The contestant list for the upcoming NBC show “Get Out Alive with Bear Grylls” has been released. Included therein are my uncle and cousin, “ANDREW “LUCKY” & ANDREA “LOUIE” LARSON.” We knew when they were gone but didn’t know what they were doing; on July 8, we’ll find out.
This New York Times piece discusses where the Common Core came from, and how it may or may not help education:
WHAT became the Common Core began quite modestly. Several years ago, many organizations, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, whose members are top-ranking state education officials, independently noticed that the content and scoring of high school “exit” tests varied widely between states. In 2006, for instance, 91 percent of students in Mississippi passed a mathematics exit exam on the first attempt, while only 65 percent did so in Arizona. At the same time, students’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress often differed from the state results.
This was not just embarrassing: it looked unprofessional. The governors and the school chiefs decided to work together to create a single set of standards and a common grading criteria. Private funding, led by some $35 million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, allowed the coalition to spread its wings. Aligning tests became an opportunity to specify what every American child should know.
In 2009, an education consultant named David Coleman was retained to help develop the program, and he and other experts ended up specifying, by our count, more than 1,300 skills and standards. Mr. Coleman, a Rhodes scholar and the son of Bennington College’s departing president, is known as a driven worker as well as for his distaste for personal memoir as a learning tool. Last year, he was selected to lead the College Board, which oversees A.P. exams and the SATs.
An amusing approach to popularizing philosophy — also has some great phil. links.
This short video is a little manic, but generally does a nice job of summarizing the philosophical (specifically, metaphysical and epistemological) discussion as to whether math exists somewhere in the universe (though it can’t be, you know, physically detected) or whether math is just a human construct, a set of ideas, or as the video describes it, a “fiction.”
The video’s narrator describes the “math realist” position as believing that math is discovered, like new species are discovered, “out there” in the world. However, since math’s ideas are not physical and thus can never be directly observed by our senses, then believing in “objective” existence of math ideas requires, well, faith.
The video contrasts math to physics and other sciences, which take as their objects of study things that happen or exist in nature. I’d point out, however, that while we can sense things, like a round-shaped, sticky, sweet-smelling pastry we label “pie,” we cannot sense the measurements of the circumference and diameter of said pie placed in a ratio we call “pi” (also, it’s hard to see how any of the terms just used — circumference, diameter, measurements, ratio, pi, and for that matter, pie — exist except as concepts.
I sometimes tell my students that one way of defining real is by determining whether one would mind being struck by that thing. I don’t want to get hit by a pie, but I don’t see how throwing pi at me could ever hurt.
And so, of course, while physics, chemistry, and biology deal with sensible things, as “ologies,” they are sets of ideas, and so these science concepts, models, theories, and laws may not exist physically any more than math ideas do.
In “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Robert Pirsig describes science theories as our contemporary technological culture’s equivalent of earlier cultures’ ghosts — things we think are real but, of course, can’t be seen, etc.
And, of course, none of our words are real, either — depending on how you define ‘real’! If real describes things available to our senses, then words are only interpretations of sounds heard or shapes seen.
So it can get complicated to figure out what’s real when one sees something like IBM’s movie of atoms:
The words “These are atoms. Magnified over 100 million times.” are needed to explain what we are seeing in the video, because what I seem to be seeing is something that looks like little metallic spheres — ball bearings, perhaps. I see ball bearings on a gray background that seems to have shading variations in a gray background.
But we are informed that these are atoms — defined in the press release as “one of the tiniest elements in the universe” — but then, these are not quite atoms. They are “molecules” of carbon monoxide, one atom of carbon and one of oxygen — but this molecule doesn’t look in the movie to have two components.
But “look” and “see” also become problem terms here. The images in the movie aren’t a result of light directly striking a light-sensor (as in a digital camera or in our eyes), but are more like graphs made by information received by the probe in the scanning tunneling microscope. According to the Wikipedia page:
The STM is based on the concept of quantum tunneling. When a conducting tip is brought very near to the surface to be examined, a bias (voltage difference) applied between the two can allow electrons to tunnel through the vacuum between them. The resulting tunneling current is a function of tip position, applied voltage, and the local density of states (LDOS) of the sample.[4] Information is acquired by monitoring the current as the tip’s position scans across the surface, and is usually displayed in image form.
