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Thought this was interesting. Across 160 teams of researchers, just about all failed to make good life outcome predictions on things like GPA, evictions, layoffs, and others. Data followed 4.5k families across 15 years, with 13k features (varied over time). Haven't looked at it directly yet, but will be turning the docs and data inside out... In the meantime, authors claim this as showing the limits of ML. Oh, and it's published in PNAS, so you know there's some big publication energy there.
https://www.pnas.org/content/117/15/8398
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I always was astonished to learn what I had said or done in the classroom when I was out of the building for the day. I would ask the admin to talk to the sub. Nothing ever happened to the subs and the admins never told parents it wasn’t me. I resigned.
Yes—girls in my 3rd grade class were reporting that girls in the 3rd grade class next door were hogging the swings during recess and being bullies about it. It had been going on for a while, it seemed, so my colleague and I, the teacher of the other class discussed what to do. The situation had come to a head and we wanted to resolve it but couldn’t count on the social worker’s availability/involvement because she was only part-time. We decided that I would invite the girls to morning meeting in my class to talk the situation out. They were interested in sharing their side of the story and, according to my colleague, accepted the invitation enthusiastically. There were 3-4 of them. They sat in our circle. Everyone who was involved shared what they thought or felt, the meeting was very calm, polite, and orderly, and it seemed like it had gone well. The girls denied that they were preventing others from using the swings or that they were aware that anyone thought they were. I figured that, whether or not the girls were telling the truth, we could make a plan for how to share the swings going forward. We did that and the girls went back to their classroom. We continued with our morning meeting routine. According to my colleague, the girls returned to her classroom in good spirits. Well, I think it was that night, my colleague and I both got phone calls from an administrator who was like the assistant principal but not quite. She was called the Curriculum Coordinator but she didn’t do anything with the curriculum. She mainly just did whatever the principal didn’t want to do OR she would involve herself in things—kind of like the faculty police. The reason she called us was that the mother of one of the girls was very upset. Apparently one of the girls complained to mom when she went home. My colleague and I were in trouble, apparently, for taking matters into our own hands. We honestly didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t policy to send kids “to the principal’s office” because she didn’t want to be feared by the children. In the absence of a full time social worker, we thought we’d handled it well. But, apparently, the curriculum coordinator had to make a personal visit to the child’s home to smooth things over with the parents, and the next time the social worker was in, she took only a portion of my students, apparently the ones who had been most involved, and the few girls from the other class to her office to talk. My colleague and I were made to feel as though we were in the doghouse (well, me more than her) but no one advised us of how we could have managed the issue differently. Sorry so long! I’ve never forgotten this story because it made me so mad.
From now on, send all problems to the office; let them figure it out!
In the years before Desmos and Geogebra, I built a program in Excel for students to input different numbers and watch how those names changed graphs. The goal was to get them to understand how different parts of equations had different effects on the graphs. I told students they should go through the Excel program and the accompanying written instructions looking for patterns, experimenting with different numbers on their own, etc.
The following PTC, a mother stormed in demanding to know why I would abandon her daughter and expect her to learn math on her own. This was an honors class, by the way. I never left the room and I circulated answering questions as they arose. But heaven forbid I expect anything approximating independent learning. Oh, and the math class after mine is a dual credit class where a large amount of independent learning is necessary. smh
That sounds like a great activity! So cool! And you were showing them an advanced way to use Excel, too.
Probably
One year I had a child with difficult behaviors. In his take home folder I wrote that he was making crazy faces to his neighbors and that got me in hot water. Admin knew that I meant no harm by it as if was hard to describe the crazy faces he was making!
That's what I am doing next year. The students who caise the issues are straight to Student Services. I don't care about the Teacher Strategies of Interventions the Social worker (who spends no time in the classroom, nor has she ever been a teacher) demands of teachers.