Number 2 Pencil

A new direction, a new location

Greetings and salutations, Devoted Readers.

As you've probably noticed, my posting on Number 2 Pencil has been sporadic as of late. Actually, "sporadic" is pretty generous; "non-existent" seems more accurate. I've been given the opportunity to follow an ambitious career path, and thanks to that (and other desirable life-altering opportunities, such as deciding how much of a Bridezilla to be this time around), I've had very little time to blog.

When I began N2P, my life was very, very different; in fact, I think the only constants in my life since that time are this blog and Alice the cat. In the four years and change since then, life has become much fuller and much more complicated (Alice has even had to learn to deal with a silly baby brother). I'm certainly not complaining - the changes have been almost all good. However, each new step seems to make it that much more difficult to create what I consider to be the minimal amount of blogging that is due my readers. N2P was intended to be a place where readers could come to peruse, at a leisurely pace but a reasonable depth, discussions of the basics of psychometrics and statistics, the myths and realities of testing, and the media's attitude towards testing at the K-12 and college level. I always believed that N2P should be a combination of a "linking" and a "thinking" blog; it never felt quite right to put up lots of quick links to education stories, but it also didn't feel that I was moving at quite the right tempo if I only managed, as has been the case lately, one day of blogging a week, or only one link with commentary every few days.

You can probably guess where I'm headed with all this, and you'd be right. After much thought, I've decided to cease production on Number 2 Pencil. I'm keeping the domain, the site, and the archives active, so that my posts are still out there for the reader's enjoyment, but I don't intend for there to be any future posts in this location. As much as I would like to keep this blog active, I don't feel it's the right thing to do, given the limitations of my time.

However, I do still have some time to lend my expertise and opinions to the lively discussions in the edublogging world, and I would like to stay involved as much as my life and time permit. Thus, I’ve decided to join the staff of The Education Wonks as a guest blogger. I feel very honored that they've agreed to have me in a guest spot on their site, which I consider to be one of the brighter new stars in the edublogging world. My psychometric knowledge and my general opinions will, I hope, add something meaningful to the discussion there.

Thank you to all my Devoted Readers for making N2P the lively place that is has been for the last four years. This blog has benefitted mightily from your input and would never have been anything close to a success were it not for those of you who emailed me, who started engaging debates in the comments section, and who just generally made this a more interesting place for everyone involved.

Special thanks go to Joanne, for inspiring me and giving endless good advice, and to Dean, for helping me migrate N2P to its current format, to John and Chett for displaying endless hospitality to a fellow blogger, and to those who just had to comment on everything I said (and sometimes catch me in error). Meep, Reginleif, Brian, Michael, Quincy, Walter, Chris, Triticale, DrLiz, LibraryGryffon, Mike, Stephanie, Tracy, Dr Weevil - I hope to see you all over at the Wonks blog.

(I'm going to leave comments active for a short while, so that if anyone wants to leave any general thoughts on this post, be it "N2P will be missed," or, "Don't let the door hit you on the ass," you can do so. After a while, I'll be completely deactiviting the comment/trackback functions for the blog; the existing comments will remain for future generations to enjoy. Also, I'll keep the kimberly at kimberly swygert dot com email address active for a while, but I'll be publishing my address on the Education Wonks website as swygert at gmail dot com.)

San Francisco, here I am

I'm currently at the annual meeting of the National Council for Measurement in Education in San Francisco. I have my laptop with me but I also have a full schedule of presentations to attend (and one to give), so bloggage probably won't resume for the next couple of days.

Trackbacks are back

Trackbacks have been reinstated. I'm keeping my fingers crossed!

And here I just thought you guys were being quiet

If you couldn't access my blog over the past couple of days, there was a good reason. Thanks to a comedy of errors (on my part, not Verve's - they're frickin' awesome), I lost my domain name for a couple of days. As you can see, there was no one else itching to get it, so it's back under my command.

Good lumbar support, but not machine-washable

Apologies for non-bloggage this week. Workdays were hectic, and when I came home and sat down in my favorite chair, I ended up passing out on my purring pillow:

I'll catch up on Sunday.

The spammers continue

Trackbacks have been temporarily disabled to foil the latest onslaught of spammers. I'll let you know when they're back up. Feel free to shoot me an email or leave in the comments that you've linked to me, and I can always put up a new post with your link in it.

Critiquing the tests

Jay Mathews reviews Gerald Bracey's new book, Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered:

As a popular writer and speaker, with regular columns in two monthly education magazines, the Phi Delta Kappan and Principal Leadership, and acidic annual reports on the condition of public education, Bracey has been exposing statistics abuse for years. But I have never seen him put together all that he knows as well as he has in this book...

