Expecting the Most From Students

There's some fear out there that the Common Core standards, which may be better than what some states had, are certainly lower standards than what California had (especially in math).  Some schools are, under the guise of Common Core, implementing "no homework" policies.  This is exactly the wrong thing to do, as these anecdotes testify:

“While U.S. schools struggled to reach even an average score on a key international exam for 15-year-olds in 2012, BASIS Tucson North, an economically modest, ethnically diverse charter school in Arizona, outperformed every country in the world, and left even Shanghai, China’s academic gem in the dust,” writes June Kronholz on Education Next.
How do they do it?

“We do an incredible amount of work,” said Alia Gilbert...

The Arizona schools operate on about two-thirds of the funding for a child in a traditional public school, writes Kronholz. Classes are large. Technology is minimal. With highly motivated and capable students, it doesn’t matter.  link

If the kids want to do the work and can handle the work, give them the work.  If you or your kid is more interested in your kid's club volleyball team, cello lessons, martial arts classes, and football/basketball/baseball than in academics, don't try to have the school cut back on academics--have your kid cut back.  Don't expect your kid to earn straight A's while taking 4 AP classes with all those extracurricular activities.  Your kid will probably do just fine even if he/she does not go to Stanford.

If you truly value academics, parents, then show you value them.  Make academics a priority in your household--and by that I don't mean just preach "we don't accept C's in this house."  There's plenty of time for schoolwork when you aren't taking a "full load" of extracurriculars as listed above.  Granted, the story below isn't from our culture, but it's worth noting for its potential:

High school is serious business overseas, say U.S. students who’ve studied in Korea, Finland and Poland. PBS NewsHour interviews the three students featured in Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way...

Finnish teachers rely mainly on lectures, said Kim. “There weren’t a lot of assignments during the semester until the end when you did exams in the form of essays.”  link

So much for all the so-called discovery learning and group work, Common Core advocates.

Our last story, from the Wall Street Journal, is about an orchestra teacher:

We're in the midst of a national wave of self-recrimination over the U.S. education system. Every day there is hand-wringing over our students falling behind the rest of the world. Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. trail students in 12 other nations in science and 17 in math, bested by their counterparts not just in Asia but in Finland, Estonia and the Netherlands, too. An entire industry of books and consultants has grown up that capitalizes on our collective fear that American education is inadequate and asks what American educators are doing wrong.

I would ask a different question. What did Mr. K do right? What can we learn from a teacher whose methods fly in the face of everything we think we know about education today, but who was undeniably effective?

As it turns out, quite a lot. Comparing Mr. K's methods with the latest findings in fields from music to math to medicine leads to a single, startling conclusion: It's time to revive old-fashioned education. Not just traditional but old-fashioned in the sense that so many of us knew as kids, with strict discipline and unyielding demands. Because here's the thing: It works...

After a list of "what works" comes the conclusion:

My tough old teacher Mr. K could have written the book on any one of these principles. Admittedly, individually, these are forbidding precepts: cold, unyielding, and kind of scary.

But collectively, they convey something very different: confidence. At their core is the belief, the faith really, in students' ability to do better. There is something to be said about a teacher who is demanding and tough not because he thinks students will never learn but because he is so absolutely certain that they will.

I care about my students.  I'm confident enough in my teaching ability to believe that if they pay attention and work at what tasks I give them, they'll understand the material and do well in the course.  I have faith in their abilities, but for most those abilities demonstrate themselves only after students put forth effort.

I am, and always have been, what's now regarded as "old school".  I don't have much use for group work or discovery learning; they're both too inefficient.  I have no interest in being a "guide on the side"; since I know more math than anyone else in the classroom I am the "sage on the stage", and part of that sage-iness is knowing great ways to teach topics so that my students have the opportunity to excel.  If you are of the group work mentality and think that works for you and your students, well, I think you're crazy but I'm not going to try to compel you to do things my way.  I would appreciate reciprocal consideration.

A Math Teacher Assesses Common Core Standards

Some of her points that really hit home with me:
1)  Standards of Mathematical Practice is just a fancy way to say "we're going to tell you how to teach mathematics", not just what to teach.
2)  The Common Core math standards are not rigorous and will do harm to students interested in pursuing STEM higher education and/or careers.
3)  (Unlike California's now-defunct standards,) Common Core math standards are not internationally benchmarked.

Obamacare

Neil Cavuto (respectfully) calls it like he sees it.

