Hey Sarah, dont quit your day job! And if you did, don't go in to real estate. Or any other industry that requires 1) Education above 6th grade andd 2) Maturity above a 4th grader. But then, did any expect Sarah Palin to be able to talk on something useful and on the topic? Real Estate people, are typically Republican, but MODERATE Republicans. The stuff her Tea Partiers enjoy will never work to real estate brokers/agents.

I recall a speech Mr. Clinton gave a few years ago, on real estate. While the speech was to help promote a Democrat, he stuck to the topic at hand. He explain the factors, the politics, and enviromental conditions from a politically-neutral stand point. Something a broker or CFP would do.

It doesn't help most Republicans/conservatives that most Americans took advantage of the $8000 tax credit on purchasing a new house last year. Certainly helped the real estate market. Which begs the question: Would you, as a real estate agent vote for the Democrat giving you more business? Or the Republican, who believes the goverment shouldn't be in the business of promoting good work ethics and policy?

1.1.1 You are correct, some word problems are completely generic and are simply translations of math into English. But the kind we are talking about relate math to the real world. Here is an example:



If you have never had a word problem like this, you had a really lousy education.

2.2.2 We are talking about a math class. Say it with me: MATH. Specifically, geometry. GEOMETRY. This is not the forum to discuss law, history, HBTQ rights, Native Americans, Nürnberg, Pearl Harbour, etc. Those topics are excellent for their appropriate classes, such as history and sociology, not in a math class.

3.1.1 Your example supports my point. You took an immoral topic (the deliberate murder of children), and changed into a moral topic (how much food needed to prevent starvation). You see, killing children is bad, preventing starvation is good. Easy to tell the difference, right?

3.2.1 I'm going to assume you are joking now.

4.1.1 The examples you provided are also completely inappropriate for math class. Those are not "interesting topics", they are traumatic tragedies. They would distract from the lesson rather than encouraging focus.

5.1.1 That is simply not true. A good teacher keeps the class on-topic, or nothing would get done. If a student recently suffered a trauma and was not able to focus on work, they should go to the school nurse or counselor.

5.2.1 If the students are eager to discuss a topic that can be worked into a lesson appropriate to the class, then great, run with it. If it is not appropriate to the class and the teacher runs with it, the students will start to manipulate the teacher into class discussions rather than the necessary lessons. I have seen this happen on a number of occasions, but fortunately the teacher was intelligent enough to recognize what was happening and bring the class back to the lesson.

I apologize if I seem rude, but you seem to lack the fundamental sense of appropriateness for a school lesson. Though it is certainly appropriate to discuss emotionally charged topics in history, sociology, or ethics classes, topics in math classes should be emotionally and politically neutral so that the students will stay focused on the math.

I used to watch The Daily Show every night...back when Stewart actually pretended to be politically neutral. Now hes just another pretentious, hippie douche with air time. I've made it a point not to watch the show...in fact I'm running an unofficial boycott of clips on the internet as well -- can't remember the last time I've upvoted a TDS clip here.

I don't really have any negative feelings about you either way, I met alot of troops like you in Kuwait already, they were all pissed they weren't fighting a conventional military force under a very vague mission statement of bringing Freedom and Democracy. Its hard to do anything when you have no definitive objective or exit strategy. Surprisingly to me a lot of them fell in love with the place and went native, but that happened in Vietnam and other conflicts as well.

The drug problem in Afghanistan is economical, when the Taliban took over they banned the drug trade with their usual heavy hand tactics, when chaos began the drug trade began all again. Culturally alot of people cultivated it for medicinal use, which explains my own rather liberal views towards drugs. But now mostly its a cash crop, for most its a means of survival though there are farms that are solely created to feed back funds into the Taliban movement and other warring factions. The old "its okay to grow this because it only destroys the infidel" ignoring the large drug abuse levels in the local population, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and many other nations through which it makes its way.

