Shrimp and Grits

A bill aimed at removing junk food like sodas and high-calorie snack food from South Carolina public school vending machines was recently rejected.  Our schoolchildren are among the most obese in the nation, so why did this happen?

“We support the intention of the legislation (to improve students’ eating habits),” said Scott Price of the School Boards Association. “But the local boards and communities should be making those decisions for themselves.”

Looking a little deeper, though, we can get a glimpse of the real reason the bill was opposed.

Some Greenville high schools earn as much as $70,000 annually from vending machine sales, said Quentin Cavanagh, marketing and training specialist for Greenville County schools. “None of (the principals) want to sell this stuff. But they need the revenue,” Cavanagh told the House panel.

[...]

But the bottled water and granola bars that replaced the Cokes and Snickers candy bars were not as popular with students. As a result, some high schools [who removed junk food] suffered big cuts in vending machine revenue for student activities.

We’ve got to ask ourselves a question. If schools are so desperate for funds that they’re terrified of putting less junk food in their vending machines because it might lower sales, then aren’t we underfunding our schools?

If you’re a college student and you’re reading my blog right now, here’s something for you to think about: How important is it, really, to do well on the first test in a course?

You can always go back and catch up on the beginning stuff any time during the semester- and a semester is a long time. Also, there are usually several other grades that can pull up a bad first test. So how bad can bombing the first test possibly be?

Here’s a chart showing a comparison between students’ grades on their first test and their final course grades. There are about 90 students plotted. Students who withdrew from the course were not included since they had no final course grade to plot.

The yellow box shows all students who both “bombed” their first test with a score of 60 or below and brought their grade back up to make at lease a “C” in the course. Notice how few students appear in that box: three.

So yes, it is pretty important to do well on the first test. Passing the first test doesn’t guarantee success in a course, but failing it almost always leads to failing the course. Think about that before you head out to another late-night party the night before your test!

Since I teach at a college, I get a fair amount of junk mail from publishers’ representatives wanting to sell me … or force me to make my students buy … their educational doo-dads. Here’s one from my inbox this morning.

Dear Professor [...]:

In a recent message to you, we noted that in a general chemistry class recently taught at the University of North Texas, students who completed more than 90% of the OWL problems assigned earned an average grade of 89.3%—while students who did not follow the assignments earned an average grade of 66.3%. With results like these, it’s no wonder OWL [Online Web-based Learning] is the most popular chemistry learning system in use today.

They’re trying to sell me an “online homework” system. I’ve been incorporating web content into my courses for a decade now, and one thing that my students have always had trouble with was web-based chemistry problem sets. Chemistry problems just don’t lend themselves easily to input into a computer - for instructors or for students.

(And besides, I already have plenty of online content for my courses, all free to my students…)

But the real reason this e-mail caught my eye is the sales pitch [emphasis mine]:

[...] students who completed more than 90% of the OWL problems assigned earned an average grade of 89.3%—while students who did not follow the assignments earned an average grade of 66.3%.

You don’t say! Students who complete nearly all of their practice assignments actually make better grades? There’s a shocker.

But why should this revelation make me want to force this product onto my students? I observe the same sort of pattern whether I have assignments on the web or on paper. The students who make higher grades generally spend more time with the material and complete more of their practice assignments.

The problem is getting students to spend time with the material.  I somehow doubt that this product runs on an Xbox 360!

For a while, I’ve maintained a website for the students in my chemistry classes. I put study guides, notes, solutions to quizzes and tests, schedules, and various other things on the site.

Shortly after redesigning the web site to use Wordpress, I received this handwritten comment from a student on my instructor evaluations:

I feel that the students should get study guides to study with for the tests.

Where were the study guides?

http://[address]/?page_id=2

I’ve deleted the address of the site, since it’s a school site just for students. But if you’re familiar with how Wordpress organizes things, you’ll notice that the page containing all the course study guides was the second page I ever posted to the site. (It was also the second link from the top of the page, just under the link to the course syllabus.)

By the time the class got to their first test, I’d added more pages. So I wonder - did this student just see the list of resources available for the course and just decide that there was too much stuff to bother with? What amount of resources is too much? What amount is too little?

CNN’s running an article about the rising cost of getting a college education.  According to the article, the average cost of a year of school at a private four-year college is $32,307 ($23,712 if you leave off housing expenses).  Ouch!

The news is a little better if you’re interested in going to a public college.  It’ll only cost you $13,589 per year ($6,185 if you’re lucky enough to not need housing).

When you consider that about half of the people who attempt to go to a four-year school don’t get a degree after six years of trying, that’s a lot of money to spend up front - even in more modestly priced public colleges.  The costs are also going up.  Cost is increasing at a slightly faster rate for public colleges (probably due to states getting stingier with funding), but has a long way to go to overtake the private schools.

The costs of going to a two-year college are also increasing, but by a much lower percentage.  A year at an average two-year public college will only cost $2,361.  That’s not including housing, but most two-year college students live at home.

