The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: teaching

  • Josh Marshall, spot-on as always

    From Talking Points Memo:

    Yes, George W. Really Should Remain Silent

    For all my many criticisms of him during his presidency, I have come to respect President Bush’s post-presidency. He’s kept out of the toxic political battles that came after he left office. He’s had the confidence or perhaps simply the realism and detachment to leave it to posterity to judge his presidency and not try to duke it out in the 24/7 press cycle like his toxic second Dick Cheney. And there are moments of grace like the recent 50th anniversary commemoration of the the March on Selma. DC’s Republican leadership stayed away. But Bush was there. One might argue that there was little to be gained by Republicans attending since, in the nature of things, it was not going to be a receptive audience and they would be upstaged infinitely by the iconic symbolism of an African-American President. But the same applies to Bush. And he was there.

    Full article: Yes, George W. Really Should Remain Silent

  • The madness of World War I

    This piece helps make clear how criminally incompetent the leaders of the Allies were during the opening years of World War I and how unworthy they were of the brave men who fought and died under their command.

  • One sentence can pull you out of an entirely fine essay

    By Godot13 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

    I actually agree with most of what Fareed Zakaria writes in his Washington Post op-ed “Why America’s Obsession with STEM Education is Dangerous“.  We need balanced, robust, well-rounded education, not narrow business-driven training.  It will take many different vantages points to see solutions to the problems we face in this hardest century of human history.  Students of mine often express shock (and perhaps a little betrayal) when they complain about, say, their history teacher and ask me “Don’t you think it’s just a waste of time?” only for me to reply that it is one of my favorite subjects.  As a physics guy, I obviously think we need more and better science teaching, but I also think we need more and better teaching in the humanities and the arts.

    Having said that… boy, does this one sentence put me in a slow burn:

    No matter how strong your math and science skills are, you still need to know how to learn, think and even write.

    It angers me that Farakaria, with a vast platform, falls into the stereotypical thinking that these skills — learning, writing, thinking — are somehow not part of the math/science pool.  In actuality, of course, scientists, engineers, and coders practice those skills constantly.  While there are surely scientists who cannot write, there are English majors with the same problem.  STEM thinking isn’t the only kind of thinking we need, but it is thinking.  It is both disingenuous and insulting for him to imply otherwise.

    I know it’s a small piece of a larger argument, but it still rankled me.

  • College Admissions Hunger Games

    Today the NY Times published an Upshot op-ed called “For Accomplished Students, Reaching a Good College Isn’t as Hard as It Seems“.  It’s one of those article that seems to say more than it does.  It doesn’t actually support the conclusion it asserts.  Saying that roughly the same percentage of “top students” still get admission to elite schools is almost self-evidently circular, and does nothing to dispute the notion that “college admissions has become a Hunger Games-like tournament”.  In the Hunger Games, the same number of winners happened each year — but the competition wasn’t always the same.  And what constitutes a “top student” could (and does!) vary from year to year without creating more of them.

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  • The persistence of “factory”-style schools

    Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute asks “Why Do ‘Anti-Corporatists’ Defend Factory-Style Leadership?”  There’s a lot in there I’d like to respond to; here’s my first swing at it.

    It’s easy to blame hidebound educators for educational malaise, and some of the blame lands justly. But you cannot begin to understand the problem until you realize how strenuously parents resist any change that means their kids aren’t learning it the way they did. If education “looks different”, it is distrusted and undervalued. (Witness the growing backlash over Common Core.)

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  • Lunacon 2014 (2d): Gamification in Education

    Lunacon 2014 (2d): Gamification in Education

    Saturday 2 PM

    I sort of felt obligated to go to this panel (and the one on The Future of Education), seeing that I am a teacher and all.

    It was OK.  The title proved to be inaccurate: This was more about the use of existing games in a school setting.  Gamification usually refers to adopting the tropes of gameplay — varying difficulty, badges and other rewards, etc. — for use in education.   Instead, the panelists related how they had used games to advance their classes.  Two of the three panelists work (at least part time) for companies that make educational games, so that wasn’t too surprising.

