Finally, the final price of a single card is NOT an indicator of profit. The difference of selling price and buying price is. If they overcharge for singles (yes, even for uncommons and commons) it means that they WANT to rip you off!!! They already made the expected profit and they are been very greedy and are looking for MORE! No self-respecting store would ever buy cards at a price that won't cover its expenses and make profit when they are sold at MARKET PRICE.
Since cracking boxes is how all stores get their singles supply at the launch of a set, let's look at the math:
Let's say that SCG opens 1,000 boxes. When they do this, they're going to open about 600 of each rare, and 300 of each mythic (Law of large numbers). This kind of predictability, combined with the pre-order data and the fairly substantial discount they get for ordering from WotC lets them price these cards in such a way that the commons and uncommons aren't needed to generate much profit. This lets them sell Doom Blade for a quarter.
Your LGS opens 6 boxes of product (which is a large amount for most small stores). The number of rares/mythics they get is much more variable because of the small amount opened. In order to make profit, they need playable commons and uncommons to pull some weight. This is why you see Doom Blade and Dissolve at a dollar. They need the increased profit margins on these cards to actually make money.
The other thing you have to take into account is the whole economies of scale argument. SCG sells thousands of orders per day, where your LGS may only have a few dozen. This decreases the amount of profit per item necessary to cover operating costs. It's the same reason why Wal-Mart can sell Campbell's Tomato Soup at 48 cents per can, when your local grocery store has to charge 68 cents per can.
I can handle $1 here or there. But 2 to 4 times the price of SCG? Why would anyone buy a 20oz coke of a machine that costs $4 when there is a machine right next to it that charges $1?
Yes, but the $1 coke machine will take 7-10 days to give you your soda. If you want your coke now, you're out of luck.
Customers who buy ANYTHING at an LGS (or merely pay entry fees and nothing more) are supporting that store by definition. Don't even try to argue otherwise.
Getting cards cheaper means nothing if you have nowhere to sling your spells. If you live in one of the higher cost of living regions of the country, your LGS can't possibly compete with TCG and Ebay sellers selling cards out of their homes. People purchasing primarily from these sources forces the LGS to increase prices (since they still have operating costs), which drives more people away. It quickly descends into a death spiral. When your local stores close, how useful is all of that cardboard now?
In addition, do you realize that most stores make nothing off of tournament fees? Tournaments exist to get you in the store so you buy things like sleeves, soda, food and the occasional single. If you go strictly by tournament fees, SCG Opens are run at a loss. It takes 500 players just to make back the money given out in prizes... not taking into account staffing (judges, other tournament staff, commentators), hall fees (rental for a weekend, set up, tear down, communications) and transportation. The real reason the SCG Open circuit exists is for them to buy your cards then sell them on their website.
It's my fault for not having the cards? Excuse me, but if a store owner told me that I would never return to his store. Ever.
Personal responsibility man... if you don't have the cards you need for an event, the only one to blame is yourself. You decided to risk buying your cards on location, where you knew they could be charging a higher price than what you could pay online if you ordered them a week in advance.
Well, indeed. Except that my personal experience with our socialised healthcare system in the last year or so is that, for a not-at-all-time-critical case, my wait for a specialist was a few weeks, and for a somewhat more urgent case, my wait time for ED was on the order of how quickly they could get the wheelchair from the hospital entrance to ED.
The difference being that you don't have 300m people living in your country.
when MA put in their insurance for all thing the city of boston has more doctors per 1000 people than any other city in the US. they also have some of the worst wait times to see a doctor.
which means that people aren't getting the appointments they need in time.
Mystery, a few things:
1. The MMS Access to Patient Care Study only takes into account those services that you would specifically schedule in advance. In this case, we're talking about checkups for Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, Pediatrics and Cardiology. (Source: 2013 MMS Access to Patient Care Study)
2. The average wait time to see a doctor in 2005 (before mandated insurance) was 47 days. It has remained consistently between 47 and 50 days since then. Mandating health insurance has not affected the wait times to see a doctor, so you cannot say that it's the reason "we have not been getting the appointments we need in time". (Source: 2011 MMS Study, since it's the last one with previous year's statistics).
3. As a resident of MA, I have never had to wait more than a day to see a doctor for something that wasn't routine... and that wait was to schedule an appointment with an ENT to get my nose cauterized. Urgent Care (things that aren't important enough to go to a hospital for, but should be taken care of quickly) is phenomenal in MA.
