A boy asked me how long I’d been teaching. When I said fifteen years, he asked whether I was burnt out.
I told him no. That probably eighty percent of my interactions with students are positive. I enjoy being around them. They leave me with a weird hope about the future.
I've been working on a project for a while now and wanted to share a brief glimpse of it and also kind of document what has been occupying my time: GrAss: teacher-designed AI & grading system.
The LZ paper reports one 248-keV event at 2.6σ global significance—interesting, but explicitly not a discovery. That makes an epistemic angle stronger than the claim that 'dark matter IS found.'
A student writes, “Increasing effective nuclear charge decreases atomic radius.” It may have been memorized, reconstructed from an electrostatic model, copied from a friend, or polished by AI. The words alone cannot tell me which.
I remember a poster quote:
“To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
There’s a familiar complaint in classrooms: “We’re never going to use this.” At the level of content, that objection is often correct. Most students will not carry specific formulas or niche facts into their adult lives in any direct way. This is often true in physics and chemistry, my subjects. But the mistake is in stopping the analysis there.
Normally, when someone is unfocused and at rest, there is synchrony of activity in brain regions known as the default mode network, which is typically more active during rest than during performance of a task. (In contrast, these brain regions in people with A.D.H.D. appear functionally disconnected from each other.) Dr. Mattfeld found that adults who had had A.D.H.D as children but no longer had it as adults had a restoration of the normal synchrony pattern, so their brains looked just like those of people who had never had it.
WE don’t yet know whether these brain changes preceded or followed the behavioral improvement, so the exact mechanism of adult recovery is unclear.
But in another measure of brain synchrony, the adults who had recovered looked more like adults with A.D.H.D.
In people without it, when the default mode network is active, another network, called the task-positive network, is inhibited. When the brain is focusing, the task-positive network takes over and quiets the default mode network. This reciprocal relationship is necessary in order to focus.
Both groups of adult A.D.H.D. patients, including those who had recovered, displayed simultaneous activation of both networks, as if the two regions were out of step, working at cross-purposes. Thus, adults who lost most of their symptoms did not have entirely normal brain activity.
"Busteed said that 96 percent of the college provosts Gallup surveyed believed their schools were successfully preparing young people for the workplace. “When you ask recent college grads in the work force whether they felt prepared, only 14 percent say ‘yes,’ ” he added. And then when you ask business leaders whether they’re getting enough college grads with the skills they need, “only 11 percent strongly agree.” Concluded Busteed: “This is not just a skills gap. It is an understanding gap.” ...the success stories shared a lot of the same attributes that Gallup found to be differentiating. In successful programs, said Auguste, “students got as much applied, hands-on experience as possible, whether in a classroom or on a job site. Schools, colleges and training centers had close partnerships with regional employers, industry groups and skilled trade unions to stay up to date on job-relevant skills. And students or working learners got a lot of coaching and guidance to understand how to trace a direct path between their training today and careers tomorrow.”Pretty discouraging...
But sometimes it happens in one person, in someone who contains contradictions and who works furiously to resolve the tensions within. When you see creative people like that, you see that they don’t flee from the contradictions; they embrace dialectics and dualism. They cultivate what Roger Martin called the opposable mind — the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time. If they are religious, they seek to live among the secular. If they are intellectual, they go off into the hurly-burly of business and politics. Creative people often want to be strangers in a strange land. They want to live in dissimilar environments to maximize the creative tensions between different parts of themselves.Another interesting note is that ADHD and giftedness are hard to distinguish, thought to be parallel, and may be in "co-petetion" [sic] with one another. The ADHD helps generate constant novelty, while the giftedness acts as a filter, recognizing good ideas from bad. Although tons of people say things about how famous writers, inventors, scientists, etc., were ADHD or 2e, the truth is that you have to have focus and drive to be successful on that level. And drive is not necessarily easy to get or keep.
Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other people’s lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.Great read. I will check out the book.
Recent work in psychology, marketing, and behavioral economics, however, presents compelling evidence that more choice is not always better. Why? Because while “homo economicus can think like Albert Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s Big Blue, and exercise the willpower of Mahatma Gandhi... the folks that we know are not like that… They are not homo economicus; they are homo sapiens” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008, pp. 6–7). Homo sapiens can make mistakes, and the way choices are structured can affect how frequent and severe these mistakes may be.So it isn't just that students are studying less (which they are). They are also paralyzed in some way by the choices before them and as such never fully commit. College is a time of freedom from choice rather than commitment to a career path.
Mistakes can happen, for example, because of pure cognitive overload. When it comes to complex decisions with long-term implications, individuals often struggle to determine which factors are most important, to gather all of the relevant information, and to appropriately weigh the costs and benefits in a final calculation. For students trying to choose the right courses, just acquiring all of the necessary information, let alone absorbing it, can be prohibitively time-consuming. Details about course content are often located in one place, course schedules in another, and program rules and requirements in yet another—often in a several-hundred-page academic catalog. Some pieces of critically important information, such as instructor quality, may not be revealed until after a decision is made.
