Administrative Idiocy is Unlimited

By Professor Doom

Administration: “The National World War II Museum is not a legitimate institution. Any time you volunteer there cannot count as volunteer service at an educational institution.”

Me: “It’s supported by the same Federal government that gives our student loans, and is one of the top museums in the world. I was approached by their education coordinator; they have student rooms for, well, students.”

Administration: “You’re being insubordinate. Stop now.”

     Often in my blog I’ve indicated the awe-inspiring stupidity and ignorance of many of the administrators running our institutions of higher education. I sprinkle my rants with select quotes of some of the amazing things they’ve said, out of fear that my own writing is sometimes dull.

Administration: “There’s no such thing as mathematical game theory, and frankly I’m a little bit angry that you would try to trick me.”

Me: “…”

--I wouldn’t dream of like, offering up a book on the subject that admin says doesn’t even exist.

      Time and again I’ve bumped into people with advanced administration degrees that I simply don’t understand how they got them. I’m not talking 95 year old senile people, I’m talking people working full time jobs, but repeatedly demonstrating an astonishing lack of knowledge, and an astonishing lack of capability to gain knowledge.

Administrator: “Yes, the policy says use of documentation is mutually exclusive in any application, and that the documentation can’t be used to apply credit twice. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use the documentation to apply credit more than once.”

Me: “…”

       The examples above are just what I’ve seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears, and although I’ve provided other eyewitness accounts of what the rulers of higher education truly know, the following should make it clear that I’m not exaggerating:

Game of Thrones quote from professor = threat to shoot up the school?

     The title does a very poor job of explaining the story. A quick summary from Inside Higher Ed: a professor posts a pic on Google+ of his young daughter doing a yoga pose. Harmless enough, except that the little girl is wearing a Game of Thrones t-shirt, emblazoned with house insignia and the phrase “I will take what is mine through fire and blood.”

     Let’s make sure we all see what was done here: the professor posted a pic of his little girl doing a yoga pose, while wearing a legally licensed t-shirt for a popular book/show. Popular amongst humans, that is…perhaps not so popular amongst administrators in higher education.

     A deanling saw the pic, felt threatened, cried havoc, and let fly the dogs of war!

“…security official said that “fire” could be a kind of proxy for “AK-47s.”

…he’s serious.

     Immediately, the deanling summoned the offending professor to a meeting with two other administrators over the “threatening e-mail.” I’ve mentioned before how there are far too many administrators, but one would hope that with three of the goobers at the meaning, there would be enough common sense in total to let the matter drop, but, well, hell no.

      Because the three administrators agreed the threat was credible, the professor was placed on unpaid leave, and would not be allowed to come on campus until he received a psychiatric evaluation.

Administration: “In response to your concerns, we’ve appointed a committee to decide if ‘consensus’ and ‘average’ mean the same thing, and are interchangeable.”

Me: “For what it’s worth, this could be resolved in a matter of seconds with a dictionary. We could clear up the complaint regarding this very quickly, and avoid a lawsuit.”

Administration: “Your lack of collegiality is not appreciated.”

--because their power is unassailable, the only thing most faculty say to admin is “yes”. It really is a good strategy, not sure why I keep trying to use common sense, instead.

To be fair, I’ve only given the basic facts. The administrators have their own insane side:

"The referenced incident refers to a private personnel matter at Bergen Community College. Since January 1, 2014, 34 incidents of school shootings have occurred in the United States. In following its safety and security procedures, the college investigates all situations where a member of its community – students, faculty, staff or local residents – expresses a safety or security concern."

--be sure to check the vote at that link. Over 99% of the voters felt the picture was not a threat, to give some idea of the disconnect between administrators and humanity (keep in mind, THREE administrators agreed it was a threat, basically 1 in 1,000,000 odds, based on the poll, to give some idea of how far administration is removed from humanity). Nothing wrong with investigating, mind you, but such investigations should probably be done by thinking human beings.

      Recall before that admin couldn’t properly investigate decades of complaints about an active pedophile on campus (and I’m not talking Sandusky), to get some idea of how bad it is in higher education right now.

