Archive for December, 2012

CW Chronicles: The Chicken Boots

Posted: December 29, 2012 in CW Chronicles
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In a recent dinner with some (most?  There were two…) of my loyal readers, the central theme of this CW Chronicles series came up:  some of our  best stories need never be forgotten, but some were never fully known in the first place.  So for posterity and entertainment, I vow for 2013 to be the year for all of these to be recorded for posterity.  Curt’s broken wrist ix next up, but for today one of my all-time favorites and one of the lesser-known Curt stories:  The Chicken Boots.

If I had a few adjectives to describe Curt, most would be synonyms for “wonderful”, at least a few would be sophomorically homoerotic because that was just the kind of humor we all used at the time, but the other big two would be:

-Hardworking

-Unlucky

And The Chicken Boots summarizes them both fantastically. During the 1999-2000 school year (Tom Brady’s senior year…) Curt worked at least a few nights a week at the butcher/deli counter at Plymouth Marketplace, about 15 miles from Ann Arbor back in our hometown. He had finally declared a major (something ecological…in the School of Natural Resources and Environment) and was working pretty hard to fit in a ton of credits.  So he’s work late to close up Marketplace, get home even later because it was a 20-30 minute drive, study until he passed out, and get up before most of us housemates to get to classes early.

One night, he was hoping to get out of Marketplace pretty early because of a big next day, so he volunteered to help the other staffers take out the garbage to close things up.  The only thing – that night the guy on garbage duty hadn’t double-bagged the bag of meat scraps, and so as Curt walked to the dumpster the bag broke, dripping day-old chicken guts and refuse-meat sludge all over his Timberlands.  Not a huge deal, so he scooped up what he could, dropped it all in the Dumpster, helped clean up the mess, and jumped in his car to get back to campus for a little studying for a quiz the next day before turning in.

Except…once he had been in his car for a few minutes he realized – his boots now stunk to high hell, mostly of what he described as “chicken juice”.  He cracked a window, drove fast, and when he got home he left his boots outside on the porch to air/dry out while he studied for his quiz, passed out in bed with a coursepack next to him, and woke up the next morning for two consecutive classes.  The first was a quiz in one of his major requirements; the second was the day they were being fitted for wading boots for some river labs they’d complete later in the semester.

Waking up a little late and a little groggy, he got dressed, looked for his boots, remembered he had left them outside, and walked to the door with a full backpack and a mind full of crammed quiz knowledge.  He threw on his boots on his way out the door, trudged up to campus, sat down in his class a minute or two before it started, and then realized…

It stinks in here.

It stinks in here, and it’s my boots.

It stinks in here, it’s my boots, and everyone’s starting to figure out where it’s coming from.

It stinks in here, it’s me, everyone knows, but I can’t leave because I have to take this quiz.  Do I sacrifice my own grades for the sake of common courtesy?  Or do I go on the rest of the semester with a B+ average as “the stinky kid”.

Now, quick aside here – Curt had a history of leaving the room during exams and sacrificing his education as a result.  During freshman orientation and the foreign language placement test, Curt – who had straight A’s through five years of Spanish – left the room to use the restroom, got lost and couldn’t find his way back to the right classroom, failed the test and subsequently had to take four semesters of Spanish beginning with level one.  I’m not sure if this was on his mind when he made his boot-stink decision, but he decided to stick it out and take the quiz.

Naturally, the professor waits until  toward the end of class to give the quiz, and so a half hour into class Curt has offended anyone within sniffing distance.  The quiz comes, Curt takes it quickly, and as soon as he’s done he excuses himself and gets out of there.  He wants to run home, or just become another Shakey Jake and go barefoot to his next class…but he can’t.  That’s the day they’re fitting him – OVER his boots – for waders for the river project.   His boots stink yet he’s REQUIRED to wear hiking boots to his next class, which starts in about a half-hour.

Now, if I get one more adjective for Curt it’s some kind of hyphenated “way-too-nice-and-considerate-for-his-own-good” word.  He can’t fathom having anyone on a knee measuring his feet with his boots smelling like that, so he has to buy a new pair.  But the only place nearby that he can even imagine would have hiking boots is the over-priced Bivouac store on State Street.  He resigns himself to his fate, runs into Bivouac – still smelling like holy hell – and finds the cheapest pair of boots they have (something in the $125 range or so in 1999 dollars).  But…they don’t have those in his size.  So he goes to the next cheapest, and repeats a few times until they find one that fits…and he ends up spending something like $200 for a pair of boots he doesn’t even like.  Just so he doesn’t offend everyone in his class with The Chicken Boots.

My favorite part of the story: seeing these kind-of-ugly boots on him later in the day and asking “hey, new boots?”, and having him grimace and tell the whole story.  The written version can’t capture that and I apologize…but the defeated, “I should have expected this” look in his eyes…that’s Classic Curt.

All That Glitters Is Not Silver

Posted: December 28, 2012 in Uncategorized
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Instead of an apology/excuse for not having posted in months, let’s get this first-post-in-forever started with a different cliche: year-in-review, albeit with this blog’s own cliche, the rant.