Is the ACA the best system out there, no. Can we implement procedures to bring down the cost of healthcare (like doing away with the Chargemaster and fixing malpractice insurance), absolutely. The healthcare system back in 2008 was untenable, and this was the best system that we could get passed to at least delay the inevitable.
As somebody who actually has to deal with this on a day to day basis (even though I'm not the biggest fan of it):
The Common Core is not nearly as proscriptive as you have been led to believe. It provides a set of standards that all students must achieve, and a list of skills that all students must have. It does not detail specific lessons and resources that must be used. While students are required to analyze the elements of a plot in a work of fiction, they are not required to complete a specific worksheet on a specific book. The teachers (or district in some cases) still have the final say on how lessons will be taught.
In addition, the Common Core does not mandate that students learn the material at the same pace with no differentiation for ability. Honors classes will still exist, and they will still be able to exceed what the Common Core requires. The Common Core simply provides a minimum threshold that must be met by all districts. For the majority of states, it won't appreciably affect what they do (other than using a different assessment). It only affects those states which do not currently meet that threshold (Louisiana, I'm looking at you...).
Hence why you don't need standarized testing. i never agreed with standardized testing anyway.
I'm also not the biggest fan of standardized testing. One of the main principles when writing an assessment is that the assessment is valid when testing for only one variable. You can write a test to determine if the student understands a subject, you can write one to determine if they have sufficient knowledge to graduate, you can write another one to give a rough comparison of teacher effectiveness... you just can't have all three at the same time. Utilizing one trial to test for three variables is simply bad science.
i am sorry holding teachers to no standard of teaching is bad and it is how we end up with teachers like my first geometry teacher in high school.
The issue is not that teachers are held to no standard, it's that the people applying the standard cannot do so effectively. It takes far more time than an administrator has to properly evaluate 40-50 staff members. What you wind up with far too often is the evaluator coming into the classroom for a 20 minute "dog and pony show", instead of evaluating them multiple times at different times during the class doing different activities.
Another problem that I experienced during my first year teaching is when the evaluator knows next to nothing about my subject. My principal (a former history teacher) observed me teaching a lesson on acids and bases, and he marked me down for "teaching them logarithms, which is precalculus math". The only thing that I was teaching them was how to plug it in on their calculator to find pH, which was a requirement of my state's frameworks.
As an aside, people have been saying that American education is awful for as long as there has been education. From the work of psychologists in the 1920's (using IQ tests to put children on tracks, Progressive education) to Why Little Johnny Can't Read in the 50's to A Nation at Risk in the 80's to the Common Core today, groups of "experts" have always been saying that they have the answers to all of our educational woes and that the teachers are essentially John Snow.
I very much doubt failing to de-sideboard at competitive rel would be downgraded. You're getting a gameloss even if you call it on yourself, the supposed more strict penalty is that if you don't call it and it is discovered later that you noticed the discrepancy (and that this can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law or something) and didn't call a judge (and make a statement to the effect that you didn't call the judge on purpose because you were cheating) then this can be upgraded to cheating, otherwise the benefit of the doubt will be given and you'll get your game loss same as if you had called the judge immediately.
To quote the MIPG under Tournament Error - Deck/Decklist Problem, Additonal Remedies:
If the player, upon drawing an opening hand, discovers a deck problem and calls a judge at that point, the Head Judge may downgrade the penalty, fix the deck, and allow the player to redraw the hand with one fewer card. The player may continue to take further mulligans if he or she desires.
People do dumb things that boggle the mind all the time. You have no idea how much of it I see every day teaching high school. Some of the things that I've seen while HJ Comp REL events:
A player registering a 20 card sealed deck (completely left out a color).
A player passing his drafted cards pile instead of the booster pack
A player who did accidentally have 5 of a card (borrowed deck from a friend, saw 4 sleeves empty and asked friend what was missing, replaced it with 4x of a card and had 61 cards). His friend provided him with a typed list.
Players not knowing what P/T actually do
Are these stupid, preventable mistakes? Absolutely. Should the players have the book thrown at them for making these mistakes? Absolutely not.
But you "benefit of the doubt"ers are insisting that they be idiots.
Even an incident like this, which is obvious and blatant cheating, the judge is required to ignore the fact that the included cards make the deck stronger and look only at the fact that the deck was incorrectly registered.
There should be no benefit of the doubt at competitve rel, the default penalties for various infractions should be tough enough to discourage cheating, and the head judge should have the discretion to downgrade if they feel it's warranted.
