Got A Teacher Who Made A Difference In Your Life? Reach Out And Let Them Know

 I got this email yesterday morning:

Dr. A:

It's been many years since we last connected.  My last memory was the day in your office (Spring 2002 perhaps) when you suggested I apply for the Presidential Management Internship program.  You took time that day to complete the faculty portion of the application as it had to be postmarked by midnight.  It's amazing how a seemingly small moment can have such a dramatic impact on one's life. I have worked for the Federal Government for much the time since and have had a successful career that has allowed me to grow in ways I would have never imagined. 

Thank you.  

Teaching is such an important job, whether it's primary school or graduate school.  You have the chance to change people's lives.  Whether it's helping them believe in themselves, giving them the tools to think critically, helping them understand how some aspect of the world works, or supporting them to take the next steps of their lives.  

And while a good teacher works hard to prepare a lesson and how to present it, you never know what random comment or action will have the most impact.  A number of times students have told me how something I said really made a difference.  And usually it was something off the cuff, not a part of the prepared lesson that clicked for that student.  

This email comes 20 years later!  I've often argued that student teacher evals should be done five or more years after the class, when the student has had time to process what actually took place and can more objectively assess a class and teacher.  I've had several cases where students have told me that the first few classes they thought I was too demanding, expecting too much of them, and that it was only after a year or more that they finally realized what I was up to and suddenly it all made sense.  

Teachers' pay in money these days is paltry compared to the education required for the job, the time and effort good teachers put in.  Teachers' real pay is psychic, the knowledge they've made a difference.  So pay up and let your teachers know.

Think about a teacher who made a positive  difference in your life.  I know that all of you can think of at least one or two such people without any effort.  Look them up, find their contact info and tell them.  Do it now.  

And support schools and teachers who are under attack from the anti-Woke mob who are afraid of letting students search for truth, who are afraid of anyone who believes things that expose their own hypocrisy.  

It's important to know that the Right has been crusading to move public tax money from public schools to private school for a long time.  All the attacks on school budgets, curriculum, teachers, LGBTQ+ content and kids, they're all aimed at making public schools so bad that voters agree to fund private schools with public money.  If you haven't read this Washington Post story, you should.  

And it's why letting teachers know that you value their work is critical, so they don't simply quit, but rather hang in there until we get past these attacks and reestablish the importance of public education.  If the teachers are driven away, we'll lose this fight.

". . .the spoken word is no more than breath."

 In No Time To Spare Ursula LeGuin writes about her fascination with words.  

"When asked to talk about what I do, I've often compared writing with handicrafts - weaving, pot-making, woodworking.  I see my fascination with the word as very like, say the fascination with wood common to carvers, carpenters, cabinetmakers - people who find a fine piece of old chestnut with delight, and study it, and learn the grain of it, and handle it with sensuous pleasure, and consider what's been done with chestnut and what you can do with it, loving the wood itself, the mere material, the stuff of their craft.  

"Woodworkers, potters, weavers engage with real materials, and the beautify of their work is profoundly and splendidly bodily.  Writing is so immaterial, so mental an activity!  In its origin, it's merely artful speech, and the spoken word is no more than breath.  To write or otherwise record the word is to embody it, make it durable, and calligraphy and typesetting are material crafts that achieve great beauty.  I appreciate them.  But in fact they have little more to do with what I o than weaving or pot-making or woodworking does.  It's grand to see one's poem beautifully printed, but the important thing to the poet, or anyhow to this poet, is merely to see it printed, however, wherever - so that readers can read it.  So it can go from mind to mind."

I put my Ukrainian English learner through the opening charges of Jack Smith's indictment this morning. His English isn't good enough to do that alone, but he can grasp the key points of this historic document with the help of a guide. There are words he should know, and I'm trying to connect him to the fact that he is living when we are facing the most important trial in US history. 

We examined words like defendant and prosecutor.  "Claim falsely" made sense when I pulled him back from his wrong turn ("falsely is like waterfall?", no, false is the opposite of true) and after several attempts to explain 'claim' he realized he knew the term from 'baggage claim.'  I started the lesson with a slice of bagel and a gob of raspberry jam, which I spread with a knife.  So I could use the image when we came to 'the Defendant spread lies . . .'  

Smith's indictment is amazingly clear for a legal document.  He (and his associates) knew it had to be understandable to the average American adult.  It's not dumbed down, but rather most of the legal jargon is couched as tangibly as possible with sentences as grammatically simple as possible.  Not the long convoluted sentence encrusted with Latin terms you often see in legal documents.

