One of my recent assignments was as more of a tutor than a teacher. The teacher sent me out with a student that completely didn’t understand the previous day’s lesson. Basically, rounding to the nearest ten and adding. 76+49=80+50=130. That sort of thing. The girl was having a really, really hard time understanding the concept. So I sat with her for a half-hour and got it to the point where she very reliably narrow it down to two options (64 rounds to either 60 or 70) and gets the right answer about 80-90% of the time.

She was quite proud of herself. So was I!

So we went back into the classroom and the teacher asked if she got it. I said, half-jokingly, that she either got it or was very good at faking it.

She burst into tears. “I WAS NOT FAKING IT!”

Oops.

The problem with the gender gap.

The United States has the worlds largest energy reserves. And it’s not just coal!

The Commodore computer is back. Sort of. Not really. It’s kind of surprising to me that a new entrant into the PC world didn’t license the once-familiar name. I know that it was considered on multiple occasions, but nobody really went forward with it.

Verizon is ending one-year contracts for new cell phones. I’m not surprised that they would claim it’s due to lack of consumer interest. But seriously, it’s one of those things that doesn’t actually cost the company anything (since people on one-year contracts pay more for the phone itself), so what’s the real reason? The real reason is, according to internal memos, lack of consumer interest. Which I guess doesn’t surprise me too much. I considered a one-year contract when we signed on, but the way they subsidize phones makes it so that you’re really better off taking a chance on a two-year contract. Of course, in a perfect world, I could switch to Verizon without having to buy a new phone to do so.

The FCC has ruled that mobile carriers have to share their data towers with smaller competitors. Not surprisingly, I consider this a good thing. Particularly in light of the relative scarcity of major carriers. If their position in the marketplace is protected – and it is by spectrum limitations – then they have public-interest responsibilities to the society that grants them that protection.

If you’re going to claim disability and seek alimony, be careful what you say on Facebook.

Canadian broadcasters seek to regulate Netflix. They actually have a bit of a point. Canadian broadcasters are required to air a certain number of Canadian programs. No such requirement exists for Netflix and as Netflix is a continued competitor for viewing eyes, that gives Netflix a distinct advantage. On the other hand, Canadian broadcasters never bothered to release all of Da Vinci’s Inquest to DVD. If they’re looking for ways to make more money, getting mileage out of the shows they do make would be a good start. Okay, that’s a lame retort, but it’s been bugging me lately.

Women have a higher tolerance for discrimination (than men) against just about everybody, all the way from a particular group I’d rather not discuss to the genetically disadvantaged. I add the asterisk because the poll was conducted following the 9/11 attacks, which may not be the best time to be asking about foreigners. Notably, and possibly worthy of future comment, women understate their tolerance for discrimination while men overstate theirs.

Fun and informative videos: You Suck At Photoshop.

Three cheers for the Michigan legislature and governor Rick Snyder, who took a step towards sanity on the subject of sex offender registries. You no longer have to register if you had consensual sex with a minor if you were under the age of 20 at the time. Apparently their arms were twisted by the feds, so perhaps I should be cheering Barack Obama or Eric Holder.

Decided to put the second pic below the fold because while it cracks me up, it’s not above-the-fold material. (more…)

For some reason, I am no longer getting email notifications of comments. That means I will be somewhat less quick to respond or pass comments through moderation. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Salmon Kahn Khan, of Khan Academy not-really-fame-YET, thinks that we should switch schoolwork and homework around. James Joyner is skeptical on the basis that it robs kids of even more of their childhood the same way homework does*, assisting only those that have the stable environment that likely will have them doing well anyway.

I’m not entirely sold on Khan’s idea, though I think it’s one that is worth exploring. I think it’s one of those things that would fall into the category of changing how we’re doing things. If you were to go forward with this, I think that you would have to look at either (a) shortening the school day or (b) having workstations where they watch the videos while at school. For instance, splitting half the day into consumption and output. Given how untenable shortening the school day is with parents’ work schedules and the like, I think that you’d have to go with the latter plan.

