So it is back to school on Tuesday, with the rants of Rate Your Students ringing in my mind. Whatever gave blogspot the idea that I'd be interested in discovering that some teachers (some professors, some not) are more mean spirited than the students are on RMP? Very strange.
As for the random bullets...
Lots of things going on this weekend:
I have to scan the Junk Mail folder periodically because our spam filter sometimes catches student e-mail from off-campus accounts, particularly when they put their name in the subject line. [Why the heck do students do that, anyway? Don't they realize their name is on the e-mail and the course number is what matters to us?]
I love the ones that seem to be produced by a 'bot from a dictionary of technical and common terms. Got a classic this weekend ...
"And ferromagnetism do baptism"
Last week the winner was "He jacobian of obtrusion"
Turner Classic Movies is showing "The Best Years of Our Lives" tonight (actually Sunday morning) at 2:45 AM. If you have never seen this Best Picture winner, I highly recommend it.
It might be unique in the post-war genre (it was released in 1946) in that it does not have any war film, not even a flashback, in the story. It also sends the strongest "Support our veterans" message I've ever seen.
Spoilers and commentary below the fold.
Veterans needed a lot of support in 1946. Demobilizing a 4 million man army dumped millions into an economy that had not really recovered from the Depression. The money that would drive consumption, earned during the war, had all been borrowed from the people who earned it. It was still tied up in War Bonds, to be paid off over the next decade. Production lines were still set up to build tanks and planes, and those jobs were already filled.
This movie, rich with irony, follows three men who return to their hometown on the same plane ... but who never knew each other before or during the war. They come from very different social circles, and one of the messages is that the WW II draft brought America together in a very real way that other wars (including the Vietnam draft) did not.
The first to be dropped off is a Navy enlisted man who lost both hands in combat. No "Forest Gump" special effects here. The actor, in his first and only role, lost his hands in a training accident during the war. He comes from a middle class neighborhood. His reunion includes some amazing acting. Watch his mother's transition from joy to fear as she embraces him. That scene resonates today.
The greatest irony in the movie is that this man, despite his injuries, is the best adjusted of all three returning veterans. He helps center the other two.
The second to be dropped off is an Army sergeant. He is a banker, returning to the fanciest apartment building in town. Is he out of place. The doorman isn't sure about letting a sergeant in, and his family sees a different person than the one who left for three years of combat (in the Pacific, IIRC). His job at the bank is waiting for him, but he is not comfortable there. He now drinks heavily, mostly to forget, like he did after combat. And he is much more tolerant of loan requests from veterans with little collateral but lots of guts.
The last is an Army Air Force officer. He is from the wrong side of the tracks, literally. His parents are dirt poor. His wife, well, I won't spoil the whole story. He has no job. His only skills are dropping bombs and making milkshakes (while in school). He is unemployed, unemployable, and not college material. When he shows up at his old job, the guys who did not go to war are worried about losing jobs to all of those returning vets.
Happy ending for all? Sort of. Lets just say it ends on a positive note, looking ahead to the future and not back to the past.
Side note:
Hoagy Carmichael (a singer / songwriter / piano player whose big hit, Stardust, has a casino named after it) plays a significant sidekick/ sounding board role in this movie as he does in "To Have and Have Not". No surprise that he is a piano player in a bar in both movies, but his scene in this movie rehearsing a group of kids is priceless.
The cell phone message I picked up after class said there would be a surprise in the freezer when I got home.
That was all. It is not unusual for The Wife to bring home lunch leftovers when she and her cow-orkers go out (most lunches today will provide dinner for two longshoremen), but that usually goes in the "fridge", and she usually says what it is.
Maybe leftover desert? Unlikely, but time will tell ...
... that it is Stephen Colbert's AmeriCone Dream!
Excellent! And yummy!
We've been looking for it for ages, but all that our store seems to have is Cherry Garcia. She stopped at a store in another part of town, the part where Suburban SUV Moms and Commuter Lawyers live, and hit the jackpot. Some combination of demographics (our store is mostly college students and middle income families) and timing (middle of the day in the middle of the week) did the trick.
Postscript:
Should have called this a "Gift from the 802". You can find lots of snow and get a really fine maple cutting board from "the 906", but "the 802" can't be beat for ice cream!
It is one thing when you get a box delivered to your house for Christmas or your birthday. It is quite another when the box looks like this one: 
Woo Hoo! Even the delivery man was smiling.
But the box is never the best part, ...
... the best part is always what is inside!
Cool! The M&Ms are Green and White (school colors). But wait, there is also something custom printed on them: 
I laughed out loud. Now that is one very clever, very creative gift from the world's most wonderful wife.
A YouTube video of a guy skiing down a 300 foot long escalator got a lot of publicity back in late March. If you have not seen it, check it out:
Now, what does this have to do with Gravity Research?
Simple. Searching for the YouTube video of this bit of off-piste skiing (that I had seen on a TV news program) quickly led me to the useful fact that the skier involved had made some movies. Several of those were for a company known as Teton Gravity Research, located in Jackson Hole, WY (in the Grand Teton mountains). Given my skiing experience there (awesome) and the skiing I had seen there (insane), I checked out their site and asked for a particular video for my birthday.
Being sensible Norwegians, my parents watched the DVD before shipping it to me. Yeah, my dad said, they don't have any of that Warren Miller filler in the movie, all they do is keep checking if gravity is still working. This screen grab from a TGR trailer should give you an idea of what Dad meant.
That blob is a snowboarder (I think it is one of the women in the film) standing upright on the least steep part of a very steep pitch before heading down the next section. Yep, gravity is still working ... and that is some serious terrain.
You can see more at Peter Olenick's Teton Gravity Research profile, which includes this bit from an interview:
TGR Inteviewer: Whats the scariest thing that has happened to you while riding?
Answer: Well I almost died one time, over shooting a hundred foot table by 80 feet and getting knocked out for five minutes, but I don’t really remember it.
Once you realize that he is a freeskier and not a stuntman, and see where he skis for fun and money, the claim that his actions were "incredibly reckless" (London Underground spokesman, reported by The Register) have to be taken with a grain of salt. He was risking his own life (as he often does), but there was nothing particularly incredible about that run compared to others he has made. They might look reckless to a British bureaucrat, but the video itself shows it was carefully planned and executed by a guy who understands risk to remove any risk to others. You can see his partner protecting the bottom of the escalator.
It was also excellent publicity, since it brought those films to my attention!
Other links for information and videos include Broadband Sports and Team Obermeyer pages about Peter Olenick.
[Finally pulled from the drafts folder ...
... update with graph added on Saturday, 19 May.]
