I was happy to see the USC business school get a Top 10 national ranking in the Wall Street Journal Guide to Top Business Schools, ahead of Stanford, ahead of Harvard and, of course, ahead of UCLA. Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Education
Great Orators of the 7th Grade
I can’t really hear what my son is holding forth on downstairs — just snippets about tyranny, racism, slavery, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, civil rights and child abuse — which means his mom must have asked him to turn off the TV and get started on homework . . . Read more →
Soak the Rich — Colleges!
A core value of American liberals is the importance of redistributing wealth from the prosperous to others, through highly progressive taxes and transfer payments. Which leads to a question: If redistributing wealth is a good idea for workers, companies, individuals, and families, then intellectual consistency suggests it should be equally valid for institutions like colleges and universities. Right? Read more →
How the Intelligent Design Hoax was Perpetrated
. . . the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a ‘controversy’ to teach. Read more →
The Algebra of Poetry
If poetry is reduced to an algebraic equation with one meaning, and only a teacher has the meaning, and you can’t figure it out without the teacher, it’s no fun. And when you become an adult, when you see a poem in The New Yorker, you’ll turn the page and look for a cartoon. You’ll say, ‘I don’t have to work for a good grade anymore.’ — Ted Kooser Read more →
The Jennings Boys
I’m dropping my son off at a UC Irvine sports camp. We drive past some construction workers and I heckle them through my rolled-up window so they can’t hear me. “Closest you guys ever got to a college campus, huh?” I say. “They’re probably high school dropouts like Peter Jennings. I hate to speak negatively about the recently deceased, but Peter Jennings was not that bright. He used to say that he learned something new every day, but that’s easy if you don’t know very much to begin with.” “Ken Jennings is smart,” my son chimes in. Read more →
Argumentation
My wife signed our 11-year-old boy up for a week-long class in argumentation — sort of a moot court thing, I think — at UC Irvine. The cost: $400. Read more →
Don’t Trade Insults With a 6th Grader on the Day Vocabulary Words Are Assigned
ME: You’re a real wise guy. HIM: You’re lamentable. Read more →
Sports Parents Are Ruining the World
To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are very naughty — much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority . . . This is called moral influence . . . — Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh One of the moms from my son’s hockey team tells me that there’s too much “silliness” on the team, that the kids need to prepare for games with a little more seriousness. Read more →
Homework Follies
“How did you multiply this times 2.5 and get this?” I ask. He looks at the problem for a while. “I multiplied it a different way,” he says. ME: Shouldn’t this answer be 41 instead of 71? HIM: No, Alex. ME: Why are you calling me Alex? HIM: What is “no”? He’s reading a word problem aloud: “Maggie was traveling with her family on the Oregon Trail. The first day, they traveled 11 miles, the second day they traveled 9 miles, and the third day they traveled 14 miles.” Pause. “Now that was a good story!” Read more →
Dark, Ironic Frost
My son was asked to memorize “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost for a 6th grade assignment: Read more →
Ancient History as Told by a 6th Grader Who Watches Too Much SportsCenter
Hammerin’ Hank Hammurabi here, bringing you today’s Peloponnesian League matchup between the Akkadians and the Assyrians. Sargon the Great gives the Assyrians some much-needed leadership . . . Read more →
Homework Follies
My son takes a break from his social studies worksheet to explain his new system for organizing homework assignments. “I write everything down in my organizer, then I draw a happy face next to the easy assignments, a sad face next to the hard ones, and a sad face with tears next to the ridiculous ones.” “What kind of a face did you put next to that social studies assignment?” I ask. “Sad face. I should have put one tear. I gave reading comprehension two tears.” “Have you ever had an assignment where you put a sad face with tears showering from both eyes?” “I just started the system today.” Read more →
Two Short Arguments For Affirmative Action
It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it . . . Read more →
HW Solves Two of the Thorniest Problems in American Education
Racial Gaps On average, black students who graduate from high school are equipped with the skills the average white student mastered by the eighth grade, according to federal tests. — “Equal access to schools fails to equalize education,” USA Today Blah blah blah . . . Read more →
Explaining
My son, with mock pathos, is explaining to his mom how he managed to mess up a word definition on his homework: I’m a little boy, not a Merriam-Webster dictionary! Read more →
Like Father, Like Son?
The number of students majoring in computer science is falling, even at the elite universities. So [Bill] Gates went stumping at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, M.I.T. and Harvard, telling students that they could still make a good living in America, even as the nation’s industry is sending some jobs, like software programming, abroad. — The New York Times, “Microsoft, Amid Dwindling Interest, Talks Up Computing as a Career” My brother is a doctor. He doesn’t encourage his kids to go into medicine though, because he’s incredibly frustrated by the fact that you go to school for 20 years to learn something, only to have clerks from insurance companies decide if a procedure you’ve recommended is or is not “medically necessary.” I’ve worked in computing for 20 years. I don’t push my kid to get into it because during that time, it’s become less and less… Read more →
Come On!
The Kumon (pronounced KOO-mon) learning centers are very popular here in Irvine, where parents are always looking for ways to give their kids a one-up on somebody else’s kids . . . Read more →
Lewis vs. Clark
My son is doing a 5th grade research paper on William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame. “Clark was a much better man than Lewis,” he says. “Why do you say that?” I ask. Read more →
Unskilled and Unaware of It
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities. — Justin Kruger and David Dunning,… Read more →