Remedial Excellence

In 2005 I graduated from one of the best public high schools in the country, with an education far surpassing that of the average high school graduate. While not everything about the experience was rosy and wonderful, I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But if I had a smart and academically ambitious child who was getting ready to go to high school next year, would I want them to go there? I’m starting to think that I wouldn’t, and that saddens me.

I went to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (known locally as TJHSST, or more often just “TJ”). It’s a public high school in Alexandria, Virginia. TJ is not an ordinary high school. It has long been considered among the very best public high schools in the country, and has frequently found its way to the top of the list. It has an unusual curriculum, and an even more unusual admission process. And by that I mean that it has an admission process. At most high schools you get “admitted” by virtue of living in the local school district. Getting into TJ is more like getting into college, except you do it when you’re 14.

If you live in northern Virginia, and you (or your parents) place a high value on academics, getting into TJ is a phenomenal thing. It’s the high-school equivalent of getting into Harvard or MIT. There’s a rigorous application process that involves resumes, teacher recommendations, and a test that bears a striking resemblance to the SAT college entrance exams. Northern Virginia, with a population of many millions, sees thousands of bright young students apply to TJ each year. Only a small percentage of them make it in. Those students are among the best and brightest, and they are treated to an education experience that is both rewarding and extremely challenging.

The curriculum at TJ has a heavy emphasis on “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, and math). The level of required courses in those areas is quite impressive. All Freshmen must take an introduction to engineering course. All students must complete courses in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Geosystems (geological science and climatology). Every student graduating from TJ has studied math at least up through Calculus. Every student takes at least one course in introductory computer science. Seniors have a year-long advanced science- and technology-oriented final project that is comparable in scope and intensity to many college level theses. There’s a heavy emphasis on professional-quality lab work, and a deep understanding of science, math, and technology.

The humanities courses at TJ are nothing to laugh at either. There’s a rigorous curriculum in English, history, literature, and foreign language (7 different languages are offered). There are challenging and provocative optional courses in topics like government, music, fine arts, and more. Every student graduates with a high number of AP courses, often enough to qualify as a full year of college. The school pushes students to their limit, and it’s not always fun. But for those good enough to make it in, and those good enough to make it through, it’s a tremendous experience unlike almost anything else in the American public  school system.

At least, that’s the way it used to be.

There’s something unusual about the student population of TJ, in addition to the fact that they are extremely smart and ambitious. The racial and ethnic makeup of TJ is atypical, even for a diverse and unusually populated area like cosmopolitan Northern Virginia. A bit less than half of the school is white, with much of the rest of the student population classified as Asian (which is a ridiculously general descriptor, but we’ll leave that alone for now). What the school is missing is black and Hispanic students. When I was there, black and Hispanic students at TJ (combined) made up less than 10% of the student body.

This is not racism, however. The admission process is based on academic merit. The students who got in were the ones best qualified to succeed academically in the rigorous scholarly environment at TJ. The proportions of various racial and ethnic groups in the student body merely reflects, at most, the quality of elementary- and middle-school education available to those groups.

In the mid-2000s, the Fairfax County school system changed the admission process at TJ, in an effort to artificially increase the representation of minority ethnic and racial groups at the school. They began by increasing the admissions caps for students from districts with higher percentages of the desired racial and ethnic groups. This had a mostly useless effect. The percentages of black and Hispanic students at TJ did not change significantly, and the increased number of students admitted merely made the school more crowded.

More recently, the admission process has been tweaked further, decreasing the standards for competence in math and science that are required to get into TJ. Not only has this not improved the ratio of black and Hispanic students in the student body, it has several other severe problems. First, the policy is implicitly racist. The concept that the best way to get more black and Hispanic students is to lower academic standards is blatantly offensive and harmful. Of course, the school board would never phrase it in that way, but that is basically what they are saying. But I don’t even want to open that can of worms. Let’s focus on the actual effects this policy has had on the quality of education at TJ.

