Math

Much has been written about the government of Ontario’s plan to decolonize Grade 9 math in the name of social justice. It is a stupid idea for any number of reasons. Apparently, math as currently taught is too objective which means that it excludes other ways of knowing. And so on.

In the great sorting hat of modern society, math, because it is objective and only partially language based has always been a route forward for immigrants of all hues for generations. You might not speak English very well, but quadratic equations, trigonometry and algebra don’t care. With some hard work, even if your English assignments were terrible, the Vietnamese kid or the Sri Lankan or Filipino student could get an “A” in math and often do well at physics as well.

Being a math nerd is the least discriminatory niche in a high school ecology.

I was never much good at math. In Ontario I would have been decolonized twice because I took Grade 9 math twice – once during regular term and once in the summer following Grade 9 because my parents recognized that my barely passing the first time was going to be a problem going forward. I stumbled along for two more years. In those years I managed to acquire just enough math to be able to understand and enjoy Physics 11 and Physics 12 (both taught by the single best teacher I ever had, R.A. Nordman.) (Later I learned a lot of statistics as an adjunct to a thesis I was trying to write. The thesis came to a sad end when my advisor said, “Oh, that should not be a problem, all you need are a couple of simultaneous differential equations.” I was cooked.)

The kids who were “good at math” generally went the STEM route in university, we math under achievers went off to the Arts or, sadly, the Faculty of Education where we were rarely troubled by math again.

“The education minister’s spokesperson Caitlin Clark told The Toronto Sun that the new curriculum reflects a changing world.

“We are taking action to ensure all children, especially those facing barriers to success, have meaningful pathways to quality learning, graduation, access to post-secondary education and good-paying jobs,” she said.”

This is reminiscent of the Indiana State Legislature attempting to fix the value of π at 3.2. There may be all sorts of good jobs which do not need a strong grasp of math but there are no jobs where a decolonized version of the subject will give you an edge.

But I may be looking at this through the wrong lens. A more imaginative lens would note that a) there were only so many “good-paying” (yes, the construction does grate but it’s a quote) jobs, b) certain, preferred, racialized groups were not getting an equitable number of those jobs because c) those jobs had the racialist requirement of a grasp of Grade 9 math which, d) was so racist that the preferred racialized groups were doomed by the system to fail. Take down the systemically racist hurdle of the current Grade 9 math curriculum and replace it with “anti-racist, anti-discriminatory learning environments” and “infuse Indigenous knowledges and perspectives meaningfully and authentically into the mathematics program.” Problem solved!

Or something like that.

In fact, all that this sort of nonsense ensures is that smart (and better off) parents – white, black, Asian – send their kids to private school or homeschool them or pay for after school tutoring. When the pure public school victims of this posturing arrive as undergraduates – courtesy of whatever diversity initiative is available – they will have no chance at a STEM education. There is no “Indigenous knowleges” based calculus or computer code or algorithmic logic. In short, the Ontario public education system is rendering its students, apparently all its students, unfit for the modern world.

And, of course, like most such programs the real beneficiaries are those, often already privileged, kids whose parents are able to pay for the Kumon classes or, well, in my case, summer school. The public school victims might get a job as a diversity hire, but someone has to actually write the code, calculate the stresses, figure out the odds and mine the data – and that someone will have a pretty solid grasp of Grade 9 math.

They’re all at it

My friend Phil wrote to ask what I thought of the current groping scandal engulfing his home state Senator Al Franken. Truth to tell, I don’t think much of any of the current groping/molestation/sexual assault/rape charges flying around. I would love to say that I was shocked and appalled, but I’m not. Not because non-consensual sexual activity is ever acceptable. It isn’t. Rather because, short of going full Mike Pence and never being alone with a woman who is not your wife, every man is open to the accusations and in the current climate of “I believe the woman” has no possible comeback. Worse, the “crime” has been defined down to such a degree that the British Minister of Defence felt compelled to resign over a “knee grazing” incident which a) happened inadvertently, b) did not outrage the owner of the knee in question, c) occurred fifteen years ago and went unremarked ever since.

