I have a friend who is looking for a calculus II tutor for their engineering major off spring. I pretty much stick to physics. If anyone knows someone good who can help, let me know. Online is good.
The other thread was over 200, so I wanted a new one anyway. Open thread. 🙂
Tom,
It doesn’t seem to me that they’re doing a whole lot with it, although maybe I’m just not paying good enough attention what with the media focused on why Trump is Hitler and all.
But if they aren’t going to pass legislation, what’s the point of having conservative majorities, other than to try to prevent Trump from getting impeached (assuming that’s a worthwhile goal). I don’t know.
https://www.theonion.com/climate-researchers-warn-only-hope-for-humanity-now-lie-1828171232
Tee Hee!
Some people may be interested in my, now senior, son’s travels through the college admission process. He got a 5 in AP European History, a 4 in US History, and a 3 in physics, meaning he passed them all. Saved me some money in those subjects.
….
He had an interesting experience in physics. He really didn’t like physics, but he had a very good teacher. Prior to what he thought was an easy last small quiz, he had something like an 80.9 grade. He screwed up the quiz, and got the only C he has ever gotten in his life. (Numerical grade was something like 78.5) Notwithstanding the C, and his dislike of physics, the teacher was so good he passed the AP test. (at the beginning of the year, the teacher said that 95% of his students passed the AP exam. — Seems to be true.) All “A”s other than the “C” last semester.
…..
On the other end of the scale, he has been stuck with a not very good English teacher the last 2 years. He thought the class was so poor that he asked to be tutored and was. On his last, ACT he received a 25 in English, which was his only score below 30.
……
He is being tutored again. At his first session, the tutor explained the difference between restrictive and non-restrictive commas, which had never been taught in his English classes. My son immediately picked up the significance and made a remark about how poor his English classes had been. Am cautiously optimistic that he can substantially improve his score.
JD
JD Ohio,
A good teacher with appropriate expectations combined with appropriate screening of students to place in AP Physics 1 is a great thing. Kids can pass.
Unfortunately, some teachers are not so good, some are good but haven’t figured out what the AP Phys 1 test is “like” and end up teaching things at an inappropriate depth. Some schools let kids into AP Physics 1 who just shouldn’t be in there. If the teacher uses a “modeling” approach, the kids need to be able to “get” linearizing experimental data within 2 lessons. (It’s ok if they forget and re-learn. But they have to at least grasp it.) If they take 6 lessons to grasp it…. forget it. The student will be lost in all following lessons if they don’t “get” this.
The students who take longer (for whatever reason) can eventually learn physics. But they aren’t ready for AP 1 that year. If put in AP Physics 1, those student not only struggle tremendously, then fail the AP test themselves, but make it next to impossible to pace the class properly. If the teacher slows to accommodate those students, the other students aren’t introduced to the material on the test. Unless they teach themselves, they fail also. (Some will get prep books and pass. But that’s sort of a ridiculous approach to the idea of “school”.)
A few (not most) teachers are just scatty. One student I had would bring in homework with topics assigned in a haphazard order. (She did gravity and was immediately shown Coloumb’s law. OK…they “look” alike. But the students hadn’t done ‘charge’, and the rest of electricity came later. THEN, when they hit electricity, the teacher seemed to think the 1 day of Coulomb’s law covered back when they didn’t know what charge was was “enough”. Similar things happened in other topics. )
I don’t know how students in that class did. Possibly ok because those who tried the homework were going to absorb some physics, and the community is wealthy enough that a lot may have had tutors. But I can tell you this student hated physics.
Lucas,
It is clear that you are very organized and are a good teacher. Too bad there aren’t more of you.
Just hope that my son can get his ACT up to 32 or better. That is in free tuition range.
JD
I can be. But I have to admit parts of tutoring are easier. I don’t (and mostly can’t) know what my students teacher is going to do next week. I have a guess– some things are more “sane”, some are less sane. (Note: can’t because getting a student to email you every day to say “we started something called ‘momentum’, is impossible and many teachers do not hand out a syllabus and don’t use a book of any sort. They all cover things is somewhat different orders.)
So, to some extent, I just have to wing it when helping. Regardless, I (a) don’t have the work of organizing that stuff (so less work)
(b) know some orders are in the vicinity of “sane” and some are incoherent and
(c) know when pacing is way, way off.
Last year, all teachers in Naperville North and Central and the one at HInsdale Central did things in an order that were either truly sane or seemed so, and pacing was ok. (I could predict the next topic and depth expected at Hinsdale because she used a book. Woo hoo!)
I can’t diagnose “perfect” teaching, but I can tell these teachers were pretty well organized, predictable, gave reasonable levels of homework and so on. (Kids did consider the class hard. But that’s ok.)
