Education

[pilowsky]

That's the important point. We know what would be ideal for educating kids, but we also know that the pandemic won't allow that. In the spring educators and parents were just improvising, since they had no time to prepare for the switch from in-person to virtual teaching. This summer they should be figuring out how to improve on it.

 

We have to accept that it won't be as good as the "real thing". Trump and DeVos, as usual, are just ignoring reality and pretending that we can go back to the way things were. Are kids really going to learn better if they also have to watch their parents and grandparents dying around them?

 

I agree, unfortunately for the average person - by which I mean people that do not have vast amounts of money like Trump and DeVos - these two are not 'ignoring reality'.

 

I will set aside my resolution not to characterise people for just a moment.

 

Trump is completely clueless. An intelligent thought has never crossed what passes for a mind in his entire life. The only thing that Trump thinks about is Trump. If you have a Dog or a two-year old child then you can understand Trump. Trump is easy.

 

DeVos and the rich ones are different. They only care about money. But they are cunning - like *****-house rats. They want schools to open so that the slaves can go back to work for them and earn money for them. If the slaves die they will just get other slaves.

 

They don't care about you or me or anything else.

 

Their children do not go to school. Their children stay at home safely. They vote by mail. They are the scum of the earth.

 

OK, back to normal now.

 

 

[y66]

My wife has a pretty consistent morning exercise routine. This morning she was slow getting started which she mentioned while putting on her sneakers. While she was making her excuses, I typed "I am a slug" into google translate and played it back for her in French which she found amusing. The quality of online tools available for learning a foreign language these days, including online chat, is amazing. I suspect this is well known by teachers and that this may be one part of distance learning that is not suffering.

[kenberg]

My wife has a pretty consistent morning exercise routine. This morning she was slow getting started which she mentioned while putting on her sneakers. While she was making her excuses, I typed "I am a slug" into google translate and played it back for her in French which she found amusing. The quality of online tools available for learning a foreign language these days, including online chat, is amazing. I suspect this is well known by teachers and that this may be one part of distance learning that is not suffering.

 

Sounds much better in French. As often happens.

 

So, a little recess chat about languages.

 

 

I took Spanish 1 in 1952 as a high school freshman. There was an area of St. Paul, across the Mississippi from downtown, that was heavily Mexican. La Casa Coronado was then just a small bar and taco place (they later expanded greatly) but they did sell 45 rpm records by Spanish singers and I bought a couple. I'm not sure just how much I learned listening to them but it was a kick.

 

One of my favorite language stories goes back to 1981-82 when my daughter Ruth was in Spain for he junior year in college. I went over to visit her and we went here and there, including Granada. We were walking, behind a group of young men, up a hill to see the Alhambra.There is a Gypsy, well, ok, Roma, area near Granada and one of them approached the guys to read their palms. This was greeted by a dismissive "Senora, somos de Granada". So she turned toward us and without missing a beat Ruth announced "Senora, somos de Granada". I could then hear the guys talking approvingly of the Senorita. On this trip often people thought I was German. (I'm not) but no one, even for a moment, thought I might be from Granada.

 

So many fun things with language. Later Ruth and I were in Seville, going to a Flamenco place. We got lost., we couldn't find a street sign anywhere. Ruth was getting tired of always having to be the one to handle the local conversations so I approached a guy and asked "Como se llama esta calle?" Ok, he told me the name of the street but then went on with some extensive thoughts, maybe about what a nice night it was, who knows? So Ruth explained to him that her father knew how to ask what the name of the street was and, when needed, where the bathroom was, but that was about it. Although I did later, while on my own, have a very good if very challenging conversation on a train with a couple who were just returning to Spain after years of exile dating back to when Franco was in charge.

 

Ok, recess is over, back to work.

 

The grandkids range from pre-school to college (and one out of college). We will see how this will go.

