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metafour

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camron at metafour.org

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Former teacher here with a similar experience. It's not only that it's not worth it, teaching for the most part doesn't even pay a living wage. You can't make up the difference with a summer job since the "summer vacation" has gotten shorter and shorter over time it seems. In addition, teachers usually have to do professional development over the summer as well as we always started back before the students did.

One of the districts I worked at didn't have an attendance policy and allowed students to do credit recovery with online courses. It's incredibly difficult to convince middle and high school students to struggle through learning when they know from their fellow students they can make up the credit later and just google all the answers since the proctors for credit recovery didn't really pay attention. They all had their phones on their leg under the table searching for all the answers while the proctor sat and ignored them.

Does anyone know if James had taken a short hiatus between jobs to travel by motorcycle for a while in Southern California? I ran it someone one day at The Rock Store that had worked with Aaron Swartz and a friend and I had a great conversation with him and I’m now wondering whether it was James.

AMA: Jesse Noller 13 years ago

Jesse, any idea when I'm going to be able to download my backups from Rackspace cloud servers and instantly/directly load them into either VMWare or Virtualbox? I asked about this a while ago and was told it was coming with the move to OpenStack.

Vesper app 13 years ago

I know the original comment was deleted but I wanted to comment on this anyway since I spent the last school year teaching in a low-income high school.

First off, don't assume that the two are mutually exclusive. One of the things you learn as an educator in a tough environment is that you need hobbies as an outlet to survive and not become depressed. If you do start to go down that rabbit hole of depression you can have a poor outlook on your and your student's ability to succeed and that is not what an ideal educator needs in order to be successful in the classroom.

Second, I could have used this app over the last year to make me a better teacher. The ability to capture thoughts with words and pictures like this app provides would have been phenomenal for my organization and let me be more effective. I tried other apps and they would not have been as useful as this one would have been so don't discount it because the time was spent working on it instead of other problems that you feel are more deserving of attention.

I don't feel like the larger issue was addressed by the CEO in the post and Apple seems to be avoiding it as well.

According to the AllThingsD article [1],

"But sources close to the company [Apple] say it was more than a little troubled that AppGratis was pushing a business model that appeared to favor developers with the financial means to pay for exposure. ... In other words, app-discovery platforms built on paid recommendations aren’t going to fly with Apple."

If this is their business model and this is really the issue, then it needs to be directly addressed by both sides.

[1]http://allthingsd.com/20130408/confirmed-apple-kicks-appgrat...

I agree. Codecademy can be useful you just need to recognize its limitations.

Does Thinkful use mostly freely available sources from the web as a way have students learn the material?

It seemed like there was when Jessica Livingston was on. Her slides were showing to the right of the video. When Patrick came on it just showed his name and title there the whole time instead.

I just watched that video and I'm incredibly upset. I'm currently teaching math at a high school that is on "priority improvement" and needs to reach impossible goals this year or face a "take over" by the state. Our curriculum is the Core series of math books that is incredibly word heavy while we have a student population that can't read that well and is primarily ELL. We have been told it is a directive that we must use the book in class. Every class period, all class period, which is 58 minutes. I had to do training on Saturday for six hours regarding our use of the book in class. They've been using these books for the past few years and it hasn't worked, in fact we need even more growth this year than was needed in the past to get out of priority improvement. Instead of changing the curriculum to include ideas like the ST Math program they're essentially threatening our jobs. There has to be a way to get these products into more classrooms like ours.

CU Denver undergrad students seeking a degree are forced to take a few 3000+ level courses to meet a cultural diversity requirement. Most other general education requirements can be met by taking equivalent courses at a community college which is what I did. I've always speculated that these are required in order to help the college get some extra money from students. Some of the options for these courses have required materials that can only be purchased from the university bookstore and they consist mainly of printouts of wikipedia articles.

If you log in to developer.apple.com and click on the Mac Dev Center there's a button that says 4.4 in the App Store. Wasn't there yet but if you click on the View all downloads link in the section just below the dmg is available there for download. This is without the paid developer account.

Talent Acquisitions 14 years ago

I have this conversation with others and myself all the time. Money is nice but what is the opportunity cost of that money?

Check out Geekhack.org or Deskthority.net. You may be able to find a keyboard from a member that's in your country or someone willing to act as a forwarding service.

So basically AL is claiming they did a mass voting snipe?

Seems a bit disingenuous but then again Ebay bidding seems to have been this way for a while and now the strategy is moving to other areas if this is the case.

Kill Math 14 years ago

I had a similar reaction after reading the beginning of this article. I feel as though modern algebra uses symbolic manipulation as a means of qualitative discovery and understanding.