The Next Step

People procrastinate because there is a tendency to get positive reinforcement for it from very early on in their lives. Academia is especially bad with this. The go-getters tend to be the ones doing extra work due to typos in assignments or late-in-the-game assignment changes, much to the procrastinators’ relative benefit. Sometimes assignments are canceled altogether or, in the case of one of my CS courses in college, are proven impossible by whoever tries it first.

What, then, is the incentive to work on these things sooner than we absolutely have to? No wonder everybody in the CS program learned to put their assignments off until the night before it was due. You can see the results of this in the business world where such behaviors really can hurt, but have been ingrained to such an extent (16+ years of education) so as to be hard for people to un-learn. Educators have to find a way to encourage proactive behavior or at the very least not reward procrastination.

I’ve made a decision this semester that I want to try to keep all my notes in digital form, which has a number of advantages: I can search them much more easily, I don’t have to carry around a bunch of notebooks, and it makes it easy for me to keep a copy of my homework even after I pass it in. It also makes them easy to archive and back up.

This was working nicely for me until I went to do my first assignment for Network Fundamentals, my only class this semester with a fair amount of math in it. There isn’t any calculus, certainly nothing beyond some algebra, summations, and basic statistical method, at least so far. I sat down to take a crack at it and realized in about five seconds that my plain-text methods were not going to work nicely. It’s very hard to keep your thought process going without being able to see equations written out in familiar symbols and layouts. For summations especially, plain text fails miserably.

So I conceded that I would have to use something that could lay out problems in more readable formats. My first instinct was to reach for Microsoft Word, which I knew to have an equation editor that I had never used before. After installing it, I set about trying to set up my equation. After about twenty minutes of fooling with the toolbar (that conveniently has no words on it), I had managed to set up something resembling a fraction with summations on both the top and bottom. I was finally ready to begin to solve the problem, when I realized that I would have to go through that process again for each step through the solution. Not only that, but I had had to invest so much attention and energy into formatting the formula that I forgotten what the original problem even was!

The tool was getting in my way. How can I focus on the math problem when I have to spend so much of my energy just to write down one step? As it turns out, I gave up on Word and went back to good old pencil and paper. The number of digital advantages I lose by doing that pains me, but I just couldn’t see any other efficient way of solving the problems. The freedom and familiarity of the pencil (and eraser!) let me focus on the problem at hand, rather than the pencil itself.

This problem interests me particularly, as someone who has always been into math and who chose to go into programming. To write my homework on a sheet of paper means to have only one copy, which I have to pass in. Of course, I can photocopy it if I don’t mind spending a few cents or using the ink. But as a programmer, this strikes me as a violation of the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle. My data should be in one place and one place only so that if I change it once, all its representations change. This, to me, is one of the major disadvantages of paper.

This made me think about all the other computer programs I’ve ever tried to do math on. To me, all merely supplemented pencil and paper, never replaced it. Can we ever have a math program that allows that level of free thinking? I can imagine that tablet PCs may be able to reach that level, but they are a long way from general adoption. Data would be difficult to edit without that very specialized hardware and, in any case, your data would be no more than some kind of image file, gaining you none of the searching advantages of digital text, nor much (if anything) in the way of automated calculations.

The bottom line is that, while there are a lot of programs out there that are good for displaying finished calculations, I’ve yet to find one that is as good as pencil and paper for actually doing math.

Standardized tests have gotten completely out of control, and it’s high time something was done about it.

1. They don’t do what they are intended to do.
Try as they might, the board of education (at least here in Massachusetts) still cannot come up with a test to determine which child is creative and thoughtful, and which one just had parents with the money to drop on a nice prep course.

2. They hurt kids.
Don’t take this the wrong way. I am all for straight talk in education, even if it means telling a kid that he just isn’t smart enough for X. However, the vast majority of kids know exactly where they stand on the intellectual ladder and don’t need some very official-looking number from a statewide test rubbing it in their faces.

3. They hurt taxpayers.
I would go as far to say that the only group benefiting from MCAS (or any standardized test) is the test preparation industry. You can be sure that “big education” folks are all up in your government selling them books and supplies, many that even have the test’s name on the cover. Your tax dollars pay both for the people who create the test, and for the books and courses to help your kids pass the test. This is, of course, in addition to regular school, which is increasingly just an extended test prep course.

4. Going “by the numbers” doesn’t work in education.
It seems to me that the educational system has tried to learn something from business, and expects graduation rates to go up every year. This would be fine, except for the fact that children aren’t getting much smarter. Teachers are expected to maintain a certain pass rate (or even improve it), and therefore push through some kids who should probably fail. I believe that this was a big part of the motivation behind standardized testing. However, now instead of just being able to push the kids through, the teachers legitimately have to spend all their time repeating the same points until the dumbest kids in the class finally get it, holding the smarter ones back. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think it’s right to just “push kids through,” but we are running into the collision of several major issues here.