Here is a good example of the Bracey passion for clarity. He is addressing the difficult concept of correlation, a key to many misunderstandings of educational statistics and to most bad education stories, including some written by me:

"We can correlate any two variables. Whether or not the resulting correlation makes sense is another question. Before everyone started wearing jeans, the Dow Jones stock market index correlated with skirt length. Shorter skirts were associated with good economic times and a rising market. Longer skirts were correlated with recessions. To the best of my knowledge, no one suggested raising hemlines as a means to boost the stock market. Similarly, there is a correlation between arm length and shirtsleeve length. Given ONLY a correlation coefficient, though, it makes as much sense to think that increasing sleeve length will make arms grow longer as it does to think that longer arms will mean longer sleeves. In this case other information could be adduced to assist in determining which way the causal relationship would operate"...

Bracey is a prolific and aggressive critic of No Child Left Behind and the rising use of standardized tests to assess schools and students, but he is too careful an analyst to embrace the most popular alternatives to testing without also giving them the third degree. One favorite of the anti-testing movement, portfolios (samples of student work), is seen by Bracey has just another idea with problems. So you have a nice big portfolio envelope, Bracey says. What do you put in it? "Typical work or the best work?" Bracey asks. "Who decides what is best? Teacher or student?" What do you do, he asks, when teachers disagree about the quality of the work?

All excellent points. Sounds like a good read to me.

His best suggestion is adding courses in what he calls "consumer-oriented probability and statistics" to our curriculums.

Hey, he stole my idea! I always thought a statistics course would go over quite well in high school, if it were retitled to be, "Bulls**t Detection 101."

Breaking in

Sorry for the extended hiatus. In addition to work worries, we took some time off to drive to SC over Thanksgiving (which was very nice, thanks, and I hope you had a good time as well).

Dave and I arrived back in PA after a long and frustrating 11-hour drive on Sunday to discover that the kittysitters (a) put the latch on the door leading down to the basement, so that we couldn’t get into the house from the basement, and (b) locked the front door lock (we usually lock only the deadbolt), and we don’t have a key for that, so we couldn’t get into our house at all.

Luckily, we had a big ladder in the basement and got in the kitchen window, which is never locked. Here are the photos I took of Dave doing that (with Alice supervising). Hee.

New responsibilities

Apologies for the lack of blogging, everyone. My job has recently become more demanding - and more enjoyable - and daily blogging is starting to seem like an unrealistic goal. I had been pondering for a while if N2P would benefit from a change in schedule, and now it seems necessary.

One possibility is one post each workday that contains multiple links, on related topics if possible. This method seems like it would push me far over onto the "linker" side of the "linker vs. thinker" continuum, but that may be what my Devoted Readers would enjoy.

On the other hand, if folks are more interested in long, thoughtful posts, it's become apparent that I can manage those only on the weekends.

So please enter a comment or two and let me know what you think would be a good direction for N2P. I think either of the above approaches would be feasible, but I'd like to do whatever will keep my readers satisfied. Thanks!

Happy Birthday to me

Whee! Tomorrow I will be 37, which is, I'm sure, a milestone of some sort. I just don't know which sort yet. Perhaps it's the "I've finally got my head together but my body hasn't completely fallen apart yet" milestone?

Gifties: A new laptop from my parents, a new mouse, battery, and computer game from my fiance, and from myself, a new kickass red lipstick (Red Attitude). Just call me a downtown chick with self-confidence.

On the agenda for the today and tomorrow: Tutoring a friend of a friend in college algebra, getting the brakes on my car fixed, admiring the huge bouquet of roses that a co-worker sent to me, going out to see Serenity with Dave, going out with a big group tomorrow night for dinner at the Iron Hill Brewery.

On the agenda for Sunday: Sleeping.

September swampland

Sorry for the lack of bloggage; I've been out of town on business and am a bit swamped at work. Be back soon.

Misplaced efforts

Jay at Wizbang is inspired by a Michael Jordan poster:

A while ago, I saw a Michael Jordan poster that had the following quote on it:

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

That crystallized a sentiment I've had for years, and touched on briefly yesterday:

One of the most valuable things in life is failure.

Nobody's perfect, and only one person in the world can be the best. Everyone, eventually, will fail at something. And the quicker and better someone learns how to deal with that, the better their chances of success in life will be...

This should be intuitively obvious to most people, but a good chunk of them (mostly liberal, and often involved in education) want to "protect" children from learning this harsh reality. They ban competitive sports, outlaw keeping score, and suppress the notion of "failing" grades in the name of "protecting their self-esteem."

I've said it for years: attempting to give someone self-esteem is, in the long run, the most damaging thing you can do to someone. Anything someone else gives you, someone else can take away. The only self-esteem that counts is that which you earn, which you get honestly from your own efforts. "A for effort" is an obscenity.

I can't agree enough. It amazes me to see the number of people involved in the education field, or the journalistic field, who believe that effort should be involved when grading students, teachers, or schools. That isn't how life works. Michael Jordan might be working in Kmart today if his basketball coaches had said that his missed baskets were "good enough."

If you are in the real world and you are responsible for doing something right, the results from trying real hard, but not quite getting there, can range from personally disastrous (you get fired) to disaster on a truly large scale (the space shuttle blows up). Why should schools be exempt?

