.

Do you know what happens if a teacher allows students to, well, not listen? Students don't have a sense of long-term consequences - that's why they're considered minors. They will, very often, choose the path of least resistance. They'll nod and smile and won't understand a damned thing, because if they're not listening, you can't very well ask them questions to test their understanding.

That's the difference here, by the way - high school is not university. If it's university, you can just stand and lecture and let the less motivated students fail. But you can't do that in high school - not if you want them to learn anything whatsoever. The kids will almost certainly be lacking in self-control and discipline, and if you let the less-motivated kids dictate what's acceptable in class, well, you'll lose it all.

This is always the same goddamned discussion. "Teachers should be doing their jobs! If they can't bring out the best in every single student, they're incompetent!" "Let students be responsible for their own performance! That's what I always wanted, so that must be the best solution!"

Listen. Many people assume that each student essentially acts as an isolated island. This is not always true.

A classroom is not only thirty (or whatever number) of individual students. A classroom is also its atmosphere and its dynamic. If you let one kid text in class, even if he knows the material, you've suddenly lost your justification to prevent other kids from doing the same. This will slowly poison the whole class to the level of the most common denominator. It's a matter of fairness. The rule has to be the same, or very similar, for everyone.

I suspect that the ball is already rolling on this sort of social reform. There seems to be a trend back towards artisanal products and services - like artisan bakeries, or CSAs, or such - and it looks like people are getting more into the whole 'support local business' thing. In these cases, people are knowingly choosing products or services that are theoretically less efficient and less productive, but which has more emotional investment.

Just a note, but I'm pretty sure that keeping a low unemployment rate isn't actually one of the goals of government. I seem to remember reading some articles somewhere wherein the prevailing thought of economists was to keep the unemployment at around 10 percent, to ensure proper 'wage pressure' or somesuch.

Seriously, reading Slashdot on this article is like reading Facebook after a major UI change. it's just post after post of whining and crying about how things are changing, and the old way was better, and how come they had to go change stuff. Wah, wah, wah.

Sure, it was heavy-handed, and sure, it was unilateral. But you know what? Maybe it'll turn out to be good. And if it isn't, no one's making you use Gnome 3. Go to KDE or Enlightenment or any of the other MANY MANY MANY desktop environments. Isn't this sort of gamble exactly what the Bazaar is meant for?

Is it common sense? If you were to go to a social event which had a free coat check, wouldn't you expect that coat checking service to make reasonably sure that they'll hang on to your coat?

Just because they disclaim responsibility doesn't make it so. They're providing a service - why shouldn't people have an expectation that the service continues?

That's... interesting. I'm not going to disparage your mother's teaching ability - obviously, I've never met her or seen her teach classes, so I have nothing to say on that score.

However, it is a fact that substitute teachers often get a break from troubled classes. See, when a 'nightmare' kid sees the same teacher every day, they grow comfortable enough to, well, become nightmares. However, when a new teacher comes in, that very same kid will be quiet and respectful for a short period of time - say, a day or two - because they don't know how far they can push the envelope. They're nervous, in other words.

I won't say that you're wrong to have great expectations of kids, but teachers are human, too. And if some *individual* kid causes trouble every day, well, it's not going to take more than a few days before expectations of that kid drop precipitously...

Think back to those classes. I'm willing to bet that those teachers, the ones you remember as being the best teachers, had earned some measure of respect from you or your fellow students. What you can get away with in a class, as a teacher, varies tremendously depending on the class dynamic. I have some classes that I, necessarily, must handle with delicacy, and I have some classes where I can call out kids for acting stupid.

Credit where credit is due, after all, and blame where blame is due. This teacher wasn't very smart in her venting, and she essentially got what she deserved. If she's going to say, in a reasonably public place, that her kids are dumb, well, she gets to reap the rewards of that.