TJ is a school that is primarily focused on math, science, and technology. But because of recent changes in the admission process, increasing numbers of the students there now require remedial math and science. In fact, some reports indicate that as much as a third of the incoming Freshman class might require remedial math and science courses. That would be perfectly reasonable to expect in a normal high school, but TJ is not a normal high school. It has a specific goal and purpose, and it is failing at it. It is failing miserably.

This is yet another symptom of the “everyone is a winner, everyone gets a trophy” American parent mentality, and it’s killing education in this country. Parents want their students to get into TJ, because TJ is a great school. But the prize isn’t going to TJ. The important thing is what you learn while you’re there. Apart from “name-dropping” rights, there is nothing special about having gone to TJ. Or more accurately, there won’t be anything special about it if this sort of trend continues. I don’t relish the idea of having to become a “TJ hipster,” always having to state that I went to TJ before standards were lowered.

The great thing about TJ is that exceptional students can go there to work with other exceptional students, and learn from exceptional teachers. They undertake a rigorous and challenging curriculum that would be far beyond the reach of the average student. The ones who thrive become (potentially) tomorrow’s leaders in the fields of science, math, technology, and engineering. They learn more in four years than they did in the entirety of their education up to that point. The prize is the process.

Artificial efforts to increase diversity for the sake of diversity, and at the cost of anything else, leads to nothing but a lower overall quality of education. If people really wanted to increase diversity at TJ, this is absolutely not the way to do it. I don’t claim to be an expert in education policy, but please humor me and allow me to suggest an alternate method.

Increase funding to science and math education in school districts feeding into TJ that have a higher percentage of black and Hispanic students. Put in the time and effort to really improve math and science education in those districts at the elementary- and middle-school level. It will take a lot of work, but it’s something that needs to be done anyway, regardless of the situation at TJ. Get rid of touchy-feely “soft” math and science at the elementary- and middle-school level, and treat those topics the way they deserve to be treated: as legitimate and crucial academic subjects that have a more important effect on the future of our country than any degree of political correctness or artificial sense of increased self-worth.

Make the admissions process to TJ more selective, not less. Make it harder to get in, and make it extremely rewarding to be there. Convince parents that it is imperative that they push their children to study math and science if they want them to get into TJ. And let them know that, despite their efforts, their kids might not make it in anyway. It’s not a personal affront. There are a limited number of slots, and there’s a lot of competition to get in. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with their kids, it just means that the competition was fierce and they didn’t make it. Life is like that sometimes.

Not everyone gets a trophy. In our rush to make everyone exceptional, we are guaranteeing that no one is. Just like an honorary degree does not mean that you learned anything, a devalued education at a formerly top-tier high school is just an ego salve. Nobody wins and everybody loses.

It’s time for a reality check. If we want our children’s educations to be better, the solution is not to call a 70% an A. The solution is to push our students towards excellence, and reward them when they actually achieve it, not just when we wish they had. Only then will we be adequately preparing the next generation for success.

Where Did I Leave My Rose-Tinted Glasses?

I was having a (mostly) polite debate with a friend of mine on the Internet last night, and in the course of the conversation I made an interesting discovery about myself and the way I view the world. It may not turn out to be interesting to anyone who isn’t me, but this is my blog. I can write about whatever I want and you have to read it. Bwahahahaha!

I mean, you don’t have to read it. But you might decide to do so anyway. And that’s pretty cool too.

For a long time I’ve considered myself to be something of a pessimist. And by “something of,” what I actually mean is that I have a shockingly low opinion of most things. I tend to be pessimistic to the point of being aggressive, which is something that few people find endearing. Those jerks. And of course, like any good pessimist, I don’t refer to myself as such. Standard pessimist doctrine dictates that you call yourself a realist, and assert that it is the world that sucks. Your opinions of it just reflect the shitty mess of reality.

But what I’ve just realized is that I may have had it all wrong. Not that my opinions of you, your mom, your ideas, your country, or your stupid face have gotten any brighter. I still have all the same low opinions of things that I have had for years. But it has come to my attention that, despite all of that, I might actually be an optimist. Sort of.