'The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won. He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures. Indeed, in many cases, the Defendant did pursue these methods of contesting the election results. His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.' [Link to the indictment]

OK, 'outcome-determinative' is not an everyday term, but 'outcome' of an election is not hard to get. 'Determinative' is clearly related to 'determine' which is fairly common and not to hard to make clear.  I talked to a lawyer friend and asked if perhaps that term 'outcome-determinative' was a translation from the Latin.  He said, "No" but suggested it was probably a legal term of art that has been an important phrase in other cases. That led me to Google and I found this sentence in 

"An "outcome-determinative" test was set forth, the essence of which was that if the determination of an issue would have a decisive influence on the outcome of the case, then that issue was one of "substance." [from a 1965 North Caroline Law Review article]

 While in the indictment sample above says the defendant has the right to publicly say falsely there was 'outcome-determinative' fraud and even to say he actually won, the indictment uses this term eight more times later on to demonstrate that Trump knew his attempts to overturn the election were based on lies about election fraud and lies that he had won.  The term is used in a list of presidential advisors who told him there was no evidence of 'outcome-determinative' fraud, starting with:

"The Defendant's Vice President-who personally stood to gain by remaining in office as part of the Defendant's ticket and whom the Defendant asked to study fraud allegations-told the Defendant that he had seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud."

Earlier in a previous LeGuin chapter "Readers' Questions," the author writes that it is relatively easy and interesting to respond to vary specific questions of 'imaginary fact,' like one about her use of the name Sparrowhawk.  

"Is this the New World sparrow hawk, Falco sparverius, or one of the Old World kestrels . . .?"

But that more general questions are much harder to respond to - questions like, 'why do you write?" and the most vexing questions are about meaning.

"Meaning - this is perhaps the common note, the bane I m seeking.  What is the Meaning of this book, this event in the book, this story . . .?  Tell me what it Means.

But that's not my job, honey.  That's your job. . .

"Meaning in art isn't the same as meaning in science.  The meaning of the second law of thermodynamics, so long as the words are understood, isn't changed by who reads it, or when, or where.  The meaning of Huckleberry Finn is."

I imagine law fits in somewhere between fiction and science.  Ideally, much closer to science, but the current Supreme Court majority has moved it much closer to fiction.  And legislation in some Republican dominated states to change how history is taught, or medicine is practiced, are also attempts to create fiction - an alternative reality.  

Terms  like 'outcome-determinative' come to have specific meanings in law, in an attempt to make it more science-like and less interpretive than fiction.  But even science articles are only attempts to capture reality in words.  Sometimes they are successful, over even close.  Other times new discoveries prove the old writings inaccurate.  

For those of you concerned about why I chose the title of this post, I can only say it was the most poetic phrase I found in LeGuin's paragraph on words.  But my brain took this post in other directions.  But it's still the most poetic phrase.  Would you rather I title this Outcome-Determinative?  Even 'outcome-determinative' when spoken is no more than breath.

Teaching English To A Refugee In Alaska - Polishing Old Skills

RAIS is the Alaska Catholic Social Service's Refugee Assistance and Immigration Service.  Last summer I volunteered to tutor English for them, but I decided that I did not want to go into someone's house regularly during COVID.  They said some of their clients live outside of Anchorage and maybe we can do this online.  

Several weeks ago they got back to me.  A refugee living outside of Anchorage wanted lessons. (I'm going to be vague to protect confidentiality.)

In Peace Corps training back in 1966 and 1967 we got killer training for Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL).  The trainer in charge of the TEFL lessons was like a teaching machine.  She had a technique and a style that, in hindsight, was a really good way to teach a foreign language AND the lessons were good for teaching any class.  I can't believe her name escapes me at the moment.  I used to have nightmares about her watching me practice teach.  [UPDATE March 11, 2023 - It was Phyllis!]

A 50 minute class consists of

• 5 minutes of pronunciation drill
• 10 minutes of vocabulary lessons
• 20-25 minutes of grammar drills
• 20-25 minutes of reading the lesson in the text out loud and questions and answers about the text

The pronunciation drill would be related to some of the words in the vocabulary lesson.  The vocabulary would come from the reading in that chapter.  The grammar drills focused on lots of oral repetition using the grammar we were working on.  And, of course, it included the vocabulary and sounds we just did.  There might be a sentence and after the students could repeat it fairly well, I'd give them words that they used to replace words in the sentence.  This was a good way to see if they understood it or whether they were just parroting stuff they didn't understand.  