While removing benefit of the doubt would reduce (probably) the amount of planned cheating that occurs, it would definitely cause a very large increase in cheats of opportunity. Let's take the following situation:
Player A is playing at a PTQ and when de-sideboarding, misses a card. He and his opponent shuffle the deck, then he draws his hand of seven cards and sees that a sideboard card was left in his deck. Under the current rules, he is incentivized to call a judge as soon as he sees it, because the Game Loss penalty will most likely be downgraded (in accordance with the IPG) to a Warning, fix it, and forced mulligan.
Under an IPG where there is no benefit of the doubt, this player would receive a game loss no matter the circumstances. Since there is no incentive for him to call the penalty on himself, he keeps quiet, thus committing a cheat of opportunity.
I've been a judge for a long time, and a competitive player for even longer. I remember the times when players were "allowed one free cheat", and the times when tapping land for mana before announcing spells led to penalties (a player got DQ'ed from the finals of a PT for repeated instances of this). The current IPG is a vast upgrade to either of those two days of a bygone era.
I disagree, if Teachers knew that their pay and preformance review was based not only on other adults but the students themselves, We would get ALOT better "fun" alternative teaching methoids, Fields trips, Interesting documentarys and experments would be way way up, and boring bland copying would be way down.
There are numerous problems with this idea. To list a few:
1. The school I worked at did student surveys for a couple of years before discontinuing it. The highest rated teachers were the ones that had the lowest standards, gave out the least homework, and couldn't lesson plan to save their lives. The teacher with the highest student rating was a history teacher who gave no homework, showed movies in class 3x per week, and gave 25 question multiple choice tests from a bank of 100 questions the students got in advance. The second highest rated teacher was fired for incompetence. The lowest rated teachers were the AP teachers, due to summer work, large amounts of homework and the rather draconian grading standards of AP graders.
2. Fun activities are great, but they eat up a lot of time from the curriculum. I do experimental science as much as the time-frame I have to teach the state mandated curriculum allows. A good inquiry lab easily takes 4 class periods to complete. If I do one of these per unit, I've used 44 days (out of the 120 I see them). I can afford to spend no more than 25 days on lab activities and still fit in what I'm required to teach.
3. Field trips cut curriculum time away from other classes. I would wager that the students I have who are in band have been gone at least 15 days on Music field trips. Then add in the other trips on top of that.
4. Inquiry based labs cost more than cookbook labs, and school sponsored field trips are expensive. Given that most schools have either received level funding (which is a net loss due to inflation), or had their budgets cut (an additional loss), how are we to pay for all of this? Just to stay afloat (because our property taxes are limited by Proposition 2 1/2, and we have no industry/business sector), our high school charges $150 for students to park and $500 per sport. Where exactly are schools supposed to get the funds to pay for all of it?
Without a lumbering and violent state hampering the market, education would be provided much more efficiently than it is now. The average cost per pupil for public schools are twice that of private schools. In fact, the public schools cost as much as the most expensive and elite private schools in the country. The difference is that the cost of public schooling is spread out over the entire population, whereas the private school cost is borne only by the families with students who attend them.
If we could abolish public schools and compulsory schooling laws, and replace it all with market provided education, we would have better schools at half the price, and be freer too. We would also be a more just society, with only the customers of education bearing the costs and driving the market.
And we run into the issue of data without context. One of the largest expenditures that public schools have is Special Education (in terms of both learning materials and staff). Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), private schools are not required to provide Special Ed. services to students. Public schools are required by IDEA to provide whatever materials are necessary according to the student's IEP/504.
I teach sophomores and seniors. Last year, one of my sophomore students was deaf. His 504 plan stated that he was required to have a $30,000 computer system, a 1:1 aide to use the computer system, and a resource room teacher. A student of my colleague last year was blind, and the amount of equipment that student was afforded ran between $250-300K. When a school doesn't have to deal with these types of expenditures, it's easy to see why they can charge lower tuition.
Players cannot cast spells or activate abilities.
At the beginning of each upkeep, a player may sacrifice a non-token permanent to ignore this effect for the turn.
When teachers have to post things on facebook like "Please pray for me and my kids today. They are testing and my career depends on their scores" we have an issue. Part of the issue is how little influence the teacher has on those kids study habits, motivation et.
On the other hand the amount of stuff kids learn should be measured. I'm all for asking teachers to do their job. I'm just thinking if she's done her job and put effort into those kids and tutored et she shouldn't have to worry about whether little johnny has good standardized testing skills.
