Productivity
15 Minute Education Plan
The US public education gets worse and worse, whether it’s class sizes going up, or layoffs due to lack of funding; our pupils just aren’t learning anymore. We face lower standards of return, even though grades continue to rise, this is a problem, it either means that pupils are being trained to be pattern recognizers, that don’t understand why the pattern is, or that the teachers are blatantly lying about pupils competence with curves. We need a new way to get the key skill for maintained learning: understanding. Here is my suggestion for understanding based learning, fit into 15 minutes.
Normal class times are generally in the 45-90 minute range, depending on how the school defines it’s periods, I’d prefer a 45 minute course daily. Working with 15 minute intervals makes it simple to repeat the process and to make sure pupils grasp and understand concepts. The key to understanding is simplifying to a key point of information that you want them to understand. This is particularly necessary in Elementary schooling, to build up a foundation of understanding, and problem solving skills.
Minutes: 1-3
Prepare the topic with the pupils, so that they have a basic idea of the concept, you are working on. Provide the pupils with a couple test problems, non-multiple choice, to test their understanding.
Minutes:4-8
This is time for the pupils to work through the problems to show how much they understand.
Minutes:9-10
Check pupils responses to this work, so you can see who had issues, and where the issues were. Make sure you are interacting with all of the pupils as a group, and as individuals.
Minutes:11-14
Have a class discussion calling on those that did particularly well, and unwell, to help gather learning concepts that some pupils gathered and others did not, this will help in the future.
Minute:15
Take those that did well and partner them with those that didn’t do as well.
Repeat this process until the end of class or until all but possibly one or two pupils grasp the concept, if they do this give them a 5 minute break, and an example problem for tomorrow’s concept. While most of the class works on this, you should interact with the remaining pupils, that don’t grasp the concept, and help them to understand that concept, as well as the new concept in advance, to help prepare them for tomorrow’s work.
If you can’t get a child or even an adult to understand a concept within 15 minutes, then the problem is most likely with you, and not the pupil(s). If there is a problem, you need to look at how your teaching, what they don’t understand, and what you can do to improve. You have all the data in the work the pupils did, so you can go through and check for where they might be missing the connection.
One benefit to this, is you aren’t overloading the mind with brand new concepts simultaneously, this helps prevent the pupil from feeling overwhelmed. A second benefit, is that you get to interact with the children one-on-one this is something that is lacking in most classrooms, and likely why the parental influence is a so much greater determining factor. Another benefit is that it is quick, it lets you know if there is a problem that you need to focus on or not, it is also quite fluid.
The fluidity, is the final benefit, which allows you to do a weekly, biweekly, monthly, recovery of knowledge quickly, by recovery I mean returning memory. Memory degrades over time, but if it recurs even slightly enough to re-jog it, it becomes wholly new again, and will last longer, this is the forgetting curve. Following the concept of the forgetting curve, you can cover 4 concepts a week, and still fit a day for recovery for all four concepts into your plan, to help increase retention. Another benefit is that you get to gain more data into how the pupils have retained the concepts, so you can better predict when you’ll have to cover the information, again.
This post is complete conjecture, and isn’t based on any significant facts.
Thoughts are Evolutionary: The Idea for Arclings
Do you really want to keep pushing ideas out, but have problems fleshing the concept out fully? Or maybe you just want to express the basis of an idea really quick, get feedback, and iterate. The problem with current systems is it’s hard to keep track of the evolution, if you post a lot of other stuff around it.
Micro-blogging lets you throw the idea out there, but doesn’t allow much room for the idea to evolve, or tracking this evolution.
Blogging in the conventional sense is much too concrete(though I’m doing it right now). I find the preconception of blogging to be you must push out a full thought. Why?
I propose a release quick, release often blogging structure and build arc’s as your story develops, making branching trees using link structures. Let the ideas build over weeks, or months, rather than waiting for one single burst of insight, and fleshing it out on the spot.
I propose using story arcs, along with links to the latest preceding events in the evolution, and trackbacks to the succeeding story events. Though this is possible in the current evolution of blogging systems, it’s complicated. I want an Arcling platform that makes the connection process easy, if not intelligent in managing the tracing of the structure.
Why I Don’t Set Myself Up For Failure(March Goal Review)
I’d love to say that I completed my goals for the month, but I didn’t. The only one I actually accomplished was finding a new vehicle, which I would of had to do anyways. It came down to various instances for each one.