Some teachers at other schools either went much to slowly (falling behind about 2 chapters relative to what needed to be covered to prepare kids for the AP exam), then did bursts of insane speed (doing things like telling the students to teach themselves calculus based gravitation over Christmas break, then having a test on that, or doing things in a scatty order.)
The kids in the classes with the scatty teachers knew their teacher was scatty. Were not happy with their teacher and so on. The kids in the classes with the other teachers mostly didn’t think they were bad– though one thought the teacher didn’t explain. She felt the teacher communicated expectations and then students taught themselves. That’s why her parents hired a tutor.
JD Ohio (Comment #169738)
August 10th, 2018 at 9:43 pm
“On the other end of the scale, he has been stuck with a not very good English teacher the last 2 years. He thought the class was so poor that he asked to be tutored and was. On his last, ACT he received a 25 in English, which was his only score below 30.”
______
JD, good for you. Your son is fortunate to have a father who takes
such an interest.
I just found out the ACT English Test is a test of your editing skills. It is not a writing test. Knowing how to edit, however, can help with
writing.
“On the ACT English Test you’ll face five passages on topics ranging from historical essays to personal narratives. Portions of each passage are underlined, and you must decide if these are correct as written or if one of the other answers would fix or improve the selection.”
https://www.princetonreview.com/college-advice/act-english-tips
After testing myself on sample questions from the ACT English
Test I have a few suggestions for your son.
I would tell your son to read the entire essay before trying to
edit the sentences because understanding what the essay is
about helps edit for clarity. I would tell him to address the
sentences in sequence because context and continuity
are important when editing. I would tell him to read each
sentence carefully and to be especially careful in reading
the multiple choice edits as differences between these
choices can be subtle.
Your son may already know all this, but if he doesn’t, it
may be helpful.
OK-Max Thanks a lot for your very thoughtful and useful suggestions. Will show them to my son.
JD
OK_Max
Yes. AP Lang and lit are where writing per se is tested or matters for a grade. The graders back off a bit on editing. ACT is more about editing. Both are needed for good writing. But there is such a thing as a “good first draft” and that’s what a student needs to aim for on AP Lang and Lit– not perfect editing.
Ideally, the writer had a natural feel for proper grammar, spelling and so on, but it’s fine for first drafts to contain some editing problems. You need to get the main ideas across, have things flow in a way people can follow.
Final editing is very important as you get closer to final drafts. But wholesale reorganization sometimes needs to happen before anyone should spend time on editing.
lucia (Comment #169752)
August 11th, 2018 at 2:14 pm
“AP Lang and lit are where writing per se is tested or matters for a grade. The graders back off a bit on editing. ACT is more about editing. Both are needed for good writing. But there is such a thing as a “good first draft” and that’s what a student needs to aim for on AP Lang and Lit– not perfect editing.”
______
Yes, substance comes first. The writer makes something. Grammar
and spelling refine the creation.
I don’t care for most books on how to write, but I can recommend The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. I believe it helped me.
Thea advice I remember most from this book is to remove needless words. I frequently don’t, but it’s good advice.
OK_Max,
Of course, one must then decide which words are needless. 🙂
Famous examples of early academic blackboard systems are the Hearsay II speech recognition system and Douglas Hofstadter ‘s Copycat and Numbo projects.
I like the juxtaposition of comments #169756 and #169766. 🙂
Just a note on the “education” of today’s children. My daughter is going into the 7th grade. She is a good student and gets mostly straight “A”s. Also in gifted English. I ordered her a laptop, which is back ordered, and not due to arrive until Sept. 20. Yesterday, she asked me: When is September coming? She really has a poor grasp of the calendar.
… .
About 2 months ago, she asked me what “real estate” was? She never seemed to pick it up even though a substantial portion of my business is real estate. I gently mocked her, and she said that she thought her friend Anna (also in gifted program) wouldn’t know. Sure enough Anna didn’t know — and Anna’s father is in the real estate business.
Don’t think social media is helping our children.
JD
JD Ohio,
Interesting… and more than a little scary. Social media allows people to communicate with people who are mostly like themselves and who share common interests, and focus almost exclusively on the things that they are jointly interested in. Since you don’t know what you don’t know, a lack of exposure to people outside your “group” (or your “peers”), who have knowledge of a wide range of subjects, means accumulating new knowledge is very limited. Broad exposure to information doesn’t have to be via face-to-face discussion; it can be, and has historically been, through reading on diverse subjects… you know, like one might expect to happen in schools. Not having the most basic knowledge (like the sequence of months of the year, or what real estate is) means those kids just have not been reading enough and/or widely enough. But I bet they have heard plenty in school about the evils of racism.
The FBI has (finally!) fired the obnoxious and grossly biased Peter Strzok. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving worm. The only remaining puzzle is why he wasn’t fired in August of 2017, a few weeks after his text messages were ‘discovered’ and he was thrown off the ‘impeach Trump’ investigation team. Mueller, to his discredit, refused to disclose why Strzok had been removed from the Trump investigation team. Maybe that is because Strozk is far from the only person on the team who holds an abiding animus toward Trump… including, of course, Mueller himself.
