Technology might be the answer, but not to this question.

Dangerously Irrelevant posted the other day

Can a computer lecture better than a human?
I’m going to prime the pump a little bit for my K12 Online presentation next week… My fifth-grade daughter’s math homework this weekend required her to find out what a radian or a grad was (hint: both are ways besides degrees to measure angles). We hit ye olde Google and quickly found this helpful (and free) learning activity from Wisconsin Online.

I'd like for all of the people reading this to follow that link and see if you see what I saw. Then come back and finish here.

Interesting that none of the viewers of this pleasant little graphic actually learned enough to notice that one of the slides in the presentation was incorrect. The commenters on Dangerously Irrelevant were all effusive in their praise of this wonderful new tool for education called technology. The commenters on wisc-online were as well - it's so much better than school!

Aside to people: if you're going to praise something, check your grammer. Typos can be forgiven but incoherence is another matter.

"This website is what our entire culture will be like in the future when society is truly and educational and deschooled (read Ivan Illich) one, straight talk free and available to the public, instead of academia building walls around information. How many thousands of dollars would I have had to give a bank to get a school to tell me, pretending theres no other way, what this site alone has taught me? Many thanks."

Shudder.

Interesting, too, that wisconsin-online has not corrected the slide.

The real problem here is that this style of education - this Death by Poweroint animation model - is touted as the paragon of education. "Bam! Ten minutes later my daughter and I had learned what a radian was (the animation was much more helpful than the mere definitions that we found), answered correctly all of the self-assessment questions, and were ready to move forward."
or
"It’s going to become unbelievably easy to find a variety of ways other than text to learn about almost anything we want."

Well, not really. You found a definition and answered three multiple-choice questions.

Let's look in more detail at the "wonderful job" this thing does.

page 3 says "click next to learn why they chose 360" - and shows a circle divided into 72 sections. Hmmmm.

Page 4 puts out a reason that is NOT the most likely, isn't the one accepted by scholars or even Wikipedia. It doesn't mention any other reasons, reasons which are more likely and more reasonable if you credit the Babylonians with any brains at all. Unfortunately this animation just assumes they miscounted the number of days in a year, something they knew quite well. Interesting.

I can't complain about the animations too much. The animations ARE useful. I would probably use one myself if I hadn't already had several versions of it. Mine don't have the straight red line extending a bit as it gets wraps around the circle but most kids wouldn't notice that happening.

I also don't like the habit of filling in the sector to represent the angle. It's an unnecessary multimedia "feature" that doesn't help understanding. I'm probably just quibbling, though.

page 12 is really quick with no additional explanations - I can't see students accepting that fact without questions or discussion.

page 16 is just wrong. Think about it -- page 14 just got done saying that pi radians is a half-circle. (That's 3.14 radians for those asking) The page 16 figure has three radii as being MORE than a half-circle. This is such a simple error to fix, yet no one has. WHY? Can it be that the creator did not realize the error himself and that no one has pointed it out? Again, why has no one pointed it out? - because all the information on the internet is true, as far as most students are concerned. Who dares question the great shiny box?

This is the problem with computerized learning, internet information, wikipedia, and many other "modern" methods of learning -- it seems so good because it's colorful and mostly accurate, yet contains mistakes that are fundamental and should have been obvious. These mistakes arise because the programmers are not math people, and math people are generally not programmers. More, those programmers are very often teenagers with an imperfect grasp of the material, but have the time to waste creating Wikipedia content.

It seemed somewhat amateurish, like something I'd get if I assigned it's creation to my 11th graders. The fact that it's held up as the model for the next generation of teachers is disturbing and bears witness to the folly of depending on the top results from Google to answer much more than trivia questions.

By the way,
All of the math teachers I know who have seen this recognized the errors as fast as I.

-------------

DI replied:
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Of course textbooks have errors too, and often teachers miss those as well. We can't blame the medium (Web or print), only our authors and fact-checkers. I appreciate you giving me some food for thought for today!

-------------

As quick reply and follow on, then I'm going back to checking homework papers.

Fixed stays fixed.
I agree that books have errors, but mostly in the problem solutions or in some area that is left to the graduate students to flesh out. The teachers I know take great pride in finding those errors and the students great satisfaction at noticing and correcting an error in the supposedly perfect text. An error, once found, remains corrected. Internet errors, especially Wikipedia errors, have an amazing ability to resurrect themselves. I am reminded of the case of a man who couldn't correct his own biography - the teenaged uber-user kept rewriting it and finally locked him out. How many other errors are there?

