Great Expectations

I am registered at a professional web site called Linkedin. At this site I am a member of several groups, including an alumni group for Governors State University (GSU), where I earned my Masters of Science in Science Teaching. Through a group, members can initiate a discussion thread by posting a question or comment. Last week a comment was posted from a disgruntled alum who is upset that he spent “thousands of dollars” on an education, but can’t find a job. He claims he has sent out over 1000 applications/resumes, but has only been offered a job that pays $9/hr. His degree is in “Interdisciplinary Studies, (IDSS).”

The economy is as bad as I have ever seen in my 50+ years, many recent grads being unable to find gainful employment in their fields of study. I just can’t help but wonder what a degree in IDSS qualifies you to do. I went to the GSU website and attempted to find out what IDSS was, but after reading all the information there am still clueless. Apparently, IDDS is for students who started college at some point, but quit before finishing a degree. IDSS allows a student to use previous credits, “life experiences”, and at least 60 hours at GSU to earn a degree. Nowhere on the GSU site does it say exactly what area the 60 credits must be in. Apparently they can be in anything; so with no area of concentration it is no surprise that graduates of this program have a college degree, but no skills to land a real job.

I attach significant blame here to any university that would offer such a worthless degree and charge tuition for it. Have they no shame? I suggest he take the $9/hr job where he might actually gain some marketable skills.

The situation reminds me of a student I taught in the mid 80’s. She was brilliant, one of the best I have ever taught. After graduation, she went off to university where she planned on studying to become a doctor. I ran into her mother several years later and was surprised to find that the girl had changed her major to “Women’s Studies”, graduated, and began working in a woman’s shelter as a counselor. The mother was understandably upset, feeling her daughter had thrown away a chance to make something out of herself, and asked be to talk to the daughter. I contacted her and we had a long, interesting conversation. The young woman argued that the women she worked with needed help and she felt responsible (as a woman) to assist them. I pointed out that if she went to Med School or Law School she could be much more helpful as a doctor or Attorney/Advocate for the women at the shelter. She replied that if she went to Med School or Law School she would not be able to help these women for many more years, and they needed help now. I never saw her again and don’t know what she is doing now. Fortunately she is the exception; most promising students actually do get a degree that really qualifies them the get a job and actually help people in a meaningful way.


The expectations students have for their lives illustrates how little they know about life and how to prepare for it. Last week my homeroom class filled out a questionere concerning their “life goals.” One of the questions asked them to state their goals. Most comment were reasonable. Things like; “I want to be successful”, “I want to be healthy and happy”, and “I would like to stay religious, and keep in touch with my friends and family.” Others were not quite so realistic. One boy wanted to live in a castle. Another girl wrote, “I want a splendid, unforgettable, remarkable, perfect life.” The most interesting comment was by my worst student that period. She is in Honors Chemistry and has gotten the lowest grade on each of the first three exams—though she is not the least capable of my students. Her comment was, “I want to be a doctor or a lawyer. I want to live in a huge house, at least three floors, and have three maids, a butler, and a chef.”

She will probably end up working in a woman’s shelter.

Sometimes You Get the Bear, and Sometimes the Bear Gets You.

It is Labor Day, and I am writing this while watching a show on Scandinavian cooking. The meal he is fixing consists of cooked carrots, baked celery root, and grilled pork chops. It was served with a cool glass of beer and looked grand.

Except for Friday, when I apparently made two young ladies cry, last week was a pretty good week. The crying had nothing to do with anything I said; it was, apparently, induced by a particularly difficult homework assignment. The first girl approached me before class to inform me that she could not do several of the problems on the assignment that was due that day. She asked for some help, her eyes swelling up with tears as she spoke. Being a man, I am not very good at dealing with an upset woman. I tried to comfort her by pointing out that the problems in question were worth only a few points in a 50 point assignment. This did not seem to make her feel any better as she said, in a breaking voice, “I never wasn’t able to finish a homework assignment before—not ever.” At the end of class another girl came up to me and said that she needed help; informing me that her homework was a mess and she did not understand anything. She wanted to know if I was going to send her down from honors chemistry to a regular level class. Then she began to cry, saying that she did not want to drop down. I told her that it was too soon to make that decision and that she should wait, at least, until she took the first exam. Both girls did much worse that the average on the assignment.

I am sure that I appeared quite hard and unemotional to both young ladies. What I wanted to say to both was, “Stop! There’s no crying in Chemistry!”, but that would have been insensitive. I am not an insensitive man—even if I don’t know how to handle a crying female. I tried to comfort each; letting them know that it wasn’t as bad as they thought and that many others had trouble with the same problems. Both of these statements were lies. The problems they had trouble with were simple density calculations, and the fact that they were completely stumped by them was a sure sign that neither belongs in Honors Chemistry; as well, most other students did them without turning into jelly. If either of them does poorly on the exam Wednesday, I may have to recommend that the drop down; though, I will not demand that they do.

The main problem each had difficulty with is given below:

Oxygen gas has a density of 1.43 g/L at a given temperature and pressure. What mass of oxygen gas is contained in a spherical balloon with a diameter of 15.0 cm? The formula for the volume of a sphere is 4/3∏r3.

In order to solve this problem you have to recognize that mass can be determined by multiplying density and volume. The density is clearly given in the problem, but the volume has to be calculated by using the formula for a sphere that was given, and knowing that the radius is half the diameter. Since these are all honors students, and all of them have to be in honors math, I would expect that they could make their way through the calculation without help. While this was true for most of the students, it was not for these two girls. We covered standard density problems in class the day before. After the exam on Wednesday I will have to check for other students who might benefit from some extra help, or by dropping down.