Giving A's for effort is not only dishonest, but cruel. If a person, or an institution, is putting a lot of effort towards a goal, and is still failing at it, the most useful and humane feedback they can recieve is an honest and timely description of their failure. Otherwise, how will they ever learn to try something else?

Un-lovely Rita

Lawrence Simon has the Hurricane Rita roundup. He and his family may decide to evacuate tonight.

He's the brains behind Carnival of the Cats; don't miss his homegrown version of the hurricane categorizing system.

Me, I'm just thinking about Michele's drive to send all those school supplies to Houston. Now where do we go?

Carnival of Hurricane Relief

Update, yet again: Houston donations address:

HISD is coordinating donations of school supplies and school uniforms for the evacuee students who will be educated during the next few months. We are asking donors to send donations to:

HISD Warehouse
Central Receiving
228 McCarty
Houston, TX 77029
ATTN. Anne Silver

Email Gwendolyn Samples (gsamples at houstonisd dot org) if you have questions. Michele has commandeered a truck and is moving supplies on down!

Update, again: Wow. A blogger (whom I worship, incidentally), Michele Catalano, is already organizing school supplies and volunteers to help out Houston's newest students. She started on Tuesday looking for volunteers. It's not just Houston - Baton Rouge and Lafayette have volunteered to take refugee kids into their school as well. Please visit Michele's site if you have time, supplies, or trucks to offer.

One of her commenters also notes the United Methodist Committee on Relief has a general advisory for creating School Kits, although their main Katrina page is asking for Health Kits and Flood Buckets at the moment.

If you're in the Houston area, go here to learn how to donate school supplies.

Update: Avon has teamed up with Gifts in Kind—the world’s leading charity in product philanthropy—to send disaster relief kits to people across the U.S. whose lives have been disrupted by disasters, both natural and man-made. I'm an Avon representative, so if you would like to sponsor the $10.00 gift (which contains five personal necessities and includes a $4.00 donation to Gifts in Kind), please contact me at kimberly at kimberlyswygert dot com.

I'm participating in the Hurricane Katrina Blog for Relief day. My charity of choice was the American Red Cross, but I admit the Humane Society was a close second. It tore my heart up to hear that those stranded in New Orleans seeking shelter at the Superdome were told they could not bring their pets along. Here's to both organizations as they move their disaster-relief teams into the stricken areas.

Instapundit has all the links here. The list of participating blogs who signed up wtih NZ Bear is here; feel free to add yours to the list. Also, Michelle Malkin has tons of links; start here and keep scrolling.

In an education-related vein, young refugees stuck in Houston are welcomed into the system there. There's a huge drive for refugee resettlement in that area. Perhaps someone should start a drive to send school supplies to the newly-homeless sending their kids to school in Houston? There's a drive for sleeping bags; surely there's one for educational supplies somewhere. I've emailed the information person for HISD, Diana Perez, to ask. (Update: Ms. Perez has forwarded my offer for help to their Community Relations Department. I'll keep you posted).

Update: If N2P inspired you to donate, NZBear has a page tracking donations by weblog. Thanks! And do read what Captain Ed of Captain's Quarters has to say:

Instead of our distant cousins of the Indian Ocean, we now watch as our American brothers and sisters suffer through the destruction of perhaps the best-loved hometown in America, New Orleans. The devastation will go on for years. The entire community has disappeared under water -- not just homes, but the businesses that employ the people who live there, the shops that fed and clothed them, the services that give Americans the high standard of living that we enjoy and take for granted.

They have nothing left. It goes beyond homelessness. It goes beyond unemployment. Our brothers and sisters have gone through the looking glass -- and as Americans, we need to step up to bring them back.

This post will stay at the top of N2P all day on Sept. 1.

Open thread for email list

Anyone who would like their email added to my email notification list can either (a) add it in the comments to this post, or (b) send me an email at kimberly at kimberlyswygert dot com. I've never used the email notification tool on MT before, but I think you might like it.

Katrina

If I have any readers in Louisiana and Mississippi, I hope you're okay.

Michelle Malkin has a roundup of online news related to the hurricane. The American Red Cross has a form set up for donations. On Fark, one commenter gives sensible advice:

A few notes from a Red Cross veteran:

Please don't try to drive to Louisiana "just to help out". It's a very sweet idea, but for at least the first few weeks, disaster management is a huge logistical clusterfark without random people showing up. You are much more likely to end up a victim yourself than you are to save/assist somebody. Donate money instead!

Alternatively, sign up with your local Red Cross, church, or community group as a volunteer. You'll recieve training in a necessary field (disaster assessment, family services, shelter management) as well as food money and local housing. Don't worry--relief operations will probably be going on to a greater or lesser extent for a year. You're not gonna miss it if you take the time to sign up. My last posting was for six weeks.

Also, don't think of this as a good time to donate last year's clothes or a huge box of random cleaning supplies. I worked at a logistics center and we would recieve boxes of this stuff from churches. Once again, it's a nice sentiment, but your old sheets, batteries, canned peas, and winter coats (it's summer! in the South!) basically just sit on a shelf in some warehouse until the operation closes down and we throw them away. Seriously, the most helpful thing you can do is give money, even if it feels cheap.