And here’s the part where I sound like an advertisement:  Looking to go to college, but not sure you can afford either the money or the time?  Try taking courses at your local community college.  Most of them have agreements with four-year schools in their state for transfer of credits.  It’s a much cheaper way to get a year or two of college courses than even a public four-year college.  If you decide that four years of college are too much, you can instead pursue a two-year degree that’ll still earn you a good salary.  (Associate’s degrees in nursing, for instance, are in much greater demand than many bachelor’s degrees in other subjects.)

So don’t forget about your local community college.  They typically provide a good education without eating such a large hole in your wallet.  (And yes, I teach at one.  If you take one of my classes, you can learn about the fine art of blowing stuff up. )

Here’s a hypothetical situation.

Let’s say you’re a Republican-controlled Congress. You start a school voucher program in the capital of the United States. You decide to funnel federal tax dollars into private schools. Since you believe in the magical power of the free market, you don’t bother to worry much about what actually happens to the money. You simply take the word of people who claim to be running private schools that they’re doing what they are supposed to be doing - providing quality education to kids in acceptable facilities.

What could possibly go wrong?

Steve Benen fills us in:

Republican lawmakers crafted a policy whereby federal funds would flow to private schools with no checks to certify whether all of the participating schools had the required operating permits. The results put kids at risk.

What’s he talking about? The Washington Post reports that

A voucher program designed to send low-income children in the District to better-performing private schools has allowed some students to take classes in unsuitable learning environments and from teachers without bachelor’s degrees, according to a government report.

So, we’re spending tax dollars to send kids to schools that aren’t even hiring minimally-knowledgeable teachers? How’s that possible?  Part of the problem is that nobody bothered to check to see that the free money was even being sent to, well, actual schools.

In a random sample of 18 schools reviewed by the GAO, two lacked occupancy permits, and four lacked permits needed for buildings used for educational purposes. At least seven of the 18 schools were certified as child development centers but not as private schools. In one case, a school was operating in a space designed for a retail store, the report says.

“Child development centers”. In other words, day-care providers. Not schools. While I don’t think vouchers are a good idea, would it kill voucher proponents to recognize the need for some oversight on where taxpayer money actually goes? Ensuring the money actually goes to schools might be a good first step on the long road to accountability.

Kellie sent me a link today to a news story describing a new study comparing public and private schools.

Students at independent private schools and most parochial schools scored the same on 12th-grade achievement tests in core academic subjects as those in traditional public high schools when income and other family characteristics were taken into account, according to the study by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.

That’s probably not what the South Carolina voucher lobby wants to hear, but anyone with any education experience at all knows that there are simply lots of factors that go into student success.  Trashing schools because they’re “public” (and have a different mix of students than the top-tier private schools) isn’t useful.

Oddly enough, there actually was one kind of private school that outperformed others:

[...] the only kind of private schools that had a positive impact on student achievement were Catholic schools run by holy orders such as the Jesuits. Such schools have more autonomy from the church than most Catholic schools, which are typically run by a diocese and are overseen by a superintendent in the local bishop’s office.

Score one for the Jesuits?

It’s an unfortunate reality in education that if you want to use modern technology to teach, you’re quite likely going to be on your own. You can get some help from grants - if they’re available. You might be able to get some technology from all-too-eager textbook publishers, but these come with a price. Your students will likely foot the bill, and if you live in an economically depressed area areas like I do, your students can’t afford it.

So what do you do if you want to use technology, but you’re on a limited budget. You can’t, for instance, shell out the cash for a Sympodium. (Especially if the funds come out of your own pocket!) If you’re willing to put in a little effort, though, you can bring some modern technology into your classroom with relatively little cost. That’s what I’ve been doing this semester with my (used, but new to me) tablet PC.

At the beginning of the semester, I decided that I’d purchase a Tablet PC for classroom use. Since I was unable to get one through the school, I decided to scour Ebay for a used model. My choices were between a Toshiba PortegeM200 and a Thinkpad X40. Since the Toshiba was cheaper and sported a higher-resolution display, I went with the Toshiba. At the time, the Ebay price for a Toshiba M200 was around $500. I added another $100 to max out the memory so the system will run its fastest. Since I was due for a laptop upgrade anyway, this wasn’t such a bad cost to absorb. The problem was - that was about all the cost I could absorb. (Education salary, you see. )

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PZ Myers describes a study published in Science correlating courses in high school with success in college-level biology, chemistry, and physics courses. As you might expect, success in college chemistry increases when you take high school chemistry, success in college biology increases when you take high school biology, and success in college physics increases when you take high school physics.

However, a high school course in one science doesn’t translate to better grades in a different science. That’s unfortunate, but didn’t really surprise me. Many high school level science courses cover a lot of topics in a small amount of detail and don’t focus on connections between the sciences or the overall scientific method.