      Only upon reading deeper does one find out that there are two other issues involved besides simple idiocy on the part of administration.

     First, the victimized professor had filed a grievance against admin for being denied a sabbatical; I don’t know if he had it coming, but I’m more than willing to buy that his unpaid leave and psychiatric evaluation are simple retaliation, the typical bullying of administration.

     I’ve been victimized by administrative retaliation, so I find this a likely explanation. Time and again I’ve quoted other faculty who criticize admin under a pseudonym. The pseudonym is quite warranted, as administrative pettiness and vindictiveness can be quite extravagant, I promise you.

     Second, administration is unpopular at the campus because they’re rewriting the rank and promotion rules to give themselves more control. The faculty have given the usual and impotent “no confidence” vote in response to the changes. The president of the institution:

“…has replaced elected faculty members on the Promotion and Tenure Committee with appointed members, against policy…followed previously at the college. The same goes for department chairs.”

--admin always ignores policy if it helps the faculty in any way, and I’ve written before how it’s not a good idea to give admin control over promotions. Making department head administrative appointees is, likewise, a disaster, as I’ve endured.

     The second reason gives an even better explanation for administrative idiocy here: it’s a show of force. The message is clear here: if your child is wearing the wrong t-shirt, admin has the right to suspend you without pay. And admin gets to decide what is “wrong” with a t-shirt.

     If suspension without pay is the penalty for a child wearing the wrong shirt, faculty are quite capable of realizing that the penalties for trying to stop administrative abuse will be very bad, indeed.

     This raises an important question about administrative idiocy: are they so idiotic that they seriously believe that t-shirt was a threat, or are they so idiotic that they believe the public and the law will actually accept their story that a child’s t-shirt was a threat?

      Either answer does much to explain how higher education has fallen so far in the last few years. Again, I ask: why would you want your children near any system controlled by people like these?

     

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Common Core Problems, Part 4

By Professor Doom

There is another issue to Common Core, possibly even more dangerous than making addition and subtraction so complicated that students will learn to become afraid of it long before they learn how to do it. The language is being changed, with a marked tendency towards lack of clarity and added complication. A Cheat Sheet, translating old phrases to new, is provided.

Let’s look at the changes:

“word problem” is now a “math situation”

I’m serious. First, note how the “old way” is three syllables, and the new way will use five syllables—high-falutin’ language is a sign of eduspeak, and this really emphasizes the theme of added complication for negligible benefits.

The whole point of word problems is establishing the relationship to the way we usually approach reality (word problem) to abstract world of mathematics. Calling word problems “math situations” actually breaks down this bridge, a big step backwards into making math into just math…with no relationship to the real world.

“Carry the one” is now “Regroup ten ones as ten”

Again, more words for the same concept. I’ve already addressed in the previous essay how the new method adds complication as well as separates the parent from the child. Neither of these are desirable.

“Borrow” is now “take a ten and regroup it as ten ones”

Again, more words for the same concept. Incidentally, the correct phrase should be “…break it down to ten ones”, since you’re breaking the ten apart. More syllables have been added literally for the sake of adding more syllables here.

“add” is now “increase”

Again, more syllables for no reason.

“subtract” is now “decrease”

I guess they couldn’t find a more complicated word for “subtract.” Perhaps “dis-addify”? I poke fun, and I admit that “increase” and “decrease” do at least sound more related than “add” and “subtract”…but I don’t see the net gain for the change in vocabulary.

“More than/Fewer than” is now “Compare”

It may seem like here we have a simplification, but the new word rather muddies the issue, and isn’t really a direct translation. “I have more than you” is meaningful. “I have compare you” doesn’t work, and even if it did, it doesn’t convey if I have more, or less, than you.

“How do you know?” is now “Evidence”

Again, this strikes me as a confusing translation. I just don’t see the point here, although of all the changes, this one, despite being confusing, is probably the least wasteful.

I can’t emphasize strongly enough how devastating it will be to separate the children from the parents like this.

