Category: General

Pencil Sharpeners

While volunteering in my son’s classroom, his teacher asked if I’d sharpen some pencils, “Having a supply of sharp pencils is the bane of my existence!” I grabbed her basket of pencils and headed to the sharpening station, in a shared resource room. There I found this lovely little X-Acto XLR 1818 Electric Pencil Sharpener.

X-Acto sharpener

I sharpened about 25 pencils before the unit overheated. After 30 minutes it still refused to work. After 45 minutes I was able to sharpen 20 more pencils before it overheated again. Frustrated, I decided to engineer a better solution.

Design considerations:

• manual sharpeners don’t overheat
• teachers might be upset if I removed the electric sharpener
• pencil shavings should be dealt with
• doesn’t require [much] more space than a 11×17″ box lid
• one-handed operation is desirable

The first step was to acquire some good pencil sharpeners. I read a bunch of Amazon reviews and ultimately found penciltalk.org where pencil sharpening nerds hang out and write about their passion for sharpeners. I whittled down my list to these four which I purchased:

• Classroom Friendly
• Classic Manual (Deli 0620)
• Stanley Bostitch MPS1BLK (Amazon)
• Westcott Axis iPoint Evolution Electric Heavy Duty (15509) Amazon

After the sharpeners arrived, I grabbed a sheet of graph paper and a ruler. I measured how much clearance each sharpener needed to avoid skinned knuckles. Then I produced this sketch.

Pencil Station

With a design in hand, I headed to the garage and found an 8’ piece of 1” thick shelving. Because MDF wouldn’t hold a dado joint, I  glued each edge and screwed in L-brackets on the 4 back  corners (not pictured). Then I added the angle brackets to stiffen up the front. The result is a sharpening station that’s very heavy and stable.

Pencil Station

All three manual sharpeners came with a round L bracket designed to mount on the edge of a tabletop. I wanted a more secure attachment and the slippery shelf surface didn’t help. The solution was to add a layer of non-slip padding between the sharpener and shelf. Combined with the included bracket, the sharpeners have remained firmly attached for half a school year.

To keep the automatic sharpeners from sliding when pressing a pencil into them, I applied a pad of industrial strength Velcro hooks to the bottom shelf and hook-and-loop pads to the electric sharpeners. Now they too remain firmly in place while sharpening.

I am now experienced in bulk pencil sharpening. Every pencil in that basket is very sharp. I’m a fan of the Wescott and Classroom Friendly sharpeners. The fastest technique I’ve found is to load the Classroom Friendly, which grips the pencil and allows one-handed sharpening. I sharpen that pencil with my right hand, and sharpen another in the Westcott with my left. Both sharpeners are fast and good. I can settle into a rhythm where I’m cranking out two sharp pencils every 10 seconds.

I can see no evidence of anyone using the X-Acto any more. The Bostich is a piece of junk. It will only sharpen perfect pencils, it doesn’t produce a great point, and emptying the shavings is much harder than the Classroom Friendly and electric sharpeners.

What do the teachers think?

Hi Matt,

When I spoke with our staff this morning about pencil sharpeners, their eyes lit up! They would love to have one station per grade level (two for kindergarten). The total would be ten, if possible.

Mike
—-
Mike VanOrden – Principal

Dropbox, and a little less love

In addition to being a big fan of Dropbox, I’m also a paying customer. I’ve recommended them and I still do. But that doesn’t quell my disappointment in their new Terms of Service which strip away the rights to legal remedies (where they can still get away with that (most Red states)). Kudos to them for making it really easy to opt-out, but arbitration is so rarely a benefit to users (the company hires the arbitrators, so it’s the playing field isn’t level) that many parts of the world have outlawed the practice.

iMac + new SSD = iTunes borked

Replacing the DVD player in my 27″ iMac with an SSD broke iTunes, yielding a -45054 error. I determined it was crying about the iTunes Store authentication, so I signed out, and when attempting to sign back in, received this error:

“there was an error storing your authorization information on this computer”

There’s an article that describes this error in the Apple Support knowledge base. The information in the article helped me figure out that iTunes was broken because the /Users/Shared directory didn’t exist. I manually created it and the problem is solved. Read on for the nitty gritty details.

Continue reading “iMac + new SSD = iTunes borked”

Money and Trust

My first employer had his landscaping business looted by his CPA, who then skipped the country. That incident planted a seed of mistrust in my mind for all financial service professionals (CPA, CFP, CFA, IFP, etc.).

Every time I hear people tell about “this guy” they know that does an outstanding job of managing their money, I can’t help but think of the very long and never ending parade of financial service professionals like this weeks example.

If I recall correctly, it was William Bernstein in The Four Pillars of Investing that, when outlining the perverse incentives that exist within the financial service industry, pointed out that the term service could aptly describe how a bull services a cow.

EditGrid

Apparently EditGrid let their domain name (editgrid.com) expire, and at present, anyone using their excellent shared spreadsheets is without access to them. What gets returned when someone currently visits www.EditGrid.com has been a 403, a parking page, and a 404 in the past 24 hours.

This morning, I did some sleuthing and found the working IP address of the www.editgrid.com web site. I have regained access to my spreadsheets by adding this little tidbit to my /etc/hosts file:

209.157.66.183 www.editgrid.com

 

Measures of Effective Teaching

http://www.metproject.org/

Of the 36 items included in the Gates Foundation study, the five that most correlated with student learning were very straightforward:

  1. Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.
  2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
  3. Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.
  4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.
  5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.

When Ferguson and Kane shared these five statements at conferences, teachers were surprised. They had typically thought it most important to care about kids, but what mattered more, according to the study, was whether teachers had control over the classroom and made it a challenging place to be. As most of us remember from our own school days, those two conditions did not always coexist: some teachers had high levels of control, but low levels of rigor.

From the Atlantic article, Why Kids Should Grade Teachers.

Money Mischief, By Milton Friedman

In the first chapter Friedman compares using gold as the basis for money to using stone discs:

For a century and more, the civilized world regarded as a concrete manifestation of its wealth a metal dug from deep in the ground, refined at great labor, transported great distances, and buried again in elaborate vaults deep in the ground. Is this one practice really more rational than the other?

Then he spends all but the final chapter detailing the pain and suffering inflicted upon societies using silver or bi-metal standards. I felt like much of the data (some in works with no citations) was cherry picked or tortured to fit his conclusions. If his conclusions are sound, and the evidence is so clear, then why does he need to work so hard to prove them? I nearly gave up the book. But the the last chapter turned out to be quite good, containing this little pearl:

It is natural for individuals to generalize from their personal experience, to believe that what is true for them is true for the community. I believe that that confusion is at the bottom the most widely held economic fallacies-whether about money or as an example just discussed, or about other economic or social phenomena.

The first and last chapters of the book are good. I think that only economists that drink from the same Kool-aid pitcher as Milton Friedman will enjoy the rest of the book.