[ EPU Foyer ] [ Lab and Grill ] [ Bonus Theater!! ] [ Rhetorical Questions ] [ CSRANTronix ] [ GNDN ] [ Subterranean Vault ] [ Discussion Forum ] [ Gun of the Week ]

Eyrie Productions, Unlimited

Subject: "Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"     Previous Topic | Next Topic
Printer-friendly copy    
Conferences Games Topic #125
Reading Topic #125, reply 10
Gryphonadmin
Charter Member
22375 posts
Dec-10-17, 03:40 PM (EDT)
Click to EMail Gryphon Click to send private message to Gryphon Click to view user profileClick to add this user to your buddy list  
10. "RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box"
In response to message #5
 
   >there's an
>enormous amount of commonality among most kids of the same age cohort
>re: the American public school system.
>
>Not with the old G&T stuff, tho. Everyone has a SUPER DIFFERENT story.
>Those charged with educating us really were throwing whatever they had
>against the wall and seeing what stuck, weren't they?

Yup. To be fair, it was a new field at the time, and there was virtually no guidance available. Best practices couldn't be referenced in the development of those programs in the late '70s/early '80s, because they didn't exist. For example, the local program here started because one teacher (coincidentally enough, my mom) read something about such a program somewhere else, found out that there was federal money available through state education departments for them, and applied to the state for a grant to develop the program and fund the position it would create.

She then had to develop the program—mostly by herself, with a bit of input from the two or three other teachers in the system who were in any way interested in such things—and defend both the necessity and the expected efficacy of it before a committee in Augusta. A lot of bigger, better-heeled school districts were looking to get on that wagon, so it was a pretty competitive process, and I would assume that most if not all of them were improvising their asses off just as much, since there were no published standards to meet.

The kicker is that when the grant came through, the town school board only narrowly, and with reluctance, voted to accept it, partly because they were not altogether convinced that such a thing would be useful, and partly because the funding it provided was a diminishing match over three years with a non-diminishing mandate to provide the service being paid for, which struck them as a shady deal. Once they did accept it, the Superintendent of Schools (who was not a particular believer in "special education" at either end of the curve) tried everything he could think of to get out of following through on it.

Part of the backlash from this, which the superintendent regarded as a fast one having been pulled on his office, was that the position existed, but the person responsible for its creation would be employed in it only over his dead body. I am informed that the actual sentence "You may have gotten the grant, but you're not getting the job" was uttered. And then Ms. Spencer came in and just made up whatever the hell she was doing instead of using any of the framework from the grant.

(The thing Mom ran while I was in first grade was evidently the part-time pilot, done under the auspices of that individual school's principal while the grant was being written, and so not involving the superintendent's office or the board. She was basically being paid as a substitute teacher—no benefits, no CBA—while she developed the program. I was six at the time and so either didn't know or had long since forgotten most of these details.)

Anyway, multiply that kind of bullshit town-pump politics and state/federal ad-hockery by however many individual school jurisdictions there were in the United States in 1978-80, and you have, I suspect, at least a partial explanation of why the situation was so confused.

>It's looking at the sort of thing that highly
>motivated people who are passionate about the subject matter (or at
>least passionate about getting full course credit) are doing in
>post-secondary education and trying to apply the form but not
>the substance of it to kids in primary school.

There was quite a bit of that going on in Quest—I mean, as I noted, one of the other things we studied was Bloom's taxonomy, and that is explicitly a teaching-theory thing, not an actual subject matter for students themselves. It's as if Ms. Spencer thought, Well, these kids are advanced, I should try teaching them what I was taught when I was older than they are. Which was the stuff from when she was getting her primary-education degree.

>This is not effective pedagogy.

It was, indeed, rather not.

>The original law/chaos axis is supposedly based on the idea of a
>morally neutral tension between Law and Chaos in the cosmology of
>Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone novels. (Which, by the
>way, have NOT aged well. Moorcock is a talented writer but great
>googly moogly the Elric books are extremely 70s and not in a good
>way.) This is why the good/evil axis exists alongside it.

