Rico Penguin

    The US and likely most people who are attached to the capitalist system believe that money can heal all wounds. However as nice as that would be it is generally not the case. It is incredibly pleasant for me to see that I’m not the only person that sees this and indeed I’m not the only one that sees the true cure for many many wounds.

    The one of the two fellows who spoke at my Graduation Ceremony mentioned that he was running a project to educate Kenyans. This project wasn’t to throw money at them, nor to throw food at them, nor to assign them to any subjective system of beliefs for personal gain. This was and is a system that I can strongly support, the idea of educating the uneducated.

    There are no negatives to a proper education, it helps expand the understanding of the world around us as well as our own bodies. A proper education can and will provide people with a better personal attitude. Unfortunately in the US we’ve got small groups of people fighting a proper education in order to push their subjective systems of belief (again for personal gain). But as Mr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson has stated before, nations that break away from scientific discovery also break away from financial security, and he has said that this is why we will never nationally support the destruction of scientific theory or a proper education, rich folk don’t want to die poor.

    But back to Africa. There are three major things that every person not only needs but they deserve, without exception. These three major things are Healthcare, Housing, and an Education. There is absolutely no exception at all period. Now I am a bit loose with Housing, because I actually include food under that domain but if we wanted to expand so it was less abuse able, you could say “Healthcare, Housing, Sustenance, and Education.” Regardless all these things are required for a nation to be just and if it doesn’t have ANY piece of these, regardless which one, it is an unfair and unjust society.

    In the case of Africa they are largely missing all four. However the foundation for this pyramid is Education, above all else. Without an education the people are left to believe not what is true but what is most convincing, the most charismatic or more likely the most violent rule in lands that are lacking in education. Many times these people are not the best people for the job. With an education comes an understanding of proper healthcare and proper home construction techniques. Renewable systems of living are also built in the architecture of education so that people do not strip the land they live in bare and end up greatly diminishing their chances of survival.

    I could go on and on, but it is quite simple, if a nation is to succeed financially and quite frankly in any other sense (even *bleh* morally) they must have a strong and legitimate educational system. Such a system is not a democracy either, just because you do not like Gravity does not mean it doesn’t exist. But that’s a post for another time.

Since I let the day escape me (as happens on holidays) here is something interesting I read in the NYT. See what you think about it and who knows maybe sometime soon I’ll discuss what I like about it and how it could be used better (in my opinion).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/education/25cards.html?_r=1

I’m hopeful you’ll enjoy it and I’ll try to update early tomorrow so that we don’t see another filler like this .

  Well with the fiery hellscape that was my finals over I suppose we (being myself and either you the reader or just the other voices about my head) can get back to some more intellectual digging. I would also implore anyone who is going to comment to think before you speak. There are a few things that I really detest in this world, stealing, sexual assault, violence against those who cannot properly defend themselves, and lying. If you are going to accuse me of any of these, even as a joke, it is not going to pan out well. If ever there was something that could be classified as a ‘dick move’ that sort of commentary sewage would be it. I already have dozens of daily spam comments automated out I don’t need real people adding to the mix.

  So back to the topic at hand. At some point between laying down and attempting to get to sleep I suddenly had an epiphany and discovered exactly how I would like my first book to end. So I found myself now grasping full the end and the beginning but without a proper solid middle. It occurred to me further then that this tied in with a previous topic I had ranted about which was testing and education. You may be asking yourself how the hell these two are related and if it has anything to do with medians (which in this case it doesn’t).

   I am a strong believer that the average professor at a United States University is an absolutely terrible tester. If you are attempting to write a documentary on how to most improperly test a class I think you can look no further than just about any class at your local college. It’s odd especially for someone who spent most of their career in college in the field of Psychology (yes I look at it like a job because that is how it is setup hardly academic anymore). You might not be able to tell given the amount of content I’ve brooded over from philosophy since I started updated daily however my first and likely lifelong passion with be that of Psychology (and its close relative in the family that is my cognitive passions Astronomy).