Lots of pixels have been spilt making fine distinctions between assorted levels of groping, outright assault, feelings of discomfort and so on. Even more have died in trying to discern what level of historic evidence should be required before a man loses his career, is shunned by his colleagues and is replaced by Christopher Plummer.

Frankly, I think it is all a huge waste of time in almost every case. Sen. Franken was idiotic enough to have a picture snapped of his grope (which was not, by the way, the worst allegation made against him). In most of the other cases, the evidence is ten or twenty or even forty-year-old memories of encounters where drugs and drink were ubiquitous and modern standards of “sober, enthusiastic consent” were unknown. Of course, there were power imbalances; Monica did not arrive in the Oval with a penchant for cigars. And Bill was simply following in the footsteps of JFK and LBJ. Was he wrong? Of course, he was, so was Jack Kennedy getting blowjobs from 19-year-old interns. Harvey Weinstein, pig that he is, was in the tradition of Hollywood producers stretching back to silent films. (Kennedy’s father among them.) No one could possibly be surprised.

As to the furor surrounding Judge Moore, there is only one accusation which I consider disqualifying if true and that is the outlying charge that Moore took a 14-year-old girl back to his home and tried to become intimate with her. I say outlying because all the other initial instances were with girls old enough to consent and whose testimony suggested that Moore was pretty much a gent throughout. (And yes, there is lots creepy about a 32-year-old guy taking a 16-year-old girl out. But that, to my mind is not disqualifying if the behaviour has not continued.) [The woman with the yearbook – and Gloria Allred as her lawyer – is not plausible until she turns the yearbook over for handwriting analysis. Right now I suspect she is Moore’s best chance to discredit all the stories.] But the Moore matters all turn on evidence which is 30 or 40 years old and which has only come to light a month before a hotly contested election. He has a perfect right to push back.

And so it goes. Right this instant, as at the height of the Salem witch trials, a denunciation becomes a conviction in the flick of a tweet. Plausibility is now a matter of sheer numbers with 5 apparently being the magic number.  There is no defence and heartfelt contrition, as Sen.Franken is discovering, is not enough. The Salem witch trials burnt themselves out but not until 19 people had been hung and one “pressed” to death with heavy rocks. They ended for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons was that “spectral evidence”, essentially dreams and hallucinations, was no longer accepted at face value.

At a certain point, and I suspect we are getting close to that point, the rush to accuse men of sexually inappropriate (and what an awful word that is) behaviour on the basis of shaky, historical, evidence will collide with the entirely devastating consequences for the men so accused. Sheep will be sorted from goats. Rapists like Clinton or Weinstein will, finally, be flung into outer darkness. So, I am afraid, will goofs like Al Franken who are dumb enough to have incriminating photos floating around. But the evidentiary standard is going to tighten as well. Dim chanting of “I believe the woman.” will be replaced with, “No ruin without evidence.”

But there are a few things we can learn from the current hysteria. First, very powerful men take advantage of that power. This is a reminder, not news. A nodding acquaintance with Roman history, or British or French monarchs, or the biography of Lloyd George or Asquith for that matter, not to mention Kissinger’s aphorism that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” will serve to confirm this fact. Reading Keith Richard’s wonderful autobiography, Life, will serve to confirm this in another sphere.

Second, power is situational. The VP marketing for a tiny company may be in a position of relative power vis a vis his staff and the vendors who want to sell to that company. It is a pretty sure thing that if you looked at the conduct of 100 such VPs you’d find a few, perhaps more than a few, who after a few drinks got very handsy indeed.

Third, none of this is a secret. We all knew. We all know. And “we” in this case includes women as well as men. Which is why I am not shocked nor, realistically, should anyone be who has spent time in the business, entertainment or political worlds. In fact, just day to day life will throw up instances of men using position to “get at” women. It is wrong and disgusting but it is also the way of the world and knowing that is part of growing up.