Ridiculous

I went in to work today--something I never do on a weekend--to install some hardware and software so I can replace the LCD projector in my classroom with the 4k tv I have, only to find out that somehow I don't have the required administrative permissions to install the software on my computer, even though I've installed other software on that computer just fine, thankyouverymuch.  Now I have to wait until I can get our district techies either to install the software or to grant me the appropriate permissions.

What a goatscrew.

And in an hour I have to go back to work to chaperone a dance.  Before midnight tonight I'll have spent an hour and a half on the road just going to/from work today, which would be somewhat tolerable if I'd have been able to accomplish something earlier.

This One's A Genius

Remember that Original Series Star Trek episode called Spock's Brain, in which the most memorable line is, "Brain, brain, what is brain???"  That quote applies to California's junior senator, who recently said that President Obama--he who has never signed a federal budget--has cut the budget deficit in half:

The White House provides the following deficit numbers:
2005: $318 billion
2006: $248 billion
2007: $161 billion
2008: $459 billion
2009: $1.41 trillion
2010: $1.29 trillion
2011: $1.3 trillion
2012: $1.09 trillion
2013 (projected): $973 billion

Note the deficit numbers started going up after Democrats took control of the Congress.  Boxer states:

I am so proud to be a Democrat.

Boxer is an idiot and a disgrace, and that she keeps getting reelected is more evidence of how messed up California is.  You might say, "No, it's evidence of how bad the Republicans are," but seriously, how many people, not just Republicans but people, are stupider than she is?  Can you name one--one--accomplishment of hers in, what, 20 years in the Senate?  Is there any evidence, any at all, that she has more than two brain cells firing at the same time to get that synergistic effect?

She's a flaming liberal--supports abortion-on-demand--so she'll get reelected no matter how stupid she is.  Gawd, I'm living in a nightmare.

These Are The Types Of Battles You Have To Fight When Silly Decisions Just Domino

I wonder how we'd deal with this in California, under our new laws:

Two boys playing on a girls’ volleyball team at a New York high school could see their playing time spiked when league officials consider modifying a rule that allows them to play with the fairer sex.

Seniors Andrew Lafortezza and Jason Elbaum both played for the co-ed volleyball club last season at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua. But due to budgetary constraints, the Quakers were unable to field a boys’ team this year, prompting the teens to seek a spot on the girls’ squad, which they earned after receiving approval from league officials in August.

But New York State Public High School Athletic Association Executive Director Robert Zayas told FoxNews.com that the issue will reconsidered by an ad hoc committee in early December.

“I’m very concerned with the fact that we have two boys playing on a girls’ team,” Zayas said. “I’m concerned there’s a significant adverse effect on other teams.”

Nobody thought this through in advance?

Tomorrow

My AppleTV came in today, all configured by the district.  Perhaps I'll go to school tomorrow and see if I can get it working with my PC and my 4k TV, then watch the varsity football game.

It's an exciting life I lead....

Boys, Girls, Math, and the SAT

Dr. Perry has some cool charts from which he draws some interesting conclusions:

Continuing an uninterrupted trend that dates back to at least 1972, high school boys outperformed girls on the 2013 SAT math test with an average score of 531 points compared to the average score of 499 for females...

For scores in the highest 100-point range of 700-800 on the 2013 math SAT test, boys outnumbered girls by 74,461 to 46,040, which would mean that there were 162 boys for every 100 girls scoring at 700 points or above. To account for the large difference in the number of girls taking the SAT test (884,000) compared to boys (776,000), we can calculate that 9.6% of boys taking the math SAT exam in 2013 scored between 700-800 points compared to 5.2% the girls taking the test, for an adjusted ratio of 184 boys per 100 girls scoring at 700 points or above...

For 2013 SAT test-takers, high school girls had superior overall academic high school records compared to boys: 56% of the students in the top 10 percent of their graduating classes were female, 59% of the students graduating with an A+ grade point average were female, and high schools girls graduated with a higher overall average GPA of 3.44 compared to a 3.30 average GPA for their male counterparts.

High school girls were over-represented in advanced AP/Honors math classes (54%) compared to boys (46%), and also in advanced AP/Honors science classes by 56% to 44%.

For those high school students taking four years of high school mathematics, girls were over-represented (52%) compared to boys (48%), and more of the students studying natural sciences for four years were female students (53%) than male (47%).

Bottom Line: Even though female high school students are better prepared academically on many different measures than their male classmates, both overall and for mathematics specifically, female high school students score significantly lower on the SAT math test, and the +30-point differences in test scores favoring males has persisted for generations.  At the high end of math performance, high school males significantly outperformed their female peers on the 2013 SAT math test by a ratio of about 2-1 for perfect and near-perfect scores, and that outcome has persisted for generations.