Or, more accurately, I’m an idealist. That’s right, I’m coming out of the closet as a flag-waving, dyed-in-the-wool idealist. I have extraordinarily high hopes for people (individually and as a group), for humanity, and for the future. Unfortunately, I think I’m also totally wrong. It’s the best explanation for how I feel about things. It’s just kind of a bummer.

See, I think that it’s possible for people to get over their differences and live together. I think that true global equality is possible. People can band together and leave behind all of the hateful, dangerous, ignorant bullshit that has plagued our species since its inception. The dream of world peace, tolerance, equality, love, butterflies, and rainbows is really and truly possible. Or so I believe, deep down inside my multi-layered onion of bitter disappointment.

But reality has this nasty habit of proving to me that I am, in fact, an idiot. Everything I’ve seen in the world seems to suggest that those things aren’t possible. Or if they are, they’re extraordinarily unlikely. I may be an idealist, but I refuse to put on my rose-tinted glasses. I’ll be optimistic about what’s possible, but I won’t be optimistic about the state of things as they actually are. And the state of things is that people suck. A lot.

I can hope for the best, but that only goes so far. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 20,000 times, I’m an idiot. If I truly were a pessimist, this wouldn’t bother me so much. As they say: “An optimist and a pessimist both believe we live in the best of all possible worlds.” If I were really a pessimist, as I have so often asserted, I wouldn’t be so bothered by the serious lack of redeeming qualities in the human race. I would just accept it as the way things are. And complain about it.

At least I’ve got that last part down.

So it turns out I might not be a pessimist after all. I might actually be a raging idealist who expects far too much of humanity. No wonder I’m always so disappointed.

Brain CGI

Let’s face it, folks.  Han shot first.  Sorry, George Lucas, you know I love you.  And I even like a lot of the changes you’ve made in your super-duper fancypants Lucasfilm-wants-all-of-my-money special editions.  But Han shot first.  Simple as that.  And not because I’m a purist who insists that the original is better simply because it’s the original.  It just makes the story better.

How many times have you watched a movie or TV show and come across a piece of it that you wished was different?  It happens to me all the time.  Sometimes it’s a big thing (as long as we’re on the topic of Star Wars, I could certainly do without Jar-Jar Binks… though I don’t have the burning vitriolic hatred for him that seems to be in vogue among some fanboys).  Other times it’s a much smaller thing, like a wooden piece of dialogue that you wish was worded better, or even just a scene where an actor could have really stood to brush up on their emoting skills a bit.  These things can go a long way to ruin a movie for the viewer.  After all, it only takes one fly in your soup to make the whole dish unappetizing.

Other times there are little changes that could have been made that would have vastly improved the quality of the movie.  Anything from major plot changes to having one of the actors wear color contacts (Harry Potter fans, you know what I’m talking about).  It’s disappointing to see those types of missed opportunities.  And once you’ve seen them, it’s very hard to un-see them.  You think about them every time you watch the movie, and the disappointment becomes part of the experience.

So what’s a guy to do?  It’s endlessly frustrating to have little things like that mess up your movie-watching fun.  It pulls you right out of the moment.  It reminds you that you’re watching a flawed piece of art, and that people (even very creative and talented people) sometimes suck at their jobs.  But there’s nothing you can do to change it, right?

You’re stuck with the fly in your soup.  The options are as follows:  You can choose not to eat that soup anymore (which is really a shame if the soup happens to be delicious, or if you shelled out some big bucks for it).  You can try to eat around the fly, which only sort of works, especially if the fly is smooshed up onto a particularly tasty piece of beef or something.  You can try to ignore the fly, and pretend you don’t notice it when it slides down your throat, all gross and prickly and germ-infested.  Or you can take the die-hard loyal fanboy option and claim loudly that it’s great to have flies in your soup, because flies are delicious and full of protein and trace minerals (Joss Whedon fans are particularly good at this tactic).  The chef put the fly there on purpose, and if other people can’t appreciate the taste of a good housefly, that’s their loss.

Ok, so maybe I took the analogy a little too far there.  That got kind of gross at the end.

