Did you know the Indiana Dinosaur Museum exists? And it’s an actual dinosaur museum, and not a secret shrine to creationism, like you might expect from Indiana? One of my wife’s cousins is in town, and we were supposed to meet her and my brother- and sister-in-law there, and well, we did, but instead of exploring the Indiana Dinosaur Museum I got abruptly and rather disgustingly ill, and ended up spending most of my time either in the (impressively clean!) bathroom or the car waiting for them to finish the tour. Then we came home, cancelling the lunch that we were supposed to be hosting, and I went to bed for a few hours. I got up and watched France squeak by Paraguay, and … well, now it’s going to rain. There were no real plans to watch fireworks tonight (the Fourth of July has rarely been treated as much of a thing by my family, to be honest) and the rain would be preventing that anyway, so I’m watching it get dark super early and waiting for the sky to explode.
Speaking of disappointments, I was hoping for some horrible people to have bad things happen to them today, but it appears that that’s not happening either. I’m turning 50 tomorrow, and I’m not happy about it, and I really don’t know what kind of day tomorrow is going to be. I know I’m watching both of the World Cup matches– my devotion to watching soccer over the last month has been surprising even to me; it’s the only sporting event I pay attention to any longer, but I wasn’t expecting to prioritize watching nearly every match I could, and that’s what I’ve been doing.
So, yeah. America 250 is officially blech. We’ll see how Luther 50 goes tomorrow. What did you do with your holiday?
This little bastard isn’t much to Puzzle People, I imagine, and it’s not a ton of pieces or anything, but it occupied a couple of hours of my afternoon and then immediately got photographed, torn apart, and given to my wife. If you look carefully there are a bunch of nautical-themed pieces in there which was a cool little touch. Also, a lot of those pieces don’t really lock together all that well so I kept accidentally shoving them out of place and having to put everything back together.
Other than that? It’s Wednesday. Comic shop. Tomorrow, I get to go to the dump. I’m super excited.
The assessment I had to give this week over the Pythagorean Theorem was not written by me, nor was it written by anyone in my building, and furthermore it was split into four parts for reasons that make sense in a way but I will not be getting into here. My partner teacher and I looked at the fourth test and decided that it was much too difficult and so we decided not to count it as a test grade, but to give it anyway, since, y’know, the Lord High Muckety-Mucks want us to.
I decided to Do Science. Anyone who spends any time around teachers nowadays is fully aware of the common teacher complaint that we’ve never seen such a level of don’t-give-a-shit from our kids than we are lately, and that further the level of inability to notice things, in general, is a big problem.
You, being an adult, have likely already noticed that I wrote the fucking answers for the second assessment– yes, it was only four questions– on the board.
106 8th graders in my class completed that assignment today. 26.4% of them failed the Problem Solving portion of it, a number so close to 27% that I am considering writing John Rogers and asking him to make an addendum to his Crazification Factor. If I add in the number of students who clearly did not notice that the answers were on the board in plan and large letters– and I promise you that board is not in an obscure location in my classroom– but did not out-and-out fail, it rises to 45.3%, which is completely Goddamned insane.
One of these days, someone will figure out a way to separate kids who don’t understand something from those who simply don’t give a shit, and on that day, American education will change radically. Until then, however, I’m going to keep bitching about the notion that my job performance is evaluated by how other people act.
Taken through the window from the safety of my library, that is about nine inches of snow, with maybe a foot or fifteen inches at the foot of the driveway where the snowplows have created a berm. Since I took this I’ve been outside and cleared enough of the driveway for my wife’s car to get in and out and mine to get in and out with a little bit of creative turning, at which point the battery died on my snowblower (mental note: buy a second battery) and I also hit my allotted fifteen minutes of being allowed outside, because, oh, right, it’s thirty below fucking zero out there.