What the video, Joyner’s post, and the ensuing conversation got me thinking about it is virtual-ed and computers in the classroom. If you’d asked me a year ago what I thought about “computers in the classroom”, I probably would have rolled my eyes. It’s a gimmick. It’s a way for school districts to ask for more money for the latest toys. When I was considering graduate school, I was pushed towards Instructional Technology due to my IT major and education minor. One of the reasons I doubt I would have gone that route is because I was (to say the least) unsure about its core mission.

This is one of the biases that actual fieldwork has brought into question. The different schools in the Redstone district have different ways of doing things. Some utilize computers with a lab, some with computers in the classroom (and maybe a lab, too), and some not-at-all. There are three layers to teaching, as near as I can tell: maintaining control of the classroom, keeping kids’ attention, and then educating them. You can’t get to the second layer without passing the first. You can’t get to the third layer – the ostensible purpose of schooling – without passing the first two. To say the least, it’s hard. At least in K-8.

But one of the things that completely astonished me is that classroom order for even the most unruly class becomes nearly a non-issue once computers enter the equation. The same class that I have inordinate amounts of difficulty keeping focused during a lesson or cooperative exercise are suddenly pounding away at their keyboards with the interactive lesson on the computer. And it really doesn’t matter if the program itself is strictly educational (as in an exercise to identify European nations, not play Where In Europe is Carmen San Diego). Part of it is that they know as soon as they finish, they can move on to the learny-type games** that are more fun. If they get questions wrong, they have to go back over it. As best as I can tell, almost all of the incentives are pointed in the right direction: stay focused (if you’re chatting with a classmate, you won’t finish), get it right (or you’ll have to repeat the lesson), and behave (if you’re messing around on the computer, you get a boring worksheet).

Two schools in particular had great programs set up so that as soon as you finish your regular coursework, you were to go to one of the computers or to the computer lab and complete educational exercises. From a teacher’s standpoint, this is golden. You know why teachers give out busywork? To keep kids busy. There’s nothing worse than having ten minutes left in a class and everyone having finished their work. The schools incentivize their computer time with rewards for the more exercises they finish. Whatever they’re giving out, it seems to work. And it provides incentive for the brighter kids to keep learning more.

Which brings me to what I think is perhaps the best thing about the potential of computerizing education, which is individualized instruction. Web and I have both complained in the past about our frustration that the class moves only as fast as its slowest students. One solution to this is tracking, but even within tracked classes you run into variations of the same problem. Even among kids of similar aptitude, you have some that will figure out this lesson quickly but then struggle with that one and others where the reverse is true. Letting those that pick up quickly on one lesson move on to the next is not only good at keeping them busy (and becoming 30-something bloggers complaining about what school was like two decades ago), but good with keeping their minds going and allowing them to go further than they otherwise would. This takes most of the more controversial aspects of tracking off the table. The kids track themselves. Pretty much the only objection here would have to involve outright admitting that you don’t want the smart kids learning anything if the dumb kids can’t learn it, too. Besides, letting the faster and even middling kids take care of themselves (for the most part) allows more resources to be devoted to the slower ones.

There are two other primary objections to going “too far” with computers in the classroom (by which I mean replacing human instruction with computer instruction). First, it separates kids from one another. Second, it’s all part of an attempt to screw the teachers. Tackling the second one first, even if we expanded virtual schools, I doubt that teaching itself would ever become redundant. I, for one, would always want to make sure that there is the option for kids to be taught by teachers in a traditional classroom environment. Most of the time, parents will want the daycare that comes along with school (and many the socialization). So teacher’s roles might change to more of being a supervisor first and tutor second, but to some extent the education establishment has already decided that this is the case with more focus on adolescent psychology than on subject matter. So this is, in a sense, a completion of that aim.

