Education: September 2005 Archive Page

Pride and Preface (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In “Drama as Literature,” I assigned the first third or so of Oedipus the King, which always throws students for a loop.

What’s with the “strophe,” which is the part of the choral performance chanted as the performers dance from right to left, and the “antistrophe,” which is chanted as the performers dance from left to right? Who chants while they sing dance, anyway? A few students have studied the play before, and they’re laudably more interested in hearing what their peers have to say as they encounter the story for the first time. When I checked the blogs last night, I could see that those students who bravely ventured to blog their opinions on the play sounded a bit tentative.

So in class today, I tackled their estrangement head-on, with an introduction that went something like this:

I recognize that the very idea of an artistic performance that includes action, dance, music and the spoken word is unfamiliar to you. After all, it’s completely unrealistic to depict a crowd of people suddenly speaking, singing and dancing in unison, as a backdrop to dramatic action.

There’s nothing on television, especially on a familiar channel such as MTV, that involves the lyrical expression of human passions in a form that involves groups of performers speaking words that are more powerful, more beautiful, and more musical than any words that you or I speak in daily life. I understand that it is foreign to your experience, to imagine listening to an entertainment that involves people singing and speaking the way they would if language were perfect and they themselves were gods.

Once I made my point, I acknowledged that our knowledge of Greek theatre is sketchy (we don’t really know what a choral performance would have looked like) but I did draw a diagram of a Greek theater, noting that the characters on stage often announce the arrival of a new character, in part because the entrance was so far away from the center of the stage that the actor would have been visible to most of the audience long before he was in position to begin speaking. I also talked about the function of the Greek masks, which contained a small megaphone in the mouthpiece. But I also told that when my wife went to Greece as part of a drama class, her instructor had the class spread out in the theatron (seating area), then he pulled out a pin. The stage was so well-constructed that everyone heard it drop.

In the midst of all this, one of my students made an offhand reference to the fact that I’m cited in our textbook, Drama: A Pocket Anthology (3rd edition). I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Another student confirmed, and there in the preface I found my name, in a list of instructors who commented on the second edition. I seem to remember now that I gave some feedback on a sample table of contents, and maybe commented on the introductory material, but I had completely forgotten about it.

Okay, so it’s not the same thing as someone citing me as an authority or responding to a claim I made in published scholarship, but it was a nice little Monday-morning picker-upper. After the mock-serious lecture about the strangeness of the conventions of the Greek theatre, I got to look all humble and surprised in front of my students.

Of course as soon as class was over I walked up and down the Humanities wing, book in hand, bragging to my colleagues. Fitting, perhaps, after a discussion of a tragic hero with the fatal flaw of excessive pride.

At any rate I’m pleased to know that some of my students actually read the preface.

Clutching the shredded tatters of my pride and dignity, I trudged to the office hours of my math instructor every week, seeking an explanation for the increasingly mysterious problems in the textbook. My instructor welcomed my presence as she would welcome the Angel of Death. Irritated? She was terrified. Explain…the problems? Articulate…the steps? Relate…the concepts? I would ask questions, and she would respond by completing yet another sample problem as fast as she possibly could, blushing nervously. I felt like I was on a Star Trek episode. "Captain, I think I understand…the creature communicates through multivariable calculus problems!"

I know what you're thinking, and you're wrong. She was as American as I am. Spoke perfect colloquial English. --Douglas Kern --Confessions of an Engineering Washout (Tech Central Station)

My first teaching job was in what was at the time called the Engineering Writing Centre at the University of Toronto.

Of course, pretty much any reference to Star Trek is blog-worthy to me, but I already decided to blog this when I saw a different excerpt on Joanne Jacobs.

Her points don't directly apply to Seton Hill, since we don't have teaching assistants and we don't have an engineering school, but I still found the subject interesting.

During the 1990's, Lorin Anderson (a former student of Benjamin Bloom) led a team of cognitive psychologists in revisiting the taxonomy with the view to examining the relevance of the taxonomy as we enter the twenty-first century.

REMEMBERING

Recognise, list, describe, identify retrieve, name ?.

Can the student RECALL information?

UNDERSTANDING

Interpret, exemplify, summarise, infer, paraphrase ?..

Can the student EXPLAIN ideas or concepts?

APPLYING

Implement, carry out, use ?

Can the student USE the new knowledge in another familiar situation?

ANALYSING

Compare, attribute, organise, deconstruct ?

Can the student DIFFERENTIATE between constituent parts?

EVALUATING

Check, critique, judge hypothesise ...

Can the student JUSTIFY a decision or course of action?

CREATING

Design, construct, plan, produce ...

Can the student GENERATE new products, ideas or ways of viewing things ? --Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (oz - TeacherNet)

Via Mike Arnzen's Pedablogue.

I've heard this revision mentioned at conferences, but I've never actually tracked it down. Thanks for pointing it out, Mike.

