Why a clicker?
I asked. Because different trainers had different voices. They wanted a consistent sound to indicate "Good job", and they settled on clickers.
The trainer still used words "Good bird," but that was probably for her and our benefit. The clicker was for the birds.
You expect the distribution to have a diminishing tail to the right, don't you?
The obvious explanation is that there's a bit of gaming going on: that the cutoffs are based on GPA and not relative difficulty of the courses involved. I'd weight a B in chemistry or French III more highly than an A in PE. Perhaps I'm biased--I did horribly in PE. If you're already doing "well enough" selecting an "easy A" course would help push the average up, maybe to the next category. That wouldn't work unless there was already a bit of grade inflation, and 44% getting honors seems a trifle inflated.
I got a little grumpy with the student speeches. They were way too "change the world" You know, there are billions of other people with different ideas about that: it makes for a lot of pushback, "follow your heart," A famous shortcut to disaster, etc -- though the last one emphasized that the world wasn't friendly and you needed adaptability and willingness to get up after disasters. Bravo!
Quibbles to the contrary, the graduation went well. The graduate seemed a trifle overwhelmed, and expressed a preference for low key celebration: pizza and games at home instead of a restaurant.
Kids are in no position to decide what's best. "Just learn your times-tables; you'll understand later." We didn't go the "unschooling" route--we knew better than the kids what would be useful in understanding the world. Once they had obeyed and learned the background they could dig into what they pleased.
Sometimes we learn from bad choices, but I know a few adults who double-down on willfulness.
From a screenshot of LinkedIn: "Mechanical Engineer, IJK Controls, "Reworked existing two-axis gimbal design to fit specifications of new project by redesigning..."
Maybe a mechanical engineer can tell how much skill that requires. I have no idea.
For an alternative take, consider the Chinese 6 arts
Alternatively: 1) Propriety, 2) Music, 3) Archery, 4) Driving, 5) Composition, 6) Mathematics
Among the Persians the virtues were: "Ride, shoot straight, and speak truth"
Hmm. It looks like the trivium/quadrivium has some implicit assumptions about what else the student has learned, easy to spot by comparison with the others. Plato wanted lots of PE, and careful attention to the poetry and music taught to make sure the proper virtues were promoted. Plato's not our best guide, though -- some of his suggestions have been tried and found wanting.
If you replace mere astronomy with introductions to science/technology, and round out the Western liberal arts with the missing Propriety/Philosophy, Driving, and Shooting you get a better base. Add on history and you get someone less easily led astray by fashionable nonsense: more of the ideal gentleman.
How do I do as a gentleman? I like to think that I do fine in "propriety/speaking truth", and in writing and math and science/technology. Music -- not so well, but I do sing in choir sometimes (they're desperate). My driving is still a bit better than average (they taught us courteous driving) but not superb, my shooting is mediocre, and I'm downright lousy in gymnastics or racing.
At the university, you're paying the teachers to make some change in you: to give you a body of knowledge or a skill or a new way of looking at things.(*) Or are you paying them to certify a lie -- that you are competent at X?
I can easily imagine cases where I'm required to show competence in something that isn't germane to what I really want to learn. For example, suppose I want to master chemistry. That implies a lot of chemistry courses, some physics, and bunch of math courses and some computing: but the university wants me to take some general studies courses as well, like swimming and latin and composition. I balk at that: I don't want to be a well-rounded citizen (who doesn't accidentally drown), I just want to be a chemist.
I could be wrong about the value of those requirements. The younger and less experienced I am the more likely I am to be wrong, and my experience with college students (including myself) has not impressed me with their great wisdom. For example, that composition course is actually pretty important if I want to communicate with other chemists, or CFO's, or funding agencies.
But suppose I'm right, and Subverting the Patriarchy 101 will never be useful to me as a chemist or as a citizen. I can see the temptation to lie to the university and to make them lie on my behalf, certifying to the world that I am competent to subvert the patriarchy -- at the 101 level.
(FWIW, I missed the memo that explained why patriarchy was intrinsically worse than other models for society. It seems to have been successfully implemented everywhere.)
No. Just no. If I can't lift the pallet, I'll say so and bring in a forklift. I won't pretend I can. If I'm really no good at something, I'd like to know where my limits are. And if I have ethical objections, I'll let them know.
