Month: March 2012

Confessions of a “Bad” Teacher

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William Johnson is a teacher at a public high school in Brooklyn who writes on education for the Web site Gotham Schools. In this Sunday’s op-ed in The New York Times, he explains how he’s been labeled a “bad” teacher at one school, took his teaching tactics to another school, and was seen as doing a good job there. The best part of the piece was his stance on teachers’ motivations and desire to improve:

The truth is, teachers don’t need elected officials to motivate us. If our students are not learning, they let us know. They put their heads down or they pass notes. They raise their hands and ask for clarification. Sometimes, they just stare at us like zombies. Few things are more excruciating for a teacher than leading a class that’s not learning. Good administrators use the evaluation processes to support teachers and help them avoid those painful classroom moments — not to weed out the teachers who don’t produce good test scores or adhere to their pedagogical beliefs.

Worst of all, the more intense the pressure gets, the worse we teach. When I had administrators breathing down my neck, the students became a secondary concern. I simply did whatever my assistant principal asked me to do, even when I thought his ideas were crazy. In all honesty, my teaching probably became close to incoherent. One week, my assistant principal wanted me to focus on arranging the students’ desks to fit with class activities, so I moved the desks around every day, just to show that I was a good soldier. I was scared of losing my job, and my students suffered for it.

That said, given all the support in the world, even the best teacher can’t force his students to learn. Students aren’t simply passive vessels, waiting to absorb information from their teachers and regurgitate it through high-stakes assessments. They make choices about what they will and won’t learn. I know I did. When I was a teenager, I often stayed up way too late, talking with friends, listening to music or playing video games. Did this affect my performance on tests? Undoubtedly. Were my teachers responsible for these choices? No.

Read more here.

Why Healthcare in America Is So Expensive

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In his latest post for The Washington Post, Ezra Klein compares the cost of healthcare procedures in the United States to that in France, Britain, Canada, and India. The obvious answer why healthcare is so expensive in America is that the prices are higher.

On Friday, the International Federation of Health Plans — a global insurance trade association that includes more than 100 insurers in 25 countries — released more direct evidence. It surveyed its members on the prices paid for 23 medical services and products in different countries, asking after everything from a routine doctor’s visit to a dose of Lipitor to coronary bypass surgery. And in 22 of 23 cases, Americans are paying higher prices than residents of other developed countries. Usually, we’re paying quite a bit more. The exception is cataract surgery, which appears to be costlier in Switzerland, though cheaper everywhere else.

Prices don’t explain all of the difference between America and other countries. But they do explain a big chunk of it. The question, of course, is why Americans pay such high prices — and why we haven’t done anything about it.

“Other countries negotiate very aggressively with the providers and set rates that are much lower than we do,” Anderson says. They do this in one of two ways. In countries such as Canada and Britain, prices are set by the government. In others, such as Germany and Japan, they’re set by providers and insurers sitting in a room and coming to an agreement, with the government stepping in to set prices if they fail.

In America, Medicare and Medicaid negotiate prices on behalf of their tens of millions of members and, not coincidentally, purchase care at a substantial markdown from the commercial average. But outside that, it’s a free-for-all. Providers largely charge what they can get away with, often offering different prices to different insurers, and an even higher price to the uninsured.

Some specific examples:

In 2009, Americans spent $7,960 per person on health care. Our neighbors in Canada spent $4,808. The Germans spent $4,218. The French, $3,978. If we had the per-person costs of any of those countries, America’s deficits would vanish. Workers would have much more money in their pockets. Our economy would grow more quickly, as our exports would be more competitive.

There is a quote from Tom Sackville, who served in Margaret Thatcher’s administration. He explains that in America, healthcare is much more of a routine business (“very much something people make money out of” than anywhere else, where there may be embarrassment at making so much money from patients.

