Mark Byron

The Freshman Five

That sounds like one of those vocal groups of the pre-rock era, like adding one to the Four Freshmen; however, that's a more scentifically valid statement of college student weight gain.

I spent my freshman year going to my local community college, so I didn't get the "Freshman 15" (extra pounds of weight from all-you-can-eat cafeteria food) until I was a sophmore. They ran a study on Auburn U students and found that it was more like a five pound game.

One difference that a lot of modern dorms do is that they go away from a one-price, all-you-can-eat model for the cafeteria and go to an a-la-carte model where you pay for what you eat and have a quarterly/semester alotment of cafeteria credit as part of the dorm charge.

That's the model that Michigan State's Owen Hall used when I lived there in 1989-90, but that was the grad dorm; the undergrad dorms were still on the eat-utill-you-*&#( model at the time. Kent State had that model in most of it's dorms during my early-90s stay there and made cafeteria credit tradable; you'd often see a bear market on cafeteria credit at the end of a term as students who didn't use the cafeteria much would unload unused credits at 10-20 cents on the dollar.

However, if you give young people (or old people for that matter) unlimited food, they'll have the tendency to eat until stuffed, especially when you have unlimited desert, unlimited favorites and no mom and dad to reign you in. Also, for guys, eating a lot is often seen as a badge of honor, like the various eating contests that spring up; "all you can eat" is taken not as an invitation, but a challange.

We're All Just Numbers, After All

I'm grading one of my finance exams, and one of the questions revolved around the mythical Wauchula Tech who had a beta of 1.50. In financese, beta measures the sensitivity to the market with the normal stock having a beta of 1; a 1.5 would indicate a stock that's over-sensitive to the economy, or a cyclical stock in finance-speak.

With that background, here's the question and the LOL answer.

2008 is expected to be a down year on the stock market. Would Wauchula Tech be a good choice for your portfolio this year if the forecast is correct?

... it would depend on whether or not we go into a regression.

With all the election polling we have going, there's a good chance that we'll go into a regression analysis sooner or later. However, it would be a recession that we'd be more concerned with in this context.

Podcast People

For what it's worth, here's part of my work of the day, a new MP3 of the introduction of my ECO 510 lecture podcast, an LOL spiel from "Barry White." 

I have the whole lecture in MP3 form, but that's a 53-meg bandwidth-eater. Barry might do Your Demand Equals My Supply on his new Calculus of Love album, but my bandwidth supply is limited. I'll e-mail it to you if you're really interested. I can spare a few half-meg uploads.

Your Demand Equals My Supply

I'm fighting off a sinus infection with a bit of bronchitis, so my plan to do a podcast lecture for my online classes were on hold, except to have "Barry White" do a promo for the Byron Broadcasting Network. When I have some congestion, my voice drops an octave or two into a fine basso profundo.

So, I have "Barry" do the intro to the podcast, promising to have samples of his new ECO 510-inspired album The Calculus of Love later in the show. Songs include Your Demand Equals My Supply, I'm a Monopsonist for Your Love and Can't Get Enough of Calculus, Baby.

Once I get my throat cleared enough to speak straight, we'll get they guy who Barry calls the "white chocolate loveball from the land of the Chippewa" back to work.

Once I get it into MP3 form, I might just post it here.

Advanced Blogging

A new town to register a blog entry from; Frankfort. I'm off for a faculty "advance" today and am blogging from the Capital Plaza inn ballroom post-breakfast but pre-collaborative learning seminars.

______________

Things aren't going well in Pakistan, as they've resorted to putting former PM Bhutto under house arrest. That sounds more like Burma, where their main opposition leader is under house arrest more often than not, than an erstwhile US ally.

For some reason, I see the name Bhutto and have word-association flashback to Animal House's Bluto. My visual pun has John Belushi popping out from under that veil and hollering "FOOD FIGHT!" before throwing a big blob of mashed potatoes at Musharraf.

___________

Date rape drug kiddy toys. China's not been having a good year with the quality of their exports.

Columbia Day, Part i-Faith and Science

Before you light up the comment section, let me take care of the proper pejoratives for Iranian president Ahmadinejad. He's a representative of a rather backward and intolerant form of Islam that needs to be restrained in the long run; in addition, they have a jihadi ethic that has caused us problems in Lebanon and elsewhere. We need to be giving his government the eagle eye and keep them from causing any further mischief.

That being said, there are also some redeeming values in the guy, especially coming from a Christian perspective. If we can contain that desire for the lesser jihad, many Muslims can be an ally on a number of issues, including the intersection of science and faith.

