Worst Play in Football

Catch. Kneel. End Rivalry game with WIN!
Or Not.
Really, the choice is yours.

Vermont ... Number One in Some Things.

Hobby - Model making

This one only cost $85,000 to build.

Not Everyone should go to College

And we probably don't need more money dumped into the laps of the drunks and fools. "The best way to assure quality in education is to make them pay for it."

I'm ambivalent. If only there were a way to ensure that the money wasn't being wasted. I know many of my students who skip college should reconsider but have money issues. What I can't predict is whether they'd fall into the immaturity trap.

What I did on my Summer Vacation

Someone asked. You can't see me in this clip -- I'm on the other side of the field. Still, it's a blast.

Younger students get ADHD

From CuriousCat Engineering Blog:
Nearly 1 million Children Potentially Misdiagnosed with ADHD in the USA

Nearly 1 million children in the United States are potentially misdiagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder simply because they are the youngest – and most immature – in their kindergarten class, according to new research by, Todd Elder, a Michigan State University economist.

Some of the numbers:

The youngest kindergartners were 60 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than the oldest children in the same grade. Similarly, when that group of classmates reached the fifth and eighth grades, the youngest were more than twice as likely to be prescribed stimulants. Overall, the study found that about 20 percent – or 900,000 – of the 4.5 million children currently identified as having ADHD likely have been misdiagnosed.

Psychiatrists and educators must be more careful. When you're looking for a reason why Johnny can't sit still, you're likely to see the reason you most want to see or the one you're just had hours of inservice about.

RTTT contenders hoist with their own petard

In his article, Why I'm Feeling Sorry for Sec. Duncan, Rick Hess laid out a few of the problems with the process.

I'm going to snip some.

program design was not equal to the weight it was being asked to bear (what with its murky criteria for judge selection, ambiguous scoring system, focus on promises and grant-writing rather than accomplishment, and the remarkable emphasis that Secretary Duncan placed on union "buy-in" in round one).

This led to "bizarre round two RTT results" and Duncan could "take the scores at face value or he could override them." There were conflicting results when it came to ranking state data systems, clarity and strength of charter laws, teacher furlough policy, with the RTTT "winners" running close to last nationally.

Then there's New Jersey. They "finished out of the money by three points due to [paperwork mistake] and [being] savaged by a reviewer who repeatedly fixated on NJEA opposition." That's funny. Hidebound bureaucratic nit-picking. Who'd a thunk it?

Gov. Christie's take? "The first part of it is the mistake of putting the wrong piece of paper in," he said. "But the second part is, does anybody in Washington, D.C. have a lick of common sense? Pick up the phone and ask us for the number."  Oh, Governor.  I feel your pain. Do you feel mine?

"Louisiana and Colorado had set the standard when it came to walking the walk on teacher quality: 'Unlike top contenders Colorado and Louisiana, California did not pass statewide legislation that would mandate a complete redesign of teacher evaluation systems.'" The judges' verdict? Two reviewers trashed Colorado on teacher quality. Whoops. And less than a month ago, Duncan described Louisiana as "leading the way" with data systems that monitor teacher preparation programs and student performance. Double whoops.

Other words and phrases: "furious" "they've been steamrolled" "winners made empty promises" "played fast-and-loose with the facts." "can't fathom how the judges made their determinations."

"Duncan strategically skipped over Hawaii's current lack of a permanent state chief, a reliable statewide data system, or any substantial record of accomplishment on teacher quality--and the fact that a new governor will take office in January."

Isn't that ironic? There seems to be a problem with evaluations of states and their worthiness for federal money.

States that overhauled their systems (for the good? No one knows.) lost out to other states that didn't. In the graphic at right, you can see a few of these reforms. Were any of them successful? We don't really know. In education, success is measured in longer terms than one or two years. There isn't a good way to know jack diddly squat about a reform until the dust has had time to settle. Merit pay, charter schools, new standards like Common Core (which some are already decrying before they've even been implemented) - will they work?

"Who knows? Who cares? They're not OUR kids. Our kids go to private school."

One of the big criticisms is that the states haven't developed an evaluation system for teachers and that teachers should be happy to accept merit pay and bet as much as $10,000 on the results of state tests that kids don't really care about. How's the state evaluation system working?

