Time for a Reboot

Americans are ambivalent about testing, standards, and accountability in their children’s schools. This is clear from survey results that swing wildly depending on how, exactly, the question is phrased—and on whether the practice in question might inconvenience one’s own kid, as apart from fixing those awful schools across town.

The public shows far greater tolerance for tests whose scores may yield things we crave—admission to the college of one’s choice, for example (SAT, ACT), even advance credit for college work (AP)—than for the kind whose foremost purpose is to rank schools or teachers and give distant officials data by which to fine-tune their policies. Indeed, when it comes to statewide standardized testing of the sort that’s become universal in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era, a great many parents—and a huge fraction of teachers—appear to have had enough. They grump, with some justice, that

• Too much school time is given over to test prep—and the pressure to lift scores leads to cheating and other unsavory practices.
• Subjects and accomplishments that aren’t tested—art, creativity, leadership, independent thinking, etc.—are getting squeezed if not discarded.
• Teachers are losing their freedom to practice their craft, to make classes interesting and stimulating, to act like professionals.
• The curricular homogenizing that generally follows from standardized tests and state (or national) standards represents an undesirable usurpation of school autonomy, teacher freedom, and local control by distant authorities.
• Judging teachers and schools by pupil test scores is inaccurate and unfair, given the kids’ different starting points and home circumstances, the variation in class sizes and school resources, and the many other services that schools and teachers are now expected to provide their students.

The political fracas brought on by Common Core standards has certainly exacerbated all of the above.

Although decent responses exist for every one of these concerns, as do sundry ways of curbing their excesses, it’s probably time for education reformers and policymakers to admit that just pushing harder on test-driven accountability as the primary tool for changing our creaky old public-school system is apt to yield more backlash than accomplishment. In any case, the NCLB-era strategies—centered on setting standards, administering assessments, and holding everybody “accountable” for the results on those tests—have yielded only modest gains, especially in the high-school years.

That’s not to say testing should cease. It’s still essential to know how kids and schools (and districts and states) are doing at the requisite skills and knowledge of the core curriculum, to inform families making school choices, and to enable educators to fine-tune their own work. The end-of-year results, in particular, make possible all manner of diagnoses, ratings, gain calculations, and interventions at every level of the system, and we’d be crazy to do away with such hard-won information. Yet testing is not a sufficient engine to drive the next generation of education reforms.

So what might be?

The wrong answer is to give up (or declare victory) and settle for the status quo. Far too many kids are still dropping out, far too few are entering college and the work force with the requisite skills, and far too many other countries are chowing down on our lunch.

Major-league education change is still needed, maybe now more than ever, and it’s no time for either complacency or despair.

Alongside transparency-oriented testing based on rigorous standards for the curricular core, here are four drivers of tomorrow’s reforms that are already nudging in promising directions and have the potential to push much harder:

1. Individualization. Without going crazy—everybody still needs to learn to multiply, to compose a grammatical sentence, to explain the background of the Civil War—education is ripe to shift from batch-processing to customizing kids’ instructional experience, moving from pre-set menus to some version of “grazing.” Not just with regard to what is learned or when, but also the mode of instruction—and the rate at which a youngster moves through school.

2. Technology hugely simplifies individualization. Over time, it will also save money, and some of those savings can be redeployed toward hiring better—but fewer—flesh-and-blood teachers. Completely “virtual” out-of-school education will have limited appeal—eight-year-olds still need an adult nearby, plus other kids—but there’s vast potential in “blended” learning under the school roof. And older kids can carry these options beyond the classroom.

3. Quality choices. Choice among schools is a fine thing, and the U.S. has made major strides in widening access for millions of kids via vouchers, charters, tax credits, savings accounts, and more. But some youngsters still have few options—and too many of the available options are mediocre. This part of the reform agenda needs more work, as does widening the marketplace to include choices among courses, delivery systems, even teachers.

4. Attaching the money to the child. All of the foregoing strategies will stumble so long as education dollars flow to schools and districts through multiple program channels that have little to do with which students attend which schools, that fund traditional district schools far more generously than “schools of choice,” and that cannot be counted upon to move if the child changes schools, courses, speed, or delivery system. Solidly placing all the money in the child’s backpack, varying the amount according to her circumstances, giving families substantial say over what schools (or other vendors) will receive it, then empowering the school to spend it however does that child the most good—this may turn out to be the most liberating reform of all.

