More PBE Idiocy

My school is implementing Proficiency - Based education this year. (Some people call it Standards-Based Grading)

We're behind the curve; the State of Vermont has decreed that ALL schools in Vermont will be using PBE so that the Class of 2020 will have had four years of PBE by the time they graduate. That's this year's sophomores.

Yes, that means we're a year behind. Our school's faculty made the decision last May to push forward with this initiative against the wishes of the SU -- we didn't want to wait two more years to begin, putting us three years late according to the directive from the State.

Our reasoning was that, if this is truly a Good Thing, then why should we wait to put it into place?

But our supervisory office and it's IT staff are hopelessly unready. Incompetent isn't a unfair characterization. They have no transcript format ready to go, no sense of how to ascertain academic ineligibility, etc.

So we faculty are doing it for them and fighting against their bad decisions the whole time.

Faculty: "Don't average proficiencies. In fact, don't even think of them as percentages."

"Hold my beer," they said.

Faculty: "Wait, you shouldn't do that ... and what's with the gaps between the levels? .... and what's with 'Not Attempted' being 0% to 15%?"

SU: "Uh, we don't know, and we don't know how to change it."
Faculty: "If you insist we keep percentages AND that they must average, would you at least fix the gaps?"

SU: "Uh, we don't know how to change it."
SU: "Uh, leadership team needs to make that decision."
SU: "Uh, it's your fault for moving too quickly."

Faculty: sigh.

SU: "Uh, you know there's two different scales, right?"

Faculty: "Wait, what? That's ridiculous, and wrong on so many levels. No one would do anything that stupid."

SU: "Yeah, check this out. Hold my beer."

Faculty: "Okay, so the percentages are the same but why is it called Approaching in this scale and 'Nearly' in the other?"

SU: "We thought it would be fun to change it two days before school starts, but not everywhere. You'll randomly see one or the other."

Faculty: "Whaaaat?"

Faculty: "By the way, if I enter a 3 out of 4, I get an NP. It should be Four Levels means One thru Four, but it isn't working that way. Please explain that."

SU: "Uh, we don't know what you're talking about and we don't know how to change it."
SU: "But, we just figured out that if you use a 5-point scale, and enter a 4 out of 5, then you'll get proficient. Think of it as a feature."

Faculty: "You went out of your way and insisting that it was four levels, not five. Would you please get it straight?"

SU: "BTW, did we mention there's a third scale? Check this out!"

Faculty: "WTF is with those percentages changes?"
Faculty: "If I enter a 3 out of 4, I get an NP again. Please explain that. While you're at it, why is 'Emerging' now 0%-50% instead of the 15%-45%?"

SU: "Uh, we don't know what you're talking about and we don't know how to change it, but all three are active in your gradebook at the same time."

Faculty" "Are you serious?" 

SU: "Yep. We're kinda proud of all the work we've done."

Faculty: "It's been all different, the kids and parents are fuming, and we're going back over everything and rescoring everything to make things consistent. THIS HAS NOT BEEN HELPFUL."

SU: "Don't be ungrateful ... BTW, you know how you asked that all of the Common Core State Standards for math be put into the gradebook?"

Faculty: "(Nervously) Um, yeah?"

SU: "We changed the names of each one of them."

Faculty: "Keep your goddamn beer."

Crazy Lady Showed Up to Preach

Nothing says Spring in Vermont quite like the arrival of the flowers, the greening of the mountains, and the chirping of crazy people in the parking lot.  We're all about free speech up here. You can say all that, even though some of it's "fightin' words", and we'll simply ask you to move to the sidewalk.



Instead of railing at students who couldn't care less and making them uncomfortable unnecessarily, why not work to change the conditions that created the problems you see? 

Oh, wait, you're a bigoted asswipe with an ego and a religion that doesn't actually care about people..

My bad.

Ego of the Ignorant

Self-centered world-view ("I don't need it so neither do you.") coupled with ignorance of the many negative effects on those children who could have accomplished something.

It's the evil twin of "I don't DO math."

Having taught SATprep for many years, I can tell you that the English side of this test isn't very hard - and easier for adults than for teenagers who haven't had as much experience in literature nor the practice in writing. The math side does contain topics that are obscure if you aren't currently enrolled in Algebra II, so I can understand that part.

