to think about if and how our views on things have or have not changed over the past decades. I think the two of us really got interested in detail enough so that we actually have done some research and writing on it in the late 1980s when her language of the goddess came out and people started calling us up newspapers asking us our opinions and we suddenly realized that we actually should articulate an opinion right and then we realized just how interesting it was as part of our wider philosophies about how to teach archaeology, how to inferences work and at what point points which is almost all the way along the way do people have to dip into theoretical assumptions about things and in particular just even calling something a female figurine or a statuette much less a goddess is in of itself an interpretation and how you name artifacts and then how you make these moves and how you try to deal with what is inherent in archaeological data and that is its ambiguity that it's always ambiguous and what everybody wants is a unambiguous story and I think Ruth and I are both very committed to having keeping that ambiguity in there and so with much of Maria's work which moved more and more so especially throughout the 1980s and into the 90s and even earlier she moved from somewhat ambiguous stories to less and less ambiguous stories where there was more closure more definition about this is the way it was in the past. We were both getting developing ideas of the feminist practice of archaeology at that time and it was within this context that our interest in ambiguity the ambiguity of archaeological data and the sort of celebration of the ambiguity rather than a turning away or a mystification of the ambiguities this is at this time this developed and there were many other aspects. Is Maria's work a feminist enterprise or is it not and it was at this point that we were showing that in fact there are many aspects of her work which are not feminist even though it would seem to appeal to feminists because of its focus on women and the focus on gender and the importance of the respect and empowerment of women. We still considered it not a work not a work of feminist archaeology. I think it's the crux of the problem because it's because we have different aims in doing our archaeology from Maria's that we have a different agenda different different viewpoint different standpoint on what is what is our knowledge on the basis of archaeological data. I think that that's where a lot of our differences come and actually we had a seminar conference a little while back on the feminist practice of archaeology and we were all asked to give our ideas of what what a feminist practice of archaeology is and each one of us came up with rather different things but there were some there were some commonalities I think weren't there. I think as we know with even what feminism is there's a lot of things and it's also changing a lot as we go on as we learn more and the feminist work in the Academy of the 1990s is very different from what was going on in the 1970s and things like that but I think what another point that that Ruth mentioned that would differ among feminist archaeologists is of course who their audiences are and by the time Maria got to be writing things like the language of the goddess in a way she was she had a different audience than the audience that Ruth and I mostly have and one of her most supportive audiences was outside the Academy and these people influenced her and sort of helped her and guided her in some ways in terms of what her response was to be and you can you can chart I think this dynamic you know I haven't sat down and done it but I think you probably could see how her ideas change in relationship and response to an audience. I think all feminists are concerned with the production of knowledge who produces it who gets to be able to decide what is knowledge worth knowing what the questions are that are worth asking and I think all feminists agree that questions about issues of gender and identity and maleness and femaleness are high on the list yet at the same time what much feminist archaeology has moved towards is an increasingly stronger critique of an authoritarian view that individuals we are authorities on something we're very uncomfortable with feeling like we're authorities we feel we have certain things that we can bring to the table for discussion but we also feel that anybody who tells us that they know that it's this is what happened in the past has got to be questioned because we're not going to know this is what happened in the past if I can just button there that's what's interesting with Maria that in a way she did challenge authority she did challenge the established authoritative picture or story of what happened in prehistory by writing about old Europe a time when women were powerful or were respected which was very different from the story that had been written before on the other hand she wrote that story in an authoritative fashion we feel that she wrote it this is the story this is the alternative this is it this is and I am an archaeological authority and so that you have to believe me because I know more about this this data I have thought about it more I'm more experienced than anyone else so I'm now going to show you how those words of mine were taken completely out of focus and actually changed the meaning of them Maria presented her interpretations at many international conferences but was often harshly criticized by her colleagues who disputed her conclusions and did not understand her methods anybody who tells us that they know that it's this is what happened in the past has got to be questioned because we're not going to know this is what happened in the past unless if I can just button there that's what's interesting with Maria that in a way she did challenge authority she did challenge the established authoritative picture or story of what happened in prehistory by writing about old Europe on the other hand she wrote that story in an authoritative fashion we feel she felt she had it so I should have used the word authoritarian rather than authoritative but you can see how that was how that was changed the meaning was changed because it didn't have the rest of my sentence there so now we'll come back to continue this it's true we do have to look at people's contexts and what gets rewarded in the in the world the institutional reward systems that reward people who have definitive theories and they get the publicity journalists call up and they ask us a question about what might have happened in the past and we say well you know it's very complicated well they don't want to hear that they want to hear an answer so there's a lot of pressure on everybody and certainly Maria and of course again she certainly is of a somewhat different generation than both Ruth and I and as we oftentimes say one generation solution is the next generation's problem and so we are more able now to recognize and again in an increasingly multicultural world that there are these multiple perspectives multiple sets of experiences going in and that the kinds of accounts that try to present a more homogenized and univocal or one sort of perspective kind of view are harder to sustain and make less sense to us in the in the worlds that we operate so this need to be able to say something certain did they believe in the goddess were their goddess worshipers were women respected is to not not to be able to say anything certain in that realm is disappointing and if we say you know that's often where it kind of rebounds for us there's a reaction against what we say because we can't say anything for certain so now i'm going to show you another excerpt from the movie itself the finished version where you can see that those questions that i asked are left hanging without without their their other part of the sentence which is talking about certainty where are they found what are they found with did they believe in the goddess were their goddess worshipers were women respected i first heard that i didn't even realize that was my voice asking those questions because it was so out of context but um so that in that kind of with that dreamy music behind it and leaving the questions hanging anyway so let's continue sorry to be jumping around like this but this is the nature of tool okay well so i think we're ready now to move on to the final film but wait this is not going to help you do that and archaeological data if you take it creatively can actually lead you into many interesting ideas it can be more liberating yes if you look at it as a way to liberate the way in which you think about the past as well as the present and especially about the relationship between the present and the past you know most people often think that there's the past and there's the present but what we're really all talking about is the relationship between the past and the present and if we think about alternatives as being ways and what we would what we emphasize in our classes with our students is they they can't just say any old thing when they're talking about archaeology they have to ground it somehow there are what philosophers in science call evidential constraints play solid fired right no head right on the floor down to the garbage right so that there that can be liberated with alternatives and then you can decide what you want what you want to use what can be done with and so forth when somebody makes an assertive sort of statement instead of saying oh yeah that's the way it was say no wait a minute how do they know that how did they come to that and how people even select images and photographs and things like that which are never neutral and that if there's any field that needs imagination it's archaeology you really need to be able to imagine other ways of existing and being and how material culture can mean in different ways and that you've got to have a good imagination to be an archaeologist it's not just a matter of being willing to sit in a muddy trench or something like that it it really is something and of course one of the things that happens while you're excavating is that well unless you go crazy otherwise is your imagination has to just sort of free float while you're there it's great great great great great great great great and you know finding things but yeah it's not free floating no it's just free floating in a way but it's always free floating as you say it's grounded so it's imagination that's grounded literally one more excerpt Meg okay hang on very important this one I think the other really important aspect to this is to place the backlash to Maria in a wider context of backlash which has certainly been going on with feminist approaches and the anxiety it's been generated by a society that realizes that now their workforce is dependent on women and that the government is still trying to control women's bodies women's futures and that for many people the backlash may be as much a result of their own anxieties about themselves their inability to change to be in a changing world and their own insecurities and we see that more widely with a feminist backlash and I think the attempt to pull out a meaningful history for women whether it's truthful or not or how it is truthful is is a wider social issue and a social problem today and so I think we can't just see it in the terms of the history of archaeology but it has to be placed in a wider context of a deeply problematic feminist background where are they found what are they found with there you go are we ready to go now we'll move on to someone who does use visual evidence and so forth really fantastically and this is Sarah's story was her master's project at the Berkeley School of Journalism in 2019 she's received several awards and invitations to festivals and we note in here that there are quite a few Berkeley former students and colleagues here but only some because there are many many more here and elsewhere that have contributed to it but this is this is a great presentation of where somebody comes in not an archaeologist with an anthropology background but not an archaeologist to try to put together a very engaging often using humor and so forth to tell us a little bit more about their story so also Sarah's presence in them in this presentation is doubly relevant because especially thinking about how the footage from our interviews has been manipulated even not just cut but manipulated because Sarah in her current employment by the Washington Post her interest is in forensic video analysis which is the manipulation of video to change its meaning and meaningfulness and she's doing this as part of the Washington Post's fact-checking initiative the team that is doing that when it comes to history the stories were told fit a simple narrative tigri looks with admiration at Angkor have a nice day okay women are the gatherers the girls who went to Big Berry and the homemakers who need protecting the men are the warriors the artists and the hunters who do the protecting but where do these stories come from some start here at archaeological sites this excavation is in israel and it's where i dub as a college student the days started at 4 a.m with breakfast pvngs and a 30-minute drive to site when we got there we grab tools drag ourselves to the squares and start digging we toss buckets it's great pickaxe and sometimes break materials oh shit occasionally we find something unexpected archaeologists working in israel found one of the first known wine sellers the thrill of discovery is one reason i love archaeology some other perks we're meeting my best friends and partner but that last summer on the dig