At my school so many high achievers would use summer school to get ahead that they had to shut it down. Those nerds were causing the actually remediate kids to feel ashamed and othered, so they would all drop out after a week or two. Year after year. I’m salty about it.
Um, yeah? Teaching is not about awarding those who game the system the best. It’s all about making sure that the “lowest common denominator” gets every chance to succeed.
It’s not a fucking leaderboard.
Signed,
a salty fucking teacher who will defend those students to the end.
Edit: I’m gonna keep going on this because it’s a subject that pisses me off to no end.
I live in a place where the rich kids can afford to tutor during the summer, and some take extra classes to “get ahead” of the school year. And you know what those kids do?
They sit in the classes, bored, because someone paid for them to do all this stuff early.
And I’m not saying that learning extracurriculars is bad, in fact, it’s wonderful! But if you paid somewhere to just take the same math class that you would have done anyway, well congrats. You got nothing. You beat Mario before everyone else.
And even that would be fine, except the attitude that comes from them – some as early as 6 years old! – is that these fucking “remedials” are slowing them down, and they are “smart” all while a mountain of money and privilege supports them.
And do those kids feel like they should help their fellow students learn? No! They just punch down harder, because no one in their families teaches them that learning is cooperative effort. Just get to the top of that fucking leaderboard and stay there at all costs. From fucking kindergarten onwards!
So taking time out of your summer as a student and sacrificing fun for the love of learning is “gaming the system,” and needs to be abolished? No wonder the United States school system is messed up…
I explicitly said that the love of learning is great.
And I’m not saying that learning extracurriculars is bad, in fact, it’s wonderful!
I’m talking about summer schools that literally just teach a class curriculum ahead of time. In that respect, yes, it is “gaming”. The only thing those students learn is to get ahead and stay ahead.
Who’s going to teach them? We can’t even hire enough teachers for the shitfestival that education is now, how do you find more teachers?
Once you get those teachers who are skilled at driving advanced classes, would you require them also work in the poor performing classes?
That’s a conditions trap, now that good teacher is dealing with the administration and trauma burden of the low performing class making it complex for them to perform in the advanced class.
Would you make them specialists? That’s an equity and human resources management nightmare. Whid want to work in a class of hard students when classes of dreamy well behaved engaged kids is a possibility
Do we keep it the same and continue to systemically disadvantage everyone?
There are no easy answers. The entire education system needs to be invented and rebuilt from the ground up.
Why take these summer breaks in the first place? Are your kids needed on the farms still? Or is it because salty teachers are underpaid and having summer breaks is th only way the US can convince them to work. Where is the data that summer breaks help any students at all? Poor or rich smart or lazy? What about the kids that don’t get lunches when they are not in school? Summer slumping is a detriment to all, to society. I don’t see many teachers willing to stand up to that as the underlying issue, and I don’t see how it’s fair to blame those that are either willing or able to fight it independently with additional learning. They are not the ones to aim your laser at.
I don’t live in the US. I’m adequately paid, and the summers are short where I live. Take your strawmen and throw them back whatever hole you dug them out of.
I can’t speak about US problems, but what I’m talking about is education in general. I’ll give you an example: I was teaching some students to read the other day, about 8 years old. One student clearly has the leg up on the other one. She goes to after school programs, short summer programs, the works. She can read about two levels higher than her classmate. Hey, that’s great. And actually when reading is concerned, I’m happy that she can do that. But what happens is that when I need to slow down and actually teach that other student to read (at a level that’s perfectly fine for her age), she groans, she gets impatient, she makes fun of that kid. And what happens to that other kid? She feels stupid, she feels inadequate.
And ok, you might say, an intensive reading program is good! But one thing it does not teach these kids is that they are not better than anyone else, and even if they learn more, they need to also learn to be respectful to their fellow students.
