50-cent solution to Car Seat Deaths

The Weather Channel has been making noise about kids left in carseats and dying from the heat ... an admirable cause, to be sure.  They had a short segment in which they talked to some people, ran a clip about some parent who forgot, and then tossed off an industry statement that "Monitoring the back seat for infants would be 'too costly'."

That is utter trash.

$0.50 and a bit of programming would knock down the rates by at least a half.

You know that beep that you get if your keys are in the ignition when you turn off the car and open the door?  It goes for maybe ten seconds and then the dome light and the beep shuts off.

Here's the Keep Your Child Alive Solution: (edited after first comment)

If the LATCH system has a seat installed, when you turn off the ignition or open the driver's door, a beeper located behind the driver (in the dome light or even further back) goes off for a few seconds. It has to be a distinctive beep and it has to come from *behind* the driver. If the LATCH system cannot have a sensor in it, then place a switch there that turns on the system when the seat is installed. Sure, someone could turn it off, but that would take a direct act.

That's all it would take. Most of these deaths are caused by harried drivers, in a rush, forgetting that their child is in the back because he immediately fell asleep and hasn't made a peep for the last thirty miles. A simple chirping noise from behind or a flashing light on the dash is all that the vast majority of these cases would need.

No child in the back carseat? So what? You still think to check.

You're getting out at the gas station? So what? You hear a chirping noise from the back and you remember he's back there. It will become instinctive for parents to hear the beep, turn and check.

All this BS with reminder cards and BESAFE lists? Useless.  It's not that parents don't care. They are forgetting that their kid is in the back - why would a checklist help?

Putting a stuffed animal in the front seat to remind you? Marginally better, until you have more than one thing in the front seat, or you forget to throw that toy in the front, or your son screams for that EXACT toy and you hand it to him ...

Hanging an air freshener from the mirror? In addition to it being illegal in most states and a bad idea to obscure your vision, this "reminder" is constantly in your field of vision and will quickly be ignored.

The car companies can put in 12 airbags that are linked to the seatbelts and pressure sensitive seat sensors, coupled with instantaneous triggering mechanisms, they have hundreds of computer chips that monitor everything about the engine, they are all furiously installing driver-distraction devices like phone and GPS screens and computer-driven window and climate controls that can't be operated safely while the car is in motion ... I think they can figure this one out, too.


Come on, car people. THINK.

Snap Judgements

I love the kinds of conclusions people make on Twitter.

"Which looks more like a 21st century classroom?"

Neither. They're booths at a conference. I understand that the snap judgement goes against the top booth because the 21st century classroom isn't supposed to be about one person "lecturing" and 30 students quietly absorbing new information without "collaboration"; it's also missing a lot of misunderstood 21st Century Learning New-Age Idealistic Pedagogical Folderol.^tm

But I digress.

In the Upper portion of the composite photo, we see a booth set up to present a lot of information. The people are encouraged by the layout to be seated, which means that they can all see because they out of each others way; no one is standing in front of the screen.

Think about this for a second. TI has a mission: sell calculators, at $150 each, with crappy screens and SLOOOOOOOW processors. They need to get you in a seat and show you the WOW factor. They need to get you past the basics fast and sell you on the tech because that $4500 classroom start-up fee is huge.  "Those regression functions don't come cheap, and aren't in any other package."

This is crying out for exactly what they've got here: a booth with a presenter who knows the machine inside and out, delivering information to as many people as they can, as efficiently as they can, in as little time as possible.

You put them in a seat where they can set down their stuff, see the big screen, write something down if they want to, hold the Inspire, swap out the faceplate, photograph it with their phones, set it down and tweet about it ... tables and chairs arranged in an efficient pattern, making best use of the space. Additionally, once seated, it's tough to leave politely before the end of the spiel and it's easy to control the technology and prevent theft.

Over on the side, some tall tables (which don't force you to lean over) for people who are browsing and don't want the whole presentation, or who want to stand and watch from the side.

