Daily Connotations

Daily Connotations

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You don't have to push the boundaries when you set the standards.

Connotation. 1. a. The configuration of suggestive or associative implications consitiuting the general sense of an abstract espression beyond its literal, explicit sense. b. A secondary meaning suggested by a word in addition to its literal meaning. 3. Logic The total of the attributes constituting the meaning of a term.

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Disclaimer: Any opinions contained on this page are those of, well, we don't really know who. Any offense taken to anything present should be directed to Sven, who will file and ignore your comments. Praise or compliments can be directed to either Dr. N, Dr. What, or Dr. Olga. All plagarized material has been tested and deemed satisfactory according to the esteemed code of Lehrer, version 2.3.
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Things We Like

Sven Bjorn Borg: Sven has been with d-con since its humble beginnings, and is responsible for punctuating, finances, guarding the office from rabid dogs and loud noises, and acting as mediator amongst the other members. Dr. Borge is well-known as the world's foremost (and perhaps only) underwater-basket-weaving expert. Sven has recently published no less than 3 books, Klingon Grammar and Vocabulary for humans, Life among the Grapes, and Escher, Bach, Gödel: A gigantic elastic bungalow. In it's copious spare time, the Sven enjoys playing the harpsichord and diagramming sentences. Sven is Chief of Staff and Director of Intelligence in the UPICN,LLC.
Dr. Bob William "The Orange" Lavoisier a.k.a. Dr. Henry Parsons: Dr. N, as we like to call him, is officially the initiator of the Daily Connotations Company, and also holds important Offices in the VVIIPP society of America and The Department of Redundancy Department, which is a place where he holds an important office in the department of redundancy. Henry also spent a good deal of his life studying the behavior of Walruses (Walri?) in the wild, inspired by a long-running correspondence with Mr. J. Lennon, who, in fact, convinced "The Orange" that he was, in fact, a walrus. Dr. Parsons' curriculum vitae is rounded out by his extensive family history (including a brother, Alan), and double Ph.D. honors in Botany and the Study of Scandinavian Languages. Recently, Dr. Henry Parsons was elected president of the UPICN,LLC
The Doctor a.k.a. Dr. What??: Dr. What joins us now as a member of d-Con in very good standing. It is important that the doctor not be confused with his slightly-more-popular brother, Doctor Who, who has carved a niche for himself in the field of time travel. Dr. What never developed the talent for time travel, and has the ability to visit only two distinct temporal locations: The beheading of John the Baptist and that one time when Stanley met Livingstone (or was it Livingstone met Stanley?) Consequently, he spends much of his time knitting (the scarves, natch) on the planet Gallifrey whilst (and at the same time) contemplating Nietzschean philosophies and memorizing much of Immanuel Kant's work, both in the original German.
Dr. Phelealabean: Dr. Phelealabean also uses the alias Dr. Olga Olathe Parsons-Uhlmer. Dr. Parsons-Uhlmer is a sister to Henry and Alan. She has a dual honorary doctorate in Arabian Literature and Language. She also has teaching experience at the University of Rekjavik which was held in a small grass-covered hut. She iswidowed after an incident involving her husband and abandonment which she is not allowed to discuss pending criminal charges. Now that she is alone, she enjoys spending summers with her brother, Henry, in his summer home, The Parsonon.

9.01.2003

Thank you, Dr. Henry Parsons, for the heads up(see). What follows are my thoughts, and not necessarily extremely organized thoughts, on the matter.

But first, a quote:
"Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education."
- President John F. Kennedy

I fully agree with the intentions of the law, but do not completely approve of the means in which it is going about fulfilling them. I do not believe that good teachers can be legislated into existence.

Firstly, we all of course have had run-ins with teachers who aren't worth any more than the paper they write their multiple-choice tests on. That is, sadly, an accepted part of our current school system. It is often written off as a "life lesson", a manner of learning to deal with someone who's not easy to deal with. Removing these (to borrow a term) bumps on a log would be a good thing for the students, but extremely difficult for the school district. Such a surgical manuever does require careful screening to avoid getting rid of the wrong person. There is no easy way of doing this.

Secondly, Standardized Tests are stupid. Let me rephrase that. Any test which requires filling in little bubbles with number two pencils is not an effective manner of judging anyone's knowledge, wisdom, or academic capability. We use standardized tests because they are supposedly "equalizers" and, more importantly, because we have the ability to score them without ever even having to read them. I shudder at the thought of forcing another large chunk of our current population to take them, as fill-in-the-bubble tests discourage actual thinking in favor of lucky guessing. My personal trust in a teacher would not be affected by the score they received on a standardized test. I've taken enough of such silly tests to know that they don't by any means give an accurate, complete picture of a person. (I was (am?) a National Merit Scholar. It wouldn't make sense for me to knock on the bubble-tests if I didn't really mean it.) Also, the art of teaching has a lot of intangibles that could never be measured in any manner, and it is easy to imagine a situation in which a really good teacher would get lower scores than a merely mediocre teacher. Being forced to take standardized tests will take away teacher's valuable time which they could be using to create lesson plans or research deeper into their subject.

Thirdly. Teachers, by their very job description, are trusted. They have a captive impressionable audience. That is a reason it is very important to remove any teachers who do not present accurate information. The ideas that are gotten by children in their formative years stay with them forever, even if they are later proven false. Most teachers would not present false information knowingly, but the increased access to information that the internet provides can put inaccurate information into the hands anyone, and a teacher who did not do any extra research could present such info to their classes, and the majority of the students would accept the information as true even if they had no other evidence to base their conclusion on.

The whole discussion leads to a deeper question about America's school system: If we graduated someone, and not just someone, someONES, 25 years ago who do not have the necessary abilities to be successful teachers, could the problem be deeper in our system than we are looking? And under-par students who grow up to be under-par teachers teaching under-par students to grow up and become . . . well, you know. . . is not going to effectively solve the problem.
Even if we do make them fill in little bubbles.

--Posted by s. on Monday, September 01, 2003.