Month: October 2011

My current task at work is to learn how to use Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Report Builder 3.0.  It is a tool to create reports from an SQL database.  I really need to start work on a project that involves images and features from images in a MySQL database.  I have done a very little bit of that already, but I need to get more comfortable with it so I can build a database of images and features for work with the R statistical programming language.  It seems like more and more people require that now to facilitate data mining of the images.  It is hard work, but very rewarding to learn this kind of stuff.  I have an old computer at home I think I will set up to do that.

Day 57 of 1000

Lorena goes to Costco about every other Saturday morning.  She drops Kelly, Christian, and I off at either at NCSU either at the D.H. Hill Library to study or in one of the Biological and Agricultural Engineering to work on GaugeCam.  She stayed with us this past Saturday to attend the prospective student open house.  We listened to an inspirational talk on scholarship opportunities at the Stewart Theater in Talley Hall, a gorgeous facility, then made our way over to a building named SAS Hall, another gorgeous facility.  SAS Hall is named after the famous statistical software company founded at NCSU to analyze agricultural software.  The Mathematics and Statistics department are housed there.

We went to SAS Hall because to talk to the undergraduate advisers.  It was all very impressive.  We walked up to the math table on the first floor of the building and started talking!  The Math professor with whom we spoke was amazingly helpful.  The professor could not have been more gracious.  He spent ten minutes with us and, because Christian’s situation is so unique, asked that we set up a meeting to speak with him about Christian’s possibilities at a one on one meeting in early November.  He then walked us over to talk to the main Statistics adviser.  We went through almost the exact same process again.  The Statistics adviser spoke with us for about ten minutes, then, because Kelly’s situation is so unique, asked us to set up a one on one meeting in early November.  They acted genuinely interested in helping us, something that has not been my experience at some other large state universities.

We were all very inspired by the visit.  My impression of the campus is that it is much more compact than the schools I attended (Oregon State University, University of Texas at El Paso, and Texas A&M University), but we were only on one of the two campuses.  The reality is that I am still not very clear about what is where.  Nevertheless, it is a beautiful campus with amazing facilities and very friendly and helpful people (so far).  Kelly and Christian will spend most of their time in the same building even though they will probably only have one or two more classes together after they leave the community college.  We have lots more paper to fill out based on what we learned on Saturday and there are several other schools with whom we need to talk, but we certainly liked what we saw at NCSU.

Day 56 of 1000

My friends know I am not a big fan of Steve Jobs.  I am even less of a fan of Wired magazine.  I might write about that someday if I can generate enough enthusiasm to write about boring and tired cliches.  That being said, my buddy Andrew, as is his wont, sent me an amazing article–a Wired interview of Steve Jobs–from 1996.  Steve Jobs hammered the National Education Association for stifling educational innovation and advocated for school vouchers.  I recommend you read the whole thing.  Here is a partial quote from the interview in response to the question, “Could technology help by improving education?”

It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I’m one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I’ve seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers – so it’s not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, “Let’s start a school.” You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they’d start schools. And you’d have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, should be credited with the introduction and popularization of the vouchers idea. Here is a Reason magazine article an interview of Friedman by Nick Gillespie from 2005 that describes the idea and some of its history.  Friedman was 93 at the time of the article and is now gone, but the ideas he expressed it first in his 1955 article titled “The Role of Government in Education” are just as fresh today as they were when he first wrote about them.  These ideas are really starting to take hold in states like Washington D.C., Indiana, Arizona, and Wisconsin.  They work.

I have a lot of hope for the future of public education in America.  Our children prospered in homeschool, but we were forced into it by what we considered to be a failed government school system where we lived.  We might never have homeschooled our children had a decent school been available to us.  The less the government is involved in running, managing, overseeing, and monitoring the schools, the faster they are going to get better.  There are two huge impediments to this happening–the teachers unions and the current teacher education system in our universities.  If we get those two huge, self-serving bureaucracies eliminated and/or competing in a free market arena, the kids will be much better served.

I texted Kelly and Christian a message about reports they had due in their writing class this morning.  The name of the class is Argument-Based Research and it is taught by a professor in the community college English department who seems to personify everything that went bad with the 1960’s.  Kelly thinks he is a little older than I.  I am always interested to hear what happens in this class because it is usually interesting, almost always a train-wreck, and almost never has anything to do with writing.  Here is the text message exchange between the three of us from a little earlier this morning:

Dad (9:08 am):  How did your papers come out?  Any comments from Professor Commie Marxist?
Dad (9:23 am):  How did it go in class today?