[y66]

That sounds like a fun trip to Spain. I had almost forgotten I need to start planning a family trip for 2022. Will get on it. :)

[kenberg]

That sounds like a fun trip to Spain. I had almost forgotten I need to start planning a family trip for 2022. Will get on it. :)

 

It was a great trip. I have too often neglected the fun that can be had on a good trip. An early trip was with a friend by bike when I was 13. We rode up to a state park on the St.Croix river and camped for a a few days. When I was 15 I bought a car and the same friend and I took a rode trip. His family owned a cabin on a lake in northern Minnesota so we stayed there for a bit and then headed over to Duluth. I remember we saw The Caine Mutiny in Duluth. I always enjoy such things and regret not having done more of it.

 

 

Another story from the Spain trip. Granada is snuggled in the Sierra Nevada mountains and I decided I wanted to go skiing. Ruth decided to just stay in town so I had to cope on my own. I am not a great skier (to put it mildly) and I figured it would not be a good idea to break a leg this far from home so I asked Ruth to ask the locals if cross country skiing was a possibility. Ruth spoke Spanish very well but somehow the communication failed. I ended up at a place that was perfectly willing to rent downhill skills to a crazy American who wanted to plod along with them on level ground but there were no cross country skis and no suitable paths in sight. Ok, we cope. There were various lifts to various heights depending on which ticket you bought and I decided to keep things simple and buy the ticket that allowed me to use all lifts and then I went as far up as I could go. It was terrific. I was skiing down the side of this mountain with absolutely no one anywhere in sight and a great view of the mountains. There was a point where I might have gone off the edge of a path for a big drop but I managed.

 

Anyway, have a good trip and tell us about it. More fun and less Trump is what this world needs.

 

Back to education for just a moment. One thing kids need to learn is independence. Some of my best assignments required me to read stuff on my own and write up my own thoughts about it. That can be done during a pandemic.

[Cyberyeti]

 

Another story from the Spain trip. Granada is snuggled in the Sierra Nevada mountains and I decided I wanted to go skiing.

 

 

First time I was in that part of the world, there was a heatwave going on in August. You just did not go out in the heat of the day it was a considerable distance into 3 figures in the sun and a number of people died (much worse in Seville than Granada). We took the bus up to the top of the mountains and went from that to close to freezing in under 2 hours.

[kenberg]

I was in Granada in January (in 1982!). Shoirtsleeve weather in Granada, skiing in the mountains. An impressive difference.

 

 

For education, we have probably all been hearing about the learning pods. Here is an article from WaPo

 

https://www.washingt...3381_story.html

 

One take-away is that educational leadership has not much gotten in front of this. I realize it's tough, but here where I live the county spent a lot of tiime coming up with a detailed plan. About a week ago the state announced some new requirements and the county;s plan does not fully conform to the new rules. It would seem to me that the state could have put something out in June or maybe early July but a week before classes start? No.

 

So parents, here and elsewhere, are coping as best they can.

[Winstonm]

I have not traveled overseas nearly as much as I now with I had earlier in life, but the most rewarding learning I've encountered were my trips abroad. I have yet to make it to Spain but I've enjoyed immensely my travels to Portugal and Italy. Travel makes you both wiser and more understanding. If only we could make it available to everyone.

[y66]

re: One thing kids need to learn is independence:

 

From How I Became a Poker Champion in One Year by Maria Konnikova at the Atlantic:

 

Our earliest walking conversations are, as you’d expect, among the most basic. I’ve already drilled down the ground rules of Texas Hold’em: You are dealt two cards. You decide whether to play them or to fold. If you do play them, you call the “blind” bet or raise. Everyone else follows the same decision process, going in a clockwise direction starting from the player to the left of the big blind, a position called, appropriately enough, “under the gun.” And then you make that decision again every time new information, in the form of new cards, appears. At the end, if only one person holds cards when the betting is done, she wins the pot. If the hand goes to showdown—that is, the final bet is called—the person holding the best cards will win.

 

But that’s about where the simplicity ends. To the untrained eye, poker seems deceptively easy. It seems like every time I talk to Erik, he has a new story of a bartender or server or Uber driver who recognizes him and offers up the wisdom that he could play just as well; that “lucky break” simply hasn’t manifested itself.

