Barefoot Running!

Last summer, JR, a good friend and author of playthink, approached me with the notion that running barefoot may be better than running with highly structured, highly padded shoes. The Barefoot Revolution, he called it. The idea seemed dangerous but simple and alluring. One of the largest instigators for this debate is a book called Born to Run, which chronicles the current state of the shoe industry and a hidden tribe that has members running extreme distances with no shoes or light rubber sandals.

If you don't have time to read the book, see the links below:

Should You Be Running Barefoot? (Time)

Humans Were Born to Run (NPR)

I am currently training for my first marathon, and I have not completely adopted this minimalist running. I have, however, shortened my stride and started landing on the balls of my feet. Anecdotally, I have seen great improvements in my knee pain and my ability to run day after day. While I do believe there are benefits to barefoot running and the shoe industry does not necessary have runners' best interest in mind, I continue to run in running shoes. For me (for now), the take-home message has been run like you are barefoot.

The debate continues, but I encourage more runners to take a seat at the table.

California Education Woes

In the Summer of 2008, I moved across the country to attend graduate school. At the time, UC Berkeley was the #1 Public University in the world. It was an offer I could not refuse-- a first-class education for one of the cheapest pricetags available. While the first attribute remains, the second is fleeting. Since the economic downturn (and before then according to some) a UC education has grown more expensive, semesters have shortened, and classes have become more restricted. Worse, there are fears that professors will leave the UC system amidst the turmoil, which would impact that first attractive element of UC Berkeley. NPR addresses the current budget woes of the UC system:

California Budget Woes Hurt University System

The segment addresses others' situations, which are far worse than mine. It brings the hardship of finding the money for college to light. At present, there are bonafide concerns about both the quality and affordability of a UC education, and there are ominous signs that UC Berkeley may be headed towards a more privatized model. Interestingly, the highly controversial President Yudof comments on these concerns.

In tonight's State of the Union, President Obama said that the best anti-poverty reform is a world-class education. The president also spoke to the growing insufficiency of a high school diploma is today's society. If we hold these tenets as true, then making college financially and pragmatically accessible should be held on high in any economic climate.

Evaluating Teachers: Part II

A few days ago, I addressed the complexity of quantifying and gauging teachers' performance. Recently, I ran across an article in the Atlantic that pushes this discussion further.

What Makes A Great Teacher?

Succinctly, Amanda Ripley reveals the data and conclusions from Teach for America's (TFA) internal study. "Right away, certain patterns emerged. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing." Further, in reviewing the efficacy of its own teachers, TFA concluded that there are four aspects that make a great teacher:

1. They avidly recruited students and their families into the process.
2. They maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning.
3. They planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome.
4. They worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

Albeit somewhat vague--Ripley pushes these conclusions and makes them more operational. Also, she articulates predictors of teacher success and debunks many commonly-held misconceptions. For example, a past history of achievement (like GPA) and leadership strongly predicts teacher efficacy, whereas a master's degree in education is a relatively weak predictor.

Interestingly, Ripley mentioned a new metric that DC public schools is implementing. Much like my educator rating suggestion, which was inspired by the NFL's passer rating, DCPS is using a composite metric of student progress and teacher observations from the principal, assistant principal, and a group of master educators.

I have linked the full article above. It is insightful, thought-provoking, and worth the read.

Events on the Horizon

Here is a mix of the education-related and athletic endeavors on tap for twenty-ten. I am excited! I've linked each event to the website:

February 7: Kaiser Half Marathon (San Francisco, CA)

March 7: Napa Valley Marathon (Napa, CA)
My first marathon.

April 9: D.C. Public Schools Urban Education Redesign Competition (Washington D.C.)

April 17: Sea Otter Classic (Monterey, CA)
100 mile Gran Fondo!

May 7: UC Berkeley School Psychology Conference (Berkeley, CA)
Addressing student stress in high and low-SES environments.

May 14: CATOGA (Dana Point, CA-Tybee Island, GA)
J.R. and I embark on a month bike ride across the US along the Southern Tier

August 12: Presentation at APA Conference (San Diego, CA)

October 10: Diablo Challenge (Danville, CA)
Looking to avenge last year's 8.5 second shortcoming.

...Should be great, could be epic...

Law & Order: Bay Area

In my fourth semester as a School Psychology Ph.D. student, my involvement within the school has gotten real real fast. After hours and hours of observation and practice tests, I am in my assessment placement and working on my first IEP evaluation with a 7th grader. The experience has been nerve-wrecking, but it has also filled me with importance. The data that I'm collecting are legal documents and are being aggregated to the benefit of a real student in need. Although some of my superiors in the field are burnt-out with their caseload or disenfranchised with the process, it is all very new and exciting to me.