So we’re not seeing atoms. In all likelihood, we can never see atoms. But, OK, let’s call what is detected by the scanning tunneling microscope an atom. But an atom, as we’ve all learned, has constituent parts, which are vastly smaller: protons, neutrons, and electrons. So “atom” just means an organizational level, like, say, a “class” is a bunch of students who gather at the same time in the same room, but there’s no class as a particular physical entity — just particular students.
However, the picture gets more complex, as protons and neutrons are comprised of smaller-yet pieces called “quarks,” and these quarks and other fundamental particles may be made of smaller items yet.
Of course, these definitions are part of an elaborate, technical model of the most basic components and interactions of physical reality, which itself is not seen as a complete model.
But of course, any explanations for things we see in the physical world is going to be an idea, an interpretation, which means it’s not the same as the physical world itself. Even these ideas I’m using now are merely ideas, by which I mean they are arbitrary, subject to replacement or revision as we see fit.
In talking about the arbitrariness of ideas with my high school students, some asked why schools teach “fake ideas,” to which I responded, “It’s better to learn fake things than nothing at all.” I’m not sure I would stand by that position all the time, but it’s worth considering from a philosophical and educational perspective.
Posted in Links, Philosophy, Teaching
Tagged atom movie, atoms, fake ideas, IBM, ideas, math, math is fake, quarks, science, science ideas, Standard Model, teaching
A show is coming in July. Here’s its page, and here’s a preview. I’ll be posting more later about this.
Posted in Get Out Alive with Bear Grylls, Links
Tagged Get out alive with Bear Grylls, TV
So, there’s a new movie of Gatsby. This isn’t as newsy now as it would’ve been a few weeks ago, but, you know, the book has been around for, oh, four-score and some years now, and my high school’s students read it in our “American Lit after 1900″ class, and I read it in high school and didn’t enjoy it (my memory is of my teacher flat-out telling us “the green light symbolizes money”) and I reread it in recent years and thought it was better than I had remembered it, but that it still wasn’t all that great. I mean, I liked that last line, about boats being ceaselessly beaten back, etc. etc., but much of the book was not that lyrically beautiful.
And I found a fellow-traveler in Kathryn Schulz’s critique of this book:
What was Fitzgerald doing instead of figuring out such things about his characters? Precision-engineering his plot, chiefly, and putting in overtime at the symbol factory. Gatsby takes place over a single summer: three months, three acts, three chapters each, with a denouement—the car accident and murder—of near-Greek (but also near-silly) symmetry. Inside that story, almost everything in sight serves a symbolic purpose: the automobiles and ash heaps, the upright Midwest and poisonous East, the white dresses and decadent mansions.
Heavy plot, heavy symbolism, zero psychological motivation: Those are the genre conventions of fables and fairy tales. Gatsby has been compared to both, typically to suggest a mythical quality to Fitzgerald’s characters or a moral significance to his tale. But moral significance requires moral engagement: challenge, discomfort, illumination, or transformation. The Great Gatsby offers none of that. In fact, it offers the opposite: aloofness.
When I saw that I wasn’t alone in my lack of enthusiasm, I started wondering why this particular book was taught and continues to be taught so much to high-school literature students. There are many, many other novels published in the last hundred years that could also be taught.
One of my colleagues suggested that the theme of the American dream in “Gatsby” makes it worth reading — and, sure, that’s a valid theme to discuss in a lit. class. But “the American dream” isn’t a theme at all until the author takes a position on that topic — “the American dream is hollow” or “the American dream is worthwhile” — and at that point, why do we need a story at all? Fitzgerald could just have written an op-ed to make that point, and have been done with it.
Instead, there is a long story that’s about as subtle in its condemnation as a fairy tale, as Schulz says above. To take a scenario as complex as Gatsby’s (ill-gotten gains, unrequited-and-then-illicitly-requited love, etc.) and just boil it down to something like “achieving our goals may not make us happy” feels like it deserves a “duh” response from adult readers. Teens may not know this yet, and maybe it’s worthwhile for them to consider it, but I’m not sure adults will take this book all that seriously. Maybe the readers who will most enjoy and appreciate a work are those who are younger than the author was when he/she wrote the work.
According to his Wikipedia page, Fitzgerald wrote most of “Gatsby” in 1924, when he would’ve been (1896 to 1924) 28 years old. Twenty-eight is pretty darn young for someone to comment on the nature of “the American dream.” Of course, chronological age does not always match personal maturity or artistic ability, but when a writer is only 28 years old — has been an adult for only 10 years — he doesn’t really have much authority, other than authority over those who are younger yet than he is.