The same people are now complaining that the "program design was not equal to the task", "murky criteria", "ambiguous scoring system," "focus on promises and grant-writing rather than accomplishment." Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

It's similar to the way a lot of administrators reach conclusions about the worthiness of faculty. Ambiguous, murky criteria. Skip over important details. Fixate on unimportant ones. Lacking common sense. Poor evaluation design. But I'm supposed to wager my paycheck on that?

States are complaining that judges make mistakes, unfairly fixate on meaningless stats, slam imperfect paperwork, ignore their own metrics, and give money to the wrong people by any measurement. Duncan could "take the results at face value or override them?" Based on what -- his vast experience as a teacher? Minutes or hours?

There's so much irony here, I could just ... , well ... , hoist.

Last bit of politics before School

In a last burst of politics before we start laughing at ourselves again, there comes this little video laughing at homophobia.

Hearsay.

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” – Robert McCloskey

A Little History is in Order.

From Sean Linnane,: "Newt Gingrich believes that the choice to build this structure so close to Ground Zero was a political decision designed to send a statement and thus must be viewed in that context, rather than simply in the context of whether a house of worship should be allowed to be built (there are over 100 mosques in New York City and over 1000 in the United States)."

I find this interesting. Because Newt believes he understands what he thought they meant but didn't say (sounds like projection) we must therefore condemn the mosque. But what if he's wrong? What if he's blowing smoke about the meaning of Cordoba and the mosque built there 1300 years ago. Even Wikipedia doesn't claim that the mosque celebrated the capture of the city and even it points out that the mosque was built some 70 years after the Moors conquered the city and was built on the site of a church they BOUGHT from the Christians. Hardly an "up-yours" to the white folk. It also mentions that there is no mosque there now, only the Catholic Cathedral that was built partly inside it.  Again, not the symbol of all-powerful Islam if you haven't owned it for a thousand years is it?

But I'm not a history major and I don't trust Wikipedia if I don't already know the answer so here is a good explanation of the problem with Newt Gingrich's version of history from a medieval scholar.

Save Burlington Coat Factory

Join the demonstration today. NYC can't afford to lose this landmark.



Later update:

NYEducator picked up on this post, calling it ironic but cryptic. That was intentional, but it occurs to me that someone else (an idiot, demagogue or asshole, perhaps) might miss the sarcasm and consider me a fellow opponent of the Muslim community center and mosque.

Let me be more clear. Being cryptic is fun but this is a more serious issue.

"Ground zero", "two blocks away," "Mosque," "radical Islamists," "Islam is terrorists," are all misleading in their political spin of this thing. I honestly don't get why this is an issue. Let someone take an old run-down, empty, decrepit building and rebuild it - the Amish food center and the Roadhouse won't mind the extra traffic and God knows the area needs development. The University of Phoenix isn't expanding into another brick and mortar building any time soon.

Let the Muslim leader who's been on peace missions with Secretary Rice and others build a Muslim version of the nearby Y or the church just over on Church street. If he wants to compete with St. John's University a few blocks away, more the merrier.

Just because Pataki et.al. massively screwed up at Ground Zero doesn't mean that everything and everyone in the whole bloody city needs to stop and wait before building anything. I feel tremendous sorrow and have much empathy for the survivors and relatives of the victims, but they should not have veto power in this or any other issue.

Secondly, we must remember that those who did this were Muslims -- Sunni Muslims, not Shi'ites (the difference is huge, bigger than the difference between Protestants and Catholics) -- originating from and funded by members of the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia. Where's the outrage about that? Are we demanding that the Saudis stop selling us oil and that the Saudi Mission to the UN be closed (It's only a block away from Ground Zero ! OMFG!)?

Come on, people. Islam is a religion practiced by millions of Americans, covered under the Constitution of the United States of America. It is not, and never has been, shorthand for "a group of killers and terrorists." If you want crazy religions, try Scientology.

Just because a soldier goes crazy at Fort Hood and happened to be a Muslim doesn't make my neighbors bloodthirsty killers. Just because the guy who got fired from the CT beer distributor and shot his coworkers was Baptist? ... was ... well, hell I don't know. I do know he wasn't Muslim or it would have been trumpeted from the minarets of Fox News at least eight times a day.