I was thumbing through Ahmadinejad's Columbia speech last night; the core of it, if Christianized a bit, could have been given by Pope Benedict, and that's not a slam on the Pope. Ahmadinejad understands that reality transcends the physical. Here's an interesting passage that strikes a positive cord on the Christian side of the aisle.

In our culture, the word science has been defined as illumination. In fact, the science means brightness and the real science is a science which rescues the human being from ignorance, to his own benefit. In one of the widely accepted definitions of science, it is stated that it is the light which sheds to the hearts of those who have been selected by the almighty.

Therefore, according to this definition, science is a divine gift and the heart is where it resides. If we accept that science means illumination, then its scope supersedes the experimental sciences and it includes every hidden and disclosed reality.

One of the main harms inflicted against science is to limit it to experimental and physical sciences. This harm occurs even though it extends far beyond this scope. Realities of the world are not limited to physical realities and the materials, just a shadow of supreme reality. And physical creation is just one of the stories of the creation of the world.

Human being is just an example of the creation that is a combination of a material and the spirit. And another important point is the relationship of science and purity of spirit, life, behavior and ethics of the human being. In the teachings of the divine prophets, one reality shall always be attached to science; the reality of purity of spirit and good behavior. Knowledge and wisdom is pure and clear reality.

It is -- science is a light. It is a discovery of reality. And only a pure scholar and researcher, free from wrong ideologies, superstitions, selfishness and material trappings can discover -- discover the reality.

That's a tad Gnostic, but it underscores the idea that modern science has blinders on if it discounts a spiritual dimension to reality. If you exclude the supernatural from the discussion, you're excluding a big chunk of reality; a hard-to-quantify and hard-to-experiment-upon chunk, but a chunk nonetheless.

Muslim countries haven't been on the cutting edge of science and engineering as of late, but their early history had them pushing along science while Europe was in the Dark Ages; one reason we can joke about "the dreaded terror group al Gebra and their weapons of math instruction" is that we get the word algebra from Arabic. Since they see a god of order and rationality, they expect to see an orderly and rational universe, as we do; that gives them a heads-up from cultures who don't have a rational God in the mix.

We still may have to parking-lot a nuclear facility or two in Iran down the line, but there may be more common ground with the Muslim world that some would think. That common ground doesn't include wiping Israel off the map or quietly becoming good dhimmis in the Caliphate, but there are grounds for cooperation if we can put the geopolitical differences behind us.

Easier said than done.

 

Down on the Telecommuter Farm

I'm in the process of grading my International Business exam, and found myself reflecting on one of the questions I posed my students on people migrating in from rural areas to work in factories in developing countries.

The problem with that is people bring a agricultural mind-set, which is task-oriented rather than time-oriented. It doesn't matter if you milk the cows at 6:45AM sharp or start plowing the back-forty at 9:00 sharp; you milk the cows early, then start in on the fields, go into town for stuff, talk with friends for a bit, then come back and do more chores. Exactly when everything gets done is a minor issue, as long as they get done.

That attitude doesn't quite mesh with a factory mindset, where you're supposed to be there on time, take breaks on time and leave on time. People often have a hard time adjusting to a time-based paradigm.

What struck me is that many modern knowledge-workers are in a similar task-oriented framework. Other than my class-times in the evening and making sure I'm in the Sullivan building by 3PM for office hours, I'm in a task-oriented framework.

Here's today for example. Get up, have breakfast, take over the world a couple times in Risk on my laptop in the den, do half the essays on my FIN 510 final, chat with Eileen, do the other half, shower, get dressed, grab lunch at Culvers, go on to campus, check E-mail, check the news, grade some FIN 510 homework, grade some BUS 424 final essays, wander over and do that Appy State post, do some more 424 essays, get inspired to do this post, go back (hopefully) and finish off the last page of the 424 exam and post the grades for 424 in time to go up and here my 510 folks present their stock portfolios tonight at 6.

A lot of intelligentsia-folks are in a similar task-based framework, especially if their telecommuters. As long as the work gets done, they're not punching much of a time clock. There may be deadlines for getting the job done, but when it's done is up to them.

Back home on the cybernetic farm, y'all. Just need to go out to the back 40 and slop the Statement Analysis finals.

As long as I got here by 3PM, exactly when I do all that is up to me.

I'll Trade You Four Nickles for Your Paradigms

I think this is a first; this blog has been sited in an academic paper. A guy named Theophus Smith from a Dutch university has cited me in a paper titled "Deconstructing the Victim-Perpetrator Paradigm: A Heuristic."

