The other day i found my all-time favorite “creationists,” Kent Hovind. They believe the earth was created in six, 24-hour days somewhere between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago. Consequently, a core tenant of these people is that dinosaurs and man walked the earth together, and no leap in logic or denial of scientific facts is too great for them when they attempt to prove their “theory” to the rest of us godless “unbelievers.”
Below is part one of a 16 part (that’s right, 16 tortuous parts!) series of videos posted on youtube where Kent Hovind attempts to explain how crystal clear it is that dinosaurs and man once coexisted.
Apparently we have no way of knowing that no man walked whilst dinosaur’s where around. But he can tell us, in great detail how Noah fitted all the animals on the arc
How flawed is this guys logic?
His flatly stated conclusions, i.e. “…there’s no way anybody could know (that man has never seen a dinosaur) unless they’ve talked to everybody that ever lived…” and his smug, self-assured delivery are so comical , that there’s really little else I can say to top it off, so I’ll just let it speak for itself. But did you notice how he referred to National Geographic as “National Pornographic,” then corrected himself? That was supposed to be a joke… one of many “zingers” that would pepper the rest of his uh, er… um… ”lecture.”
Earlier I mentioned that Kent Hovind was one of my favorite creationists, but it’s not for the reason you might suspect (his unintentional comedy like the video clip above). No, it’s because of an appearance he made on the Ali G Show a few years ago. Hovind was part of a roundtable discussion on science, hosted by Ali G, that is not only one of the funniest episodes of the show I’ve ever seen, but when Ali G accuses Hovind of leaving a “floater” in the backstage studio restroom, well… you just need to watch it…
For the past 50 years our education system has been treated like an industry. Being controlled, and having order. Young people are having a much more interesting, stimulating and rich experience outside of the school than they are in school. Young people today are big communicators, through E-mail, instant messaging and texting yet all of these things are banned from the class room. Why? People as educators need to learn that technology has created a whole new world and there isn’t really a choice any more to ignore it. Opening up to this new world is such a creative area to young people. A place where they can express them selves and not be judged. Its a place to they can reflect, research communicate, debate and allow all their amazing ideas burst out around the world! The current school structure shouldn’t be THE place where people learn but one of many places that can expand the knowledge. We’re locking young people into a class rooms, of 30 students. When they could be learning in communities of infinite people, with different ideas, suggestions, stories and experiences. Everything that is taught to young people is just for them to remember. Do students really understand, apply, analyse, share, evaluate and create? my answer would be no. On average a student gets to ask their teacher a question once every 10 hours. How would you feel sitting in a room and being unable to engage for 10 hours. Is there one student out there that doesn’t use google? Google deals with 2.7 billion search’s a month. Why isn’t this being utilised in the class room? Why not introduce these thing into the classroom. why not use blogs, wiki’s, podcasts, online collaboration, online tests, online learning, webcams, GPS, Geocaching games, GIS, Google earth, web quests, E-Portfolio’s, virtual tours, virtual pen-pals, writing, reading, reflecting. There are 1.5 billion mobile phones in the world. Why not use these in education. Students already know how to use them after all. Language, poetry, literature, history, maths, story telling and geography. Texting alone could be used for things like pop quiz’s, spelling tests, student polls, science experiments and class presentations. Try giving this question to your class:
You have 10 minutes to get some one to send you a text from outside this school. Find out, what the weathers like, what they had for breakfast and where they are. Bonus points if the person is in a different country. Using a language other than English.
Talk about gathering information. Think about the many way that this could be used to graph data. Predicting economic trends. Food economics! Only 28% of A-level students believe that education is meaningful. Lets make education relevant. 21% Believe that their course is interesting and only 39% of students believe that their education with help in anyway with their future career. How might the quarter of young people who drop out of school feel if they were allowed to use their ipods in class. Ipods allow you to download podcast’s- which allow you to learn ANY TIME of day. There are pod casts out there for every subject going.
If you cant beat them, join them.
