Bill Gates and Teacher Spaghetti Sauce

Bill Gates is at it again.  For such a smart guy, it is amazing how dense he can be when it comes to education reform. To wit:

We can “flip the curve,” raising performance “without spending a lot more,” if we “measure, develop and reward excellent teaching." ... of all the variables under a school’s control, the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. To flip the curve, we have to identify great teachers, find out what makes them so effective and transfer those skills to others so more students can enjoy top teachers and high achievement.

SO, Billy, we have to identify great teachers and find out what makes them so effective. Then we have to transfer that to other teachers. That will flip the curve.

Hey !  "Find out what makes them so effective"???

If you don't know WHY the great teachers are great, how in Bloomberg's Bloomers can you say definitively that

1. You can identify these great teachers and find out what makes them so effective.
2. These unknowns are transferable.
3. This transference will raise performance “without spending a lot more."

Sometimes life is like judging pasta sauce.

There might not be a best, only a best for you. That teacher might not be the BEST because you can't define best for more than one type of student. There are more types of teachers than there are types of spaghetti sauce. Go watch the Malcolm Gladwell talk at TED.

Chinese Mothers and KIPP

The other day, I posted an article by a Chinese-American Yale Professor describing the way she brought up her kids. In it, she speaks of no play dates, hours of practice at the piano and the violin, drills and drills on homework, an endless desire to get As and harsh language when the lone B arrives on a report card.

The commenters on the WSJ site were, as might be imagined, SHOCKED that such behavior wasn't considered child abuse, that the woman was mistreating her children and that there was something terribly wrong with her parenting skills. All of those commenters would be SHOCKED if their little darlings were subject to that regimen.

It occurred to me that this is pretty much what KIPP does. Drill, drill, and more drill, extremely high demands on time, teachers driven nearly crazy in their enthusiasm for success and the need to produce, more drill, Saturday classes, no sports, summer school, more drill, and lots of test preparation.

All of those commenters would be THRILLED if there were more KIPP schools.
All of those commenters would be SHOCKED if their little darlings were subject to that regimen.

Tortured Logic

I thought I'd heard tortured logic before, and then I listened to this.

Apparently, the dying fish and the birds falling out of the sky, coupled with the heavy rains in Queensland, are the result of the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. It's a pattern, you understand. Correlation = causation. Proof by Pomposity?

Wow.

On jumping to conclusions and historical data.

In discussions that refer to data about historical topics, the non-math folk often fall for the correlation - causation error, as well as misinterpreting their evidence.

It is generally accepted that height actually declined somewhat in late period and early modern times (see, for example, preserved sites like Williamsburg or Jamestown, where door frames and hallways are significantly smaller than nowadays), the reason having to do with more widespread malnutrition and chronic health problems emerging in the 14th century and continuing on until the 18th century. (from a mailing list focusing on medieval history.)

Average is a really tough thing to deal with here and there are a bunch of problems with this statement.

Let's deal with averages first. It's pretty easy to find the average height of modern people. They're alive and measurable. You call together twenty folks at the mall and ask them their height. Convenience sample leads to selection bias, so you retry with a cluster sampling. That's better, but did you happen upon the community of immigrants who are shorter? SO you expand your search and try a more systematic approach. In the end, you have a sense of the average height.

Now try that for the 14th century. Your sources are whichever bones you've been able to find and measure and a few written claims. Not much for numbers there.

Second issue is that pre-19th century doors, hallways and buildings weren't built for standard-sized people. They were built for the occupants and those occupants had different needs. Stating that door frames and hallways are smaller than currently because of a lesser average height is a conclusion that doesn't necessarily follow.

Your average tells you about the group but not much about individuals, so your building codes are set for the 99.8% who are shorter than +3 standard deviations from the mean so that no one is inconvenienced. But what is the average height? That's easier to tell now, but not so much for earlier demographics.

Room size does not correlate to occupant height either. My classroom ceiling, for instance, is nearly twelve feet high. Can we really conclude anything from that? On the other hand, all of the occupants for the last twenty years have been shorter than 6'5" and half of them were averaging 5'4" (the girls). All classrooms built in the last twenty years have 8' or 9' ceilings, becuse of changes in the building code, not because people kept hitting their heads.

The windows are huge, nearly 3' by 8', but that speaks to the need for free light and air rather than a race of giants.  Need and purpose are better indicators of door size in pre-code days.


The typical pre-1850 house has low ceilings and doors I want to crouch for (but that are still taller than I am), for a couple of reasons.

A room with a low ceiling is easier to heat, less difficult to build, and uses less wood in the building process. A 7' ceiling is not a problem for anyone who was going to use it - the builders were making houses for themselves and they didn't feel the need to give themselves 2' of headroom.

Sure, it's shorter than today, but only relatively. We notice because the standards have changed and it FEELS lower, not because we need to duck.

The same is true for the door. It's shorter. It was custom-made and of varying heights. Often it wasn't "square" but rather built to fit the space rather than the other way around. It might have a corner cut off to fit under the eaves or clear a stair. In any case, the door was built for the prospective occupants, not the rare fraction who needed a 6'8" door. Andre the Giant could bloody well duck.

Likewise hallways. What's the need for a wide hallway? It's just wasted space. Your big furniture was on the main floor or was carried up in pieces and assembled in place. There were no ADA-type requirements. Again, we feel constricted, but the person of that time would consider our modern requirements to be ostentatious displays of wealth. The typical house of the 15th century was maybe half the square footage of 20th century houses, and that is being dwarfed by 21st century ones. This correlation is with wealth, not height.

