My daughter is deaf and goes to a specialist deaf secondary school in the UK.
Five years ago ARISS-UK pre-arranged a connection between the school and astronaut Mark Vande Hei on one of the ISS flyovers. Various students got to ask questions directly to Mark in orbit. It was the first contact between ISS and a deaf school.
An “aural” deaf school? This seems like a fairly harmful approach. I know that approaches to deaf education are quite fraught, but pushing students to communicate orally and not allowing sign language in the classroom seems like it’ll set a lot of students back educationally. It essentially turns deafness into a learning disability, which it doesn’t need to be if you just allow sign language. (It also shuts the students out of mainstream Deaf culture, which I imagine a lot of them will resent later in life.) I am surprised that a school with this philosophy still exists, frankly.
They’ve been doing this for over a century, it’s probably the top deaf school in the UK, and has the support of nearly the entire deaf community.
Most of the students have either some degree of hearing or use cochlear implants. I think nearly all, if not all, students use either hearing aids or cochlear implants.
The classes are very small (eg 5-6 max usually), students are arranged in a U-shape around the teacher so they can read lips. And there’s a special wireless broadcast system so the teacher wears a microphone and sends the audio directly to hearing aids or cochlear implants.
Regarding deaf culture, most of the students use BSL on their own outside class, and my daughter learned BSL from her friends there that grew up with it. Coming from a mainstream primary, she found “her people” here, discovered deaf culture and a community that shares the same struggles she faces.
The idea is that by teaching in BSL the students are further restricted in their ability to function in a hearing society.
I’m curious if you are deaf yourself, or work with the deaf. All the teachers at the school are trained teachers of the deaf, some are even deaf themselves. And I haven’t heard any complaints about the aural nature of the learning (except from the reservations of a few parents before sending their kids there, and I don’t think any of these parents regrets this after their children started there.)
When I took quantum mechanics in grad school, I struggled through the weekly (and intense) homework sets. My TA was a hardass, I’d spend hours on some problem, several few pages of math work just for one problem, and make some dumb mistake in an integral somewhere, being off by a factor of 2 at the end and only getting 2 of 4 points.
It was painful, and I felt like a dumbass seeing the other kids regularly getting perfect scores.
Then the midterm came and I blew them all out of the water. I hadn’t realised they somehow had the solutions manual so just got perfect scores all along but clearly didn’t learn the material like I did.
Yeah, I had this happen to me in an algorithms course. Tests were 80% of the grade and we had the guy who had been organizing mass homework "study" groups taking up increasingly larger sections of the class time desperately trying to figure out how to convince the professor to switch up the grading to be more homework based.
I figure that the professor had to know what was going on because he kept giving the same philosophical handwavey reasons for why the tests were staying at 80%.
I can't believe people voted me down for this! It's a direct quote from the movie, after Vizzini uses the word "inconceivable" you warthog-faced buffoons:
I remember a radio host in the 90's remarking about how ironic it was that three of the biggest movie directors at the time were: Opie (Ron Howard), Laverne (Penny Marshall) and MeatHead (Rob Reiner).
It's definitely interesting seeing him physically morph from his younger days to today. When he first came on my radar as a director, I wondered if it was just another guy with the same name, I had to go look it up, and I was surprised. Seemed like a really great guy. :(
The first time after getting my driving license and having to find parking in the city, I was so jealous of George Jetson whose car collapses into a briefcase when he gets to work. Glad to see TV converging to reality.
A few people I know had moved to houses on one side of the bridge for easy access to schools and jobs on the other side, and were hit hard by the closure.
Their commute times skyrocketed to go to the next Thames crossing.
To be fair, this issue isn’t endemic only to big companies. I’ve seen similar even in academia, some people just know how to “play the game” and play it very well.
It really depends on the culture of where you are, which can even vary team by team in the same org.
Some people seem willfully ignorant of the game. When confronted with the reality of it, they turn away, complain that it exists, and act like a bullied middle schooler.
You don’t have to enthusiastically endorse the game. You can learn it, just like you learn Go or Rust or whatever. You can refuse to actively play it, but also be aware of it enough to avoid getting hurt by it.
E.g. figure out the minimal effort for convincing game players that your work is important.
I so wish every new starter in professional working life is given a 101 on literally this. I've seen so many talented people over the years think they're above taking part in the corporate optics and then subsequently get bogged down by resentment watching lesser people getting pats on the back.
The system is crap. It should all be about meritocracy and all that but it's not. It is what it is. People need to stop being naive shooting themselves in the foot
EDIT
The other thing to it is that its so infuriating because people who say they wish the game wasn't the game and genuinely could change things because they have the right sensibilities, and are talented enough to rise up to position where they can make decisions that matter, choose not to engage in the game to make that happen. Wake up, you're letting the "wrong people" (in your view) win.
I don’t understand the seeming lack of regulation for flashing bike lights.
I don’t mean a simple “normal” flashing light, but the super bright ones that are like a camera flash strobe going off 2-3x per second which hurts your eyes and kills your night vision, making it hard to see anything including the actual cyclist.
It used to be law that a bicycle had to have a solid on light front and back at night, and any extra flashing lights were optional extras that didn't count, but they scrapped that law several years ago.
Five years ago ARISS-UK pre-arranged a connection between the school and astronaut Mark Vande Hei on one of the ISS flyovers. Various students got to ask questions directly to Mark in orbit. It was the first contact between ISS and a deaf school.
https://www.arrl.org/news/ariss-confirms-october-12-as-date-...
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