In Which It Gets Worse

I wish it wasn't so easy to bash the public school systems. Sometimes when I read stories that send me in that direction, I stop and think possibly they're reacting to the material they get from the homes and streets. Surely most teachers are doing their best.

Then I hear what's going on in my 17-year-old son's classrooms. Now, my son's school district is rural and not especially geared toward sending every kid to college. Mine was suburban, wealthy, and highly competitive. Yet where his seems to me to fail him is not institutionally, but on the level of individual teachers. His middle school education was quite good. Some of his high school teachers have been inspirational. But more of them have been flops.

He's in 11th grade. His course in American history -- or whatever name they disguise that by these days -- is coming to an end and the finale is a big project that will largely determine his grade for the quarter. In my high school, the college-tracked kids were taking electives by that time, and I remember writing two 20-page papers, on topics of the student's choice, approved by the teacher. One of mine was on the legal challenge to Reconstruction after the Civil War, the other was on the Congress of Vienna.

My son's comparable assignment: To write about the significance of the lyrics of "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel.

And it gets worse. I might be able to grasp that assignment if this was a class of low-achievers who were hyped about nothing but pop music and this was a current hit song. It's not, they're not, and it's not. These are the the district's college-bound kids. And this is the best the school district has to offer them: Analyze the lyrics of some dimwit pop star's ripped off (from R.E.M.) oldie. A third of the references even the writer didn't fully understand (but he'd heard of them), I bet, and anything that can't be jammed into a rhyme isn't in there. This is called "studying history."

And it gets worse.

They don't even have to listen to the whole song! The teacher broke them up in groups and gave a little bit of it to each clump of kids. My son's group's verse is 1952 to 1956. "When I was a boy" comparisons are tiresome, but how else am I to judge this? My son is as smart as I was, as capable of mental work as I was. On his own, books he's read include Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist" and John Dower's book on the society and culture of post-defeat Japan. When I was a senior in high school I took an elective history course called "Crucial Years," which covered 1945 to the present, the present being 1978. We spent half a year on the Cold War, in other words. My son for the equivalent part of his public school education will spend a few days on a part of a song from the 1980s about the early 1950s.

And it gets worse.

The students don't even have to research everything in their assigned verse. They were told to each take one angle on it: one to write about the political, or social, or foreign policy, or pop culture qualities of the words. And then one of them has the job of putting it all together for a presentation.

And it gets worse.

When they got the assignment, they started researching it the way kids do nowadays: by doing Google searches. The first term they plugged in was "Brigit Bardot." The first thing they discovered, besides racy pictures, was a Web site in which someone went through the song, line by line, and wrote about the identity and significance of each thing in it.

Research done. No reading required. No learning required. The slim chance that the project would lead to something bigger than the song died aborning. But when the generation that is about to get the ability to vote makes its mark on America, it's good to know they'll have Billy Joel as their touchstone.

Does it get worse than that?

Blind Injustice

Wow. If I were a high school student today, I wouldn't be a high school student today.

Two students attending Eagan and Apple Valley high schools were expelled last week after buying souvenir swords during a spring break choir trip in the United Kingdom.

I bought a souvenir sword during an exchange trip to Germany in 11th grade. It was duller than a letter opener. Zero tolerance equals zero learning.

Naughty, Naughty

Here's a warning lesson to all you comment spoofers.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Bloggers and free speech advocates are calling on prosecutors not to file charges against a teacher arrested for allegedly posting an anonymous comment online praising the Columbine shooters.

Some were disturbed by the post police say James Buss left on a conservative blog, but other observers said it was a sarcastic attempt to discredit critics of education spending.

The suburban Milwaukee high school chemistry teacher was arrested last week for the Nov. 16 comment left on www.bootsandsabers.com, a blog on Wisconsin politics. The comment, left under the name "Observer," came during a discussion over teacher salaries after some commenters complained teachers were underworked and overpaid.

Buss, a former president of the teacher's union, allegedly wrote that teacher salaries made him sick because they are lazy and work only five hours a day. He praised the teen gunmen who killed 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide in the April 1999 attack at Columbine High School.

"They knew how to deal with the overpaid teacher union thugs. One shot at a time!" he wrote, adding they should be remembered as heroes.

The comment disturbed at least one teacher, who called police in West Bend, 40 miles north of Milwaukee and home of the blog's administrator. Police traveled to arrest Buss at his home in Cudahy, south of Milwaukee, last week after the blogger gave them the anonymous poster's IP address.

After his arrest, Buss spent an hour in the Washington County jail before he was released on $350 bail. He did not return phone messages and e-mails seeking comment, and it was unclear whether he had a lawyer.

The reporter can't come out and say it for sure, if he knows, but anyone who has been around political blogs, and who can compare Buss' background with his comment, will recognize this particular subclass of troll: Spoofus strawmanicus. He pretends to be a Yosemite Sam caricature of the hotheads among the people he opposes, urging them on while uglifying them by his presence among them.

It's one reason you shouldn't read the comments threads at many sites as an honest representation of people's beliefs. It's a particularly nasty behavior, and it gives me pleasure to see this particular example run into trouble, however temporary.

