Motivating Teachers

Teachers are, I believe, human too. So it should not be surprising that more motivated teachers perform better. Oscar Marcenaro-Gutierrez and Peter Dolton highlight an OECD report that shows the benefits of increasing teacher pay.

Image from Dolton and Marcenaro-Gutierrez (2011).

What’s most interesting though is their explanation of the data. It’s not necessarily that if you pay an individual teacher more they work that much harder, but that if you pay more you increase the status of the profession and so you attract more potential teachers and are able to select better teachers:

… improving teachers’ pay improves their standing in a country’s income distribution and hence the national status of teaching as a profession. As a result of this higher status, more young people will want to become teachers. This in turn makes teaching a more selective profession and hence facilitates the recruitment of more able individuals.

Higher status and higher pay are invariably linked but the two can provide separate driving forces to engineer better recruits to the profession. The key hypothesis is that better pay for teachers will attract higher quality graduates into the profession and that this will improve pupil performance.

— Dalton and Marcenaro-Gutierrez (2011): If you pay peanuts, do you get monkeys? in CenterPiece Magazine

(via The Dish).

So the actual pay is secondary to the status conferred by the job. I would further speculate that teachers motivated more by status rather than pay are more likely to want to excel at their work, since the quality of their work is tied more on their self-worth.

Coal Seam

Escavator digs out the coal.

Although it was high in sulfur, the quarry company mined the thin coal seam that cut across the limestone quarry/landfill.

The water cycle, at the quarry.

The layer of coal is pretty impervious to water, so it blocks vertical infiltration of water, which forces the water to the surface as springs.

At the surface, when the water is exposed to oxygen in the atmosphere, dissolved iron precipitates to produce a red mineral that stains the quarry walls.

The iron gets into the water when pyrite crystals (FeS2) in the coal dissolves. While the iron precipitates, the sulfur remains in the water, making it more acidic. Dealing with the acid can be a huge problem in large coal and metal mines.

The pool of water that collects at the base of the quarry, is probably fairly acidic.

Not all the pyrite is dissolved however, and since this particular coal seam has a lot of pyrite, it is not economical to burn since the burnt sulfur (as sulfur dioxide gas) would have to be captured — otherwise it produces acid rain.

The rich black coal seam sits on top of blocky limestone rock. Above the limestone is a red, weathered soil.

The Keeping Room

Impromptu concert. The choir practices in the keeping room.

Although we’re not precisely sure why, the choir was quite the popular choice this year. The students are enthusiastic, and our music teacher, Mr. E., does an awesome job. It’s really nice to run into them practicing in the commons.

In this case they were in the Keeping Room — long, vaulted ceiling, remarkable acoustics. They practiced at one end; people accumulated at the other.

The Benefits of Sarcasm

[Sarcasm] appears to stimulate complex thinking and to attenuate the otherwise negative effects of anger

— Miron-Spektor et al., 2011. Others’ anger makes people work harder not smarter: The effect of observing anger and sarcasm on creative and analytic thinking. in J. Applied Psychology via Smithsonian Magazine.

If there’s anyone for whom sarcasm is a primary language, it’s probably adolescents. It can be used to bully or put down, but, according to Richard Chin (2011), is more often used among friends; a bit like positive aspects of teasing.

Chin has a good article that looks over recent research into how sarcasm works on Smithsonian.com.

Apparently, sarcasm exercises the brain more than regular comments:

… observing anger communicated through sarcasm enhances complex thinking and solving of creative problems”

—Miron-Spektor et al., 2011.

Personal Ceramic Project

I have a neat little tea strainer that sits inside my almost perfect teacup, yet I’m usually at a loss about what to do with it when I take it out of the cup. When the lid is upside down, the strainer can sit nicely into a circular inset that seem perfectly designed for it; however, if I want to use the lid to keep my tea warm — as I am wont to do — I have to move the strainer somewhere else.

One option is to just put the strainer in another cup, but then air can’t circulate around it, and instead of drying, the used tea leaves stay wet and, eventually, turn moldy. A flat saucer would be better, but not perfect.

Of course, I could just empty out the strainer, wash and dry it as soon as I’m done steeping the leaves, but there are a few ancillary considerations with respect to time that make this a sub-optimal solution.

So, since we have a kiln on campus that sees regular use, I thought I’d sit in on the Middle School art class and make my own ceramic tea strainer holder. Since I’ve also been thinking about Philip Stewart’s spiral, and de Chancourtois‘ helictical periodic tables, and been inspired by Bert Geyer’s attempts at making sonnets tangible, it eventually occurred to me that an open helictical form would work fairly well for my purposes.

I’ve cobbled together a design using Inkscape, and layered it onto a cylinder in Sketchup to see what it would look like.

Draft model of a tea strainer holder.

So far the reactions from students has been quite diverse. I have one volunteer who’s wants to help, and I’ve sparked some discussion as to if what I’m doing actually qualifies as art. There is a lot of curiosity though. The middle-schoolers will probably be doing some type of physical representation of the periodic table, so I’m hoping this project gets them to think more broadly about what they might be able to do.