I wish it was something profound that got cited, but it was passing along a funny cover to a birthday card that our home group leader got-

In the background is some trees, with a bobo-looking tourist (close-cropped graying beard, red shirt, khaki shorts and camera) hanging by the back of his shirt from a pine-tree branch. In the foreground, two bears-

His name's Bradshaw. He says he understands I came from a single-parent den with inadequate role models. He senses that my dysfunctional behavior is shame-based and codependent and he urges me to let my inner cub heal....... I say we eat him.

I posted that part in late 2003 and tacked on a link to a picture of the front of the card in March of 2006. Mr. Smith somehow found his way to my site, calling the cartoon "The ‘Why Do They Eat Us?’ Consternation." As a good academic, he gave the blog credit in footnote 6-"Artist unknown. Accessed online by this author on June 14, 2007 at http://markbyron.typepad.com/main/2003/12/sometimes_you_g.html."

Sometimes you get the cite, and sometimes the cite gets you.

From Cola Wars to Faygo Armageddon

If you're interested in how I spent most of my Saturday, it's in the continuation.

I spent from about 8:45AM to 2PM cranking out an example of a company analysis paper on National Beverage, the home of Shasta and Faygo soda-pops. I didn't know the group existed until I read a piece on Faygo's 100th anniversary earlier this week and found that it's parent company was an interesting and seemingly under-appreciated stock.

It's not quite a 100 paper; maybe a 96. However, it's a good example of what I'd be looking for from my students. I've added some hyperlinks to the publicly available stuff; the Hoovers database is on a subscription basis and Sullivan U has a subscription. I'm no APA geek, but at least I think I got the citation stuff down.

It will be interesting to see how many hits I get for this post; when I talk about companies in the past, their blog section of some company pages for places like Yahoo Finance send traffic my way.

Introverted P or Extraverted P

I'm close to the end of one of the busiest weeks of my life. I took possession of our new apartment yesterday and have my new white Pontiac Vibe out in the Sullivan parking lot as I write.

I took all the stuff I wasn't going to need tonight from my extended stay to the apartment, then got through today's 2.5 hour faculty in-service in one piece, grabbed a quick Qdoba-catered lunch that was part of the in-service and went out to get Shine 2.0 (Eileen named my late, great white Buick Park Avenue Shine) and came back to campus for my office hours a tad after my scheduled 3PM start. My department chair noted that I don't have to worry about holding office hours on days that we have in-services, since for night-school faculty, the office hours are more for supervisors knowing when they can bend your ear in person that for students.

Breathe a sigh of relief; my Supervision class will be a relief to finish.

We were covering Myers-Briggs in our meeting, and the last of the four dimensions they dealt with was Judging (a.k.a J) versus Perceiving (a.k.a. P); we were about an hour and a half into the meeting at that point when somebody asked "Speaking of P, when can we get a break?"

I guess an Introverted P uses a stall while an Extroverted P uses the urinal :-)

Maybe I Should Call it "Mobile-Computing Challenged?"

Some suffixes don't work well with some words. I was talking with my Portfolio Analysis class this evening and was checking to see how many of them had laptop computers. Much of the stuff we'll be working on, especially bond duration calculation, beg for spreadsheets, since the calculations are too complex to easily do on a calculator. You can do them on desktops, but it's nice to work on problems in class without having to reconvene in a computer lab.

Two of my four students had laptops; the other two were, as I innocently put it, "laptopless."  Laughter and blushes all around; that sounds like a description of prurient activity at a "gentleman's club" (a great oxymoron, since no real gentleman would be caught dead in such a joint) rather than a state of being portable-computing deprived.

Oh, yes, speaking of portable computing, the iPhone launches Friday PM, and folks are already lined up. Obnoxiosly early adopters.

Coming Up for Air

Recommendation: try not to start teaching at a new school, moving into a new apartment and shopping for a new car at the same time.

I can start to breathe again; I've got the paperwork in process to buy the Vibe I looked at on Monday, my first class is behind me, and all the move-in and move-out details have been lined up.  Yeah! Drop back five yards and breathe a sigh of relief.

My International Business class was generally respectful, had a fair mix of talkative and non-talkative students and had only a few grumbles about holding the class until near the official end of 9:40. I had to ad-lib the first part of the lecture on globalization, as I only got the textbook about a half-hour before class; however, the prepared section on international trade seemed to flow better, as I had a PowerPoint, with handouts, ready for that one.

As per the Vibe-I only got a round-the-side-streets-near-the-mall test-drive on Monday, so I asked to get a serious drive this morning. I took the car west of Lexington out to the Bluegrass Parkway, so I could see how it did on the open road. Smooth as a baby's bottom at 70MPH. Sold.

To top it off, my Wednesday night Portfolio Management class has been officially changed to an independent study, so I don't have to hold them the whole four hours each night; I can take the professorial prerogative to go over the syllabus, tell them to read the chapters on fundamental analysis and bond pricing, and as Pastor Milton used to use as his benediction, tell them to "Be blessed and be gone." I'm not honor-bound to hold an independent study for the entire period, since there is no official period.

