Categories
colorado education

Local: I fear for the future of education in Colorado

SB10-191 (“Ensuring Quality Instruction Through Educator Effectiveness”) has passed the Colorado state senate and moved on to the House education committee.

This is another bill in the tradition of “blame the teachers if students fail.” I realize that mediocre and downright bad teachers exist. We’ve all had them in the past and can remember them well, no doubt. However, I think it’s pretty unfair to teachers in general to pretend that outside factors don’t have a profound effect on a kid’s ability to make it to school and learn. Does the kid have supportive parents? Are they from an abusive family? Did they go to pre-school? Do they have a learning disability that no one has the funding to address? And so on.

Admittedly, I didn’t think of a lot of these things myself until my best friend started teaching at a high poverty school, and I visited her class to meet some of the kids. There were a lot of great, wonderful little human beings, and I think most of them were really doing their best to learn – they sure asked a lot of questions when I talked a little bit about rocks in Colorado. But looking back at my own childhood, I can also see that no matter how bright and attentive a child might be at school, they may not be able to provide the test scores you think they should if, for example, they don’t get meals outside of school lunches and breakfasts because their family is that desperately poor. Or if they go home and get beaten half to death by their father, or mother, or older sibling. Or. Or.

The proposed law would impose yet another round of standardized tests on children that already spend a shocking amount of time practicing for and doing tests as mandated by No Child Left Behind. And then the results would make up half of a teacher’s “effectiveness” rating, which could potentially cause the teacher to lose their non-probationary status, which is Colorado-speak for losing tenure. Oh yes, and there’s no funding in it for developing the new assessment tests either, which seems like a bad idea since the state funding for schools has already taken a big hit this year.

I see a lot of unintended consequences coming from linking a teacher’s career so tightly to standardized tests in the name of accountability. I can foresee some teachers being worried enough about the testing that emphasis will shift even more toward teaching to the test, which doesn’t do the students a whole lot of good in the long run. And I see this as a means to “scare” teachers away from wanting to work in high-poverty schools, because classically children in those environments test fairly poorly. High poverty schools have enough problems1 without adding “destroyer of careers” to their repertoires. Unfortunately, I think this bill was largely created without considering those implications, because the plight of students at high poverty schools – and the extra disadvantages many of the kids have – is largely invisible to those not directly involved.

I certainly understand the desire to hold teachers accountable; no one likes the thought that an awful teacher is soaking up public money while not doing their job. But I really, really, really don’t think this is the solution, and frankly, I think the “awful teacher” has become a boogeyman that’s distracting policymakers from attempting to address the very real problems in public education. When the state budget for education has been slashed, it’s a lot easier to concentrate on “awful teachers” ruining students than address the effect that drop in funding will have on necessary programs, or admit that just maybe, we need to pitch in a little more on taxes so we don’t shortchange the intellectual future of our state. When low wages and an ailing economy a preventing parents from being involved in the education of their children because they’re trying to make ends meet on multiple low-wage part-time jobs, it’s a lot easier to blame “awful teachers” than to try to figure out how to enable the parents so that they can help their children excel.

I’m proud to say that my state senator, Evie Hudak was one of the 14 “no” votes on the bill in the senate. I’ve e-mailed my representative to let her know what I think. Ms. Hudak had a lot to say about why she voted no, and if you don’t buy my less-than-expert arguments, hers are much more worthwhile:
Senate Bill 191, Principal and Teacher Effectiveness
Why I Voted NO on SB 191

1 – Like not being able to afford, I don’t know, paper.

Categories
climate change

Just went I thought you couldn’t sink any lower, Cuccinelli

First, there was Cuccinelli and his anti-gay dickery. Then he jumped on to the healthcare reform lawsuit band wagon. Then he let us all in on his nipple phobia. Oh Ken Cuccinelli, is there no nuttery you will not force me to look at an say, “…seriously?”

And now he’s after a climate change scientist. Oh my stars and garters. Cuccinelli has come across pretty steadily as a climate change denier, so investigating Michael Mann for “defrauding taxpayers” over grants for global warming research carries a nasty whiff of intimidation. Don’t like the science? Attack the scientist’s reputation. Anyway, I think Phil lays it all out quite nicely.

I do have to say one thing I’ve found interesting on Phil’s post is the comments. Because as you would expect, the minute the Bad Astronomer tippy-tapped out:

To be clear: the climate is changing. There is zero doubt about that. None. Anyone telling you differently has an agenda to ram, and it’s one that is decidedly not realistic.

…the trolls and deniers came scooting out of their dark corners of the internet. What’s fascinating me is how disjointed some of the comments seem from the actual post.

My dramatic reenactment:

Phil: Cuccinelli is a jerk! Inhofe is a jerk! Politicians that abuse their power to try to intimidate scientists who come to conclusions they don’t like are jerks! RAR!

