[FRIAM] My plan to disrupt education

Sat Oct 30 13:41:56 EDT 2021

Which is a greater number 53.7% of Highlands or each of 20-40% of the
others?

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 11:34 AM Angel Edward <edward.angel at gmail.com> wrote:

> It only takes a minute or two to find the information on the Web
>
> NMH 53.7%
>
> UCSD 39%
> UCLA 23%
> Arizona 24%
> UNM 37%
> UT Austin 22%
>
> Ed
> __________
>
> Ed Angel
>
> Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS
> Lab)
> Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico
>
> 1017 Sierra Pinon
> Santa Fe, NM 87501
> 505-984-0136 (home)   edward.angel at gmail.com
> 505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel
>
> On Oct 30, 2021, at 11:14 AM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >I think the definition of Hispanic-serving is based on the percentage of
> Hispanic students which is very high at Highlands
>
> I would be surprised if Highlands had a higher number of Hispanic students
> than any of the universities I mentioned.  Compared to to them Highlands is
> small.  I wonder why percentage is more important than the total number.
> Talk about ethnicism.
>
>
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Sat, Oct 30, 2021, 10:58 AM Edward Angel <angel at cs.unm.edu> wrote:
>
>> I think the definition of Hispanic-serving is based on the percentage of
>> Hispanic students which is very high at Highlands.
>>
>> The first year I was at UNM, a colleague and I went to career day at
>> Highlands. Because Highlands lacked an Engineering program, we thought it
>> would be an excellent opportunity to recruit some of their grads to
>> Engineering at UNM, The gym was filled with recruiting tables which except
>> for us were all either from the military or the Ivy League schools trying
>> to recruit Hispanics. During the morning, not a single student came to our
>> table. After lunch, a group of young women came to our table, looked at our
>> materials, and then asked if they needed math to study engineering. When we
>> said yes, there was a loud “Ugh” and they turned around and left. Only
>> students we talked to the whole day.
>>
>> A few years later, David West would come down to UNM once a week to UNM
>> on his bike to teach a software engineering course.
>>
>> Around that time, we had a very active NM Chapter of SIGGRAPH in NM. I
>> worked a lot with Bruce Papier at Highlands who was running a wonderful
>> computer art program at Highlands. I believe he too was pushed out during
>> the Manny Aragon era. He passed away in Santa Fe a few years ago.
>>
>> But what I really want to write about is a related story to David’s at
>> UNM. At UNM the Latin American (now Latin American and Iberian ) Institute
>> is a prestigious research and teaching center. It’s founder-director and
>> associate director were not Hispanics. In the mid-90s, Tom Benavides, a
>> powerful NM legislator (
>> http://insidethecapitol.blogspot.com/2004/05/most-excellent-sir-tom-benavides.html)
>> insisted the director and associate director be replaced by Hispanics and
>> when UNM refused, the funding for LAI was removed from the UNM budget. The
>> result was  that UNM had to come up with funds from other projects to
>> support LAI.
>>
>> Tom was a very popular legislator from the South Valley, so popular that
>> there was a movement to create a separate county for the South Valley and
>> name it after Tom. But then there was his downfall; drinking and wife
>> abuse. When he lost a reelection, UNM seized on the opportunity and hired
>> him as a legislative lobbyist. UNM then got back it’s funding for LAI
>> without having to replace its leadership.
>>
>> At the time, I was teaching a lot of short courses in Latin America
>> through the Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium
>> (ISTEC)  which was started at UNM and was administratively under LAI. One
>> of Tom’s duties (actually rewards) was to attend the yearly ISTEC
>> conferences in Latin America as did I and usually Rose Mary. Tom was
>> somewhat uncomfortable outside NM and speaking Spanish, so Rose Mary would
>> often invite him to join us for dinner. I always learned a lot about the
>> spotted history of NM.