(*)When I checked in at the Physics Department at U of Illinois the day after moving to Champaign, I discovered that the next day was a "free shot" at the Qualifying Exam. You got 2 chances once you'd started studying, but trying before you started school didn't count if you failed. I hadn't studied anything in a couple of months, and unlike Feynman I didn't remember all the constants and formulae. One E/M problem I should have remembered the formula for, and didn't, but I did remember how to derive it. The examiners looked at each other as I scribbled on the board. I didn't pass that time. But I did have a handle on the material. Yes, oral exams... cutting edge then and now.
The list of the shutdown and suspended can be found in a Facebook post. I've never heard of them. A large fraction are religious institutions. I'm not sure what "Divine Airline School & Management Studies" is.
More interesting to me is the list of schools that got the "one-year compliance ultimatum" issued to them. Big names: "University of Liberia, Cuttington University, Bomi County Technical College, Adventist University of West Africa, Salvation Army Polytechnic University, Apex University of Liberia, and Nimba University. The full list is here. I taught the first (and AFAIK only) physics lecture at African Methodist Episcopal University (and exited the building through a mob of students on an unrelated strike), and my father was buried at Liberian Baptist Theological Seminary. The latter is pretty specialized, unlike University of Liberia--which I'm sad but not surprised to see on the list.
In a formal statement, the NCHE cited multiple risk factors threatening the viability of the affected institutions, including: Severe financial instability, declining student enrollment, insufficient qualified academic staff, substandard infrastructure, poor institutional governance and administrative inefficiencies.
That's for the ones they issued the warning to. The others were worse.
What he wasn't good at was fixing things. His motto was that it paid to pay to have somebody do the job right. As a result, I didn't realize the lack until he retired and I was helping him with a few things around the house. I guess shop wasn't a thing in his school.
It was in mine in Illinois, though I only got a semester's worth--and not all of that, thanks to malaria. But Dad wasn't satisfied with that. One summer he arranged for me to go work at the boarding school's maintenance shop. He paid my salary, and I worked as an assistant, learning some more-or-less safe ways to use the tools for woodworking. Making cabinets, repairing student chairs, laying bricks--I'd get laughed at in trade apprentice schools here, but stuff got built, and still does.
I emulated him in one thing--we made sure all our kids could play an instrument. I still can't. The piano should be easy; I tried. But one finger is lower than the rest and I get the equivalent of carpal tunnel. But the kids do well, and I'm proud they can do things I can't.
They could shanghai time from researchers and postdocs to help fill up the tutor count (they take overhead from the grant money already, which gives a precedent). It would need a full-time team to review the tutors, especially if they try to vet the tutor's proposed general readings. If they imposed a set of readings I think I'd be apt to ignore it. It's a pass/fail course, of course.
Imagine that I came out of retirement for a while (deeply unlikely in the near term for health reasons) and participated in such a program.
Suppose I had a student for my proposed "General Studies" course in my office twice a week. A semester is 15 weeks, so that's 30 sessions. Yes, I doubled the number for this exercise, to make it easier.
I figure the students will come in several types:
The second type sounds like a delight, and the first type one might be able to work with. I figure "tell me about the last book you read" will show me in less than two minutes which of the three types I have.
Unfortunately I cannot trust the student in the third category to read assignments outside the office, so for some of them I would have to rely on in-office readings (30 minutes). The illiterate (who nominally can read and write but rarely exercise the skills) can maybe do 20-40 pages an hour, which translates to only 10-20 pages in my office. If I ask, as I probably should, that they write down quick notes as they go about words or ideas they don't understand, that slows them down more.
What can I assign the third group?
I figure since this is the USA, part of the West, informed by Christendom, other cultures are important but have to be lower priority.
For reference, in the Bible on the desk the gospel of Mark is 21 pages—at the high end for a slow reader in half an hour. A short dialog by Plato is about 26 pages (in one edition). (A life of Buddha can be found in 100, and of Muhammad in double that—I'd have to find children's versions of those, and they're lower priority anyway.)
You may notice a tendency to rely on videos with the semi-literate.
Figuring a list for the type 2 students – curious and ready to read – seems like more fun. What would you pick to make sure your student had a rudimentary background of the important stuff?
(*) I know, Oxford uses the American plan these days. Probably cheaper.