Tragic, really. What strikes me the most is that this was retweeted so much with comments like "You're my hero!" 

I call shenanigans.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

It's nearly time for graduation and you know what that means ... more bitching about grades and discipline and willful teenagers being allowed to walk with their class (or not). It's also time for everyone to comment on what the seniors are wearing beneath their robes. 

Did I say "seniors"? I meant "female seniors" because the boys wear a dark color and the girls wear white ... a white robe made of cheap satin and quite translucent. When a boy wears a black Batman t-shirt, no one can tell. If a girl wears anything other than a plain white t-shirt, the colors show right through. It's like that girl at the right wearing a blue striped shirt. If she dares to wear a colorful bra that shows around the straps of her halter top under the robe ... well, "That just won't do."

That's right, an all-covering robe isn't enough. If admin can see the bra strap or the pink Hello Kitty t-shirt through the cheap-ass fabric ... go change. Instead of simply ordering a better robe or letting the seniors choose which color to wear, admin decides to change tradition because of colored t-shirts.

"All seniors in the dark color."

By The Way, they forgot to mention this to the school board, community, parents, and until recently, the seniors themselves.

Now, I'm still okay with things at this point. Elegant solution to discrimination, clothing and dress code issues, blah, blah, blah. Those cheap white robes were terrible. If this had stopped there, I wouldn't be complaining, and neither would most everyone else.

White robes too clear = everyone go in dark color. Nobody would have given a damn.

See? Easy.

HOWEVER, when you are in a conservative and still very hide-bound and occasionally discriminatory school district, and are considering making a change to a long-time tradition such as the color of the graduation robes (decades-old tradition), the very last thing you should do as an admin is remark that it will also help you with the LBGT kids problem.

God dammit.

Now, instead of a simple sartorial decision, everyone starts looking around for someone to bitch at and about ... and so they did. Some blame the LGBT kids for forcing a change (they didn't); the old assholes are talking about how those damn LGBTs are so entitled (they aren't); how there's something wrong with them anyway; why can't they just accept the color we've chosen for them and be happy about it; we're not even comfortable with them in the ceremony anyway. Other seniors are adding to the pressure. You'd think the color white was more important than the diploma and we were still in the 1960s.


Sheesh.

When are we gonna learn?

Reason #722 why Students Have Trouble

Found this at teachers pay teachers.

No shit. And the hundredths place is called that because ....?

The Highly Ineffective Principal: Clerical Error

A certain principal writes a letter for the school yearbook.  In his message, Roosevelt Principal Dr. Steven Strachan tells the graduates how proud he is of them and that they are a class of “great leaders, articulate orators, brilliant scientists, breathtaking athletes and extraordinary artists.”

He plagiarized the message.

Word for word. All of it.

From a principal in CA, uncredited.

But, but, but, but ... he "asked permission to quote"!

Here's the best part:

"I sincerely apologize to the Roosevelt community and to the class of 2014 for the inadvertent clerical error causing mistakes to be printed in the 2014 yearbook. An unedited draft of my remarks was accidentally published rather than the final version, and I take full responsibility for the oversight."

 Clerical error? A clerical error is misspelling the name of the guy you're quoting, or writing that the year is 2041. A clerical error is the yearbook editor rearranging the paragraphs inadvertently. A clerical error does not include you plagiarizing the entire message from another principal and then congratulating the WRONG SENIOR CLASS at the WRONG SCHOOL.

The Roosevelt principal even concluded his message like Barone did, writing, “Congratulations to the Albany High School Class of 2013.”

Blaming your plagiarism on the yearbook editor's "clerical error" is low-class, especially when you phrase it "clerical error causing mistakes to be printed." Passive voice apology fuck-you?

My favorite part of this is that he takes "full responsibility for the oversight." If one of his students did that, suspension would be in order. Nothing is happening to him ... he doesn't even have to pay the piddling amount of money for the reprint: the last line of the piece mentions that the pages are being reprinted with $800 from the "Principal's Discretionary Fund."

