BF2S Forums DAST Chat

Macbeth wrote:

I just added John Stossel to my 'people I wish harm on' list. He dressed up as a homeless person and asked for donations to "prove'' that begging on the streets is an easy way to make money. Fucking seriously?

Um, I lost track of how old news that is. I think he did that 2 years ago, or maybe it is just 1 and feels like 2.

Last edited by War Man (2012-07-10 17:26:32)

I don't know why I still watch this shit sometimes.

He is arguing that the 6 year old's rap video from last week is child abuse. When he misses it, he misses it badly.

Beggars can make good money, its been proven enough times.

There was a story a few years back about people who commuted into Manhattan from the suburbs in order to sit on the street and beg all day. They were making enough money to cover the mortgage payments on their house, and then some. It just took some makeup and rags to get into costume. I know it's definitely an outlier, but the story did stick with me. Only tourists give money to the homeless anyway

$3.2 million yacht sinks in Lake Tahoe marina

"It's the ugliest thing I've ever seen," Tahoe Keys Property Association front desk clerk Ron Parker said, according to the newspaper. "My idea is it was so ugly someone had to sink it."

Macbeth wrote:

Shocking wrote:

Did I say there wasn't? Surely as a prospective historian in the U.S. it is to be expected you know about your own country's history and the origins of its (various) cultures. At the very least in broad terms. Surely you should know a little bit about world history, too, before you start specializing yourself in just one subject.

Yeah we learn that in high school over here.

High school history is shit and there's absolutely nothing academic about it. You're following an academic discipline. You're supposed to have some basic knowledge of the subjects in the academic sense. Does 'historian' in the US mean that you're just a guy who can name what happened when?

I'm still baffled by the fact that you can specialize yourself from the getgo without some adequate knowledge of history in general. It just doesn't make sense, the whole "history is too big" argument is just a giant strawman really. All of this means that students aren't properly acquainted with their subject before they start specializing and that they will be lacking behind in what's supposed to be basic skills for historians everywhere else in the world.

It would be a waste of everyone's time.

No not really. HS history is A. shit and B. offers very little actual info. At uni you'll learn more about a subject in a single quarter than you will in 6 years of HS.

I don't really see it as a waste of time to teach students the scope of their discipline before they start specializing. It's logical. I can't stress the 'basic knowledge' enough either and HS certainly doesn't provide that.

Macbeth wrote:

And you cannot condense all of euro or Chinese or African history down to one or two classes

Macbeth wrote:

And you cannot condense all of euro or Chinese or African history down to one class.

Unis in the UK, Germany, my country etc all do so. Shit even the unis of hong kong, s-africa and moscow do so.

Want to see what it looks like?

Year 1

Q1
Historical Science - an introduction
Ancient times - an introduction

Q2
The middle ages - ''
research seminar 1

Q3
Modern history - ''
Early modern history - ''

Q4
Contemporary history - ''
World history - ''

That's what it looks like at my uni. Ofcourse there's (mostly) a European focus, that's why there's global history in Q4.

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

high school history provided plenty of basic knowledge.

I'm of the opinion that the first year in uni should be devoted exactly to that. Obviously my standard of 'basic knowledge' is different, first and foremost because we're talking about historians-to-be here. Highschool grad level of understanding of, say, the ancient times just really won't do. There's many reasons why a broad scope of history should be taught in the first year. There are also many subjects, people and places in every timeframe which you hadn't heard of in highschool but turned out to be incredibly interesting and worthy of consideration in uni.

This could also be drawn from in future research, as I said before. Knowing a good tidbit of every timeperiod is rather useful in general.

Last edited by Shocking (2012-07-13 11:16:40)