  My brain seems to blue screen anytime I think about how professors who have gotten their masters in Psychology (So any professor in the Psychology department) can teach and test so improperly. It may not seem immediately apparent the paradox till you set back and realize these are the people who study learning and behavior for a living. If ever another form of verbal emphasis is added for fonts like underlining, italics, and bold I would ask that you mentally place that tag on the above line. It requires as much emphasis as possible because it leads me to the conundrum. Why in the hell do we have thousands and thousands of people spending hundreds of thousands of hours studying learning and behavior if we never implement it in education?

  I think the greatest dissonance came in the actual course Learning in Behavior when the professor had us read a book that for an entire chapter explicitly stated why, and here is the kicker, the exact way our professor was teaching and testing was not only wrong but even counter productive to the process of learning. When I brought it up she said “We teach as we were taught.” which lead me to believe strongly that she hadn’t even read the book herself. I just found it startlingly upsetting that a professor teaching a course in behavior and learning would be acting and testing in a manner that was entirely in conflict with the slides and discussions (as well as the textbook).

  I had proposed in that same class that it would seem more effective to me to have weekly smaller exams, these exams would make sure that students are quickly refreshed in the material and because of their common nature there would be little testing anxiety (as each is worth alone very little) resulting in a much more accurate portrayal of how a student is comprehending and less on how they deal with stress (which is essentially all modern exams do anymore). Likewise this system results in students understanding each professors unique (and generally widely varied) testing style so that the student can adjust their studying habits to better cope with each course.

  Do you know the actual result of this proposition? The professor asked the class if they would like a system like that and everyone for the exception of two people (so basically 28 students, 27 not counting me of course) raised their hand. Of the two that didn’t one was sleeping so I count that as a possible victory . The professor in turn had the following complaints about the proposition.

  “Well if I were to test once a week that’s an entire class period lost.” To which I responded “Weekly tests result in smaller tests. You would still have most of the class to continue.” I even gave her the example of my Greek Mythology* course which was tested in this manner. The course had an exam every Monday, the students all took the exam (which was almost entirely essay questions) and afterwards we discussed our reading and continued on for the next week of learning. To this she responded “Well Greek Mythology works like that, unfortunately Psychology can’t hold peoples attention.” I thought to myself; of course it cannot if your opinion of it is so dry. So we continued the class as all Psychology courses do, 2-3 exams, each of which determines by itself if you will pass the course or not. The interesting note is that it doesn’t matter what Psychology professors tell you will be tested on, the exam never matches the pre test information. I have joked with many non-psychology professors that I suspect it is a large scale long term study on the effects of cognitive dissonance and stress on young adults.

  A professor should examine where they want to end in a course with their students. What important information they want them to gain, they should also look back upon their own time and see what information was actually vital to them further understanding the field and not simply expecting their students to be masters of the field from their class alone. Once this has been established they should examine where best to start. This places them in a field with a beginning and an end, finally they look at how best to bridge the middle.

  As it stands each course expects you to leave as a master of the field and because of it the majority (I say this without reserve by looking at class averages) of students leave barely average in their documented understanding. We constantly improve the medical field (albeit its difficult to see at times with pill companies) and yet the educational field looks to be doing nothing but committing seppuku. So if you are a university professor, for the sake of your students and for a course that is not merely wasting the time of all involved, examine your testing structure and look for something that works not simply something you are comfortable with.

  If you are a psychology professor and you teach in the exact same manner as your professor did 20-30 years ago (as my learning and behavior professor did) you should seriously rethink your field. Because if decades of examining the phenomena’s involved with learning and behavior have not made their way into your own educational structure then I’d say it’s utterly wasted. Knowledge that is never applied is no more valuable than ignorance.