In case you're not familiar with public school budgetary BS, that's a slush fund that the principal may use at his discretion. Usually, it's used for things like buying a poor senior her cap and gown, or funding some low-income students tickets to a show that other kids are going to. Maybe supplying the SpecialEd department with some bit of tech that they can't get under normal budgets. Feel-good stuff or charitable-type things.

Educator of the Year.

CK-12 Stealing Images Again

NPR.org's Planet Money ran "74,476 Reasons You Should Always Get The Larger Pizza" and graphed things out pretty nicely.

 

Then CK-12 took it, converted the format to a lossy jpg, branded it with their own logo and has been reposting it as if they had done the work and owned it:

If you're going to use an image on a webpage, very few people will mind. If you go to the trouble of taking the picture and changing it and then claiming it as your own ... that's not cool.

PEMDAS is unfair? I can't believe I read that.

On a blog which ordinarily doesn't have much silliness, I read the following

You can explain the truly arbitrary elements of PEMDAS (the left to right of AS and MD) through an experiment. Allow students, independently, to do these two problems any way they want, ignoring any stupid arbitrary rule they might have previously memorized:

Include here a few order of operations-type problems.

Enter the Stupid Arbitrary Rule (SAR).
Because we need to all come up with the same answer, we need a rule to follow. Really, it can be any stupid arbitrary rule (SAR). But we agreed, at some point in history, to all follow the “left to right” thing once we were down to addition & subtraction or multiplication & division.

While I agree that it is an arbitrary rule, it's far from stupid and, for me, it highlights one of the reasons why schools exist; that is, telling kids how the world they are about to enter works and what its rules are. But then I get this:

It’s important to note that kids didn’t get to be part of that agreement we made. Just like they don’t get to vote in elections. Is it fair? Probably not. They would probably do a better job of choosing leaders as well as determining the order of operations. But that’s the way things likes SARs work.

You have to stop that crap right at the source. How can anyone say "that agreement we made" and conclude that it probably wasn't fair that kids can't be part of that decision?

First, of course, is the "we" thing. There is no "we" and "they" here and nobody waved their scepter around declaring that henceforth All Students Will Do It This Way. The order of operations didn't exist at some point in time, but then neither did algebraic notation. There weren't exponents until fairly recently (they were written words), someone had to have been the first to use a zero and place value ... you can go on. The point is that someone started using a notation, explained what it meant and how it worked and others decided it was easier and fell in with the crowd.

Enter the modern student, spoiled silly and clutching his cellphone and fantasies of being a "Digital Native" who can multitask and has no use for That Boring Crap.

What has "fair" got to do with it? Why is this pubescent psycho-babble coming from the only adult in the room?

And when he says students would probably do a better job of electing leaders, you have just heard the sound of a deluded mind. It's typical in education, echoing the "noble savage" mentality. So many teachers harbor this idea that kids know so much more than we stupid adults, that if we only took off the restraints, they'd be teaching themselves calculus in no time. They're better than we were, smarter than we were, and by golly just look at how responsible they'd be.

This is a huge disservice and only feeds the disillusionment with school and learning - "Why are you screwing me over? This is so UNFAIR."

And to then make up new rules for mathematics, post them in the classroom and keep using them? You've just gotten through telling them that all the rules are stupid and arbitrary and you want to have them invent, and then use, more stupid and arbitrary ones?

I'll stick with the valuable, useful and arbitrary ones and I'm always looking for a new way to demonstrate them ... like this image I found (might be Dy/Dan's):

Now, that's education.

Yo, IT Department.

Just some notes for any IT personnel who may be reading:

1. If the accounts at a school aren't consistent -- the account names are different for network log on, powerschool log on, and email -- teachers are not going to be happy. Having mcurmudgeon as my powerschool account, curmudgeonm as my school computer account and math.curmudgeon@vtsch.net as my email is stupid. Do your job - fix that.
2. Changing the domain three times in one year is stupid. Expecting anyone to be happy when you're changing over all of the Google accounts and all of that stored class information from one domain to another should have happened over the summer, not a month into the year.
3. Training is not something you can throw together in two minutes. 



It's called a computer lab. Surely you've heard of that?