    While sitting there I thought up a game I might use in covering diffusion:

    • Start with a grid grouped into larger boxes (I’m thinking a 21×21 grid, divided into 3×3 boxes).
    • In some of the boxes, place pennies to represent molecules of gas.
    • Every turn, for every penny, roll 1d8 and move accordingly along a cardinal direction.
      • If the target square is occupied, the moving penny stops and does not enter.  Instead, the other penny moves in the direction indicated.
      • Pennies that hit the edge of the grid bounce back.
      • As a variant, give the pennies two speeds, based on the heads/tails status.
        • heads = moving; tails = stopped
        • A moving penny hitting a stopped penny itself stops.  The hit penny moves off.
        • A moving penny hitting a moving penny bounces back (in the opposite direction) and is stopped.  The hit penny is also stopped.
      • Using the larger boxes allows you to compute density variations.

    Two quips about using games:

    • Magic: The Gathering is a good introduction to business strategy and resource management.
    • AD&D is “hours of improv comedy with an algebra test in the middle”.  😀

    Games mentioned

    • Compounded: A game about the periodic table
    • Phylomon: a Pokemon-type collectible card game about ecology
    • Bio Blitz

  • The Rainy Season (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 18)

    “The Rainy Season”
    The Rainy Season

    The Rainy Season is not a happy album and “The Rainy Season” is not a happy song. While Marc Cohn held a wide mix of songs and styles, Cohn’s sophomore album is generally dark. What comes through more than anything is how hard love can be to maintain, especially when you’re on the road and apart for large stretches.

    Clouds move in
    From off the horizon
    Feels like nighttime
    In the middle of the day

    This is a nice working of metaphor, which will extend to the refrain and indeed the entire album. Not only does he evoke memories of actual storms really well, but the threat of the future is pretty palpable here. When it gets dark in the middle of the dark, it’s not just any old storm. We’re talking flash-flood thunderstorm activity, something with lots of lightning and thunder and howling wind.

    And I don’t know why
    But it’s still so suprisin’
    How a love grows stronger
    Or it just fades away

    The segue to the relationship is smooth, so smooth you hardly notice how much it hurts. He’s clearly not writing about a love growing stronger, is he?

    But you look older today
    Than I’ve ever seen you

    I’m not expect on relationships, but things rarely go well when you tell your lover, “You look older than I’ve ever seen you”. But it’s a bit more than that: She looks older today — something’s changed, something that’s bringing the rain.

    I think I know the reason

    While I’m just making this up, I’ve always assumed that “the reason” is that she’s found out he’s cheated on her. (I think that’s backed up by “Paper Walls”) That’s the culmination of a process, of course, but the cheating (and her discovery of it) provide the singular act that cause her to look older today.

    We might wash all our tears away
    But you got to bundle up baby
    For the rainy season

    Here he’s holding out the hope — thin as even he sees it must be — that this won’t be the end of things. They might get through, wiping away their tears. But it’s going to take a storm to do it, and she’s got to be ready to walk through that storm.

    I hear you breathing heavy
    On the telephone tonight
    I can feel the air is thick as thieves

    If he’s calling her on the telephone, I’m not exactly sure how he knows she looks older today than he’s ever seen her. But let that slide. This line implies (to me) that he’s cheated; she knows he’s cheated; he knows she knows he’s cheated — but no one has said or confessed anything. That’s why the clouds are stil gathering. The unspoken accusation trembles in the air; it’s why he can feel the storm coming. Moreover, this opens the possibility that she doesn’t know and he’s just projecting his guilt.

    Sometimes I just want to tell you
    We’ll be all right
    At least that’s what some part of me believes

    Here, the forlorn hopefulness is just heartbreaking. He’s trying to offer comfort but he has none and (in my theory) it’s his own fault. He wants to think they can weather the storm but he knows, deep down, it’s unlikely.

    Oh, oh I’ve been holding on so long
    Holding on and holding on so long
    Oh, oh I’ve been holding on so long

    It’s interesting that he focuses on how long he‘s been holding on. This might upend my model of the relationship. Maybe the root cause lies with her. Or maybe he’s trying to justify his own failures. In the live version (which I prefer to the studio version), there’s an interesting twist: He says he’s “been holding on so long — holding on maybe just a little too long“. That signals, to me, that he’s come to understand things aren’t going to work out and that it’s been unhealthy for a long time.

    All in all, you have to wonder what his wife thought when this song and album came out.

  • Lost You in the Canyon (30 Days of Marc Cohn – Day 1)

    “Lost You in the Canyon”
    Burning the Daze

    Marc Cohn’s third studio album seems, more or less, to be universally seen as his weakest, and I guess I mostly share that opinion.  But even so there are a number of quite good songs on it, and “Lost You in the Canyon” is one of them.

