Evaluating Education

I have been following the conversations Bill Gates has had this past week on the subject of education. One entry was about how to evaluate the quality of education.

I am not a fan of our current national and state systems of evaluation. I find that Student Learning Outcomes can be altered too easily allowing for a dumbing down of our educational system. Combined with standardized testing and No Child Left Behind this combination has actually left a larger percentage of students to be left behind upon graduation than at any other time in the US educational system.

As an educator I believe in teaching students to think, not regurgitate. Regurgitation is great for knowing some blips of information but it is almost useless when it comes to the day to grind of living life and advancing our endeavors. Does it matter that I can spout off what day an event happened? No it does not. What should matter is the understanding of the importance of that happening, the critical analysis of the situation.

I use Blackboard as an educator and use many of the question types built into it, not just the multiple choice type. Using the other question types, even if I have to go in and manual grade a test provides greater benefit for my students. Their minds are so used to looking at multiple choice (other wise known as multiple guess) that they truly have issues with any other form of question. I have worked with high school and community college students and many of them have learned top play a numbers game; if they do not know the answer they remove to the obvious wrong choices and guess from the remainder.

So how do we as educators evaluate the knowledge base of our students? In the past instructors were allowed to recommend the holding back of a student that was under performing. While this basically is a good idea education needs to be more proactive, if a student is starting to fall behind we need to get tutoring in place. Tutoring, one on one (or few) education is a great tool to help students. The delivery of the teaching materials is different in this scenario than the delivery in a group situation. It allows for more questions to be asked and answered in a style that matches the particular student.

Get rid of standardized tests. The tests are a useless metric to use for evaluating student success. Each person is an individual with topics they will do well in, exceed expectations in, or even perform poorly in (at least for a time). I will use myself as an example. Through grade school I was a top performer, challenged by my teachers and my parents to excel. Upon reaching high school I faltered, partly from rebellion partly from a change in the instructional style that I trouble grasping. In particular math was a troublesome subject for me. I failed algebra the first year, received a C- the second year, a B in geometry (which made sense to me where the numbers in algebra did not), then I completed high school by taking business math as I could not go beyond basic geometry. My brain at the time had difficulty with the subject.

That did not stop me however, all of my other subjects I did well to exceptional in, including the arts. After graduation I started college, then dropped out to enter the service. After my time in the service I graduated and started into management and eventually running my own service based business. Eventually I became bored with that line of work and decided to go back to school. Thanks to my job experience and a brain that had changed I was able, with some difficulty, to complete math through calculus and statistics with a B average.

Individuals can only be standardized at a low level, beyond that each will perform best at a subject they enjoy and have sub-performance in subject matter they do not enjoy. From early childhood education through high school I believe more teacher involvement and the use of tutors will provide more meaningful outcomes than our current evaluation systems.

Parents too should get in the mix much more than they do. Few parents evaluate their children, leaving it up to the schools instead. Expand your own knowledge as a parent, just because you had problems learning as a child does not mean that is true now. The kids are learning the same subjects you learned, it really has not advanced as much as some people might think. Talk with your children, ask them questions about the workd around them, challenge them to THINK.

Gluten Free Cookies

Just finished up a three mile walk with my dog and figured we deserved a treat. Last week while shopping at WinCo I picked up a box of Hodson Mill Gluten Free Cookie Mix. The mix smelled nice and mixed easily with the real butter, peanut butter, hen house fresh egg and vanilla. The first batch is in the oven now, tasting to follow soon.
Some kitchen notes: New Black and Decker hand mixer works very nicely, use the large end of a melon baller to get that rounded (literally in this case) teaspoon of dough, mix in the sink in case you are like me and a bit messy when mixing.
The first batch has some chocolate sprinkles on half of the batch and green sugar crystal on the other half. It was in for 15 minutes and the cookies came out a bit overdone. The second batch is going in for 13 minutes.
Okay the verdict is in, with my oven 13 minutes was perfect. The cookies are a bit crumbly but for a box mix of gluten free it is rather tasty.

For those persons worried about my diet, I had a bowl full of fresh shrimp stir fry over steamed rice. One item left out of the picture is a jar of Mowse's Special Ginger Stuff, which I added half the jar to the stir fry. So delicious!

I have to disagree with the new Proposed Calendar Change. I like the way the current calendar rolls. It gives each person the chance to experience their birthday on a weekend. It breaks up monotony of doing the same thing over and over, it is like life, full of change.

