Come to think of it, neither was i. It was just a mnemonic.
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you grant schools and teachers too much credit.
a lot of math here in the states at least is taught by rote memorization of random facts and formulas. ( i wouldn’t be surprised at all if students had to regurgitate the acronym for a test )
memorization never worked well for me and i don’t think it’s fun even for kids who are good at it. ( unless they just love testing, and some kids do )
math can be fun, and neat, and interesting - but you have to have teachers who understand it themselves, and who have the time to teach kids how to play with it
maybe im wrong but teachers who think they have to come up with racist and demeaning ways to “engage” students… probably don’t understand anything other than the facts they have to convey ( which is why this sort of cookie cutter learning exists in the first place )
the class even on a good day is probably a boring nightmare for the kids.
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2+1 =
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But you captured it for posterity, my hero! 
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Sonovagun. This was where I learned the SOH-CAH-TOA mnemonic. It was a small giveaway pamphlet which, if I recall correctly, was slipped into issues of Popular Science. The booklet included a bunch of similar memory tricks, but the only one that stuck with me was S-C-T. As for connecting the mnemonic to a Native American chief, it’s just one of a million examples of the casual, unthinking racism that pervaded the era–an era to which so many MAGA’s yearn to return.
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I hear this criticism a lot and I wish there was a way to compare to how we were taught (maybe there is?). I don’t have kids in a US school so I don’t see their homework or anything, and I also don’t know how teaching may have changed for better or worse in Canadian schools either. I feel like I got great education in these areas, but relying on my recollection of redacted decades ago is not exactly empirical.
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Oh, lovely that “even with the benefit of hindsight,” there’s really no better option than the reservation system, and, you know, continually breaking treaties. WTF is wrong with people?
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How do you transform the original Americans INTO Americans?
Yeah, that’s why it didn’t work.
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Well I mean if you acknowledge the brutality of colonialism in the Americas then people might feel negatively about the legacy of colonialism in the world… soo
/s
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id assume it comes down to class sizes, funding, and how much flexibility teachers have in teaching
american schools are funded by a mix of property tax and state taxes, but almost always poorer areas get less funding, larger school and class sizes.
after i left school testing became a big thing, don’t know if it still is, so kids were learning specific facts for specific tests - with funding and teacher pay partially based on performance - and with that there’s not a lot of free form play and discussion
that highschool doesn’t seem overly crowded. less than 3000 kids, 22 kids per teacher, and 9k of spending per student ( which seems good )
but then 75% of the kids are on free and reduced lunch programs - so that’s probably where all the money is going
it’s also 70% hispanic - noting that this teacher is white - and ranked on the lowish side of middle statewide. meanwhile, there are 11 highschools (!) in the district and some are ranked near the top statewide.
in fact the district has a stem hs ranked by that site as the best school in california - with only 650 students though, an equal mix of white, hispanic, and asian kids, and only 30% on meal plans
the imbalance there makes me think segregation and therefore funding and attention are at the heart of it
i don’t know how canada fairs. maybe less poverty overall, less packing of minority students into certain schools, maybe more equal funding across schools? maybe less focus on metrics and more on learning?
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Wait. What the fuck?
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This utter garbage is a textbook (sorry) example of the fallacy of “teaching both sides” of an controversy. One begins the lesson with the assumption that the winners in the conflict were entitled to their victory. Any discussion concerns whether the winners granted the losers too much or too little. Since the determined settlers were going to kick native people off their lands anyway, the question isn’t whether they had the right to do so but what to do with the inconvenient natives left over after the off-kicking. Should We have Americanized Them better? Provided more off-reservation jobs in Wild West shows? Or are They just belly-aching, since the reservations offered Them economic self-sufficiency?
Now that the British school has withdrawn the textbooks, I’m sure they’ll have no trouble reselling them to school districts in Texas, Oklahoma, etc. etc.
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“Black people hated it when those savage Indians won the right to vote, but luckily some kind-hearted Americans like Buffalo Bill hired them to present a parody of their heritage as a form of entertainment for white people. In conclusion, Genocide: a necessary evil or a necessary good? You decide!”
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On Old Olympus Towering Top A Famous Vocal German Viewed Some Hops
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1924, with passage of the Snyder Act. Legally, long after the 15th amendment, but the 1920s were also molested by the Klan, so lots of government officials were deciding that the 15th amendment didn’t matter.
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This is the most complicated one ever. All the parts are split into different parts of the sentence. So you can’t even chunk it in your mind (like: what’s the O over A one…? Oh yeah, -TOA).
This would be like doing “Mercury Venus Earth…” as “My Entirely Jiggly Underwear Vibrated Movingly Sunday Night” and just remembering that you have to take the back four and interleave them with the front four.
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It’s easy to remember, if you can remember this objectively more complicated thing!
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Jesus fucking Christ.
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