Other factors chime in: the cost or taxes assessed on road (or canal in this case) frontage might dictate your building style. For an extreme example of this, check out houses in Amsterdam: narrow, almost useless staircases and a hoist mechanism outside for lifting pianos and furniture to the second or third floor.


The takeaway for math teachers is to stress that we need more than correlations to justify cause. I might state the original paragraph and have the kids try to punch holes in it. Critical thinking and all that. I'd be looking for points like those above and:

• If the claim is that people were taller before the Templars' suppression at the hands of Philip the Fair, became shorter during the 14-17th centuries and then started getting taller again in the 18th, then your doors should show the same trends for the same time periods, in the same types of houses and at the same socio-economic levels. If the doors to churches showed the same decrease and increases, that would be a good sign.
• How could the builder know the average height of 15th century mankind? Communications were difficult and slow, the size of the foot varied by region among other factors. Besides, even if he did know, why would he care? He's building for the man in front of him, not some mythical beast. Is there evidence that builders knew the average?
• Is the rural house different from that in the city?  See the Amsterdam note above.
• What are other reasons for the differences do you see? 

• War.  Make your attackers duck as they enter. Some Indian adobes have four foot doors for this reason. This picture is from Doune castle.
• Security. A smaller door is easier to bolt closed.
• Religion. Make your visitors bow in humility as they enter.
• Practical. They wanted to reach the ceiling beams for storage hooks.
• Sexism.  Only women used this door so who cared about it being more than 6'? 
• This was where the children slept.  There was plenty of room under the eaves.
• Mathematical considerations:
• Can the average height be measured?  Is that number meaningful here? Should the anthropologist use median or mode instead?  What was the builder using?
• What kind of sampling would work best for ascertaining that measure?
• Historical considerations:
• How do we know that people did get shorter? Did they or is this a myth?
• If they were, was it due to nutritional deficiencies? Were chronic health problems all that widespread in just those four centuries or merely the Black Death taking all the headlines? Was the 9th century healthier?  How about NYCity in the 1800s tenements?  London's Soho at the time of cholera epidemics?
• Were the doors shorter during the time period in question? What was he looking at when he measured?
• What would the students do as step two to confirm or deny these theories? Why haven't they started?

I love math.

Science shouldn't be politicized.

It's a vital part of teaching ... helping students develop a healthy skepticism about what they see and hear. I show them videos, ads, other things and we dissect and analyze them in class. It's probably what I'll do tomorrow during the last day of school before break. I pick on the quacks, mostly: iRenew bracelets, QRay bracelet, Kinoki Footpads, Dr Marks Ion Cleanse Detoxifying foot baths, etc. Of course, during this process there is the inevitable question of global warming. It's with this in mind that I ran across the following article and thought I'd share.

From the Albany Times Union, Science shouldn't be clouded by politics
By Randy Simon

Is there solid evidence that the earth's average temperature is getting warmer, mostly as a result of human activity? What do you think?

Before answering, consider these scientific questions:

• Has coronary CT angiography made coronary catheterization obsolete?
• Are the hotspots in the earth's crust explained by phenomena in the upper mantle rather than in the earth's core?
• Can molecules exhibit intrinsic electronic functionality?
• Is lactose intolerance a genetic inherited trait? 

(to which I'd add "Will the Large Hadron Collider destroy the Earth when turned on?" and "Why won't value-added measures work to instantly maximize our schools' performances?" "Vaccines cause autism and backwards walking in cheerleaders.")

You probably are thinking: "How am I supposed to know?" That is, unless you are a cardiologist, geologist, condensed matter physicist or geneticist, or at least someone highly informed about these disciplines. These questions are in fact quite controversial in their respective fields, meaning that there is considerable disagreement among the experts.

Yet, you were probably all set to offer your opinion on global warming although you are not a climate scientist and are undoubtedly not well-versed in that discipline either. Furthermore, the question posed is not even controversial among experts in the field; there is overwhelming agreement that the answer is "yes."

So what gives here?

The answer is that you can't get opinions about most scientific questions from pundits and politicians but you can't avoid getting opinions on global warming from them.

Would you make decisions on how to treat a heart arrhythmia based on what a talk radio host believes? Would you have a senatorial candidate evaluate an aircraft design instead of an aeronautical engineer? Of course not. They aren't experts.

Clearly, we have come to believe -- or at least to act as if we believe -- that there are two kinds of scientists in the world.

There are those who work on a myriad of topics that have managed not to become political issues. They are obviously highly intelligent and accomplished individuals who have brought us brain surgery, iPads and the Space Shuttle.

Then there are those who work in areas that have become the subject of political and/or religious attention -- such as climate change and evolution -- and they are apparently dishonest, confused and deficient in their knowledge.

We are not becoming a society of Luddites; we surely want the fruits of modern science in our lives. Instead, we divide science into "good science" and "bad science" and allow partisan politics to make the distinction. It would be humorous if it were not alarming.

The political debate about global warming is fueled in part by scientists who take the position that the phenomenon does not exist, or at least that it isn't a result of human activity, or that it cannot be remediated by human intervention. This is no more compelling than the arguments in the 1960s and 1970s by a few medical doctors claiming that cigarette smoking was harmless. Indeed, there are always scientists with differing opinions on any topic.

When the overwhelming majority of scientists observe the same phenomena and draw the same conclusions, there are abundant reasons to take them seriously. The fact that we don't like the results (or even worse, political dogma doesn't like them) should not matter.

