Archive for August 2nd, 2007

My t-shirt game just went up another notch. Peep this:

Now that’s vicious. Not as vicious as a couple other joints that are coming, though.

One word about the spot I ordered it from, Minoritees, I hafta say that it came with the quickness. I ordered it on Monday. It was waiting for me when I got home today. Now that’s prompt service. I might order from them again, just because.

So spurred on by the little discussion over where Summer Soft ranks in the pantheon of Stevie Songs, I decided to do something I’ve been talkin about doing for about six months

Jacked from Jared
IF YOUR LIFE WAS A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?
So, here’s how it works:
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool.

Now obviously, this is gonna be a little different because they’re all Stevie songs, but here goes:

Opening Credits:All Day Sucker

Waking Up:Looking For Another Pure Love

First Day At School:Love Having You Around

Falling In Love:Creepin’

Fight Song:Black Man

Breaking Up:All Is Fair In Love

Prom: Maybe Your Baby

Life: Do Yourself A Favor

Mental Breakdown: A Place In The Sun

Driving: Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day

Flashback: Easy Goin’ Evening (My Mama’s Call)

Getting Back Together: Blame It On The Sun

Wedding: Jesus Children of America

Birth of Child: Gotta Have You

Final Battle:That Girl

Death Scene: Lighting Up The Candles

So there it is. Totally random. You know how you know I didn’t cheat? Superwoman’s not on the list. Neither is Summer Soft. Neither is As.

Other players are welcome.

As I’ve said on other occasions, I tend to not-talk about public education because it’s one of those spheres where everybody has an opinion - an intractably strong opinion - but for the most part, has no idea what they’re talking about with the exception of ‘well duh’ level generalizations. I mean, we all know the cliche about opinions, so I don’t need to recite it here. What I will say, however, is that it’s very easy to state the problem. Before I got back in the game, I was good for that too. Being that public education is actually what I do, however, I’m far more interested in finding solutions than articulating problems. Or maybe I should say repeating the same problems and the same non-solutions ad nauseam. But this is not about some ‘I-know-better-than-you’ elitism. Well, maybe a little bit, but not too much. For the most part, it’s about having the combination of an academic background in the theory and a ground-level understanding of what theory looks like in application. And then there’s the real street-level aspect of dealing with the kids. Which is my main concern.

See, when you listen to people talk about certain things, it’s easy to tell who sees people and who sees aggregated statistics. Not that the statistics are inaccurate, or fail to tell the story, but as I am wont to say, statistics don’t lie, but they can’t make a hen lay. Statistics can capture certain variables, but what they show is almost never as causal as the people who cite them, myself included at times, would make it seem. To go back to a post I wrote last year, I’m really interested in Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Theory and how it plays into a lot of the social questions we ask. To briefly repeat,

A powerful illustration of the ecological niche is the research that predicts the likelihood of a mother giving birth to a low-birth-weight baby. Data exist that indicate that the probability increases if the mother (a) lives in the inner city, (b)is unmarried, and (c) hass less than a high school education (three social address factors). The predictive power increases substantially by including information about personal attributes. Knowing tha tthe woman is (d) still a teenager doubles the probability and knowning that she is (e) African-American doubles the probability once more (two personal attribute factors). Combining these five factors identifies the ecological niche which indicates a high probability that a woman will deliver a low-birth-weight baby.

However interesteing and relevant these pieces of information may be, they do not answer the more fundamental question: “What are the processes or the mechanisms that actually influence the low-birth-weight outcome?” More specifically, if one had two women defined by all of the same variables identified above, and one gives birth to a normal-birth-weight baby, the other to a low-birth-weight baby, what are the distinguishing features? To find an answer to this process-question leads into the field-theoritcal or ecological model of research.

That’s the type of question I’m really trying to get at on the academic level. Obviously, having a low birth-weight baby is different than academic outcomes, since one is almost purely biological and the other is, for the most part, not biological, but those differences notwithstanding, there are some commonalities. Specifically, the idea that we can identify social markers that can be fairly accurate predictors of how a given student or school will perform academically is a direct parallel. Also parallel is the fact that given people who are identical based on whatever variables we select, if one person does well and another does poorly, then it means that while statistics may be descriptive, they are probably not best used as predictive. Statistics can, however, be instructive in guiding us to the right questions, if they are used properly.

The other thing I know, or that I can usually guess when I hear people talk is that they’ve never been in on an A-HA! moment. Cuz really, that’s where the payoff is. It’s certainly not like you’d get into teaching because it’s some type of lucrative career. To give an example, though, last winter I was one of the co-sponsors of the Madden tournament at my school. So as I was drawing up the consolation brackets, I explained to one student that whether he played again depended on whether the person who had just beaten him won his next game. If Johnny won, the student would play again. If Johnny lost, the student was done. He reflected on it for a moment, then said, “So Johnny is my independent variable.”

In that case, it was true, but one saying I might hang in my classroom this year is, “Be your own independent variable.”