Closure advisory

The Northwest Corner will be closed for regularly-scheduled maintenance until April 7, 2010.

Repairmen will also check plumbing and ductwork for clogs that may have limited the frequency and clarity of posts during the past few months. Will re-open with a fresh paint job, and with spruced-up landscaping surrounding the Corner's perch overlooking Puget Sound.

Best team money can buy

Tennessee and Kentucky are two highly-seeded teams in the NCAA tournament, which started today. Kentucky graduates 31 percent of its basketball players; Tennessee graduates 30 percent. The U.S. Secretary of Education has suggested that any team graduating fewer than 40 percent of its players should be barred from post-season play. "If you can't graduate two out of five of your student-athletes, how serious are you about the academic part of your mission?" he asks, rhetorically.

A good question, I would have thought, but Tennessee's coach, Bruce Pearl, doesn't see it that way.

If he wants to fix it, fix it at the high school level, fix it at the middle school level, fix it at the elementary school level. I'm an educator, I'm a teacher. I share the pain in not having student-athletes graduate. But I don't want to deny the opportunity to student-athletes who are not prepared. I'm going to stand up here and I'm going to fight for student-athletes who come in who aren't as prepared.

Does anyone besides me find anything odd about this argument?

Pearl does not want to deny students the opportunity to play college basketball merely because they do not have the academic preparation to attend college. And this means, necessarily, that young men should not be denied the opportunity to play college ball merely because there's no way in hell they'll ever graduate from college.

His argument makes sense only if we view college basketball as a collection of semi-professional conferences, each member team being associated for sentimental reasons with a college or university. In that case, it would be unreasonable to deny a high school graduate the opportunity to play for a member team simply because he was not interested, prepared, and/or capable of handling college-level work and, ultimately, graduating. Such teams would be licensed to use an affiliated school's name and logo and provided a place to play on the school's campus. No one would care -- it would be totally immaterial -- whether any athletes actually chose to avail themselves of the opportunity to enroll at the school while they happened to be living in the area.

Such an arrangement may be closer to the reality of today's world than anyone in academia wishes to admit. Outside the Ivy League Conference, few if any college basketball teams are made up of a bunch of college kids who simply enjoy shooting hoops and who take time out from their studies to engage in good natured competition with rival universities.

I know. You've heard it all from me before, back when I was rhapsodizing over the basketball-shooting engineers from Cal Tech. Whenever I explain my views to even my most rational and sympathetic friends, I find them nodding quietly in agreement, in the same way they'd agree with some abstruse mathematical argument I proposed, one that had no discernable relationship to the real world.

Then they begin discussing the Huskies' recruiting prospects for the coming season.

Oh well. WTF. Washington (29 percent graduation rate) plays Marquette in the first round of the NCAA East regionals, coming up shortly at 4 o'clock .

GO DAWGS!!

Plunging to earth

I skydived solo once. After a few drinks, friends often find me willing to give an elaborately detailed account of my experience. My narrative continues until I notice my audience drifting away, as they invariably and unaccountably do. My dive was from a small plane about 3,000 feet high, with no more than ten seconds of free fall. It's a hard experience to forget.

A gentleman named Felix Baumgartner is also planning to "skydive." Not from 3,000 feet, however. From a balloon, 120,000 feet (about 23 miles) up in the stratosphere. He will find himself in free fall for about 5½ minutes, long enough to mull over the joys and sorrows of his life to date. Within the first 30 seconds, he will have reached a speed of 600 miles per hour.

The point of his endeavor is to "see what happens" when a human body, virtually unprotected except for a pressurized suit, breaks the sound barrier.

Felix isn't a completely crazy cat. Serious scientists and science are behind his stunt. Actually, an Air Force pilot did something similar, from 100,000 feet, back in 1960. Unfortunately, he went into a spin of 120 rpm and blacked out, not waking up until his chute automatically deployed near the ground.

