Classroom crime scene

 

I can't wait until next year - I'll need some time to get all the materials together, but I'm planning to set up my classroom just like the picture above. 

Alas, poor Yorick...

 

Dr. Bruce Latimer has a Shakespearean moment at a Forensic Science workshop. 

Fake blood splatters

 

I had great fun investigating how crime scene investigators determined the sequence of events in gory deaths. 

Update on Gabriela Ocampo.

She knew she would face another day of confusion, another day of pretending to follow along. She could hardly do long division, let alone solve for x.

So, the REAL problem is that she is innumerate, not Algebra-phobic.

Why are students having difficulties with math? According to one teacher:

Shane Sauby, who worked as an attorney and stockbroker before becoming a teacher, volunteered to teach the students confronting first-year algebra for a second, third or fourth time. He thought he could reach them.

But, Sauby said, many of his students ignored homework, rarely studied for tests and often skipped class.

Nah, I'm sure THAT wasn't the problem. It must have been the mysterious Algebra block.

Another teacher found similar problems among the multiply-enrolled failing students:

George Seidel, devoted a class this fall to reviewing equations with a single variable, such as x -- 1 = 36. It's the type of lesson students were supposed to have mastered in fourth grade.

Only seven of 39 students brought their textbooks. Several had no paper or pencils. One sat for the entire period with his backpack on his shoulders, tapping his desk with a finger.

Another doodled an eagle in red ink in his notebook. Others gossiped as Seidel, a second-year teacher, jotted problems on the front board.

Look, guys, it isn't rocket science. If you don't put the effort in, you won't take the reward out.

Siedel was Gabriela's teacher - so why did she fail?

Seidel did not appear to make a difference with Gabriela Ocampo. She failed his class in the fall of 2004 — her sixth and final semester of Fs in algebra.

But Gabriela didn't give Seidel much of a chance; she skipped 62 of 93 days that semester.

Ya' think that might have made a difference?

What need of math?

There's a raging argument going on over at Joanne Jacobs, a blog dedicated to education topics. The reason for the outcry? Richard Cohen's article about the California requirement for graduation - Algebra I:

I confess to be one of those people who hate math. I can do my basic arithmetic all right (although not percentages) but I flunked algebra (once), barely passed it the second time -- the only proof I've ever seen of divine intervention -- somehow passed geometry and resolved, with a grateful exhale of breath, that I would never go near math again. I let others go on to intermediate algebra and trigonometry while I busied myself learning how to type. In due course, this came to be the way I made my living. Typing: Best class I ever took.

Here's the thing, Gabriela: You will never need to know algebra. I have never once used it and never once even rued that I could not use it. You will never need to know -- never mind want to know -- how many boys it will take to mow a lawn if one of them quits halfway and two more show up later -- or something like that. Most of math can now be done by a computer or a calculator. On the other hand, no computer can write a column or even a thank-you note -- or reason even a little bit. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your world, I would be on its side. But algebra? Please.

Gabriela, sooner or later someone's going to tell you that algebra teaches reasoning. This is a lie propagated by, among others, algebra teachers. Writing is the highest form of reasoning. This is a fact. Algebra is not.

Wrong-o, Cohen.

Algebra is extremely useful. It opens up the world of symbolic logic, and is the gateway to reaching the level of what is called in the educational world, HOTS - Higher Order Thinking Skills.

Who started this uproar?

Gabriela Ocampo.

Last year, she dropped out of the 12th grade at Birmingham High School in Los Angeles after failing algebra six times in six semesters, trying it a seventh time and finally just despairing over ever getting it. So, according to the Los Angeles Times, she "gathered her textbooks, dropped them at the campus book room and, without telling a soul, vanished from Birmingham High School."

Well, I have a few questions.

• Why was Gabriela still struggling with Algebra I - a freshman subject - as a senior? Does that mean that she never took any other high school math? For, that's what the pre-Algebra courses are - NOT high school math.
  
• How were her OTHER grades? Was she a student that just did the minimum? A "just gimme a D" student? Could she, in fact, write a coherent sentence?
  
• What was her high school doing about her problem? Was she given access to tutoring? How could the guidance department let her get that far without insisting she pass such a basic subject?
  
• Was she working as well as attending school? I know many teens do it, but if the kid is struggling with the classes, dump the job.
  
• Is Richard Cohen seriously suggesting that some people just can't "do math". Horse**t! It may take a special genius to invent the math, but ANY student who seriously applies themselves will be able to learn basic Algebra, Trig, and Geometry. They just have to suck it up and spend the time.

Number 2 Pencil's Kimberly Swygert also weighs in:

Let me just add my $.02. It should be a criminal offense for a journalist to address this issue (on any school subject) and fail to ask: "Were her teachers any good? Did they offer any tutoring? When she failed once, did they try something different the second time? And how many other students are this frustrated as well? How many of them all have the same teacher?" To add to this lack of any sort of journalistic investigation the insistence that the problem is the math, because it's just a bad old hard subject that adults almost never use in real life, is idiotic as well.

