My Dad

My Dad died 5 years ago today--he's still dead, which probably doesn't surprise you.




It surprises us.

Everybody's Dad is, at some point, bigger than life, of course, and the obituary tells tales of when men were men and giants still roamed the Earth. I'd been disowned by Bill Doyle twice (the second time lost its luster when I reminded him there was a first time), but few men were more generous.

Dad was born in Pittsburgh, the only child of parents who had emigrated from Ireland via Bolton. My grandfather started off here as a garbageman, and eventually managed an A&P. My grandmother made her tea every afternoon, no matter which war was being waged at the time.

They were poor. They moved a lot. My Dad was also extraordinarily short until late adolescence. Dad compensated with toughness.

How tough?

Dad spent an evening with the Hells Angels MC in New York City. In their club.

Dad flew A4 Skyhawks off aircraft carriers; while showing off after maneuvers, he clipped a tree and lived to tell about it.

Dad gave his sons a lesson on how to break a bottle to use as a weapon. We were 9 and 10 at the time.

Dad broke his neck diving, and survived. He had friends, lots of them--one of them was an FAA certified physician. Dad flew a lot of passengers with a gimpy arm TWA never knew about.

Dad left a lot of skin on the pavement. He loved motorcycles; he loved flying even more. My guess is that his happiest moments were when he was airborne 2 feet over the pavement at 110 mph, having (again) separated himself from his bike at high speed.

Dad loved fighting--he didn't always win, but he never lost. ("Dad, I'll meet you back home.")

Dad loved the Marines and America because, as he put it, no other country in the world would let a poor boy from Pittsburgh fly million dollar aircraft just because of talent. (He's the Marine in full dress in the front row in Dr. King's March on Washington in 1963--another reason he loved the Marines.)

What does this have to do with education?

Oh, he managed to get an engineering degree from Villanova along the way (and never used it) as well as a law degree from Seton Hall, (which he barely used, though he did work for Roy Cohn a bit). He wasn't a great student, he was bright enough that he didn't need to be.

Last thing he wanted to do was to work in a box somewhere.

He loved the internet, and he could figure out to fix just about anything. His forte was critical thinking (and fun), not degrees and credentials.

I'm not saying credentials do not matter. I'm just saying some things matter more.

A4 Skyhawk photo lifted from Boeing, which grants noncommercial, personal use.

LELA's just another pretty face

I am a confessed Luddite, but that's not synonymous with idiot. I decided to go wireless.

I did my research, even knew ahead of time that the Verizon DSL modem/router needed to be bridged before setting up a new router. I bypassed a sale for a cheap wireless router because I read reviews about Linksys and their phenomenal service, and decided that I'd plop down a case's worth of beer money for peace of mind.

I went for Linksys' sleek WRT160N.

Staples had a coupon if I bought it online, so I ordered it, had it sent to the local Staples, and a day later it was ready for pick-up. On the way to the store, the heavens opened up, and the Staples entrance was impassable--3 feet of water, no challenge for Noah, but a bit much for my Civic. That was clue number one.

I had read that versions 1 and 3 were fine, but that V2 was a disaster. I opened the box. V2. Like the rocket. (The Nazi V-2 rocket killed over 27,000 people--about 20,000 of the victims were prisoners who were forced to build the rockets.) Clue number two.

Here's where it gets bad--I found wonderful instructions on-line on how to bridge the Westell 6100 to make it a dumb modem, how to configure the router via the website 192.168.1.1, how to secure the system. Then I met Lela.

Lela is my personal technology expert, provided free by Linksys, and despite being a bit cyanotic, she's kind of hot. And I am a sucker for free. And so, against every fiber of common sense in my body, and because it was 2:30 AM, I slid Lela into the CD, and waited for her to purr.

She commands me to slide this cable there, this one here--doesn't seem quite right, but I am smitten by Lela, who looks like Lady Plavalaguna, the alien diva in Fifth Element.

Everything was just groovy until something, or rather nothing, happened. Frozen. I reboot. Still frozen. I click on other icons.

Uh-oh.

Leslie, the love of my life, is a writer, and a very good one. She just finished a novel, nestled in the bowels of this now-frozen machine.

I call tech support. "Earl" assures me I can just delete Lela; I tell him I cannot. After a bit of safe mode action and a few reboots, Earl tells me he need to talk to his supervisor. Seems Earl cannot delete it either.