BOOTH SCORE: 8 out of 10. Great for information transfer and for sales promotion. This booth is designed to have you linger and explore, try out and figure out, and to convince to you agitate for a major purchase back at your school.
CLASSROOM SCORE:  7 out of 10. "Boring" if you are looking for new-age learning styles, but effective as an organized setting for 30.


In the lower one, there is a guy on the left, holding a laptop in an awkward stance. One of the people he's talking to can see the screen. The other one can see the keyboard and be part of the conversation but unless he leans in and gets in the way of the other listener, he can't see much.

In the lower right, three people are crowded around a computer that desperately needs to be on a higher platform because all the people who want to look at it are standing -- it should be at eye height or, if not eye height, at least not "lean over and peer through the top part of your bifocals and then crane your neck back so you can see through the lower half of your bifocals" height - as the guy in white shorts is being forced to do.

In summary, a badly designed booth for this function, unless that function was "quick information shot and move on." This booth is designed to NOT allow you to linger and deeply explore the product.

There is no marketing director here trying to maximize anything, because there doesn't need to be. They only need to let you convince yourself that Desmos is cool - it is its own selling point. The website is free and doesn't have a large initial classroom purchase required, as TI does.

As a classroom, this booth is crap, too. There's nowhere for people to get comfortable. There's a giant graphic with some expression art. The displays / workstations are placed too low without any chairs so students have to type at weird angles. If the intent was for people standing, there should be some podiums so they can set down their devices and use both hands. If the intent was for people to sit, then the tables are at the right height, but there are no chairs.

This would be a horrible "classroom" for teacher/guide or for students.

BOOTH SCORE: 3 out of 10. (or 8 out of 10, depending on intent)
CLASSROOM SCORE:  1 out of 10.

But I guess I don't see things in the same way as other people do.

Oh dear! RT @calvinballing: @Desmos and TI at #NCTMNOLA. Which looks more like a 21st century classroom? pic.twitter.com/SgcWBPUgSu
— Christopher (@Trianglemancsd) April 13, 2014

Volumes

Thanks to a sale at Jo-Anne Fabrics, I got this heavy-weight craft paper, 100 sheets of 12"x12" for about 5 bucks. Unfortunately, they were out of heavy weight linen for fighting tunics and cotton duck for banners. Satisfy one addiction, develop patience for the other.

Print the base functions.

Shells.

Same function photographed with foil crane. Looks creepy, doesn't it? Like Giant Spider in a Colosseum model.

Cross-Sections

Those Seven Myths of Education

Christodoulou's seven myths:
1 – Facts prevent understanding, 2 – Teacher-led instruction is passive, 3 – The 21st century fundamentally changes everything, 4 – You can always just look it up, 5 – We should teach transferable skills, 6 – Projects and activities are the best way to learn, 7 – Teaching knowledge is indoctrination

She's pretty much nailed it. Here's my take on it.

1 – Facts prevent understanding

Actually, there can be no understanding without facts.

If I don't know that 8*7=56, I can't do much arithmetic without a calculator - and that means I have no understanding. I can't realize when I've punched the wrong value in the calculator or hit the wrong key.

If I don't understand distributive property, I can't do much algebra, and I can't multiply 102 * 57 in my head. Knowing those things means that I can take them a few steps beyond  the simplistic and apply them to much more complex things.

If I lack facts, then I will fall prey to misinformation. I will believe martinlutherking.org because it looks okay and says some things definitively. Facts that I know are my only shield against lies I'm told.

We'll work together. Pull !

2 – Teacher-led instruction is passive, or "Collaboration is the only way because the students will discover their own knowledge and it will be more powerful for them; they'll be engaged and learn more." 

I recall a very smart kid named Chris who was always first ... with the wrong answers. He would catch on quickly, but he had a way of speaking that other students had learned to trust and so now, they would all have the wrong idea. Once that got in their heads, it was quite difficult to change it.

It's the same thing that happens when Jenny McCarthy opens her mouth about vaccines. Or when a person holds a politically extreme position (left or right, no matter). The idea is fixed. As the teacher, you need to make sure that the right information gets out first.  You need to give them the mental shield against misinformation.

