pragmati.st

- Quarterbacks by Ableman / Teacher by Editor B

Most Likely to Succeed, the most recent Malcom Gladwell piece in The New Yorker, is a really interesting look at the similarities between trying to draft an NFL quarterback and trying to hire a good public school teacher. The main similarity being that we are incredibly bad at predicting success in either field.

For all the effort on scouting, combines, and testing of college quarterbacks it turns out that there is no demonstrated correlation between wonderlic test scores or draft position with an NFL quarterback’s career performance. Similarly, teachers who earn a Masters Degree or an advanced teaching certificate don’t perform any better than those with a vanilla bachelor’s degree. So NFL teams end up selecting Ryan Leaf with the number one pick and giving him an 11 million dollar signing bonus while passing on Tom Brady until the 199th pick. Similarly, and more important for society, we end up with teachers who have Masters Degrees, but couldn’t teach you how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I’ve always found the way we select teachers strange. You don’t need a master’s degree in math to teach high school geometry. The skills needed to earn an advanced degree and the skills needed to be a good teacher are completely different. Sure, sometimes those skills develop in the same person, but I’m willing to wager that is the exceptional case.

Let me make a quick conterfactual argument: If education and intelligence correlated with teaching performance, then college TA’s (generally Masters or PhD candidates who are incredibly intelligent and know the material inside out) would be great teachers. I think anyone who ever had a Calculus, Physics or Comp Sci class in college will immediately agree that this most certainly is not the case.

In fact, I think you can make a good argument that the skills and attributes you need to earn a Master’s Degree in math (to take one example) are a significant negative predictor of success in teaching.

Let’s face it, there is no subject taught in high school that requires a graduate level understanding of the material. The most difficult subject taught in high school is probably Calc AB and that is something that we expect college freshmen to master. The skills needed to be a great teacher are almost entirely social: you need to be able to engage your students, explain the material in multiple ways, control a classroom, and have a remarkable amount of patience with your students. These are not the skills that graduate level academics select for.

I know brilliant people who became teachers and failed miserably. I’m also fairly certain that some of the best teachers I had were actually pretty low on the IQ scale. If we as a nation are serious about improving education we need to look at ways to find and train better teachers.

There is a lot more I could say about this: about how we face the same problem in hiring programmers, or about what the implications of admitting we are terrible at predicting success are. But it is late, and I am tired, so maybe another day.

I’ve recently read some excellent long form magazine articles.

Michael Lewis

The End

Michael Lewis is the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The Blind Side (all excellent books). Before becoming an author he worked at Salomon Brothers in the 1980’s when they were the first investment bank to go public and one of his immediate co-workers invented the mortgage backed security. It is an excellent examination of just how badly fucked the system was.

Also to the “How did professionals so badly misjudge risk and fuck us all?” category are two excellent episodes of This American Life from earlier this year: The Giant Pool of Money and Another Frightening Show About the Economy.

David Foster Wallace

I’ve also recently read two excellent David Foster Wallace essays. I actually came to both organically as they were linked to from other things I was reading. Still, I feel a bit guilty to only now be reading more Wallace. (I’d only read the Federer piece and Consider the Lobster while he was alive)

Host

About talk radio host John Ziegler (Who recently got involved in some controversy with FiveThirtyEight.com and a generally ridiculous interview about an upcoming “documentary” he is releasing) By the way, the quotes around “documentary” are because he has a clear agenda in making the film, not because of its ideological content. That, in my opinion, renders it editorial or argument, but not a documentary. I would also use quotes if referring to Michael Moore’s “documentaries”

The String Theory

About Michael Joyce, at the time the 89th ranked professional tennis player in the world. However, to say that it is about a tennis player does not even remotely do the piece justice. It is about specialization, sacrifice, grotesqueness, desire, and talent. I think it was even better than the Federer piece which was amazing.

- flickr user sanjaysuchak

Anyone who knows me knows that I am very happy with the outcome, but regardless of your politics you have to admit that we witnessed something special.

A quick story

My mom worked as an election judge in Montgomery County. She was at the polls from 6 AM to after 10 PM and said she’d never seen anything like it. 2 hour lines, people genuinely excited, 65% turnout. She shared a story that I think illustrates why yesterday was special.

When the polls opened at 7AM there was already a line. While waiting, a 74 year old black man fainted. An ambulance was called, and while they were wheeling him out on a stretcher he asked if he could vote before he left (Edit 11/13/2008: Apparently I misheard my mother’s telling of the story. She asked the EMT about letting the man vote. Still a good story in my opinion). The EMT said it wasn’t worth risking his life over. My mom promised him that if he made it back he’d go straight to the front of the line.

A few hours later he came back in a wheelchair and cast his vote.

"The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."

"We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy . . . allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country," Goode said in the letter. "I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America."

Virginia, you never cease to amaze me.

Full article: Va. Lawmaker's Remarks on Muslims Criticized

I really don't understand how people can still think it is acceptable to say things like this. Isn't one of the fairy tales we are told as children that our nation was founded to avoid religious persecution? I guess that still only applies if you are white, protestant, and male.