Kelly (9:24 am):  Hey dad they were fine!  He just picked them up is all.  We are discussing gender theory now.

Dad (9:26 am):  Oh great.  Good thing he is now talking about how to write.

Christian (9:26 am):  Not yet.  He talked about sexism in the Bible which was a drag.

Dad (9:28 am):  What a loser.  The Bible has been the single biggest contributor to the emancipation of women in all of history.

Kelly (9:29 am):  Right… he was going on about what Paul said about women and Old Testament verses so I asked him why didn’t we look at how Jesus Himself treated women?

Dad (9:30 am):  What did he say?

Kelly (9:31):  That that topic is for the NEXT segment on religion.  Please.

It dawned on me that this professor, having taught at this community college in the Bible Belt for such a long time must have had to engage with a thoughtful Christians on this topic at some time during his career. It boggles my mind that, as the professor in an argumentation class, he argues for what, at best, is a position with two sides.  This is the easy, vacuous, left-wing, ivory tower approved, intellectually lazy position to take.  He propounds this position without historical or culture context to an audience of generally inexperienced community college students.  Some might suggest this is a cowardly position.  I won’t because he can flunk my children at his whim.  I guess that is kind of cowardly, too.

Day 51 of 1000

I found a link to a blog post by a South African Homeschool mom named Taryn in one of Luke’s posts over at the Sonlight Blog.  It was a great read and I recommend you read the whole thing.  There was a statement at the end of the post that caught my attention.  Taryn said, “And we don’t know if we’ll do this all the way to grade 12.”  That was exactly our thinking for the first five years of homeschool.  Due to a serendipitous set of circumstances, we changed our minds.  We enrolled our kids in college at ages fourteen and sixteen when their normal school trajectory would have put them in their freshman and junior years of high school.  We have no illusions that our children are more brilliant than other children, we just found our self in a set of circumstances that has to have played itself out amongst at least some of the other homeschoolers around the world.  This post explains what happened.

We moved to Raleigh, North Carolina before our son, Christian’s sixth and our daughter Kelly’s eighth grade years of school.  When we signed up our homeschool through the North Carolina Department of Non-Public Education, we found that the ACT counted as one of the national normed annual tests accepted for compliance with North Carolina’s annual testing law.  We also found that Duke University had something called the Talent Identification Program (TIP).  The TIP program provides an opportunity for all seventh graders who have received a score in the 95th percentile on any nationally normed standardized test to take the ACT or the SAT.  The purpose of the testing is to identify and target students who perform very well on the tests so they can be given opportunities to enrich their education.  Many schools in seven Southern states participate in the program.

The upshot is that Christian scored high enough on the test to receive state-wide honors in every test category.  There is a nation-wide category he did not receive, but nevertheless, he performed well.  In the meantime, Kelly had taken and passed College Level Examination Programs (CLEP) tests that gave her college credit for Freshman College Composition (6 credits) and Spanish (2 years).  I have written fairly extensively about these and the other tests she and Christian took here.  By the time Kelly finished the tenth grade she had passed a bunch of those tests including pre-calculus.  Since it was clear Kelly and Christian could perform at a college level, I decided to put them in a class or two the next year so I started checking with the local community college.

Fortunately for us, the community college said kids under age 16 could not “dual-enroll” there unless a parent sat through classes with them.  Dual-enrollment is a category of students who are still in high school, but want to take a few classes at the community college without going through the formal, full-time enrollment, admissions process.  That meant Christian could not dual-enroll without Lorena to sit there with him through every class.  In addition, classes available to dual enrollment students was very restricted.  There were very few classes Kelly wanted or needed to take that were available to her.

We were very frustrated until it dawned on us that both the kids probably qualified for full admission as degree seeking students.  There are no age or class restrictions for students admitted in that category.  It was no trouble at all to enroll the both of them.  Kelly enrolled in Calculus I because she had passed the Pre-Calculus CLEP test, but Christian had to take a math placement test.  He was only half-way through Thinkwell Precalculus (from Sonlight!), but did well enough on the test that they wanted him to also start in Calculus I.  We signed them both up for 12 credits for the first semester and, two semesters later, they are up to 16-17 hours per semester that they can handle if they work hard.  We still do a few homeschool things when time permits, but they keep pretty busy with their homeschool work.