For me, it boils down to this question, "Who should be teaching the kids? Should it be Chris, who is learning this for the first time or me, the teacher, who knows what's going on?"

New teachers take note: The school is paying you $40k+ for a reason ... you have several more years of coursework and understanding.

What are you waiting for?  You don't have to talk for forty minutes straight but you are the recognized keeper of knowledge here; you have studied, written, been tested, researched and spent time at this. Some of what you have learned needs to be transferred.

3 – The 21st century fundamentally changes everything

No, it doesn't. You will be dealing with fundamentally the same kinds of minds that you went to school with. They have the same fears and needs, the same hopes and desires, the same weaknesses and strengths.

Sure, there are more toys in their pockets, but you're probably just as addicted to them. If it messes with your mind or distracts you endlessly, it will have the same effects on the students.

The tools are different now, but the learning is the same, the goals are the same, and the pitfalls are the same.  The kids are hormonal and angsty just like you were, pressured and anxious and worried about college or girls or boys ... or a girl or a boy. When they get out, they'll still need math, science, English, history, Arts, languages.

Just like you did.

4 – You can always just look it up.

You can only look something up if you know that you don't know, and you can't check your source if you know nothing about the topic.


What's wrong with the following story I just made up?

Old man Smith was a curmudgeonly sort but happy, outgoing and pleasant. On this particular day, he had left his warm bed at 5:30 in the morning to mount his harvester and head out to the fields. He had hoped to get all of his haying done by noon but the baler was giving him trouble and the fifth-wheel on the hay wagon went flat. 

Nothing, grammatically. In RealLife, though, you can't bale wet hay or it burns down the barn, you don't use a harvester for haying, there isn't a fifth-wheel on a hay wagon and it isn't a tire so it won't go flat, and "curmudgeonly" is the wrong word in that context. How much did you look up? And what did you look up? And where?

Or did you do just as every student does ... read it and move on, assuming that everything was fine?

If you don't know something, you can't be expected to look up and fix what you don't know is wrong. If you don't know that sin(4°) is positive but sin(4) is negative, how would you know if you got it wrong? What should you look up? Type sin(4) into Google or wolfram and you get

Must be the right answer - the internet said so.

5 – We should teach transferable skills

The skills that I learned in school more than 40 years ago were pretty basic and I transferred them to the new world pretty easily. There's a reason that everyone still requires math, science, English, history, Arts, languages.

Teach skills. Math skills, writing skills, whatever your discipline requires. They'll transfer just fine.

6 – Projects and activities are the best way to learn


If you have no idea what you are doing, how are you supposed to start? How do you get over that hurdle caused by a lack of knowledge?

Start with a transfer from the sage to the students. Then build them up from total noobs to something just a bit better. Now you can have them work on a project but remember the one salient fact ...

Work is different than learning.

Don't expect them to teach themselves and then accomplish some big project. They need you to do your part first.

Not sure that any of this year's graduates
fit this particular mold.

7 – Teaching knowledge is indoctrination

No. Teaching lies is indoctrination. Deliberately teaching misinformation is indoctrination. Forcing your students to spout your political views or parrot your religious teachings is indoctrination.

Critical thinking looks similar to and is often confused with an attack on indoctrination. If they challenge you, then you're doing it right.

Don't confuse acculturation with indoctrination. The kids also need to know how the world works and what is expected of them. It's not evil to explain what kinds of behavior with result in being fired.

Public schools are rarely guilty of the brain-washing they're accused of. Private schools do it constantly but since it matches the expectations of the parents, it's apparently okay.

I enjoyed our little chat. thanks for stopping by.

Workfare is Detention for Adults.

And just as effective at getting the building cleaned.

This little meme has been going around and it's obvious to me that no one is really thinking ... really using those critical thinking skills that they always bitch at teachers for not teaching.

Should able-bodied do work for their money?