Could the majority opinion be wrong? Absolutely. But ignoring that opinion because you don't like it is foolishness.

Every day we trust our lives to the fruits of modern science. Medical technology, aircraft design, structural engineering and many other disciplines impact our safety and our very survival and, by and large, we feel that we can count on them.

Yet, when thousands of climate experts around the world draw serious conclusions from a wealth of data, we reject those conclusions because of our politics. It is nothing less than astonishing.

Perhaps you are not surprised by this at all. Some may see this discussion as an analysis of current attitudes toward science but others, I suppose, will cast it aside as "left-wing propaganda." And that, I suppose, is the problem in a nutshell.

One of the comments on this article was "We all have daily experience with weather, and through experience, with climate. To have some understanding of climate and none about the other issues is not surprising."

Really?

So I visit the doctor a couple times - does that make me qualified to judge his work?
I teach high school math and physics but I can't do a simple probability analysis. Should I be commenting on the LHC?

Watch it all or forward to Walter Wagner at about the 2:15 mark.

I used to run daily. Did that make me a physical therapist?
I eat food every day. Does that mean I know the nutritional value and positives / negatives of an Activia-fueled diet?
I go to the mall and I walk. Is iRenew a good product?

I went to school. Does that make me an education expert?

There is a huge difference between "I have experience with these" and "I have studied these in a scientific fashion." One is a guess. There other is not.

Dozens of TV shows and thousands of people believed that cheerleader who claimed the Flu shot made her walk backwards. Quantity is not a proof. Science is not a debate.

Another commenter:

So, where are the counter examples where scientists/experts got it wrong? This whole article is built on a fallacy--trust the experts. If it were to be the least bit helpful, it would have explained what we know, what we don't know and the strengths and weaknesses in our methods of knowing about the climate. But, of course, newspapers would rather make stupid arguments than educate the public so they can make better decisions.

Which I find somewhat amazing. Scientists get lots of things wrong. Then they fix the model and try again. Just because someone was wrong doesn't mean they can't fix it and get it right.

Rush Limbaugh is not a counter-argument.

And why the complete distrust of the "experts"? Do we refuse to drive a car because an expert mechanic worked on it? Does the expert computer technician bring us calm hope that our problem will be resolved or do we scream invectives and demand that the other politician really knows what's going on?

If you find that you can't trust those who spend their lives working on a problem in favor of someone with a monetary axe to grind, you'll simply wind up with "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette."

Critical Thinking is not for Everyone.

The latest act in the worldwide WikiLeaks comedy: on Friday, the White House told federal employees and contractors that they're not allowed to read classified federal documents posted to WikiLeaks unless they have the proper security clearance.

It's posted for all the world to see, but if I work in Gov't, then I must adhere to the security limitations so the only people who won't read it are in Gov't.

Stunning.

Update from the drive home:

And then I thought about it a bit. Those with clearance randomly undergo security screenings and occasionally polygraph testing.  One question usually deals with "Have you seen, read or otherwise had knowledge of classified documents for which you did not have the proper security clearances?"  If I had seen something on Wikileaks, the honest answer would have to be "Yes."  That would lead to a whole lot of unpleasantness.

This advice might just save a few jobs.

Ingenious Solution - except for those who didn't pack their own bags.

The Grouchy Old Cripple had a thought:

FINALLY - A great alternative to body scanners at airports ...

The Israelis are developing an airport security device that eliminates the privacy concerns that come with full-body scanners at the airports. It's a booth you can step into that will not X-ray you, but will detonate any explosive device you may have on you. They see this as a win-win for everyone, with no crap about racial profiling. It also would eliminate the costs of long and expensive trials. Justice would be swift. Case closed!

You're in the airport terminal and you hear a muffled explosion. Shortly thereafter an announcement comes over the PA system . . . "Attention standby passengers - we now have a seat available on flight number XXXX. Shalom"

"Have your bags been in your possession since the time you packed them?"
"Yes."
"Have a nice day."

Just because YOU don't know what it is ...

doesn't mean it's aliens. Just because your feeble brain is stuck on something and can't come up with a reasonable answer, doesn't mean there isn't one.

So here's the moron who's convinced that he sees a cellphone using time-traveler in an outtake from a Charlie Chaplin film.


When faced with two or more conclusions, the simplest one is usually the truth. In this case, the simplest explanation is that this is an alien. No wait, it's a secret plot by time travelers. No wait, she's holding her hand over her ear because it's cold out. No wait, it's DVD distortion. No wait, it's a cellphone. No wait, it's photoshop.

Look, if we can make the entire friggin' Lord of the Ring Trilogy of Monsters, why is "time travel" the first thing this so-called intelligent filmmaker can come up with?

Okay, let's run with a time traveler: Why would someone with the technology to do time travel be wandering around Hollywood with a cellphone that has to be held against the ear and is going to buzz or ringtone at really inopportune times (like that wouldn't be noticed?)? Why not a subdermal subvocalization mic w/ bluetooth connected to a satellite phone to the geosynchronously orbiting time travel pod and the bevy of space-studs dressed in leather thongs? Because that would be ridiculous?

All that technology that I just mentioned is currently available. Even the studs dressed in leather thongs. Cellphones in the form the Irishman witnessed have only been around for 5-6 years. Previously, they were differently shaped and would have required a cellphone tower every three miles. Phones are even now beginning to look different from "this" one - smartphone, bluetooth, etc.

Why would technology from the current, and narrow, 5-6 year window be the one seen? Because this is a self-delusionary fool who has a little imagination and sees what he wants to see.