Here’s the good news: I’ve devised a much more appealing alternate strategy.  Use your secret Jedi mind powers and magical wizard tricks to turn the fly into a crouton.  (Do people put croutons in soup?  I really don’t know about these things.  If they don’t, just pretend I said you should turn the fly into some more appropriate soup thing.)

Regrettably, I don’t have Industrial Light and Magic on my payroll.  I don’t even have a payroll.  That requires having, you know, money.  But what I do have is a very colorful and active imagination.  Sometimes that’s just as good.

I call it “brain CGI.”  When I see something in a film that bugs me, I just superimpose something better on top of it in my mind.  I edit things out, change the things that happen, make special effects more seamless, replace bad dialogue with better dialogue, and bad acting with better acting.  It’s not that hard if you have a good imagination, and it’s actually quite useful.  I find that I can now enjoy things a lot more than I used to.  Movies with mooshy rotten spots magically turn into cinematic masterpieces.  It’s pretty great.

There are other perks to brain CGI.  A lot of my favorite TV shows take being a ship-tease to an art form (look it up if you don’t know what that means).  But with brain CGI, I can have things turn out however I want.  This includes things that wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate for TV audiences.  I’m a bad boy, I know.  But I’d be lying if I didn’t say it made things more fun and entertaining.

Brain CGI is a technique that I’d recommend to anyone with a decent imagination.  It can make bad films good, and make good films amazing.  And it’s all for the low price of free.  You just have to tap into that underused atrophied thing sitting inside your skull, and become an active participant in your own entertainment.  I know this is a strange concept to the modern generation, so used to sitting on the couch like a lump of inert protoplasm, on a constant diet of intravenous B-grade (at best) “entertainment” made for profit rather than creativity or art.  But use your imagination a little and it all becomes so much better.  Seriously, try it.  You won’t regret it.

One final disclaimer:  Be careful about using brain CGI too much.  It becomes highly awkward to talk to people about the movies and TV shows you’ve watched when they realize that what you “saw” wasn’t actually there.  The more changes you make, the more it behooves you to keep them to yourself.  This is especially true if any of your additions are NSFW.  Nobody needs to hear about that; that’s what anonymously written Internet fanfic is for.  And above all else, avoid the temptation to apply this technique to real life.  It may make things a lot rosier, but it can also very rapidly turn you into a crazy person.  Consider yourself warned.

Speaking of which, I have to go.  The Millennium Falcon just landed in my backyard, and I’d better get going or I’m going to be late for that kegger on the moon with all of my talking dinosaur pals.  Han Solo is not a patient man, and he might shoot me if I make him wait too long.  He’s been known to do that sort of thing.

Decoding the Dictionary (because I really am *that* much of a nerd)

If you didn’t know any words of English, a dictionary would be of no use to you. But how much English would you need to know? For the sake of argument, let us imagine that there is some language out there that has precisely the same grammatical structure as English, but no words in common whatsoever. Now imagine if a speaker of this language, and one with a lot of time on his hands, got hold of an English dictionary. Let’s assume that in this dictionary there is none of the extraneous information that is in so many dictionaries, like etymologies and such. Instead, there are only words, followed by their definitions.

So here is the big question:  What would be the smallest amount of English words that this person would have to understand in order to understand, given enough time spent with the dictionary, the whole of the English language? And, more interestingly, which words would those be? Are there multiple minimum sets of words that would work?

What about words that are mentioned in the dictionary, in one of the definitions, but are not defined. Proper names of historical figures, like Einstein, for example, or Napoleon, might be mentioned in a definition, but most likely would not be defined in the dictionary. These words would not count in the minimum set, as they are not considered (by the dictionary) to be words that must be known to understand the language.

Could the minimum set be greatly reduced by ignoring the need to understand certain words? How much smaller would the minimum set be if you wanted to understand, for example, ninety percent of the language? Does a word’s being in the minimum set correlate with its frequency of use in the language?