First indication this is silly: the implication is that people should only be paid for their work. Does that mean that, in order to get benefits, they now have to be given a government job, with all the benefits, rights and responsibilities ... which then means they aren't technically unemployed anymore ... which means that the right-wing demagogues who posted this are agitating for more people on the government payroll?


Are we as stupid as that?

No. 

I'm sure that some people who are out of work could do those jobs quite well and they should be able to apply for a government job if they want, but to fire the current workers in order to give work to the unemployed seems circular to me.

That's until you get to those who can't do the job ... then this idea is frankly nuts.

Have you ever supervised detention at school? When you have untrained or unwilling workers (even moderately unwilling), you get sloppy work and no attention to detail. You're worse off than when you began because now you need someone competent to go back and redo the job properly.

Of course, you also need more supervisors to check whether they've worked "hard enough" or done the job "well enough", meaning that you now are paying your current workers to be management and your new workers, too. And you still haven't really gotten the job done well.

If you decide to fire all of your current public works employees and replace them with unemployed, you haven't really accomplished anything except adding to your current problems.

The constant turnover of staff would be a nightmare and the logistical headaches of this idea make it unworkable. No business owner in his right mind would ever accept this idea.

But, hey, all anti-welfare folks, keep pretending you have a clue.

How much math do we use at Work?

Shawn Cornally writes about this piece in the Atlantic.

So the survey results are out ... no one uses complex math in RealLife^tm, so we probably shouldn't be requiring it of all the students in high school.

These numbers alone aren’t an open and shut case against teaching complex math to most high school students. But they do suggest that what we teach today has little relationship to the broad demands of the job market, and that we should at least be conscious of the possibility that we’re putting educational road blocks in front of students without a practical application for them.

I have a few observations about this rather simplistic interpretation, including a rebuttal of those who, like Shawn Cornally, feel that the problem lies in the way math was taught.

Cornally: There’s a case against CRAPPILY teaching complex math to high schoolers. The adverb there is really important. What that graph really means is that the way people were taught math disables them from ever actually using it.

Okay, let's start there. Cornally is a SBG guy through and through and that's fine. It works for him. But to assume that what works for him is the only possible way to teach ignores that lots of teachers are very good but never bothered with SBG. This graph says that large percentages of people never use complex math in their daily jobs ... it does not say that they can't or didn't learn it.

As for that graph:

22% use any of the advanced math skills.  It did not say WHICH of the skills were used, how often, or whether the job required it but they didn't know ... so they answered "No."

Let's look at a breakdown (and no snarky comments about the color choice ... whoops, too late.)

Of the 14% who used geometry, there is no indication of which of the geometry skills each person used. Let's arbitrarily designate the broad topics of geometry as A,B,C,D,E, and F. This person uses A,B,and C. That person uses D,E, and F. Both respond that they use geometry. A third person uses the ideas but not in any formal way; he's a mechanic who needs to keep certain parts perpendicular to other parts, or needs to maintain a 5° camber on that steering linkage and uses the "Diagonals of a rectangle are equal in length." Is this "Using Geometry"? Not many mechanics would think of it that way and most would say "No." What are the locations of the bolt hole in a seven bolt pattern with a diameter of 11" inches? If you can't say that but you can program the CNC milling machine, does that count? Despite all that, 30% of high-skill blue collar jobs use geometry.

Second, is enough "No" answers a valid argument for eliminating Geometry, anyway? I don't think so. Just because you don't formally use it doesn't mean you don't use it.

Third, I am of the firm belief that students will learn many things while in school but forget a lot of that after graduation. Isn't it's better to require Alg1, Geometry and Alg2 and have students forget the hardest aspects of those three courses (unless they specifically use them) than to only teach them basic math and have them forget the hardest aspects of that?

Fourth. I debate the idea that most kids can't do Alg1, Geometry, and Algebra2. Most students can learn something and many who thought they couldn't realize that they actually could. I have students constantly tell me that they "hate math but they like my class" and then, in the middle of something, "Oh, I get it!" Regardless of whether they ever use that specific skill again in a formal setting, they have learned something; usually the calculation methods get lost in time but the concepts remain and that's good enough for me. If they every truly "need" it, the re-learning is far easier than starting fresh.

