Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

It just ties into something I think I said quite a while back. Everyone has an agenda. The doctor wants to promote and give more credibility to his beliefs. The media above wants to highlight a failure which strengthens their position on everything. You can’t trust anyone anymore and the average person doesn’t know how to dig through everything and weed out the garbage.

No, not everyone has an agenda. One asshole doctor does not invalidate the body of science and general desire to find a way out of the pandemic. Furthermore, you'll be hard pressed to find data that shows masks don't contribute to the reduction in disease transmission. I mean, even zoo keepers have been wearing masks for years around other primates so as not to transmit human diseases that could possibly infect other primates. Does anyone think that everyone in an operating room wears a mask because of an "agenda?"

That's kind of the problem with internet "news." It's easy to find isolated examples to support any position. The real responsibility of the citizen, though, is figuring out the broader trends. Just because one expert found X, one data point suggests Y, or one politician did Z does not mean that is representative of actual reality and usually not enough to make knee jerk generalizations.

I mean, I could cite the Florida Dept. of Health firing the data scientist because she wouldn't doctor the data to let them reopen, but that doesn't mean I should multiply all the case counts by 2 when I look at them, nor does it mean I should ignore Departments of Health. New case counts started falling around when reporting practices sidestepped the CDC. That doesn't necessarily mean that the data is being manipulated. I can find scientists who don't believe in climate change or vaccines or evolution or even round Earth. But that doesn't mean any of those things are less real.

The failure of our education system isn't that we don't teach math, reading, or whatever (though that is a real problem). The real issue is that we don't teach enough critical thinking for our citizenry to distinguish between outliers and trends and to have the humility to know when they don't know something and should trust someone else.

Critical thinking means people don’t behave like sheep. That is a bad thing for people who try to control the masses.

Did you read that on the internet?

No, but you can’t tell me that various entities and organizations aren’t attempting to control the way you spend, the way you live, and the way you do business on a daily basis. People who are ignorant are easily swayed. That’s what the organizations like. You can’t tell me the various candidates for the upcoming elections aren’t attempting to pull the wool over our eyes.

Good thing we have you to tell all of us ignorants what's really going on.

So that must mean you are easily swayed Andy. Because if I recall I don’t remember calling anyone here ignorant. But your response doesn’t surprise me either.

You don't have to call anyone ignorant to have the readable intent. Also, one rarely wins a debate about the ignorance of people with the promise that they in fact have the answers.

We’re going to need a peer reviewed study to resolve this impasse. Or an executive order.

I don’t remember ever taking a class on critical thinking, either in high school or college. Is that something that used to be taught? And assuming it wasn’t a class back in the 80s why do we need it to be taught today? How did we manage to lose our way?

And I would say that the ability to admit you are wrong is every bit as important.

Sigh.....

I never said I have the answers, I never called anyone here ignorant. My message was simply that I believe we are creating people who are conditioned by the government, the media, and the various business entities to accept what is given and not to push back very hard.

Additionally I believe that if given the option to better themselves most people will take that option, even if it means stepping on someone else's toes. We see it play out every day, this is why everything is currently the way it is.

Remember Wall-E, how the human race was depicted. I absolutely believe that at some point we will get there on our current path. Unless global warming kills us all first.

As an educator of 8 years and a parent of 10, the issue is that we’re measuring the wrong things and so we’re getting the wrong things. We’re more interested in whether a child can pass standardized tests (“which one is an elephant,” just for instance) than whether they can connect different facts from different arenas to make form reasonable conclusions. We’ve often confused memorization for aptitude, whether that be memorization of facts, algorithms, or someone else’s (teahcer’s) opinion.

Oh how I loved the tests. That’s all we did was get taught the test. That’s the problem with metrics in any capacity. If you are measuring something then that is the only focus, everything else is back burner for filling in spare time.

An old business adage: "What you measure is what you get."

ApolloAndy said:

We’ve often confused memorization for aptitude, whether that be memorization of facts, algorithms, or someone else’s (teahcer’s) opinion.

100% agree. The focus on the SAT, ACT, or any other standardized test has shifted our focus to skill acquisition. The Common Core had promise as now there were practice standards added to the content standards, at least in Math. Unfortunately most parents, educators, and textbook companies didn't really understand that and the practice standards have fallen by the wayside.

TheMillenniumRider said:

My message was simply that I believe we are creating people who are conditioned by the government, the media, and the various business entities to accept what is given and not to push back very hard.

That's what the government and the media want you to think ...

We all live inside the matrix. And we all also imagine that we are outside the matrix and able to view and analyze it objectively.

ApolloAndy said:

An old business adage: "What you measure is what you get."

Person Woman Man Camera TV

Read the manuals. Read the books.

If the goal to bring the conversation back to Covid by bringing up Common Core? It may work.

Yes. I was a mega super fan in favor of common core. I was so upset by the amount of resistance it got. As someone who teaches upper level high school math (calculus and beyond) I was impressed and excited to see common core teach methods that were directly applicable to fractions, decimals, algebra, and calculus. The process for multiplying two digit numbers is exactly the same as the process for multiplying mixed numbers which is exactly the same as the process for multiplying binomials with a constant which is exactly the same as the process for multiplying binomials with all kinds of crazy stuff going on. It's sad that almost all the opposition to common core was from parents and teachers who liked rote algorithms saying, "This wasn't the way I was taught and it's slightly harder to solve the problems that are in front of my face" or "I wasn't taught this way and I don't want to learn a new way."