Many people involved in my profession shrug this question off, either saying “Of course education is worth it, education helps job outcomes of many sorts, people who graduate from college are less likely to be employed and have higher salaries.” Or “Not everything needs have a price tag, I am helping to develop and transform young minds, I can’t be bothered by putting a dollar figure on my work.”

And I am sympathetic to each of these thoughts, but they don’t work for me. Education in general is of course beneficial, but is the education that I personally provide, beneficial to these particular students? That I am not always so certain of. And of course not everything should have a price tag. But money is just choices, made concrete. Every month when that miniscule slice of my college debt gets withdrawn from my bank account, that’s money I can’t spend on my kids camps, or new clothes, or donuts. I know that I am costing my students thousands of future donuts, and I need to ask myself, “Am I worth it?”

This week is one of those that I think I am, and I thought I would share why with you. I think it gets at why people in my profession resist simple economic models of services delivered, or value as average cost divided by conveniently measurable benefit. The past two weeks I have met with my 40 advisees to help them choose their fall classes. Most I meet with for half an hour, but some for longer. Some of this time is devoted to helping them navigate our full and rigorous curriculum. At Randolph-Macon we swim against a few tides in higher education, one is that we still require a degree of proficiency in foreign language (what amounts to four semesters of college language). Another is that we require four science and math courses, two of which must be labs. But as I help students choose their classes, I also help them choose their major, or if it is a psychology major, I help them choose careers paths and advise them on steps along that path. Sometimes, students are full steam ahead, coming in knowing what they want, and charging to get it, only basically needing logistical help. Other times students have really struggled with a class or field that they once loved, and are lost. Sometimes these are the same student a year apart.

Relevant to the title, I am starting to feel that these one-on-one advising sessions are some of the highest value that I provide here. I have to keep in mind the logistical complexities of our curriculum as well as the current and future interests of that student. But also, I show them that I am a human being who is sympathetic to their struggles and wants them to succeed. Packing all of this into a half an hour or even an hour is really exhausting, but I can tell it helps. I have a feeling it helps even more then either of us realize. I might even go so far as to say that this hour is worth the tuition here (even though 99% of our students receive some sort of financial aid, and our average price is closer to half the advertised tuition).

Why does this hour help so much? Because it isn’t just an hour. It is hundreds of hours packed into one. It is me reaching out to admissions officers at graduation schools of clinical psychology, trying to tell what can make some applicants from smaller schools stand out. It is me going to bed thinking about what kinds of strategies would help students realize the importance of freshmen year, while still letting them make their own mistakes. It is me being on a first name basis with the psychologist who is the head of our mental health clinic, and being able to tell the difference between a student who needs to be walked over to the clinic right then, or one who should be gently nudged because if they are forced to go it won’t help.

The value of expertise is uneven, in education doubly so. Yeats said that education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire, but it is both, and more. Sometimes students have fires that need to put out, others have fuel that needs igniting. Most of these things don’t work unless students feel that another human being is providing them. When we worry too much about counting the overall value in a diploma, in a major, or in a course, we can lose sight of the concentrated value of a moment.

Anyways, advising is exhausting work. Like a lot of exhausting work with teenagers, they have no idea how much effort it is and how much good it does them. But in response to my nagging “Am I am worth thousands of future donuts?” questions, occasionally an advising session will give rise to another little voice. This voice gently whispers, as a student leaves with their head a little higher, or a little extra lilt in their voice as they are surprised at how helpful advising was, “Yeah. That was it. That was worth it, right there.”

The syllabus serves many roles.

One could see the syllabus as a contract. Here is the work you will do, and if you adhere to these stipulations, you will be paid with the following grades. When things go wrong in a class, the syllabus can be called to serve this purpose. In a legal sense, when someone tells you to “get it in writing” the syllabus ends up serving this purpose in college classes.

The syllabus introduces the instructor. What kind of person are you? Will you be organized? Will you be easy to follow? Will you be strict or loose? Students ask these questions and look for answers in the syllabus, whether they realize it or not.

The syllabus also serves as an instruction booklet for the course. Most students begin with simple, logistical questions. How much reading will there be every week? How many exams are there? Are there regular homework assignments? What are the grading criteria? Students refer to it for due dates, for how to complete papers, for grading criteria, or even for how to ask questions that they are left with.

I tend to view my syllabus as being as clear as I can possibly be about the logistical details (dates, grading criteria, etc) and then nudge the students a little bit to do some bigger picture thinking about why they are in the class, how they will approach the class, and what they will get out of the class. Many students might have simple, instrumental responses to these questions (to fulfill a requirement, to get my desired grade with the least amount of work, to get a grade on the way to my diploma) but I want to urge them beyond these as early as I can. They are important considerations, but if they are the only ones, maintaining motivation can be nearly impossible for many students.

Now for some examples:
I am pretty pleased with my current syllabus for the General Psychology Class I am teaching this spring. I am teaching two sections of 30 students (in addition to another class of all freshmen in our FYEC program), which is large for Randolph-Macon. I was inspired by a comment by Dr. Melissa Bartlett at this post on syllabus bloat by Matt Reed (aka Dean Dad). Dr. Bartlett left a link for her syllabus, in which she separates the bloated, reference-book part of her syllabus from a quick one page guide to the logistics. I don’t like the part of syllabus bloat that just includes legalistic definitions of cheating or disabilities, but I do see many good reasons to justify my own “sylla-book.” Certainly not all students will read the whole thing, but the ones that do will get a good introduction to what to expect from the course, what to expect from me, and the kind of culture I hope that they experience more at Randolph-Macon. They will also be nudged to reflect a bit more about their learning.

I kind of love reading extreme examples of syllabi. Here is what W.H. Auden assigned when he taught a course at the University of Michigan in 1941-2.

Here is the fantastic historian (and Harvard professor) Jill Lepore’s instructions on how to write a paper for her classes. I love how it is conversational, but also useful advice. I try to emulate that tone in some of my instructions.

Resources:
I would highly recommend perusing the new free, peer-reviewed, open-access journal called Syllabus. It is a great way to look at a bunch of syllabi that reflect a great amount of thought and expertise. It is also a way to get new ideas for assignments, or creative pedagogy. I recently reviewed a syllabus and was struck that yes, this is a kind of scholarship. I am not sure that it can be evaluated in the same way other kinds of scholarship can, but I felt richer for both engaging with such a well-designed course, but also with trying to decide how it might be improved. It is also a great reminder to me of the remarkable diversity in higher education. The current issue has a syllabus from a course called “African American male first year writing” as well as one called “Introduction to Applied Data Gathering and Analysis.”