Is the small likelihood of total mastery a reason to deny students the chance to learn something of each topic? Shouldn't all kids have the chance? I think they should because it's the small spark that gets ignited into a flame of interest in a field they didn't even know existed. If you refuse to let them stretch, they'll stagnate and wither.

Both is better than just one.

Fifth. "Here's How Little Math Americans Actually Use at Work" is the title. What about in life? Shouldn't ALL students be required to take probability and statistics, if only to understand how incredibly stupid the anti-vaccination movement is and how utterly wrong Wakefield's work was? Shouldn't all students be taught how to recognize the true risks behind everyday behaviors so they can judge their responses appropriately? Why should "Work" be the only measuring stick for value of an education? Isn't a knowledge of Dante and Shakespeare worth the effort?

Sixth. Who the hell says that THIS kid isn't going to be one of those who uses trig every day of his life? How do you know that all these kids are going to fail at advanced math without giving them a shot at it?

"These numbers alone aren’t an open and shut case against teaching complex math to most high school students." You're including Algebra Freaking One in "Complex Math"? 95% of kids can learn and understand algebra 1 by the end of 10th grade, geometry by the end of 11th. 100% of anything is stupid, but throwing out several perfectly reasonable courses because McDonalds cashiers and administrative assistants "don't use math" is idiotic.

If you applied this same reasoning to every discipline, you wouldn't have any education above the 8th grade.

• Certainly poetry would be out. Milton? Chaucer? Odyssey? Short Stories? Poe? Wharton? Dickenson? Useless to most American jobs. Research papers? Gone. Creative writing? Most Americans don't read or write anything nowadays so we shouldn't teach either?
• History? Forget about it. It's in the past. Nobody uses that in their jobs.
• Science? Just as useless for most American jobs as Math is. I mean, really. Chemistry? Unless you're building a bomb or something and we can certainly do without that. Biology is another useless field.
• Languages? Spanish is the only language you'll ever possibly need and not the kind they teach in schools. You'll swear words and a lot of macho mixed in with your Spanglish. Grammar is only an impediment.
• Art? Music? Nobody cares about any of that except artists and musicians and none of them has a job that makes any money ...
• Logic? We don't need anything other than than "Reductio ad absurdum", "Ad Hominem", and "Gun Control is a Slippery Slope to Banning All Guns and That Just Leads to a Police State."

Fortunately for all of us, the opinions of The Atlantic isn't relevant. Leave education decisions to the people who are qualified to make them. The Sociology professor at Northeastern who performed the study isn't at fault here; he reported what he found. It's Jordan Weissmann, an associate editor at The Atlantic, who came up with this piece of brilliance.

Another student whining about School

From Dangerously Irrelevant comes this sad tale of woe and student repression that needs another point of view.

Here's the story. A student named Jack Hostager went to the "Coastal America Student Summit on the Oceans and Coasts. So far, I'm loving the sound of this.

[It] was indisputably the best learning experience I have ever had. I learned more than I could have ever learned in a classroom about how the planet works, ways in which humans depend on and impact the ocean, and efforts being undertaken to conserve them. 

This is awesome, though I have to point out that few classrooms will ever be the same as a Student Summit on the Oceans and Coasts because they are not designed to be so specific.  Rather, school curricula are usually designed to be an underlying foundation that provides the students with the knowledge and skills to appreciate and learn from something such as this.  

Equally important, I discovered how to work well with others, connect with people, be persuasive, speak in front of an audience, answer questions under pressure, juggle competing priorities, and follow through with a project.

Okay, but hardly new in the annals of education. Overall, he's still on a good theme here, though a bit misguided about what makes for effective education. Then he gets off track:

These all sound like skills that every student should have. Yet because I didn’t practice them in a classroom, I was punished by education’s systems of grading for this. 

