So Arthur, in thinking more about your well-founded suspicion of the profit motive, when it comes to curriculum writing and standard setting (test making), I'm thinking we should go over in what ways the public schools, pre college, are already subject to commercial moneymaking. You may suppose I'm about to launch on another anti-TI tirade (but you'd be wrong; plus I just bought one for my daughter, the same kind "Mr. Bright uses" (an excellent teacher)). More, I'm drawing from personal experience with McGraw-Hill, Avenue of the Americas (28th floor, desk jockey under Nola Hague, peer-to-peer with Ray Simon, who got me the post). It was all about Texas and California, the states with the biggest school-aged populations. Mass publishers had to jump through their hoops, our kiss good bye any real chance for profit for hungry investors. Just pandering to the baby states (like New Hampshire) made *no* economic sense. So what's happened is Californians and Texans have realized their economic clout with New York publishing and have decided to politicize around that fact. I know less about the situation in Texas (let others tell that story), but California is pretty obviously laid out on the table over on Math-Teach. It'll be really easy to do the postmortems. The story Californians now tell themselves is: we were going down the sewer, mathematically, but now scores are on the rise and all because of a new State Standard championed by our Education Pope, one Wayne Bishop over at CalState (a competent teacher I'm sure -- I use some of his linear algebra thinking in Gnu Math as a matter of fact). Now that Wayne is Pope, we're hearing a lot more about Saxon and Singapore, as the two flagship tree-killer textbook series that Our Nation must embrace. And yes, their ambitions are National, what with the Department of Education obligated by law to pass judgement on textbook offerings, thereby giving Our Friends the Big Publishers in New York, access to the levers of power at the federal level (a known quantity high ground). Get the Ed Department to sign off on Everyday Math, and you've got your gravy train for the next fifteen years minimum (but good doobie bureaucrats need job security too, so stamp it with "more study needed"). What has all this to do with Python? Precious little, which is of course my point. Textbook publishing is profitable because at the K-12 level, it's all about rehashing. Colleges pioneer and explore (or used to), but K-12 never changes, or, if it does, hardly moves at all in Mathematics. The pictures get more ethnically diverse, the sidebars more loquacious, the binders stronger, the books heavier and more expensive. These are the only dimensions we care about. Math Content, meantime, remains Plain Vanilla Pablum, i.e. nothing serious, until we weed 'em and feed 'em (Calculus Mountain to weed 'em). So has our Python Nation any hope at all of propagating to more than homeschoolers and forlorn little one roomers on Shoshone Rez in someplace godforsaken? We beed to recruit too, after all, if our ethnicity is to survive. Not according to conventional radar (which the math-teach subscribers all deem me to be "under"). With New York holding Congress in hammerlock, and pesky politicos yammering "fuzzy" and "new new", screaming to high heaven to legislate Math from On High (the only way religious fanatics know to get anything), Python, open source, GNU, Linux, Ruby, tupuloid, Sims, Alan Kay, $100 laptop, are all doomed from ever impacting any mainstream child in one of our mainstream all-American public school K-12 classrooms, ad infinitum and ad nauseum (a little Kay goes a long way, I agree, but he's still powerful good medicine). Obviously there's something wrong with this overly pessimistic model, as we already know from personal experience, if dealing with teenagers personally (as I do, daily), that the above memepool is hardly esoteric. A lot of kids already know about this stuff, because they're *all* homeschoolers when they come home, and keep learning through the balance of their day (even sleep can be educational). They're out of school and smack dab in the middle of that Commercial Sector you're always so suspicious about (having worked in it for many years, our first meeting being in your home town's Financial District). And smack dab in the middle of the out-of-school Commercial Sector, is the breakfast cereal industry. Cheerios, Cheerios, Cornflakes & Grape Nuts, one of the most feared Capitol Hill lobbies in the history of our planet. They own Saturday Morning, a cartoon festival and clown show, puppets galore, and long the Fortune 100 focus for discovering Emerging Trends. Cartoons have snakes. Cartoons have pirates. So what candle do the print media Publishers hold, when it comes to comparing old dead language lead, flat-on-a-page XY somnambulisms, next to the EyeCandyLand