I just came back from visiting family in Tanzania and I feel that the big themes in my trip were courage and fearlessness. I think of these as two sides of the same coin. Without both sides, the value of the coin, in my opinion, depreciates. I believe one can be courageous, but be ruled by fear; and similarly one can be fearless but lack gall. I came back to work with these two themes in mind. I wanted to be bold in my work this year because if your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough.

It’s the third day of the new decade and I’m feeling good, Nina Simone. Before 2019 closed out, I had a chance to listen to a talk on the Future of Data Engineering and I had just watched another nice prose-like approach to explaining Airflow. I was most drawn to how they talked about their data engineering journey in stages and I want to emulate that with my current work in K-12 state reporting.

I have raised more than my fair share of blogs in these few years, most of which never made it past 3 blog posts. However, the latest blog I cooked up on WordPress has had some sustained (albeit slow-going and inconsistent) traction.

Reviving ye ole blog with a non-analytical piece. Summer of Data Science is back again – follow along and join us on Twitter #SoDS19

TL;DR

In the virtual environment scripts (bin or Scripts directory), find the activate (Linux/macOS) and activate.bat (Windows) files. Toward the bottom of the files, (but before :END line in .bat file) add the lines in these formats:

• For activate file: export ENV_VARIABLE="s7r1n9"
• For activate.bat file: set "ENV_VARIABLE=s7r1n9"

In this second installment, I spent some time digging deeper into school sizes. Having spent a year working in a charter school in New York, I noticed the attention to regulating class sizes and the sheer number of small schools that share buildings in the city. As it turns out, the lived experiences of millions of students have historical precedence, both legal and financial/philanthropic.  I don’t plan to dive deeply into the merits or lack thereof of smaller classroom sizes and smaller schools in general, but it’s clear that there is a belief that smaller schools/classrooms ought to do better than crowded educational institutions. I’m not sure whether there is a clear cut answer there. However, to a layman, a smaller classroom should mean more focus on individual students and a more manageable workload for a teacher in supporting students. With this assumption in mind, I sought to check if school sizes matter in the performance of the ACSEE in Tanzania.