In an anti-voucher PowerPoint presentation he acquired, Oak uncovered given to Oak by a nameless source, the the following incriminating meta-data was noticed:

Created: Tuesday, July 31, 2007 9:08 PM
Modified: Friday, October 12, 2007 10:13 AM
Last saved by: Cache County School District
Revision number: 30
Total editing time: 689 Minutes

Here is the screenshot:

Now it may be that the file was created by someone else, and merely opened and saved by an individual in the Cache County District . However, if it was actually created at a Cache County District computer, and they used 689 minutes of their time to create it, then that is a serious abuse and against state election laws.

Whether or not you agree with or oppose the the voucher laws (HB 148 and HB 174) that have been proposed, we should all oppose this kind of illegal misuse of school resources.

In full disclosure, while they are certainly not perfect, I favor the voucher laws. However, if Pro-Voucher advocates were illegally using school resources to further their cause, I would oppose their actions just as much.

UPDATE: Oak has sent me a copy of the PowerPoint document. When I open it in OpenOffice and look at the document properties, it says that it was created by someone named “Mandy” on July 31, 2007 at 21:08:54 hours. Opening the file properties in Windows also lists the author as “Mandy.” It was last modified by the “Cache County School District” on Oct. 3, 2007 at 07:08:48 hours.

I also have a forwarded copy of the email used to transmit the PowerPoint presentation, which appears to have been sent using official @cache.k12.ut.us email addresses to what appears to be a listserv or email distribution list on the @cache.k12.ut.us.

If anyone wants a copy of the PowerPoint file or the email, let me know in the comments and I will send it to you.

I would spend hours every week sitting down with him to help him understand the math he was expected to be learning for his class. Even with my contribution he really struggled.

The next school year the Alpine School District adopted a new math curriculum called Investigations math based on a Constructivist philosophy of learning. To be fair there are some portions of Educational Contructivism that I agree with, but the applied Contructivism of the Investigations program turned out to be a really terrible way to learn math.

One of the biggest problems with Investigations was that it was nearly impossible for me, as a parent figure trying to help, to ascertain what mathematical concept or algorithm was being taught from the Investigations text and workbook that my young brother-in-law would bring home each night. Many educators know the importance of the contribution of parents in the success of math students. I remember that, as a child, both my mother and father spent many hours helping me understand my math assignments. So I found it preposterous that the district would adopt a curriculum that basically made it impossible for parents to look at the course materials and help their children understand what was being taught and what the home work required of them.

Many local citizens, lead by Oak Norton, protested the new curriculum and, after a few years, were finally able to force a change this past fall. But in the mean time, the math education of many, many students was severely damaged.

In any case, I tell you all of this as a prelude to the following 15 minute video to help you be aware of the differences between the Investigations Math Curriculum and the traditional Algorithmic approach:

Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

Watch the video and make sure you pay close attention to your state and local school curriculum.

Also check out this article by a mathematician currently completing a Ph.D. in mathematics that cites this video with further discussion.

(Bad pun of the day: The video is subtitled “An Inconvenient Truth” so it really is…wait for it…”Algorithmic!”
)

Excerpt:

One of the most amusing things about the movement to force immigrants to speak only English is that we have a much more serious language problem on our hands—and it’s centered in the universities.

There are whole departments where English has been effectively banned and replaced with “Theoretics,” a language designed so that the speaker can make the listener feel stupid without the speaker actually having to be smart.

Read the whole thing.

I dropped out of college after 1999 with only three classes remaining to complete my bachelors degree in English Literature. Life had become much more complicated than it had been before and budgets significantly more involved.

Three years ago I completed one of the classes I need to finish as an online, independent study course offered by the university. Another course can also be completed online, budgets permitting, but the third is not offered by the independent study program. It is available, however, as an open enrollment night class.

So last Tuesday I left work a little early to drive over to the university, as I will continue to do every Tuesday and Thursday until the middle of April, to attend my first college class in five years: Spanish 315 . The university requires a certain degree of study in a foreign language to graduate in English, and despite the fact that I lived in Santiago Chile speaking Spanish for nearly two years, and despite having followed those two years with another two years in the university’s foreign language housing program, speaking both Spanish and Portuguese on a daily basis, and despite having taken Old English, which compared to modern English is practically a foreign language, I have to take Spanish 315 to graduate.

It is an odd feeling attending a class where the majority of my classmates were likely in the first grade when I first started at BYU in 1993.

Night courses for non students like me will cost you your liver and a lung compared to the per-credit price of being an accepted full-time student. They are even more expensive than the online, independent study courses.

Once I complete this semester, however, I only have to finish the one remaining English class via online course, and I will finally graduate. It has been a long 12 years since that first semester in 1993, but I appreciate school more now. If I graduate in August or December of 2006 it will have been 13 years.

This is also a great opportunity to make some observations about the current use of educational technology and educational methodologies at the university in preparation for the extra exciting, super-secret project I have in the works. I’ll tell you more about it when it is closer to ready.