We had a Level 3 English textbook at training that was used in Thai high schools.  The readings in the chapters were about Thai history, US history, and British history.  (I learned the basics of key Thai historic figures that way.)

When I arrived at my school, I found they were using the same book we had trained with.  And the class was at a chapter that I had done a practice lesson on in training in DeKalb, Illinois.  It felt like magic.  

So, using what I learned then,I've started preparing my lesson plans, though now I can do that with Keynote (Apple's version of PowerPoint.).  My student is highly motivated, already speaks fluent enough English, but grammar and vocabulary are limited and pronunciation could be improved as well.  Lesson 3 is tomorrow morning (Saturday).  So far he's put up with my very packed lessons with good humor.  I think I will have to ease back a bit - I can't sustain that level of effort.  But we've got lots of material to work with over the next month.  I told him he's my boss and he has to tell me what he wants and then I'll do it. But, of course, his texts also alert me to sentences and grammar he needs to work on.    

As I've been reading online to get foreign language teaching tips, I found one that both of us like:  Learn the words to English songs you like.  He's suggested the Beatles "Yesterday."  So I'm going to see what sort of grammar and pronunciation lessons we develop using the lyrics as a starting point.  (I used "Hello, Goodbye" once in Thailand.  Very easy lyrics.)

I'll look at the grammar they use, and then try to substitute words to make a lot more useful sentences from the lyrics.  

Learning to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer meant we were learning Thai using the same method that we were preparing to teach our students with.  That's a very humbling experience which gave me a much better understanding of what my students were struggling with.  What looks so obvious to a native speaker seems impenetrable to a non-native speaker.  Sounds they make in Thai, we simply couldn't distinguish at the beginning.  So I had a lot more patience than I probably would have when my Thai students had the same problems I had and was still having trying to speak Thai.  Thais only have eight final consonant sounds.  Eight!  B, D,  K, N, NG, M, P.  (I checked online and they include W and Y, but it seems to me that those really become vowel sounds.)  But that means Thais have a LOT of trouble with all the consonants and consonant clusters (RD, ST, CH, NK, etc.)

So I've been looking at specific pronunciation issues that speakers of my students native language have.  

That's been using a lot of my creativity.  

I also learned in our first meeting that one of his sponsors is someone I've spent a fair amount of time with in the last couple of years.  

Snow, Sun, Bread, And Saving Lives

Tromped to the dentist for a cleaning this morning through the new snow.  Others had already created a path.  When I got home I shoveled a lot of snow.  

The sun crept into the bedroom this afternoon and hung a new picture on the wall.  I like it.  But it was only a temporary loan.

Yesterday I did the work.  This morning I pulled it out of the refrigerator, let it warm up, and put it in the oven.  This was a good one.  Rosemary olive.  

How professors can save lives:

Labor Shortage, Law Enforcement And Teaching In Alaska

 This has been flashing at the State Troopers Headquarters at Tudor and MLK

Now Hiring State Troopers

$20,000 Hiring Bonus

Starting Salary $74,693-100,630

Apply Online Today

Here are the qualifications listed online:

The minimum qualifications for the position of State Trooper Recruit/Lateral are outlined below.

General Qualifications

• Must be a citizen (including US Nationals) of the United States of America.
• Must be 21 years of age or older* at the start of the academy .
• Must be conversant in both spoken and written English.
• Most possess a high school diploma or have passed a General Education Development (GED) test.

* There is no upper age limit; if you can pass the physical fitness test and medical screening,  you could be hired.

Driving

• Must possess a valid driver’s license issued within the United States or its Territories.
• Must be free of excessive moving violations and recent license actions (canceled, revoked, suspended, limited, or SR-22 requirement).

Drugs

Drug use/abuse is closely scrutinized and recent drug use may be cause for elimination from the hiring process, including:

• Marijuana use within the last year
• Use of illegal narcotics within the last ten years
• Manufacture/sale of illegal narcotics as an adult
• Illegal drug use while employed in a law enforcement position
• Prescription drug use without a prescription unless there was an immediate, pressing, or emergency medical circumstance to justify the use

Criminal History

• Adult criminal history is closely scrutinized and the following may be cause for elimination from the hiring process:
• Felony conduct as an adult
• Misdemeanor convictions within the last ten years
• Any conviction related to domestic violence

So a high school diploma or GED is all you need to get a starting salary of

In comparison, here's the salary schedule from the Anchorage Education Association  Contract - teachers.  This is for the 202-1022 school year.  There is a bump up each year, but the highest starting salary is $55,158 and the highest top salary is $97,238.  

