Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Woolie Wool on September 29, 2003, 03:14:52 pm
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Our disgraceful public school system makes people into idiots:
Clicky (http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm)
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Meh, too much to read at this time of evening. I'll just nod and smile.
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:( why woolie why :D
public schools do have their problems but sooner or later...
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*adds site to list of reasons why school sucks*
:D
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i never really paid much attention in school. except in history and math. my high school science department sucked balls. we couldn't blow **** up. thats how you learn chemistry, right?. the one exception is the crazy biology teacher who told us a bunch of these conspiracy theories. what really pissed me off is that my 10th grade english teacher told us about how she got so wasted, she broke her nose when she collapsed from drunkeness :wtf:, now there is a real genius. oh wait its an english teacher! I subscribe to the argument that i should have to take only need 8 years of english rather than 12
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No, blowing things up is not how you learn chemistry.:p
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That's how I learned physics! :D (seriously, I got to blow a balloon with hydrogen in it in 7th grade)
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same with me
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Originally posted by Woolie Wool
No, blowing things up is not how you learn chemistry.:p
Yes it is. And I did a degree in it ;7
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I'm learning more about history at my co-op placement (graphic design) than I did in school, so..yeah the schools really need to set higher standards, not for achievment, but for interest and general enthusiasm.
Like, I like learning history and such, but the stuff we learned was for the most part boring. I wanna learn about battles, and strategies and the movements of races over the years. I don't wanna learn about Martin Luther for 2 weeks straight.
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I find myself agreeing with the article. :shaking:
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Anyone put Pottasium Metal in water? That's what we get to do in chem :)
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when we did that we had to put on goggles, stand on the other side of the room, and watch the teacher do that to a piece of sodium about the size of a fly
we also watched a video of this guy who threw a cinder-block size piece of sodium into a lake
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Ouch, did he live?
Good old catapult physics are always fun too, since you can actually get ahold of the stuff to build some really neat contraptions. Anyone ever made a hovercraft out of a vaccuum cleaner? No? Been sanctioned to launch water balloons at your classmates? How about building a pneumatic cannon? Yay for good old high school science :D
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Originally posted by StratComm
Ouch, did he live?
yea. he threw it off a 30 ft cliff or so
Good old catapult physics are always fun too, since you can actually get ahold of the stuff to build some really neat contraptions. Anyone ever made a hovercraft out of a vaccuum cleaner? No? Been sanctioned to launch water balloons at your classmates? How about building a pneumatic cannon? Yay for good old high school science :D
*grumble*
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We do labs.. with goggles... and bunsen burners......
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here's my bunsen burner:
(http://www.zianet.com/paulsplans/images/fthrow2.gif)
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Cool Shadow.
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Originally posted by PhReAk
here's my bunsen burner:
*snip*
:D:yes::lol:
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Yeah, we did the sodium thing in Chem class. The teacher broke us up into small groups, each with a beaker half-full of water. He got his sodium from the supply cabinet and plopped a peice about the size of the first joint of your pinky finger into the beaker. The sodium in our beaker danced all over the surface of the water and (here's the cool part) burst into flame. So here we stand with this smallish fireball bouncing around a glass beaker the girls recoil and every guy in the class clustered around our table to watch, meanwhile the teacher explains how the sodium chemically separates the hydrogen from the water and the excess energy ignited the free hydrogen. That was a cool day.
On the whole my school wasn't bad, just underfunded. 2 years after I graduated, it went to hell. They went from having 9 classes a day to 4. How can you learn anything with only 3 classes and a study hall?
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I am SO homeschooling my kids. :)
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did he intentionaly misspell things?
not that I have any room to criticise
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Doesn't tell me anything I didn't know before.
Once again the moral of the story is: Pretty chicks, emigrate to Estonia. We need some extra population here.
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We have everything here.
From a wind-tunnel to an atom reactor.
Budapest University of Technology and Economics (a recent faculty) is one of the best places to study IMHO.
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Meanwhile you got Dave Matthews Band donating 1 million to New York schools when he should be donating it to the state w/ the lowest grades. Just cuz he's from NY or something doesn't mean you can only be charitable there.
Public schools are really in need of revamping. In Florida they put in the FCAT, which is an exam that measures what you've learned to what you should have learned by that year. Basically means that students have to take a comprehensive exam at the end of the year to see if they pass to the next grade. It doesn't matter if they were getting B's in their classes (I think A students are exempt, not sure), if they fail the SAT-style test they have to stay in that grade.
It's supposed to be that by 2012 or something all students should be reading at their grade level, which is something that Florida really is missing the ball on.
I'm so glad I didn't have to worry about that 10 years ago.
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Yeah, I think Mississippi needs help. It's sort of like a Third World country within the United States.
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I once saw an episode of the Open University in which the demonstrated the reactivity of the alkali metals.
First they dropped lithium in the water. - it fizzed and bubbled a little like an alka-seltzer.
Then they dropped in sodium & potassium which caught fire much as everyone else has said.
That's where the experiments usually stop in schools cause they have already demonstrated that the alkali metals get more reactive as they go down the series. The OU however hadn't had enough yet. So they got some rubidium out and put that in the water. The flames were even more impressive and IIRC the water even started to boil close to where the metal went in.
At this point most sane people would stop but the OU decided to get out some Cesium. At this point is worth noting that the person doing the experiment was no longer visible on camera. Instead you saw a pair of long handled tongs appear on camera. The second the cesium hit the water there was a loud bang and the water trough shattered.
I think that was when I decided I wanted to study chemisty :D