Who needs parents when kids have “service coaches”?

For the third or fourth day in a row, I’ve heard references to school “service coaches”. Apparently, these people are supposed to help the kid’s figure out how to best volunteer to “help out the community”. ‘Scuse me?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for community service and volunteering. What I find a bit odd is that some bozo has decided that our schools are not only the place to teach the kids that volunteering is good, but also to teach them where to volunteer, and what to volunteer for. Remember, these are the same schools that rank as among the worst in the industrialized world. They can’t teach kids to read, write, or perform basic math, but they’re going to spend resources and time teaching them how and where to volunteer? Then there is the whole issue of government sponsored indoctrination brainwashing education. If it weren’t for the fact that the schools are so hopelessly incompetent, I’d be worried about what the agenda of these “service coaches” was. Call me paranoid, but this type of government sponsored subordination smacks of brown shirts and Orwellian “right-thinking”. Parents, it’s time to get off your butts and start being parents. This is YOUR job, not the schools. Get your righteous indignation up, write the school boards a letter and raise some hell. Take some responsibility for raising your kids, and insist that the schools concentrate on teaching the academic skills they’ll need to survive in the modern world. Or not. There will always be a need for mindless sheep. They make good cannon fodder, and are easy to manage and manipulate. They’re your kids. You decide their future.

This is math education?

I clipped this directly from my 5th grade daughter’s math homework grading rubric. The assignment: create a factor tree.

Grading Rubric:

Choose an interesting number (10 pts), Factor Number correctly (15 pts), Prime numbers are highlighted correctly (15), Number contains at least 5 factors (15 pts), factor string is displayed correctly (10 pts), Exponential notation is displayed correctly (15 pts), Display is neat (5 pts), display is creative (5 pts), Project is handed in on time (5 pts), Project shows effort (5 pts).

So, in  an assignment that is supposed to reinforce factoring, there is a total of 30 points that actually have anything to do with math – 15 points each for factoring correctly and being able to put it into exponential notation. Even if the factor tree was completely wrong, an artistic and well presented project would generate a 70. However, a project that simply did the factoring correctly, but was not artistic enough would get a 30. And we wonder why our students are incapable of performing basic math functions?

Here’s a clue: instead of having the kids spend and hour or two putting together a fancy presentation of a SINGLE math problem, have them spend 15 minutes actually doing 10 or 15 math problems. Do them in pencil and hand it in on plain old notebook paper. Then actually grade it based on the number of problems that  the student solved correctly.

I’m sorry folks, but this assignment is more appropriate to an art class than a math class. If this is math, then what we are teaching is that ‘pretty’ is more important than ‘correct’. Imagine if we took this approach in our health classes: “now girls, you’ll need to get boob jobs as soon as possible, and don’t forget liposuction and facial reconstruction. You have to look like Barbie. Guys, you’ll have to spend at least 2 hours a day at the gym, and you’ll have to take at least 5 credits of fashion classes (unless you’re gay – then you’re excused form the fashion class). Remember: it doesn’t matter what you eat, or how much you exercise, as long as you look pretty.”

Ever wonder why Universities are having to add a year to their normal curriculum? It is because so many of the incoming students think that if they turn in their homework or exams written in lots of pretty colored inks, with nice drawings and a pretty layout, the content doesn’t matter. Of course, they can’t actually DO the assignments, but they can produce something pretty that sort of resembles the assignment and is very artistic. It takes at least an extra year of university to take these dolts and teach them that what really counts is being able to do the assignment, and get a correct answer. All that matters in presentation is that it is legible and flows in a logical sequence.

Oh yeah, and giving points for handing the assignment in on time? Get a friggin’ clue. How about PENALIZING students that turn it in late? Then the kids might actually have a clue as to how the real world works.

Dusting off the Desk…

With much flailing of dust cloths and billowing clouds of dust, the time has come to bring the Iron Desk back to life.

Through a long and convoluted series of coincidences, it looks like I will be teaching at the local charter school beginning in January. It is an ‘Arts and Technology’ charter school that has drifted far, far from the ‘technology’ part of their charter, and I’ve been offered the opportunity to bring some robotics and mechanical engineering curriculum in to help correct the situation.