    Got your call from California
    But I could hardly hear your voice
    Through the hissing of the highway
    And all that other noise

    I really like the extended metaphor, analogizing the erratic cell phone signal we all loath with the gradual decay and loss of a deep emotional connection:

    Now all these things we leave unspoken
    Seem to haunt me like a ghost

    This is our first hint that this song is about more than a dropped call.  It’s more than static that’s getting in the way; the call is failing to transmit the things they can’t say.

    There were times I thought I knew you
    Before these changes came to pass
    But you don’t think about it do you?
    From up there in your house of glass

    The loss becomes palpable here.  The regret seems resigned, sad rather than angry to discover that the other is not whom the singer thought he was.  “House of glass” works on many levels.  It denotes a certain ultramodern detachment and impracticality, a retreat into aesthetic that walls off the singer from his conversant.  A glass house looks pretty but doesn’t make much sense.  It’s also intrinsically fragile and even a bit reckless, even if it’s the singer throwing stones.

    The Earth is shifting underneath you
    The land is sliding all around
    Do you ever stop to wonder
    About that paradise you’ve found?

    Ostensibly about the California from the first line, this is really an anguished cry that things are changing and the conversant apparently doesn’t even notice.  A loss cuts twice as deep when only one feels it.  This might also render the first line’s California metaphorical — it’s more the California of the mind than of the Pacific coast.  While it’s probably reading too much into it, this really works for the times during which Marc Cohn grew up — late 1960s through early 1980s.  This was exactly the time that California was shifting in the American psyche, from technicolor fantasy world to a grittier, harder-edged reality — when the paint had begun to dull at Disneyland — when the state, and the nation, woke up to the hangover truths of the times.  A dimming and distant California, lost in static not music, fading from paradise into parody, speaks to everyone coming of age at that time.

    I hear you moving through the mountains
    Through the fires and the floods
    But I can’t fix this bad connection
    In the wires or the blood

    This is the crux of the song for me.  It works on a literal level, of course — fires and floods in California are nothing new.  But it’s also about the wanton way in which we reinvent ourselves, obliterating what we were to become what we hope to be — and the losses we suffer, the things and people we leave behind, to whom we might speak but with whom we will no longer connect.  There’s also just something gripping about the “connection in the wires and the blood”.  (That might make a great title for a novel of the Internet age.)

  • Extremism begets extremism

    I would not normally be this way, but I’ll admit: The unyielding intransigence of the doomsday gun nuts is beginning to make me think it’s time to amend the Constitution and repeal the Second Amendment. If 2A means that no reasonable efforts can be made at all to reduce gun violence, then maybe it’s time for 2A to go.

    http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/01/impeach-obama-guns-steve-stockman.php?ref=fpb

  • One party is not fit to govern

    Hint: It’s not the Democrats.

    According to a piece in Politico, significant numbers of Republican representatives are willing to trash the full faith and credit of the United States — and incidentally dynamite the entire international economic order — so that they can “send Pres. Obama a message”.  Some of them are more reasonable, according to the bizarre new definition of “reasonable” that pervades today’s GOP: They only want to force a government shutdown, not a full-on default.

    This is insanity.  It’s time for everyone who’s not, you know, crazy to start calling it out for what it is. And that begins with the numerous sane moderate Republicans we are always assured are lurking in the background in the Party, rolling their eyes at their wayward brethren.  It’s time for those so-called leaders to step up and call out this craziness.  Someone calling for a platinum terabuck is a lark; someone calling for the US to default — to score points! — is a loon.

    By the by, it’s not even sound fiscal policy motivating these guys.  Apparently, it’s all in the testosterone.

    • “They think this is the only way to get Obama’s attention.”

    • “This is where they could choose to shut down the government to dramatize their contention that for four years Obama has promised in words to cut spending but in action only piled up debt. Many Republicans believe this is precisely what they will do.”

    We’ll leave aside the fact that spending has been cut, to the tune of two trillion dollars.  After all, the official GOP position is, if the numbers don’t support you, ignore the math.
    The best part of the Politico piece is this:

    Obama assumes Republicans would never be so foolish as to put the economy at risk to win a spending fight. Conservatives say he’s definitely wrong on that score.

    He is wrong.  Even the conservatives admit, they are exactly so foolish.
    .