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Post by Mari on Apr 18, 2013 20:04:30 GMT
When do they have to start typing assignments? I remember already by year 11 and 12 it was expected we would type out our assignments and you could be graded lower for presentation if you did not type it out. Of course this was for the more major pieces of work, not so much for general homework. But a book report or something like that, would have been typed. Considering it's a Waldorf school things are a bit different here. It's important kids get to express themselves in writing and drawing which most of them do and love. I do get a lot of typed assignments, but I basically don't really care how they hand it in as long as it is complete, legible and pretty. Scanning it is difficult: I have no scanner. Besides, scanning every paper by hand and converting them is going to cost more time than picking the few suspicious ones out and googling them myself.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 19, 2013 7:54:02 GMT
The only thing we ever typed at school was for computer programming lessons. Around the time I left school, they were starting to obsess with using the computers for anything, with no real justification for it. During my last years of school, some people started to get obsessed with PowerPoint presentations.
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Post by Mari on Apr 19, 2013 7:57:12 GMT
Heh, we are past that. Now it's all about building websites. Or just making a poster the old fashioned way.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 19, 2013 8:41:01 GMT
Building websites?
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Post by Fr. Gruesome on Apr 19, 2013 15:07:24 GMT
All the undergraduate students at the uni where I am researching are required to produce a clearance certificate from Turnitin ... which is a plagiarism checking application. I would be interested to run my material through it, if only I understood how to use it.
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Post by Shake on Apr 19, 2013 15:46:32 GMT
Heh, PowerPoint is so 2007. All the cool kids use Prezi for presentations now.
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Yuki
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Post by Yuki on Apr 19, 2013 15:56:26 GMT
When do they have to start typing assignments? I remember already by year 11 and 12 it was expected we would type out our assignments and you could be graded lower for presentation if you did not type it out. Of course this was for the more major pieces of work, not so much for general homework. But a book report or something like that, would have been typed. Considering it's a Waldorf school things are a bit different here. It's important kids get to express themselves in writing and drawing which most of them do and love. I do get a lot of typed assignments, but I basically don't really care how they hand it in as long as it is complete, legible and pretty. A Waldorf school! I didn't know.. I hope that model spreads more in the future.. Scanning it is difficult: I have no scanner. Besides, scanning every paper by hand and converting them is going to cost more time than picking the few suspicious ones out and googling them myself. Which is why we must get scanners in our eyes, and internet connection in our brains!! ;D
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Post by raspberrybullets on Apr 19, 2013 18:14:47 GMT
Well if they are anti-vaccine they might spread. That was a lame joke. I'd never heard of a Waldorf school so just looked it up on wiki. There seem to be concerns about the teaching of science and psuedo science and also they don't seem to encourage immunisation. Don't really like the sound of that.
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Post by Mari on Apr 19, 2013 18:19:23 GMT
I hope not. Shake, no that never caught on here. Students think it's cool you can use it, but I think PowerPoint is much easier and the students really don't care either way.
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Post by Alvamiga on Apr 19, 2013 18:27:00 GMT
I have just seen Office 2013 and I think it's the most unusable version of Office I've even seen. No-one in the office can find anything in it any more. M$ have really lost the plot!
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Post by Mari on Apr 19, 2013 18:43:18 GMT
Which is why I stuck to Office 2003, the last usable version.
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Post by Alvamiga on Apr 19, 2013 19:09:47 GMT
Yes, unfortunately, we needed to buy new PCs, which need newer versions of Windows because all the support has stopped for drivers and so on. New versions of Windows make the older (and totally sufficient) version of office we have unstable and the previous version of office (2010) has has the price hiked up to about 5 times the cost of the current version to about £200 a seat! The latest version of office refuses to work properly with the exchange server I was forced into buying, the new version of exchange will need a newer version of Windows. The newer version of Windows will need a newer PC to run on. ...and all that to achieve... absolutely nothing more than what we do now with what we already have! ...and some people think I hate Microsoft without a valid reason! If the choice was entirely mine, I'd remove M$ from almost the entire office. If we had to be able to access some specific documents or applications I'd install it on one machine, along with screen-sharing, so we could have only one license! At home, the only reason I have Windows at all is to play certain games and, with the advances in emulation, the need for that is vanishing, too! Windows and Windows applications are the root of almost all the major problems I have with computers!
