Teaching From My Head, Or From The Book?

There's so much backstory to this post that I hesitate to start--I could spend days telling you how bad my school district has screwed up everything from switching from traditional to integrated math, to having no valuable textbook piloting/adoption process, to fashioning rules for (not) accelerating capable students, to creating odd classes to get around the other rules.  While convincing themselves that they use "a collaborative model" of management, it's a top-down style with little to no help to teachers.  I've said several times in frustration that it's obvious that the number one priority of my district is not the education of children; if it were, just about everything would be done differently.

So you'll just have to take my word for it that currently, the situation in my district is "less than optimal".  And in math, the bad decisions compound.  Again, it would take too much explanation, so I ask you to just believe me when I tell you that.  It's bad.  Very bad.

There.  Without any facts or anecdotes, I've tried to set the scene.  I hope I've done so adequately.

And now the story.

One of the classes I teach, new to our school this year, comes with a student textbook that is known in education parlance as a "consumable".  In other words, it's half book, half worksheet-book.  We'll buy new ones each year.  In theory, students would take classroom notes in these paperback books (which are inches thick), would do their homework assignments in the book, and would rip out the homework pages and turn them in.  The "notes" they would take are more like "filling in the missing words" in the book or on the example problems, and the homework has all the advantages of worksheets but without the copying!  The former might work if the book's methodology were clear, and the latter might be useful if I didn't have to spend more than one day on a lesson, and if the problems on the homework page lined up perfectly with what we'd cover in a day so that students would only have to rip out and turn in one day's assignment while leaving the next day's intact until the next day.

To channel John Kerry, "would that it were so."

Yesterday I needed to cover the section about transformation of functions (stretch, reflect, and translate), and today I needed to cover the section about inverses and composition of functions.  Looking at how the book covered the material, I just couldn't do it.  It's one thing to present in-depth instruction that makes kids think, it's another thing entirely to present the material in such an obtuse way as to allow someone to pretend that the material is in-depth.  The textbook authors charted the latter course.  Thus, my dilemma.

So yesterday, I just taught.  Off the top of my head.  Completely ignoring the convoluted way the material was present in the text.  Here's how you stretch a function, both vertically and horizontally.  Here's how you reflect over the x- and y-axes.  Here's how you translate vertically and horizontally.  Direct instruction, presented clearly.  Today's homework results indicate that my instruction was effective. 

And today I did the same thing with inverses and compositions of functions.  Clarity is one of my hallmarks.

So at the end of class I asked my students a question.  I told them that I'm not fishing for compliments or anything, that I genuinely want to know what works best for them.  Do they prefer that I follow the book, where they only have to write some of the things due to the text's fill-in-the-blank style, or do they prefer when I go rogue and teach my way?  I wasn't even done asking the question before the chorus arose, loudly and forcefully, "your way." 

They want to learn.  They're not afraid of hard work.  They just want the best opportunity to learn; they want clarity in their instruction. 

I feel like I'm doing them a disservice when I try to follow the book and have them fill in the missing words and numbers.  Yes, those pages can be thought-provoking when the material is written and presented well, but that presentation gives the impression that there's only one, or one best, way to solve a particular problem.  When I teach "freestyle" I can show students multiple ways to solve a problem.  There's plenty of room on their note papers for my multiple methods, there's no such room in the text.  One way, the book way, or the highway, I guess.

I'll use the book when it makes sense to me to do so.  Otherwise, I'll teach it my way.

Privilege

The Problem With "Privilege".  The author objects to the word "privilege", not to the idea that some people have advantages that others have.

So the title of that article could easily cause people of my political stripe to dismiss it.  I took the bullet for everyone and read it, it's not as bad as you'd think.  At all. 

I'll gently recommend that you read it yourself :)

Couldn't Happen To A Nicer Bunch Of Idiots

Administrators at The Evergreen State College have announced that the embattled school faces a massive $2.1 million budget shortfall due in part to a drop in enrollment, and the institution has already handed out some temporary layoff notices as officials grapple with balancing the books.