Each of these strategies will face opposition from the education establishment and will be disruptive of hoary structures and timeworn policies. But if the available alternatives are status quo on one hand and just doubling down on testing on the other, it’s surely worth giving them a chance.

Education reform is dead. Long live education reform.

Finding Time

the four horsemen OF MY APOCALYPSE are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our lives and expand our horizons.

I’m listening to a man on the radio describe how great it is that there are websites where musicians who have never met or conversed or had any contact at all can lay down tracks together to make songs. While the experiment sounds interesting, the assumption sounds scary — that the complex personal, creative, and cultural collaborations of music-making could be unnecessary and you just need the digital conjunction of some skill sets. The speaker seems to believe that the sole goal is the production of songs, sundered from the production of social ties and social pleasure. But music has always been an occasion for people to get together — in rehearsals, nightclubs, parties, festivals, park band-shells, parades, and other social spaces. It is often the soundtrack to bodies in conjunction, whether marching or making love.

Ensemble music made in solitude is a very different thing; as a norm it signifies a loss. The loss is subtle and hard to describe, especially compared to the wonders of what can be uploaded, downloaded, and Googled, and the convenience and safety of never leaving your house or never meeting a stranger. The radio rave comes a few days after I talk to a book editor who’s trying to articulate what goes missing when you go to Amazon.com for books: the absence of the opportunities for browsing, for finding what you don’t know you’re looking for or can’t describe in a key-word search. A digital storefront can lead you to your goal if you know exactly how to spell it, but it shows you next to nothing on the way; it prevents your world from getting significantly or surprisingly larger. The virtual version rips out the heart of the thing, shrink-wraps it, sticks a barcode on, and throws the rest away. This horseman is called Efficiency. He is followed by the horseman called Profitability. Along with Convenience, they trample underfoot the subtle encounters that suffuse a life with meaning.

The problem is partly one of language. The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures. It weighs the obvious against what in its terms are incomprehensible. When I drive from here to there, speed, privacy, control, and safety are easy to claim. When I walk, what happens is more vague, more ambiguous — and in many circumstances much richer. I am out in the world. It’s exercise, though not so quantifiably as on a treadmill in a gym with a digital readout. It’s myriad little epiphanies and encounters that knit me more tightly into my place and maybe enhance the place overall. The carbon emissions are essentially nil. Many more benefits are more subjective, more ethereal — and more wordy. You can’t describe them in a few familiar phrases; and if you’re not practiced at describing them, you may not be able to articulate them at all. It is difficult to value what cannot be named. Since someone makes money every time you buy a car or fill it up, there’s a whole commercial language built around getting us to drive; there’s little or no language promoting the free act of walking. Have you not driven a Ford lately?

Even the idea of security illustrates the constant conflict between the familiar and the intricate. When I drive, I have a large steel and glass carapace wrapped around me and my contact with other human beings is largely limited to colliding with their large metal carapaces at various speeds or their unbuffered bodies in crosswalks. Fifty thousand or so people a year are killed by cars in this country, but its citizens officially believe that safety lies in the lack of contact that cars offer. Walkers make a place safer for the whole community — what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street” — and in turn become more street-smart themselves. Too, safety is a reductive term for what being at home in the world or the neighborhood can provide. This is a more nebulous kind of security, but a deeper and broader one. It is marked by expansiveness, not defensiveness.

Walking versus driving is an easy setup, but the same problem applies to most of the technological changes we embrace and many of the material and spatial ones. The gains are simple and we know the adjectives: convenient, efficient, safe, fast, predictable, productive. All good things for a machine, but lost in the list is the language to argue that we are not machines and our lives include all sorts of subtleties — epiphanies, alliances, associations, meanings, purposes, pleasures — that engineers cannot design, factories cannot build, computers cannot measure, and marketers will not sell. What we cannot describe vanishes into the ether, and so what begins as a problem of language ends as one of the broadest tragedies of our lives.

