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The
Story of Joan
An attempt to learn about the
real estate business brought me in contact with Joan, a middle aged women
who had been a million dollar salesperson in her first year. She was
well dressed, attractive, very ambition and had a talent for selling.
Joan was famous for her answer to a question from prospective buyers who
were aghast when they saw a foot of water in the basement of a home they
might buy. “Well, think how lucky you are to know about the water. Now
you can bid $3,000 lower and fix the problem for $1,000. Joan was
correct; they bought and were very happy with the property. This was the
middle 1970's when new starter homes were small, about 10,000 square
feet, had one bathroom, three bedrooms, and cost about $40,000.
A larger home was one of the items the middle class purchased with
productivity gains made over the last fifty years.
Joan wanted to be a real estate broker, but fail
the test because of her poor mathematical skills. Math required for the
license was using formulas, a little geometry, and multi-step word
problems. Some of this was necessary for commercial developers but for
what Joan wanted to do, little math was needed. But testing is a way to
limit supply of brokers thus keeping broker/manager salaries high.
As her tutor, much of what I did was build her confidence that if she
did the easy questions, a missed the few difficult questions, she would
still pass. Needless to say, she passed the exam.
Joan was one of the most confident people I've
encountered in many years of education. She went to school before
testing sapped the vitality out of people who were not above average in
both mathematic analysis and verbal understanding. Interpersonal
intelligence, easily the most important in the real world kind of
useful intelligence, isn't considered important by our academic educators.
The Rest of the Story
Joan had a secret to her success. She belonged to
the Friday 7:00 AM Howard Johnson Breakfast Club. Two or three plus
salespeople from ten or so local real estate companies met, talked a
little business, and created a network, a monopoly. If you needed
something for sale at one of your competitors, you called your friend
from Friday morning and they would call you. The more people you helped, the more
people who would help you.
I once had the world's greatest house listing in A+
condition at a great location, and price correctly. Two or three sales were stopped by
parents coming to visit their children who loved the house. I had guaranteed the owner who was leaving for
Venezuela that it would be sold and he was nervous, but not me. With two
weeks to go I called Joan and agreed to split the listing commission and
it was sold the next day. Some people think Joan should go to college, I
think school should be designed to maximize special intelligence of
people like Joan.
e-mail
comments to antonw@ix.netcom.com
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Battlefield Reflections of a
Life-Long
Statistic Teacher
The Normal Curve Rules
Teaching Statistics to Open Enrollment
Evening College Students by
Walter
Introduction: After years of
traditional teaching I switched to the programmed type text
Quick Notes Statistics and its companion
Excel Statistics Lab
Manual which had
all the problems
and their data sets written in Excel so much of the calculation
requirements were removed as an obstacle to learning. Many students were
familiar with the text as they had used
Quick Notes Financial Accounting
and/or
Economics
Interactive Class Notes with Links
in previous courses. These
books had concise two-page outlines
per learning unit with practice problems and complete solutions.
Methodology: Class one began with
a 30 minute summary of material covered on the first computerized
take-home exam or in the lab test. We then adjourned to the lab with some of
the better students leaving to do required work at their own convenience
while
the others joined me in the lab learn to use Excel to calculate measures of central tendency. Lectures/lab sessions followed.
The class before the
computerized test using Excel was a comprehensive hour or so
review where I again saw the better students and after the review a few
students
were off to the lab to finish their computerized lab set due
before the test. This procedure was followed for tests on probability and
on
hypothesis testing/correlation/regression.
Result:
1) Being an honor system take-home or in lab
computer exam resulted in the same grade distribution as for a traditional
in class test where students were allowed a large note card/ cheat
sheet.
2) Using computers, more material was easily covered with less work and anxiety
than the note card system.
3) But only the better students learned
more, much more. Students over 35 years at four
different average at best colleges divided themselves into four groups.
Group one completed the course requirements but never really learned
much and some found
Excel very difficult. They assed with low grades because of easy grading procedures.
Group two calculated some statistics correctly
but ran into trouble deciding which Excel menu procedure to use
for each of the eight different problems on the take home final. I had
warned them that over 35 years grades always went down with each tests
and many were
always disappointed. Some of these adults worked really hard but having to
choose between finite and normal distributions, large and small
samples and then between one sample and two samples eventually led to mistakes.
Group three often got the statistic
correct but then had
difficulty determining to accept or reject the no change null
hypothesis. All the studying in the world doesn't help because they had
never really figured out what hypothesis testing was all about.
Group four, the top 20% had one final hurdle to explain what the answer meant.
They had correctly accepted or rejected the null hypothesis but what did
it mean? They needed to write in the analysis section that the new
procedure was faster/slower or had less/more defects or the new diet was better/worse or
else it was back to group three and a lower grade. Less than six from a
class of twenty-five got almost everything correct and got a 4 points on almost every problem. A
very few indeed got everything correct.
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Teach Students to Read and
Do a Little Basic Math and
Get Out of the Way
"Computerized work has also made knowledge more abstract and more
reliant on data. In the late 1970s, Ford Motor Company began to use
computer-controlled fuel injection systems in place of mechanical
carburetors. Ford soon experienced heavy warranty expenditures because
many technicians, not understanding fuel injection, would tackle a
problem by "throwing parts at it"—replacing one component after another
in the hope that something would work. Ford responded by requiring that
warranty repairs could only be made by technicians who had passed a
training course on repairing fuel injection systems. Half of the
technicians who took the training course failed, many because they
could not read well enough to understand the technical manuals. They
knew how to repair mechanical carburetors because they had watched other
mechanics do it. Watching other mechanics could not teach them to use
computerized tools to test electronic components."
By making students read what the system wants and not what the
student wants means too many students never really learn to read.
Reading is key and what they read is irrelevant. Teaching General Science for students who don't like science
was like me taking Gym; it was a waste of time. The idea that you
taking CIVICS or studying US History makes someone a good criticize is
ridiculous. Let students read what
they want and let the computer interpreter and direct toward their studies. Can you imagine all the
money we spent educating these mechanics and they couldn't read. Not
doing algebra was not the problem. The term of a senator versus a house
,ember wasn't the problem. They couldn't read!
Dancing with Robots“ by
Frank Levy and Richard J. Mundane,
is right and in one respect
and wrong in another.
"It is important to put
these trends in perspective. American schools are not worse than they
were in a previous generation. Indeed, the evidence is to the contrary.
Results from the NAEP long-term assessments show that most American
students now master foundational skills as defined 40 years ago—for
example, reading well enough to follow directions. Today’s education
problem stems from the increased complexity of foundational skills
needed in today’s economy and from the changes in family income and
family structure that leave a significant portion of American children
unprepared to learn when they enter school."
There
has been an increase in the complexity of foundational skills
needed in today’s economy.
They are wrong in
thinking that the changes in family income and family structure that
leave a significant portion of American children unprepared to learn
when they enter school because intelligence is normally distributed and
it is impossible to increase the number of people with the ability to
master these more difficult foundational skills. Just find these
intelligent people and encourage them to develop foundation skills and
reward them economically.
copyright 21st
Century Learning Products
All Rights Reserved
edited and
written by Walter
Antoniotti,
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