Mr T's rants and ravings

A couple of years ago I needed to open a Google account so that I could reply to some Blogspot blogs in the comments section. So I did. This created the possibility for a blog so I created one of those as well. A couple of reasons. One was to try different blog engines – I have several on several different sites. And one was to post the occasional post that I didn’t want to post elsewhere and also to cross post from my other blogs. I toy with the idea of consolidating some where not specifically work related and this seemed like a good place to save some of my better posts.

Well two days ago I was trying to post there and got a message that my blog was disabled. What? I was confused and annoyed but filled out the form requesting assistance.  This blog has been around for a couple of years, usage hasn’t changed so I saw no reason to seriously think that it could have been tagged as spam. Something else must have happened.

Finally, 48 hours or so later, I got a reply from Google saying that the problem I described was resolved. Yeah! So I try to open my blog and get "The blog you were looking for was not found." Doesn’t sound resolved to me. But I can get to my profile which I had not been able to get to before.

Google says the blog was marked as spam by a robot and to fill out a request to get it back. Several steps later (enter a phone number so I can get a text message, enter the code in another form and pass a captcha)  that is done and they say "We have received your request for a review to verify that your blog is not a spam blog. Someone will look over your blog and respond "

I’m sort of used to email from help desks that like this one clearly are not responding to the problem I am asking about. They usually show some the entry I made or refer to the problem they think they fixed so you can see right away if they understood your issue or not. So this was well below my already low expectations. I mean once 24 hours passed without a response expectations dropped very low.

What I don’t understand is the lack of notice to me. I use my Google account for several things. For example Feedburner (which I was using long before Google bought them) and I have played with Analytics. So they have good reason to believe that the email address is a good one. It would not take a very smart robot to send an email with the process for getting a human review. With a tiny bit of effort they could explain what set off the robot to its conclusion.

And why didn’t the robot notice that I regularly delete spam comments? Do span blogs do that? I doubt it!

Well now I await the next reply from Google. Am I optimistic? Not really. A low level of expectation has been set. This time next week I will be at Google HQ. If it is not resolved by then maybe I’ll ask someone about it.

I don’t like soccer. I really don’t like it. It may be fine for little children too young to play organized sports but really by the time you are old enough to run without tripping a lot you should move past it. So of course all this attention on the World Cup drives me a bit crazy. But at the same time I can not bring myself to not root for an American team and we have a team in there this year. So on one level I am happy that they won a game and are going to the next level.

On the other hand the further they go the more attention there is on them and the more attention (of a positive sort) is placed on soccer. This is not, in my opinion, a good thing. Sigh – what is a patriotic American to do?

Oh and yes I know that soccer is probably the most popular game in the world and much more popular in other countries than in the US. It makes me feel very sorry for them.

So a few weeks ago my main blog (about teaching high school computer science) got a new URL. For people who subscribe to it using an RSS feed no problem. I updated Feedburner (I started using it before that advertising company bought it and haven’t seen a good substitute yet) and they should all be seeing it fine. Also my statistics on Feedburner seem to still be fine. Although for some reason they are reporting about a 50% increase in subscribers. Makes me wonder but higher is better right?

For people and search engines using old links also not much trouble. There is a lot of automatic forwarding going on and, I am told, it is being done in all the right ways. So access is not lost which is a relief.

Technorati on the other hard is a bit of a mess right now. I have added the new URL but it has very low authority so far. It was 1 (out of a possible 1000) today. The old URL is still showing up because I didn’t delete it yet. It peaked at 471 (in the top 6500 of their list) about a week or so ago but has been dropping precipitously ever since. I expect it to go to zero eventually and then I will delete it. But it is frustrating because i care way too much about such things.

I am more concerned about search engine traffic of course. But so far that seems not to be an issue. I am seeing the same amount of search engine generated traffic as before the move. I guess that is a testament to the people who handled the cross over and the people who manage that sort of thing at the various search engine sites. I haven’t checked my Google Page Rank though. Not sure I want to. I think I’ll wait a while for that.

In the mean time I’m going to try and avoid changing URLs when I have a choice.

It appears that a thief cut through a padlock and broke a window and stole about $124 million dollars worth of art. First off, who knew that that much valuable art work was that easy to get at? If you watch art thefts in the movies you would expect that this sort of thing (large value art theft) was really really difficult. But apparently a large bolt cutter will do the trick. Yet another case of real life and the movies being out of sync I guess. From what I read all of the high powered security devices that the movie thieves by-pass can not really be by-passed using the tricks in the movies either.

The director of another art museum said "These five paintings are un-sellable, so thieves, sirs, you are imbeciles, now return them." In the movies such art works are unsellable at least in the open market but are sold to rich collectors who have secret collections. I have no idea if such secret collections exist but if they do I suspect this art thief knows about them and we’ll never see those art works again. After all the art stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston have never been seen again. According to that article the recovery rate for art is about 5% and for high profile art only about 20%. So apparently all this stolen art goes somewhere.

Did someone steal this art for themselves or under contract for a private buyer? We’ll probably never know. It’s pretty amazing though that thieves get a way with it so often.

Working from home I sometimes get lonely. There are conference calls, email, twitter and IM (at least) but there isn’t a lot of casual people talk. Sure some of the IM and Twitter chat is just that – chit chat – but it is different from standing around the water cooler and chatting. I’m not sure how but it is. Perhaps it is the lack of body language or facial expressions. So sooner or later I really need to be with people.

