Go ahead and use the not so constructive words. It's okay in war, and at this point, in politics.

Most English, Math, and first year science courses should be able to be taught at the high school level to adequately prepare for college courses at an upper level. Make the existing AP, Honors, and IB curricula adequate to replace those required courses at the college level. My high school calculus course was better than the equivalent college course, but the calculus teacher at college was the department head and had his own calculus book to sell, so it was hard to test out of 1st year calculus for engineering students there. I managed to test out of 1 semester, but not both. This is just an example.

Note that I wasn't saying that they should start studying the actual course work for the profession, but a large number at least have a direction planned by the time they hit high school. They have at least some idea if college is the direction they are planning on or whether they are going a trade route or retail. If you don't then still taking a course load that would satisfy a year or two of college courses by the time you graduate high school wouldn't be an awful thing. I realize that not all high schools offer AP, Honors or IB curricula, but many do. Also, not every city has a junior college. And yes, many that do already offer the chance to take college courses in high school, but coordination of schedules between high school and college is a challenge.

As far as phones are concerned, I think that banning phones is silly, but also that most all kids need better supervision in when their use is appropriate and when it isn't.

Helping students work through the curriculum as quick as they can would be great if every school district offered it, but logistically it would be really difficult to implement. If it wasn't in place everywhere, moving between school districts would be a nightmare.

All high schools should be expected to prepare students to start learning the professions you mentioned at a much earlier stage in their college careers than is currently the case. There are too many courses required for most students in the early years of college which cover information that should have been learned in high school.

If the high schools can't teach them adequately, then let the college bound students switch to college a couple years earlier and let grades 11 and 12 be taken instead as freshmen and sophomores in college, with the funding that would have gone to the high schools going instead to the colleges. Let the grades 11 and 12 for remaining students be oriented to vocational occupations.

That might give students a bit more incentive to work harder in the early years as well. It would make college a bit cheaper for those college bound as they wouldn't be paying full price for courses the colleges want people to take to satisfy garbage breadth requirements, and the full price courses would be ones more relevant to their degrees.

This would be a good law to see the federal government and all state legislatures pass. Too bad Congress is wasting time renaming the Gulf of Mexico.

Yep. And many of us who grew up in that era can still right decent, compact, and fast code - to do some things. Unfortunately, there are too many jobs today that require a wide amount of CS ability. You may be very good at X, but the project needs X, Y, and Z. If Y and Z can be provided by a bloat filled library and get the project out the door faster, that's what people do. They don't want to hire an expert on Y and Z as well.

Not saying they aren't testing the waters, but raising the prices immediately gives them some time to buffer profit until they have to raise them the full amount to cover the tariff costs. It lets them ease into bad a bit slower so people don't scream as much - frog in warming water and all that.

I'll bite. I have several children. They all attended the same public school system in the same town for their entire K-12 education. Of those, three chose to apply themselves and graduated with an IB diploma.Two chose to not work as hard. One was just more of a people person, and still is. Another did great on tests, and could discuss any topic the teacher asked about related to the reading, but didn't feel homework was worth it. He'll give you a rational and fact based opinion on most any current subject you want to talk about.

I realize that we have good schools where I live. It's one of the reasons that I chose to live here, although the economic opportunities aren't grand. I'm quite sure that there are places where the public school is indeed failing. My college roommate had gone to Loyola in Chicago because of its problematic public schools.

I don't think that the system should be left alone, but I don't particularly fault the school system or the Department of Education for the results we have. We do need a federal level body to set up standards of what must be learned in each grade level. Our mobile population requires this. It is no benefit to our students when California teaches Geometry in 7th grade and North Carolina teaches it in 9th grade - just to give a completely random example with made up subject to grade matching to make my point. When families move, their kids shouldn't have missed out on subject X or a portion of subject X, nor should they have to take it twice. Federal standards aren't a bad thing. It's also a problem when students on advanced study tracks take math at an accelerated rate, but the standardized tests are oriented towards the normal track, so they are answering questions about something they may have learned two or three years ago rather than the last year. The concepts they are recently familiar with aren't touched because most students haven't learned them or perhaps won't even touch them in their entire K-12 education.

