Foiled again

re: stop making sense, chemprof writes:

Yeah, and this is also why people wind up using the same two or three passwords for everything. When I worked in the national lab, they assigned us passwords -- awful, un-memorizable things that met IT's standards. So of course everyone kept theirs on a post-it someplace or locked in a drawer.

Hah!

Forget that, chemprof!

The times they are a-changin'.

Back story:

The tech system at my college automatically changes both your passwords every 90 days unless you change them first.

Needless to say, I've never changed either password first, mostly because I have never, not once, seen the email alert re: Impending Password Change that's supposed to come out on Day 85.

Not getting the memo may be my fault, of course.

My college has two separate IT systems with two separate email addresses and two separate passwords, and you have to find this out yourself, usually over the course of multiple conversations with Help Desk. Nobody tells you, going in, "Welcome to yourcollege! We have two IT systems."

The user interfaces are inscrutable, with tiny-fonted "ADMIN SIGN INs" here and orange "ROOM BOOKING" tabs there (you have to click on a "Room Booking" tab to find out who you're tutoring) and two "Change Password" tabs that don't change your password but do lock you out of the system, and nothing you do takes less than 8 steps. I have a list of 18 steps to deal with the Online Appointment Calendar. The whole thing is stupefying.

The system was so impossible to navigate that eventually I settled into a routine of using my Verizon account 95%-99% of the time, and checking my two work emails only when my fear that I was missing essential communications grew stronger than my dread of dealing with the system.

So I may have missed the Password Change alerts. Assuming the alerts were a) sent and b) actually delivered to one of my 2 work addresses, that is. Which I do not assume.

Back to my story: for a while there things were working OK, I thought. Every so often I would discover that my password(s) no longer worked, and I would deal with it when I absolutely needed to by calling Help Desk and having them figure things out. But this most recent lockout has taken almost 3 weeks to resolve, with 4 different employees working on my case at various times, and multiple phone calls and emails. I don't want to do this again come April.

So I had a long conversation with Help Desk about the EXACT steps involved in changing my password(s) myself. Then I had Help Desk stay on the line while I looked up passwords, changed passwords, and reconciled passwords.

Which brings me back to chemprof.

Naturally, I want only one password for everything, so I asked Help Desk whether I could change back to my regular password now that a few 3-month cycles have gone by.

Help Desk said he'd see, and he checked the documentation which, he was surprised to learn, made no mention of the number of old passwords the system remembers. (No documentation? That is surprising.)

The usual number of old passwords a system remembers, he said, is three. If you use your usual password, you should be able to cycle back to it after 3 changes.

But that's going to change, he said. The new Windows system is going to remember twenty-four old passwords. If your system makes you change passwords 4x a year, it'll be 6 years before you can use your regular password again.

I wonder if, when that happens, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be able to pick up a measurable drop in productivity.

stop making sense

Back from another tête-à-tête with Help Desk & now in the process of amending the 14 pages of Directions I have written for navigating my college's computer system.

This afternoon I've added a new heading:

Weird dangers & quirks:

• OUTLOOK/EXCHANGE: DO NOT use the “Change password” option inside Outlook. If I  do, the system will either refuse to make the change (message: password illegal, or some such) or lock me out.
• OUTLOOK/EXCHANGE: DO NOT use the “Change Password” option in http://xxxxx.edu/xxxxxpass . If I do, the system will lock me out. Ignore on-screen directions. ("You can change your existing password by confirming its current value.")
• OUTLOOK/EXCHANGE: If I want to change my password for Outlook/Exchange, I have to use "Reset password." Ignore on-screen directions. ("If you have forgotten your password, you can reset it and unlock your account if needed.")
• OUTLOOK/EXCHANGE: When I sign into Outlook, I must use mycollege-backslash in front of my user name: mycollege\myusername
• OUTLOOK/EXCHANGE: When I change my password for Outlook, the phrase “Account Name” actually means “user name.”
• OUTLOOK/EXCHANGE: DO NOT use the mycollege\ prefix when entering my user name under “Account Name.” Just use my user name as I do for the Mycollege Connect system.^*
• LOGGING ON TO CAMPUS COMPUTER: When I log onto an on-campus computer, use the “Student” domain.
• LOGGING ON TO OFFICE COMPUTERS: For computers inside mycollege offices, as opposed to mycollege classrooms and the mycollege libraries, everything is different.