  Final Note: For those that feel I’ve addressed the problem without giving a personal solution here is how I would personally teach and test a course. First I’ll address you to read the part that begins with “A professor should” because that would be the groundwork. From there I would have weekly exams, each week I would take what I felt was the most important of the information from the previous exam and add a similar question to refresh the students memory on the next exam. Continuing this process each week until by the end of the course there is an exam with all the most essential information from earlier and the final questions from the final week. Likewise I would have an essay that asks the student on the final (since they’ll have 2 hours) to explain to me the most interesting things they’ve learned from this course. This may sound superfluous but every time I’ve seen it in action it seems to sincerely result in deep thought by a good majority of students. If I felt that I didn’t have enough time in a week to do these tests and teach I would rethink my teaching style and the material I’m covering, there is something superfluous in my information. I will end these thoughts (and be glad to clarify any unsaid information to any commenter who is curious) with a quote that was mentioned in one of my favorite video game series: Civilization IV.

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." –  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  I hope that the extreme importance of this quote is easy to grasp when discussing the problem at hand.

*(The course was and is taught by a fantastic professor by the name of Diane Johnson, if you are ever in Washington and want to meet someone whose enthusiasm for their field will inspire you regardless of initial interest, she is certainly your woman. I cannot say enough good things about her to ever do her justice.)

  It is often the belief by people that freedom is the greatest of all life’s gifts. An inalienable right that all men (well humans) are born with, or something deep and inspirational like that. I’m here to argue however that it is relatively weak on the value scale in life.

  The inspiration for this article comes from a short story today begins as many bad jokes do:

“Mother Theresa walks into the White House to speak with Ronald Reagan. When they meet she scolds him greatly pointing out the fact that the US is the richest country in the world and yet it has poor people. To this Reagan responds that “They may be poor but they are free.” to which Theresa (apparently) responded “That is bullshit. The free that are hungry desire food, not freedom. The homeless that are hungry desire housing, not freedom. The poor that are free desire aid, not freedom. Freedom is only important to those that have all that the less fortunate do not.”

  Now I’m sure I embellished a bit but the basic point is the same. When you ask a starving man on the street what he wants most of all, you are more than likely not to hear “freedom”. Which comes back to a term that was introduced to me in the “Theory of Justice” course at Western Washington. Based on a book by a man named “John Rawls”, he introduces the concept of “Primary Goods”.

  There are certain goods that no person should be without, those things are called “Primary Goods”. I don’t recall what his were but by personal opinion mine would be, food, health, education, and shelter. Now you might think that at least one of these things are superfluous but allow me to explain.

  All humans (in fact all living organisms) require food (I include any nourishing material under the tag of food) to survive. Few things that are readily and consistently available will kill you faster than being without food.

  The next important factor is Health, now you can easily place shelter under the blanket of Health and I would be willing to accept that. Without a proper and universal healthcare system you aid in the spread of disease and birth defects. Neither of which is a positive addition to any living thing. Likewise over a billion dollars a year is lost in reduced man hours because of injury and illness. In most studies that I’ve seen the introduction of a diverse and available healthcare system results in a net gain of revenue for the country involved.

  Education comes in third but it is hardly unimportant. A good education is critical to the furthering of a species…period. If we do not work very hard to create a proper, comprehensive, and efficient education system we essentially are preparing our own demise. Let me drop some information on you for instance in the US:

33% of people don’t know the 3 branches of government
75% of people knew at least 1 of the AI judges…
50% of the US States don’t require Civics and Government to graduate.

    Now let me reiterate the depressing information above. It’s not that 33% of US citizens do not know what the 3 branches do it is that they don’t know what they are period. Our country is actively creating less and less competent people and this is an incredibly dangerous thing to do. Even college is nothing more than job training, people in large do not go to college to educate themselves.

  The final factor in furthering humanity is shelter. Proper sheltering helps quell many diseases and it reduces overall health issues related to temperature and environment (that are not disease related like hypothermia). It’s relatively obvious so I don’t feel that it requires any further explanation feel free to comment if you disagree.

