Galactic threats to higher education and software development
It's the start of another school year, and evidently there was a sufficient threat to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to bring the Doctor openly to campus. But I'm not so sure he's going to succeed, because though there are some scurrilous rumors the attached recording came from the recent Google-Verizon talks, I suspect the […]
Colbert “University”
At the bottom of this entry is the embedded 7-minute clip from Wednesday's Stephen Colbert Report segment on college. As usual, the Colbert Report writers neatly skewered for-profit scams, and then Colbert interviewed Andrew Hacker, one of the authors of Higher Education?. I will have more to say about Hacker and Claudia Dreifus's book next […]
OMG–helicopter parents!
Some observations as my daughter watched her friends head to college in the past week and then moved in herself: One friend of my daughter reports that her roommate at a public university brought a flat-screen television along with a microwave and mini-fridge. At first, my daughter thought that this was stereotypical university overindulgence. No, […]
Long-term question on RTTT: Teacher evaluations
…a widgetized evaluation system is no better and in many ways much worse than a widgetized salary system…
Prince George’s County insults its AP teachers
This is just a brief note: according to Ken Bernstein, a high school AP government teacher in Prince George's County, Maryland, the county administration decided arbitrarily to change the weighting of grades for AP classes away from assignments and tests to class participation… without telling the teachers until after they had printed and distributed syllabi. […]