Beyond that, look… I don’t have any particular animus towards teachers. They educated me, after all, and I work with them day in and day out. Most are great people. It’s not with any great enthusiasm that I would suggest a path that could (eventually) put their current job (or job description) in jeopardy. But if there is a better way of going about it involving computers that either produces better results or saves money… well, welcome to the modern age. As I say, I am skeptical that all teaching opportunities would evaporate, but it could become something that much fewer people do. And schools could become more selective. We always talk about how we want a better group of teachers, right?

On socialization, to say that I think it’s overrated is an understatement. Some days I wonder if K-12 socialization isn’t a net negative, where a lot of us have to spend more time unlearning what we socially learned in K-12 than it would take to simply learn through less intense exposure. But even if I’m wrong about that, there’s no reason that the kids can’t go off to a school and still spend recess, lunch, PE, and so on together. Except for group exercises, socialization detracts from education. When they should be learning, they’re talking. Second, even if what I believe about negative socialization is mostly wrong, there are kids for whom it is right. It doesn’t take but two or three kids to hijack an entire classroom. And sometimes kids with other kids is a bad combination.

A while back I was talking to an instructor at the local school for hardened kids. He was talking about how a lot of the kids just need structure, some get worse, and some he wonders why they ever arrived in the first place. Sometimes, you take the kid out of a particular environment and the problem just disappears. If a parent is worried about negative influences on his or her kid, allowing them to be removed can help and a lab with a computer is a place to move them to. To some it sounds dreadful, though for me it would have been heaven as often as not. My friend Clint got three days of in school suspension once where all he got was the days assignment. Best three days in high school, as far as he was concerned.

Except on the cost front, there aren’t too many people “against” computers in the classroom, though there is a contingent to make absolute sure that we don’t rely too much on them. My concerns could not be further from the opposite. Redstone’s schools have a decent half-way solution on a shoe-string budget, but I think that if we are going to do this, let’s really do it. Or try and see what happens. To me, a worst-case is where we are supplying all of the computers with a laptop – which is costly – and not changing the way that we do things – which is also costly. If it doesn’t work, I will be the first to admit it and change my mind. I’ve already changed my mind once, after all.

* – I am of a mixed mind on this. I hear enough complaints about the enormous amounts of homework that kids get that I think that there must be some truth to it. And I am against homework in general. On the other hand, my limited experience suggests that a whole lot of the homework is self-induced. They have time to work on it in class. They choose not to. As someone that would try to race through the coursework so that I didn’t have homework, I kept wanting to ask “Do you really want to have to do this at home?!” And I did ask and the answer was always yes. They didn’t say so, but the reasoning was obvious: at school, they’re surrounded by peers. At home, they’re not.

** – Like Carmen San Diego. Before you laugh, though, I learned far more about European geography through Spies in Europe than I ever did in school.

Back when I was choosing a major, Business actually had a pretty good rep. Everyone my brothers knew were doing really well with their business degrees, so I figured it had to be a “good major”. Then, when I chose Southern Tech, I went to a school with a really good business program that was particular about who they let in and who they let stay in. So I was kind of surprised when I started reading articles referring to business degrees as something of a joke. Looks like it’s going (or has gone) the way of colleges of education:

That might sound like a kids-these-days lament, but all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Mr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: Nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major.

This is not a small corner of academe. The family of majors under the business umbrella—including finance, accounting, marketing, management and “general business”—accounts for just over 20 percent, or more than 325,000, of all bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in the United States, making it the most popular field of study.

It seems like just about any major that gets a reputation as a pathway to a good or at least decent job, but isn’t inherently difficult or selective, runs the risk of attracting people looking for little more than a pathway to a good or at least decent job. As a subject field, business falls somewhere in between the liberal arts and technical or scientific fields. Unlike, say, engineering, it doesn’t require the black-and-white tough courses. Unlike liberal arts, it does have the potential to be directly applicable as vocational training. I didn’t end up going into the College of Business, but the business courses I did take have proven to be about as helpful as the technical classes I took.