It has been very fun to hear their stories about their community college experience.  Socially, the transition was both fun and enlightening for the kids.  Most homeschools prepare students to function effectively with even the most eclectic groups of people.  Students, faculty, and staff at most community college certainly qualify to be characterized as eclectic.  The kids most enduring friend at the school is a 28 year old, recently married, Iraq War veteran working on the first two years of an engineering degree.  They have had Marxist, feminist, conservative, Christian, brilliant, and clueless professors.  There are plenty of homeschoolers and and other students in the school from 17 to 70 years of age.

So, if you are undecided about whether to homeschool through the 12th grade, reserve judgement about where they might go after homeschool and when they might go there.  Even after junior high, a move into traditional or government high school might just be a step backwards.

Day 50 of 1000

Now I know that what I am about to write is about personal taste and does not hold true for everyone, but there is something I really want to get off my chest.  It came clear, again, that some things are only good if you have not done them for a long, long time.  I am not talking about those things that one does every so often just to remind themselves why they hate them like driving through the campus at the University of Oregon or reading anything written by Noam Chomsky or Paul Krugman.  I am talking about those things that are really good, but only in small doses.

I was reminded of this when I downloaded Louis L’Amour’s Crossfire Trail and read it during my daily walk over the last couple of days.  As Louis L’Amour books go, it was great.  It has the tough, noble, good guy that gets the girl by shooting and beating up a small army of dastardly (although a little one dimensional) bad guys.  I knew when I finished the book that it would have been a much better read if I had waited two or three years.  You see, I read Utah Blaine by L’Amour last week.  The reason I bought Crossfire Trail was because I enjoyed Utah Blaine so much.  It is like the one time I ate too much Dungeness crab.  If you have every had Dungeness crab you would think that last statement was an oxymoron.  It is not.  I was actually TIRED of Dungeness crab for a period of about three days.

Now, to take this a little further, someone made the silly statement that Texas rodeos are better than Oregon rodeos*.  Well, beside the fact that it is not true, it made me think of what joy it gave me during my formative years to attend the St. Paul Rodeo in St. Paul Oregon.  Still, and many probably believe this disqualifies me as a critic on this subject, the reason it was enjoyable is because we went only once every three or four years.  Too much rodeo is the same as too much Dungeness crab or too much Louis L’Amour in too short a period of time.  How much time?  It varies depending on the subject.  With Dungeness crab, I can get back in the saddle (no pun intended) after about a week.  With Louis L’Amour it is one or two years.  With rodeos it is three to five years.

I am going to get myself into a lot of trouble for making this next statement, but, from my perspective, Oregon State University football games are a lot like rodeos.  It is a lot of fun to talk trash about the game at the water cooler on Monday morning, but sitting through a game is only fun every two or three years.

*It should be noted that even Larry Mahan, the best Texas rodeo cowboy in all of history, is from Oregon.

The blog I am doing with my buddy, Warren, is up and running now.  It is called Truth Has a Chance from the Winston Churchill quote “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”  I will blog here VERY sporadically on homeschool topics and maintain my bible reading log here, but the bulk of my blogging will move over to the new site.  The purpose of this blog was to document our homeschool.  That is now officially over and my family and I have beat me into submission.  It is now time to (semi) retire the ChapmanKids blog.

One small problem!  In the move, I lost a comment with the name of a Louis L’Amour book that I really want to read!  If someone could repost that, I would very much appreciate it!

Day 46 of 1000

I have very fond memories of our recently passed friend, David Christie, sitting in his recliner reading old, tattered, Louis L’Amour paperbacks.  He must have read every one of them at least ten times.  I hope to write a little more of my memories of Dave before too long.  The reason I brought him up is because I though about him during one of my neighborhood walks earlier this week and remembered how much he enjoyed reading Louis L’Amour westerns.  I have been reading some pretty heavy stuff for several years now with just a short respite to listen to a Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey and a G.K. Chesterton novel or two from Librivox on my ZenStone Plus.

That all inspired me to download a Louis L’Amour novel to read on my Nook Color while I walked.  I picked Utah Blaine.  I just picked it at random.  It turns out that it is one of his earliest books written a year before I was born.  It was exactly what I expected it to be.  The good guys were tough, handsome, and bigger than life.  The beautiful pioneer woman kisses the hero about two thirds of the way through the book.  A great read!  I need to do that more often.  I think L’Amour is the MacDonalds of books.  Their food is not great, but it is good and, above all, very, very consistent.

Eric left this in the comment section, but I thought it worthy of its own post.  I concur with everything here except one:  My bet is that his kids will be ready a LOT sooner than he thinks.  Thanks for your thoughts on this, Eric.