i picked up a camera and found a new thrill i never looked back until i met the archaeologist margaret may conkie is now well documented integrating between neanderthals and modern humans i personally have 306 neanderthal variants which is more than 88 percent of the people that 23andme have tested but that's okay i like having neanderthal i've always been a big fan they would not have made it as long as they did if they weren't great and adapted and doing all the right thing uh i did work and it wasn't my duty to see can i have a picture of you oh sure sure sure sure yeah not with my selling glasses right okay meg inspires a lot of people she got me started on this journalistic excavation where i traveled across the country and over the Atlantic to visit museums experts and even a swedish island once inhabited by vikings to understand how we've simplified men and women and if it's more complicated than what we've been told new york's museum of natural history it's among the most trusted institutions of knowledge in the world major discoveries take center stage here like this australopithesis skeleton otherwise known as lucy the skeleton is believed to be a close relative to humans and around 3.2 million years old the hominid is also famously female within 24 hours of finding the fossil without adequate scientific analysis etc they named it as lucy they named the skeleton after the famous beetle song that played during the celebration the day of the find now it turns out she was quite small other fossils were found that were bigger so immediately became clear the research that we're working on it that males are large and females are small she didn't look like anything we had ever found before she was something very different and because of that she opened up for us and an entire new chapter on human origins but some scientists argue that we may not be able to tell the sex of lucy the skeleton is after all a non-human incomplete fossil anthropologist adrian zillman says for all we know lucy might just as well have been a male as a female all we know for sure is lucy was small so the debate over lucy's sex continues but in the meantime hager worries about the consequences of her long-term representation as a female if you go to the american history museum you will see a diorama where there's a male and there's a female she's representing the female and the male is much bigger but the man has the arm around the female and seems to be guiding her seems to be protecting her and the view of the past has traditionally been that the male is the guardian and the breadwinner and the female moves along with them and what i find most disturbing is it does take it to the general public and say this is the way we are and because this has a long evolutionary history don't even think about changing this is how it is lucy was a trope for passive small females the opposite for males was the strong warrior or hunter a stereotype seen in most places especially sweden so this is the prehistories our exhibition this is the oldest woman in sweden for the moment she's 9 000 years old and you know the interesting thing with this is that she had some hunting tools with her so that led to the conclusion among the archaeologists that this could not be a woman it was a man so if you were a hunter you were a man critical to the development of that idea or ethnographies of gatherer hunter societies there were these old-fashioned ideas about living primitive in the most pejorative ethnocentric way that living primitive people were frozen in earlier stages of human evolution in small bands they still existed as they always had as early man once which was convenient for people studying cultural evolution because then you just have to trot around the world in the present and see ancient examples frozen in time there was a picking and choosing of ethnographic studies that corroborated that the men do the hunting and women don't the ethnographers were primarily men and they would primarily talk to men they assumed that the men would know what was going on with everybody and the men were doing the important stuff anyway they paid very little attention to women and most of the information they got about women came from men interestingly enough in some instances whether something got considered hunting or gathering depending on who was doing it fishing might be considered hunting if men are doing it and it might be considered gathering if women are doing it and so we get this now listen to me closely yes we're hunters men just males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes why were women invisible and men were the main focus well if you want the short answer why were women invisible it's because we live in a patriarchal society archaeology long had a reputation as a very masculine field and even as women began to enter the field women typically tried to become honorary men we had a notion of what a real science is a male scientist who walks into the lab in their little white lab coat and leaves the culture at the door science doesn't work that way science never has worked that way science never can work that way because guess what the human walked into the lab right the human walked into the lab and nobody leaves their culture at the door it's impossible this is really a very strange to figure it out because it's your turn to start off isn't it she works out of sumo wrestler or crouton daughters well as a woman of African and Cherokee descent there is no objectivity in history I can look at the same archive as three other people and all three of us come up with different stories the tapio-maché foundation for the replica of the warrior's grave has been made ready for a long time archaeologists thought they were approaching their research through a gender neutral lens because they didn't see men and women they just saw the the norm which was the men men wrote about men doing things men did not write about women doing things and when women wrote they tended to write about the men doing things they were embedded in the same society the story we tell about early paleolithic hunter-gatherers is the men found awesome stones and they chipped them away and made really sharp knives and then they went running after the mammoths and the bison and all these other big animals and then they slaughtered them and then everyone ate lots of meat and was strong and the women did everything else in southern Ethiopia these barren hills may conceal the earliest evidence of man's existence primarily he was a hunter people are making assumptions about things to help them get to an answer that they either unconsciously want or definitely want or one that's really problematic there was a lot more sharing of activities in hunter-gatherer society gender roles are not as absolute as we want to think when you actually go and see what people do the idea of rigid gender roles in the past started to seem ridiculous Diane Gifford Gonzalez wrote you can hide but you can't run about the imagery of human evolution so showing all of these paintings that accompany articles mostly for the general public about the past and almost without fail there is a woman on her hands and knees scraping a hide in the background and it looks just like a 1950s housewife scrubbing her kitchen floor it's a bit of a vicious circle because we assign gender roles to hunting and gathering people that we are pulling from our own experience of gender roles and calling that natural you know they say a woman's place is in the home and I suppose as long as she's in the home she might as well be in the kitchen and that explains my mom how come you always do the outside cooking well I'll tell you son now women do all right when they have all the modern conveniences but us men are better at this rugged type of outdoor cooking sort of a throwback to caveman days we're using the past to justify the present but we're talking about the past in terms of the present we don't have to use the past to normalize a present that we one don't want don't need and actually don't have the evidence for in the past anyway you know something was happening in the wider cultural setting that starts raising a lot of different kinds of questions and breadth of talent among women all over the place anthropologists a lot of women were part of that movement and they started rethinking their own discipline the primary start was the question where were women in prehistory women had to have been doing more than gathering and tending babies for 500,000 years a million years that just started to seem stupid this was the start of feminist and gender archaeology and meg was one of its founders historians had asked wonderfully a number of years ago is there a usable past for women and i think one of the things that we've tried to do is to make women everywhere realize that they were important in the human past because of their labor so women's labor even today is not valued as it should be we implicitly recognize as women that the pay gap and the wage gap is an injustice that persists through secrecy and it's an injustice that persists to the present day so to think that by adding to the conversation that we don't have to be like this because it's always been this way but rather because people in the past were inventive creative collaborative work together their labor was valued well if it was that way in the past why can't it be that way in the present though meg and her fellow squeaky wheels started to challenge the norm in the 80s these gender assumptions were difficult to shake everyone from hunters to cave painters were men and some people couldn't accept other realities in 1988 randa white decided to feature a woman as a cave painter in a national geographic illustration the importance of all of this for me was that at the time it was estimated that they had 60 million readers every month because as you well know national geographic is in dentist's office and doctor's offices and everywhere uh in america the illustration was one of the first real expressions of gender balance in the past she was surrounded by some men but she was clearly the actor and her female sex was indicated by the fact that they just left the side of her tunic open to show that she had a breast randall didn't expect a call from the national geographic editor the night before publication the line that that i remember coming out of his mouth was dr white you know as well as i do that women never would have been allowed to do anything this important and in the day before this image went to press before the story went to press they used their graphics computer at the time to transform her into at least a gender neutral but almost certainly a male figure uh to conform to the preconceptions of one of the senior editors at the magazine so men had agency and women didn't like the most famous stereotype of masculinity the viking warrior the northman sailed by the sun in the daytime and the stars at night men were macho fighters on their longship scaring the clergy in 1888 archaeologists introduced the world to 581 the quintessential high status viking warrior buried beside the skeleton were two horses weapons and gaming pieces ever since the burial was excavated it had been assumed that the person in the grave was male and actually all we did was to use dna and we proved that this person was in fact female it took a moment for the penny to drop when we say hang on 581 is female um because this is a famous grave yeah i mean you have immediately got our attention yeah the image that we have at the vikings is still very very male dominated and i think that is something that certainly factors into the reactions to this burial this person cannot be a warrior because women can't be can they they're too weak or they're you know it's against nature and all kinds of sexist rubbish so again projecting it's a bit like one of those rorschach ink blots you know where where there's actually nothing there and people see what they bring to it these pagan pirates warriors colonists and merchants poured over much of Europe what was the reaction from academia um when the reaction in the beginning was surprise uh and skepticism it must be the wrong skeleton and if it's not the wrong skeleton it must be something else it's not a warrior she was representing a dead husband there is a tendency to take away the agency of women and interpret a man with tools to be the actual user of the tools while a woman with tools would be representing somebody who used the tools and and this is something that we still are doing uh even though we we should know better we're in sweden until thursday and we're just going to the island for today okay it's a short trip my excavation ends here on the island where the viking warrior was buried i wanted to see the very place where she lived and died almost like i was stepping into the past to meet her the vikings believed in legacy long after death but they were reduced to simple stereotypes that are slowly unraveling we'll never fully understand the viking warrior but we do know her story is much richer than what we previously thought but just think of how many other women in the past we've ignored or mischaracterized what would the present look like if we knew their stories history i mean our story is complicated like us and there's every indication that we probably did have lots of different genders maybe just two but who knows people of different ages different races ethnicities so many broader possibilities there's so many more black archaeologists in my generation than the previous generation there's so many more native american archaeologists in my generation still a small group but it's