Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Friday, January 31, 2003

Education and Presidential Politics

Normally, I try not to include politics into the wry and witty commentary found in this space. I mean, it's just too easy to find absurdity in that arena. Too much like the proverbial fish in the barrel. However, something the other morning caught my attention and I feel that I have to comment on it.

NPR was airing an interview with North Carolina Senator John Edwards, the first in a series it will be doing throughout the week profiling each of the six (let's hope it doesn't become seven-the Dems don't need to give the nation another chance to mock their candidates) individuals who feel they have the vision to lead the country from 2005-2008. What really got me going was Edwards' views on higher education availibility in America. From his perspective, more kids need to go to college. His position is that any kid who passes a set of college prep courses with some minimum GPA should get to go to a technical college or a community college for free. From this professor's perspective there are several obvious flaws in the good Senator's thinking.

First, I teach in Georgia, where we have HOPE. Funded by a state lottery, the HOPE scholarship program gaurantees 126 semester credits for free as long as the student maintains a GPA of 3.0. If the student is coming from high school then the GPA applies to the college prep curriculum that the student takes. Much like Senator Edwards' proposal, only better. I mean, if a student is worth funding for their first two years, aren't they worth funding throughout their education? It's unlikely that if they were unable to attend college due to financial considerations as a freshman, things will have changed much by the time they are a junior. More than that though, if they merit aid on the basis of their grades shouldn't they keep it if they complete two years of college successfully. It's like penalizing someone for being successful. In fact, it will discourage students from entering transfer programs at two year colleges with liberal arts curricula since the students won't be able to finish what they started. The technical colleges will benefit in the short term as more students will go into two-year terminal degree programs. However, as the jobs these students learn to do are eliminated in today's rapidly changing workplace they'll be left with skills they can no longer use. 30 years ago, TV repair schools were popular, when was the last time you took your TV in to be repaired? Our greatest asset is a workforce trained in a liberal arts curriculum who have the flexibility to learn new skills, adapt to new situations and ethically evaluate the outcomes of their actions.

Second, what about all of those people who aren't kids coming out of high school? What about them? Does the newly single mother not deserve a chance to better herself and thus make a better life for her kids? In Georgia, everyone has a chance for HOPE and it doesn't matter how you have to do it. If you've got the grades, you go for free. It doesn't metter if you're taking 6 credits or 16. It doesn't matter if you're on the four year plan or the eight year plan.

However, the real problem is that many of Georgia's HOPE scholars aren't. What really happens is that many of the K-12 school systems in the state lower their standards until almost all of their students can get A's and B's with little to no work. This is shown by the surprisingly large number of HOPE scholars (3.0 or higher GPA in HS college prep curricula) who score lower than 600 on the SAT. This sort of thing hurts everybody. It hurts the substandard students by promising by giving them false HOPE. Here at Gordon, over 50% of our HOPE freshmen lose their eligibility after one year. Over 65% of these do not return to college. They probably shouldn't have been here in the first place, but nobody told them. Now that wouldn't bother me much until I think of the effect the lower HS standards have on the students who could easily do better. How many of the students in a HS physics class would have been able to handle a full physics curriculum but were only given a course with 25% of the material with no strong mathematics requirement? How many students get trained to believe that doing well in school only requires six hours per week of work (as a recent CNN story reports) only to arrive at college like a deer in the headlights.

Clearly, the problem isn't presently in the higher education system. The problem is in how the K-12 public school system works. It's not the teachers' fault either. How many people are going to take the heat for keeping a kid out of college because they held high standards in their classes. Talk with teachers for any period of time and you get a pretty clear picture of the pressures they face from administrators, parents and kids not to stand in the way of the future. Why does this happen? Because the K-12 system is locally controlled. Locally elected school boards hire the administration. The administration hires and fires teachers (who lost tenure rights in Georgia last year). It's pretty easy to see what happens. Senator Edwards did nothing to address these issues. Is he willing to take local control away from schools? Is he ready to push for a national curriculum with a set of national standards that emphasize both process and content? Is he willing to go beyond multiple choice testing to determine if a student has really learned or just memorized? Is he willing to pay teachers enough to attract large numbers of the society's best and brightest into the field? Is he willing to enforce the same high level of professional standards (i.e.-a practicing doctorate) ont he teaching profession by requiring a licensure exam as the medical, legal and engineering professions have done?