Highlights from today's exchange:

"Why would you have a button that says "Change Password" if you can't use it to change your password?"

"If you're going to have a button that says "Change Password" that can't be used to "Change Password," why don't you tell us?"

It's been 2 years now, and I've only just discovered that "Change Password" means at least three different things depending upon which "Change Password" button I hit on which one site:

• "Change password" 
• "Enter a new password and receive a "password illegal" message" 
• "Lock yourself out of the system" 

^* A couple of weeks ago I discovered that my college has two completely separate computer systems with two completely separate passwords and two completely different set of instructions. 

recent comments redux

The Recent Comments widget is broken, and I have no idea how to add a different "Recent Comments" widget because the process seems to have changed and the various directions posted around the web have not been updated.

Blogger has a Recent Comments widget, but that, too, is broken.

I've seen nothing on the web thus far indicating that anyone else's "Recent Comments" widget is not working, so no help there, either.

Annoying.

recent comments seems to be broken & other

Will try to figure it out....

Meanwhile, thanks, everyone, for weighing in on Surfer's diet ----- (and canola oil!)

Calorie replacement is the issue as I think Allan says. I'm going to figure out what kind of non-tampered-with meat I can buy around here. ("Non-tampered-with": how's that for an informed position?)

On another subject, and for passersby: the word "hateful" is verboten!

worse than you think, part I've-lost-count

(Family motto: It's always worse than you think)

Excerpt from Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be.:

At one time, a writer in this industry could write a book and receive roughly 6% royalties on sales. The salesperson who sold the product, however, earned (and still does) a commission upwards of 17% on the same product. This sort of pay structure never made sense to me; without the product, there’d be nothing to sell, after all. But this disparity serves to illustrate the thinking that has been entrenched industry-wide for decades—that sales and marketing is more valuable than product.

Now, the balance between the budgets for marketing and product development is growing farther and farther apart, and exponentially so. Today, royalties are a thing of the past for most writers and work-for-hire is the norm. Sales staffs still receive their high commissions, but with today’s outsourcing, writers and editors are consistently offered less than 20% of what they used to make. As a result, the number of qualified writers and editors is diminishing, and those being contracted by developers and publishers often don’t have the necessary skills or experience to produce a text worthy of the publisher’s marketing claims.

Here’s how it works: Many publishers solicit developers, often on the Internet and from all over the world, looking for the best bid on a project. With competition this fierce, developers are forced to drastically lower their rates just to stay in business (and publishers exploit this fact). Let’s say a publisher hires a developer for a certain low-bid fee to produce seven supplemental math books for grades 3-8. The product specs call for each student book and teacher guide to have page counts of roughly 100 pages and 80 pages, respectively. The publisher wants these seven books ready for press in five weeks—over 1,400 pages. To put this in perspective, in the not too recent past at least six months would be allotted for a project of this size. But publishers customarily shrink their deadlines to get a jump on the competition, especially in today’s math market. Unreasonable turnaround times are part of the new normal, something that almost guarantees a lack of quality right out of the gate.

Of course, the developer could say no to this ridiculous timeline, but there are plenty of others who will say yes. So, the developer accepts the work and scrambles to put together a team of writers and editors who must have immediate availability, sheepishly offering them a take-it-or-leave-it rate, a mere pittance of what they could once demand. As is the case for the developer, for each writer or editor who declines, there are scores in the wings who will say yes just to survive. Those who do accept the inferior pay and grueling schedule often do so without the ability to review the product specs to know what they’re getting into. That’s because the specs are still being hashed out by the publisher and developer even as the project begins. And when product specs are “complete”, they are often vague, contradictory, and in need of extensive reworking since they were hastily put together by people juggling far too many projects already.

[snip]

Copyediting, the work I generally do now, is the final stage of editing before the product goes to press, where only a check for grammar, punctuation and things of this nature should be required. Content editing is a whole other expertise, one that is done after the writing where the content editor reviews the writer’s work for accuracy, sense, and structure, and makes sure the material adheres to the product specs. When I’m hired to copyedit, the profound errors I see in content are often staggering enough that grammar and punctuation seem immaterial. Sometimes the content in the student materials is so poor—steps omitted, unclear directions, concepts introduced when they’re not developed till later in the text, distorted interpretations of math terms and applications —that it boggles the mind it got past a content editor. With so many errors rampant at this stage of editing, rewriting is hastily done and it’s only inevitable that some errors will show up in the final printed product. And with a different copyeditor on each book, there are those who don’t even think about, or have the experience to recognize, the content issues so they go unaddressed. For a rate of four dollars a page, most copyeditors will do only what they were hired to do—look for errors in grammar and punctuation and move on. There's a mortgage due after all.