Tl;dr we’re teaching them to be competitive, not good human beings
Hot take, schools should be geared towards accommodating the smartest kids, not the dumbest. There should still be safety nets like summer school, but the smartest kids should be able to learn as much as they want to
Those smartest kids can go test out of everything with AP, take SAT courses privately or for free. Those kids who need more helo have no fucking other chance. Experiences like these tilt them away from education entirely.
My kid now has to sit in classrooms where kids scream, threaten people, throw things, and break shit. The teacher has had to evacuate the classroom until these kids calm down. Barely any teaching or learning takes place because these poor teachers are far too busy trying to manage these students.
My kid went from top student in every single grade to an anxious wreck because he now has to deal with kids who threaten to hurt both other students and themselves.
I’m very much for “education for all”, but this ain’t the way to do it. It’s a fuckin’ mess out there. I don’t envy the kids of today in the slightest.
That’s horrible. Yeah, I think the misbehaving kids would fit better elsewhere. I didn’t have such disruptive issues in my school, more that the students of retired engineers took all of the fucking opportunities. Our AP classes were full, and the game to getting in was not about grades. And when I was a young child I kndw why: George Bush’s No Child Left Behind laws. And I think that crap is still in effect, as public schools continue to fail American kids.
My hot take: schools should be geared to everyone. Have advanced classes, normal classes, and below average classes. The teacher can teach according to each class. Everyone should get an education.
Even calling those students Below Average others them. They probably have other forms of intelligence. Or they just don’t learn well in the one exact neurotypical classroom that we offer in the US. Or maybe they have issues at home, economic issues, or social issues that are keeping them from succeeding in school. Kids in other top countries are never asked to worry about these things.
Thermonuclear take; the kind of work it takes to perform well in school is exactly the kind of work society is preparing kids for, so good school performance can still be a strong indication they’ll be good employees.
Wether or not our society and schools are right for that is a much more interesting topic of debate. Kids who crush it in school (and continue to crush it all the way through college) will go on to make their companies loads of money for cheap.
Yes, school is a soul crushing amount of mindless busy work to earn a pieces of paper with shit printed on them. What you will do until you die. Welcome to society, it sucks here.
My school had two separate classes for that exact reason. Remedial summer school was Tuesday Thursday for a little bit longer, and get ahead summer school was Monday Wednesday Friday
That’s interesting. At my school, summer school was only for the remedial students and there was a stigma involved with it. Basically nobody wanted to do summer school and most kids would do anything to avoid it.
I’m a teacher in training. We had reading “homework” over the summer for our incoming students. Their families were instructed that if their child read every day (15-30 minutes or so), and they kept track of it on a chart we sent them, they would win prizes when they came to school. I think it was something like a pizza party if they read a certain number of days. It wasn’t mandatory and there was no punishment for not doing it. I thought it was a great idea.
This is how we know they really nailed it on AC6, this is exactly the experience. Well, whenever I didn’t say FUCK IT, and equipped dual Zimmermans and the stun nail launcher.
Maybe it’s just the only way I learned to play, but armored core 3 I found only the floating legs were very viable. Then I would equip self aimed missiles and found arena quite simple. The missions you could use different set ups, but I could never win arena much with any other legs.
In 2 and (I think) 3, there was a fifth class of legs called "hover" that basically acted like quads do in hover mode in AC6, but bound to the ground unless you boosted. IIRC, they had the easiest time getting airborne from a boost, but had no unboosted jump. Basically, they were faster treads that could move sideways.
Oh look, a boss fight. Will this be a fair-and-balanced skill-based experience? Or will it be a DPS race against the clock and hoping I get good RNG on the enemy attack patterns so I don’t die to mostly unavoidable or unreactable damage?
No clue what you’re talking about with bad hitboxes. Dark Souls 1 suffered from this a bit. Dark Souls 2 as well. Bloodborne, Dark Souls 3, Sekiro, and Elden Ring had near damn perfect hitboxes.
It's a Dark Souls boss, not an Armored Core boss. AC bosses in previous games were usually (with the exception of For Answer) just other ACs with really good AI piloting them, not giant, unique things with mechanics that you don't see anywhere else.
