Übercrawl

Author: robert lewis

  • Why does CWE need its own LMS?

    KISS: We can’t negotiate with all the other locals, professional organizations, and internationals that have one, if we don’t have one better than theirs. “Why should I lower my standards?”

    The ubercrawl unceremoniously sluiced back into the agua eléctrico this month, given its successful and unprecedented circumnavigation of worlds rarely explored by worker education crews, pre-Pause. “Click and dragging” is not a skill much valued in our neck of the woods. But we were all in deep waters last year, our rafts paddling next to the “New Jacobins.” But for the first time since we last had a worker as our Labor Secretary, and a woman at that, “scaling up” is no longer a dream, it is an imperative.

    My contact hours actually increased during COVID, not only because I mastered LMS skills well before it was an acronym, but more fundamentally, because I always will have a compulsion to keep my hands in many pies. Construction Skills cut back last FY, but I nickel-and-dimed more hours from NEW. Not for greed, prestige or any of the other behaviors Big Data seeks to monetize with its exploits into remote learning. (I imagine boardroom meetings many years ago, plotting the derivations of disaster capitalism, salivating over the panoply of permutations they could avail themselves of, when our apprentices became exposed to their toxicity). No, in order to keep my brain occupied during the “shelter at home” times, repetitive behaviors were anathema to me, especially because my career path seeks to offer my talents towards enhancing workers’ lives. My skills, my innovations, my life would deteriorate if I was relegated to a virtual cubicle. Consider the irony of virtual hands-on training.

    Under duress, I developed methodologies, processes and workflows that exceeded any port I docked in last FY. My most important lodestar on those moonless nights was knowing our knuckleheads will lie, cheat and steal whenever the opportunity presents. I ported my WordPress LMS I used as an adjunct at Boricua College for a decade (I am still dumbfounded by how one week, I am teaching a lesson on life after the Hadean, just as I had for the past decade, and then the next, nothing, to this day). And I figured out a way to make sure my assessments couldn’t be “cut and pasted” from one knucklehead to the next.

    My last presentation was all about the alpha: what are our guiding principles as we build our own LMS? Not that we are anywhere close to answering those questions, but I feel the need to launch a beta presentation, things I could do to heighten and extend our capacity and prestige as the premiere NYC organization offering technical support to worker direct entry programs into locals across the city. various daydream projects to consider implementing as our LMS takes wind.

    RPi

    Zip Code

    Intake –> Retention –> Grant writers

    Assessment/Traffic–>effective instruction, Zoom most clicked

    Sharing/Search

    SQL join

    Test Prep

    online curriculum <> LMS — Moodle, Google Classroom, Teams, doesn’t matter. Connections relationships, etc.

    IP/Luddites/Guild/Outlook

    The Semantic Problem/Menu/Post/Page/BuddyPress Intelligent Communication

  • What is Green Trades Math?

    Ripped from the Headlines, Part Deux!

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/29/upshot/portland-seattle-vancouver-weather.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

    CO2 levels the highest ever measured. The last time there was this much CO2 in the air, Titanis terror birds roamed the Earth.

    An extra tidbit: a study surveying half a million workers found that physically demanding jobs will help you live longer.

    Warmup Question: Why are Bioswales an example of green building? (responses)

    LEED link

    Apply table and graph reading skills to solve three green trades math problems:

    What follows are the procedures for calculating how green a building is.

    Green Math Calculations

    Let’s start with

    Heat Transfer through a Wall. You’ll need to find three numbers:

    1. The Thermal Conductivity number, given building material.
    2. The Area the heat gradient is going through. We will use one of three rooms.
    3. The “delta T” — the change in temperature. Each problem will give you two temperatures. Do the takeaway.

    And now Solar Panels. You’ll need to find, … another three numbers:

    1. The Insolation number, given city and month.
    2. The number of daylight hours.
    3. The area of the solar panel in square meters.

    And finally, Heat Pumps. Another three numbers:

    1. Mass Flow Rate. Given in the problem.
    2. Heat Capacity of the coolant.
    3. Another delta T.

    That’s it for Green Trades Math.

  • curriculum vitae

    Apex, zenith, escape velocity are quick motifs for where I find myself, right now. My most important values, that I refused to let go of during the Pandemic migration to remote learning left me exhausted, and exhilarated:

    • Designing & Delivering Data Rich Assessments
    • Tackling “The Semantic Problem”
    • Furthering the Apprenticeship Tradition

    I am currently a full time employee of the Consortium for Worker Education, delivering trades math, NABTU and local union test prep curricula, such as the IBEW Local 3 Aptitude Test and IUEC Local 1 Elevator Industry Aptitude Test (EIAT), for the Edward J. Malloy Construction Skills and Nontraditional Employment for Women pre-apprenticeship programs. I invested much of my life into constructing that sentence, and I am loathe to deconstruct it. Yet part of me senses the only way forward for me on my career path that will take advantage of all of the LMS skills I acquired in the past year will require me to risk it all.