At the same time, I think the standards need to be raised higher. I really don't care if you are planning to end up in a vocational job - you need to be well educated. Pushing everyone higher needs to be emphasized. The expectations of everyone have dropped over the couple of centuries of our countries existence. And if you doubt that, I challenge you to take a college entrance exam from 150 years ago. Yes, knowledge has changed. But if you look at what was considered college level work 150 years ago and compare it to the general population then, our college entrance standards are pretty low today.

Teach your kids to read and to do basic math before they hit kindergarten. We did. Show them the value of reading and learning by doing it yourself. Don't just let your mind rot watching Fox or CNN or what passes for television these days. Pick up a book and read. My son that didn't feel homework was worth it just finished the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago. He decided to read some Dostoevsky and also has my copy of War and Peace that is on his reading list. Those books weren't ones I was assigned in school. They were just ones I chose to read (although GA 1 was so bleak I never made it to GA 2 or 3). Get your kid's heads out of the tablets that they seem so attached to from the time they can physically hold them up. Put down the cell phones. Turn off the gaming consoles. Convince them that they don't need to let their minds rot on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or whatever the latest fad is. And if you don't think any of that is important, then don't make the Department of Education your scapegoat when nothing seems to be going well.

With the ability to run cloud based servers anywhere, exactly how are you going to determine if a packet is ultimately destined for China? Any information really important can be downloaded "locally" and go in a diplomatic pouch.

The weight of an e-reader like Kindle is much easier on these old joints than a heavy hardback or holding a paperback's pages open. A kindle holder makes it even less work. A book a day keeps the mind active.

But the younger generation not reading much at all other than tag lines and short pithy comments certainly doesn't help any. Their attention span doesn't even reach to full length videos very often.

Fiber performance is higher and you don't have to deal with overlapping frequency issues though.

Rural fiber is expensive. But many rural spots are also high wind which means wireless has antenna directional issues. The towers are also difficult to get to and also have power and wind issues. Line of sight is also an issue.

I'd prefer a centrist party that lopped off the loons on both sides. FWIW, Christianity should remember Christ's command to "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's". Everyone, including religious people, have a right to express opinions in the political arena and to vote their conscience. But religion's goals should be different. Get more hearts truly in tune with what God wants and not what a particular religious group thinks He wants, and there would be better candidates on all sides winning the nominations. Remember all of God's commands and not just the easy ones. Reestablishing the fear of God (versus the fear of a religious group) would also be useful in mitigating some of the excesses and errors from the elite.

When you have an incoming president who has promised to prosecute everyone he thinks has wronged him, what do you expect? He shouldn't complain about any pardon Biden has made when he's planning to pardon all the insurrectionists from Jan 6 who were indicted by grand juries of citizens and convicted by juries of their peers.

First, I'm Republican - not a Trump lover - but Republican. There were a lot of very angry people over COVID-19 handling in 2020, and I'd suspect that, by itself, led to higher voter counts in 2020 vs the other years. Hatred of inflation that is on the wane is far less of a motivator to vote than hatred of masks and isolation were in 2020.

And whether you like it or not, predominately blue districts were negatively impacted in 2024 due to bomb threats and long wait times. Shutting down mail voting as many places as possible was also an issue. Like it or not, some workers have a harder time making it to the polling places and long wait times after work don't help.

We need to figure out how to get all legal voters to be informed in an unbiased way and actually vote. Yeah, that's fantasy. But it should still be the ideal we shoot for. Gerrymandering by any party needs to stop. Every voter should have the same approximate wait times to vote and each voting precinct should have the same relative average distance to voting place per voter. While we're at it, give Puerto Rico statehood. How they're treated during hurricane season is a national disgrace. If that annoys people, look at a East and West California, Oregon, and Washington. That would make a lot of people happy there. To keep the electoral college sane, go to proportional ECs based on popular vote for all states out to say 4 decimal places.

If any party can't win fairly, they really don't deserve to be in power.

Just one? With your UID, I'd think you would have several by now.

It's doomed to fail because the vast majority of people choose taste and texture over healthy until they end up in the ER or doctor's office and they are forced to choose between healthy and dead. And even then, it's a hard choice for some.