 

Seidel doesn’t give me much in the way of concrete advice, and our conversations remain more theoretical than I would prefer. He focuses more on process than prescription. When I complain that it would be helpful to know at least his opinion on how I should play a hand, he gives me a smile and tells me a story. Earlier that year, he says, he was talking to one of the most successful high-stakes players currently on the circuit. That player was offering a very specific opinion on how a certain hand should be played. Erik listened quietly and then told him one phrase: “Less certainty. More inquiry.”

 

“He didn’t take it well,” he tells me. “He actually got pretty upset.” But Seidel wasn’t criticizing. He was offering the approach he’d learned over years of experience. Question more. Stay open-minded.

 

These Zen koans can be frustrating. I do want answers. I do want a guide for what to do with my pocket 10s from the small blind following a raise from under the gun and a re-raise from the hijack. Enough philosophy! I want to yell. Give me certainty! Tell me if I’m supposed to call or shove or fold. Tell me if I’m making a big mistake! But Seidel will not be shaken. And I’m left with that frustrating not-quite-rage that, weeks later, miraculously coalesces into knowledge. Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all. Only I didn’t quite realize it wasn’t just uncertainty about the outcome of the cards. It’s uncertainty about the “right” thing to do.

 

A number of years ago, Erik heard about a seminar led by Mike Caro. Caro is famous for his book on tells—live, in-the-moment reads of others at the table. “He’s a pretty eccentric guy,” Erik says. “And he’s walking around the stage and starts off by saying, ‘What is the object of poker?’” I nod in agreement. A question I’ve been asking myself frequently.

 

Erik continues, “Somebody says, ‘Winning money.’ He says, ‘No.’ Somebody else says, ‘Winning a lot of pots.’ ‘No.’ He says, ‘The object of poker is making good decisions.’ I think that’s a really good way to look at poker.”

 

He thinks for a bit. “When you lose because of the run of the cards, that feels fine. It’s not a big deal. It’s much more painful if you lose because you made a bad decision or a mistake.”

 

Seidel won’t tell me how to play a hand not because he’s being mean but because that answer comes at the expense of my developing ability to make good decisions. I have to learn to think through everything for myself, on my own. All he can give me are the tools. I’m the one who has to find the way through. And then, perhaps, I’ll be ready to play for real stakes, in a real casino, one step closer to the World Series of Poker.

[y66]

The hell that is remote learning, explained in a comic

 

If this is hell, imagine what it's like for teachers who have two kids the same age as the author's kids.

[y66]

From Tyler Cowen's conversation with Michael Kremer:

 

COWEN: Let’s say the current Michael Kremer sets up another high school in Kenya. What is it that you would do that the current high schools in Kenya are not doing? What would you change? You’re in charge.

 

KREMER: Right. We’ve learned a lot in education research in recent years. One thing that we saw in Kenya, but was also seen in India and many other places, is that it’s very easy for kids to fall behind the curriculum. Curricula, in particular in developing countries, tend to be set at a fairly high level, similar to what you would see in developed countries.

 

However, kids are facing all sorts of disadvantages, and there are all sorts of problems in the way the system works. There’s often high teacher absence. Kids are sick. Kids don’t have the preparation at home, often. So kids can fall behind the curriculum.

 

Whereas we’ve had the slogan in the US, “No Child Left Behind,” in developing countries, education system is focused on kids at the top of the distribution. What’s been found is, if you can set up — and there are a whole variety of different ways to do this — either remedial education systems or some technology-aided systems that are adaptive, that go to where the kid is . . . I’ve seen huge gains from this in India, and we’re starting to see adoption of this in Africa as well, and that can have a very big impact at quite low cost.

Michael Kremer is best known for his academic work researching global poverty, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019 along with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. Less known is that he is also the founder of five non-profits and in the process of creating a sixth. And Kremer doesn’t see anything unusual about embodying the dual archetypes of economist and founder. “I think there’s a lot of relationship between the experimental method and the things that are needed to help found organizations,” he explains.