Tomorrow, I take possession of the new apartment and arrange for car insurance. Hopefully, I can de-tense enough to get some blogging going again.

Lexington Conquered

It's now official; I'm on board as a Sullivan U instructor. They've put me on the payroll as of today, rather than when my classes start in late June. Right now, I'm slated for a Tuesday night pre-MBA Finance class for folks who are tackling an MBA without a business degree, an undergraduate investments class on Wednesday night and a MBA Financial Management class on Thursday night and a class to be named later, hopefully not too much later.

In addition, I've already got a line on a nice apartment a few miles from campus that reminds me of the apartment we had in Florida; they're even offering the first full month's rent free. I'll officially nail that down later today. In the meantime, I have use of a student apartment for June and what's left of May.

I'll have a few days of orientation and paperwork to do down here, then I'll head back and spend the next three weeks prepping from Midland.

Expect a return to blogging later today once I get into my apartment.

Bird in the Hand

Dr. Byron rides again.

I've got a verbal offer from Sullivan U. Given that Louisiana College has yet to call, I may be in the odd position to weigh more than one job offer and there are a lot of differences.

Secular versus Christian. Lexington versus Cenla. Working year-round versus summers free. Mostly adult learners versus mostly traditional learners. Starting next month versus starting in September. Being road trip distance from my folks versus being road trip distance from Eileen's folks (if they don't move after her mom retires later this month). Mostly online versus all brick-and-mortal classroom.

Lots of things to think through. The good news is that our long national nightmare is over. Well, my long nightmare at least, but give me some poetic license. I'll be back teaching in short order.

LC Update

I've had a good interview day here at Louisiana College. I got to go to a nice Baptist church, Philadelphia Baptist, yesterday with the academic VP and a nice lunch at a good madre-y-padre Tex-Mex place in Ball, a burgh a few miles north of Pineville. One of their biology profs took me out to a nice local pizza joint Sunday night after his first two choices for non-national-chain food, Copeland's and Johnny Carino's, were packed to the gills.

This morning, I got in, printed out some handouts for the money lecture I had planned and helped the management professor get the classroom set up; the tables were all pushed to the side, so we had to lug tables and chairs around like setting up for a church dinner in Fellowship Hall.

The simulated lecture, to a few faculty members and a few recruited students and recent alums (they had graduation Saturday, so the campus was fairly deserted), went well. I had to wing a response to the academic VP's question on whether Alexander Hamilton's money policy was right;a strong central bank helps things along and keeps from having inflationary crashes and runs on banks. I earned some brownie points for bringing a historical prospective to monetary policy, where conservatives and liberals have been duking it out for centuries, including Andrew Jackson's blood feud with the Second Bank of the US and it's chief Nicholas Biddle and bimetalist William Jennings Bryant's Cross of Gold speech.

I also had to wing a  question from the accounting prof (who taught Money and Banking while LC was short a pure Econ prof this year) on whether the lack of transparency of the Fed could lend fuel to conspiracy theorists' fears; yes, but we need a bit of opaqueness to keep politics out of the Fed, and at some level, you have to trust folks to do their job even in a fallen world. I had read about such fears in the past; given the odd-ball nature of the Fed, (where it's technically owned by the member banks with directors nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, but with 14-year unfirable terms) it is easy to be distrustful. It is fairly unaccountable to Washington, which scares a lot of folks who tend to be distrustful of folks in power, but it's that way by design.

If it were accountable, they'd have a tendency to game the economy, goosing the economy with a loose monetary policy leading into an election, then paying for the added inflation once the ruling party got another term. Mexico's central bank, without that independence, goosed the peso supply leading into the 1994 presidential election in order to make the ruling PRI party look good; once the PRI candidate got elected and the nasty inflation set in, the US had to come in and bail out the Mexicans (in a lame-duck session so that the toxicity of such a bailout happened after the US elections) when the peso went into free-fall and foreign currency to pay back debts were hard to come by without help.

Back to my LC folks. I had a nice chat with the president, some nice catfish at Cajun Landing with the two returning business faculty members, including a management professor from Zimbabwe; we had some interesting discussion about hyperinflation under Mugabe/ZANU rule. He mentioned that the place was safe despite the bad press that Mugabe gets, but that the transfer of land from whites who knew how to farm to blacks who often didn't left the country's agriculture very underperfoming, thus creating high inflation.