growing queer people are growing and we're getting louder about being queer unless in the closet nico do you know how i get my panel back that i may disappear perhaps click on the um oh here we go yeah it looks like it's about one o'clock but are there any questions jordan um just one in the youtube chat from uh christine about how you got the uh the cutting room floor excerpts whether that was something you have from the get go or or a recent request um i asked them for it after we saw the movie and saw that we only had two seconds each just about it was two excerpts i think um i wrote to them and said i would be very interested to get what we said to them because i felt that there was something really some really good things that we were saying like a record of it so they sent us that it's not anything like the full three hours but it's it's something good i'm glad we got to see exercise selves and i appreciated the the contextualization within uh how those ideas evolved as well um uh a question from nico um says last month randall haas at all published an article on a female big game hunter burial that included a review of 27 hunter burials that could be sexed in nearly half 11 of the 27 in the americas were female i was surprised that a review like this hadn't been done some years ago maybe this is part because the ability to sex remains have improved recently perhaps you have a comment on this well i actually reviewed that article um for um responded to that article for science magazine um and uh if you look at the response uh other kinds of comments um about it and nico and others actually many of those so called other tested uh um situation are actually very weak and feeble in terms of the evidence and um i think bob kelly from uh wyoming actually felt that there was really only just a couple of them um but i do think that in the case of the um example um that haas and colleagues published that they did use a new technique about um proteins um in their analysis of the skeletal material that it wasn't just based on morphological inferences from things like the pelvis which in itself is lori hager and sabrina agarwal and others would tell you uh is a very problematic sort of indicator it's not um anything one way or another but so there is a new way and it was described in that haas article uh that appeared in science thank you for that um it looks like christine has one question about uh the what do you think the impact uh that sarah calen's film has had in the u.s press is you have a sense of its reception yet because it's not publicly available gotcha as far as i know is it meg you you could you could confirm that um she did show it at the mill valley film festival a couple of years ago and uh it had several showing up here it was last year and um uh it it was very favorably reviewed people really liked it i think her use of humor and um sort of some of these uh blasts from the past in videos or television shows or whatever which at the time people took straightforwardly and seriously you know we weren't critiquing leave it to beaver but we of course now critique leave it to beaver and all of the other kinds of things very rapidly so it does show a lot of change cultural change and cultural um understandings and you know some of the wider cultural movements the so-called women's lib or even the demonstration after the election of um that guy in the white house um uh it was uh with all the pink hats and so forth you know it really shows that there's been cultural changes over the years as well um it is i think she would allow people to use it for classroom teaching um i have lent it to uh my version to at least one person who was teaching an archaeology of gender class and um she actually was surprised about finding this as a topic because in her undergraduate education and anthropology they never seem to have covered this as a topic as recently as the mid 20s you know 2015 and so forth so that was kind of a shock to her so it does mean that some of us here at Berkeley have been for decades uh much more engaged with this serious topic with serious implications for people's social and gender relations today in ways that have not yet spread even around the country in anthropology departments yeah i think it could be used to to um disseminate to a much broader audience um to make other people aware of this of the whole biases that are still going on um i think that that could it could really work if she if she did disseminate it um but it's always a problem for you know it's a kind of dilemma that young filmmakers have that um how if they put it on youtube then it's they get they get no professional or not much professional um or monetary right now and now it's on youtube now it is on youtube that's right buried yes i suppose um well so a quick segue out of that um if we've got time for one more question that will be my own um uh in light of of um sort of pedagogical concerns which by the way if you want to use your classroom teacher and want to use that film in your class get in touch with meg um uh but that was something that came up a bit in in the talk and the films here um what what do you see as sort of the next steps for pedagogy um on these issues in in archaeology and more broadly well i think um i mean there is a international workshop uh going on now on zoom which is kind of about archaeology archaeological pedagogy and of course i think the scope of our concerns in archaeological pedagogy are not just limited to issues of gender and whatever gender means these days because even in the decades that people like Ruth and I and our colleagues here and elsewhere have been working on this topic the very notion of what gender means has itself shifted and changed enormously but of course now there are many other components of the um what makes for a if you will a distributed person different identities different uh concerned has expanded enormously uh which is both exciting and a real challenge so i think uh and you know just to name a few um sort of notions of um indig in indigeneity um racial or ethnic uh kinds of uh aspects as well um among many so as well as disabilities and other perspectives on uh what humans are all about and what perspectives they come to bring to the world in terms of both their ontologies and their epistemology so i think the challenge is even greater these days than it has been before but i think that this is something that archaeology has the ability and the capability and the creativity to rise to and and and deal with and i think that's our challenge thank you for that all right um well i guess that brings us to the close for today and then the close for this semester so thank you both very much and thank you to all of our presenters this this semester and all of our faithful attendees over over youtube and we look forward to seeing you in the spring


Auxiliary variables are very useful when dealing with missing data. Auxiliary variables are variables that can predict missingness, but are not interesting for the main model. Let's take a look at how auxiliary variables work. The idea of an auxiliary variable relates to the missing data mechanism. So the missing data mechanisms that we have are missing completed random, which is not problematic. We are missing at random and then we are missing not at random. Missing not at random is of course the most problematic. We know that missingness R can depend on the observed predictors and the observed dependent variable, but it also depends on variables that we don't observe. We call these variables Z here. So if we observe these Z, we can actually do a couple of things. The Z variables are assumed to be correlated with selection. So we might say that, for example, whether you have kids or not depends on whether you are working and whether we observe your weights or not and that kind of things. And the Z variables are independent of the study variables. So they are irrelevant or based on theory, they are expected to be uncorrelated with the main study variables. So what we can do is that we can use these as auxiliary variables. How it works is that we use the information from these auxiliary variables, other variables. They are often demographic variables and other things like that to make our missing data estimation better. And one nice thing about auxiliary variables is that in some cases, they can convert this problematic missing not at random pattern to a less problematic missing at random pattern. Let's see how that works. So the idea is of converting missing not at random pattern to missing at random pattern is illustrated by this example. So this comes from the Ender's book. And we have a model where we are interested in the correlation between self-esteem and whether the person is sexually active or not. So these are our teenagers. And we don't think that sexual activity itself has a causal relationship on being selected in the study. We assume that esteem does have a causal relationship. But we have theoretical reasons to believe that age actually influences whether a person is selected to the study or not. And we know that age determines your sexual activity so that older people are or closer to adulthood are more sexually active than younger teenagers. So if we don't model this age, which is not the age is not important for our theoretical model. If we don't model this age when we do our missing data model, then we can see that there's a spurious correlation between sexual activity and being selected. Now if we add age to our missing data model, then controlling for age, sex and our selection would be uncorrelated. So that would be nice. And how do we actually go about doing this? If you do a multiple implantation study, then you simply add age as a predictor in your implantation model. So simply adding more variables into the implantation model and then run the implantation, then leave age out when you do your main analysis, this correlates. If you do full information maximum likelihood, then you need to do something like this. So these AV1 and AV2 are the auxiliary variables, X1 and X2 are the main variables and Y is the dependent variable. In SCM framework, we would add the auxiliary variables and allow them to be freely correlated with any of the predictors and also any error terms of observed variables. So this is an observed variable model and there is just one error term. So we are saying that these auxiliary variables are freely correlated with everything. We are not interested in their correlations and they would not be affecting model fit at all. But interestingly, even if we have these variables that don't affect the path coefficients, don't affect the model fit, simply by adding them to the model allows the FIML algorithm to use the information from these variables to compensate for missingness. And that's a nice thing to have. In more complex models, if we have a latent variable model of the same, so we have X1 and latent X1, latent X2, latent Y, then we need to add these auxiliary variables and we have every correlation with auxiliary variable and the error terms of the observed variables to be freely correlated. Of course, the auxiliary variables are freely correlated with themselves, too. So what's the logic here? The logic is that we don't constrain the correlations between any of these variables and any of the observed variables to any values. So importantly, this error term of the latent variable because the latent variable is not observed, that should not be freed because that would make the model not identified. So we do the simplest possible thing to allow these auxiliary variables to be freely correlated with the observed variables and that is adding the correlation between the error terms and the auxiliary variables. Now this kind of specification is not directly supported by every statistical software. For example, I'm not sure if you can do this with data, but what you can do always is to just specify additional latent variables that predict these observed values. So they are basically kind of like error terms that you specify yourself. So there are workarounds if your statistical software does not allow you to do this kind of specification. How many auxiliary variables do you apply? Well, there's an influential study by Collins in 2001 that concluded that the more is always better. But the current understanding is that there are limitations. So technically there are auxiliary variables and how they relate to selection or missingness. So it's not a causal relationship. It does not need to be. So we don't need to care anything about measurement error or endogeneity or reverse core seller or whatnot. We just need to calculate predictions. And to calculate predictions, more predictors is better assuming that you have a very, very large sample size. In practice, there are limitations. So if you include 100 auxiliary variables, then your model might have difficulties in converging. There's an absolute limit that you cannot have more auxiliary variables or more variables in the model than you have observations, because then you will run into a perfect collinearity issues. So the current recommendation is that you include auxiliary variables very liberally, but if you have problems in getting the model to converge, then you should take some of those away. And the key thing is that if we have two auxiliary variables that are highly correlated, then that may cause a problem in convergence and then taking one of those out might help the problem. So as a general advice, using background variables that are not interesting for the main research question as auxiliary variables is pretty much always a good idea when you do a missing data analysis.


