Shaky Danny

  I am surprised that this issue is still in question. When I was taught the preferred teaching method was called “look see”. It relied on memory to read. I admit not much works with boys and almost anything seems to work with girls. Girls have more brain connections or something and they don’t seem as affected by fetal alcohol. Or maybe girls figure out phonics on their own. In any case mom got disgusted and got me a tutor who taught phonics. I had to do workbooks. Blue birds were the lowest reading group in class. I moved from blue bird over red bird to yellow bird and never looked back. I’ve already posted about reading aloud and using grids rather than flash cards. But ignoring the phonetic basis of written English is perverse. Later Sesame Street seemed to have settled the issue and I was relieved. I didn’t realize the nonsense was back. Now it is called “whole language”. Children are supposed to use the “language of context” to somehow intuit words rather than sounding th...

  According to their web site, 2024, at University of Chicago 43% of the teachers are professors. This is better than most schools. By third or fourth year an undergraduate will be taking instruction from a professor. Again, the site says the average pay of a professor at University of Chicago is $165,000. Nonetheless, most tuition money does not go to instruction. At the old Columbia College in Chicago graduation was a great shame. Nowadays Columbia is more collegiate. It used to be more vocational.   The instructors were professionals in their fields. Graduation meant you hadn’t been hired. If schools are training professionals, their graduation rate should suffer, just as in sports. Conversely why take training from people who can’t find work? Corporate training can be adversarial: how would you train your competition? I propose a new form of institution. Rather than a degree I propose an open transcript. Everyone can see your grades. Enrolling in the Co-operative Colle...

Brandon Johnson has just been elected mayor of Chicago. Except Byrne we have always elected lawyers, even prosecutors, in the hope that they would avoid indictment. So far, they have. Johnson is the first schoolteacher. As a teacher Johnson is trying to approach crime from a Confucious perspective, systemically. Here are some obvious concerns: A court clerk just made the mistake of self-publishing a book about a recent case. In general police, prosecutors, judges and even clerks should be cautious publicly expressing opinions that could be thrown back at them, endangering testimony, and convictions. It is unfortunate that people closest to issues are precisely the ones constrained from public discussion. Police are not screened for clerical aptitude. Clerical tasks are a major part of police work, especially investigations. Back in the 90’s the federal government confronted domestic violence. Their solution was the development of a form that must be filed if the husband was not arr...

  Previously, for many decades intelligence test scores increased. For the last two decades, test scores have decreased. Whenever intelligence is at issue, consider demographic. Intelligence score “discoveries” are a consequence of sampling. How has the demographic changed? In the earlier decades the educated population increased. By definition, the people tested are the educated. With increase a greater proportion of the population was tested. Throttling back reduced the population tested. The impact on scores is apparent when you see how the population changed. The answer is grades and privilege. There are four possibilities: Good test scores, good grades Good test scores, poor grades Poor test scores, good grades Poor test scores, poor grades   People with poor scores and grades, except for the privileged, do not persist in school. If the unprivileged with good scores and grades are also smart, they may recognize that con...

  One of the first instructions you get in school is to read to yourself. This makes sense in a classroom. But it is a mistake. If you want to remember your lines in a script always read your portion aloud. If you want to remember your lines, never read them to yourself, always read them aloud. If you are having difficulty with a text, read it aloud. If you are working a difficult problem, read it aloud. I don’t know why it is, but we process differently when we voice the words. You will be more successful reading aloud.

  Next time you see some little darling tormented with multiplication tables, have them make up a grid and fill it in themselves. It is easier to remember with context and seeing the relations between numbers. Be sure to point out the square’s diagonal. They can also build grids for the other operations, just for fun.

Any time someone gives you a rate for anything, it’s been jiggered.  The unemployment rate is a well-known example. In 2012 the reported unemployment rate was around 8%. If I take the total reported employment of around 134,000,000 then apply it to the total population between 20 and 64 of about 162,000,000 I get around 17%. That seems a little high for 2012 but it gives you an idea of the variance. At this point economists start throwing smoke.  Most economics seems to be disputes about rates.  Disability, yadda yadda, looking for work, employability, underemployment, I’ve known a lot of deranged people who have jobs.  A good rule of thumb seems to be double the reported rate. Google real unemployment and double the rate seems the general conclusion. Given the tremendous amount of data available and studied we should have immediate, accurate and complete information segmented across any desired index of our unemployment.  Given that we don’t it is obvio...