Punished? Because you learned something while not being in school? Did you think somehow that school was the only place you could possibly learn?

When I got back to school, my grades had dropped (some considerably) since I missed a few assignments and a test. It was as if the whole experience meant nothing because I learned the wrong thing. But it would have been irrelevant even if it directly related to what I was studying because I still would have had to make up the work, listen to a lecture, and eventually take a test.

The main thing: You missed a test and some assignments. What did you expect your grade would be based on? Random behavior rubric? A report on "What I learned at the Conference"? If the teacher had said, "That sounds like a neat symposium, you get an A" he would be okay in your book? Instead, he said "That sounds like a neat symposium but irrelevant to our study of the Kreb Cycle and so you still have to take that test" and that makes him a bastard?

This symposium was irrelevant to the course and that is what you are graded on.

It may be relevant to your life (sounds like it will be and THAT's why you should have done it) but it was irrelevant to the course. 

Even if it were directly relevant, you can't expect a teacher to give you a grade based on self-reported and vaguely stated "learning" from a conference that the teacher did not attend. As much as possible, grades need to be based on objective standards not on participation rubrics and happy feelings.

Shut up and study hard.

But, please continue:

After returning inspired and ready to change the world only to be thrust back into the invariable cycle of desks, worksheets, textbooks, and lockers, education’s expectation for me hit me painfully hard. I realized that apparently my job is to shut up and study hard. If I’m so inclined, I can go out for a sport or join a club, but my schoolwork should trump all. 

Now THAT is funny. You went to a single conference and when you returned, you expect that the entire school would have changed to reflect and resemble a two-week student symposium. What did you expect, "Sure, you can skip all this material" or "Jack went to a conference, so we're changing the curriculum to match"?

I’m not supposed to contribute anything noteworthy to the world, but instead lay low and consume it until after I’ve graduated. Sure, adults applaud when we do something great outside of school. But ultimately school only cares if it meets some curriculum standard that can be measured. Oh, and it has to be the one we are studying right now, and it has to be part of an assignment that’s going in the gradebook. If not, I don’t get credit and therefore it’s a waste of my time.

No one is stopping you from contributing anything. Knock yourself out.

I certainly won't hold you back.

If I seem underwhelmed by your obvious brilliance, it is because that brilliance isn't so apparent. You aren't the first student to come back inspired from a summit and you won't be the last. What will set you apart from the rest is what you do from now on.

Will you spend your time whining about oppression by The Man or will you actually do something noteworthy?

Are you one of the crazy ones?

There's a big difference between being a rebel because you know something better or have done something important and being a rebel because you're immature.

Certainly, I wouldn't give you credit for something you haven't done. When I give grades, I do so based on things that I have direct knowledge of, like the tests that I write. I don't give credit for attending a conference I know nothing about, because that's what the students, parents, and school demand.

The grade is something you earn, not something I give. As best as possible, it reflects what you know and have learned.

I am required to address a certain number of curriculum standards, not because I have this random, indeligible list of checkboxes but because I know that students from this Algebra I class are going to be expected to know various things before going to Algebra II, before attending symposia, or before they can "contribute something noteworthy."

Was this symposium a waste of time? For you, it might have been. If the only thing that makes this type of experience worthwhile is a grade in the gradebook, I truly feel pity for you. If, on the other hand, you spent the summit "messing with perl" ...

Leap of Logic: Romeo and Juliet Updated

That's right.  Putting a new, flashy cover on the book will mean more teenagers will read it.

No kidding.  Adding nifty-neato-graphics hasn't worked for any math book written in the last century, but maybe Shakespeare is different? Understand that I'm all for kids reading Shakespeare ... and I've often said that if parents really knew the crudity, sex and violence in  his plays, kids would never be allowed to read them. I'm just not sure that the problem is the cover. Anyway ...

ABC News breathlessly tells us that: Sexy Covers Lure “Twilight” Teens to Capital-L Literature

"Yes, that is the Bard’s bad boy on the cover of the new Penguin edition of the classic Shakespeare tragedy."

