Choose your words well

An elementary school principal made a choice about her language that, well, she probably won't choose again.

Apparently, she was sprinkling her 5th grade flowers with some of the same language that they use, trying to teach them in this (shocking?) way. I will say I understand that she might be frustrated, bewildered, out of options, etc. I can't say I would want to go down this road, but I also can't say she's completely damnable.

There are many ways to teach something. None of them is perfectly effective for all learners. This particular lesson no doubt had some benefits and some consequences...maybe a net negative mix of benefits and consequences, but there were some benefits.

Maybe, just maybe, one benefit might be in students witnessing a serious accounting and apology from this principal...a model of what swearing students ought to consider. Or, maybe parents could talk to their kids about why they didn't like that the principal swore, but that adults make a lot of choices and we don't always agree with all of them, so we have to figure out how to engage those people and their decisions in an effective way.

I hope that parents aren't just learning that they can claim their 15 minutes of fame by calling the newspaper to criticize an adult who made a mistake.

I'm your technopolist and I'm here to help.

Neil Postman would be saying, "I was trying to tell you what your love of technology would do...."

From an article in the NY Times....

Jack London was the subject in Daterrius Hamilton’s online English 3 course. In a high school classroom packed with computers, he read a brief biography of London with single-paragraph excerpts from the author’s works. But the curriculum did not require him, as it had generations of English students, to wade through a tattered copy of “Call of the Wild” or “To Build a Fire.”

Mr. Hamilton, who had failed English 3 in a conventional classroom and was hoping to earn credit online to graduate, was asked a question about the meaning of social Darwinism. He pasted the question into Google and read a summary of a Wikipedia entry. He copied the language, spell-checked it and e-mailed it to his teacher.

Mr. Hamilton, 18, is among the expanding ranks of students in kindergarten through Grade 12 — more than one million in the United States, by one estimate — taking online courses.

It's the future, I'm assured by so many. Maybe so, maybe so. I'll say it again, technology seems to prove that the downsides of something--anything-- are about equal in depth and intensity to the benefits of that thing.

We work pretty intensively with Call of the Wild in my 8th grade class, by the way.

Rational Behavior?

My brother, professor of sport sciences at Ashland University in Ohio, sent along an interesting observation he came across.

Education is the only "product" on which we spend money and then spend the rest of the time trying to get out of.

Is that rational behavior? Economic reasoning might say so--get as much benefit (the credential) with as little expense (paid the money, now I want to minimize the time) as I can. Psychological reasoning might question whether a person behaving thusly truly understands the short and long-term cost/benefit structures.

And that's a big part of the problem for some 8th graders. Who doesn't remember feeling like, "Why in the world do I need the quadratic formula for my life?" Since the answer is abstrusely distant from the immediacy of their lives, many decide they don't need it.

Of course, in too many ways, adults aren't much different from teenagers. Adults are just better at covering their foibles, idiosyncrasies and self-orientation than teenagers.

Not Sure I Follow....

Curious argument about Japanese education, the earthquake and standardized testing.

The claims here cover a lot of ground. The Japanese system created an alienated generation, but a crisis has awakened that generation to hope for a new transformation. We might be creating such an alienated generation because of our emphasis on testing, but we might forestall this if we create enough 'engaging' experiences in the world for students.

The Japanese alienation is all ascribed to the testing-focused education. The solution to avoid that here, get rid of testing.

A bit too over-determined? Political culture drops out of the story. None of the Japanese alienation derives from the strain of living an intensely materialist life in an amazingly group-oriented culture...a problem more lately arrived in Japan?

All of the American solution is civic participation programs (if I might reduce it down to that)? Or 'rituals of transformation'?

Just what are such rituals? And how do they compare to ad hoc response to a real, not ritualized, disaster?

I'd say the story is that people want a sense of purpose, which is increasingly hard to find in a society that gorges itself on the kinds of infantile distractions that both American and Japanese youngsters have available to them.

Doubly difficult for education when it has been made so instrumental in America. Prepare for a job, get a better job, get a raise...get 'more rounded,' more fulfilled...do better for yourself.

Testing is nothing if not a symbol of that instrumentalism. Listen to the rhetoric...somehow annual testing ensures students get the skills they need to compete in the world economy. Fine enough, perhaps, but as education becomes increasingly just that--competitiveness preparation--we're in real trouble.

By the way, last I checked, the US is still awfully competitive (economists measure that as labor productivity) in the world.

It's going to take a lot of participatory programs to change that instrumentalist mindset...fight the good fight.

Can you say 'Dancing CBA'?

That would be Classroom-based Assessment....

Nice story about what sounds like a nice program...ballroom dancing is certainly a happy addition to the regular curriculum.