I must admit that there is a certain amount of dread involved here. Many of the students have been through much of their high school career with very little exposure to science or technology, and bringing a robotics class to these students will require a major leap for them. I’ve used this curriculum before in middle school, so I’m confident that the kids will be able to handle it – my concern is how receptive they’ll be. The focus of the school has definitely been on the arts, and there simply isn’t any way to teach programming and basic mechanical engineering without using some math, design, and critical thinking skills – exactly the type of things that many students enter the arts to avoid.

Having said all of that, I also find myself a bit giddy at the prospect of returning to the classroom. I love teaching, and I love working with middle and high school kids. (the preschool and elementary school kids have a whole different appeal – I love working with them too, but the rewards are very different.) Playing with tech, building things, and watching the ‘lightbulbs’ go off are some my favorite things to do. And of course, I’m a bit of a hard-ass when it comes to classroom and teaching. With a mix like that, it should be a very interesting semester.

So stay tuned. I’m guessing that this will be one hell of a ride….

Cooperative problem solving

Well, we’re a month – more or less – into the new year. This year, the big project is working with a group of middle school (grade 5-8) students, and trying to get them to actively problem solve in real time. Here’s the scenario: A group of 20-25 kids working in pairs. Each team has a few lego sets. Every day there is a “lesson” and a “challenge”. The students have the option of doing either the lesson, the challenge, or just playing around with the legos. There is no requirement to do any particular activity, no records are kept, there are no grades, etc.

On the first couple of days, the kids pretty much ignored both the challenges and the lessons. They played with the legos, and made some pretty impressive structures – cars, houses, hotels and such. Then, one of the challenges really clicked. It was a pretty simple one – given an inclined plane (a tabletop six feet long, with one end lifted about a foot, and a “ramp” at the end to provide a smooth transition to the floor), build something that will roll or slide down the plane and either stop as quickly as possible, or go as far as possible.

One group took on the challenge – the undirected play was getting a bit boring – and as soon as the others saw the “car” zoom across the floor, they were all on it. It didn’t take long for them to all optimize their distance vehicles because they shared ideas, copied, and pretty quickly optimized their options. Once they had more or less maxed out the distance challenge, about half of the kids moved back into free building (but with a lot more emphasis on movement now), about a quarter of them kept running their distance cars down the ramp and tweaking them, and the rest started working on the “fast stop” challenge.

Once again, as soon as one group had their marks down, the other groups quickly joined in. Because there are a lot more ways to slow down the “car”, there was a lot more variation in the vehicles – from having wheels rub the body, to using dragging parts, and even a couple of high friction gear trains and a sail.

It has been truly gratifying to watch these kids pull together and figure out ways to have “cooperative competition”. Instead of focusing on making sure that “I do best” the overall feeling is more of sharing ideas to “defeat” the challenge. Once all of the kids were working on the fast stop challenge, there were 5 or 6 different mechanisms that were being used to slow the cars down. As they compared methodologies, successes, and shared ideas as to how to improve each others designs, the groups would tend to coalesce around two or three models. Each group would still make their own version of the model, but they would share ideas with the other groups and work together to try and get the best result.

The best result: cars that would creep down the ramp and stop within 1″ of the bottom. The most creative? probably the car that was designed with an accidentally turned front wheels. Its path would curve until it was going sideways, then it would flip over a couple times and start again.

The most interesting observation: the teams that were most willing to use odd mechanisms were all girls. The boys tended to build fairly “standard” 4 wheel cars, and then try to figure out how to slow them down. The girls would come up with a way to make something go slow, then build around that. The boys were responsible for the models that worked best in the distance challenge, bit the girls came up with the ideas that worked best in the fast stop challenge.

This week, we’re starting to work with motors, so we’ll see where that goes…. 

Another School Year Begins: How To Deal With the First Day

How I deal with the first day depends on where I’m teaching. In the Public schools, the first day is an opportunity to make sure the kids know their limits and the rules. My classroom is a dictatorship, and I don’t pretend otherwise. I like to think of myself as a benevolent dictator, but the simple reality is that I make the rules, and the kids follow them or deal with the repercussions. I make it clear to my students that my classrooms will be civil, polite, and well mannered. I pretty much use the first day to make sure that the students know exactly what is expected of them. Usually on the first day they also figure out that there are repercussions to their behavior – there is always at least one student that has to test the rules right away. Of course, the details of the first day are very different for different ages. Little kids operate at a completely different level than early teens, and late teens have a whole new set of issues. Depending on the class I’m in, I adjust the delivery and details, but the basic rules are pretty much the same.