Optimistically, it is possible that the current generation of men, as they enter adulthood will have absorbed more egalitarian principles. But I doubt it. Against all the schoolmarm indoctrination about “appropriate” behaviour and “sober, enthusiastic, consent”, are ranged the full impacts of internet porn, hip-hop culture and a thoroughly sexualized media and advertising industry. Worse, the feminist doctrines of female sexual emancipation have created a Tinder culture where women are just as likely as men to swipe right and hook up. Obviously not every woman is on the hunt, but enough are to complicate things.

Even more complicating is the fact women have been known to use their beauty to get ahead.  The wonderful, and very beautiful, Nancy Huston writes,

“My beauty has gotten me many places, to some of which I very badly wanted to go, and to some of which I did not want to go at all. Over the years, I’ve watched it attack and corrode borders, then take me with it into foreign territories. Borders are ideas erected between age groups, social classes, all sorts of hierarchical entities, in order that society may function as predictably and as decently as possible. They are not solid brick walls. Beauty eats them away. This is the truth; we’ve all seen it happen, though it happens differently in different places” Dealing with What’s Dealt (excerpt)

While I am quite certain the current mania will pass, the underlying issues of sexuality, consent and power are not being addressed. Nor do I think they will be. Like a lot of other human behaviour, it is pretty much impossible to come up with top down rules governing sexually charged behaviour between adults. I suppose a company might make it a firing offence to be alone with a member of the opposite (or same, because, gay) sex. But I can’t see that working very well and, fairly quickly, it would be routinely ignored. And would a rule against older men dating younger women get off the ground? Should we go back to the days of chaperones? (Which, in the current climate, maybe an emerging Hollywood profession.)  I don’t think any set of rules dealing with sexuality will work.

A more promising avenue is an ethical philosophical commitment to treating all people as ends in themselves. Whether it is sex or business or school gate acquaintanceship,  it makes sense to treat people with kindness and respect rather than as mere instruments. This sort of approach would take a long time to gain traction but, in the long run, solves a lot more problems than just sexual misbehaviour. It is more than a little utopian but it is something you can teach your children right now. It is also something which HR departments, schools and universities,  can use in place of the brain dead “zero tolerance” dogma which gets in the way of a healthy business or learning environment. Best of all, it provides a framework for conduct and a scaffold for dealing with misconduct. It recognizes that “all or nothing” is an entirely inhuman way of understanding human behaviour.

A commitment to treating people as ends in themselves would also provide a means for individuals to redeem behaviour which fell beneath that standard. Instead of mouthing platitudes, Sen. Franken, possibly with the help of an applied ethicist, could set about making amends to the woman (well, women, it appears) he groped and, in the process, actually set his sights higher. Even criminal acts, such as Clinton’s or Weinstein’s rapes, while attracting criminal sanction, could also involve making amends.

I am deeply skeptical about the efficacy of any top down “rules” for behaviour; but I am deeply optimistic that men and women can learn simple, universally applicable, ethical principles and apply them in day to day life. We may not always meet those ethical goals, but having them at all is a good first step.

 

Arcadia

Via the National Review I came across John E. Seery’s lament for the small liberal arts college, strangled at the hands of administrators gone wild.

I commented:

The odd thing is that a good undergraduate Liberal Arts college needs a few classrooms, a few seminar rooms, a small library with a serious affiliation to a big library, some professors and an administration to take the fees and pay the people. (Yes, if it is residential, there is all that stuff but there are many people who have run Holiday Inns.)

I am astonished that American parents are willing to fork over 60K/a for a quasi-university education.

The temptation to create a “graduate college” on the lines above somewhere fairly remote and populate it with profs emeritus and brilliant buggers who have had it with being sessionals is huge. Two years, 10K a year, seminars of twenty in Y1, 7 in Y2 to give you the education you didn’t get while you were doing diversity training and taking “Studies”. Small, residential, maybe 500 20-25 year olds. Act up and you get kicked, be there to learn or leave. No social rules – you’re adults, deal with it.