Or this is a stunt by the Irishman - maybe he wants to get himself a little exposure as an idiot, thinking he'll somehow get more "award-winning" film jobs.

Or this is a stunt by the DVD compiler, trying to sell copies of a boxed set to gullible idiots or people who want to "prove that Irishman wrong," i.e., gullible idiots.

Or this is a misinterpretation of 6 seconds of footage culled from millions of hours of Hollywood video. At this rate, even monkeys can randomly type a line or two of Shakespeare.

Critical Thinking requires foundation

In this article on the Dangerously Irrelevant blog, Richard Kassissieh writes of an interesting, high stakes test in Britain

A student gazes at a mystery solution. Its contents are unknown. The student reaches into her toolkit, a set of known solutions, and one by one, combines them with a small portion of the mystery solution. One test changes the color to bright yellow. Another produces a milky, solid substance. Gradually, the student pieces together the clues that allow her to identify the unknown solution.

This qualitative analysis laboratory required the student to recall properties of different solutions, understand reaction processes, and synthesize the results of different experimental tests while under pressure. To practice, the student had worked together with classmates to identify a series of mystery solutions and shared their findings with their classmates.

Too often US "reformers" believe that critical thinking like this can be taught, that repetition and practice is "Drill and Kill" and that foundation work can be ignored until the student "needs it", at which point the Omniscient Google can be used -- no need to memorize anything.

Critical thinking requires the foundation in order to be effective. That student needed to know how chemicals react, the contents of her "toolkit" and have a basic understanding of the processes.

Prior knowledge leads to further learning. Memorized knowledge is a prerequisite for critical thinking.

Speaking of New Orleans and the Miracle Hurricane

Surrounded by gutted homes in the Lower 9th Ward, Sen. John McCain promised that the federal government won't be so slow after the next big storm. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee toured a residential street with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, before addressing about 50 activists, journalists and Hurricane Katrina survivors in front of a church. Ironic, huh?(from 2008.)

To hear the charteristas tell it, Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans schoolkids.  Now they've got charter schools and all that creamy goodness. If one were waxing cynical, one might rename Katrina as "The Divine Wind", the kamikaze that overwhelmed the school system down there.

But then, if you actually go there and look around, the picture is not so rosy. Consider this on Women's eNews (8/29/10) by Kimberly Seals Allers,

When a few of the local community leaders came to address us, what they had to say about the Lower Ninth Ward was appalling but not surprising. They said that of the $90 million that the Federal Emergency Management Agency allocated to rebuilding the city, the Lower Ninth Ward has not received any money. Nobody has been told a definitive answer as to why.

They said the Lower Ninth Ward only has one working school for kindergarten through 12th grade. The school has 750 students and a 450-student-long waiting list. There are no hospitals in the area and God help you if you need emergency care and have to travel across the bridge and across town to get it. Many displaced residents, they added, would love to return to the area, but they can't because there are no schools and no real health care options for the elderly. The local community leaders expressed their outrage that tour companies bring busloads of people through the Lower Ninth Ward everyday to gawk at their despair, yet never share any of their profits or stop to support local businesses.

Kinda pisses you off, don't it? Tourists? Sure! Come and gawk at the poor people! One school that can't fit all the students? Who cares? 450 are on a waitlist. That's nearly 40% of the kids wanting an education from that school who are left out in the cold. Exactly what are they doing in the meantime? Charter Schools are the answer to all your education woes unless you're inconvenient, I guess.

LA should have rebuilt the public schools. They won't turn kids away.

Reform, Deform, Conform.

The other day, it was announced that Vermont had the highest scores in the nation for FRL kids. And was graded "D" by the same organization for not reforming itself enough. Joanne Jacobs: Vermont. Good results, weak reforms

In ALEC’s Report Card on American Education, Vermont is ranked first in the nation for educating low-income children, but gets a D on its reform policies. Well, maybe Vermont doesn’t need to reform. Massachusetts, second in performance, gets a C; Florida, ranked third, gets ALEC’s highest reform grade, a B+.

What I've seen and heard most, in the math network meetings and the professional development et cetera ad infinitum, is that the powers that be don't have much in the way of vision. We keep getting told "Reform" but no one ever specifies "To What?" or "In what way?"

That's right. The goal is the change itself. We are never given any other goal. I have been told point-blank that the State will never recommend any program or project or method of teaching, but they want us to change nonetheless. When we finish the change, we are supposed to change again. That's why so many of us resist and it seems to have paid off, at least for some of our kids.

School Spending

Here's a nice little "exposé" from the CATO Institute about school spending and how they hide their "true" expenses from the public.

While I agree that all expenses should be published, I don't think that all should be lumped into the per-pupil numbers in the way suggested. I think it's perfectly appropriate to have them separated.

Should everything be clear? Yes. Should everything be understandable by the average taxpayer? No, because the average taxpayer doesn't know jump about financing and accounting. The ones who do know something about it (not pros mind you but knowledgeable) should be able to figure things out on their own and the information should be available.

The comparison to private school tuition is an interesting slight-of-hand and is the real reason I picked up on this. He says something like "private schools tell you what it costs to educate your kid," which is true to a point. Private schools DO tell you the tuition. They do not tell you what it actually costs, though. That's a key point because he is complaining about how the Public schools left out information. He forgot to mention that the Private schools left out the same information.

I'm always amused by the claim that the local Catholic School is "so inexpensive." Yeah, because they don't own or maintain a building. The Diocese does, and the School rents it for a dollar a year. Likewise, many of the usual "costs" are off the budget. Of course, it always helps if you have nuns teaching - they are incredibly good but historically have been paid next to nothing. And, it this case, many are on the Diocese payroll. Presto, "lower cost per student."