  Once you have fulfilled all of the primary goods, that is when freedom starts being the most important thing to deal with. Because until that happens, the only people who value freedom, are those that have the primary goods. Likewise the people who have lived their entire life with these goods will never appreciate them or appreciate just how horrible the life of a person who is without them is. Freedom feeds no-one, freedom heals no disease, freedom houses no people, and freedom educates no-one. What freedom does is allow these things to be freely dispersed and the problem is that freedom is not used in such a way. For that reason, Freedom is worthless.

  I can see no positive gain from ‘for-profit’ versions of any primary goods and the mere act of doing these things solely for profit is a slap in the face to all living people (regardless of whether or not they are within your domain). The moment people stop attributing an intrinsic (and dominating) value to Freedom and begin working on the truly valuable goods is the moment that I feel that the US will truly be a country to admire.

  A person can bash these sort of beliefs all they want, but considering the following information:

The top 10 "happiest" countries:
1. Denmark
2. Switzerland
3. Austria
4. Iceland
5. The Bahamas
6. Finland
7. Sweden
8. Bhutan
9. Brunei
10. Canada

The U.S. ended up on the 23rd place, the UK on 41, China is 82, Japan 90, and India an unhappy 125.

   These sort of studies are done all the time, and you can almost always correlate the ease of acquiring the primary goods in the nations with their ranking on the happiness scale. There are always special exceptions, however the overall pattern is difficult to overlook. Well…apparently not all that difficult considering the garbage I’ve been reading and witnessing on the topic of healthcare and education.

  A small clarification that is a common retort to this is: “What about countries under Tyranny they want freedom.” I would point people back to the paragraph just above the list of countries. When people desire freedom, they want it for the things it is supposed to aid and enhance. You’ll also find that some of the most unhappy places in the world not only do not have any freedoms, they have no primary goods as well.

  I’m pretty fascinated with learning, it’s a wonderful process that never ceases to please. However I find myself fighting to stay enthused about interactions with the university I’m currently shoveling money at. I don’t think its the financial investment either, which albeit at this point does feel a bit wasted, I think it has to do with the nature of Education in (at the very least) the US.

  When I (and most people I know) read a book the general idea is to grasp the gist of the material, the take away from the experience new outlooks on some branch of thought. When you read however for school the way that testing is made up you end up being required to memorize the entirety of the text which leaves you with a huge chunk of matter.

  I remember far more from just reading books and am more likely to return to the books when they aren’t turned into a chore. The moment my classes are over I have my college texts up for sale, the sight of them disgusts me (literally). I think the challenge of Education is to create a system of learning that is enjoyable. This is not difficult and is something that video games manage all the time.

  Learning in games? Well it’s not exactly conventional knowledge seeing as knowing the names of the 150 original Pokemon won’t exactly help you as a Chemist. However you’ll find for many people while its difficult to memorize 150 different parts of the human body, with the same amount of studying they’ll grasp all the Pokemon.

  To me it has to do with the atmosphere of the two projects. If you fail to memorize all the Pokemon on day X you will likely just be inconvenienced when trying to remember what you are missing. If you fail to memorize all 150 different parts of the human body you were handed, you look to fail an exam and depending on its weight find yourself having wasted months of time and thousands of dollars.

  So what is impeding your intake of knowledge for these two activities? For the Pokemon you are learning with no real penalty if you fail and thus you put more time thinking about the information than the repercussions. For the body parts you are trying to remember the information while having the very large negative effects of failing nagging at you.

  Anytime you are in a course where exams are far and few between you are not being tested on what you know, you are being tested on how well you deal with stress. Telling from the response of the average college student it would appear that most people are not good with handling stress.

  There are obvious ways to fix this and I’ve discussed them many times before. However this week, alongside a huge collection of Metaphysics questions I’ll take a stab at how Education should work and hopefully if enough people see it somewhere might actually try it. Be interesting to see students succeed again.