That alone is enough for me to wish they'd called it something else.
Yeah the arena disappointed the very shit right out of my ass. I just finished it last night and expected the S-rank contenders to be even slightly more difficult than the D-rank ones, but they weren't.
Arena should have been increasingly demanding fights that each require a unique build to conquer. Or even better, each fight should have made you use a pre-set loadout, so you’d have to explore and learn new builds, and that knowledge could then be carried into designing mechs for the campaign missions.
I bet theres a lot of people out there not changing it up at all, missing out on an a lot that the game has to offer.
Ideally each one could have made you adapt to and learn new mechanics.
But it seems each one is just a randomized loadout or a character from the story, with the exact same AI slapped on.
The arena is honestly pretty close to how it was in the old games. Hell, in 4A, if you beat White Glint in the story missions before beating her in the arena, you got to skip the arena fight entirely on account of her being dead.
Forcing players to use a specific build goes against the entire spirit of the series, though.
It’s just an idea I had from a game design perspective.
Nier: Automata is one game with which I saw a lot of people complain, as the game does nearly nothing to get you to actually experiment with different weapon combinations and plug-in chips, and a lot of people overlook those systems because of it. And hence the experience of some players suffered.
Pre-set loadouts in arenas could have been used to address that design problem by showing players the possibilities.
Although, it wouldn’t necessarily need to be mandatory. Each arena fight could come with a “recommended AC” for countering the opponent, while still allowing players to take in their own mech should they want to. This could have come with the fights being a lot harder as well, making using your own design viable only if you know what you’re doing.
If you want to play the game as a glass cannon DPS machine, you can do that with the right parts. But there's nothing stopping you from actually reading boss patterns and dodging them. The only boss this doesn't apply to is the first one, and I suspect it will get nerfed because of how many people are complaining about it. Some damage is unavoidable but it's minor, every big attack is dodgable and even accompanied by a loud warning sound. I don't think it's unfair.
I think the boss is fairly readable and I can take it down quickly, it’s just annoying that it can fly out of bounds where I can’t hit it but it can still fire at me. That and your starting mech isn’t the best either but I got an S rank on that level after 4-5 attempts.
Yeah the first boss isn’t a great first impression. I knew I could beat it in <5 tries but what annoyed me was how boring it was. Basically shoot at the broad side of a barn while hiding behind cover.
I went the other way around. I went all in with my energy sword. Stayed mid air under it as much as possible to use the rockets. When the second blade combo attack hits, it get staggered and you just pummel the boss. Rince and repeat
But there’s nothing stopping you from actually reading boss patterns and dodging them.
Is there enough information to do this on the first time through, if you have enough skill? Or is it necessary to try and fail multiple times to see and learn each pattern?
I definitely dislike this dynamic in games. If you’re only able to win because you built up muscle memory for that specific segment of the game, it doesn’t feel like a real win, feels almost as unrewarding as grinding XP to make things easier.
If you don’t enjoy practicing bosses, FromSoft games will probably not be for you.
This is not a dunk! There is nothing inherently superior or worthwhile about games that require practice. I personally enjoy Soulslike games, but people who claim they’re they’re the One True Genre are just fooling themselves.
Probably, though I did beat and enjoy the first three games in the Dark Souls series (if you include Demon’s Souls) before I got tired of it, despite having to iterate on some bosses. There are a few saving graces that make it tolerable: effective options for cheesing, being able to grind XP/gear to make it easier, mandatory downtime between fights that punishes trying to brute force practice them, the option to give up for a while and go explore somewhere else, the presence of more dynamics to fights to optimize than correctly reacting to patterns to the point where you can remain mostly ignorant of them and still win another way. Playing DS3 I got the feeling that maybe the issue was getting worse and I was kind of burned out on the gameplay overall so I dropped it.