The high today is supposed to be around 4:00, so I’ll go back out around then and finish the driveway off and clear out enough room for the mailbox to be reachable on Tuesday. I’d love to know what percent of schools nationwide are going to be out on Tuesday; I figure the chance that we’ll be in person on Tuesday to be nearly zero and 50/50 on Wednesday; it’s supposed to warm up a lot in the afternoon but it’s still supposed to be twenty below in the morning and, as I’ve said many times, it’s just not safe. So this will be either a three- or a two-day work week, since even though technically I have to provide instruction on both of those days it doesn’t really count if I’m not actually at work.
Meanwhile, I’m off on a common wintertime mental tangent, that being fascination at how our bodies perceive cold. As I said, the windchill is thirty below right now, and the actual air temperature is seven below zero. This becomes extremely dangerous after fifteen to twenty minutes and can genuinely be fatal if you’re not prepared for it.
I was absolutelycolder on Frozenween than I was just now. Now, there are some mitigating circumstances; while it’s not nearly as labor-intensive as shoveling, even snowblowing nine inches of snow is work, and I wasn’t just sitting in a chair waiting for children to hand candy to, but I also had my beast coat on for Frozenween and a space heater next to me and I still spent half an hour after getting inside cradling a chemical hand warmer like fucking Gollum with the Ring.
(If you are from somewhere where it doesn’t usually get cold, or if you generally suffer from cold hands, these things are fucking lifesavers. I rarely have need to use them as a born-and-bred Northman but you should make sure you have some on hand just in case. Honestly, I should throw a set in the car, now that I think about it.)
Anyway, the difference, of course, is that my body has done whatever the hell bodies do when they adjust to cold weather; the other fun example of this will be the first day in Spring when it’s 45 degrees outside and everyone acts like it’s the middle of summer and goes outside in shorts and t-shirts. But I will never stop finding this fascinating; it is objectively much colder than it was on Halloween and I know I have to go back out in it again in a couple of hours and it’s genuinely no problem at all.
I did something this quarter that you normally can’t do in schools, and that’s using my students to perform an experiment. I have two honors Algebra classes, and I decided early in the 3rd quarter that I was going to grade most of their assignments simply on completion. In other words, I wasn’t going to go through any of them question by question and decide, okay, this one is a 9/10, or this is a 7/10, or whatever. Turned it in, and it looks like you tried? 10/10. Didn’t turn it in? 0/10. Same late work policy as the rest of my classes; ie, if it gets turned in it gets graded and I don’t care how “late” it is.
One would think, that if the only grades that were possible outside of tests were either zeroes or A+, that would really skew grades toward failing or high-A grades, and with a group of honors kids, generally more predisposed than others to turn in work, one would expect to see higher grades across the board.
One would be wrong. This policy barely moved grades at all. Most of the kids whose grades changed also turned in more work. There was no skew to the extremes, because kids inclined to failing assignments also don’t turn in a lot of work, and the amount of work kids turn in is really damn close to the scores they get on the assignments they turn in. Find me a kid who turns in every single assignment on time and I’ll show you a kid getting an A. Damn near every time.
Tests, of course, are a great leveler, and one other thing I have to pay attention to is whether test grades are plummeting, which might also be a side effect of this policy. Once kids figure out they don’t necessarily have to work super hard on classwork, because missing a question or two isn’t going to hurt their grades, maybe they don’t learn as well and that shows on the tests? All I can say is I didn’t see it, and I was paying pretty close attention. I might take one of my regular ed classes next quarter and see how well this policy works; I’m not going to try and apply it to everybody, though, at least not until I’m certain what kind of effect it’s having, and I don’t have remotely enough evidence for that right now.
(Reminder: all grading is arbitrary. Yes, all grading, even the system you have in mind right now.)
Third quarter ended today. Two weeks to Spring Break, about a month to ILEARN, and then that’s year 19 done and dusted. Amazing how fast the year has flown by since I changed schools. Just amazing.