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Yuki
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Post by Yuki on Apr 19, 2013 19:52:26 GMT
Well if they are anti-vaccine they might spread. That was a lame joke. I'd never heard of a Waldorf school so just looked it up on wiki. There seem to be concerns about the teaching of science and psuedo science and also they don't seem to encourage immunisation. Don't really like the sound of that. Well, I like the philosophy of it in general, I didn't check the details.. if it becomes a regular form of education, there might be a few regulations to make..
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Post by Mari on Apr 19, 2013 20:15:12 GMT
Well if they are anti-vaccine they might spread. That was a lame joke. I'd never heard of a Waldorf school so just looked it up on wiki. There seem to be concerns about the teaching of science and psuedo science and also they don't seem to encourage immunisation. Don't really like the sound of that. Sorry, hadn't seen your post earlier. As far as I understand there are some pretty sect-like Waldorf schools out there. The ones I've heard of in this country are more liberal. It is true that many parents are against painkillers etc. here, but that is not something the school promotes. Also, sciences are taught quite properly, though they also learn things like astronomy and metal works, circus, choir, cooking, etc. My school is in the top 10 schools in the Netherlands. That's based on exam scores though.
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Yuki
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Post by Yuki on Apr 19, 2013 21:26:56 GMT
Well if they are anti-vaccine they might spread. That was a lame joke. I'd never heard of a Waldorf school so just looked it up on wiki. There seem to be concerns about the teaching of science and psuedo science and also they don't seem to encourage immunisation. Don't really like the sound of that. Sorry, hadn't seen your post earlier. As far as I understand there are some pretty sect-like Waldorf schools out there. The ones I've heard of in this country are more liberal. It is true that many parents are against painkillers etc. here, but that is not something the school promotes. Also, sciences are taught quite properly, though they also learn things like astronomy and metal works, circus, choir, cooking, etc. My school is in the top 10 schools in the Netherlands. That's based on exam scores though. This is a quote from wikipedia: A 2003 study of science education in American Waldorf schools by Jelinek and Sun found the scientific reasoning of Waldorf school pupils to be superior to that of non-Waldorf students, with the greatest gains in the later years of schooling;[24]:29 Waldorf students achieved better results than the public school students on a non-verbal reasoning test, on a TIMSS assessment (where the Waldorf group results were also higher than the international average), and with part-whole relations, and achieved comparable results on a test of verbal logical reasoning. The study found that most lesson time was spent “asking questions, considering possible answers to questions, noting unexpected phenomena and carefully observing specific phenomena”, while little time was spent comparing students’ perceptions and considering alternative interpretations. The researchers remarked on the Waldorf students’ high degree of enthusiasm for science. They considered the science curriculum for Waldorf schools somewhat old-fashioned and out of date, and critiqued some doubtful scientific material. [95]
A 2009 PISA study found that European Waldorf pupils' ability in science was "far above average".[80] A 2007 study found that an above-average number of German Waldorf students become teachers, doctors, engineers, scholars of the humanities, and scientists.[80] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education#Reception
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Post by Alvamiga on Apr 20, 2013 5:43:58 GMT
"Celery, Apple, Walnuts, Grapes..." "...in a Mayonnaise sauce." ...and now a reference from 1922 that I'm not going to explain!
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Post by raspberrybullets on Apr 20, 2013 7:59:55 GMT
But the US is already well known for very poor scientific literacy so to be above average does not really say much. Wiki also mentions that they use textbooks with out of date and wrong scientific knowledge. That would concern me. I have no problem though, with learning other things like cooking and metal works - did that in my high school and a lot of it was useful. I also don't like all the holistic and spirituality talk - brings out my allergies. But, that is not to say there aren't some ideas in there that aren't interesting.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 20, 2013 9:21:25 GMT
I have to admit that I'd probably rather send my child to a Waldorf school than to a regular school in Germany It's probably easy to say that when I don't have children, though.