Teaching at University (and sometimes High School) is a whole different game. The basic behaviors can (usually) be assumed, and there is a lot less time. I tend to focus a lot more on the issues of the particular course I am teaching. I don’t make a “this is the hardest course you’ll ever take” speech. Students have heard that one so many times that it is simply noise, and starts off the class by reducing your credibility. Instead, I tend to focus on the requirements and expectations for the course. I have taught university classes that require absolutely no out-of-class work, and other classes that require as much as 30 hours per week of additional work. I make sure the students know what to expect. I go over my grading policies, what the major assignments will be, my cheating and plagiarism policy (If I catch a student cheating, they have flunked the course).

So that is pretty much it. Regardless of the age or venue, I use the first session to make sure that the students know what is expected of them, and what they can expect from me. We take an age-appropriate foray through acceptable (and unacceptable) behaviors, and set the tone for the remainder of the year. I don’t buy the “be a hard-ass for the first N days” theory. For me, consistency works much better, so I treat the students the same way on the first day as I will for the rest of the year. Get to know the students, and make sure that they get to know you – and your expectations – and the first day is a success.

Teaching Science

One of the constant problems that I have with public schools (High school and Junior High school) is the way that they teach science.

 ”Science” is a term that includes a lot of subgroups. Chemistry, physics and biology are the standard minimum HS fare, although some schools offer other science classes. The problem is that the classes are taught completely independently of each other. This means that each teacher must assume that the kids in their class doesn’t know the basics of the other sciences (even if they have taken and passed another science class, it doesn’t mean that they actually remember any of it). So each course begins by covering the basics of atomic and molecular structure. Of course, if a kid has taken another science course, and actually learned anything, this is simply redundant, and a waste of time. After sitting in a classroom for a month listening to material that the kid already knows, is it any surprise that by the time the new stuff comes around the kid is completely tuned out?

Besides the redundant teaching, a nasty reality about science is that the “categories” – the biology, chemistry, and physics – are meaningless artificial groupings. So, how did these artificial grouping come about? Well, in the not-so-distant past, they were separate subjects. There was little to nothing to be shared between Biology, Physics, and Chemistry. Biology dealt with animals and plants on an organismal level, with some forays into cellular structure. Physics dealt with motion, statics, force, and energy, and chemistry dealt with the existence of molecules, what they were, how they went together, and eventually, atomic structure. These groupings made sense in the early days of science, but in the modern world, the categories are really sections of a continuum.

It is impossible to study ‘biology’ with a basic understanding of both ‘chemistry’ and ‘physics’. Modern biology requires the ability to understand molecular interactions – in some cases at the subatomic level, and also requires a good understanding of physics. A simple example is running a gel to separate proteins – a common HS biology lab. Without understanding how the electrical charge of a protein can be determined, the lab is meaningless. To understand how a protein can have an electrical charge, the student needs to understand the molecular structure of the protein (‘chemistry’), and the way the electrical charge effects the protein’s movement through the gel (‘physics’). Likewise, when a student is studying chemistry, the structures of proteins, sugars, and other organic compounds are simply trivia without a framework to hang them on – so we’re back to biology, with physics thrown in so that we can understand why some structures are more stable than others.

So, rather than having the “sciences” broken down into subgroups, why don’t we simply re-write the curriculum to reflect the reality of modern science? There are a couple of reasons. The first is because this is the way we have always taught sciences. A simple fact is that changes in education take a very long time. The more significant the change, the longer it will take. Don’t forget – we’re talking about a system that still regularly seriously considers teaching creationism as an idea that is as valid as evolution. Second, it isn’t just the public schools that have this problem. Colleges and universities face the same issue, and have been just as slow to modernize their classes and departments. Why should public schools change the way they organize their classes when the students will be getting the “old way” as soon as they hit university?