Oh, and mandatory Church on Sunday (and I don’t care if you are Jewish or Muslim or what have you) – it is entirely cultural. Believe whatever you want but learn the liturgy, the Hymnal and the Book of Common Prayer because that is the cadence of Western Civilization – English division.

Teach the students to think, to write and to argue. Read chunks of the Western Canon, also read smart people like Orwell and Oakeshott. First year – rather like law school – everything is required. Second year an elective and a directed study towards a required forty page thesis.

Three grades – fail (you have to do it again until) pass and then, because excellence needs be recognized, distinguished. Distinguished would be very tough to get and papers which hit that standard would be published, on paper, every year.

The President of this Arcadia would be chosen for his or her grumpiness when confronting academic lassitude and capacity at the BBQ for the occasional “feast”. (Pace Frank Iacobucci.)

Admission would be strictly by merit but merit would be a very elastic concept. Write one really interesting undergraduate paper, you’re in, build a community organization from scratch, you’re in, play bassoon in a world-class orchestra, you’re in, build an app that’s on my phone, you’re in. But it is a liberal arts college so STEM people, valuable as they are, business undergrads and “studies” people are going to be faced with a fairly high bar.

Finally, the “interview” would be mandatory and last for a residential week. Arrive before Church on Sunday, leave after Church the Sunday after. Seminars, cocktail parties, a President’s BBQ, perhaps a paper presentation: gruelling does not begin to describe it because my graduate college requires a habit of mind, an ability to disagree without being disagreeable, the social is just as important as the academic.

If you get in, two years later, you will be better educated and, more importantly, a better thinker, more deeply informed. A much better writer and, I suspect, a more deeply understanding person.

Future Work

My 14-year-old got a strange little cable from China the other day. It has a USB thingie at one end and a big honking industrial grade connector at the other. It came with a CD. To get it to work he had to partition his $15 ThinkPad’s hard drive, install Windows XP and then install the software. He can now do dealer level diagnostics on about sixty different sorts of older cars. It cost him $20 which he earned himself doing online reviews (big hint, diet pills don’t actually work.)

He got it running just after installing a new keyboard on my AIR – chocolate milk is not your friend as his younger brother has been learning. And before that he did a sketch-up version of a forty dollar plastic part for a BMW rear window awning which he sent off to an online 3D printing shop and which should be here for $15.00 for two, including shipping, in a couple of days.

One of the reasons why we homeschool is that I am pretty much convinced that the idea of a “job” economy where you punch assorted academic tickets and then take an entry-level position and work your way up is pretty much over. Yes, there will still be lots of STEM jobs where the ticket punching makes a lot of sense – you can’t design or build a serious integrated circuit without a good deal of electrical engineering training – but a lot of the other career paths manufacturing, banking, government, even teaching, are undergoing radical transformations. So are the low skill jobs like taxi driving and retail sales.

[I am going to ignore the AI elephant in the corner. Once that gets out of the lab a lot of bets are right off the table.]

The whole question of “what do you need to know to get a job” is a moving target. There is no question at all that the ladies at HR will be looking for “qualifications”. Captain Capitalism suggests that college has become a fourth layer of government in the US because you can’t get the good jobs without having passed through its sorting hat. I suspect he is right, he usually is. But it is the layer of government which is easiest to evade.

I went to college for a long time. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I learned many things. I had an excellent time and would recommend the experience highly. I also started university when a year’s tuition was $450 and when I went to law school it was something like $2800. (Yes, I really am that old.) But to put it in perspective, I paid for a third and fourth year myself as well as grad school and law school with part-time jobs. It was totally doable. Now, as my elder son is finding, it is close to impossible.

The credential itself is a lovely thing but, by the time you are in your early thirties, no one ever asks what you did as an undergraduate. They are interested in what you can do for them right now.

Richard Feynman got off to a great start taking apart broken radios in the 1930’s. Eventually, he understood enough that he could actually fix the radios. He learned about locks and security systems and, eventually, noticed that a brittle O-ring brought down the Challenger and proved it with an elegant little experiment.

