onoway

Something else ... why on earth are the cards for the endless hands now suddenly so monstrous? I feel as though I am being slapped in the eyes when I log in, as though I should be standing about 8 feet back from the computer ..they are far far FAR too big for the size of the screen, and the space is now obnoxious and next to useless. You might as well be playing an arcade game, it has no resemblance to a bridge table. It was very usable before but like almost everything else on BBO in the last few years, apparently that's not allowed so it's been changed too. Don't the programmers have enough to do trying to make BBO itself somewhat vaguely user friendly as it used to be without screwing up the one place still possible to play bridge without blood pressure spiking as soon as you try to log in? So sad.

I have been driven out of BBO by the new program which I find extraordinarilly frustrating, far too stressful to be worth the effort it now takes to play..although hope springing eternal I keep trying every few months in the forlorn hope that someone somewhere MIGHT be listening to the ongoing laments. Just because Flash was disappearing should not have meant that everything that made the the site so successful so quickly should be tossed out too. Anyway, because of that, I've been playing the endless hands on occassion and now they too have been messed up, the most important screwup being the GIBs explaining a bid as meaning something it cannot possibly mean, such as claiming to have aces you are holding in your own hand. It's literally like playing with three opponents on some hands and good training to bid as though you cannot trust your partner. At all. One feature I DO like is the ability to access BridgeMaster, I have owned two copies of this and lost one in a move, the other was "borrowed" and never returned so that's something I was very pleasantly surprised by. However, even that is not immune to being frustrating now, there is now no way to claim, as there was in the cds, you have to slog through the entire hand to the end or at least until the bid is made, even though the outcome is obvious and unavoidable. This is borriiinnnggg and has made me quit the program more than once.

Precisely my point. Many of us have very limited access to f2f bridge and in the past BBO has spoiled us by offering many options to play online with a variety of potential partners. Now, for one reason or another, many people play only with a limited group of known friends, and so it's so much easier to play the endless hands than make the effort to foster a partnership or try to find a partner for a tourney if none of your friends happens to be online or free at the time. I do this myself, play the endless hands, but it might as well be donkey kong or angry birds as anything else, it isn't bridge as far as I'm concerned, it's just a way to fill time that requires no real effort. Learning to deal with the bots isn't the same thing at all as working out a partnership with a person, but it encourages people not to bother making any effort, or make any sort of commitment. It's difficult to me to see how this promotes "bridge" which is a difficult game to play well and, to my way of thinking, only really rewards a compatible human partnership of whatever level. This is certainly not being fostered by the instant gratification of the bot tourneys. It also isn't being fostered by the unnecessarilly complicated steps needed to do anything at all on BBO now. As host, I was totally stymied trying to get rid of a bot so a player could sit at a table the other day and ended up needing to reset the table. At another table, an opp was totally unable to invite a bot to play so HE had to reset the table. Another player couldn't even FIND the table, as she said clubs were not in the list of options on her iPad. I'm not able to access BBO proper on my iPad at all. although I can access the forums, if I want to play with anyone I have to find a library or a "real" computer somewhere. It's all just easier to forget it, and to my mind, it's a wonder there are still so many people playing here with actual human partners and opps. It's certainly no surprise at all that there are fewer people posting in the forums.

Seems to me that the number of people generally is dropping, every time there is an update and certainly after the enforced migration to the web version. Certainly I know a number of people who dropped out of BBO to find other things to do when the move to the web was (largely) enforced this year. As far as the forums: I used to post on various threads, although to be honest mostly eventually ended up being mostly in the water cooler. That was an eye opener in terms of abusive personal attacks, although I was only a target once or twice and the remarks were not quite as extreme as they were towards some others. It seems as though some people would rather search out things to be vitriolic and vicious about than to simply pass on by. When I asked some very thoughtful and intelligent people why they never posted even in the water cooler, I was told that the forums were the bailiwick of a few people in a clique, and they had no interest in getting involved. Eventually, at least in the water cooler that appeared to be true, and heaven help anyone who dared propose an alternate point of view to the dominant posters. I got bored with the whole thing, although some posters had interesting things to say and thoughtful comments to make about things they disagreed with, there was far too much "why don't you go drown yourself, you useless moron" type of comment to make it worth while. This attitude seems reflected in a comment made on this thread, which is why not close down the water cooler or at least restrict the topics, presumably to those interesting to the person wanting to control/dominate what people can talk about or how discuss. All that said, I was looking at the tourneys a few minutes ago. 28 tourneys posted/running. 26 of them were for individual players. I don't see how this is promoting bridge which at least originally was a social event, although perhaps it is good for the bottom line in the short term. I remember when BBO first broke the 10.000 people online mark. It was quite a while ago. Now it seems BBO is frequently back to that level and shrinking. Clubs are shrinking, WP used to have 20 tables or more most of the time, virtually all with people, no GIBS. Often now there are no tables going. There used to be a host of public tourneys to choose from, but the instant individual tourneys have decimated them, being as there isn't any waiting or looking for a partner, so now often there are no free public tourneys at all running. If they aren't connecting on BBO as players, why would they post in or even read the forums? Many of the questions really seem to come down to partnership communication, or they used to, and since most people these days appear to be playing with GIBs, what's the point? The people who are working on partnerships that I know all have experts they are already working with.