As far as the prototype, it ended up being far more complicated than I had suspected. I had originally planned on just using the SAX XML parser built into python. Unfortunately, it ended up not being a viable library now I have to build a custom parser which will take much longer than I originally planned.
As far as posts a lot of them I ended up cutting due to my own shortsightedness on using short term posts. I thought I had a lot more posts set aside but I began cutting them do to no longer being relevant to you guys. Falling back to quality over quantity I ended up killing a lot of my posts and haven’t been thinking much about topics to write about. The blog is now a place for ideas I can’t condense into a few tweets.
And as far as my stack goes I got up to 8k and then I got cocky and started playing with my emotions and not with my brain. This occurred even when I knew I had a losing hand I would shove all in. Stupidly, I did this over and over to the point that I hit 1k by the end of the month.
All of this goes back to me not being able to deal with failure. I have a tendency to either be perfect or just laze around. The only time I fail is when I don’t try which is far more often because I find a reason that it can’t be perfect and I’m not saying that everything I attempt comes out perfect, it’s not, there is always more that can be done. If it’s something that I only have a short time to do, I’ll finish it but it won’t be of the quality that I’d like.
Because of this I try to remain aloof and allow myself the time to adapt to any changes that may occur. If I need to implement something better I don’t mind stepping back and taking a little more time. I’m averse to failure and it makes me even more prone to failure. Maybe I need to just start trying more and failing only because I didn’t succeed and not because I didn’t try.
Goals For March ’09
So this is something that I was inspired to do by Erik Kastner over at his blog Meta|ateM. He did it last month and was fairly succesful and it also goes along with something that I have thought about and possible written about, providing people public knowledge of what your goals are so they can hold you accountable. So here is my list for March.
Get a working prototype of my Main project finished.
This might not get done but I’m really hoping that I can as I spent the past month working on the algorithm and design of the system. I think I can get the base down in 2 weeks but some of the higher functioning algorithms will take a bit longer but I have to build a working test body before I get to them.
15 posts
I know I was lacking last month, in fact this is the first post in over 2 weeks. I’ll be finishing a bunch of posts I’ve been working on and should be able to hit 15 fairly easily.
Find a new car
This is new as I just totalled my car an hour ago, at the time of writing. I was planning on looking more towards the end of the month but looks like that clock was stepped up a bit.
Build up my chipstack on Full-Tilt
Lately, I’ve been playing more often I haven’t reached a point where I’m able to sacrifice money from my daily life so I just play for fun and intellectual challenge. Right now, I’m at 3,000 and I want to reach 10,000 by the end of the month.
I’ll update you guys on how I did at the end of the month. Oh and for those of you that subscribe and visit the site I’m wondering if the new design is more pleasing to you?
Killing Time Sinks
Just over a week ago, I started playing World of Warcraft(again) and I was have a great time getting back into the game. Unfortunately, for you guys it completely knocked out my time for blogging and also some of my other things that I enjoy. My estimate for in-game time is over 40 hours for the week, that’s a full time job, what the hell could I have been thinking. So I’m going to write down a list of ways to seek and remove time sinks.
Do a Weekly Analysis for 1-2 Weeks
You don’t have to over thorough with you tracking, but every couple of hours write down what your doing. If you do something that could take a few hours write before you start and when you end, including the time for each. At the end of the week, compile all that information and look for stuff that appears rather excessive and see if you can cut it out; for me excessive would be anything above 6-8 hours for the week. Obviously, you can’t cut sleep, dining, or commuting out completely, but it is possible to cut back.
How to Cut Back
If say reading too much(though I don’t think that’s possible), you could cut the number of books available to you so that you read them more slowly and cherish them, or maybe it’s a social activity, you can cut your funding so that you have to stay home. Find a way to either make the time have more value, rather than desaturate it with over use, or put a flow valve on it so that you can constrict it. If it’s possible you could also just go cold turkey and cut it completely, this was my choice in canceling my subscription and removing the software from my system.
Find Something Productive to Fill the Time
This is the big one anytime you try to stop a habit, you need a distraction to prevent you from going back to your old ways. You need something that you find interesting and will add value to your life. Here are a few, some that I plan on using
- Blogging( I know I already am, I want to do it more frequently)
- Freelancing
- Programming
- Reading
- Focused Topical Learning
- Get A Job
- Head Back to School