  As people who have been keeping up with these daily updates know. I would like to become a teacher. However there are some things I think require some dramatic overhauling, mainly because we are at an unusual cross roads where I feel misinformation is causing a dramatic (and ill directed) change in the education system.

  For further discussion later I will note that I am strongly opposed to most (if not all) of the premises behind the No-child-left-behind act. The logic behind taking money away from worse off schools and shoveling that money into better off schools until the worse off schools implode is terrible at best. In Seattle quite a few schools closed down because of the policy and the funding cuts and it makes me wonder when you shove 5 school’s worth of children into less than 5 schools how you are not leaving children behind.

  However it’s painfully obvious that if you wrote a bill that legalized the beating of babies and called it “The don’t beat babies bill.” people would vote for it for fear of voting otherwise leaving them labeled baby beater.

  We’ll leave that there for now and I’ll come back to it on another day. For today I’d like to discuss why all exams should be looked over with the mean, median, and mode or shouldn’t be looked over at all.

  In most of my psychology courses the professor would explain how they feel the exam tested well because the average grade was a low B. This sounded cute and fulfilling till you looked at all the possible situations where the mean or average gives you no idea of the ‘average’ performance in a course.

  Say you have an exam for simplicities sake that has 10 questions. We’ll assume each class has the same amount of students.

7 – 7 – 7 – 7 – 7
Class Average: 7 (Or 70%)

  When we thing of the average grade in a class we think of it like this (or perhaps a more direct 9 – 8 – 7 – 6 – 5 setup). If the average was 7 then everyone got roughly a C and passed the class. That’s fine and dandy in theory however the average really tells us nothing about how the class overall really performed.

10 – 10 – 5 – 5 – 5
Class Average: 7 (Or 70%)

  As you can see in this example over half the class failed the exam. If you walked into a course and the professor told you that over half of you would fail would you stay? What if they told you the class average was 70%? It is likely that the latter would trick you into assuming the course was doable when for all intensive purposes the people passing appear (when looking at the performance of the whole) to have the knowledge necessary to pass regardless of how the professor or the book educates them.

  I’ve noticed in courses with much larger numbers of students you’ll have a small group that performs exceptionally well and a vast majority that perform at just below par or quite far below par. This offsets to some ‘theoretically’ comfortable average and when seen by other faculty or staff the average alone gives the allusion of proper examination and instructional procedures.

  Likewise I feel that the next source of information is by itself relatively worthless. The median essentially tells us nothing about the performance of a class. I’ll again provide two examples that return the same result but are dramatically different. The median for those curious is the middle number when all numbers are placed in numerical order (IE. from least to greatest or vice versa). In the case of an even number you generally would take whatever is in between the two. If you meet at the middle with 7 and 6 the median would be 6.5 else if you met with 6 and 6 you’d end with 6.

  10 10 7 1 1
  Class Median: 7 (or 70%)

This seems appropriate for what the median does by itself. Indeed when you lined up the grades of all the students in your class the median grade was 70%. This is a pretty respectable performance, however you still have just barely under 50% of your course failing, 40% to be exact. This again is offset by the fact that generally speaking the people who do exceptionally well on an exam that the majority of students do on par or sub par would have performed at such high rankings regardless of the professor or the book.

8 – 8 – 7 – 7 – 3
  Class Median: 7 (or 70%)

  So the reason this bothers me is that as you can see the performance of these two classes is dramatically different. In the bottom set 80% of the class has passed, likewise the upper performance is not perfect which may hint towards a more accurate examination to teaching style. I’ll come back to why the above example is better than the first (of the median examples) in a short while.

  We finally move onto the mode, a mode is the most common digit in a set of digits. For example if you have 3 numbers and two of them are the same then the mode would be whatever that number is. However much like its cousins (or brothers/sisters what have you) the mode is utterly meaningless by itself.

