Trump: The Second Year

I think a very fair conclusion at this point, is that virtually every non family member that comes into contact with Trump realizes he’s just a genuinely nasty human being.

Either that or they’re all megasnowflakes. Lots and lots of em

I thought he was going to surround himself with the best and brightest? As much turnover as his staff has apparently his idea for full employment is to have every American work for him at some point.

2 Likes

I’ll take ‘Babysit a Billionaire’ for $300,000 Alex.

2 Likes

Larry Hogan 2020

You can tell he’s telling the truth because he wants you guys spending $700,000,000+/year over five years in order to improve buildings.

MD schools are in pretty rough shape.

Still not sure how building quality=education quality. Perhaps he can explain.

It’s kinda hard to learn when it’s 32 degrees and there’s no heat in the building.

2 Likes

Actual conservatism doesn’t abandon poor children to subpar education. So that’s a X2 from me.

2 Likes

Maryland is spending $13k/pupil (likely not even including legacy costs like pensions). That’s middle of the road in the US. According to the below NY spends $18k while some states like Arizona only spend $8k.

It’s not that the public education isn’t funded or a policy priority… much of the money is wasted. We could argue for 10,000 posts about what constitutes “waste” in public education. But don’t assume for a second Americans don’t throw money at education and think that alone will fix it.

Gross over simplification warning!!!

One room school houses and emphasis on the 3r’s brought us through the industrial revolution and into the space age, but now kids need smart boards and Ipads or they’ll choke on their own drool.

It ain’t a problem with the implements of learning(books,buildings,tech) or one that more money will solve.

5 Likes

Devils advocate. The 3rd grade project in the stem class at my daughter’s grade school (she’ll be doing it next year) is to build a working circuit board by hand.

The 5th grade project is using python to create a drone path that flies in 3 dimensions during it’s flight.

I genuinely fuckin pitty the kid that has to enter the workforce with my daughter with a one room schoolhouse and the 3 Rs behind him.

3 Likes

Eh, I don’t. You can go a long way with strong fundamentals that you can’t with cool tricks. Strong fundamentals in science, math, etc= writing computer programs. Learning to use a program that was designed to be user friendly=cool trick.

The stem programs are cool for their contemporary tech, but how much bang for the buck are we getting?

Not zeroing in on any one student, but on the whole?

I don’t really disagree with either side, but the bottom line is that, in parts of MD, the school infrastructure is pathetic.

2 Likes

Jonathan Pie, probably the last of the real, reasonable leftists explains Trump in under 4 minutes.

3 Likes

@SkyzykS Totally agree. It’s all “party tricks”, for lack of a better term. Reminds me of my friends telling me how much smarter kids are today, and how it’s so much more competitive to get into the Ivy League schools, blah blah blah…kids can out tech me all day, but somehow they can’t really read or write, because that’s all so yesterday.

One of my favorite SciFi novels was written by Robert Heinlein (don’t remember the title anymore it was so long ago) -every kid had all knowledge downloaded into their brains when they became of age; the hero was deemed dumb/retard/idiot because his brain lacked the ability to receive knowledge via download, and had to learn everything the old fashioned way; turns out people with the inability to acquire “all” knowledge through download were the only ones who still had the ability to actually innovate and invent and actually advance civilization.

3 Likes

Learning python and the concepts of how a circuit works is worse than the fundamentals?

The point was more that the 3 Rs aren’t obselete, they’re just fundamentals. Freshmen are learning math now that my dad would have needed to take senior year as an honors class.

Well my local metro doesn’t have these cool programs but my suburb ‘pay taxes through the nose’ does. I’ll let you guess which one leads to more successful future people.

I’m not saying it’s causation or anything, but it’s silly to act like they’re anything other than positive.

If it is instead of and not along with, then yes.

Full disclusure- my dad used to bring home electronic appliances (control systems) and amplifiers, which we would tear down, repair and test right on the kitchen table. This did end up coming in handy later in life when I started working in robotics.

But it was done after school, not instead of.

The basics that are required for most (all?) the follow-up criteria is still in place

I can think of a slew of commonplace subjects that won’t ever touch the real world applications of my daughter’s once a week stem class

Not knocking at all, this is genuinely awesome. I wish everyone was like this with their kids

I had to google search for Maryland’s school heating problems. As I suspected, it seems to be a Baltimore issue. This was one of the top results:
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/how-baltimore-students-got-left-in-the-cold/549866/

1 Like