Rarity
The second issue with "Textbooks are wrong, too" is the frequency. True, textbooks have errors, but far fewer than the information I typically find on the web.

Intent
Book errors are usually due to oversight or grad student miscalculation. They are rarely errors in fact or method. The errors on the web are due to not only typographical or "understandable" mistakes - I would include page 16 above - but also of the intentionally misleading (what politics calls spin), intentionally incorrect and nasty (see martinlutherking.org) or just plain boneheaded nonsense.

I don't mean to pick on your one line, but the flexible and ever-changing nature of the medium demands that factual and methodological errors be fixed as soon as possible. I don't see that happening in very many cases.

Does internet reference ever work? Wolfram, yes. Wikipedia, only when it's a fact-based question that can be easily checked. Wisc-online - as far as I can tell. General websites, almost never - you just can't trust the answers unless you already know them.

Internet learning can be valuable - fix the errors above and that would be a good explanation of radians. But how are students supposed to know what's good and not? The previous commenters and reviewers and website users all took that little tutorial and none realized the errors. And that's a single page on a generally good site.

These ARE the fault of the medium as it is today and we must lay the blame at its feet or the medium will never change or improve. Is it a deal killer? No, but it worries me.

The whole lipstick on a pig thing.

But then, I don't want to be political.

Dance of the Lemons begins anon.

I went visiting some old friends from another school the other day. These guys had been through a lot with bad principals in the last few years - a wimp then a loser, followed by touchy-feely throw around a ball of yarn dude, replaced by borderline psychotic paranoid woman. So they breathed a pretty big sigh of relief when the down-to-earth guy arrived.

Who has been seen recently with the science teacher's hot wife ... in a setting and with behavior that didn't suggest routine "networking". Yup, the married with kids Principal canoodling with the married-with-baby, science teacher's wife. Quiet so far, but sooner or later, scandal will out.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

Politics and math -- what a concept!

I love when conservative bloviators try to make government sound really terrible, like this one did a few days ago on a Vt-based blog:

Protecting the Vermont Brand
The label says "Produced for Bove's of Vermont." The sauce is produced for Bove's of Vermont. What more truth in labeling can there be? But Bove's of Vermont will have to pay a six-figure fine. Yikes! We wish Vermont would get as tough on real crime as it is on business.

Sounds pretty mean of the state, doesn't it? "The gummint is just trying to ruin small business here in our state," I hear them cry.

The blog entry referenced another article for more details. A sentence from the article: "The settlement ... requires Bove's to donate $50,000 worth of food to the Vermont Foodbank and pay a fine of $5,000"

That's not a six-figure fine, at least not to people who do math. Maybe he's using the two digits after the decimal point? And that not much of a fine, really. That $5 grand won't cover the state's cost in lawyers and wouldn't be a fraction of the company's lawyer fee.

What was the point? "The attorney general said it is manufactured in Rochester, N.Y. and contains California tomatoes and "only one type of cheese ... made in Vermont." The product has other ingredients whose "geographic origin ... was unknown to the company," the attorney general's news release said." Puts a different spin on it, doesn't it?

As for the $50k part? It doesn't mean company cost of $50k but rather retail price - the company is probably paying $8k-10k out-of-pocket at most. Finally, it's being given to the Food Bank, for chrissakes.

More Orwellian, though, the company will call all of it a donation, like ad-copy for the holidays: "We're donating $100,000 of food product to the Vermont Foodbank." - actual quote.

Yikes, indeed.


--- update:

Later this afternoon, it also occurred to me that the company will write off both the fine and the required donation of $50k from their taxes, gaining more than the cost of the product involved. Add the voluntary donation and the write-off. Good for the accounting department.

It then all becomes a huge ad campaign: $100k of product labeled with your name being given to thousands of hungry folks in your sales area - those are not the folks who are going to be offended by the "not made in Vermont" tag. The people who do buy into the "buy local, eat local" are the only ones who will be affected -- but many of them will be swayed by the "Gummint messing with po' little us" argument here.

You are keeping your employees happy by maintaining their jobs in a bad time. They've already started the "We're wonderful for giving $100000" spin.

Because we should - Happy Halloween

Bobby "Boris" Pickett - Monster Mash (rare color clip)

Why Students aren't running things.