I am a huge fan of university. I am also aware that the life expectancy of my children is, as I write, something on the order of 100 and probably closer to 150. Taking four years when you are 25 or 30 to study something you are interested in makes a lot of sense. But, if you have a capacity and a curiosity about how stuff works and how to fix it, it may make a lot more sense to run with that for a few years in your late teens and early twenties. If there is a credential required, a trade ticket is forever. Robots will serve you that Big Mac, they will not rejig the fuel injection on your BMW or get your cooler to be cold.

Building apps is a wonderful thing. It is nice, clean work. Hacking code is lovely and it is very lucrative. The Google guys who made Sketch-up and 3D printers have given kids like my son the ability to make “things” which would have taken a complete machine shop to build a decade ago. And that is changing the nature of work in ways which make the entire idea of credentials seem rather quaint.

A kid who goes into a trade program already knowing how to make custom parts without the machine shop is in a different world. We didn’t teach Sam how to draft or how to take measurements with a set of digital calipers. We told him it was possible and that there was a need for a particular part. He taught himself the rest.

The new jobs are going to be the old jobs with new technology. Fixing your cooler will be the same set of HVAC issues but being able to scan and replicate the broken part changes the entire ball game. More importantly, knowing that it can be done is the key bit of knowledge which will change how work is done in the future.

The credential is a “nice to have”, the knowledge is essential.

Form Factor Future

Tackle Box Robot

A lot of the substantive content with my homeschooled boys is looking at interesting things and then discussing them and digging a bit deeper.

For no particular reason this past couple of weeks we’ve been discussing:

• pallets and containers
• delivery drones
• 3D printing
• autonomous and electric cars
• economic aspects thereof

Now the fun part of this is that we can find useful things on the internet like Captain Capitalism’s thought provoking post on “Post Scarcity Economics” or Walter Russell Mead’s post on “Is Downton Abbey the Future of the US Economy?”.

While the economics are interesting, the actual history of things like containers can be riveting for boys and their father. (Susan decamps with a good book.) An article about the humble pallet gives the boys a fair bit of insight into everything from the global economy to the logistics of Ikea cup design.

One of the recurring themes which has emerged is how standardization improves efficiency. Containers have to be the same size, pallets – in an ideal world – would be the same size. A decision would be made about metric vs. imperial. Merchandise packaging would be optimized to max out pallet efficiency. There’s room for a bit of math and some basic geometry.

Once you start talking about pallets and containers you can also consider the “last mile” problem. How do you get the goods to the customer? Amazon uses the mail and UPS. Walmart wants you to actually go to their store. Nothing is more fun than thinking about how that last mile can be crossed without a trip to the mall or the UPS guy finding you are not at home.

In Australia there is a company set to deliver text books by helicopter drone. (And, yes, we did discuss this quaint idea of a paper “textbook” in a Kindle world.) No question that for things like pizza, prescriptions and drycleaning the flying delivery drone makes sense.

But, for my money, the autonomous vehicle is a better bet for the day to day business of getting stuff to people. (3D printing is still a distance away for every day use.) The excitement and hype in the autonomous car world has been about passengers – essentially moving people rather than things. But moving things is a huge business and it could get much bigger if an easy, inexpensive, means to get your groceries to your house could be devised.

We already have automated warehousing. (Worth looking at this video at Amazon’s Kiva systems site. However those robots merely pack the boxes with the customer’s order. Now what?

The last mile problem is going to get a lot of attention in the next few years. Autonomous delivery vehicles are one part of the solution; but the other part is actually delivering to the customer. Canadian start-up Buffer Box (recently bought by Google) has a fairly elegant partial solution. Your stuff is delivered to a Buffer Box kiosk which has electronic lockers you can open with a passcode from your phone. Nice for your online kite purchase, not too brilliant for the chicken you want to cook tonight.

There are lots of ways to attack the last mile problem. Each family gets a personal box and deliveries are made right to your box. Or, if price can be brought down, a person or family would have one or more “boxes on wheels” which would travel on some sort of schedule to the various places the family needs to have stuff picked up.