A cash donation means we can buy as many cots, first aid kits, cleaning kits, teddy bears, etc. as we need. It also means the stuff we buy is organized, professionally packed, and clearly marked so we can count it. It doesn't matter what you gave if it can't be counted! Cleaning stuff that isn't professionally packed is also a hazard to warehouse workers.

Thanks for the help everyone and good luck.

Breathing easy

No bloggage today; work is hectic.

I also - finally - hope to get my health issues under control. I've just been diagnosed with asthma, which explains quite a few of the problems I've been having. I'll start treatments this week, so I hope to have more energy for the blog, not to mention the rest of my life.

I'm sure I'll still be hyperventilating in the future when I read about Alfie Kohn and his ilk off on another rampage against testing, but it'll be due only to disbelief, not to disease.

Goths roaming the streets of NYC

A friend of mine just sent along a NYTimes multimedia feature entitled, "Tribes of New York: The Goth Girls." This caught his eye, because this is how I refer to my gang of girlfriends. Except for the black-dyed hair, I've certainly dressed up like some of these girls before (although the more extreme stuff I've worn only for Dracula's Balls.) I'd say my style, and that of my local friends, tend much more towards Comfy Goth (black Converse sneakers with spiders painted on them) or RomantiGoth (nix on the facial piercings, dreadlocks, extensions, and uncomfortable bondage gear). The NYT got the background/intro music right, I'll say that, and every goth girl I know - myself included - got into it for the music, just as one girl is quoted as saying in this piece.

(My friend couldn't resist this comment when sending me the link - "Have you been to the NY Times web site today? I know you wouldn’t normally read such a liberal rag, and that you probably stick to “objective” sources like Fox news, but today there’s a multimedia piece..." Heh. I read the NYTimes often. True, it's often for the express purpose of finding an education piece that I can fisk, but I do read it.)

What's Dutch for "'til we meet again"?

Tomorrow I catch a flight to Amsterdam to attend the International Meeting of the Psychometric Society. The Palm Pilot is charged, the shampoo is packed, my pashmina and Bucky pillow are in my carry-on - I think I'm almost ready.

Actually, I'm completely ready, except for, you know, the talk I'm supposed to give next Tuesday. That's still taking shape. As in, I'll probably be doing frantic revisions on the laptop Monday night. No matter - IMPS is a fairly laid-back conference, and research that's "in progress" is always welcome. I'm hoping to get some helpful feedback during the talk.

Anyway, I'll be back home next Thursday. May you all have a joyous and food/flag/fireworks-filled 4th of July.

Bits and pieces

A couple of quick links, before I crawl back into bed and whimper, my sinuses ravaged by the recent onslaught of pollen and the sudden 30-degree change in average temperature outside...

From today's Onion sidebar: "PETA Complains As Revised SAT Tested On Chimpanzees" (thanks, Mike M).

Devoted Reader Tracy A. notes that the AJC previously published a criticism-free article on the state exams; her theory is that this explains the subsequent article in which non-substantive criticism was shoehorned in. I think she's right.

Anyone ever hear of the Waldorf schools? This article is thought-provoking. The school philosophy sounds about as hippie and touchy-feely as one can get. I would think it'd be difficult to catch students up in later grades after they fall behind early on.

A cheating scandal unfolds in Louisiana. Obligatory quote about how there's too much pressure on teachers these days is included. I'd just like to say that I'd love to be in a field where, if I was caught breaking the rules, the newspapers would rush to make excuses for me.

The Nyquil is kicking in. Goodnight.

Update:Awww. In my allergic misery, I have company:

Off for the holidays

I'll be busy getting work done today and tomorrow, and then Thursday we head to South Carolina for the Memorial Day weekend. I'll try to log back on this Friday or so, but no bloggage until then.

Moving day(s)

Bloggage will be light for the next three days, as I'm in the middle of moving offices. Dang, but I've collected a lot of junk in my current-soon-to-be-former office. I'm such a packrat.

Comments

Comments are down again, and I'm not sure why. I haven't changed anything in the templates lately. It might just be an issue with Verve.

Update: They seem to be operational now.

Carnival Week 7

The Carnival of Education, Week 7, is up, with Jenny D guest-hosting.

Every week, I am amazed at the amount of quality output from edubloggers out there. But I guess I shouldn't be.

Something different: Vampire Bat Research

Last night, high on cold medicine, I was researching vampire bats online. I love bats, period, and vampire bats definitely have some unique qualities apart from the whole sanguivorous diet. Did you know they're the only bats that can run and jump? They're also very social, and will regurgitate blood to help save unrelated blood-buddies from starvation.

Best of all, their saliva contains extremely powerful anticoagulants (the better to keep the cow blood flowing as they feed). A blood-thinning drug has been derived from their saliva, and it's been delightfully named Draculin (as has the anticoagulant factor in the wild).