For high school students, you are absolutely correct... not so much for elementary and middle school though. The major difference is the amount of skin that the students have in the game. If little Johnny fails his 10th grade tests, he doesn't graduate. If he fails his 2nd-8th grade tests, absolutely nothing happens to him. These students have no real incentive to pass, so a decent percentage of them just don't try. Some of my most brilliant Honors and AP students absolutely bombed their 8th Grade Science MCAS test because they just decided to take a nap.
In general, I highly support the development of nationalized standards for what our children learn. As a high school teacher, I always find it frustrating when I receive a new student halfway through the year and discover that this student is well below the level of expectation that our school has. I remember one of these students in particular. He transferred from one of the "best" schools in Ohio to my Honors Chemistry class in the middle of March. He was amazingly intelligent, but when his former teacher gave me a list of what they had covered (this is for three quarters of the year mind you), my honors class had done all of that in the first quarter and a half.
One thing that I would caution against is that the standards creators must be careful not to make the standards too proscriptive. The developmental new science standards are an example of this. Not only do they list the standards that are to be taught (which is good), but they then go on to list how to teach them and what connections need to be made to other sciences. This normally would be acceptable, except they are focusing on pairing physical sciences with Earth systems and Engineering... with a complete and total lack of connection to Biology. Given that I teach in Massachusetts, which is one of the leaders in biotechnology, I would much rather integrate my curriculum with life science, instead of Earth systems.
This is a much more complicated situation than I feel most here are giving credit for. As a bit of background, I've been teaching Chemistry in Massachusetts for the last 6 years. We have a mandatory 11% contribution to our retirement system. I have put in about $30K over those six years. Here are some things that need to be taken into account:
1. The pensions paid to current retirees comes from the money that I put into the system. If we change to a 401K system, where will the current retirees get their pension from? Or do we leave them out in the cold?
2. What about the money that I put into the system? You'd better believe that I want it back, and I can guarantee that there will be a huge lawsuit if the state refuses to pay back the $10B plus that the current teachers have paid into the system. As much as you say "it's better to hurt a few people now", how exactly would you react if your boss decided to clean out your 401K, leaving you with nothing?
3. If a change like this goes through, I can see the majority of the math and science teachers in Massachusetts demanding a raise comparable to what they would be earning in industry, or walking out. And I wish you good luck in finding qualified people to replace them when towns say no.
While the teacher in question did something incredibly stupid, and should have been disciplined for pictures which obviously violate federal law, you guys don't know how much of a hot button issue this really is with teachers. With the popularity of facebook/twitter/etc, school districts everywhere are starting to enact social media policies which go way beyond what is intended.
My cousin and I are both teachers (she's in middle school and I'm in HS). The social media policy for both of our districts (taken from the Massachusetts exemplar) states that we can be disciplined or fired for photos of us partaking in certain perfectly legal activities which go against the message that you would give school children. This includes things like drinking, and it doesn't matter if it's on your social networking profile or not. At her own wedding, she had to clear the table of all alcohol (and hold her own beer behind her back) while taking pictures. This is because a teacher in her district had already been suspended that year for being tagged in a picture, taken by a student and posted to that student's facebook page, showing them drinking at a restaurant.
I get that we are supposed to be role models to these children, but given the proliferation of cameras, the editing capabilities of photoshop (and don't tell me that middle and HS students wouldn't do that) and the viral nature of social media, to what extent do I need to modify my personal life so that I don't get fired?
I don't think that teachers should be held to puritanical values. You can roll your eyes as much as you want at past behavioural requirements but the effect has always been the same: control of the teacher's life by their employer.
Boo freaking hoo? You don't like it, get a different job. Teachers are hired for, among other things, the purpose of shaping young people during their formative years.
At some point, you're going to get to a point where the job has so many obstacles, hoops to jump through, and invasions into private life that nobody is going to want to do it.
I recently went through resumes and interviews from the other side for the first time (as someone looking through a stack of well-over-a-hundred resumes, narrowing it down to around ten to do phone interviews with, and then narrowing those down to four to do in-person interviews with). And I've gotta say that being on the other side was an eye-opening experience.
There simply isn't time for the person looking through resumes to thoroughly read every detail of every resume. You end up just skimming them, and throwing resumes out if there's one little thing that you don't like. The resume is very very important. It needs 100% flawless spelling and grammar, and it needs to grab the reader's attention quickly and in some exceptional way. Begin with whatever the most impressive accomplishment or experience is. Put as much experience on there as possible. If you're going to make it longer than 1 page don't rely too heavily on the stuff beyond the first page. Multiple pages look more impressive, but they get skimmed. The first pass through the pile of resumes is pretty much: "Can I find anything on here to make me throw this one out?" Next pass is looking a more closely for things to make you throw the resume out. Then you start looking for things you like about the ones left, and start throwing out the ones that don't really impress you in any way. It's quick, snap judgements that thin the pile until you get down to 20 or so when you can take the time to read every little detail. Focus on making the resume free of errors, deal-breakers, and red flags. Then read the job description and tailor the resume to each specific job description. If you make it into the pile of ~20 to be read carefully, having a tailored resume will help you towards getting an interview.