After lunch, I had a formal chat with the academic VP (I should be hearing yea-or-nay later in the week), a walking tour of the campus from one of the admission office's young staffers in air-you-can-wear 95-degree heat (the academic VP wisely told me to ditch my tie for the tour), then back to the hotel to cool off before a chemistry professor and her husband took me out to dinner at Copeland's (a New Orleans-based chain with Cajun-inspired cuisine, including a bilingual bad pun-Chicken Alfredeaux); there were no lines tonight.

I'm on my tutoring job as I speak; one of my fellow tutors covered me until I got back from dinner. I'll fly back to Midland tomorrow morning and hopefully get a thumbs up. The school has a bunch of nice, friendly people and a spirit of peace permeates the campus; it's not just the peace of a college campus just after the term's over and the kids are gone, but a shalom that says that God's in da house.

God willing, I'll be back later this summer to start work here.

Cokeland

I have my itinerary for my Louisiana College trip; I'll be taking in Philadelphia Baptist in Alexandria with the academic VP on Sunday. It seems to be a well-rounded Southern Baptist church, with an ubiquitous (for Baptist circles) Awana kids program and a Lord and Savior University discipleship program whose blue-and-gold logo looks all too much like that other LSU down I-49 a bit.

In addition, their music seems to be not overly old-school. They have a Voices of Praise choir, whose blurb includes a quote from the Brooklyn Tab's Carol Cymbala, as well as an Instruments of Praise Orchestra/Band; that leads me to think that we're not in your piano-and-organ, hymn #218 church. Christian Celebration Center, the AoG church my sister goes to here in Midland, likes Brooklyn Tab arrangements for their choral numbers, including a three-hanky version of Total Praise.

[Update 2/25/08-It's actually Richard Smallwood/Vision that does the definitive Total Praise that CCC uses; since I caught the YouTube bug, that video's been in heavy rotation on my laptop.]

The part of the Philly Baptist web site that got a chuckle was the ad for their pre-Wednesday-night-service dinner. The meals are $3, with tea and water included. "Cokes are 50 cents."

Yes, they're in that part of the deep South where carbonated beverages (that are called pop in the Midwest and Northwest and soda on the coasts) are called Coke; you then have to then specify which kind of Coke, which could well include Pepsi or 7-Up. Here's a fun map of the various generic names for sody-pop nationwide,

Drilling down into the LA statistics, Alexandria's Rapides Parish is over 90% Coke. I'll have to get used to that for the next few days.

Sullivan Rewards

I just got back from my Sullivan U interviews, which seem to have gone well. Let me share a bit about my morning, and hope that I don't have to correct this post like I did my Louisiana College post, where the provost pointed out some errors and false assumptions that I went back and corrected.

That Other College in Lexington

Good news on the job front; I'm going down I-75 once again for a job interview, but it won't be one of those 20-hour marathons down to central Florida. This time, I'm going to Lexington, KY for a college teaching interview; about seven hours if traffic cooperates.

Sorry, no Ashley Judd connections; it's with Sullivan University, an adult-ed centric private college which (according to Wikipedia and my business-school contact) is Kentucky's largest private college. They're looking for Dr. Byron (or some other Dr.) to come down and teach finance in their Lexington campus; they're Louisville-based, but have a large Lexington branch campus. Shades of Indiana Wesleyan's Indianapolis branch.

I'll be driving down tomorrow for a Thursday morning working interview. Pray for traveling mercies and peace of mind; interview nerves helped me lose out on a full-time job at IWU three years ago.

LC

Some good news on the teaching front; I got to talk with the academic VP of Louisiana College this afternoon about a Finance/Economics teaching job. It's a Southern Baptist school; as a former Southern Baptist, I would fit in well there.

After getting the call, I wondered where they were at in the Baptist wars, where Southern Baptist institutions have struggled to keep things on a Biblical footing and gotten into moderate-conservative food fights. Thankfully, they're in the conservative camp. Given that one of the problems I had at my last teaching stop was being to the right of the powers-that-be on keeping an evangelical character, that would seem to be a step in the right direction.

LC got in trouble with SACS, the regional accrediting body a few years ago; they were put on probation in 2004 and brought back to good graces in 2005. However, good schools can get into SACS trouble for any number of reasons.

They don't have an cessationist stance built into their standards, so a Bapticostal would be acceptable; the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message statement is the main doctrinal statement in their "Christian Commitment Statement" page, and it is silent on the "gifts of the spirit." I went over that in this 2003 post and had little problem with it.

Could I sign that document? I think so. Strangely, it’s the section on peace that gives me the most trouble. Some might balk at the male pastorate and others might balk at the wifely submission, but their doesn’t seem to be much, if anything, in there that goes against basic Biblical concepts.