4. When conducting software training, it helps if the teachers can be logged in to a computer and can see what you're talking about. Waving your hands dramatically isn't a good way to convey the use of the four level tab and pull down menu structure.
5. Showing a random video to a roomful of teachers isn't software training.
6. Making a 100+ character link available on the school webpage works much better than attempting to relate it verbally to the group.
7. Your job is to make the technology work for the teachers and staff. Period. You have no other purpose.
8. My job is to teach. It does not include teaching myself how to use all this technology so that I can teach the rest of the faculty because you're an incompetent ass.

Have a nice day.

Arrested Over a T-Shirt.

and the rules didn't specify that an image of a gun was "illegal", they just prohibit violence. In my mind this incident is wrong on many, many levels.

In a minor way (pun intended), the boy probably figured he was going to exploit a loophole and knew someone would react. In that very small sense, he takes a bit of the blame for initiating this incident.

The much, much bigger problem is the over-reaction by the teacher ("arguing"? Really?), the drastic over-reaction by the administration in calling the police.

Jared Marcum showed up at his West Virginia middle school Thursday wearing an NRA shirt with a picture of a hunting rifle on it, and ended up getting arrested over it. He and a teacher argued over the shirt, and the 8th grader was eventually suspended, arrested, and now finds himself facing charges of obstruction and disturbing the education process, WOWK-TV reports. The 14-year-old's dad says school policy doesn't forbid images of guns on T-shirts; the dress code does prohibit clothing displaying "violence," but gun images are not listed specifically.

Once called, the police have to put everything down on paper, but they should have toned this down instead of raising the stakes ("arrested?" "charged?"). And the judge should throw out the case entirely.

This is NOT the proper use of the criminal justice system.

The Irony? "Protect Your Rights"

I don't care how disruptive this kid may have gotten, or how much he argued. He is a 14 year old middle school student. Discipline is the job of the administration and the administration failed because this should not have even been an issue. This shirt does not depict violence.

And it's West Virginia, for crying out loud. If they're anything like us Vermonters, kids wear these shirts or camouflage or other hunting gear all the time. What's the big deal?

Highly Ineffective Principal: HIPster of the Month.

... or the Terrorists will win.

Moral Certainty

I might add that this drive to inflict piety also shows up as nose-in-the-air certainty that our wildest steps to "protect" our children from evil and danger are necessary and effective.

No Cops in Schools - Admin, Do Your Jobs

Admin + Cop = Idiot

"A story about one 5-year-old particularly stands out. The little boy was required to wear black shoes to school. Because he didn't have black shoes, his mom used a marker to cover up his white and red sneakers. A bit of red and white was still noticeable, so the child was taken home by the cops. The child was escorted out of school so he and his mother would be taught a lesson."

Really?

"Students playfully throwing peanuts at one another on a school bus ended in five black male high school students being arrested for felony assault after one of the peanuts hit the white female bus driver."

Well, that IS a problem.

I guess.

It's simple. Combine stupid with racist, add in administration that is way too full of itself and stir with a ladle of cop-speak and you get this. Administrative Over-Reaction and a No-Tolerance/No-Intelligence Discipline policy.

Keep the police officers out of schools.  Call them in when you need to have someone arrested, certainly, but don't make them the first-response to student horseplay and childish antics.

Force the administration to do their jobs properly or fire them. Discipline should stay within the boundaries of the school building.

Don't even get started with the whole gun thing.

Link: lawsuit

If you're going to belittle people ...

it would be nice if you checked your math first.

Apparently, there are now 76 days in a year. Maybe he could ask one of the Useless Idiots if he could borrow a calculator.

Algebra for all in the 8th grade is disastrous

from Joanne:

Stop teaching dumbed-down algebra to unprepared eighth graders and we can solve America’s math problem argues Jacob Vigdor in an American Enterprise Institute report. Unprepared students don’t benefit from Algebra Lite and prepared students are turned off to math, he argues.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools pushed most eighth graders into algebra classes, he writes. Students scored much lower on the end-of-course exam than those allowed to take algebra in ninth grade — and accelerated students did worse in geometry. The district abandoned the experiment after two years.
Our math problems are largely “self-inflicted,” Vigdor writes. In order to bring low performers up to the standard, schools have lowered standards.