Update: Hee hee hee hee. Comment from Triticale:

If, as legend has it, being bitten by a vampire bat causes one to turn into a vampire, then would would happen to a person bitten by a fruit bat?

Behold!

Om Om Om

My gym workouts are really having an effect. Tonight, I was able to hold vasisthasana (sideways plank), kataranga (bending the elbows backwards in plank pose), and urdhva muhka svanasana (upward-facing dog) much longer than ever before.

Bear in mind that as I try to hold difficult poses, I have two cats swarming around my body, brushing up against me, and licking my fingers (Pippin has a thing for fingers) when I'm trying to balance on two fingers and one toe.

Mysterious visitors from Oz

All of a sudden, I'm seeing a spike of referrals from Tim Blair's site. I love his stuff and read him daily, but I can't find, for the life of me, anywhere over there that is linking back to here. I haven't commented on there lately, and he doesn't have a permalink to me.

If you're visiting from there, would you mind dropping a comment here to let me know what led you this way? Thanks!

I'd like to ping them upside the head

I got hit hard by spammers in the middle of the night last night - hundreds of pings to some useless website selling some useless product. Apparently the MT code that prevents multiple comments from being made within a short period of time doesn't do the same thing with trackback pings.

So if the webpage was down, or you were trying to ping me and couldn't, I apologize.

EWF, 36, seeks advice

According to my Control Panel stats (my Sitemeter stats aren't yet accurate, since I forgot to put the meter code on my archive pages until today), there were 50 visitors today who spent over an hour on this page.

My, but you Devoted Readers need a life.

However, seeing as how some of you are parking here pretty much permanently, I could use some advice. I'd like to increase my traffic. Sure, an Instalink is always good for an extra 5000 visitors or so, but most of his readers are more interested in political blogs (as am I).

Things I've done before and will probably try again: paying for monthly ads (mainly on right-of-center political websites), commenting on other blogs, sending link suggestions to other bloggers, and so on. I was just wondering if any of you out there had any additional ideas for what else I could do. I'd be willing to put together a monthly or weekly summary page, and perhaps a column or two (a la Joanne's sweet - and entirely deserved - deals with Fox News and Jewish World Review), if I knew who might be interested.

Any suggestions, short of actually putting photos on here of the "nak3d t3achers" for whom so many surfers are searching, are welcome.

Comments are back up

Comments are now active, and I posted a whole buncha stuff last night. Go ahead and give me you $.02. For two of you, I've taken the liberty of posting comments that you emailed to me.

Let's hope the Eagles perform better than my blog

Comments are currently farked, and I've no idea why. Last week trackbacks were shut down due to a spammer attack, and this may have the same cause. Thanks to MT Blacklist, I don't see all that much spam, but that doesn't mean a lot of it isn't trying to get in.

I need to get off the computer anyway, because it's kickoff time. Keep trying on the comments, and if there's no improvement in the am I'll check with my hosts.

Updates

Not a lot of time to post today, so I thought I'd add a few updates to previous popular posts:

* Great comments for the post about the spelling bee. My two favorites are the suggestion that some educators must believe in No Child Gets Ahead (by Alessandra), and the theory that spelling bees are necessary because in addition to learning to be winners, kids need to learn how to be graceful losers (by ricki).

Also, the bee might not be extinct after all. But who knew that spelling bees took "several months" of preparation? Think there's a bit of inefficiency in there?

* My comments filter out the words "sports" because I was hit by spammers who had that in their URLs. I'll see if I can go back and un-ban that URL now.

* Reader Alice E noted in the post about the immodest prom dress that one solution is to hold a pre-prom fashion show featuring pretty yet modest gowns, so that young girls do have a choice. Not surprisingly, the Mormons have some experience in dealing with this problem. Of course, for all you parents on a budget, you should know that while modest can mean "pretty," it can also still mean "expensive."

* I discovered last weekend that certain of my coworkers have been sneaking in my office after hours and breaking off hunks of my Ghirardelli bar by slamming the bar down on my desk (it's in a plastic bag). I had already used up about 4 pounds of it for a fondue party and thus didn't notice that more had disappeared. Work is going to continue to get more stressful, so I guess I don't have to worry about what to do with all that chocolate.

Quick hits

Lotsa good comments on this Joanne Jacobs post about merit pay for teachers. Maybe if the good teachers got paid well enough, they wouldn't have to strip kids to find $10.

How are we going to convince kids that it's fair for us to take away all the sweets from their school vending machines when Mom is downing one of these every morning?

Um, honey, we may want to keep the kids away from the "bunny trails" this week.

Dan Flynn says, "Return the money!" It won't make everything OK again, but it would be a start.

What's wrong with American high schools, you ask? Erin O'Connor and her commenters answer.

Daryl C - like, fer sure, dude! - finds a homeschooling article that's not only positive but reveals that homeschooled kids actually appear normal, too. And can you believe that a recent study suggests over a third of college admin officers still think that homeschooled kids aren't "socialized" enough for college? Yeeks.