100 SERIES – SALARIES AND BENEFITS 105 SALARY SCHEDULE

2021-2022 Salary Schedule

Step	B00	B18	B36	B54	B72
0	53,287	55,872	58,455	61,039	65,882
1	54,698	57,282	59,865	62,448	67,283
2	56,106	58,690	61,273	63,857	68,685
3	57,516	60,099	62,682	65,266	70,087
4	58,925	61,508	64,091	66,674	71,488
5	60,333	62,917	65,501	68,085	72,892
6	61,745	64,326	66,910	69,494	74,294
7	63,153	65,737	68,320	70,901	75,697
8	64,562	67,145	69,729	72,311	77,101
9	65,970	68,554	71,137	73,722	78,501
10	67,378	69,963	72,548	75,129	79,904
11	-	71,371	73,955	76,540	81,306
12	-	72,780	75,364	77,947	82,708
13	-	-	76,773	79,357	84,109
14	-	-	78,182	80,768	85,514
15	-	-	79,591	82,175	86,915
16	-	-	-	83,584	88,318
17	-	-	-	84,993	89,718
18	-	-	-	-	91,119
19	-	-	-	-	92,520
20	-	-	-	-	93,922

 

Here are the qualification requirements for an elementary school teacher:

Job Requirements
The following are required:

1. A valid Alaska initial, professional, or master teaching certificate.
2. Evidence of content knowledge shown by:
1. a posted degree in the content area of this position; or
2. a posted minor in the content area of this position; or
3. passing Praxis Subject Assessments scores (formerly Praxis II) in the content area of this position; or
4. a certificate endorsement in the content area of this position

What's required for a teaching certificate?  There's a lot of different ones listed, but here's for someone who has never taught in Alaska:

INITIAL/PROGRAM ENROLLMENT TEACHER CERTIFICATE

To qualify for an Initial/Program Enrollment teacher certificate, an applicant must meet the following requirements:

• Has never held an Alaska teacher certificate

• Completion of a bachelor’s degree from a regionally or nationally accredited university;

• Current enrollment in an approved teacher preparation program as verified by a Program Enrollment form (docx) and official transcripts (Program must be completed within two (2) years of the issuance of the Initial certificate).
• Passing scores on an approved basic competency exam 
• Has passing scores on an approved content area exam
• Five years of experience in the subject matter that you will be teaching;

• Offered a certified teaching position by an Alaska public school district.

I've had comments in the past that argued that having a Bachelor's degree is no guarantee that someone can do the job better than someone without one.  That requiring such a degree is elitist.   I would say that depends on the kind of job you're hiring for.  And the quality of the degree one has.  

But I would argue that a good Bachelor's degree forces one to challenge one's world view, to be exposed to alternative ways of thinking about things, to develop thinking and logic skills, and to spend time working through ethical problems.

I suspect that if qualified teachers applied for and got State Trooper positions, the quality of our state law enforcement would improve greatly.  I also think that if our teacher pay scale were to be more like the trooper pay scale, we'd have better teacher applicants.  But I would also acknowledge that there are both troopers and teachers who would apply for those positions regardless of the pay, because that's what they really want to do.  In both cases, I would hope the hiring authorities make sure that the want to pursue those careers for the right reasons.  

Merlí - High School Philosophy Teacher, Student Issues, Barcelona Make Fascinating Netflix Series

We finished season one last night on Netflix.  It pulled together a number of loose ends in a satisfying way.

Photo of Merli (Francesc Orella) from Season 1 Episode 13

Episode 1 (I just went back to remind myself) opens with Merlí meeting his ex-wife in a bar across the street from his apartment.  As he talks to her about her new job (and boyfriend) in Rome, he watches police vehicles in front of his apartment.  He assures her he will take good care of his 17 year old son whose been with the mother.  Merlí goes across the street to talk to the police about his eviction while the wife goes to pick up the son, Bruno, at his ballet lesson.  Merlí packs his stuff and moves in with his mother a once famous actress.  Shortly after Bruno reluctantly moves in too, Merlí gets a call to fill an opening for a high school philosophy teacher.  In Bruno's school.

