It's a Sunday evening, and I'm just sitting around the house watching TV. It's a good thing.
The school-related workshops are done for now. In mid-September, there was one that was related to retention and diversity. This is one of those things where I think a lot of people make mistakes by conflating and confusing issues. I respect the need to pay attention to diversity, and that it is important to be aware of unintentional messages (such as if all of your advertising only contained white students). But it's another thing to try to pretend that such things are at the root of the problems of racial equity in higher education. Specifically, we were led through a mini-session on looking at a nursing syllabus, and talking about how it's helpful if the syllabus contained quotes from doctors or nurses of different ethnic backgrounds. But to me, that's a bit much. Would students even be able to recognize that the quote is from a particular person? Is it even relevant to the class? And you can put in a lot of energy trying to find such quotes, but even at best the expected return would be extremely minimal.
The next week, I was in Chicago for a Complete College America workshop. It was my first one-day business trip that crossed time zones, and turned out to be a 21 hour day. That trip was a bit more interesting. This was related much more focused on remediation issues. There are some very good ideas floating around, but there are also some things that make me pause for a bit and wonder if it's going too far. There is a constant tension between the idea of making college degrees accessible and the idea that college degrees need to be meaningful.
One of the ideas presented was to create an alternate remediation path for students who are not going into a math intensive field of study. This is a good idea. But the application left something to be desired. The idea was to create a statistics-specific remediation class for students whose college level math class will be statistics. And while this is successful in the sense that the students who are prepped for statistics did well in their statistics class (of course), the speaker also made the off-handed comment that she's not sure whether her students are able to add fractions, and that didn't bother her. At that point, I have to question whether this is a good idea. If you meet someone with a college degree who can't do basic arithmetic, isn't this a problem?
This theme was repeated two weeks later at another workshop in Reno. That conversation was led by someone who was involved in public policy, and his entire perspective was driven by the policy perspective that the goal is to have X people with college degrees in the next Y years. It reminds me of the "No Child Left Behind" goal of having 100% graduation rates for high schools. If the high school diploma is supposed to mean something, then it is necessary for some people to NOT have one. In the same way, we can continue to de-value the college degree by changing our standards simply to attain some sort of numerical goals.
This is very speculative on my part, but if this trend in public policy continues, there's probably going to be an industry formed in the next 20-30 years for certificates that replace the traditional college degree. It's already happening in a number of industries, and I don't see any reason why it won't continue if higher education continues down this path. All it would need is a clear definition of what the certificate would represent, and then the approval of whatever industry is demanding it. I digress...
My next work travel is about two months from now:
http://www.cvent.com/events/state-science-technology-engineering-and-mathematics-stem-summit/event-summary-a0eff8ac4aa14fb7891723ab6bbdd96a.aspx
This one is even more closely tied to public policy, so it will be interesting to see whether I'm more encouraged or more frustrated by it. There's so much traveling that I will do this year. In July, I flew home. In August, I drove to Southern California. in September, I flew to Chicago. In October, I flew to Reno. In November, I will fly home. December will be a flight to Durham, NC and also be a flight home. Then January will be a flight to Boston. And who knows whether February will bring any more travel.
The Math 093 modularization project has continued to move forward very well, and I'm getting some interesting data. It has also been significantly easier to track this than I thought it would be, and much easier to make the room rearrangements than I thought it would be. There are some questions about scale, but I think that it will scale just fine, at least over the sizes that I expect to see this system applied.
I'm going to be presenting again at the Joint Meetings in January (which is the aforementioned Boston flight). I've been given the first speaking spot in the session, which I think is a good thing. But more importantly than just giving a 15 minute presentation, I've got to start thinking about a publication. There have been two journals that I've been considering, and there might be a way to get into both of them by presenting different pieces of the information in each one. One of the journals is more math-focused, and I can submit the data regarding the pedagogical aspects of the system. The other one is more general, and I can use that to talk about the structural issues that the system addresses. But there's a way to go between here and there.
We're losing our president at the school:
http://www.lvrj.com/news/nevada-state-college-president-leaving-for-colorado-post-131145518.html
It's a bit sad for us because she was a good leader. We've still got enough people in leadership positions that we can keep moving forward, but it's getting thin (as it is all over campus). So the campus will have to continue to band together to make sure things get done.
Church stuff is still rolling around. We've started a discipleship class that is essentially a small group leader training. It's only been going for two weeks, but it at least gives a focus and direction for us. We're at least having the conversation about discipleship and getting people to start to move towards that goal.
I'm not an elder, and I won't be an elder until we at least have an interim pastor in place, and then I will make a decision whether I want to serve. Part of the problem is that I don't want to be disruptive as a leader. I don't want to commit to a leadership position and find myself in a place where the person I'm serving behind hasn't been given the authority to do the things that need to be done. If the interim pastor is simply a guy who fills the pulpit, I don't think I can be an elder. It would be far too frustrating to be sitting there and watching nothing happen from the leader, and that would be very disruptive to the leadership structures. But if there's a guy there who has a sense of what needs to be done, and is looking for people to step up and help him accomplish those things, I would be all for it. So I'm just going to sit tight for a month or two and support the things that I already support.
We'll see what happens between now and the next time I have time to post something.