And yet, despite the persistent, statistically significant differences in math performance by gender on the math SAT test that continue over time, we frequently hear statements like this: “There just aren’t gender differences anymore in math performance,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde, “So parents and teachers need to revise their thoughts about this.  Stereotypes are very, very resistant to change, but as a scientist I have to challenge them with data.”

I wonder what Larry Summers would say about that last paragraph :-)

Anyway, that was the data, here's the conclusion:

Further, compared to boys, high school girls get better grades on average, and are far more likely to graduate in the top 10% of their high school classes, and much more likely than boys to attend and graduate from college.  By all objective measures, girls have essentially all of the necessary ingredients that should result in greater representation in STEM fields like engineering and computer science except perhaps for one: a huge, statistically significant +30-point gender gap on the SAT math test in favor of boys that persists over time. And if there are some innate differences by gender for mathematical ability, as the huge and persistent gender differences for the math SAT test suggests, closing the STEM gender jobs gap may be a futile attempt in socially engineering an unnatural, and unachievable, outcome.

Is the science settled?

An Empowering Experience

The current course I'm taking for my master's degree is Probability Theory, and our instructor pointed out early on that it's a "calculus-based" probability theory course.

One part of the lesson I watched last night involved calculating a definite integral; the instructor skipped the intermediate steps, said something like "you can confirm this with u-substitution", wrote the answer, and moved on.  Today I decided I needed to review u-substitution and integration by parts, as it's been a few decades.  I got a calculus book and got to work reviewing, and after a few minutes decided to try last night's problem.  Before starting, though, I called up a couple of my stats students who either have taken or are concurrently taking calculus, and asked them to make sure I didn't make any mistakes in the process.

While I solved the problem correctly, I think they enjoyed my soliciting their "help".

I'm Shocked--Shocked, I Tell You!

Why would students want to do this?  Are they not satisfied with the new educational vistas laid before them with the advent of the iPad?

It took exactly one week for nearly 300 students at Roosevelt High School to hack through security so they could surf the Web on their new school-issued iPads, raising new concerns about a plan to distribute the devices to all students in the district.

Similar problems emerged at two other high schools as well, although the hacking was not as widespread.
Officials at the Los Angeles Unified School District have immediately halted home use of the Apple tablets until further notice.

The incident, which came to light Tuesday, prompted questions about overall preparations for the $1-billion tablet initiative.

LA Unified wants to spend one billion dollars--that's $30 for every single person in California--on a program this easily bypassed?  Anyone else willing to predict some possible outcomes of this program?

Assuming they thought at all, what did they think was going to happen upon issuing iPads to students?

Idiots.

Neat Story, In A Bittersweet Sorta Way

From today's major Sacramento paper:

Pendleton was a public school drama and English teacher in Sacramento whose estate fit into a tidy ranch-style home with a single rosebush on the front lawn. Her collection of antiquities included a few old cameras, some tea sets and enough beaded necklaces to cover a dining room table.

With only a small circle of dear friends and no surviving relatives left to mourn her death in 2011 at the age of 82, Pendleton asked that nearly one-third of her modest wealth be given to the institutions she cherished, those dedicated to preserving the history of Sacramento. After her home in Greenhaven was sold and her estate settled, those donations eclipsed $80,000. 

Her money went to the Old City Cemetery, the Sacramento County Historical Society, the downtown public library, and the Crocker Art Museum.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/09/23/5759107/qa-history-buffs-bequest-a-boon.html#storylink=cpy

Local School District Can Close The Schools It Planned To

Some people act like it's a civil right to keep their kid's crappy school open:

A federal judge today dismissed a case brought by a dozen parents who sought to block the Sacramento City Unified School District from closing seven elementary campuses.  link

The district had to close schools due to budget considerations.  The suit claimed that the district target "minority schools" while leaving "white schools" open.

Stats in the Real World

Seen today on Instapundit:

MY MENTION OF “WELLNESS PROGRAMS” YESTERDAY produced this email:

At University of Virginia, where I am visiting this term, it’s apparently not just answer-or-pay. It’s sign up your body for Big Insurance’s invasive eyes or pay. Faculty who don’t show up for workplace screening are penalized according to the Aetna health plan “incentives”.

