Sheep Guarding Llama

Nothing exciting, just cleaning the house and trying to get ahead on all of the work that I need to do before dad gets down to Texas.  We got a ton of cleaning done today, the house is looking pretty good.  It is the cleanest that we have had it since before the holidays.

Today is the final weekend before dad comes on Tuesday so this weekend is our major cleaning weekend.  I have quite a bit of work that I need to get done so that I have time to visit once dad is here.  I worked quite a bit and we cleaned like crazy.  So much to do.  We did heavy duty cleaning, like getting lots of things boxed, organized, moved to the garage, etc.

This afternoon we went to Denny’s for dinner as we often do on Saturdays now.  Luciana loves Denny’s ranch dressing and gets all excited if we mention going there.

The house is looking good but there is a lot more to do.

In Scientific American I saw an article about how Students with Autism Gravitate Towards STEM Majors.  That anyone needed to do a study to determine this seems surprising but, as always, you can’t publish something based on common knowledge or common sense, you always have to get a grant and do a study because that’s how journals work.  Nevertheless, the information in the article is important.  American needs more STEM-focused students going from childhood to the workforce.  We are lagging horribly against the global economy in those areas that most drive the welfare of our nation.  This we have known for a long time yet schools continue to push an anti-STEM agenda and attitude driving students away from STEM.  (To be fare, education itself is not a STEM field so there is a nature anti-STEM bias in any system where the non-STEM portion of the population is in charge of providing the drive towards one type of career path or another.)

The article makes the conclusion that schools, primarily high schools, need to do something to encourage students with autism spectrum disorders, who are already taking an interest in STEM at a higher rate than normal but who attend university at a lower than normal rate for the population, to go on to attend university – to leverage their already existing leaning towards STEM studies.  This is not a crazy conclusion, but it is one that screams “thinking inside of the box” – exactly what we want more autistic students to provide an alternative to.  Traditional thinking is, if you have kids and you need more people in the economy, pump them through university.  But ask those students in question and you’ll get very different answers to what the data is telling us.

There are two main conclusions that I would draw that are wildly divergent from what the article concludes.

The first answer is that making high schools push students towards university is pointless as it is the university system, not the high school, that is broken.  Autistic students rarely enjoy school in the way that other students do.  They don’t tend to like the focus on sports and other “less costly than academics” activities used to divert attention from the education process.  Universities often extend this to new levels.  Often they find high school to be lacking in challenge to the point of struggling with boredom.  Even those that manage to find challenges in high school are often faced with rigid educational policies and structures that encourage good educational practices for more “mainline” students but undermine the average autistic student’s ability to learn effectively.  University only carries on these problems and high school students are conditioned to see university studies as nothing but a waste of time as they will continue with their boredom and poor educational policies.  There are universities offering alternatives to the traditional education models but they are few and far between and difficult for high school students to effectively identify.

The second answer is that university should not be needed at all.  STEM fields especially lend themselves to self education and in today’s world of unlimited available information the university system is no longer an ivory tower of knowledge but, in fact, often stands as a quagmire of busy work holding back students who can, and would, self educate at a vastly more rapid pace.  STEM exposes severe shortcomings in the university education system now that even an average student can acquire all of the necessary educational resources, including lab facilities, to match a university education at home for a tiny fraction of the cost and self educate far past the level of the average professor in a span of time far shorter than an average university curriculum.  What needs to be fixed, then, is America’s hiring practices.  Some STEM fields, like IT, already far reward those who skip university over those who follow traditional, slow education paths and recognize the important in self education in fields that require life-long learning.  But other, less demanding STEM fields like engineering, chemistry, etc. are still relying heavily on the “path of lease resistance” university programs that have been in place for centuries.  Fixing these hiring processes, rather than fixing students, to hire the most skilled, more educated and most likely to succeed rather than the easiest to pick via handy HR-enabled metrics will revolutionize American industry both by raising the talent pool considerably and also by allow those best suited for many jobs to not only be recognized but by keeping them from never entering the field.

Encouraging students to pursue STEM studies is fine and this will have positive impact.  But when dealing with autistic students perhaps it would be better to leverage the “outside of the box” thinking that they provide to solve the problem that they are presenting to the educational system.  If we feel that America’s wealth of autistic students are the salvation of the economy why would we trust the approaches that have failed in the past and are least suited to this popular segment?  It’s time to reevaluate how our education and hiring mechanisms are designed and stop using the economy in general as a reverse justification engine to prop up a failed educational infrastructure.  If you want the autistic student segment to take the programs seriously you must move from the irrational to the rational.

