Sub Ubi

[ This is the second of two posts regarding my views on the role of respect in educational settings. --MCJ]

I began my first comment on respect by saying that “respect is foundational to all of my thinking about the classroom.” To be fair to Aurthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson were, I believe that their Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education are all foundational, and can apply equally well to all levels of the educational system:

A noble list, which is almost never encountered in toto. My motivation for re-examining Chickering and Gamson is that we’re coming up on the class session where I feel that, as an teaching assistant, there is very little respect for me or my abilities in the classroom. A session where I can’t even begin to find how any of Chickering and Gamson’s principles were in mind when the material was being developed. While the rest of the year won’t be stellar, this particular session is below and beyond the quality of other material I’m expected to deliver to my students.

Last year, I walked in on my Monday class, and tried to get them psyched about the material; there was no hope. I lost my cool with them when they didn’t take the material seriously. As soon as I lost it (a first for me in the classroom) I realized I had made a mistake. By Friday, with my second session of the week, I came in with a new line:

When I was running A290: Introduction to LEGO Robotics at Indiana University, I worked hard to make every class the best I could. I came in prepared, and often had a lot of prep to do: as a hands-on course guided by a [very constructivist-leaning theory of instruction ], I had to prep doubly hard to have a semi-structured environment where, for one-and-a-half hours twice weekly, students would explore a concept as opposed to me lecturing on it.

If someone is going to produce material for eight or ten instructors to take out to several hundred students, I expect it to be good. I expect them to either spend time on it themselves, or to ask for help preparing good materials. I don’t expect to be fed a pile of poo, have zero time for input (it’s handed out on a Friday, and we’re teaching it on Monday), and all the while be judged (unofficially) by my attendance numbers and (officially) by the reviews students give me at the end of the year.

It’s this kind of resentment that leads me to believe that I couldn’t hack it in K-12 settings. The teachers who soldier on every day against small-minded regulations and politically-mandated standardized tests are saints and heros. Five days a week they’re in the classroom for countless hours on end, and they’re spending their evenings and weekends preparing for the next day. They’re forced to suffer an uninformed public’s opinion that small classrooms aren’t necessarily better, or that music and art are not critical to their child’s intellectual development.

The list goes on-and-on; fundamentally, there’s a lack of respect that lands on the teachers like a huge, steaming turd. And the administrators, teachers, and support staff who are amongst the best are those who take that turd and turn it into a rich compost that can be used to grow a better generation of students. I don’t know how they do it, but they rise above the politics, the infighting, the fixed curricula and mandatory tests, and create a classroom experience that students will recall for the rest of their lives.

So what did I do for next week? I told my students about my mistakes last year, and what I’d do this year: I don’t even believe the material is worth their coming to class for. They won’t be tested on it (they weren’t last year, or the year before, or the year before… I’ve taught the prep course for the final exam in this course, and know at least that much), and it is unlikely they’ll use that information from this one session again in their degree. So I told them I’d be there, and if they want help on any of their coursework, come in. I’ll be waiting, and we’ll work through anything in my course, other courses… anything. But I refuse to pass on that turd.

Respect for the student is easy: it involves individuals. Respect for the teacher is hard: it involves systems. Very few social systems that I am familiar with evolved around principles of mutual reciprocity, cooperation, and respect. My hat is off to the educators around the world who struggle daily against a system that fails to acknowledge their strengths, their uniqueness, and the gifts they bring to the classroom day in, and day out.

At roughly 1.5 years out I’m starting to wonder: what’s next?

The English understand it to some degree, but… small towns here have a different character than Potosi, Missouri. Gambier, Ohio. Places where you can drive for miles amidst fields of corn and wheat, cattle and sheep.

Mellencamp’s acoustic version of Small Town captures that feeling very well, I think. Granted, he grew up in small town Indiana, and has called Bloomington his home for a long time.

Small towns. It’s what I know, but is it where I want to be?

Just taking a moment’s pause on a beautiful November day: clear blue skies, crisp sun, and the taste of the fading autumn on the air. It’s hard to program on days like this.

…contract negotiations took place today between representatives of TCNJ and Peter DePasquale. Reportedly, an agreement has been reached keeping Dr. DePasquale in the Department of Computer Science, filling one of the currently open tenure track lines. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Congrats Pete! Excuse me, I mean Dr. DePasquale. Good for you, and good for them.

Now start your networking engines… I’ll be on the market in a few years…

It turns out that the Berkeley DB libraries were upgraded from version 2.7 to version 4.0. This means that the files in which all the content for this site were, effectively, no longer readable by MovableType.