Most private schools are 501c(3), non-profit organizations which means that people can donate to them and write it off their taxes. That's money that isn't charged to the parents. Private schools also don't have a capital bond. They have a capital fund drive instead. Nearly every building on a private school campus has someone's name on it - the name of the person who gave the money to build it.

(It's funny. Public schools name things after a late teacher or principal who made a huge impact on the school. Private schools name things after the person who donated money for it.)

The Alumni Director is an important and well-paid position because the alumni give big bucks. There is a Development Director whose sole job is begging for money. There are dozens of fund-raising situations every year at every school. Parents in another local academy are required to help in the fundraisers.

Then the bookkeepers rise up. In a private school, fees are the thing. The parents pay for all sorts of things. Books are obvious. But also, most field trips and activities are extra. Don't for get the lab fee and the materials fee and the art materials fees. If it costs the school, it gets passed on to the parents. I know. I ran a school for years.

That's the big difference between public and private and is always ignored when people tout the relatively low cost of private schools.

But then, who expects politics and money to be anything but contentious?

Boredom

via Joanne Jacobs, Bored in school and summarizing.

High school is boring, say two thirds of students in the 2009 High School Survey of Student Engagement.
# 41% went to school because of what they learn in classes.
# 23% went because of their teachers.
# 30% went because they enjoy being in school.

In related news, 79% of those who were interviewed at home last Saturday afternoon said they were bored, leading the Society for the Prevention of Childhood Boredom to recommend that home life be changed ("Reformed") so that kids could be stimulated constantly with creativity and intellectually stimulating projects.

Mothers who participated by purchasing the Home Boredom Reform Toolkit reported that they had taken the kids out for ice cream and had a "wonderful, fulfilling time." After further interviews, the teenagers' boredom response rate changed to 93.2%, most saying "Going for ice cream was SOOO boring."

Mothers who participated by buying a lawnmower, lining up a few potential customers and then letting the teenagers create a lawn-mowing/general yard work business with absolutely no further input from either parent reported that the teenagers didn't seem so bored anymore. The teenagers themselves couldn't be interviewed because they were out earning money or out spending that money on their car, their date or going for ice cream with their friends.

Students who are thinking about about dropping out say they don’t like the school, don’t like the teachers or don’t see any value in the work they’re asked to do. Students said they wanted chances to be creative at school. Most dislike lectures and like “discussions in which there are no clear answers.”

In other news, adults who don't like their jobs or who were just laid off in a nasty recession were encouraged to go back to school. There, they could take courses that improved their job prospects or trained them for a new career. Poofy courses and touchy-feely courses that discussed the feelings of the students are to be avoided. Writing, grammar and basic math courses are the recommendation, followed by computer courses and science. History and languages are also good. Avoid classes that are geared toward sparing the feelings of the students. Look instead for those that offer lots of useful information, delivered in a compact and efficient style ... like a lecture. Not a boring and monotonous one of course, but one delivered by a teacher who knows his stuff.

The report looks at schools that are trying to engage disaffected students.
Kealakehe High School in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, has focused on building relationships between school staff and students. . . . According to the principal of Kealakehe, Wilfred Murakami, there is a perception that people love the school and that most students participate in school activities; HSSSE data revealed that actually just about half of the students say they love the school and, similarly, about half participate in school activities. The principal uses the data to raise important questions with his staff: “What about the rest of the kids? What are those kids doing?”

In a final bit of related news, The American Center for Conservative Liberal Studies in Education and Life in General has just released a study saying that teenagers who answer surveys in class report that answering surveys is really boring. Comments added at the bottom include, "I really wish we could just learn things instead of taking these ridiculous surveys." and "Great, another f****ng survey."

And that's why the Curmudgeon isn't a big fan of this type of "data-driven" school reform.

Placing the Blame - Student Debt.

The NYTimes has a long article detailing the money troubles of a recent grad with thousands in debt. Showing pictures of her in her fashionable clothes and a ten-speed bike, the reporter bemoans the seemingly vast numbers of students who, through no fault of their own, racked up enormous debt. The colleges and universities should do something, he rants. Deputize MBA students (?). The parents - are they at fault? Sallie Mae? CitiBank?  Yeah, CitiBank.

Puhlease. Just because she's pretty doesn't mean she's right. Just because CitiBank sucks doesn't mean they're wrong. Let's examine a few things.

"The balance on Cortney Munna’s loans is about $97,000, including all of her federal loans and her private debt from Sallie Mae and Citibank. What are her options for digging out?"

Holy crap. She must have really needed that degree if she was willing to incur that much debt. The prospects must have been good before the recession hit, wouldn't you think? I'll bet this was an MBA or engineering degree? She's got savant talent and is about to blow your doors off? Well, no.

"... since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies."

Right there, you can tell this isn't going to end well. This is obviously not a financial wizard. She majored in touchy-feely on someone else's nickel. She went to NYU instead of CC or any of the SUNY campuses. It isn't all bad, though. She just got a raise. Now she makes almost as much as I do.

"She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. After taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they weren’t being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over."

Not a lot left? That would be $850 per month left over, maybe $30 per day. She is just out of college. She can brown-bag lunches like the rest of us. Share expenses. Skip the "going out" stuff. Bike to work instead of bus or car. Share the apartment. Get a second job, if she needs the money so badly. Get another, more useful college degree but not if it is solely to avoid paying your debt. When you are desperate, try 80-hour work weeks - it beats eight hours of tv and partying every night.