I used to go to collaboration meetings for CMS at CERN. The ages of the participants ranged from early 20's up into 70's. The first meeting was held in the main auditorium, and the first talk was the last quarter in review, plans, and status of the machine. Everybody went, and I invariably got there late enough to either have to stand or at best sit in the far back. (the morning after a long flight and time zone shift, of course)
This was followed by overview talks from the various detector groups and physics groups--no details, just the big pictures.
The hall was dark so you could see the slides displayed.
That is, it was dark in the room until the first talk ended. Then there came a brightening as hundreds of laptops opened.
From the back I could see a sampling of what people were doing. About half started finishing up their own powerpoint presentations, and most of the rest were answering emails or working on code: Slowly, because the WiFi wasn't quite up to handling a hundred laptops at once.
This anecdote is probably not applicable to your average college student.
The lie is that every child can be anything he or she wants to be. No one really believes it, but we approach education’s problems as if we did.
It isn't a secret that things like Head Start can create a bump in achievement, but that it lasts less than a handful of years, at which point there's little to no difference in academic skills compared to the control sample. He suggests there can be in some interpersonal abilities.
I wasn't aware of how things like the NAEP math tests worked, and found his numbers on how many students couldn't solve the "8'th grade" problems horrifying.
He proposes cerfifications to undermine the BA fetish, hoping that a need for certifications would create a supply for them. Let employers who don't know what a school's BA is worth (or whether the fellow without a BA is good) have a way of measuring skill.
For those who go to college for STEM, he has little to say: The demands of STEM weed out those not apt; there aren't "too many" after a while. But many are encouraged to go to college who don't benefit.
For those who don't "live in Lake Woebegon," he points to existing and underutilized and underadmired career and technical education. He wants tracking--though I'm not sure he understands how big a staff increase this might require.
For the gifted he hopes to teach wisdom:
A wonderful maxim is attributed to George Christian, one of Lyndon Johnson’s press secretaries: “No one should be allowed to work in the West Wing of the White House who has not suffered a major disappointment in life.” The responsibility of working there was too great, Christian thought, to be entrusted to people who weren’t painfully aware how badly things can go wrong. The same principle applies to those who will become members of America’s elite. No one among the gifted should be allowed to rise to a position of influence without knowing what it feels like to fail. The experience of internalized humiliation is a prerequisite for humility.
At all levels, he wants to teach basic Western culture and the principles of virtue. Those aren't exactly popular, at least in public.
As a sympathetic onlooker, I offer one piece of advice to advocates on the front lines: Stop focusing on math and reading test scores to make your case. They are the measures of educational achievement most closely tied to the child’s underlying academic ability. The limits that public schools face in raising those scores also bedevil private schools, charter schools, and home-schoolers. The reason private schools, charter schools, and home-schooling are desirable is their ability to create a better education in ways that do not show up in reading and math scores.
What can push change? School choice (including homeschool) and certification can help address the first few problems. For the liberal education he hopes in four things: "The stuff of a liberal education is truly wonderful," professors trying to look smart with "impenetrable vocabulary" can't get away with that forever (may not be a safe prediction, it's an old problem), students already ask themselves the questions a liberal education addresses, and using your capacities to the utmost is fun.
Don't look for top-down solutions:
If there is to be a return to reality, it will not come from government. Of all the people hooked on wishful thinking, politicians have the most untreatable habit.
It's about 168 pages, with the rest being notes. Some of his ideas parallel things I've been thinking about education. Give it a read.
The theme of the system is a balance scale, and the balancing rules are made easy to visualize. Once you're set up, both sides of the scale always have to balance. You can add numbers to both sides, split into groups to show division, and get a feel for what it means to have a name for an unknown. The video shows a newer version, in which the cubes have actual numbers. I like the older approach better: if you want to represent 12, you count out 12 cubes onto the workpad. It makes numbers easier to visualize, and to separate into groups (divide), or to combine groups (multiply). Since you don't have to do the translations (a 10 cube is the same as a 5 and a 5), the lesson is simpler to visualize.
The kids learned the material quickly enough, and the last lesson had a sneaky problem or so that would trip up kids who were guessing their answers. I thought it was a clever approach. There was one more day than lessons, so I ended by giving them a little explanation of clock math and triangle math, not as parts of a field of study, but as examples of mathy things that didn't work like the usual counting numbers.
