Welcome to 2009. Today is the first day of the year and the first day for the Big Ten to earn or lose more respectability. Here are my predictions for today's match ups.
Iowa vs South Carolina: Iowa is a hot team, with most recently beating Penn State to keep them out of the National Championship game. The "old ball coach" hasn't quite made USC into Florida yet and Iowa wins this one. Iowa 23 SC 14
Georgia vs Michigan State: Georgia was ranked as the #1 team in the country starting the year in August. They had some injuries and some poor losses. Michigan State had a nice comeback year but they have played three quality football teams this year and they lost them all and got blown out by Ohio State and Penn State. Sorry Sparty, you don't match up well in this one. Good news is Matthew Stafford will be coming to Detroit as the Lions #1 draft pick, so enjoy this game as you scout Stafford for the Liedowns. Georgia 38 MSU 13
Penn State vs USC: I think this game maybe a little closer them some people think. The bottom line is that this USC defense gives up 8 points a game and the best defensive in the country. Penn State blew out Oregon State and USC lost to Oregon State. The key to this game is the Penn State's defensive, they have to create turnovers and play mistake free if they are going to win or even keep this close. Closer then many think. Penn State: 14 USC 21
I think the Big Ten will go 1-2 today with only Ohio State left to go on Monday. Happy New Year and enjoy what used to be the best football day of the year.
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As the U.S. goes through a cultural transformation to effectively compete in a global economy, the education of present and future workers must be improved.
One way to look at the basis of educational improvement is to determine the quality of teachers. An article titled, "Most Likely to Succeed," in THE NEW YORKER on December 15, 2008 by Malcolm Gladwell compares the selection of college football players for drafting into the professional National Football League (NFL) with the selection of teachers within the school system.
A college football quarterback joining the NFL has to learn to play an entirely new and different game. For example, Tim Couch, the quarterback taken first in the player draft of 1999, set every record imaginable in his years at the University of Kentucky. Professional football scouts used to put five garbage cans on the field and Couch would stand there and throw--dropping the ball into every one. But Couch was a flop in the pros.
All quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to take an I.Q. test--the Wonderlic Personnel Test. The theory behind the test is that the pro game is so much more cognitively demanding than the college game that high intelligence should be a good predictor of success. But when David Berri and Rob Simmons analyzed the scores they found that Wonderlic scores are all but useless as predictors. Of the five quarterbacks taken in round one of the 1999 draft, Donovan McNabb, the only one of the five with a shot at the Hall of Fame, had the lowest Wonderlic score. And who else had I.Q. scores in the same range as McNabb? Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, two of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game.
A group of researchers have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master's degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every school district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.
What really is significant is not how a teacher stops the deviancy at the end of the chain of student classroom misbehavior but whether she is able to stop the chain before it begins. This teacher "withitness" (a teacher's communicating to the children by her actual behavior) allows her to know what the children are doing, and has the proverbial "eyes in the back of her head." It stands to reason that to be a great teacher, you have to have withitness.
In teaching, the implications are profound. They suggest we shouldn't be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree---and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.
Education needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. That means tenure can't be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and half's material in one year, we're going to have to pay them a lot---both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive and prosper a healthy reward.
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