My first reaction to reading all about this in the New York Times was to wonder how Felix would be able to exceed the terminal velocity for a human body, usually put at around 120 mph. But that figure assumes the falling body's arms and legs are extended. Terminal velocity increases if the diver pulls his extremities in and up close to his body, and falls head down. Also, the customary figure for terminal velocity assumes normal atmospheric pressure. During much of his fall, Felix will be plunging downward through an extremely tenuous atmosphere, almost a vacuum. As you fall, terminal velocity decreases one percent for every 525 foot loss of altitude. With this information, terminal velocity at 120,000 feet can be readily calculated. The calculation is left as an exercise for the reader (as my math books used to so frustratingly put it).

Also fascinating -- to me, at any rate -- is the meteor effect, although the scientists must have reasons for believing this not to be a problem. The atmosphere protects those of us on the earth's surface from having to dodge a daily shower of space debris. The friction through the air as rocks fall towards earth causes them to vaporize long before they reach the surface.

Even tiny rocks, not much bigger than a grain of sand, can be clearly observed as meteors as they heat and burn. Why wouldn't the same happen to a human body? It would be an awesome way to go, if you had to go. Streaking across the sky, a ball of fire, observed by millions. Almost worth it.

At least better than having a heart attack while tending your virtual garden on Farmville.

Discharged

Nokia has reportedly filed for a U.S. patent for a "self-charging" cell phone. The cell phone converts the kinetic energy of the owner's daily movements as he walks about into electrical energy stored in the battery.

The phone is designed to permit small internal movements within the device as it's jostled about -- for example, while the owner carries it about in his pocket. The movements back and forth cause compression of piezoelectric crystals, crystals capable of creating electric current when compressed or bent. The current charges a capacitor, which in turn can charge the phone's battery.

Very interesting. Of course, only the United States has citizens so sedentary that even their technologically advanced self-charging batteries will discharge as they lie sprawled out inert on the living room couch, gaping at the TV.

Good teachers: made, not born

Looking back at high school, I'm impressed by the incompetence of so many of my teachers. The elderly woman who taught my required senior course in American government -- a topic that had fascinated me since at least sixth grade -- managed to extract every last drop of juice and interest from the course, relying on a lesson plan that required rote memorization of dry facts. Facts that I'm sure, for 90 percent of the class, were forgotten the day after the final exam.

At least she ran a taut ship. No one clowned around while her steely gaze was upon them.

I've mentioned before that teaching at one time interested me as a profession. I suspected back then, however, that not only would I be incapable of transmitting my enthusiasm for any subject to the majority of my students, but that I'd be wholly incapable of controlling a classroom of typically restless kids.

And yet, some teachers do succeed. Some did, even in the intellectual and economic backwater that was my hometown. How did they do it?

Newsweek discusses the problem in this week's issue, and concludes that the solution is merit pay for good teachers and the sack for bad teachers. These solutions may improve the teaching in some schools, but they do not enlarge the pool of competent teachers. A more careful discussion of the problem was provided in yesterday's magazine supplement to the New York Times.

The NYT article discusses two on-going studies devoted to the question: "What makes a good teacher?" These studies are not abstract and theoretical. In fact, the article implicitly criticizes many present courses at American schools of education for being abstract and theoretical, often taught by professors who have never actually tried to teach a class of elementary or high school students. The studies discussed in yesterday's article are empirical, based on close observation of successful teaching techniques as used by successful teachers -- observation of actual classrooms and of videotapes of actual teaching.

The first study, by Doug Lemov, consultant and author of the forthcoming book Teach Like a Champion, has generated a list of 49 proven techniques to control the classroom -- ways to capture the attention of the students and get them to follow instructions. The study suggests that a successful teacher can have any type of personality -- Lemov describes himself as an extreme introvert. Successful teachers are those who have learned the appropriate techniques in leading the class, not charismatic figures with inborn talents.

