The Hanover Collaboration

Reading through the PISA results for this post, I noticed that they demonstrate a cross-culture difference in the way that boys and girls understand science.

Standardized Testing in General and No-Child-Left-Behind in Particular are Destroying our Schools

You are doubtlessly aware that there has been some controversy regarding the effects of the historic “No Child Left Behind” law, created in 2002. In fact, the “controversy” is the political kind. Amongst teachers there is a robust consensus: It’s hamstringing them.

There two ways to change performance. One is to create rewards and punishments to create an incentive for the desired change. The other is to figure out why someone is doing what he or she is doing and then try to make it easier for the person to do the desired thing. Usually the first has to do with behaviors associated with will and choice and the second when there are physical (or other) limitations.

In education, you see both of these methods. Schools have punishments (detentions, suspensions) and rewards (stickers, privileges etc.) to try to control student behavior. Punishments work best because they don’t cost money and rewards are often small and have to do with academic achievement not good behavior (although the first often requires some of the second). Academically, there is a second standard that assumes there can be physical limitations to achievement and so we use the other method to figure out what is hindering a certain performance and coming up with strategies to make it easier. To qualify for special education, you have to show a difference in aptitude (your potential) and achievement (how you actually perform). People who just have low IQs do not qualify for any special help because theoretically they won’t be able to do better help or no help. If you are dyslexic, you have a limitation of how you perceive letters and words, but you are smart enough for the higher cognition of reading. So, schools help you get better at recognizing words and you show better overall reading performance. This makes sense.

We don’t need to draw the academic line. ADHD, for example, effects academic performance as well as general behavior. Maybe you need stronger rewards and punishments to behave in class or maybe we give you medication. As a classroom teacher in charge of controlling the behavior of twenty-five adolescents, you’re navigating both methods – you set clear rewards and punishments, but you know some kids are going to need extra motivation and you know some kids have these other physical and emotional reasons why school is difficult. You try to motivate students with rewards and try to make difficult work more manageable to your struggling students. You also communicate with parents and make recommendations for physical or emotional support.
On a side note, a lot of private schools do not have special education programs. I have limited experience with private schools, but the two I have interviewed for made it very clear that it was a sink or swim environment – students are either motivated and excel or are not and fail or are not worthy of private education. I will assume that not all private schools are so rigid, but they all do have the advantage of a trump punishment – they can expel (or just not admit). Public schools do not have that option. If you are expected to teach all students, the burden of making school accessible to all students means finding ways to balance a limitation (we could say weakness, something that prevents you from achieving your aptitude) with assistance that’s aimed at the cause of the weakness.

Ok, now imagine that you are trying to change the performance of the entire population of school-aged children. You want more kids to achieve more. The first method says you have big rewards and punishments. Because adults are in charge here, it’s going to come in the form of money – federal dollars. Schools that don’t work, we won’t fund. That’s a big incentive. Of course, it’s also a bit insulting because it assumes that schools can change their performance, but they are just not motivated to. No Child Left Behind, what in our case is in charge of changing the performance of the entire population of school aged children, does provide some guidance in terms of the other strategy. For example, “failing” schools are prohibited from having new teachers fill more than a small percentage of their teaching staff. This makes sense. Having a huge percentage of inexperienced teachers is not wise and might limit how much the new teachers can learn if there are fewer experienced models and mentors. But, a school that has a high percentage of young teachers probably does not have it that way by choice. A poorer performing school is going to attract poorer (or at least more inexperienced) teachers. This is not to knock young teachers, who are often committed, idealistic and hard working, but you want a mix of idealism and tried and true strategies. As far as I understand, NCLB provides no support to help the school attract better teachers (with money, for example). To beat my metaphor with a stick, this is like telling the dyslexic kid he needs to switch his letters less.

If you assume that principals and superintendents are where they are because they are competent and care about doing what is best for their students, then the motivation is already there (This is not what I would grant to be true for all of my 12 year old students, who do need some external motivation and is why I would treat them differently. And never pay them to be in charge). So, if it’s not motivation, are there limitations that are creating a difference between public schools’ aptitude and their achievement? Of course there are, which is why there is so much discussion regarding changing the performance of public schools. But, I would argue more of an emphasis needs to be on managing those limitations, not on motivating administrators.

Recognizing the limitations is the harder issue and they have to do with every element of a society. But, what seems to be a starting point is that “failing” schools are usually in poorer districts and that means the schools have less funding and it often impacts how much academic support students have at home (in terms of having time and a quiet place to do homework, a positive parental attitude towards school, affording educational materials, time spent watching TV, etc.). In many places, poorer areas are also less white and more black or Hispanic or other communities that are already often discriminated against and may have less resources. We know the effects of poverty and racism spread to every aspect of life. Affirmative action comes exactly from this understanding. Fixing these limitations means making a more equitable society. And, schools are a great place to start. It is possible to address inequality in a classroom and within a school district, but it takes a lot of work and requires small classrooms, lots of support staff (counselors, after-school programs etc.) which means, money. There are some excellent programs designed to decrease the achievement gap between white and minority students that work because they address the causes. Creating a huge initiative for school change that seems aimed more at motivating administrators and ignoring the root causes of inequalities in schools seems like a colossal cop out. If you tell your students that you’ll pay them $50 if they can read something aloud perfectly, you’re just emphasizing inequalities we already know about. Your dyslexic student might manage to figure out some strategies to read on his own, but why should someone pay you to teach him if it was just a matter of motivating (paying) him?

