Pacifica Riptide

Spanish and French Classes @ Terra Nova, Through May 2

Sign up for Spanish and French classes for adults at Terra Nova High School (Jefferson Union High School District): Wednesday evening classes through May 2 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Register at class or through JUHSD (www.juhsd.net and click Adult Education, then Community Classes) or call 650-550-7871. Email Christine Guzman for Spanish at spanishwithchristine@gmail.com or Monique for French at moniquedubief@earthlink.net

High School Summer Internships in Transportation

The 2012 Metropolitan Transportation Commission High School Summer Internship Program is now open and accepting student applications online. Approximately 35 internships will be available throughout the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. The pay rate is $10.25 per hour. Each internship will last up to a maximum of 250 hours. Students may work full-time or part-time, for up to 10 weeks, between June 26 and August 31, 2012.

The purpose of the program is to: promote interest in transportation as a potential career; help students understand the role of transportation agencies in the community, county and region; provide skill-building and enrichment opportunities during all phases of the program; and provide assistance to our partner transportation agencies. Interested tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grade students are invited to apply now.

APPLICATION PROCESS
Complete online application. Attach a page that describes in your own words a transportation prob­lem in your community and explains what you think could be done to resolve the matter. Also attach one letter of recommendation from a teacher, principal, counselor, religious leader or employer (two letters are required if GPA is below 2.8).

Program requirements and information:
http://www.mtc.ca.gov/jobs/high_school/
 
Listing of the internship opportunities and application form:
http://jobs.mtc.ca.gov/InternshipOpportunities/jobinternship.html
 
Deadline for students to apply: March 8, 2012. We hope you will help us spread the word and look forward to seeing your students take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.
 
Michelle Tan
College & High School
Internship Coordinator
(510) 817-5807 office
(510) 817-5848 fax
Metropolitan Transportation Commission
101-8th St 3rd Floor
Oakland, CA 94607
www.mtc.ca.gov/jobs/high_school/

Pacifica School Volunteers Fundraising Campaign

Unfortunately, the K-8 School Success Workshop scheduled for Tuesday, January 31 at 7 p.m. must be postponed. We apologize for any inconvenience. We will reschedule the workshop in the spring. Watch for details in this space from Pacifica School Volunteers. Meanwhile, please support our fundraising campaign.

CLICK FOR INFO ON FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN

Oceana High School's New Athletic Facilities Take Shape

DAVE YUHAS

Why Kids Can't Search

Why Kids Can’t Search
By Clive Thompson   November 1, 2011  |   Wired November 2011

We’re often told that young people tend to be the most tech-savvy among us. But just how savvy are they? A group of researchers led by College of Charleston business professor Bing Pan tried to find out. Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the web pages at the top of Google’s results list.

But Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren’t assessing information sources on their own merit—they’re putting too much trust in the machine.

Other studies have found the same thing: High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the authors’ credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?

Who’s to blame? Not the students. If they’re naive at Googling, it’s because the ability to judge information is almost never taught in school. Under 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act, elementary and high schools focus on prepping their pupils for reading and math exams. And by the time kids get to college, professors assume they already have this skill. The buck stops nowhere. This situation is surpassingly ironic, because not only is intelligent search a key to everyday problem-solving, it also offers a golden opportunity to train kids in critical thinking.

Consider the efforts of Frances Harris, librarian at the magnet University Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois. (Librarians are our national leaders in this fight; they’re the main ones trying to teach search skills to kids today.) Harris educates eighth and ninth graders in how to format nuanced queries using Boolean logic and advanced settings. She steers them away from raw Google searches and has them use academic and news databases, too.

But, crucially, she also trains students to assess the credibility of what they find online. For example, she teaches them to analyze the tone of a web page to judge whether it was created by an academic, an advocacy group, or a hobbyist. Students quickly gain the ability to detect if a top-ranked page about Martin Luther King Jr. was actually posted by white supremacists.

“I see them start to get really paranoid,” Harris says. “The big thing in assessing search results is authorship—who put it there and why have they put it there?” Or, as pioneering librarian Buffy Hamilton at Creekview High School near Atlanta says, “This is learning how to learn.”

One can imagine even more entertaining ways to help kids grok the intricacies of the search world. Why not let students start a class blog on a subject and see how long it takes for it to show up in search results?

Mind you, mastering “crap detection 101,” as digital guru Howard Rheingold dubs it, isn’t easy. One prerequisite is that you already know a lot about the world. For instance, Harris found that students had difficulty distinguishing a left-wing parody of the World Trade Organization’s website from the real WTO site. Why? Because you need to understand why someone would want to parody it in the first place—knowledge the average eighth grader does not yet possess.

In other words, Google makes broad-based knowledge more important, not less. A good education is the true key to effective search. But until our kids have that, let’s make sure they don’t always take PageRank at its word.

Environmental Service Learning @ Skyline College

"I'm taking Environmental Science from Professor McCarthy this semester. I've been taking classes at Skyline for 17 years, and she is one of the best professors I've had the good fortune to work with. She has pioneered this class in collaboration with another professor. If you have the opportunity to take this class, don't pass it up!"

