StartUpNY? Only politicians could make this up

So the problem in NY state according to our state government is high taxes.

Solution? Run a lottery for businesses in which the winners will pay no taxes! (Provided that you meet their criteria, of course! See http://startup.ny.gov/)

Will that help the business climate in New York? No.  As a matter of fact if these businesses do start up and pay no taxes, their existence will in effect increase the tax burden of the businesses already in place. Great solution!! That is, overlooking the fact that business "startups" usually don't generate a profit for a number of years, making the income tax issue kind of moot, and overlooking that a successful startup generally is at its smallest size when it is beginning, so the property tax issue isn't that big.

Spoiler alert: When all is said and done, these businesses are supposed to bring in new jobs. These people will presumably be voting in new York State. Whom do you think they will vote for? Perhaps the politicians who created these tax-free jobs for them? Remember, a business cannot vote but people can. The voting employees will be getting a meaningful tax break from day one.

What happens when the 10 years are up and the tax breaks are gone? Well, expect our creative politicians to have a solution! After all, they won't want these voters to follow the businesses out of state.

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Common Core Needs a Rewrite

Fluently multiply multi-digit whole numbers using the standard algorithm.
Thus states 5.NBT.5 of the Common Core standards.

No doubt, I find it positive to include multiplication of multi-digit whole numbers, and I believe the intention of the statement is that people should be able to do it mentally or on paper, but without calculators.  But to mandate "the standard algorithm", whatever that is, and require "fluent" use is way out of line.
I suspect that by standard algorithm they mean something like this:

What I find interesting is the inclusion of the phrase "using the standard algorithm". That, together with the word "fluently".

I learned it that way. So did millions of others. But many did not master it.

In my teaching days it hit me that in a world that reads and writes left-to-right, we were expecting students to work right-to-left in their arithmetic.  I consider that one of the great fertilizing factors of math phobia.  Left-to-right processes can be helpful for several reasons:

• The chance of error increases the further you get in an algorithm, and with numbers the most significant figures are to the left.

• Estimation is much easier for a brain trained left-to-right.

• Mental calculation skills improve when using the ability to read, write, and say numbers the same way.

• When using the above algorithm, the brain focuses on digits and not numbers.

Now, when it comes to standard algorithms, there are many. A neat one, perhaps easy for those accustomed to it, is a Japanese technique using drawing segments and counting intersections. A video sample form YouTube is here.

Lattice multiplication is kind of neat, but I would not call it an algorithm that leads to greater understanding. 

Back to Common Core: time to do a rewrite. Get Pearson out of the way, get big business to the sidelines, and get some math people covering the gamut from K to 12. Just make sure that they all have at least a BA in math.  Just because Common Core means well doesn't mean it is doing it yet.

The web site freetestprep.net  acknowledges this on one of their pages (see here).

Common Core is Fine, But its Application is Terrible

In my meanderings around the common core story, I came across a shocker. Here is one question from a snapshot of a test posted online. (the story is here and the snapshot is here)

The article this came from refers to the test as a first grade test. If that is the case, I am amazed and shocked.

Are typical first graders that good at reading? I just popped the problem into my word processor and came up with a Flesh-Kincaid reading level of 6th grade.

Here is another:

I am just a retired career math and computers teacher with BA and MA in Math and I can honestly say in my lifetime I have never seen such a question: indeed, I have never seen an addition fact referred to as a "subtraction sentence."

Back in February I posted an entry here question Pearson's role in Common Core. (It is here.)  I question their role even more now.

The two examples above are not the worst part. Question #1 is the worst, but I will let you click the link and see that for yourself.

Do your tires travel in circles?

The above animated gif is a recording of a file created in GeoGebra. (Find the file here)

This creation used a bit of basic sine and cosine together with knowledge about rotations and translations.

More importantly, though, guided creation of a file such as this can be good way of firming up a student's basic knowledge and even, at times, a means of introducing such concepts.

With such technology the dynamic nature of mathematics can be used as a prime teaching tool, with textbooks being primarily supportive in nature.

Ebooks are great! Or are they?

Here I am sitting at my desk at my computer. Bookshelves full of books are to my left, as well as upstairs and in boxes in the basement.  But not all the books I have bought are even in the house. Some are not even owned by me anymore.

Over the years ( lots of them since graduating from grad school in the 70's) I have dispensed many books in many ways, from library donations, deposits in a school's "drop box", garage sales, yard sales (are they really different?), and so on. Some have been given directly to friends and acquaintances who ask about a book I am reading after having seen its cover. Others were loaned to friends in that ubiquitous eternal one-way form of lending.

I still read lots of books. But now a number of them are present on my Kindle, or should I say "Kindles", as I have two Kindle devices and can also read them on laptop, tablet, and phone.  Upstairs I have a Kindle Paperwhite so I can read at night without turning the light on.

These ebook readers are very very friendly to the reader.

But not so friendly to the book owner.

I no longer can drop my book off at the library as a donation. I have yet to find any means to donate an ebook to a library.  I cannot drop a book I have read at the local school.  I could sell my Kindle at a garage sale, but not any ebooks!  Nobody has asked to borrow a book I am reading after seeing the Kindle's cover.

Do I really even own the ebooks?

This issue has been around for a while, but the frustration with being unable to share a book that I thought I owned is increasing. This "licencing" of books rather than just selling them is slowly going to push me back to paper books. For any "Shark Tank" watchers out there, I am beginning to dislike Mr. Wonderful.

During this Common Core crisis that is happening as we speak, I must add to my concerns the fact that major companies, such as Pearson, could easily be handed the opportunity to licence texts to the schools, which might seem nice. But what does that mean when compared to multi-year use of standard textbooks? I cannot but sense that whatever direction these companies push will have their bottom lines in mind.

