Category Archives: Education

Never be afraid to share

September 7, 2015 6:59 AM , Leave a Comment ,

One of the guys on my Facebook feed always posts up quotes from a pop philosopher.  I suppose all of us have that friend, the one that’s not afraid to share posts from someone who inspires him.  Maybe we even are that person.

Most of the advice that my acquaintance posts is fairly generic stuff.  Things like “Don’t judge a book by its cover” or “Always be kind to one another”.  Of course it’s all delivered in this philosopher’s own style and for some reason that really spoke to this friend of mine so he thought he ought to share it with everyone else.

Honestly whenever I see one of these posts I just cruise past the post.  I don’t find it to be particularly sage-like or inspirational. But I don’t mind if this person posts this.

Someone did however.  Someone on this person’s friend list took him to task for posting these little inspirational memes.  My friend gave a very spirited and well thought defense of his posts.  He wasn’t shy about his beliefs and his need to share them and as he pointed out if this other person didn’t like those posts then he was always free to unfriend him.

What really struck me though is how my acquaintance stuck to his beliefs and showed that he wasn’t ashamed or afraid to share them.

I feel that in the modern age that we’ve become too apologetic and almost ashamed of the beliefs that we hold.  Whether those beliefs are religious or not doesn’t seem to matter.  We try to accommodate other people and their beliefs so much that we shy away from promoting what we believe.  I don’t advocate for those beliefs that are hurtful or exclude others.  I also don’t believe in being obnoxious and insisting on sharing my beliefs with those that don’t want to hear about it.  Don’t let me be misunderstood about that.

But I do think that there is a lot of good in the world that can be shared and we simply don’t because we are either too shy to express those beliefs or are in some weird way ashamed of them.

In The Merchant of Venice a character mentions that the quality of mercy blesses not only those that receive it but those that give it.  I think it’s the same with sharing your beliefs with others.

Posted in: advice, education, inspiration, life in general

The high cost of success

December 17, 2014 6:23 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note.  This is a reprinted blog posting from June 2008]

 

I was bored Friday night and decided to rummage through the closet for things to donate on Saturday to the local charity thrift store.  As I was sorting through old college notebooks and receipts I came upon a cardboard tube with my name on it and inside was my diploma.  I had never gotten it framed partly due to circumstances and partly due to laziness.

It was early December of ’93 and I had just cleared my library record, I had settled all my accounts on campus and I had gotten clearance from the registrar to graduate.  I went home and sneezed as I was cleaning my apartment since my parents were coming for the graduation.  That was the beginning of a three week-long flu bout.

By the next morning I could hardly get up.  Heavily fortified by NyQuil and pig-headed determination I somehow attended the graduation ceremony and stumbled across the stage to receive my diploma and then went home to lie in bed for most of December.

The diploma lay forgotten in some moving box. I was out of college but poor as a church mouse and living on credit cards as I tried to find a job, so framing a diploma was the least of my concerns.

Couple years later, I’ve got a job and I wander into a framing shop and they quote me 60 bucks for framing it.  Being lazy and needing to save money for vital things (aka going out and drinking) I put it off.

So it’s 2008, I take it out of the tube to look over.  There’s a slight crease along the side of the diploma from the graduation when I, half out of it due to the Nyquil and the fever, took the diploma out to look at it and then jammed it back in the tube hard.

On reflection, graduation should have been one of my proudest moments.  Not just for the occasion but due to the fact that I received my diploma from Michel Halbouty and shook his hand.  Who is Michel Halbouty?  He’s the last of the great Texas Oil men.  It would be like an engineer receiving her diploma from Thomas Edison or an art student receiving his degree from Leonardo da Vinci.

In any case, I finally took the diploma to a framing shop and found that success does indeed have its costs, as does laziness and procrastination.  There were frames to pick, backgrounds, different types of glass, and in no time a 60 dollar frame job turned into 390 dollar job and will take 2 weeks to be done.