Beside the fact that math professors in the movie wear ties — “never,” said Kontorovich — and “there are no blackboards,” noted Stechmann – who laughed when Hal called a proof “hip,” – the aspect of the movie the students found strangest was that it centered on an argument over whether Catherine could have done a certain bit of mathematics that she kept secret for years. Kontorovich said keeping work under wraps on the QT to stop “the hype from taking over,” is not unexpected, but as to the continued arguing, “Are you retarded?” Kontorovich asked. “It’s a proof. Go through it.” All three students agreed that mathophiles would be more focused on examining the work than debating the author. “Everyone was happy when [ Andrew Wiles] proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, even though many had labored unsuccessfully, Kontorovich said. “It was a proof for humanity.” Added Stechmann, “people said, ‘Great, we can stop working on it now.’” --David Epstein --Is Gwyneth Paltrow a Genius? (Inside Higher Ed)

The "take a bunch of experts to see a movie about their field and let them pick it apart" is interesting when the experts are grad students.

Finally, don't even think about applying to a small college unless you love teaching. Students will eat you up. Their need for your time and your energy could overwhelm you, and if you don't love the idea of the enthusiastic undergraduate student just sitting in your office, sipping coffee with you, while you talk about voice in Faulkner or imagery in Toni Morrison when all your papers are just sitting on your desk waiting to be graded -- then the small college is not the place for you. --Carol Kolmerten --What Small Colleges Really Want (Chronicle)

Friday afternoons are my "get through this stack of papers so I don't have to bring them home" slot.
Some days I will pick up my stacks of papers and sneak off to a remote corner of the library. But on Thursday and Friday, a steady stream of students dropped by in order to drop off papers, and I found myself waving them in, one after the other.

Have a seat, how's your semester going, what's on your mind?

When I was just starting grad school, I used to worry that I wouldn't know what to write in order to get published. I used to worry that my conference proposals would be turned down. Now I've got a forthcoming book chapter that I'm expecting back from the editors any time now. A few weeks ago, an encyclopedia editor asked me to write an article, and seemed interested in having me write two more articles I suggested. I've been accepted and given funding for to more conferences than my wife will permit me to attend.

There are times when it hits me -- I won't have time to write up and publish all my ideas.

But you know what? Right now, I'm okay with that.

O professor deve deixar claro o que espera. Não traduzi por falta de tempo, mas é uma proposta muito estruturada e, em parte, inspirada pelo fato dos alunos terem uma preocupação maior com o como serão avaliados do que com o que vão aprender. --Refletindo sobre blogs (Projetos Colaborativos)

With help from faculty colleagues and Babelfish, I got the following:

A professor should be very clear about what he expects. I did not translate due to time, but it is a proposal very structuralized, in part inspired by students who were worried about how they will be evaluated.

One of my linguistically gifted colleagues translated "deixar" as a comparative "more," rather than the intensifier "very". But a modern language specialist said the context of the link to my work is positive.

I'd like to think that my blogging rubric is pretty clear, but I don't foist it on the students all at once, and in different classes, I expect different levels of close reading, personal reflection, current events, and peer interaction.

It's the third week of classes, so students have had more than enough time to come to me for help if they have difficulty getting their blogs to work. Now that I can assume everyone's got a basic level of blogging comfort, I'm starting to adjust my expectations in the lit classes from "blog something" to "quote a passage from the assigned readings and blog about it" to "practice the skill of advancing a thesis, engaging opposing and alternative viewpoints, and using textual evidence to back up your claims."

I haven't yet introduced my full-fledged blogging rubric in any of my classes, but I'll need to post some version of it soon.

She listens to her 12-year-old son and his friends as they discuss the novels that their teachers have told them to read over the summer. The boys don't like them. They seem, in fact, to hate them.

The books that her son, Alex, and his friends are compelled to read are highly regarded by teachers and professors of education. Many come decorated with Newbery medals and endorsements by the American Library Association. They are books known in the field of children's literature as Young Adult (YA) literature. All are highly realistic, written in a confessional tone, usually in the first-person voice of an angry or alienated teenager. The protagonist deals with traumatic experiences: murder, suicide, the death of a parent or friend, incest, sexual abuse, rape, drugs, abortion, kidnapping, abandonment. Friendly or protective adults are virtually nonexistent; the main character's mother, writes Feinberg, is dead, missing, or nonfunctional. Children in these novels almost never play. Often they feel guilty for whatever catastrophe befalls them. The books are uniformly humorless, earnest, and depressing. Their message, to the extent that they have one: the world is a nasty and brutish place, and you can depend only on yourself.

What is missing from YA books, says Feinberg, is any recognition of the role that imagination and fantasy play in children's ways of experiencing life. Instead, the books seem dedicated to shocking children, destroying their fantasies, and giving them a mean dose of reality. --Diane Ravitch reviews the book by Barbara Feinberg --Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up [Review] (Education Next)

Found amongst a good collection of links on This Week in Education.