My usual practice when teaching is to preview the next major topic as a way to warm up the kids brains and point to key topics in the next day's readings. On the first day of the gen-ed class I am teaching, I always make the point that we are going to work at connecting the principles of physical science to events from daily life. As a preview, I asked how many of my students had seen the Kentucky Derby, or news coverage of it. The answer was none.
None !! So much for being digitally connected to news and current events. (I didn't ask if they knew the Queen of England had visited the U.S., or why.)
Heads up to newbies (and oldies): Assume nothing! I learned that I had to change my plans for Thursday to include showing them the real-world context of the example.
Fortunately, the massive copyright violations available on YouTube made it easy to show them the entire two-minute race:
The eventual winner, Street Sense, is the horse that disappears from the screen at the 0:22 mark, reappears at the 0:28 mark (he is the last horse on the rail through the 0:38 mark). He vanishes from the coverage until the 0:54 mark (again on the rail, in 19th place). The last two horses seen at the 1:09 mark end up finishing 1st and 4th, from 19th and 20th.
The "come from behind" starts at the 1:22 mark with Street Sense at the very bottom of the frame, still on the rail. But Street Sense does not speed up; the other horses slow down. He stays on the rail until the 1:41 mark when he has to move outside to take second, and then first.
[Graph added Saturday, 19 May ...]
The distance vs time graph that I used in class (cleaned up a lot for public viewing) provides a mathematical version of what you see in the video. [A functional representation of it, if Jennifer O is looking in.] The blog-display version is just barely legible; you need to click on it to see some of the detail, such as the green line showing a constant pace. The graph clearly shows that Street Sense ran close to a constant pace, and that Hard Spun fell back after a much too-fast start.
The second place horse, Hard Spun, shown with a blue line, started out fast. His highest speed (marked with an asterisk) is for the first quarter mile. He (along with the other horses in the lead group) is slowing down the rest of the way. A slight increase in speed at the end enabled him to hold on to 2nd place after leading from the start. His slowest speed was when running the final curve, not unlike a runner hitting the "wall" at an uphill finish. 
The red line shows the performance of Street Sense, the winner. He starts slowly, slower than any of his other segment times. As slow, in fact, as the second place horse is going at the finish! His fastest segment is the 2nd quarter, but even his highest speed is less than what Hard Spun did over the first half mile. He is saving energy for the rest of the race. That increase, sustained over the 3rd quarter, was just enough to get him close to the ideal pace (54.0 ft/s, shown with the green line) for the race. He ran the last half mile right on that constant pace.
Technical detail for any physicists who might read this and want to use in when introducing motion diagrams and graphs: You can barely see the negative curvature of the graph for Hard Spun. I used a yellow shading between the constant speed line in green and the blue curve to highlight this, but it would have to be pointed out that the numbers are a better measure of the acceleration than your eye is.
Reference:
The procedures used to get the "data" plotted here are described
in the previous post. The minor flaws in that analysis don't affect the qualitative conclusions discussed here. Anyone want to hand-time the video?
Is it a marathon or a sprint? Whether it is the advice her mentor gave profgrrrl about research and publication after - as well as before - getting tenure, the results of the Kentucky Derby this weekend, or planning/updating the way a college course is presented, the same question arises. Can a steady pace win the race?
Today I am writing about the strong finish by Street Sense in the derby, and how it resulted from good pacing. (I am also thinking about new examples I can use this week and in the fall, involving average velocity in a "come from behind" victory.) Lets compare the split times for the two horses at the quarter mile points in the race. (Apology for the crude table.)
The * indicate an estimate (quite crude in some cases) of the split time based on the published gaps between horses and about 0.15 s per length. [*] For example, Hard Spun finished second, 2 1/4 lengths behind, suggesting a time of 25.5 s for the final quarter mile, finishing about 0.34 s after Street Sense. Street Sense was 3 1/2 lengths behind at 1 mile, so he probably ran the final quarter in 24.6 after making up about 0.53 s at the mile pole.
For reference, Street Sense's winning time corresponds to an average of 24.43 s per quarter mile (which is 36.8 mph). He ran the last quarter at close to his average speed for the entire race. He pulled away because the other horses slowed down, not because he was speeding up.
Profgrrrrl might notice the similarity between the way the winning horse ran this race and the philosophy behind the training program she is using to get ready for the San Diego marathon. A repeated emphasis is on training at "race pace", so you can learn to avoid the fast-start no-finish syndrome of road racing. Now back to thinking about the pacing for my class that starts this week, and how to get the students to run it as a marathon ... doing some homework every day. The example above might help with that.
[*]
The length of a thoroughbred horse is not easy to find via Google. Estimates were based on 8.25 ft length (the length of a full size statue of a horse being sold on the web), divided by 54 ft/s. That adds 0.152 seconds for each length. Another estimate on the web equates a length with 0.2 seconds for handicapping purposes, but that is not for top 3 year olds. In any case, the largest error is due to the accumulated round-off errors made when I added up the gaps that someone estimated for the distance between the horses at each point on the track. I'm impressed with how consistent these estimates seem to be. Must be the usual effect of random errors tending to cancel out.
Rick Majeris, speaking about Bobby Knight in a tribute to Knight's 880th career win on 1 January 2007:
[Players] don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
An interesting thought to transfer to teaching.
Most faculty probably approached a class with the assumption that the teacher had something important that we wanted to know. That might not be quite so true of our students. After all, if a top college coach can say that about young men who basically went to college with the sole purpose of learning from him and moving on to the NBA, what of the random kid in our classes?
I remember well hearing a student of mine tell a friend that she figured out that her calculus and physics classes took about 30 hours a week (between class and homework), making them almost a full time job! [I used that conversation as a teachable moment to tell her and her friend that most engineers say that it only gets harder and more expensive in the later years of that major.] She got it. And she got her degree in Chemical Engineering (easily one of the hardest majors out there) last year.
Simple math, really. Five hours in my physics class (including lab) and five hours in calculus, plus 10 hours each for homework. That adds up to 30 hours, as just the minimum expectation for those classes. But that is certainly not what most students think when they see the schedule of classes and think it means they only have to put in two hours per day on school.
That is basically what two recent articles, a Reality Check from RightWing Prof and College is Hard from Joanne were saying. They are right on the money. Sadly, the old CHE article cited by RWP (and something similar I read over on IHE in early April) shows that not everyone on either side of the HS / College divide get this. Several seem to buy into lowered expectations, although I might sympathize with the "public university science professor", since he is probably at a place where they don't intercept students into college preparatory classes. If he is, then he just has to make sure that those classes raise the students from wherever they are intellectually when they leave HS to where they need to be to go to college.