[y66]

David Lipomi and Tyler Cowen discuss aspects of remote learning in covid times that will stay with us after on-site learning returns:

(starting at 32:11)

[pilowsky]

Elsewhere, there was a discussion about maths training and Bayes theorem.

I referenced a site that ranked countries according to success in a standardised maths test.

Here is a graph that compares rank in maths (Y-axis) against the number of Bridge players per 1,000,000 of population.

Turns out there is quite a decent relationship!

http://bit.ly/MathEdBridge

For added fun, here is a Geo Heat map of where Bridge is most popular/1,000,000 of population.

The data was taken from the WBF.

https://bit.ly/BridgePopularity

 

Obviously, the data from the WBF could underestimate some countries that do not pay subs for their full WBF membership - I note that Russia has exactly 1000 members - which suggests that the numbers are not completely reliable.

[barmar]

I refuse to take seriously a graph that pluralizes "math". :)

[hrothgar]

FWIW, I heard back from my nephew about Bayes theorem.

 

He did encounter it during his high school curriculum, but not until his multivariate calculus class (I have no idea why it showed up here).

 

For the sake of reference, he went to one of the top public high schools in New Jersey and will be attending Princeton next year. So, my guess is that most high school students in the US never receive any formal instruction on this topic.

[barmar]

He did encounter it during his high school curriculum, but not until his multivariate calculus class (I have no idea why it showed up here).

When I was in high school (late 70's), my guess is that less than half the students took any calculus at all. And this was in an upper middle class school district.

[kenberg]

When I was in high school (late 70's), my guess is that less than half the students took any calculus at all. And this was in an upper middle class school district.

 

I can't resist using this to illustrate just how much things have changed.

 

Brad Efron and I grew up in St. Paul, both finishing high school in 1956. We were not close but we both belonged to a teen-age discussion group (The Philosophers) and he was at my house a couple of times. He went to Central HIgh, the best public high school in St. Paul, I went to Monroe, which was, well, not the best. By my senior year, most of my friends went to Central. Greg (another Central friend, we still see each other) and I were talking about Brad and he told me that the math teacher (a trig course) brought in a calculus book, handed it to Brad, and said, here, read this, you are finding trig too easy.

I knew of no other high school senior anywhere who was involved with calculus. Greg and I had taken a non-calculus based physics course at the University of Minnesota the summer before (his parents paid for his enrollment, I asked the prof to sit in for free, permission granted). Greg, I, and others attended a free lecture series at the U of M, given by Paul Rosenbloom on Saturdays. But none of us knew any high school kid, except Brad, that was studying calculus.

 

What a difference, then and now.

 

It's great that kids are taking calculus now, or I suppose it is. I enjoyed working on cars, my car and cars that my friends owned, if I had to pick I think I would stick with the cars. But it would be nice to do both.

 

One problem that really bugs me. In the 50's, Monroe and Central were not all that much different. Central was better, a fair amount better, but today the gap between the good public high schools and those that are not so good is a chasm.

 

My apologies to Brad for telling this story w/o asking if it is ok to do so. Seems harmless enougjh.

[hrothgar]

So, here's MY Brad Efron story

 

Back when I was working at The MathWorks, I wrote up an amusing little app that I called "FitIt".

 

It used cross validation to select the optimal span for a smoothing spline and then used a bootstrap to generate confidence bounds. (Cleve Moler - one of the company's founders) was doing a walk about and really liked the application. he stopped to talk to me and asked me how I figured this all out. I explained that I had been reading a book called "An Introduction to the Bootstrap" by Brad Efron and it contained a very similar use case. The only thing that I had done was re-implement this all using MATLAB, added in GUI, and included an object to store the results of the fitting operation so folks could use it for interpolation.

 

Cleve gave a chuckle and said that Brad had been his roommate back in the day and that he knew the book and the example quie well. (He just wanted to see if I was dumb enough to try to claim credit for someone else's work)

[pilowsky]

When I finished high school research looked like a good choice.

