Education in the Land of the Blind

Thanks to KRudd and Co., education here in Oz is very much in the public eye at the moment. Online news sites have embraced the blogging meme and provide their readers with the opportunity to comment on stories in a way that was never possible with newspaper columns. While in principle I think this a good thing, far too much of commentary on education stories is, sadly, drivel.

This appeared among the comments to a journo-blog entry on the Daily Telegraph website:

In many public HS, we have teachers who don’t know much more than their top students. These students actually learn from books and self research (and some do it with help from private tutors). Those who are not top students move on and cramp [sic] for the HSC. And again, some of these average kids are the most likely to follow education training to become new teachers. By the time they get to University 2nd year, they forgot most of the stuff they bolted down in a short period without true understanding. So we have a vicious circle that need to be broken by offering high pay to teachers to attract top candidates. I could see that Universities are doing the right thing at this moment to offer combined educational degrees to make sure that new teachers will have at least one solid specialisation. But we need the government to get serious and offer high pay for good teachers and encourage the rest to go back to University to learn specialisation to lift their performance and consequently, better pay.

There are a number of fallacies implied in this comment:

• that teachers don't really understand what they are teaching;
• that those who go into teaching are not the 'top candidates' but only average students;
• there is a vicious cycle (!) of poor teachers leading to more poor teachers;
  
• a 'solid specialisation' (whatever 'solid' is supposed to mean) should be part of teacher training (hmm, now what 'solid' specialisation should a K-2 teacher have?);
• that 'specialisation' would lift 'performance' (naturally without any explanation of how 'performance is to be measured or how a 'specialisation' would change it).

I keep seeing this dreck again and again in comments on websites to educational stories. The Federal Government has added fuel to the fire by teasing the media with hints about performance pay (though they've carefully dodged using that exact expression) and teacher accreditation and accountability.

Like our politicians, it seems there are many members of the public who believe they are knowledgeable about education, apparently on the basis that they had one.

And it appears to have become fashionable to rubbish our education systems in this country. It's no surprise that the KRudd government is gung-ho about changing education in Oz - fiddling around with education and then claiming to have achieved something is de rigueur for Labor governments (and almost as much so for Coalition ones). But we are now seeing the likes of Rupert Murdoch dumping on Australian education (though why anyone would think that Murdoch would know anything about it eludes me) and no one standing up and saying "hang on a minute, is any of that criticism actually valid? Is it based on anything substantial, or is it just hot air?" The same goes for the media - witness the negative spin put on the TIMSS results reported by ACER a couple of weeks ago. Anyone would think that our Year 8 students couldn't add up, the way it was reported in the media. In reality, the gap between Australia's results, and those of the USA or Britain was very small, and only Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan can claim to be clearly ahead of everyone else.

Is there room for improvement in our education systems? Of course there is. Are we failing our students and delivering them a substandard education? Of course not.

Geek vs. Tool

I've started playing with GeekTool. I'd seen it some time back, but hadn't bothered with it until I stumbled one of those "Top 10 thingies" lists and saw some nice screenshots of GeekTool in action.

Getting my CPU usage stats up on my desktop was straight-forward enough, so I thought about what else I'd like displayed. Then I saw a forum post where someone was using curl and sed to pull out a list of items from SlashDot.

The script was this:

curl http://slashdot.org/index.rss | grep <title | sed -e ’s/<title>Slashdot</title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/<title>Search Slashdot</title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/<title>//g’ | sed -e ’s/</title>//g’

Now, I wasn't interested in SlashDot, but getting the headlines from the ABC news website appealed, so I started playing with the above script, using the same idea to strip out the parts of the xml feed I didn't want.

At which point I learned something important about sed on Mac OS X - it won't wipe out blank lines. This instruction - sed -e '/^*/d' - should delete all blank lines; at least, that's what every sed tutorial tells me. But it just doesn't work on OS X. I even made sure that I had the GNU version installed rather than the POSIX one, but to no avail. So my output contained multiple blank lines between titles. Blech!

After scouring the web for hours trying to find an answer to this problem, it seemed that GeekTool had left me feeling rather un-geek-like, but certainly a bit of a tool.

I finally found part of the solution, in another forum - use perl instead of sed:

perl -pe 's/\r\n/ /'

This did the job of removing the newlines, but left me with a long chain of sed and perl calls piped together, at which point I began thinking again and asked the obvious question: can I do this more simply with a single call to perl? A little more searching, and...

curl http://www.abc.net.au/news/indexes/justin/rss.xml | perl -nle 'print for m:<title>(.*)</title>:'

Done.

I'm now thinking that it would be nice to be able to put somewhere on my desktop a list showing the subjects and senders of my most recent unread emails. If I can work out where and how Thunderbird keeps this info, it should be easy (note the unwarranted optimism), but it could also mean that I need to learn perl (properly). Now if only some kind person would comment on this post and provide me with a solution. (There's that unwarranted optimism again.¹)

1. With apologies to Dilbert

Drongo #3

Playing with StumbleUpon, I came upon a list of websites that work only with IE. I still occasionally come across websites that only look good in IE, but I was surprised that there are still websites out there that use javascript to check the user agent and spit back unhelpful messages if you are not using IE.

When I noticed an Australian site, I decided to have a look. Sure enough, this site for an electronics firm in northern Queensland checks your browser and unless you are using IE on a Windows machine, you get "Your are not currently supported" (whatever that's supposed to mean), and the (poorly designed) drop-down menu doesn't appear.

When I looked further at this site (after changing my browser to bypass the javascript), it became apparent that there is absolutely nothing in the site that requires IE as the browser or Windows as the platform. The javascript to block non-Windows non-IE browsers appears to have no rationale except to ensure that people who use other platforms or other browsers cannot navigate through this website, i.e. to turn away potential customers.