Imagine that.

Although the memo does not reference it, the drop in student enrollment can likely be traced back to the national uproar caused after a rowdy group of progressive students took over the school in May and June.

First they cornered white biology Professor Bret Weinstein and shouted him down over his choice not leave campus during a “Day of Absence,” in which white students and employees were asked to stay off campus for the day. The aggressive actions against the professor forced him to hold class off campus at a nearby park.

Next, students accused the university’s administration of racism during a contentious meeting, during which they yelled at and belittled President George Bridges. At this meeting, some white students were told to stand in the back of the room because of the color of their skin. The progressive student protesters also issued a string of demands to combat the alleged racism on campus, most of which the university agreed to implement at an unknown fiscal cost.

The college was also shut for multiple days in early June because of threats it received. Student vigilantes even took to patrolling campus with bats. Later reports about the school revealed that radicalism and anarchy had been pushed at Evergreen State College since at least 2008.

Normal people don't want to be around people who are so batcrap insane.

More here.

A Devilishly Handsome Fellow

My school pictures came in.  Here you go!

When Even The Atlantic Notices...

Some on the left are trying to equate speech with violence.  This tramples on the Constitution, specifically the Bill of Rights, and our American way of life.  I'm glad that others on the left are starting to take notice:

Of all the ideas percolating on college campuses these days, the most dangerous one might be that speech is sometimes violence. We’re not talking about verbal threats of violence, which are used to coerce and intimidate, and which are illegal and not protected by the First Amendment. We’re talking about speech that is deemed by members of an identity group to be critical of the group, or speech that is otherwise upsetting to members of the group. This is the kind of speech that many students today refer to as a form of violence. If Milo Yiannopoulos speaks on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, is that an act of violence?

...This is why the idea that speech is violence is so dangerous. It tells the members of a generation already beset by anxiety and depression that the world is a far more violent and threatening place than it really is. It tells them that words, ideas, and speakers can literally kill them. Even worse: At a time of rapidly rising political polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence...

Free speech, properly understood, is not violence. It is a cure for violence.

Yes, the authors are Jonathan Haidt (self-identified leftie and author) and Greg Lukianoff (President and CEO of FIRE), who have spoken and written much on this topic.  But this was published in The Atlantic, which is a good start.

I've written about Haidt plenty of times.

The Left Is A Mockery of Itself

Shamelessly lifted from Instapundit:

DENNIS PRAGER: THOSE WHO DON’T FIGHT EVIL FIGHT STATUES.

And, of course, it fights global warming. Leftists have convinced themselves that the real fight against evil in the world today is not against Islamism; it’s against carbon emissions.

And now, we can add statues to the list. The left was AWOL against communism, and it’s AWOL against Islamism. But it’s in the vanguard of fighting statues.

Found via Kathy Shaidle, who writes, “I’m so old, I remember when the Left said ‘Marriage was just a piece of paper’ and ‘Flags were just pieces of cloth.'”

Well, the left have always been able to cut their conscience to fit this year’s fashions.

They're pathetic. Yes, they can still cause a lot of trouble and do plenty of damage, but they're still pathetic. They'd merit pity if they weren't so dangerous.

Today's Weight

My scale is too erratic.  It's not even consistent.  When I can step on it 3 or 4 times and get different values each time, and those values can differ by a couple pounds, then it's not worth maintaining this listing any longer--at least until I can find a spring scale.

But for your reference, the most likely weight value from this morning was 198.6 (I didn't believe the 194 at all).

Do Racial Achievement Gaps Mean That America's Education System Is Racist?

Joanne has a great post on the achievement gap between white and black students in Minnesota, and she states the following:

Denise Specht, the state’s top teachers’ union boss, believes “grades, conferences with teachers and even talks with the children themselves” are better judges of how students are doing than test results, writes Stewart. That “terribly irresponsible response” is easier to say for someone who doesn’t “have Black children getting a raw deal in a kind, gentle, racist education system.”