I'm sorry for your losses, people, but it's time to stop the retributions against people who were not responsible. Rebuild your lives and rebuild your city.

Even later update:

an anonymous guest wrote:

Nobody has called them 'evil doers'. I believe the argument is that the proposed construction of an Islamic center 200 meters from the edge of the crater where 3,000 innnocents were killed by self identified Islamic jihadists is, just a tad, insensitive. Considering that libs routinely lecture on real and invented cultural sensitivity from a self-proclaimed position of great moral authority, Curmudgeon's post was even more ironic than he/she intended.

Well nobody but Newton Gringrich, Catholic (newly made because he's running for President) and family man (he's had three, so far), FOX News and the entire GOP:

Gingrich showed up on a Fox morning show and talked about why the "radical Islamists" who want to build the cultural center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, who want to show they can "build a mosque next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by Islamists," must be stopped.

Oooooh, talking point. How is this desire to build insensitive?

Is it the distance? Would 300 meters be okay? Or are we nitpicking here?
Is it that the crater still exists? - certainly not their fault. Take it up with Pataki.
Is it that they are Muslim and thus are identical in body, mind, spirit and attitude to the whackjobs from Saudi Arabia? Can't be that because they're not.
Is it that the time is too close and the wounds still raw? If so, when will the relatives get over it? Or will we hear from them until they die that office space and retail space within a mile of the sometime to be built tower can't be sold to Muslims, rented to Muslims, used by Muslims, viewed by Muslims -- all because of "sensitive" New Yorkers? Can there be a Muslim center in Manhattan anywhere, at any time in the future? Should we put up segregated signs, perhaps?

If so, when and how far away will those undesirables need to be?

Wed. Update:

The Daily Show points out that the Head of the group that will provide funding for this project, the one demonized on Fox News (but not by name) as being Radical Islamist, is none other than the largest shareholder of FOX News Corp, besides Murdoch. "Fox News is either evil or stupid for not mentioning that Alwaleed bin Talal is News Corp.'s largest shareholder."

Ain't that a twist?

Technology and the Digital Natives

We hear all the time about our digital natives, their need for 21st century skills and their total immersion in 21st century technology. This morning, the following thought occurred to me:

Our kids don't need any training / help / instruction / encouragement with social networks and tech. They've got that in spades already. What they need is to control their social life and learn the unsocial 21st century skills.

My son was sitting on the coach with his wireless laptop, playing World of Warcraft with Facebook open in another window, his band's Myspace open in another and an IM session running ... then his phone rang. The TV was showing iCarly or Spongebob.

If anything, kids need to be pulled back and calmed down when it comes to social media and web 2.0. They've stayed at the banquet table too long and gorged themselves on every privacy exposure they could find. There are ways to reduce your public exposure, but many settings were deliberately left obfuscated so kids wouldn't understand what they were throwing away. Marketing, of course.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt in Wall Street Journal: "In the future, the passage from teenage life to adulthood will include an automatic name change 'in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.' "

I don't think it needs to be that way and it's not too late. Everyone should simply change their names now on all social media accounts. As I said last month, put up a fake persona. We all need to do that: our social life gets a fake persona ("Harold the Magnificent"), work and serious life gets the true stuff, and never the twain shall meet.

Back in the classroom, what our kids really need for the "real world" and for "work in the 21st century" is to learn and make better use of the non-social tools. You know: spreadsheets, word documents, email, writing, publishing, graphic arts, WolframAlpha and calculators, online references and other tools ... whether Excel, Google Docs, blogs, OpenOffice, forums, wikis, etc.  They need to consider their words, slow down their minds and stop blaring out any random fluttering thought.

We need a catchier word for it. though. What's the opposite of "social media?"

Anti-social ... no.
Non-social ... that doesn't seem right either. It's serious but needs to be shared.
Web 2.x ... not descriptive enough.
unsocial ... oh sure, make a geek joke, why don't you?

Weight of the Argument

from Scott Macleod (Dangerously Irrelevant) comes this angst-filled twitter post:

and he asks: "Hmmm… What’s in there that’s not available in at least a dozen places on the Web for free?"