Today, I was imagining I was a detective in Law & Order. At one moment I was testing the student's IQ, then (play Law & Order transition sound) I was interviewing the parents about their son's stregnths and weaknesses, and then (replay transition sound) I was watching the student interact with his peers at P.E. Next, I bring piles of records and data points back to the office to crack the case (or in my situation, prepare for a triennial). I even went as far to imagine the IEP meeting to be the courtroom scene where the true culprit is revealved to the audience. In Law & Order: Bay Area, however, no culprit is present. Rahter, the panacea for helping a special education student, which was overlooked by everyone else, is revealved in a eloquet and sophisticated monologue by me.... Roll credits... Created by Dick Wolf....

Okay, I've taken this vision too far, and in reality, I forsee no epiphanies for a child who has been in special education for three years and is only being reevaluated because of a federal mandate to keep records current. Nonetheless, putting the puzzle that is this student together has been challenging and envigorating. And here's to hoping that the newness never wears off! Who knows, maybe I'll get a TV show out of it... (I hear there's an opening on NBC these days.)

How Should Teachers Be Evaluated?

In football, the quarterback is the leader of the field. He is involved in almost every offensive play and is paramount the team's success. Every year college and professional teams spend millions to secure and protect their quarterback. But how do teams appraise the value of a quarterback? In other words, with so much riding on a quality quarterback, how do teams quantify the effectiveness of the quarterback? In the National Football League, there is a statistic called Passer Rating. This score is an aggregation of statistics (i.e., passing yards, touchdowns, completions, and interceptions) with a specific weight. This measure is a decent metric for measuring quarterback's passing ability. For example, Steve Young, a hall of fame player and Superbowl Champion, holds the record for highest career passer rating. It should be noted though that, for passing alone, this is an imperfect metric, and for measuring the whole value of a quarterback (e.g., leadership, courage, decision-making, and running ability), passer rating is quite insufficient.

The outstanding point of my quarterback commentary is to accentuate the importance and difficulty of measuring the complexity of human performance. Like the quarterback, the teacher of a classroom and is the leader and plays a pivotal role in the academic and social-emotional development of each student. The evaluation of teachers is equally difficult, but there is much more at stake than the success of a sports team.

Below is a link for a NYT article that addresses the elusive metric for assessing teacher effectiveness. The article raises the question, but does a poor job of suggesting possibilities.
How Should Teachers Be Evaluated?

Maybe we should take a page from the NFL. Could an Educator Rating be adapted from several sources of information (e.g., student evaluation, third-party observations, student score improvement, and a school climate measure)? From lessons learned in baseball and football, it is unlikely that this composite score would appraise all teachers perfectly and fairly. It may, however, be a more objective, accurate, and agreeable than the current methods used today.

Just food for thought. If you're curious, the NFL passer rating is below:

Then use the above calculations to complete the passer rating:

America's Hiking Boot

Though the five weeks of vacation have left me no excuse, a certain reticence bound me until I could find something to post that I felt compelled to put my stamp on. In this case, I am moved by the force of an increasingly re-occuring, unpleasant feeling: my American guilt

The Americanization of Mental Illness

New York Times, January 8

"It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host."

I strongly encourage you to take ten minutes out of your day to read this article, for I know I will not do it justice. No matter if you find mental illness a topic worthy of those ten minutes, you will find that its theme captures the essence of America's footprint on the rest of the world.

Here are three truths I held prior to reading this article; following the colon are quotes from the article challenging those truths. I urge you to do the same.

• An almost incontrovertible trust in Science:

"Mental-health professionals in the West... create official categories of mental diseases and promote them in a diagnostic manual that has become the worldwide standard. Western drug companies dole out large sums for research and spend billions marketing medications for mental illnesses. The assumption is that these remarkable scientific advances have allowed modern-day practitioners to avoid the blind spots and cultural biases of their predecessors."

• Mental Illness is a disease like any other and the adoption of this perspective alleviates stigma:

"Once people believed that the onset of mental illnesses did not spring from supernatural forces, character flaws, semen loss or some other prescientific notion, the sufferer would be protected from blame and stigma... [However,] in numerous studies around the world, those who adopted biomedical/genetic beliefs about mental disorders were the same people who wanted less contact with the mentally ill and thought of them as more dangerous and unpredictable. [Cross-cultural studies on schizophrenia revealed that] besides keeping the sick individual in the social group, the religious beliefs in Zanzibar also allowed for a type of calmness and acquiescence in the face of the illness rarely witnessed in the West."

