2011年1月10日星期一

Smaller Books For Smaller Brains

Another fine piece of educational legislature. A bill that recently passed in California makes schools use only books which are 200 pages long or less. Longer study books are mac makeup brushes cheap forbidden.Also, the bill:

Encourages the use of technology and multimedia materials to create higher interest and more up-to-date information from varied sources.

It does that by requiring that the new and shortened books will include references to Internet resources on the subject. So the pupils could go look for more information on their own. Providing fixed links to specific references bobbi brown brushes all specific subjects must seem much better to the bill drafters than just adding general lessons on how to use the Internet and search for reliable information.

This is all absurd, of course. Yes, some study books are much longer than they need to be. But not all. Dealing with the issue should be done individually, by whatever authority is in charge of study books quality and selection. But just telling everyone to cut stuff until they get to 200 pages is so arbitrary that it’s bound to be ineffective. If all that matters is length, students will get a shorter version, but not necessarily a more coherent and orderly one. Cutting is easy, properly summarizing is hard.

And while the Internet contains many good sources, having a printed book link to Internet pages is silly. The Internet also contains bad info. And Internet pages are constantly changing, and changeable. When a book is printed you know exactly what’s in it. But a page you link to can change, or just go away. So this will make official study books become obsolete and inaccurate in the same rate web pages are. Worse, the publishers of a book have no control over the content of external Internet sites, so asking them MAC Cosmetics Outlet print a permanent reference is too much.

Unless book publishers are expected to put up their own sites, for each book, putting on each site the material that was cut from the book. This practically ensures that cutting the books down won’t do any good, since they will all just crop material, and have the book point to the site. The books won’t become better, they will remain the same except that parts of them will become less accessible.

One more point, mac lipstick show how well thought-of this bill is:

FISCAL EFFECT : None, according to Legislative Counsel.

Sure. Making many study-book publishers edit and cut their books, publish new versions of everything, and have people scrutinizing web sites, will cost nothing. Because it won’t cost the publishers any money, so they will obviously not need to raise the prices of books. They will also not be tempted to just take one book and make it a series of several smaller books, MAC Cosmetics so nobody will need to pay for the purchase of more books. And the wide changes will also not force pupils to buy all these new books since the often used versions they’re using will not become obsolete and they could go on using them.

Yes, there are many problems with textbooks. Yes, many are unclear. Yes, many are old fashioned. Yes, many are uninteresting. But merely forcing everyone to make the books shorter will not solve any of that, and will just create new problems.

Of course, it’s always possible the people proposing the bill are ones who always had a hard time reading any long and complex texts. And since they turned out so well and fine without it (look, they’re even capable of coming up with such amazing education bills), mac eyeliner gel made perfect sense to them to let others benefit from the same joys of not having a working and educated brain.

Un Prophète

Drinkability

Lou Dobbs Demands to See Proof of Obama Conception

Last Girl Standing

Knowing

Hope Dies Eternal


没有评论:

发表评论