Roger's View of the World, Love and Seafood Gumbo!
Seize the Day! Put no trust in the morrow! — Horace
A special congratulations to my daughter Karen Freberg for jumping another hurdle and passing her oral exams and becoming ABD ( this stands for ‘all but dissertation’). Karen is a hard working and creative soul, so I am sure her dissertation will be something interesting, indeed. In the meantime, all your hard work is paying off!
love, Dad
Everyone in my family loves technology, especially something new. Each generation of technology was fun for us to explore. We all joke about the days when updating an Apple meant knowing how to use a soldering iron! I remember cutting into a case to add the first floppy disk, then the 3 1/4, cd and dvd and all the recording versions. If you are old enough, you’ll remember when a floppy handled a whopping 10k of memory and buying a computer without a hard disk. We’ve even beta tested a few items which was fun, especially new video game systems. We smile back at those times. We may never meet any of the geniuses associated with these great devices, but we are grateful for the sense of awe they bring, their usefulness and practicality…. and yes, for the envy it causes in others! 😉
So one day, we are all on the conference phone discussing Apple’s latest mobile devise called the iPad and ‘wondering’ which iPad — if any — is worthy of purchase? After much discussion, we agreed that we each would buy the WiFi 6G 64GB as it had virtually everything. They’ll be shipped at the end of the month and the only question remains is who will get theirs first?
Here’s a nice discussion on iPad:
Yes, I have heard from a few friends that we are once again being mislead on the quest for truth and enlightenment. We have heard that the iPad is just a fad and this too will pass. They said the same thing about the personal computer thirty years ago. However, I am reminded of Mark Twain’s famous remark,”denial is not just a river in Egypt!.”
iPad envy is a terrible thing.
Roger Freberg
Laura has always loved science, football games and technology … things that most of the male community also gravitate. Laura will pass up the Oscars or the vast wasteland of soaps to watch the stuff I also enjoy like: the documentary channel, the super bowl game, the history channel or just sit around talking about the latest thoughts on evolutionary psychology or what William James would think if he was still alive.
So, I knew that the hardest thing would be to get her out of the Virtual Imaging lab which combines a lot of our favorite elements in a virtual environment.
It was fun to watch her overcome her fobias and ‘jump’ off a cliff and ‘walk over a deep ravine on a thin plank’ in the virtual world.
This picture of Laura just makes me smile.
Roger
Before addressing the official responses to Brendan Pringle’s recent opinion piece on “inclusive excellence” in the Mustang Daily, I’d like to make a personal note to Cal Poly administrators David Conn and Cornel Morton: I would suggest approaching this and any subject in your public comments by arguing the merits of your side of the case, not attacking the student-author in question, as many view this as unnecessarily intimidating, threatening and unprofessional…. Or as they say, ‘pick on someone your own size.’ After all, universities are all about teaching critical thinking, and the collective power of two Vice Presidents coming down in a very personal way against one student seems unfair.
Getting back to the issues, I wonder how many Cal Poly faculty are aware that the program of ‘Inclusive Excellence’ – as applied by other universities following the same AACU approach – views “selectivity” on the part of elite universities as “bad,” and ignores the SAT scores and grade point averages of certain applicants in order to grant admission. I am sure most faculty do not want to offer remedial education, nor do they wish to flunk unprepared students.
Here’s how Cornell Morton and David Conn spun the Inclusive Excellence discussion in a letter that I could not find on-line and only in the student newspaper hard copy! ( I thought you two would be proud of such a piece?)
Let’s parse one of the bits of illogic used by others in defending this program in the Mustang Daily:
1) …on whether their high schools are wealthy enough to offer AP courses
2) or the advantage of having parents who can afford to pay for SAT coaching.”
These statements border on the absurd. First, many universities ask high schools to send transcripts with the higher grade point averages from AP classes already factored out. Besides, high GPAs are not a problem at culturally disadvantaged schools—quite the opposite. The student with a 4.0 at a poor school might not be as well prepared for college as a student with a 3.0 from a good school. The whole purpose of using a standardized test like the SAT is to control for just that situation. Secondly, SAT coaching does not jump a student’s score from 700 to 1600 and is a much overrated factor, if a factor at all, except to all who are trying to get every last point.
The SAT and the SAT2 (Achievement Tests), like any classroom exams, have been much maligned by those who believe that they are a barrier to entry to whatever they want to do. Sometimes, you have to pass the test to pass the course. The problem, for those who want to ignore their results, is that these tests are excellent predictors for college performance, which is all they were ever supposed to do. The achievement tests (SAT2) measure many basic skills, like competence in math, science, and English, without which any student would have an impossible time of securing a degree in a quality major.
Here are two links that support the value of the SAT and SAT2 in college admission:
2009 SAT scores National by demographic
I do not suppose that we should be developing majors of lower academic caliber for the new arrivals? Doesn’t Cal Poly have enough of those already?
The California Master Plan of higher education was developed to grant admission based on a multi-tiered system: the best and the brightest would have an opportunity to attend a U.C., the next tier was the C.S.U., and for those who still needed to sharpen their skills before trying for the brass ring, there was the community college. Consequently, opening up Cal Poly to accept students who should learn the elementary skills of reading, math and science by first attending a community college is ill-advised.
Cornel and David, we’re all for fair play and diversity, but your comments about “a retreat from a merit system” are too vague. Please give us your explicit promise that you will not deviate from use of GPA and SAT data to meet your goals.
This is a really bad idea. Work harder, Chip.
Roger Freberg
Tonight Greg Lukianoff is announcing the coming of his new book with F.I.R.E. : ‘Greg’s book will explore how today’s college students are “unlearning liberty,” and discuss what happens to our society when students are taught in a campus environment that is marred by speech codes and censorship. Greg’s book will also cover FIRE’s work on hundreds of cases involving student and faculty rights over the past decade..’
Greg writes the following on the Huffington post:
“This brings me to my big project for 2010: I’m working on a book highlighting the literally hundreds of cases I’ve worked on involving crazy abuses of student and faculty rights. I intend to demonstrate how campus censorship, far from being a niche concern applicable only to those on campus, is a threat to the functioning of our democracy as a whole.”
Greg discusses this tonight at his alma mater Stanford!
Roger Freberg