The ABC reveals this morning that top teachers [are] lagging behind in wage stakes. The article reveals that our (so called) top teachers have not had any sort of effective payrise in 20 years. This is ludicrous. But it’s complex.

Teaching is one of the few professions that are treated like a trade. In few other professions does a union collectively bargain for pay and tie that to the number of years of experience. The rest of the professional world is paid by merit. The best programmers are paid the higher salaries, or get to work for the cool companies. One way or another, they’re rewarded for being good at what they do.

But the teaching profession doesn’t do this. Instead a graduate teacher’s salary is looked up on a negotiated union agreement and they’re paid whatever it says. OK, so they’re a graduate, who knows if they’re really any good at actual classroom teaching? But ludicrously, even after teaching for five, 10 or 20 years, salary is still paid according to tables.

This means that rubbish teachers sit around failing to educate our children until they get to retire. And they’re paid just as much as the teacher for whom education is a life-calling, who spends every available hour devising ways to inspire greatness in our children. The only opportunity they get to increase their salary is to become a leading teacher or principal. That’s right: to reward them for doing so well by stopping them doing it.

I’ve heard many ludicrous arguments against performance pay over the years. Here’s my argument against two (one from the linked article).

Different pay rates would affect the collegiality of the teaching profession

I’m sorry teachers, but wake up and smell the coffee. Every other profession does this and it has no impact on collegiality. My junior programmers and senior programmers work together to solve problems. They review each other’s code. They eat lunch together and have no problem ragging on each other — both inside and outside the office.

Paying for performance has no impact on collegiality. The opposite is surely not true. Knowing a rubbish teacher is paid more than you because they’ve been rubbish for five more years is terrible for morale (and thus collegiality)

You can’t pay for performance because every school is different

There seems to be this mindset (and I’ll assume it comes from the same place that the current experience-based pay does) that performance based pay has to be tied to objective testing of some sort. Like there’s some way to test kids that will allow objective comparison of teachers in two different schools (or even two different Key Learning Areas)

Principals, if hired for ability, are certainly capable of determining the best performers and negotiating an appropriate salary. That’s what every other profession does.

* * *

So back to the original astonishing news that top teachers haven’t received a pay increase. Let’s give them a pay increase. But let’s give it to the principals who know who the real top teachers are, rather than just to those who have served the longest or who have managed to avoid the classroom by taking on some other responsibility.

What do you reckon? Can we trust principals to know who the real top teachers are?  Let me know in the comments if you agree or disagree.

Next post I’ll be talking about increasing pay for every teacher, or about the myth of class size, or about touching trees, or about non-auditorium style teaching, or about sacking under-performers.

Over the past 10 years, the music industry has shot itself in the foot by suing its best customers and trying to maintain an outdated model that required physical retail space. The newspaper industry, the book industry, and the movie industry are all having similar growing pains as technology passes them by.

Tonight, I declare that the home video rental industry is dead.

I have a Foxtel IQ — a PVR that lets me schedule and record programs aired on Foxtel’s 100+ channels. On top of that, it has a system called “IQ On Demand” that keeps a library of about 10 movies ready for me to watch at a moments noticed (for a fee of course).

But nothing there interested us much, so we decided to head to Video Ezy in Werribee. We’ve been a member since we moved into town five years ago, and every few months (normally school holidays) we head down and grab a bundle of movies. Tonight we picked five movies — one overnight, two three-nighters, one six-nighter and one weekly — and headed to the counter.

Because we usually use more modern technology than physical media, they told us our membership had to be reactivated. We also had $8.95 outstanding in overdue charges that we were quite willing to pay*. All up, we wanted to give them about $30.
But they decided to shoot themselves in the foot instead.

As our membership had to be reactivated, and because we have a history of paying overdue charges, they wouldn’t let us borrow all the movie we wanted. We could only take a couple today. We asked why: the owner doesn’t want to reactivate too many accounts. So we didn’t ask them to reactivate our account, we came home and will not be returning.