Micheal Wesch is the professor whose students made what many consider a seminal video on education. I include it here because I figure that it's a pretty good example of why the adults in the educational system shouldn't really listen to the opinions of students.

When you do, you run the risk of justifying that senioritis is legitimate, that students really are different today, that technology is necessary, that teachers are solely responsible when their students tune out, that cheating is a natural response to teacher pressure, that students can't memorize but should learn information retrieval instead, that blah, blah, blah ....

Wesch - In spring 2007 I invited the 200 students enrolled in the “small” version of my “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” class to tell the world what they think of their education by helping me write a script for a video to be posted on YouTube. The result was the disheartening portrayal of disengagement you see below. The video was viewed over one million times in its first month and was the most blogged about video in the blogosphere for several weeks, eliciting thousands of comments. With rare exception, educators around the world expressed the sad sense of profound identification with the scene, sparking a wide-ranging debate about the roles and responsibilities of teachers, students, and technology in the classroom.

Students are forever whining about their work.

Why do we have to learn this stuff?
Because you can. Because you’re here and you signed up for it.

When am I ever going to need this?
I don’t know. What I’m teaching you isn’t directly applicable, but it does train your mind in a way of thinking that you haven’t been able to use before.

Why do I have to take this class?
Beats me, kiddo. You’re the one paying money for this. If this is your way of wasting Daddy’s money, then have at it. If it is pointless, then wander over to Admin and drop out. Why spend months in a class you can’t learn in, that you disparage constantly and that you don’t like? How dumb are you to put yourself through months of something you consider a boring hell?

These students all think they’re clever because they can make a YouTube video disparaging education. They think that because they can stick an iPod bud in their ear and watch a movie on the laptop while browsing Facebook and texting the kid next to them that they’ve made a statement.

It’s pretty amazing if you think about how shallow and silly they really are.

Doesn’t bother me but I want to challenge them all - “If it’s so pointless, wean yourselves from the parental feeding tube and fend for yourselves. Drop out, get a job, change the world. Put that infinite information retrieval ability to the test. Show the world what special people you are. You’re the digital natives, the 21st century students. Show us your magnificence.”

Or at least shut up. I'd be grateful.

Sometimes the story seems fake.

I ran across this "case study" example for how the increase in minimum wage can negatively impact a business. These numbers just don't seem to add up. See what you think.

Here’s a personal case study in how that works to squeeze workers out of the minimum wage job market:

My parents own an ice cream shop, and rely heavily in its operation on eight 16-20 year olds working part-time schedules of 16-24 hours a week, along with one full-time manager who is assisted by my parents in their free time. Over the course of a 7 day work week, they typically employ the part-time workers for a total of about 340 hours a week.

Raising the minimum wage by .70 increased their straight wage expense by $240 a week, or about $1000 a month. But it had collateral consequences as well, as their worker’s comp. and unemployment insurance costs rose in relation to their payroll, as did their payroll tax contributions. The combination of wage increase and the various increases that spin off that wage increase was about $1500 a month. This is against a total wage expense for the part-timers of about $8000 a month.

Now, the ice cream parlor business is somewhat inelastic from a price stand point — people won’t continue to pay higher and higher prices for an ice cream cone when the alternative is simply to do without. So, that increase in operating expense could not, in total, be passed on to the customers. Instead, my parents worked a few more hours themselves and trimmed back on the hours they had the part-timers working. When one of the part-timers quit, they didn’t hire a replacement for her.

Now, the same thing is going to happen next month — another increase of .70 per hour, totaling about $1500 a month in additional operating expenses is going to kick in. This will come on top of significant increases over the past year in product costs — multiply the increased cost of milk you are paying at the supermarket several times over and you get a feel for the increased cost of buying ice cream on a large scale for a business establishment.

Politics and the American Teenager.

Central Florida 7th grader called racist for wearing Palin t-shirt.


I've got to give her credit for having the guts to wear that shirt. I know how students can behave. It isn't pretty sometimes.

My own students were needling another for supporting Palin/McCain. They took the tack that her religious beliefs were non-mainstream. That's not appropriate in an argument and I said so, but I have to wonder what drives my students to automatically jump on the obamabandwagon. After I told them that attacking a candidate based solely on a vague notion of her religion is wrong - argue her positions on policy, track record, and governing style instead - none of them seemed to have any idea of what policies Palin stood for that they disagreed with.

Failure is an option

What is wrong with Education in America is embodied in this one sentence:

For the first time in seven years, Seattle public high-school students who do poorly can receive a failing grade on their report cards.