Another womyn's studies disaster. Cry me a river.

The article is copied below.

Placing the Blame as Students Are Buried in Debt

By RON LIEBER

Like many middle-class families, Cortney Munna and her mother began the college selection process with a grim determination. They would do whatever they could to get Cortney into the best possible college, and they maintained a blind faith that the investment would be worth it.

Today, however, Ms. Munna, a 26-year-old graduate of New York University, has nearly $100,000 in student loan debt from her four years in college, and affording the full monthly payments would be a struggle. For much of the time since her 2005 graduation, she’s been enrolled in night school, which allows her to defer loan payments.

This is not a long-term solution, because the interest on the loans continues to pile up. So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.

Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn’t ask borrowers to verify their incomes.

Ms. Munna does not want to walk away from her loans in the same way many mortgage holders are. It would be difficult in any event because federal bankruptcy law makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loan debts. But unless she manages to improve her income quickly, she doesn’t have a lot of good options for digging out.

It is utterly depressing that there are so many people like her facing decades of payments, limited capacity to buy a home and a debt burden that can repel potential life partners. For starters, it’s a shared failure of parenting and loan underwriting.

But perhaps the biggest share lies with colleges and universities because they have the most knowledge of the financial aid process. And I would argue that they had an obligation to counsel students like Ms. Munna, who got in too far over their heads.

How many people are like her? According to the College Board’s Trends in Student Aid study, 10 percent of people who graduated in 2007-8 with student loans had borrowed $40,000 or more. The median debt for bachelor’s degree recipients who borrowed while attending private, nonprofit colleges was $22,380.
The Project on Student Debt, a research and advocacy organization in Oakland, Calif., used federal data to estimate that 206,000 people graduated from college (including many from for-profit universities) with more than $40,000 in student loan debt in that same period. That’s a ninefold increase over the number of people in 1996, using 2008 dollars.

The Family

No one forces borrowers to take out these loans, and Ms. Munna and her mother, Cathryn, have spent the years since her graduation trying to understand where they went wrong. Ms. Munna’s father died when she was 13, after a series of illnesses.

She started college at age 17 and borrowed as much money as she could under the federal loan program. To make up the difference between her grants and work study money and the total cost of attending, her mother co-signed two private loans with Sallie Mae totaling about $20,000.

When they applied for a third loan, however, Sallie Mae rejected the application, citing Cathryn’s credit history. She had returned to college herself to finish her bachelor’s degree and was also borrowing money. N.Y.U. suggested a federal Plus loan for parents, but that would have required immediate payments, something the mother couldn’t afford. So before Cortney’s junior year, N.Y.U. recommended that she apply for a private student loan on her own with Citibank.

Over the course of the next two years, starting when she was still a teenager, she borrowed about $40,000 from Citibank without thinking much about how she would pay it back. How could her mother have let her run up that debt, and why didn’t she try to make her daughter transfer to, say, the best school in the much cheaper state university system in New York? “All I could see was college, and a good college and how proud I was of her,” Cathryn said. “All we needed to do was get this education and get the good job. This is the thing that eats away at me, the naïveté on my part.”

But Cortney resists the idea that this is a tale of bad parenting. “To me, it would be an uncharitable reading,” she said. “My mother has tried her best, and I don’t blame her for anything in this.”

The Lender

Sallie Mae gets a pass here, in my view. A responsible grownup co-signed for its loans to the Munnas, and the company eventually cut them off.

But what was Citi thinking, handing over $40,000 to an undergraduate who had already amassed debt well into the five figures? This was, in effect, a “no doc” or at least a “low doc” subprime mortgage loan.

A Citi spokesman declined to comment, even though Ms. Munna was willing to sign a waiver giving Citi permission to talk about her loans. Perhaps the bank worried that once it approved one loan, cutting her off would have led her to drop out or transfer and have trouble paying back the loan.

Today, someone like Ms. Munna might not qualify for the $40,000 she borrowed. But as the economy rebounds, there is little doubt that plenty of lenders will step forward to roll the dice on desperate students, especially because the students generally can’t get rid of the debt in bankruptcy court.

The University

The financial aid office often has the best picture of what students like Ms. Munna are up against, because they see their families’ financial situation splayed out on the federal financial aid form. So why didn’t N.Y.U. tell Ms. Munna that she simply did not belong there once she’d passed, say, $60,000 in total debt?

“Had somebody called me and said, ‘Do you have a clue where this is all headed?’, it would have been a slap in the face, but a slap in the face that I needed,” said Cathryn Munna. “When financial aid told her that they could get her $2,000 more in loans, they should have been saying ‘You are in deep doo-doo, little girl.’”

That’s not a role that the university wants to take on, though. “I think that would be completely inappropriate,” said Randall Deike, the vice president of enrollment management for N.Y.U., who oversees admissions and financial aid. “Some families will do whatever it takes for their son or daughter to be not just at N.Y.U., but any first-choice college. I’m not sure that’s always the best decision, but it’s one that they really have to make themselves.”

The complications here go well beyond the propriety of suggesting that a student enroll elsewhere. Colleges don’t always know how much debt its students are taking on, which makes it hard to offer good counsel. (N.Y.U. does appear to have known about all of Ms. Munna’s loans, though.)

