Fare The Well, 2011 (worth an entire read and play)

2011 is slipping away, and I bid it farewell. The last twelve months and eleven days have been about partings in my family: first Dad, and then Mom. My brother and I are the adults in the room. Ours it is now to preserve the bits and pieces of multiple lifetimes for our own families. The winnowing will proceed for months. It is a long road.

But we do not travel it alone. Our families are close, and my own grew this year by a son. And that seems a good place to start.

I do not mourn overly. I have never been one for maudlin displays --and as a point of theology (which I will not expound upon here and now) I think it is counterproductive. My Uncle Albert buried his wife of fifty years and within a year was remarried to his soon-to-be-bride-of-twenty-five-more-years. Life moves on. Bad things happened to lots of people this year. The world has not made significant progress: springs have taken a fall, and change is what you find on the street. What occupies our attention fades and is replaced.

But move on. Unless the whole world moves backwards, you cannot advance by standing still.

I'm going out to buy fireworks now, and there will be loud noise and revelry tonight. Most of you know that this is actually my favorite holiday of the year, tied with July 4th.

And now, some lovely marching music to lead us into the New Year.

FYI: Joe and I were at this performance, as were Father and Mother.

Proßit Neu Jahr 2012!

In Hoc Anno Domini - WSJ.com (REPOST)

In Hoc Anno Domini - WSJ.com: "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage."

Written in 1949. Still good today.

A Tale of Two Students (and the perverse incentive to cheat)

Consider two students, both of whom are enrolled in a college class.

Both students fall woefully behind in their course work, to the point where their ability to pass is in Serious Jeopardy. And the day is the date of Last Drop and they both need to turn in a major paper, which they've had no time to complete.

Student A makes the painful decision to W the class rather than take the GPA hit. The next semester, Student A must retake the course but does so completely out-of-pocket. For Student A's financial aid is cut because Student A is no longer considered a full-time student.

Student B, believing the professor to be a short-sighted incompetent boob, copies a paper off the Internet and turns it in. But alas for Student B! The plagiarism is caught, and is so blatant and egregious (after multiple litanies to the class about the very thing) that the instructor has no choice but to record a course grade of F and deny the student access to the course for the rest of the semester. The next semester, Student B will retake the course as well, but will be given financial aid to do so. For Student B maintains a full-time load and is considered a full-time student.

What's wrong with this picture? Student A is penalized for doing right, and Student B is being incentivized to cheat. Most student grants specify completion hours, and a grade of F indicates a completed course, regardless of circumstance. Some colleges (my own included do have a grade of FX, indicating a student who quit attending after the date of withdrawal and who will be denied financial aid in the future (obviously the student was trying to game the system...) But they are not the majority. And colleges have no incentive beyond their reputations to challenge the system, as government funding is based on completion rates.

If you incentivize a behavior, expect more of it. My students don't even bother to try to deny cheating any more, they just try to give justifications and then beg to be allowed to stay in class: I can't afford to drop the course. Sadly, I think I hurt them more by saving their GPA with a Withdrawn than by giving the used-to-be-shameful grade of F.

Technorati Tags: academia, education and pedagogy, unintended consequences

Darth Mojo Teaches The Great Depression

So there I was today, lecturing over the causes of the Great Depression, when one of my more perceptive students had a Light Bulb Moment and began making comparisons to the economic crisis of 2007 and beyond. "Good, good..." I intoned. Class discussion became lively and animated at this point. Students began to make connections and I even was asked for an explanation of my approach; for what it's worth I am now publicly self-identified as an Austrian.

But it was after class that things got interesting. The same student who shared the epiphany with me asked me about why we don't hear about more comparisons to the 1930s and the causes of the Depression from historians. Then I got asked where to find more material along the lines I was presenting.

Instantly I responded, "Not from a Jedi..."

Technorati Tags: business, economy, Great Depression, history, Star Wars

Ten Years (minus one hour) Ago

It was another day riding herd at my school (the one public school I actually enjoyed, even though i was teaching Geography and not History). A fight had broken out in the cafeteria that morning and the usual vibes of the chest-thumpers were still reverbing in the halls. My phone vibrated and it was a text from my brother: a plane has crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers. My very first thought was that it was a rehash of the 1945 B-25 Incident at the Empire State Building. It was a strange and sad curiosity, but probably nothing more.