Rotting my teeth

Bloggage will resume when I return from vacation on January 11th. I expect blogging to be frequent and somewhat spacey at that point, given that I'll be trying to catch up on all that I missed and I'll be experiencing quite the sugar high:

(Yes, this was an Xmas gift. Yes, it weighs ten pounds. The writing implement is there to show the scale.)

Update: This is a list I sent out to coworkers of what I've thought of to do with this chocolate beast:

1. Keep it in my office for when I want to bludgeon someone (probably an annoying coworker) into submission.

2. Melt it down in a small swimming pool and have a chocolate wrestling match.

3. Invite people to come by with hammers and break off as much of it as they desire.

4. Bake about 10,000 chocolate chip cookies.

Let me know if you can think of any others!

Apologies for my absence

Here are the reasons I've not been blogging, should you care:

1. I now get up at 6 am so that I can get to the gym (at work) by 6:45 am. My calves already look better, but my late-night blogging has predictably dwindled.

2. I have a new job, as of January 1st. It's within the same company, but represents a substantial shift in responsibilities. Therefore, I've lately been spending time preparing, interviewing, and discussing my new tasks with all and sundry. Interestingly, this is the first time that my business card will actually read, "Psychometrician."

3. Just got my copy of the Extended Release DVD of The Return of the King, so there go about 20 hours of free time right there.

4. I'm only halfway through my shopping list, and now my Christmas card list has all my fiance's family and in-laws on it. If anyone knows where I can get a Darth Vader Voice Changer helmet - before next Wednesday - please let me know. And no, it's not for my fiance.

5. I've only gotten two Christmas gifts from friends, but both gifts were large bottles of liquor. Probably not a wise idea to chug Nocello (my favorite) and blog at the same time.

Did I mention I'll also be on vacation from December 22nd - 28th and January 1st - 10th? I'll try to squeeze some bloggage in around Christmas (including photos of my fiance and me), but I won't be anywhere near a computer the first week of January. So let's hope it's a slow news week for testing. And don't stop the email and comments - even if you don't hear back from me, I read everything, and I love to see energetic comment debates such as the ones here and here.

Update: Just got another Christmas gift. Wheeee! And my fiance's boss bought him this as a gift. How apropos.

Feeling appreciated

From a new Devoted Reader who shall remain nameless (for now) comes this lovely email:

Ms. Swygert,

Anyway, I thought I would share a story that appeared in my hometown newspaper that would be perfect for your site....

Take notes, people. THIS is the way to send email to bloggers. If you ever want to send me a link and aren't sure what to say in the email, just cut and paste this and insert your name at the end. Seriously, there's not much more you can do to make a blogger feel good than to write emails like this. Makes it all worthwhile.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope you and yours are all having a restful, food-full day. I'm looking forward to catching up to blogging this weekend, as this is the first time in a month that I've had more than one day in a row off from work.

Hope all my Devoted Readers are well, and I'll be posting soon. Until then, here's a long list of things you can do this Thanksgiving to help our military members, and those who love them.

Too hot to handle

Thanks to the most recent wave of spammers, I've had to disable anyone with a Hotmail address from posting. If you have such an address and you're NOT a spammer, I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience (and I'm afraid that two of you who are legit commenters had recent comments removed during my housecleaning). I'll let you know when I can restore access to these addresses.

I really should buy Red Sox caps for all of you

Once again, I disappoint my loyal readers by not posting enough. Heck, I didn't even manage a catblogging photo on Friday, much less the Cheating In The News roundup! I know, I'm lame. I have no excuse other than an insane workweek (let's put it this way, on Monday night I had to take my analysts out for drinks, because the week was already that hellish) and the fact that I am now in Boston for a conference. Which requires a lot of networking. And 7:00 AM business breakfasts. And moving hotel rooms, because they couldn't get me into a non-smoking room last night, thus ensuring that I would wake up this morning totally snotty and with bloodshot eyes. Gah.

I'll make it up to you sometime this week, I promise. And if any of my Devoted Readers are in the downtown Boston area and you can email me in time, I'll be happy to buy you a drink.

When life interferes with blogging

No, I'm not dead. But thanks for asking!

Seriously, I'm up to my armpits in work, and that's not going to change over the next couple of months. What free time I have is spent eating, sleeping, and surfing the non-testing news on the web. Like most of the rest of you, I too have been constantly clicking through news/blog links to see what gets destroyed first - Alabama's coastline or Dan Rather's credibility.

I hate to say it, but it looks like N2P is going to have to go weekly, rather than daily, for a little while. Weekends are probably going to be my only chances to catch up, and hopefully I can squeeze a week's worth of material in for those days. For those of you who used N2P to kill time at work (and I know you're out there), here's a list of sites that are entertaining time-wasters, one and all:

Defamer, FuggingItUp, and AwfulPlasticSurgery - The best way to feel good about yourself is to observe how badly celebrities act, dress, and surgically "enhance" themselves when their handlers aren't around.

Movie Review Query Engine and Rotten Tomatoes - I'm an obsessive movie review fan and these sites allow you to read tons of review on any movie you choose. The MRQE site in particular is easy to use, and has reviews on obscure/old movies as well.

