Cleaning up an old table saw

[Larry Blanchard]

What are the percentages of students failing and having to repeat a grade? That'll tell you more than your personal experiences will.

[Larry Jaques]

Um, someone tell Mike about the No Child Left Behind laws. They're what predicated the change to LCD teaching. And someone find the persons responsible for putting more money into the architecture of school buildings, the sports programs, and the administrator salaries than that of the teachers. And make them pay for their crimes against humanity.

My neighbor's son was a high school Principal and tried to save teachers after funding cuts by removing the funding for the athletics department. The -state- jumped in and said he _must_ fund the dept. This was not the PE classes, but the -volunteer- sports programs. He thought that if enough parents wanted the sports, they could fund 'em themselves. The state told him differently.

Sports are more important to some people than their child's education. Go figure.

-- Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

[Larry Blanchard]

Mike, 51% passing is more than 49% that aren't :-). All I was trying to do was to get a quantifiable answer.

[Larry Jaques]

Were the parents Professors or school teachers? Profs make more.

Amen! I guess the state thinks that parental donations directly to the school and/or the sports programs more than make up for the lack of teaching and teachers, somehow.

-- Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

[Keith Nuttle]

In Indianapolis Indiana there are several High Schools in Indianapolis Indiana, where only about 20% of students entering into the high school will graduate from high school.

Where are the parents? Teacher can not punish the kids when they miss behave. Parents who try to punish their kids get pulled into social services.

Isn't our nanny society great.

[Larry Jaques]

I did read but people use words carelessly, so I checked. So sue me. I'm in a small, rural part of Oregon and you're over in the big city. Salaries are a bit different in the two places.

Agreed!

-- Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

[Larry Jaques]

The East Coast is one big city, as is the greater San Angeles area here on the Left Coast. You've never been rural so you don't know.

Right now I'm worth about a plugged nickel. Halvsies?

-- Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

[CW]

The East Coast is one big city, as is the greater San Angeles area here on the Left Coast. You've never been rural so you don't know. =========================================================== You don't really believe that, do you?

[Dave]

On Sat, 25 Feb 2012 07:24:17 -0500, "Mike Marlow"

To me, rural means not having the amenities of the city nearby. How far away (distance or traveling time) is your "lot" from city conveniences?

Perhaps something more pertinent to the conversation. How far away in distance or traveling time is your "lot" from a major hospital? An airport? A major grocery store?

To me anyway, those things are the "city".

[Dave]

On Sat, 25 Feb 2012 07:54:08 -0500, "Mike Marlow"

Honestly, I'd have to question your "rural" designation, at least by my "time" criteria. With the frequent traffic congestion of any moderately sized city, thirty minutes traveling time is entirely acceptable. Quite possibly, the bulk of your travel time might be past fields and farms, but most anything you might need is apparently readily available if and when it is needed. "Rural" is supposed to be isolation in most every sense of the word, at least the way I view it.

[Larry Jaques]

I was back there in '98 with a buddy, doing a PM on a gamma camera up on Lon Gisland. (Massapequa, IIRC.) We drove from there to D.C. and I saw all the forests between. Talk about tunnel vision on a really dull trip. BORING! Anyway, I know it's not one big city, but the density there is much higher than here in the West.

Geeze, neither you nor CW caught the Demolition Man reference. Hmm, I missed the Blade Runner and Double Dragon references myself.

>> BTW - how much can I sue you for? Maybe we can cut a deal...

The Czech is in the male.

-- Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

[clare]

But New York covers a lot of land that is FAR from the "east coast" and about as "rural" as you could get. Real "hill-billy country" -

[clare]

from:

term ?rural? conjures widely shared images of farms, ranches, villages, small towns, and open spaces. Yet, when it comes to distinguishing rural from urban places, researchers and policymakers employ a dizzying array of definitions. The use of multiple definitions reflects the reality that rural and urban are multidimensional concepts, making clear-cut distinctions between the two difficult. Is population density the defining concern, or is it geographic isolation? Is it small population size that makes it necessary to distinguish rural from urban? If so, how small is rural? Because the U.S. is a nation in which so many people live in areas that are not clearly rural or urban, seemingly small changes in the way rural areas are defined can have large impacts on who and what are considered rural.