Closing the achievement gap by improving the performance of struggling students is hard; closing the gap by reducing the quality of education offered to high performers—for example, by eliminating tracking and promoting universal access to “rigorous” courses while reducing the definition of rigor—is easy.

The first step to improving math performance is to concede that students differ in abilities, he concludes.

I have an idea. Let's try this everywhere.

Credit Recovery or Fraud?

From Joanne Jacobs:
Three Los Angeles seniors who failed a required class, were able to transfer to a credit-recovery school for two days, pass and return to graduate with classmates, reports the Los Angeles Times. Teachers are annoyed.

The students withdrew from STEM Academy of Hollywood as late as June 13, a Wednesday, attended the adjacent Alonzo Community Day School the next day, and checked back into STEM to graduate that Friday.

Teachers are annoyed indeed.

It makes you wonder a lot of things: the idea that the other school was "adjacent", the idea that you can "drop out" with two days to go, the idea that the second school's standards are so low that the kids failing at school #1 can take a few quizzes and tests in 2 days and pass and then re-enroll in time to graduate, and the idea that STEM "has" to accept the credits.

 Alonzo, the alternative school, is intended for students who are at risk of dropping out. Although it has a traditional school day, it measures credits only by work completed, not the time the students spend in class, said Principal Victorio R. Gutierrez.

How about growing some cajones and refusing to let them re-enroll?  It's obvious to all but the most insufferable twit that they are gaming the system.  At least delay the acceptance of the credits until after some paperwork has been done -- just long enough to keep them from walking with the rest.

Self-Immolation by EduTroll

I didn't alter anything, I swear ...

Unbelieveable...if you people really think that this is the successful way to the future, then your as stupid as the students that cant spell the word 'future'. Students have no social skills what-so-ever being raised in a computer generated world. They have no English skills as a result of comp slg...oh what you dont know what computer slang short-cutting is. The have no spelling skills as a result of spell check.

Why is a Valedictorian Like a Throughbred Horse?

Not similar to GPA.

Beats the hell out of me. Why should a girl who wants to major in engineering be "competing" against a girl who wants to major in business? How can anyone possibly compare the two to the number 3 girl who took predominantly music, art, and English electives and wanted to major in theater?

A couple of years ago, my school had two amazing kids: one took geometry as a freshman, the other took algebra 2 as a freshman. By the senior year, both had progressed up the ladder and taken calculus. Their GPAs were 0.003 apart. The valedictorian received a UVM total scholarship (Green and Gold) but didn't need it and went elsewhere. The salutatorian who needed that scholarship and wanted to go to UVM, didn't get it.

Why do we do this to our kids?

Just one more sign of the Education Apocalypse

Destroying the budget, it is.

Highly Ineffective Principal decides that the cost of printing is SOOOOO big. "Something must be done! I know, quotas!" Never mind that the principal himself prints out and copies tons of junk for our mailboxes instead of forwarding it. Never mind that the principal needs to hire someone to implement and oversee the quota system / accounting and is paid more than the printing budget. Never mind that the quotas are set without any rhyme or reason.

Whence the rant? I was just reading Mimi's blog and I ran across this sentence:

PS. You can see a copy of my said trig test here. Sorry but the font is small -- for two reasons: one is that I am almost out of printing quota for the month.

Aaaaaah.

Kinko's charges 9 cents per page to make copies and they're making a good profit. A typical school photocopier costs between 3 and 5 cents a page, so let's say 5 just to be snarky. (It's based on print density and that trig test was hardly dense.) That trig test is two pages so that's 10 cents per kid; pretending there's 30 in the room, a total of $3 for that assignment or test.

Why, yes money grows on trees.
To pay the admins at least.

You're going to complain about a teacher spending $3?  Really? I can see why you'd want a teacher to consider the printing costs if the options were to print the text of War and Peace or buy the paperback, but otherwise the school should just shut up about printing costs. Three dollars is approximately what our curriculum coordinator (who never actually shows up and coordinates) gets paid for 2.5 minutes, assuming $90K, 180 days, 7hours/day.

"Sorry, I can't print out the work for all of my 150 students. A useless member of our school bureaucracy (is that redundant?) needs to be paid for the time she'll spend while her computer boots up today."

Zombies, all of 'em.

If this is Singapore Math, I want nothing to do with it.