To this educator, Senator Edwards just sounded like another hopelessly misinformed political hack who can talk the easy talk but has never really considered the ramifications and consequences of his proposals. But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

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Wednesday, January 29, 2003

we're baaaaack.

haus and pfeffer

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Tuesday, January 21, 2003

Chaos

I have just finished with teaching the lab portion of my colloquium course. These courses are one of the cool things about teaching at a TYC in Georgia. You get to pick a topic that you want to teach that is a bit outside the normal core curriculum and you are allowed to teach it and the credits even fit into a portion of the required curriculum. It's a win-win thing with we instructors getting to teach courses that are interesting, challenging and current and the students get to learn something outside the box if they are intrepid enough to go adventuring.

My course is called "Chaos Across the Sciences". I love the title because I always get a few students that think the course is about the chaos in the venacular sense of the word, i.e.-total disarray or disorder, anarchy or confusion. While on the surface the course may seem to look at those types of phenomena, it actually unravels the details behind complex systems and makes them understandable.

I think that the thing I like most about the course is the wide variety of different systems that can be studied. We look at planetary orbits, wildlife populations, epidemiology, futures trading, turbulance and galaxies to name a few systems. We learn to use tools such as phase space diagrams, state maps, topological foldings and fractals. We delve into puzzles such as Julia Sets, Cantor Dusts and Infinite Coastlines. All in a course available to anyone who is ready for college level algebra.

Are some of the students overwhelmed by the class? Of course but most of them go away with a new view of the world around them. When that happens, I figure I've done my job.

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Wednesday, January 08, 2003

Pioneering

The last time I tried to write this blog, Blogger and/or BlogSpot decided to hate onme and ate my post. So here goes again.

Over the Christmas holiday I visted my family in Salt Lake City. One of my goals for the time together was to catch up on some family history, especially that concerned with what the family did in Elko County in northeast Nevada. Over the time I heard about my father's family pioneering the area to supply horses to the U.S. Army fort that was built to protect the building of the transcontinental railroad from the western side. My mom's parents talked about our relationship to "Major" Howard Egan who was one of Brigham Young's main leaders went the Mormans moved from the midwest to the Salt Lake Valley.

Over and over I was amazed by the pioneering spirit that was and still is a part of our family. As I have thought about it, I have realized that the pioneer spirit is still a very real part of the culture of the west. My students here in the south are constantly amazed and surprised went I tell the story of leaving home prior to my 18th birthday to set out on my own. They are surprised when I tell them I took my first air flight at age 8 and I traveled across the country in 1976 at 10 in a car. They are amazed when they find out that I haven't lived within 1000 miles of a single relative since I was 18 and I moved from Oregon to Florida with all of my worldly possession in a Honda Civic with 140,000 miles on it. To many of them, it's unimaginable.

To me, I have a hard time understand their homesickness when forced to live more than 50 miles from their family. I can't understand those students who won't leave the town they live in to pursue better opportunites because they can't leave their families. I'm blown away that many of my students haven't left the state much less flown on an aircraft. All and all, the difference in culture is truly apparent to me.

Out west the things I have done are commonplace, part of the expectations of the culture. A person is expected to go out and make their own place and follow the opportunities that are presented to them. Our ancestors ALL did. No one came to the west without leaving most everything behind. The risks they took were phenomenal. On the Oregon and California trails, nearly 1 in 5 people who set out died on the way. Can you imagine being offered a job with uncertain benefits and an uncertain future and having to leave everything you know to take it? Now, think of doing that and knowing that you have a 20% chance of not making it to the worksite. Wow. Yet, nearly everyone I knew had decended from people who had done exactly that. It changed our culture, made us more independant, more self-reliant. But we also lost things in the journey. We lost the sense that relationships might be more important that opportunities. That home might have everything we need and that over there isn't really better than over here.

Still though, I like being a pioneer or at least having that spirit. There are times when the cost of self-reliance has been high but the journey has been awesome so far.

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