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Yuki
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Post by Yuki on Apr 20, 2013 11:17:53 GMT
But the US is already well known for very poor scientific literacy so to be above average does not really say much. Wiki also mentions that they use textbooks with out of date and wrong scientific knowledge. That would concern me. I have no problem though, with learning other things like cooking and metal works - did that in my high school and a lot of it was useful. I also don't like all the holistic and spirituality talk - brings out my allergies. But, that is not to say there aren't some ideas in there that aren't interesting. It's above the international average, not the US average.. Well, their use of outdated textbooks may come from poor State regulation (compared to regular form of education), which would not be the case had they been the standard educational system. And in fact, I think it's far more important to teach skills like analysis, scientific reasoning, and such, than accurate information which can be easily found on the Internet nowadays. What matters is to know how to find information, distinguish between good and bad sources, and handle the information (rewrite it in your own terms, skim through it searching for something specific, etc).. I'm not saying that Waldorf schools necessarily teach all of that.. I'm not entirely sure they do.. but regular education does a very poor job at it as far as I can see.. As for the holistic philosophy and the spirituality, I don't see a problem, as long as they don't indoctrinate the students into some form of religion/non religion.. holistic thinking is at the heart of quantum theory by the way, or modern science in general (it contrasts with reductionism, i.e. analyzing systems by dividing them into their components), and it's something much needed now that we have a lot of people specializing in particular fields, but completely ignorant of anything else. At this point we need to start linking the tremendous amount of data gathered in each separate field, to create something bigger.. a lot of technologies and discoveries came from cooperation between fields.. the idea of DNA for example was proposed by a quantum physicist: Erwin Schrödinger, in his book "What is Life?".. So an early introduction to the philosophy of holism (that everything is intrinsically linked to everything else) is a good thing I think.. Concerning the spirituality part, some psychologists speculate that one of the reasons of the rise in modern mental diseases (stress, depression, anxiety), is the fact that in our modern societies, we have lost contact with nature in what some call the "disenchantment of the world", i.e. we now tend to value rational thought and scientific knowledge more than belief in magical or spiritual forces in nature (even relatively among believers themselves in general).. which is in some sense a good thing, and is responsible for the scientific and technological progress we have made so far.. but it seems like our brains did not evolve to live in the modern world, and this is causing a lot of stress on their processes.. this is not to say that we should go back to believing in fairies and trolls and sorcerers, but some spirituality (Carl Sagan style maybe) would help a lot.. but as they say, the devil is in the details, and I don't know exactly the sort of spirituality they teach in Waldorf schools, or if differs from one school to another.. perhaps Mari could enlighten us in that regard.. Regarding the "disenchantment of the world" I recommend this great TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert: And yeah, I agree that we should at least take some ideas from their teaching philosophy and implement it in regular education.. This quote from wiki is also worth mentioning: Educational Scholars
In 2000, educational scholar Heiner Ullrich wrote that intensive study of Steiner's pedagogy had been in progress in educational circles in Germany since about 1990 and that that positions were "highly controversial: they range from enthusiastic support to destructive criticism."[14] In 2008, the same scholar wrote that Waldorf schools have "not stirred comparable discussion or controversy....those interested in the Waldorf School today...generally tend to view this school form first and foremost as a representative of internationally recognized models of applied classic reform pedagogy." [15]:140–141 Professor of Education Bruce Uhrmacher considers Steiner's view on education worthy of investigation for those seeking to improve public schooling, saying the approach serves as a reminder that "holistic education is rooted in a cosmology that posits a fundamental unity to the universe and as such ought to take into account interconnections among the purpose of schooling, the nature of the growing child, and the relationships between the human being and the universe at large", and that a curriculum need not be technocratic, but may equally well be arts-based.[11]:382, 401
Thomas Nielsen, an assistant professor at the University of Canberra's Education Department, considers the imaginative teaching approaches used in Waldorf education (drama, exploration, storytelling, routine, arts, discussion and empathy) to be effective stimulators of spiritual-aesthetic, intellectual and physical development and recommends these to mainstream educators.[44] Andreas Schleicher, international coordinator of the PISA studies, commented on the "high degree of congruence between what the world demands of people, and what Waldorf schools develop in their pupils", placing a high value on creatively and productively applying knowledge to new realms. This enables "deep learning" that goes beyond studying for the next test.[80] Deborah Meier, principal of Mission Hill School and MacArthur grant recipient, whilst having some "quibbles" about the Waldorf schools, stated: "The adults I know who have come out of Waldorf schools are extraordinary people. That education leaves a strong mark of thoroughness, carefulness, and thoughtfulness."[81][importance?]