"No frills or lace. Instead, Romeo sports a white tank top and a three-day stubble. He still talks funny, but publishers hope the catchier cover will at least get young people to give the Elizabethan prose a try. Shakespeare owes a debt to the “Hunger Games” trilogy, the “Twilight” series and Harry Potter. The runaway success of those series taught publishers that young people weaned on videos are not afraid to pick up old-fashioned books, some of which can go pound for pound with “Moby Dick” or “War and Peace.”

Really?

Shakespeare owes a debt?  Romeo and Juliet is somehow an analogous book for Harry Potter fans? A kid reads Hunger Games and just naturally picks up "War and Peace"? The "funny language" issues aren't going to get in the way either.

Has this idiot ever read Romeo and Juliet?

Not an issue.

Romeo (brash 17 year-old) wants to marry Rosaline but she says no. He falls for 13-year-old Juliet at a party even though he has no idea who she is, but he tells her he loves her on sight ... which means she realizes that she loves him right back.

If it stopped there, you might be forgiven for thinking of this as a romance, albeit somewhat creepy because of the whole age thing. (Think a high school senior wanting to marry a freshman.)

Tybalt wants to murder Romeo for coming to the party. Benvolio and Mercutio make vague threats and Romeo arrives but tries to stay out of a fight, so Tybalt kills Mercutio and then Romeo kills Tybalt. It's still a romance, though, because Romeo sleeps with Juliet that night ... because sex with a child the night after you meet her is so romantic.

Romeo has to skip town because of the killing thing, and since Juliet is only momentarily upset by the murder of her cousin, she fakes suicide to get out of an arranged marriage of her own. Romeo thinks the fake is real so he commits suicide and then Juliet commits suicide when she finds him lying there.

How heart-warming.  "And the fathers lived happily ever after in harmony."

Puts me in mind of this eCard which has been going around recently:

Texas Republicans are Against Higher-Order Thinking

Don't think for Yourself.

From the party platform:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Because nobody wants you to challenge your fixed beliefs and because everybody knows that parental authority is sacrosanct. New state motto: "Don't Think For Yourself."

Oh, and make sure you use the right books:

We believe that the SBOE ... responsibilities must include maintaining sole authority over all curricula content and the state adoption of all educational materials. This process must include public hearings.

Until such time as all texts are required to be approved by the SBOE, each ISD that uses non-SBOE approved instructional materials must verify them as factually and historically correct.

 Whose definitions of "facts" and "historically correct" are to be used is carefully not specified.

We support school subjects with emphasis on the Judeo-Christian principles upon which America was founded and which form the basis of America’s legal, political and economic systems. We support curricula that are heavily weighted on original founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and Founders’ writings.

Yup, like the math of the Three-Fifths Compromise? Of course, if we only look at the original writings and the original founding documents, we'd have to ignore the amendments like the 1st and 2nd ones, wouldn't we?

Colleges' Math - Science Death March

The group that made a YouTube
video denigrating the education
they were ignoring while they made it
-- and then wondering
why they couldn't understand
the material they were ignoring.

But maybe there's a reason that so many drop out?

But, it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.

So what? There's a reason why they made those courses so hard -- so 75% of the freshmen WOULD drop into something else. They need the worthless chaff to switch and leave the wheat behind.

The STEM courses have always been difficult if your preparation

• consisted of "fun" and "dropping eggs" and stupid computer games pretending to teach.
• involved "student-directed learning", standards-based grading based on vague rubrics instead of knowledge and ability, and open-ended questions with no middle, beginning or point.
• didn't include calculus, chemistry, and physics.
• focused on inquiry-style explorations that managed to avoid inquiring or knowledge.
• didn't involve 40-page research papers and English teachers who dropped the grade by a LETTER for each grammatical mistake on an in-class, timed essay.
• focused on computer usage and gaming rather than programming. (Hello World!)

I love the appeal to pity "a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out."

If you can't learn from her,
you need to change your major.