When I point out critical errors in content to a developer’s project manager, there’s generally a pause at the other end of the phone. I’m ruining their day, handing them a problem they don’t want, can’t possibly address given their resources and time. Some do their best; they’ll ask me to make corrections and bump up my rate a bit. Some will ask me to make notes so that they can fix the errors and do the rewrites themselves on their own time. Others will simply sigh, “The publisher knows it’s bad. Just do the best you can.” The publisher knows it’s bad. And yet, it doesn’t seem to matter. That’s because the sales and marketing team is already at work developing videos, brochures, webinars, catalog copy, and whatever else their bloated budgets will allow in order to sell what doesn’t actually exist—a quality product.

And speaking of the printed product, there’s one more step before we get there—production. These are the people who typeset the books and get them ready for press. India is a favored venue for some publishers because workers are available on three shifts and work fast, but mostly because the price is far cheaper than in the U.S. As editors, we often have to compensate for language barriers by color coding our instructions to the production staff or using simple language that is still frequently misunderstood, resulting in further unintended errors that often make it into the final product because there’s no time left in the schedule, no money left to pay someone, to do a final and thorough review in the manner it should be, and used to be, done.

[snip]

One must conclude that students and their education, if this is judged against product quality, is becoming an increasingly low priority. Not only don’t some publishers care, some have no problem expressing their lack of concern. Example: I received an email from a senior math executive of a well-established publisher responding to a concern I raised about the lack of correlations in a particular math series to the Common Core State Standards, correlations that were part of the product specs. The reason they were part of the product specs is because Common Core State Standards have been officially adopted by 43 states (ascd.org) and publishers are racing to make sure their products address them. This is how the senior executive answered my query: “It doesn’t matter if there aren’t enough correlations; our marketing materials say only that we ‘expose’ students to Common Core.”

Not only did this top-level “professional” have no problem stating this, she had no problem committing it to writing. Buyer beware: Read that marketing copy very carefully.

Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be.
Annie Keeghan

Barry Eichengreen has a really bad idea

From Barry Eichengreen, a historian of the Great Depression:

Indeed, one might question the very premise that, two decades from now, there will be textbooks as we know them. Today, introductory economics is taught using a textbook in which an eminent professor authoritatively bestows the conventional wisdom on his or her (typically, his) students. Knowledge, as encapsulated in the textbook and interpreted by the professor, is delivered from above.

This, of course, is also how newspapers traditionally delivered the news. Editors and publishers assembled and collated stories, and the newspaper that they produced was then delivered to the subscriber’s doorstep. But the last decade has seen a veritable revolution in the news business. News is now assembled and disseminated via Web sites, wikis, and the comment sections of blogs. News, in other words, is increasingly delivered from the bottom up. Rather than relying on editors, everyone is becoming their own news curator.

Something similar is likely to happen to textbooks, especially in economics,where everyone has an opinion and first-hand experience with the subject. Textbooks will be like wikis, with faculty adopters and students modifying text and contributing content. There still may be a role for the author as gatekeeper; but the textbook will know [sic] longer be the font of wisdom, and its writer will no longer control the table of contents.

The outcome will be messy. But the economics profession will also become more diverse and dynamic – and our children’s economics will be healthier as a result.

Our Children's Economics

Number one: if it's textbooks not being a source of wisdom you're after, we've got that now.

And, number two: I prefer fount.

Font of wisdom sounds dumb.

Other people who have really bad ideas

dogs are omnivores

Back to the vet's today for our third set of stitches and a really huge dog-cone attached via chest strap.

At the office I pussy-footed around the subject of: can a dog be a vegan? (I read The China Study two years ago, see below.)

"Do dogs need to eat meat?" I asked.

The vet, who tends to scoff a lot (I was hoping to forestall scoffing), gave me a look. "What do you mean, meat?" he said. "Do you mean raw meat?" He looked like he was fixing to scoff.

Raw meat, as I discovered yesterday, shows up frequently on websites devoted to dog nutrition. I haven't learned why as yet.

"Well," I said, "sure. Raw meat. Or cooked meat. Or just meat in general. Should I be giving Surfer real meat?"