Honestly, the best way to get in somewhere is through networking. If you know someone who already works there and that's a huge advantage. It's always better (and easier!) to bring someone in through a recommendation than a lengthy resume/interview weeding-out process. Mention it to as many people as possible and you might luck out!
Good luck!
This, this, this, more than anything this!
Having been on the other side for the last three teachers my department hired, you would be surprised at the number of bad resumes that people have sent in. You need to make me want to read your application materials, and I don't want to read that many. One thing that I will add into what InfinityAlarm said, make sure that you have a well researched cover letter that is specific to the job you are seeking. It should basically tell me three things: that you've done your homework and know what you're getting into, what you expect me to do for you (why do you want this job), and what are you going to do for me that makes you the best candidate for the position.
This applies in reading and math area's that many colleges have struggling to keep up with since most high school students can't get into college level math.
I personally find this appalling. lowering standards is never a good thing.
The thing that most people don't understand about lowering standards is that it soon turns itself into a very destructive cycle. By lowering the standards previously, Florida basically gave the students a license to do nothing in class. If I take it down to the classroom level for a second:
All of my mid-level students have been conditioned to say "I don't get it" immediately after being assigned work since middle school. The rationale is that if they "don't get it", I will be forced to either do the work for them or make the work much easier (not that solving density equations is hard). They have also been conditioned to just hand in work without putting any real effort into it. My reaction to this behavior has led students to label me as the teacher they should hope not to get. On the first day of school, I tell them the following:
1. The phrase "I don't get it" is hereby banned in my room.
2. I do not accept, nor will I grade crap. If your work is not acceptable, you will have to keep doing it until you meet my standards (which are very reasonable). You are also allowed one free retake on any test, provided that you complete a short interview to demonstrate that it's not a waste of my time.
3. Anything that you haven't done to my standards by the end of the quarter is a zero.
4. I have absolutely no problem if everyone fails because they choose not to do their work well.
The way that a lot of my fellow teachers respond is to contract the curriculum, and ratchet back on the "non"-difficulty level because it requires less time and effort dealing with all of the redone work, and very angry parents.
Working back to the state level, the latter is the decision that the state of Florida has chosen, which kind of makes sense when you think about it. Even though the Dept. of Ed. in Florida may not be an elected board, they are still politicians nonetheless. As such, they will continue to lower standards because it is the most expedient way to keep themselves in office.
The government went in and fired CEO's same with the car companies.
Those decisions are up to the board of directors not the government. he had no authority to do that.
Oh really... let's look at the CEO's of the banks which accepted TARP money.
Citigroup - Vikrim Pandit is still the CEO
Goldman - Lloyd Blankfein is still the CEO
JP Morgan - Jamie Dimon is still the CEO
Wells Fargo - John Stumpf is still the CEO
Bank of America - Kenneth Lewis retired at age 62
Merril Lynch - Is now a subsidiary of BofA. No CEO exists.
Morgan Stanley - John Mack retired at age 64
State Street - Ronald Logue retired
NY Mellon - Robert Kelly resigned before his board could fire him
Would you care to rephrase your statement about the government firing the CEO's of the big banks?
Since cracking boxes is how all stores get their singles supply at the launch of a set, let's look at the math:
Let's say that SCG opens 1,000 boxes. When they do this, they're going to open about 600 of each rare, and 300 of each mythic (Law of large numbers). This kind of predictability, combined with the pre-order data and the fairly substantial discount they get for ordering from WotC lets them price these cards in such a way that the commons and uncommons aren't needed to generate much profit. This lets them sell Doom Blade for a quarter.
Your LGS opens 6 boxes of product (which is a large amount for most small stores). The number of rares/mythics they get is much more variable because of the small amount opened. In order to make profit, they need playable commons and uncommons to pull some weight. This is why you see Doom Blade and Dissolve at a dollar. They need the increased profit margins on these cards to actually make money.
The other thing you have to take into account is the whole economies of scale argument. SCG sells thousands of orders per day, where your LGS may only have a few dozen. This decreases the amount of profit per item necessary to cover operating costs. It's the same reason why Wal-Mart can sell Campbell's Tomato Soup at 48 cents per can, when your local grocery store has to charge 68 cents per can.