The diploma will be custom fitted, sealed and protected from the elements in a dark red cherry wood frame with gold edging on a maroon and white (the school colors) background.  Normally I don’t like conspicuous display, I find it vulgar.  However, some things do deserve to be displayed and some things are worth showing off. This now sits in my home office.  The only decoration in the room.

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Posted in: education, life in general, memories, school

tablet and education update

July 18, 2014 7:08 AM , Leave a Comment ,

A little over a year ago I posted some thoughts on using tablets in education.

Since that time technology and online applications have moved forward and some school districts are moving along some of the lines I suggested back then.  I thought it might be nice to delve a little deeper into some of the aspects of technology’s role in public education.

One of the more exciting aspects would be the ability to specialize the curriculum to meet the requirements of not just the state but of the actual school district and even the school.  Before the school year begins the departmental staff could gather together and discuss the successes and failures of the last year and decide what needs more focus in the coming year and select from online publisher catalogs as to what should be in their textbooks.

In Texas we have what are called “Magnet schools”,  schools that put special emphasis on certain curricula.  These schools may focus on the arts, on law, on trades, or the sciences. Having texts that are specially keyed in on these fields would help students not only focus on their chosen fields but also allow them to engage with other courses that aren’t in their chosen fields like maths and sciences for art students, or literature and writing for technical students.

We have such a wealth of communications means these days compared to even when I was a student in high school.  In my time most communications to parents came through the student themselves having to ferry notes and grades from the school to the parent.  In rare cases a teacher might mail or call the parent but that was the exception.

Even with the common communications means like texting, Skype, social media, and email there can be robust communications with parents on the progress of a student.  Communications with teachers but with other parents is possible.  Classes can become secondary communities where topics like drugs, alcohol, gangs, or bullying can be addressed by parents.  I think marrying up technology will make it more attractive for parents to become involved in this and help them take preventative measures to help their children avoid these problems.

The last aspect I would address is the fact that computers and internet access do open up so many new opportunities and aspects of life.  We have so much information readily available to us online that we can become inundated with data but yet at the same time if it is managed properly then we can look at this as resource.  Online schools exist that help adults with remedial courses, governments from federal to local now post information and forms online, besides that you have all the data that commercial companies post.

I don’t deny that there are costs involved in all of this or that there are pitfalls to these schemes but on the whole I think this is the direction that schools will have to go to keep pace with the rest of the world.  The tried and true model from the last century of paper textbooks and school binders and backpacks is sadly out of date and needs to be replaced as soon as possible.

 

Posted in: education, technology

The new experts

January 25, 2014 7:21 AM , 1 Comment ,

I was part of the last generation to rely exclusively on libraries and books for research.  Back in college I would do reports looking up books and theses on an old computer catalog (or sometimes on paper catalogs) and then hunt them down on the various floors of Evans Library.

Evans became like a second home to me.  if I wasn’t in class or at home that’s where I could usually be found.  Despite the fact that the library staff was constantly replacing books I would always seem to end up looking for that one book that was never where it was supposed to be.  If I found the book I would then be hunched over a copier making copies of the relevant pages and scribbling down bibliographical notes for reports that I would later laboriously type out on an actual typewriter.  After college I didn’t need to do all that much research but the local library was always around if I needed to.

New information sources were becoming available.  Computer disc sets such as Encarta were vying to replace the venerable old Encyclopaedia Britannica as a repository of knowledge.  Truthfully, the couple of times I tried the “free” trials of products like Encarta, I wasn’t impressed.  The articles were usually short little blurbs and never really gave in-depth details or references.  They were very impressive to look at with colorful pictures and even videos but short on hard facts and references.

With the rise of the web a floodgate of information opened up to the general public.  Hypertext linking and search engines simplified the tasks of research.  You could enter some vague terms into a search engine and be transported to a website where people were talking about whatever you wanted.  Sometimes it was a website full of experts, sometimes a website of full of amateurs.  Some educators wrote articles expressing concern about the quality of research that kids did for reports using the internet.

