Education: System is out of Sync

Sir Ken Robinson touched on a number of points that I think are important in terms of revolutionizing education. One is that the current education paradigm was conceived in a different age. In his talk about changing education paradigms, he shows a chart of instances of prescriptions given for ADHD by state in the United States. According to the chart, you are more likely to have ADHD the farther East you live.

At the same time this "medical fashion" is taking shape and spreading, kids are growing up in the "information age". They have had cell phones, the internets, youtube, social media, netflix, cable tv packages, video games and a million other interactive, personally significant sources of information and we expect them to sit still and in silence while a teacher tries to lecture them abstract, intangible subjects.

Our kids are living in an age that no one could fathom even 10 years ago, yet we are still trying to teach them in the same manner as our grandparents and their grandparents were taught. The system of eduction was conceived during the industrial revolution to meet the demands of growing job markets. It came to be in a time when a people rarely travelled more than 20 miles from home their life times; when  if you wanted to talk with some one, you had to find them or write them a letter; when the closest thing to avoiding reality was reading a book or the newspaper.

People were use to long conversations and taking time to be entertained. They had to be patient because nothing was immediate. There was no central source of information available to everyone everywhere all the time, so people had to swap books, stories, and gossip, and if information had to reach the masses, the masses had to find a central location to be reached.

Now, the wealth of the world's information is in each kids pockets and at their fingertips at every moment of the day. If they want to know something, kill time, organize a get together, find a location, go out to eat, or anything else, they just pull out their phones. Furthermore, they do not have to spend an hour getting lectured. They can find a reliable source of information and get a succinct description or watch an informational video/tutorial.

Today, we are using the "technologies" (really, the methodologies) of past ages and penalizing kids for not conforming to it while outside of the classroom, students live in a different culture.

IDL

Up until recently, pretty much all of my programming experience has been in IDL. I decided to finally buckle down and learn how to do things that I always use other people's routines for. In doing so, I realized how stupid IDL can be. I wound up fighting more against the language than against my own stupid programming skills.

Take, for instance, the TV and TVSCL commands. They take an image and plot them on the display. If you want to put them within a plot window, however, you cannot just use the same position vector that you used to make the plot axes because the bottom and left axes are drawn within the plot window. You have to reduce the size of the image by 1 pixel in each dimension and offset it up and to the right by one pixel.

Ok, so fine. I can do that... But then I want to save the image to PostScript. You would think that, everything having turned out well on the display, that it would look good saved to a file, right? Wrong. The image still covers the axes and I have yet to figure out how to fix it myself. So now I am using Coyote Graphics, which is pretty much the awesomest thing to happen to IDL, and the best resource anyone can ever get. The guy who runs the company, David Fanning, also has a Google group where he and others answer IDL questions.

But then I asked myself, What the h-e-double-hockey-sticks is a PostScript file anyway? Turns out it is an archaic printing language that helped computers output to printers. PDF is its modern replacement. I never really used PS to begin with. I just saved as .ps as an intermediate step before saving it as a .pdf, .jpg, .tiff. .png, etc. Now I know about the X buffer and TVRD. Things are going to change. Big time.

But that gets me back to my original rant. IDL should just work. I should not have to worry about scalable pixel sizes, make separate contingencies for the device I am using, which operating system I have, which decomposed state I am in, etc. IDL should know these things and just do what I want it to do.

After the aforementioned instance of recently, I started using Python. Nuff said.

Changing Education

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I feel education needs to be changed. This not a new unique sentiment that few others share. I hear about it all the time. One person who feels this way is Sir Ken Robinson [1], [2], [3], an international advisor on education in the arts. He says that change is not enough. We do not need the system to evolve. If the foundation and fundamentals of the system are broken, then the evolved system will still be fundamentally broken. What we need is a revolution.

The problem is that despite all of the people that are passionate about educational reform, very little is taking place, especially at the college and post-graduate levels. The change within the sciences is even slower because a scientist wants to see scientific results that one set of educational methodologies is better than another. It is sort of a Catch-22. Where is the scientific method here?

So, my plan is to highlight education programs that are doing something new, reaching out to a larger audience, concerned with social and global issues, etc., as well as platforms for education, creative and new ideas, and outreach programs -- because education should not only be better, it should be available at a high quality to everyone, regardless of geographic, economic, and demographic factors.

Just as a start, I already partially introduced TED.com and their "ideas worth spreading" with the Sir Robinson videos above. TED is a conference that tries to feature people with great ideas and inventions. They oublish new videos weekly on their website.

Additionally, there is the Studio School, a new type of school for 14-19 year olds in England that turns the classroom into a hands-on environment in an attempt to bridge the gap between classroom skills and workplace skills.

Recap

After a grueling month of incessant grading, I finally made it through the semester. Here is a list of things that I learned:

1. A firm late policy is necessary for all assignments.
2. Assignments submitted via email should be penalized slightly to discourage it
3. Plagiarism and copying should not be tolerated and the school's plagiarism policies should be included in the syllabus.
4. Make-up style assignments should be work for the students, not for me.
5. My grading style was too kind to lab reports that adhered to the required format but poorly analyzed the data.
6. The rubric I made was too detailed and its function was lost in its length.

So, students, you have just made your lives worse. Hrm hrm hrm hrm ha ha ha haaa

Metas

Diana was telling me about a meeting given by the GM of her hotel to her and the rest of the employees. At the end of the meeting he asked who among them keeps a list of goals and objectives. Diana was the only one to raise her hand. When asked, she said that at the beginning of the year she writes down her goals for the year to come on the first page of her agenda. As the year progresses, she occasionally checks her list and, come mid-year, she does a complete evaluation of the list, making changes in her schedule and her life so that she can achieve what remains incomplete.