to tell these films all in migrant stories through film for a century. Excellent medium to be able to communicate to the wider population. Everybody loves to watch a movie and it's an opportunity for one to sit back and relax and really absorb the message. So I feel like film is an excellent medium for an individual to learn something new especially when it has to do with migration and diversity and inclusion. I feel like films can speak many languages. Obviously there's the visuals, the sound, you know, even if you don't understand the language sometimes you can just see the visuals and you can connect to the subject, connect to the content of the films you're trying to present. I think that film is a way to tell the story of migration to a range of different audiences that can easily be translated into different languages that allows the stories of migrants from different communities to be understood by a range of different audiences. We all come from different places united here for a common objective. I didn't feel like I could have tied her anymore. Film is uniquely positioned because I believe in the value of culture and culture is an important part of people's life. It helps, it doesn't just help, it's what makes them who they are or a central part of what makes them who they are. Film, discussion, it's all part of what fills up good culture. Through storytelling we relate to other people or importantly we see ourselves and in that way we foster a sense of belonging and for anyone, for everyone in fact I think that's critically important. Thailand has benefited immensely from micro-workers. Micro-workers are the ones who are building the apartments, they're the ones who are building the roads, they're the ones who are picking the produce that we are eating, they're the ones who are taking care of the children and the grandparents. And so, migrants we see the contribution that they are providing in Thailand every single day. The main message we send to the micro-workers community in this region is thanks to the work we're doing because there will be no tourist industry, there will be no service industry, there will be very difficult to have food and a garment industry without micro-workers, so the prosperity in this region and some extent in the peace in this region is built on micro-workers. I think it's really important to understand the story of migration and how that impacts communities, governments, society.


And I am just helping them hold that space to make that awareness, that experience, more helpful. If I can do that, that helps. I think just having an audience know that it's an ensemble, you know, but for us having the audience know that they're a collective, you know, this, and they, you know, if they have questions, they'll say, ah, it's correct to be collectively, right? No. You know, if it's a collective project, no. But the fact that they know it's collective, that they know it's an ensemble, tweaks their vision of what's possible. You know, in society, it's increasingly it's about the individual, individual. Same thing, this is an ensemble. I think sometimes that's just, right. And what I think the way you're putting it is sort of that's, it's sort of, it's life and it's death. That's not, and I've been saying that's just a sort of part of what we're giving up, as opposed to the big thing, which, and emotionally I get what you were saying before, the word was like, we sweated an excellent process with each other for a long time, but you can't really share that other than through what the performance is and by saying, hey, it's a collective and maybe sometimes inviting people in at certain points to perhaps offer feedback. But there's a whole thing that happens privately within the company that just doesn't get shared and it's sort of, has to tend to be wonderful on its own or awful on its own or whatever. I actually disagree. It is that unseen process of breath that holds an ensemble together but that actually is what the audience is going to see. That's what their company is going to see. That's what they're going to think. They want to be in a space with it. I think it's wonderful that, you know, I don't want to, you know, I want to figure out what they mean because it's the future. You know, I want to be in the same space with it. Yeah, because that's the change here. You know, whatever. But it's about... She's going to share this with us. Ooh! And that experience of ensemble, that there's something admirable about that audience sense of... Question. If the language starts to get to be a problem here, but if we're talking about a product, or the product is even getting to be, but if I didn't know it was an ensemble, would I sense it? And does that contribute to the excellence of the experience? And are there sort of two parts of it? Is there something about it that feels ensembly and also it's a really good show? I love to come up in every single session. Do we have to mention that when we go to the theater, we see love for the part of that process that we just died on. Something we need to know is an ensemble. People will see it.  You've got to get these people, not just cast them and get them in the middle of the line, but they kind of have to follow them more, the process of following up with what you're doing so that by the time it opens, they're just as passionate about it. It's not just a gig, you know, because they are now part of something and not just in something. I don't struggle. But what? We were at a time when I said one more question. It's so fast. And it goes into this notion of if the product is in the process, is it disingenuous to open a show? I mean, like, is that... I don't assume that we're going to get it right in the rehearsal. You know, I would say that's right in the rehearsal many times. But this is an assumption that we're going to get it right real quick. And it's, you know... The process should be an internal barometer that says whether a show is meant to go on or to show it all the way to public. I mean, one of the issues I do have with some months on the work is I don't feel that the text material gets worked in sometimes is... It's almost always the last thing that gets worked on. It's sort of like it's shoved into the picture at the last few weeks or months of development. We've got a two-year process, but the script's being finalized in the last couple of weeks. To me, that's backwards, you know. Even though... And I know that's really hard for an ensemble because you're developing stuff along the way. And then finally, so you're going to do a epiphany and you know what the text will be through. But then, to me, it needs another round of workshopping before it goes up in front of the public. So I think there needs to be this internal barometer that says, do we really need to be sure we're ready that you can't just have the insurgencies in your reducing schedule determined because I've just seen too many really, really great projects leave that key piece to too late. And that's why we have the Work for Progress series and we're the theory factory. We have 20 out of 30 of our companies because in the dance world, you get two minutes, five minutes. It's very common that in the dance world, they're putting up projects all the time that are these little, little bits. And there's not enough venues for, like, people who buy work, as a matter of course, to be able to do that. So that you can, what I call, it's like, ablutions or go through the ablutions stuff. This process that happens, this all-chemical thing that happens with the audience, which is you can't get to that point until you put it in front of the audience and reach as your other ensemble member and you get it out there. So for us, it's a huge piece of importance and obviously for the other people that are applying and coming into the process, it's for them too. And of course, then talk, which we've talked about before, but how do you use that? I don't know. Well, I would say that just also, like for the monitoring, we just say, let's do that because if we're doing something that happened because a nuclear power plant exploded, you know, a two-year process and you hear our most, the vast majority of our time is researchers. That's been so much in research and then style and genre to figure out how to tell the story. And then I go, ah, and then I can start writing. It is, but where we do benefit from, is the ensemble part. And being a really honest ensemble, that's a big thing. And then because we have a particular style, we will go, you know, this just isn't, the scene doesn't work, Michael, because of, you know, you're not dealing with this or this character and you're like, okay, I'll rewrite it, but you're going through process and stuff. But I think that, you know, the question of is it okay to basically open up the process as a product? You know, I think with that, you know, there is that overlap.  Back in the 80s, ACT was doing some shows, Lear, I think it was, and a company from Moscow came to see what they were doing. And they were like, how long have you been working on this? And they were so happy that they did this in the days where you had an eight-week rehearsal period. Remember that? That eight-week rehearsal period. Yeah, and the company, the Soviet company said, you can work on this for eight years. They had just done handling. They hadn't opened yet, and they've been working on it for two years on a show that was done. They were like, how can you possibly do Shakespeare and work on it for less than two years? You know, they're going, that's funding. They ended up having a list. Yes. We do have, didn't we? Do you have to go to this next section? So I hope we're beginning to take it here and keep the conversation going. Please, do I have to? Do I have to divide the group? Great. I'm going to ask you over here to repeat that, like this half here, sitting in this room, and this half there. You can go to the... next door. Thank you all so much.