Sarcasm (or satire, which it resembles in this case) that deals with very edgy and horrifying ideas, depends absolutely on the sympathy of your audience, granting you the benefit of all doubt about your intentions. And online, you can guarantee that some segment of your audience will be highly unsympathetic and not inclined to go along with the joke because you're such a good guy, really.

A teacher ought to be smart enough to know that. On the other hand, maybe he's grown so accustomed to grade-mongering students laughing heartily at his tired humor that he thinks it's sincere.

Anti-Science Ecumenism

[Posted by reader_iam]

Maybe fundamentalist Christians and conservative Muslims could join forces to battle the "deceit" of the theory of evolution. Talk about unholy alliances!

It is the voice of Adnan Oktar of Turkey, who, under the name Harun Yahya, has produced numerous books, videos and DVDs on science and faith, in particular what he calls the “deceit” inherent in the theory of evolution. One of his books, “Atlas of Creation,” is turning up, unsolicited, in mailboxes of scientists around the country and members of Congress, and at science museums in places like Queens and Bemidji, Minn.

At 11 x 17 inches and 12 pounds, with a bright red cover and almost 800 glossy pages, most of them lavishly illustrated, “Atlas of Creation” is probably the largest and most beautiful creationist challenge yet to Darwin’s theory, which Mr. Yahya calls a feeble and perverted ideology contradicted by the Koran.

In bowing to Scripture, Mr. Yahya resembles some fundamentalist creationists in the United States. But he is not among those who assert that Earth is only a few thousand years old. The principal argument of “Atlas of Creation,” advanced in page after page of stunning photographs of fossil plants, insects and animals, is that creatures living today are just like creatures that lived in the fossil past. Ergo, Mr. Yahya writes, evolution must be impossible, illusory, a lie, a deception or “a theory in crisis.”
...
In the book and on his Web site (www.harunyahya.com), Mr. Yahya says he was born in Ankara in 1956, and grew up and was educated in Turkey. He says he seeks to unmask what the book calls “the imposture of evolutionists” and the links between their scientific views and modern evils like fascism, communism and terrorism. He says he hopes to encourage readers “to open their minds and hearts and guide them to become more devoted servants of God.”

Yeah. OK. Right. Just keep it the hell out of our schools.

And I, too, would love to know where the money trail leads. Wouldn't you?

Harvard's New Boss

[posted by Callimachus]



How could I have missed this? I saw the headlines, "Harvard names female president." But only now do I see it's Drew Gilpin Faust, one of the superb American history writers of the current generation. She opened up huge, important vistas into the role of women in the Civil War -- and allowed that to be integrated into the full history. This wasn't some graduate school abstraction; all you have to do is read the wartime writings of both sides to understand how crucial the work and will of women was to the struggle.

I wish her all the best. I'm only sorry that her new role likely will mean she'll be writing less history.

A Read in the Wind

[posted by Callimachus]

I suspect every lover of reading will relate to this.

The role of literature is to mess with time, to establish its own time, its own rhythm. A new agenda for literary studies should open up the time of reading, just as it opens up how the writer establishes his or her rhythm. Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don't even muss up our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words.

You remember those books? The ones you didn't want to end, and because you felt that you slowed yourself down, not reading that next chapter tonight, even though you had time. Re-reading a chapter before going on to the next one, because it was so fulfilling. (In Stendhal's day, concert orchestras played each movement twice before going on to the next, so the audience could feel it, and feel it again. Kundera would get that at once.).

The article is about education, but I think schools can't do this. Have you ever observed a "free reading" period in some elementary classroom, and seen the teacher order everyone to close the book now and go on to math or whatever the next thing is? See that girl who just doesn't want to stop reading now, but has to. Yet what else can a teacher do?

When I see stories about some elementary school class reading 100 books in a week or something so they can win some prize, I don't think that's reading, any more than some skinny Japanese guy stuffing 25 hot dogs into his craw in a minute is "eating."

Created Unequal

[posted by Callimachus]

How do you feel when you read this?

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

In full agreement? Instinctively hackle-raised? If you want him to be wrong, can you prove he is? Don't be lulled by the Mr. Rogers' sweater of his comfortably self-effacing rhetoric. What he's saying is cold. And he's going somewhere with it.

Here and here and ultimately here.

Then there's this:

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities--in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.

Absolutely right. Mind is muscle. You have to get it out and exercise it. Too many public school systems I know from experience lack a challenge at the top. Exceptionally smart kids have the system figured out by 4th grade, and, barring some catastrophic personality disorder, can rest assured they will get As and Bs with minimal effort right up to the day the superintendent hands them a diploma.

The schools, for their part, are happy to keep such kids on board since they ramp up the overall standardized achievement test scores. They keep them fed on "advanced" courses and programs that are more like rewards than challenges. But if you never run up against something that you can't master at first sight, and if you are never forced to actually put that gray matter to work and make it sweat, you're not learning. And worse, you're not learning how to learn. That kid with the average IQ who is struggling through his first Shakespeare play in the classroom next door is getting it. Your smart kid isn't.