Former Teach For America high school computer science and math teacher here. (I also taught at a school funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's High Tech High initiative noted in the summary.)
First, some positive comments. It's great to see studies like those mentioned in the Newsweek article attracting eyeballs in academia and the popular press. The conclusions may seem to border on the tautological for most of us (great teachers are great at teaching!), but such ideas are largely verboten in the public school system. If you haven't already RTFA, I'd suggest The Atlantic's treatment of the same material.
Anecdotally, I can fully corroborate Teach For America's data. Both in my school as well as those of my TFA colleagues, teachers that continually pushed themselves to excel and improve in their craft were able to consistently produce jaw-dropping results in their students' test scores. It really is amazing. As an example, I co-taught a summer school pre-calculus class with another TFAer in Watts a few years ago. We somehow managed to march through three years worth of material in those two months; our students went from being on average two grade levels behind to slightly above grade level. I attribute this success to Teach For America's philosophy of teacher excellence (which is similar to 'kaizen' in many regards).
The summary asks "What makes a good teacher?" This is the wrong question. There is no one thing that will make a teacher great (vibrant personality, deep subject knowledge, an M.S. Ed., etc.). Rather, it is an attitude that is willing to try anything (and, conversely, promptly reject the ineffective) to make students succeed. To use a math analogy, it is the second derivative that matters, not the current value or even the slope.
Disclaimer: this post does not necessarily reflect the views of my former employers.
I'm a developer for one of the larger US banks and am currently in the pilot for the mobile personal banking rollout. I don't actually work on the mobile team, but I do have access to most of the internal security reports, and I can assure you that at least our company has thoroughly reviewed the many security concerns. Is it perfectly secure? No, and pretty much no system is. But from what I've read, the security risks are on par with (although different than) connecting to the bank through a personal computer.
One interesting thing to note, is this is actually my employer's second rollout of personal mobile banking. They were the first major bank to offer mobile services (over a decade ago) but canceled the program because of lack of interest. Perhaps features looming on the horizon like "contact-less payments" will draw more attention, but the response amongst most my coworkers on the pilot has been pretty ho-hum: kind of neat, but I don't think I'd use it very often.
As a former math teacher at another Bay Area high school associated with High Tech High, I can say that technology was (for the most part) integrated judiciously with the curriculum. I don't know if this was also the case at SVHTH, but based on my experience with other schools in the HTH network, I would suspect so.
Whenever I mention to people that I worked at an HTH, their first thought is often that the school is an IT vocational school, or a traditional school but with everything done on the computer. Both of these notions are incorrect.
The main emphasis of HTH's is project based learning. Rather than assigning loads of repetitive homework, teachers are encouraged to create challenging and relevant projects that motivate students to do their best. The project format was used for small, large, individual, and group efforts.
The "High Tech" name is used for two reasons:
1) When applicable, students use productivity software to do their work. This often comes in the form of collaborating with other students on projects using Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office. The idea here is that technology literacy will become increasingly important in the 21st century, and therefore should be integrated into the curriculum.
2) The schools are administrated electronically. Student tracking, facility scheduling, and parent/administration/teacher communications were mostly done through a centralized computer system provided by HTH. This was a great boon to the faculty of my school.
Stephen Talbott offers an excellent treatment of this subject in the 23rd chapter of his freely available book The Future Does Not Compute. The book is out of print, but was published by O'Reilly.
Guessing by the language they use to describe their compatibility algorithm, I would say their matchmaking is heavily influenced by the Myers-Briggs personality theory. This theory has been around for quite some time and is used by many matchmaking services. As pointed out in Please Understand Me (1 and 2), certain pairs of myers-briggs personality types tend to do very well in romantic relationships.
On a different note, I always thought it would be fascinating to let loose some datamining programs on one of these matchmaking services databases. Maybe we could discover a better indicator of compatibility.
There are two issues in the current debate on digital copyright violation. One is a question of personal morality: Is it wrong to digitally duplicate an intellectual work? No (I'll spare you the apple analogy). The second and more often ignored point considers societal morality: Is it wrong for a society to not support its creative workers? This is more of a gray area, but surely it is at least extremely foolish to let all artists starve.
It is important that the two issues not get confused.