This is most manifest in the life of the suburban commuter who weekly spends a dozen or more hours on the road between the putative dream house and the workplace, caught in the gridlock of tens of thousands likewise trying to move from the residential-warehousing periphery to the economically productive inner rings. Space is quantifiable and we are constantly taught to covet it (though leisure is advertised too — mostly as vacation packages). You can own those two thousand square feet including two-car garage, and it is literally real, the real in real estate. But to have this space you give up time, the time that you might be spending with the kids who are housed in the image of domestic tranquility but not actually particularly well nurtured by their absentee parents, or time spent immersed in community life or making things with your own hands or doing nothing at all — a lost art.

You give up time, and you often give up the far more than two thousand square feet that you don’t own but get to enjoy when you live in, say, a rented apartment in a neighborhood full of amenities nobody advertised to you, because you don’t have to buy the public pool or playground that your kids don’t need to be driven to. The language of real-estate ownership is loud, clear, and drilled into us daily; the language of public life and leisure time is rarer and more complex.

People elsewhere are better at this language. At a certain fork in the road of automatization, Europeans chose to have more time, and they work far less than we do and get much longer vacations. We chose to have more stuff, the stuff sold to us through those beckoning adjectives — bigger, better, faster: Jet Skis, extra cars, second homes, motor homes, towering slab TVs, if not the time to enjoy them or to enjoy less commodified pleasures. These may be the wages of inarticulateness.

The conundrum is that the language to describe the ineffable splendors and possibilities of our lives takes time to master, takes a certain unhurried engagement with the tasks of description, assessment, critique, and conversation; that to speak this slow language you must slow down, and to slow down you must have some inkling of what you will gain by doing so. It’s not an elite language; nomadic and remote tribal peoples are now quite good at picking and choosing from development’s cascade of new toys, and so are some of the cash-poor, culture-rich people in places like Louisiana. Poetry is good training in speaking it, and skepticism is helpful in rejecting the four horsemen of this apocalypse, but they both require a mind that likes to roam around and the time in which to do it.

Ultimately, I believe that slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for, the things that don’t get measured and can’t be bought.

Tips for Better Time Management

Are you usually punctual or late? Do you finish things within the time you stipulate? Do you hand in your reports/work on time? Are you able to accomplish what you want to do before deadlines? Are you a good time manager?

If your answer is “no” to any of the questions above, that means you’re not managing your time as well as you want. Here are 20 tips on how to be a better time manager:

1. Create a daily plan. Plan your day before it unfolds. Do it in the morning or even better, the night before you sleep. The plan gives you a good overview of how the day will pan out. That way, you don’t get caught off guard. Your job for the day is to stick to the plan as best as possible.
2. Peg a time limit to each task. Be clear that you need to finish X task by 10am, Y task by 3pm, and Z item by 5:30pm. This prevents your work from dragging on and eating into time reserved for other activities.
3. Use a calendar. Having a calendar is the most fundamental step to managing your daily activities. If you use outlook or lotus notes, calendar come as part of your mailing software. Google Calendar is great – I use it. It’s even better if you can sync it to your mobile phone and other hardwares you use – that way, you can access your schedule no matter where you are.
4. Use an organizer. The organizer helps you to be on top of everything in your life. It’s your central tool to organize information, to-do lists, projects, and other miscellaneous items.
5. Know your deadlines. When do you need to finish your tasks? Mark the deadlines out clearly in your calendar and organizer so you know when you need to finish them.
6. Learn to say “No”. Don’t take on more than you can handle. For the distractions that come in when you’re doing other things, give a firm no. Or defer it to a later period.
7. Target to be early. When you target to be on time, you’ll either be on time or late. Most of the times you’ll be late. However, if you target to be early, you’ll most likely be on time. For appointments, strive to be early. For your deadlines, submit them earlier than required.
8. Time box your activities. This means restricting your work to X amount of time. Read more about time boxing: #5 of 13 Strategies To Jumpstart Your Productivity.
9. Have a clock visibly placed before you. Sometimes we are so engrossed in our work that we lose track of time. Having a huge clock in front of you will keep you aware of the time at the moment.
10. Set reminders 15 minutes before. Most calendars have a reminder function. If you’ve an important meeting to attend, set that alarm 15 minutes before.
11. Focus. Are you multi-tasking so much that you’re just not getting anything done? If so, focus on just one key task at one time. Close off all the applications you aren’t using. Close off the tabs in your browser that are taking away your attention. Focus solely on what you’re doing. You’ll be more efficient that way.
12. Block out distractions. What’s distracting you in your work? Instant messages? Phone ringing? Text messages popping in? I hardly ever use chat nowadays. The only times when I log on is when I’m not intending to do any work. Otherwise it gets very distracting. When I’m doing important work, I also switch off my phone. Calls during this time are recorded and I contact them afterward if it’s something important. This helps me concentrate better.
13. Track your time spent. Egg Timer is a simple online countdown timer. You key in the amount of time you want it to track (example: “30 minutes”, “1 hour”) and it’ll count down in the background. When the time is up,the timer will beep. Great way to be aware of your time spent.
14. Don’t fuss about unimportant details You’re never get everything done in exactly the way you want. Trying to do so is being ineffective. Read more: Why Being A Perfectionist May Not Be So Perfect.
15. Prioritize. Since you can’t do everything, learn to prioritize the important and let go of the rest. Apply the 80/20 principle which is a key principle in prioritization. Read more about 80/20 in #6 of 13 Strategies To Jumpstart Your Productivity.
16. Delegate. If there are things that can be better done by others or things that are not so important, consider delegating. This takes a load off and you can focus on the important tasks.
17. Batch similar tasks together. For related work, batch them together. For example, my work can be categorized into these core groups: (1) writing (articles, my upcoming book) (2) coaching (3) workshop development (4) business development (5) administrative. I batch all the related tasks together so there’s synergy. If I need to make calls, I allocate a time slot to make all my calls. It really streamlines the process.
18. Eliminate your time wasters. What takes your time away your work? Facebook? Twitter? Email checking? Stop checking them so often. One thing you can do is make it hard to check them – remove them from your browser quick links / bookmarks and stuff them in a hard to access bookmarks folder. Replace your browser bookmarks with important work-related sites. While you’ll still check FB/Twitter no doubt, you’ll find it’s a lower frequency than before.
19. Cut off when you need to. #1 reason why things overrun is because you don’t cut off when you have to. Don’t be afraid to intercept in meetings or draw a line to cut-off. Otherwise, there’s never going to be an end and you’ll just eat into the time for later.
20. Leave buffer time in-between. Don’t pack everything closely together. Leave a 5-10 minute buffer time in between each tasks. This helps you wrap up the previous task and start off on the next one.

Equation of Time

The Winter Solstice usually occurs around December 21 in the Northern Hemisphere and June 21 in the Southern Hemisphere. Many believe that the year’s latest sunrise and earliest sunset also happen on this day. This is not the case.

Apparent solar time is also called sundial time.

©bigtockphoto.com/lavoview

If you look at the sunrise and sunset timings for any city in the Northern Hemisphere around the December Solstice, you will notice that the earliest sunset occurs a few days before the Solstice. Similarly, the latest sunrise happens a few days after the solstice.

This is also true for locations in Southern Hemisphere. The year's earliest sunset in the Southern Hemisphere happens a few days before the Winter Solstice in June, and the year's latest sunrise occurs a few days after the Solstice.

An example

Let’s take the cases of New York City, United States and Sydney, Australia.

New York City is located at 40°43' North latitude. In 2012, the Northern Hemisphere Winter Solstice occurred on December 21, 2012. The same year, New York City experienced its earliest sunset on December 6, 2012 and the latest sunrise on January 10, 2013.

Sydney, Australia which is in the Southern Hemisphere and is located at 33° 8' South, experienced its latest sunrise of 2013 on July 6, and the earliest sunset on June 5, 2013. The Winter Solstice for the Southern Hemisphere occurred on June 21, 2013.

What explains this curious occurance? Why doesn't the shortest day of the year also have the latest sunrise and the earliest sunset of the year?

