We're #1

Heckuva job, California:

As if White Settlement didn’t do enough to undermine gun control’s arguments all on its own, there’s another bit of information that shows us just how useless gun control really is.

You see, the big argument is that gun control is needed to prevent mass shootings. While White Settlement showed us the wisdom of law-abiding armed citizens in a place, anti-gunners are still pushing forward with their claim that we need gun control to prevent things like that from happening at all.

Of course, if that were true, California would have fewer mass shootings than anywhere else. However, they actually led the nation in 2019... (boldface mine--Darren)

California’s mass killing problem–not all were shootings, to be fair, and many are probably more gang-related than anything else–should serve as ample evidence that the problem isn’t guns.

Anti-gun voices will automatically jump to the claim that California’s problems stem from pro-gun states where firearms are obtained and smuggled into California. Of course, this line of reasoning never explains why those states don’t reach that level of violence themselves. Funny how that shakes out, isn’t it?

Starting My 7th Decade

I was born in the 1960s.  That makes the 2020s, which start tomorrow, the 7th decade in which I'll have lived.  My high school students will be starting the 3rd decade (!!!) in which they'll have lived.  When I put it that way, the impact of such information is much less overwhelming.

They Almost Got It

The Los Angeles Times recently published an opinion piece blaming the US's low ranking on international academic tests on--you guessed it!--poverty:

But if Finland, Singapore and South Korea are all doing better than we are, that suggests there may be a factor at play other than how we teach. And indeed there is something that all three of these nations, and every other country that outranks the United States on the PISA test, have in common: lower rates of child poverty. And poverty is a major factor in how well students perform on the tests...

A 2013 study by Stanford University researchers found that the U.S. would rank much higher on the PISA test if it weren’t for its higher levels of socioeconomic inequality.

“Because in every country, students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution,” the study concluded...

There is something different between the US and those other countries, but will the author figure it out?  Will the author's ideological blinders allow him/her/them to see it?

This is not to let the education system off the hook. One way in which poverty affects educational attainment is that low-income students tend to attend schools with fewer resources and lower expectations. And there are countries where the poorest students fare better than that same group in the United States.

Ah, swing and a miss!  Why are there "countries where the poorest students fare better than that same group in the United States", one might ask?  The answer is simple, and if you've read this blog for any length of time you know what I'm going to tell you that answer is.

One word:  culture.

What Should I Do With This Information?

If your article is going to describe personality factors, shouldn't it also tell you how to interact with people with different personality factors than your own?  I finished this article thinking, "What should I do with this information?"

Most modern-day psychologists agree there are five major personality types. Referred to as the "five factor model," everyone possesses some degree of each.

Some Might Call Us Hoarders

My dad's parents were teenagers during the Great Depression.  They met and got married during World War 2.  Since grandpa was an NCO in the Army Air Forces/US Air Force, they were far from wealthy.  They learned how to "make do".

Grandpa kept anything that might someday be somehow useful.  My dad does the same thing.  Can't throw that away, I might need that some day!  I do the same thing, albeit to a lesser degree than the two of them.

Tonight, though--tonight I made myself worthy of the family name!

In a couple days it will be time to filter and bottle Quattro, my fourth batch of homemade limoncello.  Primero and Due were both 100 proof, but I made those with 151 proof Everclear as a base, and getting the final product to 100 proof was very easy.  Tre and Quattro used 190 proof Everclear as a base,  and Tre ended up about 126 proof because I didn't adjust the recipe to account for the stronger Everclear.  Tre was a bit too strong, though, so I adjusted the recipe so that Quattro should be 100 proof.

My limoncello takes 90 days to make, and Tuesday is the 90th day--time to start filtering and bottling.  I have to filter out all the lemon zest that's been soaking for all that time!  For the first 3 batches I used a coffee filter and a pasta strainer, but the process was slow, inconvenient, and messy (the bottom of the strainer was bigger than the opening of my gallon-plus Mason "soaking jars", causing much waste).  I toyed with the idea of making some sort of custom filtering device that would fit the Mason jars exactly, but that's a little beyond my capabilities.  I don't have a press or milling machine!