'Rural definitions based on the administrative concept start with the Census Bureau?s list of ?places.? Most places listed in the 2000 Census are incorporated entities with legally prescribed boundaries (e.g., Peoria City), but some are locally recognized, unincorporated communities. Rural is defined as territory outside these place boundaries, together with places smaller than a selected population threshold. For example, USDA?s Telecom Hardship Loan Program defines rural as any area outside Census places of 5,000 or more people.

Rural definitions based on the land-use concept most often start with the Census Bureau?s set of urban areas, consisting of densely settled territory. Rural as defined by the Census Bureau includes open countryside and settlements with fewer than 2,500 residents. Urban areas are specifically designed to capture densely settled territory regardless of where municipal boundaries are drawn. They include adjacent suburbs that are outside place boundaries and exclude any territory within places that does not meet the density criteria.

The most widely used rural definition based on the economic concept consists of the 2,050 nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) counties lying outside metro boundaries. Metropolitan (metro) areas are county-based entities that account for the economic influence of cities. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) defines them as:

Core counties with one or more urban areas of 50,000 people or more, and;

Outlying counties economically tied to the core counties, as measured by the share of the employed population that commutes to and from core counties. Using these criteria, urban entities are defined as countywide or multicounty labor market areas extending well beyond their built-up cores.

Prior to 2000, the land-use concept (Census urban areas) and the economic concept (OMB metro areas) were not applied to urban entities below 50,000 people. In 2000, the Census Bureau added urban areas ranging in size from 2,500 to 49,999 (labeling them urban clusters to distinguish them from the larger urbanized areas that had been defined since 1950). OMB added a new micropolitan (micro) area classification, using the same criteria as used for metro areas but lowering the threshold to 10,000 people. These modifications greatly increase the flexibility of researchers and administrators to tailor rural definitions to different target populations. Counties are often too large, especially in Western States, to accurately represent labor market areas in all cases. Thus, metro and micro areas often include territory that is legitimately rural from both a land-use and economic perspective. ERS Rural-Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) codes provide an alternative, economic classification using census tracts rather than counties. Although relatively new, these codes have been widely adopted for both research and policy, especially in rural health applications.

RUCA codes follow (as closely as possible) the same concepts and criteria used to define metro and micro areas. By using the more detailed census tracts, they provide a different geographic pattern of settlement classification. While counties are generally too large to delineate labor market areas below the 10,000 population threshold, RUCA codes identify such areas for towns with populations as small as

2,500. Additional information and files containing the codes are available in the ERS Measuring Rurality Briefing Room.

[Larry Blanchard]

My suspicion is that a more students flunked out when I went to school than do now. But numbers are hard to come by. When I try to look up failure rates over time I get numbers that count dropouts, boasts about some new technique that lowers failure rates, etc.. But nothing that says x percent flunked in this year, y in this year, etc..

One could suspect that the NEA doesn't want those numbers readily available :-).

No, I don't. I've lived in Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Idaho, California, and Washington. I have no knowledge of the NY school system. But if you have the nirvana you describe, you're very lucky.

I think most people over 50 who come in contact with today's high school graduates would declare it obvious that standards have fallen since they went to school. But even that opinion can be challenged on the grounds that maybe some of those graduates actually weren't.

I do remember seeing claims that a 4-year college degree today is equivalent to a high school diploma of past times. Anyone have that data available?

[Larry Blanchard]

But how many of those flunked as opposed to the ones who dropped out?

[Larry Jaques]

So says the man from the most densely populated area in his entire country.

This is humor country, and literalists need not apply.

-- Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

[Scott Lurndal]

Or how many would have flunked had they not dropped out?

[clare]

Well I know for sure that what comes out of the college automotive repair course today is roughly equivalent (being generous) to what graduated from a good Ontario technical secondary school in 1969

[Larry Blanchard]

True. Another example of why meaningful numbers are hard to come by.