Global warming is not a controversial issue when the President of the United States denies it is an issue at all and therefore need not be considered in any of the laws or policies of the United States? Not trying to hijack the thread but that seemed an astounding thing to say.

There is this: https://phys.org/news/2016-11-diamond-age-power-nuclear-batteries.html Since these apparently are only able to do small power jobs alone, why not do as Musk has supposedly done for the home battery systems he is selling and put dozens of them to work together? (only in his case they are supposedly tiny lithium ion batteries). I am always a bit wary of anyone who uses absolutes in terms of having reached the limits of pretty much anything, that's been the barrier to increasing knowledge throughout man's history. Not only because nobody then bothers to look, but that because since science has already proven we know everything we need to know about xyz, anything anyone suggests differently is automatically discounted. These days especially, when so many "scientists" are turning out to be corporate whores and the scientific community is doing nothing about cleaning up their house, so increasingly "science" is falling into disrepute.

Most of the problems for me are because it is so clunky and cluttered with the buttons you need scattered all over the place. Someone yesterday simply gave up trying to reach the club, said it was just too complicated, especially having to argue about whether or not he could get into the club when he was told by the system no tables were available because the table he wanted to kib had 4 players. The people setting matches really need to be able to set the match all at once, instead of having to wait until the match has started to add a co director. This delay almost guarantees they won't remember and therefor cannot be helped if there is a problem. If the option is going to be there at all, why not make it part of the settings instead of tacking it on later, where people are highly unlikely to remember to leave the hand underway to fix the match settings? It makes it very difficult to run team match series for club championships and means I have constantly to pester yellows to interfere. This is the major reason why we are not presently running a series, so the players are the ones who are losing out. If trying to limit options why not trade the ability to easilly see who is kibbing as in the download version by using only ONE chat box instead of having to juggle two? One of which has to be parked somewhere because it lands right in the middle of everything and is very difficult to see the rationale for in any case, it decidedly doesn't stop messages from going astray.If anything I get more missent messages now than ever.

Today a short while before the start of an IAC tourney, the IAC ID got booted and banned for a minute. There was absolutely no cause for this as that ID had done nothing whatever other than help a member get registered and announce for the tourney. When the ID was finally allowed to return, almost all of the memberships had been cancelled by BBO; everyone whose nick started with a letter later than "D" (and some of those as well) was simply gone, including all but 2 of the IAC admin and teachers. (even Reisig had been booted:)) I have been adding people back but we went from over 3000 members to about 400 in the time the ID was disallowed. First question is what the repercussions might be for the IAC ID getting banned for a minute (and why/ how in the world that even happened!) and 2) if we get the membership list restored as I have been working on, is there a good chance this will happen again so we should have a list handy outside of BBO so we can restore it? I have sent a message to Barmar but I doubt he has had a chance to read it yet, I don't trust anything to get anywhere so posting it here as well. We have been having an issue for some time now with members not being recognized by BBO so I have had to delete individual names and reregister them, and that's sorted it out for them. That's only been a minor headache so hadn't whined, but in case there is a connection, thought I'd mention it now.

Found this article today and this is something that the courts have acknowleged. So the choice to ignore someone that is citing research from published peer reviewed studies can be bypassed if you so choose, but the evidence is mounting. http://www.naturalblaze.com/2017/01/biologist-proves-measles-isnt-a-virus-wins-supreme-court-case-against-doctor.html As well , nobody seems to have addressed the question: why should parents accept having less accountability from a manufacturer putting out a coffeemaker than for injections of toxic substances into their child's body?