>>
>> Ed
>> _______________________
>>
>> Ed Angel
>>
>> Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory
>> (ARTS Lab)
>> Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico
>>
>> 1017 Sierra Pinon
>> Santa Fe, NM 87501
>> 505-984-0136 (home)   angel at cs.unm.edu
>> 505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel
>>
>> On Oct 29, 2021, at 6:15 PM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> During the era of which Dave speaks at New Mexico Highlands i had an
>> interview for a faculty position in the CS Department there.  I wasn't a
>> good match because they were looking for someone in the area of computers
>> and the arts.  Among my application materials I emphasized my ability to
>> speak Spanish, my family roots in Central NM, and our adoption of a young
>> child from Mexico.  Someone told me that it was a mistake to mention the
>> relationship with Mexico because Aragon didn't consider Mexicans to be
>> Hispanic.  To him that word apparently means someone from one of a few
>> families from Northern NM.
>>
>> At that time there was material that claimed that Highlands was the
>> foremost Hispanic serving university in the US.  At the time I wondered,
>> "What about UCSD, UCLA, Arizona, UNM, UTexas, etc?"  I think the answer lay
>> in his definition of Hispanic.
>>
>> Frank
>>
>> ---
>> Frank C. Wimberly
>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>
>> 505 670-9918
>> Santa Fe, NM
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 29, 2021, 5:39 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Manny Aragon was president of Highlands at the time of my program. He
>>> hated me personally for no apparent reason other than my program was
>>> gaining publicity and overshadowing his role as "savior" of Highlands.
>>> Also, his Board of Regents assigned mission was to reduce the white faculty
>>> and increase the Hispanic.Those efforts earned censure for the University,
>>> multiple lawsuits by white faculty all of which Highlands lost; and
>>> eventually Manny's firing as University President.
>>>
>>> He arbitrarily and "illegally" (circumventing the faculty and
>>> established procedures) cancelled the program. Students demonstrated at
>>> Capital in protest; dozens of industry leaders, and all of our clients,
>>> sent letters in protest, students directly petitioned Manny to change mind
>>> — all to no avail.
>>>
>>> A little less than two years after cancelling the program, Manny was
>>> convicted of embezzlement of federal funds and sent to prison for five
>>> years. He was Speaker of the House in the state legislature before coming
>>> to Highlands and nothing but a powerful and corrupt and self-aggrandizing
>>> politician before coming to Highlands and wreaking havoc.
>>>
>>> davew
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Oct 29, 2021, at 3:33 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>>>
>>> Dave, Sounds like a wonderful program. Is it continuing? If not, why
>>> not? If so, how has the structure changed so that it sustains itself as an
>>> ongoing effort?
>>>
>>> -- Russ Abbott
>>> Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
>>> California State University, Los Angeles
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Oct 29, 2021 at 12:40 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Pieter,
>>>
>>> Your plans are admirable and exciting.I wish you the best in this
>>> endeavor. If you would have any interest, I would be happy to share my
>>> experience in New Mexico developing and delivering an industry award
>>> winning program — the Software Development Apprenticeship.
>>>
>>> We totally blew up the academy. The program had no courses — instead we
>>> defined "competencies" that had to be demonstrated — acknowledged by peers,
>>> professors, and industry professionals — at five different levels:
>>> basically following directions or rote learning; applying knowledge solo;
>>> applying in different context; mentoring others / sharing knowledge; and
>>> making an 'original' contribution or extension to the knowledge. Everyone
>>> had to master all the "competencies" to level 3, but would vary widely by
>>> individual interest in which ones were achieved at higher levels.
>>>
>>> We had a "one room schoolhouse" where students worked in teams on
>>> real-world development projects alongside industry professionals, graduate
>>> students to freshmen mixed on each team.