I would cite Super Meat Boy as a more pure example of the problem I’m talking about, that game left me feeling brain fried and like I hadn’t learned or accomplished anything.
mandatory downtime between fights that punishes trying to brute force practice them
Fascinating. This would frustrate the hell out of me - if I’m trying to get better at something, the last thing I want is enforced wait-time between practice attempts! Still, I’m glad you’ve found other games that you enjoy more rather than being influenced by the Internet’s collective fan-boner for FromSoft.
I'd like to direct your attention to the prior games in the series we're discussing, which have no such issues despite being made by Fromsoft. This "hurr durr issa Fromsoft boss get used to it" schtick is fucking insufferable and ignores the 15 years of history that company had before making those godawful Dark Souls games.
How would the game give you any more information than it already does without worsening gameplay? Like sure, you can make the boss' moves slower and more telegraphed. Put in Atreus to tell you the Boss' weakness or something while you fight him. I'm personally not a fan of that.
In my experience, you don’t have to compromise. You can take meta dual shotguns and two heavy hitting shoulder mounts and just vaporize enemies. Almost trivially, in fact.
The problem is, the game is not more fun if you force yourself into something like a melee hybrid build. It’s significantly harder and there’s less room for error when piloting lightweight ACs, so it’s no surprise that most people find the most comfortable build to be one where you have high health and damage mitigation, insane burst DPS, and stunlock potential.
In short, there’s not a good balance between the different playstyles and difficulty. Some bosses are actually really fun to fight, but two or three of them have made my shit list already just due to the nonsense you are forced to put up with. Juggernaut, Balteus, and Sea Spider are the three biggest offenders right now.
I had very little trouble with Juggernaut once I started fighting him from the air. He has a very low max firing angle and you can get a nice, clear shot on his butthole from directly above him.
My gripe with him isn’t so much his fight mechanic, it’s his absolutely massive hitbox that activates whenever it moves a centimeter.
Fighting him from the air is the most efficient, I’ve discovered, but I spent a good few attempts trying to get in close with the plasma blade and would see three quarters of my HP bar disappear because my recovery animation overlapped with the startup of his charge attack that shouldn’t have been able to hit me because I was to his side or rear.
The Cataphract has been my favorite fight so far. Really challenging, but really rewarding.
I haven’t played AC6 yet but the fact that you’re bothered by unreactable damage makes me think you’re playing this like Souls. But it’s not Souls, it’s a shooter. Be preemptive? Make your own movement pattern hard to follow.
A very glorified DPS race is more or less what a duel is in a shooter.
NASA wants to shit-can it because of money issues. They want to turn it into a heliosphere probe, which NASA doesn’t need; it just gives them an excuse to mothball it.
A shit ton of planetary scientists have been complaining and word got out, upsetting us space nerds everywhere. NASA doesn’t want to send another probe out to the Kuiper Belt for another 20-30 years, as in we millennials will be old or dead by the time we get new Pluto pics if they get their way.
Won’t they need to get more funding from Congress unless they want to cut other big missions instead? Doesn’t seem like NASA is at fault here, they need more money to do everything they want to.
(And cutting on SLS won’t help, it’s got a separate Congress mandated pile of money)
What would you rather they cut? If I’m remembering correctly I think their budget shrunk in real terms this year due to inflation while they’re being asked to do more.
I wish the space nerds around the country were more politically active. Nonviolent pro-NASA protests in front of the Capitol when they’re deciding on the budget every year would accomplish a lot more for space than just bitching on the internet.
I totally agree! It sounded from your comment you were upset with NASA, but I think we ought to be upset with Congress instead. I’m sure NASA would like to continue to mission if they had enough money.
I’m confused here. Are you implying that funding the New Horizons probe will achieve more Pluto science? Because it’s long past Pluto and will never be able to study that object again.
It could study other Kupier belt objects, but never Pluto.
I think the petition’s goal is to ensure NH flies off to explore other Kuiper Belt objects instead of being sent to the ass end of nowhere like NASA apparently wants to do
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