Is the American education system--thousands of school districts in 50 states and 6 districts and territories--racist?  Is that even possible?  How big would that conspiracy have to be?  Are all those Democratic activists (teachers, especially teachers union members) really honestly truly racist?

Occam's Razor tells me that there's a different explanation, one that involves the cultural dysfunctionality of certain segments, including racial segments, of our society.  Yes, I'm saying that some cultures are "better" than others and some are more likely to allow students to achieve more in school than others do. That didn't used to be such a shocking conclusion.

Here's an example.  I teach in a relatively upscale area. In one of my classes, only 1 in 12 students has a step-parent.  I'm sure some of those kids are being raised by single parents, but as I scroll through the parent contacts in our student information system I see that a lot of them live with both their parents.  Any psych will tell you what an advantage that is.  In fact, in the year I was born, Moynihan released his report on "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action".  Despite the welfare state, affirmative action, and a focus on racial issues, the problems Moynihan identified decades ago have worsened.  I just don't accept that they've worsened because America's teachers have gotten more racist in the last fifty-plus years and are intentionally limiting the achievement of black students.

Some black and Hispanic students do succeed.

Interesting Upcoming Court Case

Lifted shamelessly from Instapundit:

BAKE MY CAKE OR SUFFER THE PENALTIES: As Ed Driscoll reported yesterday, the D. James Kennedy Ministry is suing SPLC, GuideStar, and Amazon over “Hate” labeling. I’ve had a chance to go through the Complaint, and my view is the defamation claims may have enough merit to proceed, the Trademark claims are weak, but the most interesting thing — and what may be the most impacting aspect of this suit — is the claim under the Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. 4 2000(a), which the Plaintiffs point out:

“Because the Amazon Defendants are operating a public accommodation(s), it is a violation of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically 42 U.S.C. § 2000(a), for the Amazon Defendants to deny the Ministry the privileges and advantages of the AmazonSmile program on the basis of the Ministry’s religion and the beliefs that are inherent to that religion.”

Now here’s where it gets interesting. If the Commerce Clause gives government the authority to trump a businessman’s personal beliefs, even if couched as a First Amendment expression, then the same logic that requires Christian fundamentalists to bake “gay” wedding cakes against their beliefs ought to mean that Amazon has no right to deprive the Ministry of a public accommodation because they “don’t like” that Church’s view on gay marriage.

I’m betting if Amazon doesn’t settle, that this issue is headed to the Eleventh Circuit, and maybe even SCOTUS. This is right in Justice Gorsuch‘s wheelhouse. Stay tuned.

What Kind Of Sick Crap Is This?

Who could possibly have thought this was reasonable?

Administrators and coaches at East High School in Denver, CO, have been put on leave for making their cheerleading girls practice painful splits. The horrifying video was released by local media, and it shows one cheerleader crying "please stop" as they seemingly force her to do the move. The American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Administrators and USA Cheer released a joint statement saying they don't "condone the coach's actions, and reject them to the fullest extent. Stretching should never be taken to the level of causing pain."

Free Speech At Berkeley? Not Everyone Is Impressed.

I've written, most recently here, about the UC Berkeley chancellor's stated commitment to free speech on campus.  That should be a "duh"; that it's not shows how far Berkeley has fallen.  That the student body president openly challenges that commitment is sad indeed:

A University of California, Berkeley professor and the student body president recently condemned the school’s decision to allow right-wing speakers on campus.

UC-Berkeley will host conservative speakers Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, and Ann Coulter in September, and school administrators are preparing students by rededicating themselves to free speech after the same speakers were shut down by rioters earlier this year.

According to a letter sent out by Chancellor Carol Christ, “public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view.”