See, there’s one thing I haven’t said about Foxtel IQ: If we had a slightly newer box, we could watch any movie from their library of thousands at any time via an internet connection. Which we will now be doing.

Video Ezy didn’t get our $30. We’re upgrading to modern technology because they pushed us to. They’re not even getting our $8.95 in overdue charges.

If a problem shared is a problem halved, then is experience shared half the experience?

A good question, worthy of some analysis.

Given that an experience is negative or positive, then a single experience has a value of -1 or +1.

Given that the more people that share the problem, the more the nett effect is dissipated, we can assume that:

nett effect = 2 ^ ( experience * ( people - 1 ) )

Which means that a negative experience shared by two people we have:

nett effect = 2 ^ ( -1 * ( 2 - 1 ) ) = 2 ^ ( -1 * 1 ) = 2 ^ -1 = 0.5

In other words, a problem shared is a problem halved.

But for a positive experience:

nett effect = 2 ^ ( 1 * ( 2 - 1 ) ) = 2 ^ ( 1 * 1 ) = 2 ^ 1 = 2

In other words, a thrill shared is a thrill doubled.

So no, an experience shared is not half the experience. An experience (of any nature) shared is 2 to the power of that experience multiplied by the number of other people experiencing it.

Want to know the nett effect of an experience? Here’s a handy calculator:

Neil Pasricha: The 3 A’s of awesome

Ze Frank’s web playroom

Let’s talk parenting taboos: Rufus Griscom + Alisa Volkman

Tony Porter: A call to men

John Hardy: My green school dream

However I’ve had a bad experience.

For a trade to be fair, it has to be fair in both directions. The source producers need to be paid a fair price for the product the produce, but I too need to pay a fair price for the item I’m purchasing. This price is, understandably, normally higher than the price you pay for non-fair-trade items — so that’s not my problem.

My problem comes from the product I take from the supermarket shelf compared to the product I find inside the container. Here’s my problem:

This is the second container of Republica Drinking Chocolate I’ve purchased, and I made sure the batch numbers were different. Both were just over half full. Even accounting for ‘air’ and ‘settling’ during transport, there’s no way you can call that a fair trade. It’s deceptive.

Though to be fair .. it is the best hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted.

Republica: Change your packaging to match what you’re selling
Fairtrade: Change your licence to mandate a fair trade on both ends of the transaction

(I have contacted both companies for comment, and if I get a response, I’ll update this post)

h = √( a² + b² ) or you might know it as a² + b² = c²

I was a bright math student. To brag, in year nine I was one of 18 students in the Geelong region selected to participate in Deakin University’s advanced student program. But I was a pain in the arse to my teachers. I’m sure the phrase “could do better if only he applied himself” was coined specially for me.

One particularly annoying thing I did was insist on knowing how something worked. Or why it worked. I disagreed with teachers when they were wrong (Galileo didn’t prove that a feather and a rock dropped from the third-floor science wing would hit the ground at the same time. If he did, skydivers are all screwed)

Pythagoras Theorum was one of those things I needed to understand. Remembering the formula was a cinch, but I wanted more. And I got more. Here’s what a teacher said when I asked:

It’s called Pythagoras Theory because it’s only a theory. Every triangle that it’s ever been tested on works, so there’s no reason to doubt that it will continue to work on every triangle we ever find. But until there’s a way to prove it, it will always be called a theory. If it’s ever proven, it will be called Pythagoras Rule. (OK that was 20+ years ago, so it’s just a paraphrase)

About five years ago I was reading the book Fermat’s Last Theorum when I discovered to my astonishment that the Pythagorean Theorum had been proven in many many ways for hundreds of years. Just because it was called a “Theorum” didn’t mean it couldn’t be proven.

I went to a number of high-schools, so unless you were in that back row of math-nerds with me, you won’t know where it was. But that doesn’t matter. You can’t change the past, only the future.

Today I discovered the Khan Academy (via Reddit) and now I want you to discover it too. Especially if you’re a teacher who has students that want to know more than you have time to give them. Or who want anwers to questions you’re not really qualified to give.