The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong. --Charles Murray --The Inequality Taboo (Commentary)

Murray is one of the authors of The Bell Curve. I found this essay fascinating, especially this caveat: "[T]he members of just about every group can so easily conclude that they are God’s chosen people. All of us use the weighting system that favors our group’s strengths."

The whole essay's over 16,000 words -- I had to start skimming.

From the conclusion:

Let us start talking about group differences openly—all sorts of group differences, from the visuospatial skills of men and women to the vivaciousness of Italians and Scots. Let us talk about the nature of the manly versus the womanly virtues. About differences between Russians and Chinese that might affect their adoption of capitalism. About differences between Arabs and Europeans that might affect the assimilation of Arab immigrants into European democracies. About differences between the poor and non-poor that could inform policy for reducing poverty.

A culture that values diversity seems to insist that people aren't the same. Historically, when those in power have identified difference, what happens next is that tribalism and selfishness tends to isolate, to exclude, to denigrate. Is Murray's language a fancy way of saying "celebrate long-standing stereotypes"? I don't think it really helps anyone to anyone to award points for "high self esteem" in a spelling test or a bar exam or a military training exercise, so it doesn't seem to make much sense to me to give pity points beyond elementary school.

Still... it seems so very convenient that his scientific evidence supports the status quo so well. On the other hand, is that any reason to dismiss the evidence? My "Drama as Lit" students have read several plays in which a woman wants to do something that is compassionate and just, but which happens to be against the law. The women in "Trifles" hide evidence that would convict a farm wife of murder; a grieving mother in "Heart in the Ground" wants to bury a child on her farm, despite a local regulation prohibiting it; and Nora in A Doll House sees nothing wrong with forging a signature if it will save her husband's life. In the world of fiction, where motives are simplified, and characters carefully drawn, the answers are more clear-cut, or at least the audience has been conditioned to be satisfied with a well-posed question, and with the ensuing opportunity for self-reflection and study.

Being a scientist, however, Murray demands an answer -- consequences be damned. He is careful to note that he is usually talking about very minor differences, which manifest themselves in such a way that environment and socialization are insufficient explanations. After controlling for those factors, he still sees difference, tied closely to an evolutionary advantage associated with that difference. Men had to track game and throw spears; women had to gather edible mushrooms and berries, leave the poisonous ones alone, keep track of children, and build social networks through gossip.

Is it bad to say such things? Well, if you're the president of Harvard, it's risky. And if you don't respond to the outrage in the blogosphere by immediately releasing a full transcript of the event, so that bloggers could see the context for themselves, then its even more risky.

I think most telling is Murray's argument that, in the specific areas of mathematical cognition that are required for visionary genius skills, women are clustered in the middle of the scale, while men are more likely to have widely differing skills. This means, I presume, that in the particular subset of mathematical skills required for higher mathematics, men are more likely to be geniuses, and more likely to be idiots, than women. The idiots didn't bring home the bison or win Nobel Prizes, but the geniuses did. The idiot men aren't any competition for the genius women; the genius men are serious competition.

Which brings us back to the bell curve.

Talk to teachers, review messages posted on e-mail groups and browse professional journals, and you'll find high school assignments that are long on fun and remarkably short on actual writing.

For example, someone who teaches an honors class for high school freshmen posts a short-story project that allows students 13 options, only a handful of which involve actual writing. Among the choices students are offered: create a map to illustrate the story's setting, make a game to show the story's theme, put together a collage from magazine photographs, or assemble a scrapbook or photograph album for the character.

Teaching Arthurian literature? Have your students design a coat of arms. Need an alternative to a book report? Have students draw the design for a book jacket.

While such activities may be more entertaining for students, and less work for the teachers in terms of grading the projects, kids are often showing up at college unable to write. --Donna Harrington-Lueker --'Crayola curriculum' takes over (USA Today)

This essay is from 2002. I tracked it down from a comment on JoanneJacobs.com.

In one of my classes, when I teach Margaret Edson's play Wit, I read from a copy of The Runaway Bunny, a children's book which is mentioned in the play. It's the last week of the class, and many of the students are just starting to get the hang of studying literature at the college level; so they seem happy and nostalgic for a time when teachers did most of the work for them. But I don't do this in place of asking them to do serious work. And since many of our English majors are double-majoring in education, it helps us talk about the playwright's full-time job as a kindergarten teacher, and the play's implicit anti-intellectualism.

Of course, high school teachers simply don't have the time to get students to write and revise college-length papers. So naturally, I don't expect all college freshmen to arrive on campus already competent in college-level work. But I'd really prefer that more arrive on campus ready to do such things as read and follow assignment instructions, and read a syllabus on their own.

Best response to this whole thing, from a commenter: "I'm so angry at this crap I feel like making a poster."