There is a teacher in trouble for assigning violent math problems.

A Washington, D.C., charter school teacher has been fired after it was discovered the teacher had assigned third-grade students a number of math problems framed around violent and illegal scenarios.

Hummm. Not a peep from the evil teachers' union. Maybe you can fire bad teachers after all. Maybe, just maybe, you need a reason to fire bad teachers ... and given a good reason, the NEA will stay out of it. Oh, my bad, this is a charter school. The union and all those pesky certification requirements are not welcome.

At first, the unnamed teacher at the Trinidad Center City School claimed he had been ordered to assign the problems, but it was quickly discovered that the teacher had actually downloaded them from a free homeschooling website called "HomeschoolingParadise.com."

Ordered to use those problems ... doubtful. I've copied a few below. I'm not sure I'd give them to a third grader.  They are stupid and unrealistic while pretending to be "engaging". The violence is somewhat of a problem but then I grew up with Tom and Jerry and Wile E. Coyote so cartoon violence doesn't bother me, but I can see how today's admin, parents and students might be uncomfortable. Are they Racist? Absolutely.

Even more baffling, other parents at the school say the teacher in question is a minister.

I'd be curious if the "minister" was a real one or just someone who bought a one-week course and a semi-fake diploma. I think this is a red herring. Being a minister doesn't immunize you from stupidity or racist assholishness but it isn't pertinent to this discussion.

Anyway, I'm interested in the questions. I followed the link to Homeschooling Paradise and then chose a set of free printable math worksheets for 3rd grade. At random, I chose this one.

Math Problem 9
A swarm of bloodsucking flies descended upon Egypt. King Tut and King Rehotep leapt onto their chariots and began to catch the flies with their long sticky tongues. By the time they were finished, King Tut had swallowed 7 times as many flies as King Rehotep. If King Rehotep caught 251 flies, how many delicious flies did King Tut swallow?

Really? King Rehotep? Catching flies with their "long, sticky tongues"? I'll bet this question satisfies the Science and History requirements, too ... you little &^%(. 

And this teacher went and downloaded this because ... why?  Was this material superior to what he already had? Wait ... this is a Washington DC Charter School teacher? 

Math Problem 16
My sister greedily lapped up 483 liters of maggot juice from a saucer. I slurped up 5 times as much creamy maggot juice as she. How much delightfully delicious maggot juice did we drink altogether?

Sure, that's a RealWorld problem. My mass is 100kg. So this "sister" lapped up nearly five times my weight in liquid and "I" lapped up five times as much, from a saucer remember; that's equal to the weight of my Ford Ranger pickup truck.

I'm done with that idiot teacher. Send him on his way - he definitely used some really bad materials and he has the intelligence and judgement of a rotten tomato. I will try to ignore the whole "Charter Schools are automatically better than public schools thing" - that's another piece.

But homeschooling parents don't deserve this trash either and this website must be serving someone. It's no wonder that so many homeschoolers take math classes at the high school if this is the kind of educational material they and their parents get to choose from.

Pretty amazing stuff. I tried out the mass, volume and time.

Question 1
Last night, a 2950 g beaver entered Bob's house and put its wet paw into a hole in a wall socket. The poor beaver died of electrocution. Bob was delighted. He cut out 850 g of the dead beaver and made beaver pies with it. He divided the remaining dead body into 3 equal pieces and gave them to Alan, Charles and Mei Ling. What was the mass of the portion Charles received?

That seems a bit much. Let's try some intended for the second grader in your homeschool paradise.

Free Elementary Math Worksheets: Homeschool Math Practice Question 19
Sadistic Serial Killer Suppiah crept into a hospital brandishing a machete. He went on a killing spree and murdered 634 doctors, nurses and patients. He slashed 457 doctors to death. If he butchered 151 more nurses than doctors, how many poor nurses did he kill?

Well, that's a relief; I thought they'd have something unpleasant.  I'm more offended that this problem is unsolvable as written. The answer is supposed to be 164, you see.

"If your child got all correct, she must be a math whiz. If she didn't, all she needs is a bit more math practice. That's what we are here for! Please bookmark our Home Page and come back for more Singapore Math Worksheets."

Um, No.