So Much Goodness in the Icy Wind

I have much to be grateful for this week. There is music in the house. Suna and I are both healthy. The kids are supportive, and we have a nice house.

That last bit is important. While running an errand the other day, I saw a homeless man panhandling on a busy corner. When I left the business, I saw the cops arresting him and several of his compatriots ambling away from the scene and trying to look like they didn’t know him.

I thought of that man and his friends this morning when I stepped out to go to work—something else for which to be grateful in this economy. I was supposed to wake up to temperatures in the 50s. Instead, I stepped out into a near-freezing wind. I wondered if that homeless man was warm, if he thought it was better to be in a warm jail cell than looking for food and shelter on a windy street. I won’t get started on the criminalization of poverty. I promise. Still my heart went out to that man I had never met.

So let me talk about an internal locus of control. We can choose our attitude. All we have to do to feel grateful and empowered is to look at those who have less than we do, not those who have more. I have seen people with very little smile and laugh while others worry themselves sick over trying to get another TV.

Then if we actually do something to help our fellow humans, how much better would we feel?

So, most of all, I am grateful for these lessons in humanity and humility.

Winter Concert

Last night, the holiday season began with the McNeil High School Band’s winter concert. Suna went a little early with TubaBoy so that she could catch the last bit of the orchestra’s concert. I took the extra half hour after I got home from work to unwind so that I could enjoy the band.

McNeil Varsity Band

The Varsity Band played two numbers. They sounded really good this year—much better than last year. I’m not sure if that is because the music selection was better suited or because of the number of ringers playing with them. (The guy on mallets for the first number will soon turn 50. That’s younger than Suna and I but a tad oldish for a high school band.) Or maybe they just worked harder this year.

Concert Band

Next came the Concert Band. They also sounded really good, even if the music selection did annoy Beccano. He only got to play two notes on the first selection. Then they played “Ave Maria,” which had no percussion at all. He did get to play quite nicely on the final selection.

Wind Ensemble

The third and last band was the Wind Ensemble, featuring TubaBoy. OK. It didn’t feature him, but he was in it. They play a choir song that the composer had arranged for band. It was awesome. Then the director read a Cajun version of “The Night Before Christmas.” That has been something of a tradition, but he punished the audience last year by being too angry at the antics of a the drum line to read it.

Wind Ensemble wrapped up with “Sleigh Ride,” which we will also be doing in the choir’s Christmas program. Sigh. The band played it really well.

But the strangest part of the night was that all three band directors seemed to have gotten a fresh hair cut for the performance. Being fans of the military style, all three were shorn high and tight. They looked really professional when facing the audience. But when they turned to conduct, the stage lights shown through their hair giving the impression of haloed skulls. It would have been a really cool effect for a Halloween concert. For Yule, it was just a little creepy.

Unfortunately—or maybe fortunately—none of the photos show the skull effect, but you can see more at Facebook.

Good New—I Hope

I got a meeting request from my boss today. Nothing noteworthy about that except that the meeting is in January and my contract is supposed to expire at the end of the year. That’s good news—I hope.

Thank Yous

Suna and I open wedding presents.

Photo by: Beccano

Of course, I have to be grateful today for Suna and the family. They come first, but I’m also grateful for all the friends who came to our wedding last week. And for all the lovely gifts. Thank you to everyone who came. Thank you for all the goodies, especially for the toilet seat we asked for.

I think we finished writing our thank you cards this evening while watching the football game. I know I still have to find a couple of addresses.

Gardening Sadness

White Begonia

We can’t return, we can only look behind

From where we came

And go round and round and round

In the circle game

—Joni Mitchell

Today was a sad day in the garden, the first weekend after the first freeze. I spent a good bit of time trimming frost damage from some of my beautiful plants. Then to make it a perfect storm, this is also the day I had to cut the beautiful wedding flowers into bits for the compost pile.

I love finished compost, but it is always sad to have to put such beautifulness on the pile.

So, I’m posting a picture of one of the begonias to remind me that life is a circle. This white begonia is the only one in a whiskey barrel of red ones.

Some of these begonias became part of the compost pile today, along with the wedding flowers and other stuff from the yard. There they will slowly revert to compost, which will feed other plants and bring beauty back into the world.

Mothers and Hearts

The heart is one of the yang organs

Photo source: Wolf Wikis

On returning to work this morning, I had some astounding news. 

• My former boss missed the wedding because her mother had to have a heart “proceedure” again last week. She is doing better now, and former boss is back at work. 
• Then I found out my current boss was out yesterday and this morning because her mother was having heart problems and her father was too sick to take care of her. We had a nice talk about heart surgery in elderly parents—my mom lived five years after having a quadruple bypass at 75 but never regained her former strength—and I reminded her about the Austin Heart Hospital.

Please send positive energies to these two lovely women and their mothers. I’m sure that if you send positive energy, it will get to the right place and then come back to you reinforced.

Farewells

My nephew Chris made the trek from Bozo’s Port. He and his wife went back early Sunday via my Dad’s.

Photo by: Parker

After the wedding, Suna and I honeymooned at a local hotel, where we had champagne as a midnight snack and for breakfast. Sweetness and Suna’s family joined us for brunch at the hotel. Sweetness went home to her kids from the hotel, and we went home and spent a quiet day catching up on important things like Facebook and family.

