38 thoughts on “08 August 2017: Goin Fishin’”

1. socal mentioned it but no link and only "left" the team versus being fired.

   1. Yeah, Levine on Aaron's podcast didn't sound like he was fired. He might have been influenced to leave, though.

   2. Ah, the lack of a link explains why I missed it.

      1. Covering it again with a link is nice. There are other interesting bits of information in the link.

   3. I was surprised they gave him a chance at all. Not too many teams take a guy from the ticket office and make him head if analytics. Twins way!

      1. Didn't Calvin get his start selling peanuts in Griffith Stadium or something like that?

         1. The Repository of Knowledge says he started as a batboy before inheriting the team 30 years later.

            1. That's one way to get a handle on things.

         2. I think Calvin was arguably the Twins' best head of baseball operations. He had a lot of problems, *to be sure*, but he assembled some pretty good talent on his squads.

            1. He pretty much HAD to. He was the last of the owners that had no outside income besides baseball.

            2. How much credit does he get/deserve? He had a good run from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. That was basically getting lucky with a handful of home-grown stars and good trades for one short stretch.

               1. I don't think it was just luck. Griffith had a pretty good scouting system . Even in the mid-to-late 70s, after free agency set in, he managed to keep the team relatively competitive. And at least some of the '87 championship team was players scouted and drafted under Griffith. I don't mean to overdo it--as SBG says, he had a lot of problems--but his Twins teams developed a lot of good players.

                  1. Reading his Wikipedia bio, it looks as though he deserves a lot of credit for investing in the scouting staff and minor league affiliates after he took over from the Old Man in 1955. But he could not sustain the success in the wake of expansion and free agency.

2. If I knew about this, I forgot about it: Ike Davis is trying to make a comeback as a pitcher.

   1. The Twins have a closer vacancy, right Rhu_Ru?

      1. *eyeroll*

         1. Is I.D. a horcrux?

   2. I.D.! I.D.!

3. I know RBI is kind of a flawed stat and he has missed a lot of time, but, Byron Buzton has more stolen bases (18) than RBI (17).

   1. Done 403 times* since 1901 for qualified players. Last Twin to do it:

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      Ben Revere in 2010.

      Rickey! had a few of these seasons too.

      * I did a >= search instead of >. There are a few seasons where they're equal and I don't feel like finding them.

4. Gonsalves promoted to Triple A

5. Kid Related Stuff

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   I found out today that my daughter's elementary school will be ending its gifted and talented program after this school year. We moved her to this school precisely because of the program and she will be in middle school next year so this decision will not impact her. But, holy shit. What a good program this is/was. Miss SBG would be bored to absolute tears in a regular classroom, but here she's challenged and has shown such amazing growth. Her classmates for the most part were similarly gifted and they pushed each other a lot. The reason? Because too many parents complained that their kids weren't in it. The program had parameters for kids that qualified and they then dipped below the parameters to fill out the class. They had 27(!) kids in my daughter's section, which is a lot, so they went out of their way to accommodate as many kids as possible. But, you know what? There's a point where kids are better suited for a regular classroom. It reminds me of my days in SBGville. When I was in the fourth grade, they had a test at the beginning of the year and for the first period every day, kids were sent not to the classroom of their age, but of their ability. I spent the first hour of every day in the sixth grade. It was great. Unfortunately, people complained and the program was scuttled at Christmas time. Back two years I went and in the sixth grade, I got to do the same stuff I'd done two years earlier. Fun. Now, with all the complaining, everyone will be in the regular classroom. Kids like my daughter (but again, not my daughter) will have their wings clipped. Ugh. I hate people.

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      That is sad. I am sure the logistics would be challenging, but I think it would be nice for there to be more of a mix between advance-with-the-class learning and advance-at-your-own pace learning. In math, I was not very good at addition and subtraction in elementary school, but I happened to pick up multiplication quickly and from there on did really well in math. I was fortunate to have a lot of opportunities to advance more quickly than normal, but when I was allowed to go at my own pace, there were always certain things that would go easy and certain things that would be difficult. It would have done me no favors to just skip to the next topic before I had mastered the previous, and I can see how it would become progressively more difficult to really learn math if you are forced to keep marching ahead before you've mastered previous topics. So potentially, slower learners would have even more to benefit by taking, say, two years to actually learn algebra versus getting a C in a one-year algebra course and moving on to subjects that require your shaky grasp of algebra.

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         I am expecting that the market for more individualized instruction via technology (supporting teachers, not replacing them) will grow rapidly in the next decade. It is happening already, particularly in India. Teachers unions will fight, and eventually lose, as the tech improves in charter schools.