It's hard. It's supposed to be hard. None of these careers has all that much room for error and few have much room for whiny crybabies. There's a LOT to learn. Relying solely on a Google search and a Wikipedia article while building a 2000' skyscraper is dubious at best. If you can't hack it, get out of the way of those who can.

Face facts. Stop lying to yourself.  Tell your momma to go home; this is your time to make a decision. Work for a degree or don't. There are lots of people who destroy their health and hole up like an anchoress to get a degree in this stuff. Slide your lazy, drunken, over-sexed butt into something more your speed.

If you can't put some effort into the $35,000 /year you're spending (or borrowing), why should anyone care about you and your obvious lack of critical thinking and adult decision-making skills?

Atari Founder will do what no one else can

At least, he thinks so.

Atari Founder to Create Game to Reduce High School to 1 Year: Nolan Bushnell thinks we can make better use of technology and what we know about learning to streamline high school from 4 years down to 1. A complete high school education in one year? Although details are sketchy, Bushnell plans to utilize his experience as a game designer to fix, what he calls, “broken computers and maladjusted teachers.”

Which is a very cool idea. I mean, think of it ... a whole lot of 13 and 14 year-olds who have finished their high school education and are now looking for jobs. Because what more does this country need than ill-prepared 13ers running around thinking they know everything? (They already do that but this program would put a stamp of approval on the whole charade.)

Hummmmm.

This project, known as Speed to Learn, incentivizes learning by providing students with interesting payoffs. Good work could earn one a nap or time with a laser cutter, for example. At an education summit in New York, Bushnell described the program as arcade-style videogames combined with aerobic activity for the purpose of education.

Interesting choice that. A nap or time on a laser cutter. Wonder which one the kids will choose? At first, the laser cutter. That'll get boring quickly because it's online and no one wants to give a bunch of 13ers the really good materials. They'll just take a nap ... or go outside ... or play real video games that are fun.

Hold on, how's he going to pay for the materials and the $100,000 laser cutter? I thought this was going to save us money? Are the kids doing this at home? From the WinXP machine in the corner of the kitchen?

While visiting schools, Bushnell noticed that up to 15% of available terminals were unusable due to various computer problems, a number that he aims to reduce with the new system.

Well, THAT certainly rings a bell. Going onto the cloud won't do much for that dream if the computer itself is crap, though. Or if the network is down. Or it's Vermont, where half of the state is still dialing in to log on.

The educational speed gains will come mainly as a result of the unique way of rewarding students for successfully accomplishing their tasks, such as obtaining a solution to a problem in a specified period of time:

Ahhh. A modern-day version of a Skinner box.  As long as we're all pigeons, it should work out just fine.

“We’ve been in hundreds of classrooms with 40,000 kids. We are currently teaching subjects 10 times faster. We believe that when we roll this up to full curriculum we’ll be able to teach a full career of high school in less than a year. And we think we’ll be able to do that by the end of next year.”

I can solve your problems
with a magic box.
In one year, all of your students
will graduate with honors.
But not yet.

Well, let me know when you have something, Nolan.  Be sure to do some testing, though.  Just saying you're "Like Salman Kahn" and proclaiming the next coming of Jesus Christ isn't enough. "We are currently teaching subjects ten times faster" means nothing if those kids aren't learning anything.

"When we roll this up to a full curriculum"?  How about getting one course first? You know, a beta version?

I'm sick of computer guys assuming that they have the answer to all of education's problems just because they managed to write a computer program once. Online learning is a sham. Video games don't teach math. The kids are getting screwed.

"Deus Ex Machina" was a theatrical trick in Ancient Greece and it's a theatrical trick now.

"Bushnell has said that he’s been working on Speed to Learn for over ten years, but so far there are no demos or screenshots to examine. However, if he intends to stick to his ambitious launch deadline, those should be appearing in the very near future."

At this rate, I'm expecting Duke Nukem Forever to come out first. The kids will really enjoy that and they might learn something about the promises Broad and Gates and Bushnell make and recognize them for the false prophets they are.

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."