If your not using technology to teach, then you should be. I’d like you to look up two words in the dictionary (an online dictionary obviously) To Teach (v):
1) Show or explain how to do something 2)Encourage someone to except something as fact 3)Give information about or instruction in
To Educate (v):
1)An experianced and trusted advisor
2)Someone who gives moral and intellectual guidance
3)A person who advises and shows the way
“Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school”
- Albert Einstein
Allowing young people to act as individuals is the root of progress, this individuality can be gained through giving young people a proper education. The importance of a good education is quite obvious to everyone, we can find this out just by looking back through history.
“If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.”
- Plato
An important part of all education currently is the examination. Exams should be a way of checking the ‘Calibre’ of students, their talents, and determined where they stand within the academic system. But our examinations are purely mark based. This tunnelled view can determine the rest of a student’s life.
Students are made literate, but not educated. Students become passive thinkers and can only relay what they have been taught, and have no passion, drive, or knowledge to question the only thing they know: how to listen.
The current examination system only test the memorizing capacity of a student. The system doesn’t allow for the development of creativity.
As exam time approaches you will see students cramming and forcing formulas, theories, definitions and so on into their brains. Students spend weeks trying to learn their study material. Because if a student come up with a new, creative idea then the teacher can’t bear to think of something in a different way. They want their students to copy out the paragraph from the text-book, word for word, full stop for full stop, and comma for comma. Even if the student might not know any of the logic behind the answer to the question, or even what the question means. But they know when they see a certain word in the question that they need to copy out a certain paragraph from the text-book.
The entire examination system is based on memorization. Not learning.
It is totally unfair to expect students to be able to fit an entire years worth of learning into just a couple of hours at the end of the year. Of what worth to the student is memorizing the entire text-book when just days after the exam they would have forgotten it all. How can this possibly test the potential of a student.
Student are under tremendous pressure due to they being overburdened by school or college. Students panic at the thought of any test or examination. The education system is creating problems and fear with in these young peoples lives- prompting students to be driven to cheat, or even harm themselves. When the pressure builds and get out of control, it leads to frustrations and nervous breakdowns. The students feel unheard, and as if nobody understands their problem.
Around exam times last year there was a 30% increase in students who visited doctors. Can this really being doing any good to young people?
Conventional annual examinations must be dropped. Internal exams could be held on weekly basis and the students could be rated on the basis of their overall performance. Internal assessment should be an important component as well as other extracurricular activities, group discussions, case studies, oral presentations, seminars should be introduced. These activities ought to carry some marks for the purpose for evaluation. Learning has to be made enjoyable and an enriching experience. Things should be made simpler and interesting for the students, even if it involves hard work. Parental pressure should be reduced. They should not learn for the exams but for acquiring knowledge and enriching their minds.
Facebook campaign over ‘unfair’ exam http://bit.ly/aMtIkY
If you really want to listen to youth voice? Then start by looking inside yourself. Before you go listening to youth voice, ask yourself these questions, Who am I? Where did I come from? What do I stand for? What do I stand against?
Then look at the young people around you. Where are they from? What do they stand for? What do they stand against? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then go ask those young people – and ask sincerely, and ask honestly. If young people know what they believe, then they will tell you. If they don’t know, then you can support them by facilitating opportunities for them to discover. But don’t make up your mind beforehand – that’s the important part.
Is That All It Takes?
There is no such thing as one single Youth Voice. The voices of young people are infinite, like stars, each shining in a different way. Young people come from a lot of different communities, different cultures, and different heritage. It is the responsibility of adult to hear their voices.
When youth voice is engaged in communities, schools, and organizations, young people grow more capable, effective, and powerful than we have ever imagined. They enhance their academic skills with “real world” experience, learn leadership and citizenship skills and the importance of helping and working with others.
Just as important, adults grow more energized, creative, and insightful. Their work becomes more responsive, and their hearts become more engaged. Sharing responsibility of community building lifts the weight of working alone.