According to their study 51.5 percent of professors, responding to the question of whether they believe in God, chose the response, "While I have doubts, I feel that I do believe in God," or the statement, "I know God really exists and I have no doubts about it." While atheists and agnostics in the United States make up about 3 and 4.1 percent of the population, respectively, the prevalence of atheism and agnosticism was much higher among professors: 9.8 percent of professors chose the statement, "I don't believe in God," while another 13.1 percent chose, "I don't know whether there is a God." In other words, religious skepticism is much more common among professors than in the general American population. However, the majority are still believers.
How do these numbers break down by discipline? Gross and Simmons explore how belief in God is distributed among the 20 largest disciplinary fields. In terms of atheists, professors of psychology and mechanical engineering lead the pack with 50 percent and 44.1 percent respectively. Amongst biologists, 33.3 percent were agnostic and 27.5 percent were atheist. Interestingly, 21.6 percent of biologists say that they have no doubt that God exists. In contrast, 63 percent of accounting professors, 56.8 percent of elementary education professors, 48.6 percent of finance professors, 46.5 percent of marketing professors, 45 percent of art professors, and 44.4 percent of both nursing professors and criminal justice professors stated that they know God exists.
Gross and Simmons also attempted to discover the proportion of professors who think of themselves as religiously progressive, moderate, or traditional. They found that professors in the social sciences and humanities are more than twice as likely identify themselves as religiously progressive (32.5 percent and 35 percent, respectively), while a larger number of physical and biological scientists see themselves as moderate (32.2 percent) as opposed to progressive or traditionalist.
The research also describes the religious affiliation of professors in the United States: 37.9 percent can be classified as Protestant, 15.9 percent identify themselves as Roman Catholic, and 9 percent as "Other Christian." Jewish professors make up about 5.4 percent of the sample, and 2.6 percent are Muslim. Overall, 18.6 percent stated that they were "born-again Christians." Around 46 percent of professors who identified themselves as "traditionalist" were also born-again Christians. Although, as noted above, 51.5 percent of professors say they believe in God, 31.2 percent claim to have no religious affiliation. In other words, they don't belong to any particular religion, but still believe in a higher power.
Bauer went on, and he claimed, "I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina," adding, "You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I'll show you the worst test scores, folks. It's there, period."Let's leave aside for the moment the politics of this statement. Bauer is right: the painfully obvious fact is that poverty is correlated to poorer educational outcomes. But he's an idiot in the way he links them: the correlation between poverty and low test scores is not caused by allowing poor children to receive free lunch. It's one thing to not have an IQ of 140, and quite another to be so completely clueless about the logical fallacy being committed here (cum hoc ergo propter hoc).
If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong. Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, “Intelligence and How to Get It,” which also offers terrific advice for addressing poverty and inequality in America.As I've said before, I don't put much stock in basic IQ tests if the results are anywhere between -1.5 to +1.5 standard deviations from the mean. Outside of that, you can probably roughly correlate an IQ test to basic intellectual ability by labeling someone as "bright" or "dim" I guess. My interest in the genetic basis for intelligence is especially acute in these "outliers" as I figure they have the most to show us about differences in brain development and structure. It would be fantastic to learn that a simple drug or developmental program could raise IQ, but my hopes for such genius will probably remain unallayed.
Professor Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity — but focuses on how to raise America’s collective I.Q. That’s important, because while I.Q. doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher I.Q. correlates to greater success in life.
Intelligence does seem to be highly inherited in middle-class households, and that’s the reason for the findings of the twins studies: very few impoverished kids were included in those studies. But Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia has conducted further research demonstrating that in poor and chaotic households, I.Q. is minimally the result of genetics — because everybody is held back.
“Bad environments suppress children’s I.Q.’s,” Professor Turkheimer said.
One gauge of that is that when poor children are adopted into upper-middle-class households, their I.Q.’s rise by 12 to 18 points, depending on the study. For example, a French study showed that children from poor households adopted into upper-middle-class homes averaged an I.Q. of 107 by one test and 111 by another. Their siblings who were not adopted averaged 95 on both tests.
Another indication of malleability is that I.Q. has risen sharply over time. Indeed, the average I.Q. of a person in 1917 would amount to only 73 on today’s I.Q. test. Half the population of 1917 would be considered mentally retarded by today’s measurements, Professor Nisbett says.
Good schooling correlates particularly closely to higher I.Q.’s. One indication of the importance of school is that children’s I.Q.’s drop or stagnate over the summer months when they are on vacation (particularly for kids whose parents don’t inflict books or summer programs on them).
Professor Nisbett strongly advocates intensive early childhood education because of its proven ability to raise I.Q. and improve long-term outcomes. The Milwaukee Project, for example, took African-American children considered at risk for mental retardation and assigned them randomly either to a control group that received no help or to a group that enjoyed intensive day care and education from 6 months of age until they left to enter first grade.