I’m now almost 40, and I can now look back at my 28-year-old self and see that I strongly held certain beliefs and judgments about which I am now not sure certain. This is not to say that I was wrong, exactly, about the things I said then, nor that I am perfect now, but that I now try to be more humble about my opinions (Humble enough to blog them to the rest of the reading public, of course. Also, the delusions of grandeur endure).
And so I can now look at “The Great Gatsby” and admire some of the writing but I also look at the story and think that there’s not much there for me to learn. I feel like I’m smarter than the characters, and also wiser than the author. With other books and authors, too: I don’t have to agree with Hemingway’s biases towards his characters in “The Sun Also Rises,” written when he was 26, and I don’t have to think that Kerouac’s characters could find satisfaction in their lives “On the Road,” published when Kerouac was 35. I look at some of these books now and wonder why the authors really have to tell me about the condition of being alive that I haven’t already learned on my own.
It’s age-ism to say that I can’t learn anything from writers who are younger than me (or were when they wrote — and of course, I did learn from reading Hemingway and Kerouac when I was a late-teens, early-20s reader). And yet, as I get older, and as I get more familiar with the fuller range of ideas, the range of ways of writing, the range of tones/perspectives, etc. that writers can use, I find myself less thrilled, less enthused, to read the writings of most other writers.
That’s a huge generalization, of course. And I’m not talking about reading things for “escapist” purposes — a writer of any age, presumably, can write a story. But I often read in order to learn something, and the older I get, the less I don’t know.
That sounds terrible — terribly closed-minded, and typical of an old (read: inflexible) person. And not entirely true — I am able to better appreciate some things now — including some of the classic texts — than I was when younger. But when I now read Plato’s “Apology” or the epic poem “Beowulf” (as I read last year for the “World Lit” class I was teaching), I’m more likely to approach these texts as a peer of the writer — I’m less likely to cede authority to that author. I’m gonna question the author’s veracity, legitimacy, purpose, etc. — all that stuff that my college lit. profs. probably wanted me to question when I was 20.
But I’m here now, and some of the magic of the texts is gone, or maybe it was never “magic” — maybe I’m just more clear-eyed and less reverent when I approach texts. Maybe I’m not buying into the Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Kerouac myths that I used to accept — that there was something gloriously important and rapturously tragic (or vice versa) about Being an Author and Writing Novels, etc.
I don’t feel bad about my current approach — and once one is aware of the myths and the magic, one “can never return again.” Not only do I not feel bad about my current mindset, I feel pretty good about it — I feel wiser than I used to be. Where I used to see intellectual limits, I now see boundaries whose lines can be crossed. It feels pretty good.
And one thing I feel good about is not wanting to merely criticize others and their works. I want my fault-finding to lead me into a positive, substantial new direction — and I think for me, this means that I no longer really accept texts as beyond reproach and I no longer accept ideas as unassailable answers (everything is reproachable and/or assailable). But I trust now in the process, in the act of thinking and writing, and in this way, I can continue to discuss and consider even works I disagree with — I can continue to teach my students (and myself), and I can be humble enough to see also that I may also one day find something beyond process that I like even better.
Posted in Links, Nonfiction, Teaching
Tagged fiction, Fitzgerald, Gatsby, growing up, Hemingway, hype, kerouac, literature, myths, reading, students, teaching literature, The Great Gatsby
Still catching up on links I’ve marked in recent weeks to share:
1. A Stephen Colbert graduation speech.
2. Dialect map of U.S. English speakers.
3. The highest-paid employee in most states is a college coach.
4. Obits of the “influential obscure”: Linear B interpreter.
5. A Wikipedia list of “literary techniques” — I’m not sure this list is (or could ever be) comprehensive, so long as writing stays creative, but it’s an intriguing list anyway–maybe because of the pointless Aristotelian effort to list such things.
6. A sketch made of slaves recently freed from Jefferson Davis’s plantation.
7. Accents in the Game of Thrones.
8. Memory in plants.
My wife is reading Jennifer Egan’s book Look at Me, which, unlike almost the entirety of world literature, is set in Rockford, Illinois, the place I have to travel to in order to buy stuff (like, say, books, cars, clothes, and anything not marked up for the sake of its convenience). I’ve never lived in Rockford, but I’ve lived near it most of my life, and the duration of my life has not been a good period in Rockford history — factories shut down, corporations moved out, jobless rates and crime rates climbed, and Rockford frequently competes with places like Flint and Detroit, Michigan, for the highest rankings on “most miserable cities” lists. (Of course, the same list linked above put Chicago at #4 most-miserable, which doesn’t quite give credibility to the list. Chicago’s got problems, but people still actually want to live there, or near there. Literally millions of people crowd into Chicago and its suburbs rather than commuting from Rockford, which would require driving, because there’s no way to take a train for the 90-some miles from Rockford to Chicago. The “Was Metra an option today?” signs condescending to drivers on I-90 are simply mocking those of us who live near Rockford.)