Given that I'm merely to  "teach and work in accordance with and not contrary to this doctrinal statement" and the statement is largely a codification of generic evangelical thought, it shouldn't be a binding constraint.

I'm supposed to be hearing from the search committee next week. Keep this, and other prospective jobs, in your prayers.

 

Stadium Musings

It's a bit funny to see tonight's Florida-OSU game being hosted at the University of Phoenix Stadium. The school has accelerated adult-ed programs spread throughout the country and likely has never had a football team. They merely bought the naming rights to metro Phoenix's new football stadium in Glendale, where the Cardinals play their home games, to advertise their no-ivy-draped-walls school.

The Bull Moose is getting face time tonight, flipping the coin in his home turf.

One odd factoid that came to mind; the University of Chicago's football stadium got used as a nuclear research facility in the Manhattan Project, where they came up with the first fission chain reaction. They actually had a big-time sports program before WWII, playing in the Big Ten before dropping football in 1939; the first Heisman Trophy winner was UoC's Jay Berwanger. They still participate with the rest of the Big Ten on academic issues.

Hopefully, the game tonight won't be as big a bomb as what those folks came up with.

Elementary, My Dear Professor

I've got another tool in my teacher-job-hunting quiver; I passed Florida's Elementary Education exam this morning. I'll need to bone up on English pedagogy if I get a job, but I did strong enough on math, science and social studies to make up for making educated guesses in teaching English, music and phys-ed.

I had to go over to Tampa's University of South Florida for the exam; it's a definite contrast to Florida Southern in Lakeland ere I took my Middle Grades Math and Business Ed exams in April. FSC is an older, private school (Methodist-affiliated) with a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed campus. USF wasn't even founded until 1956.

At most big campuses, you'll see a quaint ivy-lined old-school section of campus that's pre-WWII and pre-GI Bill, then the boxier, more stark modern side of campus. Since USF doesn't date back to that earlier era, all they got are the modern stuff that's functional but soulless.

However, USF's now in the Big East; that takes some getting used to. They'll have to start working on traditions.

Back to the Elementary Ed stuff. I have been looking at teaching at the middle-school level, but there isn't that much of a leap from teaching sixth graders to teaching fourth and fifth graders. The one difference is that you go from teaching one subject to five or six different classes to teaching four subjects to one class; there's more prep time to teaching at the elementary level, but you get to interact with the kids on a more personal basis, since you're with them for 4-5 hours a day, five days a week.

I'm a generalist; I had four fields (Math, Social Science, Computer Science and Business) that I had credentials in coming into today, only missing English and Science in the four main academic food groups.

Next step; putting out feelers for elementary teaching jobs.

Be Our Guest

A busy day for me; I looked into becoming a substitute teacher here in Midland this morning after sending out some feelers for regular teaching jobs in the Tampa area. The county ESA that Bullock Creek and the charter schools use still calls 'em subs, but the Midland Public Schools now calls them Guest Teachers. Where's Tom Tancredo when we need him to rain hellfire down upon Guest Teacher programs?

However, the paperwork needed just to sub is laughable; every little bit seemed to make sense to a lawmaker in Lansing, but you're spending a couple of days of legwork and mini-classes and close to $100 in fees just to get your foot in the door for work that pays ~$10/hour. You're working your first two days just to pay for the fingerprints and licenses.

After getting back from my sojourn through sub-land and grabbing lunch, I got an e-mail from one of the metro Tampa schools; I've got an interview Monday morning. I hope they don't take too much offense to the Sprawlsville Middle tag I gave them earlier this summer.

Extra Sterling Silver

I've been busy; the on-line orientation at Sterling College started today. So, I'm back in professor mode, tracking down desk copies (publishers give free copies to profs) of textbooks, overcoming glitches in the e-Sterling system and creating HTML syllabi.

Good news; I'll be reprising my micro and macro classes during the second half of fall term. That means 2X the income. I found that out when I saw that there were four sections of economics in my electronic cubby-hole; two sections won't start until about Halloween.

Sunday Morning Vs Monday Morning

Here's an interesting Globe and Mail piece on world attitudes about evolution; it's more than a bit condescending towards religious Americans.  The bullet point is that the US is split on the issue-

The study, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, found that in countries like Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and France, at least 80 per cent of adult believe that humans evolved from other species. In Japan, 78 per cent of adults believe in evolution.

But in the U.S. only 40 per cent of adults believe whole-heartedly in evolution, while 39 per cent called it “absolutely false” in the 2005 survey, which questioned 1,484 Americans and more than 33,000 people worldwide.

The final paragraph, a statement from the survey's author, Jon Miller, is interesting-

“It doesn't say anything very good about education here,” he said. “The findings should be of substantial concern to science educators in the United States because we've spent billions of dollars, we have a high percentage of young people going to college and taking science courses and yet we have a very ambivalent attitude on a subject that's a closed book almost everywhere in the world.”

