Category: observations

Some people swore that the house was haunted.

Haunted? Like, by ghosts? No, it wasn’t like that. But “having or showing signs of mental anguish or torment” as the definition reads? That’s more accurate.

But how does that work for an inanimate object, like a house? Well, if you consider that a house is made of wood and wood comes from trees and trees are living things, can’t living things be unhappy, maybe even very unhappy? If a house was made of wood from trees that were unhappy in life, does the wood remember? Can you expect those warped gnarled timbers to hold their shape, bear that load, to shed weather any better after being harvested than it did before?

This house was built from wood that should have been plowed into a slash pile and burned before anyone relied on it for anything but heat. The trees were bent and twisted from weather and wind over many years and had been left standing when others around them had been harvested.

After years of standing as a windbreak and being used as a living fenceline, having gradually engulfed wires and staples, the land was cleared and no one related their story to the new owner. New to the territory, they pulled the trees down and piled them up for burning. But before the wood was dry enough, someone took the bigger pieces and built the house — the one we’re talking about — from the lumber they trimmed from them. No one knew who took the wood or who built the house. We don’t know how they milled it, as crooked and dangerous as it was. No one ever saw it in its intended location. We never saw it til it got here, where you see it now.

It moved itself here, where the trees came from. We never figured out how. It left some marks behind, of course. Nothing that big moves without leaving some trace. That gate you came through? Demolished. Knocked flat with 20 feet of hedge on either side of it. Some gouges in the lawn there, too. But we never found where it started from. And no one claimed it. Can you imagine a “Lost: house” posted on a telephone pole? See a milk carton with “Have you seen my house?” printed on it?

Next morning, the coast watchers came out to check the beach and do their usual weather observations and look for any problems. And there it sat. Right on that cliff as if it had been built there. The old fellow who was first to see it, well, he didn’t know any better, so he went up to it and tried to open the door. It was locked or somehow held shut. He kept on pulling and knocking and for some reason it finally opened (according to the fellow with him that morning). He went in and the door slammed so hard, the house jumped off the ground. And out through the front door, on the opposite side, he came flying out and ended up out in the channel, about where you see those gulls. Fully 20 yards.

His partner rescued him, as they had a boat and life-rings right there, but he quit that day and never came back. Haven’t had a coast watcher here since. No one will take the job.

Time was, we had a swimming beach and a boat launch here and some picnic tables and fire rings for families to enjoy. But then that house arrived.

Nothing was ever the same again after that.

The drugs we really need wouldn’t make us high, rather reliably connect us with whom we already are at our best.

Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton)

Talking with a parent whose kids went to preschool with ours and found her kids are moving out of a high-quality Catholic school to one of the premier private schools: she urged me to get ours assessed with the ISEE exam. Her oldest says he is being challenged for the first time, after spending elementary school in a well-regarded Montessori program and then Catholic school for middle school. Hmmm. 

If they did well on the assessment, would we abandon public school? Assuming we could afford it, with financial aid etc., would we do it? 

The advantages:

• High academic rigor
• High expectations (college prep, professional careers)
• Contacts. Steve Ballmer didn’t get to run MSFT based on his personal charm or good looks

The negatives:

• Expensive
• Insular: private school goes against a lot of what I believe in. I don’t want my kids exposed to a country club atmosphere or hanging with kids who feel entitled
• Am I wrong to be more concerned about the social dynamics of a rich school than a good middle class public school? Popular fiction notwithstanding, I’d have to think about it. 

I think the assessment might be as far as this goes. Though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the scores are shared with the schools and if they’re good, that we hear from them. Oh, well, better to be asked than ignored. 

In the wake of the midterm elections, how long do we wait for the new leadership to fix everything they think Obama has neglected?

The new session will begin in January 2011. I say we give them til April 15 (a date that reminds us that we own a piece of this enterprise). If we don’t like what we see, we start writing letters, emailing, and calling these public servants to find out what the hold-up is. Where are the jobs? Why is the deficit still so high?

They claim to have the answers: let’s find out.

The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa category in the United States under the Immigration & Nationality Act, section 101(a)(15)(H). It allows U.S. employers to seek temporary help from skilled foreigners who have the equivalent U.S. Bachelor’s Degree education. H-1B employees are employed temporarily in a job category that is considered by the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services to be a “specialty occupation.” A specialty occupation is one that requires theoretical and practical application of a body of specialized knowledge along with at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent.

