Do you think our schools are just fine?

The Denver Post - School reform: A major '08 pitch: "The biggest problem school reformers face nationally is that the majority of people think school systems are working well, said education-policy expert Van Schoales."

Lots of people do think our schools are just fine. I am not one of them.

How much math Chinese students learn in elementary school doesn't concern me much. I worry about whether these reformers are going to be pushing for tighter and tighter standards and even further away from the education that made this country so great.

The younger years of our children need to be a time to explore and experiment. They need to learn what they like to do and what they hate to do and figure out how they can spend the most time doing good.

Virginia Tech Fallout

It looks as though you can't talk about what to do if something similar happens in your classroom.

For all the protestations about not restricting academic free speech, there certainly seem to be some areas that are strictly off limits. It is interesting to see what comes up that way. I would not have thought personal safety would have been one of them.

It is best to think about the unthinkable before the unthinkable starts happening. The thing of it is that bad things happen and ignoring them won't keep them from happening.

You can decide now if you will stay away from drugs, alcohol and how you might react to a terrorist attack. The Boy Scout Motto is "Be Prepared" I am an Eagle Scout, and what I learned most about being prepared is, it is more about mindset then equipment. Not that equipment isn't useful but knowing what to do in a situation helps you overcome the "freeze" when your mind is trying to figure out what to do and you've not thought about it before.

Virtually all training is centered around the idea of "when this happens, do this." This radically decreases the amount of time that you will take to react to a situation. Typical reaction times are around 0.2 sec. While a person will decide on a whether a website is good or not is about 3 seconds. So you can save quite a bit of time if you do the decision making process first, not in the moment, which takes a long time.

Systemic Problems

The Establishment Rethinks Globalization: "Americans can choose to blame China or disloyal multinationals, but the problem is grounded in US politics. The solution can be found only in Washington. China and other developing nations are pursuing national self-interest and doing what the system allows. In a way, so are the US multinationals. 'I want to stress it's a system problem,' Gomory says. 'The directors are doing the job they're sworn to do. It's a system that says the companies have to have a sole focus on maximizing profit.'
"
There are a plenty of systemic problems in many large complex systems. I believe that our schools have systemic problems. Many companies have internal systemic problems, just call for support on a computer problem and more often then not you'll see what I mean. How many bureaucracies exist when the problem they were created to no longer exist?

He talks about shovel to shovel competition, sure we can build a bigger shovel but we are not 4 times stronger then most other humans. Sure we can innovate and build a machine that can move huge amounts of dirt, but it can be built there as well as here.

Most people work to maximize their profit, which isn't always a paycheck, and an organization will do that too. Change the nature of the game and the rules are no longer restrictions but freedom.

Library books

Libraries are great things, you can find all kinds of good and interesting things to read. I am reading the History of Mathematics but it is a somewhat dense book and so it will go back for a little while. Actually it is beginning to get interesting since I reached the Greeks, we have primary documents about them and what they did, not all but enough to get an idea of what they went through in their exploration of mathematics.
They sure were a contentious bunch, on the one hand wanting a perfect system that explained everything but they kept finding things that blew their theories out of the water. Some of them didn't want to accept that so they fought about it.
I'll get back to it soon enough, but I need to recharge a bit first.

Fight or Flight and Predetermined Decisions

How do you react to a situation depends a lot on what you have already decided to do. The sad thing is that most people never think about what they should do in a situation, so they end up panicking and not really deciding anything and often just going with the herd. It also doesn't help that Hollywood often shows what not to do being successful in many films for cool visual effects.

It doesn't matter if you choose fight or flight both are valid responses to critical situations, by deciding beforehand you remove the freeze that comes when you are busy trying to decide when there is no time to decide. The hesitation is not all that long but when things are happening in small fractions of a second, not having that hesitation can save your life or the life of others, as you act while others are still trying to identify the problem.

I was involved in a car crash a long time ago when a drunk driver crossed the median of the interstate. While I had imagined such an incident, not something you can really practice, I was ready to steer onto the shoulder. The only problem was that he wasn't traveling straight down the street but diagonally across it. I was able to get my foot on the brake, which amazed the cops, but violently turning the wheel at freeway speeds does nothing for a very long time. I survived and learned.

Prepare your mind to act by deciding what you will do beforehand and that way you will act quickly when the time comes, when there is no time.

Virginia Tech Shooting

The shooting at Virginia Tech is a terrible thing. My heart goes out to all the victims who were just there to learn something to make their lives better. My heart also goes out to the shooter, he should not have done it, of course, but college can be very hard and demanding, far from home and without a support system until you make one yourself. Which can be very hard when you are going to school, doing homework and working.

What to do in such a circumstance? First don't panic, find cover, determine what is happening, and evacuate the area in a rational manner. The police are going to take a very long time to show up, so don't expect to be able to sit there and be rescued, you need to rescue yourself.

Babylonian mathematics

I am finding the History of Math book most fascinating. The Babylonians based their number system on base 60.

To given you an idea of what that would be like here is how we represent base 16:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 A1 B1 C1 D1 E1 F1 20...

To do the same with base 60 we would end up using the English alphabet, the Greek alphabet and still come up a bunch of characters short before we could use zero to get to "ten." Obviously it could handle really large numbers quite easily.

The funny thing is that we still use it to a limited extent today. We divide minutes into 60 seconds and hours into 60 minutes, there are also 360 (6x60) degrees in a circle.