"Dogs aren't obligate carnivores," he said.

What? Dogs aren't carnivores? (And what's obligate?)

I was gobsmacked.

An "obligate carnivore," it turns out, is a cat. A cat has to eat meat or it will die, hence the term "obligate." Cats are obliged to eat meat. Dogs are not obligate carnivores, and they are not obliged to eat meat. They just like to eat meat, same as people, but a dog can be a vegetarian. The vet actually used the word "vegetarian" himself, which is a lot better than me saying "vegetarian" and getting scoffed at. If I remember correctly, and I think I do, the vet actually said, "A dog can be a perfectly healthy vegetarian."

So today Surfer ate Amy's lentil soup, diced tomatoes, olive oil, and a boatload of fish oil. He was a pretty good sport about it, but I don't think he's going to be too thrilled when the cruciferous vegetables show up.

From The China Study:

...I decided to start an in-depth laboratory program that would investigate the role of nutrition, especially protein, in the development of cancer....I chose to do this research at a very basic science level, studying the biochemical details of cancer formation. It was important to understand not only whether but also how protein might promote cancer....

What we found was shocking. Low-protein diets inhibited the initiative of cancer by aflatoxin, regardless of how much of this carcinogen was administered to these animals. After cancer, initiation was completed, low-protein diets also dramatically blocked subsequent cancer growth. In other words, the cancer-producing effects of this highly carcinogenic chemical were rendered insignificant by a low-protein diet. In fact, dietary protein proved to be so powerful in its effect that we could turn on and turn off cancer growth simply by changing the level consumed.

Furthermore, the amounts of protein being fed were those that we humans routinely consume. We didn't use extraordinary levels, as is so often the case in carcinogen studies.

But that's not all. We found that not all proteins had this effect. What protein consistently and strongly promoted cancer? Casein, which makes up 87% of cow's milk protein, promoted all stages of the cancer process. What type of protein did not promote cancer, even at high levels of intake? The safe proteins were from plants, including wheat and soy.

[snip]

But how much protein is too much or too little? Using rats, we investigated a range of 4-24% dietary protein....Foci did not develop with up to about 10% dietary protein. Beyond 10%, foci development increased dramatically with increases in dietary protein.

[snip]

The most significant finding of this experiment was this: foci developed only when the animals met or exceeded the amount of dietary protein (12%) needed to satisfy their body growth rate. That is, when the animals met and surpassed their requirement for protein, disease onset began.

This finding may have considerable relevance for humans even though these were rat studies. I say this because the protein required for growth in young rats and humans as well as the protein required to maintain health for adult rats and humans is remarkably similar.

According to the recommended daily allowance (RDA) for protein consumption, we humans should be getting about 10% of our energy from protein. This is considerably more than the actual amount required....What do most of us routinely consume? Remarkably, it is considerably more than the recommended 10%. The average American consumes 15-16% protein....

[snip]

[D]id it make any difference what type of protein was used in these experiments? For all of these experiments, we were using casein, which makes up 87% of cow's milk protein. So the next logical question was whether plant protein, tested in the same way, has the same effect on cancer promotiona s casein. The answer is an astonishing "NO." In these experiments, plant protein did not promote cancer growth, even at the higher levels of intake....Gluten, the protein of wheat, did not produce the same result as casein, even when fed at the same 20% level.

China-Cornell-Oxford Project 

Surfer, part 2

The first thing that happened was a routine trip to the vet's, followed by surgery to remove a growth on Surfer's hind leg (a growth the vet thought should be removed not because it looked dangerous but because it was bothering Surfer), followed by lab results giving Surfer 8 months to live without treatment and .... I guess a bit more than that with treatment. Surfer is 11 and by all appearances in the pink of health: he's strong, hearty, energetic, and interested in life. It's dreadful news.

Surfer had the surgery Monday. Today is Sunday, and Surfer has now ripped out (or more likely licked off) his surgical staples twice. Once because I took the cone off (and, yes, I do know how fantastically stupid that was for a person who has written two books about animals) and once because the cone turns out to be too short to prevent Surfer reaching his hind leg and ripping out staples.

Friday was the pits. First the cancer phone call in the afternoon, then Extreme Weather in the evening, followed by discovery of the first ripping-out late Friday night, when we were already buried in snow and had no hope of getting out. The next morning Surfer was crying, I felt like crying, the driveway was buried under a foot and a half of snow, and the vet was closing at noon. We made it to his office at 10:50 am.