The temptation has to be strong for universities to water everything down because, unlike with some other vocational fields, you can. And there’s really no cap to the number of graduates that can be produced. My brother was warned against engineering because of the lack of jobs available at the time. His particular field of engineering was cyclical and enough others took that advice that by the time he graduated, they were in demand again. But since you can’t point to a specific cycle for business (if the “business” sector is bad, you’re screwed no matter what you major in), there’s nothing to move people towards other avenues of study.

The end of the soap opera?

ABC canceled two of its three soap operas on Thursday, consigning “One Life to Live” and “All My Children” – and Susan Lucci, daytime’s most famous actress – to television history.

The move leaves “General Hospital” as ABC’s only daytime drama, one of only four that will remain on ABC, CBS and NBC’s daytime schedule.

Soap operas have slowly been fading as a TV force, with many of the women who made up the target audience now in the work force. In place of the two canceled dramas, ABC will air shows about food and lifestyle transformations.

“Viewers are looking for different types of programming these days,” said Brian Frons, head of ABC’s daytime department. Frons went to the California set of “All My Children” to deliver the news on Thursday, where a video link was also set up to the New York set of “One Life to Live.”

Interestingly enough, those are the two daytime soap operas I have ever kept on top of, courtesy of my mother and my ex-girlfriend Julianne’s mother.

I grew up with All My Children on every day, without fail, at noon. My interest in it was limited, for the most part, but there was nothing else to do. We either didn’t have cable or when we did we only had it on the TV that Mom was monopolizing. So it was on and I would find something to do. Sometimes in the living room. And it was on. So I picked up bits and pieces. There seemed to be two summers in particular when it piqued my interest enough that I remember the storylines at least a little. One involved Erica Kane’s romance with Jackson something-or-other following the death (but preceding the resurrection) of Tad. The second I remember more clearly: Natalie in the well. Natalie and Trevor (the local police chief, perhaps why I was interested in this storyline) were engaged or something and Natalie’s twin sister Janet threw Natalie down a well and took over her identity. This one was so interesting that I had Mom record it when school started back up again until the story was resolved (I FFWed through the other storylines).

I remember thinking that Janet (pre-transformation) was hot while Natalie was take-it-or-leave-it. They were played by the same actress. I would like to think that I like Janet more because she had dark hair and glasses and not because she was nuts. Given my romantic history, either is possible.

One Life to Live was the favorite soap of my ex-girlfriend Julianne’s mother. I spent a lot of time at her house. It was on. So I would periodically watch. Particularly the storylines involving Bo Buchanan, Llanview’s police chief (noticing a pattern here?). There was a storyline involving mentally-struggling Todd breaking out of the loony bin and the introduction of Sam Rappaport. And a fake marriage that was required for someone to get an inheritance. That’s about all I remember, other than a vague recollection of the characters, where they fit in to everything, and so on. Julie’s Mom also watched General Hospital, but for some reason that never caught my interest. Maybe it didn’t have a police chief.

Anyhow, I’m not entirely sure what it says about our society that these shows are going by the wayside. It’s not like they are high-entertainment, but I will take just about any scripted show over any of the shows that are slated to replace them. The main problem with soaps, and particularly the daytime sort, is that everything has to constantly change to keep things interesting. So there’s never a happy ending. Never any sort of payoff, ultimately. So after one summer of watching OLTL, for instance, I’d catch an episode and be alienated by how everything changed over the course of a year. It’s not unlike comic books and wrestling that way.

To the lawyers, is there a legal principle that says “Even though this situation was not come upon legitimately, it has been the case for so long that it has become de facto legitimate?”

An example… a surveyor made a mistake 100 years ago and a property line should be here and not there, but since everyone has been assuming for the last 100 years that the property line is there, the property line needs to be there?

Or it turns out that someone got something (in good faith) that it turned out they were not eligible for, but they’ve had it for a long period of time and therefore the person who theoretically should have gotten it can’t just come and take it?

I’m assuming that there is no outright fraud or that the fraud was not committed by the benefited party.