10 – 7 – 7 – 2 – 1
  Class Mode: 7 (or 70%)

  A 70% is essentially the bare minimum you can receive in a course before you pseudo-pass it. When you pseudo-pass something you receive a ‘passing’ grade however you are strongly requested to retake the course. It’s essentially failing without failing and I know in the one case where it happened to me it was treated as worse than failing (which I found odd).

  Modes can get far more hokey when you get into larger groups of people. On an exam with 50 possible outcomes you could end up with only one outcome being performed more than once leaving it as the ‘mode’ where really the only thing it has on others is that its merely one larger. The mode is a support function when looking at grading and really means nothing by itself.

7 – 7 – 7 – 7 – 7
  Class Mode: 7 (or 70%)

  This case is dramatically different from the first case, your entire class passed the test which is a good thing however nobody performed better or worse than anyone else. This tends to show failure on the part of the examiner for either providing misleading study suggestions, poorly worded questions, or some other mistake that is all too common. The main reason for pulling this out again (as it matches up with the very first example) is that it leads into my main point (took a while to get here…perhaps unnecessarily so…but I’m rarely as succinct as I want to be).

  The only case in which statistics for a course are acceptable without the full print out is when the mean, median, and mode all are fairly close to one another. If any of them is dramatically different than the other an investigation should be taken. Not necessarily by the FBI but someone should look into the teaching or testing style of the professor/teacher. This is usually a good sign that something is wrong and generally when an entire classroom is effected its not all the students (people aren’t quite that homogenous yet).

  A few examples are as follows.

8 – 8 – 8 – 8 – 7
  Class Mean: 7.8 (or 78%)
  Class Median: 8 (or 80%)
  Class Mode: 8 (or 80%)

  So in the above case you have a class where everyone passed, we don’t see a case of a ceiling or floor affect (everyone neither got a 10 nor did everyone get a 1), and roughly speaking all three M’s are very close to one another. It is difficult to create a situation where all 3 are the same and you don’t have an accurate idea (without seeing the individual performance of all the students on an excel printout) and I don’t have one handy but I’ll give it a shot. (Update: In retrospect I feel I failed. Feel free to comment if you have a working example).

9 – 7 – 7 – 6 – 3
  Class Mean: 6.4 (or 64%)
  Class Median: 7 (or 70%)
  Class Mode: 7 (or 70%)

  I believe in this case we do see a relatively broad range of grades (as high as 90% and as low as 30%) however the overall performance is so poor that it doesn’t matter. These kinds of cases should always spark curiosity in the institutions that they unfold in. Maybe I’m being close minded and there is a grand example of a mean, median, and mode all showing great performance yet most of the class failing but I’m not convinced that is entirely possible (I will not say it isn’t though).

  The perfect case is obviously when everyone in the course gets the exact same grade, that’s the point of popping out the lucky 7’s scenario. Ideally I would hope everyone would get ‘lucky’ 8’s or 9’s but it seems odd that we immediately assume that all people are ‘above average’…I would think that if everyone is above average then they are not above average they are average.

  These three functions are almost meaningless by themselves, each can in certain (and numerous) situations provide dramatically misleading information supporting all sorts of flimsy or hokey ideals. The use of any of these three functions by themselves when fashioning policies or judging the performance of an entity is likely to end in misinformation and failure. I propose that either professors and teachers produce all three pieces of information or provide none because it has become all too apparent at the very least at Western Washington University, that Mean is being abused worse than the proverbial red headed step child.

  The psychology department routinely fails large portions of their students (or D’s them) and yet the average make it appear that people are performing at or slightly above average performance. This is unacceptable and an additional reason I’m not the least bit troubled that the college has lost 35 (possibly more) million dollars.

  If you can’t see the flimsy nature of the mean function than you probably cannot see the danger of living dramatically far beyond your means (pun intended and in at least one sense its not even a pun).

For Next time: I’ll likely discuss the idea of Indeterminism.