This really impressed me. Before, I would have thought it was good for her, but not really for me. In the last year or two, however, I have learned more about myself and what I am driven by, and I want to pursue what drives me. What's more, I want to pursue and succeed at what have become my passions.

But that is not all. She told me she does the same thing with her personal goals, but that she keeps those in a separate place. When she came back from her room, she layed her notebook open in front of me and started paging through the last two years that we have been together. She read aloud, "Be with Matt", "Send more messages to Matt", and several other goals related to how she could change herself to make me happy and to make our relationship stronger. I was more than impressed. I was affected.

It was one of those moments that changes a person. Here she is, one of the best, nicest, most caring people I have ever met in my life, selflessly changing the way she is to make the relationship that we have better. Not only that, but as I listened, I noticed a check in her voice. As my eyes followed her words along the page, I realized that she had successfully done everything that she could think of to make my (our) life happy.

At that moment, I felt more than just love. I felt a desire to make her feel the same way. Affected. Loved. Astonished. New. I wanted to change myself to make her happy and I wanted to be with her to support her and help her fulfill the rest of her goals.

So, I planned on making my own list of goals the next day after I finished teaching. The whole day I thought about my dreams and aspirations, excited about the permanent reminder I would have to provide me with ambition and motivation to do great things -- about having a simbol of the greatness and love that was shared with me the day before -- about carrying around in my pocket the power, strength, will, and vision that had given dominance to my stride and fire to my soul.

But classes went long and I grew tired and distracted. I went to bed without picking up a pad and pencil. Soon, my list became another goal to be accomplished some other day. Another thought to be pushed aside or forgotten -- a memory to smile at in a moment of reflection or a window to a time of what could be if I had the time to make it.

That is the danger that we all face, isn't it? It is the reason for the list. The list serves as a token against complacency and procrastination. It is a focal point to keep our attention on what is important, to remind us of the things that are bigger than our daily lives. It keeps us honest and gives us a reference to not only where, but to who we want to be.

And having a list of positive things to constantly be reminded of only leads to more positivity. Sure, I feel great pursuing my list, but I feel even greater helping some one else fulfill theirs. It is one thing to be great and a-whole-nother thing to share it and make great the world around you.

So, in the name of greatness, here are some of my goals for the rest of this year, in no particular order. I hope I have inspired you to write your own.

• Create my "Potentials and Fields" class and make an effort to put it on YouTube
• Contribute at least twice a month to Casual Science
• Gather parts for the Watch-a-Doodle (a.k.a. Wetch-a-Sketch)
• Do not let work keep me too busy nor play keep me too idle.

And lastly (for this blog, anyway), but certainly not leastly,

• Help Diana fulfill the rest of her goals.

Khan Academy

Through my frequent readings of Saturday Morning Breakast Cereal, I came across a link to the Khan Academy and watched their featured video. It is of Salman Khan, the founder and sole teacher of the Khan Academy, speaking about his youtube school at a TED convention.

Khan was a hedge fund analyst at a brokerage firm when he started making youtube videos to help tutor his little cousins. After receiving numerous positive emails and comments from his family, friends, strangers, and teachers, he quit his job and decided to found the Khan Academy.

There are over 2,100 educational videos on the site (mostly pre-/highschool level), all made by Khan. Each video is 10-15 minutes long and consists of Kahn's voice explaining a topic while the video shows Khan's notes appearing on a computer-based blackboard (via SmoothDraw).

Additionally, there is a fantastic organization and homework scheme created by the software crew. All of the videos are thrown into an intricate flowchart that creates a smooth learning path through and across subjects. You can start at the beginning and be guided through harder and harder topics. Each topic requires 10 consecutive correct answers before permitting you to move on.

The program allows teachers to get a microscopic view of what their students are spending their time on and having troubles with. A teacher can see where, when, and how long/often students pause or replay a video, which types of problems they get stuck on, how long the spend on each question, and where holes in their knowledge base are. With all of this information being made available, teachers are able to assign lectures for homework and do homework during lecture, thereby increasing student-teacher and student-student interaction.

Furthermore, the student progress can be tracked through each class and grade, providing a great tool for evaluating of the quality of student being generated by the school system and of the school system and teaching staff itself.

The most amazing thing was seeing how the self-paced learning was going for each individual student and how, after progress flatlined for a period of time, their learning curve suddenly rose sharply upon the mastery of a difficult topic and continued to climb quickly and steadily.

Fin.

(To get a proper, resolving conclusion, you will have to check out the site and see it for yourself.)

Hard work pays off

Currently, I am teaching six physics labs of 15 students, each of whom write a weekly lab report that I have to grade. That makes 90 lab reports, or roughly 650 pages to read and make comments on. Often, the reports need alot of improvement and my comments are ample. Unfortunately, that takes time and the students probably do not make an effort to read them.

One thing that makes their lab reports bad is the lab manual itself. Before the procedure, there is an objectives and a theory section. Between the two, all of the concepts and ideas that the students are suppose to discover during the lab are given away. As a result, the students think that instead of analyzing their data, they can say that their data corroborates the theory and be done with it.

So, I end up writing "Discuss more than the theory, error, etc. Compare, analyze, and discuss the results", "Results --> Theory --> Error", and other such things about 70 times per week. In order to cut time, I made a document that lists all of the comments. I assigned numbers to general comments that can be applied to any lab and letters to comments that pertain to the results and objectives of the particular lab being graded. The result? My grading time got cut in half.

An added benefit is that now, after having made the comments list available to my students via a Google Docs shared document, I can now see when my students are looking at the list. As I am typing, Anonymous User 1337 is checking the comments I left on his or her lab report, and I am smiling knowing that my efforts are not entirely in vain.

Thank you, Anonymous User 1337.