By the way, I didn’t set out to live near misery — my family came to Rockford decades ago, when it was a more-prosperous community. And once our roots were established, it wasn’t always easy to notice just how bad things were getting.
But, living here, taking in what passes for local media (the poorly managed, shrinking newspaper and the farm-team broadcasters–#134 biggest!), we tend to hear a lot of empty boosterism about Rockford, such as this:
Winnebago County Board Chairman Scott Christiansen said he disregards the Forbes ranking because it fails to recognize the positives the city has going for it.
Among those positives, he notes growth in the city’s aerospace industry and a “world class” airport, improvement in education, Woodward’s decision to expand locally, and the Rockford Park District being named the best in the country.
“Clearly, we have our challenges, but let’s offset that with some of the positives,” Christiansen said. “Unfortunately, the negatives sell magazines.”
Even as a child, riding home with my mother and Grace after a Saturday in Chicago, new dresses and Frango mints from Marshall Field’s packed carefully in our trunk, lunch at the Walnut Room still alive in our minds—even then, when the drive between Rockford and Chicago had encompassed the entire trajectory of my known world, arriving at State Street’s outer reaches, at that point practically rural, had roused in me not the lilt of home but a flat dead drone inside my head. Even then, I experienced my return to Rockford as a submersion, a forfeiture of the oxygen of life. And with every subsequent return there had been a flattening, an incursion of dreariness, as I remembered what I had come from and faced it again.
…room at the Sweden House’s faux-alpine façade, its little flags bearing generic coats of arms. I breathed smells of carpeting and Lysol and old cigarettes and braced myself for the familiar sensation of entombment. The Rockford thud.
I was alone in the middle of nowhere—worse than nowhere: the place that had made me. And now the depression, the Rockford thud whose arrival I had awaited from the moment Irene and I first drove into the city, blanketed me in its crushing, airless weight.
Posted in Links, Nonfiction, Ogle County Poet Laureate
Tagged Jennifer Egan, Look at me, miserable cities, misery, Rockford, Rockford Illinois
Today’s links roundup contains some slightly older things I marked but didn’t post over the last few (several?) weeks:
1. Churnalism: Comparing online text to promotional (press release) text.
2. I’m thinking of the Reinhart-Rogoff “Excel coding error” of a few weeks ago as a case-study of how a particular idea can get very popular without even really being accurate.
3. Andrew Sullivan and Kai Rysdall on Donald Rumsfeld.
4. Student debt:
America is distinctive among advanced industrialized countries in the burden it places on students and their parents for financing higher education. America is also exceptional among comparable countries for the high cost of a college degree, including at public universities. Average tuition, and room and board, at four-year colleges is just short of $22,000 a year, up from under $9,000 (adjusted for inflation) in 1980-81.
Compare this more-than-doubling in tuition with the stagnation in median family income, which is now about $50,000, compared to $46,000 in 1980 (adjusted for inflation).
Also, something I didn’t know until I started trying to pay back college loans:
Consider another dubious distinction: student debt is almost impossible to discharge in bankruptcy proceedings.
5. A cartoon reference: Toonopedia.
6. Leno’s singers: On truth in comedy.
7. Before diaries were private, they weren’t.
8. Pictures of snowflakes as they fall.
9. Color movies of London in the 1920s.
10. History of English language: it’s already bilingual (sorta).
Posted in Links
Tagged Andrew Sullivan, cartoons, churnalism, college loans, color movies, comedy, diaries, Excel, history of English, journals, Kai Rysdall, London, press release, Reinhard-Rogoff, Rumsfeld, snowflakes, Toonopedia, truth
This New York Times article, saying it’s harder to raise students’ test scores in reading than it is in math, indirectly raises some cultural/epistemological questions about the differences between math and reading.
The article opens with this anecdote from someone who has apparently taught both:
David Javsicas, a popular seventh-grade reading teacher known for urging students to act out dialogue in the books they read in class, sometimes feels wistful for the days when he taught math.