I even know that one of the faculty at my own college is in the same state of Denial as ones quoted in that article. He has lower expectations for his summer calc class because of the time constraints. I say, tell them the first day that when the class meets for 90 minutes a day (in a compressed summer schedule), that means they need to do 3 hours of HW every night. They better not be taking 3 other classes.
Unlike RWP, I endorse the mentor concept. I'm not so cynical as to believe that the problems are solely the domain of educlation colleges, although that is part of the problem. After all, I have a PhD, years of research and teaching experience, but zippo knowledge of what goes on in a 3rd year engineering classroom. Or, I should say, I didn't until I talked to my CC alumni and some engineering faculty. I learned some things that have tweaked my teaching and, more importantly, my testing and homework. It would not hurt for some HS teachers to hear what college writing and math teachers have to say about fluency in those skills.
Dug out of the draft files from back in April, when Dean Dad's Brother posted this title as a good one for a job talk.
Could not resist. Now it is time to fill it in.
My first thought was not about laptops and SmartBoards, topics that dominated the recent discussions that brought this back to the top of my list. My first thought was about graphing calculators. I banned them years ago from my physics exams because of cheating, but I'll admit that three factors had an equal weight:
The kid can't solve 3x+17.5 = 9.76 using algebra? [Certainly explained the ones who got points taken off for not showing their work.] What would happen when (not if) he gets a problem where the values are given symbolically rather than as numbers? How can you do a "u substitution" integral if you can't solve a linear equation? Short answer: you can't. That student should never have passed his pre-calculus algebra classes without taking some tests where he had to show his work without ever using a calculator.
So the NYTimes (May 4, 2007) article "Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops" cited in several places plus a group of articles over the weekend by the kitchen table math folks from the K-12 wilderness about budgets eaten alive by SmartBoards got my attention. And not just because I cannot imagine how a SmartBoard would replace a book or a smart teacher in my 3rd grade experience.
I like the SmartBoard when it is in its place -- which is not in the middle of the room. I like it next to a blackboard, where the real process of problem solving can play out. I love it as a tool for annotating and correcting what is in the textbook. I love it as a tool for displaying a problem, and sometimes for animating a sequence of events. But entire lectures on it? No way. Entire classes structured as a dog-and-pony show? Where all they do is watch, entertained? TV on, minds off, I say. I can even see the evidence on tests. A problem that was worked entirely on the SmartBoard is always harder than one that was worked out on the board, because they watched the first one and put pencil to paper on the second one.
But my conclusion would be "for Better and Worse". I am far more effective having certain tools available. My students learn better now that they get problems with realistic numbers rather than the few that could be memorized or looked up in tables, and then manipulated on a slide rule. My use of a computerized homework system has demonstrably helped learning, but only because it is fully integrated into my teaching style. Yet my students also have to work harder to learn that 10^7 meters is not the likely answer to a projectile motion problem, and I don't let the availability of a certain technical tool dictate what I am going to do in the classroom.
An article in the April 30th New Yorker about Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor of the L.A. Philharmonic) mentions an adage from his homeland:
A Finnish introvert looks at his own shoes, while a Finnish extrovert looks at other people's shoes.
NBC
You put up a half dozen candidates whose total name recognition hovers under 1% and you don't put names under their faces? What a joke, and what a ripoff for those poor guys. It was bad enough in the Democratic debate (where 3, maybe 4, of the 8 are well known), but this was surreal at times.
Who the heck was saying what? Guy in dark suit and red tie with a modest $200 Republican hairstyle says something stupid and Guy in darker suit and different red tie and nice haircut says something interesting, but who was he? I mean, I follow national news and politics a lot, but I don't recognize most of the minor candidates on sight. (I'll bet some of them wouldn't be recognized outside of their own congressional district, if there.) You had to be taking notes when each question was introduced to have any idea who was talking.
And who raised their hand to say that they were Creationists? Why ask if we can't identify who answered? It looked like an SNL parody of a debate.
[Update: It appears they were Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo. I was pretty sure of one, because he was on the near end in the shot, but the others come from a variety of web news sources. I continue to give NBC and MSNBC low marks because I heard Chris Matthews mention the creationist head count and again fail to give the names. Was he even watching as he moderated the debate?]
I was unimpressed with how many of them have would fight for the right to life of a brain-dead woman but would rather see a conscious woman die than perform an first trimester abortion on her. Logical consistency was not a strong point once you got past that guy Dr. Paul. I must hand it to him for saying he opposed federal funding of stem cell research because he opposed all federal funding of anything so he could get rid of the income tax.
Statements like "“Promise Scholarships” would average $4,000 and allow students whose public schools have failed to make adequate yearly progress for five years in a row to attend private school." from a Hoover Institution report contain a hidden premise: that a private school must be a quality school. There is no such guarantee. The only thing a private school guarantees is to keep its customers happy, and anyone who teaches knows that there are a lot of customers who are much more interested in the credential or the grade than in any of the learning that is supposed to be behind it.
In my role as a faculty member, I help advise incoming students. I see plenty of examples of students from small private schools who join the products of our (justifiably) failing public schools by placing into the 5th grade arithmetic "prep" class.
As the Chronicle reports, the NCAA, having banned any HS credits from at least 15 prep schools, has now acted to limit student athletes to only one course from "prep" schools. Clearly they see a problem with the competition between profit and quality.
If a public school must meet specific content, testing, and progress benchmarks to keep its funding, why shouldn't a private school meet those same requirements to get that same public funding? What are they afraid of? Two guesses and the first does not count.
Another year, another disaster area to deal with. And this doesn't even show the semi-organized piles on the left where each class has its own stack of books and notes ready to be grabbed for class. Most of what you see is the detritus of committees, books being reviewed for adoption next year, and campus junk mail from the last few weeks of the semester ... and one for the first week of Fall!
Yeah, you read that right. Our Provost sent out a memo detailing the schedule for our first week back in August. Time to get my Fall syllabus ready!
The student speaker at Ishkabibble Community College took 5 years to earn her 2-year associates degree. Legislators and education bureaucrats are upset about people like her, because they impose some fixed costs on the college and take up space that will be needed as demand continues to grow for seats in our classes. Why would we choose a slacker like that to speak at graduation?
Maybe its because she represents all that we stand for as a CC.
Our speaker is in her 40s, and is president of our returning adult students club. She is working full time, which limits the number of classes she can take. But even that does not begin to tell her story.
She dropped out of high school at 16. She was a drug addict for 20 years after that. She lived long enough to start fighting her way out of that life, and apparently became something like a peer counselor. That led to her getting hired into a job that brought her to Our Town, but she was pretty sure her boss did not know she had only a 9th grade education.