Well, organization, for one thing -- it's one book instead of "a dozen places on the Web" for each topic. Location, for another. Accuracy, for a third. Fourth, cost. Lastly, bias.

I'm all for free textbooks for the school, but those who write them occasionally want to get paid for their work. If the school buys a textbook, they have similar editions for all the students in the class and assurance that someone has vetted them for accuracy, minimal bias, and clarity for the level of student. It's also free to the student. The cost to the school is spread over several years. Online resources are currently too expensive or scattered and useless.

Bias is similarly easier with a book - Howard Zinn was a socialist. Knowing that meant you could easily work around it or extol it but you'd always be dealing with a known quantity. Websites change too often for you to trust them without verifying.

Hoo boy, trust. What if that website you linked to in August is kaput and serving ads in December when the parent tries to follow it -- or worse, gets squatted on by Stormfront -- and that parent hits martinlutherking.org (NSFW) instead of the main page for the King Center (the real one). A textbook gets vetted once.

Accurate? Accuracy matters: Read here:
Technology might be the Answer but not ... for the story of the definition of Radian.

I think the iPad (or similar) will be the textbook of the future, as soon as Apple drops the ridiculous iTunes Store file limitations and opens up the platform to flash. It would be wonderful. It's the right size, has color, can run video, touch screen and type, has everything except openness. We're close but until Steve Jobs realizes the goldmine he could be sitting on, we'll still have books. He'll charge for the convenience, but it would beat paper.

Free online doesn't necessarily mean free to the student. I've noticed that free materials invariably are better and easier to use when printed - that's a cost for the student, especially if we're talking about inkjets. It always amuses me when conference people make a big noise about "saving money, paper and the environment by not printing out notes and handouts" and then you look around at all the attendees who printed everything out themselves at their expense on less efficient inkjets. 

Then, there's readability. Those textbooks that are free on the web -- I'm thinking the California initiative -- are not easily read. I'm reminded of the study comparing ease of reading of Kindle, iPad, paper and computer screen (including laptop). "iPad, Kindle, and the printed book all scored fairly high at 5.8, 5.7, and 5.6, respectively. The PC, however, scored an abysmal 3.6." Imagine if they had been working with a math book? Again, I have hopes for the iPad or a similar, but it's not quite worth it yet.

Let's pretend that we're not printing out material, just accessing it.  How trustworthy is it?  Is it "Wikipedia good?" Has it been edited recently by someone who knows the truth or is the urban legend version of history taking hold here?  Just because everyone knows that "tea partiers" are the only true patriots doesn't mean that it's a true fact. I have confidence in that printed book.

Why is the online textbook free? Is it free because it's the pdf version of the second edition, copyright 1990?

Organization is another big issue for me. The material for a typical history or even math course would be so widespread over the internet, it would be a tremendous pain to find and collate. Why should I spend that time and effort finding and verifying what the book publisher is willing to do for me? Nothing will be free but I think that iPad (click above to enlarge) holds the most promise.

Then there's linkrot. I took an online thing this summer and 1 of the links had expired and was serving ads - less than a month after the link was created. You would have to recheck everything every year to be sure that the page hadn't changed nor had any others on the same site.

Finally, there's cost. You can't carry a desktop computer. Laptops and netbooks have a serious distraction issue, they're delicate and they're tough to read because of that vertical screen. iPad shows the most promise but, starting at $499, isn't affordable by every student. With an initiative, we could supply them to every student -- cheaper than a laptop -- and escape the problems with laptops in the classroom, damage, viruses, etc.

In sum, we're close. I can taste it already. We just need a little push.

2010 Darwin Awards

Warms my heart.

"3rd Place
After walking around a marked police patrol car parked at the front door, a man walked into H&J Leather & Firearms intent on robbing the store. The shop was full of customers and a uniformed officer was standing at the counter. Upon seeing the officer, the would-be robber announced a hold-up and fired a few wild shots from a target pistol. The officer and a clerk promptly returned fire and several customers also drew their guns and fired. The robber was pronounced dead at the scene by Paramedics. Crime scene investigators located 47 expended cartridge cases in the shop. The subsequent autopsy revealed 23 gunshot wounds. Ballistics identified rounds from 7 different weapons. No one else was hurt."