• Constant reflection and rumination of ourselves and life's events give us meaning:

"Westerners share evolving beliefs about what type of life event is likely to make one psychologically traumatized, and we agree that venting emotions by talking is more healthy than stoic silence. We’ve come to agree that the human mind is rather fragile and that it is best to consider many emotional experiences and mental states as illnesses that require professional intervention. The ideas we export often have at their heart a particularly American brand of hyperintrospection — a penchant for “psychologizing” daily existence...deeply influenced by the Cartesian split between the mind and the body"

I am well aware of the repercussions Western colonization and globalization. I worry and fret over my guilt by association. But perhaps due to my curious attraction to mental health, this particular footprint is like a hiking boot. Even though it is worn with good intentions, it is wide and strong, leaving deep marks in the mud and easily trampling on the beautiful flora.

Morning

Yesterday morning, I got up early to go on a long run. At 6am I jumped out of bed, ate a full breakfast, drove to the Presidio, and was at the trail by 715am. Oliver joined me for the last half of the run, and afterward, we grabbed an early lunch at Nick's Crispy Tacos. The run, the sights, the conversation, the outdoors, and the food were so rewarding!

I was back home by 11:30am with a full day ahead me, and the experience was better than any indulgent, post-alarm sleep I have ever had. Here's to the morning! Below is a picture of the city I took right before starting.

I love HER music!

Sometime ago, I was prompted to make a list of my top 20 favorite music artists. As most of you could probably guess, Pearl Jam was atop the list, and Death Cab, u2, Neil Young, and Drive-By Truckers rounded off the top five. Without going through whole list, I did find one unexpected finding: my list was lacking female artists! With the exception of Regina Spektor, my list was woman-less.

Don't get me wrong-- I love artists like The Pretenders, 10,000 Maniacs, and Tracy Chapman, but none of them could break into my top 20. As a result (be it guilt or whatever), I have decided to blog about some recently discovered bands with front[wo]men. Enjoy!

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: They are enjoying big-name success these days, but I have only found them in the last few months. Karen O heads the band as vocalist and pianist. She can rock. Check out the songs "Gold Lion", "Cheated Hearts", and "Heads Will Roll."

Florence + the Machine: I found her on Pandora, and the vocals in this band are epic. They also have a harp. My favorite songs include "Cosmic Love", "You've Got the Love", and "My Boy Builds Coffins."

Lisa Hannigan: You have probably heard her singing on a Damien Rice album (e.g., "9 Crimes"), but she is solo now. I had a chance to see her open for David Gray, and I was impressed! Her latest album, Sea Sew, is excellent top to bottom.

Crooked Still: Labeled as neo-bluegrass, this band reminds me a lot of Nickel Creek (who also has a prominent female). I also found this band on Pandora. My favorite song is "Did you sleep well?"

So, there you go. In an attempt to rectify my male-bias in music, I hope I have shared with you your next favorite band. If you've recently fallen for a great musician, regardless of gender, shoot me a note. I'm always looking, and my top 20 is never solidified!

Time flies... How the Brain Measures Time.

Where Did the Time Go? Do Not Ask the Brain.

Above is a link to a fascinating article in the New York Times about how our brains work to track the passage of time. It amazes me how my recent holiday break flashed by, but waiting on my bags at the airport seemed to take forever.

The article provides some insight to why our mind is so poor at gauging time. In one interesting example, the article stated, "In another series of experiments published in Psychological Science, psychologists found that when people were tricked into believing that more time had passed than was really the case, they assumed they must have been having more fun. The perception heightened their enjoyment of music and eased their annoyance at doing menial tasks." That is, if something occupied us for more time than we expected, then we must have been engaged, and so it was fun. Our minds are so wired to make meaning of external stimuli that we often change our perception to make sense of the world!

The article addresses more than this single phenomenon and raises some unanswered questions to how our mind works to monitor time. It's worth checking out.

Connecting a Degree to a Job

Kate Zernike recently wrote an article in the New York Times that addresses the relevance of a college degree in the work force. The article can be found below:

Making College Relevant

I found the article to be both pertinent and accurate. In order to promote student occupational success and to provide society with competent contributors, post-secondary institutions will always need to evolve with the greater industrial and socio-political climates. As a result, universities must adapt.

This is especially true today. As fast as technology is evolving, it is difficult to foresee what jobs will require. This sentiment is echoed in much of the curricula research; there is a call for a stronger emphasis on soft skills development rather than hard skill development. That is, instead of teaching undergrads specific knowledge, universities should equip students to thinking critically, write clearly, organize and present coherently, and think flexibly. When soliciting the opinions of today's employers, Zernike reports similar findings.

So, what should an undergraduate degree look like? How specified should it be? What majors will be extinct and what courses will be added? In my opinion, it seems all students could benefit from a technology, a finance, a critical thinking, and a writing/speaking curriculum. I hope and anticipate that my children's undergradaute education will be much different than my own.