Today in a teaching session the teacher was apparently being booted by BBO fairly constantly, Voice would vanish and he would (eventually) get back and say he had been booted. This happened at least 4 times, once for several minutes. This is the second teacher who has had this problem, I don't know if both were on laptops or iPhones or what, it seems to be a fairly common problem for people on iPhones. Also someone today said she had no idea where she was, as when she tried to come to the club she got a not available notification, but somehow ended up there anyway. She could see the table but not the hands. She complained she couldn't hear the voice and I talked her through all the steps to find the settings so I'm positive she was doing stuff right ( eventually :))However, when she clicked on start listening all she got was " no service" response. Eventually she understandably left, since she could neither see the play nor hear the commentary. She is not the first to describe having that problem, in particular getting a not available or some such notice when trying to come to the club. She tried logging out and back in but apparently it didn't help. She was able to chat to me throughout but I was on download with the IAC ID at the time, no idea if that made a difference or not, didn't think to check if she could hear me from the web version. I'm also not positive she was on a mobile device but chances are. She is from the US so a signal should not have been an issue and she apparently had no issues with connections elsewhere on BBO.

ah I will have to mention that to the other director ( from another club) who was telling me that she couldn't see her tourneys anymore either. She is on the web version almost exclusively. Thank you

I was really sorry to hear yesterday that Borko, a yellow on BBO had passed. He was one of the nicest people on BBO and will be sadly missed.Condolences to his family and friends and coworkers on BBO.

Setting a tourney last night for this morning, for the first time ever I was unable to see any tourneys that were more than an hour or so further along, so I was unpleasantly surprised to learn I couldn't see it to see if I got the settings right. Turned out this morning I had inadvertently set the tourney under the wrong name, (under my own instead of BBO_IAC) and had a horde of registrations. It seemed unfair to cancel on them all because of my error so ended up with 41 tables of mostly nonmembers and an hour or so of frantically trying to keep up to the need for clusters of subs mostly for people who weren't getting the scores they wanted for their hand records so abandoning ship. There's no list of banned runners for this profile and there's no need to set completion rates for tourneys restricted to IAC members. Also, I often announce for tourneys that other people run when I do a daily announcement to the club about the events for the day, I won't be able to do this if I can't see what they've set. Is this a glitch or something that BBO is deciding to do now?

I was interested in the measles being included in the list above so looked it up and the world Health Organization has one comment I found significant ( among others, admittedly I was not aware how severe measles could be) Severe measles is more likely among poorly nourished young children, especially those with insufficient vitamin A, or whose immune systems have been weakened by HIV/AIDS or other diseases. So severe measles, is basically a complication of poverty, and so while vaccinations do little to address the cause they will help prevent one of the symptoms of poverty. That's not insignificant, and I will look into it further.

Having known many people who had measles when I was a child, and having had them myself, and never having known anyone who had any untoward long term affects from it, or even anyone who knew or had even heard of anyone with any long term issues from having had the measles, it's very difficult to understand the panic around it. My son got it, my daughters never showed any symptoms at all of catching it from him or anyone else. They may have had it and had no symptoms because they had very healthy immune systems or who knows? But it certainly makes it difficult to imagine that anyone who isn't vaccinated is going to run the risk of dying if they come into contact with someone with it, since 2 of the three kids in the house never showed any sign of getting it. So, it seems to me that making sure the kids have healthy immune systems is more important than shooting them with toxic substances to make sure they stay healthy, that's an idea that basically seems flawed to me. If the vaccines didn't use poisons as adjuvants then perhaps it wouldn't be as questionable...but then you still have questions about retroviruses from the source used to culture the virus in question. As far as HepB is concerned, this is the list of people for whom this is recommended: The hepatitis B vaccination is recommended for: Those who may be exposed to blood or blood products through their occupation: Healthcare workers who may have contact with blood or body fluids. Laboratory staff. Carers of high-risk or known patients. Morticians and embalmers. Police and fire and rescue workers. People travelling to or going to reside in areas of high or intermediate prevalence, particularly travellers with pre-existing medical conditions, who may be at higher risk of requiring medical procedures abroad. Those individuals who change sexual partners frequently, particularly commercial sex workers. Injecting drug users. Also: Partners and children of injecting drug users. Non-injecting drug users who live with injecting drug users. Individuals and staff in residential accommodation for those with learning difficulties. People receiving regular blood or blood products - for example, those with haemophilia or chronic anaemias. Prisoners and prison officers. Family contacts of those with chronic hepatitis B infection. Families adopting children from high-risk countries. Foster carers. Those patients with chronic kidney disease or chronic liver disease. Prevention measures to be taken Prevention of transmission Measures to be taken include: Practise safe sex. Avoid sharing intravenous drug equipment. Immunise at-risk individuals. Wear gloves when exposed to blood or body fluids. Clear up blood or body fluids, using warm water and detergent. Ensure surgical instruments are disposable or adequately sterilised. Handle 'sharps' safely. Wear goggles if there is risk of infected material splashing into the eye. Do not permit healthcare workers who are positive for hepatitis B antigen to work in areas where they could be a risk to others. So clearly if an infant is born to a sex worker or drug addict or is going into a home situation where HepB is possibly an issue, then it is probably very appropriate. But otherwise, how many of the above apply to a newborn?