Then there’s a branding problem. Urging students to attend a cheaper college or leave altogether suggests a lack of confidence about the earning potential of alumni. Nobody wants to admit that. And once a university starts encouraging middle-class students to go elsewhere, it must fill its classes with more children of the wealthy and a much smaller number of low-income students to whom it can afford to offer enormous scholarships. That’s hardly an ideal outcome either.

Finally, universities exist to enroll students, not turn them away. “Aid administrators want to keep their jobs,” said Joan H. Crissman, interim president and chief executive of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “If the administration finds out that you’re encouraging students to go to a cheaper school just because you don’t think they can handle the debt load, I don’t think that’s going to mesh very well.”

That doesn’t change the fact, however, that the financial aid office is still in the best position to see trouble coming and do something to stop it. University officials should take on this obligation, even if they aren’t willing to advise students to attend another college.

Instead, they might deputize a gang of M.B.A. candidates or alumni in the financial services industry to offer free financial planning to admitted students and their families. Mr. Deike also noted that the bigger problem here is one of financial literacy. Fine. He and N.Y.U. are in a great position to solve for that by making every financial aid recipient take a financial planning class. The students could even use their families as the case study.

The Options

The balance on Cortney Munna’s loans is about $97,000, including all of her federal loans and her private debt from Sallie Mae and Citibank. What are her options for digging out?

Her mother can’t help without selling her bed and breakfast, and then she’d have no home. She could take her daughter in, but there aren’t good ways for her to earn a living in Alexandria Bay, in upstate New York.

Cortney could move someplace cheaper than her current home city of San Francisco, but she worries about her job prospects, even with her N.Y.U. diploma.
She recently received a raise and now makes $22 an hour working for a photographer. It’s the highest salary she’s earned since graduating with an interdisciplinary degree in religious and women’s studies. After taxes, she takes home about $2,300 a month. Rent runs $750, and the full monthly payments on her student loans would be about $700 if they weren’t being deferred, which would not leave a lot left over.

She may finally be earning enough to barely scrape by while still making the payments for the first time since she graduated, at least until interest rates rise and the payments on her loans with variable rates spiral up. And while her job requires her to work nights and weekends sometimes, she probably should find a flexible second job to try to bring in a few extra hundred dollars a month.

Ms. Munna understands this tough love, buck up, buckle-down advice. But she also badly wants to call a do-over on the last decade. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life slaving away to pay for an education I got for four years and would happily give back,” she said. “It feels wrong to me.”

Critical Thinking needs critical facts

From a website begging to teach me critical thinking:
“With No Child Left Behind in the rearview mirror, it's time to broaden your students' horizons. Now teachers can focus on critical thinking, comprehension and meaningful expression. Critical thinking is the most valuable skill we can teach our children. With it, kids can find any fact and solve any problem.”

Actually, no. And yes.

Yes, you can find any fact.
No, you can’t solve any problem.

The acquisition of facts allows the brain/mind to juggle those facts and judge whether or not something is true, to extend the facts beyond what is known and extrapolate to an unknown, to devise a new formula from the old, to push the boundaries of understanding beyond the limits.

Critical thinking, by itself, is not enough. “If I have seen far, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” Critical thinking is that “Seeing far.” We must build upon our past, expand our knowledge and push our learning forward.

Without resistance and thinking, one cannot have learning. Learning is hard. Understanding new things is hard. If it isn’t, then the new thing probably isn’t new. It may have been unthought-of, but it isn’t new. The spark was needed but the groundwork had been laid.

Before you can be a critical thinker, you must have some facts to critically think about. Before one can decode a word problem and reduce it down to its essence, one must first understand the essence. Only then can we see the frills and verbiage that obscure the true problem.

Surface area of a house … “What’s the formula?” There isn’t one. It’s a collection of known figures for which we do have formulas.

Fallacy of Relevance - Ad misericondium

When arguing a point, attempting to get out of a traffic ticket or scraping together a passing grade, an appeal to pity can sometimes be effective. Other times you just look stupid.

Case in point, a Yemeni man is held in Guantanamo Bay and the Obama administration won't release him. He might have had a chance but the Christmas day bomber-moron tried to remove himself from the gene pool and take others with him.

"So a Nigerian man tries to set off a bomb on an American plane, and they punish my brother for this?" says Hila's sister, who did want to be identified.

An excellent point, even if she does forget to mention that the Nigerian trained in Yemen. (BTW, the 'I don't want to be identified' part is pretty funny if they mention she's his sister - sign of things to come?) Now the appeal to pity:

"His mother died, his father died, his two sons died, and now his uncle has died," Hila's sister says. "Do they want us to all be dead before they bring him back home again?"

It's a fallacy of relevance because the death of the relatives has nothing to do with the reasons for jail. Still, it can be effective unless you take this fallacy so far. Too much detail tends to ruin the weepy feeling and harden the listener. "Crash!" goes your argument:

"She says the family has endured enough trouble already. Last year, Hila's two young sons died when a grenade they were playing with exploded."

If your two young kids played with a live hand grenade and killed themselves, you're a terrorist. Dude, your unidentified sister is making this too easy.

Source: npr.org.

Books, Part Deux

Yesterday, I mentioned the books that I have, Part One. Those were the easy-to-read books. I got class sets of those.

The books below are harder to read, with a more limited audience so I only got 3 or 6 of each of them. They are the books a serious math student should have read, so I encourage them to try.

The "Biographies"
These biographies are written for the serious and capable 12th grade student or college student. The writing is very clear and the topic is fascinating for me. My students, not so much. An Imaginary Tale; The Story of i. A funny thing about this one was when I tried to type up the order to present it to the decider-person -- I couldn't type "i" without Word getting all angry at me.
e: The Story of a Number. Maior is a good writer, but not for the faint of brain. Also, try Zero; A Biography of a Dangerous Idea and The The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World's Most Astonishing Number .