of XYZ television? Nada, right? So I guess this is the truce I'm seeing emerging between us. You're wanting to marshal the troops to defend the Sanctity and Purity of Ivory Tower Virginity, to keep it free from that down and dirty Profit Motive (at least in any tainted sense -- high grades still sought after). All along, you've been supposing my Fuller School credential meant I was duty-bound to try to get passed you and your forces, as I tried for the End Zone of Academic Respectability. You wanted me to check my funny-looking pyrate hat at the door, be a good compromiser, give a little, in the interests of mutual respectability. Then we could join forces and champion Python together, on the same side of high walls (with Microsoft at bay outside). But how it turns out is more like this: I'm happy to leave you to that battle, and hope you keep winning it (need troops? just ask). But I'm content to leave Academia to its textbook fixations and focus on Saturday Morning, where my market researchers have "lazy fare" to just experiment and play with little kids' minds, beyond any oppressive scrutiny and control of those "too old for cartoons" fuddydud college professors (except maybe the semioticians -- they watch us agog (or "agrog" as the case may be)). You keep Academics respectable (I support you in that), and meanwhile I'll do like me Pyrate Captain taught me: engage in all out psychological warfare on the fringe, where few dare venture, and even fewer make it back. Python Nation is lucky to have recruited someone like me. Kids really love it when I "Talk Like a Pyrate" [sm].[1] Yar! [sm] [2] Kirby 4D Studios Portland "Open Source Capital" Oregon [1] http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2005/09/talk-like-pirate-day.html [2] http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/09/yar.html
On 9/27/06, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
So Arthur, in thinking more about your well-founded suspicion of the profit motive, when it comes to curriculum writing and standard setting (test making), I'm thinking we should go over in what ways the public schools, pre college, are already subject to commercial moneymaking.
I said nothing about the test making industry, i.e. ETS. Obviously there's a lot more to this picture than just textbooks, plus New York isn't necessarily a center for K-12. I hear the McGraw-Hill division I used to work for moved to Deluth or someplace, maybe Omaha.
You may suppose I'm about to launch on another anti-TI tirade (but you'd be wrong; plus I just bought one for my daughter, the same kind "Mr. Bright uses" (an excellent teacher)). More, I'm drawing from
TI-30x? Something like that. A "2 line" display (all Python really needs, right?).
It was all about Texas and California, the states with the biggest school-aged populations. Mass publishers had to jump through their hoops, our kiss good bye any real chance for profit for hungry
...[or] kiss good bye...
The story Californians now tell themselves is: we were going down the sewer, mathematically, but now scores are on the rise and all because of a new State Standard championed by our Education Pope, one Wayne Bishop over at CalState (a competent teacher I'm sure -- I use some of his linear algebra thinking in Gnu Math as a matter of fact).
Cite: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2006-September/007145.html ISBN: 087150300X
Get the Ed Department to sign off on Everyday Math, and you've got your gravy train for the next fifteen years minimum (but good doobie bureaucrats need job security too, so stamp it with "more study needed").
Cite: http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=1454461&tstart=0 Everyday Mathematics Gets Qualified Nod From U.S. Ed. Dept. Posted: Sep 21, 2006 12:11 PM post by Jerry P. Becker
Textbook publishing is profitable because at the K-12 level, it's all about rehashing. Colleges pioneer and explore (or used to), but K-12 never changes, or, if it does, hardly moves at all in Mathematics.
And I'm NOT saying "old is bad" here. When mathematics gets creative and imaginative, as in a Renaissance period, it's often "old stuff" that gets a new lease on life, e.g. Fibonacci's Liber Abaci, in turn an exhumation of Lost Arts (known within Islamic circles, but semi-purged from Xtiandom by the Spanish Inquisition and its sorry precursors).
The pictures get more ethnically diverse, the sidebars more loquacious, the binders stronger, the books heavier and more expensive. These are the only dimensions we care about. Math
Big confusion between "ethnicity" and "genetic makeup" by the way. They could be identical twins, and yet fight on opposite sides in some civil war. Memes, way more than genes, carry Kulture.
Content, meantime, remains Plain Vanilla Pablum, i.e. nothing serious, until we weed 'em and feed 'em (Calculus Mountain to weed 'em).