“…When literacy was first abandoned as a primary goal by schools, white people were in a better position than black people because they inherited a three-hundred-year-old American tradition of learning to read at home by matching spoken sound with letters, thus home assistance was able to correct the deficiencies of dumbed-down schools for whites. But black people had been forbidden to learn to read under slavery, and as late as 1930 only averaged three to four years of schooling, so they were helpless when teachers suddenly stopped teaching children to read, since they had no fall-back position…”

“…Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:

After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren’t faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then…”

I very, very, strongly encourage the dedicated reader to check out this source.

     Much like the passage above, there’s considerable evidence of the devastation possible when children are separated from their families, so that only the teacher in the public school can “help” the child. This will be the true disaster of Common Core; already Americans are basically innumerate in many things, when these new “standards” come up, there will be no fall back for most families, to teach their children the necessary things (like basic addition) that will no longer be taught properly in schools.

      So far, I’ve identified three ways Common Core fails: by making the simple into something complicated, by minimal practice, and by devastating a generation of children by further separating them from their families. Alas, it fails in yet another way.

     Using a longer words for the same concepts is foolish, and perhaps this will be the one time in history separating children from parents will be a good idea, but what about simple practice of skills? In looking over the worksheets, I see there is minimal rote practice…what little skill building is in Common Core is minimally reinforced, further dooming the student. Even if he somehow figures things out, he’ll have no opportunity to truly learn.

    It’s almost as though the people involved with this don’t have human children: a human child needs to be told most everything many times, and repetition is a key part of learning. Repetition is not a part of Common Core, as near as I can tell; that’s a shame, because that means learning will not be a part of Common Core.

     But wait, there’s more.

 

     The last failure is trying and failing to teaching all this underlying theory to small children is going to delay things quite a bit. Just as much of higher education today is simply high school material repackaged for a higher price (over 90% of community college courses are identical or weaker than what is taught in high school), so too will the middle school material of Common Core simply be what used to be taught in the first few years of school, just delayed. What used to be taught to 6 year olds will now be delayed until they’re 8 years old, literally throwing away those critical formative years. I don’t know if throwing away those formative years will be the biggest crime, but those years will be thrown away.

I’m not kidding:

Under the Common Core Standards, students will not learn traditional methods of adding and subtracting double and triple digit numbers until fourth grade. (Currently, most schools teach these skills two years earlier.) The standard method for two and three digit multiplication is delayed until fifth grade; the standard method for long division until sixth.

Schools are already notorious for teaching very little considering how much time they imprison hold children. Common Core will subtract decrease the amount they’ll be teaching by TWO YEARS or more (note how “decrease” is the more appropriate word here than “subtract”, although Common Core says the words are the same).

Just as the overly theoretical method for fractions has created a generation terrified of fractions, delaying their ability to learn much math until college (if ever), so too will Common Core’s emphasis on theory first delay our children’s ability to perform basic math until college (if ever).

I realize I should just keep my mouth shut about this, since the disaster that Common Core will inflict on our children will provide ample job security for me in the future. But, it’s the right thing to do to try to prevent this disaster, even if doing so is not to my benefit.

Plenty of other educators are also taking the high road here…but not enough. What would happen if all the real teachers simply walked away from Common Core? Unfortunately, I fear it wouldn’t stop it. There are too many Educationists more than willing to sacrifice children for personal profit, and many of them are already in the schools.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Common Core Problems, part 3

By Professor Doom

     In previous posts, I’ve discussed how to add fractions. One way is very simple, simple enough a child can learn. The other way is how it’s done in public schools, using far more theory than an 8 year old can reasonably be expected to grasp. The result is a generation of students that have learned to be terrified of fractions.

     Common Core, as near as I can tell, is going to address basic addition and subtraction in a very theoretical way as well…I expect the results to be as disastrous as we’ve already seen in fractions.

Parent: “Close the bag of potato chips tightly.”

--how many times has the child left the bag open, causing the chips to become stale? Should this discussion be addressed in terms of relative humidity, bacteria growth, and chemical reactions, or should the child just be directed to close the bag properly?