Part of the educational process here is that these are not questions which, at present, have answers. But they are not abstract issues: even a partial solution to the last mile problem is a billion dollar business. And it is a business which will occur very, very quickly. The horse was replaced by the internal combustion engine in less than 20 years.

Marrying a GPS/internet/Google Map aware computer to the rather well understood technology of the golf cart or electric scooter and you have an autonomous delivery vehicle prototype. With a secure storage capacity – think trunk of a car – you could probably build such things for $1000. They don’t have to go fast and, with good logistics design, they would not likely have to go far.

Now, think about what the introduction of such personal pick up and delivery ‘bots would change, especially in cities. Just one example: at the moment even if the Lady of the House is hyper aware of which items are on sale at which grocery stores this particular week, she is not particularly willing to make five stops and go through five checkout lines to save a total of, say, $10-20. But her pick up agent would be delighted to make those stops. (And, of course, now the supermarkets – if they are smart – are going to want to attract the pick-up agents so the scope for price matching and agent loyalty programs is huge.) On the other hand, think of the congestion these pick-up agents might cause. How to solve that problem. (Two hints – first, the number of car trips to get stuff would go down as would the number of manned delivery vehicles, second, it should be possible to build anti-congestion imperative right into the software which runs the pick up agents.

As I have pointed out to the boys, one interesting thing about robotic pick up agents is that they can operate continuously and therefore quite slowly. If your agent has to make four pick ups all within a one mile radius of your home over the course of, say, three hours it can accomplish that at a walking pace even allowing a ten minute stop at each pick up location. While I am not all that thrilled with the prospect of driverless semi-trailer trucks running at 60 miles an hour (which is an irrational fear but there it is), box toting pick-up agents sauntering on the sidewalk or in designated road lanes seems pretty manageable.

Mandarins

Kathy links to Megan Macardle’s article on the homogenization of America’s (and, realistically, Canada’s) ruling elite. Being the son or daughter of Harvard grads and a Harvard grad yourself is now, apparently, the ticket to alpha jobs in politics, law, the academy, journalism and finance. Which is a) likely more true than not, b) hardly surprising given the entrance requirements act as a ferocious cognitive screen, c) of less and less importance.

It is becoming less important because big government, the academy, big law, huge finance and big media are dying. Not quickly but they are on their way. Why? Because the mandarinate has not done much productive in forty years. And, in fact, the elite activities of governance, anti-trust litigation, climate action, tax law, derivatives and queered gender studies have largely left any possible reality. Spending a trillion dollars a year you do not have is a flight from reality, explaining why such spending is a good idea is financial surrealism, but actually financing the spending is an error that only a really well trained, Ivy League kinda of a guy could make. The rest of us are simply not cognitively capable of ignoring reality at that level.

As many people are starting to notice, the wheels are falling off the more cherished social tropes of the mandarinate. Cost benefit analysis of a black studies degree from Yale is being performed, legal analysis is being out sourced to India, banks are being bailed out to postpone the day when all those derivatives are going to come back and bite. Climate action is being quietly under bussed by smart politicians.

Smart parents are looking for ways to prepare their children for both the alpha cognitive world and the world where things are actually made and services performed. A trade makes a lot more sense than an internship at the end of a 200K debt financed “education”.

As with the end of the catastrophic global warming scam, the political elites will be the last to know because they are advised by mandarins.

It is instructive to look at what happened when the Chinese Manchu mandarinate was confronted with a changing world. The denial of the 18th century gave way to the decline of the 19th and the collapse at the beginning of the 20th. The mandarins did not become dumber nor were the examinations any less tough; the fact was that the modern, western, world arrived at China’s door and would not go away. The mandarins had no answer to a radical change.

Our mandarinate is, to a degree, innovative. But it is the phoney innovation of people who share precisely the same central world view and argue about the margins. Real change, radical restructuring in the face of a changing world is simply beyond the stunted imaginations of the test taking classes. It was not on the exam.

Wussy Brits

Worried parents will ban their children from making snowmen and having snowball fights this winter – for fear they will catch a cold, a study found.