She came to us in 2000 to get her GED. She graduated two years of night classes later, and started college. Now she is off to Wannabe Flagship to get a BA and MA in counseling, maybe in time to start that career when she turns 50.
When (not if) she does, we will continue to be proud of what she made of herself. We can all hope that the strong voice we heard at graduation will be heard by younger versions of herself, saving them the pain of two decades in the wilderness.
Oh, and one other thing. She has re-married the father of her 3 children, putting back together the family that drugs tore apart.
No set of statistics, not even the longitudinal data that probably show an odd outlier in the time-to-AA data for some high school 9th grader, can capture that.
Update:
Read this commentary from IHE.
I can always tell when Dr. Condi Rice knows there is an odor of mendacity surrounding the remarks she is about to make. She gets a little quaver in her voice, an edge to it, that is probably out of her control. Perhaps we should give her credit for being basically honest, and since she is certainly intelligent enough to understand the word trick she is trying to pull off, her subconscious gives her away. "Part of all this has just been listening to this for almost three years, listening to the Vice President go on Meet the Press on the fifth year of 9/11 and say, well, George Tenet said slam dunk, as if he needed me to say slam dunk to go to war with Iraq, as if he needed me to say that. And you listen to that and they never let it go."
(An article today about origins of language makes a point that we have much less control over non-verbal things than of speech itself.)
As has been common for the past 6 years, statements were made this weekend that provide plausible deniability as to outright prevarication while being constructed and used in a way that leads the listener to a conclusion that is not actually supported by the statement. Consider the following from the official transcript from the Secretary of State of Dr. Rice's interview this weekend about claims made by George Tenet and others.
Context: Wolf Blitzer stated
Here's what George Tenet writes in this new book, At the Center of a Storm: "Those involved in (inaudible) the Bush Administration that war was inevitable. Richard Haass, the former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, has said that Condi Rice told him in July of 2002 that 'decisions were made and unless Iraq gave in to all our demands, war was a foregone conclusion.'"
Rice:
Well, I don't remember that specific conversation, but clearly when the President went to the United Nations Security Council in September and said that if Saddam Hussein does not act, then we will have to act, ...
Which is several months later, but in no way denies the correctness of what Tenet wrote or what Haass says. In fact, Rice is confirming what Tenet wrote, but uses that "well" to get you to think that she is contradicting him. Classic debate trick.
Context, from Wolf Blitzer:
Because you remember Paul O'Neill, the first Treasury Secretary, where he wrote in his first book, The Price of Loyalty with Ron Suskind, and what Ron Suskind later wrote in his own book, The One Percent Solution, that the Bush Administration came in with a mindset to deal with what they called unfinished business with Saddam Hussein.
Rice:
That is simply not true. The President came in looking at a variety of threats.
and the quavering statement that made all the news sound bites:
But the idea that the President had made up his mind when he came to office that he was going to go to war against Iraq is just flat wrong.
Not relevant even if it is right. The President might have come in looking at a variety of threats and still have had a mindset to deal with Saddam Hussein. Similarly, her last statement does not contradict what a loyal Republican conservative wrote in his book. The "idea" she says is wrong is a straw man of her own construction. Having a "mindset to deal with unfinished business" is not "made up his mind that he was going to war". No one but Rice claimed that this was his goal. Her voice probably cracked at this point because she could smell the odor of mendacity on that straw man.
Context: Wolf Blitzer quotes Tenet on "60 Minutes"
... He's saying that he's been scapegoated, in effect, that he acknowledges he made that comment about slam dunk that the case could be a slam dunk about the weapons of mass destruction, but he says by that time you, the Administration, had already made up your mind to go to war
Well, by that time we were certainly in the process of having brought Saddam Hussein before the international community and demanding that he carry through with his commitments or that there would be action.
In other words, Yes, we had made up our minds long before he said those words, because we now know that "action" equals "invasion".
Rice:
I certainly don't blame George for the slam dunk comment having the sense that that was the reason we went to war. I think it's a complete misreading of how certainly I read the slam dunk comment.
Here we see Rice agree with the complaint from Tenet, albeit in a totally muddled sentence. She appears to confirm that his "slam dunk" comment was not the reason we went to war and that she did not read his comment at the time as an argument for war. She implicitly confirms his version of the context of his statement being about using WMD to make a strong case for war. I am not alone in this reading of her remarks. CNN says much the same thing, but then does not understand the implications of what they are saying.
Look at the lead from a CNN news story:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday said the administration did not use former CIA Director George Tenet's "slam dunk" comment as the reason to invade Iraq, disputing his complaints.
CNN has been totally bamboozled. The point that Tenet made was that his "slam dunk" comment was not used as the reason to invade Iraq! She is agreeing with him, not disputing him. His complaint is that his comment was misrepresented by VP Cheney to convey the false impression that his remarks were the reason for the invasion. Rice is disputing Cheney's version of the events, not Tenet's complaint about what Cheney said.
Rice:
I was asked about this and I was asked did he say slam dunk. I said yes.
Exactly what Tenet complained about. Given a chance to set the record straight, she made a narrowly factual statement that helped convey the false impression that the V.P. had given a factual description of why we went to war.
Yet she can't leave the WMD issue without trying to cover her earlier mendacity on the imminent threat of a mushroom cloud with Iraqi origins.
Rice:
I said but we all thought that the intelligence case was strong. ... We all thought, including UN inspectors, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
While we are parsing the carefully parsed, notice that she does not say that the intelligence itself was strong, only that the intelligence case was strong. She just hopes you will think she means that the intelligence was strong when the facts are that it was not. Her focus was (and is) on whether she has the cards in hand to win the debate, not on the validity of what is on those cards.
As to the rest of her remark, remember that the UN inspectors did not think he had nuclear weapons, or any reasonable prospect of getting them in the near term. She is clearly hoping that people will confuse aging stockpiles of nerve gas that could not be used effectively with a nuclear weapon on an ICBM that could reach the US. She is also hoping you will not notice that many members of the US Intelligence community have come forward to make it abundantly clear that hre "we" did not include the analysts within the CIA.
Lest we forget, I'll close with a quotation from an open letter to Tenet, that is also an open letter to Rice and many others:
CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq. This intelligence was ignored and later misused.
That letter also contradicts another famous Bush administration talking point:
Although CIA officers learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, you still went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda.
Update:
Tyler Drumheller Corrects the Record on a George Tenet memory lapse,
and
Larry Johnson compares what George Tenet wrote to what he said under oath to Congress.
What a wonderful couple of days.
Started at the request of "Mike" in the comments section on PG's blog.