As far as Polio is concerned, this article... with references to studies published in Lancet and other such publications, is I think quite interesting. http://www.thinktwice.com/Polio.pdf

Did you actually bother to look at any of the research or is this just knee jerk reaction to something you disagree with? Talking about herd mentality... It would be nice to think that people were able to consider that there is an outside possibility that maybe, just maybe, something which worked well for smallpox may have been taken and turned into something not so benign for diseases not anywhere near as virulent and dangerous. A little of something is good, then more must be better is a mantra which resonates with people but isn't necessarily true at all. IF vaccinations are the road to health, then why isn't the US population healthier than that in the rest of the world, instead of being arguably among the least healthy of the developed countries? You spend more than any other country per capita, much more than some countries, so what's going on? Seems to me that unless people are willing to consider what's going on then it's only going to get worse.And looking to consider what's gone wrong involves looking at EVERYTHING that's changed, NOT assuming that pet theories, well supported by carefully managed public relations campaigns, are above scrutiny. Aren't the predictions that the generation now entering kindergarten will be the first generation we are aware of predicted to have shorter life spans than their parents? The rise of autoimmune diseases has gone through the roof with no sign at all of slowing down. So rather than expecting people to wither in your totally unimpressive scorn, why not come up with a rational explanation, supported by independent research, instead of parroting the mantra of anyone who has concerns about vaccinations is an idiot.

For what it's worth, and I expect to get flamed or whatever for this, I am very very reluctant to advise anyone to get their child vaccinated. I have a very strong conviction that anything that a company produces that is a) protected by the government from being held accountable for the impact it has and b) is extremely profitable for companies to produce and 3) has as far as I can see got very little current research being done on the efficacy or the long term side effects on either the vaccines alone OR the combination thereof is something to be extremely wary about. I fail to see the wisdom of injecting aluminum, glyphosate ( now being used to replace mercury, which is still occassionally used) into very young children.I fail to see the urgency of now injecting children with some incredible number of vaccinations -in my day I believe we had 5, now it's in the hundreds, and somehow the population kept growing in spite of our lack of vaccinations. The original inspiration, that milkmaids never got smallpox was very different, the milkmaids were not getting the pox vaccine injected into their bloodstream, mixed with material known to be toxic to people. The severity of the disease is also of a different order of magnitude than that of measles, for instance. Admittedly I am prejudiced, since I dutifully got my son vaccinated until a friend's healthy active child very nearly died after getting a dose of live vs killed vaccine, after which none of my kids got vaccinated for anything and they are all obnoxiously healthy. My son got measles, he got over it, like a minor case of the flu with spots. There is actually a growing body of research suggesting that the sort of article above is the same sort of thing that was done around tobacco being good for you. A couple of links http://www.greenmedinfo.com/anti-therapeutic-action/vaccination-all to research and a blog from the same place regarding this question: http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/attacking-ourselves-top-doctors-reveal-vaccines-turn-our-immune-system-against-us Anyone who wants to can wade through all those research articles. One stat I found interesting though I don't remember where I read it is that the US vaccinates more than virtually any other country, but the incidence of illness is not lower. At all. In fact in health care the US is somewhere down around 17th in the world. If more vaccinations is the answer then why should that be so? And why are ads for flu vaccines saying things like, "most children who got the flu last year were not vaccinated." Most? why only MOST ? was the vaccine actually doing not anything at all and it was just random who got it and who didn't? Does anyone even know? Aluminum, for instance, is generally accepted as being toxic to people, it's why it's used as a carrier. For those medical people here, just how much aluminum is safe for humans to have injected into them before it has a negative affect? Does anyone even know, percentage of body weight? How much of the reaction is to the carrier, aluminum or whatever, and how much to the actual vaccine? And is there a long term effect on combining a bunch of vaccines to be given at once, as there are sometimes interactions if certain drugs or even herbal concoctions are used? Then there is the question of retroviruses which I admittedly don't really understand.But they are now acknowledged to be probably? possibly? there,they are potentially scary, and nobody much is talking about them, certainly not the pro vaccination people. Bottom line for me though, is if the companies producing these things cannot be held accountable, then I'm not letting them inject it into my child's body. I wouldn't even buy a new coffeepot without expecting some sort of warranty, I get it home and it doesn't work, I am going to get my money back. If there is some sort of flaw in it and it blows up and takes off half my face, or burns down the house, then someone is going to be held accountable for putting out a defective product. Why should less accountability be accepted for stuff we are injecting into immature immune systems, even babies? Money in that case is not the point, it is possibly a blighted life, as in the case of my friend's daughter, who had some ongoing issues even after she finally got out of hospital.

