Education Buzz

This week's is posted here and includes my post on getting more curious about all that math I was supposed to have learned back in college.

Philadelphia, Day 1

After a long redeye airplane flight, and a short amount of sleep,we made it to Philadelphia. We've had a full day of sightseeing (click on the pictures to enlarge):

The USS New Jersey, as seen through a porthole on the Olympia, Commodore Dewey's flagship during the Battle of Manila Bay in the Spanish-American War.

Olympia and the Becuna, a WWII submarine.

The bows of Olympia and the Becuna. The ship on the left is a restaurant.

Old and new merge in more ways than one in this picture.

An alley in Old Town Philadelphia.

Independence Hall. A couple weeks ago I paid $3 to reserve "free" tickets for a tour, which consisted of seeing two rooms. Seriously.

Cheap Trick played here.

Your intrepid blogger, next door to Independence Hall.

Another shot of Independence Hall.

Row houses in the Society Hill area.

Up for tomorrow: Valley Forge, the Liberty Bell, Franklin Court, and Ben Franklin's grave.

Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Still illegal in California, but that doesn't mean it doesn't occur:

Affirmative action proponents took a hit Monday as a federal appeals court panel upheld California's ban on using race, ethnicity and gender in admitting students to public colleges and universities.

The ruling marked the second time the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned back a challenge to the state's landmark voter initiative, Proposition 209, which was passed in 1996.

Whole Language and Fuzzy Math Are Back In The News

I just cannot understand why schools of education want to foist upon students programs that clearly don't work:

Imagine a physics program that won’t teach the theory of relativity. Or an English department that shuns Shakespeare. That would be equivalent to how U.S. schools of education treat the most effective method for teaching beginning reading.

That method is called decoding, the shorthand word for the scientifically tested techniques for teaching children the relationships between symbols and sounds, often just called phonics. Reformers have fought for generations to have decoding skills taught systematically and directly, but schools of education will have none of it.

Instead, the education establishment prefers to teach beginning readers to guess at the identification of a written word using its context -- the so-called whole-language approach. The people who run education schools hate the “code” because they say it requires a repetition of boring exercises -- “drill and kill” -- turning children off and discouraging them from “reading with meaning.” There has never been evidence for this view, however.

The whole-language advocates pitch their approach as being on the side of “meaning,” not the “code.” Similarly, math educators have long used the goal of “deep conceptual understanding” to justify requiring children to invent their own methods for performing basic arithmetical operations instead of teaching them to understand and use the standard algorithms, which mathematicians note are more efficient, effective and general.

You know what else, besides "drill and kill", turns kids off from reading? Not being able to read.

That's why "drill and kill" is actually "drill and skill"--in reading, in math, and in just about every other subject.

OK Then (Teacher Behaving Badly)

A Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader and high school teacher is busted for having sex with a student. Her mother, a principal in the same district, is accused of helping her cover up the crime.

Sheesh.

Checked Baggage

I'm leaving tomorrow with my son for a few days of American history in Philadelphia. After the recent pleasantness of my Coast Guard Academy trip, on which I brought only a carry-on, I thought I'd try it again.

Ain't gonna happen.

The Coast Guard trip was 2 days, this trip is 5. This time I'm also bringing a full complement of camera gear, and my tripod won't even fit in my carry-on bag. I might have made do, it would have been close, but then I remembered that I offered to carry some items back east for a friend. The carry-on just isn't big enough.

So I broke out my medium-sized suitcase and packed it. Everything fit, but just barely. If I've already decided to pay the $25 in blood money for the privilege of checking a suitcase, why should I take as small a bag as possible? Answer: I shouldn't. So I'm taking Big Bertha, and there's plenty of room in it even after packing my warm jacket.

Weather's supposed to be clear and cool. Hotel, airfare, and rental car are all booked. Can't wait for the history!

School Funding Ideas

Is this the latest fad?