I'm not advocating we give up on Calculus, but I think Computer Science, with its hunger for discrete mathematicians, is not off base when it goes in with a less calculus-intensive, yet technologically sophisticated, alternative track (or set of tracks). We'll cover calculus in overview still, but the "weed 'em" feature of Differentiating By Parts, for example, might be given short shrift. Mathematica automates this stuff anyway. We're not trying to compete with robots when it comes to Factory Algorithms. Even the TIs do simple integrals these days.
So has our Python Nation any hope at all of propagating to more than homeschoolers and forlorn little one roomers on Shoshone Rez in someplace godforsaken? We beed to recruit too, after all, if our ethnicity is to survive.
...[need] to recruit...
And smack dab in the middle of the out-of-school Commercial Sector, is the breakfast cereal industry. Cheerios, Cheerios, Cornflakes & Grape Nuts, one of the most feared Capitol Hill lobbies in the history of our planet. They own Saturday Morning, a cartoon festival and clown show, puppets galore, and long the Fortune 100 focus for discovering Emerging Trends.
I left out a key variable in this equation: commercial jingles. There's a huge tie-in between the Breakfast Cereal Industy and Nashville. Dyxy Chyx on the back of the cereal box kinda thing, but also what you hear, not just what you see, is important on a flatscreen (smell is for when you open the box -- usually lots of sugar).
All along, you've been supposing my Fuller School credential meant I was duty-bound to try to get passed you and your forces, as I tried for the End Zone of Academic Respectability.
Which isn't to say I think Fuller Schoolers can't emerge from the woodwork within Academia. I'm just saying we have other routes to command and control positions, other than through our nation's war colleges, duh. Fuller held a professorship at Harvard, had numerous relevant credentials. Most faculties considered themselves lucky to get him, as students tended to go gaga for his geometric geegaws (raising suspicions of the type you harbor, since he was obviously a businessman wolf in sheeps clothing).
You wanted me to check my funny-looking pyrate hat at the door, be a good compromiser, give a little, in the interests of mutual respectability. Then we could join forces and champion Python together, on the same side of high walls (with Microsoft at bay outside).
Regarding Microsoft, it's too big an operation to be all on one side of anything. I regard the IronPython krew as seaworthy, given how C# promises great speed combined with access to multifarious treasures (even Parrots -- a bird we tend to favor). Re Disney, why not Kaa?
You keep Academics respectable (I support you in that), and meanwhile I'll do like me Pyrate Captain taught me: engage in all out psychological warfare on the fringe, where few dare venture, and even fewer make it back.
Bucky actually called it "psycho-guerilla warfare" more often than not, and associated it with Cold Warring, ala his 'Critical Path' magnum opus (a mythopoetical work, but with lots of factual material).
Python Nation is lucky to have recruited someone like me. Kids really love it when I "Talk Like a Pyrate" [sm].[1] Yar! [sm] [2]
But I'm overworked and overbooked in a lot of ways, so the focus now is on swelling our ranks. I'm happy to keep with the gnu math teaching, but expect the economies of scale to make that job easier than it has been. Kirby
From: kirby urner
On 9/27/06, kirby urner wrote:
So Arthur, in thinking more about your well-founded suspicion of the profit motive, when it comes to curriculum writing and standard setting (test making), I'm thinking we should go over in what ways the public schools, pre college, are already subject to commercial moneymaking.
I said nothing about the test making industry, i.e. ETS. Obviously there's a lot more to this picture than just textbooks, plus New York isn't necessarily a center for K-12. I hear the McGraw-Hill division I used to work for moved to Deluth or someplace, maybe Omaha.
Glad to have that toned down a bit. We are more ethnic (and sensitive about it) then folks tend to be in Portland, for example. Careful - speculating about the influence of business folks based in New York in particular might bring you allies you shouldn't want. And there will be no possibility of a truce, with me. Maybe, in fact, us business folks in New York lost our sense of humor about fringe movements sometime last century, and perhaps our discussions do reflect some of that undertone.
Get the Ed Department to sign off on Everyday Math, and you've got your gravy train for the next fifteen years minimum (but good doobie bureaucrats need job security too, so stamp it with "more study needed").