The biggest culprit in educator’s minds was Wikipedia.  Started as an online collaborative effort to provide an online encyclopedia to anyone about anything, Wikipedia allowed any person to come in and enter and edit articles without regard to their qualifications.  This set off a panic in the educational community as they saw what they regarded as amateurs expressing opinions on matters that should be best left to properly qualified and degreed experts.  They urged kids not to eschew the traditional library and return to books as the one and only source of knowledge.

In truth there was some cause for concern in the early days.  Some contributors wrote articles based off pure opinion and conjecture.  Sometimes online vandals would come in and wreck pages just for fun.  Some groups would blank out pages for political or other reasons.

Wikipedia as any organization went through several trial and error periods until it finally began a more comprehensive and meticulous editing process.  Articles are no longer left up to single individuals and roving editors patrol the entries constantly to monitor the quality of the articles.

In addition entries now provide (almost demand) references to source materials be included in the articles for readers to do their own follow-up research.

The error rate has dropped significantly and several studies now show it to be on par with more traditional encyclopedias.

So does this mean the death of the traditional brick and mortar library and the printed word as the repository of expert research?  Possibly, but not for a generation or two.

Books have built up a type of cultural inertia in the minds of the general public.  Until the last few decades it has been a major undertaking to publish books.  The thinking was that if the publishers were willing to invest so many resources into a hardbound book then they must be very confident in the accuracy of the contents.

Nowadays wood pulp and ink are cheap and the major component of book costs is transporting them from the printers to the point of sale and paying the authors.

This perception that books are the only trustworthy source of knowledge is changing and more and more people are turning to online sources of information as dependable fonts of data.  I would hazard to guess that within 100 years that the only books that you could buy would be presentation pieces bound in leather and custom-made to order.

Could this trend to store information online only be dangerous?  Very much so!  I don’t have to touch upon Orwell’s “memory hole” or the great Chinese firewall to point out how information can be erased or restricted from a culture’s collective mind.  I think most people are aware of this.

However we have to be more cognizant of the fact that knowledge is power and that therefore those that can control or steer the distribution of that power are themselves powerful.  We must be ever vigilant that information is not tampered with, manipulated, fettered, or restricted to a privileged few and that it can be accessed by all in its purest and raw form.

At least for now that knowledge has a safe place to rest on the pages of the printed book.

Posted in: books, computers, education, internet, school, technology

The purpose of free education

June 3, 2013 1:57 PM , Leave a Comment ,

The other day the deadline for protesting your local property tax passed.  These taxes mainly fund the local school district.

Confession:  I always protest my tax evaluation.  Not because I hate education, or don’t want to pay my fair share.  I just work damn hard for what I have and have no wish to just simply give it away.

This got me thinking of an online discussion awhile back that I was following.

One person took the view that all public education was a waste of tax money.  Summarizing his viewpoints, he felt that the system was fundamentally broken, public school teachers were lazy and over coddled by a powerful union which refused any attempts at reform or accountability, illegal aliens are taking advantage of our generosity and diluting the level of education for other kids, and that the only solution that politicians could come up with was to throw more money at the problem.  Finally he opined that the public school system should be shuttered and that only private schools should exist.

I normally do not step into online discussions.  I have had a long and sorry history with these.  I participated in the flame wars of the 90’s and I know from experience that these type of discussions eventually degenerate into ad hominem attacks.  Sometimes though I still get pulled in.

My own history with public education is not all that great.  When my family arrived in Houston in late ’77 we went looking for a school for me.  I should preface this with the facts that in Bogota, where I had previously lived, that I had attended a bilingual kindergarten and I had a smattering of English.  Not enough to converse but enough to understand some things.

Back in Houston we found the local public elementary school.  My parents and I went in and sat down with the registrar.  She asked them if I could understand English and they admitted that I knew very little.  She looked down at me and said “He will have to sit at the back of the class and be quiet.”  I will remember that moment for the rest of my life.

Perhaps it was a sense of self preservation, or perhaps it was the very first adult decision that I ever took.  I told my parents that I did not want to attend that school.