And then there is the other extreme. I worked last weekend. I was with people pretty much constantly from getting to the airport Friday morning until I got home late Monday night. Sure I slept but I was with people from breakfast (earlier than I usually get up) until after dinner (usually 9PM or later). It was a lot of people time.

By the time I got home I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts. Even the email felt like a lot of contact. I sort of wanted to lock myself in a room and avoid the computer, email, twitter, the phone and people face to face.

I don’t think the people contact was over much though. I really like the people I work with. It is a serious treat to spend time with them. So it wasn’t them. I think it was me. It was too much of a change, too fast and for too long. If I were with people more often (in real life) I think I would have come home without feeling the need for alone time.

Balance is key in so very many things. I  think my goal going forward is to keep my daily level of contact with people in real life higher than it currently is. Perhaps I need to join a club or something. Something to get the balance better. This is something to keep in mind if you get the chance to work from home though.

I was sitting in the hot tub thinking. I actually do some of my best (and weirdest) thinking in the hot tub. It occurred to me that one way teachers fail their students is by letting them know that they don’t like what they are teaching. Perhaps they are teaching a class because the administration was stuck for someone and they were assigned. Or they are a teacher who has to teach several subjects (like many elementary teachers) and the hate Math or History or something. But for what ever reason they are teaching something they would rather not be teaching. If they hide that fact great. If they let it all hang out the students are going to be turned off. They may never recover and may miss out on the chance to find a great love for their life. After thinking about this for a while I started thinking of what other ways could teachers fail there students. Below is the list I came up with. I doubt it is complete but it covers a lot of ground.

Let your students know you hate what you are teaching

This lets them know that what you are teaching is not important. You are giving them permission to not care about it.

Do as I say not as I do

Hold them to tight deadlines and then miss the deadlines you set for returning things graded. This does two things – first it means that feedback in not timely and so is much less useful for learning. It also teaches them that life (and you) are not fair and reliable. It says you don’t respect them and they will reciprocate by not respecting you and what you are teaching.

Avoid asking questions that force students to think

Of course you want to ask questions. But ask questions that require only rote regurgitation of facts. Questions that make students think encourage them to think independently and to understand things more deeply. That would contribute to you being successful as a teacher and them more successful as learners and as adults.

Curb your enthusiasm

Chances are good that you will teach something you care deeply about. Hide it! If students see that you are excited about something they will get the idea that it is important, useful or even interesting and so learn it better. Worse still they may want to learn more on their own or even go into that field. Only successful teachers want to see that sort of thing happen.

Teach to the test

You can teach things that have value in ways that show value beyond the test. Avoid that. By emphasizing the need to know something because it is on the test you can narrow student’s view of the subject. Better still you are implicitly giving them permission to forget it all once the test is over. You wouldn’t want them to retain knowledge and build upon it now would you?

Drill and practice all the time

Bore the heck out of them. Rote memorization is good. Well really the only two times I can think of when it really matters are learning the alphabet (silly teachers teach that with a fun little song – shame on them for making it fun and easy) and the times tables. Somebody may have a fun and easy way to learn them but don’t go looking for it. Just think of the frustration they can have the rest of their lives if they don’t learn this well!

Grade based on things other than what students know

Johnnie’s mother is president of the PTA so doesn’t that mean her son is an A student? Of course it does. Jenny always sits quietly and never says a word. Isn’t that worth an A? Jack is always asking tough thought provoking questions taking up time and forcing you to cover more material. C student? Why not. Arbitrary and capricious grading with convince students that study is pointless, grades and meaningless and the whole testing and grading process is a farce.

Assume all students learn the same way

If you learned it one way that should be good enough for everyone! Differentiated instruction is a time waster. Let them figure it out on their own. Or not – who cares.

Always view test scores as about the failure or success of the student and not as a tool to evaluate your teaching

Everyone failed one part of the test? The whole class much be dummies. Never assume that you might have taught it wrong. That sort of thinking could lead to new teaching methods, reteaching material or worst case differentiated instruction.

Write “gotcha” questions for tests

Trick questions. Questions with several very good answers but only on “best” answer. Weirdly phrased questions that are targeted at common misconceptions. Anything and everything that will ensure students have some level of failure. Remember you are going to blame them anyway. These questions will give you opportunities to make students feel like the dummies you know they are. Plus it will ensure that some number of students will just plain give up trying for good grades and not bother learning.
 

I think that most of us have at least one teacher in our own education who was above the rest. The lucky people have several like that. These are the teachers who really inspired us, who taught us the most, and who really made our education more meaningful. But I find that many teachers do not want to admit, at least not out loud, that there are some teachers who are better or worse than average. To do so would open the door for real evaluations and ultimately differentiated pay.

The myth I hear expressed time and again is that all teachers should be paid the same because they are all doing the same work. And that is true to some extent but some people just do it better. Sometimes a lot better. Sometimes, obviously, a lot worse. Many teachers do not trust their administrators to be fair judges of teacher quality though. All too often this distrust is warranted. Other times teachers are uncertain of their own quality of teaching. We know that in many fields women tend to under-estimate their ability while men over-estimate it. Teaching is a field that is dominated by women so we should not be surprised that people who may be more concerned about how they would fare in a fair evaluation are avoiding being evaluated.

The press for evaluation teachers on student test scores is an attempt to add some objectivity into the teacher evaluation process. If this were being done right it might work. But of course it is not being done right. Comparing how a teacher does with one group of students does with a totally different group is completely flawed and invalid as a tool. That is what No Child Left behind does and so it should be no surprise that intelligent teachers reject it.

It is a complex problem that refuses a simple solution. That being said it is one we really need to address.