Category Archives: Education

Weekend Reading

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There will be a quiz on Monday.

  1. The chaos of urban school reform.
  2. Life-long learners versus life-long test takers.
  3. Grade anxiety and felony burglary at the University of Kentucky. What do you propose as punishment?
  4. Can science help marathoners break the 2-hour limit? Truly excellent breakdown. Fav sentence, “Basically, in the marathon, there are a lot more pipes that can burst than, say, in a mile or a 5K.” The attempt is in Italy Saturday morning at 5:45a, tonight at 8:45p PDT, 11:45p, EDT. I do not expect to see a sub two hour marathon in my lifetime; however, I do hope to break two hours in my first stand-alone 10k in ages tomorrow morn.
  5. The real reason Clinton lost. Prediction: Alison will disagree. Vehemently.

Sentences Worth Re-reading

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A horrendous sentence by an exceptionally good writer. Pulitzer good. I proceed knowing full well that kharma is going to kick my ass sometime soon.

Kathryn Schulz in Polar Expressed:

“The Greenland Ice Sheet, which is more than a hundred and ten thousand years old and covers six hundred and sixty thousand square miles of the Far North, has shed two hundred billion tons of water a year since 2003.”

Three references, each one extremely difficult to picture, taken together, laughably incomprehensible. Can you picture hundreds of thousands of years or square miles? What about 200,000,000,000 tons of water (or 444,000,000,000 lbs)? We need the equivalencies. For example, six hundred and sixty thousand square miles, or the size of “x” number of Western states. Or two hundred billion tons of water or enough water to fill “y”. The best writers sometimes swing and miss, just a lot less often than the rest of us mortals.

An exemplary sentence by Zoe Heller’s in her review of Sally Bedell Smith’s new biography, “Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life”.

“Too physically uncoordinated to be any good at team sports, too scared of horses to enjoy riding lessons, and too sensitive not to despair when, at the age of eight, he was sent away to boarding school, he was happiest spending time with his grandmother the Queen Mother, who gave him hugs, took him to the ballet, and, as he later put it, ‘taught me how to look at things.’”

One sentence, seven detailed references about Charles, resulting in genuine insight into his personality. Brilliant.

And another Heller gem from later in the same review:

“Even Charles’s love life was choreographed for him with the sort of elaborate care and tact usually reserved for pandas in captivity.”

A master lesson in how to make your readers smile.

Liberal Arts Lamentations

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I teach at a smallish, private liberal arts university that’s $5m in debt. Our president has “resigned”. A special faculty committee has been formed to determine which programs and tenure-track or tenured faculty should be eliminated. The guess is 20-60 faculty will be let go in one year’s time.

I’m skeptical of our newest religion, data analytics, because I reject data’s omniscience. I’m partial to stories. Numbers can tell stories, but the emotionally rich stories that resonant most deeply with me are told with words, photographs, video, film, dialogue, music, and acting.

My university’s ability to turn things around is complicated by the resistance of Religion, Language, Music, Philosophy, Art, and English faculty to change. My militant liberal artist friends are struggling mightily to accept their declining influence. Here are just a few recent signs of their struggle:

• At Faculty Assembly, a faculty member stands and says, “Many people don’t realize it, but some departments aren’t nearly as productive as they once were.” A religion professor turns to his colleague, makes air quotes, and quietly and derisively mocks the speaker by repeating, “productive”.

• A faculty leader from the Religion department writes a letter to the Board informing them that they should hire an interim-President for two years, not the planned for one, so that the campus can spend two years on the search for the next president. Humanities faculty dominate the growing list of signatories.

• Following an administrator’s decision to cut one liberal arts department’s budget, the chair says, “Are we going to become a trade school?”

We are not going to become a trade school, but we are not immune to the disruption that’s riddling wide swaths of the economy. At the price families are paying, it’s understandable that they want a “return on their investment”. And yet, business phrases like “return on investment”, and “productive”, and “market forces”, really anything related to the business model, set my militant liberal artists friends’ heads spinning.

The MLA’s (pun-intended) are trusting that our University’s mission will save their bacon. And I’m confident the most economically successful departments will continue to subsidize some especially mission-critical academic majors and programs. But not nearly as many as in the past and not nearly as many as the MLA’s are hoping.

 

25 Years His Senior—Say What?

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Emmanuel Macron, hopefully France’s next President in two weeks, is 39 years old. His wife is 64. He fell for her when he was 15 and she was his math teacher. Because your susceptible to soap operas, you will want to read the whole story here.

I confess, the context for their meeting and their pairing strikes me as really odd. And yet, the President of the U.S. is 24 years older than his wife. Which, if I’m honest, doesn’t seem nearly as odd.

When it comes to pairing up, shouldn’t older women have the same rights as older men? Is this the ultimate double standard? Am I an unredeemable sexist? Of course, yes, and probably.

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Math on the Brain

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On this morning’s run to Priest Point Park, I was thinking of Ms. Z’s Marysville Middle School mathematicians. More specifically, I came up with a real world word problem for them. Maybe a “do not proceed to high school” until passing problem of sorts.