Crimelibrary, The Worldwide Serial Killer Homepage, Cult Killers, and Violent Kids - Because a day without a juicy forensic interview of a serial killer is like a day without sunshine.

If you've got money to burn, these are very cute bags (I ordered a couple in purple), this is a GREAT shoe store (kudos to the Devoted Reader who told me about it), and this site can handle all your dragon-related needs. If you'd rather laugh at the spendthrifts than part with cash yourself, there's always Who Would Buy That?

Favorite kitty-related site: MeanKitty.com. Be sure to read the descriptions in the galleries. This cat is apparently my Alice's twin sister in spirit. Heck, if you feel like admiring photos of my kitties too, admire away.

Check back this weekend for more news!

Oh, and one more thing...

..if you like handmade jewelry, my friend Jenn has finally got a store up on eBay. It's Freya's Fire, and I can personally vouch for the quality of her jewelry and the care that goes into making every piece. She recently made me a great black crystal necklace with this little guy hanging upside-down at the bottom of it. If you buy anything, tell her I sent you!

Movin' on up (in the blogosphere)

Woo hoo! Michelle Malkin, for whom I have tremendous respect, knows I exist! I'm thrilled to see a link to N2P from her blog - and thrilled to know she's not singling me out for skanky behavior (though that would get me another Insty link). She doesn't pull any punches.

What's going through my head today

Busy at work, so here's my roundup of, well, just about everything I'm thinking about, not all of which is related to testing.

Today, I was able to convince a colleague (just in time) that the story alleging a huge IQ gap between the Bush and Gore 2000 states is a hoax. I have great Googling skills, a good memory for what I read online - and Devoted Readers who send me every possible IQ story on earth.

Got kitties? Got a ShopRite near you? This week is ShopRite's can sale. Get 24 cans of Friskies wet food for $5 with your ShopRite card, limit of 96 cans. As God is my witness, my kitties will never go hungry again. (And for those of you who teach elementary school math, time to turn this into a good word problem! "Kimberly has two kitties who each eat one can of food a day. 24 cans of food cost $5. How much would six cans cost? How much does she need to spend to keep her kitties fed for 48 days?")

My boss bought in fresh cilantro from his garden. Pasta with cilantro pesto is on the menu tonight.

This kinda changes the idea of what "volunteering" is, doesn't it?

Sephora.com took in its usual infusion of cash from me this week. I am an unrepentant skin-care-product junkie, yes I am.

I don't have to defend tests anymore; Joanne Jacobs, Bill Evers, and Jay Mathews have done it for me.

Can I get one that says, "Hands off, I'm taken"?

Want to know more about value-added testing? The Pacific Institute's new research report, Putting Education to the Test: A Value-Added Model for California, is out. Also, the entire Spring 2004 issue of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics is devoted to this topic.

Jonah Goldberg provides a link to a cemetery for "Dogs of War". I love this comment: "If you search for Dogs of War on the web you get all sorts of sites like this, about dogs of war. If you search for cats of war the internet laughs at you."

And while we're talking about cemeteries, I learned two cool new words this week, both of which describe those who love these creepy, historic, unique places: taphophile and necrolithologist. The second term, believe it or not, is not anywhere on the web, but was mentioned in Cemetery Stories. Regardless, it's safe to say that buying a house because there's a graveyard behind it earns me these labels.

Get 'em while they're hot

Dean Esmay has graciously helped me battle the Spambots by changing my comment specifics. Comments for posts over 30 days old are now closed, and in the future comments functionality will be closed once a post is over 30 days old. So if you have something to say, do it quickly; otherwise you'll have to send me an email and let me post an update.

And speaking of comments, I found this post on blog civility fascinating. I certainly have noticed the influx and effect of trolls elsewhere, but N2P has remained refreshingly free of them. Perhaps it's because of my civil tone (usually) and the fact that I don't post rash statements just to get readers riled up (though I loved the whole Blair Hornstine controversy). Perhaps it's because readership is below the danger point (10,000 - 20,000 a day).

Or perhaps it's because anyone commenting here probably knows they're dealing with a blogger with a Ph.D. and regular readers who are quite educated, and to leave ridiculous, nasty, incendiary comments here instead of thoughtful ones is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. You'll just get your tail whupped and your profanity (which doesn't impress us) deleted.

Final Test

From Dean: "I believe the blog is now working as it should, and our spam problem should be fixed. Stay tuned...."

And it does appear to be. Regular bloggage should resume over the holidays. And a big smooch to Dean for upgrading my site and getting rid of all that nasty spam.

Warning - Hard Hat Area

Comments are still out, and I'm still working 11-hour days with no time to blog, and Dean Esmay is graciously helping me resolve some MT and MT Blacklist issues (N2P was one of the sites he so kindly switched from Blogger to MT about a year or so ago). So, consider this site "Under Construction" for a few more days. Hopefully everything will be back up and running after the July 4th holiday.

So get up from the computer and go eat a hot dog (or tofu dog) and watch some fireworks, will you?