Good evening. I will call this school committee meeting of April 25th 2013 to order my name is Judson Pierce chairing the school committee tonight. I'd like to start out with Respectfully with a moment of silence For those who have tragically lost their lives and those many who were injured last week in Boston. Thank you We'll see I'm wearing a hat and I'll be wearing it all night We have a special guest with us tonight to start out the evening First I should say Miss Heim Regretfully cannot be here with us tonight Due to some obligations at home, and we believe mr. Thielman and mr. Schlickman are on their way Hello, mr. Schlickman I'll let dr. Cheson if you wouldn't mind introduce our guests sure It's my pleasure to introduce our special guest tonight Ben Sherston. Ben is a teacher at the Dallin elementary school He's also a key member of the tech leader team across the district Which is made up of teachers from every single building elementary middle and high school Ben has taken a real role in the leadership of the Putting in technology at the elementary schools. He actually has a pilot classroom in which his students One-to-one iPads. It's a third-grade classroom, and he's going to tell us a little bit tonight about what the work He's doing in his classroom Okay So to start off I do I have this one-to-one environment in my classroom, which has been great And a piece of this has been just trying to try a little bit of everything to try to get a sense of what works And what doesn't work so that we can really inform the new environment that we're going to have in Thompson next year So that's kind of part of where I'm coming from Before I show you some of the stuff that my kids have been doing I just want to say a little bit about sort of where where I'm coming from from the instructional lens The iPad for us as a tool and it does some really neat things and there are some things it does really well And some things it doesn't necessarily do well, and that's okay. It's not replacing all the things that we do So when I think about where I want to incorporate this into my teaching I Sort of ask myself three questions One of them is is this going to allow me as a tool to do something that I've never done before Is it going to allow me to do something much more easily than I have been able to before do something that was prohibitively difficult? And isn't it going to make something more fun because that's an important piece of school as well So I just want to run through and show you guys a few things that that we've been doing and tell you about that I jumped in with with with typing and the writers workshop and when we came around to our second round of a personal narratives I gave the option of the kid that you guys want to write in your notebooks With pencil that's fine. If you want to do typing that's fine, too I've got some students and we all do it third grade that are just really slow writers and I said, okay well, maybe Maybe the typing won't be any faster, but it might be more legible It might you know Maybe create something different for them and certain and certainly revising typed work is very different from revising written work and so I gave them the option and Of my 24 kids by the time we got through that piece about a third of them had done the entire thing by hand about a third of them did it entirely on the iPads and about a third of them did a mishmash of both and Where it's really made the biggest difference is revising when we go back to to change things And add things it's it's really different when when you're on a computer And or on a digital device and for kids these days. It's a lot of erasing It's a lot of cutting paper apart and piecing things together and that final draft is a very much another draft And you know, I tried as best I could with paper to to limit the amount of copying over the kids We're doing but to some degree it has to happen And it's been really interesting with the iPads that we get to that final draft and all of a sudden We've done all we're editing and we've done all of our revising and that final draft is suddenly there We don't have to rewrite it. It's done And the kids love that For that that last step of writing was always the most arduous if I have to copy this over one more time and Now that's not a piece of it anymore which has been really neat for me and for them and Because we use a shared evernote account, which is cloud-based. I can access all the writing from anywhere So if I want to look at what they're doing or comment on it I can do that from my device without having to track down their stuff or if I want to look at stuff at home I don't have to bring home a stack of Writing journals. I can pull up all their writing on my own device And look at it and see where they are Sort of better inform instruction or if I want to check in with the kid the next day Then I can sort of plan that meeting the night before while I'm at home that I have to bring a bunch of stuff with me It's it's changed the way that we do some of our research We don't do open Google searches in third grade. We do thanks to our PTO have a subscription subscription to something called nettrekker Which is a search engine that has been vetted by actual real humans And has an elementary appropriate section middle school appropriate section a high school appropriate section and we're able to get on those with the iPads and What's interesting is that we've done this research before and it's always been in the computer labs And when you sit with a computer that is Solid and kind of stuck somewhere research becomes very isolating and Now that we have kids working in groups with their own devices that they can hold in their laps They can say to the person next to them. Hey, look at this really cool thing that I found Which is what you can kind of do with a laptop But it's a little more cumbersome than just to have something that's you know the size and the weight of a notebook and So there's this whole social piece That's been that's been emerging with the iPads that isn't possible at all with desktops and it's difficult with laptops So it's really interesting to see that how that's changed We also use when we were studying space some NASA has put together some really great apps with information And so we were able to do some apps specific research as well And again that social piece came out where they were really more easily able to share with each other Each other the things that they were finding and this whole different level of engagement When you bring the social aspect into it, which was really neat This is actually gonna start All right, I'm just going to do this the right way So one of the core apps that a lot of folks are using a lot of folks love is called explain everything And really the best way to describe this is just in the name It allows you to explain anything And so you have the audio recording that goes over it And then students can Predraw or draw in the moment anything on the screen at the same time and it zips together into this beautiful movie file And they can go back and edit things and so at the end of my unit on sound Rather than giving a quiz or something of that sort what I said to kids was here to open it to questions about sound You should be able to answer Go for it explain what you know to me Using the explain everything app. And so this is what one of my students put together. So we'll see if you guys can hear this When you hit the tune Then it hits this first layer of molecules They love it the next one the next one and the next one and the next one and the next one until it goes inside your ear To your ear does like it will seem like a flat piece of skin And then that you just wiggle for instance in your signal to your brain my new brain On a guitar if you tighten the string It gets higher because it moves fast If you loosen a string This one it gets lower because it moves slower So how do you change your picture on a guitar is you loosen the string or tighten the string Now you loosen your tight strings You turn this thing one way to have it tighten the string And the other way to have it loosen like this string And so we have this this new way for kids to explain how to explain to us what they know And it really sort of is like We all wish that we had the time to sit with those kids one-on-one And can you take two minutes and explain to me what you know rather than give a test or have them do a drawing And this allows us to do that But not having to sort of sacrifice all that class time If I spend three or four minutes with every kid suddenly an hour and a half has gone by and most of those kids spent that chunk of time Not doing anything And this also allows them just to go back and revise And and make it perfect or as perfect as they want it to be or I can go back to them and say hey Can you explain this part a little bit more? And it really allows them to do a lot and this app has come has really exploded was actually put together The guy who came up with the idea is a teacher down in New York City and got together with some guys who code And they put this thing together and it sort of exploded now to the point where as you are Explaining and doing your screencast you can have a live Web browser on the screen as well So you can actually navigate through the web well talking about it all being recorded at the same time All in the same device and it's all right there in front of you There are no cables to plug in and when you're done with it You can just email it out and it's done notes, you know looking for cables and trying to convert file types It's all there, which is really great We made a lot of use out of there's no the core app that we've been using a lot called book creator Which is exactly that there's a piece of it that is just so Just simple with kids and so they select basically a book size and then they can add Text to it they can add pictures to it They can add their own audio recordings over to if they want to This was actually neat when I did it with with kids I had one group that decided to audio record their voices reading every single page And I collected them all in and some of them were not the quality that I wanted them So I handed them back said okay guys like You just this is this is my feedback and you know Let's let's change some things and as soon as the other groups realized that one group of kids had done this They all did it the second time around So you can go in and you can have this read to you by the kids It's a standard e-pub format. So it opens up in iBooks and everything else. It works across non-apple devices as well And we were able to actually put them all together into one book That's ready to go ahead and send it out yet But ready to go out to parents and you know rather than having those final projects We hung on the wall in a space where Parents have to come in and see these things so we can now put them on Public spaces or send them out over email so that so that you know the as we try to share what we're doing We can do this beyond the walls of the school, which is really neat I'll go back The last three things that I want to say I asked my kids in the last couple of days said okay I got to go and give this presentation. Why do you guys like doing this? you know, what do you enjoy about having these in the room and We talked for a few minutes about and a lot of things came up and they kind of centered around three ideas One of them was that the iPads are mistake tolerant, which is the adult phrase that we use these days That it's easy to to play around with stuff. It's easier for them to try something out if they don't like it to change it I mean if you think about what I mean with pencils we can erase them there's you only erase so many times before you have to start over again if you want to look really nice and iPads and digital devices allow us to make those changes really easily and the kids really like that