Joel and I have been using the analogy 'herd of cats' a lot recently in our back-and-forths, to describe the general lack of cohesiveness on the left, considering we've also been joking recently about how we tend to continue talking at each other in long abandoned threads we hijacked, I shouldn't have expected anyone to catch that joke Being something of a cat person, I probably overly relate human and feline behavior, but I tend to think we act more like cats then say, sheep. Or should I say, ideally we want people to act more like cats than sheep, and I am not sure packing kids into a classroom encourages that.



Yes, I've usually found most people have a solid attention span for around 20-30 minutes and a lesser span for around an hour, I'm not sure this represents a flaw in standardized testing, just the education system. I've never had a 'standardized education' and I seemed to have done fine on standardized tests, though admittedly I might have occassionally underscored since sometimes I'd see stuff that I hadn't been taught, I don't think I knew what a 'preposition' was until I was 20, it just hadn't come up. Anyway, I'm not really sure the flaw lies in the concept of standardized testing, but in the method in which it's applied. Currently teachers fear it, because it causes stress, as opposed to representing an incentive. I don't like the punishment approach in teaching, so I don't like it for teachers either. A bonus system seems better, with the tests broad enough in the question pool that they can't teach to the test, this is not hard, the solutions are known and easy, but you have two (or more) competing political ideologies who seem to have a vested interest in making the alternative options fail and theirs appear to succeed more than in making their's genuinely work.




Sorry to hear that. Well, you're certainly welcome to argue, I never mind chatting with polite persons about almost anything. Keep in mind though, that most homeschoolers are understandably defensive on this issue, as I mentioned in an earlier post, we tend to view this 'lack of social interaction' thingy as about one step up from comments of the 'fried chicken and watermelon' or 'jocks are dumb' variety. A cheap red herring to try to detract from our academic credentials. The reality of the situation is obvious, students whose parents are heavily interested in their education outperform students whose parents are not, on average. So fundamentally we outperform simply because parents who homeschool self-select essentially out of a pool who are basically by definition very interested in their kid's schooling. That's really the long and short of it, but I think we tend to benefit a bit since our non-jail atmosphere is a bit less likely to make someone have a distaste for schooling, and by association, learning.