Fundamentally these programs are not about individuals at all. They are about forcing people into being part of massive samples for junk “research” that will hound everyone for years to come. As you know, if you push sample sizes big enough, standard errors fall and you can find practically any point estimate statistically significant, so these huge samples mean ever more “significant” correlations to obsess over…

Anyway please leave my name out of any further discussions. the PC land of campus life could brand me an unwanted guest and I don’t want to go home yet.

...

Meanwhile, here’s more skepticism on wellness programs.

I expect these programs to become more commonplace and more compulsory as government takes over health care.

But I especially like the points made regarding sample size and statistical significance (which is entirely different from practical significance).

Update:  Here's another story that discusses statistical significance, this time in reference to improved performance in a university "flipped" classroom.

Theoretical vs. Experimental Probability

Here was the problem on my last homework assignment in the Probability Theory class I'm taking:

Three identical fair coins are thrown simultaneously until all three show the same face.  What is the probability that they are thrown more than three times?

When three coins are tossed there are 8 possible outcomes, two of which are (HHH and TTT) have all three coins showing the same face.  Therefore, the probability of getting all three coins with the same face is 2 out of 8, or 1/4.

I solved this problem two different ways.  First, I used a formula derived in an earlier problem and calculated P(X>3) directly and got ~.4219.  Wanting to check this, I next used the "brute force and ignorance" method and calculated P(X>3) = 1-[P(X=1) + P(X=2) + P(X=3)] and again got an answer of ~.4219.

The math department chair at my school enjoys programming so I asked him to program this, run it 10,000 times, and see how the experimental probability matches up with the theoretical probability.  Here is the text of the email I just received from him:

I just finished coding the program to test your coin flipping problem. The program considers 10,000 test cases. I ran it 10 times with the following results. Also, I've included the program if you want to see what it looks like. I wrote it in Python.
Results:
0.4184
0.4245
0.4271
0.4223
0.4102
0.4176
0.421
0.4226
0.414
0.4171
Pretty good results. I'd say your answer is correct.

Program:
i = 0
s = 0
def role():
x = int(np.random.random_sample() + .5)
y = int(np.random.random_sample() + .5)
z = int(np.random.random_sample() + .5)
return (x,y,z)

while i < 10000:
    t = True
    c = 0
    while t == True:
        r = role()
        c += 1
        if r == (1,1,1) or r == (0,0,0):
            t = False
            if c > 3:
                s += 1
    i += 1

p = s / 10000.00

print p

Nice!

It's Not Just In The US

I doubt anyone would ever go for this idea, but just imagine for a minute how interesting it would be if, instead of curriculum decisions' being made at the state/province or district or school level, they were actually made at the teacher level?  The source of the problems mentioned in this story would be made clear, the choices placed in stark relief, but I genuinely believe there are interests out there who, for political reasons, do not want this problem solved:

Sadly, the latest testing data from Ontario’s Education and Quality and Accountability Office is unsurprising: Student performance in mathematics is continuing its downward trend for the fifth straight year.

It doesn’t matter whether your child attends a highly sought-after public school, or a not so stellar one: Chances are the school’s math scores are declining. The provincial government has blamed teachers’ weak backgrounds in math, recognizing that students need more support, but it has not retooled the curriculum.

There is an emerging and disturbing consequence. Families that can afford it are opting in record numbers for private tutoring, while those that cannot are stuck with the status quo. The result is a de facto two-tier system, though the government has undertaken to offer a quality, accessible education to all.

The current curriculum is grounded in “discovery learning,” in which students use their own learning styles to explore math. The emphasis is on problem-solving techniques, real-world applications and greater creativity. The problem is that students don’t have the basics on which to build.

Common Core implementation, anyone?

Refusing To Believe The Facts About Head Start

For the billions that have been spent on Head Start, there's no evidence at all that the program does what its supporters say it does.  In fact, there's no evidence at all that it has any effects after third grade.  Why should we spend billions for a program that doesn't have lasting results?

The lack of any results doesn't keep the bleeding hearts from keening about a cut:

Head Start programs in the Sacramento region began the school year with fewer preschoolers after federal leaders imposed across-the-board budget cuts in January.

Besides providing preschool education and child care, Head Start serves as a one-stop shop offering health screenings, meals, nutrition advice and access to social services. Advocates say the program is essential to giving impoverished children a chance to succeed once they start kindergarten...

The Head Start program has its critics. Republicans have argued that it costs too much and has not been effective, pointing to a 2010 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study that showed positive gains made by Head Start students “are largely absent by first grade for the program population as a whole.”

But Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Childhood Education Research at Rutgers University, said research on the program conducted every few years shows Head Start is improving steadily.

The federal Head Start program is of higher quality “than the rest of the programs that kids were in,” Barnett said. “If you look at the state-run programs, they are all over the place. Some are horrible.”

I don't see how Mr. Barnett's statement demonstrates improvement in the program or a counter to "Republicans" who argue that it "costs too much  and has not been effective."  I think it's just a teacher welfare program and a socialist hook.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/09/14/5735042/federal-cuts-lead-to-fewer-head.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/09/14/5735042/federal-cuts-lead-to-fewer-head.html#storylink=cpy

This Is What The Major Sacramento Newspaper Calls "Questionable Decisions"--When The Vileness Comes From A Liberal

First, the tweet that started it all:

May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases.

Nice guy, attacking a Republican woman for tweeting

GOP beat gun control, changed Obama's mind on Syria, is holding the line on amnesty. We can defund Obamacare, too!

And this is how the major Sacramento paper reported it:

Tempers flared Friday as House Republicans voted to defund President Barack Obama's signature health care law, which led to some questionable Twitter decisions.

Amanda Carpenter, a speechwriter for Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tweeted to urge Republicans on. Then Allan Brauer, communications chair for the Democratic Party of Sacramento County, lashed out with a response involving Carpenter's kids.

There's nothing untrue in the statement, but wow, if that isn't the most droll way to present what happened!

In an update to that story the paper reported the following:

A Sacramento County Democratic Party official has resigned over an offensive tweet that involved a fellow Twitter user's children...

In an email, Democratic Party of Sacramento County chair Kerri Asbury said the party had sought and accepted Bauer's resignation.

"The comments by our volunteer communications chair are appalling and inexcusable," Asbury wrote. "No matter what our political disagreements may be, wishing harm is never an acceptable response during heated public debate or any other time."

What's left out is some of Mr. Bauer's follow-on tweets after he initially took some heat, quoted from the first link above:

Busy blocking the tapeworms that have slithered out of hellspawn @amandacarpenter's asshole. How's your day so far?

I'm being attacked on Twitter for wishing one of Ted Cruz's pubic lice to experience the pain her boss is inflicting on Americans.

Yes, your party takes bread from the mouths of starving children and medicine from the sick, and I'm the problem. Got it.

Nice guy, and this isn't the first time he's said such reprehensible things.

But let's go back to the media bias at the second link, above.  Note the nice, sincere-sounding statement from Kerri Asbury.  Here is how a spokesperson for the California Democratic Party worded it:

The problem with this kind of rhetoric is that it lets fringe characters--those who are actively trying to shut down the government--like Ted Cruz, off the hook.  It's never acceptable to wish physical harm against physical opponents, regardless of how objectionable their policy priorities are.

Let me translate:  we understand why someone would say what was said because Ted Cruz is such a horrible person, but we don't condone (publicly) wishing physical harm on others.

Classy people, these liberals.

These Kinds of Posts Sorta Write Themselves

Fortunately FIRE is on the case:

In a stunning illustration of the attitude taken towards free speech by too many colleges across the United States, Modesto Junior College in California told a student that he could not pass out copies of the United States Constitution outside the student center on September 17, 2013—Constitution Day. Captured on video, college police and administrators demanded that Robert Van Tuinen stop passing out Constitution pamphlets and told him that he would only be allowed to pass them out in the college’s tiny free speech zone, and only after scheduling it several days or weeks ahead of time. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has written to Modesto, demanding that the college rescind this policy immediately.

What could I add that would demonstrate Modesto JC's stupidity above and beyond what they've done?

Chocolate and Travel

This story combines two of my favorite things, chocolate and travel:

Air Miles are awesome, they can be used to score free flights, hotel stays and if you’re really lucky, the scorn and hatred of everyone you come in contact with who has to pay full price when they travel. The king of all virtually free travelers is one David Phillips, a civil engineer who teaches at the University of California, Davis.

David came to the attention of the wider media when he managed to convert about 12,150 cups of Healthy Choice chocolate pudding into over a million Air Miles. Ever since, David and his entire family have been travelling the world for next to nothing.

A Class Act

Last weekend #5 Stanford headed to Army to play the, uh, 1-1 Army Black Knights!  Army led 3-0, then 6-0, until late in the 1st Quarter, then Stanford pulled ahead for good, finishing the game with a score of 34-20.

Stanford wide receiver John Flacco posted this YouTube message to West Point cadets.  This is what character looks like.