In Olympia, Washington there’s a beautiful little waterfront community called Boston Harbor. Visit it sometime. Rent a kayak, eat an ice cream bar at the marina, meditate on the Puget Sound. BH is 7 miles from downtown Oly. Traveling from BH to town on BH Rd. the first 5 miles are 40mph and the last two are 30mph. However, it just so happens that Thurston County doesn’t patrol North Olympia’s rural roads. Therefore, half the residents, the Rule Followers, do 40 and 30, but for the other half of Deplorables, like myself, the only deterrent is occasional deer on the road (for the record, I do 45 and 35).

On Monday’s run, a van passed me doing approximately 70mph, today a white Volvo wagon doing 65mph (yes, I am a speed estimating savant). Which got me thinking. How much time does a BH driver save on their way to town if they drive 60mph for the 5 miles designated 40mph, and then stuck behind a Rule Follower, 30mph for the last 2 miles?

I’ll wait.

Here’s my peabrain calculation. Sorry in advance to Ms. Z. for my unconventional approach. First, we need to calculate the Law Obiders travel time. As a cyclist that tends to ride around 18-20mph, I know that at 20mph, it takes 3 minutes to travel 1 mile. Therefore, if we double the speed, we can halve the time, so 40mph = 1:30/mile. So multiply 1:30/mile x 5 = 7:30. At 30mph it obviously takes 2 minutes to travel 1 mile, so 4 more minutes, so BH to downtown Oly in 11 minutes, 30 seconds.

Follow?

Now what about The No Regarders for the Law? 60mph is 1 minute/mile, so 5 minutes. Then our 4 minutes to cover the 2 mile stretch for a grand total of 9 minutes.

Here’s the tricky part, keep your columns straight people! 11:30 – 9:00 equals a grand total savings of 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

Now a message for my BH friends. If you’re so efficient with your time that you never waste two and a half minutes once you get to your destination, go ahead and speed away, just don’t look for any sympathy when your car is totaled by Bambi. Or leave for work 2-3 minutes earlier?

All good math lessons have extensions, so here’s mine for Ms. Z. Based on available government statistics, calculate the increased likelihood of an accident as a result of increasing one’s speed by 20mph. Then take that increased likelihood and calculate the approximate negative effect on the speeding driver’s life expectancy. I’m guessing it’s greater than 2 or 3 minutes.

Class dismissed.

 

My Daily Run in Pictures

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Hard to find a better place to run than the Specific Northwest. Moderate temps, beautiful flora and fauna, undulating roads and trails. What more could one want besides more daylight and sunshine in the winter?

There are two types of runners, creatures of habit who run the same out and back every time, and higher life forms, like myself, who know “Diversity is the spice of life”. That said, since the move a year ago, I’ve backslidden a bit in that I do a similar route about half the time. Three miles to Priest Point Park along Boston Harbor Rd. Once there, loop the lower road and head home for 6.2, loop the upper road and head home for 6.4, or like last week, loop the upper road and the 1 mile wooded trail for 7.4. The bike lane on BH Rd is about 8′ wide and I routinely see deer.

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Hard to get my stretching in afterwards when the labradude insists on cuddling.

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Correction: This should’ve been titled “My Standard Run”. Unlike my brother who has a 1,000+ day running streak going, I’m only running 3x/week. Also, for all the geezer triathlete readers looking for an edge, I’m having skin cancer surgery Friday morn and the doc has banned me from swimming for 3 weeks. But as a former guv of CA once said, “I’ll be back.”

Addendum: There’s nothing worse than just having worked up a lather 2.5 miles in and then having to stop while otters cross the road. Kidding. I haven’t seen an otter in year one. Maybe the sign is just local character.

My Favorite Scientific Paper of All Time

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Layperson summary:

“New research carried out online has found that 59% of 28,113 respondents preferred to eat chocolate rabbits starting with the ears, 33% indicated that they had no starting point preference, and 4% indicated that they started with the tail or feet.”

I’m concerned that 41% of you don’t know the proper way to eat a chocolate rabbit. Anything besides the ears is just wrong.

“Researchers conducting the online search also found increased reports of confectionary rabbit auricular amputation-that is, ear amputations of chocolate bunnies-in late March through mid-April for each of the 5 years studied.”

Fav scientific phrase of all time. . . confectionary rabbit auricular amputation.

“. . . human adults and children appeared to be wholly responsible for the amputations. Although several reconstructive efforts might be used to re-attach the ears, this may be a futile effort, since often the rest of the rabbit soon succumbs to a similar fate.”

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One Person Can’t Make a Difference

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If you believe that, you haven’t met Angelo Carusone, market force activist.

Carusone explaining his difference making to Eric Lach:

“When you create critical mass, even if other ads are still running, they just won’t pay the same rates. Bill O’Reilly is the Fox News standard-bearer, he’s still their highest rated program, their most valuable asset from an advertising-and-revenue perspective. An advertiser that’s going to stay is not going to pay the same, they’re just not going to do it. At worst, even if Bill O’Reilly stays on the air until he’s ready to leave, his advertising rates will diminish. And the more advertisers that leave, the more that will be affected. It’s market forces.”

When O’Reilly was harassing women at FOX he wasn’t thinking about smart, socially conscious people leveraging social media to shape public opinion. But maybe he should’ve been.