By age 5, the children in the program averaged an I.Q. of 110, compared with 83 for children in the control group. Even years later in adolescence, those children were still 10 points ahead in I.Q.
Professor Nisbett suggests putting less money into Head Start, which has a mixed record, and more into these intensive childhood programs. He also notes that schools in the Knowledge Is Power Program (better known as KIPP) have tested exceptionally well and favors experiments to see if they can be scaled up.
Another proven intervention is to tell junior-high-school students that I.Q. is expandable, and that their intelligence is something they can help shape. Students exposed to that idea work harder and get better grades. That’s particularly true of girls and math, apparently because some girls assume that they are genetically disadvantaged at numbers; deprived of an excuse for failure, they excel.
“Some of the things that work are very cheap,” Professor Nisbett noted. “Convincing junior-high kids that intelligence is under their control — you could argue that that should be in the junior-high curriculum right now.”
The implication of this new research on intelligence is that the economic-stimulus package should also be an intellectual-stimulus program. By my calculation, if we were to push early childhood education and bolster schools in poor neighborhoods, we just might be able to raise the United States collective I.Q. by as much as one billion points.
That should be a no-brainer.
* Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.Compare that to the numbers from 2006, reported as the % answered correctly (2006 SE, Table 7-10):
* Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time.
* Only 47% of adults can roughly approximate the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water.*
* Only 21% of adults answered all three questions correctly.
STATE-MANDATED IGNORANCE.... McClatchy ran a disturbing piece the other day, noting the results of a new study examining Texas' public schools and lessons on sexual health. It wasn't at all encouraging: "The overwhelming majority of Texas schools use scare tactics and spread myths in place of teaching basic sex and health information that students can use to protect themselves and others."I've heard before that "nothing fails like prayer"...maybe that should be amended. Faith-based sex education fails miserably.
The report, Just Say Don't Know: Sexuality Education in Public Schools, published by the Texas Freedom Network, studied materials from 990 Texas school districts and found that 94% of the districts use "abstinence-only programs that usually pass moral judgments while either downplaying or ignoring contraception and health screenings." An additional 2% ignore sexual health altogether. "What is left is a miniscule 4 percent of Texas school districts that teach any information about responsible pregnancy and STD prevention, including various contraceptive methods," the TFN noted.
Let's not forget that state-mandated ignorance on this scale comes with considerable costs. Texas, thanks to its taxpayer-financed confusion, has one of the highest teen-pregnancy rates in the nation, costing the state "approximately $1 billion annually for the costs of teen childbearing."
Data from the CDC further showed that "young Texans overall rate well above national averages on virtually every published statistic involving sexual risk-taking behaviors," making this "one of the most pressing public health issues facing" Texas.
Hyperactive is a word often used to describe gifted children as well as children with ADHD. As with attention span, children with ADHD have a high activity level, but this activity level is often found across situations (Barkley, 1990). A large proportion of gifted children are highly active too. As many as one-fourth may require less sleep; however, their activity is generally focused and directed (Clark, 1992; Webb, Meckstroth, & Tolan, 1982), in contrast to the behavior of children with ADHD. The intensity of gifted children's concentration often permits them to spend long periods of time and much energy focusing on whatever truly interests them. Their specific interests may not coincide, however, with the desires and expectations of teachers or parents.I'm not sure if our baby is gifted or not, but I'm hopeful that's what it is from the evidence I've seen. Now I know you're a genius if you're reading my blog, and I know that I'm a little fixated on the idea of giftedness generally and especially studying the lives of the highly gifted. Thus this may be me fixating on something that doesn't exist, but that I hope does. Otherwise, our baby may be autistic or something...but I'm not too worried about it, since it makes eye contact, smiles, coos and goos, &c.
Moreover, the Reformers say, conservatives need to pay attention to the way the country has changed. Conservatives have to appeal more to Hispanics, independents and younger voters. They cannot continue to insult the sensibilities of the educated class and the entire East and West Coasts.
It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." ... The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them. [...]And the WaPo says:
Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives' "disdain for liberal intellectuals" had slipped into "disdain for the educated class as a whole," and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn't care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead.
Tuesday's Republican debacle was, as the social scientists say, "over-determined." It had many causes. Was it brought on by congressional corruption, Bush administration incompetence, intellectual exhaustion or John McCain's failings as a candidate? All of the above -- and then some.They go on to dissect three of those four causes, but not intellectual exhaustion.
An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.I really think that Americans were so sick of our Idiot-in-Chief that listening to Barack refuse to oversimplify answers and pontificate was actually refreshing. We understood that it was time for a leader who was goddamned razor-sharp and willing to consider arguments from all perspectives. Republicans had some ideas for this election, but their ideas lacked the force of power that Democrats' did, precisely because Republicans have a sort of dogma that resists challenge.