Commenter: But what about MY feelings????? How dare you call ME a denier!!! OMG I feel so attacked!!!

I don’t know. Maybe the people writing those comments are actually Cuccinelli and Inhofe under assumed names? Otherwise… goodness, we are getting a little defensive, aren’t we.

Categories
geeky stuff

Fun with colors

xkcd did a survey of what people called different colors and has now posted the results. It’s all pretty funny, for a variety of reasons, so you should read the post.

I was actually surprised that there wasn’t really that much of a difference between what men and women called the various colors. And that there was some consensus between the genders regarding “teal.” Because let me tell you, maybe my X chromosomes are faulty, but I have no clue what the hell kind of color “teal” actually is.

What I was most amused by, however, was the giant list of all the various colors, and the most frequent names given for them: Color table here. A lot of it is fairly ho-hum, but as you scroll down, you’ll find some real gems, like “blurple.” Also, “puke,” “ugly brown,” “bland,” “poo,” “windows blue” and “bile.”

Categories
geeky stuff science fiction

Terry Pratchett on Doctor Who

Terry Pratchett has written an interesting guest blog post about Doctor Who, and I have to say that I pretty much agree with him. And not just because I think Night Watch is an amazing book because it both made me laugh out loud and made me cry.

I tend to be more liberal with my definition of what science fiction happens to be, probably because I grew up reading fantasy and then moved over to science fiction when I got sick of unicorns. All I really want out of my science fiction is an element of scientific plausibility and some sort of logic to the laws of physics. I’m not that demanding. And in fact, I prefer my scifi almost unforgivably loosey-goosey compared to what hard science fiction fans like. I think long explanations about how faster than light travel could work incredibly boring. Really. Just tell me “It’s something to do with wormholes,” and I’m good to go1.

That said, even by my own incredibly forgiving definitions, Doctor Who really isn’t scifi. It’s magic cleverly tarted up with machinery. I don’t think even whipping out Clarke’s third law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”) helps the case all that much when, as Pratchett cites, there’s an alien using pills to transform body fat into little baby aliens. And you know what? That’s totally okay. It’s a fun show, and I actually don’t think it matters all that much if people want to call it scifi or fantasy or superhero adventures, though I’m sure whoever feels that their genre is being abused will disagree with me. And I suppose it is something of a culture shock to people who have watched Doctor Who if they go to the local store and pick up some scifi and discover that it doesn’t go quite like that.

What I actually think is more interesting about what Mr. Pratchett had to say were his comments on how the Doctor has become increasingly god-like, particularly in these new episodes.

The Doctor himself has in recent years been built up into an amalgam of Mother Teresa, Jesus Christ (I laughed my socks off during the Titanic episode when two golden angels lifted the Doctor heavenwards) and Tinkerbell. There is nothing he doesn’t know, and nothing he can’t do. He is now becoming God, given that the position is vacant. Earth is protected, we are told, and not by Torchwood, who are human and therefore not very competent. Perhaps they should start transmitting the programme on Sundays.

I think here, he’s hit on a bigger narrative issue than the tissue-thin science of the supposedly (winkwink) science fiction show, and something that I think really ruins some episodes that could have otherwise been interesting. I tend to think that the Doctor’s increasingly god-like tendencies are probably connected to the need the show feels to threaten to blow up bigger and bigger things, which I’ve already complained about at length.

During The Waters of Mars I felt like the writers at least recognized the problem and did something quite dramatically fantastic with it. The Doctor buys in to his own image for a moment, believing in his god-like powers, and then at the end of the episode he gets a good metaphorical gut-punch to show him that no, he’s not everyone’s savior. It was lovely, and unfortunately ruined by what followed it. Here’s hoping that the new season will let the Doctor go back to being very smart and inventive, but not some sort of deity.

1 – I actually have another reason for this beyond my own intellectual laziness. I don’t think that those sorts of explanations make for good narrative or believable characters. For example, unless your character is the guy that invented the FTL engine, or someone intimately involved in its maintenance, it just doesn’t seem all that plausible that they’d be that detailed about how it functions. Just think about people today and cars. If you ask someone who isn’t the sort of person that changes their own oil how a car functions, you’d probably get something along the lines of “well, it burns gas and that makes the car go.” At the risk of generalizing too much, I don’t think most people give a crap about how their car functions so long as it gets them from home to the ice cream shop without exploding. And I bet that some day, when we’re zipping around faster than light in shiny space ships, most people on those space ships will feel pretty much the same.

Categories
technology

Facebook? Bah, humbug.

I actually have a Facebook account. I just only log in to it when I’m extremely bored, because I’ve never had much use for it. And to be honest, while I do like everyone who I’ve friended, I also really don’t care what they’ve been doing in Farmville or Mafia Wars. At this point, I am seriously considering just deleting the account.