Here’s just one way to Capital-P-Prove Pythagoras Thorum:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’re  a teacher, get the Kahn Academy site on your school’s whitelist. Then follow my simple plan for teaching regular, slow, and advanced students:

Regular: Here’s the theorum, learn it so you can write the formula from knowing the theorum.
Slow: Here’s the formula, remember it and learn where the [√] and [²] buttons are on your calculator. Write it on you scrap paper before you even look at the test so you don’t need to try to remember it after you’ve started.
Advanced: Here’s the theorum, and here’s a video that proves it works for all right angled triangles.

If you’re a parent and your kids are asking for help (or need help they’re not asking for) then send them to the 1600+ videos that Salman Khan has put together on an amazing range of subjects.

Our banks are businesses. They exist to create a profit for their shareholders. They were deregulated to drive competition and the federal and state governments sold the banks they owned. So we can’t really question their desire to increase profits — even if we’re horrified by how high those profits are.

[Possibly in another post I'll talk about how just four banks won't lead to competition and so allowing them to acquire smaller banks is counter-productive, but not here]

What we must question is that banks are effectively raising the price of a service after it’s been purchased. In no other industry is this legal and it must not be allowed to continue to be legal in the credit industry.

When we take our a mortgage, we understand that interest rates fluctuate. After all, even banks can’t plan for the next 30 years. The maximum fixed term is 10 years.

But the interest rate I pay should remain steady against the RBA rate for the life of the mortgage. Otherwise it’s not just profiteering, it’s a very strange arrangement whereby I’ve agreed to buy something at a given price and then I have to pay more than I agreed, just so the seller earns a higher profit. As I said earlier, in anything other than the credit industry this would be highly illegal.

Banks should be required by law to charge interest that is in line with the RBA rate on the day I sign my mortgage. If the RBA lifts by 0.25%, then mine goes up by 0.25%.

If they want a higher profit, then they increase the difference between the RBA rate and their rate for new purchasers of credit.

What do you think? Should we include credit in the laws that require a business to charge you the price they contracted to sell it for?

Dear Joel and Jeff,

You lauched Server Fault for SysAdmins, but you admit to not knowing that crowd as well as you know the programming crowd. That’s fine. But you need to find someone who does understand that crowd — and preferably already has the credibility you two have with programmers. Then you need to get him (or her) to co-host the podcast.

At the moment, your podcast does you no favours in promoting Server Fault: You constantly show little understanding of such things. The entire argument on hosting your own DNS on the most recent podcast is a perfect example.

I’m sure nobody minds if you don’t know everything, but to gain credibility for Server Fault, it needs a ‘sponsor’ that can join your team — at least on the podcast.

Cheers!
Rick Measham

There’s a push on to ‘return’ to the idylic times where a man would work the farm chatting to his cows while his lovely wife baked a loaf of bread (probably with a dab of flour on her nose) while a pail of milk (direct from the aforementioned cows) stands on the bench beside her.

There’s a push on to do-it-yourself. To be handy around the garden and home. To plant one’s own vegetables and to bake one’s own bread.

But is that really good for the environment? I doubt it (though I haven’t done the research to prove it)

See, if I run my oven for long enough to bake a loaf of bread it would use N units-of-energy. But the oven has just a single loaf in it! It’s big enough for four such loaves, and while it will take more than N units-of-energy to bake four loaves, it wont take as much as 4N units-of-energy.

But at the evil factory down town, you can be absolutely certain that they maximise the number of loaves in each oven to reduce (dollar) cost to the lowest possible value. Reducing dollar cost means saving energy where you can, and that’s good for the environment.

Factories are really good at saving costs. The milk factory that takes the raw milk from all today’s cows pastuerises the milk in enourmous vats, again carefully calibrated to steralise the milk at the lowest possible cost. If every farmer was to do their own pastuerisation, the cost would go up. Not to mention the cost if everyone had their own cow and had to do their own pasteurisation, homogenisation, skimming, churning, curdling and every other process milk goes through before we consume it.

