Squirrel, my skittiest kitty, is becoming less and less skitty. She still wasn’t too pleased with the idea when my sister crashed here for a night (although actually Panther was even skittier about Rianna…that surprised me since Panther’s an in-my-face kind of kitty), but quite often now, she curls up next to me and allows herself to be petted. Today she even rolled over a few times so I wauld give her a belly rub–I think it reminds her of being a kitten.

This is Squirrel when she was a kitten.  As you can see, she’s always been extremely cute.

The day before yesterday, while I was still hitting the snooze, my phone rang…and the charter school I interviewed at was on the other end, asking me if I could come in that day to sign a contract.  I get two paid planning days before I start teaching on Monday, which is the beginning of a new term there.  Of all the things I never saw coming, they’re putting me to work in the high school–their high school math person is leaving.  I don’t think I’ve got all the facts about why but it sounds like a lot of drama.  Anyway, it’s legal for me to take that spot over because my sub license is K-12.  Apparently a lot of the kids at this school are not so high achieving…not a problem.  I got my start in teaching when I was a kid by teaching a friend who couldn’t read yet.  Plus it’s good to know that they’ll be straight with me about that kind of thing.

I keep getting ideas of things to shoot for, with these kids.  A while ago I came to the realization that college sets ed students up to think they have to save the world right away.  Stand and Deliver and Freedom Writers references were set up in front of us as examples.  The problem is…not everyone can be Jaime Escalante straight out of the box…heck, even Jaime Escalante wasn’t Jaime Escalante when he started.  The Hollywood version left a few things out:

“It took 10 years to bring Escalante’s program to peak success. He didn’t even teach his first calculus course until he had been at Garfield for several years … Escalante says he was so discouraged by his students’ poor preparation that after only two hours in class he called his former employer, the Burroughs Corporation, and asked for his old job back … By showing students moving from fractions to calculus in a single year, it gave the false impression that students can neglect their studies for several years and then be redeemed by a few months of hard work. This Hollywood message had a pernicious effect on teacher training. The lessons of Escalante’s patience and hard work in building his program, especially his attention to the classes that fed into calculus, were largely ignored in the faculty workshops and college education classes that routinely showed Stand and Deliver to their students.”

Start from the bottom, build a foundation first.  Eventually…who knows?

Now that the WGA strike is over, shows other than reality TV are going back into production. We won’t be doomed to an eternity of Are You Smarter than the Girl who Wants to Marry a Bajillionaire? crap. YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY!!!!! Among a laundry list of shows that I don’t care about (I just don’t get into most stuff any more…in fact, I don’t even bother to watch most stuff any more), House is coming back on April 21 at 9 PM. Note the timeslot change–it’s on Mondays now, contrary to House’s line in a recent episode to the effect that broadcast TV would be good enough to watch on Tuesdays. At least it’s not a Friday Timeslot of DOOOOOOOOM.

While I’m on the subject*, what’s up with TV these days? I mean I get that TV networks would go broke if they planned their entire lineups to appeal to the IQ range that my friends and I inhabit, but on the flip side, all this crappy reality TV exists for two reasons: it’s cheap to make and it’s freaking insanely popular with The Masses. So, it would be nice if they would at least use those cheap profits to pay for the production of something of value…although really it would be more of an investment than a subsidy, since over time smart programming will earn more than Reality crap. Do the math…a Survivor season (whatevertheheck it’s called) can run each episode maybe 2-3 times, and then the tapes are worth their weight in film. Shows that can stand up to repeated viewings and that last a few seasons so that enough episodes are made can keep making money forever. A constant trickle over a long enough time can add up to more than even a huge single burst. I could say it in statistics notation with an inequality, which would be cool because any geekery involving Greek symbols cannot possibly be less than amazing, but I’d need another WordPress plugin for that.

*note: this means “Avrila’s been waiting to rant about this for a long, long, LONG time”

So, I say to…well, everybody, though mostly the TV studios…think long term. Long term wins in the long run, and the nature of time will put us all into the long run eventually.

If you already know that Vista sucks, go sign the petition to save XP (hey, it might or might not work, but what’s to mess up by trying?).

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, go read some of the articles.  I especially recommend this one.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/

Disclosure: I didn’t write this…I just wish I did.

He says the problem with teachers is, “What’s a kid going to learn
from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?”
He reminds the other dinner guests that it’s true what they say about teachers:
Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.

I decide to bite my tongue instead of his
and resist the temptation to remind the other dinner guests
that it’s also true what they say about lawyers.

Because we’re eating, after all, and this is polite company.

“I mean, you’re a teacher, Taylor,” he says.
“Be honest. What do you make?”

And I wish he hadn’t done that
(asked me to be honest)
because, you see, I have a policy
about honesty and ass-kicking:
if you ask for it, I have to let you have it.

You want to know what I make?

read the rest

Vote plzkthx!

The good news is, this place will be a little harder to spam from now on. By a little I mean a lot. WP-Ban is keeping out 2,480 new spammer IPs that I got from Stop Forum Spam (hat tip: WeatherMod). And of course Akismet is doing its part too.