This piece about syllabus bloat has an interesting discussion on whether a syllabus should be a map or a recipe. I like the metaphor, and I think it is good lens to look at the goals of your course. I tend to think that beginning students need recipes (just like beginning cooks) but advanced students are more capable of taking a map and exploring. Obviously, though, I think that there needs to be some exploring and some clear instructions in every course.

Here is someone who abandoned the syllabus, entrusting more and more of the organization of the course to the students. This sounds great to me, and I am glad it works for him, but I am not sure I am quite ready for this bold experiment myself. And I don’t think it fits with my teaching persona or philosophy. Which is totally fine. I still found this interesting.

I’d love to hear from my college prof readers on your own approach to syllabi (or even get a peek at some of them?). If any students are out there, I’d also love to hear from you. What do you want in a syllabi? How do you read them? Please share in the comments.

Since one of the sessions I helped to moderate this year (with the amazing science artist  Michele Banks) was on metaphors, I thought of an appropriate metaphor for the ScienceOnline conference: a small town, just like Garrison Keilor’s Lake Wobegon, or the kind imagined in Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town” or even the kind of town that I live in, here in Ashland, Virginia (pop 7225).

People from all over the world converge on Raleigh, North Carolina, but really, on two locations: the hotel and the wonderful McKimmon Conference Center at NC State.

There is one bar, where the town’s celebrities rub elbows with everyone. 

Twitter serves as the local paper, contributing to this small town atmosphere, because you don’t have to try to hard to know everyone else’s business. Unlike the local paper, this is published every second instead of every day. But many townsfolk know who is celebrating happy news, or dealing with illness, or tragedy.

The hard working town council makes sure everything goes smoothly, but they live in the town too. Just like the small town politicians I know, taking care of their small town is a labor of love for Bora, Anton and Karen. 

The conference sponsors are not just corporate outsiders who throw money around for the privilege of advertising to we academic or freelance journalist power brokers (ha!). They are much more like the small town businesses that the townspeople believe in. The representatives of these “local” businesses attend the conference themselves, and value the same kind of openness and sharing that many in the crowd do. FigShare, Science Seeker, Mendeley, Academia.edu. They attend the town meetings, they support the townspeople, but recognize that more open publicly accessible science isn’t just their business model, but a value we all share.

Like the small town I live in, newcomers are welcomed, but still feel like newcomers. I remember asking for directions, almost a year after I moved here, and the multigenerational denizen of Ashland kindly gave me directions that hinged on landmarks that no longer existed. “Go past where the Southern States used to be, then take a left where the newspaper offices closed ten years ago.” It was a map of memories, more real to him than the current, physical landmarks, but invisible to me. I was quite aware of my lack of knowledge of the place only a few blocks away from my house. At Science Online, there are inside jokes a plenty, often hinging on people who are amazing celebrities “in town,” but not always known outside of town. Sometimes small towns have local clubs where those who’ve lived in town for generations convene. I’d nominate the #DSNSuite (who needs Elks or Moose when you’ve got sharks?) for that title, a place famous (infamous?) inside this small community, but exclusive. Not exclusive in intent, the Deep Sea News people seem all to be good, caring, inclusive people, but for its small size, and the fact that wild and crazy initiation rites seem to whisper (or rather, twitter) from its closed windows.

I served as a cab driver of sorts, being one of the few with a car. Helping to deliver someone to a meeting, picking up shuttle bus stragglers, and getting to hear some of the small town gossip along the way. I’ve always enjoyed having conversations in cars, it seems to make the silences less awkward, as I concentrate on the road. I also don’t have to negotiate eye contact, which is honestly a relief, as I know I am one of those people who peers off into nothingness when I should be meeting eyes. 

The banquet night serves as a small town festival, where everyone feels generous to each other, and of course some people are overserved, Except, instead of local delicacies, a strawberry, or a tomato, there is science at the tables, science activities, and talk of science and journalism as the music plays.

The small town generosity extends throughout the conference, whether it is the unending coffee, or the fact that there is always food at The Chatterbox Figshare Cafe. The unconference style sometimes resembles a town meeting. Yes, some people do go on for a little bit, but you know what? They really care about those sidewalks, or that dog ordinance, or the importance of conveying statistical uncertainty in the context of climate science, so more power to them. And when it’s time for a town barbecue, they share their fantastic bourbon so we’ll tolerate them now. I know some people feel they didn’t learn as much from these sessions as they contributed, and I can see their point. The sessions don’t always offer tips and practical advice, or really anything that feels like learning. What it does offer me is a feeling of being in a community of people who care about communicating science. Just sitting and thinking about these questions, hearing examples from physics, from chemistry, from biology, from geology, is worth it for me. Having these people hear about an example from psychology is worth it too. And when I am discussing with my students what makes psychology a science, without realizing it, I bring up examples from this conference. My teaching is also shaped by the muscular, confident scientific feminism that I don’t normally have too much contact with. Those town hall meetings don’t always end neatly, but I think they are necessary. I hope I end up going next year, even though I certainly could see the case for vacating my spot for another.

One reason I think this conference can maintain this intimate and open feeling is by limiting the attendance to 450 people. No doubt they could easily jump to 2000, but I think something might be lost. So the town council tries to contain the development, while staying fair and true to the values of their small town.

So, here’s hoping I’ll visit that other small town again next year, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average. 

Been thinking more on my piece last night on the problems of poor smart kids choosing not to apply to selective colleges. I still think seeing this as an unqualified national crisis is overblown, and a bit elitist.

But I do want to leave space for a few complicating factors. First, when people from poor backgrounds do find success by leaving their communities and entering elite halls of academia, I applaud them. One of my other friends at Harvard came from a poor background, went to Harvard, then Columbia Law School and is now a successful corporate lawyer. If he had chosen a less selective CUNY would this path have been as open to him? I would acknowledge likely not. I really appreciated Ron Suskind’s book, A Hope in the Unseen, chronicling the journey of one student from a truly disadvantaged background (unlike my own privileged background despite being low-income) of Ballou High School in DC to Brown University. Despite many struggles, both at home in DC and with the huge cultural differences between Brown and Ballou, Cedric Jennings graduated and is successful. I certainly don’t mean to say that he should have gone to the University of the District of Columbia, or Prince George’s Community College, like many of his classmates. But this was not clearly and unambiguously a better path for Cedric all the way through. The book shows that there were real difficulties at Brown that were not only Cedric’s lack of intellectual  background.  And there are some Cedric’s who don’t end up at those places. Are they wasting their time? No. If we are displeased with the fate of smart kids at less selective places, we should improve those less selective places instead of taking their institutional poverty as a given and trying to funnel the “achievers” away from them.

And we should do that without saying things like:

Getting these students in our best colleges should be a national ambition. It would increase social mobility, raise national productivity, increase taxable income, shrink our deficit, cut income-support payments … you get the point.