That's not quite the case. You can teach people about evolution and get them to understand what modern science thinks about where life came from, but you can't always get them to believe it.

I remember getting my formal exposure to evolution in 9th grade biology. I wasn't much of a Christian at the time, but had a decent amount of Bible literacy, especially about Genesis. I saw the sequence of evolution, from plants to fishes to animals to man, and saw Genesis running roughly along those same lines. The text book was describe how it happened, the Bible was describing Who made it happen.

If you're focused on the how, you're likely to be an evolutionist. If you're interested in the who, you're likely to be a creationist of some sort. There are theistic evolutionists who split the difference and argue that God used evolution to do His work (common among Catholics, IIRC) but that's a more intellectual argument than most folks are willing to invest in.

Note that the country's not 39% "fundamentalist," unless you're going to give that sobriquet to anyone who darkens the door of a non-liberal church on a regular basis. You do have a plurality of the population, whether they have a working relationship with God or not, who are unwilling to write Him out of the creation mix. When you add a 21% block of folks who aren't sure, you've got 60% who don't fully buy evolution.

The vast majority of that 60% were taught about evolution in school. However, they weren't systematically deprogrammed of their religion while in school. You can parrot back the right things about natural selection without believing it to be the case, or believe that God wasn't ultimately behind it all even if natural selection did seem to occur. That's not a failure of American public education, since it isn't militantly secular.

To get that number down to single digits, you'll have to get church-going and active Christian faith down into single digits. That's something beyond the scope of public schools, as well it should be. The modern public school might not be encouraging of an active faith and may discourage acting upon it in some areas, but they can't actively discourage it.

As long as that's the case, Darwin's going to have an uphill slog in the US.

A Second Horse for Dr. Byron?

I'm blogging from Dayton, hitting a Panera on my way back from Florida; I got a tentative job offer from Saginaw Valley State U to teach some economics classes this fall. The department chair One of their econ professors called fifteen minutes before yesterday's job interview for a middle-school teaching job in LaBelle, a nice small town east of Fort Myers.

It was the first day of school in Florida, so I got to see some of the kids come through the office wing. As I waited for the principal and saw the 'tweens in the office, I realized that I was really better off in Michigan and in college teaching. The kids seemed nice and well-behaved (in the admin office, you'd better) but the idea hit me that this was a different kettle of fish that wasn't really me, especially when I had a doable option back up in Michigan.

Hopefully, this will be the last run back up I-75 for a while, and the stored knowledge that there was a Panera on the north side of Dayton will be a useless piece of trivia.

[Update 8/9-I goofed; it was one of their senior econ professors, not the department chair. I wasn't taking good notes in a car just before another interview.]

[Update 8/10-SVSU wound up going with someone else. However, I think college teaching is still where I need to focus.]

Dr. Byron Rides Again

I got a job offer yesterday, but not anything from my Florida interviews; Sterling College, a Presbyterian-affiliated school in Kansas, has me teaching an on-line economic class starting next month. This had been in the works since April, but the details are finally nailed down.

That might well be a nice way to get back into teaching at the college level; I'm better on-line than I am in person.

I had a third interview for a brick-and-mortar teaching position today; it went so-so. The folks who were supposed to call with a yea-or-nay yesterday have yet to do so, so things are seeming to have dried up; I'm heading back tomorrow morning if I don't hear anything.

At least I can head back to Michigan with a part-time teaching job that goes with me; that will give me something to keep me from going stir-crazy as I hunt for something to supplement it in Midland.

Rethinking the Liberal Arts

I'll let you in on one of the questions I had to deal with this afternoon on my Southern Nazarene application; it might have some interest to the Peanut Gallery.

How would you explain the purpose of Christian Higher Education?  In this context, how do you understand the relationship between liberal arts and professional education?

Here's my stab at it-

Christian Higher Education should equip students to advance God’s kingdom. That equipment should include the development of a firm and robust faith in Christ that is more than echoing their parents’ belief, a solid knowledge of the world around them and skills that will allow them to function in a chosen field of expertise. All three are important.

ID-Putting Biases on the Table

Here's what's been floating through my head on Intellgent Design; the idea of stating that evolution is merely a theory might not be the best way to fly. A better way to approach the issue might be to put on the table that science doesn't handle the supernatural well and that it is biased to assume that the natural is all there is.

Modern science likes to test out hypotheses, but the supernatural doesn’t lend itself to testing; you’re not going to hear a researcher tell God “Take the next few cases off; they’re the control group.” Science almost by its nature has to ignore the possibility of the supernatural, since there’s little way to differentiate between it and a long-shot. Thus, there’s no good way to tell whether God loaded the dice in evolution or we got lucky; the scientist assumes the latter. 