I say this a lot, but it’s as true now as it’s ever been: I don’t need to review this book, because you already know if you want to read it or not, so really, my job here is just to make sure that you know it exists. And did you know that Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs existed? Yes? Then you have it already. No? Go buy it. I was about to say “It’s about dinosaurs!,” which actually isn’t quite true, because the book begins on what Black quite reasonably refers to as the worst day in the history of the entire world: the day that a 6-mile-wide object, possibly an asteroid, possibly a fragment of a much larger asteroid, and possibly even a comet, slammed into the Chicxulub region of what is now the Yucatán and basically killed every living thing on Earth. Including all the dinosaurs, except for the ones lucky enough to be living underground or underwater when the object hit. She goes into some pretty intense detail about what happened in the immediate aftermath and then skips ahead a bit in each subsequent chapter– the next day, the next year, 100 years later, and so on. “That sounds fascinating!,” you think, if you’re the type of person who would be reading this blog in the first place.
Yup.
I like the description on the cover, there, that refers to the book as “narrative prehistorical nonfiction.” This is definitely a work of pop science; there are notes, but they’re confined to the back; Black is not citing sources or arguing with specific paleontologists during the text, because it’s not that type of book, but neither is she engaging in wanton speculation. Where things are fuzzy, she says so, but she talks about the different changes on Earth after the explosion through narrative, fictionalized stories about the various creatures that would have been alive (or could have been alive, at least) during whatever time period she’s discussing. In other words, we might not have uncovered the fossils of the specific Triceratops with bone cancer in the Hell Creek formation in what is now Montana that she discusses in the first chapter, but there were definitely Triceratops there and we’ve uncovered evidence of some that appear to have had cancer. Do we know for sure that this particular turtle might have been in this river at that time, staying alive partially by breathing through its cloaca? Nope! But they can do it now, so it’s reasonable to project that ability backwards given other trends in the evolution of prehistoric turtles.
You get the idea. This book tells stories; the stories are not specifically true, necessarily, but they are carefully fictionalized, and there’s forty pages of extra “stuff” in the back past the official end of the book if you want to read in more detail. Which I do, of course. What you need to be able to pull off a book like this is a fine grasp of the detail, a good journalist’s instinct for getting your story straight, and a novelist’s flair for storytelling, which is a rare combination, but one Black (an amateur paleontologist but not, I believe, a Ph.D) has in spades. This is a great read for anyone who thinks deep history and dinosaurs are cool, and if you’re not one of those people, you’re not here anyway, so everybody else go buy it.
(Oh, and also: I found out about it on Twitter, and bought it on the spot, so those of you who don’t think Twitter can sell books are doo-doo heads.)
I’m putting this in print now, so that I can point at it later: Assuming it makes it to its Lagrange point fully functional and successfully accomplishes all the various complicated unfoldings and such necessary to start receiving data and transmitting it to Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope is going to discover evidence of extraterrestrial life at some point, and probably at many points, during its lifetime. A slightly inaccurate story about NASA hiring a bunch of theologians to discuss the possibility of alien life blew up on Twitter over the weekend, which led to everyone speculating that NASA already knew about alien life Out There Somewhere and was scrambling to figure out how it presented it.
To be clear, when I say “life,” I’m talking about microbial life, although discovering evidence of intelligent life would be a lot easier, relatively speaking, especially post-the-alien-equivalent-of-the-Industrial-Age life, which would involve a planet emitting a lot of light from its dark side on a tight band of wavelengths and would be difficult to explain as anything other than artificial life. Microbial life is going to involve lots of hypothesizing about chemical analysis and will have people arguing about it for decades, if not longer.
I have actually said this part in print before: I think that ultimately we’re going to discover that there’s a pretty high probability of life anywhere liquid water exists, and I think there’s probably half a dozen or so places just in our solar system where life exists or existed at some point outside of Earth.(*) Remember, 20 years ago we didn’t even know if planets existed outside our solar system– one of my finest moments in Divinity School involved an argument with an actual astrophysicist about the Drake equation, where I argued that we would eventually discover planets would be common, something I was absolutely right about– and I have the same level of certainty that 20 years from now we’ll have had the same sea change about extraterrestrial life.
(*) Including, but not limited to: Mars, Io, Enceladus, Europa, Venus and Titan.
Go ahead, bookmark the page. Y’all can come back and laugh at me in 2027 if I’m wrong.