My biggest problem with textbooks is that they have become bloated and unreadable. Bloat makes them unreasonably expensive, and tight adoption cycles (down from a dozen years in the 60's to every 3 years now) effectively increase that expense. Bloat, driven by editorial additions rather than writing the text de novo, contributes to (un)readability as the book loses the single voice it had when originally written.
My model right now is the Hewitt's book for basic (conceptual) physical science. It is way too cutesy for my taste, but college students will read it for knowledge and enjoy doing it. It may be written somewhere around a 9th grade language level, but that keeps linguistic sophistication from getting in the way of the many difficulty ideas being presented. The focus is on the new vocabulary and concepts. Best of all, it is properly organized pedagogically.
I wish there was a calc-based book that had that approach.
There are, finally, some new books out there and I am adopting one of those. Its virtues are that it is short(er) and sweet. That also makes it cheap (although only on a relative scale) and light enough to carry, but I like that the words are chosen carefully and that the book does not obscure the main narrative with lots of cute color pictures.
Here is a novel approach along the lines of "teaching to learn".
Stick Man sings the quadratic formula.
Disturbing, yet at the same time potentially effective.
Spread the word.
-------
Update for Profgrrrrl:
It may not be a bouncing ball, but the "Quadratic Rap" includes a visual aid. It is also superior to some of the other quadratic formula videos out there in that it says "all over 2a" rather than just "over 2a". Distributing the division is an important detail.
There is also a trigonometry interpretative dance. Clearly there are a lot of HS students using their cell phones to record video during math class and, based on this Graph Dance, there is some cult of trig teachers who "dance" the graphs of various trig functions. [I see the sine, cosine, tangent, and secant being illustrated in a rather extreme version of active learning.]
Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the following quotations:
U.S. Congressman Mike Pence reportedly said, in part:
"The Democrat emergency supplemental appropriations bill is fiscally irresponsible ..."
"What the Democrat (sic) Congress has produced is a bill that violates the budget resolution that passed the House ..."
"While I am opposed to this bill based on its fiscal irresponsibility, ..."
Finally, someone who agrees with me about what Congress should do if President Bush decides to veto the bill that "gives" (from the pockets of future generations) money to properly train our troops and care for them after they are wounded. There is no question in my mind that the correct response to a veto is to pass a bill the "funds" the troops, with no other strings attached other than the requirement that it be revenue neutral, although I think it should also require that troops not be sent to war without proper training and resources to meet the mission, and that our Guard units not be diverted from their important duties at home. We must support our troops and safeguard our nation as well as protecting the Shiites in Iraq.
Similarly, U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich. said:
"Providing full funding for our troops in combat should be simple and straightforward."
Yes, it would be, but it would require a tax increase like the one that Congress imposed at the start of WW II. No one in the White House or in Congress, on either side, has had any inclination at all to sacrifice one penny to match the sacrifices made by some of my students. Last I looked, people like Hoekstra were against actually funding the war. They want to charge it to their grandkids like they have been doing for the last four years.
Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino says the President even seems to agree with me:
"The President calls on the Senate to quickly pass this legislation so the President can veto it and then work with the Congressional leadership on a clean bill that funds our troops while respecting the judgment of our military commanders and helping ensure the safety of the American people."
I also like the President's suggestion that Congress force the President to stop reducing the safety of the American people by sending our National Guard troops overseas. We need them to protect us during national disasters or, heaven forbid, an attack by one of our actual enemies. Its bad enough that President Bush cut and ran in the face of nuclear tests by North Korea because of a troop shortage in Iraq. We can't afford any more of that.
TCM is showing The Best Years of Our Lives tomorrow (Wednesday, 4/25) at 3:30 pm ET. This is a must-see movie from 1946 about the adjustments men must make to civilian life after years at war.
The fact that the role of the man with no hands was played by a man who lost both hands during the war (Harold Russell, who had only acted in an amputee training film, won 2 Oscars for his performance) puts it far beyond Forrest Gump ... and makes it particularly relevant with the return of Iraq war veterans to similar circumstances.
I have a colleague who visits Thailand regularly. (He is married to a Thai woman and they own a second home in the northern part of the country.) PG's latest blog about her planned trip reminded me to ask him some travel questions when I ran into him today between final exams.
His comments, in no particular order, from memory:
There is no major difference between May and June. Both are equally hot. As in 100 to 110 F hot. The rainy season comes much later in the year, so you probably won't have to worry about scheduling a trip around bad weather. It is only "cool" in the winter when they visit. Winter is also the only time there are a lot of tourists. (The resorts were packed when the tsunami hit near Christmas.) The north is only cooler in a relative sense, but he said that Bangkok is particularly hot because the tall buildings block any breeze, plus the usual urban heat island effect. Running in San Diego is just the thing to prepare you for the trip!
If you are in Bangkok, you can spend days just touring places in the city. Lots of temples, for example. One very cheap way to do this is to hire a car (sedan with driver, not a taxi). Your hotel will be able to set you up with some reliable choices. You can get driven anywhere you want to go for an entire day for a very nominal fee. Sounds like a great travel tip. I expect lots of temple photos in return!
Bangkok has nothing resembling zoning. A 5-star hotel could be one block from a slum.
The country is larger than it looks on a globe because it is dwarfed by India. He said it is something like 900 miles north to south, and it is not a "day trip" from Bangkok to many places of interest (like the beaches). Several hours on a train each way, so you would have to plan for an overnight stay if you go very far afield.
One side trip he recommended was to visit the ancient capital, which is upriver from Bangkok and can be reached via a beautiful boat ride. There are regular tourist excursions up there.
He did not think there would be any trouble traveling as a single woman, but he did recommend avoiding the southern part of the country. There have been problems with terror groups down towards Malaysia, but nothing major. (The major beach resorts, like the ones hit by the tsunami, are down there, but he said those are safe. His concern seemed more with the countryside in between.)
I also asked him about crossing the border to visit Angkor Wat, a place I've always wanted to see, but he had no experience with that. His wife cannot cross that border on her Thai passport. (Not sure what that is about, but must go back to the Vietnam War.)
Finally, he added, if you like riding an elephant ... there are week-or-two excursions into the jungle on elephant, moving from camp site to camp site. Sounds totally exotic.
A few random thoughts from the weekend:
...
... plus quite a few left over from the past week's events:
I think that emptied the "clip" of bullets on the control panel, so that must cover everything. If not, it is close enough.
Thank you, Sherman, for pointing to this tribute and linking to the Virgina Tech engineering college biography for Prof. Liviu Librescu.