In second grade our teacher Ms. Bowers introduced us to Cantor’s diagonal proofs.  You are already familiar with this, of course.  The rational numbers, the fractions, are listed with 1/1, ½, 1/3… on the top row, 1/1, 2/1, 3/1… in the first column and the diagonals always equal to 1: 1/1, 2/2, 3/3… and all the fractions in between. Then Cantor counts them by going up and down diagonally, zig-zagging between them.  All the second graders accepted that.  Then she showed us that the real numbers, say all the real numbers between .0000… and .9999…., were uncountable because no matter which way we listed them, she could generate a new one by going down the diagonal going on to infinity and generating a new one.  Cantor liked diagonals. I may have lost some of you.  I think the reason we got this as second graders is because we knew that if Ms. Bowers was explaining this to us, it couldn’t be that complicated.  But adults believe that this stuff should be...

Some years ago, after many academic adventures I found myself taking an introductory programming course as a general requirement for graduation.   The best part of the course was the computer problems book.    It encapsulated all the uses for a computer up to the undergraduate senior level.    I wanted to get my computer programs out of the way at the beginning of the semester so I could clear the decks for the important courses I was taking in mathematics.   Several computer program problems were required, but some were electives; they were ranked in order of difficulty.    In the back of the book, there was a list of how many lines of code each problem took.    Cross referencing each list to get the most credit for the least lines of code lead to the problem called partitions.    Partitions was defined as the number of different ways to sum integers to reach another integer.    For instance 2 is 1 + 1, 3 is 1 + ...

The greatest and most difficult issue facing humanity is social segregation. This issue allows all other issues to fester unaddressed. The fictional town of Pottersville has one significant advantage over our real civic arrangements: Potter lives in Pottersville. The cost per student at The Cairo IL high school is $8,817. In Highland Park IL it is $17,636.    That is because education, security, maintenance and recreation are funded by real estate taxes.    The corporate ghetto, Oak Brook IL, is organized to minimize services in order to benefit the companies that reside there.    Other suburbs minimize their education expenses because only the servants use those schools or the residents are old. The real estate tax itself could be very progressive. But using it to locally fund our services maximizes the benefits of social segregation. The cherry on top, isn’t it great to live in America, is that social segregation is then subsidized by our income tax ...

I was tormenting Tiquan.    This was right and proper, as he was smaller than I was.    We were in second grade at Ray School.    Suddenly Tiquan turned around in his seat and screamed at me. -Oh Tiquan, that’s wonderful, you yelled, Ms. Bowers said. Ms. Bowers seized every opportunity to pass on a life’s lesson.    Embarrassed, we both shrank in our seats. If someone is picking on you, you should stand up to them.    Once when someone did something she said: -Who did that? Look at you, you all turned to look, you dummies; you gave him away.    Raymond, are you proud of yourself?    All these friends of yours that you are showing off for gave you away. Thereby she imparted the important lessons of group cohesion and honor.   -I can see your lips moving, I know you’re talking. Don’t be caught was the number one lesson.Each day was a new challenge.   One morning the principal, Ms. Kenause, lay in ...

The Supreme Court decision striking down quotas,  Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 ,  is such woeful denial of their entire history of honoring precedent that the decision itself becomes an agonized ironic scream. Back in the sixties, it had finally come down to the question of merit.   This is what everyone had been fighting for and the civil rights movement finally came to its senses.    There was no way we could have merit, so we got quotas.    The actual law said, in admittedly protracted convoluted language, that if you could demonstrate merit, and not very strictly, I might add, you didn't have to have quotas.   The fact that we have quotas means very few were able to even give a pretense of merit selection. To understand the deep bitterness aroused by affirmative action in the 70’s you have to recognize that the essential function of middle management is to avoid responsibility.    Wh...

Just recently, there was a school shooting and all the children interviewed used the word surreal.     I actually did have a surreal experience in college.    It was a liberal arts college called Shimer, based on the great books where we used original sources except for a few textbooks and this one instance:  Moby Dick .    Moby Dick  is a young people’s adventure story.    Why out of all the books assigned, including  Ulysses,  was this the only abridged version?    I had read Moby Dick before and something was nagging at me throughout the class.    It wasn't until later when I happened across a cheap version of the book that I realized that not only was our version abridged, it was bowdlerized. They had replaced all the Voudun imagery with Christian themes.    For instance, the ending where a bird is smashed against the mast with a hammer instead had three masts sinking into the ocean....