Poo.

Fortunately, Sleepycat Software provides a tool called “db_upgrade” with the Berkeley DB distribution that, when given the name of a database file or index, it will bring it up to the format of the current library.

And that was it. It took a lot of Googling to find it. For those who have this problem in the future (symptoms: you can’t log in, there are no posts, Kung-Log dies with big uglies every time you try and do anything), there is a possibility a system upgrade like this happened to you as well. My solution is in the MT Support Forums, and the realization as to the easy solution was on dbforums.com.

I’ve never really written about my research on my weblog. I’ve talked about the process I go through, but I’m now getting into examining and analyzing real data. As I go through this exploration, I’ll find general trends implying new questions, or perhaps ideas that merit further investigation in new or different ways.

Do I post graphs and data, as well as ideas and questions inspired by them here? As has been asked before–is it safe? First, for reasons of academic integrity (I don’t want people thinking I’ve discovered cold fusion), and second for reasons of getting scooped, as a colleague of mine has wondered about in the past.

Hm. Interesting to reread this post as I ponder the same question again. Big words from a grad student in the Southeast of England just half a year ago, but do I believe them now? Any thoughts from the gallery?

Or, how about $5 mil? (From the Washington Post.)

I like this Republican response:

Oh, I’m sorry. As if any of the organizations that architected the invasion of Iraq aren’t “unregulated, under-the-radar-screen, [and] shadowy.”

Yes, this is a lot of [blatant] politics for me. I just that I don’t understand why it is wrong for a private citizen to give money to political organizations of his choice? Is it because he is one of the rich in America today who do not fall in lock-step with the Bush Administration’s have/have-not social and economic policies? Or is it because in the United States of America, a place where we hold certain truths to be self-evident, “you are either with us or against us,” to use the words of the President of the United States?

No, don’t answer that question. I don’t really want to know.

Have fun.

The next morning. That’s what the evening brought.

But, not unprofitably. I have tied in my mining operation into gnuplot, and can produce pretty pictures. I also implemented a simple analysis, the lag plot, which I don’t think it was particularly useful for the particular time series I was looking at. But, regardless, all the pieces are in place for building on top of.

Ah! And playing with LEGO! CSCS had it’s first “do stuff” meeting today, which is reported on by shendry over at the CSCS weblog. There are (big) pictures, including a picture of Bob The Car, and a bot exhibiting a number of my LEGO minifigs.

Exploratory data analysis, or EDA, is what I’ve been trying to do in an ad hoc manner for the last few days. I don’t know why I didn’t start with Google in the first place. That, or the library.

From the NIST Engineering Statistics Handbook online, chapter one, section one:

I think that captures the next step in my research; I have data rolling in, so now it’s time to see what’s in there. I’m going with Prof. Linington’s suggestion to start by using some simple statistical tests to find out whether my data has some kind of underlying structure.

If the data looks random, then there isn’t going to be much hope for the rest of the thesis. If I’ve got some kind of underlying structure, however, then there’s lots of interesting work to be done.

We’ll see what the rest of the evening brings. For the moment, it’s time to go play with LEGO.

I have started watching the newsgroups for our first, second, and third year students at UKC, and in the few weeks that I’ve been “keeping an eye on them,” I see (what feels like) lots of sentiments like this:

There is a lot of concern about the end-of-year exams. I personally think your educational system has failed if you get to this point. I still (naively) believe that we’re in the business of educating students, not testing them. When your students and instructors alike are getting hung up on questions about “what will be on the exam” half-way through the course, as opposed to questions about the material, the system has let everyone down.

There is no reason to attribute this message to any one student; it’s been repeated over-and-over on the newsgroups at Kent, for many different courses; as it stands, you can’t even tell what year the student is and what course they’re taking from this excerpt—and I didn’t edit it at all. There are a number of “quality assurance” controls that make it incredibly tedious to assign project work of substantial value; past a critical point, you’re expected to have multiple people marking the scripts (for consistency) and in some cases an outside examiner to help keep the process objective. I don’t pretend to understand it; I just understand that some things seem to have been made remarkably tedious.

My lack of understanding also extends to the benefits gained from the additional complexity. Perhaps one of these days I’ll look into it. For the moment, I’ll just continue my guerrilla warfare and leave the hornet’s nest be.

(I’m fairly confident that I’m complaining about systemic issues that are not unique to Kent. I suspect I’m complaining about things that are endemic to the British educational system, much like the CAT or SAT in the USA. This is, however, another point I could be wrong about…)