I do, however, have a plastic peanut jar and a gallon milk jug that I haven't taken out to the recycling can yet.  I was toying with how I might cut, puncture and modify these to better serve my filtering purposes, but then an idea came into my head.

I have a plastic (former) soup container in my cupboard.  It's a nifty size, I couldn't just throw it away, I might need it to transport some liquid or something some day!  So it's been in my cupboard for years now.  Literally, years.  Just taking up space.

I thought, I should use that soup container!  I don't need the lid--toss it!--but I could puncture the bottom of the container, put the paper coffee filter inside the container, and pour the limoncello with lemon zest into this jerry-rigged filter--all I'd need was a way to keep this container over the opening in my second gallon-plus Mason jar.  If I solve that problem, my filtering and bottling process becomes significantly easier.

So I pulled the secondary Mason jar out of the closet and got the plastic soup container out of the cupboard.  As luck would have it, the bottom 3/4 inch or so of the soup container fits inside the opening of the soaking jar--it'll just sit there, wedged in!  All I have to do is put some holes in the bottom of that container and put in the paper coffee filter and I have a flawless (and efficient!) filtering system!

My grandfather and dad were very creative, resourceful men.  When I even get in the same ball park as those two, I feel pretty darn good about myself.

And it all happened because I didn't throw away a plastic soup container years ago.

Where Might Ed Reform Turn Now?

Forbes has an interesting piece on ed reform, where we've been and where we might be going:

Have the past ten years been a “lost decade” for education reform? Or is the focus finally shifting to something that might actually work?

Ten years ago, reformers were confident they were on the brink of fixing the U.S. education system—especially for the most disadvantaged students. As a neophyte in the movement, I often heard some version of “We know what works.” The agenda included:

· Replacing bad teachers with “rock stars;”

· Creating schools—outside the traditional system, if need be—where there was order instead of chaos;

· Focusing relentlessly on reading and math skills;

· Relying on data from frequently administered tests in those subjects to guide instruction; and

· Using end-of-the-year test scores to determine which schools were providing a high-quality education.

All this plus the Common Core standards, released in 2010, was to usher in an era where all teachers and students would be held to high expectations, backed up by rigorous tests. A child’s zip code, as the saying went, would no longer determine her destiny.

None of this worked...

Now that the decade is coming to a close, there’s a small flurry of retrospection. One conservative commentator, calling the 2010s “ed reform’s lost decade,” advises those aiming to reduce poverty to focus instead on initiatives like “incentivizing work.” A progressive responds that he sees “a lot of good things happening” in ed reform, but they’re modest compared to the hopes of a decade ago (for example: U.S. test scores at least remained stagnant while some other countries’ declined). They and others argue we need more school choice. Still others, including Democrats competing for the presidential nomination, blame too much choice for our lack of progress—along with low teacher salaries, poverty, and racism.

At the same time, there’s a development in the education world that has gotten relatively little attention and seems to belong to another universe. It’s not about school choice or teacher quality or any of the other things that have dominated the public conversation. Instead, it’s about what gets taught in classrooms and how—a subject in which reformers have shown surprisingly little interest.

The huge and largely unreported story is that American educators are trained to believe in ideas and methods that have little or no evidence behind them—and often conflict with what scientists have discovered about the learning process. Classroom materials rest on similarly flawed assumptions. The disjunction between evidence and practice makes it unnecessarily difficult for teachers to do their jobs and for all but the ablest and most advantaged students to learn. The glimmer of hope is that a growing number of teachers—along with some administrators, policymakers, philanthropists, and parents—are beginning to push for change.

The leading edge of this movement has focused on reading, and primarily on the aspect of reading commonly known as phonics. That’s understandable. The debate over phonics has been around for a long time, and it may be easier for people to wrap their minds around it—although it’s also easy for them to dismiss it. Many teachers believe they’re already teaching phonics when in fact, because of deficiencies in their training, they’re not...