I'm not giving anything away.  This all happens in the first 15 minutes of Episode 1 of 13 nearly hour long episodes.  That's probably one reason this series goes so well - there is a lot packed into every minute.

Pol and Bruno (Carlos Cuevas and David Solans)

Each episode is titled after a different philosopher.  Episode one is The Peripatetics - and he takes the students for a walk to the school's kitchen.  He tells them the Peripatetics thought while walking.  A student asks him if everyone can do philosophy.  He stops.  Ponders for a long time as the students start snickering.  Then he tells them that he paused that long so he could think about the answer, and to make the point that people don't respect people who think before they speak.

As he engages the students, he antagonizes the other teachers, particularly one who starts a campaign to get rid of Merlí.  The show focuses on about ten of the students - we never find out anything about the black or the Asian student we see now and again in the class.  The students all have their own issues - absent parents, over protective parents, poverty, sex, difficulty in school, and one absent student who has been diagnosed with agoraphobia and never leaves his house.  Merlí helps them all through the application of philosophy.

Merlí is an inspiring teacher, but a difficult human being.  His pursuit of women is out of synch with #Metoo standards, yet he genuinely likes women and sex with them and they like him.  His constant violation of school rules and protocol is exasperating yet it's done in the interest of exciting his students with philosophy.  My sense is that the writers made his transgressions work out way too perfectly, but why not imagine such a world now and then.

I enjoyed it all - the acting, the dialogue, the issues, the look at teachers' lives and students' lives, all wrapped up in philosophy lessons as well.  We also get to see a bit of Barcelona, though mainly the neighborhood around the school and regular panoramic views of Barcelona.

Speaking of Barcelona,  Merlí teaches at Angel Guimera Institute.  Wikilpeida tells us:

Àngel Guimerà[a] (6 May 1845 or 6 May 1847[1] or 1849[2] – 18 July 1924), known also as Ángel Guimerá, was a Spanish Nobel-nominated writer in the Catalan language. His work is known for bringing together under romantic aspects the main elements of realism. It is considered one of the principal representatives of the so-called Renaixença,[3] at the end of the nineteenth century.

It goes on to tell us his most famous play was translated and performed internationally, including on Broadway.  That he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 23 times, but that Spain prevented a Catalan language writer from getting the prize. Clearly, the name of the school was no accident.

I'm writing this because I know that lots of people will enjoy this show.  I can find very little online about the show - basically a Reddit discussion group, but even that is brief.  One person who summarizes what he's found out on Spanish interviews of the actors who play the roles of Pol and Bruno.

What I've learned is that there are two more seasons.  That many think season 2 doesn't keep up the pace of season 1, and I'll leave it at that.

And I still haven't figured out what the owl symbolizes.

Netflix - and the other streaming channels - are transforming the movie watching experience.  We now have available outstanding movies and series from around the world.  It used to be that US culture was sent out into the world via films and music and television.  Now there's a bit of a two way exchange.

All of you with Netflix, especially those who are in education - students and teachers, - at least watch episode one.

Worth Noting - Redistricting, Court Info, Teaching Tolerance, Trees and Crime

Redistricting News Today:  Federal court invalidates part of Texas congressional map

Free Law has put up 1.8 million free opinions from PACER.  What's PACER you ask.  From PACER's website:

"The PACER Case Locator is a national index for U.S. district, bankruptcy, and appellate courts. A subset of information from each case is transferred to the PACER Case Locator server each night.
The system serves as a locator index for PACER. You may conduct nationwide searches to determine whether or not a party is involved in federal litigation."

Teaching Tolerance has lots of resources for educators.

Do trees lower crime?  That's the claim a Chicago group is making after mapping tree density in 284 municipalities in the Chicago area.  My reaction was 'whoa, that's correlation, not causation.'  My take would be it's the other way around:  Where there's less crime, people plant more trees.  Where people have more money they have bigger lots, more trees and more park area.  And where there are already lots of trees, the property values are higher, and wealthier people buy the land.  But the article expected people like me:

"Of course, skeptics might argue that this sort of data is only correlation, rather than causation. Underserved communities have high crime and fewer trees—not high crime in part due to fewer trees. So to support their claims, CRTI compiled all the benefits that trees provide, with citations for the various studies backing up the claims. One of those studies suggests that trees 'may deter crime both by increasing informal surveillance and by mitigating some of the psychological precursors to violence.'”

