Eastern Desert

I've just had a wonderful weekend. Perhaps I was motived because it was the last long weekend before school opened for another school year. I finally made a point to get out and go for a ride. I went for a short one (about an hour) on Saturday and Sunday each. Then, on Monday morning I was gone for a good three hours touring the river valley with a couple friends. I came back refreshed and feeling completely incompetent.

Being a math teacher I have noticed that calculators are not always a good thing in a classroom. I have watched students blindly enter numbers, use some operation (why is it mostly multiplication?), and simply write down the answer. They are unaware of why the answer is incorrect or even how the answer seem to appear on the screen. Yet, I've watch other students (a depressingly few) carry out complex "what if" tasks before confidently jotting down the numbers on the tiny screen.

It is such a wonderful feeling to find research that supports what your gut has been saying: calculators can be helpful and also very damaging.

The Wall Street Journal has posted an excellent article on the necesssity of college degrees:

Imagine that America had no system of post-secondary education, and you were a member of a task force assigned to create one from scratch. One of your colleagues submits this proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

You would conclude that your colleague was cruel, not to say insane. But that's the system we have in place.

A couple of months ago I finished the book "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts". It is a book about addictions and their terrible hold on people. And that is where the topic of addiction has been for me. It has been an academic discussion. In my job I discipline students who don't finish their homework, skip class or get into problems because of substance abuse and addiction. But that is still at arms length to my soul.