Most importantly, how would the minimum set be calculated? To understand that, let us take an extremely simplified test case:

Imagine a miniature language of only eight words, represented by the letters a through g. For the sake of this example, I will assign to each “word” an arbitrary “definition” that is made up out some of the other seven “words.”

a = b d b e g
b = c d f h
c = a d g
d = e f h e f
e = a b d b g
f = a b e
g = d h
h = c f g c

It would not matter how many times a particular word appears in a definition.  It only matters how many distinct different words appeared in each one.  So we could simplify the definitions, to get a list for each word of the words that constitute its definition.

 

a = b d e g
b = c d f h
c = a d g
d = e f h
e = a b d g
f = a b e
g = d h
h = c f g

 

Now we start at the assumption that we must know all eight of these words to understand this language. But that is not so. Take “a” for example. If we also know b, d, e, and g, then we know a. Look at “g.” If we know d and h, then we know g. So if we know b, d, e, and h, we can understand both a and g. In effect, at this point in our computations, we know that if we understand the six words b, c, d, e, f, and h, then we understand all eight words.

Now out of those six words, can any of them be defined solely by other words in the group? Certainly: b is defined to be c d f h, so we do not need to know b to understand the language. And lastly, using the five remaining words that we need to understand (c, d, e, f, h), we can also understand d, because d is defined as e f h. Unfortunately that is as far as we can go. We have reached the minimum set. In this test language, if we had the definitions of the words, we could come to an understanding of all eight of them, even if we began with only an understanding of the words c, e, f, and h.

This is an interesting concept, but to determine it in practice (with a real language) would take an obscene amount of time and probably a computer to do the number crunching.  Or grad students.  Grad students are good for that sort of thing.  But it was something I was thinking about, so I figured I’d share it.

If this makes you think I’m a huge dork…  Good work, Sherlock.

Lady Liberty (postcard fiction)

Here’s another piece of postcard fiction for you all.  For those who don’t know, postcard fiction is a short story that you can read in the span of about a minute.  It’s not an immersive reading experience, it’s an entertaining little diversion from your day… which is perfect for all of my college friends who are currently in the middle of finals week just before graduation.

So without further babbling, here it is:

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LADY LIBERTY
by Joe Spiro
(written in 2003)

She was as magnificent as he had expected: the Statue of Liberty. She’d been refurbished to look the way she had in the golden age of immigration. Even in those distant days the copper had already been green with age, but that somehow only added to the majesty. For myriad thousands of immigrant men, women, and children, her towering visage was the first they saw of America, that famous land of the free.

He gawked at Lady Liberty like a tourist, and she gazed back down with infinite benevolence, like an inconceivably wise and ancient god. The poem inscribed upon the base of the statue brought hope and solace to the destitute and desperate. It was not hard for him to believe that, at one time, people had risked everything to come into her embrace. The statue must have seen hordes of them, fleeing persecution, full of hopes of new opportunities, a new life, and streets paved with gold. Some distant ancestor of his had made the very same journey.

He closed his eyes and pictured what it would have been like. Coming from a tiny pimple of a town in the middle of war-ravaged eastern Europe, and next to penniless, they left their entire lives behind. He understood now how America, how Lady Liberty, had rekindled hope in the hearts of the poor and oppressed. They had fought against all odds, laboring day and night to scrape up enough money for the voyage. Doubtless, many of them had still come up short, and had to be left behind. Still, some must have managed, and some out of millions is still many thousands. In time, these would form the amalgam of American culture. And Lady Liberty, chaperon of the great unwashed, guided them all to her shores.

Returning to the real world, he dabbed the glistening corners of his eyes with his shirt sleeve. After stealing one last glance at Liberty, he left the room. It was a shame, he thought, that he could not visit the real thing.  But that was impossible – America had been uninhabitable for centuries. It would be another thousand years before the radiation levels were low enough for any kind of life to be able to survive there. He would have loved to see the real America… but of course, there was no real America anymore. Everyone knew that.

He picked up his pace; no time to loiter. He felt a little silly for having come so close to tears. There was no use crying over ancient history. Tearing up over the land that had once been America made no more sense than weeping about the destruction of the library of Alexandria. That last thought brought him fully back to reality, and he moved on with more purpose. His ticket was good for only one day, and as he had just remembered, he’d wanted to see the exhibit on ancient Egypt.