But there is one more point I want to make. The Hoxby paper and commentary seem to treat the link between less selective schooling and salary/success etc as a law of the universe. Go to Harvard, make big $ because you are smart. Go to Chico State, make no money, because you don’t get the smarts and skills you would have gotten at Harvard. But there is an alternative explanation, provided by this interesting “class autobiography” written by University of Oregon economist Mark Thoma:

I did well at Chico, really well, but I was naive. This is going to sound dumb to all of you, but I really didn’t understand the difference between Stanford, Berkeley, and Chico State. Where I grew up, there were two types of people, those who went to college, and those who didn’t. It didn’t much matter where, just going and getting a degree was enough. I suppose the “upper class” understood the difference, but in working class land where I grew up, such distinctions weren’t drawn, at least not in my house. The Ivy league was for other people, and people either went to college or they didn’t, to Chico, maybe to a UC if they could afford it. And those who went often never returned. When I hear Bryan Caplan say in his essay “What if I had grown up rich? … I would have gone to the Ivy League instead of UC Berkeley, but it’s not like Berkeley held me back,” I have to laugh because to me, Berkeley was an elite school, a dream, not something I could ever do. My third year at Chico a faculty member took me aside and told me I needed to go to a UC school, Chico wouldn’t do. I called my parents and told them, and they said, simply, that’s not going to happen.

I had no idea how limiting coming out of Chico would be. I’ve seen a lot of graduate applications in my life, and mine was more than competitive as a math/econ/stat major with really good GREs and great supporting letters. But I was denied every place I applied and to this day I think that still affects my attitude about this profession. I can remember opening the letter with the last chance I had on my front porch and feeling crushed. I was going back to the tractor store just like my dad, brother, and grandfather. You can’t get there from Chico no matter how good your record is.

Fortunately for me, I was working for a faculty member doing work for Medicaid estimating reimbursement levels for pharmaceutical drugs and he got to know me pretty well (he’s president of a university now). When he found out I had been rejected everywhere, he made a phone call and got me into Washington State University with money, the place where he had gone to graduate school (in an afternoon – it wasn’t until much later that I realized how much I owed him for doing that).

The whole thing is interesting. Please read it. It is definitely more complicated than just this point. But it introduces this possibility that maybe, just maybe,  part of the reason that high achieving students coming from “low” places don’t get ahead is not their own relative incompetence, but active discrimination. Lauren Rivera published this important paper in which she interviewed hiring officers at many elite firms (banking, consulting, etc) What is the way to appropriately address that discrimination? It seems that Hoxby, Wolfers, and Thompson would rather ignore it and send more high achievers to “top-flight” schools? I disagree. Of course, this need not be an either/or proposition. But I happen to think diminishing and turning away excellent people from Chico State is a bigger problem than the fact that the Mark Thoma’s of the world don’t apply to Stanford.

First, I was a high achieving, low-income student. I went to DC Public Schools and then I chose Harvard College. As a brief qualifier, although my parents’ income qualified me for generous need-based financial aid, I was raised with amazing social capital. My house was filled with books, stacks of the NYRB, and parents who would take me to Shakespeare and urge me to apply to amazing science camps. So I was in no way typical of their sample, but I still think I have a better view of this population than they do.

Second, I now teach in one of the institutions that Hoxby, Anderson, and the journalists that write about this paper would call “less selective.” I work very hard for my students, including some who are high achieving and low income. And yes, I am defensive that my institution is somehow a clearly inferior choice for those of my students who are lower income. If you detect an edge in some of my words below it is because I have dulled them from my original angry bloodied spear point.

First, the Hoxby and Avery paper:

We show that the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university. This is despite the fact that selective institutions would often cost them less, owing to generous financial aid, than the resource-poor two-year and non-selective four-year institutions to which they actually apply. Moreover, high-achieving, low-income students who do apply to selective institutions are admitted and graduate at high rates. We demonstrate that these low-income students’ application behavior differs greatly from that of their high-income counterparts who have similar achievement.

I don’t find anything wrong on the face with studying how people of different classes make different college decisions. The upgoer of this article seems to be: when it comes time to chose a school after high school, poor smart kids act more like poor kids than smart kids. Ok, yeah, class matters. Not just for academic achievement, but for college choice. I am not surprised at this, and I don’t think they were either.

It is the next part, the popular interpretation of this paper that drives me crazy. Here Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson writing in an article titled “Why Some Top Colleges Miss Great Students”:

The real crisis in American higher education is that our best colleges never see a large chunk of our smartest students.

In an important recent study, the economists Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery found that very few high achievers from low-income families ever apply to top colleges, and that the missing applications from these kids largely explain why they’re underrepresented at our leading universities.

See how they quickly move from the “selective” to “top” and “leading” as descriptors of these colleges that poor smart kids are missing out on? So the real crisis in education is that Harvard can’t get another fifty Pell Grant kids to improve its income diversity? Apparently this real crisis is that high achieving poor smart kids from rural areas never even consider Harvard, and are far more likely to stay closer to home at regional 4 year college. Instead of going to the best, they come to me. They go to Historically Black Colleges and Universities or they go to community colleges. This is not a crisis.

I have met faculty at these places, and they work hard for their students, they know their students. The faculty member who knows all his students’ names, that they want to be a pharmacist when they grow up, and what a hard time they had when their father died two years ago might be a worthy mentor for that student to have. They might just be better for that student than the many world-renowned experts I encountered at Harvard who were blissfully unaware of my own awkward intellectual and emotional stumbling. Choosing a place where people like you find a supportive community is not a crisis.

Wolfers and Stevenson end with a few suggestions for remedying this “problem” with relatively small nudges, then close with:

It’s a startling fact that such small barriers could be a stumbling block to socioeconomic diversity on U.S. college campuses and to economic mobility.

The good news is that the talent is there. Now all we have to do is tap it.

So this is it. We have given up on the hope that our university system as a whole is an engine of economic mobility. We’ve given up on former U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan’s view of community colleges:

“I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly — and with very little financial encouragement — saving lives and minds. I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, except perhaps the bicycle.”

Do Wolfers and Stevenson realize that they are saying that smart kids going to community colleges are a crisis? Do they realize that they are saying that the poor rural smart kids who go to my school are merely a passive pool talent, sitting there untapped? I can only assume that plenty of tapping is going on at University of Michigan, where they teach. Although I would guess that they personally aren’t doing much:

 Being able to live near campus will, says Ms. Stevenson, free up time for teaching, writing, and public appearances. She and Mr. Wolfers will no longer need a driver. They hired one for their two hours of daily commuting between Philadelphia to Princeton, having calculated that that would optimize their output and contentment.