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Post by madmadeline on Apr 20, 2013 12:12:50 GMT
The only thing we ever typed at school was for computer programming lessons. Around the time I left school, they were starting to obsess with using the computers for anything, with no real justification for it. We weren't expected to have to type anything execpt the final term paper and then it was more than acceptable to use a typewriter instead of a word processor for just that reason. Then again, I graduated high school in '94...
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Post by raspberrybullets on Apr 22, 2013 8:13:07 GMT
The whole disenchantment of the world thing is not something I can really understand. I suppose I could see the problem for theists who feel their religion is not actually fullfilling the role it should. But for me, the world is very, very enchanting and wonderful. So I don't really get it. It's pretty much why I also don't get religion really.
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Post by tangent on Apr 22, 2013 8:32:48 GMT
Nevertheless, a lot of people feel disenchanted with the world and I don't think it is because of their religion.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 22, 2013 8:35:36 GMT
Nevertheless, a lot of people feel disenchanted with the world and I don't think it is because of their religion. Neuther do I. But I've noticed that some Christians besically feel like the world is hopeless and like all they can do is look forward to heaven and hope the world will end soon. I'm not like that. I live living here and I don't want the world to end soon and I don't want to die soon.
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Post by Kye on Apr 22, 2013 10:48:37 GMT
It's kind of against Christian teaching to feel the world is hopeless...
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Post by tangent on Apr 22, 2013 11:13:18 GMT
When you're a child, you're shielded from all the horrible things that are going on in the world but as you grow up the reality hits you. It might be a reaction to that. And as we get older, we become less troubled, although not impervious, to the world's problems. I pity the children growing up in Syria and Palestine who know nothing but conflict and bloodshed.
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Yuki
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Post by Yuki on Apr 22, 2013 12:53:15 GMT
The whole disenchantment of the world thing is not something I can really understand. I suppose I could see the problem for theists who feel their religion is not actually fullfilling the role it should. But for me, the world is very, very enchanting and wonderful. So I don't really get it. It's pretty much why I also don't get religion really. Yes, I think the problem of disenchantment by rationality or scientific thought can be resolved in its general form, in a secular context.. you don't have to be religious to be enchanted by the world, or to be "spiritual".. however, in specific cases, like the problem of "creativity crisis" raised by Elizabeth Gilbert in the video I posted above, the problem arises again..
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Post by raspberrybullets on Apr 22, 2013 14:07:33 GMT
I think that could be solved if people didn't have such big egos in the first place. For example, when she mentions people asking her about doesn't she fear she'll never be so successfull again or something along those lines. And I remember watching a clip of Jennifer Lawrence after she one her oscar, and somebody asking her that exact same dumbarse question! The problem is that humans seem to think that is a legitimate state of exisiting and thinking about the world. If people didn't put that pressure on each other, than the creative artist would not need to feel that pressure themselves either. Why don't they just enjoy the moments when something wonderful comes to them from nowhere and enjoy the work they do? I don't really see how creative people are any different from anybody else. Most people just work every day in their normal boring job and every once in a while something cool happens - that is pretty much what scientists do. And it's what everybody does. Whatever job somebody has, in the end a lot of it is just the same old stuff and a lot of hard work, and every once in a while a moment of inspiration or something clicks and it all works. That doesn't mean we should go and assign it to some supernatural force. We should just appreciate those moments as the reason why we do the job in the first place.
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Post by Mari on Apr 22, 2013 18:10:13 GMT
I enjoy my job a lot, almost every day, but it's easier to complain about the things I don't like.
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Post by tangent on Apr 22, 2013 18:51:17 GMT
That's good to hear, Mari.
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Post by Alvamiga on Apr 22, 2013 19:07:19 GMT
I think the world would be fine, but for many of the people in it.
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