And it was.

Every decade that followed publications where Australia was included as an Affiliation Country the start to the end of decade percentage of papers either stayed the same or increased.

In the last decade, it collapsed to 1970's levels.

[Cyberyeti]

I refuse to take seriously a graph that pluralizes "math". :)

 

Maths is the standard word in the UK, math is an Americanism

[kenberg]

Maths is the standard word in the UK, math is an Americanism

 

A relaxing early morning exercise.

 

I guess we could say maths is short for mathematics in the same way that langs could be short for languages. But while a person might study languages he might also study a language. The word "mathematics" is more like "civics". A person might study civics but I have never heard of a person studying a civic. Nor have I ever heard of a person studying a mathematic. Of course a person could study algebra and geometry at the same time, just as another person might study French and Spanish at the same time, so a plural form could have its uses. But that is not how "mathematics" is used. We don't say that a person taking a course in federal and state government is taking a civics course while the person studying only the federal government is taking a civic course. Same with algebra, geometry, mathematic and mathematics.

 

Or maybe I am wrong. Maybe in the UK a student could take a mathematic course and has to take two courses if he is to be studying mathematics.

 

This issue has not been disturbing my sleep.

A guy I once knew of English descent had to keep it straight which members of his extended family pronounced their name one way and which pronounced it in a very different way. That could be a crisis.

 

 

 

 

[y66]

I learned this word yesterday from Kim Stevenson (food writer): whatevs.

[Cyberyeti]

A relaxing early morning exercise.

 

I guess we could say maths is short for mathematics in the same way that langs could be short for languages. But while a person might study languages he might also study a language. The word "mathematics" is more like "civics". A person might study civics but I have never heard of a person studying a civic. Nor have I ever heard of a person studying a mathematic. Of course a person could study algebra and geometry at the same time, just as another person might study French and Spanish at the same time, so a plural form could have its uses. But that is not how "mathematics" is used. We don't say that a person taking a course in federal and state government is taking a civics course while the person studying only the federal government is taking a civic course. Same with algebra, geometry, mathematic and mathematics.

 

Or maybe I am wrong. Maybe in the UK a student could take a mathematic course and has to take two courses if he is to be studying mathematics.

 

This issue has not been disturbing my sleep.

A guy I once knew of English descent had to keep it straight which members of his extended family pronounced their name one way and which pronounced it in a very different way. That could be a crisis.

 

Mathematic is never used as something you study here or as "a mathematic" it is occasionally used as an alternative to mathematical.

[kenberg]

Mathematic is never used as something you study here or as "a mathematic" it is occasionally used as an alternative to mathematical.

 

I majored in mathematics in the US. In Minnesota to be more precise. If I had pursued the same course of study at a college in England and I was asked "What are you studying?" my answer would be?

 

Let's assume I wanted a more formal answer than "I am studying maths". Or is that the preferred answer?

 

This is interesting. I had always assumed that I would just say "mathematics". I spent a month long ago at a maths conference (that's the correct usage?) in England once (the University of Warwick, a great place) and I cannot recall the issue ever coming up. Of course we all knew why we were there.

 

My memory focuses on strange things. While I was there I saw the movie version of Cabaret at the Lady Godiva theater. Yeah, I also did other things.

[Cyberyeti]

I majored in mathematics in the US. In Minnesota to be more precise. If I had pursued the same course of study at a college in England and I was asked "What are you studying?" my answer would be?

 

Let's assume I wanted a more formal answer than "I am studying maths". Or is that the preferred answer?

 

This is interesting. I had always assumed that I would just say "mathematics". I spent a month long ago at a maths conference (that's the correct usage?) in England once (the University of Warwick, a great place) and I cannot recall the issue ever coming up. Of course we all knew why we were there.

 

My memory focuses on strange things. While I was there I saw the movie version of Cabaret at the Lady Godiva theater. Yeah, I also did other things.

 

I have a maths degree also, and that's how I would say it in almost all circumstances.