Derek Thompson, in the Atlantic, writes a similar column, calling it a “quiet crisis:”

There’s a quieter, more lower-case crisis that is potentially even more dangerous for the economy: Smart, low-income students who never consider applying to our best colleges — even though the education would both cost less and lead to higher-paying jobs.

He closes with

If both institutions [the media and selective colleges] looked harder for our education system’s quieter crisis — the promising students who don’t go to school or apply to non-selective colleges — it would make the entire country richer.

Yes. The whole country would be richer if only more poor kids went to Harvard.

I was reading these articles in the context of one of my typical January activities, interviewing scholarship candidates for my college. Whereas most bigger schools have alumni networks that do candidate interviews, Randolph-Macon brings merit scholarship candidates to campus for a visit, and each gets a brief interview with a faculty member on a Saturday afternoon, along with some typical tours and lectures. I end up talking with a lot of kids who would probably fall into Hoxby and Avery’s category of high achieving kids from poorer rural areas. One of the things that I ask them is why they chose to apply to Randolph-Macon. Most often they tell me that they like the small size (just like their hometown), the fact that it is close to their family. They tell me that they value the  personal attention they see in the sample classes they’ve attended and in the amazing job that the admissions office does in wishing them a happy birthday or personalizing every acceptance letter with details from the application.

Like all kids who apply to college they want a job when they get out, but they also want a good experience while they are in college. They want a school with the highest status that they can imagine, but one where they fit in. They feel that they won’t fit in at Harvard or Yale or Princeton. This is not an irrational decision made because they don’t have enough information. My freshman roommate was from a small coal mining town in Kentucky. He left Harvard after freshman year, not feeling like he fit in. He transferred to a school closer to home that fit better with his recent religious conversion.

And this to me is a big ignored point, and a common theme of this blog. Sometimes people make decisions because they have different values than you, not just because they are stupid and uninformed of the benefits of your way of thinking. This is a blind spot for Thompson (also from DC, I see, but went to Potomac School, then Northwestern, now lives in NYC as a senior editor for the Atlantic) and Wolfers (B.A. University of Sydney, Ph.D. Harvard, now at Michigan) and Stevenson (B.A. Wellesley, Ph.D. Harvard, now at Michigan).

Most people don’t just choose college based on getting a high paying job for the cheapest four-year cost. They want to have a learning and maturing experience with people like them. Is this so wrong? They want to stay close to home and their social support networks.  Is this merely a symptom of selective colleges failing to reach them with information about the benefits of an elite education? No. It is selective colleges failing to align with their values. And they might just be right. Some people would rather be close to their families than be at a more elite place. Oh, wait, Stevenson and Wolfers have made exactly this decision.

I don’t doubt the data that elite colleges often do offer better long-term salary prospects, especially for low-income students (in fact, higher income achievers likely already have high income social networks, and therefore do not benefit from elite schools). But when I ask the students I meet what they want out of college, they don’t say high salary. They don’t say Harvard Medical School. They say that they want the things they currently value: family, church and service to their community. This isn’t a crisis.

What is a crisis is that economists and business writers who don’t actually talk to these students denigrate their decision-making process as short-sighted and deficient. Then these writers imply that the economy would improve if this “untapped talent” made better choices, as if the lack of opportunity these students face when they exit college is their own fault for choosing the same places that the respected members of their community went and loved.

UPDATE: I have added a brief follow-up post adding a few wrinkles to this story.

I don’t have much to say but I want to remind people that this is a fairly old debate. I really don’t think it changes much each time we have it.

It has taken on new dimensions with the world of the internet but provocative trolling for outrage in book form looks remarkably similar.

I think many fellow professors click on the list, read the article, and think along these lines:

I know I don’t have as stressful a job as a taxi driver (most likely to be victims of a crime) or of an active duty soldier. But there is no need to continue to spread these falsehoods about a summer off, or a stress-free nine-to-five existence. And the “adding plenty of new adjunct and tenure-track jobs” fiction is hilarious.

They then share their outrage on Facebook and twitter. They click on the Career-Cast links to the methodology. They play into the hands of the craven journalistic incentives that continue to give birth to these monstrosities. There is a business model that is fueled by outrage. It has some things in common with the one fueled by people clicking and sharing lists in which they are included.

So, here’s my New Year’s Resolution, which I know I have already failed (standing next to something and yelling “IGNORE THIS” at top of lungs, not that effective):

1) Ignore these lists. Don’t click them. Don’t share them. Be more wary of clicking on Forbes.

2) Ignore the professors-are-lazy meme when perpetuated by lazy journalists.

3) Be a hard working professor, and _show_ people that I work hard, don’t just tell them how hard I work. Spending one day in a school telling kids what you do, academics, will do more than a thousand RT’s or twenty blog posts. I am a big fan of blogging, but nothing beats boots on the ground, or tweed in the classroom, so to speak.

4) Keep AAUP on my radar, and promote them to my colleagues. Want to click something? Click this: Join AAUP  Want to advocate for your profession? That’s what professional organizations do. They lobby, they educate, they investigate. They could do more if more faculty joined. They have recently changed their fee structure to be more affordable. At my salary annual dues are about 100 bucks. This seems like a lot for membership in yet another professional organization. But I think of this as privilege taxes. I am a tenure-track faculty member who may not be actually standing on the physical shoulders of adjuncts, but I am part of a system which exploits their labor. I owe them at least a modicum of advocacy on their behalf. AAUP may not be perfect in this regard, but it is better than nothing.

I am open to other courses of action, so anything you are planning on doing? Please reply in the comments.

So said one of my many basketball opponents after I made a basket at Hamilton Playground. Violence in his tone, frustration emanating from his adolescent body, he just saw me as some white kid who he should be beating. My being both white and better at basketball was, at that moment, seen as aggression and reacted to as such. I’m sure it didn’t help that I was also, in all likelihood, engaging in the kind of playground antics designed to embarrass him and I seemed to be having fun. After all, I was a stupid teenager, too. In the moment this epithet was a chilling slap to my fourteen-year-old self, its memory is a gift to the future me. This and many memories of my times as the only white boy (my nickname was “white boy”) on the basketball court now give me a different racial perspective than many of my white peers.

“Yo juro alianza a la Bandera de los Estados Unidos de América y a la república que representa, una nación bajo Dios, indivisible, con libertad y justicia para todos”

Every day in elementary school, after saying the Pledge of Allegiance, we said it again, in Spanish. This is what being in a bilingual elementary school meant. When I was at my kids’ school a few weeks ago, the Pledge started over the PA and everyone stopped where they were, stood, faced the flag and put their hands on their hearts. I found myself continuing after the Pledge had finished, saying what was in my head as simply the next verse. I hadn’t thought about that for at least twenty years, but there it was, just on the tip of my tongue. As my lips moved a bit after everyone put their hands down and resumed what they were doing, I was reminded of how different my childhood was.