Economist Rick Hanushek argues today that there is no evidence to suggest “weighted student funding” will improve public school outcomes as its bipartisan backers hope. He contends that simply tying school-level funding to students, and thereby bypassing some of the budgetary role of districts, will create no systemic incentive for improvement and will not advance more substantive reforms.

He’s almost certainly right. Instead, Rick contends that districts should be financially rewarded based on their performance, borrowing a key aspect of the free enterprise system. But just that one aspect… and that’s a problem. There is no reason to believe that slapping a single isolated aspect of the market system on to the side of our state school monopoly will transmogrify it into a model of efficiency and responsiveness. Any more that strapping feathers to a brick can make it fly.

I Did It

Tonight I filled out the application and paid the fee for that Master of Arts in Teaching Math program. May the Force be with me.

Canadians Have The Answer In Numismatics

They pulled their $1 and $2 bills years ago and replaced them with coins--which is certainly reasonable, since coins should be for "small change" and notes for larger expenditures. We should do the same.

What good are pennies anymore? None, and the Canucks are yanking them:

The Canadian government announced on Thursday that it plans to pull the penny from circulation at the end of 2012, saying the copper-coated currency is more expensive for the Royal Canadian Mint to produce than its actual currency value.

I don't often say that we should follow the lead of our friends up north, but in this case we should.

The Lefties Are In A Tizzy

Lefties have been in their own echo chamber for so long that this week's arguments before the Supreme Court (regarding Obamacare) were entirely novel and amazing to them--but we conservatives haven't been keeping these arguments secret. No, our friends on the left have just refused to accept that conservatives can make valid points that lefties don't want to hear. They're stunned and amazed, the shock and awe of legitimate conservative arguments. When even Mother Jones claims that the government's (pro-Obamacare) case was pathetic, perhaps liberals need to pay attention and not cover their ears and repeat "la la la la la la I can't hear you".

Oh, but they'll claim their arguments were just fine, it's this biased conservative court that's the problem. National Review covers a lot of ground in this piece, but here's what they say about the ideological court:

In recent reports, it’s been noted that 20 percent of the Court’s cases were decided 5–4 in the 2010 term. True, but 48 percent of the cases were decided 9–0, which reflects a pattern that has held for years. Is the Roberts Court any more divided than the William Rehnquist Court in 2000, when 30 percent of the cases were decided 5–4? Is the fact that Roberts and Alito agree 96 percent of the time really more troubling than the fact that Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor agree 94 percent of the time?

I hope they make the right decision. A wrong decision here, combined with Kelo, means that Americans essentially have no rights remaining that the government doesn't grant.

Update: Why did legal elites underestimate the case against the mandate?

Ridiculing the need for a limiting principle or other anti-mandate arguments may get approving nods in the faculty lounge, but, as we saw this week, it won’t receive an equally warm welcome in court.

Have You Had A Bad Week?

If so, was yours this bad?

So, in one week, Mr. Obama got caught whispering promises to our enemy (actually, "rival"), incited a race war, raised serious questions about his understanding of the Constitution, and then got smacked down over his proposed budget that was so wildly reckless that even Democrats in Congress could not support it.

Winning The Lottery

Of course the chances of winning the big one are about the same whether you play or not, it's still fun to play sometimes--even if GMA wants to play party-pooper:

The Mega Millions jackpot, the biggest lottery award in the game's history at an estimated $500 million, has millions of people dreaming, however ridiculous the odds may be.

The odds of getting struck by lightning are about one in 280,000, according to the National Lightning Safety Institute. The odds of winning the Mega Millions jackpot for the next drawing on Friday are estimated at about one in 176 million, according to lottery officials. Though that bolt from the sky may strike you more than 500 times before you hit that jackpot, it's still fun to dream.

Some people claim to have strategies to increase your chances at lottery games, but mathematicians say there is little you can do to win Mega Millions.

I Came To A Realization Today

I'm going to share a deep, dark secret with you:

I don't know as much math as you might think I do. And I've always been afraid of being found out.