Something Klein neglects to mention but is picked up in the comments by a user named “blert” is how Americans subsidize the cost of medicine for everyone else by investing so much money in research and development:

[S]ome of the development of MRI technology happened in Britain. Most was performed in the U.S. Who is paying for the cost of development of this and other new technology and drugs? It’s often not the people in places like Canada and France, where government controls hold down prices. Most of the cost of research and development is paid for by Americans. We pay perhaps five times more in the U.S. for some procedures than people in France pay, but the technology might not exist in the first place if we didn’t pay this disproportionate share. Once the technology exists, companies keep charging as much as they can in the U.S. to recoup costs and to fund development of the next big thing in medicine, and meanwhile other countries in the world adopt the technology, gaining benefits from it without actually paying the costs. This is Canada, France, and much of Europe. Plenty of medical research goes on in these countries, but American consumers ultimately bear most of the cost. It’s an unfair system in many respects, but it’s what has kept medical research moving ahead for the last several decades.

Healthcare is such a complex topic that I realize that nothing I (or Klein) can write in the blog post can begin to fully explain the difference in healthcare costs in America vs. that of Europe. But hopefully the quotes I provided are food for thought.

Ridley Scott Directs a TED Talk from 2023

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7YK2uKxil8 h=400 w=600]

A TED talk from the future, as envisioned by Ridley Scott. Peter Weyland gives a masterful performance in front of thousands, in what may be a viral promotion for Prometheus. 

Peter Weyland has been a magnet for controversy since he announced his intent to build the first convincingly humanoid robotic system by the end of the decade.

Whether challenging the ethical boundaries of medicine with nanotechnology or going toe to toe with the Vatican itself on the issue of gene-therapy sterilization, Sir Peter prides himself on his motto, “If we can, we must.” After a three year media blackout, Weyland has finally emerged to reveal where he’s heading next. Wherever that may be, we will most certainly want to follow.

 

Ryan Gosling is Everywhere

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Because it’s Friday, why not? Here are some Tumblr blogs out there showcasing the polymath that Ryan Gosling is:

They make for some hilarious viewing/reading. Which one is your favorite?

David Foster Wallace on Arts and Television

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This is David Foster Wallace talking about TV and the arts:

You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need… is seriously engaged art that can teach again that we’re smart. And that’s the stuff that TV and movies — although they’re great at certain things — cannot give us. But that have to create the motivations for us to want to do the extra work, to get those other kinds of art… Which is tricky, because you want to seduce the reader, but you don’t want to pander or manipulate them. I mean, a good book teaches the reader how to read it.

The quote appears in David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, published about ten years after his interview with DFW.

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(via Brain Pickings)

Roberto Bolaño’s Labyrinth

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Labyrinth

Take a look at the photo above. It’s a real photograph, but in a story published in The New Yorker last month, Roberto Bolaño creates a (fictional) story for each of the individuals seen in the photo. He goes in depth hypothesizing on how the characters are named, how they are dressed, why they are or aren’t looking at the camera, what’s going on in the background, and ultimately into behavior of the characters. The title of the story is “Labyrinth,” and it is fascinating:

The photo was taken in winter or autumn, or maybe at the beginning of spring, but certainly not in summer. Who are the most warmly dressed? J.-J. Goux, Sollers, and Marc Devade, without question: they’re wearing jackets over their turtleneck sweaters, and thick jackets, too, from the look of them, especially J.-J.’s and Devade’s. Kristeva is a case apart: her turtleneck sweater is light, more elegant than practical, and she’s not wearing anything over it. Then we have Guyotat. He might be as warmly dressed as the four I’ve already mentioned. He doesn’t seem to be, but he’s the only one wearing three layers: the black leather jacket, the shirt, and the striped T-shirt. You could imagine him wearing those clothes even if the photo had been taken in summer. It’s quite possible. All we can say for sure is that Guyotat is dressed as if he were on his way somewhere else. As for Carla Devade, she’s in between. Her blouse, whose collar is showing over the top of her sweater, looks soft and warm; the sweater itself is casual, but of good quality, neither very heavy nor very light. Finally, we have Jacques Henric and Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. Henric is clearly not a man who feels the cold, although his Canadian lumberjack’s shirt looks warm enough. And the least warmly dressed of all is Marie-Thérèse Réveillé. Under her light, knitted V-neck sweater there are only her breasts, cupped by a black or white bra.