More Testing Blahs.

As some of you know, I'm not a great fan of the NLCB testing. I should be more clear here - I don't mind the tests themselves - they're fine tests.

What I dislike is the uses that the results are put to and the interpretations and decision based on the results.

To wit, we gave the writing test today and one of the better students academically was talking about her essay. The topic was something by Gandhi - be mellow and don't stress out - and she wrote a polemic on the testing of students and the idiocy of the state's analysis of results. Completely off topic, no?

So, a fairly decent essay that is completely off-topic will be considered a 0. Our principal will discuss the results later in the year and say things like "We should put in our action plans to align our curriculum better to the GLEs / state standards / Frameworks. We must motivate our students to do better."

Welllll. No.

Our curriculum might need adjusting, but this is not a good reason why. These kids don't care about the test and their results will be meaningless.

Testing, testing ...

So the principal doesn't apparently trust the faculty to proctor the state NCLB testing. So we're dutifully teaching our classes and Principal PJs takes them kids off to be tested. We find out later that he packed them too many to a table unnecessarily (there was plenty of room but the kids crowded together - no surprise), left the room unattended while he chatted on a cell phone and wandered to a bathroom, and the students had a food fight with the motivational bagels and juice!

So today an English teacher was designated at the last minute to help him stand watch. (Tomorrow, it's a math teacher.) Apparently today was much calmer.

Any bets on how long this goes until TSHTF**? Until someone reports to the Supt? Oops, too late. Superintendent already knows. State will be notified. It's flying.



** "The solidified fecal material makes contact with the gaseous propulsion device."

3 days for un-tucked shirt?

From KPHO in Phoenix, AZ comes this heartwarming tale of no-nonsense school administrators living up to their stereotypes:

A 12-year-old girl who didn't tuck in her shirt was suspended from an Albuquerque middle school, KOAT-TV reported. Judy Benavidez said her daughter, Natalia, is a good student and not a troublemaker. But Natalia is on a three-day suspension from Harrison Middle School because her shirt was untucked.

A school district spokesman said a special announcement was made this year that students could be suspended for dress code violations.

Hey, they made an announcement. They warned the kids. What did the kids expect? This is willful disrespect for the rules.

Of course, a 3-day suspension is a stupid administrative over-reaction, but I'm being redundant.

English Immersion Example

IN a New York Times "Education Watch" article:

The Bilingual Debate: English Immersion
By Lance T. Izumi

Take, for example, Sixth Street Prep, a charter elementary school in eastern Los Angeles County. The school’s students are overwhelmingly Hispanic and low income. More than a third of the students, many of whom are recent arrivals, are learning English. Yet, among fourth graders, an astounding 100 percent of the students tested at the proficient level on the 2008 state math exam. A nearly equally amazing 93 percent of fourth graders tested proficient on the state English-language-arts exam. This incredible success was achieved using a different ingredient than the one favored by Mr. Obama.

Sixth Street emphasizes review and practice, constant assessment of skills and a no-excuses attitude. Furthermore, and here’s where Mr. Obama should take note, according to Linda Mikels, Sixth Street’s principal, the school’s instructional approach for English learners is “full immersion.” English immersion emphasizes the near-exclusive use of English in content instruction. Ms. Mikels, who opposes bilingual education, told me, “we’ve had tremendous success with having a student who is brand new from Mexico and you would walk into a classroom 12 months later and you wouldn’t be able to pick out which one he was.” “It’s working,” she observed, “it’s working for us.”

I wonder why that seems to be the exception rather than the rule? I can't see bi-lingual education being as effective - it certainly never was in my experience.

Let's define effective while we're at it. The students should walk in knowing only their own language and walk out speaking fluent, if accented, English. To put it another way, in two years or less an immigrant student should be able to function in an exclusively English setting whether it be a community college or trade school or sales position at a car dealership in Iowa.

How do you pack twelve years of English education into two? By doing it 6x as often per day, i.e., immersion.

Seems simple to me.

Sick.

BLEAH.

Feel like dirt on a taco. I figured that I'd made it through the first month with only my own allergies to complain about. Cruising along, wasn't I? and then -- WHAM -- hits me like a truck. Slept for 24 hours, nearly straight through. Still not good, coughing and just plain grouchy.

As for that "feel like dirt on a taco" thing? I just made it up. I thought it was clever until I realized that I'm somewhat delirious and that I made no sense.

Fits, somehow.