JIM WAGNER

Measure L Victory Margin Increases: 69.2 Percent YES

PACIFICA SCHOOL DISTRICT MEASURE L (2/3 APPROVAL REQUIRED)
Completed Precincts: 28 of 28
Vote Count/Percentage
YES
5,453/69.2%
NO
2,424/30.8%
(Thanks to Mark Stechbart for the update.)

Measure L Passes Muster: 68.8 Percent

BY LIONEL EMDE, RIPTIDE CORRESPONDENT
 
In a late-inning victory, Measure L, the Pacifica School District parcel tax, passed with a 68.8 percent majority. Early mail-in ballots had the measure below the threshold to pass, but Election Day voting put it over the top. This correspondent witnessed canvassers in his neighborhood working the electorate, and apparently the campaign was well organized enough to pull it off.
 
Measure H, the San Mateo County Community College District bond issue, failed with a 52.7 percent majority, less than the required 55 percent. But voters apparently did not want change on the college board, as the three incumbents (Dave Mandelkern, Karen Schwarz, Patricia Miljanich) were returned with a comfortable majority.
 
In San Bruno, Measure O, a bond issue requiring 55 percent approval, failed by more than four percentage points. There was organized resistance to the measure, as this writer saw printed signs in multiple locations in San Bruno.

CLICK FOR MEASURE L WEBSITE

Oceana's Naftali Moed Wins Cox Conserves Hero Award

Oceana High School student Naftali Moed has won the Cox Conserves Hero award in the Bay Area and was awarded $5,000 for the Oceana High School Garden, which he made a reality, complete with chickens and now maybe goats! For more of the story and a video, click the link below and search for San Francisco Bay Area:

CLICK FOR COX CONSERVES HEROES

Naftali selected Pie Ranch to receive the $5,000 award. Naftali had a vision for an organic vegetable garden to teach fellow high school students about the value of organic gardening and sustainable agriculture. Under his leadership, the vision has become a reality with 10 garden beds, a chicken house, and an outdoor classroom space. The garden is a living lab for science classes and a source of food for the nutrition classes.

Opinion: Crunching the Numbers of PSD Parcel Tax (Part Deux)

Following my recent comments here on Riptide and in the Tribune about the new Pacifica School District (PSD) parcel tax increase, Measure L supporter and Saving Pacifica Schools president Kalimah Salahuddin and PSD board member Joan Weideman contacted me for a sit-down to discuss the disparity between what I feel the district spends per student per year ($9,170.76), based on total overall expenses of the district, and what they feel the district spends per student per year ($7,253), based on an accounting procedure that separates overall expenses into two categories, one for staff and staff-related expenses that comes directly from the district’s general fund, and the other for infrastructure improvements, which are restricted funds. The rationale in splitting the two categories is that neither students nor teaching staff receive a direct benefit from building maintenance and capital outlays.

By separating the two categories, it appears the cost per student is indeed $7,253 a year, but if, like me, you choose to combine the two categories because without buildings or capital improvements there are no structures to house teaching staff and students, it equally appears the district spends $9,170 per student a year. The difference between these two sums is $1,917 per student per year. That is a big difference and it highlights the magic of governmental accounting.

Speaking of governmental accounting and its Magical Mystery Tour logic, Weideman went over another figure I mentioned recently, an accounts-payable liability of more than $8 million. It doesn’t represent unpaid bills, as I had suggested. No, it’s much more entertaining than that. Half of that amount ($4 million) represents an accounting error by the State of California that requires the district to repay $4 million, but at the same time the state is refunding the $4 million through a different governmental accounting maneuver. In essence, no money is changing hands, but an accounting practice required by the state, so it doesn’t look like it made a $4 million mistake, is being satisfied.

In stark contrast to the accounting games of the State of California, most of the remaining $4 million represents straightforward payroll deferments by teaching staff so they will receive summertime paychecks while on hiatus. I always wondered how that worked.

I’d like to personally thank Joan and Kalimah for their offer and subsequent meeting. Joan came well prepared to discuss the district’s expenses and explain the staffing positions that Measure L will fund, and Kalimah provided extra support through her Blackberry and a mystery contact when questions could not be answered.

I wish the district luck with Measure L but strongly feel the district and Measure L supporters must include information on the district’s split accounting practice in any political literature published for their parcel tax campaign to be honest, open, and informative to the voting public. The difference of $1,917 annually per student equals a whopping $6,184,242. And make no mistake about it, the district does spend that extra $6 million annually whether it accounts for it separately or not.

Whether you choose to support Measure L, which will raise our property taxes by $118 a year for the next seven years to fund PSD staffing positions, or choose not to support Measure L, please do go to the polls November 8. It would be a shame if a small turnout swayed this parcel tax ballot measure one way or the other. The sums of public money at stake are huge, and real people will feel their impact for the next seven years.

TODD MCCUNE BRAY