Words can't describe my respect for Prof. Librescu. Here is a man who has seen the worst the world can offer, as a survivor of the holocaust, and paid it back by being an expert in an extremely challenging field. [Non-linear dynamics, particularly of supersonic fluids, is about as nasty as it gets ... let alone in unsteady flow with magnetohydrodynamic effects.] His record of research, teaching, and service is spectacular. He was still going strong at the age of 76, but he apparently did not think twice about sacrificing himself to block the door to his classroom when his students came under attack on April 16. Like Sherman Dorn said, Damn.
If students ever wonder how their professors feel about them, they need look no further than how this man gave his life keeping the gunman out of his classroom.
Today has been a sad day since I heard the news of the shootings in the engineering school at Virginia Tech. You can't teach future engineers, as I do, and not feel a connection to engineering students everywhere. It is tragic to see any young lives lost, but these were hard-working lives particularly full of promise to the future of our nation. My heart goes out to their families and friends, and the entire campus community.
It will take a long time for the scars to heal. I know people at one university where a faculty member was shot by a graduate student many years ago, and that incident was very much alive to them as much as 10 to 15 years later.
Like Chad, I think it would be nice to see some decorum. The feeding frenzy at the 7:30 pm press conference was revolting. Those insta-expert journalists all seem to think that this is a CSI episode, and the ballistics tests should be done by the next ad break. Didn't they learn anything from the Duke lacrosse story? Lets wait and see what the facts are.
I also can't help but reflect on an event at ICC a few months ago. Got to work and about the first thing I heard was "classes are not cancelled, ignore the bomb threat". ... OK. ... There was nothing to it, as the experts had deduced, and the decision to not disrupt the education of thousands of students was a good one. Will we rethink that? Will our policy be on the agenda of the governance committee I will be on next year? Will it be on the agenda for every college and university in the country? Probably. We can but hope that this necessary effort will be a waste of our time because this will not happen again.
Note added:
Bingo. The topic was on the agenda today, but fortunately it will mostly be addressed by people above my paygrade at meetings that start later this week.
Finally, as a big fan of irony, it was not lost on me that a Palestinian civil engineering grad student was the hero i-reporter for CNN. It says a lot about the difference between his homeland and mine that his reaction to gunfire was to stay put and record it on his cell phone video.
Followup to earlier comments on college readiness:
My earlier comments ended up centered on reading, with algebra left as an afterthought towards the end. But my boldfaced comment about algebra, which is that most students do not comprehend the very concept of prerequisites, and thus underestimate the importance of fluency in algebra to their careers, got reinforced this weekend during a conversation with a professor of engineering at Wannabe Flagship U.
First, my example. Simply ask your students to solve a simple log equation on one of the first few days of the semester. No warning, no review, straight out of the blue, no calculators or cell phones. And I do mean simple, something like "8 = log_10(2x), solve for x". My experience at a CC is that the majority cannot do it. They can do it just fine if shown an example or prompted to review it, but they do not know how to do it. This after "passing" college algebra and pre-calc classes that each spent a week or more on that topic along with application problems. Is it any wonder they are strung out in calculus when the get to the log integral? Or when we simply assume they can follow some simple algebra steps in class?
The corollary is that most think "prerequisite" means they need to have "taken" a course, not that they will be expected to know everything they were taught in it. [Again, a question about what we mean when we say that trig or calculus is a prerequisite for our class can make an interesting quiz.] Is it any wonder that they treat trig like a random history class from high school, or the high-stakes test they crammed for back in 10th grade? Take it, cram for it, pass it, and forget it. After all, next semester there will be several weeks of review of anything they need to know from that class. Except there won't be any review. That was then, this is college.
The conversation that reminded me of this was about the failure rate of students in the prof's third-year "dynamics" class, and a general remark that no student should go into engineering unless they had a solid HS background in algebra and were ready to start in calculus as freshmen. (Clearly alluding to weakness in math, particularly algebra, as a signal for future failure in the engineering curriculum.)
But, I protested, that leaves out lots of students, including essentially all of mine. (And not just the returning, adult students who almost always start back in HS-level classes.) And lots of mine have done very well in his program. Oh, that's different, as long as they come in from ICC with all of their physics and calculus complete. They will be a year behind, but they can do it if they really know what they are doing.
He also made a general comment, about abject ignorance of math and physics being the main reason that 20% of his students don't have a chance, but then amended it to say that the failures had usually started at WFU. My ICC alumni did OK. So what was the difference? Well, they seem to know their basic physics and math. Most of the WFU kids also know it, but some don't have a clue, despite spending thousands of someone's money on "taking" physics and calculus. He attributed most of it to a really weak math department at WFU, and social promotion in the calculus classes.
I'd be shocked, but I know that most of those classes are taught by grad student adjuncts or one-time assigned faculty -- not "regulars" like at ICC. (See regular discussions over at Dean Dad's forum for that topic, and concerns that adjuncts and new faculty grade easily to get good evaluations.)
But I also know that one of my weekly goals is to tell my students where calculus concepts they are working on that week (particularly from calc II, which they never have to apply in "anger" in my physics class) fit into what we are doing now, and what they will do next year. Ditto for key physics concepts, such as learning to draw a free-body diagram. The multiple-choice tests at WFU can't test this, but my exams require it. Perhaps more importantly, I tell them why I require it, and sometimes my alumni drop by and tell them the same thing, student to student.
And the most important part might be that last one. Student to student. I cannot take credit for their learning. They have to do that. I'm not even sure I can take credit for convincing them of its importance, because my alumni are a big part of that, although I do try to lay the groundwork.
... is to run into former students who are doing well, or even graduating, in their chosen field.
Today I learned that two former students were part of a team that finished in third place (and may have had a chance to win) in a state-wide mechanical engineering design competition. Awesome! Now they know more than I do about some subjects, and can even put it into practice. I live (and teach) for moments like that.
Lost amid the focus on the invectives that Don Imus directed at the Rutgers women's basketball team is the trigger for it all: his initial impression (prejudgement, prejudice) based on the tattoos worn by those young women. College kids entering the job market don't realize that someone in their late 60s, with military service in the 50s, might be of the opinion that the only women who wear tattoos are whores, or "hard women". There are quite a few college students who would not get a job if a liberal like Don Imus was doing the hiring. God only knows what Rush thinks.
Its unclear to me how many people from my generation hold those views. Working on a college campus keeps one younger, since you are around 20+ young people all the time. College students never grow old, and we stay young with them.
In a business like my brother is in, where what you can do matters more than what you look like, my impression is that it would not matter much. When I asked him about the corporate view of a student of mine, who resembles "Pierce" in the comic strip Zits, he told me that one of their last two fresh-from-college hires fit that mold. They could care less how many rings he ahs in his nose as long as he can design a working bit of software.