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            I could be wrong, but I suspect it might be driven more by colleges than charter schools. College professors generally have enough things on their plate that if they can use technology to reduce their work load somewhat, they could be more willing to do so. If you show you can do it in college effectively, then some high schools will adopt and if it becomes popular, eventually the parents with the pitchforks will win (as the parents with pitchforks happened to win in SBG's case. I mean, at this point, it's kind of quaint that college professors bother to do their lectures in person rather than spending the resources to put together a really polished video lecture series that students can watch at their leisure. Then schedule time for students to ask questions later on, and they can revisit the lecture if necessary later on. Students could use more of their in-person class time for labs or office hours. While some profs really care about teaching, a lot of them will completely phone in their lectures anyway.

            1. Creating individualized learning plans is hard enough in the primary and secondary levels, where the learning objectives are highly agreed upon. I suppose there are courses at the college level that are amenable. Lots of math courses, intro courses in many of the sciences (social and natural), etc.

               I think we are already seeing some universities supporting this approach, seeking to leverage their brand names to create new markets.

            2. What you're describing is called a "flipped classroom" and is all the rage among college faculty who want to do more than just phone it in. The studies I've seen show that it is incredibly helpful in physics classes in particular, as it leads to more time for students to work problems in class when they have time for peer-to-peer learning (another current hot topic) as well as access to the professor in the moments you need the help the most.

               I've been moving my classes a little more in this direction every semester, increasing the interactive learning time little by little. But, it's definitely not taking the easy way out.

               I'm quite sure a big reason more faculty don't do it is that it is sooooo much more work. Lecturing is easy; after a few years teaching I can now make an hour-and-a-half lecture on just about any intro astronomy topic in 15 or 20 minutes, at most. Planning out useful videos as well as activities to do during class is much, much harder.

               1. You said it way better. The "flipped classroom" idea is a great one, in abstract. It is utterly inconsistent with the current model of mass, higher education, however. When I was teaching in the UC system, I had a grand total of one undergraduate class in 7 years with fewer than 25 students. Most were well north of 50. Giving individualized instruction to 50 students during an hour or hour-plus, is not feasible for one instructor. That's why we had TAs and discussion sections in lower-division courses.

                  when I first arrived in grad school, my then-adviser told me an anecdote about his first conversation with the then-dean. The dean told him directly "we didn't hire you to teach." The economics are bad, trying to utilize highly-trained and very expensive research talent to teach freshman students the rudiments of a field.

                  1. Bigger class sizes definitely make this much, much more difficult to accomplish in a beneficial way, through with enough in class TA support it can be done. One of the leaders in interactive learning in astronomy teaches a fully flipped class, with near-constant interaction for a classroom of about 1000 students. They have their TA's walking through the auditorium, giving instruction to small groups and individuals. Seeing it in action is quite impressive.

                     Of course, that also requires an army of TA's, which many schools don't have. My classes are capped at around 40, but my wife regularly teaches classes of 50-75 with no TA, and sometimes no grader, either.

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      Why is this in spoilers? Also, Minneapolis Public Schools has not had gifted and talented for years. They have what's called "accelerated learning", and your child remains in the regular classroom. My daughter is in the 96th percentile in 1st grade, what would typically be GT. Instead, by December, she'd finished 1st grade reading and math curriculum, and they started giving her 2nd grade. Their class was divided into groups based off reading levels, and the teacher and aids divided time between them so that new readers and advanced readers still got individualized instruction. As a former GT person myself, I'm saddened by not being able to be pulled out of classrooms to prove my kid is a smarty pants. But as a parent of another child who has a 130 IQ but can't finish work worth shit due to ADHD (and is therefore barely a D student), I also see the purpose of not rubbing it in the other kids' face that they're not as "gifted" and letting them take school at their level with the other kids. Nerds don't get herded with nerds (as was my life). That's nice, too.

      1. Because an abundance of caution. Some citizens (ahem, me) sometimes push the Forbidden Zone envelope. We are pretty good at self-policing, however. Using the spoiler function helps us do that.

   3. I'm thankful everyday for the public education I received in Minnesota, and am continually thankful my parents didn't choose to live in New Mexico, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama ...

      1. what meat said.

   4. I'm guessing Elaine is spinning in grave over this news. She was the G&T teacher at Thomas Lake Elementary back in late 1990s when the G&T program was just starting and had many battles with parents about who and who wasn't in the program.

6. R. I. P. singer Glen Campbell, at age 81.

7. Word is that Cowboy Joe West got suspended.

   1. I don't necessarily agree with why he was suspended, but take it when you get it

      1. Given all the things you could suspend Joe West for, it's really odd that this was apparently the straw the broke the camel's back. But you're right, I don't have a lot of sympathy for him, either.

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