Tonight is Sunday and I am sitting here, again, with a soon-to-be dying dog who has a gaping 5-inch open surgical wound on his thigh. But no snow, thank God.

Tomorrow brings a third trek to the vet for a third stapling ----- and no doubt a further delay in starting the Magic Chemo med the vet told us about....

Which is called (I see from my notes) Kinavet. Hmmmm. The fact sheet says Kinavet is not a chemotherapy drug. Interesting. The vet called it chemo (a targeted chemo). It's obviously pretty toxic, judging by the video. But toxic in a good way.

Do people use Kinavet (or its equivalent)?

Do people get cancers originating in mast cells? It seems as if we ought to, but I haven't found anything about it so far.

And are people starting to have targeted cancer drugs?

I spent part of today skimming Daniel Servan-Schreiber's Anti-Cancer, trying to figure out what to have Surfer eat. I admired the book tremendously when I read it a couple of years back. Then, a little while ago, I looked up Servan-Schreiber's website and discovered that he died in 2011. Sigh.

Apparently Servan-Schreiber believed the reason his cancer returned was that he failed to slow down. He did too much jet-setting around the world to international conferences and the like.

That's not going to be a problem for Surfer.

A monkey in the multiverse

In the Times today:

“My goal is to do for these kids what I do with my own children,” the teacher, Susana Rojas, tells me. “It’s all about exposure to concepts — wide, narrow, long, short. I bring in breads from different countries. ‘Let’s do a pie chart showing which one you liked the best.’ I don’t ask them to memorize 1, 2, 3 — I could teach a monkey to count.”
The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools | By DAVID L. KIRP | Published: February 9, 2013

OK, yes, you can teach a monkey to "memorize 1,2,3":

Nieder and his colleagues spent about nine months training and testing two rhesus monkeys. The monkeys looked at a computer screen, which displayed from one to five dots.
Evidence Adds Up That Monkeys Can Count

Seeing as how it's a simple matter, requiring a mere 9 months, to teach a monkey to count, there is obviously no reason to teach a child to count. Not when you can spend that learning-to-count time teaching concepts like "When I put all the ingredients in [the food processor], what will happen?” or "Describe the smell of an onion, strong or light" or “Room 210 is a pie...and each of us is a slice of that pie.”

Meanwhile, over at themoneyillusion, Scott Sumner has posted this passage by physicist Eliezar Yudkowsky re: the multiverse:

So let me state then, very clearly, on behalf of any and all physicists out there who dare not say it themselves: Many-worlds wins outright given our current state of evidence. There is no more reason to postulate a single Earth, than there is to postulate that two colliding top quarks would decay in a way that violates conservation of energy. It takes more than an unknown fundamental law; it takes magic.

[snip]

We have embarrassed our Earth long enough by failing to see the obvious. So for the honor of my Earth, I write as if the existence of many-worlds were an established fact, because it is. The only question now is how long it will take for the people of this world to update.
Many Worlds, One Best Guess

So there you have it. There are many Earths, and we are on the wrong one, the one where not teaching is teaching and Salman Khan is the man you call to help you spice up a presentation.

On the other hand, as Ed pointed out to me this afternoon, the fact that there are multiple Earths doesn't mean any of them are different. They could all be the same, the way dollar bills in your billfold are the same.

In that case, we need to find another planet altogether.

help desk - Surfer

One of our dogs, Surfer, has cancer. We heard yesterday, then today we found out how bad it is.

It's bad. Mast cell cancer, Stage 3. Eighty percent of dogs with this diagnosis die within 8 months.

(Just one thing after another around here, it seems.)

Anyway, I'm posting to ask for whatever knowledge or experience anyone has in this realm. Apparently there is a brand-new chemo drug that targets a receptor on the surface of the mast cell, so Surfer will begin taking that shortly. The vet said they started another dog on the drug 4 weeks ago, and when they saw the dog again the bloody tumor on his face was gone and he looked "5 years younger."

(I'll take it!)

I'm also going to figure out whatever anti-cancer diet exists for dogs. I know quite a bit about anti-cancer diets for people because I went on a health-book reading binge when my mother fell ill. (Best books I read: Anti-Cancer by Daniel Servan-Schreiber and The China Study by T. Colin Campbell.)