No one thinks that their childhood is unique while they’re living it; it’s invisible like the air they breathe. I went to a bilingual elementary school, taking half my classes in English, and half in Spanish. But when I was in fourth grade, I wasn’t waxing poetic about the amazing cognitive benefits of bilingual education. In seventh grade at the basketball court, I wasn’t marveling at the incredible racial diversity. I was grumbling about some homework I didn’t want to do and worrying about bullying and what being a male meant, like every other boy.

But just like that Pledge of Allegiance, every now and then my childhood reaches forward and jerks me away from the crowd I am in, making me move my lips in a different way, as everyone else goes about their business. Yesterday was such a day.

Many of my scientific twitter followers discovered Gizoogle, which turns any web page into language as if uttered by Snoop Dogg. Here are a few examples. The juxtaposition of science writing translated into gangster talk lead to loud (virtual) guffaws (I’ve used a new example other than the ones mentioned on twitter here). Some of this rubbed me the wrong way and led me to think about how my racial sensibilities lead me to discomfort and when others are led to humor.

Gizoogle claims to simply translate any web page into Snoop Dogg language using an algorithm from words actually used by Snoop Dogg himself and contains the follow caveat:

Apologies if you are in any way offended by the explicit wording used in the translations.

The slanguage used in our algorithm has been quoted from Snoop Dogg himself and is commonly used in movies, conversations and music he has written.

These words are based on slang and can not be interpreted in any other way other than how they are quoted. There are no racist words used in the algorithm.

A little analysis at what the algorithm does tells me that it replaces many words like “world” with “ghetto,” slangifies other words (more -> mo’, am -> be, at -> up in) and adds occasional filler phrases from Snoop’s lexicon, like “I aint talkin’ bout chicken n’ gravy biatch.”

I am often reluctant to write about race from my position of privilege. I always feel the danger of assuming (and asserting) I know what black people are thinking when I think “Damn that’s racist.” Sometimes I think, “That’s not really my place to point out what might be offensive to someone else. I shouldn’t speak for them. Let them point it out.” But as I’ve read a lot more about being an internet ally, in particular to women, I think there is value in saying something, even if it carries the risk of coming across as an aloof privileged academic having an aloof privileged conversation.

So, I’ll come out and say it bluntly: I don’t like this approach to humor. I won’t lie, a little giggle arises at “Pimp Benzedrine being elected all up in a papal enclave,” but mostly I’m made uncomfortable by the mindless search and replace approach to this. Why? Because Snoop Dogg’s language is not all his own, but a variant of African American Vernacular English. Snoop is not the only one who pronounces “the” as “da” or “tha.” He’s not the only one who says “mo” instead of more, or “axed” instead of “asked.”  I try not to be judgmental here, but I think my experience in knowing a lot of people who use this dialect means I have a lot harder time finding this sort of thing funny.

I don’t giggle when reading that “Wallace axed Darwin bout da origin of da mothafuckin species.” It is one thing to mock Snoop’s f’shizzle dizzle and quite another to replace “food” with “chicken,” just adding “biatch,” and calling it hilarious. I don’t have a particular memory but I am sure that I sat in junior high biology and heard questions and answers in African American dialect, uttered by sincere and confused teenagers. Perhaps the -izzles just aren’t enough to prevent me from thinking we are mocking not just Snoop, but those kids too, in addition to my angry, frustrated opponent at the basketball court, the adults they have become, and the language they speak around the dinner table.

The coders responsible for the algorithm claim that “there are no racist words used in the algorithm,” but racism isn’t a property of a word. It’s a property of the speaker and of the situation. And fellow white people using African American Vernacular as if it is funny or ironic in and of itself has always made me uncomfortable.  I know that an eighteen year old prep school kid from the suburbs calling everyone “dawg” has good intentions, but it has never sat right with me.

When people see African American dialect juxtaposed with eloquent scientific prose as hilarious, part of what I hear is “Ha! those would never exist in the same place. People who talk like that would never understand science this deeply.” Maybe I am saying all of this too strongly, and it is all just an impersonation of Snoop Dogg, just like the Thomas Friedman column generator (click on that second one, it’s uncanny). I just can’t help but hear undercurrents and echoes of negative stereotypes like “all rappers are ignorant and shallow” and “urban black culture is backwards, anti-intellectual, and responsible for black poverty.” There may be some truth to some of those stereotypes (yes, I have seen smart black kids hide their intelligence or be called “white” when they use big words), but it seems quite different to me to see Chris Rock or Ta-Nehisi Coates talk about it than to read John Derbyshire, or even Matt Yglesias on the subject.

I think this is similar to making fun of names (and not just because I have a weird one myself). When one’s junior high yearbook has an Natisha, Shawnte, Talib, Checharna, Lawanda and Marquitta (and that was just my homeroom) those names aren’t humorous, they are just those people.

But I am not entirely humorless. As someone remarked to me on twitter, people talk funny. Are we forever prevented from mocking people who talk funny? As I thought more about it throughout the day, I wondered: Where is the line? And I keep returning to a pair of skits about language and names from Key and Peele, a new comedy duo with their own show on Comedy Central.

Why do I love this skit? It plays with the line between humor and offense and it knows it. The first name “D’Marcus Williums.” I knew people named D’Marcus, okay, weird spelling of Williams, but not really funny. Okay, next. T.J. Juckson, alright, riffing on Jackson, a little abnormal, not really funny. T’Variusness King. Okay, T’Variusness is kind of a funny name. Why, it takes the T’ but then adds something a bit sillier than usual. This is not a play on Akisha, Keisha, Lakisha, Shakesha, but T’Variusness. I find that worth a smile, not too guilty, I don’t know any T’Variusnesses or anything approaching it. Nor do I know any D’Squarius – again, little smile. But I still see that Key and Peele (by the way, Jordan Peele was almost named Noah. Yes, his mom almost named him Noah Peele) are playing with the line here, with a little step over. But when we get to “Jackmerius Tacktheratrix.” I lol’ed. That’s some inner city dinosaur shit right there. As the skit goes on, Key and Peele pace the names, stepping gingerly around names that sound almost realistic: “Jasper Probincrux III” could have gone to Andover, but “D’Jasper?” Probably not. Javaris Jamar Javarison-Lamar, well over the line into silly. I’ll stop, but watch the thing. The over-analyzing doesn’t stop the giggling. At least for me.

The second skit is about an black inner-city substitute teacher who comes into an all-white classroom and takes attendance.

“J-kwellen” doesn’t respond to her name, and it continues. I like how this skit plants a seed that all pronunciation of names might be a bit arbitrary and invented. As someone who was told by my German homeroom teacher in high school (in friendliness, hi Ms. Cranston!) that I pronounced and/or spelled my own last name wrong (it’s Ry-ner, not Rhee-ner), I know that there is nothing that makes an Irish pronunciation of a German name any more natural or normal than a mix of spelling and pronunciation of Swahili and Hebrew.