The problem comes when theistic people enter the naturalistic world of science; it’s naturalistic framework ignores the supernatural. Science can’t fit God into a naturalistic paradigm, so He’s ignored. 

However, the idea that we’re merely highly-evolved animals has implications elsewhere in life; ignoring God also ignores the intrinsic worth of the person. Kids growing up with that naturalistic framework will struggle with their place in the universe; it’s hard to feel special if you’re just a naked ape. The naturalistic mindset then has to work up a self-esteem program to make kids feel special. 

That lack of esteem has implication for social policy; the low-esteem kid will tend to underperform and be more likely to look for worth in premature sexual intimacy than the kid who knows that “God made you special and He loves you very much.”
 
Elites might snicker at that Veggie Tales aphorism, but it helps mitigate against a lot of social pathologies. Knowing that God made the universe special helps reinforce that God made us special as well. 

The answer to the ID question might be to be up front that science doesn’t handle the supernatural well and comes at things from the assumption that God is either non-existent or leaves His hands off things. The modern science class assumes the evolutionary mutation dice aren’t loaded, since they have no good way to prove they are. 

One has to choose between God and dumb luck, baring a rather Deist deity who merely let the dice rip and rolled boxcars. Given the naturalistic nature of science, they’ll choose dumb luck as their default value. The answer to the ID-versus-evolution debate might be to not label evolution a theory but to be upfront about the anti-supernaturalism inherant in science.

Bridging the Tiber

A number of metro Detroit Catholic schools are being shut down; one of them, Redford's Bishop Borgess High, is reopening as a generic Christian school. They're keeping most of the old staff in the new Covenant High.

But religion classes will change to bridge Protestant and Catholic teachings. In recent years, nearly nine out of 10 of the school's students have been Protestant, Charnley said.

 

"That change may help me," Arielle Williams, 16, a returning junior, said Tuesday. "I'm Baptist. I probably will feel more comfortable asking questions in religion class."

That's often the case in many urban Catholic schools, where Protestant kids make up a big chunk, often the majority, of the students; there often aren't evangelical schools that have the intellectual rigor and track record of the Catholic schools. Borgess prided itself in graduating everyone and sending everyone on to college.

I don't have a clear thought on how to de-Catholic a religion curriculum. Generic Christianity that both sides can agree upon would seem to err on the side of being something loosely Wesleyan, going back to the meme I had going a while back.

Longitudinal Testing and Charter Schools

I'm coming off my news fast; I'm not sure if this is the best place to start, but this NYT piece on charter schools under-performing their conventional public school brethren has been making the rounds. The piece has been trumpeted by those in the NEA-AFT sphere as proof that charter schools don't work. However, as Daniel Drezner points out, check out this paragraph toward the back of the piece-

One previous study, however, suggests that tracking students over time might present findings more favorable to the charter movement. Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, who conducted a two-year study of 569 charter schools in 10 states found that while charter school students typically score lower on state tests, over time they progress at faster rates than students in traditional public schools.

Yes, that charter member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, the Brookings Institution, just keeps getting in the way of the teachers unions.

Before reading the piece, and Drezner's good wrap-up, I was talking this over with Eileen over dinner last night. The thought that came to my mind is that charter schools draw students whose parents aren't satisfied with the standard public school fare. That can either because the kids are smart and aren't being challenged or because the kids are struggling and that the public schools aren't able to adequately deal with their problems.

While public school systems are quick to set up magnet schools for the smart kids (Polk County's International Baccalaureate School comes to mind) they don't do a good job with the kids who aren't Special Ed (or ESE as it goes by these days) but aren't quite with the program. While there are high-end oriented charter schools, like the Midland Academy my niece goes to, many more charter schools will focus on kids that aren't well served by standard teaching methods. That will likely mean that charter schools will tend to have weaker students, all else being equal.

The measure for any school, charter or not, should be whether they are teaching their kids. If the Brookings study is valid, charter schools are getting their charges up to speed. Rather than looking at where the kids are at one point of time, the better way to measure where a school is at is to look at where kids are at the end of the year and compare that to their score from the past year. If the students are advancing more than a grade-level per year, the school will be doing an good job. That's something that's lacking in most school testing, which punishes schools with a poorer or multi-ethnic clientèle even if they're doing a good job of teaching the kids they do get.

It's that type of longitudinal testing that is needed to see if schools are doing a good job; otherwise, schools will be encourage to cherry-pick and drive off the marginal student or get him classified as ESE, which gets them out of the testing loop in most state.