However, reading anti-cancer books for people doesn't instantly tell me what an anti-cancer diet for a dog might be, since dogs are carnivores. (People are omnivores, right?)

I'm a believer in diet as a treatment for cancer because of my father's experience. He was diagnosed with three different kinds of cancer in the last 20 or 25 years of his life (squamous cell, bladder, and prostate) and he didn't die from cancer, or even come close. He tracked down all the information he could on cancer and diet, and followed the dietary recommendations to the letter. All three cancers eventually disappeared.

Of course, I think my father had interesting genetics ... which I suspect may have made him more able to deter cancerous cells. On the other hand, he did have cancer - 3 kinds of cancer, no less - so he obviously wasn't cancer-proof, interesting genetics or no.

My dad used all available conventional treatments as well, so it's impossible to say what role diet played in his survival, if any. However, no doctor expected to see his bladder cancer disappear in the way that it did. It recurred for years and then .... it was gone.

I remember my mom's report after what I think must have been my dad's last trek to Mayo Clinic for follow-up.

The doctor said: "You have cancer, and you're going to continue to have cancer, but you're not going to die of cancer."

My father died many years later, in his Springfield townhouse, where he lived on his own, unassisted.

Probably a heart attack.

Definitely not cancer.

College Readiness

The problem with CCSS is that it was based on a "workplace analysis" that defined a one-size-fits-all pseudo-algebra II target in math. It's driven by the K-12 world that went out of its way to ignore college readiness tools currently used by colleges. PARCC is defining its own PLDs and cutoffs and only vaguely worries about correlating their data with existing tests. Also, the levels do NOT address the K-12 academic needs of those interested in STEM careers. PARCC is ignoring the ACT, SAT (I and II), AP tests, and they even ignore common remedial tests like ACCUPLACER and COMPASS.

What does it mean that ACT decided to split from PARCC to develop its own products? Specifically, they now have ACT-Explore for 8th and 9th grades, ACT-PLAN for 10th grade, and the ACT for 11th or 12th grades. These are tied into ACT-Aspire, a system that will cover K-12 development and testing.

What does it mean that the College Board is developing their own products? They have ReadiStep for middle school, the PSAT/NMSQT for 10th/11th grades, and the SAT. They have the SAT II and the AP classes and tests, soon to be supported by "SpringBoard", their grade 6-12 "Pre-AP" program.

And what about ACCUPLACER and COMPASS? Will colleges dump them and buy into an unknown and uncalibrated PARCC product that might have trouble calibrating its no-fluency-necesssary idea of education with the needs of colleges?

Who will drive this process, K-12 educators or colleges? This is a philosophical control issue.

Both the AP sequencene the College Board sequence build upon known quantities that are currently used by almost all colleges. They are fitting CCSS to their higher standards, not defining a curriculum that maxes out on barely college ready. I would give the College Board the edge because of their high-end AP and SAT II products, but I would give the edge to the ACT over the SAT. I think that Coleman at the College Board wants to adddress that "aptitude" issue.

So, what does CCSS/PARCC offer AT MOST?

Level 5 - "Students performing at this level demonstrate a distinguished command of the knowledge, skills, and practices embodied by the Common Core State Standards assessed at their grade level. ... They are academically well prepared to engage successfully in entry-level, credit-bearing courses in College Algebra, Introductory College Statistics, and technical courses requiring an equivalent level of mathematics."

One can hope that real college expectations and curricula will eventually be driven back to the lower grades. But how long (if ever) will it take our PARCC state to come to grips with the idea that they have to define a path to the top end for all students; not just be happy if little urban Johnnie or Suzie makes it to the community college level; not just fool themselves with terms like "college ready" and "distinguished". With a choice of standards products I'm hopeful, but only over the long term.

"Distinguished" in CCSS/PARCC Does NOT Mean STEM-Ready

Our state will be using the PARCC test, and PARCC is defining different "Performance Level Descriptors" (PLDs) that will define different levels of academic achievement. This is nothing new. Our current state test does that (e.g. below proficient, proficient, etc.), but they are vague levels at best. Are the PARCC levels any better? Do they define a level needed to prepare for a STEM career? Note that in the following document describing all of the levels, the term STEM is not found.

PARCC College and Career Readiness

PARCC PLDs define the following five levels (Distinguished, strong, moderate, partial, and minimal):

Level 5 - "Students performing at this level demonstrate a distinguished command of the knowledge, skills, and practices embodied by the Common Core State Standards assessed at their grade level. ... They are academically well prepared to engage successfully in entry-level, credit-bearing courses in College Algebra, Introductory College Statistics, and technical courses requiring an equivalent level of mathematics."