>>>
>>> If we had packaged the knowledge delivered in the program into
>>> traditional semester credit courses it would have been the equivalent of
>>> two undergraduate and three graduate degrees. Subjects far transcended
>>> programming and other computer science topics to include business (of
>>> course since business constituted the vast majority of our projects), hard
>>> and soft sciences, writing, presentation, inter-personal and "soft" skills,
>>> philosophy and history (Computer Scientists and Software Engineers are
>>> abysmally ignorant of their own history and the thought foundations of
>>> their discipline), art (including computer graphics of course, but much
>>> more), and math (but probability and statistics and geometry instead of
>>> calculus).
>>>
>>> Students learned 'on-demand'. The project to which they were assigned
>>> would require some specific knowledge and they would "demand" that
>>> learning. Actually, every six weeks, students would complete a learning
>>> plan and the faculty had to combine them into a set of modules for lecture
>>> and presentation in the ensuing 6-week interval. All teaching took place in
>>> the same open lab/classroom, so everyone either directly or by "osmosis"
>>> picked up on what was being taught.
>>>
>>> The program was immensely successful. Our student body came from the
>>> poorest county in the poorest state (sometimes Louisiana would take first
>>> place) and were woefully unprepared for college. But they succeeded: one
>>> exemplar student entered the program lacking even rudimentary user skills
>>> like "cut and paste," but was a team leader and J2EE mentor at the start of
>>> his second semester. (He was also the only one who figured out why the Hero
>>> — movie of same name — did not kill the warlord unifying China in a
>>> wonderfully written essay.)
>>>
>>> Our student body was 70% minority (mostly because of where we were and
>>> the mission of the University) and 51-54 percent female.
>>>
>>> Half of the students in the first year of the program had papers (not
>>> student presentations but full papers) accepted to OOPSLA and Agile  both
>>> conferences had a 90+ percent rejection rate). Every student was place in
>>> jobs, often before graduation and often with the companies who gave us
>>> apprenticeship projects.
>>>
>>> The preceding is just bragging, but I am very proud of what we did.
>>>
>>> We had two faculty, myself and Pam Rostal and both of us worked 70-90
>>> hour weeks which would not be sustainable long term. We did attract a lot
>>> of attention and industry "superstars" would drop by to mentor in their
>>> particular area for 2-3 weeks at a time.
>>>
>>> If you have interest in any details, please ask off-list and I will be
>>> happy to respond.
>>>
>>> davew
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Oct 27, 2021, at 12:25 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
>>>
>>> The public education system in South Africa is largely broken. For those
>>> who can afford it, we have very good schools, but the majority cannot and
>>> the education options for them are bleak.
>>>
>>> I plan to do something about it.
>>>
>>> This is my second attempt. About three years ago I started a school as a
>>> proof of concept with a radical model to have very high quality yet very
>>> low cost education and it failed miserably. (I managed to make plans for
>>> the kids and I don't believe any suffered from the experience - I pulled
>>> the plug before too much harm was done). I've thought, and discussed it a
>>> lot, and I'm ready to roll out my second, very different attempt.
>>>
>>> The basis of this is that there are plenty of resources available for
>>> free, and provided you manage the environment properly, kids can and will
>>> teach themselves.
>>>
>>> My plan is a model with two legs, both legs offering very high quality
>>> education, but the first leg is relatively expensive and has "bells and
>>> whistles" to attract the wealthy and the second is bare bones to make it
>>> affordable for those kids whose parents can't pay.
>>>
>>> The profit from first leg schools then cross-subsidise the costs of the
>>> second leg schools.
>>>
>>> The concept for both legs are copied from https://www.khanlabschool.org/
>>> , adapted for local conditions of course. The second leg schools will just
>>> be a low cost version, but the education offered will still be world class.
>>>
>>> Our academic year starts in January. I'm working flat out to have my
>>> first school of the first leg open in January 2022. Then to have the first
>>> school of the second leg open in January 2023. Then to learn from the
>>> experience, adapt and roll it out so that every child in South Africa has
>>> access to world class education in five years time.
>>>
>>> Pieter
>>>
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>>
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