Yes, I've posted about the psychological benefits of trees, but I'm still skeptical.  Trees may, to a certain extent 'sooth' a community, but I'm still guessing that there's an economic correlation between low income and fewer trees and that the economic factor is the bigger driver of crime.  I would guess that Anchorage has a pretty high level of trees per people and a fair amount of crime.  And much crime happens where trees give cover for the homeless who commit crimes in the greenbelt areas.  But it's interesting research.  And I'd love to be wrong on this.

Variations On The Theme of Knowing and Ignorance

I don't like to just repost what others have done.  I feel some need to include some sort of value-added.  The value here is fairly minimal.  It's merely putting these together with what I see as the common themes of ignorance, the difficulty of knowing, and the greater difficulty of being able to assess what you know.


I got a link that sent me to McSweeny's Internet Tendency.  It turns out McSweeney is a publishing house in San Francisco.  Had I known that last week, I might have tried to stop and and see who is behind these two posts.

• IF PEOPLE TALKED ABOUT OTHER THINGS THE WAY THEY TALKED ABOUT GENDER IDENTITY  by KAYA YORK

Here are two examples from the piece of talking about other things like people talk about gender:

Cats: “A Manx is not a cat. Cats are defined as having tails. Maybe it’s a koala.”
Ice cream: “Avocado is not a valid ice cream flavor because I’ve never heard of it and it does not appeal to me.”

There are lots more such examples.

• THAD, THE WORST STUDENT IN YOUR INTRO CLASS, HAS SOMETHING TO SAY

by RJ HAPPEL

Oh my!  There must be a kind of genius that allowed Happel to create this essay of twisted logic.

• The Tangled Story Behind Trump’s False Claims Of Voter Fraud

'Zombie Research' and how the study that led people (like Trump) to incorrectly conclude that non-citizens were voting in big enough numbers to impact election results was used to impact an election.  This comes from Nate Silver's Fivethirtyeight website.  It's about a very sophisticated ignorance - the kind that always made it hard for me to submit academic articles, because I was always certain there was some important piece that I had missed entirely.

• "The greatest enemy of knowledge is NOT ignorance, it's the illusion of knowledge."

I first wrote about the  Dunning-Kruger effect  a year ago April.  This video is actually an example posted by Alberto Cairo - the professor who taught the online class I took on infographics for journalists -  of how videos are an improvement over simple graphics (Cairo's area of expertise.)  His post includes three more such video examples on:   the visualization of uncertainty, the first of  a series about elementary statistical methods titled Methods 101, and a discussion about Cairo's book, The Truthful Art.  






(The 'greatest enemy of knowledge' quote comes at the end of the video.

The notion that I had to confront the 'knowledge' my students already had embedded in their brains about any given topic before they could really consider a different 'truth' came about a third of the way into my teaching career, and radically changed how I taught. If someone 'knows' something, it's really hard to displace that 'knowledge' with something else unless you get that person to consciously confront the existing 'knowledge' and how it was acquired.

Data Journalism In The Alternative Fact Era

This is the second week of a MOOC class I'm taking called "Data Exploration And Story Telling" taught by Alberto Cairo and Heather Krause.

I'm taking this class because several work sessions at Alaska Press Club conferences (for example this session with Chrys Wu)   have convinced me of the power of being able to extract information from online or otherwise acquired (with permission of course) data bases and then manipulating that data, offers opportunities for really powerful stories.

[For those of you still scratching your head about MOOC, it's Massive Open Online Course.  This class has some 6000 students.   And when I write 'manipulate' I mean it in the sense of reorganizing the data so that the meaning of the numbers is easier to understand.  But I acknowledge that it is easy to misinterpret the data both accidentally and intentionally.]

Data Journalism seems to be a hot topic these days as large data bases are increasingly becoming available.  For me the issue is figuring out how to download them, clean them up, and then play with them to find interesting patterns.   That's what I'm hoping to get out of the class.

Here's a link to a Guardian article on data journalism.  Here's a section of that article that is becoming increasingly clear to me

"5. Data journalism is 80% perspiration, 10% great idea, 10% output
It just is. We spend hours making datasets work, reformatting pdfs, mashing datasets together. You can see from this prezi how much we go through before we get the data to you. Mostly, we act as the bridge between the data (and those who are pretty much hopeless at explaining it) and the people out there in the real world who want to understand what that story is really about."

This is both encouraging (I'm not a dummy because I think this looks like a lot of work) and discouraging (because I'm one blogger without a team of folks to help figure this out and do the work.)