Summer vacation is over and I am back in the routine of waking at 6 o’clock each week day. The first full week of classes is done and I find myself comfortably into the swing of a new school year. The students I have been assigned appear to be both bright and enthusiastic—at least up to this point. With the first exam coming up soon I should know if appearances are deceiving; though, their honors Biology teacher from last year says that these students are very good workers.

Class sizes are reasonable, with the exception of advanced placement chemistry which has 30 students. A young man wanted to change his schedule the first week of school and come into my AP class, but the registrar and I told him no; the class being filled to capacity. Actually, 24 students would be ideal. They took an exam over the summer homework assignment I gave them in May and the scores were about average. In my mind, these scores are never high enough. I will need to step up the pace this year as the Chemistry exam is the first of the AP exams in May, giving me two weeks less than last year.

We did the first lab with my honors classes on Wednesday, and second period was quite exciting. About ten minutes into my explanation of the procedure I heard a thump, and turned to find one of my students flat on the floor. She had fainted, coming to almost immediately. We helped her up, and I found a stool for her to sit on while I evaluated her situation. She said that she had never fainted before, but declined a trip to the school nurse, insisting that she felt fine. I honored her request. About two minutes later a different young lady collapsed. Her situation was visibly different, looking like a seizure rather than simple fainting. Her eyes fluttered and rolled, her hands were clasped together and held tightly to her chest. The whole episode lasted about a minute. When she snapped out of it, she complained of blurry vision and a headache. Alarmed, I had her taken to the office to see the nurse. I have had other students faint before, but in all my years of teaching never two in the same period. I followed up with the school nurse the next period; telling her about my suspensions that it was a seizure, not simple fainting. She said that the girl seemed fine, but was picked up by her father and taken home all the same, adding that she had a doctor’s appointment for the next day. I reported the other girl who did not want to go to the office and the nurse decided to call her down to check her out too. Both young ladies showed up in class the next day, no worse for wear.

Thursday evening was the yearly “back-to-school” night where parents run through their student’s schedule during five minute periods. The evening was uneventful for me, but some teachers reported unpleasant encounters with parents. One Spanish teacher recounted how he was ambushed by a parent. Her daughter has a D, based on a single recorded assignment the first week of school. He admitted that he would not be entering grades as quickly in the future based on his encounter with the ridicules parent.

My evening was much tamer. After 35+ years, most of the parents I encountered were either former students, or parents of former students. Being a known commodity works in your favor—unless you have been an ass.

My favorite Woody Allen movie is “Love and Death”, hence the picture above. One of my favorite lines in any of his movies was not in it, but in another whose name I can’t remember. “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach-- and those who can’t teach, teach P.E.”

Sadly, it is true that many people believe that someone goes into teaching because he or she could not hack it in the real world. As well, most people believe they could do as good a job or better teaching students anything they happen to know (or think they know) something about. The Chicago Public Schools use this widespread feeling among the populace to lower their costs. Experienced teachers are fired, usually when a school is being “reorganized” because of poor performance, and replaced by new teachers recruited from industry to enter the teaching profession. This happened to a friend who taught in the CPS system. When his school was reorganized all the teachers had to re-apply for their positions; most of those hired back had five or less years of experience. He had taught for 20 years and was too “expensive” to rehire. His replacement was a woman who had left her job as a chemist in the private sector to become a high school teacher. She was paid at the level of a first year teacher, saving the school tens of thousands of dollars. He found out from a colleague that she quit after three weeks. Depending on who you talk to, this practice may occur frequently. School administrators get away with this by convincing the media that there aren’t enough teachers when no such shortage exists.

Recently, the federal government has proposed a new multi-billion dollar stimulus package which they claim will save the jobs of many fo the teachers that have been laid off. In reality, the money, if allocated, will be used to hire additional first year teachers—the experienced teachers that have been laid off will not be getting their jobs back. Make no mistake about it, many public school administrators believe that a trained monkey could do as good a job as many teachers; and would hire one if they could get away with it. With teaching salaries being 75% or more of school budgets, the incentive is high to purge the highest paid staff whenever possible. Union contracts usually prevent this from happening; but when a CPS school is deemed failing by the central office teacher tenure and seniority are canceled. It is a puzzle to me why the teacher’s union doesn’t put up a fight when these things happen. Maybe they don’t care; union dues are the same for everyone, regardless of their experience.

Don’t get me wrong here; I’m not implying that experienced teachers are always better than inexperienced teachers. Many experienced teachers have given up and are just “phoning it in” until they have acquired enough years to retire at full pension. I feel that decisions about teacher retention should be made based on effectiveness, not seniority or, on the other hand, how cheap someone is to employ. Seniority and salary are both easy to measure, so they are easy to use in retention decisions. Measuring effectiveness is much more difficult. In my mind, the best measure of effectiveness is to pre and post test students; measuring effectiveness by student improvement.

Allow me to illustrate. You are asked to determine which of two cars is faster. Both are on I-80, making their way to California from Chicago. You locate each vehicle using their GPS system and determine that one is near Denver, the other is in Omaha. You report that the car near Denver is the faster of the two; Denver being closer to California than Omaha. This is the equivalent of using post testing only, something like exams on state objectives, to measure the effectiveness of a teacher. Maybe the vehicle in Denver left Chicago a month ago, and the vehicle in Omaha left yesterday. Now which one is faster?

I am going to test my method this school year. Over the summer I generated a test consisting of 50 multiple choice questions that cover the major concepts in chemistry. I will give this exam to my students the first week of school and again the last week of school. By doing this I hope to verify that the students actually learned something this year.