A quiz, he recalls, could quickly determine which concepts students had not yet learned. Then, “you teach the kids how to do it, and within a week or two you can usually fix it,” he said.
Helping students to puzzle through different narrative perspectives or subtext or character motivation, though, can be much more challenging. “It could take months to see if what I’m teaching is effective,” he said.
I have taught high school science and English, and I’m not sure I’d say it’s easier to teach science, because of what it means to “teach science.” The expectation (as I was informed after I pursued a different goal) is for students to learn and apply the set of science ideas (theory of evolution, atomic theory, Newton’s Laws, etc.) that are provided in the textbooks. The discipline of science observes and tries to explain the physical world, but most science classes don’t allow this. Students take notes, do equations, take tests. Real research is not done by most students (though some high school science competitions, such as this one, show that students are capable of doing impressive work).
Science classes, then, just teach a set of ideas — let’s call it a story, Science Stories — and so do math classes. Math classes could be theoretical explorations of these abstract ideas, but many high school math classes simply teach procedures (algorithms) for doing things: to find the area of a rectangle, multiply the base times the height. Sure, that’s useful information, but hardly intellectually all that challenging. Math, as taught to high school students, is a tidy system of right and wrong methods for arriving at an answer. What mathematicians do is far more abstract and creative, of course, but we don’t generally let students see that.
In English, however, we’re actually asking students to do the same things (though obviously adapted to younger minds) that English professors do — read and analyze texts and write about them. What I love about teaching writing is that students are truly CREATING texts. Students in our science and math classes are not making anything — they are just taking in the ideas that others have made.
Of course, creating something is more intellectually demanding than just memorizing and applying an idea (even Bloom’s Taxonomy, that education cliche, says so). So we writing and literature teachers give our students guidelines and models to help them “scaffold” (in the teachers’ vernacular) their way to completed projects.
But of course, there are very few right or wrong essays or literature interpretations — there are worse ones and better ones, and judging which is which is highly subjective. The student essays I like best are those that go beyond what is merely stated in a text to make connections that are not obvious. In other words, I like essays that are interesting, that say things I hadn’t read or thought of before.
Lately I’ve been suspecting that maybe the best way to teach this kind of creative thinking and individual judgment is to model it for my students. As a teacher, I have my own biases and peculiarities, and so I’m not an ideal (Platonic?) model — but maybe learning to be analytical and/or creative is really more of an apprenticeship anyway, rather than something that has set standards for students to adhere to.
And here’s where teaching the study of literature gets interesting and/or controversial. The recent Common Core State Standards for teaching literature include statements such as the following:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.11-12.2 Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.
The very use of the the word “objective” in relation to a text is nearly an absurd statement to someone familiar with the critical theories used to interpret literature that arose in the last few decades. Taking undergrad literature classes in the mid-1990s, I gained just a limited understanding of some of these approaches, but judging by the enthusiasms of the younger professors and by the resistance of the older ones, I understood these ideas to be important.
But the Common Core standards seem written in ignorance of these developments in interpretation, as if the standards writers were just gonna elide the last 50+ years of criticism. And though the standards are careful to call their lists of texts for use in classes “illustrative” rather than “recommended,” this listing shows 14 texts, only two of which were published in the last 50 years.
So the act of reading and interpreting texts is something that, in addition to necessitating word-processing skills, also “requires background knowledge of cultural, historical and social references” (as the Times article states), and from these basic skills and resources, we ask students to make coherent, logical statements of analysis. That’s asking a lot of anybody. But then, all too often, standardized reading tests ask students to select an interpretation from multiple choices, which requires students to also analyze the test to see which of the many possible interpretations of a text is the one that the test will honor as the “right” answer. The student has to match minds both with the text-writer and with the test-writer. In the Times article,
But when [the teacher] asked [students] to select which of two descriptions fit Terabithia, the magic kingdom created by the two main characters, the class stumbled to draw inferences from the text.
Uh, yeah. Why only two descriptions? We ask students to make this complex, creative, personal interpretation, and then ask them to compare theirs to an adult’s?
This might all be despair-inducing, except for the fact that when we teach interpretation skills to students, we also empower them to see the tests and the standards as the bullsh*t they so often are. This reminds me of the Hemingway quote featuring his one standard of education:
“Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him.”
(One, too, might employ such a crap-detector while reading Hemingway.)
Posted in Links, Teaching, Teaching writing
Tagged Common Core, crap detector, critical theory, Hemingway, literature, math, reading, science, standards, testing