Numbers, graphically displayed, can powerful tell stories that are otherwise invisible.  I've known this for many years.  It can often be relatively simple to prove or disprove someone's idea by getting the numbers.  I remember back in the 1980s at the Municipality of Anchorage, a couple of fairly easy projects where data ended or changed the conversation.

One was about the use of pool cars.  The Muni had some cars that employees could use to go out on Muni business.  We were getting complaints that there weren't enough cars and people were getting turned down.  We just asked the person who assigned the cars to log the requests for a month.  It turned out that anyone who asked for a car 24 hours in advance, got one.  But people who wanted a car in ten minutes sometimes got turned down.  That report ended the discussion.

Another study of the people making over $10,000 a year in overtime was sent to all the department heads, just to let them know.  This highlighted some departments with high rates and led to more careful monitoring and in some cases to adding positions.

Hospitals have used data on treatment and length of stay and recidivism rates for each doctor's patients in certain units.  The data led to doctors making changes in their treatment of patients.

So I know this can be very powerful.  We'll see whether I can learn to do this with the tools I have - I've been an Excel holdout, trying to by with Apple's version, Numbers.  And there seem to be a number of folks in class who are doing this already as part of their work.  And this class seems a little harder to negotiate online than the Coursera class I took in the fall.  There are so many forums and comments - which there should be with 6000 students - that it feels a bit like being in jammed train station at rush hour.

And then there's the issue of storytelling.  I believe in the power of stories and their importance.  But I'm starting to get concerned about how loosely it is being used, and how it can lend to people dismissing the stories as, just that, stories.  Something made up.

We're in the era when photos can be easily manipulated by anyone and now video can be manipulated to change the narrative.  The use of story lines by media is nothing new.  The broader skepticism on the part of the public is also a good thing.  But skepticism without the critical skills to assess a story's accuracy is problematic.  We're in an era where people shop around until they find the spin that fits their world view, wether it's accurate or not.

And some take full advantage of this.  Trump tells whatever story makes him look good and challenges those that don't.  From the LA Times:

Challenged on NBC's "Meet the Press" about Spicer making incorrect claims, Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway made a startling characterization , that Spicer gave "alternative facts."
“You're saying it's a falsehood, and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,” Conway told host Chuck Todd, who immediately interjected his disbelief over her description.
Conway eventually backed off Spicer's adamant claims and inflated crowd estimates. “I don’t think you can prove those numbers one way or the another,” she said. “There's no way to really quantify crowds."

Alternative facts?  No way to really quantify crowds?   Really?

If you live in Trump's competitive world where everything is about winning, then facts only matter if they help you win.  You challenge the umpire every time he calls you out and every time he calls your opponent safe.  Whether you got to the base before the ball did is irrelevant.  Instant replay is only your friend if it confirms your claim.

Can data journalism become a form of instant replay?  I suspect not.  It plays a different role.  Instant replay shows us, in slow motion and from a better angle, what we all just saw from different angles at high speed.  Data journalism goes through lists of numbers and converts them into visuals that make sense of the numbers.  It makes the incomprehensible, comprehensible.

And people will have to become more sophisticated about data collection, about categories used in collecting data, about survey questions, and a whole lot of other things if they're going to be able to evaluate the accuracy of data journalism.

Journalist have to learn those things.  In the first week of the class, Heather Krasue offered students a checklist for data:

• Who collected the data?
• How they collected the data?
• Who was included? 
• When it was collected?  
• Why did they collected the data?  

So, between watching the class videos, reading the articles, participating in the forums, and doing the assignments, not to mention playing with my granddaughter and other duties as assigned, keeping up here is getting sketchy.

Here's another look at this topic that my friend Jeremy posted on FB the other day.

Diagram of Connections in Newstown Development Scandal

[Regular Blog readers, see note to you below]

[Coursera readers - below is the chart that graphically shows the key shell corporations that my article explains.  I couldn't put it into the story, so I've posted it here for you.  You can either look at it here or you can download the pdf image to look at while you read the article.]

Regular Blog Readers:  This chart is part of my assignment for the online course I'm taking from the University of Melbourne (Australia) called Journalism Skills for Involved Citizens,  We have been getting more information each week on a land development deal in a fictional town called Newstown.  This week we got to see a set of documents about political donations and corporations.  I decided that the best way to illustrate the links between these corporations was to make a diagram.  But it turns out I can't put an illustration into the template for my assignment.  So I'm linking the graders here.