Two different factors combine to cause this interesting phenomenon:

• the equation of time
• a location's latitude.

The Equation of Time

Very simply, the equation of time is the difference between time that is measured using a sundial (true or apparent solar time) and time that is measured using a watch or a clock (mean solar time).

Most clocks work on the idea that a day - the time between one noon to the next - is exactly 24 hours.

Scientifically, however, a day is defined as the duration between 2 solar noons. A solar noon is the time of the day when the Sun is at the highest point in the sky, and a solar day is the duration between two solar noons.

A solar day is not exactly 24 hours long. Its length varies throughout the year. In fact, the solar day is longer than 24 hours around the summer and winter solstices and is shorter than 24 hours around the spring and fall (autumn) equinox. This means that the length of the solar day does not always match up to the length of a day as measured by a clock. This is because of two reasons:

• Elliptical shape of Earth's path around the Sun

  The shape of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun is closer to an oval than a perfect circle. The technical term for its shape is an ellipse. The Sun is not situated in the center of this elliptical orbit, but closer to one side than the other. Because of this, the Earth comes closer to the Sun(the Perihelion) during one part of its orbit than the other (the Aphelion).
  When do the Earth's Perihelion and Aphelion occur?
  The speed at which the Earth moves around the Sun varies throughout the year. When it is closest to the Sun, the Earth travels about 13,500 miles (21,726 kms) more each day than when it is away from the Sun on its orbit.

• The Earth's axial tilt

  In addition to moving around the Sun, the Earth also rotates on its own axis. The axis is an imaginary line that passes through the North and the South pole. It is tilted to about 23.5° in relation to the Earth's orbital plane around the Sun (the ecliptic). This tilt is known as the Earth'sobliquity, and is responsible for seasons.
  Does the orbital position of the Earth around the Sun affect seasons at home?

The combination of these two forces leads to changing lengths of solar day during the year. This means that on most days the solar noon will not occur at the same time as noon on your watch. The equation of time or the difference between apparent solar time and mean solar time is about +14 minutes in February and around -16 minutes in October.

Equation of time is often pictorially represented by a figure 8, also known as the Analemma.

Location's Latitude

The dates for the earliest sunset and latest sunrise for a location also depend on its latitude. Locations closer to the equator have their earliest sunset sometime in November. Locations at higher latitudes, on the other hand have their earliest sunset later, closer to the actual date of the winter solstice.

What are latitutes and longitudes?

This occurs because of the Sun’s declination. The Sun's declination is the angle at which the rays of the Sun hit the plane of Earth’s Equator.

Because the Earth’s rotation axis with respect to the Sun is tilted to about 23.5°, the Sun’s declination varies through the year. During the summer solstice it is +23.5° and during the winter solstice it is -23.5°. It is 0° during the equinoxes.

During the equinoxes, when the Sun’s declination is 0°, most locations on Earth, with the exception of locations on and around the North and the South Pole, experience around 12 hours of sunlight. On the other hand, when the solar declination is +23.5°, all locations in the Northern Hemisphere experience over 12 hours of daylight, while the Southern Hemisphere experiences less than 12 hours of daylight. This effect reverses when the sun’s declination is -23.5°.

This varying lengths of daylight through the year due to the declination of the Sun also affect the timings of sunsets and sunrises.

Is Time an Illusion?

As you read this sentence, you probably think that this moment—right now—is what is happening. The present moment feels special. It is real. However much you may remember the past or anticipate the future, you live in the present. Of course, the moment during which you read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is. In other words, it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present is constantly updating itself. We have a deep intuition that the future is open until it becomes present and that the past is fixed. As time flows, this structure of fixed past, immediate present and open future gets carried forward in time. This structure is built into our language, thought and behavior. How we live our lives hangs on it.

Yet as natural as this way of thinking is, you will not find it reflected in science. The equations of physics do not tell us which events are occurring right now—they are like a map without the “you are here” symbol. The present moment does not exist in them, and therefore neither does the flow of time. Additionally, Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity suggest not only that there is no single special present but also that all moments are equally real [see “That Mysterious Flow,” by Paul Davies; Scientific American, September 2002]. Fundamentally, the future is no more open than the past.