Aside from my general apathetic feelings toward Facebook, there’s also the privacy issues, as well as security and possibly even ethics problems. While I don’t feel as if much of this affects me personally (I don’t use any Facebook applications and about the only pictures I have are ones of my cats) it certainly doesn’t paint FB as an attractive place that I want to spend a lot of my internet time. Plus people I don’t even remember from high school keep friending me, and it’s starting to get a little creepy.

Considering how little I actually use the thing, I doubt this would be much of a blip on the radar. Maybe I’m just more of a Twitter girl.

Questions of privacy and fairness and seem to abound these days. I’m looking forward to when I can get an iPhone finally, but at the same time feel more than a little trepidation about, say, Apple being the gatekeeper for the iStore and all the concerns with the DRM as well. I’m not a sophisticated user of technology here; when I get a new toy, I’m basically stuck with what it can do when it comes out of the box because I lack the dedication and brainpower necessary forge my own path through the digital jungles. So it makes me rather nervous to know that by buying a product, I’m ceding a lot of control regarding what I can do with that product to the manufacturer. I recently got to see an iPad; it was sleek and shiny and I immediately wanted one.

It’s just that whiff of “Borg” that has me worried.

Categories
Uncategorized

There’s a new hero in town

Electron Boy saves Seattle. Make a Wish does some incredible things for kids, but this has got to be one of the coolest. I think every fledgling geek has probably fantasized at some point about being a super hero, but to actually get to play that out in a story that involves lots of other people? Wow.

And of course, no WoW nerd can read this story without thinking of Ezra Chatterton, who left his mark on a fantasy world. There’s a quest in the tauren starting area that he designed, among other things. And he’s remembered as an elder now during one of the game holidays.

More than just wish fulfillment, I think stories like these really do touch the lives of others. Everyone finds their own meaning in them, but it really strikes me how these kids are able to have a moment, or an afternoon, or a week of happiness, and simultaneously (perhaps accidentally) shout to the world, “I was here.”

Categories
science fair

Speaking of science fairs…

A wonderful story about three Palestinian girls going to Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair.

I think the article really highlights how important these events are for students – even on the local level. If nothing else, science fairs give students like these girls motivation to try their hand at solving a problem – either through engineering or scientific investigation.

And this?

The girls beat dozens of contestants in the West Bank to win the prize. But even after that, they ran into one last obstacle: There was only enough prize money to allow two girls to make the trip. After drawing lots, Asil was to be left behind as her classmates headed to San Jose.

UN workers heard this and pooled money last week to purchase an additional ticket. When Asil heard the news on Monday, she broke into tears, leaping up from the table to embrace her classmates.

Blub.

It’s an amazing story to begin with, but you’ll have to forgive me if my blub is just a little blubbier because it’s three girls who have won this opportunity.

Categories
Uncategorized

Dr. Watts will not go to jail

Blub.

Categories
science fair

Done with science fairs for this school year

Today was the Merrill Middle School science fair, which was my last for the school year. I’m definitely planning to continue volunteering next year, since this has been a lot of fun. And hopefully, I’ll have a better attendance record. This year went like this:

  • Grant Middle School (January) – missed, due to horrible stomach bug that caused 12 hours of endless vomiting
  • DPS district fair (January) – Made it to this one
  • Denver Metro fair (February) – Made it to this one
  • Colorado State fair (April) – missed, due to having mono

    • …so with today, that gives me what, a 60% attendance rate? Oof. And I really could have done without the mono. And the vomiting.

    This was actually the first fair that I’ve made it to that was just for one school. It was also apparently strangely timed, since the district, regional, and state fairs were all over with – any student with a good project in this fair wouldn’t have had anywhere to go. Which is sad for them, since there were some pretty good projects that at the very least deserved to go to the district-wide fair, I think. From what the volunteer coordinator said, the school’s likely to shift their schedule soon so their students do have those opportunities. Which is great.

    The difference between this fair and, say, the district fair was pretty apparent. The projects had a really wide range of quality, from “I just came up with something because I had to” to “Wow.” A lot of the projects were pretty lackluster, but there were some that still really stood out. We actually had a pretty tough time choosing the best in show from among the first place winners; all of them definitely deserved their prizes, and in the end I think the grand prize winner only really edged out ahead because he’d done a little more background research and had whipped out some pretty impressive math for an eighth grader. (Or, as I put it, “Can you guys believe it? An eighth grader, using pi! Voluntarily!”)