Yes, but the $1 coke machine will take 7-10 days to give you your soda. If you want your coke now, you're out of luck.
Getting cards cheaper means nothing if you have nowhere to sling your spells. If you live in one of the higher cost of living regions of the country, your LGS can't possibly compete with TCG and Ebay sellers selling cards out of their homes. People purchasing primarily from these sources forces the LGS to increase prices (since they still have operating costs), which drives more people away. It quickly descends into a death spiral. When your local stores close, how useful is all of that cardboard now?
In addition, do you realize that most stores make nothing off of tournament fees? Tournaments exist to get you in the store so you buy things like sleeves, soda, food and the occasional single. If you go strictly by tournament fees, SCG Opens are run at a loss. It takes 500 players just to make back the money given out in prizes... not taking into account staffing (judges, other tournament staff, commentators), hall fees (rental for a weekend, set up, tear down, communications) and transportation. The real reason the SCG Open circuit exists is for them to buy your cards then sell them on their website.
Personal responsibility man... if you don't have the cards you need for an event, the only one to blame is yourself. You decided to risk buying your cards on location, where you knew they could be charging a higher price than what you could pay online if you ordered them a week in advance.
Mystery, a few things:
1. The MMS Access to Patient Care Study only takes into account those services that you would specifically schedule in advance. In this case, we're talking about checkups for Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, Pediatrics and Cardiology. (Source: 2013 MMS Access to Patient Care Study)
2. The average wait time to see a doctor in 2005 (before mandated insurance) was 47 days. It has remained consistently between 47 and 50 days since then. Mandating health insurance has not affected the wait times to see a doctor, so you cannot say that it's the reason "we have not been getting the appointments we need in time". (Source: 2011 MMS Study, since it's the last one with previous year's statistics).
3. As a resident of MA, I have never had to wait more than a day to see a doctor for something that wasn't routine... and that wait was to schedule an appointment with an ENT to get my nose cauterized. Urgent Care (things that aren't important enough to go to a hospital for, but should be taken care of quickly) is phenomenal in MA.
Is the ACA the best system out there, no. Can we implement procedures to bring down the cost of healthcare (like doing away with the Chargemaster and fixing malpractice insurance), absolutely. The healthcare system back in 2008 was untenable, and this was the best system that we could get passed to at least delay the inevitable.
The Common Core is not nearly as proscriptive as you have been led to believe. It provides a set of standards that all students must achieve, and a list of skills that all students must have. It does not detail specific lessons and resources that must be used. While students are required to analyze the elements of a plot in a work of fiction, they are not required to complete a specific worksheet on a specific book. The teachers (or district in some cases) still have the final say on how lessons will be taught.
In addition, the Common Core does not mandate that students learn the material at the same pace with no differentiation for ability. Honors classes will still exist, and they will still be able to exceed what the Common Core requires. The Common Core simply provides a minimum threshold that must be met by all districts. For the majority of states, it won't appreciably affect what they do (other than using a different assessment). It only affects those states which do not currently meet that threshold (Louisiana, I'm looking at you...).
I'm also not the biggest fan of standardized testing. One of the main principles when writing an assessment is that the assessment is valid when testing for only one variable. You can write a test to determine if the student understands a subject, you can write one to determine if they have sufficient knowledge to graduate, you can write another one to give a rough comparison of teacher effectiveness... you just can't have all three at the same time. Utilizing one trial to test for three variables is simply bad science.
The issue is not that teachers are held to no standard, it's that the people applying the standard cannot do so effectively. It takes far more time than an administrator has to properly evaluate 40-50 staff members. What you wind up with far too often is the evaluator coming into the classroom for a 20 minute "dog and pony show", instead of evaluating them multiple times at different times during the class doing different activities.
Another problem that I experienced during my first year teaching is when the evaluator knows next to nothing about my subject. My principal (a former history teacher) observed me teaching a lesson on acids and bases, and he marked me down for "teaching them logarithms, which is precalculus math". The only thing that I was teaching them was how to plug it in on their calculator to find pH, which was a requirement of my state's frameworks.
As an aside, people have been saying that American education is awful for as long as there has been education. From the work of psychologists in the 1920's (using IQ tests to put children on tracks, Progressive education) to Why Little Johnny Can't Read in the 50's to A Nation at Risk in the 80's to the Common Core today, groups of "experts" have always been saying that they have the answers to all of our educational woes and that the teachers are essentially John Snow.