Earl gets back on after an uncomfortable pause--"You'll get a call from Linksys in 24 to 48 hours." Um, does that mean we're done? "You will get a call from Linksys....You will get a call from Linksys." I am still waiting for that call....

I've been married a long time, but even a solid marriage might not survive losing 2 year's worth of writing. In a moment of logical, I zoom the computer settings back in time, to a time before I fell to Lela's siren call. I put the cables in order--modem->router->PC.

I figure I'd log on for technical assistance to set my security. Here's a snippet:

Michael Doyle: Should I go ahead and reload LELA? [08:49:38 AM]
Michael Doyle: And should I upgrade the firmware [08:49:47 AM]
Michael Doyle: poke [08:50:47 AM]

After a bit of back and forth, we get to here:

Jhoneil (22042): Your concern here is you want to secure your wireless network, correct? [08:57:31 AM]
Michael Doyle: So I thought maybe I'd just reload LELA, forget about the third party security [08:56:33 AM]
Michael Doyle: Yes, I want to secure it-- [08:56:39 AM]
Michael Doyle: If I can do that without LELA, that would be fine [08:56:51 AM]
Michael Doyle: (My bigger concern was not getting divorced when my wife realizes I fubared her puter) [08:57:33 AM]
Jhoneil (22042): Okay. I can help you secure your network manually. If that's what you want. [08:58:58 AM]
Michael Doyle: Great! [08:58:03 AM]

Yes, Jhoneil, that is what I want!

Jhoneil (22042): Both wireless computers are online wirelessly to the router right now? [08:59:33 AM]
Michael Doyle: THe pc is hardwired to port 1 of the router, the laptop is wireless [08:58:47 AM]
Jhoneil (22042): Great! [09:00:03 AM]
Jhoneil (22042): But I'm sure you are chatting on the hardwired computer. [09:00:19 AM]
Jhoneil (22042): So, there is no need to worry. [09:00:24 AM]
Michael Doyle: I am chatting on the wireless [08:59:23 AM]

So I guess there is a need to worry after all.
We spent the next dozen minutes trying to get the laptop hardwired to the internet. It did not end well:

Jhoneil (22042): Did you connect the cable firmly at the back of your laptop going to the router? [09:13:57 AM]
'Michael Doyle' disconnected ('Concluded by End-user'). [09:13:09 AM]

I've given up on Lela, I've given up on Linksys tech support calling me back this decade, but I've not given up on the internet. I found a wonderful site with simple, cogent directions, and here I am, playing on-line via a wireless, and perhaps secure, line.

The lessons?

Avoid cyanotic purring technical experts.
Avoid using bots when you have a clue what you're doing.
Don't start playing with new tech toys at 2:30 AM
And don't expect LELA to return your calls.

Lammas

The sunlight diminishes perceptibly now. The plants know.

The past week we've eaten deep purple eggplants and bright pink brandywine tomatoes, yellow summer squash and green-and-red striped beans. Today we will pick basil for pesto, some for tonight, some for February. A bowl full of ripe blueberries waits for us, sunlight incarnate.

But the sunlight is dying, and the plants know.

We do not speak of religion in class, at least not formally, though students will occasionally ask religious questions, and I will deflect them. I explain that some things cannot be known through science, and that what I believe beyond the limits of science falls outside the province of class.

In class we talk of light and hormones, photoperiods and abscisic acids, to explain how plants know. We talk under the hum of fluorescent lights, time marked by defined blocks of time. In class, September light is exactly the same as February light, and class is always 48 minutes long, no matter where the sun sits.

Sunset today marks the start of Lammas, or Loaf Mass Day--joy for the harvests that are coming and regret for waning sunlight. Lammas used to be celebrated--the first wheat berries of the year were ground into flour and baked into bread offered in thanks, some used for Communion, some for the feast that followed.

We thank God (or Tailtiu or Lugh or some other forgotten gods)--harvest time reflects death and grace, whatever the culture. Death and grace feel foreign in the classroom, indeed foreign in our culture. We pretend, at our peril, that life is linear.

Lammas falls halfway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox. The days are shortening, winter is coming. Until you feel the seasons in your bones, until you follow a grain of wheat from the ground to plant to bread to you then back to the ground again, the modern myths may be enough.