Today we said goodbye to the Prince and Suna’s sister. We dropped the Prince off at the airport and went to lunch with SS at the new Kirby Lane. The food is as good as ever, but they have completely ruined the atmosphere. The interior of the new restaurant seems to be designed to amplify the least sound enough to raise the ambient noise level past the threshold of pain. This was at 13:30, and the room was far from full.

We left after a tasty but deafening meal and visited the Amish Furniture store down the sidewalk. Then we took SS back to the house to pick up her rental car and said farewell.

Everyone eventually made it home safely, and our house is returning to its “normal” levels of chaos.

So this week I am grateful to have formed a new family and to feel so welcome in it. I am grateful to everyone who traveled to attend Thanksgiving and the wedding—and to everyone one who just crossed town. I am grateful to everyone—Parker, SS, Elizabeth, and many others—who helped the wedding come of smoothly. And I am grateful to be able to enjoy some relative peace and quiet at home again.

Hitched

Beccano, Me, Suna, and TubaBoy

Photo by: Parker

Suna and I got married in the presence of more than a hundred of our favorite people. Rather than talk about it too much, here are links to various photo collections:

• A collection of pre-wedding photos in a Facebook album
• Jon Montgomery’s pictures collected in one of my Facebook albums
• Suna’s Flickr wedding album
• Some of the photos Rick Hendricks posted on Facebook
• Captain Flatulence’s MSN photo album of the wedding
• Emily’s Facebook album
• John Phelps posted his collection at johnphelps photography (Added 5 December)
• Chemical Pink posted her view of the wedding on Flickr (Added 6 December)
• Rick also posted Michelle’s photos on a Facebook album. (Added 9 December)
• Suna’s friend Janet posted photos on her Picasa album.

Validating Multiple Choice Assessments on the Cheap

A question where the stem gives away the answer is an “antagonistic question.” No idea why. But without some form of internal validation, finding antagonistic questions, leading questions, and questions with more than one correct answer can be difficult to spot. Subject matter experts love their wording, even when it invalidates the question. Numbers never lie.

This post originally appeared on the Central Texas Instructional Design blog on this date.

As I mentioned last time, internal validation is a method of estimating the fairness and effectiveness of questions on a multiple choice assessment with data from the assessment itself. Note that it cannot determine the fairness and effectiveness of the assessment. That requires some form of external validation (Mehrens & Lehmann, 1973). You should not make retention or promotion decisions based solely on an assessment that has only been internally validated, but that assessment may still be of value in stack ranking learners or identifying areas where they can improve.

In this post, I give you a quick and dirty procedure for internal validation that you can perform with nothing more complicated than a PC database and spreadsheet. I used Access and Excel, but any database and spreadsheet would do.

Here’s how I structure the record:

• Student ID*—a value that differentiates individuals but does not necessarily tie to any personally identifiable information
• Assessment ID*—a value that distinguishes between the various assessments used in a curriculum and between versions of the same assessment
• Question ID*—a value that distinguishes between versions of the same question but may allow the question to be used on multiple assessments
Note: The Question ID should link to a separate table of questions that includes the text of the stem, correct answer, and distractors.
• Correct answer— the value of the correct option (may reside in an external table)
• Learner Selection—a value that identifies the option the learner chose

Fields with an asterisk are part of the key. This table links to another table that contained details about the question, including the text of the stem and options.

With this data, you can determine the statistical measurements that the Measurement and Evaluation Center of the University of Texas at Austin (2006) identifies as relevant for internal evaluation:

• Item difficulty—the percentage of learners who got the question correct
• Item discrimination—the relationship between how learners performed on the question and their overall score on the assessment
• Reliability coefficient—the margin of error in the overall score

You also have the information you need to evaluate the distractors, which may be the most useful result of this method. If you can determine why learners answer incorrectly, you can take steps—either in the learning environment or in the workplace—to correct this behavior.

In future posts, I’ll discuss how to calculate and interpret each of these measurements.

References

• Measurement and Evaluation Center (2006). Analyzing Multiple-choice Item Responses. Austin, Texas: The University of Texas. Retrieved November 16, 2008.
• Mehrens, W.A. & Lehmann, I.J. (1973). Measurement and valuation in Education and Psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

 

Thanksgiving

Suna and I enjoy a glass of wine before Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends. More photos are on Facebook.

Photo by: Mystery Photog

We had a full house for Thanksgiving. Suna’s sister flew in yesterday, and her father arrived this morning. TubaBoy drove Suna and Beccano to the airport to greet him. I stayed home to finish a couple couple of cleaning projects and a few odds and ends around the house.

Suna’s friend arrived with her daughter, Cakegirl, and Cakegirl’s significant other. They brought a delicious duck dish and duck stuffing, in addition to working on the wedding cake some more. I say significant other because, although they are planning to get married on 10/10/10 (they didn’t say what time), they came very close to being common law married. In Texas, that’s scarily easy.

Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful, and the company was enjoyable.

I delayed Grateful Monday until today because what better time to be grateful than on Thanksgiving. Today I am grateful for family and good friends.