We had an overhead tour of the training area. One section of the floor had gratifyingly cluttered benches and desks, but quite a bit of the area’s desks were clean. The spiel of the guide on the tram included the cheerful assertion that the goal was to have a woman person of color on the Moon.
NASA has a bit of a history of trumpeting its "firsts", no matter the details or the significance, so this kind of foolishness has some precedent. But in an era of greater budget squeezes and no great obvious public enthusiasm for the project (or, I'm afraid, clear science or exploration objectives), it seems remarkably stupid to advertise a science/technology project as a social engineering project. The people most interested in "diversity and reparations quotas" would find this a rather inefficient use of money–much better if the money went to projects easier for them to govern.
On the brighter side, there must have been about 400 youngsters there from schools in Texas and several nations south of the border, in brightly color-coded shirts, apparently having a blast. The James Webb lecture was a LCD talk, but with some gorgeous before and after photos. There were lots of hands-on things for the kids, and some of the grownups, and tons of artifacts.
One thing they can do better is the signage. What’s there is OK, but if, for example, alongside the "this is a rocket nozzle from a Saturn V" they had a second poster with a line drawing of the nozzle with important parts labeled, that would satisfy the “general interest” people, but also give more explanation for those who are curious how the thing actually worked. (They often has a provenance explanation.)
Come to think of it, a display of how a rocket motor works is something I didn’t see there. It would best be shown with an animation–several stations for the different kinds of rocket. Maybe I just missed that section–it’s a large place. "How a simple rocket works" could be another display–like a water rocket. It might be too mechanically complex to be a reliable exhibit, though. But…
You’d need a clear plastic rocket (replaced regularly thanks to fatigue), captive to a guide rod. (Or maybe inside a clear pipe? Wear would make the pipe less than transparent after a while). At the bottom something presses it down (a hold-down) onto a plug that corks the bottom of the rocket. Through the plug run two tubes, one long and reaching almost to the top of the inside of the rocket (for air), and the other just inside the bottom (for water). Open the air valve to let air escape, and force water in at the bottom. Then shut the water valve, and force air in until the rocket is pressurized. Release the hold-down, and the air forces the water out and the rocket flies up to the top of the exhibit.
The constraining device would wear (or the rocket plastic distort), and eventually the rocket wouldn’t fall exactly back down where it ought to–so you’d need some guides at the bottom of the system to encourage the rocket to land properly. And some sensors so you don’t have to rely on timing to bring the hold-down into action (suppose wear on the constraining tube makes the rocket fall too slowly). And if this can be cycled once a minute, that’s about 600 launches a day–which is likely beyond the endurance of the toy models. NASA has bunches of engineers–or used to, anyway--so this should be solvable.
Another thing that cried out for explanation was why the instrument panel control switches had guards around them. Adults can guess, if they didn’t know already, but a sentence to explain it to the kids would be nice.
Also, a cartoon of what banks of instrument switches were for what would be nice for adults too. When you can’t read the labels it looks like this.
The atmosphere was upbeat–no mentions of why things failed when they failed, unless it was accompanied by a description of how they managed to fix it (e.g. the solar panel on Skylab, or the CO2 scrubber on Apollo 13.
I’m glad we went.
When I was in high school I remember reading of Russian course on Soviet Mathematics, where the focus was on the victory of the proletariat and not on theorems. I thought the notion obscene. I still do. I hope somebody with a sense of the absurd is playing pranks. If not, I have to question the integrity of those running their chemistry department. A scientist needs some smarts, but without integrity that's worthless.
Previously, most of the visitors who came to CERN were already familiar with the lab. They were interested in touring its experimental areas. “They wanted that authentic ‘behind the scenes’ CERN experience,” Sanders says.But Sanders is hoping Science Gateway will become a tourist destination for both dedicated science fans and more casual visitors. “A lot of our exhibits involve play,” she says. “That’s a valid goal: to make a place where families can have a fun day out. If kids have fun at CERN, that’s an important first step in engaging them with science.”
I like that "authentic 'behind the scenes' CERN experience." Authentic involves trying to find the leak.