     The point: a child really doesn’t need a complicated explanation for how and why to do something. Starting simple, and mastering foundation skills to build upon later, is really the way to go. Let’s take a look at a Common Core problem:

“Use number bonds to help you skip count by ten by making ten or adding to the ones.”

7 + 7 =  7 +  7   = 10 + 4 = 14

                   /  \

                3      4

The basic theory here is to exploit the base 10 numbering system. Presumably, our 8 year olds have already mastered the underlying theory of how a base 10 system works. So, they take off the second 7, and pick off 3 of it (so breaking into a 3 and a 4, connected via “number bonds” I presume), then exploit that 7 + 3 is 10, making it easy to add the leftover 4.

I’ve taught mathematics for over 20 years, and I’ve never seen the phrases “number bonds” (a bad idea, since “bonds” has other meanings) and “skip count” (a real problem for a child, who thinks of “skip” as something completely different). The new language will separate the parent from the child.

I get the underlying theory, but this is no easier than the old “carry the one” method, AND it requires the student to have already mastered subtraction (so that he can quickly realize that 7 – 3 is 4), AND to have already mastered how a base ten numbering system works AND to have realized that it’s easier to add powers of ten to units.

Now the Common Core method here is certainly graceful, but look at how much more the student needs to know to do it. It’s the same with the public school fraction method—it requires so much knowledge at once that most students get overwhelmed, and can only know fear at the sight of a fraction.

Another issue, of course, is the separation in language from the parent and child. It harms the ability of the parent to help the child with schoolwork. While I imagine most parents can follow the silliness of the Common Core method, it’s still rather strange-looking, and completely different than the “carry the one” method the parent was taught in school.

Basic subtraction is likewise handled in a more complicated way. Instead of a “borrow a ten” method (the graceful counterpart to “carry the one”), small children are instead directed to break the ten up into ones, and subtract off from there. The end result is a problem like “134 – 52”, which used to take 3 lines of text and a few seconds, now will take up a quarter of a page and a couple of minutes. Go and click on that link to see what a mess the new method is; it’s the same thing as borrowing a ten, but requires much more writing to achieve the same effect.

That’s a bit much for an 8 year old.

Again, parents will simply be annoyed and confused at handling problems in such a verbose, excessively symbolic, and arcane way.

The alleged benefit of the more complicated method is the child supposedly will have a better grasp of the underlying theory…I strongly suspect the reality will be that the child will simply be overwhelmed by basic arithmetic, much as many students today are overwhelmed by fractions.

The Common Core method may be mathematically sound, and possibly more revealing of the underlying theory…but I remind the gentle reader that this stuff is intended for a 6 to 8 year old human child. Honest, a simple method, combined with repetition, is the way to go with an eight year old. An eight year old can certainly be shown the more complicated technique, but the reality is still going to be the child will use the simple method when the time comes to calculate.

It isn’t simply the higher degree of complication in the Common Core methods, there is also the change for change sake we have here. Parents are going to have a hard time following the new vocabulary, although luckily a Cheat Sheet, translating old phrases to new, is provided.

I want to talk about these translations case by case, and why changing the language and techniques is a recipe for destruction, next time.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com

Common Core and Fractions, Part 2

By Professor Doom

Last time I covered the “sledgehammer” method of adding fractions, a method that is very simple and anyone can master in a few minutes.

That’s not the method taught in schools, however. Let’s go over what you need to know to be able to add fractions, using the public school method, and note that it takes weeks for a student to almost never master all this:

1)    You need to know about prime numbers. Prime numbers are those numbers which only have themselves and 1 as factors. So, 3 is a prime number (the only positive whole numbers that go into 3 are 1 and 3). 10 is not a prime number (since 5 and 2 are factors of 10). This is introduced around the 3^rd grade; if the student doesn’t know this, the rest falls apart and the student will never “get” fractions the public school way.

2)    You need to be able to “factor” a number into a product of primes. So, you need to be able to take 20, and write it as 2 * 2 * 5. This method is called “prime factorization”, so the prime factorization of 20 is 2 * 2 * 5. As before, if the student misses this part of class, it’s over.