Level 4 - "Students performing at this level demonstrate a strong command of the knowledge, skills, and practices embodied by the Common Core State Standards assessed at their grade level."

Level 3 - "Students performing at this level demonstrate a moderate command of the knowledge, skills, and practices embodied by the Common Core State Standards assessed at their grade level."

Level 2 - "Students performing at this level demonstrate a partial command of the knowledge, skills, and practices embodied by the Common Core State Standards assessed at their grade level."

Level 1 - "Students performing at this level demonstrate a minimal command of the knowledge, skills, and practices embodied by the Common Core State Standards assessed at their grade level."

Level 5 is NOT a STEM-ready level.

PARCC defines level 4 as the cutoff for minimal college readiness. For math, this means:

"Students who earn a PARCC College- and Career-Ready Determination by performing at level 4 in mathematics and enroll in College Algebra, Introductory College Statistics, and technical courses requiring an equivalent level of mathematics have approximately a 0.75 probability of earning college credit by attaining at least a grade of C or its equivalent in those courses."

Since these PLDs will be used to set grade level standards and drive curricula back to the earliest grades, it's clear that parents who want their kids to be prepared for a STEM college career will have to (continue to) get help at home or with tutors. If they don't figure it out in the early grades because their child is "distinguished, it will be too late by seventh grade.

paper

ABSTRACT
Fiorella, Logan 1; Mayer, Richard E. 1
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY | Vol 104 November 2012

Paper-Based Aids for Learning With a Computer-Based Game.

The purpose of this study was to test the instructional value of adding paper-based metacognitive prompting features to a gamelike environment for learning about electrical circuits, called the Circuit Game. In Experiment 1, students who were prompted during Levels 1 through 9 to direct their attention to the most relevant features of the game and were provided with a list of its underlying principles to relate to their game actions performed better on an embedded transfer test (i.e., Level 10) than those not provided with the intervention (d = 0.77). In Experiment 2, the principles were not explicitly provided; instead, students were asked to fill in the correct features of each principle on a sheet while playing Levels 1 through 9 of the game. Results indicated that this method of prompting improved transfer performance only for learners who could correctly fill in the list of the game's principles (d = 0.53). Overall, paper-based aids for directing students' attention toward the most relevant features of a game and asking them to apply provided principles to solve game-based problems result in a deeper understanding of the game's academic content. (C) 2012 by the American Psychological Association

What will they think of next?

(Richard Mayer is the author of Should there be a three-strikes rule against pure discovery learning? The case for guided methods of instruction.)

books are technology

A great observation re: technology from Brad DeLong:

From my perspective, I will not dare make predictions about the potential Christensenian disruption of higher education until I understand why and how the university as we know it survived the Christensenian disruption that was the coming of the printed book. I don't understand that. Thus I do not dare forecast what is coming.

Shortly after C. began his freshman year at Hogwarts, Ed and I asked the principal about technology. We had learned that the school had a technology committee, and we were concerned. We'd seen what cascading Technology Initiatives had wrought in our district.

The principal said people often worried they were behind on technology (true), but technology was expensive (true), and they weren't going to invest in technology that didn't advance the students' education.

Then he held up a pencil and said, "A pencil is technology."

doctors on electronic medical records

As a veteran of the public school system, I've never seen electronic medical records as the great white hope where medical costs are concerned. "Technology" is expensive.

Sure enough:

The conversion to electronic health records has failed so far to produce the hoped-for savings in health care costs and has had mixed results, at best, in improving efficiency and patient care, according to a new analysis by the influential RAND Corporation.

Optimistic predictions by RAND in 2005 helped drive explosive growth in the electronic records industry and encouraged the federal government to give billions of dollars in financial incentives to hospitals and doctors that put the systems in place.

[snip]

RAND’s 2005 report was paid for by a group of companies, including General Electric and Cerner Corporation, that have profited by developing and selling electronic records systems to hospitals and physician practices. Cerner’s revenue has nearly tripled since the report was released, to a projected $3 billion in 2013, from $1 billion in 2005.