5. Teachers are evaluated based on student performance.
This is a tough issue for me. On one hand, you can’t argue with results. There are some teachers who are just really really good. Certainly, these teachers should be rewarded. However, for a teacher to know that his performance is being judged by how his students do on a single test only encourages him to ignore the ones who will pass it easily, and focus all the attention on the ones who won’t. Even outside of the standardized testing world, it prevents teachers from acting honestly all the time, even if only subconsciously in some cases.

6. You absolutely have to trust your teachers.
What it all comes down to is that you need your teachers to be trustworthy individuals and, more importantly, you need to actually trust them. If you’ve hired someone who isn’t doing his job well, you will find out, one way or another. If you, as a parent, think that teachers aren’t doing a good job, well maybe you should be a teacher. And if you are, good for you. Keep fighting the good fight.

1. Find out I got three A’s and an A- (+1)
2. Find out my mechanic doesn’t have the mirror he said he’d have today to fix my car. (-1)
3. The Bruins beat the Senators, 7-2 (+1)
4. Rumor has it that Amazon is going to try their hand at opening a DRM-less music store (+0.5?)

Also, it would appear that my readership entirely disappeared with the beginning of Northeastern’s winter break. Oops.

Fresh off of Thanksgiving break, I’m being thrown to the wolves. Here’s a rough outline of this week’s activities:

MONDAY: 2500 word proposal due, Japanese vocab quiz
WEDNESDAY: Stats exam, Japanese vocab quiz, programming assignment due
THURSDAY: 1000 word draft of portfolio reflection due, Japanese listening and speaking test

And through all this, I have to deal with Twilight Princess sitting in the living room begging me to play it.

I realize this is very old, but I had never seen it before now, and now only because I’m doing some research for a paper. Well worth a read, in a 1984 kind of way.

Yeah, I guess I’m just crazy busy and can’t find enough time amongst all my important things to update my blog. That might be a lie.

Actually, I’ve spent a lot of time lately playing Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, a game I highly recommend and a bargain at just $20 now. I just beat it yesterday, so that might help to explain the sudden update.

I guess it’s a good thing that I’ve been playing so much, because it’s helped to distract me (or at least dull the pain) from the Red Sox as of late. Looks like it will yet again be the pitching that is our undoing. And the yankees getting Abreu today…. it makes me sick. Guys like Mike Mussina and Bobby Abreu should not be playing for the Yankees. Guys like Randy Johnson and Alex Rodriguez should be playing for the Yankees. They can have Julian Tavarez too.

I had both of my midterms on Thursday of last week, and (hopefully) blew them both away. Physics has been wicked easy, Database less so, but I think I’ll survive. Everything in that class is a little… muddy, I think is the best word for it. The windshield is constantly dirty. You kind of know the basic idea of what’s in front of you, but you’re out of washer fluid and the wipers just sort of smear things around. Then you get home and forget to refill it, and get mad again the next day when the same thing happens.

So today, Tellef, Lauren, and I were down at Beaconsfield throwing the softball around when a bunch of people started showing up with bags of equipment and throwing their own softballs around. I was thinking “crap, they’re going to take the field and we’re going to have to move” when one of them came over to us and asked if we wanted to play. To which we replied “Hell yes.” So the three of us played softball with Ted and Kim and friends, who (small world) happened to all be Northeastern law students. So that was a lot of fun. Hopefully we can run into random people who want to play softball with us more often.

TODAY: Haircut + Calc quiz + interview + regular classes
TOMORROW: Train ride to Littleton + Interview in Littleton + Train ride back from Littleton + Class (and homework due so it can’t be skipped) + studying for Systems quiz
WEDNESDAY: Regular classes + Systems & Networks quiz + studying for calc midterm + studying for physics quiz
THURSDAY: Calc midterm + regular classes + physics quiz + studying for Thoery of Comp. midterm + physics lab report
FRIDAY: Lab report due, Theory of Comp. Midterm.

But ethan has it worse. All the same as above, but throw in like 2 more interviews, none of which are actually in Boston.

The first day of classes is over, and I am not pleased. I have all four of my classes on the same days (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday), except for one that runs only Mondays and Wednesdays. While this does give me a couple of nice days off, it also forces me to go to lunch during the activity period (when everybody goes to lunch). So naturally I had to wait in line forever and then fight for a place to sit. It’s definitely an incentive to keep food in the dorm room. Stupid freshmen.

Well, off to do tons of homework.