Search goes on for the beloved Orchard Supply Hardware sign
There’s still no sign of the beloved Orchard Supply Hardware sign that vanished from the site of the shuttered San Jose store off San Carlos Street sometime last weekend. But it’s looking more and more that the sign was not removed on purpose.
Google, which owns the property the store and sign were on, told the Preservation Action Council this week that it was unaware the sign had been removed and was looking into it. Lowe’s, the parent company of Orchard Supply, has not indicated that it ordered the sign to be taken down, either.
If anything, there are clues that this was just an outright theft. San Jose couple Dan and Kathy Hendrix emailed photos of the sign they took after 9 p.m. Friday, hoping it was still lit up (it wasn’t). The sign was noticed missing by Monday morning, and it’s hard to believe it would have been officially removed over the weekend instead of on Friday or Monday.
The mystery deepens when you consider an email I received from Kim Garfinkel, who said she was driving with her
son on California Street in San Francisco on Saturday when they saw the sign in the back of a “dark, junky” pickup truck.
“I pointed it out to him because it was such a cool old neon sign,” she wrote. “It was way too big for the truck and was strapped down haphazardly.” That, friends, is what they call a bad sign.
If the sign doesn’t turn up soon, it may become an urban legend like Bigfoot or D.B. Cooper. Maybe it’ll pop up with an Instagram account like a traveling gnome. And a decade from now, people will sit around the bar at Original Joe’s and talk about how somebody saw the sign in somebody’s backyard in San Martin. Or was it San Mateo?
One place you can still see the arrow sign — at least in picture form — is the San Jose Signs Project guidebook, a pamphlet of The pole that once held the vintage arrow sign at the Orchard Supply Hardware store in San Jose stands empty Tuesday, and nobody seems to know what happened to the sign. stuck in remedial classes and dropped out, he said.
Katherine Stevenson, a Cal State Northridge math professor active in statewide efforts to improve math learning, wanted the delay. Yet now that changes have begun, she said she was “cautiously optimistic” despite some lingering concerns.
As part of the reform, Cal State dropped its muchdreaded placement test that had sent so many students to remedial courses. Now students’ abilities are assessed by high school grades and by the state accountability and college entrance tests they take during high school.
According to preliminary figures, 11 percent of current freshmen this fall were directed to an English class where they got additional support; 27 percent were placed that way in math. (Those include some required to first complete a summer online or in-person prep course, known as Early Start, often for three weeks.)
The new assessments were a bit chaotic, with students being switched around at the last minute, Stevenson said. And too many underprepared students were deemed ready for the classes that don’t offer extra support, she said. As a result, she decided to allow students in her first-year Business Math course to use calculators during exams.
So far, test results are about the same as last year, even though more underprepared students are in the class, she said. Perhaps the calculators are responsible for the success or students are rising to the material, she said: “I’m pleasantly surprised. This is one of those things where the best possible outcome was
preservation.org. The proceeds, by the way, go to restoring the Stephen’s Meat Products “Dancing Pig” sign, which was still there
to be wrong.”
Still, while she does not want remedial education returned, she fears some students around the university won’t succeed under the new system without extra attention.
The Fullerton campus was ahead of some others by already offering co-requisite math in recent years. Converse’s course has the added feature of posting lessons and exercises online in advance of face-to-face classes.
In the past, the course “was a bottleneck” for students who tried to fulfill degree requirements but could not overcome poor math skills and study habits from high school, she said. Then a pilot this past summer with supplementary sections improved performance and so far this fall, no one is failing. “I’m very encouraged,” Converse said.
One of her students, Gabriela Garcia, described herself as the type of student the new courses benefit. A fourth-year sociology major, she had to take remedial math as a freshman and then failed her first for-credit math class and got an unacceptable D the second time. She was placed on academic probation and lost financial aid for a while, she said. So this fall, in a do or die effort, she signed up for Converse’s class and is doing well. “I’ve been struggling for years and now I’m really happy and finally feel I am going to pass,” said Garcia.
Cal State San Marcos math professor David Barsky, who chairs the academic preparation committee for the statewide faculty Senate, said he too had worried about the speed of the changes but now sees some positive results. In past quantitative
the last time I checked. reasoning courses, most students seemed to be either “entirely with me or entirely lost.” Now he has noticed improvement with the extra help in the new co-requisite course: more students are “following large parts of what we are doing although not mastering everything.”
Still, for those with very weak math skills, even a corequisite course “may be asking them to cross a bridge too quickly and they may not get there,” Barsky said.
Faculty report complications at some campuses shifting instructors from remedial courses to new ones and hiring or in some cases not re-hiring lecturers. But Minor, the system official, said there is no “evidence at all of some massive job losses as a result of these policy changes.”
Moreover, some faculty have said privately that they fear administrators may push them to make the new courses easier — to bolster pass rates and ultimately graduation rates.
Cal State recently announced upticks in graduation rates. Among students who entered as freshmen, those who finished within four years rose from 22.6 percent last year to 25.4 percent this year. And the rate of those who graduated within six years or less rose from 59.2 percent to 61.1 percent.
Minor insists there is no dumbing down. “In no way shape or form is the expectation that the academic quality or rigor of the college level courses will be changed, altered or modified,” he said.
What has changed, he said, is “the approach to help students meet the outcomes for those courses.”