The bad news: I broke the Wall of Shame. Apparently when I added all the new IPs I went over the size limit for the database field that holds pages in WordPress. Now, I know that MySQL is what it is, but…oh great and powerful WordPress Development Team, a warning message would’ve been nice.

The other good news: After a significant redesign and a stop by Google Cache for essentials like the awards list (yes I have it backed up, but I would’ve had to unzip the backup and either get really lucky with a text search or set up a clean installation of WordPress to find it), the Wall of Shame is back up and running.

Fight back against spammers, or there’ll be even more tomorrow. It’s internet natural selection. Or maybe spamlection.

It’s no secret that interactive websites draw people in.  I call this the Word Search Effect.

There’s not a whole lot of skill involved in solving word search puzzles, though of course people like me manaage to come up with systems for it, and when it’s done, it just kind of sits there.  Yet people would rather do anything, even something patently pointless like a word search (or adding music to their freaking Myspace), than do nothing.  Basically, the Word Search Effect works because people like to do stuff.

In this part of the timeline, that means people spend time on sites where the interaction goes beyond “click here for next page.”  We don’t just read other people’s sites, we make our own.  Then we enter “the blogosphere” and set up our sites so that other people can comment on them, and we run around commenting on other people’s sites.  And don’t get me started on wikis.

So, here’s something you can do.  Yes, you right there.  In addition to commenting on my blog (you know you want to) I’m going to let you start labeling the posts with tags.   You can put the same tag on posts you think are related.  Standard fair warning, I may mess with it because this is in the final analysis my site…don’t be gross, don’t be mean, and if there are two very similar tags (like cat and cats, for example) I’ll probably combine them.

Just click on a post title and scroll to the bottom of the post to get started.  Have fun!

I can’t say very many good things about my fourth grade year. In fact, even the activity I’m writing about left me thinking “so what?” about what we were supposed to learn that day, though I think I learned more than I was intended to.

Ms. M. handed out strips of paper and tape, and told us to twist the paper once and tape the edges together. Then, she asked us how many edges the new shape had. I remember realizing that it only had one edge, because when I used my finger to trace the edge, it went all the way around on both sides.

I still don’t know what the Möbius Strip is to me, or I am to it, that I should care that it has only one edge, nor do I know what a fourth grader was supposed to get out of that. But I do remember having the idea that someone must have been the first to do that, and to realize what they’d done, and that on that day I’d done the same thing. So that’s what school is doing, I thought, taking us down the same path of figuring things out that other people have already been on. Although I didn’t tie that idea in with anything else for the next few years, it was in the back of my mind.

By sixth grade, I had picked up pi=3.14 from somewhere. I didn’t yet know that even that was an approximation, so I thought I was hot stuff when we measured diameters and cirucmferences and I was a step ahead when someone said, at the teacher’s prompting, that going from the diameter to the circumference was like multiplying by 3. But then I realized that what we were doing in that classroom had been done before by some ancient people, to figure out first that it was close to 3, then that it was 3.14. I found out later by playing with a calculator that there were more digits; later still, I found out that the digits went on forever. Once I knew that, it wasn’t any real surprise to me that people are still calculating the digits of pi, though I hope they’ve moved beyond measuring some round object and dividing by now.

Not long ago, I asked my at-the-time students to write a page starting in “Math is…” or “Math is good for…” Most of them couldn’t do it. They’ve been trained to do pass tests by doing mathematical tricks, but not taught to think about math. These were smart kids, but abstract thinking–anything that can’t be measured by a fill-in-the-bubbles test–isn’t in their curriculum any more.

I’m not ranting about NCLB or the testing systems. That’s been done, and anyway, the alternative (e.g. Oregon’s overall sub-40%, and lower in high school, pass rates before NCLB threatened the districts’ wallet) was worse. I’m talking about the best way of getting things done, which is a conversation that should be separate from “how do we beat the tests?”

Pure direct instruction does not work. There, I’ve said it. I can’t prove is, because as far as I know we’re not measuring the kids on the important stuff that direct instruction fails at–the easy things to measure, like whether the kids can do something, are all well within the range of things direct instruction is good at. Whether the kids can think something through, though–that’s not so easily measured, and they don’t learn it from being told and imitating.

I’ve gone back and forth on this one, because of some of the nonsense that sneaks in disguised as “reform” math, and I do think that there’s a place for direct instruction, contrary to what the radical philosophical constructivists say. However, I don’t think it should be considered the be-all end-all of teaching. Sometimes, yes, it works best for the knowledge to go from the teacher to the student, but if the students are to be active learners rather than passive receptacles, the emphasis needs to be on the teacher setting up the activity so that the student will figure it out. This will give students a reason to think that it matters if they try, and a sense of their own ability to figure things out.

I may not have cared about the one-edged Möbius Strip, other than as a curiosity. But because of what I saw in the Möbius Strip, I cared about learning.