Anyways, there is both a world of difference, and sometimes a thin line, between sophisticated code-switching and clumsy blackface minstrelsy. When there is a possible violation of that line into offense, I try to take a conservative approach and avoid engaging with it when there is any question. If you have to say “I’m not a racist but…” it probably means you are about to say something racist. If you are going to make fun of a member of a group for talking a certain way, maybe consider if other members of that group also talk that way and think twice about whether you are mocking the entire group for something they take seriously.

Maybe all of this means progress and I shouldn’t take my own discomfort as some sort of absolute barometer of racial offensiveness. But I needed to get this off my chest.

But then the governor of my state endorsed this, or at least opened the door for a “discussion” which is what people in public office want to do when they want to endorse something without explaining it.

As those who read this blog regularly, I find mockery without seeking understanding distasteful, especially when I feel myself engaging in it. So here is my effort to understand this, through my understanding of the psychology of cognitive biases. I think, in all this, there is also a lesson about the value of psychology in the face of what some might call common sense.

If I were to pick a psychological topic for people in this debate to understand more fully, it would be the concept that in calculating the likelihood of events (future or past), or how things are caused, we take our thoughts, our memories, and our imagination as data. We might recognize that our views are subjective and we may try to account for our own values and experience, but what we do not account for is that we are not merely subjective, but we are all biased. We are biased because our imaginations are biased. It is simply easier to think of some things that others.

Depending on how it is applied, this tendency is sometimes called the availability heuristic, sometimes the simulation heuristic. When judging what causes something else (was it the guns or the deranged mind?), we engage in counterfactual thinking (what could have stopped this?) and we judge things that are more mutable (things we can imagine changing) as more important to causing an event than those we can’t imagine changing.

This feels like logic, but it is not. A thought experiment is not an experiment.

Just because I can imagine looking more carefully doesn’t make it likely that I would have avoided getting hit by that car when I was on my bike. Just because it is easier to imagine avoiding the accident than breaking my neck, doesn’t make me any less lucky that I only had a few stitches on my hand.

Just because we can imagine that mentally ill person being violent, doesn’t change the facts:

Most people with SMI [severe mental illness] are not violent, and most violent acts are not committed by people with SMI. In fact, people with SMI are actually at higher risk of being victims of violence than perpetrators. Teplin et al found that those with SMI are 11 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population.ⁱⁱ

Just because we can imagine that if only Dawn Hochsprung had a weapon when she heard that crash, the shooter would have been stopped, doesn’t make it more likely.

Just because someone can imagine that a crowd ganging together and rushing an attacker (yes, someone imagined such a thing in print) might be an effective way of limiting fatalities, doesn’t make it so. Bringing up Flight 93 only proves the point that one could only think this because of its success in another totally unrelated and different scenario.

In a case as horrible as this, how could we not nudge our memories and our imaginations to make it not happen? Isn’t it merely human to imagine this evil man-child, this villain, this terrorist, blown away at the door by a vigilant police officer or quick thinking super hero-teacher? Isn’t it equally human to imagine this monster, angry and frustrated, only being able to access a small handgun and a small clip, then walking into this school and *only* killing half the class?

These are human responses, and when I confront tragedies large and small I do the same thing. But when we are designing laws and policies, I think we can do better than what some columnist thought about on a cab ride home. We have to force ourselves outside of our own imagination, both by expanding our imagination, but also by consulting the science of how people actually behave and evidence of how people have actually behaved in the past.

The data on the complicated but not random phenomena of suicide offers a sad but necessary reminder of the limits of our imaginations and the need to ignore our common sense. Common sense might make it easier for us to imagine that suicide is only the result of extreme chronic depression and hopelessness. Someone who hits “rock bottom” and can’t take it any more. But suicide in bipolar disorder also can happen in the manic phase, and it is often better considered an acute event, rather than an inevitable chronic one. What might seem like the most personal, independent and isolated decision one could ever make can actually be contagious, and affected by media reports. While a suicide attempt is often an indicator of psychiatric disorder, it is not a death sentence.  Finally, this act, of taking one’s own life, for most of us almost the very definition of “the unthinkable,” is actually far more common than we’d like to acknowledge. More common than homicide. More common than deaths from war. Worldwide, more common than accidents, homicide and war put together.

I think trying to expand our imaginations (or at least remind ourselves of their limitations) can also be a useful complement to statistics. Feel comforted by the idea of having a gun when your house is burglarized? I know I have imagined this. My house growing up was burglarized three times, once when my family was in it. My first apartment out of college was burglarized.

Now try imagining that gun in many other moments of its life. Listen to Nas’ “I Gave You Power.” Imagine it in the hands of every other person who lives in your house. How about in ten years? (“Having school-age children in the household did not significantly affect gun ownership rates, either positively or negatively“)  Imagine that you leave the door unlocked and someone comes into your house at night and sits on your couch and fumbles around for remote. I know someone who this happened to, a new neighbor got very drunk and walked into the wrong house at 2am. Do you use your gun?

What really strikes me about the proposal to arm teachers (or arm everybody) is in our frenzy to get schools safe, we are ignoring what schools do when they are not being attacked by assault rifles. We are so caught up in this moment, in our grief, in our human desire to reverse this, that people can only imagine a teacher’s gun erasing this moment, and not all the other moments it would create. To many non-teachers, the moments where a teacher must think “This makes me scared and angry, but I really shouldn’t shoot this person” vastly outnumber the moments where drawing and/or shooting a gun might be appropriate.

Sandy Young, one of my favorite commenters over at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ place at the Atlantic  relates his experience this way (but read his whole comment):

Three times in my career as a teacher, I have had to confront and disarm disturbed and angry students. Once I had to disarm an intruder. None of these cases involved firearms; they involved knives, a machete, numchucks (sp?) and a crowbar. Each time I had to face them down and tell them that they had but two choices; they could surrender the weapon to me, or they would have to use it on me.

Each time, I watched and waited as they pondered their decision. I was surprisingly calm. I felt in that moment that I had simply cast my fate to the wind. It was only later that the shakes set in.

I am a college professor, not a high school teacher, nor an elementary school teacher. But through my kids, my visits, and my loved ones, I know that discipline in a classroom often consists of personal inhibition of action, rather than active confrontation. Teachers try to create in the classroom a model of the civil society that Alan Jacobs sees us relinquishing in efforts to ensure personal safety through assured destruction. Classrooms are exactly the last place that we should bring guns in. Safety in the classroom has to be assumed and thoughtless, not constantly reminded through the presence of weapons.