Of course, there's John Allen Poulos:
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, as well as Mathematician Plays the Stockmarket and the inservice classics: Innumeracy and Beyond Innumeracy. He has some others. Try them if these do good things for you.

Damn Near Impossible for High School Students. (If that's not a challenge, I don't know what is ...)
A Brief History of Time by Hawking. You gotta throw down the gauntlet.

Books on the Shelf.

What's in my classroom? Well, I like books and there was money in the budget, so ... someone had to do it. I ordered with this philosophy: if the book was an easy read, I tried to get a class set which could be lent around the department. If not, I got maybe 3 or 6 which I could lend to individual students.

Here are a couple of the easy reads:

Short Circuits.
One-Minute Mysteries: These are really easy but a good way to while away a few minutes of TA or homeroom. They are one- or two-paragraph mini-mysteries in which the criminal makes one mistake or one misstatement that shows his guilt. "How could he have known the victim was killed with a potato peeler if he wasn't there?" A similar book is Two Minute Mysteries, which is more of those "outside the box thinking" or "lateral thinking" puzzles. These can take a while because the kids have to come up with reasons that aren't readily seen or intuited. Some reasons fall into the category of "WTF? How are we supposed to know that?"

Statistics:
Huff's How to Lie with Statistics is a classic. I use at least some of the ideas in every class from consumer math through Pre-calculus. I also make the speech before the students start their science fair projects. See also "How to Lie with Maps."

From the guys who brought you Klutz's Guide to Juggling comes Cartoon Guide to Statistics. It's great. In fact, when I unpacked the books, the other math teacher instantly borrowed it. Gotta be a good sign! Witty and fun, it's still got the STUFF. The cartoons are quite descriptive and the math is all there, even if the 'toon of Galileo is goofy.

If you haven't read it ... Freakonomics (and the sequel, Super Freakonomics) is a really good collection of statistical stories and case studies. Leavitt is a good writer and he analyses his work in engaging and easy-to-read chapters. "Why Do Drug Dealers Live with Their Mothers?" and "Why is the KuKluxKlan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?" You'll want an entire Saturday for it.

Theory:
The Number Devil is a good book for starting kids reading about math topics without slapping them silly. Easy to read but not pandering either. Probably the best explanation for the Fibonacci sequence I've seen.

Trivia:
Loosely organized book of trivia and generally "neat stuff" is Brain Fuel. Engaging reads of one or two pages each that aren't particularly mathematical but I was able to buy them, so there! Kind of "Ripley Believe it or Not".

Geometry:
If it's a math class, it has to have Flatland & Sphereland in it. Misogynistic? Yes. Satire? Yes. Still, it's an exploration of geometry you shouldn't be without. Available online for free (long out of copyright), but you'll want tangible books. Fortunately, they're cheap.

SAT Prep
For my SAT Review class, I was able to score some $3 versions of Prince by Machiavelli and Sun Tzu's Art of War. These are used as essay topics. I'll take a paragraph almost at random (they're that good for this kind of thing) and make a question about it. Instant Essay topics.

For the same course, I got - and this is no shit - a copy of Specerian Penmanship. The students are fascinated by my ability to write cursive. Probably 50% can write poorly in cursive, the other half not at all. I, of course, had Mrs. R. to teach me this some 50ish years ago. So I lend out the workbooks with the stern instruction to use a piece of paper placed over top. SO far, no writing in the books. A couple girls have really worked on it. So funny. One texted this fact to her friend - proud she was teaching herself to write cursive. The irony escaped her.

Drafting is important.
How to Read/make Mechanical Drawings and Popular Science's The Art of Mechanical Drawing are good source books for orthographic projections and for general work. I feel it very important that students learn the basics of drafting. The art department is getting swamped and stamped and cut these days and the technical centers are becoming more exclusively for "tech kids" - where's the generally good student to learn this stuff? ME!

I can't say anything yet about 100 essential things because it's backordered.

That's a part. I'll talk about some of the rest tomorrow: the tough reads, the ones that I bought only 3 or 6 copies of.

caio for now.

The State of the Climate Debate

Is this the best they can come up with?

Temp is -12 global warming degrees F up the mountain at Killington today. Think I'll just ski half a day, have a couple of beers and some chili, and drive back to NYC.

or:

Late Thursday evening, in the hour before midnight, I found myself driving home from the airport amidst howling winds, blowing-and-drifting snow, and rapidly-falling temperatures. Watching the temperature dropping on the display of my truck's exterior-monitoring thermometer, an interesting and possibly didactic exercise occurred to me:

Ponder the following three factoids:
o The long-term average high temperature for this time of year (at the BTV airport reporting station) is 27F;
o Monday, the temperature reached into the low 50s;
o Friday (yesterday), the temperature struggled to reach into the low single-digits.

Do the math and ponder what these things tell you about the nature of the underlying "system"....

I know that this is supposed to be a clever rebuttal of the Climate Change theory, but I just can't bring myself to do anything but laugh at it. What a pathetic attempt.

I'm glad I don't live near the ocean in one of those low-lying cities like New York or Los Angeles. Though, to be able to travel by ship through the Northwest Passage which has opened for the first time in memory would be cool ...

Dolphin Hunting techniques have evolved

I am fascinated by these dolphins. If this isn't "tool use", then it is at least a sign of awareness and intelligence.