Info Why are tables not taught in OW classes anymore?

[boulderjohn]

Sure. What high school student, even an ESL student which was likely given the neighborhood, could possibly have trouble with such an easy read? Here's paragraph 4.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

My family has a little story about this book. My father was in the GE College Bowl quiz show (as part of the 1960 Rutgers team that won 5 straight matches). You could buzz in at any point while the question was being read. He buzzed in at "What famous English novel begins..." and correctly answered with this title.

In a presentation I made at an education conference, I put a PowerPoint slide on the screen with a portion of a paragraph. I asked if anyone in the audience would like to summarize it. No one would try. I am sure none of them could understand it at all. I am also sure that every person in the room had at least a masters degree, and I would bet nearly half had PhDs.

What I had put up from them to try (unsuccessfully) to understand was a portion of Edgar Alan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," which in my school (as in many others) is routinely assigned to 10th grade students of all abilities.

 

[Bigbella]

Sure. What high school student, even an ESL student which was likely given the neighborhood, could possibly have trouble with such an easy read? Here's paragraph 4.

His entire class were English speakers, save for a kid from Laos, who, I was told, later went on to Stanford Law (and also hadn't spoken a word of English as a freshman); it was supposedly "college prep" and the material, as such, had to pose more of an intellectual challenge than Hop On Pop or some f**king comic book.

We read that damn thing in middle school, along with Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451, In Cold Blood, Treasure Island and Billy Budd . . .

 

[Marie13]

Yikes.

A flashback: a college friend of mine -- obviously sadomasochistic and with maybe a helping of self-loathing -- decided to teach secondary school, "college-prep" English in East LA; and he was tasked by the local administration to teach A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, a meager book that should only take a long afternoon to complete.

Instead of passing out the usual Penguin Classics editions, he was given a few dogeared copies of the actual novel; a forty page "juvenile-retelling" in huge Scholastic Books font (oh, what the hell?) -- and, to top things off for a college prep class, even a Classic Comics edition of the story!

He enlisted in the Marines after only two years at the arse end of the Kali-fornia school system -- probably thought it less challenging . . .

I’ve tried multiple times to read A Tale of Two Cities. Couldn’t get through it. My Dickens favorites are Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield. Jane Austen is my favorite author.

 

[lowwall]

We read that damn thing in middle school, along with Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451, In Cold Blood, Treasure Island and Billy Budd . . .

Lord of the Flies in middle school. Kids probably thought it was an instruction manual.

I read Crime and Punishment in 4th grade just to prove I could do it. I read Pynchon and Eco for fun. And yet I still find Dickens a trudge. Especially the dialogue in books like David Copperfield. But the worst was Shakespeare. A good chunk of it is unintelligible because the language has evolved over the last 400(!) years. Even when you think you understand something, you are probably wrong as the meaning of so many of the words has dramatically changed since then.

 

[boulderjohn]

Here is the essence of that part of the above-mentioned presentation. A typical English class follows this sequence when teaching literature of this nature.

1. The teacher assigns reading.
2. Very few students do the reading.
3. The teacher tries to have a class discussion on the reading.
4. Few students actively participate, and they indicate they didn't really understand it.
5. Few students listen to the discussion.
6. As time runs out, the teacher grows concerned about the ability of the students to deal with the coming exam on the topic.
7. The teacher summarizes the key points students need to know to be successful on the exam.
8. Students take hurried notes on the teacher's summary.

I was contrasting that with online education, where students can't do that and must instead read the material and understand it on their own.

 

[boulderjohn]

Here is an exercise I used to do with my Advanced Placement literature (typically 12th grade) classes.

In all Edgar Allan Poe short stories in the horror genre, he hides a clear key to full understanding, including especially the fact that you should not trust the truthfulness of the narrator,, in the first couple paragraphs. I did the following exercise with "The Cask of Amontillado," which is typically taught at the middle school or 9th grade level.