Helping in a new way

I'm providing a link to an interesting article in the New Yorker, that asks social scientists to look at major issues, such as homelessness, in a new way.

In the nineteen-eighties, when homelessness first surfaced as a national issue, the assumption was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semi-permanent distress. It was an assumption that bred despair: if there were so many homeless, with so many problems, what could be done to help them? Then, fifteen years ago, a young Boston College graduate student named Dennis Culhane lived in a shelter in Philadelphia for seven weeks as part of the research for his dissertation. A few months later he went back, and was surprised to discover that he couldn’t find any of the people he had recently spent so much time with. “It made me realize that most of these people were getting on with their own lives,” he said.

Culhane then put together a database—the first of its kind—to track who was coming in and out of the shelter system. What he discovered profoundly changed the way homelessness is understood. Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

The next ten per cent were what Culhane calls episodic users. They would come for three weeks at a time, and return periodically, particularly in the winter. They were quite young, and they were often heavy drug users. It was the last ten per cent—the group at the farthest edge of the curve—that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem—the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges—it’s this group that we have in mind. In the early nineteen-nineties, Culhane’s database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade —which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless.

It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless.

It turned out that, by targeting the hard-core few, social services could be delivered cheaper, and, more importantly, better.

What does this have to do with education? The ones that cause the majority of referrals, disciplinary actions, and poor scores on high-stakes tests, may be just those hard-core few. And they are being poorly served by current educational fixes. Many of them have poor reading and writing skills; some are virtually innumerate. Yet, in a typical high school, such students generally do not get the assistance they need. They aren't "special ed", they just haven't picked up the skills they need to manage to learn. They find classes a tedious and incomprehensible nuisance - as a result, they often disrupt, just to engineer an escape from the torture.

Such students might better be served in a "high school preparatory" program, that addresses their educational shortcomings. It should probably be housed in a separate facility, far from temptation to cut class and wander the hallways. No student should be in the program except the academically underpowered. It shouldn't be a dumping ground for the unruly. The goal would be to turn the students around in the shortest time possible, and might include a longer day, or even Saturday school or an extended school year.

What's the purpose of education?

Over at Marginal Revolution, I found this pithy piece:

I view education as a self-commitment to being a more productive kind of person. Education is about self-acculturation.

Men are born beasts. But education gives you a peer group, a self-image, and some skills as well. Getting an education is like becoming a Marine. Men need to be made into Marines. By choosing many years of education, you are telling yourself that you stand on one side of the social divide. The education itself drums that truth into you.

Similarly, if you become a Mormon or a Protestant in Central America, your life prospects go up. It is not that Mormons have learned so much more, but rather they have a different sense of self. They have a positive self-image about their destiny in life and choose a different set of peers. They also choose not to drink.

It's an interesting idea - that education might be more important than we realize. It's not "just the facts" that matter, but the opportunity to mold CHARACTER.

Making a REALLY BIG number understandable

It been suggested the the full cost of our war against terror (at least the Iraq part) may eventually cost $ 2 trillion dollars. It's hard to visualize that large a number, so Hit & Run asked for suggestions on putting that into clear focus. Some of the comments (warning - I don't vouch for the accuracy of the calculations - it's much too early, and I don't feel like it):

• It's a stack of $100s 1357.32 miles high, weighing approximately 20,000 tons.
  
• population of USA (via google): 295,734,134
  
  2 tril/295,734,134 = $6762.83 per person in US
  
  population of Iraq (via google): 26,074,906
  
  2 tril/26,074,906 = $76,702.09 per person in Iraq
  
  We should try to break down the national debt this way - it might make people less likely to pressure their legislators to "get their share".
  
• If you made the average US wage in 2004 it would take you a little more than 56,103,263 years to make 2T.
  Had you been collecting that amount since the split of the common ancestor between apes and humans, you would be about a tenth of the way there.
  
  At the other end, if you could buy a water molecule for each dollar, you might just be able to see it with one or two Trillion dollars(Googling I found an estimate of 10T molecules in water drop the size of a period).
  

Any further suggestions?

A really good way to weed out the unqualified

How do you recruit truly qualified technical people?



Found on Curmudgeonly & Skeptical.

Caution: the site is often not safe for work - view at your own risk. But, it is one of the funniest sites I regularly visit.

Helping students to understand science texts

While checking out the Carnival of Education, I found a gem from Ms. Frizzle's blog. Ms. Frizzle is a scienc teacher from the Bronx, whose adventures provide much enlightenment and entertainment (most of it coming from her descriptions of the bureaucratic hassles she encounters).

Ms. Frizzle invented a method to help students learn how to read science texts.