You might want to check out the Total Points club. The way Total Points works is very similar to rubber bridge in that you are only playing vs the other pair at your table. They run tournament fairly often throughout the day, which consist of a specific number of hands, 8 for the first round, 4 for each subsequent rounds. It is a knockout system, the winners play winners, the losers are out. Players see ongoing scores as the hands are completed. Each round starts fresh. The scoring is slightly different but the strategies etc are the same as rubber bridge. The difference anywhere else is that the scoring is vs all other players who played that hand anywhere on BBO, or, in tourneys, against all the other tables in the tourney. In Total Points what happens at the other tables has no bearing on the score at your table. They are a nice bunch there as well.It's a public club so people can just show up before a tourney starts and tell the TD you want to play and who your partner is.Or, you can tell the TD you want to play and need a partner, they will try to get someone who also needs a partner to join you. The TD assigns pairs to tables with specific opps, you go to those tables, ask to sit, and play as you would anywhere else. The tables are even preset so the only thing the assigned host of the table has to do is let the other assigned players join the table, and report the final score for the round to the TD. It won't be the same, and they only offer tourneys so not much help if you just want to play for a while, but it's a lot closer than anything else I know about.

If I just log into the web version and click on friends nobody shows up. Ever. Never have. I have to click on who's online first,then back to friends and then I am allowed to see them. Also, apparently I can only talk to them, I cannot find any way to join their table, right clicking on their name is like throwing sand in the sea, nothing at all happens. So how do people join tables, they have to find out where the the friend is, then go to that area and scroll down to their table to find them? The web version may have no limit on how many friends it allows, but I can say with absolute confidence that the download version SHOWS more of them than the webversion comes anywhere close to showing. I see it every time I log in on one or the other. I've never counted how many but at least 6 columns will show up purple friends on download. As far as I can tell, there is only room for two columns on webversion. it seemed odd to me that the stuff which should be large,..the size of the table unless you change it, is small and the names of friends, which should be small so as to allow more to show up, are large. One of our members has written up a "how to" for members who are being booted into the web, she announced tonight that we have that on the website now and she said she instantly got 22 requests for help. I don't know why they aren't accessing the help from BBO, but apparently they either aren't or they are finding it just too complicated for what they are trying to do. It seems there are lots of features on the web version that you have to be a computer person to access and most of us are not, and more to the point, have no wish to be forced to be. I found by accident how to increase the size of the table, which makes it actually usable,yay! but if I do that to look at pending tourneys, for example, then I cannot change back to the previous screen. Undoubtedly there is some way to do this but it is decidedly not intuitive and I didn't find it, I just logged out eventually. Also, the arrangement to add co-directors to team matches is simply next to useless. When a match starts, people are not thinking about going back and editting the settings for the match, they are quite reasonably, thinking about the cards, bidding etc. We reminded captains every match and still most of them forgot once there. If you are going to allow for co-directors at all, what on earth is the point of not doing so at the time of setting the matches? Having team match series for groups of players becomes something impossible to offer, really, unless co-directors can be listed. They are not the same as casual random matches. One thing I have got oodles of complaints about is the kib system and how unhappy people are about not being able EASILLY to see who is kibbing at a table, and having constantly to update the information instead of it being just "there". This is especially a sore point for those of us who are helping out with teaching sessions. It seems people either don't know about the this thread or are uneasy about complaining, so I end up bringing these things up for them. Sometimes they are very small things: Why, for example, after you delete messages is it necessary to tell us that we have deleted messages, presumably we are aware of that? Having the messages all there at once instead of them coming up one at a time is an advance, so don't mess it up with trying to force us to have a conversation with the program which is both unnecessary and unwanted. It might possibly be useful to consider having non computer people try out the next edition and see what they think, it should not be necessary to force people into a new system if the system is truly at least as user friendly as the old one was, in whatever form the new one takes. It CAN be done. I was told that the beta version I saw a million years ago before the web version was released initially was a figment of my imagination, which is/was inexplicable, since I can't even imagine dreaming, awake or asleep, about a computer program. I was quite ready to jump to that one, although it was very different it looked very doable. So it isn't just a reluctance to change or try new things, it's a reluctance to lose the features that make the old one valuable.