The things that motivate businesses like competition and earning money don’t work for social programs like public schools because you are not allowed to have winners and losers ie leave children behind. The upside is pouring money into improving schools might be the most effective and cheapest way to create a more equal society.

You’ve all been in class where the guy up at the board screws something up. You, being as sharp as you are, notice immediately. Then you have to decide whether or not you should correct him. I’m curious what your policies are here since I’m thinking about changing mine… Which is:

First, I don’t want to be a show-off. I hate those kids. I always want to give the prof an opportunity to catch it himself. So if the mistake is someplace unimportant, I just let it go. If it is running derivation, watch to see if the mistake propagates. Often it willl get spontaneously corrected on the next line. Other times it will simply persist until it makes its presence felt later. If I think that will be soon and it won’t undergo any growth or change (like most sign flips), I still let it go. Otherwise, for instance if an incorrect minus sign undergoes exponentiation, or it is going to be 10 lines before the guy sees it, it is probably in everybody’s interest that you get it fixed.

But now I’m in this proofs class. It isn’t so much like derivations where each line depends on the line above, instead there are about a dozen statements all numbered, asterixed and daggered any several of which can be called upon to make a new statement. At each of these steps, we depend gravely on the absolute veracity of the previous steps. This is in contrast to algebra where you are mostly just writing stuff down to so you don’t lose track of things. This means that the mistakes have a lurkier character in the context of proofs. Nonetheless, about half the time, the guy just wrote it wrong and will use it later as if he had written it right. All you need to do is write it correctly in your notes and it is a non-issue.

But the strange thing is that if the prof catches it himself later and changes it, even if it was the most obvious typo you’ve ever seen, even if he said the thing he meant to write while writing it wrong, pretty much every kid in the class is correcting his or her notes. I look around and think that maybe I should have said something.

The only worse case than that is the whispering. Sometimes kids are paying enough attention to see it (say, if it is early in the lecture), then over the ensuing minute or two, people decide it is important to confer with their neighbors whether or not there is, in fact, an error on the board. I find this infuriorating. If you’re unsure, don’t be a wimp and raise your hand. If you are sure, don’t be a show-off and shut up.

note: I don’t mean to imply that I am catching all of the prof’s mistakes. I’m not. I’m struggling a lot more than some. I do make more of an effort to follow the lecture than most (owing to the fact that I write far less of it down). I ask myself, had I not noticed this error, would I be grateful if someone else pointed it out? I often think, “no, I wouldn’t”, but upon this further reflection, it is more subtle than that. When you’re falling off the back, as they say in bike racing, perhaps those little mistakes can be the short hills that finish you off. Conversely, the break in tempo plus the slight improvement in clarity due to the correction might be just what the other kids need to rejoin the group. Then again, I’m not sure everyone wants to keep the pack together.

In many MIT classes each problem set has been augmented by an additional problem.

How long did you spend on this assignment?

My answer is always of the form,

Let t be an appropriate amount of time to have spent on this problem set to adequately achieve my learning goals. I spent 1.3 t on this assignment.

Could it be that I am the only person who thinks this question is inappropriate? In any case, other students have been putting in answers that use absolute units and in so doing risk looking dumb or lazy.

Before going on, I should make a distinction for the Dartmouth crowd. The classes at MIT are harder although the kids are equally smart. This sets up the situation where a much higher fraction of the class might be struggling on some matterial.

As it would happen, the undergrad controls course (roughly ES26) hasn’t been doing very well on the problem sets. At the end of the lecture, the Profs (there are two) went on an angry rant about how they would be willing to fail the whole class.[1] Worse still, their average time spent has been less than the correct answer to problem N+1. It isn’t a matter of the shit being hard, it’s a matter of not putting in the time.

I was sitting there dumbfounded looking at all the children just taking it. Finally, I raise my hand.

Tom: I would take those time figures with a grain of salt. Since they are self-reported, it would be reasonable to expect a pretty strong bias.
Prof: Blah, blah… honesty.
Tom: Kids don’t want to look stupid.
Prof: Blah, blah… you guys shouldn’t corrupt the data.
Tom: You corrupted the data yourself just now with this hostility. Now that everyone knows what you’re looking for everyone is just going to put 12hrs down next week.

I would love to see how many kids spend exactly 12 hours on this weeks problem set.

¹ Highlight: “You can’t work for Boeing if you can’t invert a 2-by-2 matrix.”

I was lucky enough to learn C++ first. So when I learned Java it was like prayers being answered. Most people these days do it the other way. Jon, could you put the great quote from [My copy of] “C++ for Java programmers” if you still have it.