This also brings to mind another thing that gets me: search through Amazon's help section and you will not find Amazon answering questions: only customers trying to explain Amazon's process as they see it. Why is that? 

Why do we have schools and why do they need a common core?

Having read, seen, and heard a number of stories regarding Common Core and, more specifically, testing related to Common Core, I keep coming back to one nagging question: Why do we have schools?

I am not trying to be funny. I am really and truly asking WHY schools exist? Is it to train a work force? Is it to create an informed population? Is it to babysit children?

Here is a column from the JacksonHerald Today web site, from December 2010

What is the purpose of education? That question may seem obvious, but ask 100 people why schools exist and there will be 100 different opinions.

Among those opinions, a popular one is that education is for the training of workers in our economy. Indeed, over the last two decades secondary schools have increasingly put an emphasis on workforce development. A growth in vocational programs has ridden that wave and today is a large part of school programs.

But perhaps that idea has gone too far. Schools don’t exist just to train worker-bees for economic development. Students shouldn’t be viewed as mere “products” of an assembly line.

At their core, schools should prepare people to be constructive citizens. A part of that is the building of a common base of civic, cultural, social and political knowledge.

But all too often, that core is missing, either through neglect or extreme political correctness. The common body of knowledge has fragmented such that it really doesn’t exist.

The result is that schools are churning out people who have some specific technical skills, but no understanding of the larger world around them. They can’t balance a checkbook, evaluate political candidates, or understand information that is put into a historical context because they themselves have little historical context. And too many have no concept of how to express their ideas either verbally or in written form.

While schools tend to focus on language and math skills, that doesn’t seem to be working. Take a look at the terrible grammar and spelling by those who put comments on any of the various mainstreetnews.com websites — the inability to communicate clearly is obvious. And while some students do conquer math, many high school graduates can’t compute simple math formulas.

Maybe it’s time for school systems to focus less on developing worker-widgets and more on developing well-rounded citizens.

A more wordy dissertation can be found here  in an article from WholeSchooling.net.

Thomas Jefferson wrote to George Wythe (find it here):

I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness...Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [tyranny, oppression, etc.] and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.

Needless to say, we do have schools, we do have this entity called the Common Core having a strong impact, and we have people all over the place complaining about Common Core tests, and complaining that we have too many teachers "teaching to the test", as the saying goes. With that idea in mind, I do have to quote Diane Ravitch, who, in an article entitled "Why So Many Parents Hate the Common Core" on CNN Opinion (see it here), wrote "It is time to stop testing students on material they have not been taught."

I find it a bit enlightening to come across diametrically opposite complaints about the same thing: the Common Core is bad because it forces teachers to teach to the test, then tests on things that have not been taught. Which is it?  Actually, I believe the real basis for the dislike of Common Core is neither of those.  I have the sense that everybody who dislikes Common Core has his/her own rationale for that dislike, and the only reason those complaints sound so loud is because they have a common enemy. 

When New Yorkers complained to the New York State Education Department in the past, it was generally in regards to a local concern.  People in Oregon were little concerned, and probably largely unaware, about the complaints that surrounded the demise on Regents Competency Tests as New York went to a "Regents for all" standard with its Math A/Math B program. I cannot reverse that direction, since being an upstate New Yorker, very little news came about the status of the Oregon Department of Education.  Both states, however, are wrapped up in Common Core issues. (See here for Oregon and here for New York).

Should we have a common core? In some respects, yes, in other respects, no. Should there be some common knowledge between and among school graduates throughout the country? Definitely yes. Should big business be behind it and federal aid be tied to it? Definitely not. I cannot get past the fact that the business world was responsible for sending millions of jobs overseas, and keeps what it does in the US only when it helps their own bottom lines. Business is patriotic only when it is convenient.  Sorry, Bill Gates.  We must remember that in our society, business is there to help the citizens, not the other way around.

When we consider how much involvement big business should have in education, we must consider the impact it has had in the world of health care.

One nice thing about Common Core is the "common" part. In this day and age when people listen to music and podcasts and books on headphones, and DVR or Tivo a couple of the thousand TV channels (when they are not streaming other media) and read a digital book they cannot lend to their neighbor or watch one of the 35 professional or college sports games on at any one time, it is nice to have something in common.

Who is to be trusted?

The state of Georgia has now expanded the people and places where guns can be, and in many cases has paced the burden of their presence or absence not on the gun carrier, but elsewhere. It seems that a restaurant owner cannot ban guns, but can ban people carrying guns, which means he/she needs to know who is carrying a gun.  I believe the burden of proof has been tragically misplaced.

Suppose we passed a law that allowed a person stopped for DWI on the highway a "free pass" provided that they agreed to stop driving in that location for a while. Why not? A person can bring a gun into a Georgia airport, and get away freely as long as they leave the premises when asked. Evidently the only way a person can break the law with a gun is by actually committing some crime with it. Walking in an airport with a gun is not to be considered a crime.  By the same logic, a person drunk who is driving is not committing a crime: driving is legal.

The way I understand it, the lawmakers really do not want guns in the airport, but see no legal way to stop them except by asking nicely, please, "could you and your gun leave."  If the person refuses to leave, what law would they be breaking? Unwillingness to submit to authority? Isn't that what this business is really all about?

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

These are the words that many gun owners hide behind.  I must admit that I have not seen a militia in my lifetime, but there must be one hiding in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

I also cannot help but wonder if counterfeiters are going to enter the business of gun permits.

While we are at it, the 7th amendment says: In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

I hope that all those NRA people are also campaigning to see that the $20 limit is stringently followed. After all, this is our Constitution.