Me: (reading aloud from syllabus for UC Irvine Young Writers class, in which my kid is enrolled) “We are going to be doing a variety of activities, including a facade poem, a four season poem, journal writing, and a memory snapshot story.” Him: Poems blow. Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Education
Three Short Arguments Against Affirmative Action
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that race can be a factor for universities shaping their admissions programs, saying a broad social value may be gained from diversity in the classroom. The Fairness Argument If it was unfair when we used to discriminate against blacks and Jews, don’t tell me it’s fair now to discriminate against whites and Jews. Read more →
Stuff They Don’t Teach You in School
A client I’m working with is rewarding the top 20 percent of its sales force by flying them to Lake Tahoe for a 3-day weekend. An enterprising competitor might say to himself, “Hmmm . . . what if something were to happen to that plane?” Now there’s something they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School. Read more →
Teachers Making a Difference
Good or bad? It doesn’t say. OC Family‘s Special Annual “10 Teachers Making a Difference” issue is out . . . Read more →
Harvard Admits I Was Right
Got an email from Harvard this morning: Hello Paul, Thank you for catching the error on the Harvard at a Glance page. We now use the correct “principal.” Sincerely, The Harvard News Office You are quite welcome! How about throwing in free tuition for my kid? Read more →
Harvard Errs
I was marveling at the Harvard University fact page — 14.6 million volumes! Established 1636! — when I noticed “10 principle academic units.” Egads! A grammatical error on the Harvard site! I’d better send them an email . . . Read more →
Lost in America
Nearly 30 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 cannot locate the Pacific Ocean on a map. You can try it yourself here. Read more →
8th Grade: Then and Now
Dat’s de ‘fect of education; dat’s de t’ing what’s gwine to rule; Git dem books, you lazy rascal! Git back to yo’ place in school! — James Weldon Johnson, “Tunk” If you’ve ever wondered — I know I have — if certain of your colleagues completed the 8th grade, or rather spent their time jacking off like apes when they should have been doing math homework, you may be interested in Could You Pass 8th-Grade Math?, a sample of the Illinois State Board of Education’s math test for 8th graders. Read more →
Geography
This is probably why geography has not really been taught since World War II — to keep people in the dark as to where we are blowing things up. — Gore Vidal Read more →
Useless and Pointless Knowledge
Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain That could hold you, dear lady, from going insane That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain Of your useless and pointless knowledge. — Bob Dylan, “Tombstone Blues” “I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while–just once in a while–there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time!” — J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? The cycles of heaven in twenty centuries Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust. — T.S. Eliot, “The Rock” Read more →
Does an Elite College Really Pay?
This article concludes that the answer is no — that if you’re smart enough to get into, say, Princeton, you’re smart enough to make money wherever you go to school, even if it’s someplace a lot less expensive. Not to say that I wouldn’t be thrilled to have my kid get into an Ivy League school, but I’ve always thought that it’s no great feat to graduate “the best and the brightest” if you only admit the best and the brightest to begin with. Read more →
1st Day of 4th Grade
We have Mr. Walker for 4th grade this year . . . I saw an article today: Do Kids Need MP3 Players for School? It seems obvious to me that they don’t, and why even bring it up, although a pair of my kid’s back-to-school pants actually came with a built-in MP3 player holder. His reaction: “Cool! . . . what’s an MP3 player?” Read more →
Geometry or Epistemology?
With school starting up in a couple of days, my wife is trying to get our boy in an academic frame of mind . She has him doing some exercises from a geometry workbook and of course he’s not interested. “I can’t tell if these lines are exactly alike,” he says. Holds the book up to his face. “They look exactly alike . . .” Call me biased, but turning the whole exercise into a philosophical problem, rather than just saying “I don’t want to do this,” is a pretty sophisticated plan of attack for a 9-year-old. Read more →
Welcome to Irvine!
Education is important in our community . . . Word came home last week that this year’s Stanford 9 testing starts the first week of May. Immediately, my wife got a call from another mom announcing that she’s cancelling all play dates through the end of the testing period so her kid can spend every waking moment on test prep. The gauntlet has been thrown! Meanwhile, in business news, thanks to the tech meltdown, office space vacancy rates in southern Orange County continue to hover around 30 percent. The screaming rent deals this creates were enough to induce the company I work with to pack everything up and move one off-ramp further south on the 405 . . . Read more →
Teaching Kids to Write
Having students write essays about books accomplishes three things. It makes them hate writing, because it’s such a fruitless, uninteresting assignment. It makes them hate reading, because even books they enjoy are turned against them. And it probably makes them hate thinking, because the kind of analysis they’re forced to do is so strained and dull. — Joseph Weisberg Read more →
Radical Notions Debunked!
The big controversy at the office this week was a “radical” idea offered by one of our developers regarding data collection with a series of web-based forms. The idea was that rather than just pouring the data into a relational database like everyone else does, we’d build up an XML tree, essentially a gigantic (in this case, ~200K) string, and pass that around from form to form. The advantages of this, if I understood correctly, would be to simplify the data model design and eliminate the need for table joins. Of course, it also violates every known rule of efficient data access and ratchets up the processing requirements by several orders of magnitude, but that didn’t stop one of the development managers from throwing his full-fledged support behind it. I TA’ed undergraduate software engineering classes for a year at USC, and every so often an underclassman would advance some… Read more →
Students Lack Grasp of Science
Only one in five high school seniors has a solid grasp of science, according to the results of a national test released today. Related link: Having It All! Read more →
Having it All!
Working moms are destroying the nation The labor force participation rates of mothers with infant children fell from a record-high 59 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2000, the first significant decline since the Census Bureau developed the indicator in 1976, according to the Fertility of American Women report released last week. Read more →