January flew by and I barely even realized that it is 2013.  You know that you are getting old when Windows Server 2003 is a full decade old and I still generally feel like it is a “newish” product.

I had to be up super early this morning, five thirty, so that I could get into the office to cover the non-farm payroll announcement.  First Friday of every month.  Hard to believe how many years I’ve been doing that.  The market announcement went smoothly this morning, not quite as good as expected but quite good overall and nearly expectation so the market actually reacted very positively today and after good European market action last night we actually saw one of the highest ever days for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  Today was one of only fifteen days ever in history that the market topped 14,000 points and one of even fewer that was able to end the day above 14,000.   Either an excellent sign of recovery or we are ready for another crash.  Only time will tell. Reading the stock market graphs of the century shed little light on the long term economic situation as there appears to be a new trend of heavy market swings since the advent of auto-trading (computers doing the trading instead of people) twenty years ago – the market of the last two decades is nothing like the market of the previous, well, forever.

This afternoon I went to get coffee with George Crump of Storage Switzerland.  We had a nice time talking about storage and the Spiceworks community.

I got another article written and submitted today.  It’s been a very busy week.

This afternoon Luciana asked Dominica “Where’s daddy?”  Dominica said: “He’s at work.”  And Luciana did her trademark “Oh…” and then she started to cry.  She has really started wanting to spend a lot of time with me in the last month or two.

I got stuck doing deployments until pretty late.  I had thought that I was going to escape at a really good time but every time that I thought that I was about to stand up and leave someone would come to me with a new request and staggered them just enough that I could never make it away.

Dominica decided that she really wanted pecan encrusted trout for dinner so went me to Rockfish in Las Colinas to pick it up.  So it was well after seven when I finally got home.  Barely time to put on Are You Being Served? and then to get the kids to bed after eating our Rockfish dinner (I had the grilled salmon salad.)

Liesl was good today and got four stories instead of three.  She loves this new policy.  And she is loving all of her new books.  Dominica has been getting her a number of classic books that deal with behaviour.  Some of them are quite good.  One was first published in 1900 and the vocabulary that they expect for a four year old is insane.  The average college graduate would struggle with it.  One phrase in it is “didactic chaff!”

At nine thirty Watson swung by and picked me up and we went out for food and drinks at Redneck.  Haven’t been there in two weeks, I have been so incredibly busy with work and the kids.

I got up with Dominica this morning, that is at a quarter till six in the morning.  I figured that if I got up with her that I could actually get some work done in the quiet before the girls got up.  And I had an easy conference call scheduled every Thursday not at eight thirty in the morning which is hard to make if I am not up and caught up before it happens.  I have to be showered, dressed and all ready to go when it starts so that all that I have to do is get out the door with the kids once it is done.

I did my call and got the girls dressed and out the door before nine thirty.  I was pretty impressed with myself.  That is really hard to do.  I drove them up to Corinth and dropped them off at a quarter till ten and then rushed right down to the office.

Dominica worked until almost noon today and then did some quick shopping and picked up the girls.

Our new 103″ projection screen for the living room arrived today.  Dad is going to make an attempt at figure out how to install it while he is down next week.  Just five days until he arrived.  The girls are very excited.  Luciana called her grandpa tonight for the first time (had me dial, of course) and managed to say a few words to him.  She was very happy to carry around the phone and listen to him.

I had to work some tonight so spent much of the night in the office.  The girls cycled in and out to hang out with me.  Luciana brought in her iPad, blanket, lambie and the stuffed monkey that she stole from me (a Linux Mono monkey from long ago that she just loves that we had found in a bin, she sleeps with it now) and made a comfy spot on Liesl’s little pink arm chair right at the side of my desk and spent a long time doing her own thing right next to me.  It was very sweet.

We got both girls off to bed at a good time.  Liesl is super excited that she has a new rewards chart that gives her gold stars for good behaviour around the house each day.  If she does well each day she gets an extra story at bed time and if she does well enough all week she gets one dollar to spend with the parent of her choice taking her shopping at the dollar store.  She thinks that that is very cool and she did well today and got four stories at bed time.

Dominica and I watched about one episode of Are You Being Served? and were off to bed ourselves.  I have to be up very early tomorrow morning as it is non-farm payroll day so I need to be up around five thirty.