The unfortunate reality is that it is very unlikely that any significant change will take place in the foreseeable future. Those students that manage to keep an interest in the sciences alive through the public schools will go on to University and find a way to work on the stuff that interests them regardless of how the material is structured. I have worked with undergrads interested in everything from plasma physics to fluid dynamics, to evolutionary biology. In the course of pursuing their particular interests, they come to University with a good broad base of scientific knowledge. Knowledge that they do not get at school, but knowledge that they have picked up on their own.

What happens to the kids without the motivation or resources to get this level of scientific literacy before they come to university? I can’t say. I do know that they do not find their way into the research labs, and that I have yet to meet one in an introductory course I teach at university. I have to assume that they simply lose interest or give up on their scientific interests, and join the great majority of americans that view anything scientific as simply magic. So there ya go: Science education in America is either self education or no education.

Why is teacher turnover so high?

In my daily perusal of a bunch of online stuff, I came across a few interesting stories (for some reason, these stories always seem to pop up right before school starts). Anyway, they were lamenting the fact that many school districts have major retention problems. They quote numbers that suggest that 1/4 of new teachers stop teaching within 3 years, and 1/2 within 5 years. One school (I think it was in Chicago) claimed to have 100% teacher turnover from year to year.

 Why? Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, most of the places that seem to have real retention problems are places that no sane person would want to be to start with. High crime, inner city schools. Places where education is so far down the list of “things to do” that the staff would be better equipped with experience managing a hostile prison population than a BS or MS in education. If you remove these schools from the studies, teachers still have a high turnover rate, but not as bad. Even “normal” schools have high turnover rates compared to other fields that require BS or MS degrees for employment. Once again, why? I believe there are a bunch of reasons:

1. Teachers get paid crap. Nothing more to be said there.
2. The demographic of people entering a teaching career happens to be a very good match to the “starting a family” demographic. By combining items 1 and 2, anyone with kids will realize that the crappy teacher salary doesn’t begin to cover the cost of day care, so why work when it results in a net income loss?
3. #2 leads right in to this one: career change. To a college kid, the idea of summers off, spring break, and short work days is a pretty strong incentive. Of course, once they hit the real world, and realize that their kids day-care worker gets paid a lot more than they do, that other job starts to look pretty good. Not to mention those office salaries….
4. Respect: something that is non-existent in the teaching profession. On the scale of Job Status, public school teacher is barely a step above flipping burgers. If you’re lucky. And the kid flipping burgers probably makes more than a starting teacher…
5. The realization that a job in a public school is 50% paperwork, 40% babysitting, and (in a good school) only 10% teaching. For this you need a college degree?
6. The fact that no matter how poorly a child behaves, performs, or treats others, there is absolutely nothing the teacher can do about it without risking getting fired. One bratty kid can easily eliminate that 10% teaching time, and there is nothing the teacher can do about it, and worse, the kid knows it. If you’re lucky and you’re teaching in elementary school, you may be able to get the kid tagged as “special needs”, then at least the little runt will be out of your class for a couple hours  for special ed.

So, given all of that, is it any surprise that half of the teachers that start out punt in 5 years? Especially considering the fact that moving out of the public schools – moving into private schools, tutoring, or other educational venues – counts as “leaving teaching”. The simple fact is that the teachers that remain in teaching are either completely dedicated, or so incompetent that they have no hope of finding any other job. And the truly dedicated ones burn out, leaving behind empty husks that simply don’t have the energy to change.

First day of Reading Hebrew Class – Happy teacher

This class is simply amazing. I teach at a local Religious Institution, and this course covers reading Hebrew phonetically (for those of you who are not in the know, the bible was originally written in Hebrew, so if you want to read the source material, you gotta have Hebrew). I’ve taught this class before, and usually cover the material in about 12 sessions. This time, the course is a crash review. Review because in a month, we’re going to be offering a Translating Biblical Hebrew course, and the requirement for that course is the ability to fluently read the language.

For those of you that have never had the pleasure of teaching archaic language classes, having more than a couple of students is pretty unusual. I have twelve! ranging from a couple of junior high kids (one of whom has just returned from a missionary trip to central America) to a couple of (very) senior citizens. I must admit to being a bit worried. the room was very crowded, and I’ve never taught this material to such a large group, let alone in a very fast (we only have 4 sessions) review.

