In Memoriam: Marbles

It’s taken me a bit to write this. About a month ago, it became clear that the fourth drug in Marbles treatment rotation wasn’t working anymore. We tried a different drug, but it didn’t work, either. So I made an appointment with a house call vet, and last Saturday morning, my little Marbles died in my lap. I miss her terribly. Tibby’s been looking for her, too, and has rarely let me out of her sight.

We adopted Marbles as a four-month old, from the same shelter Tibby had come from. As we were carrying her out to the car in the little cardboard carrier, she was crying her head off. Dirk and I turned to each other at the same moment and said, “I’m thinking Marbles.” We later decided that Marbles had been crying, “I’ve lost my marbles! I’ve lost my marbles!” and the only part we heard was “Marbles!” At any rate, she got her name faster than any other cat we’ve ever adopted.

When we first got her, she had an upper respiratory tract infection, and was sneezing. Tibby became convinced Marbles was a demon, and wouldn’t stay on the same floor with her. Eventually, though, Tibby accepted Marbles, and they became good friends, especially after Tibby lost her best friend Dante.

Marbles had her own turn with demons when we adopted Kiera. There was no sneezing this time, but Marbles was still convinced Kiera was a devil. Marbles hid in the garage for nearly a month, sneaking in only for food. Finally, she calmed down. They were never really snuggle-buddies (Kiera had adopted Tibby, in the meantime), but there was at least an amiable truce.

When we started hosting house concerts, most people didn’t realize we had a third cat. They met the ultra-outgoing Kiera, and would see Tibby going about her own business. Marbles was super skittish of anything unusual, though, and didn’t let herself be seen. Until, that is, at some point she realized these people who came to visit could pet her. Marbles loved nothing more than to be petted, and she finally decided that it was worth braving strangers to get attention.

Marbles was also very fond of her toys. It wasn’t unusual to hear her singing with her mouth full of toy as she brought us her prize. When our day room was in the basement, her toys would make a daily migration, as she brought them down to us as we were watching TV, and back up to us in the bedroom as we slept at night.

As with most cats, Marbles worshiped the sun. This became especially apparent when I was living in the basement in Colorado, with only the little basement windows to let in the sun. Marbles could be counted on to be in that little sunspot when it came, though, and she’d follow it as it moved across the floor.

I’m glad she got to come her to California before the end. That she was able to enjoy larger patches of sun, and even wander in the back yard, sampling the grass. I wish she was still here. Still coming to snuggle under the covers at night. Still cute-ing at me, asking to be petted. Still basking in the sun with her friend Tibby. But she’s gone now. She will be missed.

PBLWorks: The Project

PBL Works has recently launched a new podcast called The Project. I listened to the first six episodes today, and it was well worth the listen.

In Don’t Send a Professional to do an 8th Grader’s Job, Ron Berger of EL Education talked about a project that had city engineers training students to do energy audits of the schools. The students then took a proposal to the city with recommendations for $156K worth of improvements, saying the city would recoup its investment within 5 years. The city actually did it, and recovered their investment in 2 years. The rest of the discussion is about the power of having students do “beautiful work” – that is, authentic work that has real value. One of the points Berger makes is that it’s hard to do beautiful work without examples to aim for, which is why EL Education created Models of Excellence.

Some of the points made across episodes are that we are living in a project-based world, and while project-based learning might be trickier to implement and assess than your standard worksheet, it’s also a lot more authentic and helps students learn skills they’re actually going to be able to use in life. There’s a blooper episode, which discusses the pitfalls of project-based learning, that gets at the idea that learning to implement it is a project all its own, and one you’re not likely to get right on the first try. But there are lots of resources to draw on, and this work is worthwhile. The episodes also address the equity aspect of PBL, that all students deserve access to meaningful work, and that high-quality PBL gives students needing work on the fundamentals a reason to do that work.

This Teachable Moment highlights opportunities for PBL during the pandemic and discusses the free e-book PBLWorks offers with ideas for parents and educators to engage their students in the moment.

The “Breaking Bias” Project discusses an ambitious project with five teachers across three high schools in different states designed to help students recognize their biases and break them down. This project was planned before the pandemic and George Floyd, but seems especially powerful in this time. Getting students in different places and from different backgrounds talking with each other and recognizing how their environment creates and reinforces biases is an amazing thing.

I’ve taught robotics with a project-based mindset, and I try to bring that mindset to my science and computer science classes as well. But there’s clearly room for growth. I would really love to build these skills, and to help students recognize their power to do authentic, meaningful work.

PBS: Game On

This morning I participated in an interactive webinar put on by PBS Learning Media and Breakout Edu. After an introduction to the activity, we were put into breakout rooms with small groups with instructions to introduce ourselves and start the game. The goal was to explore the PBS Learning Media site and learn a bit about how to use it, and to solve puzzles along the way, using the information we learned. It was a fun little game, and seemed like a great way to engage students. I don’t know how hard it is to create games, but perhaps I will find out: participants are supposed to receive a free one-year subscription to Breakout Edu. It doesn’t include the kits (presumably), but should include access to the site, to create virtual games. I’m looking forward to checking it out!

Random Cool (?!) Stuff

BioDive, featured in this TED Talk, is “an immersive dual virtual reality/digital experience where middle school students are marine biologists investigating the delicate ecosystems of venomous marine snails. Throughout their expedition, students observe, discover, and hypothesize about abiotic and biotic factors that impact marine biodiversity.”