Then the word came about the second plane, and my next thought was of Osama bin Laden. Even back then, I had been worried that this random nut job would try to pull a stunt like this in retaliation for the failed Clinton cruise-missile strikes of 1999, which in turn was retaliation for the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Well, he did it. And the rest of the day was spent dealing with the aftermath.

Parents ran to school to get their kids. Then kids began calling their parents to come and get them --it was a grand excuse for a holiday for many of them. Counselors emailed us with orders not to watch the news in class because it would upset the kids --and then to turn it back on so that the kids wouldn't be upset by not knowing what was going on. One kid was laughing about how many people got killed and if more planes would hit. I pointedly reminded him that he wouldn't be laughing if his own mother were in one of those buildings. And in the back of my head, i knew I'd have to spend the next several weeks talking about Afghanistan. And Islam. And yes, tolerance. Liberals' heads may explode about how our local state board of education has Rightened the curriculum, but they conveniently forget how Leftmatized it had been since the early 1990s, and it got worse in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. Tolerance, diversity and acceptance became the orders of the day after the initial burst of patriotism. The idea of fighting evil was discouraged. I did not blame any Muslim student for these attacks, for I knew better. But administrators everywhere gave instruction after instruction about sensitivity --as if a student might suddenly go jihadi and attack his classmates. Isn't that just as damaging, ultimately, as the assumption that all Muslims are terrorists? But questions that violate groupthink were not allowed.

I tried not to think of the families. It was simply too much. After Pearl Harbor, news of the ultimate death toll was censored for weeks, lest the full extent of the Japanese attack demoralize the war effort. We do not live in such an age now. The dead are used as agitprops by all and sundry. May they have peace instead.

Ten years later we are not done experiencing the reverberations of 9/11, nor will we be done in another ten, or even fifty. But for a brief moment, be silent. Be respectful. And remember that evil exists and it is for we the living to stand our ground and to see that it does not win.

And go love your loved ones.

Technorati Tags: history

The Spending Is Nuts

Courtesy of the nice folks at Power Line, this video has just won their contest for best explaining the debt. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: economy, history, humor, unintended consequences

How Being A Big Burly BRUTE Almost Landed Me In The Emergency Room

So there I was at the gym today, doing Mucho Macho Mojo. For the uninitiated, this is my workout routine in the summer --heavy lifting three days a week, lighter lifting two days a week, and 45 minutes minimum of moderate-to-strenous cardio on each of those days (plus bike rides at home when the weather permits). It has been doing a decent job of enhancing my health and making me just brutally Hulk-like, but it does have its hazards. Over-confidence is one of them.

I was doing chest and upper back today. My first routine involved a Hammer wide-grip bench press machine. I work out alone, so plate-based free-form machines like those made by Hammer are ideal. I loaded four 45lb plates on each side, and then a 25lb plate on each side, and did my first set of eight. Wow! I am strong!!! Let's go for the gusto! I replaced the 25lb plates with 45lb plates, for a total of five 45lb plates on each side. Total combined weight: 450 lbs. And I did a set of six. HE-MAN! HE-MAN! I got so excited that I took a picture of the rack to prove it to Mrs. Mojo (who is skeptical that I do all these Manly Feats).

And then I did a third set. I did with gusto! I did it with speed! I did it with an abandonment of common sense and let the machine bounce at the end of rep #2, whereupon the outermost plate on the left-hand side slid off the machine and bounced on the gym floor inches from my foot. A plate that size really ought to have crushed most of my metatarsals from that height, but I was lucky. Only then did I turn to the nearest gym attendant and asked, "Well, a day late and a dollar short, but do we have any pins for these machines?" He shook his head no.

I think I may have to find another movement...