In terms of imposing culture I think alot of US military and political planners, coming from the top down Bush belief that "democracy will simply flourish given the chance" implemented alot of very silly political and economical ideas. I remember reading about the imposition of democratic elections in Iraq in rural tribal areas, the US civies where then shocked to find that everyone voted by tribal alliances and background. It's again a failure to read the human terrain of the battlefield in the same way we had occur in Vietnam.

This aspect is covered very well in several chapters of Dexter Filkins The Forever War - http://www.amazon.com/Forever-War-Dexter-Filkins/dp/0307266397
Showing the disparity of understanding between coalition forces and the local population, I recommend it as unlike many books it stays politically neutral with no preaching on either side but rather an account of a journalist who went through Afghanistan and Iraq during the opening stages of the war.

In reply to this comment by smooman:
As per our last "discussion" you probably dont like me much but I think i just found some common ground =)

In reply to this comment by Farhad2000:

Given the last 8 years, I believe the Western world needs to engage the Arab world in dialog but it must respect the cultural background of the region and not just think that it can westernize ideas through brute force and seemingly endless criticism of it's religion.

I, for one, absolutely HATE the idea of westernizing Arab and Persian nations (namely Iraq and Trashgan....I mean Afghanistan). One of the platoons in my unit, while we were in Afghanistan, went out on a mission with the objective of demolishing a cannabis field. I was livid when I found out. These are a people who have been a nation far, far longer than we (the USA) and here we are telling them, forcing them even, to be like us while completely disregarding centuries of culture and history. Fuck that!

Personally, if I may weigh in here, I have to disagree largely with the claim that fedquip has enhanced the content of the sift... I mean, how many of his videos are Daily Show? Bill Maher? The sift was chock full of this stuff before fed showed up... all we have as a result of his entrance is a collective that is dedicated to these shows, along with the occasional posting of documentaries (most of which now seem to have been self-linked), along with whatever the hell happend to make his pals chuckle that day... music, commercials, anything, doesn't matter, post it to TAYTV and friends will upvote it.

The TAYTV collective is a personal annoyance to me if only because it does nothing to aid in the categorization and organization of the sift... which I had always thought was one of the main points of the collectives.

As far as contributing to discourse on the sift, fedquips posts are universally left-leaning and highly editorialized, I've taken issue with this over his "Army Ethics" post but that was not the only example of his agenda.... TAYTV is not about political discourse but about continuously reasserting his own, tunnel-vision view of the world. Do not think I am pointing this out because my politics do not agree with feds... if anything I'm right there next to him on the left side of the line... but I firmly believe that the sift should remain politically neutral, and having TAYTV as one of our highest ranking collectives only serves to cast a leftist pall on the rest of the site... and now to find out that the only way he got to this point was to self-link his own material and then pad the collective with Daily Show and Colbert to reap points strikes me as pretty shady.

I still stand by my call for a ban... and not for a week, but a ban period... correct the initial mistake of showing him the favoritism that gave him a collective in the first place and set an example once and for all that self-linking is never okay... anything less will be a continuation of that initial favoritism.

"America is the last accountable nation in the planet." - no an accountable nation is one that has enough regard for the integrity of other nations and peoples to be held to account by politically neutral international institutions like the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

"Americans are held to their own high standards, and not to anyone else's." Typical bullshit exceptionalist rhetoric to be expected from a champion of the American right. It's funny, because those high standards you talk about aren't very apparent in the appalling treatment of inmates at Guantanamo Bay who have been denied due legal process. America is constantly in violation of the Geneva Conventions and many international human rights rights treaties - this is why you think that the International Criminal Court "is a joke, a fucking joke" - because you're terrified that you and your ilk may have to answer for the crimes they have committed - or blindly supported. Furthermore, if Bush and his cronies had invested the same effort in supporting the ICC that they invested in trying to discredit it, and intimidating third world nations with the threat of a loss of aid if they support the court, then perhaps it could be more successful.

Wumpus - you know nothing about international law or the international legal system. I can only take comfort in the fact that people who hold views similar to yours are a small minority - only prevalent in America - whose days of policy making and international influence are thankfully coming to an end!