I've always known where my education was deficient, even when I was receiving that education. In high school I never learned about hyperbolas, or about factoring a cubic polynomial. I'd never heard of the Rational Root Theorem or Descartes's Rule of Signs. In college I earned a degree in applied math, and could calculate my butt off, but so often didn't fully understand what I was doing. I knew what to do, and I could understand why one step logically led to the next, but I didn't have a "big picture" understanding. As an example, in differential equations I could calculate eigenvalues all day long, but to this day I don't know what an eigenvalue is or what it does for me or why I need to calculate it. I've taught myself plenty--sometimes just days before I had to teach it to my students.

This came to a head today when I was talking to one of my students who's heading to Cal Poly. I told him not to make the mistake I made; ask the questions, go for the deeper understanding.

I've never understood the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. Why, exactly, are an integral and an antiderivative the same thing? I've followed the steps in my calculus books, and understood each step, but never really understood how they all fit together. So today I pulled a different calculus book out of my closet and I started studying. I found one that provided a very user-friendly explanation, which then allowed me to understand the very rigorous (read: dry and difficult) proof in a second text. It took a few minutes to replace decades of deficit.

I learned something today. Tackling the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra, which one book says is "beyond the scope of this textbook", is next.

I remember my senior project at West Point. I was writing a computer program that would aim a gun at an airplane, and an instructor asked me, "Why are you using that algorithm? There are others that will converge much more quickly." I knew that there were others, and I knew what "converge much more quickly" meant, but what I didn't know was what others there were or how they'd converge more quickly. I was able to throw him off, but I remember the fear of being caught that day.

So now I want to learn. I want to understand. I'm looking forward to that masters program I'll be starting in the fall, a Masters in Teaching Math through the University of Idaho's Engineering Outreach Program.

Explaining this to another teacher today, I was told that now I'm experiencing the difference between learning and merely completing a degree.

I'm looking forward to this.

White Girls Can't Do Math???

I sincerely hope that I don't have one of these subconscious biases:

That’s the conclusion of new research from University of Texas researchers, which suggests that the teachers of today are just as convinced that white girls can’t do math as their 1950s predecessors.

Researchers looked at student grades, test scores and how teachers rated their students’ abilities. They found that while on average teachers rate minority students lower than their white male counterparts, these differences disappear once grades are taken into account. (Those findings are consistent with decades of research on the minority gap in math achievement.) The new research, however, found bias against white girls that can’t be explained by their academic performance.

When I first read about this article over at Joanne Jacobs' site, I was convinced that the focus of these stereotypes had to be elementary teachers--cue Barbie's "math is harrrrrrd." Imagine my shock to learn that the problem is with high school teachers.

Wow.

Hope

Hope is all you have left when you're tired of being afraid.
--unknown

Hope is not a battle plan.
--old Army saying

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
--Sir Francis Bacon

This School Is Out Of Control

If I have planted my standard on any hill on this blog, it's that what students and teachers do on their own time is of no concern to the school unless and until that behavior significantly affects school activities--and I don't mean just any effect, I mean that the effect has to be significant before the school can react. If a school can suspend a student over this, are there any limits to its power to suspend students?

From Facebook communications to tweets, you're no doubt already aware that nothing you do online is truly private. But should you have a reasonable expectation that your superiors aren't actively spying on you? That's the question a lot of people are asking after Garrett High School in Indiana expelled a high school senior for cursing over Twitter during off-school hours.

The tweet in question dropped the F-bomb a number of times, but was otherwise non-threatening. It was posted at 2:30 a.m. — a time when the student in question was most assuredly not at school. Still, despite the evidence, the school stands by its decision to expel the student.

What the kid does at 2:30 in the morning is his parents' responsibility, not his school's.

If You're A Union Supporter, Why Do You Think People Would Voluntarily Reject A Union?

Is it because they're stupid? Or do you have another idea?

Graduate student workers at the University of Minnesota again voted against forming a union.

About 62 percent of those who voted last week opposed the union, the state Bureau of Mediation Services reported on Monday, adding to a string of failed attempts to organize the students who teach classes and conduct research on the Twin Cities and Duluth campuses.