Technorati Tags: humor, The world is full of morons

Why Do Students Regard Reading as Torture? - Neil Tokar - Mises Daily

Why Do Students Regard Reading as Torture? - Neil Tokar - Mises Daily: this is today's required reading, although most younger teachers would use "whole language" instead of "whole word." Pain is watching middle-school students reading aloud and completely screwing up words and never even realizing it.

This is pure money:

...[L]earning to read independently was supposed to be the first goal of primary education; hence, reading seemed to be the most natural place to start. When I was in grade one, I had a red phonics textbook and had lessons that taught sounds, for example, the "ch" sound accompanied by examples such as "child" or "church."

But the whole-word method taught students to guess at words, not to actually read them. This paralyzed the rest of their primary and secondary educations. Primary and secondary schools failed to build vocabulary and content-knowledge levels. Then, when high schools sent these graduates off to university, the recent graduates were unable to engage in critical thinking

Technorati Tags: education and pedagogy, The world is full of morons, unintended consequences

Famous Historian David McCullough Makes Me Feel Better About Myself As A Teacher

The Weekend Interview With David McCullough: Don't Know Much About History - WSJ.com: this is worth an entire read, but there are some parts that I need everyone to read, now.

One problem is personnel. "People who come out of college with a degree in education and not a degree in a subject are severely handicapped in their capacity to teach effectively," Mr. McCullough argues. "Because they're often assigned to teach subjects about which they know little or nothing." The great teachers love what they're teaching, he says, and "you can't love something you don't know anymore than you can love someone you don't know."

Another problem is method. "History is often taught in categories—women's history, African American history, environmental history—so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."

What's more, many textbooks have become "so politically correct as to be comic. Very minor characters that are currently fashionable are given considerable space, whereas people of major consequence farther back"—such as, say, Thomas Edison—"are given very little space or none at all."

Mr. McCullough's eyebrows leap at his final point: "And they're so badly written. They're boring! Historians are never required to write for people other than historians." Yet he also adds quickly, "Most of them are doing excellent work. I draw on their excellent work. I admire some of them more than anybody I know. But, by and large, they haven't learned to write very well.

Are you listening, Mr. Big-Shot Professor Who Wrote My Textbook That No Student Really Likes?

Are you listening, Snotty Colleagues of Mine Who Insist On Doing Things "The Right Way?"

Technorati Tags: academia, education and pedagogy, history, News I Can Use, The world is full of morons, unintended consequences

The Evils of AP

A lesson in Advanced mis-Placement - Boston.com: this is worth an entire read, but it's not new to me. I saw this over a decade ago where I used to work. We were told by admins (and it's always "told" and never actually put into writing --can't leave a nasty paper trail) to identify students for placement into AP classes. This was a terrible deal for me, because it meant that I lost my best and brightest students to a program that was generally taught by someone with less actual field knowledge than me. But worse than that, students didn't want to go to the AP class because --and here's the fun part --they knew that AP isn't always good prep for college! Yes, there are good AP instructors out there, but not nearly as many as AP instructors think. Some students deliberately avoided AP because it would ruin their GPAs. Even more twisted, the ones who were in the AP sections getting A's were scoring 2's and 3's on the actual AP when they bothered to take it --because their own AP instructors discouraged them from taking the exam on the grounds that "minorities never get a fair shake on the APs."

So why even bother? First, it's a boondoggle for AP instructors, who get to have comparatively well-behaved students for most of their sections. They get a stipend for their trouble. And they can lord it over their colleagues that they get to teach AP. Second, it's a boondoggle for admins that get to pad their campus stats sheet (except for that pesky pass/fail number). And did I forget to mention that campuses get stipends based on AP enrollment? That's the part that's going on in the article. Admins get the credit for spiking AP enrollment and increasing campus funds (which are almost never spent on AP students, natch), while AP instructors get the heat for not doing a good job with students who have no business being there in the first place.

Full disclosure: I was, at one time, certified to teach AP U.S. History. I also work for a college system that heavily emphasizes and benefits from dual-credit classes which compete with AP courses for enrollment. But many of the same complaints apply there as well. Commonality: you tell the admins that their campuses will get money for doing a certain thing, and everything else goes out the door. I've seen it too many times.

Technorati Tags: education and pedagogy