Science can explain why plants produce fruit when they do, and I can teach the steps. We can test whether a student learns what I present, and the students that do this best have access to all our culture offers.

You can become very powerful, very rich, without knowing grace. You can go far in life if blessed with intelligence and beauty, degrees and citations, without ever knowing what a wheat berry looks like, without ever kneading a lump of flour and water and yeast into glistening dough.

In the end, we don't know much, and may never know much. We can, however, recognize grace. We might not grasp it rationally, but we we can grasp it--a good reason to celebrate Lammas.

The Skeleton of Death dances every hour in Prague--photo of the Prague Astronomical Clock by Sandy Smith found on VirtualTourist.

Picking urban blueberries

I just picked a pint or two of blueberries from my tiny blueberry bush that sits on the square yard or two of land in the front.

Last year the bush took a break--not one berry. This year it's making up for it.

There are a lot of calories in the berries I picked, and they're meant for me (or any other critter that chooses to eat them). I get the sweet sugary deliciousness, the seeds get a free ride, to, well, to a sewage plant, where chlorine will end the spark of life given to me by my bush.

I didn't hold up my end of the bargain, so to speak.

A bear would have had the decency to shit in the woods.

Fruits exist for animals to eat--this is not some Biblical decree or some squirrel-kissing-tree-hugging philosophy. It's an evolutionary strategy. Blueberry bush wraps its seeds in deliciousness, I eat them, then poop them a mile or two away while chasing down a wild boar for dinner (or running away from the same).

The fruit gets mostly digested, the seeds do not, and they get the added benefit of a nest of nitrogen to see them off.

There are books on how to poop in the woods. When you dig your cat-hole, ideally at least a stone's throw from water, do not dig it too deep (it won't decompose) or too shallow (for obvious reasons).

For years one of our department's finest has led children into the woods, 3 days of wilderness camping on the Appalachian Trail, and the poop spade has become legend. While a few students come back a little, well, log-jammed, most learn more about biology than they may have bargained for, and are none the worse for the wear.

I'm not sure my blueberry bush will ever become a parent; with a population of 45,000 folks on about 5 square miles, were talking about 3 or 4 tons of poop per square mile on any given day.

I have no plans to keep my end of the evolutionary bargain, but it does make for an interesting lesson that will never happen.

Still, it seems to me that anyone with a high school diploma should be able to tell you where their last meal came from, and where it ultimately goes.

The book cover is available from Amazon..

Nattering on numbers

While were nattering on about numbers....

Calculus serves scientists well, and I am not advocating that we junk it in high school entirely, but Dr. Arthur Benjamin, a mathemetician, makes a succinct and compelling argument here for making statistics, not calculus, the pinnacle of high school math.

(If I were the Czar of Mathematics, I'd ban calculators before senior year in high school, replace digital clocks with their analog, more useful, parents, and make counting to 10,000, one second at a time, mandatory before finishing elementary school.

I might even make counting to 100,000 be a requirement for high school graduation. Every year I offer an A+ to any student that counts aloud to 1 billion, 1 second at a time, and every year a few try it.)

I stumbled on this while snooping around Calliope Sounds (Andrew Gilmartin) via a link from Tuttle SVC (Tom Hoffman). Gilmartin found it at Daniel H. Pink's site, and somewhere along the line it originated at TED. Attributing things on the web is starting to feel like slipping in footnotes while on a manual typewriter.

Numbers don't kill careers, people do.

This is the second part of a longer piece discussing the particulars of the Obama/Duncan Race to the Top, a scheme developed by powerful people who deign to help your child to "outcompete any worker in the world." Funding depends on metrics, determining who's competent, and who is not. Arne Duncan has already made noises about using tests designed for other purposes to measure teachers. I'm not sure if he's trying to fool us, or if he's really that ignorant.




I used to practice, and teach, medicine. Time after time, some young gun would run a willy-nilly battery of needless tests, then come running to me with the "diagnosis," completely off base.

If you do not have a good grasp of how tests depend on the prevalence of the condition being tested, you will be misled by even good tests. Lots of decent doctors are lousy at metrics.

Suppose Arne's Army developed a test that could separate the good teachers from the bad. Never mind what "good" or "bad" means, the test itself defines competency.