East of the Rockies is an interactive narrative AR experience told from the perspective of Yuki, a 17-year-old girl forced from her home and made to live in one of Canada’s Japanese Internment Camps. – Apple devices only

IEEE Reach provides teachers and students with educational resources that explore the relationship between technology and engineering history and the complex relationships they have with society, politics, economics, and culture. Inquiry units, multimedia sources, primary sources and hands-on activities.

ImageJ – Image processing and analysis in Java, from NIH.

Organic Chemistry Lab Experiences – Five open-access VR labs. If you use them, let them know. Reporting usefulness back to their funders can help fund the creation of more labs.

PolarTrec – “Activities, opportunities, and resources for educators to learn more about the polar regions and polar science.”

Book: How to Do Nothing

I don’t remember how this particular book wound up on my to-listen list, but it was there, and looked interesting, so I went for it. In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell isn’t really advocating that people do nothing, but instead that they disengage from the attention economy and engage in life with intention. As she warns at the start of the book, it’s a bit of a ramble at times, because it comes out of her own experiences and reactions.

More specifically, the book comes out of her reaction to the 2016 election and some of the aftermath (though not the pandemic – it might be interesting to hear her thoughts these days). She gets into Burning Man and Commune life and other attempts at “dropping out,” looking at their successes and failures. She talks a lot about bird watching, and developing an awareness of place and of ecology.

As an educator, I think an awareness of how the attention economy works is important, partly so we don’t get caught up in it ourselves, but mostly so we can help our students be aware of it. There are behavioral scientists that have been working on getting our attention through advertising for many, many years, but the internet allows that work to be much more targeted and far more insidious. For our students, that’s just how it’s always been, and they may not even be aware of how they’re being played.

Bike Ride: Grijalva Park

The posted trail at Grijalva Park was a 1.1 mile loop (that bit in the upper right), so I added to and from along the Santa Ana River Trail and the Santiago Creek Trail. There have been some reports of assault recently in the area of the latter trail, so while it’s a reasonably pleasant ride, I didn’t stop for pictures. (All the women assaulted have been walking, so I’m operating on the assumption that I’m a more difficult target on a moving bike.) Roundtrip, about 21 miles.

Book: The Last Wish

When I have time, I’m a gamer, and I especially like immersive, open-world RPGs with a good story. I recently finished Witcher 3 on Game Pass. I’d played Witcher 2 some time ago. I’d never played the original game, though, on on a whim, went looking to see if I could get it. Just by chance, it was being given away free that day, so I got it. However, the post that highlighted this giveaway said the story in the games came after the books.

So I decided it would be fun to see if I could get the books. They are, conveniently enough, available from my library as audiobooks. I recently finished the what Goodreads lists as the first full book (numbered 0.5, so it may have been written later), The Last Wish. (There’s a short story, The Road with No Return, that’s supposed to come in before it, but I’ve not been able to get my hands on it.) It opens with Geralt of Rivia investigating a contract for a striga, a princess that was born cursed, but who may be able to be saved if someone can stay all night in her lair. He gets injured in this adventure, and goes to a temple to heal. While he’s there, there are a series of flashbacks that highlight other adventures, including travels with Dandelion and his first encounter with Yennifer.

It was a fun listen to get some of the back story on Geralt and his friends. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to be the only one inspired to do this. The next in the series, The Sword of Destiny, has 55 holds on 25 copies, so it will be a while before I get it.

GSP: Conrad Wolfram

Conrad Wolfram was recently on the Getting Smart Podcast, talking about his new book, The Math(s) Fix: An Education Blueprint for the AI Age. Based on what I heard, this book is definitely going on my reading list. The underlying problem is one that I’ve been hearing about at least since folks like Dan Meyer (who gave a great TED Talk back in 2010 that is sadly still relevant now). Our standard math curriculum is focused on teaching students the algorithms for doing math, and evaluating them on their ability to carry out those algorithms. Just the fact that you can call them algorithms should be an indication that computers can do that so much better than people can.

What we don’t seem to do (and very much need to do) is focus on figuring out the problem identification side of things: figuring out what algorithm is relevant, and why, as well as what information is needed for that algorithm and how to get it. That’s the tricky bit, the part that computers aren’t good at. It’s also the much more interesting part. If we teach students the computational tools that are available to them, and then let them use them, they can ultimately solve much more interesting and relevant problems.

Book: Elastic

I finished listening to the book Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change by Leonard Mlodinow. The book compares top-down analytical thought to more bottoms-up creative thought. He highlights the human brain’s adaptability to ambiguity that gives computers so much trouble.

It is our capacity for elasticity in our thinking that computers (and artificial intelligence) find difficult to replicate. He considers the problem of identifying a chair: we do it pretty easily, but analytically defining the characteristics that make something a chair is quite difficult. Language processing is another notoriously difficult task. Computer translators have gotten a lot better, but computers still have difficulty when meaning is determined by context.

Humans operate based on rules, but we can be flexible (or elastic) about when to implement them and when to ignore them. We even have a phrase about obeying the “spirit” of the law, rather than the “letter” of the law. Even the most sophisticated AIs we have are still incapable of this type of thinking. In his TED Talk, Sylvain Duranton highlights the dangers of letting AI make decisions, because it implements solely rule-based thinking.

I’d recommend the TED Talk to anyone interested in exploring AI and machine learning. The book would be a good opportunity to dig deeper. Could be useful for upper-level computer science classes.

Bike Ride: Back Bay Loop

My dad’s car needed to go in for service, so I offered to take it for him. Turns out the service center is right next to the Back Bay, so I went for a bike ride while I was waiting for the car.

I had ridden most of this route before, although some of the segments at the south end of the ride had been closed the last time I was out this way. Part of the route was posted no bikes, so I got off and walked for that section.