They eventually found a private school, Ascension Episcopal, where a kindly teaching assistant took the extra time to basically teach me English and catch me up with the other kids.  I seriously doubt that I would have received that level of extra care from the other school.

Eventually I did enter the public school system but only after I had caught up to the kids in my grade level and could compete on even terms.

I should be bitter and agree with the individual above about public schools but here is why I don’t.

As a nation we are living in a time of tremendous challenges and opportunities.  Trading partners are emerging as powerful rivals, old time allies are not as tractable as before and are trying to do what’s best for them, and enemies are becoming more sophisticated and organized.  It’s a leaner, meaner world that we live in.

Why then are we indulging the luxury of not utilizing every resource that we possibly can to keep or even enhance the standard of living that we enjoy?

We live in an age where the knowledge and the service economic sectors are the becoming the primary economic engines, at least for this country.  This is not the simple age that my parents grew up in where a man could walk in off the street and take up a trade to support his family.

The next generation is going to need all the educational resources that it can get its hands on just to stay competitive around the world.  America will need everyone on board and bailing just to keep the ship afloat.

From an altruistic viewpoint you should want to help your fellow man and should be happy to give them an opportunity to better their lot in life.  From a pragmatic standpoint we need to take individuals that could potentially be liabilities and make them into resources.

Now, do I believe the current system to be perfect or even good?  No, of course not.  The educational system is fragmented, corrupt, and profligate.  But just because it has problems is no reason to end it.

To be brutally honest you can either spend your tax dollars supporting education and turning out the next generation of innovators, leaders, and fellow tax payers or you can spend your tax dollars for police protection from the next generation of street criminals and thugs.

I know which future I would rather fund.

 

Posted in: education

thoughts on tablets and schools

April 10, 2013 1:44 AM , 3 Comments ,

I often find my mind wanders while on the trails and I start doing mental exercises.  The other day on the trail I suddenly found myself thinking about using electronics with public school kids.

Given that a school district would want to do this, how would it work?  What would schools want out of these devices and how would it be organized?

School districts have long wanted to switch over to digital media,  The One laptop per child (OLPC) initiative was popular in the last decade but really didn’t go anywhere mainly due to costs.

Might tablets provide a better answer?  The newest Android operating systems have revolutionized the mobile computing world, and the cost of tablet components have made cheap models easily available.  In addition the cloud computing concept has opened up vast territories of cheap and accessible online storage that for the most part lays unused.

Firstly all the textbook writers would provide digital formats of the student’s texts available either on SD cards or through cloud connections.  This would reduce text printing costs, allow for regional customization (so California students don’t have to learn what Texas students learn), and alleviate childhood back problems from carrying heavy bags.  Students could never claim that they left their texts at home or at school.  At the beginning of the year students could upload new texts and continue on without having to check out new books.

Homework could be digitally done and checked automatically in some cases.  Quizzes could be coded in and students receive instant feedback on their progress, as could their parents.  Alerts could be set up to be texted or emailed to parents if a student begins to slip.  parent conferences could be skyped saving travel costs and making appointments easier to keep.

Access to the internet.  Apart from learning activities this could help whole families get access to online resources that they would normally not have.  A study credit program would allow a student to use the unit for personal use only after their homework was marked as completed.

 

Challenges and possible solutions

Cost – Obviously.  a 9″ or 10″ tablet with a simple camera/microphone set up and 16GB of memory would probably run about $300.  Even with the school district helping to offset the costs, it would be daunting for lower income families.  Consider however that such a tablet could be used for 4 to 6 years and hold mutliple textbooks over time.

Theft – Whether from a local bully or professional thieves, it is a possibility.  Apart from physical markers on the case, a program could be included that would render the unit inert if tampered with or if reported stolen.

internet cost – obviously this program would require wireless broadband access, not just at home but in schools.  This would probably need government subsidies for lower income families. Internet providers might consider what they could do with economies of scales from suddenly having much larger customer bases.  It would also incentivize the construction of a more robust national internet network.

 

Anyways some random thoughts to expand upon at a later date.

 

 

Posted in: education, internet, technology