To come around, once more, to our deficit of imagination, and to suicide: According to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, one in five American high school students reported seriously considering suicide in the past year and 8% of high school students make an attempt. That is two kids in a class of twenty five. If we get more guns into more people’s hands, whoever wields a gun is likely to use it in the way that guns are currently most commonly used: to kill themselves, not save children from homicidal maniacs. Just because it is harder to imagine this, doesn’t make it any less true.

In this debate that we have, over gun control, over access to mental health, over our collective reaction to rare events, I hope that we can at least agree to give priority to evidence about how people actually behave, instead of how they behave in our minds.

The first was a discussion about the new logo for the University of California system.

Old and New Logos For University of California System

Also, check out the video announcing it. 1:16-1:18 is awesome (Go Marian Diamond and neuroplasticity!). The rest, well, I’m with Aaron Bady on this one. Yes. It looks like a toilet. Or a little icon that says “Loading, loading….”

What’s the big deal? It’s just a logo, right?

The second is a kerfuffle over Rachel’s post (picked up by Diane Ravitch) about why she doesn’t like it when education leaders like David Coleman and Gerard Robinson use profane language and metaphors when describing different educational policy decisions.

The third is the latest installment in Ta-Nehisi Coates ongoing discussions about why he doesn’t see the Civil War as tragic. His series is collected here. Coates acknowledges that he is talking symbolically, obviously not about the obvious fact that many many people died, and that there is sadness in any death. But as he reads deeper and deeper into Civil War history, Coates sees real triumph in the Civil War, and he sees problems with the view that because many died, it was therefore a national tragedy.

In each of these examples, some commentators respond with shrugs and “What’s the big deal?” Some of these people might think “let’s skip over these shallow and tangential discussions and get to the real meat of the discussion.” Criticisms of the language style are derided as political correctness, criticisms of the re-branding are seen as academic revulsion at advertising and marketing in a digital age, and Coates is often labeled as belaboring an argument based on semantic vagueness.

But for those who bring up these “surface” examples, they reveal a window into deeper, more fundamental differences. These people writing these critiques see them not as merely sitting on the surface of the deeper structural and logical disagreements, but reflecting the form of what’s beneath.

From Bady’s post on the logo:

That thing is ugly. But it’s not only ugly because it looks like a Swedish flag being flushed down the toilet; it’s ugly because it so perfectly crystallizes everything that’s been going wrong with the University of California for years, the same mindset that’s been dragging the UC down in its nose-dive with destiny.

From Rachel’s post on Sex, Shit N’ Standardized Testing,

How are we take one of the lead advocates of the more “rigorous” and intellectual ELA Common Core Standards seriously when he doesn’t see fit to use appropriate, professional, and specific language when advocating for the standards and for their accompanying tests. Coleman may be thinking I’m brash, but all I can think is, No, you’re full of disdain. Disdain for teachers, disdain for students, and disdain for engaging in any process of education reform.

From Coates:

And from the moment the first shots were fired, the black imagination conceived of the Civil War differently than the rest of the country. That difference continues up to the present day. Were I not the descendant of slaves, if I did not owe the invention of my modern self to a bloody war, perhaps I’d write differently.

Why does it matter what the UC logo looks like? Because it is just another place to realize how fully the language, attitudes, values and goals of the corporate world have co-opted our public universities. When people talk about how higher education should be run more like a successful business, they should acknowledge that many “successful” modern businesses put more effort and resources into marketing and advertising than they do research and development. Now ask yourself what a university with that ethos would look like. The University of Phoenix spends $170,000 a day on Google advertisements, making it the biggest advertiser on Google.

Why does it matter if David Coleman says that “People don’t give a shit about your feelings” and “tests are shittier?”  Because it indicates a disdain for engaging with your opponents and their evidence and perspectives. When Gerard Robinson shrugs and compares the anxiety over (what he thinks is indispensable) standardized testing to the inevitable anxiety over (equally indispensable?) sex, he is refusing to grapple with the reasons for the opposition to his policies.

Why does it matter whether we call the Civil War tragic or just merely full of sad death? Because it was a war fought over black humanity, and its memory should acknowledge black agency as a core element of how we tell its history. From what I see, Coates, as a mainstream journalist and writer plumbing the depths of Civil War history, wants us to acknowledge that to the modern African American, the Civil War was a War of Independence, and as much a cause for celebration as any war can be. The “rending brother from brother” stuff was happening to some people for a hundred years before the Civil War.

None of these points are tangential, they get to the core of the philosophical disputes in these cases. The reason Michelle Rhee was so despised in DC was that she openly and bluntly dismissed the value of dialogue, diplomacy and consensus. (“I think if there is one thing I have learned over the last 15 months, it’s that cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated.”)  Part and parcel of this attitude is maintaining tha tyou have nothing ot learn from understanding The reason David Coleman is so despised is that his language indicates a disgust with his opponents. To me, this represents not just a disconnect between sides of an emotional issue, but a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of your own job. David Coleman, if you treat teachers who use Huck Finn as an entrance to modern racial identity as if they are training shallow navel-gazers, they will stop listening to you. I am not anti-David Coleman, and neither is Rachel, we are probably natural allies if you look at our support of Core Knowledge and the role of background factual knowledge in critical thinking. but the cursing in this case says “I am not taking people who disagree with me seriously.”

The UC leadership should realize that they are not a Bay Area tech startup in 2003. The people who comprise their institution, who make it work, have a different value system than a tech startup. Of course this is sometimes a problem. But it is a reality, and should be acknowledged, rather than ignored.

And Coates’ argument about Civil War history and memory should be taken to heart. A casual sigh about the tragedy of the Civil War comes with a casual diminishing of the triumph of that war for millions of Americans then and since.

I learn something new every time I go. If you are interested in education reform, there really is no substitute for actually spending a whole day in elementary school. I spent time in three different classrooms (two kindergarten and one second grade), I worked several shifts in the lunchroom, and watched a school assembly.

First, I am pretty confident that school has gotten better in the past twenty to thirty years. This is probably not universal, but I would guess that if we were good enough at collecting the data, it would be similar to climate change. The weather in one place may not get hotter year to year, but overall, things are definitely changing, and changing in certain direction. There are certain pedagogical practices and overall principles which have reached consensus now, and are positive improvements. I believe that the way children are taught to read (to decode) and to do mathematics overall has improved. The emphasis placed on literacy and on developing a love of reading very early in school has improved. The way young children are treated has improved. To clarify, I mean this in the value-neutral sense that we understand more about how younger minds work, and how children are motivated, and how this is applied to classroom practice. Although the evidence in limited (unlike the clear man-made influence on climate) and there may be some doubt whether these changes are “school-made” or “home-made,” there are measurements which have documented improvement in overall academic achievement.