3)    When you look at two numbers, you need to be able to find the Least Common Multiple (LCM). For example, the LCM of 3 and 4 is 12. One way to do this is the look at the prime factorization of 3, and 4, and multiply the non-overlapping prime factors.  So, to get that 12, I multiplied 3 and 2 * 2 (the prime factorization of 12). It can be a little more involved than this, but I’m taking a simple example just so I can go through the entire public school process of adding fractions in a sane amount of time. A student that doesn’t know LCM will never get past this part.

4)    Now, to add fractions with the same denominator, use the same steps I mentioned above (add the numerator, leave the denominator alone).

5)    If the denominators are different, well, this is where even my teacher in public school always got scared, but here goes: first, look at the prime factorizations of the different denominators, then find the LCM by comparing the prime factorizations.

 As before, I use the example of 1/3 + 1 / 4.

6)    The  LCM of my first example is 12 (by looking at the prime factorizations of 3 and 4, by using steps 1, 2, and 3). Now, compare the prime factorization of the LCM to the prime factorization of the first denominator. Multiply the first fraction, top and bottom, by whatever prime factors are not in the prime factorization of the first denominator. So, in our example, I’d multiply top and bottom of the first fraction by 2*2 (i.e., 4, since the prime factorization of the LCM is 3 * 2 * 2, and the prime factorization of 3 is just 3).   Then repeat the process with the second fraction, by comparing the LCM to the prime factorization to the second denominator.

7)    After you’ve performed the prime factorizations and comparisons and multiplications in steps 2-6, you get fractions with the same denominator. Now, just add the numerators and leave the denominator alone.

8)    Simplify if necessary.

If you can’t remember the easy way to do this, go back to the previous post, and see how much simpler it was to calculate 1/3 +  1 / 4, to get an idea how ridiculously overcomplicated the above method, used in the public school, is.

Now, the public school method is, absolutely, more mathematically graceful, especially when dealing with unusual fractions…it also overwhelms the students with the amount of material necessary to just add a couple of numbers together. In many classes I’ve taught, including calculus, the students expect the entire discussion to come to a complete halt the moment a fraction comes on the board, because they’re used to having to access insane amounts of material to deal with that fraction.

If a student is weak on any aspect of steps 1 through 7 (and all he has to do is miss a day of school for that), he is forever under the impression that adding fractions is a ridiculously hard concept meant only for “math whizzes.” Since those steps all rely on some underlying theory that few 8 year olds can follow, that’s most students.

The method covered in the previous essay? A little clumsy, but it’s simple, relies only upon basic multiplication, takes a few minutes at most to cover in complete detail…and allows the class to do a problem with fractions in it without everything coming to a halt. A student that missed that day can catch up in minutes, not days.

Since schools use the ridiculously overcomplicated method, most students go through the system with nothing more than fear of fractions.

This is my biggest problem with Common Core—the underlying theory may be fine, but covering all that theory when all a child needs is “here’s how to do it” means that any child that doesn’t follow the theory will simply walk away from math thinking it’s all incredibly complicated, instead of learning the basic skills that, when he is older, will make understanding the theory much easier.

Now that, I hope, I’ve taught the reader a simple way to add fractions, and reviewed the stupidly complicated way of public school, the reader will have an easier time appreciating my claims that added complexity (even with more theoretical grace) will make things much, much, worse for our children.

There’s another reason kids won’t gain skills in Common Core: lack of practice.

“6 hours a day, 6 days a week.”

--when in training, this is how much Michael Phelps would practice swimming. You’d think he’d know all there is to know, but still, he practiced like this. Practice the basic techniques of swimming, over and over and over again. Bottom line, that’s how you get good at a skill…repetitive practice. This level of repetition got him 57 gold medals in various competitions. Why don’t the schools know the obvious?

     To judge by the Common Core assignments I’ve seen, simple practice of basic skills is also missing. I’m not saying our kids need to practice 6 hours a day, 6 days a week, but even 15 minutes of practice isn’t going to be part of Common Core for most skills. 

     This is going to be disastrous.

Next time, I’ll address some specific examples from Common Core showing what I mean.

www.professorconfess.blogspot.com