voluntaryXchange

Grousing

For the first time in my life, my university built a new building and gave me an office in it. I like that part.

I do not like the penny-wise-pound-foolish decision to not provide enough shelves.

Here’s Bill Nordhaus in his office:

Last I checked, professors used books. And the best place to store them is on shelves.

In my new office, I have four. Shelves. Not bookcases. Shelves.

BTW: This does not seem to be a university wide problem. The English faculty, who got refurbished offices instead of new ones, have 21 shelves. And, our old bookcases (I had 3 of them) have been repurposed for the use of the Geosciences faculty.

Saddened

Sorry … OLW and Typepad still refusing to play nicely with each other from the PC I wrote this on.

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I rarely watch the news on TV. I almost never watch the local news because it comes from Salt Lake City, 250 miles away.

And what was I doing on Spring Break? Tuning in at Noon because our cable was glitchy and I was checking it out.

The lead story (featuring many photos of familiar places) was that The University of New Orleans was shut down for the day due to violent threats from a student who was still at large.

I was on the faculty at UNO for most of the 90’s, and still have friends there.

Weird American Priorities, Education Edition

I am sorting through paper multiple choice exams from a large lecture. They get question sheets, and enter their answers on a machine scored sheet.

My students were told, more than once, that while they can’t keep the exam they should feel free to write all over them. I keep them and let them review them in office hours.

The American students, almost always, turn in question sheets that look untouched.

No marks at all.

No cross outs of weaker choices.

No circling of answers that were later transferred to an answer sheet.

No signs of any reflection about the answers.

No sketches.

Not even a doodle.

The international students mark their question sheets up quite a bit.

Here’s some things I infer about Americans from this.

• The obsession with not wasting paper is a hugely misplaced priority. Paper is cheap, and it’s a renewable resource. Get a clue: perceiving that paper should not be wasted is not the same as grossly overestimating the cost of that behavior.
• To the extent that they take other exams online (and this is not as common as you might think), they have lost, or never developed, important critical thinking skills related to playing with the alternatives ... because they generally can’t sketch these things out on the screen.
• They may have been conditioned to tests based mostly on memorization, where consideration of alternatives may not be important.
• Re-use of exams by teachers is widespread. One wonders if this is because they can’t make up alternative questions, or would be unsure of the answers if they did. Another possibility is that norming across sections and semesters is common, although my impression is this would be too much work for most teachers.
• Students are just lazy.
• Teachers are just lazy.

Technorati Tags: paper,exam,question,sheets,writing,doodle

The Student’s Economic Costs vs. Accounting Costs in College Choice

I’m not too concerned about the particular case, but there’s some good economics here:

This is a lawsuit …

… it claims that CollegeAmerica’s tuition is much higher than at community colleges. But since it takes far less time to obtain a degree at CollegeAmerica, the cost to graduate is actually lower there. And if one counts as a cost the income that students must forgo while attending college and being out of the workforce, the shorter graduation time makes the total cost of a degree substantially lower—$92,000 at CollegeAmerica Denver vs. $125,000 at Community College Denver for an associate’s degree.

The lawsuit was brought by the State of Colorado against CollegeAmerica. That’s a non-traditional school, or “career college”. These are currently out of political favor generally, but mostly because of the specific actions of some. Whatever.

The case argues that tuition is too high at CollegeAmerica. But that’s an accounting cost. Economics costs include the opportunity costs of foregone income, and they show that CollegeAmerica is a pretty good deal.

The piece is called “Attack of the Nanny-State,” it’s by Peter Schwartz, and it appeared on HuffPo.

Technorati Tags: economic,accounting,cost,collegeamerica,for profit,college

Misplaced Priorities

Found this ancient cartoon (it looks like 2010) from the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

No doubt this was about the Michelle Obama led changes to school lunch menu — the ones my kids (who are generally not very picky) regard as inedible.

Technorati Tags: school,lunch,nutrition,michelle,obama,math,misplaced,priorities

Is This Me, or People I Work With, or Both

You decide:

From the November 18, 2015 issue of Pearls Before Swine.

Technorati Tags: professor,academic,boring

Food for Thought

New colleague Paul Schneider repeated this example in brown bag seminar on teaching:†

Honestly, I wonder how many adults would respond that this question is not answerable.

In doing quantitative work, particularly with undergraduates, I run into something like this. It’s a sure fire sign that a student doesn’t understand the problem their working with if they print out every possible digit produced by their computer or calculator. Rounding, I guess, is an indicator of comfort with your level of understanding.

† I believe the cite for this is Bransford, John D., and Barry S. Stein. "The IDEAL problem solver." (1993).

Technorati Tags: bransford,stein

Hitting Close to Home

Steve Karlson of Cold Spring Shops sums up what goes on at many potentially decent universities:

… Has occurred to you, dear reader, that if college professors were as overpaid and underworked as these polemics suggest, the graduate programs would be swamped with lazy careerist local kids. [sic]  Have I just described MBA programs at lesser-known institutions? Sorry. [emphasis original]

The meme that professors are overpaid and underworked goes back at least a generation or so.

And yet, in that time I taught in 4 Ph.D. programs (2 were state flagships, 2 were urban commuter schools, 3 were public and 1 was private) that produced bright and shiny new professors. Their programs were not full of lazy careerist local kids.

I have also taught in/around 7 MBA programs (and a smattering of specialized masters programs), and yes they do tend to be filled with lazy careerist local kids.

The latter pays the bills of the former. Perhaps if it paid better, professors wouldn’t feel so underpaid and overworked.

Technorati Tags: professor,ph.d.,mba

Tell Me You Got That On Tape

Just got out of a very good, albeit required, faculty meeting about Title IX.

And the speaker presented the following helpful video:

Except this is not the video the speaker linked to.

The exact same production company has two versions of this video. What the speaker wanted to link to was the one labeled Tea Consent (Clean), and not the one labeled Tea Consent. The latter has swearing for effect.

Both videos are great, but there were huge and shocked guffaws from the audience when the unclean version started up.

It was classic. Classic to the point that a little time bit of me wonders if the speaker did it for effect.

Technorati Tags: suu,title ix,consent,tea

One More On Parental Choice and K-12 Schools

San Francisco has the highest proportion of parents choosing to send their children someplace other than the public schools.

That’s not the metropolitan area, chock-full of quasi-libertarian programmers.

That’s the city itself: arguably the strongest Democratic/Progressive enclave in the country.

And this was reported by The New York Times. Last I checked, that publication wasn’t very good about supporting parental choice.

Technorati Tags: school,parental,choice,san francisco,k-12