Teacher-training programs promote the idea that education is ideally a natural process in which students discover or “construct” knowledge for themselves. “Teacher talk,” therefore, should be kept to a minimum, and group work or inquiry-based learning should be maximized. Under this theory, if teachers provide comprehension “skills,” they don’t need to build knowledge; kids can eventually use their “skills” to do that through their own reading. But cognitive scientists have found that when learners don’t know much about a topic, it’s far more effective for an expert to explain it and guide discussion than for them to try to figure it out on their own. Similarly, if you know nothing about chemistry or biology, you’re going to have a hard time acquiring knowledge from reading an article on DNA, no matter how many times you’ve practiced “finding the main idea.”

The sad truth is that in their well-intentioned zeal for “data,” reformers have only made this problem worse.

Go read the whole thing. Seriously.  And then think, what is the problem in math?

Temporary New Digs

While Joanne is vacationing and visiting family in Europe, I'll be housesitting over at her blog.  (And even when I'm not, she should be on your "daily read" list anyway!)

Happy Hanukkah?

I recall two references to Christianity in the original series Star Trek (Uhura's "Son" worshippers vs "sun" worshippers, and Kirk's “Mankind has no need for gods. We find the one quite adequate.”)  In my favorite episode, Balance of Terror, a (nondenominational) chapel was shown on Enterprise.

While I don't recall any reference to Judaism in the show, I have to believe there were Jews on the Enterprise.  After all, Jews have survived as a people for thousands of years, so they'll certainly be around a few hundred years from now!  And mathematically speaking you'd think there would be at least a couple in a crew of over 400.

So, would a Jewish crewman have one of these?

Yes, I think so.

Another Reason To Miss School

Students should be in school.  It's only 180 or so days a year.

We have plenty of excused absences from school--illness, doctor/dentist appts, family funerals, court appointments, school activities, and plenty others--but one district in Virginia is adding a new excused absence:  protests:

One of the largest school districts in the United States has announced that it will allow students one excused absence per school year to participate civic activities such as protests.

Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia plans to start allowing the absences Jan. 27, 2020, news outlets reported. The district is the largest school system in the state.

Students in seventh through 12th grades can use the day for “civic engagement activities” such as attending marches or meeting with lawmakers, according to district spokeswoman Lucy Caldwell.

This entire country just made 21 the minimum age for buying tobacco or vaping products.  Voting waits until 18, and driving until 16.  You can be a child until age 26 and stay on your parents' health insurance.

But at 12 you can go protest.

I understand that teenagers can be very passionate about their beliefs.  I also know that most of them lack a true critical thinking ability--just read some of their essays--and many couldn't find their butts with both hands in a well-lit room.  That's why they should be in school.

 “Skipping school and business as usual is to show that there's no point in going to school if we are having our future taken away from us,” she said. “There's not a point to our education if we're not going to be alive in 10 years, 20 years, the end of the century.”

They should protest on weekends and during breaks.  And take classes in logic.

I see protests on "test days".  One of these days I will run a chi-squared analysis on absences on test/quiz days vs other days.  I have no doubt what the results would be, given that the number of empty seats on test/quiz days is noticeably higher than on other days.

By the way, does anyone else see in this new policy the potential for abuse by school administrators?

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The climate:

The Royal Statistical Society announced the Statistic of the Decade as “8.4 million.” The estimated accumulated deforestation of the Amazon rainforest over the past decade is equivalent to around 8.4 million soccer fields (about 10.3 million football fields). That is the size of Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

We – I’m a member of the judging panel – also decided to have a highly commended statistic of the decade of “19 percent.” The global death rate from air pollution fell by 19 percent over the past decade (and by over 42 percent since 1990)...

And I think these two statistics chosen by the Royal Statistical Society actually highlight the crux of the issue with environmental concerns, pollution and climate change as a whole.

The deforestation of the Amazon is a very serious issue. Any short-term financial gain is absolutely blown out of the water by the long-term financial and environmental loss. But the environment and climate change are complicated issues and by only focusing on the impending doom (of which there is certainly truth), we tend to ignore, and in fact, brush off the positive developments.

Make Your Own Hallmark Christmas Movie

You laugh, but it's possible!

Math students:  how many different movies are possible with the given choices?