Update: Maybe a better example of what I am talking about. Several years ago, a contractor employee at Microsoft who got cancer sued Microsoft for the benefits that he was not eligible for because he was a contractor. The courts ruled that even though the employment documentation said that he was a contractor, he had been acting as a de facto regular employee and therefore was due benefits.

(I realize that “de facto” may be the closest I am going to come to what I am talking about. I was just wondering if there was something more specific.)

The Wired has an interesting story on sudden cardiac arrest among college athletes:

• Overall, more sudden cardiac arrest deaths occurred in basketball, striking one in 11,394 athletes every year. The next-leading sports were swimming, lacrosse, football and cross-country.
• Focusing solely on Division I male basketball players, the rate shot up to one in roughly 3,000.
• Men (one in 33,134) were at a much higher risk than women (one in 76,646) to die from sudden cardiac arrest.
• Black athletes also faced a much higher risk (one in 17,696) as opposed to white athletes (one in 58,653).
• 75 percent of all deaths that happened during or immediately after intense physical exertion were related to cardiac causes.

I’m rather surprised that the biggest offender isn’t football. It seems that every time I hear about one of these, it’s football. Plus, often overweight players in hot August heat wearing hot equipment. I suppose that’s probably because (a) more football players get afflicted in raw numbers, (b) I’ve lived most of my life in pigskin country, and (c) I pay more attention to football than other sports. And the heat issue would, I would imagine, apply more to heat stroke than heart attacks.

In another sense, it does make sense that basketball would be the worst because of the exertion it requires combined with the competitiveness of the sport. The team physician for U-Dub suggests that they might need to consider screening athletes. Given that it’s a risk that 90% of athletes at the Division I level would take, that’s going to be tough to implement.

A handy dandy couple of charts on traffic fatalities over the decades. It’s not just fatalities, though. Injuries and accidents are down as well.

If comic books are so big, why don’t they pay? There’s a lot of words there to state the relatively obvious: Too much supply, too little demand. When you have an excess of talented people, it’s pretty easy to expect them to work for practically free. It is interesting that, unlike similar creative fields (novel-writing, acting, etc) even the really successful ones don’t get paid very well.

Will the Tampa Bay Rays become victims of contraction? A real bummer, if true, as someone that believes that the major sports should be expanding rather than contracting. Relocation seems like a better deal, but there are some contractual problems with that. Given how the major leagues do not typically like odd numbers of teams, it seems that folding the team and then creating a new one a couple years down the line is going to happen. Worst-case, another team is dropped along with them. The Oakland Athletics have been mentioned.

Subaru’s apparent desire to shed its quirky image is a puzzler. They have two niches and its quirky image is one of them. They have a smallish, but pretty loyal, following. Back when they were just another carmaker, they were doing so poorly that they almost had to exit the North American market.

An interesting article in the New York Times about physicians choosing work-life balance over more money. I’ve commented before that physician wages have stagnated over the past decade or two, but that’s not entirely accurate. They’ve actually gone down in total, though when you account for the fact that they work fewer hours (an average of 51, compared to an average of 55 years ago) it evens out. This is something to keep in mind when we consider taxing the income of those who make too much money (when we define it beyond the top 1% of earners, at any rate). It makes taking a pay cut for leisure time more attractive.

Speaking of which, a good example of why you shouldn’t use wealth distribution as being comparable to income distribution. It makes even Sweden look bad.

We need fatter crash test dummies.

For those of you who don’t watch The Office: Threat-Level Midnight is the name of a movie produced by Michael Scott (Steve Carrell), the present-but-soon-to-be former lead character of the program. Various mentions of it are made earlier in the series, though in a recent episode it is declared finished and the ep is centered around Michael showing it off to the other characters (most of whom played parts). As one might expect of a movie created by the uncreative and null-brained Scott character, the movie isn’t very good.