I am taking an upper-level undergrad class in automation to prep for the quals. They conveniently let me get credit for it if I do a few suplemental assignments. Right now they are strolling CS25 presumably on their way to bigger and better things. I guess we can afford to stroll since the term is so much longer here. The strange thing being back in an undergrad class is how much hand holding there is.

The grad class would say, “Provide test code using Junit” (What the hell is Junit). The undergrad class is like “There are these testing tools called Junit… We’ve installed Junit on the lab computers, here’s a link to their intro page, and the TAs will have a tutorial on wednesday evening.”

Naturally, I am getting the “Don’t waste my time telling me things I can find out faster with Google.” attitude. Worse still, we’re blowing tons of lecture-time talking about how to implement things in Java. Litterally CS5 material; for the undergrads it was a prerequisite; and I don’t think it would be a lot to ask that engineering grad students know how to write in Java.

Finally the point: The prof has spent no less than 10 min (cumulatively) bemoaning the lack of multiple inheritance in Java. An understandable complaint, but he was being particularly incisive—chalking the decision up to laziness and designing themselves into a corner.

I almost called him out but I wasn’t sure I had my facts straight. I’m pretty sure that the reason was a good one based on how little time I have spent worrying about dynamic casts in Java. Michael, what exactly does making inheritance a tree buy for you? Can an inheritance DAG do the same thing?

0) I have a Control Theory assignment due today. We need to hand in a printout of our source code, and some graphs that show it working. I have a program that can make the right graphs. In fact, my program works for multi-dimensional cases, when we only had to address one-dimensional cases for this assignment. But, my program has a bug, and I know about it. Many of the case it should work for, it doesn’t work for.

I can print out the required graphs, picking situations for which my program works. Handing in these graphs and a print out of my source code, it is very unlikely anyone would every find the bug. My program would probably see perfect. Unethical? Wrong?

1) Often in physics exams you get a question that says “Use to derive .” The usual method of answering this problem is to work on equation 1 until you get stuck, and then work backwards from equation 2. If you were then this method would be impossible, because no one would have discovered equation 2 yet. Is it wrong on a test?

What if you never completely get equation 1 to meet up with equation 2? Some students will get the equations to match up by “accidently” making some algebra errors in convenient places. Unethical?

2) There are a finite number of solved problems in math and physics. Sometimes a problem you are given for homework or take-home exam is a solved example in a different text. If you happen open a solved version of an assigned problem, then what are your responsibilities? Convetional wisdom is that a simple citation will protect you from all fronts.

But, if it is ok to simply copy a solution from a book, why not just photocopy the pages from the book? Surely no one would expect credit for doing that. But why not? If it is important that you understand (whatever that means) the problem, then what is the correct course of action?

3) Since starting graduate school I’ve start explicitly pointing out errors in weaknesses in my homework, and things I think I poorly understand. I do this because I think it is honest, and furthers my education and understanding. It certainly results in worse grades. Should I stop? Ideally, I would bring these issues up with the professor before the homework was due, and address them in my final solutions. Unfortunately, my time endowment is finite, and so the grade/learning optimal solution isn’t always obvious.

Some of you may have been following this argument over whether or not TV and videogames are bad for you.

Where did the whole anti-videogame thing come from in the first place? My theory is that they are from the early days of games when there was a lot of crack-cocaine given to kids in the form of tetris. These days, there is no question. Tetris is definitely bad for me. But originally, it was one of those quick thinking things that I might have help me develop. Likewise, pong is bad for me… so very, very bad for me. But it helped me grow up.

I guess the people who think that all videogames are tetris might have reason to think that games are bad. Get with the times you old farts. The example in the above article is Halo 2. To be good online in Halo 2 you need some skills. Some of these skills certainly are helpful in the rest of life and I don’t just mean the coordination.

Now about TV and books, I have always been pretty incredulous of the claim there is a qualitative difference between books and TV, in the light of the fact that they make movies out of books all the time. Or that Shakespear, the acme of worthwhileness in reading, wrote plays. You guys have to realize that they are just different media for the same product. We can argue about the relative advantages of the media but it is clearly impossible that one be good while the other is bad.

So on the TV side there is a bandwidth of what? a billion times that of a book? That is a pretty substantial advantage. Of course the brain is nowhere near the speed it would need to exploit that advantage fully. But there should be little doubt that AV media is substantially faster than text. But there is a benefit from going slower in that text is more expressive (at least the way that they are used generally).

I can tell you pretty certainly that before I went to college, I learned more from TV than I had from books. That isn’t to say that I didn’t read a lot; I did. I read pretty much the whole goddamn honors English book list. But for every one book I probably saw an episode or two of NOVA, a couple of specials on Discovery, 5+ Star Trek TNGs and two movies.

A lot of people make the argument that the book is better because the reader has to work harder. Maybe that sort of work is helpful in it’s own right but don’t pretend that that it makes the material any better. I had a Physics book (by Dirac) which, like a book from Harry Potter, wouldn’t let you open it until you smashed yourself in the testicles with it. Then it made you do it again every time you wanted to turn a page. Do you think that made me learn more physics?

It didn’t work for me, but I’ve heard some kids learn better like that.