However, there appears to be one high school subject that increases success in all three of the studied college sciences, and that’s … math! This is unsurprising to me. As someone who’s taught freshman chemistry full-time for seven years (has it really been that long?), I’ve noticed that students who are proficient with math almost always succeed in freshman chemistry, and those who really struggle with math rarely succeed. As I’ve said to other teachers:

Give me a student who knows basic math, and I can teach her chemistry. But don’t expect me to teach her basic math and chemistry in one semester.

That said, I think this study isn’t all that useful unless the researchers had some way to control for the effects of self-selection bias on the results. In our state, at least, these high school science and advanced math courses examined are optional, and only students who demonstrate high aptitude in math and science already (which would probably translate to success in college science) and who are on the college prep track take them.

In my last Teaching Professor post, I talked about podcasting, and how I didn’t really feel I could use podcasts to benefit my students. In this post, I’m going to talk about a different session - one with things that I did feel I could use to help both my students and myself out.

Ricky Cox and Jamie Rogers (from Murray State) hosted a session on the uses of Tablet PCs in the classroom. A Tablet PC is a laptop with a built-in digitizer in its screen- on which you can write with the included pen.

This tablet looks much like a regular laptop, but it’s more than meets the eye.

You can fold the screen over the keyboard and write on the tablet’s screen almost like you’d write on a sheet of paper.

Cox and Rogers used their time to demonstrate several technologies and techniques that they felt added value to the classroom experience - even if only one tablet were available. A few applications I thought sounded interesting were:

• Improved, more interactive class sessions
• Complete, accurate sets of lecture notes available online shortly after each class.
• Virtual office hours

I’ve never been a big fan of Powerpoint (or other presentation tools like it). It’s great for making, well, presentations. In the classroom, though, I’ve mostly seen Powerpoint abused. I’ve seen instructors fly through difficult material because it was all on slides, and (sometimes) students had copies of the slides. I’ve seen instructors read slides at students while they slept - and so on. I’m partial to black/white boards for the classroom, because they force you to slow down some (so students can keep up), and because they remove the “rails” that Powerpoint keeps you on during a class.

Of course, the black/white boards have disadvantages, too. A major one has to do with note-taking. Students will quite often write things incorrectly into their notebooks - especially if the concept you’re going over is new to them. I’d almost go as far as saying that mangled chemical equations and equilibrium calculations are the norm in student notebooks. With Powerpoint at least, you know the parts typed onto the slide are correct.

With a tablet, you get the best of both worlds. You get the structure that using slides provides, but you also get the freedom to modify them on-the-fly. You could do this with Powerpoint and a blackboard, but with the tablet you can save copies of whatever you write on the tablet screen and distribute the notes online to your students afterwards. So, the students get an accurate set of notes - even if you use complex equations or drawings!^*** (This might sound familiar to those of you who use smartboards or sympodiums - the software that comes with most tablets is similar in operation to the sympodium software and has many of the same capabilities. Also, the tablet’s a whole lot cheaper, and can be taken back to the office!)

The ability to write out complex formulas and equations using a pen instead of things like chemdraw and equation editor - combined with the ability to give students copies of exactly what went on in class was enough to sell me on trying a tablet for my classes.^**** So far, it saves me a tremendous amount of time - even outside the classroom. It’s easy, for instance, to provide complete problem solutions for tests and homework - like this simple example from my introductory class (shrunk a bit for this post):

I could type something similar in an equation editor, and lay out the simple drawing with a word processor’s drawing tools. It’d look a bit neater, but it’d take me more than twice as long to get a solution out to students. I prefer to give quick feedback on practice sets and quizzes, and being able to write out solutions directly into my computer helps me post them fast. So far, that pleases my summer students, and it saves me a lot of time.

Cox and Rogers also mentioned using the tablet to host so-called “virtual office hours” - using a software package called Elluminate. Elluminate allows you to share a virtual whiteboard with other people over the net, along with text messages, voice chat, etc. I’ve experimented with virtual office hours in the past - back when IRC and ICQ were the only real-time messaging software out there. It didn’t work too well then, given the limitations of text-only communication. Elluminate solves some of those problems by adding voice chat and an interactive whiteboard, but at the cost of using a high-bandwidth CPU-intensive Java client that the students have to run to access your virtual hours. I can see how this might work well for a university campus, where fast computers and high-speed internet access are the norm, but most of my students (I teach at a technical/community college) use older computers and dial-up internet access. So unless my school starts giving out free computers and high speed internet access, I don’t see virtual office hours in my future.

All in all, the Cox/Rogers session was a good one to attend. I’d seen tablet PC technology before, but it was prohibitively expensive and little software support was out there. Now that the tablet has matured somewhat, going to the session and seeing the demonstration helped me see that it was a rather useful technology for a science teacher like me.

^***One questioner actually asked the presenters if having these notes caused decreased class attendance and decreased grades. They said it didn’t seem to. I’d tend to agree, since those people who tend to skip class at the slightest excuse would skip even if they didn’t have an accurate set of class notes!

^****That’s not just a figure of speech. Shortly after the conference, I spent some of my own money on a (used) Toshiba M200 tablet from Ebay. That’s the one you see in the pictures above!