All of them, more or less warmly dressed, captured by the camera at that moment in 1977 or thereabouts, are friends, and some of them are lovers, too. For a start, Sollers and Kristeva, obviously, and the two Devades, Marc and Carla. Those, we might say, are the stable couples. And yet there are certain features of the photo (something about the arrangement of the objects, the petrified, musical rhododendron, two of its leaves invading the space of the ficus like clouds within a cloud, the grass growing in the planter, which looks more like fire than grass, the everlasting leaning whimsically to the left, the glasses in the center of the table, well away from the edges, except for Kristeva’s, as if the other members of the group were worried they might fall) that suggest a more complex and subtle web of relations among these men and women.

If you’re a fan of fiction, don’t miss it.

Give It Five Minutes

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Jason Fried has a good post on taking a step back (by reflecting for five minutes) before choosing to critique others’ ideas:

A few years ago I used to be a hothead. Whenever anyone said anything, I’d think of a way to disagree. I’d push back hard if something didn’t fit my world-view.

It’s like I had to be first with an opinion – as if being first meant something. But what it really meant was that I wasn’t thinking hard enough about the problem. The faster you react, the less you think. Not always, but often.

It’s easy to talk about knee jerk reactions as if they are things that only other people have. You have them too. If your neighbor isn’t immune, neither are you.

This came to a head back in 2007. I was speaking at the Business Innovation Factory conference in Providence, RI. So was Richard Saul Wurman. After my talk Richard came up to introduce himself and compliment my talk. That was very generous of him. He certainly didn’t have to do that.

And what did I do? I pushed back at him about the talk he gave. While he was making his points on stage, I was taking an inventory of the things I didn’t agree with. And when presented with an opportunity to speak with him, I quickly pushed back at some of his ideas. I must have seemed like such an asshole.

His response changed my life. It was a simple thing. He said “Man, give it five minutes.” I asked him what he meant by that? He said, it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them. “Five minutes” represented “think”, not react. He was totally right. I came into the discussion looking to prove something, not learn something.

This was a big moment for me.

He concludes:

Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work. Those things may be true, but there may be another truth in there too: It may be worth it.

I think what’s important about this post, to me, is that it is making me recognize how often I may be prone to dismissing someone’s idea when I first hear it. While it is useful to be quick on one’s feet when listening, it’s also important to recognize that some thoughts take a bit longer to process and develop. So, give it five minutes.

The Charlemagne Riddle and Pedigree Collapse

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Robert Krulwich recounts a story/riddle about a guy who discovered he was related to Charlemagne the Great. But was he? He went to class one day, where the teacher had a lesson on genealogy:

The teacher says if you count your direct ancestors backward through time, the further back you go, obviously, the more ancestors you have. But when you do the numbers, something queer happens.

Go back to A.D. 800, he said, and the number of direct ancestors is, well, puzzling. You start with two grandparents, then four great-grandparents, then on to eight, 16, etc., and by the time you get to A.D. 800, the number averages to about 562,949,953,421,321. That’s a lot of people. In fact, that’s more people than have ever lived.

So if you go far back enough in history, everyone is related to Charlemagne. This answer is justified with the so-called pedigree collapse:

Without pedigree collapse, a person’s ancestor tree is a binary tree, formed by the person, the parents (2), the grandparents (4), great-grandparents (8), and so on. However, the number of individuals in such a tree grows exponentially and will eventually become impossibly high. For example, a single individual alive today would, over 30 generations going back to the High Middle Ages, have 230 or roughly a billion ancestors, more than the total world population at the time.

This apparent paradox is explained by shared ancestors. Instead of consisting of all unique individuals, a single individual may occupy multiple places in the tree. This typically happens when the parents of an ancestor are cousins (sometimes unbeknownst to themselves). For example, the offspring of two first cousins has at most only six great-grandparents instead of the normal eight. This reduction in the number of ancestors is pedigree collapse. It collapses the ancestor tree into a directed acyclic graph.

In some cultures, cousins were encouraged or required to marry to keep kin bonds, wealth and property within a family (endogamy). Among royalty, the frequent requirement to only marry other royals resulted in a reduced gene pool in which most individuals were the result of extensive pedigree collapse

So next time someone says they’re a direct descendant of someone, say, who was born before 1600, be highly, highly skeptical.