In our communities, young people are viewed as problem makers rather than problem solvers. When young people help make decisions, design their own programs, then we are more likely to meet their needs. And when young people are part of the process they feel ownership, encourage others and become powerful role models. Most importantly, youth empowerment unites people to work for improved communities and schools.
In communities, schools, small towns, cities and in countries around the world, youth empowered young people are changing society, economies, the environment, and more. Various youth empowerment programs world-wide are engaging with young people as, Community planners, School teachers, Program evaluators, Neighborhood activists, Government officials, Non-profit directors, Workshop trainers, News reporters, Action researchers and so much more.
You want to make your school, community, business, charity or what ever else, to run more smoothly….GET YOUNG PEOPLE ON BOARD!
Are we discouraging students from being creative with the current schooling process
I’ve always had an interest in education, in particular the way in which it is structured and run, and since a young age always wondered ’WHY?’. But I think everyone has something to say about education. It has had an effect on everyone, people always want to tell you SOMETHING about their education.
If you ask somebody about their education something comes up from inside of them. Its something everybody can take an interest in. We all have a vested interest in education. Education is meant to take us into a future that we can never grasp.
It is thought provoking that, people who started school this year won’t retire until 2070. Yet nobody has a clue what the world will look like in 5 years time. In recent months I’ve been to conferences where people have been discussing the future, the future of technology, and the future of education. But none of these people can tell you anything that will happen beyond 5 years. Then how can we possibly be educated for it. To me, someone who is hoping to become an education professional, the unpredictability of education is extraordinary.
This is why we have to recognise the phenomenal creativity and innovation of children and young people. You can take a look at any child and you will be able to identify their amazing talent.
It might not be amazing when you look at the entirety of childhood, but what is amazing is that that child has put in the dedication to develop their skill into a talent.
My opinion is that ALL children and young people have an amazing talent, that through our education system we squander this talent, sometimes ruthlessly. My argument is that creativity has been left behind in an ever changing world. I believe that creativity is as important as numeracy and literacy, and that it should be treated with the same status.
There are great examples of where kids don’t know…… but have a go. (I could write speeches for Gordon Brown with rhyming like that).
I’m not saying that being wrong is creative, but i do know that if your not prepared to be wrong then you will never come up with anything original or creative.
The issue is that by the time people become older, we become frightened of being wrong.
The national curriculum shows that mistakes are the worse things you can make. This means that we are educating people out of their creative capacity.
“All children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up”
-Picaso
I believe we don’t grow into creativity, we do the opposite, we grow out of creativity. Not willingly or knowingly, but we get educated out of it.
Where ever you go in the world, all educational system has the same hierarchy.
Maths & science——————>Humanities——————>The Arts
I always spent most of my school time at the bottom of this scale in the arts department, and I noticed another hierarchy there: Drama and dance are not as important as music and art.
There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance to students every day the same way we teach maths.
WHY?
I think maths is a very important subject, but I also think drama and dance are equally important.
If you were to look at the education system from the outside, as an alien, you would have to conclude, from looking at the output, that the purpose of the system is to produce university professors. These are the people who come out of the top of the educational system, and with all respect to university professors, they are put on a pedestal and recognised as the ‘greatest’, but why?
Firstly, our education system leans upon the idea of academic ability, and there’s good reason for this. Maths, English, Science were the subjects we are told were the ‘good’ subjects. The creative subjects, the ones you enjoyed, the ones you where unknowingly pushed away from, on the grounds that, “you’ll never get a job doing that”. Am I right?
“ Don’t do music you can’t be a musician.”
“Don’t do art, you’ll never become an artist.”
Now, quite obviously, this view is out dated. The planet is engulfed in a revolution.
The other reason that creativity is suppressed, is that academic achievement has tainted our views on intelligence. The whole education system is back tracked from university graduates. Then you end up with a lot of highly talented, creative, brilliant people, thinking that they’re not. Because the thing that they are good at, at school wasn’t recognised or some times stigmatized.