They like the idea that they can change a color or change a font or move a picture around that if they don't like it They can easily put it back It doesn't cost them huge amounts of time to do those experiments and it changes It changes the way that they plan for these things to you know kids are impulsive and sometimes that I mean there they should be they're developmentally impulsive and Sometimes that can be can be tricky for them They want to try something that it doesn't work and then it costs them time and energy and now we can just put it back And they know that and they appreciate that The other thing that they talked about was this idea of gamification The idea of taking this this inherent competitiveness that kids have the people have I have to teach multiplication math facts in third grade and It is boring. There's no way around it I'm really glad that I do it and I'm really glad that my kids learn it I'm glad that I learned it in third grade, but it's boring And my kids will say even now we have a couple of apps that allow them to practice these things and They get high scores and there's a timer and they'll come to me and they'll say I'm don't have my work Can I practice my math facts? Which has never happened before ever And that's really exciting that like yeah, they want to do this and it's it's it's it's sinking into their heads Which is really neat and The last one was this idea of differentiation and the kids are picking up on this too that It's easier for them and one of them actually said that it noticed that it was easier for me Which I thought was kind of cool That if I have different kids at different levels, which we all do in every classroom that it's very easy to Tailor what kids are doing to their needs With these devices really easy to sort of ramp things up or bring them down if we need to And and I noticed that certainly was really neat that one of my kids was able to point that out to me as well And so of all the things that they notice they seem to You know come around those three categories, which are great because those are things that are important to me, too And it was nice to hear that out of the out of the mouths of my eight and nine year olds So that's what I had you guys have any questions any questions sir. Mr. Hanna. Do you have one that? for the word Word processing and stuff. Yeah, do the children have a keyboarding course or program? We don't have one this year We have in past years done that through the library through our library technology program a couple years ago when we were cut Down to a single fizz ed. We had a more formal computer program or a computer special that they went to every week We don't have one now. I didn't know with with all the technology if there isn't Out there or something. I am sure they're out there And and personally I think it's an important skill for kids to have We played around with some of the dragging dictation software out there, and it's pretty good But it's not perfect and where it gets tricky is that oftentimes those kids that have the The fine motor difficulties are often kids that have like a lisp or a little bit of a speech thing Which is really tough with dictation software So it actually isn't doesn't help the way that it would help for you or I as an adult speaker And thank you start what was your level of knowledge on the iPad before you started this Do you feel and did you need to get any training on this or did you kind of learn as you went as well? And and how how much of a ramp-up time do you see with any of this with the kids? The first piece I own I had my personal iPad for about a year and a half Before I started doing stuff with kids A lot of them have had some exposure at home And what's really neat is to get into something and there will be those kids It'll pick it up really well, and they will automatically Go and help out other kids doing it and oftentimes because it's coming to me I don't remember how to do this Okay, can you find someone else who does because I'm sure that there are 10 kids in the room who know exactly how to do this And so a lot of that initial piece is training those kids to be independent And then also getting them into the mindset of there are 20 other people in this room And if I don't remember how to do something my teacher is not the only person that I can ask And if he's with somebody there are lots of other resources in the room In terms of having to learn things there were some apps that I was really familiar with Evernote is one that the one that we used for writing is one that I live on personally my entire personal life is in another evernote account But I wasn't other than that I wasn't doing a whole lot with cloud storage Things like Dropbox, which I learned how to use because I knew we needed it But that's sort of how we transfer stuff from device to device and so I learned how to do that with the kids and They picked it up really quickly and within a couple of weeks. They were able to Take a picture on one iPad upload that to the cloud and then pull it back down onto another device Which was great for me because they were able to do it on their own and the more they can do then Unless I have to do in the more time I have with kids Cool, thanks. I'm just wondering if you could reintroduce the speaker since mr. Schlickman. Oh, absolutely This is mr. Ben Sherston. He's a third grade teacher at the Dallin and as you can see very Very well-versed in the iPad Any other questions by the committee? Dr. Bodie, Dr. Chesson No, I guess the last thing I want to say is on Tuesday evening We had the pleasure of having an event a kickoff event sponsored by the Arlington educational foundation Which has is its goal to try to accelerate the technology plan that we saw during the last school committee meeting And I would invite anyone who's listening at home to check out the Arlington educational foundation Site which also has information has like a blog and we have teachers that are actually posting Then I know has personally has posted out there We have a number of other teachers that have posted on that site Things the parents might want to read to consider about technology and technology for their children and technology and education Well, thank you very very much for joining us here and helping us understand a little bit about what you're doing every day with these kids Thanks. Welcome. Thanks for having me. I Just have a quick question in terms of classroom management. Yeah working with the kids Do you have a display? Are you running through Apple TV? How much are you bringing stuff together? From kids and displaying it We do have an Apple TV. We have a dedicated ceiling mounted projector as well So both my device and all the kids of devices are able to hook into that Apple TV as a way to share And with that I've also been using we we have a small document camera for Physical stuff as well And I've actually started in the last few weeks doing more with the camera on my device As a mobile document camera basically and mirroring What's what's being viewed for my for my camera so rather than kids having to bring stuff up to the document here? I can bring my device is a document camera around the classroom. Oh So the Elmo kind of camera you're not using as much not as much I use an IP vote not an Elmo, which is a very different P-scale so to speak But but for that you know just you know for kids explaining what they're doing in math rather than bringing it up Sometimes it's easy for me to walk around and I can they can sit at their desk. I can hold My iPad over what they're working on and they can explain it and it's up on the board Thank you very very much. Thank you. Thank you. That's great. Thank you. Thanks, Ben Before we move on tonight, I'd like to introduce our AA rep, Siobhan Foley. Thanks for being here Our student rep. Could you take the mic and maybe introduce yourself and Senior at age Keep the mic over there because you're gonna play we're gonna figure you in prominently I think in this next spot So if I could ask miss my against it to come up to the podium and discuss your town cleanup event Yes, please Hi, good evening everybody We usually watch this on TV, so it's exciting to be here Live on the stage So, thank you for having me. I'm coming to you My name is my against I am I've been in Arlington for about 10 years I have two children both at the Brackett school grades one and and and three And over the last several years, I've developed a growing concern around litter in Arlington I think it's a beautiful town With a lot of beautiful open space But as a runner in the town, I have been seeing a lot of litter especially over the last few years. I think I think with the economy sort of When the economy went down I think they had to lay off some of the people in the town who helped keep the town clean So there and the town has grown. So I've been working with the town as well as with a number of other concerned Members of the Arlington community who happened to also be parents in the Arlington schools Dalin Bishop and Brackett and We have been trying to think of ways to address this issue So we formed a group we were calling ourselves the Arlington clean team act and As our first project we've we are planning a town-wide cleanup Now there are other cleanups that go on in the town, but they're very focused on specific areas There's a bike path cleanup and a robin's farm cleanup and our concept was more of a town-wide cleanup So it's going to take place on May 11th from 9 a.m. to noon and The concept is is that we will be meeting at the parking lot on mystic where the farmers market is held And I'll be there and other members of act will be there And we will be giving out garbage bags and we'll have a list of suggested areas in the town But it's really for people who come to decide The areas that they're concerned about maybe they walk their dog in an area every morning That's littered and they want to use this as an as an opportunity to go clean up that specific area And then we're just asking that people return the bags of garbage to either the meeting spot at Where the farmers market parking lot is or at the DPW who happens to be having a Trash collection day there as well for TVs, etc. So So our challenge of course is everyone's busy, especially this time of year with sports So our challenge is getting people involved and getting people to show up I look at this as not just an opportunity to clean up the town but also just as a as a Effort to raise awareness about this issue. I think again the town is growing There's a lot of people doing a lot of different activities and unfortunately sometimes this results in an abundance of litter In certain areas of town. So I'd like to start raising awareness and I think My reason for coming to the school committee is because I think that the children of Arlington are a great place to start So we can all develop good habits early So I'm coming to you to ask I guess for your support and your ideas about how maybe we could get The students in the Arlington public school system involved in this event and just overall You know involved in keeping the town clean and beautiful. So that's my My spiel as the judge said so I have a few handouts with the specifics But I you know, certainly if anyone has any questions for me or or ideas. I would welcome them wholeheartedly so Well, let me just begin by thanking you for coming one of the reasons why I wanted you here Speaking tonight was because you presented a town meeting. You presented at the board of select men Yeah, very eloquently. I mean you are first-hand witness to what? Isn't something that I think our town would like to see yeah And the board of select men in their meeting. I believe it was last month or perhaps two months ago Suggested that she come and speak with the school committee About what we could do to foster awareness and I've spoken with dr. Bodie as well to see if there's any sort of