The H1B is a visa category for skilled workers, in industries that originated here in the US. Look at the top 100 companies who use this to get the employees they need. I wonder how many of them lobby for lower taxes (that would go to help schools educate the workers they need) while spending money on the legal process and recruitment that allows them import that knowledge. And there are non-immigrant visas: these workers come to the US, use their knowledge to our benefit but also learn from us and undoubtedly use that knowledge when and if they return home. It looks like a losing proposition in the long-term, as we don’t develop home-grown expertise while we subsidize our possible competitors in the markets that US companies will be trying to expand into in years to come.

Link: Quality education for me, but not for thee

If Bill Gates is adamant that American public schools are broken, why doesn’t he look at the schools where his H1B visa holders have come from? Do they use his DVD player model, where one good teacher’s lectures are recorded for use in many classrooms? Or do they still do things the old-fashioned way, with basic skills, standards and rigorous testing and assessment?

A veteran educator with 25 years of service shared some thoughts on student achievement with me the other day. As in many large cities, there are differences in socioeconomic status and educational attainment across the city. Here, we have a North/South divide: northend schools historically outperform their southend counterparts, just as the northern half of the city is in the higher end of the socioeconomic scale. We often think we know the reasons why students struggle and fail – lack of parental involvement, cultural differences, poor schools – but I heard a different take on this.

Lack of parental involvement — manifested by weak parent/teacher contact/communication, lack of support for homework, reading, good study habits or work ethic — is both cultural and economic. If several generations of a family can see that they have made no economic progress despite their efforts in school, they are not likely to value education as a way to improve the lives of the next generation. And some families who still believe in hard work are often unable to engage with their child’s school due to their own work demands. People making minimum wage often need more than one job to make ends meet if they have children and that additional work time is time they can’t spend at home supporting their child’s education or working with teachers to ensure their child is making progress.

But there is another aspect of this I hadn’t realized. An unstable or marginal family structure can undermine the work in those precious few hours in other ways. Two factors were laid out for me: mobility/school changes and summer vacation.

This veteran educator told me that, in his experience, kids who completed grades K-5 in the same school performed better on standardized tests than those who arrived in the school where they would be tested in the 3rd or 4th grade. There is a clear advantage to students having a consistent school experience, being able to make friends, to bond with teachers, to feel comfortable and confident (I mentioned confidence earlier and while it may not be a reliable metric, I think it’s an indicator/predictor of success). Early learners need to feel supported and know that people care about their education. This is missing in the lives of kids who move around between schools. It can also mean their home life isn’t stable. Varying custodial arrangements, different households, inconsistent parenting/role modeling can confuse and undermine a young kid. Not to say that older kids don’t need that, too, but building a foundation where kids know how to learn and that value of learning, the confidence that comes with mastery, can help the older student stay on course.

But what about summer vacation? What can be wrong there? It’s an anachronism, a relic of an agrarian past that is easily 100 years out of date. But how is it harmful? Turns out, it’s not so much what they do over the break, it’s what students don’t do.

Ten/twelve weeks of idleness for a latchkey kid with working parents, maybe working 2 or more jobs, can freeze a student in their tracks. Those few hours of school attendance and socializing are important in the intellectual and social development, their need to find their place and realize their potential. If their summer is unstructured and devoid of any enrichment, they can actually lose what they learned, like an athlete losing muscle tone or a musician losing their chops. Latchkeys kids with the TV for company aren’t prepared for returning to school like their peers who take vacations, go to museums or camps, and are supported while they’re out of school. Ten/twelve weeks out of the learning environment, when they are already at a disadvantage, will stop a kid’s progress and if it continues, will probably have a cumulative effect by the time they reach middle school. They’re in review/catchup mode while other kids are breaking new ground and that can eat away at their confidence and sense of belonging. It’s not to hard to imagine a young student starting to doubt school is for them, that there is a any point to it.

Proposed changes to the school calendar that would shrink summer break or distribute it through the year are usually framed as being more realistic, making kids more prepared for life. And that argument makes sense. Spreading the 36 weeks (more or less) of attendance around with 2-3 week breaks would be interesting to study. I never considered it as a serious disadvantage for poorer kids but it makes sense.