Heh, I wonder how much of that is because they legit have aged poorly, and how much of it is because the reference pointers have flipped and the D&D player reading them recognizes all the stuff that was stolen from them for D&D, but subonsciously perceives it as riffing on the game instead. :)

(Similar to the reaction a friend had to The Lord of the Rings as an adult: "This is like somebody's D&D campaign journal with some really insane house rules." :)

>"You didn't play a Fighter, or a Mage, or a Cleric, or anything like
>that. You played an Elf. Your class is Elf. The Dwarf's class
>is Dwarf. You didn't gain levels in Fighter or Mage. You gained
>levels in Elf. Humans have a race AND a class. You just have a class."
>
>Conceptualizing it that way made it make a lot more sense.

Well... does it, though? I mean, if you want your dwarf or elf or whatever character to hit all the stereotypes, great, but enforcing them that way in the game mechanics? Enh.

>Other classes get different options but it all makes sense. Like.. the
>Burglar's Pack contains a thousand ball bearings. You, personally,
>might not ever use them... but you can certainly conceive of why a
>pack of general-purpose burglar's tools would have ball bearings.

Well, I suppose, although a thousand of them seems a bit excessive. I guess it would depend on what size they are.

(Also, ball bearings, patented in 1794, are anachronistic to the game setting. Also also, they probably mean "bearing balls", since the phrase "ball bearing" properly refers to the entire mechanism with the balls, the rings, and the lubrication and retention materials assembled. Did I read somewhere that they have guns in 5th Edition? Perhaps "round shot" would have been a better descriptor. Also to the third power, I might just have spent several minutes trolling Wizards of the Coast and they're not even here.)

>> and the guy sitting next to me
>>rummaged around in his bag and came up with one of the licensed
>>D&D novels to pass the time. (I have no memory of which one.
>>There can't have been all that many of them in 1987, can there?)
>
>This would almost certainly have had to have been a Dragonlance novel,
>of which there were ten in publication by the end of 1987. There is a
>small, outside chance it was one of the two Greyhawk novels, or the
>single Forgotten Realms novel, available at the time, but weight of
>probability says Dragonlance.

True, although we used the Forgotten Realms setting, so it's possible it was that one.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


  Alert | IP Printer-friendly page | Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
 Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box [View All] Gryphonadmin Dec-09-17 TOP
   RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box StClair Dec-10-17 1
      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 2
          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Dec-10-17 14
      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box zwol Dec-10-17 17
          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box rwpikul Dec-11-17 26
              RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box zwol Dec-11-17 27
                  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box rwpikul Dec-12-17 34
                      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-12-17 35
                          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Dec-12-17 36
          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box jonathanlennox Dec-19-17 41
      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Mephronmoderator Dec-19-17 40
   RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Wiregeek Dec-10-17 3
      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-11-17 28
          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Dec-11-17 29
   RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box drakensis Dec-10-17 4
      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 12
          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box drakensis Dec-11-17 25
   RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Mercutio Dec-10-17 5
      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box MoonEyes Dec-10-17 6
          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Mercutio Dec-10-17 7
              RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 8
              RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box MoonEyes Dec-10-17 13
                  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Dec-10-17 16
                      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Trscroggs Jan-02-18 42
                          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Jan-02-18 43
                              RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Jan-02-18 44
                              RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Trscroggs Jan-02-18 45
                  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 18
                      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box MoonEyes Dec-10-17 23
                          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Nova Floresca Dec-11-17 32
                          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Silversword Dec-18-17 39
     RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 10
          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Mercutio Dec-10-17 20
              RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 21
          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-13-17 37
      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Proginoskes Dec-10-17 15
      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box MoonEyes Dec-10-17 24
   RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box DaPatman89 Dec-10-17 9
      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Dec-10-17 11
          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box StClair Dec-10-17 19
   RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box pjmoyermoderator Dec-10-17 22
   RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Kendra Kirai Dec-11-17 30
      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Dec-11-17 31
          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Kendra Kirai Dec-11-17 33
              RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Jan-02-18 46
                  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Kendra Kirai Jan-03-18 47
                  RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box MoonEyes Jan-03-18 48
                      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Jan-03-18 49
                          RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Gryphonadmin Jan-03-18 51
                      RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box Peter Eng Jan-03-18 50
   RE: Elder Days Story Time: The Red Box BobSchroeck Dec-18-17 38


Conferences | Topics | Previous Topic | Next Topic

[ YUM ] [ BIG ] [ ??!? ] [ RANT ] [ GNDN ] [ STORE ] [ FORUM ] GOTW ] [ VAULT ]

version 3.3 © 2001
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
Benjamin D. Hutchins
E P U (Colour)