Opportunities and I'd love to get your your take on this too To get to get the word out and get people to to be a little bit more cognizant Do you have do you have any opportunities to maybe speak with with some of your fellow students between now? May 11th about this event and see what we could do to drum up some support for Things in terms of like the entire student body ever being together in one place that never happens I think the one thing we do do is like get flyers out through like through the principal emails out to homeroom teachers And home teachers tell students or like some like gives teachers packets. It's mainly in homeroom Each student's home. They can receive information. There's also the daily announcements every morning So I think work and spread through that and we can also try to like even have like a table in the cafeteria It's a common thing for people to spread awareness because people come and talk in the cafeteria So I think those are the best ways that I think about top my head. Okay. I think you can get something out of it Okay, that sounds like a good plan. Perhaps, you know, maybe make a meeting if if if you can with the Mary belong on the principal to high school and And talk with Mary about setting up that table in the calf or doing that announcement over the over the homeroom I don't like whoever's interested in it Maybe like can meet in a certain room at a time and like those people could be like the proponents Like if there's like certain group of kids that are interested in like really I'm Leading the group then it's like they can get their friends and that's usually how things also spread Is there a high school sort of environmental club or something? Yeah, I'm actually a part of it just it saves students against violating the environment I'm sure actually I probably could talk to them I can talk to the president of the club to charting something out There's also like an agriculture club and a social justice club, which is kind of like they try to learn about like Environmental justice as well. Okay, there's those three clubs. I think that okay talk to them, too. Yeah, that would be very helpful I really appreciate that that would be great. Thank you Luke. I appreciate that. Yeah, the members have any questions for Maya? Well, the timing of this could be very good for seniors because there's often a rush at the end to finish up hours of community service Arlington Public Schools has a 40-hour community service requirement over the course of the four years Not that they were just trying to fulfill their community hours, but at the same time It's a great way to to accomplish both so going through the different clubs would be very helpful, but I would also Make sure we could make sure the guidance knows this because often Those activities are organized through the guidance department We can also if you give me the flyer Make sure that all of the PTO so you may have already done that are aware of this I I think we have the PTO covered, but I'm happy to give you the flyer because I cannot hear things enough, right? So that would be wonderful. Thank you And I I think that you would also have some success at oddison So I certainly can pass that on to the the principle of oddison and let that be known up there as well I would be very appreciative. Thank you so much. So can I leave this? Yes, please? Yes, thank you so much Maya. Thank you for doing this. Thank you very much And if any of you would like to come out and join We will be there So I'm just gonna leave these fires here and I'm gonna kind of get in touch with your crew over the high school Okay, thank you. Have a nice evening everybody Okay, moving on right on time The Human Rights Commission appointment. We have two vacancies that we need to appoint as a school committee Two folks have come our way one has just come in this afternoon by way of resume and letter of intent and With with your permission, I'd like to meet with her Intendantly scheduled a meeting with her tomorrow morning and if Things look good. I'll present at our next school committee meeting her credentials and see if we can Appoint our second person, but tonight. I wanted to discuss with the committee this letter from Sharon P. Grossman and I'd like to put a motion on the table that we Appoint miss Grossman to the Human Rights Commission Miss Grossman as many of you know has been in town for for over 30 years. She's been active in a variety of capacities Ranging from advocacy No place for hate Arlington common threads to political campaigns and school related issues like PTO and high school selection committees in her professional life, she's a school psychologist and She's a strong core belief that our community should be welcoming to tall and bias and unfair treatment of any sort is wrong I think miss Grossman would be the ideal appointment by our body So is there a discussion all those in favor So if Karen you want to get I'll get a letter to you Great. Thanks Okay monthly financial report miss Johnson you have the reports we are we have completed the request for Purchase orders and they're all in the process of being processed I was away at the beginning of April and came back to a formidable stack But we are churning through that and I hope by the report at the beginning of May I'll be able to update you with our year-end balances in light of the entry of all those PO's Any questions Dr. Allison I had a question for page two of three The power and electricity. I was just concerned that we're running a hundred and thirteen thousand above budget and Wondering why that is and also Whether we've budgeted enough for next year with the Thompson coming online This is just the general fund portion of power and electricity. There are other places where power and okay, okay? So it's being paid out of a different right and also if you look at the line immediately below that We're running significantly under a natural gas, right? I think it will more than wash itself out without having to turn to those other funds But we budget we don't just budget in the general Okay, so that there's other electricity budget in other parts of the budget. Okay Such as where the building The building rental fund and we can also take some power money out of Pierce field for the electric on the lights If we choose to do so Any other questions, okay, great. Thank you very much Update on Thompson rebuild Dr. Bode well, there's since the last time I reported there. We have not had another Thompson building school committee Thompson school building committee meeting however since then members of the committee have Visited Thompson, and I don't know if they would like to share some of their impressions at this point That was awesome. I got my own private tour because no one else showed up yesterday, but it was a gorgeous day so that was nice and They said it's it's kind of interesting They said if you came every week now you'd see there's huge changes because that's where they are in the building I was I was just floored at kind of the whole flow of it the way It flows especially when you enter the building and kind of how you can see the whole main floor from that entry way I just love that the way it's going to be all open and kind of glass and I Mean, I know that right now there's no glass, so it's kind of hard to visualize it But I don't know it just it seems really cool and just the way they've thought through the space and the flow of it You know like the fact that there's Two ways to get into the library, you know So you can kind of run through it and that there's all these different Meeting spaces like there is this place where the kids can sit In the middle of some of the floors like in the middle like I think it was the kindergarten first grade There's like this stepped up thing that's built and that's gonna also happen in the library There's gonna be like a reading area, so it just seems to me It's really been thought well thought out as to kind of how kids Congregate and how you kind of want to teach them things And I thought that was really cool I also of course stuck my head in the bathrooms and wanted to look at the bathrooms because those were so horrendous at Thompson before And and I said hey, there's no doors on the bathrooms, and they're like yeah You know it's like the airport that you don't need them And there's there's no sense in having them because they only get in the way and pinch fingers and all that kind of stuff for little kids And I thought oh that's really cool idea, so it's got that big kind of entry way But you can't see beyond it, but you know it's obvious one way is one way So I thought I just I really think it's just really well thought out, you know I just feel like it's and it's just a lot some of the tile was up not all of it But I you can get a real sense of how bright and you know just so bright all those windows It's so bright and wonderful in there. I think it'll just be so much fun to go to school The kitchen's starting to you know come together too, so that was cool Just you know to see all that knowing what that basement kitchen was like before you know It's so cool having the Kind of the before and after you know going in and seeing he's like you want to see the heating and water system I said yes because I said I have this picture in my mind of that old thing that we replaced You know and he's like here it is and I was like that's it and he's like yeah, and there's a backup system I thought that was cool, and I don't know it just it feels like I mean I just can't wait now, and he's like well you can come back You know come back in a couple weeks It'll look so much different because you know every day the stuff gets added in there You know whether it's ceilings or flooring or whatever, so it was really cool So thank you so much for setting those up. Oh, you're welcome. Well They'll be toward the end of June and go in they'll just be amazing. Well, we will have occupancy after July 12th So when you I think that what you're gonna see is exactly what Brian D. Philippa said is that it can be major changes all the time Because when we were there, I thought how I'm gonna have three months left to this and he said really the last month it just Falls it just comes all together. I think you had mentioned that July 12th Would be marked the earliest, you know occupancy date. Yes of any recent building in the town, correct Mr. Hand between seeing the school and hearing the presentation tonight the old man has a feeling you'd like to go back to teaching So much there well so many things are happening in education and like this building It's changing so quickly for the better. I think and it's really exciting to see what's happening and The other night with the technology night watching the different levels from the elementary kindergarten class all the way up to the high school and with this new building. It's exciting. I Can't speak directly to it, but these little pieces of material that are just outside the windows They're Well, I wouldn't even call them an awning because it's only going to come out about this far They are awnings is what they are, but they're going to redirect the light Sunshades Everything is so well thought out that it's exciting. I I've got to say And I don't mean to be a doomsayer, but each one of the rooms is set up for 26 students And I really would like the room set up for like 22 23, but With that's where we are The and each level when we went in the first level was just basic construction But the time we get to the third level the rooms were finished They just needed furniture for the most part with some fine fine touches And you really get a sense and feel for the size of the rooms and stuff Thank you. We have one of the Thompson teachers here. I think you've already seen it You've had a tour of it, too. And how are the teachers feeling about a shaman? Oh, I mean everyone's just Really excited You know the overall question has been when we're gonna be able to move in when we're gonna be able to start bringing our stuff over there And you know, where's everything we just want to know where we're gonna be able to put everything and we're already trying to visualize it We've had meetings about what's been ordered for us So now it's a matter of you know starting to pack up our rooms There were a couple of teachers already came in over vacation to start packing up their their classrooms So yeah, I think everyone's chomping up a bit I also really love that there's no lockers Yes, you know there won't be any of that. I don't know that clangie.  