However, American and African American Studies Assistant Professor Michael Cohen took to Twitter on August 23 to demonstrate his outrage with the decision and chastise the administration for failing to ban the speakers from campus...

As of August 24, Cohen has taken down some of the tweets reported by Campus Reform, but Student Body President Zaynab Abdulqadir-Morris shared similar sentiments...

Abdulqadir-Morris further claims that the university is not bound to the constitution, but only to the “code of conduct which denounces hate speech.”

Zaynab has a few things to learn.

Pat Benatar and Toto Last Night

Toto opened, played for a little over an hour, and then the stage was readied for Pat Benatar.  She played for well over an hour and, three hours after the show began, it was over.

What a great time!  And only $50, including Ticketmaster's bloodsucking fee.

Here We Go Again With The Electoral College

I continue to marvel at the wisdom of our nation's Founders. The Electoral College, while a compromise, continues to pay dividends over 225 years after it was created.

The only people who believe this are those who don’t know and learn from history—you know, like the people who (pretend to) think that tearing down statues will solve problems:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson on Sunday gave a strong endorsement to the movement for removing monuments to leaders of the Confederacy and called for the electoral college to be abolished.

Nice Juxtaposition

‘All Republicans are racist scum,’ professor declares

It’s Official. Democrats Have Learned Nothing From Donald Trump’s Win

Free Speech In Berkeley

This cannot be said enough, especially in Berkeley:

This fall, the issue of free speech will once more engage our community in powerful and complex ways. Events in Charlottesville, with their racism, bigotry, violence and mayhem, make the issue of free speech even more tense. The law is very clear; public institutions like UC Berkeley must permit speakers invited in accordance with campus policies to speak, without discrimination in regard to point of view. The United States has the strongest free speech protections of any liberal democracy; the First Amendment protects even speech that most of us would find hateful, abhorrent and odious, and the courts have consistently upheld these protections.

But the most powerful argument for free speech is not one of legal constraint — that we’re required to allow it — but of value. The public expression of many sharply divergent points of view is fundamental both to our democracy and to our mission as a university. The philosophical justification underlying free speech, most powerfully articulated by John Stuart Mill in his book, On Liberty, rests on two basic assumptions. The first is that truth is of such power that it will always ultimately prevail; any abridgement of argument therefore compromises the opportunity of exchanging error for truth. The second is an extreme skepticism about the right of any authority to determine which opinions are noxious or abhorrent. Once you embark on the path to censorship, you make your own speech vulnerable to it. . . .

We all desire safe space, where we can be ourselves and find support for our identities. You have the right at Berkeley to expect the university to keep you physically safe. But we would be providing students with a less valuable education, preparing them less well for the world after graduation, if we tried to shelter them from ideas that many find wrong, even dangerous. We must show that we can choose what to listen to, that we can cultivate our own arguments and that we can develop inner resilience, which is the surest form of safe space.

As I've said before, I hope she succeeds in reinstilling the values of free speech for which Berkeley became nationally known.

This Is The Kind Of People The Left Have Become

Harper's Bazaar magazine came out with a highly offensive article called "If You Are Married To A Trump Supporter Divorce Them" and it wasn't click bait. That was their actual advice.

More here.

Six Months Ago, Six Months From Now

It's hard to believe that it's only been 6 months since I was in Iceland, in a failed attempt to see the Northern Lights.

The friend I went with--we've known each other since 1st grade--we've been planning a return in 6 months to give the lights another try.  But even after clearing out the cookies on my computer, each time I look at the cost of a flight and hotel and a couple of goodies, the cost keeps going up.  In May, the total cost was just under $2800, but by this past weekend the cost had gone up to over $3000.

That's a lot of shekels, even for a rich math-teacher-with-master's-degree like me.

So I got to thinking, what if I'm heading in the wrong direction, literally?  My friend ixnayed Cancun immediately--too touristy.  I like it there, but not enough to lobby for it.  We thought Aruba--it sounds so exotic--but discovered that on many message boards, Aruba is identified as being pretty much Americanized, so eh.

