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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (April 8, 1985)
Monday, April 8, 1985/The Battalion/Page 7 tfards w tltreeTm- ions art avail, of Iris pre-lav ?sted siudenu Aotderai lay mmy will Uii Applicants let j n selected and it unless it'satij e. The rnoitu if, the biggerdj feels the slat t care, the newly-e student sera a hold com iday beforeS llison said lid oe taken i he Senate vottsil lison said shell hold the mons and thei! j rage studeiii!| s will comeand^ and senators* nt Govemmeml purvey- (continued from page I) Ividual teaching methods and not be |compared to other professors. “I don’t think it’s possible to mea sure a Rod O’Connor in an introduc- itory chemistry course against a John IMcDermott in an advanced hurnani- [ties class, ” he said. ■ Many variables should be consid ered during the preparation of stu- Edent questionnaires, he said. These ■nclude type of course, student level, class size, classroom location, facili ties, course objectives, whether it’s a required or an elective course, diffi culty of subject matter and time of lay of the course. Johnson said that in the Depart ment of Educational Curriculum and Instruction two questionnaires are used: The first one, given mid- |semester, is a formative evaluation. The advantage of this questionnaire jis that it is given in time for student feedback to lead to changes and im- jprovements before the end of the se- Imester. “If you ask me, the formative eval uation is 10 times more important Ithan the summative because there’s time to turn the course around,” lohnson said. The summative evaluation is given at the end of the semester, and a mandatory evaluation of the course and the professor’s teaching. Concerning the issue of pub lishing the evaluations, Johnson said professors often seem threatened by Ihe results being released. He sug gests moving away from negative phrasing and putting professors in a ^negative role. Johnson also said that to be worth- fwhile, the published results must contain information that students vant to use. The wording must be brefully chosen, he added. Davenport said some professors have argued that the professor alone should be told of his evaluation so he jean work on improvement and not ■face condemnation or competition. He also said the legality of pub lishing the evaluations has not been confirmed, but will be a consider ation of the subcommittee. Royall the Student Government once attempted publishing the re sults, but the project was disastrous. The main reason it didn’t work, he hiid, was that it wasn’t feasible for Student Government to handle such darge project alone. Free Fridays give schools a boost Photo by KIMBERLY TRANT Spring Training These children show their Aggie Spirit at an already qwn official Aggie garb, ei early age. Mark Hix (left) and Jared Trant though their Aggie yells are still garbled. Isolation Life still possible without electricity, phones Associated Press COLDSPRING — While many Texas schoolchildren spend Fridays daydreaming in class about their weekend plans, students in this small East Texas community go on field trips and take part in other extracur ricular activities. Children in San Jacinto County’s Coldspring-Oakhurst school district have enjoyed a four-day school week since 1983. Texas Education Agency spokesman Tom Patton said the dis trict’s four-day week is unique among Texas schools. School officials began giving stu dents Fridays off after they realized children were missing more and more class time because of extracur ricular activities. Now, the district’s 1,600 students start school a few weeks early in Au gust and take Fridays off from March through May. District offi cials try to restrict most extracurricu lar activities to Fridays. “We just felt it was a logical thing to do,” said school district Superin tendent Fred Arneson. “You don’t have to make drastic limitations on the outside activities which kids en joy to keep them in Class.” Some teachers have said the four- day week creates a holiday atmo sphere. Others, however,,think it has made students more serious about their schoolwork. Most students seem to favor the program. “It used to make me mad to be robbed of school time when I partici pated in extracurricular things,” said Tracey Trantham, 14. “Now I have even more time for studying.” One student, however, had some complaints about the shorter school week. “I hate having a shorter summer,” said Jennifer furner, 13. “It cuts down on the time my family can travel and go camping.” The shortened school week saves the district about $2,900 a year be cause it doesn’t have to hire substi tutes for teachers who are on field trips during regular school days, Ar neson said. Teachers are not paid overtime for extracurricular events. Arneson liked the experiment so much he testified to a legislative committee, urging state lawmakers to consider a four-day school week as an alternative to cutting back ex tracurricular activities. But the idea was never adopted. The state’s Education Reform Act passed last year limits students to 10 absences a year for extracurricular activities. Associated Press KERMIT — Rancher John Haley stopped phoning home and quit pay ing electric bills 16 years ago when he moved his family to the remote, 10,880-acre cattle spread where his parents lived as newlyweds in 1924. Dressed in faded blue jeans, west ern work shirt, boots and a cowboy hat, Haley said last week that his de cision to do without electricity and telephone service was “a matter of principle.” “I had an estimate done when we first moved here on running an elec tric line and phone line to my home,” he said. “I thought they could have given me a better deal than that. I thought, I could burn a lot of kerosene for that amount of money.” He did just that. Instead of paying $30,000 to $40,000 to have phone lines in stalled, he drives 20 miles to Kermit and makes his business calls in a of fice that he rents for $325 a month. And rather than pay $700 for an electrical line and then monthly elec tricity bills, Haley burns $1,000 of butane and kerosene a year. “I had very little reason to use a phone until I became involved in some investments,” Haley said as he walked to his 30-year-old gas refrig erator to get a beer. “My office phone bill runs about $200 to $400 a month,” he noted. “I still have phone bills, but I have no need for one on my ranch. If some one wants me bad enough, they can send after me.” Haley, 58, spends his mornings scanning The Wall Street Journal for the metal market prices. “I have my breakfast,” he said. “Cigarettes and coffee .each morn ing. And I look at what’s happening in the metals — gold and silver mar ket. “You have to start out with what you have. If you’re lucky, you can in crease your capital. I’ve made some good investments, and I’ve made some bad ones.” He said the ranch, which is about 65 miles west of Odessa in sparsely populated Loving County near New should earn everything Mexico border, has been one of his better investments. At least, said Haley, “I don’t get interrupted in the middle of a good steak by the ringing of a phone.” Evenings at the Haley ranch are often spent reading. Haley, who once made a living trading in the stock market, is partic ularly fond of the works of author Joseph Conrad. “I like his way with words and his philosophy,” he said. “Conrad be lieved a man he got.” Haley and his Stefanie, 47, believe their five children are reaping the advantages of ranch life. “It’s a good place to rear kids be cause ranch life breeds indepen dence and creativity,” Mrs. Haley said. “Our 16-year-old son is now being entertained by the television set in Tucson, Ariz., where he goes to a E rivate high school,” she “But when e comes home for the summer . . . he reads.” Criminal charges filed in paddling Associated Press GARLAND — A Garland couple has filed criminal assault charges against a school principal who alleg edly paddled their 11-year-old son. The parents said they had signed official school district documents saying they did not want corporal punishment given to their son. They say that Herman Salter, principal of Northlake Elementary School, paddled their son March 29 for disrupting class. The couple told the Daily News they want Salter reprimanded by the Garland Independent School Dis trict board and brought to trial. Dr. Eli Douglas, superintendent of Garland schools, verified that the parents had asked to address the board about the incident at trustees’ April 18 meeting. The boy was involved in a similar incident before in which he was paddled “until he bled” in front of other students, and the boy needed counseling as a result, his father said. T he family filed a lawsuit which is still pending against the school dis trict involved in the earlier paddling, she said. 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