Have you ever noticed that after Monday and Tuesday even the calendar goes WTF?

It has been a long time since I last blogged, reasons abound. Any who, a lot of small projects are being worked on around my little homestead, trying to make a livable place out of my chunk of the western Mojave. Yesterday while digging a trench I hit a small 1 foot wide patch of hard as cement sand, Caliche I believe it is called. I chiseled away on it for about an hour from both sides and decided that is where the last valve on that line would go, thus bridging the dirt from ages past.

I have been on my soapbox in other venues about the food we eat (and should not), the use of materials, nuclear energy, and a plethora of belief systems. I occasionally get interesting and well though out responses. More often than not I get short form answers that have been fed to the flocks or handed down by political agenda. If I have one goal during my life (outside of personal happiness) I believe it would be to wake up the minds of others and make then think critically of events around them.

I do like Halloween. It allows for creativity based both on the real, surreal and outlandish! A crafters paradise! This year I am wearing a DIY piece, made from a baseball cap (brim cut off), caulk, a bit of gauze and some acrylic paint. For a gander go check out my profile on https://plus.google.com/u/0/117581393452618724394 or on Facebook!

Computing State of the Art

Nintendo unveiled the video game industry's first new major home console since 2006. 


Not 'A' new console, the sole new console since 2006!


Think about this for a moment, computer games require more horsepower to run than anything else most humans use computers for. Scientists obviously use a lot more power for modelling and crunching data, and the world governments use a crap load of power to watch us and each other. Normal users however browse the web and maybe do a little office work or watch a movie, none of which requires much power at all.


So, 5 years ago was the last real advance in gaming horsepower. Now get a load of this, Nintendo has always used technology that is actually a little out of date. Why? Well it costs less and it gets the job done. They have more units sold than Microsoft and Sony combined.


My thought on this subject though is a bit closer to home. Why does the computer industry try to tell me I need a quad core machine with no less than 4 gigs of RAM when it is running the same basic software I started using in 1995? I use that year because it was my first Windows based system. In reality I have watched video, ran spreadsheets and word processing, plus played high quality games since 1987 on the Amiga 1000 I bought that year. The software has not changed that much but mysteriously it uses a lot more resources to do the same basic job.


Lets compare...

Amiga	Windows PC - Toshiba Satellite
Motorola 68000 @ 7.16MHz	Intel Core i3 @ 2.3GHz
512KB RAM	3GB RAM
July 23,1985	Current

These two sets of numbers say a lot.My laptop has more power than an Amiga by several hundred percent! The RAM is no less than 500% more on most systems than an Amiga 1000.


If I could do all those nifty things on the Amiga back in 1987, why does it take so much more power to do it today?! Speedier? Not really. More features? Sure there are more features but do I use them, nope!


Plain and simple it is bloat. If a Word Processor only did its job rather than constantly add code in the background so it can be instantly placed as a web page, or used for video presentation (yeah it can do that too!). Or how about those video playbacks? Back then it was equal to low quality VHS, but today the best you can use is HDR, most people don't, they still use DVD quality or less if streaming across the web.


I am glad prices have fallen on equipment, but I would like my new computer to be as stable as my Amiga was, and actually run everything as smoothly. After all, my Motorola Droid can! (512KB memory and 512MHz processor running Android/Linux)

Overthought Ideas

I was reading an article at Fast Company about a French engineer that wants to tow icebergs from Greenland to Saudi Arabia in order to provide fresh water.

At least one commentor pointed out it would be cheaper to use a tanker and pull the water from the flow under the glacial icecap, or melt them on site using mirrors into a tanker system.

Things not pointed out is that we now have global modelling systems to see what the effects would be and no one has run this scenario. Without the model I can see reduced desalinity in the water at the proper time and place, reduction of krill habitat that feed under icebergs as they melt, reduction of resting sites for sea birds and sea mammals that use icebergs. Not to mention the carbon footprint of towing or shipping that much water.

I have a better idea for those Saudi princes and really the world near a coast line...
Use salt water through an extra line entering each house to provide clean salt water for use in bathing, swimming pools, and get this toilets!

Salt water is naturally a bit of an anti bacterial, the salt also mildly scrubs surfaces. Look at that would ya! Two things we like, clean toilets and less bacteria! Why do we need clean potable (drinkable) water to flush detrius out of our homes? Or to shower in when a salt bath works better (read how many salts are in your shower products folks!)? Many pool owners are switching to saline water since it is more environmentally friendly.