The report predicted that widespread use of electronic records could save the United States health care system at least $81 billion a year, a figure RAND now says was overstated. The study was widely praised within the technology industry and helped persuade Congress and the Obama administration to authorize billions of dollars in federal stimulus money in 2009 to help hospitals and doctors pay for the installation of electronic records systems.

[snip]

But evidence of significant savings is scant, and there is increasing concern that electronic records have actually added to costs by making it easier to bill more for some services.

In Second Look, Few Savings From Digital Health Records
By REED ABELSON and JULIE CRESWELL
Published: January 10, 2013

Mickey Kaus has posted emails from physicians describing their experiences with EMRs that are fascinating. This one especially:

I once reviewed a hospital record from a large national medical center that I can’t name, but [you've] heard of. The patient had a major operation. The operative note was incredibly good. Page after page it recorded in exquisite detail exactly where the surgeon cut, exactly what he retracted, exactly what he saw, exactly what detailed care he took to avoid injury to this organ and that one. I was impressed. I remember thinking, “Wow. No wonder this place has a national reputation.” This was the best documented operation I had ever seen.

In spite of this operation, the patient got worse. Four days later she went back for a repeat of the same operation. And the second operative note was the exactly the same as the first. Identical. Page after page, word for word, exactly the same. Leave aside the impossibility of having two multi-hour operations go exactly the same way, it is not possible to dictate or write two multi-page op notes that are word for word identical. The op notes were frauds. They were templates, worked out with the hospital risk management department to describe what should happen, and entered in the EMR with one click of a mouse. What actually happened? No one can tell.
More on Obama’s Great Health Leap Forward

Talk about 'always worse than you think.' Yikes.

We experienced a comic version of the prefab clinical observation several years ago when we took Andrew and Jimmy to the hospital for extensive speech testing, resulting in extensive reports. When we read Andrew's, we discovered that the report characterized him as 'deaf.'

Andrew is not deaf.

The rest of the report seemed to be about Andrew, not some other kid, so we assumed somebody must have hit the 'deaf' macro by mistake. That was mildly annoying, but it didn't occur to us to ask ourselves whether anything in the report was specific to Andrew.

Then there was the time C's middle school math teacher selected "Finds math difficult" from the Comment Bank....which reminds me of the then-assistant principal telling parents that teachers were no longer allowed to hand-write comments on report cards because you never knew what they'd say. (They might say something inappropriate, like "Finds math difficult.")

Meanwhile here's the latest news from the coming Disruption that is the MOOC: Crash Sinks Course on Online Teaching.

The six-week course, called "Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application," was created by Fatimah Wirth, a Georgia Tech instructional designer. The emphasis of the course, which began on Jan. 28, was to teach students how to create online learning materials and manage an online class.

Students were asked to sign up for groups using Google Docs, but a spokesman for Google Inc. said the program allows only 50 people to edit a document simultaneously. When the crush of students tried to sign up, the system crashed, said Debbie Morrison, who was in the class.

Ms. Wirth emailed an apology, but when things didn't improve she, in conjunction with Georgia Tech and Coursera, pulled the plug on the course.

Kaus's other post on EMRs: Obama's Great Health Leap Forward

The Ups and Downs of Electronic Medical Records
Medicare Is Faulted on Shift to Electronic Records
A Shortcut to Wasted Time
Abuse of Electronic Records
Uneasy About Online Medical Records

Weird but True Animal Facts

Have just discovered the Weird but True Animal Facts blog!

national PTA gets tough on parents

Don't Politicize the Common Core State Standards!
By Eric Hargis, Executive Director of the National PTA

update: National PTA gets $1 million from Gates Foundation

The Problem is Who Else is Going to Think This is a Good Idea

While reading this link at Marginal Revolution, I had a nightmare vision of someone in an ed school reading it and thinking this was a great idea for younger grades.  It's got it all: technology, students "teaching" each other, problems that are above the head of most students.

the people's poems, part 2

Constructivists:
drill and kill
sage on the stage
guide on the side
chalk and talk
cells and bells

Instructivists
teach, test, hope for the best (said about constructivists)
thrill of skill
Basics outside the Matrix (CT)
Accelerate and congratulate (CT)
learn and earn
college knowledge
blame and shame
hover and discover (Grace)
abduct and instruct (Grace)
abduct and instruct (Grace)
flail and fail
open schools model = gather and blather (Anonymous)

gather and blather

I've just this moment discovered Anonymous's entry in the Poems for Instructivists thread:

Open schools model = Gather and blather

Horselaughs!