Pathetic.

The Purpose of Education?

I've been catching up on reading the edublogs in my newsreader, which has led to an interesting juxtaposition of articles for me.

The first is Wolin, Democracy and The Math Wars by Michael Paul Goldenberg. I found the following quote Michael gives from Wolin's book resonates very strongly with me:

"The new education is severely functional, proto-professional, and priority-conscious in an economic sense. It is also notable for the conspicuous place given to achieving social discipline through education.
It is as though social planners, both public and private, had suddenly realized that education forms a system in which persons of an impressionable age are “stuff” that can be molded to the desired social form..."

While Wolin is talking about the US in particular, this is consistent with what is also an emerging trend here in Australia, where governments readily tout education as an economic mechanism, but discussion of education as a means for personal discovery and development is thin on the ground.

Craig Emerson, the Federal Minister for Small Business , has made his view very clear:
"Market democrats harness the power of the market for the public good," he said. "They dedicate themselves to remedying social disadvantage out of prosperity by giving every child the opportunity of a quality education through excellence in teaching and high-quality school facilities." [as quoted by Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald]

I agree with Gittins' response: "the primary cause of inequality of opportunity isn't education, it's inheritance - of brains, social status, social skills and money." [link]

Hard on the heels of reading Goldenberg's article, I came upon this offering from Tom Hoffman.

After reading through William Deresiewicz's article and then visiting the Teach For America website, I found myself wondering if I was missing something, if perhaps I had failed to fully appreciate the full extent of the socio-economic impact of education.

But after re-reading all of the articles again, and taking some time to reflect on them, my response to all of it is as follows:

• My own view of education, while it allows for the idea that improved levels of education may lead to opportunities for students to improve their socio-economic status, is grounded in the idea that the student be given the opportunity for self-actualisation. Consequently, I object to views of education that seek to reduce education to little more than a social or economic mechanism. This sort of utilitarianism devalues education as a whole - it dismisses as unimportant subjects like Visual Arts and Music in the first instance, but ultimately devalues all subjects by narrowing the curriculum to fit the desires of business and industry.

• William Deresiewicz's "holes" are not in his education - or more specifically, not in his schooling. His attitudes, his self-professed inability to talk to people not like him and false self-worth are the products of the social environment he grew up in, not his education. (What does the fact that he now wants to point the blame at his schooling rather than his social upbringing say?)

• Programs like TFA are actually doing good things, but there is a real risk that governments, bent on driving their particular socio-economic (read myopic) views of education, may hijack their agendas.

But that's only my view things, which no doubt someone will regard as the by-product of my 1970s/80s education and Gen-X mindset. Or possibly my working-class upbringing or maybe the fact that I now teach in a non-denominational non-government school.

Whatever. I just wish there was a way to keep politicians at arm's length from education.

The Plausibility Trap

Words intrigue me. I love learning about language, and it seems I'm not alone - websites and mailing list about words abound.

Unfortunately, so does a lot of rubbish about the origins of certain words and phrases.

An enquiry to the World Wide Words website asked about the word denigrate:

“A recent film, The Great Debaters, suggests that denigrate is an offensive term for African-Americans because it means “to make black”. The Denzel Washington character says that the word has racist undertones because of this. What do you think?”

Thankfully, World Wide Word's Michael Quinion pours cold water on the notion, but the plausibility of the idea worries me. It appears in a highly acclaimed movie - how long before someone claims to be offended by someone else using the term 'denigrate', simply because they've seen the movie and picked up on this faulty idea?

It's not quite up to the level of the feminist who objected to the term "mandate", but it's not that far from it.

Stumbling into Nausea

One of my favourite things is StumbleUpon. Today it led to me to this site. It'll make you think again about your next visit to a so-called "family restaurant". (At least, it ought to make you rethink what you order.)

And the #1 worst food bothered me for a whole different reason - as an Aussie, I cringe at the thought that Americans might think that here in Oz we would actually eat "cheese fries". We don't even use the word "fries" here. And we certainly don't have "ranch sauce" (or 'ranch' anything else). I don't know where the Outback Steakhouse is, and I don't really care to find out.

Excuse me now, it's almost dinner time and I have to throw a couple of roo steaks on the barbie.

Web + Mathematics -- Take 2

At the end of 2006, I posted a rant about the sorry state of working with Mathematics in the browser. That post elicited some good feedback, but I was still dissatisfied with the overall situation. I still am, to some extent. Microsoft still couldn't bring themselves to add support for MathML in IE7 (along with a host of other things) - at least MathPlayer is still there to paper over the gaping hole. Apple's Safari browser is into version 3 and still struggling with MathML. It's not encouraging.

But there are good things happening. Peter Jipsen of Chapman University has developed a javascript approach to entering equations in a simple syntax (well, simpler than LaTeX, at least, and nowhere near as verbose as MathML itself) and rendering it on-screen with Presentation MathML. It's called AsciiMath. And it works! Not only that, adding it to Moodle proved to be simplicity itself.

There are a few caveats. (Isn't there always?) Because you are using Presentation MathML, you need the MathML fonts installed on your computer. And if you use IE, you need MathPlayer (or a real browser, but let's not go there.) If you use Safari... sorry, try Camino or Flock.

But it's a big step in the right direction. Especially if you are using a VLE like Moodle, since it means that students can enter their own mathematical equations and expressions without needing to resort to other software for its creation and/or editing.

Being able to type in `x^2 +(3x)/5 =0` and getting a good-looking equation on-screen is exactly the level at which students (and teachers) need this to work - a simple, effective way of entering their equations resulting in immediate and effective presentation.

Peter Jipsen - you're a legend.