The Foundation for Good Government (FGG) contributed to the campaign of the mayor of Newstown to the tune of $80,000.  The various documents show us the connections between the Foundation for Good Government and the CEO of Futupia, Robert Blatchford.  As you can see in the chart, Shield PTY company has a share of FGG as does Newstown 38.

Newstown 38, in turn is owned by Robrey PTY, which is owned by Roblatch, which is wholly owned by Robert Blatchford, the CEO.  And Shield PTY is also owned by Roblatch.  So, in fact FGG is wholly owned by the developer.  And all the companies have the same address at Rocket Suite 1101.

There's a lot more, but I decided in this case a picture was worth more than 1000 words.

I'm not sure that the other students who end having to grade this will agree, since I'm not exactly sticking with the assignment.

The Dangerous Machine And Other Distractions

I'm trying to be faithful to my blog, and I have a list of unfinished posts, but I also have other distractions in my life.  As we left Seattle I stopped to empty my pockets right before going through security next to the "Dangerous Machine" credited to Cappy Thompson, Dick Weiss, and James Lobb of Pottery Northwest.

Dangerous Machine - Cappy Thompson, Dick Weiss, James Lobb 

Cappy Thompson created the stained glass window at the south end of Seatac and Dick Weiss has a big one at the north end.

Which leads to another project - organizing my photos so I can find old ones, because somewhere I have a picture of the north stained glass window.  Can you tell I liked the dangerous machine?  It enlarges a little bit if you click on it.  And I still have to learn photoshop's tricks for getting rid of the reflected lights.  The tips I've read are fairly tedious and time consuming.  The best one is use a polarized filter when you take the picture - but that's not an option (to my knowledge) with my Powershot.  I did play a little with the background.

Other Distractions

I'm preparing to teach the capstone class for the public administration MPA this spring.  It's the class where the students find organizations in the community who could use them on some sort of organizational/management analysis project that will allow them to apply the things they've learned in all their other classes.

I'm going through last year's blog posts to see if there is anything good enough to submit to the Alaska Press Club's contest.  Last year's submissions got lost and they sent me my application fee back.  I had good stuff in 2013 - I was still finishing up the redistricting board and I'd covered the Kulluk press conferences.  2014 doesn't have anything quite that substantial.

from the book

And I'm working on a book for my granddaughter's 2nd birthday.  That still has a ways to go and the birthday is coming up soon.


Today I was at the Citizens Climate Lobby meeting and we heard from Shell Oil's climate change advisor, David Hone, who called in from London. (Here's a link to his blog.)  He basically said that Shell knows that climate change is an issue facing earth and is already factoring in a carbon fee into their financial planning.  He said they know there will be action to limit carbon and they prefer a straightforward fee or a cap and trade (their preference) approach to regulation.  These approaches, he claimed, would be equitable for all carbon producers.  (I'm still thinking about that, since one of the maxims I've picked up in my life is that every change has winners and losers.  Is his claim limited enough so that 'carbon producers' would be the 'losers' and the winners would be in other sectors?  Still thinking that through.)  I felt good because the momentum for a carbon fee has grown hugely since I joined CCL a few years ago and CCL has been a key player in changing the political climate for a carbon fee.  One of the stats that I heard that struck me was that CCL local chapters now cover - and I can't find the exact number in my notes - 80 or 90 percent of congressional districts.  That's a key number because the whole strategy of CCL is to have members of congress lobbied by their own constituents.

There had been some protests, we were told on the conference call, to having the Shell guy there.  But the response was that we have to be willing to talk to everyone as human to human if we're going to get things done.  He's message, to a degree, overlaps ours.  But I also blogged the Kulluk fiasco last year and I know that the Shell spokespersons told us as little as they thought they could get away with and in some cases outright lied - such as whether they left Dutch Harbor when they did to avoid paying a tax.

Then I caught a ride over to the library to pick up a book I had on hold (No Land's Man by Aasif Mandvi).  Anchorage legislators were holding a community meeting in the Assembly chambers so I stuck my head in and listened to a teacher talk about the new teacher evaluation system ASD is using after opting out of No Child Left Behind.  She was an award winning teacher who got very emotional as she explained that the new system made it impossible for a teacher to be rated highly.  But she didn't go into enough detail for me, so I followed her out and asked her for more detail.  I've got that on video and so that makes one more post in my line up of unfinished posts.

And then I enjoyed the warm (for Anchorage) 38˚F (according to a bank message board) sunny weather as I walked home.