So I checked on my old fallback, cruises.  And what did I find?

Day

	Ports of Call	Arrival	Departure
1	San Juan, Puerto Rico	---	8:30 p.m.
2	Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, U.S.V.I.	8:00 a.m.	5:00 p.m.
3	Basseterre, St. Kitts	8:00 a.m.	5:00 p.m.
4	At Sea	---	---
5	Willemstad, Curacao	8:00 a.m.	8:00 p.m.
6	Oranjestad, Aruba	8:00 a.m.	11:00 p.m.
7	At Sea	---	---
8	San Juan, Puerto Rico	6:00 a.m.	---

So there's still an opportunity to see Aruba, as well as some other very interesting islands.  I've been to the first 3 ports of call, but there's always more to see!  And there's so much to do on a cruise ship.

So we'll either bundle ourselves up and approach the Arctic Circle, or we'll don shorts and t-shirts and approach the equator.  Either way, a fun trip awaits!

Awesome Coincidence

My statistics students were working on a lab/project today, so while they worked I played music on Pandora.  One song was Hold The Line, by Toto.  The very next song--I don't remember which one it was, to be honest--was by Pat Benatar.

This Friday night, two friends and I are heading to the local Indian casino to see Pat Benatar and Toto in concert :-)

There's Nothing Educational About "Credit Recovery"

I what's considered "old fashioned". 

I don't think everyone deserves a high school diploma.  A diploma should signify some minimal level of education and competency.  If you don't earn a diploma, the problem is yours; the taxpayers shelled out a lot of money for you, and you either wasted it or weren't capable of meeting those minimum standards.  That's not a judgement, that's a recognition of fact.  The sky is blue.  The sun rises in the east.  Objects fall down.  You didn't earn a diploma.

Some people, however--and they work in education--think everyone is entitled to a diploma, whether they know anything or not.  It's bad enough when parents think that way, but we're doomed when teachers and district administrators think that way.

Which means we're doomed.

Credit recovery is a lie.  It's a sham.  It's a way to skirt requirements and give a diploma to people who haven't really earned a diploma.  And it's making a mockery of those who actually try to teach and learn:

Online credit recovery programs are used by 88 percent of U.S. school districts. They give high school credit for just a few weeks (sometimes a few days) of work, with little or no evidence that much is learned. School districts know they have a problem but often look the other way.

I can see why. Allowing students to cheat on the exams has helped raise high school graduation rates to a record 83 percent. In a recent column I suggested we overlook the problem, since restless students who hate high school are just going to drop out if we don’t give them some escape, like credit recovery.

Having thought more about the stories Jonnard, Davis and other teachers are telling me, I see I was wrong. Letting such dishonesty thrive poisons any respect teachers, students and parents have for our schools.

Integrity is important.  Accountability for taxpayer dollars is important.  Learning is important.

A graduation rate, when you think about it in detail, is a very difficult thing to measure.  Who counts?  What about people who move away?  How do you measure a school's "drop out rate" or "graduation rate"?  So we cobble together some convoluted formula, call it a "graduation rate"--and you know what?  It's just a marker.  It doesn't signify that anyone's learned anything, we just know, or think we know, that a higher number is better than a lower number.  In that way it's a lot like the "body count" statistic during the Vietnam War.  It didn't mean we were "winning" the war, whatever that would have looked like, we just knew that a higher number was better than a lower number.

And how did that turn out for us when all was said and done?

There is no value in credit recovery except for the school and district administrators who get to pretend that they're educating more children than they really are.

Weight

This morning's weight was 196.6 lbs, but who knows how accurate that is.  I can step on the scale 3 times and get three different values, sometimes with a range a 3 lbs!

Danged digital scale.  A spring scale might not be entirely accurate, but at least it would be consistent.