I realized that I needed to model notetaking for them, possibly by showing them several examples of notes on the same passage, and having them discuss which ones would be most useful for studying at a later point.

As I began thinking about today's lesson - another reading-oriented lesson, this time about machines & mechanical advantage - I realized that there are several aspects to successful content-area literacy. The goal is that the students will be able to learn new material from a text with little support from the teacher. The first thing they need to be able to do is figure out what's important in the text. Then they need to be able to reflect on it and play with it in their heads until they are sure they understand it. Finally, they need to write down the most important points and whatever supporting details they need in order to remember and review it later on.

She goes on to detail just how she manages the process of helping her students to "de-code" the text.

I know I'm going to try this out today. I'll post later this week how it worked.

Instructional Day

My co-presenter, Catherine Greene. She's a hard-working and dedicated teacher, and a great colleague. 
 

My new technology

I received an MP3 player for Christmas - not the famous Apple IPod, which always seemed to me like a walking advertisment that the owner knew squat about tech. It wasn't completely intuitive to get started using (of course, I didn't bother with the directions), but within a short time, I was enjoying listening to music and books on tape without carrying around a bulky CD player. I'm hoping that I can make use of it while exercising; I certainly need the workout.

At school, yesterday we had an Instructional Fair. My department head and I showed teachers our new Quizdom setup. Afterwards, the feedback was terrific. I've heard from a good 1/2 dozen people that we did a fine job. Nice to hear it, though.

I've been exploring our school's eChalk site. It's at Wade Hampton High School. You can search for my page, then click on the individual class pages to see what I'm talking about. One peeve I have is that updates are slow to load. However, I can see that it's a useful tool for the newbie to manage. And, I can see that it would be easy to set up a group for the Science Department, the 9th grade Academy, etc. I might just do that.

A news feed I've been enjoying lately is Tech Central Station, which primarily focuses on the impact of technology on life and society, but goes into interesting topics such as the effect of life extension on populations, or drug development and the currently litigious climate.

Back from semi-hiatus

It's Winter Christmas Break, and I'm semi-caught up on home organizing. Alas, the grading is still looming, but I'll tackle that later, when I'm properly fortified with food.

There's an interesting discussion going on over at Going to the Mat, about whether there are too many people in college, and what the utility of a college degree is today. One provocative comment suggested that government stop funding the liberal arts degree with loans and grants. I think the idea has merit, but I doubt that it will fly past Congress. Or do they have to approve a rules change like that?

I think you could make a good argument for phasing out subsidies/grants/loans for liberal arts majors over a few years. If people want to study liberal arts, let them pay for it. Then, use 1/2 the money saved for increasing funding in math, engineering, and science.

All I want for Christmas is....

I know that I can't effortlessly count in binary, the language of this clock, but I want one.

Amazon has a really good idea. They organized their gift suggestions by magazine - each editor has a clickable picture of the magazine that leads to gift ideas for the readers. I checked it out, and it's nice. Good idea for that hard-to-buy-for person - as long as you know what magazines he/she reads.



Tsunami X Blaster Motorized Water Gun

Or, even better:



The Robo Raptor - hey, it's only $99.00! I was playing around with it last Friday, and it is a pretty good toy.

The above available at Radio Shack.

Fun definition

Found on One Cosmos

Bilingual education involves the difficult achievement of learning nothing in two languages.

Nearly done!

I just found the information about a course I took through the University of Hawaii at Manoa in the 90s, that puts me over the top for getting my full certification status. They're issuing me a temporary certificate, with a permit to teach out of field. Once they receive the last 3 credits, I'm in for the full certificate.

At last!

If there is a lesson for all of us, it's keep the paperwork together. It took me months to pull all the information from my fast-fading memory cells. I've been attending classes and workshops for the last 17 years, since I first was certified. I never had to scramble for credits to renew. Usually, I had all the credits in the first year to renew four years later. Often, I was too cheap to pay for the credit, and just by-passed the chance.

Never more. It was a tight squeak, but I made it. Credits, Praxis, and all.

Christmas is going to be VERY, VERY good this year.

The most important scientific discoveries

On Viking Pundit, Eric posted a list of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20 century. Read the list, and see if you agree with Physicist Alan Lightman.

New Picture from Thanksgiving

 
 

Virtue may be its own reward, but...

I've been a very good girl today, spend a good portion of the day grading and planning for the semester mid-term, so I could indulge myself with some free time blogging.

Which I am enjoying right now.

New Blogger for Word

I’m trying out the new Blogger for Word.

It’s a quick add-on, that has features that make it work well for me.  But the biggest advantage is that I can write my posts, then upload them at one time when I have a connection.  That means I’ll be able to do more blogging in my free time during the day, instead of trying to compose at night, when I’m more tired.

We should be getting a faster connection this week, probably cable.  That will make working on projects MUCH easier, not to mention the ease of keeping up on news.