The entire episode gave me flashbacks to some of my earliest “productions”. My friend Clint and I used to make radio movies. The first set was a series of rip-offs of a major film at the time. They were fun to make. We didn’t have a script. We just had an idea of where the plot would go and took it scene-by-scene. We made four in all. Fun to make though they were, they were dreadful. I don’t even think Clint and I ever actually made our way through listen to an entire “movie.” We became increasingly aware of how terrible they were. Years later we would listen to them again and they took on a whole new level of entertainment. Nostalgia and (mostly unintended) comedy. Having third graders play adult characters is funny. Having them try to talk even more pipsqueaky to emulate third graders is hilarious. Probably not to anybody but Clint and myself.

We always intended to make an actual movie-movie with the concept. But making movies is hard. In high school (I think? Maybe junior high) we did actually make some moviesbut by that people we realized that they couldn’t be remotely self-serious. We called it Howser & Mitcham (named after the two main characters). Unlike the radio movies, these I don’t mind showing to people, but under the category of “things we did when we were young” rather than “What do you think?!”

In a way, it’s a really good thing that we never fully appreciated how bad the things we were doing actually were*. When you’re working creatively, you have to start out bad so that you can improve from it. Over the years I’ve met with more than a few would-be writers who have said that they wanted to write, but they could never live up to their own expectations. Some of them basically realized that they simply didn’t have the time and energy to devote to improving their craft. Some took a more egotistical tact: It would almost certainly be great, would probably be published, but would never live up to my expectations. Their only shortcoming, then, is that they are just perfectionists. Thus allowing them to believe in their own greatness without ever having to actually produce anything. The best of both worlds. At some point I will pick up on this as it pertains to novel-writing, but for now I will stick to movies.

The idea of making an actual movie-movie, longer than an hour, was revived in college. My roommate Hubert, bereft of creative talent but a good producer-type, was particularly keen on the idea. So keen it kind of made us nervous. I don’t know if it was that we weren’t serious about it or that we recognized that something like that would take time to do right and he wanted to do it immediately. I wrote the outline of a plot with a movie that would have been doable (“The Late Shift”). Hubert loved it, but my actor-friend was kind of lukewarm on it, which killed Hubert’s enthusiasm. This worked out for the best, we thought (though my ego was stung).

Threat Level Midnight puts a finger on why I felt more relieved than anything when The Late Shift kind of got tossed by the wayside. Even with a good script (which TLM lacked), it wouldn’t have had much in the way of anything, production-value wise. Less, even, than Clerks, because apart from an actor and a lighting guy, we didn’t have much of anything in the way of production talent or even thousands of dollars. And while TLS was a comedy, it wasn’t a silly-stupid comedy like Howser & Mitchem were. And we didn’t want to do Howser & Mitchem. We wanted to do something better.

Making a movie is still on the list of things I want to do before I die, through Threat Level is mostly what I am going to be aiming to avoid. The good news about the way that my life has unfolded is that I will be able to actually take film classes. The only real questions will be money and time. Whatever it would be, it would likely need to be something pretty modest. One of the ideas involves most of the movie taking place in an auditorium or gymnasium. Unfortunately, I worry that the window for writing that piece has passed and I’m not sure I could write it today as I could have a decade ago. It needed the mentality of a younger person. I may even re-visit The Late Shift.

On the other hand, the whole thing is less important to me than it used to be. In part because I don’t really watch movies anymore (in favor of TV shows, which I definitely couldn’t make). In part because I’ve found that novel-writing provides me a way to tell the stories I want to tell. And from a practical standpoint, I’ve been developing ideas for a multimedia thing that would rely most heavily on novels, but will buttress that with other productions (including, perhaps, short films) in order to entice people to read. As mentioned before, an advantage to the way that my life is unfolded is that I have options. Unfortunately, so many possibilities I am reluctant to commit in any particular direction.

* – A moderate counter-example. I took a visual-media class in high school and made a music video. The write-up was great. The editing wasn’t very good due to technical limitations (no longer an issue). I got the only standing ovation from the teacher. There was going to be another assignment at the end of the class, but the teacher went and had a stroke. Clint and I have talked about going back and re-doing the music video with today’s technology. We probably could. But they would still be, at best, very skillful home movies, until I’m ready to commit.