But somebody call OSPI, quick...we have to figure out how to assess student learning in this.

The Real Problem with No Child Left Behind

NCLB isn't a failure as much as it reflects and sustains failure...failure of trust and civility. It's no coincidence that as the fabric of social relations began to unravel lawyering rose. Robert Putnam points out in his essential book, Bowling Alone, that social capital (networks of richly varied relational connections among people, especially in groups) correlates with trust. High social capital, high trust, and society 'works' better.

He also points out that the per capita number of lawyers in the US was constant from 1900 to 1970. When social capital really began to drop--in the mid-1960s--lawyering took off. Lawyers create synthetic trust, he explains. Low social capital, low trust, and society doesn't 'work' as well. And, by the way, tends to rely on more legal authority than trust relationships.

So, law, contracts, lawyers and all have come to be the mechanism by which problems get solved. One result is that we more and more rely on external authorities (the state paramount among them) to decide on best outcomes and mandate their pursuit.

[A friend asked me to clarify the role that lawyers play in this story. The problem I mean to describe is that as trust and social capital have declined people have turned to lawyers more and more in order to get that trust replacement. Lawyering rose as a response to the trust crisis. Lawyering did not cause it. People entering the law profession are only responding to the increased incentive for lawyering.]

It's an inexorable process. The authority of the state and laws is comprehensive and definitive, transcending any trust-built choices coming out of actual relationships among people. Why bother working things out, since the state just mandates anyway?

All the nearly inscrutable laws and regulations governing so much of what we do makes relational trust not only more difficult to maintain, but almost an anachronism. The 'cover your backside' mentality can't help but grow stout in such an environment.

Try to imagine this by wondering about the implications of something like an NCLB law. I guess we need such a law because without it schools and teachers would leave children behind. And apparently, the best way to make sure they don't is to craft extensive regulations and dispense mandates that require it. And the opportunity for people (parents, students, teachers, administrators) to actually work together corrodes a bit more.

Bill Gates

A little missive for Bill Gates....

March 25, 2011

William H. Gates, Chairman

Microsoft Corporation

Dear Mr. Gates,

I want to tell you how excited I am every time I browse through the Microsoft web site, or look at your foundation’s web pages, or, of course, use a Microsoft product. You and your company are the epitome of ingenuity, vision and service.

What America needs now is a software development company that makes a wide range of sophisticated cutting edge technologies that people can really use, and you have built and maintained just that company. I am especially grateful that you have created products that allow people, especially young people, to realize that they needn’t learn something when they can just have the computer do it, or they can look it up on the web. By the way, it’s too bad you didn’t come up with Google, or at least buy it. That way we could know that an even wider array of digital tools and services was being ably created and managed by Microsoft.

I also appreciate how smart your products are. I hardly ever have to go back and repeatedly fix the automatic changes that your Word program executes while I’m writing. I mean, it’s true...I hardly ever use an abbr. In the middle of a sentence and so prefer that your cleverly designed auto-corrections not do their handy work. (I am surprised, however, that the program registered no concern about the badly mangled construction of the previous ‘sentence.’ I take some consolation, though, that it did mark the sentence just prior to this one as a fragment. Wow, I think I know what you programmer types mean about infinite loops.)

I truly admire that you have followed your dream and your vision and achieved the ideal of what you wanted Microsoft to become. I wanted it to become that, too. You’ve created the tools that help the symbolic analysts (as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls them) compete and win in the brutally competitive information economy. It took vision to understand that information is really the core resource, and to devise better and faster techniques to use, manage, send and manipulate that information. You saw, long before anyone else, that information, not knowledge or wisdom, is where power really resides.

That’s why I’m so pleased that you are inserting yourself so forcefully into the discussion about school reform. Sometimes it takes a so-called outsider to really see the forest for the trees, or understand how the digitized art work projections of forest-like environments function. Who else could so clearly and rightly break down the service called ‘teaching’ into the sequential technical steps that will maximize students’ technology skills, and the like?

I have grown tired of teachers speaking of their “craft,” or of meeting the different needs of their numerous students. It takes clarity and drive to know how to apply technical problem-solving genius, like yours, to the rather uncomplicated task of educating children. You have the bold insight to know that merely replicating a successful product wins the day. Putting more students in front of the good teacher reflects the same kind of simple elegance of your brilliant repetition of the Office line of software products. If we find the circumstances for success, then the surest route to efficient use of our technological resources is to conform all other divergent conditions to those successful circumstances. If I may be so bold as to refashion the expression--you have created a powerful hammer, now everything around can be easily pounded.

I look forward to great success in all your endeavors. One I hope you will consider undertaking, as I still await its advent...a digital satire-detector.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew K. Milton