The second study is one originating independently at Michigan State. Teachers may have developed exceptional abilities to control the classroom and interest the students -- but still not have the ability to teach their subject. The work at Michigan State recognizes that a solid background in the subject matter being taught is a necessary but not sufficient condition for good teaching -- the teacher's own knowledge is important only insofar as he or she has the ability to convey that knowledge to the student. Again, this is a skill that can be taught.

The Michigan study was aimed specifically at developing methods for teaching mathematics. A Stanford professor is now attempting to develop similar techniques for teaching English.

If attained, the goals of these two studies -- engaging the students and transmitting the subject matter -- should together permit schools of education to produce exceptionally strong teachers. Although evidence of success to date seems primarily anecdotal, the examples discussed by the NYT article provide hope that these approaches actually work. Anyone interested in new approaches in American education should read the article -- and perhaps the studies on which it's based.

A fairly bashful kid, such as I was, may in future years have less hesitation in choosing to be a teacher, knowing that Schools of Education actually are capable of teaching him how to engage and educate real students -- not just ambitious kids from middle class families, but "problem" children from broken homes and dysfunctional street cultures. Like new doctors and lawyers, new teachers might then bring an arsenal of proven techniques to their new jobs -- rather than finding themselves thrown into a hostile classroom with no idea of how to meet the horrific challenges they're often forced to encounter.

Scrutiny

The lure and the danger of mountain climbing have always fascinated those of us who mostly keep both feet on the ground. In November, I reviewed Ed Viesturs's history of the conquest of K2, which included his brush with death during his own successful climb in 1992. Viesturs emphasized the climber's responsibility to assess the risk throughout his climb, turning back when the risk becomes unreasonable. The climber should never consider a prudent decision to abort the climb as a "failure."

In the current issue of Sierra, the bimonthly publication of the Sierra Club, Emmett Berg asks whether modern commercial sponsorship of climbs and the technical ease of filming those climbs are making it more difficult for climbers to call it quits in the face of highly risky mountain conditions.

The article describes last year's failed first ascent of the east face of China's Mt. Edgar. The climb, by two well-known, experienced Colorado climbers, was sponsored by a film company, and was intended to be shown as one episode on a National Geographic Channel climbing series. The company provided a photographer who was to accompany them during the lower portions of the climb.

The Mt. Edgar climb wasn't really the ideal climb to make Berg's point. Once the danger of avalanches, caused in part by unusually warm temperatures, became apparent, the climbers abandoned the climb and their equipment after establishing an advance camp about 8,000 feet below the summit. They retreated to their base camp, hoping to return when conditions improved. After waiting at base camp for three weeks, with no improvement in conditions, they gave up and decided to return home. But they made the fateful decision to climb back first to the advance camp and retrieve about $10,000 worth of equipment.

Conditions were even worse during this second climb. An avalanche swept both climbers and their photographer -- a young man shooting his last film before beginning a Ph.D. program in chemistry at the University of Washington -- to their deaths.

The climbers had made the proper decision in aborting their climb, and the attempt to recover their gear seemed reasonable, according to other climbers. But Berg suggests that the expectations of sponsors and the knowledge that they are being filmed throughout the climb does put constant pressure on climbers to present the right image, to succeed, to earn their funding.

Our world today is preoccupied with reality shows, with insatiable voyeurism into every aspect of the lives of others. No matter how used we become to being on camera, I suspect, the camera is never wholly absent from our thoughts. Lawyers increasingly not only have to satisfy the judge, the jury, and their own clients -- but, when cameras are permitted in courtrooms, also have to be concerned with how they appear before the eyes of their TV audiences.

A lawyer risks only his reputation and his client's case when his decisions are affected by the camera's eye. A climber -- hoping to satisfy his sponsor's desire for a good show -- risks his own life and that of his companions when the camera prejudices his sound judgment.

That may not have been the case with the climbers on Mt. Edgar. But it is a risk worth noting. Not all climbers have Ed Viesturs's strength of character when the time comes to make the decision to quit, especially when that decision won't be one that best amuses the television audience -- or their own sponsors.