ok, an example of what I mean. I have a lot of the regular IAC members on friend's list so I can access people I see are free to invite them if I need a sub for a tourney or team match. When I was on web version the other day there were precisely none showing, and when I clicked on Friends or follow, not a name came up. So I logged out and back in with Windows, and about 30 showed up instantly. It's difficult to imagine they all logged in in the two minutes it took for me to change from web to download. So I need to click on two tabs in two different places to find out what is showing automatically on download? That is a perfect, typical example of what drives me crazy about the web version.

We had some issues with team matches when players were not getting their invitation to the match. I suggested they log out and back in and that seemed eventually to work, but normally people wouldn't even know an invitation had been sent out, nor would the organizer know they didn't get it. It was only when I roared at them for repeatedly refusing that I was told they never got an invitation to accept or refuse. Should we make a point of telling everyone that an invitation has gone out and look for it? This is a problem which has not come up before. I should have mentioned this problem was on I believe an iPad, a mobile device of some kind, anyway.

listing at least all the friends is hugely useful for times of running tourneys, especially since the web version doesn't allow for members who offer to sub to be differentiated from the general public. I can see club members who have just logged in and ask if they are interested in subbing..usually they are. When we lose this feature we lose and the members lose as often they look around, don't see a game available that suits them so they go away. This way they get to play and we have a smoother running tourney. That would be infinitely more useful than the fragments of conversation from other areas in BBO which take up a whole lot of space for no apparent purpose. If we must have clutter then please let it be useful clutter at least.

do I? How difficult is it for a member of a group to advocate something other than what the group traditionally is about? I have met many many union members who grump about their union and say they don't see any need for it, but how do you suppose that would go over, especially with the marginally competent who rely on the union to keep their good jobs for them? Who is going to point the finger at a fellow worker and say, "hey guy, you really don't belong here doing this job?" Even if other members agree, that is not the way union members "behave" so it's highly unlikely to happen. That's why you have police who themselves are straight arrow not turning in fellow police who are not, and why they protect them, if only by their silence. The culture of the group is a VERY hard thing to go against. Loyalty is still a cherished value, even if sometimes misplaced. Like any other organization, a union has the desire to continue to exist, so they do, but what exactly is it that they are accomplishing these days? How many businesses have they stopped from moving overseas or to Mexico in the last 20 years? How are they countering the drift to more and more robotics being used from store checkouts to Amazon pickers to mechanical (and human health) assessments? Isn't it more likely, these days, that the rigid adoption of "he's a union member so must be defended from any issues, even those of his own making and no matter how dire", is working against the other member's (and the union's, for that matter) interests? How about the perception that unions are actually operating against the public interest, such as driving up costs of services and providing less value? Unions traditionally have been successful ( or not) by motivating public support, that is more difficult to come by when union members are viewed as being greedy and unreasonable. Thus we have seen in almost every contract negotiation teachers crying about needing to have smaller classrooms to be able to do their job adequately but always settling for more money instead. Any wonder the public is a bit jaded about their real motivations? So I'd be interested in what you think they do now that is so helpful.

I have linked to this guy before but perhaps once again as it shows what I am talking about. Note that he is not talking about needing teachers. He looked for grandmothers, or someone who could fill the role of enthusiastic support and appreciation for the kid's efforts. For sure, there was guidance in that someone provided the kids with the challenge, but his research classrooms are a light year away from anything that probably 90% of teachers today would feel comfortable doing. Note the enthusiasm in every example, no matter how difficult the challenge. How many teachers see THAT in their classroom with any sort of regularity? Note how it fosters cooperation rather than isolation, every child is never on his or her own, these are always small groups. That is absolutely counter to the ideas that give rise to grading on the curve and other such things. The kids are also always allowed to move from group to group, so would presumably counter the idea of " my group" vs " not my group" which would be a nice thing to see, given what's just happened in the US elections and elsewhere. Note also that this has had precisely the same result in every place he has tested it, from very remote areas in India that the internet is uncertain at the best of times, to schools in urban England.