The protective one in five mums and dads, 20 per cent, will try to stop their youngsters falling ill by keeping them wrapped up warm indoors.

Furthermore, 29 per cent say it is “too dangerous” to let them outside because they may slip on ice or be bruised by a tightly-packed snowball. the telegraph

I am just trying to imagine how you could keep a normal kid inside in a big snowfall…nope, can’t do it. Impossible.

College

It was the law professor (and prominent internet commentator) Glenn Reynolds who first popularized the phrase “higher education bubble.” Drawing on Stein’s Law, Reynolds argued that the market for higher education, like the housing market before it, is on an unsustainable, inflationary path. “Bubbles form when too many people expect values to go up forever,” he observes. “Bubbles burst when there are no longer enough excessively optimistic and ignorant folks to fuel them. And there are signs that this is beginning to happen already where education is concerned.”

the new criterion

The New Criterion article goes on to discuss the wave of online university level course which are being offered for free. Given a choice between spending 20-60k per year in a bricks and mortar university or effectively nothing online the initial decision should be pretty straightforward.

But there are intangible social goods that four years of an undergraduate degree bring: friends, connections, romantic partners, drinking buddies and hooking up. Viewed from a purely logical perspective these things are hardly worth 20k a year; but they are not worth nothing.

So, a modest business proposition: why not set up what amount to tutorial centers? These would be very much free enterprise units where students could meet other students, create study groups, take tutorials based on online course material and, in time, write exams to test their knowledge.

Oddly, this is very much the way that the old Universities – Oxford and Cambridge – evolved: the colleges being the equivalent of tutorial centers with the added bonus of accommodation.

Of course, the major course providers such as Coursera are counting on online student interaction; but I suspect a more intense experience would be offered by local centers with loose affiliations to the course providers. We’ll see.

Radio Silence and Moving

Sorry to be off air for few days. We have just moved which is massively disruptive as always. But we are in snug for Christmas and the books are returning to their shelves.

A couple of random observations. The place we are moving from was a lovely, large, Uplands house which is going up on the market. There it will join literally two dozen other, lovely, large Uplands houses which have, I fear, been rendered relics of a demographically and socially lost era. Ours was relatively sensible in that it had only four bedrooms. Most of the others have 5 or more. Families are simply no longer that big. Plus, families tend not to buy 2 million dollar houses. (We got an incredible deal on the rent for a couple of years; but even if we had the money we would not have bought the house.)

Along with the couple of dozen listed on MLS, there were, in fact, four vacant houses on my daily dog walk. As well there were a dozen more which had been for sale but had been pulled from the market. Call me crazy but I have to think that the upper end of the Victoria housing market is due for a significant price correction.

Second, I was in a small supermarket the other day and there was a staffing panic going on. It was occasioned by one person phoning in sick to an already short staffed store. And the reason it, and many other stores like it are short staffed is that there are not that many kids around to do the cashier/restocking jobs. I suspect this trend will continue (which is great for my younger boys who will be looking for work in a few years.)

All the kids my now childless female friends from highschool and university didn’t have are, of course, not around to fill entry level jobs while going to school or university.

A final and somewhat related point: sitting in our much cozier living room last night Sam, my nearly 12 year old, and I were talking about what he would actually like to do over the next decade or so. “I’ve been looking at some Apprenticeship programs Dad. You can start when you are sixteen and have your ticket by 20 or 21.” “University?” I asked. “Absolutely, but I’d like to do it part time and then do refrigeration stuff three days a week.”

For the refrigeration idea I want to thank the nice, 20 something guy who bought the double oven from us. HVAC and refrigeration has been good to him…he runs $90 an hour and has more work than he can handle. Which he told Sam and Sam is good at multiplication.

Many years ago, I met a guy named Joseph Tussman, a philosopher of education, who maintained that a candidate for a graduate degree in any of the Liberal Arts should be required to have a trade. I suspect he was right.

Another Brick in the Wall

Texas schools punish students who refuse to be tracked with microchips

And people ask why we home school.