On the first day of the new release, redhat released this statement:
In the past, Red Hat has ensured compatibility and supportability within product families. With the recent introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and that family of products, we are now able to integrate stable and mature new technology developments as they are released instead of having to delay their incorporation until the next major release, following a few point releases. The accelerated numbering reflects Red Hat's move to speed the adoption of open-source technology.
Whatever that's supposed to mean.
Release can be found here.
Slashdot Mirror
Former Teach For America high school computer science and math teacher here. (I also taught at a school funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's High Tech High initiative noted in the summary.)
First, some positive comments. It's great to see studies like those mentioned in the Newsweek article attracting eyeballs in academia and the popular press. The conclusions may seem to border on the tautological for most of us (great teachers are great at teaching!), but such ideas are largely verboten in the public school system. If you haven't already RTFA, I'd suggest The Atlantic's treatment of the same material.
Anecdotally, I can fully corroborate Teach For America's data. Both in my school as well as those of my TFA colleagues, teachers that continually pushed themselves to excel and improve in their craft were able to consistently produce jaw-dropping results in their students' test scores. It really is amazing. As an example, I co-taught a summer school pre-calculus class with another TFAer in Watts a few years ago. We somehow managed to march through three years worth of material in those two months; our students went from being on average two grade levels behind to slightly above grade level. I attribute this success to Teach For America's philosophy of teacher excellence (which is similar to 'kaizen' in many regards).
The summary asks "What makes a good teacher?" This is the wrong question. There is no one thing that will make a teacher great (vibrant personality, deep subject knowledge, an M.S. Ed., etc.). Rather, it is an attitude that is willing to try anything (and, conversely, promptly reject the ineffective) to make students succeed. To use a math analogy, it is the second derivative that matters, not the current value or even the slope.
Disclaimer: this post does not necessarily reflect the views of my former employers.
I'm a developer for one of the larger US banks and am currently in the pilot for the mobile personal banking rollout. I don't actually work on the mobile team, but I do have access to most of the internal security reports, and I can assure you that at least our company has thoroughly reviewed the many security concerns. Is it perfectly secure? No, and pretty much no system is. But from what I've read, the security risks are on par with (although different than) connecting to the bank through a personal computer.
One interesting thing to note, is this is actually my employer's second rollout of personal mobile banking. They were the first major bank to offer mobile services (over a decade ago) but canceled the program because of lack of interest. Perhaps features looming on the horizon like "contact-less payments" will draw more attention, but the response amongst most my coworkers on the pilot has been pretty ho-hum: kind of neat, but I don't think I'd use it very often.
As a former math teacher at another Bay Area high school associated with High Tech High, I can say that technology was (for the most part) integrated judiciously with the curriculum. I don't know if this was also the case at SVHTH, but based on my experience with other schools in the HTH network, I would suspect so.
Whenever I mention to people that I worked at an HTH, their first thought is often that the school is an IT vocational school, or a traditional school but with everything done on the computer. Both of these notions are incorrect.
The main emphasis of HTH's is project based learning. Rather than assigning loads of repetitive homework, teachers are encouraged to create challenging and relevant projects that motivate students to do their best. The project format was used for small, large, individual, and group efforts.
The "High Tech" name is used for two reasons:
1) When applicable, students use productivity software to do their work. This often comes in the form of collaborating with other students on projects using Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office. The idea here is that technology literacy will become increasingly important in the 21st century, and therefore should be integrated into the curriculum.
2) The schools are administrated electronically. Student tracking, facility scheduling, and parent/administration/teacher communications were mostly done through a centralized computer system provided by HTH. This was a great boon to the faculty of my school.
Stephen Talbott offers an excellent treatment of this subject in the 23rd chapter of his freely available book The Future Does Not Compute. The book is out of print, but was published by O'Reilly.
Guessing by the language they use to describe their compatibility algorithm, I would say their matchmaking is heavily influenced by the Myers-Briggs personality theory. This theory has been around for quite some time and is used by many matchmaking services. As pointed out in Please Understand Me (1 and 2), certain pairs of myers-briggs personality types tend to do very well in romantic relationships.
Wikipedia on Myers-Briggs
Chemistry.com seems to be nothing new.
On a different note, I always thought it would be fascinating to let loose some datamining programs on one of these matchmaking services databases. Maybe we could discover a better indicator of compatibility.
It is important that the two issues not get confused.