To quote the MIPG under Tournament Error - Deck/Decklist Problem, Additonal Remedies:
If the player, upon drawing an opening hand, discovers a deck problem and calls a judge at that point, the Head Judge may downgrade the penalty, fix the deck, and allow the player to redraw the hand with one fewer card. The player may continue to take further mulligans if he or she desires.
People do dumb things that boggle the mind all the time. You have no idea how much of it I see every day teaching high school. Some of the things that I've seen while HJ Comp REL events:
Are these stupid, preventable mistakes? Absolutely. Should the players have the book thrown at them for making these mistakes? Absolutely not.
While removing benefit of the doubt would reduce (probably) the amount of planned cheating that occurs, it would definitely cause a very large increase in cheats of opportunity. Let's take the following situation:
Player A is playing at a PTQ and when de-sideboarding, misses a card. He and his opponent shuffle the deck, then he draws his hand of seven cards and sees that a sideboard card was left in his deck. Under the current rules, he is incentivized to call a judge as soon as he sees it, because the Game Loss penalty will most likely be downgraded (in accordance with the IPG) to a Warning, fix it, and forced mulligan.
Under an IPG where there is no benefit of the doubt, this player would receive a game loss no matter the circumstances. Since there is no incentive for him to call the penalty on himself, he keeps quiet, thus committing a cheat of opportunity.
I've been a judge for a long time, and a competitive player for even longer. I remember the times when players were "allowed one free cheat", and the times when tapping land for mana before announcing spells led to penalties (a player got DQ'ed from the finals of a PT for repeated instances of this). The current IPG is a vast upgrade to either of those two days of a bygone era.
There are numerous problems with this idea. To list a few:
1. The school I worked at did student surveys for a couple of years before discontinuing it. The highest rated teachers were the ones that had the lowest standards, gave out the least homework, and couldn't lesson plan to save their lives. The teacher with the highest student rating was a history teacher who gave no homework, showed movies in class 3x per week, and gave 25 question multiple choice tests from a bank of 100 questions the students got in advance. The second highest rated teacher was fired for incompetence. The lowest rated teachers were the AP teachers, due to summer work, large amounts of homework and the rather draconian grading standards of AP graders.
2. Fun activities are great, but they eat up a lot of time from the curriculum. I do experimental science as much as the time-frame I have to teach the state mandated curriculum allows. A good inquiry lab easily takes 4 class periods to complete. If I do one of these per unit, I've used 44 days (out of the 120 I see them). I can afford to spend no more than 25 days on lab activities and still fit in what I'm required to teach.
3. Field trips cut curriculum time away from other classes. I would wager that the students I have who are in band have been gone at least 15 days on Music field trips. Then add in the other trips on top of that.
4. Inquiry based labs cost more than cookbook labs, and school sponsored field trips are expensive. Given that most schools have either received level funding (which is a net loss due to inflation), or had their budgets cut (an additional loss), how are we to pay for all of this? Just to stay afloat (because our property taxes are limited by Proposition 2 1/2, and we have no industry/business sector), our high school charges $150 for students to park and $500 per sport. Where exactly are schools supposed to get the funds to pay for all of it?
And we run into the issue of data without context. One of the largest expenditures that public schools have is Special Education (in terms of both learning materials and staff). Under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), private schools are not required to provide Special Ed. services to students. Public schools are required by IDEA to provide whatever materials are necessary according to the student's IEP/504.
I teach sophomores and seniors. Last year, one of my sophomore students was deaf. His 504 plan stated that he was required to have a $30,000 computer system, a 1:1 aide to use the computer system, and a resource room teacher. A student of my colleague last year was blind, and the amount of equipment that student was afforded ran between $250-300K. When a school doesn't have to deal with these types of expenditures, it's easy to see why they can charge lower tuition.
Attrition Warfare
Players cannot cast spells or activate abilities.
At the beginning of each upkeep, a player may sacrifice a non-token permanent to ignore this effect for the turn.
For high school students, you are absolutely correct... not so much for elementary and middle school though. The major difference is the amount of skin that the students have in the game. If little Johnny fails his 10th grade tests, he doesn't graduate. If he fails his 2nd-8th grade tests, absolutely nothing happens to him. These students have no real incentive to pass, so a decent percentage of them just don't try. Some of my most brilliant Honors and AP students absolutely bombed their 8th Grade Science MCAS test because they just decided to take a nap.