American Christmas

I've loved this one since the first time I saw it:

Are Trenton and Bastogne the 2 most famous/inspiring Christmas battles in American war history?

Blast From The Past

I remember learning about "layaway" as a child, I didn't know it was still done:

For the past two years, items on layaway for over 200 families at the Walmart here have been paid for by some generous soul who won't reveal his or her identity. Last year, this modern St. Nicholas paid off $46,000 in items placed on layaway by local residents. This year's total was $40,000.

Generosity is one of the most noble traits.

Merry Christmas, Everyone

Enjoy your evening and have a full day tomorrow!

A Canadian Gets It

Despite our thousands-of-miles-long border and kinda sorta common language, there are significant differences between the cultures of the US and Canada.  In many areas I find Canada to be much more culturally similar to Europe than to the US.  There isn't much of a "small government", American-style "conservative" right in Europe or in Canada.

That doesn't mean there are dissenters up north, just that they're much fewer and much quieter than we are in the US.  The owner of this vehicle though, might be home in many parts of the US:

 (I took this picture in 2016)

The author of this article understands as well:

The progressive dislike of handguns and certain kinds of rifles in Canada isn’t a public policy issue. It’s an ideological preference. Millions of Canadians do not understand how tight our laws already are, how they could be reasonably improved, have no interest in shooting sports and cannot fathom why anyone would feel differently. They’d rather live in a country with fewer guns. For a brief moment last year, there was a news story that gave their cause ammunition, but even when that story was completely debunked, the focus on legal guns remained. This isn’t about gun control. It’s dislike for guns and gun owners.  (boldface mine--Darren)

That’s fine. We’re all entitled to our views. But it’s important we be honest. The changes the Liberals will soon bring down will cost hundreds of millions of tax dollars, anger and inconvenience thousands of citizens and devastate a thriving sports shooting industry, but won’t stop the shootings in our cities, or, Canadian data suggests, reduce suicides. It’ll just disarm law-abiding, non-violent Canadians. That’s the goal. It always has been.  (again, boldface mine--Darren)

Leftists always seem to operate from the same playbook.

So Many False Prophets

In the field of education, facts are not required for some people to become superstars.  Come up with some novel belief, or repackage an old one, and if it sounds good, off you go on the lecture circuit to make your millions!  It may sound odd, but the education field places probably the least emphasis on scientific data analysis and more emphasis on emotion and excitement than any other field.  Look, whole language!  (Who cares if study after study after study shows that phonics if far and away the best learning method.)  Look, self-esteem!  (Show me the good that has produced, better to try self-control.)  Look, peer mediation!  (Results?  We don't need no stinking results.)  If it sounds good, too many of us in education will fly to it like a moth to a flame, evidence (or lack thereof) be damned.

In math, one of the prophets is Jo Boaler.  She has Stanford attached to her name, so in education that gives her immediate cachet--whether or not her methods are of value.  She talks about "mindsets", she isn't a fan of memorization and recall, she appeals to people who weren't necessarily successful in math at school.

Intelligent but lesser known voices--including that of the author of California's (awesome) 1997 math standards--are arrayed against her, but her star appeal has so far won out over reason.  Here's another voice that doesn't take Boaler's gospel at face value, reviewing her recent book:

Perhaps it’s true that you can’t judge a book by its cover—but the bright splashes of color on the cover of Limitless Mind certainly suggest that this book will be full of positive messages. And it is. Jo Boaler, a professor of mathematics education at Stanford, devotes a chapter to each of six “learning keys.” Each key is a variation on the overall theme of the book, which sets out to make the case that intelligence is not a fixed entity, and that most everyone has the potential to learn most anything. In parts, this volume reads like a self-help book for developing positive self-beliefs and unleashing one’s previously unknown intellectual powers. It contains touching anecdotes and examples of how to apply the keys to achieving a “limitless mind,” with particular attention to math. However, while the book’s content is a mile wide, its substance is little more than an inch deep...

