Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

In his 2022 book, The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale , economist John List, the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago , defines the Sunk Cost Fallacy as the idea that one must continue to pursue an idea based on money previously invested. The basic idea is that the money previously spent is already gone and no longer recoverable. As humans we have a tendency to feel like that money is wasted if we decide to abandon the effort we spent that money on, even after the project appears doomed for failure. Too often, people continue to pour good money into a failing effort, because they don't want to waste the bad money they've already dumped into it. Teachers are prone to this same fallacy. The year was 2019. I sat for the ACT for the first time since I was a junior in high school, way back in 1984. Thirty five years had passed since the one and only time I'd ever actually SEEN the test. Ov...

 From a letter to Abigail, 1775. "It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."  Education matters!

 The Land of Opportunity. That's what I always considered our country. I was taught that I could be anything I wanted if I was willing to work hard enough. I've made a good living as a blue collar worker--driving a truck and as a chicken farmer. I've also made decent as a teacher in the white collar world.  As a kid, I never really saw myself going to college. I never thought I'd need it, that I could do whatever I wanted without spending the time and money for school. I went for a year right after high school because a lot of people expected me to, but I only lasted a year. I didn't flunk out, but I spent all my money and as a student I was less-than-stellar enough to lose my tuition scholarship.  So I went back to what I knew best, hard work. And I was good at it. After 17 years bouncing around from the Marine Corps to driving a truck to raising chickens and cattle, God made clear to me that He was calling me to teach. I tried to convince Him He was wrong, but fai...

  Students going into 8th through 12th grades will soon be choosing which classes to take next year. Many of these students have no idea what they will do when they get out of school. Some who think they know will change their minds at least once before they graduate. Many of these students are also being told by friends, family, and maybe even some educators, to take the easy way, not to push themselves, not to challenge themselves. Here's some unsolicited advice. Take it or leave it. If there's any chance you might enter a STEM field after high school (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), take all the math and science you can get. Don't stop taking math and science classes because you passed the bare minimum number of classes to graduate. If you do, those college level science and math classes are going to bury you. Even if you don't think you're going to college, take college prep courses, regardless where your interests lie. They'll require you to...

  Unpopular opinion. We've been making up snow days as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I remember going to school on Saturday. I remember going past the last scheduled day. I remember lengthened school days, all to make up time lost to snow days. One thing we know for sure. Very few kids ever learned anything on AMI days. Heck, our school would not allow teachers to cover any new material for the same number of days we missed when kids came back from AMI days so they could catch up on the work they were supposed to do on AMI days! (Yes. What was the point of AMI days?) We also know that practically everyone bemoaned the fact that AMI days meant no more real snow days, even though most kids didn't do a lick of work while they were gone on AMI days. We KNOW these things! Now people are complaining that we have to make up the days. (Even though most schools have snow days built into their calendars and don't even know yet exactly how many days will be made up.) Now p...

She loved the snow. If she were alive today, she'd be loving this. But 13 years ago today, her life was taken by a drunken, stoned 19-year-old at a party. Teens drinking and using illegal drugs ended the life of Amanda, only four days before she would have turned 18, only four months before she would have graduated from high school. I knew she was partying. I knew she was doing things she shouldn't have been doing. I chalked them up to a teen phase that she would grow out of. She never go the chance to grow out of it. Many teens believe they're immune from harm. Amanda did. She thought she could handle whatever came at her. It's a real phenomenon, a sense of invincibility, a sense of immortality even. If you're a teen, please read the story of Amanda and realize that you're not invincible, and certainly not immortal. Alcohol and other mind-altering drugs may seem fun. Five minutes before Amanda was shot and killed, five minutes before, she texted a friend and sa...

We have a three day weekend in honor of the great civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. No high school basketball games last night, and no peewee games for us today. So I had a little time to play around. A friend of mine gets voter registration information from the Secretary of State every month. He shares the Faulkner County, Arkansas data with me whenever I ask. I'm extremely grateful, and it gives me an opportunity to practice the data science skills I gained when I was tasked with teaching a data science course a couple of years ago. In addition to teaching, I serve as the elected Justice of the Peace for Faulkner County District 3. This year I don't have an opponent, but every two years, I'm up for reelection, and I'm sure the day is coming when I will run against an opponent. The office of JP isn't one that garners tons of donations, so my campaigns are mostly self-funded. I'm not a rich man, so stretching the dollars I sink into running for a...