[clare]

Well, as a former automotive instructor, mechanic, and service manager I can tell you that diagnosis today is no harder or easier than it was in 1969. It was just a whole lot different. Today's troubleshooting is actually EASIER to teach and learn. Electronics are more or less self diagnosing - and everything is logical. Logic can be taught. Hydraulic computers in early automatics are a whole lot more difficult to diagnose and understand than the digitally controlled electronic transmissions of today. The mechanicals have not changed that much.

When I graduated from high school with a double major in auto mechanics on '69 I could read a scope and understand what it meant to diagnose ignition, fuel, and engine mechanical condition. I could check, repair, and adjust most of the different carburetors in use, and I could tear down and rebuild an engine - from one end to the other - including the required machine-work. Brakes, suspension, steering, alignment, clutches, and transmissions were all part of my everyday work during my apprenticeship. I didn't do much automatic work because it required special tools the boss did not want to invest in - there were a few good tranny shops around that we could farm out that work to and make some money on.

I could do - and did - anything the licenced mechanic in the shop did.

The 16 weeks of trade school that were required for my apprenticeship (I was excused from basic (8 weeks) for having the double major, and my marks) was basically review and a refresher. In 2 1/2 years I finished my apprenticeship

Two years later I was teaching in a local highschool - less than 5 years after graduation - and half a year later teaching in a trade school.

Ten years later, as a service manager at a dealership I had to hire apprentices - and even at that point what was coming out of the secondary schools was definitely an inferior product. The "average" first term apprentice didn't earn his keep. The equipment in the highschool auto shops had not been updated in the ensuing 15 years. Most still even had the same engines in the shop for the students to work on. The shop I was trained in still had the 235 inch Chevy engines and the 1953 Ford chassis, and the SAME Sun scope and distributor machine - and alignment rack.

The highschool I taught in still had the same 1963 Chevy chassis and the same 313 Chrysler V8 engines along with the couple of early seventies import engines we aquired back then (Datsun 510, 2T Toyota,

1600 Ford Kent etc) and the same diagnostic equipment.

Today, at EDSS where I graduated in 1969, the SAME equipment is still there (some of it, anyway - and what is no longer there has not been replaced) It is now "transportation technology" and instead of rebuilding engines, doing alignments, and learning state-of-the-art diagnostics, they are making go-carts and motorized skate boards - the kind of thing i and my friends were doing in our spare time in our early teens. A friend of mine is teaching there, and his hands are tied by the school board and the department of education.

I'm out of the business now - but my kid brother - 5 years younger, is still in the business and by the time he gets an apprentice through the intermediate level they are - if he's lucky - able to handle the work that comes into the shop - but cannot, generally, make a decision on how to tackle something different if their life depended on it. Diagnostics??? Heck - even when the code scanner tells them what is WRONG they cannot reason out what the cause is.

For instance - the scanner reports an intermittent miss, or a low oxygen content in the exhaust, or whatever - they can't figure out if the engine is running too rich or too lean - or why.

A car has a steering pull. They have a hard time figuring out what to do to compensate - the camber is off a half degree on one side. What can they do to the caster on the other side to get rid of the pull? etc.

Those basics were taught to US in high school. And we didn't have the computerized alignment machines that calibrate themselves and print out the measurements with almost absolute precision. Centering a steering wheel today is child's play because you can see in real time what the absolute toe is on each side - while we had to estimate how far off it was, and in each direction - make the adjustment and then remeasure to see if you had it right. The only know to know FOR SURE was to drive the car. Today you can KNOW - FOR SURE that the wheel is centered before it leaves the rack - and you KNOW the vehicle is or is not tracking 100%.

Other than the fact there is a lot more jammed into a lot less space on today's cars and you can't fix them with fence-wire - they are actually EASIER to fix - in most ways, than the cars of the late seventies and early eighties. - and not a whole lot more difficult in many ways than the cars of the sixties.

Some of the apprentices now do all their "schooling" at community colleges before being sprung on the workplace - their theoretical knowlege is about equal to what my graduating class left highschool with - but they have extremely limited hands-on experience in comparison.