Unfortunately, Boaler’s review of the empirical literature on efforts to change mindsets uses outdated studies and overstates the effects of the interventions. Some of the early studies on this subject did indeed suggest that mindset interventions among students had large transfer effects on their academic learning, but subsequent work with larger, more representative samples of students has shown that these effects are, at best, modest—and possibly, nonexistent. A recent study with more than 12,000 U.S. 9th graders showed that, following less than an hour of computerized mindset intervention, lower-achieving students raised their grade point averages by 0.1 points in subjects such as math, science, and English—representing a small but significant transfer effect. In contrast, a randomized controlled trial conducted by the United Kingdom’s Education Endowment Foundation found almost no evidence for a positive effect of a mindset intervention targeted at both students and their teachers. In sum, the evidence from these large-scale trials is mixed, and the positive effects reported are smaller than those conveyed in some of the earlier work on mindset intervention that Boaler cites in her book. The newest research does not support the book’s strong claims about mindset.

Ironically, despite reviews and blog posts pointing out Boaler’s clear errors of interpretation and inference in her previous writings, she adopts a fixed mindset when it comes to scientific evidence, continuing her past tendency to play fast and loose with these findings and to ignore those that run counter to her narrative.

Read the whole thing.

The Duality of Christmas

I probably have a similar post every year, but here I go again.

Christmas, by it's very name, is a Christian holiday.  Manger scene, 3 wise men from the East bearing gifts, star in the sky.  It's all in the Bible.

You know what's not in the Bible?  Flying reindeer, decorated evergreen trees, mass commercialism, eggnog, and a fat guy who lives at the North Pole:

There was a huge dust-up in the IT community this week after Microsoft caved to a developer who complained about a festive Santa hat embedded in the code, saying the "religious" symbol was "offensive."

The drama played out on GitHub, the leading open-source code repository, which hosts Microsoft's open-source projects, including the popular developer tool VSCode.

Earlier this week, a user named Christian-Schiffer opened an "issue" on the platform complaining that someone at Microsoft had inserted an " Easter egg" into the code, displaying a Santa hat to users. "Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to me," he wrote in the subject line.

"Additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as part of a product update is completely unacceptable," he went on to say. "Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika."

When I think about the "War on Christmas",  I don't consider the problem to be anti-Christian.  I consider the problem to be puritanical leftists who can't stand the idea that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.

As a teacher, I understand prohibitions about having religious iconography in our classrooms.  I knew a teacher who was pretty incensed when he was told he couldn't have a small creche on his desk--his personal work space--because of his position of authority over the students who went up to his desk.  But there's no religious iconography at all in Santa, in snowmen, in flying reindeer, in Christmas trees.  Anyone trying to ban those in public is just a mean-spirited, sad little person who won't be happy until no one else is.  They deserve to be scorned and mocked, not kowtowed to.

That is why I don't ignore the War on Christmas.  Christmas, my favorite holiday?  I won't cede an inch of that ground to lefties.

When You Have To Invent Victims

Copied in its entirety from Instapundit:

WITH GROCERY DELIVERY BECOMING AVAILABLE ALL OVER, ISN’T THE VERY CONCEPT OF A “FOOD DESERT” BECOMING OBSOLETE?

Related: “Food desert” research is bogus. Plus: “‘Knoxville’s Federally-Designated ‘Food Deserts’ Include Super Walmart, Sam’s Club, Kroger. Plus a couple of tasty oriental supermarkets.’ And a Trader Joe’s.”

Anyway, if you want minority neighborhoods to have more farmer’s markets, you’re just promoting white privilege, so shut up, racist.

I call BS on the whole "food desert" and "food insecurity" issues anyway, at least in the United States.

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

The Camile Paglia feminist in me asks, Isn’t this just an admission that women can’t cut it in STEM fields? Isn’t this the most anti-feminist suggestion there is?

The authors of a new study suggest that science and technology professors should “equalize average grades across classes” in order to draw more women into those fields of study...

Notably, the authors determined that women in the sample data, though possessing higher grades overall than the men, were underrepresented in STEM classes. Their contention? That “harsher grading policies in STEM courses disproportionately affect women,” according to the study itself.

Almost There

I have to administer final exams to 2 classes, and then I'm done for 2 weeks!