Every Christmas I spend a ton of time recapping the state of education and politics with family and friends, most of whom these days are pretty like-minded as educators and progressive thinkers.  And this time of year it’s common to take a look back and recap on the events of the year.  And through all of those discussions and reflections, I’ve come up with two rant-worthy conclusions:

1) All that glitters is not (Nate) Silver

2) One of the main differences in philosophy among most of us is short-term vs. long-term thinking…and I’ll openly campaign for long-term

A big portion of this comes from discussions about educational reform and the charter school and common-core movements, and spills over into much of what I’ve seen/heard in business and decision making.  With education, two major pet peeves include:

-An emphasis on “raising test scores”, tying school funding and teacher pay to those test scores, and trying to keep up with the world as it pertains to those test scores, and

-The statistics that charter schools are outpacing traditional public schools

Why those stats bug me – just a moment.  But here’s why they’re so popular…Moneyball and Nate Silver.  Those two things (Moneyball the movie…what last year?  And Silver all this year) have been perverted quite a bit from their true nature, which is absolutely intelligent and correct,  to the pop culture version of them:  “use statistics to make good decisions!”.  And the pop version is just about dead wrong, because neither Moneyball nor Nate Silver claimed to be the first to consider statistics – they’re just the  best in the game at looking at the most valuable statistics (and thereby writing off the less valuable statistics) when it comes to making decisions.

Here’s a quick synopsis of Moneyball, the book:

For years, baseball decision makers have relied heavily on a certain set of statistics, including RBIs, batting averages, ERAs, and pitcher W-L record.  But as a cash-strapped Oakland A’s franchise realized that it couldn’t afford to compete with the Yankees, Red Sox, and other big-market teams to buy the players best at those stats, it had to dig deeper and found that:

-Batting average is a little overrated, as it doesn’t factor in walks (or hit-by-pitch), and since most hits are singles anyway why does it really matter if you walked or  singled?  You’re on base, and that’s a good thing. On-base percentage is a more useful stat, particularly because there’s value in a player who can get on base after a 10-pitch at bat vs. a 5-pitch at bat…the former makes the pitcher work harder and therefore means you get to the middle reliever (who’s usually not as good) sooner.

-RBIs aren’t as highly correlated with success as one might think, because too much of that stat is based on one’s teammates and position in the batting order, and those variables can skew the data.  A leadoff hitter won’t get many RBIs since at least 1/4 of his at bats, by nature, will not have anyone on base.

Moneyball the book was focused on finding the most predictive statistics – it absolutely conceded the fact (which the movie didn’t) that people had been using stats for a century…it just questioned whether they were using the best possible stats to make their decisions.

Similarly, with Nate Silver – he didn’t conduct his own polls, but rather created a system to determine bias in polls and reliability of polls so that he could  combine several polls in each state to find the most predictive algorithm out there.  He wasn’t the first at all to “use stats” – he just did a much better job than anyone else of determining which stats were the most meaningful, and which needed handicaps (say, the Rasmussen poll which had value but always came with a Republican bias because its methodology tended to lead toward more GOP-friendly responses).

So back to education – the problem with what’s happening with our use of test scores and charter school trends is that we’re blindly “focusing on stats” without going Nate Silver / Moneyball and trying to determine what those stats really tell us:

-Do the standardized tests that compare us against China and India really measure what we as a nation feel is most important?  Do they have biases that favor some students over others?

-Are the tests flawed?  Do they measure (as I predict) what’s “easy  to measure” over what’s truly valuable?

-Which kids take the tests (and which don’t)?  And what are their incentives?  In Michigan, the MEAP statewide test comes with a carrot – those who pass get (at least they did last time I looked) $1,000 toward college…but that assumes that the kids on the verge of passing are even interested in college.  And my contention – if you’re struggling with state-level proficiency, college really isn’t the carrot that motivates you, at least for a lot of those students. So why do they  care?

In the realm of the charter school, their charters essentially won’t allow them to make admission based on merit, but rather require that every student who chooses to apply has an equal chance of admission.  But here’s the catch – there’s a pretty substantial hurdle to jump to apply to a  charter school and it’s one that gives those schools a huge leg up on the public schools: you have to actually apply.  And so that process of filling out and submitting a form will weed out anyone whose family doesn’t value education enough to fill out the form.  Which means that charter school kids are much more likely to value education and have parents to supplement their in-school experience. It’s a small point but a huge one – public schools are guaranteed to have ALL the kids whose parents don’t fill out the form (and some whose parents do), while ALL charter school students have parents who at least care enough to fill out the paperwork.  Charter schools therefore SHOULD have a higher set of test scores – it’s not surprising that they do, but the masses like the political appeal of “look, they’re doing a better job – just look at the difference in test scores”.

So my rant – which may need to be continued since I’m running out for dinner with  two of my like five loyal readers, the main reason I finally got up and posted again – is essentially this:

Just because a study uses numbers doesn’t make it Nate Silver.  In fact, most conclusions based on numbers are crap – they’re misusing numbers or drawing conclusions that don’t logically follow.  What makes Silver and Billy Beane such visionaries is that they looked behind the numbers, then carefully selected the types of numbers that would lend a high probability of success in prediction.  But the legacy of Nate Silver’s 2012 and the movie Moneyball is quite often used for the opposite purpose – “look, we have numbers…we must be right!”.

Mark Twain is famous for a quote:  “There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.  If we’re using statistics to improve education we should at least heed the advice of one of the authors that we ALL read in school.  Moneyball and Nate Silver are NOT about “use statistics”, but rather “look behind the numbers to find the most relevant and predictive statistics”.  And if the tests we’re using to measure education lead us to promote and follow leaders who can’t see that ever-important distinction, then we’re absolutely using the wrong statistics.