    Data-driven assessments, delivered on WordPress LMS platforms based upon a workflow process I developed:

    • Permutate — Create Excel worksheets using CONCATENATE, VLOOKUP, INDEX, INDIRECT
    • Pour — Build InDesign shells (styles, linked text boxes, .indb,
    • Press

    Through the clouds a luminous summit, I don’t know what is there, but I know I have come closer in the past year than most in my life, and would like to maintain my momentum moving forwards, but with less stressful, or at least significantly higher earning opportunities.

  • Data beam received, will make it to Friday

    Getting up at 4AM to be on time for your 1st shift has its agonies, but as any journeyperson can recall from one point of their life or another, once you coast into your momentum for the day, catch your second wind, you can reach epiphanies about the course you are charting. Keeping the apprenticeship tradition afloat during the COVID tsunami — I have already explicated the agony. But by the end of our last class, I started falling into the Goldilocks Zone.

    Workers seek to improve their skills. To minimize unskilled labor. To provide for their families. To see how far they can go into the starry night (OT doubles after 12). My worker experiences so far with this class: after the agony, a rapturous data beam, pointing the way like a pole star, tacking towards a better quality of life.

    First column: Every hand shall be in the box. Huzzah! for T. Jones, getting the high score. But that’s not how the apprenticeship tradition should be respected. K. Harris, et. al., had a lower score, but everybody on their team represented, so their team submitted the best work product. respect.

    Second column: Performance spectrum among the groups. How did our group perform? What and how much could we have improved upon? Learning how to efficiently submit work product was clearly a learning curve our first time in Breakout. Let’s improve on that skill! Hopefully today, one submission only per group.

    Question #5 clearly offered the most challenge for the entire class. I will begin today’s class workshopping solution strategies.

    Measuring your skills objectively, learning from your mistakes, building a better mousetrap, that’s how skilled laborers live their lives. Let’s learn together. Nail penetration & Screw holes.

  • Navigating Proxima Centauri To Dry Dock

    6/2 On our way to finishing the last BIG class I will teach until we’re on this year’s other side for 60 degree weather (an ideal Memorial Day for me, misty and chilly at night) — I already feel like I’m living on Proxima Centauri. So far this year, 134 (73 + 15 + 26 + 20) students have passed through my online classrooms. I asked you yesterday, what did they learn? “Logging on early” means a “working lunch”? You are apprentices, in a worker education program that values “hands on” as the primary mode of instruction: isn’t all that “virtual hands on” can be is a misnomer?

    Here’s the schedule for the rest of the week:

    • Today (6/2): LCT Missing Sides. No notch counting. Less than does not mean the right sided alligator mouth. A penny nail will go through how far. Choosing the right drill bit when screwing.
    • Tomorrow (6/3): All assignments to date DUE 8AM. The first 45 minutes of the class will be “free form,” that is, any student can ask any question about any mistake they made on their homework.1
    • Friday (6/4): 2 hour assessment of first week trades math skills.

    My biggest takeaway from our class yesterday was the connection made between “simple” and “complex” learning. Why I have made a life choice teaching trades math (besides respecting workers), is that, despite moronic public perceptions about “shop math,” it is easy to delve deep into a many millenium’d tradition. Trades math is real, many math classes are not.

    We will experience this reality, first with LCTs, and then with nail penetration and screw holes. I know you can hardly wait. I can’t wait to finish this class and be that much closer to drydocking the ubercrawl for summer.

    1 The apprenticeship tradition is like a personal conveyance, from the journeyman, to the apprentice. It stands to reason, therefore, that even in a virtual environment, individualized assessments should continue to be de rigueur in online apprenticeship programs. As I cycled through the 10 Breakout rooms yesterday, I sensed that for some, not having the same assessment as everybody else was a surprise. As apprentices, you should always expect that kind of value of/for you, another worker.

  • My Last Bearded Class

    Even something as pure as mathematics has been laid low by COVID. In a Zoom class, calculators must be allowed, because there is no way to prevent their use, without excessive surveillance, which is anathema to the apprenticeship tradition.

    This class, a pre-apprenticeship class, heightens the importance of developing “soft skills,” skills that also are not conducive to remote learning. “Working lunch,” a time where highly motivated apprentices could gain additional time with their journeymen, now only means logging in early.

    Over the past year, we at CWE have endeavored to migrate our values and traditions onto this Learning Management System (LMS). We have designed it to protect your privacy. Its structure is to encourage group work and discussion. A workflow process has been designed to ensure that each apprentice will receive unique assessments.

    Doing so has lowered us into a “Groundhog Year” experience. I gave up shaving sometime in February. I hope to return to that luxury at the completion of this Cycle 9 Trades Math class.

    In a pre-apprenticeship trades math class, not only math is being taught. Submitting assignments on time is critical to success. Acknowledging personal weaknesses and communicating them is especially hard in a Zoom class. 30+ workers learning in the same class, under these conditions, makes it even more imperative that we remember: we are all in this together.