But do such interventions have any other benefits? Suppose they encouraged students to stay in school, and not get involved in crime? From 2001:
" children who participated in the preschool intervention for 1 or 2 years had a higher rate of high school completion (49.7 % vs 38.5%; P = .01); more years of completed education (10.6 vs 10.2; P = .03); and lower rates of juvenile arrest (16.9% vs 25.1%; P = .003), violent arrests (9.0% vs 15.3%; P = .002), and school dropout (46.7% vs 55.0%; P = .047).
Not exactly a silver bullet, but if this reproduces (and since this is a longitudinal study that takes time), it would help. It's 20 years old, with hundreds of citations.
Another group used their data to study the effect of "Adverse Childhood Experiences" (they make things worse), and 37% of these high-risk youngsters had none from birth to 17. (Things like abuse were measured from police records, not self-reporting.) Somehow that number seems both horribly low, and surprisingly high.
I wonder what sorts of facilities would be required to do this sort of early intervention on a large enough scale. In a big enough district you could set aside whole buildings for the project, but in a small one you're duplicating a lot. If you got rid of a lot of administrators and consultants you'd get some of the way to affording it--and that's not happening. Maybe there are some non-public options.
One of the things I do remember was the habit of trying multiple hypotheses on an observation: What confounding factors are there? Once you get in the habit it is kind of fun, though it can make you a bit of a nuisance sometimes. And it probably gets in the way of making prompt decisions. And it opens you to squirrel attacks when you're trying to work through a problem from beginning to end. At least I think that's what those squirrels are planning. Oh look, another one!
I think some of the "creativity exercises" do pretty much the same thing. You don't need four years for them, though.
(*) No. Be grateful.
I remember some of the things we tried to make sure we taught our kids. I saw/see notable gaps in current high-school grads' knowledge. And I recall some things I should have been shown or refused to be interested in that in retrospect were a lot more important than I thought.
"One size fits all" is probably not the best way to go, but "fits many" has its attraction. The following isn't as random as it looks...
Not everybody should go to college, and Vocational Education is far too small a program in the places I've seen. I think most of us already know this. But as the comments in AVI's link above remind us, just being academics-smart isn't good prep for life, or even for college.
I took drafting and shop in Middle-School/Junior High. Any kind of graphics art would have probably had the same effect as drafting. Shop, however interrupted by malaria, was useful. I had the equivalent of a course in power tools while working at the maintenance shop at Ricks--albeit with some safety shortcuts. Yes, it was also useful to have it very clear that on some things I wasn't the smartest person in the room.
Some schools teach what I'd call "Survival Skills": money management and cooking and sewing and health. I'd add a few more--including some simple woodworking, engine diagnosis (these days you can barely repair them), and keyboarding.
Add a couple more short courses for surviving in a culture of lies: statistics and how to spot propaganda and how to read a news story and figure out what got left out.
I'm not 100% sure that Algebra II is worth a year, and trig is just a month's worth of material.
I don't know that I learned much more in later English classes than the earlier ones, though more exposure to good writing and speaking is a good thing. To be blunt, though, I'm not overwhelmed with confidence that the teachers/school boards are picking good examples.
The student should have at least a little exposure to energy and chemistry and biology--more is better, but I get it that some kids aren't going to master the fields. Still, they need enough to recognize the concepts in the wild.
History: There's more than you can cover in a few years, and more dates than anybody will ever remember. The history of the West, history of the US, with a sketchier parallel history of the MidEast and East, and Africa and the Americas.
Social Studies: Why is our government designed as it is, and how is it supposed to work? How do societies work? How do economies work? What is the role of religion? Unfortunately these questions are currently largely answered by ideologues, for a kind of negative learning.
A foreign language would be good, but I'd schedule that a lot earlier than high school, when it isn't nearly so hard. Maybe some followup courses...
I can't expect to pack into less than half a dozen years what I learned in decades and which my mental foreshortening imagines happened in the week between 7'th grade and yesterday. But some things could maybe be squeezed in.
If only: some of the kids could tackle some of the important questions, and learn about the old debates, like "What is freedom?"
And then one has the classes I hated the most: PE and music. I wasn't much good in either, and resisted practicing for either. My foolishness; both are important. Dance would be a good compromise--not that I cared for that either. Regular team sports are part of PE.
Hmm. There isn't much room for electives in this. Maybe with a 5-year program, scheduling some of the shop and whatnot in Middle School... there's some elasticity in the programming; some courses don't need a full semester.
What would you put in? Or take out...
