alas_141

No child should be actively excluded based on a metric like race or gender, just like no student should be deliberately included because of race, gender, class, or any other metric that a parent could use to coerce a school to place their child in a gifted/magnet class. That should be common sense.

Kids should be placed in the gifted/magnet track because of performance, and performance alone. I don't believe that a meritocracy is racist, sexist, or biased in an unfair way. Placing students in classes where they may under perform, and excluding kids who would perform well in an accelerated program are unfair, and a meritocracy mitigates both of these problems.

The article raised a good point about schools that marginalized groups would attend don't have a gifted program, precluding them from even participating. That can be addressed a couple different ways. Either redirect high performers to a school where there is a gifted program present, or mandate the presence of a gifted program in all schools. There will, of course, be differing quality of the program from school to school, which would favor the former course of action.

Having gone through the "gifted program" through elementary and middle school, I can say that the only real differences I felt weren't related to curriculum, we were taught essentially the same things, with slight differences.

1. Smaller class size. In a class of 4th, 5th, and 6th graders, there was maybe 25 kids. 2. Less rowdy/troublemaking classmates. Made for less distractions. 3. Less busywork. The routine of getting a packet every night for homework was not something I had to suffer through like many friends I had that weren't in an accelerated program.

I don't believe you will ever truly eradicate inequities within public services, and the cost of private services, especially in education, preclude many from participating. That said, we should strive to mitigate them. My fear is that the steps taken to mitigate inequity will just move the availability of opportunity from one group to another, where the true solution is increasing the availability for all groups, and let performance be the selector of who is admitted to gifted/accelerated programs.

On your last bit, I don't see your point. It was obvious from the article that Josh didn't have a problem breaching personal privacy/security provided he was wielding/creating the tool that did it. It didn't track that he leaked data for any ideological reason other than he could, and felt the CIA deserved to get egg on their face for how they treated him. Also, beyond the idea that the CIA knew of vulnerabilities on public companies that exposed Americans and neglected to cooperate to patch them, the data, largely made up of exploits, that was leaked can't really be ideologically driven unless you're operating under the assumption that it isn't widely known that intelligence agencies hack their adversaries.

I have got to re-watch that movie. Definitely a top ten for me.

I liked it. Very reminiscent of a rubik's cube. I found it's easier to make solid stripes and manipulate from there instead of going for the checkerboard right away.

I will check it out. Thank you!

Checked it out just now and pulled to trigger on it. Definitely what I was looking for in regard to the first.

I played that one a bit, felt like another splinter cell to me. I will have to revisit

Gaming has been as big a part of my life as anything else, a few of the games I wish existed, or that I hope exist and just haven't happened across:

1. A true large scale battle game, kind of like what Hell Let Loose is, but for knights, samurai, spartans, Persian Immortals, and any number of other warriors throughout history. Each has their own skill tree and strategies, you can control troop movements on the battlefield, and become an individual warrior and enter the fray. You can pick a 'campaign mode' which consists of conquering surrounding civilizations, or make the setting a historically significant battlefield like Thermopylae.

2. A spy rpg, where you follow the life of a CIA case officer, or KGB operative. Kind of like what Sam Fisher did with Splinter Cell, but those games missed out on big aspects of spycraft, like developing assets and constructing a spy network for intelligence gathering.

3. A good surfing game. I love surfing and have done it most of my life, but I haven't happened across a video game that does a good job capturing what surfing is like. They either make the surfer impossible to unseat from their board, or make every wave teetering on the edge of wiping out. I know water physics are hard in games but I keep holding my breath a game studio gets it right.

You're right in that it is a less immediately needed or important skill for most things. It comes down to whether you want to outsource the job or not. If you can change your own oil, you don't have to outsource it to a mechanic. Knowing how to do stitches saves you an ER trip. Hair is a weird one because I'd imagine it's hard to cut your own hair. The programming version of this would be writing a script that gets comps for listing real estate, and a realtor becomes less valuable. Spending a bit of time to really learn bash can get much more value out of using a computer. The window of problems to solve that don't already have a solution readily available is shrinking, but not gone. A personal example for me, I couldn't find a ballistic computer that was free and did what I wanted, so I wrote it myself. I've also written scripts that scrape ebay links when me and friends couldn't get the new xbox. These things don't move the needle very much in terms of quality of life on their own, but as an aggregate, I am grateful I took the time to learn how to really use my computer. You are right though, in pointing out that they aren't as important as cooking and literacy. I would only add that the importance on knowing programming is trending up with time.

The layman should learn to program the same way that they should know how to cook. They won't be as good as someone who is fascinated with CS, but they should know enough that they won't "starve". To me, everyone should know how to script a basic program (maybe snake or tetris is the line for basic), scrape for some information, and do basic data analysis. As tooling gets better all the time, I could see the goalposts moving a bit to standing up a server or making a basic AI. Just like not knowing how to use Google in the 2000's would handicap you, I see programming knowledge the same way. You can survive without it, but the quality of life you'd enjoy would be much higher for knowing it.