Past Baby Blogging entries may have created the impression that SteelyKid does nothing but lie in her back in her crib. Quite the contrary– here’s a picture of her in one of her favorite activities, shaking the hanging animal toys in her play gym. The traditional Appa-for-scale is in the background– beware of forced perspective […]
Month: December 2008
Standards Are the Enemy of Achievement
The US Chamber of Commerce has a education website, which provides “grades” for states based on various measures of their educational performance. One category is “Academic Achievement,” based on the percentages of students scoring at or above grade level on the NAEP test. Another is “Rigor of Standards,” which is a little fuzzier, but is […]
links for 2008-12-18
Barack Obama Defeats Barack Hussein Obama | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source "Though few had heard of the freedom-hating extremist before, Barack Hussein Obama quickly garnered attention in several key regions of the country, and saw his popularity buoyed by conservative talk-radio hosts, mass e-mail forwards, and thousands of Americans riding on the […]
The Stupidest Argument in College Football
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has a nice, concise post about what’s wrong with college football. He’s responding to a desperately stupid post that ends with this: Let’s not ruin college football’s fabulous 13 week do-or-die regular season with a playoff! This was posted back in October, so the author can perhaps be forgiven for […]
Tenure Is Not the Problem
Steve Hsu has a nice post on teaching, following up on the Malcolm Gladwell piece that everyone is talking about. Steve took the time to track down the Brookings Institute report mentioned in the piece, and highlights two graphs: The top figure shows that certification has no impact on teaching effectiveness. The second shows that […]
links for 2008-12-17
Confessions of a Community College Dean: “It’s Just a Job” vs. “We’re All in This Together” "[T]here’s been a fascinating exchange in blogland between Tenured Radical and Dr. Crazy. Both addressed the ways that budget issues are being discussed at their respective colleges. Stipulating upfront that neither was really arguing with the other, and that […]
The Monkey Dance, Benny Hillified
Via Tom, my go-to source for this sort of nonsense, the Benny Hillifier, which will add “Yackity Sax” to any YouTube video. Because any video is funnier with “Yackity Sax”. And since I know somebody will ask, it works on the Monkey Dance, too.
Jiggitty Jig
We’re home again, at last. Actually, the power came on not quite 24 hours ago, but by the time we learned it was back, we were settled in for the night at the hotel. And it would’ve taken several hours for the house to warm back up from its sub-40-Fahrenheit temperature to a temperature at […]
links for 2008-12-16
kast_sko Throw a shoe at George Bush. In Norwegian. (tags: politics silly games internet) Kevin Drum – Mother Jones Blog: DC Charters "Look: even your most novice educational researcher knows that comparing test scores is useless unless you control pretty carefully for things like parental involvement and expenditure levels. And most of the studies I’ve […]
The Perils of Competence
Day four of the power outage, with the added angry-making twist that the people across the street from us have their power back. Staring across the road at their warm, shiny lights, I could feel the beginning of the sort of rage that fuels torch-and-pitchfork mobs storming medieval castles. Only, you know, there was just […]