But if you are a business major, or in a sales area where first impressions are everything, the situation could be different. How many tattoos do you want to see on your doctor?
Note added:
On the job hunt, you can hide lots of tattoos, but you might not be able to hide your myspace or facebook history.
A recent op ed piece in the Washington Post has seen wide distribution (even made it into our local paper), but I wonder if anyone actually read all of it.
The authors note a study that says "only 38 percent of graduating college seniors can successfully perform tasks such as comparing viewpoints in two newspaper editorials". Not surprising to me, because I teach at a college and even attended one in the distant past. The focus for many majors is not (and was not, even in the halcyon past) on critical thinking. You don't need much of that if you major in "housing" or any number of workforce-oriented programs. Its not like every Directional State University guarantees the same kind of quality education that our President got at Yale. We do what we can, but my focus for future engineers is on thinking critically about data and the known unknowns that might make a bridge fall down, not analysis of political discourse. But I digress.
What I like about this op-ed piece is that it appears written to appeal to the 62% who don't process complex arguments that well. Lets look at the bottom of the inverted pyramid. In the third graf from the bottom they write "This problem [pushing research fame rather than learning] can't and shouldn't be fixed by government regulation." Then, with one paragraph to dull the reader's mind, they say "... and by requiring taxpayer-subsidized colleges to disclose their performance to the public, the federal government can ..." -- which sounds remarkably like a government regulation to me.
And it won't even solve the problem, which is that U.S. News chooses to emphasize one set of data over ones already available on outcomes. There are already federal regulations requiring documentation of how each college does at helping "undergraduates learn and earn degrees", with the emphasis on degrees. In addition, our accrediting agency wants to know about "engagement", generating even more data on learning. We track others ourselves, internally. Much is available on our portal, just as it is for everyone else the accrediting agencies look at. U.S. News could use those data if they wanted to. So could the "Education Sector" think tank, and produce their own ranking system.
OK, I'll give the authors the plausible deniability angle, that they were referring to a law in the last graf and a regulation in the earlier one, but maybe you see my point. If they truly respected their readers, they would not have made a logically inconsistent argument. They could have been honest about wanting a new regulation, or a revision to the existing one. I hope the talk at AERA addresses the real challenge, which is coming up with a measure that will not destroy college education with a one-size-fits-all test where art majors and engineers are held to the same math standard the way they are in high school. [We already have such a test in this state, it turns out, and it is a total joke. Fortunately, it does not skew real education too much.]
But I am not optimistic. This Op-Ed is thick with anti-intellectual attacks on research and publishing in higher education. Sorry, but as a physicist who teaches future engineers, I can tell you that their education (particularly with regard to critical thinking) is improved by access to research programs as an undergraduate, just as mine was. Research is not just for the journals, and benefits more than the faculty and the nation. It also improves undergrad education.
One size does not fit all. A future engineer needs to work with real problems, not read "four books" in their senior year. Faculty know this, and that is why they rate quality higher than mediocrity and assign capstone projects to their seniors rather than books to read. Do you want to drive over a bridge built by someone who read five books their senior year, or someone who helped design and build a steel truss during their senior year?
I have less trouble with the argument in his blog about accountability, but I have a swamp to sell him if he thinks NCLB has eliminated a caste system in our local schools. Testing did help in this area, but that was before NCLB. Word is (I don't know its reliability) that the average HS reading level went from 4th to 8th grade after they started No-Stakes testing in this state some 20+ years ago. (There were no punishments back then, just data that were used to shift resources to students who needed help.) But plenty of kids today are still being left behind, while good students are forced to waste their time prepping for a High-Stakes test they will pass easily rather than learning what they need when they get to my physics class. A test that gets their teachers a raise while taking time away from student learning.
Thanks, Sherman. Your blog on empty thesis statements, pointing me to the interesting comments of the Little Professor, was just the thing to run across while procrastinating over sloppy lab reports.
When adding my dos centavos to the Professor's blog, I forgot to point to my earlier remarks describing my views of the relationship between what we read in college and what they are trained to do in high school. That this training helps them survive a college composition class only reinforces the behavior.
It is a real problem. In a few years, these students will be writing memos and reports that could determine whether your airplane flies or a dam collapses. Vague generalities just will not do in that case. I hope your class and mine push them to take the risk of being wrong. I do it by taking off more points for being vague than for trying and getting it wrong. I can correct wrong; I can't correct vague.
I'll say more if I ever get an essay about teaching Lab classes out of the draft folder .... but now it is time to get back into the maw of the Beast.
In Uncertain Principles' "Pick a Number" challenge, a pair of comments by a student used TI-83 notation to write mu_0 as 4piE-7 rather than 4pi x 10^{-7} (using pseudo-TeX due to the absence of superscripts and greek letters in this forum). This is an abomination perpetrated (in part) by math faculty at various levels, including at good old ICC.
It is bad enough when they tolerate using 3E-7 as if it conveyed the mathematical idea of exponentiation rather than the subtraction of 7 from three times the Erdos-Borwein constant E, but some will even tolerate 3e-7, when every child knows that this is seven less than 3 times Euler's (or Napier's) number e. [And, I might add, e is one of the most important numbers in mathematics, right up there with its friends pi, i, and -1. See my pi-Day observation posted back in March.] In my not so humble opinion, this is the equivalent of teaching BASIC in programming 1 to computer science majors.
It starts, of course, with the adoption of a particular graphing calculator (the TI-83 at ICC and elsewhere) that does not display numbers in correct scientific notation. It is reinforced when algebra instructors grade students on whether they correctly copy the exact contents of the display that results from carrying out a trained task (such as pointlessly using "trace" to "solve" an equation) in the prescribed fashion and never ask the student to also provide the correctly written value after rounding to, say, 3 significant figures. [Don't even get me started on whether they also look at any of the work the students have done, grading them on its correctness and clarity.]
Yes, computers and calculators often cannot handle data input of numbers in standard mathematical form, but that is no excuse for confusing expediency with correctness. Students must be taught to translate the expression shown by their calculator into the form used by all professionals in their published [*] work. They could also be told that much cheaper calculators, such as the Casio fx-115ms (for numerical integration and uber-cool symbolic prefixes in engineering mode) and many Sharp models, actually display a power of 10. For instructors, these other calculators also have the virtue of reducing cheating off of electronic formula sheets.
[*] Journals have, and probably still do, accept tables reproduced directly from computer printouts that use this FORTRAN format, but that is the exception that proves the rule.
I teach both physics 1 and physics 2 each semester at Ishkabibble CC, but I don't recall ever doing all four of these demos on the same day, ever. A combination of factors (room scheduling, availability of staff to get LN for my morning class, a helium balloon) conspired to allow me to do 4 of my favorite demos today. Listed in the order they were done:
1) Talking with helium.