In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people will graduate from university, world wide, than the total number of graduates….EVER. And this is because of things such as technology, the transition into work and the huge explosion of population.
Then suddenly a degree isn’t worth anything. Forty years ago if you had a degree you had a job. If you didn’t have a job it was because you didn’t want one. But now young people with degrees are heading back home to live with Mam and Dad, because all of a sudden you now need a Ph.D.
We need to rethink the way it works, we need to rethink the way intelligence works. We know three things about intelligence and the way it works:
Firstly- diversity, we think about the world in all different ways. Through sight, sound, movement.
Secondly intelligence is dynamic. Creativity, which I believe is the production of valuable original ideas, lets us think about situations in different ways we will have a creative idea. The third thing, intelligence is, is that it is distinct. From person to person it is all different, and if we stop looking at situations with tunnel vision then we will approach things with a different, alternative, creative and enriching perception.
What we have to celebrate is the gift of the human imagination. We should be recognising and cherishing this gift wisely, to stop creativity being destroyed.
The way we can do this is by seeing our creativity and imagination for what it is worth, and to see children’s imaginations for what they are. Our job is to nurture this creativity for the future. A future we may not see, but they will, and what we have to do is help them make something of it.
That’s simply a lie. It surely has to me more than half a grade?
I’ve seen teachers posting about this story on other blogging site saying that it has nothing to do with them it must be the students faults…NO!
It is impossible for it to be the students faults for having bad grades. A teachers job is to get students through the syllabus and getting them the best grades they can. If the student fails- the teacher fails. It is a teachers job to make the lesson engaging, make these students WANT to learn. I’ve seen it done with some of the most hard to reach young people.
It is a teachers role and responsibility to cater for these young people and to make sure they are having the best learning experience.
If I had a bad maths teacher, i know that i wouldn’t have done aswell in my maths GCSE. I’ve been to several school sitting in on lessons, seeing how teachers implement their lesson, ad i’ve seen quite how BAD a teacher can do. How can teachers say that it’s not their fault…..ITS THEIR JOB.
As the article says, “Inspire challenge and extend”. that’s what teachers should be doing. Inspiring young people to want to learn and engage with a subject, whilst still challenging and broadening their views. We need teachers to go beyond the classroom, and not just hand out the textbook! Teachers should be TEACHING not reading from books.
Why can’t young people just be given the opportunities they deserve- young people are entitled to a good education, everyone starts off at school- maybe if we start looking at the8,130 permanent exclusions this obviously shows that education isn’t for all young people, maybe we should stop looking at way we can exclude these young people- further alienating them and pushing them further into an unconstructive culture. Surely excluding roughly 4.4% of all pupils for a fixed exclusion isn’t the way to go. We should be nurturing and supporting these young people. (information from the DCSF statistical first release)
“Teacher think they’re a disruption to the class” its the teachers job to make sure that their not.
Young people are being excluded because of the failing of he teachers. A teachers job is to teacher pupils and give them support. Not just to teacher and give support to the ‘well behaved average grade’ students. but to ALL students.
I think schools shouldnt be allowed to exclude student PERIOD.
Just over a recent conversation I’ve just had with a teacher a vast cavern forms between youth workers and teachers! How more patronising and offensive could they get?
You see a gap, when youth workers hear that young people have a voice they’re all for it! Pretty good from my point of view
But why are teachers so patronising… What pricks. You go to a teacher with an ‘alternative’ view, and they will look at you like you’ve just shat on them. And I’m not genralising. Well I’m not meaning to genralise anyway, but in my experience.
You ask a teacher to think from a different point of view, think about things differently, do a tinny bit of extra work Or to have any question of authority and they won’t bother giving you the time of day!
This is why formal education should be run by youth workers, or learning coaches.
We love you teachers!
Rant over.
…..Actually no its not.
It been grinding at me since I first wrote this.
Surley teachers should support the voices of their young people, they spend the most time with them! Why be so condisending! I hate it.