No posts, and fewer comments

Just wanted to let you know I'm still alive, and not to be alarmed by the lack of posts on the site. I've been at work, oh, 11 hours already today, and haven't quite finished up. Not a lot of time to blog, there is.

Also, don't be alarmed by the sudden misfunctions of the comments, either. Right now, when I barely have time to link to the briefest of Fark articles, I've been getting hammered by the nastiest, vilest spammers possible, to the tune of 750+ spammed comments a day. The URLs and keywords keep shifting and permutating through various spellings of gross and illegal acts, so it would take constant vigilance to keep MT Blacklist on top of it. And I don't have that right now.

So, much as I love to read the comments and the interplay amongst my visitors, I've had to briefly disable comment functionality (it will appear to you like the comments, and comment functionality, are still there, but if you try to click on the comments link, you'll get an error). Even if I hadn't thought this was the best thing to do, this email from my hosting company would have spurred me to action:

Your site was under attack by numerous "spammers" who left links to porn sites in the comments they left on your blog...There were so many that it increased the load on the server to an unacceptable level. You should consider upgrading to the latest version of Moveable Type, which prevents this kind of spamming.

So I'll upgrade. And hopefully will have comments back someday. And if you have something you really want to say, and want everyone to know, email me, and I'll attach it as an update on the end of the post in question (a la Instapundit).

Education news round-up

It's still work=insane, me=slammed around here. I'll be in meetings all day today and tomorrow. This weekend, I may be drinking heavily. Caveat emptor on any postings from Saturday, in other words.

But I do have a few quick things to put up..

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A Man Bites Dog story: An African American mother is fighting to rescind a rule that prevents her child from being given an IQ test. The rule follows from a a 1979 case in which "a judge decided IQ tests could not be used to determine children’s placement in special education classes in California," and the mother in question, Ms. Lewis, believes the assumption behind this is that all black children are dumb:

The ruling sought to address the overabundance of African-American students who were placed in special education classes after performing poorly on the IQ test, Lewis said.

"This is closet racism within the school district and the courts," she said. "Basically they're saying if you're black, you're dumb."

Others are urging Ms. Lewis not to open the door for minority kids to take such a "racially biased" test, thus reaffirming her assertion that a whole lot of people out there think all African American kids are too dumb to take IQ tests. She's right to call this "racism."

(Thanks to Devoted Reader Linda S. for the story.)
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THIS is why we need a sounder math curriculum in schools:

Confused about how to divide "kilos" of cocaine into ounces for sale, two teens from a Saanich private school turned to their math teacher for help, provincial court heard Monday.

The other student, now 18, is on trial in B.C. provincial court for possession of a narcotic for the purpose of trafficking.

It's sad to see a promising enteprenurial career stalled by a inadequate math education, isn't it?

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She could have gotten 15 days in jail, but the cheatin' teacher from South Carolina chose the $800 fine:

A Columbia woman is the first teacher to be convicted of helping students cheat on the Palmetto Achievement Challenge Test, the state’s high-stakes standardized test...Deborah Primus, 32, a math teacher at Southeast Middle School in Richland 1, pleaded guilty to violating mandatory test security Tuesday, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 90 days in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.

A state Department of Education committee will review the case and may decide to suspend or revoke her teaching license.

The "pressure" of testing is cited as a possible cause for her behavior. Here's a tip - if you can't stand the heat, get the hell out of the kitchen.

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Students who rank low in good high schools are catching a break, as colleges are relying on such rankings less and less.

According to a survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, colleges and universities across the country are paying less attention to rank and placing more emphasis on good grades, application essays and standardized test scores, such as the SAT and ACT.

"Finishing first or fifth at your high school doesn't tell a college as much about you as your standardized test scores or the strength of your curriculum because that they can compare to students at other schools," said David Hawkins, director of public policy for Alexandria, Va.-based National Association for College Admission Counseling.

In other words, if you're in the bottom half of a great (and competitive) school, and you have good grades and high SAT scores, your low ranking won't hurt you as much. Which is as it should be.

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Finally, here's an advice column for worried parents whose kids get straight A's but rock-bottom scores on standardized tests. The advice? Hey, lighten up! - the teacher's grades must be the more accurate assessment!

Q: My daughter's final report card puzzles me. She is a fifth-grader and received all A's this year. However, she had very low scores in math, social studies and spelling on a standardized achievement test given to her class. I am thinking that maybe her teacher was just handing out A's. How concerned should I be about the discrepancies between my child's report-card grades and her achievement-test scores?

Typically, teachers' grades give a good picture of how children are doing in school, because the teachers observe how the children are doing every day on a wide range of tasks. On the other hand, standardized tests are a one-time reading of students' abilities. One of the problems with these tests is that many students are not good test-takers. Others can get low scores because they were sick, did not try to do their best, or had some test anxiety. Also, standardized tests are considered to be especially unreliable in assessing the achievement of students of very high and very low ability.

Not necessarily - and they're certainly not "unreliable" to the point where a true A student will be bombing them