Just folks.. Happens that the brightest, most committed, most energetic high school math teacher I know is not beating his head against some pillar in the Bowery, or wearing a pirate hat - for that matter. He first co-authored a high school trigonometry textbook with a Russian gentlemen, now professor at a US university, acknoledged to be a Major Living Mind in mathematics. They, I assure you, were only going to write the text book they were willing to write - the publisher's ability to cover costs being the publisher's problem. He was then recruited by the National Science Foundation, to advise on grants related to pre-college mathematics education. Yes he is Old School. Knows nothing about programming and seeing PyGeo didn't seem to light him on fire. But there are years of classroom work, organizing math competitions all over the world, etc. and etc. - all on short pay, at work in his look at things. And he is nobody's lackey, I assure you. The NSF was doing its job quite well in recognizing and recruiting him. In my own small cross-sectional view of things - gained from the simple fact of waking up in the morning and going about my business - I have seen this kind of story repeated enough that my own cynical, pessimistic tendencies have been tamed a bit. OTOH, this same cross-section has included an intense and realistic view of what makes a business tick. And I have no personal problem seeing myself as part of that clockwork. I won't belabor the issue, other then to repeat my conviction that this ticking, brought too close to the classroom, is and is not what it might seem to be. It is a finely tuned clock, indeed - except that it is now attached to a detonator. It is nobody's intention that this be the way it is. But that doesn't help. And something or other about breakfeast cereals, but I'm not sure what. Art
On 9/27/06, ajsiegel@optonline.net <ajsiegel@optonline.net> wrote:
It is a finely tuned clock, indeed - except that it is now attached to a detonator. It is nobody's intention that this be the way it is. But that doesn't help.
And something or other about breakfeast cereals, but I'm not sure what.
Art
Well, that's disturbing imagery, so I'll send in my defusers and try to fill in more of the picture as I see it. There's this cold hearted business logic that'll chew up good people, spit em back zombies for The Establishment, and then there are good hearted people, still not chewed up yet, at least not completely (some were spit back for some reason? Not tastey?). You and I both know it well (the Business World) and work for it, but in different walkx of life. I come from a crony capitalist Philippines, and before that from some thriving Etruscan center, updated through centuries, a product of Overseas Schools, interlude in Florida. I had by 'n large wonderful teachers, who gave me great faith and hope in this life. Plus I was blessed with great parents. So I was already far in the direction of Loving Education, which is probably what got me into Princeton (on top of the high test scores, which many good schools don't even care about). I dove head first into computer science (by way of APL, including a graphical version tucked away in the E-Quad) and philosophy (1879 Hall, since made bigger). This all goes to explain the importance of the Global University meme in my writing (GU), which is acknowledged from the outset as a meme i.e. not some real administration with one apex hierarchy. We're multi-apex and we know it. We're a network of invisible colleges, with real campus footprint manifestations. The Fuller School is one of these invisible colleges, and our campus ain't shabby: radomes, Montreal Expo, a long shelf of books, an Archive at Stanford, numerous websites, a long pedigree of contributing professionals. I thank my lucky stars to have crewed among them, many of whom I'll never meet probably. But in a very big world, it's not stupid to have a crew as cosmopoliton and polyglot as Fuller's, a lot like New York's (which polyglot functioning also includes self policing as a necessary evil). I won't go back over the breakfast cereal business. That was a one-off, although a Geek Brand cereal could conceivably tease kids with Pythonic Equations amidst the fuzzy furries, with a DVD in the box, one of those Distros we've been talking about. Why not? Let's just say I'm not too worried about our working at cross-purposes sometimes, with respect to investors looking to pump up our snake, make it a Macy Day balloon or whatever (Portland is getting a new Macy's downtown, complete with hotel, and I think that's a very positive development). We can use edu-sig to compare notes, which I like doing, because I advertise my 4D Solutions as "a pioneer in open source" which is what Bucky called "thinking out loud" and took very seriously (there's a good bio-documentary about him by that title you could see sometime, first broadcast by WNET, which also did a website). Relevant: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/fuller_b.html Kirby
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