One thing that I would caution against is that the standards creators must be careful not to make the standards too proscriptive. The developmental new science standards are an example of this. Not only do they list the standards that are to be taught (which is good), but they then go on to list how to teach them and what connections need to be made to other sciences. This normally would be acceptable, except they are focusing on pairing physical sciences with Earth systems and Engineering... with a complete and total lack of connection to Biology. Given that I teach in Massachusetts, which is one of the leaders in biotechnology, I would much rather integrate my curriculum with life science, instead of Earth systems.
1. The pensions paid to current retirees comes from the money that I put into the system. If we change to a 401K system, where will the current retirees get their pension from? Or do we leave them out in the cold?
2. What about the money that I put into the system? You'd better believe that I want it back, and I can guarantee that there will be a huge lawsuit if the state refuses to pay back the $10B plus that the current teachers have paid into the system. As much as you say "it's better to hurt a few people now", how exactly would you react if your boss decided to clean out your 401K, leaving you with nothing?
3. If a change like this goes through, I can see the majority of the math and science teachers in Massachusetts demanding a raise comparable to what they would be earning in industry, or walking out. And I wish you good luck in finding qualified people to replace them when towns say no.
My cousin and I are both teachers (she's in middle school and I'm in HS). The social media policy for both of our districts (taken from the Massachusetts exemplar) states that we can be disciplined or fired for photos of us partaking in certain perfectly legal activities which go against the message that you would give school children. This includes things like drinking, and it doesn't matter if it's on your social networking profile or not. At her own wedding, she had to clear the table of all alcohol (and hold her own beer behind her back) while taking pictures. This is because a teacher in her district had already been suspended that year for being tagged in a picture, taken by a student and posted to that student's facebook page, showing them drinking at a restaurant.
I get that we are supposed to be role models to these children, but given the proliferation of cameras, the editing capabilities of photoshop (and don't tell me that middle and HS students wouldn't do that) and the viral nature of social media, to what extent do I need to modify my personal life so that I don't get fired?
edit:
At some point, you're going to get to a point where the job has so many obstacles, hoops to jump through, and invasions into private life that nobody is going to want to do it.
This, this, this, more than anything this!
Having been on the other side for the last three teachers my department hired, you would be surprised at the number of bad resumes that people have sent in. You need to make me want to read your application materials, and I don't want to read that many. One thing that I will add into what InfinityAlarm said, make sure that you have a well researched cover letter that is specific to the job you are seeking. It should basically tell me three things: that you've done your homework and know what you're getting into, what you expect me to do for you (why do you want this job), and what are you going to do for me that makes you the best candidate for the position.
The thing that most people don't understand about lowering standards is that it soon turns itself into a very destructive cycle. By lowering the standards previously, Florida basically gave the students a license to do nothing in class. If I take it down to the classroom level for a second:
All of my mid-level students have been conditioned to say "I don't get it" immediately after being assigned work since middle school. The rationale is that if they "don't get it", I will be forced to either do the work for them or make the work much easier (not that solving density equations is hard). They have also been conditioned to just hand in work without putting any real effort into it. My reaction to this behavior has led students to label me as the teacher they should hope not to get. On the first day of school, I tell them the following:
1. The phrase "I don't get it" is hereby banned in my room.
2. I do not accept, nor will I grade crap. If your work is not acceptable, you will have to keep doing it until you meet my standards (which are very reasonable). You are also allowed one free retake on any test, provided that you complete a short interview to demonstrate that it's not a waste of my time.
3. Anything that you haven't done to my standards by the end of the quarter is a zero.
4. I have absolutely no problem if everyone fails because they choose not to do their work well.
The way that a lot of my fellow teachers respond is to contract the curriculum, and ratchet back on the "non"-difficulty level because it requires less time and effort dealing with all of the redone work, and very angry parents.
Working back to the state level, the latter is the decision that the state of Florida has chosen, which kind of makes sense when you think about it. Even though the Dept. of Ed. in Florida may not be an elected board, they are still politicians nonetheless. As such, they will continue to lower standards because it is the most expedient way to keep themselves in office.
Oh really... let's look at the CEO's of the banks which accepted TARP money.
Citigroup - Vikrim Pandit is still the CEO
Goldman - Lloyd Blankfein is still the CEO
JP Morgan - Jamie Dimon is still the CEO
Wells Fargo - John Stumpf is still the CEO
Bank of America - Kenneth Lewis retired at age 62
Merril Lynch - Is now a subsidiary of BofA. No CEO exists.
Morgan Stanley - John Mack retired at age 64
State Street - Ronald Logue retired
NY Mellon - Robert Kelly resigned before his board could fire him
Would you care to rephrase your statement about the government firing the CEO's of the big banks?