More than two-thirds of the 4,400 workers who were eligible to cast ballots in the weeklong vote did so.

The article also contains a graphic with the following information:

RECENT VOTES AGAINST UNION

Year Vote

1990 No: 67 percent

1999 No: 58 percent

2005 No: 58 percent

2012 No: 62 percent

Source: Bureau of Mediation Services

So again I ask, union supporters, why would people repeatedly and voluntarily reject a union?

The End of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" At Our Service Academies

The Spectrum club was mentioned briefly in our educators summit at the Coast Guard Academy, and is mentioned in this piece about GLBT clubs and events at other academies:

At the beginning of the school year, gay pride events at a military academy with titles like "condom Olympics" and "queer prom" would have been unthinkable. This week, they're a reality.

Cadets in uniform at Norwich University, the nation's oldest private military academy, participated Monday in sessions about handling bullying and harassment as part of the school's first gay pride week. The events are believed to be the first of their kind on a military campus...

Until last year, only a select few at Norwich knew of the sexual orientation of Joshua Fontanez, 22, of Browns Mills, N.J., a past president of the student government who quietly laid the groundwork for the school's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning and Allies Club, which held its first meeting the day the law ended...

In December, a group of students at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., formed a group called Spectrum, which has many of the same goals as the Norwich club. A similar organization with the same name is being formed in New York at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

For many of the newly open student leaders, the changes brought by the end of "don't ask, don't tell" haven't overwhelmed, despite the years-long political wrangling that culminated in the policy change.

"It was definitely a big change, but it happened over such a long period of time for me that it didn't seem like that big of a deal," said Coast Guard Academy Senior Chip Hall, 21, of Monterrey (sic), Calif...

A group of alumni called Knights Out will hold a campus dinner this weekend and is expecting at least a dozen cadets to attend, said the group's director, Sue Fulton, a 1980 West Point graduate who was among the first women admitted to the academy...

Some members of Norwich's Christian Fellowship have been uncomfortable with gay student club, but the two organizations have worked together, with members of each attending some of the other's meetings, said biology emeritus professor Carlos Pinkham, the Christian group's faculty adviser.

"We make it clear to them that we use the bible (sic) as our guide and that as a result we can't condone the stuff they do," Pinkham said. "But the Bible is also equally clear, in fact, even more clear. … Being judgmental about the sin without extending love to the sinner is another form of sin."

Bringing Discredit Upon Our Profession

In what more positive language could you describe these actions?

An open records request filed by Milwaukee conservative radio personality Mark Belling has revealed that freedom of speech in some public schools is reserved for those who agree with the unions.

According to information obtained by Belling, a custodian working for a private contractor at Whitewater (Wisconsin) High School was recently fired by her employer after two school employees, including the supervisor of custodians, demanded that she remove a pro-Scott Walker sign from her car and she refused.

If you recall, Big Labor is attempting to recall Gov. Walker over his new law that curtails collective bargaining privileges for public employee unions.

You lefties can whine about this next statement all you want but I know it to be true:

Readers who think this kind of rigid, narrow-minded thinking isn’t seeping into the classroom are kidding themselves.

Why Might California Be Doomed?

Here is yet another data point:

It's hard to believe now, but Jerry Brown once ran for President as a reformer who favored a flat tax with a 13% top federal rate. That was 1992. Nowadays in his second stint as Governor, he's running to give California alone a higher top income-tax rate...

All of this is said to be necessary to balance a $9.2 billion budget deficit. So what else is new? Mr. Brown expects about $9 billion in added revenue, up from $7 billion in his first package. But the state Legislative Analyst's Office has already told Mr. Brown that he's hallucinating to think he can get that much money from a corner of the taxpayer base.

The top 1% in California pay between one third and half of all state income tax revenues, depending on the condition of the economy. California already has the fourth highest income tax in the nation....

None of these facts matter to Mr. Brown or his allies because the tax increase is simply about the political power to deliver money to the interests that live off government.

What happens when that golden goose is killed or the turnip is bloodless? I fear that day is not far off.