1. Read the story.
2. Rewrite the first two paragraphs in your own words, such that they can be understood by a middle school student.
3. When the students came to class with their versions of the first two paragraphs, I put them in groups of 4-5.
4. In each group, the students read their rewrites to the group, and they talked about them.
5. Each group then made a single, consensus rewrite that they all agreed was true to the original.

I never once had a group get it right. Never once. They always misread the key sentence, the one sentence in those paragraphs that is absolutely necessary for understanding the story.

(BTW, I took an entire class on E. A. Poe in graduate school, which put me at an advantage. I would bet 90% of the teachers teaching that story do not understand it, either.)

 

[Nick_Radov]

This interminable debate about whether tables should be taught in OW courses largely misses the point. The real (and low) risks of DCS in open water diving largely come from bubble mechanics and multiple repetitive dives, particularly in combination with a circulatory system shunt such as a PFO. None of the deco algorithms in common use today model those factors accurately. Bühlmann ZHL-16C doesn't even try. VPM-B and RGBM sort of try, but seem to have missed the mark, or at least empirically they don't produce better results. Recreational dive tables are constructed using algorithms similar to what dive computers run. None of those deco algorithms have been properly validated for use in multiple repetitive dives through large-scale studies and thus as we stack up multiple dives in a series the models increasingly diverge from the reality of what happens in our bodies.

It's tough to hit the NDL limits on a single Aluminum 80 tank for a single dive. Most OW divers will run low on gas first. But most deep-ish dives will produce some bubbles even without clinical DCS symptoms. The trouble comes when divers go in again and again without enough time for those bubbles to resolve. The bubbles get compressed down, squeeze through into the arterial side of the circulatory system, and then expand on ascent causing ischemia. Sometimes cattle boat operators rush divers back into the water in order to stay on schedule. Or divers at a resort or on a liveaboard trip do up to five dives per day from a misguided desire to maximize their time underwater. It's like dude, maybe quit after three and drink a beer on the beach instead?

I'm not an instructor myself but after many years of diving and answering questions from new divers I'm skeptical whether it even matters. Casual vacation divers aren't going to really understand or remember how to do table calculations. Even if they have a computer failure, they'll just follow the dive guide and probably be fine. The divers who have some mathematical aptitude and an interest in understanding deco will do their own research and figure it out later.

Given limited time in OW courses it might be better to devote that time to practicing skills that in reality have a much greater impact on diver safety than anything related to deco calculations. DCS causes very few deaths or serious injuries for OW divers. The bigger risks are in areas like over weighting, gas management, equipment checks, rough surface conditions, and entanglement. Maybe focus on that stuff instead of tables.

Surveillance of Fatal Injuries in Diving

With the collection and reporting of dive fatalities, DAN can develop a more accurate database that monitors trends and identifies associated risk factors.

dan.org

 

[scubadada]

Hi @Nick_Radov

The DSAT (PADI) RDP and the DSAT computer decompression algorithm were specifically designed for repetitive dives in recreational divers. Sorry, I can only find the abstract, @dmaziuk may have a link for the entire publication that came from Rubicon

 

[lowwall]

The only sentence that stands out is "You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat."

That makes the story a confession. Presumably a deathbed confession given the last lines. "For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!"

 

[boulderjohn]

The only sentence that stands out is "You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat."

That makes the story a confession. Presumably a deathbed confession.

The key sentence is the last. He says there are two conditions for successful revenge. The first is that you don't get caught. The second, explained in challenging language at the end, is that you must make sure the victim knows the reason for the revenge. In the story, he never tells his victim why he is killing him, meaning the act does not meet his own definition of revenge. No motive is ever given anywhere, but it is implied. Fortunato, the victim, has been fortunate in his life, and the speaker has fallen on hard times. Fortunato is a blameless scapegoat for the speaker's misfortunes. He has done nothing to merit execution, which is why he does not understand why he is being killed. The trip through the catacombs is described as if it were a religious ceremony taking place in a cathedral. Their speech is liturgical in nature. It ends with Fortunato's arms chained to the wall at the end of the hallway, like a crucifix.