Let’s think back to our idylic couple. Was it really that good? Of course not. The guy out in the fields is using a hand-plough behind a couple of flea-bitten old horses that don’t want to work at all, let alone go in straight lines. He’s blistered and tired. He doesn’t come in at the end of the day all pleased with himeself for his “hard day’s work”. He comes in expecting a meal then goes to bed, just to wake up before dawn the next morning just to do it all over again. Day after day.

She’s in the kitchen making bread with one hand while keeping an eye on the boiling kettle full of clothes and nursing the new baby on the other hand.

So where should our environmental desires be focussed if not at the factories?

I’d suggest the farm. While there’s been incredible change on the farm in the past century and even the past hand-full of decades, there’s still a long way to go. Imagine if we brought the full impact of modern technology to the farm rather than praising it for it’s rustic past.

Let me design just a couple of machines that could be used on every farm. Maybe they exist, but somehow I don’t think they do. Or at least they haven’t been taken up yet by farmers. Their sons or their grandsons will be the ones ready for the next major shift in farming.

First invention is the automatic weeder. Think of it as a Rhoomba for the farm. The “Weeda” hangs above a crop, is powered by solar panels and travels up and down the crop day-and-night doing the weeding: removing weeds increases yeilds. However the device doesn’t spray chemicals onto weeds (though it would have the precision to do so) instead it carefully plucks the sprouting weed before it gets a hold. We have this technology. A camera and pincer would travel up and down, back and forth, scouring the ground for weeds. The camera would know what was a sprouting weed and what was a crop. We have this technology already — we use it to stop terrists at airports and known-to-be-felonius-teenagers at shopping centers. So we’ve removed all the weeds, and done so using the power of the sun.

Next invention could even be mounted on the same boom arm, but it does the totally opposite job. This device finds the crop and waters it. At the moment, we water crops using massive irrigation sprinklers that spray water in unmeasured, uncontrolled relatively random patterns. But why not use our recognition systems to identify plants we do care about and use sensors to determine the exact amount of water each-and-every stalk of wheat needs? We can measure the stalk density to determine if the plant is too dry, and check the ground to see what water the plant has available. Now we stop wasting any water whatsoever. Every drop is used to make sure each individual plant is the healthiest it can be. And we stop watering weeds.

One last thought comes to mind:what if we pluck the weeds and put them in a special hopper. As the sun hits the hopper, it bakes the weeds. We then capture the escaping moisture and feed it back to the plants. (OK, I’ll admit that the cost of this reclamation scheme would probably well outweigh the reclaimed moisture, but we do need to kill those weeds somehow, right?)

That’s my two-and-a-half inventions. Have I sparked any in your head? Do you agree that farm life wasn’t to idylic and that baking bread at home isn’t as environmentally responsible as it feels?

Forgive me reader, for I have sinned. It’s been some time since I last posted to this site.

I haven’t stopped writing, but instead have been trying to ‘seed’ my new site with content. There’s only so many words in my head at any one time! Anyway, it’s now ready to be revealed to the world.

A year and a half ago I was promoted into management at the company I work for. And then I was left to work it out for myself. Thrown in the deep end.

I’m a resourceful kind of guy so I managed to find many resources to help me become the best manager I could. The more I studied the topic, the more I wanted to have my say on it too. I wanted especially to talk about people management (leadership) from the ‘vertical’ slice of Software Development. That’s what I’ve done as a career for many years, and it’s who I’m now leading. So, without further ado, I present http://geek-herding.com

While this blog will continue, I’m going to be restricting it to thinks that aren’t work related as I want to really push Geek Herding.

I’m interested in your feedback, though if you’re not in the software development industry, or interested in leadership and people management, it might be a little bit boring.

On the other hand, if you’re interested in either topic, I’d love it if you:

• Read the articles
• Commented on the articles
• Promoted the articles (if you’re tweeting, please use #geekherding so I find the tweet!)

Even better, I’m going to be looking for Guest Bloggers soon, so have a think if you have anything you might have to say on the topic.