And with teachers your allways looked on as a fellow youth work proffessional. Where as to a teacher your just a student, an insignificant obsticle in there lives. Around some teachers I’ve allways thought that the worst part of their job, to them, is the young people. PISSES ME OFF!
Right now its:
Is it more or do people in this college seem to be getting younger and younger. I know I’m a 18yr old AS level student, but come on? Some of these kids look about 10! Its absolutly silly! some of these people look like they just stroled out of the womb and in through the college gate. I mean, seriously can a 16 year old be that small eithout having a medical problem. And some of them are even driving. HOW DO THESE PEOPLE REACH THE PEDALS?!?
Its about time for a rant. Read this…. then my view will follow!
A Japanese gamer has taken the highly unusual step of ‘marrying’ his videogame sweetheart, in what must have been a very bizarre ceremony recently. The gamer, known only as Sal9000, is a big fan of the Nintendo DS romance ‘em up, ‘Love Plus’, in which players attempt to woo their digital paramours with flowers, lavish dates and such. The behaviour of these in-game girlfriends then changes dependent on how they’re treated. Ah, so true! Ahem, anyway, Sal9000’s pretend romance came to a frankly worrying conclusion when he eventually plighted his troth to his silicon ladyfriend – a modest lass named ‘Nene Anegasaki’ – during a ceremony overseen by an actual priest and witnessed by dozens of onlookers at a recent technology festival in Tokyo. Heck knows how Sal9000 is now planning to consummate the marriage – perhaps that’s the substance of an especially twisted Love Plus minigame. However the priest involved has since stated that the ceremony was neither official nor legally-binding. In any case the marriage, such as it is, is likely to end in disappointment, as it turns out that Sal9000 is something of a ladykiller when it comes to digital girlfriends. By all accounts he has a string of similar romances already behind him.
WHAT THE FUCK!
Things go too far sometimes. its just getting stupid, people marrying their pets, that weird. BUT at least the that thing is living- could be argued that it has a personality. A dog is something tangible. Once this guy turns the screen off the character is dead!
“oh no! unless i find a power point my wife will fun out of battery!”
That should never be something that someone can say.What happened to a loving, mutual, respectable, pretty, white, Bride and groom wedding?Can’t things just be normal, this is the type of story you wonder why we bothered going into WWII for.
“We won the war so people could Marry their Nintendo DS’”
- I can honestly say- i don’t know one war veteran (you could argue that i don’t know many) that has ever said that.It just disappoints me that there are some people in this world who don’t deserve to be.
Maybe it’s just natural selection kicking in and so its stopping him ever having kids (someone has told him he cant have children haven’t they?)
The words “ONLY” and “IN” and “JAPAN” spring to mind when i read this.
the list is ridiculous. heres a few of my favorite PATHETIC weddings:
http://bit.ly/fJv3B -Woman Marries dolphin…….
http://bit.ly/2A93Gj – woman marries dead man……….
I just can’t be bothered to judge. I sometimes wonder “would it be a bad thing if it all ended now”.
Up until July this year i was chair man of a charity called “UK Youth Voice” (UKYV) and we worked to get the voices of young people heard. and i have just re-discovered this quote by a VERY good friend of mine who was vice chair at the time.
this year’s conference will be just as successful as all the other conferences Youth Voice has delivered. A lot of hard work, time and commitment have been put in by UK Youth Voice members to ensure that all the young people involved will get their voices heard and most of all have lots of fun! We have consulted with young people to find out what issues effect them and what is important to create a positive change. You get out what you put in, so don’t be afraid to voice your opinion and have a ball! Hannah Rachael Yates, Vice-Chair UK Youth Voice UK Youth’s Youth Voice Conference is this weekend at UK Youth’s activity centre in Avon Tyrrell.
Interesting presentation from Dafydd Elis-Thomas, presiding officer for #wales even though it was all in #welsh Prof Jonathan Bradbury next 2 hours ago
Sat in a confrence listening to a speech by presiding officer for the #wales assembly government talking to #yp3 hours ago