I guess we have to have lockers But I love the fact that they they maintained cubbies in the classrooms. Yeah, you know You know, I think it just adds a sense of warmth that there's not these big metal lockers out in the hallway I remember it was it was my first couple of months on the committee and we went we had the opportunity to go to Boston to Listen to an architect specialist in school buildings and one of the things I remember from that talk was the new concept of having sort of hallways that aren't as Exactly what you said like clangie and industrial and More open space, you know And I think that's what they created with with this It was nice to see the way they were setting up the kindergarten suite with that Couch in the middle and between the four classrooms. Yeah, and Going up to the third floor and looking at the rooms because you saw the cabinets coming in and all the amenities and the views from there It's just just you know from the third floor. It's just going to be so Beautiful looking out there. You could see up to Sims You can see across to Cambridge and Somerville depending on what direction you are and the fact is that because the building is Caddycord It really makes it even that more interesting to be looking at over the rooftops of the homes in the neighborhood. It's it's People are just going to love being there Good report. Thank you Okay, superintendent's report I just have a few things Well, first of all Thank you for the moment of silence We had moments of silence at the middle school and the high school this week and at the elementary schools as I had said in my my email to parents on Friday that very much like the last time we had a A similar situation with the tragedy in new town We from what we what we knew intuitively what we what we had Had read what the research had showed is that is that the best thing to do is to have as normal a school day as possible Not that you don't answer questions and that did happen But I've talked to all the principals and they all said that it went very very smoothly and a lot of credit to to our teachers and staff that they were the The models that that made that possible so I want to thank them and Say that I also want to thank all of the administrators who also were very much a part of this planning going on to I want to We had another honor for one of our music teachers Tino D'Agostino and There is an organization in Boston called the Pirandello Lyceum and this is an organization. It's an unprofit organization that Tries to it aims to encourage a greater understanding appreciate appreciation of Italian culture and every year they give awards to outstanding Americans of Italian descent and and they also raised money for scholarships and this year Mr. D'Agostino who you all know Received one of those honors and so I wanted to congratulate him. It's a in in this in this community It's a very prestigious award and I might say quite well deserved I also want you to be aware of a program that we're going to be starting next year very soon. This is going to be Advertised it's it's very close to being ready to go out, but since we've had a lot of discussion this year about Spanish immersion program We have not because of Budget issues being able to fund that I still see see the possibility may May be there in the future. We're not ruling that out But there is a tremendous interest and demand for this type of programming and so we are going to begin an after-school Spanish immersion program as a pilot next year for students in grades K and 1 at the Brackett School and We decided upon the Brackett School even though it's an all-district program It's that we still have long wait lists at Brackett to get into the after-school program But as I said, this is a an all-district program And we have a set up in terms of a schedule so that there would be time for People to come from other schools to join in Obviously, there'll be space limit limitations to this program But all of that will unfold over the next week and I'll probably have a flyer for you on May 9th But I wanted to mention it tonight so that parents are aware of this I think that one of the things that we're seeing in Arlington increasingly is a demand for after-school care as we have more to income families and Unfortunately, the schools many of the schools are not even able to provide for the demand that we are seeing it at these schools And in particular at the Brackett School, we usually have wait lists So this is another going to be another opportunity and parents will have the Option of having a two or three-day program and the program will go from after-school till 6 p.m So it really is an immersion opportunity and Eventually depending on how this program goes how well it's received We we can expand into other grade levels, but right now we're going to just start with K and 1 Dr. Anthony, will there be busing from other schools besides Brackett? Unfortunately, no There would not be busing we don't have a busing program now on the other hand We do have a bus for Bishop, and I don't want to commit right now to say that that might be a possibility It really depends on what on the route and the schedule next year But I'm hopefully and if there are people at a particular school they they can arrange some kind of carpooling Carpooling up to Brackett and how many slots are there? I think that we were going to have two classrooms. We've already worked with teachers That have been willing to have the program in their in their rooms because that was certainly a key a key necessity before we can move forward I I Want to say 20 and I think that is the number But I think there's some flexibility around that number right now It's how many it's how how many hours a day and how many days a week? parents can have a two or a three-day option and It starts right after school though. There's a and it can go to six o'clock We're building in a couple of time periods where there's a transition time and parents can pick up at those transition times We don't want to just have Pick up throughout the entire afternoon, but There will be a time for snacks and and before the actual program starts so the parents that are Carpooling or bringing their children from another school. I will have it will not miss anything and you're promoting starting to promote this and We're gonna promote it. Oh definitely going to promote it. I wanted to to touch base I did touch base with Donna. It's and who is our Our director of our community at program which is part of the early into public schools So this is an early even though we're having a vendor a go lingo, which has been Very well received with our after-school language programs And they have They have done similar programs elsewhere, but this is they're very they're very happy to be working with us They have I have to tell you they have made a point of telling me how much they have enjoyed working with Arlington children Totally unsolicited so they're very happy that that we're interested in doing this So this all this will be out in the next couple weeks, but I know parents start thinking about this I've already had actually I've already had a couple of emails Asking where we were on this program. So We're Moving forward. Mr. How was this funded? Tuition it that it will be very similar to any after-school program Price will be fairly comparable. Thank you. We'll go lingo still be operating in the other schools that I were the other programs We'll still continue Thank you, it'll be great and one last thing Again the Arlington community education is a part of the Arlington public schools and one of the Innovative things that we've been doing this year for adults and and also for high school students is to have Speakers come in and we had one just recently which was I went to was terrific the Lincoln's tragic pragmatism But we have another author coming On Tuesday, May 7th at 7 from 7 30 to 9 in the high school media Center. This is Margaret Fuller And then it's an art It's a biography of Margaret Fuller a new American life and the biographer is Megan Marshall who will be here to discuss her book so hopefully there was a large crowd for the last program and hopefully that That people will be enticed to come to this as well And that's it great. Thank you. It's subcommittee reports policies and procedures We need to schedule a meeting to start revising CBI, but we have not done that yet budget We have nothing to report Community relations, I think that's Yeah Curriculum instruction assessment nothing to report Facilities Legal services, I don't know if we reformed legal services I'm sorry we were discussing that last time I think that we stay in effect through the end of the school year Till we make a report. Oh, okay. Yeah, so I thought that it was okay. We still exist Chair, there's nothing for me to report Consent agenda All items listed with an asterisk are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion There'll be no separate discussion of these items unless a member of the committee so requests in which event the item will be considered It's normal sequence Most new approval warrant one three one four seven dated April 11th, 2013 total warrant amount 396,156 dollars and 49 cents a minutes of approval regular minutes March 14th and March 28th 2013 an approval of jazz band Italy and Switzerland music tour 2014 second Any discussion all those in favor? All those against Passes Secretary's report. All right over the last two weeks. We've received the following correspondence the town of Arlington fiscal year 2014 town managers annual budget and financial plan a copy of the Arlington public schools report to town meeting in fiscal year 2014 budget summary a flyer from community education on the great conversations that the superintendent just told us about the 2013-2014 list of Arlington school committee members and our appointments a letter from chairman Judson Pierce to town meeting members Introducing the book for town meeting a letter from Evelyn Smith DeMille to Kathleen Bodie informing her of the APS receiving $34,000 in funding from the Sanborn Foundation for the Arlington public schools 2013-2014 anti tobacco education and a letter back from Kathleen Bodie to Evelyn Smith DeMille thanking her for the good news on receiving the Sanborn grant mass equity school committee survey a copy and request to take it online a Proposal for the jazz band Italy and Switzerland music tour 2014 that we just approved the April 2013 monthly tracking reports from CFO Letter and resume from Sharon Grossman to Judson Pierce and Adam chaplain in application for one of our two vacancies on the Arlington Human Rights Commission and Responses to the budget questions raised by mr. Heiner from Diane Fisk Thank you. All right, I'd like to Make a motion to go into executive section conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with union and or non-union personnel Or contract negotiations with union and or non-union in which a failed in an open meeting may have a detrimental effect To conduct strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation which have been held an open meeting may have a detrimental effect collective bargaining may also be conducted Only to come out for the purposes of going into a retreat to discuss our district goals for the 2013-2014 year An executive session