It turns out that things went fine. We covered three chapters in an hour and a half. One of the students (only one!) didn’t already have some exposure to Hebrew, and by the end of the class, he was keeping up just fine. The rest of the class really were just needing a review. They started off a bit haltingly, but at the end of the first hour, most of them were sight-reading the words without having to check their aleph-bet charts.

Lets see: Large class, big age range, enthusiastic and well prepared students….. Sounds like a recipe for a good time, eh?

An example of how critical thinking works: Why it is so hard to teach.

Here is an example of critical thinking that happened to me a few weeks ago. This example truly drives home one of my basic premises about critical thinking: That it is a lot more than just problem solving. For critical thinking to work, there must be a certain amount of background knowledge.

In this case, a good friend of mine was having problems with the garden tractor (lawnmower). The battery wouldn’t hold a charge, and we had to jump start it fairly regularly. The person in question is a fairly intelligent entity, very capable of critical thinking and problem solving. It turned out that part of the problem with the battery was that it was an open cell (not sealed) battery, and the level of battery acid was low – there was simply no knowledge that open cell batteries need topping off every now and then. I demonstrated how to top off the  battery, we jumped the tractor, and I drove away to run errands.

When I got home a couple of hours later, there was a voicemail message – the tractor had stalled as soon as the mower was engaged, and could I possibly come take look at it. I popped over, and we started out with a detailed step-by-step description of what had happened. Everything was normal until the mower deck was engaged, and then the engine just stalled. We started up the tractor (we did have to jump it again – it hadn’t run long enough to recharge the battery), and everything seemed fine until we tried to turn on the mower. As soon as the mower was engaged, the engine lugged down as if it was under a huge load, and stalled. A glance under the mower deck verified that all that was wrong was that a large stick had somehow jammed the blades so that they couldn’t turn. Removal of the stick cured the problem.

So why is this such a good example of critical thinking? It demonstrates that being able to solve problems is only half of what is needed. The owner of the tractor is extremely good at solving problems. However, this individual has no real experience in dealing with engines, tractors, and other types of mechanical devices, so when something fails, there is simply no starting point or frame of reference that makes the problem solving possible. When someone who is familiar with mechanics came experienced the problem, the cause was immediatly evident – the only critical thinking needed was to make the association between this particular tractor’s stalling, and the many similar instances of  engines stalling because of overload, then realizing that the mower deck was the most probable place for the overload to occur.

The background experience made it possible to solve the problem, not any special critical thinking skills. In fact, anyone who had worked as a mechanic in a lawnmower or tractor shop for any amount of time could have solved the problem without any critical thinking – simply recognizing the sound an engine makes when it is overloaded, then tracing the drive train to find the blockage. Simply following a recipe, not really critical thinking.

However, even with good critical thinking skills, the owner of the tractor was stuck. there was not enough basic information available to make the inferences needed for critical thinking to occur. This is one of the key reasons that critical thinking is so hard to teach. teaching people to be able to solve problems and think critically is not that hard. What is truly difficult is finding a way to provide a broad base of information, skill, education, whatever. This is one of the key ideas behind a “liberal arts education” – to turn out people that have a very broad basis of knowledge. A true liberal arts education will produce an individual who can discuss science, literature, history, or pretty much any topic with some degree of knowledge (and who will know what they don’t know). This is what is needed to produce an individual who is truly capable of critical thinking. Right now, our education systems (I’m including university) are pretty good at turning out experts – people with a decent grounding in a particular subject. Where they fail is providing the rounded education. This means that the graduates are capable (if they have been taught problem solving) of solving problems in a very narrow realm of information, and anything outside of that realm is simply magic. Intellectual specialization is anathema to being able to be a true critical thinker.

A CASE OF GRADE INFLATION? « Texas Hold ‘Em Blogger

A CASE OF GRADE INFLATION? « Texas Hold ‘Em Blogger

Apparently, grade inflation is S.O.P at this school

NY Times Source Article - Make sure you read the whole article. The very last line explains why this student needed to pass: She couldn’t afford to go to her senior prom for the third year in a row!

I’d love to be around when the Clue Train flattens both this bimbo and her mom (who claims that she “earned” her grade).