A review topic from last week, but an ICC club event had some helium balloons available that made it convenient to do it today. Great fun, and probably worth having to defer one example to the next class day.
2) Liquid Nitrogen experiments, including the best experiment that never !! works.
I use a constant volume gas "thermometer" filled with air to test the ideal gas law prediction of the change in pressure with temperature. The result is wrong because ... air is not an ideal gas. The Oxygen condenses out at LN temperatures, and that 20% change in the number of moles exactly explains the error. Great fun, because the students always think "experimental error" rather than "interesting physics beyond the standard model" when I ask what might be wrong with the prediction I made before doing the experiment.
3) Rotation of polarization with Karo syrup.
Always a crowd favorite, but I put two orthogonal Polaroids side-by-side on the bottom after doing the usual experiment and ask what will happen. They correctly guess "two different colors", but hardly expect to see two complementary colors (such as lime green and magenta) as the result.
4) Illustrating a real image produced by a concave mirror by putting the image of light bulb in an empty socket.
They can't believe this one. Some even think the bulb is real. I like it best because I built it myself, from memory, to replicate the one at Enormous State University where I did my PhD.
And, best of all, some of them learned a few things that won't even be on the test!
[Yes, any of my students will immediately guess who wrote this, but I'm not that paranoid about what I write here. Besides, I doubt that anyone even reads this blog yet.]
One problem at every college or university is that students think they are moving on to Grade 13. (Some state educational systems even look at it this way.) The consequences for student success are severe, because a high-school approach to learning will lead to failure in college. The impact is probably greatest for under-prepared students at a CC, and more significant for first-in-family students than for ones whose parents went to college. (That said, I have taught children of engineers who act as if they were never told that college classes require more work than high school did. Kids who took AP classes in HS and thought they were an example of a college class are often in for the biggest surprise.) But it is a problem for most students, even ones at elite universities. (See example from JHU linked below.)
Why is "grade 13" thinking a problem? College is different. It has always been different, but now that the majority of students move on to college in the same way they moved from middle school to high school, few think that going to college is a big deal. Everyone does it (sometimes literally everyone), rather than just one or two when my grandfather went to college. Yet it is a big deal, and nobody is telling them just how different it is going to be.
Steven Zucker at Johns Hopkins has done a lot to change the orientation program at JHU. His collection of orientation materials contains lots of information. One particular document from circa 1996, when he wrote an article in the Notices of the AMS, and a later outline of a presentation at orientation provide a good summary of the wakeup call new college students need if they are going to succeed in a true, college-level math or science class.
What would I like to see at ICC orientation?
Some of the differences between high school and college:
1) You had to attend class in high school; you do not have to attend class in college. However, your teachers were required to pass you in high school; we are not required to pass you in college. (You didn't know they had to pass you? See the next item.) There are many college math classes where half of the class does not earn a C or above. A high school teacher would be fired for doing that. The concern in college is not how many students pass the class, but whether every student who passes the class has learned and retained the material taught in the course.
2) You were never taught "at your level" in high school. Your high school teacher was teaching to the bottom 20% of the class, trying to keep the failure rate down to a few percent while giving them the rote skills needed to pass a "high stakes" exit exam. They were teaching to kids who are unlikely to ever go to college, not even to ICC. The teachers were responsible for kids passing their class whether they learned anything or not. In college, you are responsible for learning the material. You are an adult now, not a child. We will gladly help you learn, but that extra help will be outside of class, during office hours.
3) You went to class for 6 or more hours every day in high school, but only go to class for a few hours in college. Lots of time to work or party! !! Yes, but only if you want a career as a prison guard. If you want to be an engineer or doctor or nurse or business professional, you have to spend several hours doing homework for every hour in class. Most learning takes place outside class.
Example: One year of high school Spanish equals one semester of college Spanish. How do we do this? We don't. You do. You do things outside of class that high school teachers made you do in class.
Another example: We teach a math class at ICC that "covers", in just 15 weeks, all of the material taught in a common two-year high school algebra sequence (algebra 1a and 1b). We do this while only meeting 3 times a week. How do we "cover" 320 days of material in 45 days? We don't. We teach the principles and one or two examples, and you learn it on your own through review and homework.
4) You must do homework outside of class. (Of course, you don't have to do homework, but you also don't have to pass. You must do homework to learn the material, pass the class, and succeed in your career goals.) At least an hour a day for each class, two hours for every hour in class. You must do this even if no one tells you to do it, or collects it, or grades it. You must allow time to contact your instructor during office hours if you need additional help, or organize a study group that meets regularly outside of class.
5) College faculty do not have any time to waste. We don't teach anything that we know will not be needed by some student in their next class, and we don't re-teach anything you were supposed to learn in a previous class. (We might review it while doing an example, but we will not teach it as a separate topic.) If you need to know trigonometry to succeed in a physics or calculus class, we require a trig class as a prerequisite and we expect you to still know the material taught in that trig class when you take our class. We will not waste our time, or those of other students, reviewing material from a class you already attended. If you forgot it the day you left the final exam, you wasted your money and relearning it is your problem. Many low level classes at ICC spend a lot of time reviewing material from a previous class (something you were used to in high school), but that will not be done in higher level classes such as calculus, physics, or the classes you take after you transfer to Wannabe Flagship Tech.
You need to learn for a lifetime, not cram for tomorrow's test.
Links added in May 2008:
When posting a comment on Learning Curves, I noticed I had not directly linked to the comments Zucker published in the Notices of the AMS. The links up above are to pages that describe changes to orientation at John's Hopkins he was involved in. The links below are (mostly) to published articles on this subject:
I'll add the comment that "teaching freshmen to learn mathematics" is not at all the same as teaching mathematics to freshmen. The same applies to physics for future engineers, hence my observations from April 2007 you see up above.
I teach at Ishkabibble Community College.
Well, not really.
Dean Dad used Iskabibble (sic) State University as an example of an Organic Free-Range Certified college with a 90% f-t faculty ratio. I like that name. I'm not old enough to remember Kay Kyser, but my parents do. [Dean Dad, being about one more generation removed, got the spelling wrong. Young whippersnappers can look up "Perfessor" Kyser on Wiki and see if his sidekick Ishkabibble is described there.] I think I'll use Ishkabibble CC (ICC) as the pseud for where I teach, even though our f-t ratio is only about 50%.
I can't tell which is funnier, a straight-faced claim that there is no longer any role for experiment in physics by Chad Orzel over at Uncertain Principles,
or the bogus agenda for a faculty union meeting posted by Sherman Dorn.
