I Dare You to Bring CornNuts

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the SDE was accepting volunteers to be on the TLE working group that would inform the TLE Commission in its task to select Other Academic Measures to use in the evaluation of teachers in non-tested subjects. According to emails forwarded to me by readers, over 200 people signed up. I can’t take credit for all of that, but maybe an icebreaker activity for the working group can be developing a formula for evaluating the impact of this blog.

One can dream, right?

Seriously, though, the group has gotten so big that the SDE is dividing them up into three smaller groups. The first meeting is today. Participants have been told three things and three things only:

1. The meeting is at Langston-OKC
2. Dress comfortably
3. Bring your own snacks and drinks

One can infer from the second point that a dress Snuggie™ (I haven’t checked, but you know they have to make one like a tuxedo) would be appropriate. The third point raises several possibilities, however. Clearly there will be no chocolate fountain and crabcakes. I do suggest bringing something, though. A full day without nourishment can be brutal.

I had a college class with a guy who always ate CornNuts. It didn’t matter where you sat in the room, you could hear them and smell them. It’s not a horrible snack if you are the one eating them, but I have a thing about sounds and smells. 

Overall, the variety of snacks is likely to be more interesting than the exchange of ideas. It will certainly be more fulfilling. Hopefully the snacks people bring with them will be less irritating than the topic at hand.

The truth is, your ideas are merely a prop. The real work on VAM is being done by a company called SAS out of Cary, NC. Fortune Magazine just ranked them 2^nd on the list of top 100 companies to work for in the United States – right behind Google. Business analytics are a growth industry, after all.

In all seriousness, if you go today, speak up. In all likelihood, the SDE staff that will be there have their mind made up about what measures will be used. That doesn’t mean that collectively, we can’t make it interesting.