Making housing more stable for students, either through subsidies or other assistance, might make a big difference in the achievement gap. It sounds like meddlesome big brother-ish interference but these are kids who could use a big brother, someone to look out for them. I would like to see the test results for kids who are struggling with the state-mandated tests cross-referenced with changes in home address or custodial responsibility. If there is something to this and no one has acted on it, what a disaster.

More MAP today. Very frustrating as the infrastructure seems to have been rolled out without any performance/scalability testing. Five and six year olds are generally not blessed with a lot of patience and when they are removed from their routine, their classroom, and made to sit in front of unfamiliar equipment which doesn’t work, they’re unhappy. And their teachers and other staff, less so.

Evidently, the purpose-built wireless networking equipment for the 25 or so laptops is insufficient. Response times are abysmal, with some of the units freezing to where some students had to be moved to a different station. Older wired equipment seemed to work fine, so the performance issues were not computational. Did no one roll out this system in a lab and test it? Have no other schools reported these issues? And how much taxpayer money is being spent on this? The loss of instructional time, especially given how early in the school year this comes, and the misuse of staff time as library specialists and teachers are forced to do technical support for this product is more of a waste. How hard would it be to send along the equipment to put this on a wired segment? Probably cheaper too. I think a wireless base station should support 25 clients easily, but again, was this ever tested? The old adage that “if you don’t monitor it, you aren’t managing it” rings true here, more simply expressed as “an unmonitored system isn’t in production.” Maybe too geeky for a discussion of education but it ties in with the notion of assessing performance and responding to what’s learned.

And this will be repeated in January and May. January is awfully soon anyway but consider: November is shortened by the Thanksgiving break, then we return for a 2-3 weeks before winter break, with some kids absent and many of them distracted by the upcoming holidays, then two weeks off for winter break. How much useful instructional time is in there? How much will these kids be expected to learn over that time? And will it all work any better?

Today was the beginning of MAP testing which is not really testing but since the MAP (Measures of Academic Progress®) is a replacement for the loathed WASL old names die hard.

So picture two dozen kindergarteners/1st graders seated at desks with laptops, mice, and headphones. Some of them had never sat in front of a laptop before. Imagine administering a self-guided assessment with students who had never seen a pencil or paper. Some teething troubles, as not all the stations were operational, missing headphones or a mouse, but easily fixed. Not so easily fixed was the design of the exercises. Given there were headphones, you know that questions and answers were read aloud to each student. Fine, though the language and terminology used by the assessment software is likely to differ from that used by the classroom teacher. Unlike a classroom teacher, a computerized test cannot alter the delivery of questions of answers to match the listener. So the assessment of the material may be skewed by how well the student can comprehend the language of the voice prompts and the written answer choices.

The MAP is intended to dynamically change the questions based on prior answers. So if a student presents strength in a given area, the questions will become increasingly more challenging, to assess their strength. Great idea, really. However, if the wording of the questions themselves is more challenging than the question’s content, how accurate can we expect the results to be?

Given the age of these students, some questions contained manipulable elements: put three apples on the plate, sort the ducks by length, for example. In the apple example, simply clicking on an apple made it appear on the plate. With the ducks, they had to be picked up and dragged into position with the mouse. Did I mention that not all of these children were experienced laptop pilots? In other questions, an equation would have a missing term and the student was to choose from a list. Rather than simply clicking on the desired element, they were expected to drag it into position. Some found the trackpad easier, or perhaps more fun, to use but the proctor/administrator wouldn’t let them: why not?

Most frustrating and possibly what makes the MAP design suspect is that there was no way for a student to indicate they didn’t know or were unfamiliar with a concept. They had to choose an answer to get to the next question. The questions I got indicated some of them understood the concept being assessed but had no way to choose from the bewildering answers. Again, how accurate can the results be?

I suppose some will argue that the fix for inadequate technnology is more technology: perhaps a touchscreen device like the iPad would work better. Color me skeptical. Teaching and assessing progress is a human activity that might be aided with computational power but I favor a high-touch over a high-tech approach. When adaptive technology can find ways to assess students with something other than a one size fits all approach, we might be getting somewhere.