Second, despite overall improvement, there are still times when we just flat out waste students time. I want to dwell on this point for a little bit, because I read a lot of rants about how we waste students’ time by teaching algebra or old physics, or whatever. Most of these rants miss the point regarding how difficult it is to tell  if students are being appropriately challenged or if their time is being wasted. These polemics are often written by people who haven’t actually had to struggle with teaching the rest of the curriculum, and their back of the napkin speculating doesn’t hold upon further scrutiny.  But this rant (the one that follows) tries to consider a more general case and also tries to confront the difficulties with knowing if students’ time is being wasted or not. Students often get better at stuff, but it is not always obvious whether it is because they have gotten older and it would have clicked anyways, or whether that year of torturous practice actually helped them.

Most of the skills worth having in this world take a great deal of practice, and you have to start small and build your way up. Want to learn to read? First start by practicing letter recognition. It takes most kids a good chunk of time to reliably tell the difference between a ‘d’ and a ‘b.’ So, kids in kindergarten spend a fair amount of time on activities which are little games designed to help them identify letters, then identify the sounds that go with them. Sometimes kids find this tedious (although amazingly, some kids love it), but I tend to see this as an unavoidable first step on your way to reading the Great Books. (and good books, and everything in between).

However, some skills cannot be acquired, and hence shouldn’t be practiced, until the right time. While it serves infants of any age to be read to, no one bothers tutoring a two-month-old infant on recognizing their letters. For starters, their visual acuity isn’t well-developed enough to even discriminate between the letters. No amount of practice will change this. But then at some point, we decide that children are capable of practicing a certain skill, whether it be tying one’s own shoes, or buttoning one’s own coat, or reading on your own. We recognize that the struggle in these cases in necessary for improvement.

“And this item on the exam asks students to draw the distribution of rods and cones across the retina. Can you say fovea?”

Some skills move from being near impossible to trivially easy, either because we get older or because they weren’t really skills in the first place. These are exactly the wrong things to practice, because they just get better by themselves.  The development of fine motor-skills strikes me as a good example. Practicing grasping objects, drawing, writing, and then tying shoes are all good things to develop fine motor-skills. Practicing sharpening your pencil would be a waste of time, because the more you practice writing and drawing, the better you will be at holding your pencil. In other words, identify the larger skill (control over fine-motor movements) and practice that in the most fun and effective way possible. For example, picking up and manipulating blocks, then coloring with fat markers, and then writing with pencils. Spending equal amounts of time drawing and sharpening the pencil would be absurd. Sharpening the pencil comes for free once fine motor skills develop.

In one kindergarten classroom, I assisted at a station where the activity consisted of practicing logging in to the computer over and over again. They had to remember an order of operations, and what to do on each step. They had to begin by pressing ctrl-alt-del at the same time, then type in their login number and password (which were both written on a popsicle stick). In between fields, they had to remember to hit the tab key (and remember where the tab key was as well as the enter key). Then, once they logged in, an adult (me or another assistant) would log them out and the students would start all over again. Several kids I was helping were getting frustrated with this–because they could not remember the steps, had a hard time pressing all the keys at once, or had some difficulty finding and recognizing all the letters and numbers in their login sequence and password.

Logging in to a computer is not something you need to, or can, practice. Knowing where the keys are? Yes, that’s important. But there are so many better ways to practice that. Hitting ctl-alt-del is a dead simple thing to learn when you are eight years old, but tortuous when you are five years old, so why bother practicing it when you are five? This struck me as a classic example of practicing something that can’t and shouldn’t be practiced. It also struck me as something which is likely driven (albeit indirectly) by test-based accountability. This is a subject for another post, but even though most kindergardeners aren’t included in standardized testing (yet), there is still pressure to familiarize them with testing routines. Eventually they will be using the computer by themselves to take these tests, so the schools and teachers are eager to get an early start on computer skills and familiarity with the computer. This could be applied to testing situations, but would also seem to apply to life in the 21st century. Everyone needs to know how to log in, right? But again, why practice something which later comes effortlessly?

How would I improve this? Give younger students familiarity with the computers by showing them the cool stuff they can learn on computers. There are good games, boring games, activities which are fun and smoothly integrate the content to be learned, and activities which are electronic flashcards. Students already do these activities, so I would prefer they just continue them. Any additional time and energy should go into assessing whether younger kids are motivated and engaged in the actual content they are doing on the computer, and not into practicing hitting the right buttons or memorizing an arbitrary set of steps that is beyond the current limits of their working memory.

Or, it could be that they turn out not to be skills, but strategies, which can generally be instructed and applied immediately. Cracking an egg with one hand is a skill, while coating the inside of the bowl with vinegar to speed whipping egg whites is a strategy. It is heartbreaking to see elementary-aged kids “practice” tasks which are not really skills. These include strategies, such as those taught when reading is taught as a subject, like making inferences or gleaning cause and effect. The kids don’t feel like they are getting better at reading (or even at taking reading tests), because they aren’t. Either they are capable of completing the task (applying the strategy) or they are not. No amount of practice will change this. When students are subjected to an incoherent, fragmented curricula of random excerpts, they miss out on content-rich instruction. Sometimes, even if the passage has interesting facts in it, students learn that the information about penguins is not important. They focus on what they are told to focus on, practicing making inferences, defeating the purpose of reading in the first place: to learn stuff.

I am concerned about this. Not scared. Just a little concerned. Oh, and that mouse pad looks chewy and delicious.

To end on a positive note, it always strikes me both what a magical time learning to read is and how incredibly difficult it is to teach a room full of sixteen or seventeen children of this age. Younger children feel and express wonder at things we take for granted. “Bear starts with B” . . . “HEY! MY NAME STARTS WITH B TOO!” It is as if the  letter itself is a talisman of magic power, which they, by virtue of their name, own and hold.  And these letters *are* full of power and magic. They grant these little creatures their first steps into the kingdom of the grown-ups, of the learned. As my own daughter learns to read, I am reminded again how awesome reading is and, at the same time, how confusing it must have been not to be able to read anything in our text-filled world.

Even as this magic is happening for some kids in a classroom, for some it isn’t. And it is frustrating. It takes real craft to toe the line between encouraging children to practice reading, setting some students free in a world of books, and gently guiding and holding the hands of others. Some simply need to learn the lesson that great knowledge and great stories can be found in books and that school can be a place to experience these great things, even if it takes them a while to understand that the letters on the side of their orange juice don’t say “Shaky Wheel,” they say “Shake Well”. Even though I have criticized the practice of logging in above, I still have the utmost respect for all of the teachers I witnessed, for how they keep their students happy and engaged, identifying what each needs individually, and nudging them at the same time to consider their community of classmates, as well.