On a personal level, when I started at the university in 1990 the cost was $16,000 per year. This year a freshman at that same university pays $52,000 per year. When compared to the rate of inflation (CPI), that $16,000 in current dollars is slightly more than $23,000. Why has tuition at my alma mater increased more than double the rate of inflation?

There is nothing conspiratorial about the education bubble and I’m not the only one aware of it. I stand with more influential folks like Peter Thiel of PayPal fame,

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/

Then there is Mish Shedlock at Global Economic Analysis who has blogged extensively on the subject.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/04/education-bubble-student-loan-debt.html

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/03/debt-for-diploma-schemes-and-cookie.html

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/03/for-profit-schools-turn-students-into.html

The reason we are in an education bubble is that tuition is highly subsidized by the federal government in the form of Pell and other grants to students. Secondly, tuition is subsidized by low interest long term loans to students. Thirdly, it is subsidized by similar loans to parents. Subsidies affect prices in the market place, and rarely to the downside.

I am very fortunate because my children will not start secondary education for several more years. I am pretty sure the education bubble will have burst by then. If it has not burst by then, I will encourage them to obtain an affordable education in the U.S. at a good state school. Another option is to encourage my children to go abroad for secondary education where they can literally get a fantastic education much less. For instance, Cambridge University in England is only $19,000 per year and Einstein’s alma mater, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology is a mere $750 per semester. The price is much lower & all that remains is academic barrier of entry. My kids would have a better education and resume, international experience with ZERO debt.

I love this article on Neuroscience.  It reminded me of all those articles written by Denyse O’Leary about Evolutionary Biology, another non-science “science”, IYKWIMAITYD I read You can say just about anything and no one can prove you wrong.

I have a buddy named Eric in Indiana who believes there is an education bubble.  He sent me an this article last week about how Seton Hall will lower their tuition to match that of Rutgers.  This seems to be a theme that comes up more and more often.  I am not a huge fan of Rick Perry, but his plan to provide a $10,000 Bachelors degree to qualifying Texans seems to be a stellar idea.  If they could get rid of some of the goofy, politically correct curricula and replace it with something the is a little more market driven, our higher education system might start to improve.  There is more to this story than just cost.  Maybe too many people who would be better served in apprenticeships and community college go to four year colleges to get worthless degrees.  Maybe some fields like Psychology would be better served through certification and apprenticeship programs than through traditional college degrees.  I was gratified to see that one of my favorite authors, Charles Murray, is going to debate that topic in Chicago on October 12.  I plan to start watching this topic a little more closely.

Eric is not what I would call a conspiracy theorist, but almost.  I think his problem, if you want to call it a problem, is the same as mine–he knows what he believes and the things he believes are not based on the pop culture zeitgeist.  We might be wrong, but it least we know what we believe and why we believe it.  We are not EXACTLY on the same page on everything, but we are pretty close on a lot of things.  He has a wonderful family, homeschools his kids, lives on a farm, works as an engineer, and does what he believes is right to a fault.  He is a thoughtful, happy, but pretty intense guy.  Come to think of it, I need to ask him to start doing a guest post for me here if he can ever spare the time.  Eric?

Day 42 of 1000

Kelly does not know what to say when people ask her what is her major.  The reply she gets when she tells them she is working on a Statistics degree is “What can you do with a degree in statistics?”  It is generally a longer discussion than is called for in a “What’s your name?  Where are you from?  What’s your major?” kind of discussion.  There are TONS of jobs available to Statistics majors, but even that is not the right answer in Kelly’s case.  Kelly wants to go on to graduate school.  She wanted a degree that would give her an advantage in graduate school that would also let her explore different application areas.

We talked to a number of professors who all said that Statistics is used everywhere and would be a wonderful option if she wanted to study History, Sociology, Biology, Engineering, Journalism, Education, Psychology, Political Science, Business Administration, or a staggeringly broad range of other fields.  Kelly is not sure yet what she wants to study at the graduate level, but she has certainly done the homework to find an undergraduate degree that will give her flexibility.

Christian is in the same boat, but has a narrower range of interests for his graduate degree.  He chose Applied Math because it provides a strong foundation to go on to graduate work in Math, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Computer Engineering, or some other similar field.  He will have to take stuff like Statics, Dynamics, Strengths of Materials, Circuits, Thermodynamics as elective courses or his applied area, but that is what he likes.

On top of all that, Forbes put an article on their website in January of 2011 that ranked statisticians number four and mathematicians number two in terms of future job prospects.  They ranked the jobs based on scores in five categories:  Work environment, physical demands, stress, median income, and hiring outlook.  I tell the kids to be gracious when a communications, education, or psychology major disses their degree.