For simplicity, let's make it a urine dipstick--if you get a "+" you're in the club, a "-" and your license is revoked.

Suppose the test was so well designed that if you were competent, the test would be "+" 95% of the time, and if you were incompetent, it would be "-" 95% of the time. Not bad, eh?

So what happens if you get a "-"--does that mean you're likely incompetent? Are you 95% confident in the result?




(I'll pay the Jeopardy theme while you come up with an answer....)




No way to tell--the test's usefulness depends on how many teachers are actually, in fact, incompetent.

Let's say only 5% of teachers are incompetent--in that case, a positive test reflects a truly incompetent teacher only half the time.

Here's the math: if a 100 teachers are tested, the 5 who are incompetent would likely be picked up. Of the remaining 95, however, there is a 5% false positive rate, and 5% of 95 is about 5. Only half of those who test positive would indeed be incompetent.

It's counterintuitive, but it's real; it's called Bayes theorem, and it reveals a practical problem with any type of binary testing--the accuracy of the results depends on the frequency of the condition you are testing for.

If 90% of teachers are incompetent, and some of the public might even believe that, then the chance that a test is a true positive exceeds 99%--same test, different population.

I have no problem with metrics, but I am opposed to what knuckleheads can do with numbers. Numbers don't kill careers, people do.

Most docs are reasonably bright people with a generous dose of ambition, and a lot of them can't grasp this--what hope do we have that Arne will?

The picture is from the Life archives via Google--OK for personal, non-commercial use.
A tip of the hat to Tom Hoffman at Tuttle SVC for pointing out the Gerald Bracey article.

Butcher, Baker or Candlestick Maker

This is the first part of a longer piece discussing the particulars of the Obama/Duncan Race to the Top, a scheme developed by powerful people who deign to help your child to "outcompete any worker in the world."



I live and teach in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Less than a block from the school, we have a shoe repairman. A few blocks north of the high school, we have Gencarelli's, a wonderful bakery, where you can still get in line before sunrise Christmas morning to get a loaf of fresh bread (which they boast on their website).

In my neighborhood we have teachers and cops, postal workers and musicians. Next door on one side lives a nurse, on the other a professional caddy.

We are home to Angelo's Pizzeria, owned by Charles Grande, who's in the Pizza Hall of Fame for winning the national pizza making championship several times. The Tripucka clan grew up here, Frank of NFL fame, his son Kelly, of NBA fame, and Dr. Carr, the Director of Pre K-6 Education here in Bloomfield, and who happened to score 56 points in a high school basketball game before her brother could even grow his famous moustache.

I'm within a stone's throw of thousands of people who make a living making things, being useful to others, using their hands, doing work with job descriptions that do not need further explaining. They pay a lot of money to educate the children in our town.

I'd bet none of the above (with the exception of Dr. Carr) had to prove a working knowledge of algebra to get where they are today, and I doubt even Dr. Carr uses the quadratic equation in her duties.

You will find families that have been here for generations, more concerned about what's happening in the local schools and Little League than what's happening in Geneva, and despite our über urban sheen, Bloomfield still resonates provincialism.

I know provincialism has a taint about it now, but the older I get, the less I understand why.

I teach science here in town, but not as an outsider. I know that many, perhaps most, of my lambs can get through life just fine without grasping the intricacies of the DNA molecule, and more importantly, the students know this as well, poised to inherit a family business or take an inside track to an apprenticeship to learn something tangibly useful.

Our school budget passed this past year despite a lot of hurting people, because, for the most part, our schools are still part of what makes our community a community.

Any child in our town has the tools available to gain the education needed to get into schools like Stanford or Yale, and a few regularly do. Still, for most families, this is not a priority, nor should it be. My goals are to provide students the opportunity to see the world beyond their iPods, and to be able to critically analyze data, a fancy-pants way of saying helping them to think. Ultimately, I want our children to live productive, happy lives.

What you won't find in my neighborhood is Bill Gates, or his assistant, or even his 2nd assistant to the assistant, though Mr. Gates is welcome to live here. He's not welcome, though, to dictate how education should be run in our town. He's all for "productive" lives, if productive means feeding the global economy. I'm not sure if happy fits into the equation.

The Shoe Repair Man statue is from the Statuary Place Online Store, and can be bought for $12.95. Used with permission.