    From the three fairs that I actually made it to, these are the things I’ve noticed that really make some of the projects stand out:

  • Actual research having been done. I was pretty surprised how unusual this was. I guess I just sort of assumed that in the age of easily accessible internet (the school library at Merrill had an impressive array of iMacs) that we’d at least be seeing Wikipedia references. And while Wikipedia doesn’t cut it if you’re in college, I’d be more than happy to settle for that from elementary or middle school kids particularly. As it is, most of the kids managed to come up with a question and a reasonably testable hypothesis, but then never took the step of seeing what information was already out there about their topic.
  • A connection to scientific concepts beyond use of the scientific method. I remember how blown away I was by the fifth grader at the district science fair who connected his “fun with fluids”-type experiment to a broader exploration of Newtonian versus non-Newtonian fluids. The grand prize winner at Merrill did his experiment on the speed at which ice in different shapes melted, and made assessing surface area (and surface touching a hot cookie sheet in the oven) integral to that. I suppose that this is something that goes hand-in-hand with the research, since it’s hard to make this kind of connection without doing a little reading. Most projects seem to take a question (“which kind of football can I throw the farthest”) and even come up with plausible explanations in their conclusions (“this one went farther because it was smooth and light”) without ever looking at why their results turned out that way (“smooth things are more aerodynamic and right now a lighter football is easier for me to throw because I haven’t hit my growth spurt yet”). That means that the few projects where the kid takes that extra step and connects their small experiment to a greater body of work really stand out.
  • Repetition of trials and controls. Most experimental design for these projects is extremely simple, which is how it should be. Unfortunately, that also tends to mean that the kids either forget about (or perhaps haven’t been told about) keeping proper controls or doing multiple trials so that the results can be averaged. This is another thing where when it does happen, it really impresses the judges because it’s so unusual. It’s even more impressive when the student can explain why they did it that way, since that lets us know that they didn’t just do it because an adult told them to.
  • The student can tell you what they would have done differently. My favorite question to ask a student always comes at the end; I ask them, “Knowing what you do now, if you could go back in time and re-do your experiment, what would you change?” Most of the time, the answer I get is a shrug or some variation thereof. But sometimes, I get a great answer from the student, detailing how they would avoid mistakes, or fix a flaw in their methodology, or even redesign the entire experiment because their first shot didn’t produce data that was useful to answering their question. Those are the answers I love, because it proves that the student does have a grasp of how experimental science works – it’s all about seeing your own mistakes and refining your process. I admit that I also love it when students find out their hypothesis was wrong; most of the time they ask a question that they already knew (or thought they knew) the answer to and use the experiment as a way of proving themselves right.

    • So, I’m looking forward to the next school year, when the science fairs start up again. Hopefully I’ll be able to work volunteering in around my grad school schedule. One unexpectedly fun thing is that I’ve started to get to know the little community of local science fair judges. You see a lot of the same faces from fair to fair, which is neat. The smaller fairs seem to be dominated by geologists and engineers, though with a sample size of only two I can’t say that for sure. We’ll see in the fall!

    Categories
    Uncategorized

    Random updates for today.

    I received my official admissions letter from CU sometime in the middle of last week, and finally got around to ticking the little box that says “yes, yes ZOMG I’M GONNA BE A GRAD STUDENT” (I’m paraphrasing here) and wrote them a check for $200, then mailed it off. So it’s all official-like now – I’m going to get to wear the big girl geologist pants in a couple of years. Hopefully.

    Colorado Skepticamp’s wiki page is now up, so you should go over there and sign up as an attendee. If you can do so without knowing the date, that is. The crack location hunting squad is still out in the jungles of the Denver-metro area, searching for a place for us to call home for several hours some Saturday or Sunday in the near future.

    I am also of the opinion that the Colorado Skepticamp motto should be something like, “The highest Skepticamp around!” Particularly if we end up doing the event in Boulder.

    The three whole people who read this blog (who aren’t my mom) may have noticed that my entries were so sparse as to be non-existent for the last three weeks or so. This is because I was very, very sick, with a horrible fevery illness that then proceeded to give me hives all over my body for the next week after the fever finally went away. Said illness was apparently an EBV infection, more commonly known as mono, according to my doctor. Let me tell you, calling it something as cutesy as “the kissing disease” doesn’t prepare you for how godawful you end up feeling, unless the implication is that you’ve been kissing a zombie cyborg terminator who’s come to the past to scramble your brain and various lymph nodes with an eggbeater made of razor wire.

    I’m finally feeling mostly normal now, at least.

    I am currently trying to work my way through this year’s Hugo nominees. So far, I’ve read The Windup Girl, which I enjoyed and would definitely recommend. It’s a very different take on a near future where global climate change has taken its toll, and I spent a lot of time being surprised by the unexpected turns the plot takes. I also attempted to read The City & The City and… didn’t enjoy it so much. I had a hard time getting in to it, and ended up returning it to the library when I’d read only about a third of it, since I couldn’t renew it. Now, keep in mind that I was also trying to read the book while in the vise-like grip of the epstein-barr virus, so it could be that I try the book again later and have a better time trying to read it. I’m currently working on Boneshaker, which has been interesting so far.