Yes. That’s why I marvel that someone advised he be put on leave for 60 days first. This whole thing took a long, long time.
Max,
I guess the closest I can come to criticism of ‘the poop problem’ in SF is a general statement that’s analogous to one of Jordan Peterson’s rules. Progressives in SF ought to clean their room. They ought to consider dealing with their local problems effectively before trying to tackle national issues. Reasons include, 1 managing the smaller problems in life is harder than lots of them think, but helps people develop characteristics that are useful in dealing with these problems. 2. It would lend credibility to the idea that maybe these progressives know what the heck they are talking about, if where they held sway it actually did appear to be a more idyllic society.
.
I won’t live on the [West] Coast, and I’m a software engineer. A lot of the tech giants are out there. I won’t live in Portland, with antifa and the unrest there. I won’t live in SF with poopy streets and needles all over. I won’t live in general in a place where the cost of living is sky high. I’m not eager to subject myself and my family to living under a government intrusive enough to forbid us all the use of drinking straws. I am more than a little uncomfortable at the notion that immigration status appears to trump criminality, and that the state may strive to offer safe refugee to violent repeat offense criminals solely on the basis that they are illegals. So on and so forth. Do they manage resources well. I seem to remember hearing that much of the drought problem was exacerbated by the mish-mashed government regulating agencies or something to that effect.
.
Now – are there people who would rather live just about anyplace besides Alabama or the south in general? I’m sure there are, and more power to them. It’s one of the nice things about our States and local governments, that we can be locally different. I’ve no issue with folk out in California and Washington living whatever way appeals to them, provided they extend the same courtesy back.
.
Anyway.
.
[Edit: I didn’t give the full nuance to the drinking straw thing. I know they aren’t illegal, but instead that it’s illegal for servers to give me one unless I ask for it. It doesn’t matter to me, this is still frighteningly absurd in my viewpoint. This is a government doing very strange things, and I don’t want to be subject to a government that does very strange things if I can help it.]
Tom,
I’ll give the media credit for finally mentioning a particularly murderous weekend in Chicago a couple weeks back, but it’s back to ignoring it since then. Shootings are ..normalized, I think that’s the word that gets used… in Chicago. Well, shootings of mostly black men by people other than police anyway.
.
My takeaway: Black Lives definitely Matter to the national news. No question about that. They just maybe don’t matter as much as supporting a chosen narrative does.
Max,
So, interesting. I don’t know that I’d say the police took me from my family in their time of need, if they came and arrested me for a crime I’d commit. My view would be more along the lines that I knocked myself out of the picture in their time of need. I tend to view this guy the same way.
Assuming I was more or less guilty.
[Edit: Heh. Is it that I smell bad, or is it that nobody wants to move off the old thread. Rhetorical, I know. I stink. :/]
OK …
I give the media credit for not burying how badly botched the recent illegal story turned out. They should have gotten the facts first, but they did report them once they were available.
(RE: 170036):
Thanks Max.
Yes. There are those who believe Cohen’s story makes Trump an ‘unindicted coconspirator’ and see this as a path to impeachment and removal. There are others such as Dershowitz who are less impressed with this argument. He argues that everybody violates campaign finance laws one way or another.
Here is an example of a similar accusation that could be leveled against the Clinton campaign. Here is an article that claims Bush did it.
I don’t want to trigger the Blackboard’s automatic defenses against comments with too many links, but – I could link more. This is just to get the idea.
Going forward, the hope some apparently cling to of Trump’s removal from office will probably hinge on the Democrats ability to flip the Senate. I read that the odds are in their favor of flipping the House. We shall see.
Here were President Obama’s 2008 campaign finance violations.
.
Here were President Bill Clinton’s campaign finance skeletons.
.
So on.
mark bofill (Comment #170023): “Heh. Is it that I smell bad, or is it that nobody wants to move off the old thread.”
Oh. the same discussion seems to be happening on two threads.
Mike,
Yah I know. I conspire to try to draw people off the old thread and onto this thread because when I read comments on my phone it takes longer to load on long threads, mostly. Shrug.
John McCain has passed on. I’m sure the Democratic party will feel his loss keenly.
And in local news:
‘Butt naked man tasered by police’ on Jordan lane here in Huntsville.
.
Wasn’t me. Just wanted that to be clear.
mark –
I thought the idiom was “buck naked”. Apparently “butt naked” is also in common usage.
Especially in Huntsville.
I was confused about that as well. 🙂 I may spend some time tomorrow looking into the etymology. There was a silly/funny explanation someplace that blamed it on Yankee mispronunciation I wish I could locate, but alas.