Author: Greg

In my last posting I suggested that some menaces, like Macavity, work invisibly and are ‘not there’ when attempts are made to detect and stop them. It may seem flippant to name a class of potential disasters after a fictitious cat, but in the musical version of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, Macavity is a menace.

The response to the novel corona virus is revealing another menace that dodges attention. It is the danger that people will start to believe, wrongly, that online education is as good as the live and personal kind. Besuited personages are already coming out of the woodwork of their tendentious and commercially funded ‘Institutes’ to offer this argument and to welcome a turn of educational events that in the normal course of things would never have begun.

Actually, online education is a second-rate spare tire that can be used to get the car to the garage in an emergency, but then must be replaced. A whole generation of teachers and students now know how true this claim is. Ask them if they’d rather be at school or in front of their screens, and there is only one answer they will give unless they were giving or getting a spare-tire education in the first place. I include college students and their professors, one of whom writes to say that remote lessons are an unsatisfactory substitute for the close engagement he and his students used to have. Because he teaches at a small college with an admirable student/teacher ratio, he is able to mitigate partially the effects of remoteness by having daily written encounters between himself and them. Consider by contrast the teacher of large or immense classes, his Zoom screen a flickering honeycomb of indistinguishable little faces or, as Orwell might have put it, an undifferentiated blue stuff. Who could be in favor of it unless the alternative was a pandemic?

We should never underestimate the ability of people to be panicked or provoked by educational ‘movements’ or to run before them, particularly if they really don’t know how education works. They can sometimes work rapid havoc, as in the case of the University of Virginia’s dismissal of its president Teresa Sullivan. Its governing body got the scent of the MOOC menace (remember MOOCs?) and off they ran. Sometimes the havoc is persistent, as in the twenty-year upheaval in education caused by “value”-“added” “metrics” (remember VAMs?), whose partisans are still clattering across empty prairies like the bucks chased by the “firecat” across Oklahoma in Wallace Stevens’s poem “Earthy Anecdote.”

Another cat! But the firecat, unlike Macavity, is a menace because of its power to stampede dumb animals.

Tomorrow marks an entire month of closed schools in Hong Kong as a result of the outbreak of the “novel coronavirus”, as I will call it: “Covid 19” looks and sounds too much like something spray-painted on a wall at night. The Vertical City has become the Masked City; the Fragrant Harbour has become the Hygienic Harbour. We are so clean that there has been no significant outbreak of winter flu, and so fastidious that we have abandoned the handshake for the traditional Chinese fist-clasp and bow. 

I say ‘we’: I wear a mask though I am a foreigner, but most foreigners are conspicuous by not masking. I’ll explore the reason for this difference of response below, but my students have noticed it. One of them told me that the foreigners where he lives are unmasked, and he wondered whether they are fools or he is a coward. A quick look at where the disease is spreading and where it is being contained should answer that: they are fools, which is what I told him.

But a longer look is more helpful, a former student argued. He pointed out that while there is little or no evidence that masks protect their wearers from others’ nasty micro-aerosols, there is significant evidence that they protect others from the wearers’ own coughs and sneezes with their comparatively large drops of chest gunk. We should therefore wear them for their social benefit rather than their personal benefit. Non-maskers are not fools; they are free riders. ‘Well-reasoned’, as the Ravenclaw knocker would say. He (the former student, not the Ravenclaw knocker) adds that the many other hygienic measures people are taking, such as washing hands frequently and working from home, probably have a great combined effect.

I would add to his argument my my own that masking, the most continuously visible of the protective measures, has come to symbolize public hygiene and should be seen as a sign of accepting a public good and not just a magical talisman.

Two years ago Hong Kong was struck head-on by the ‘super typhoon’ Mangkhut. Storms that bring seemingly Biblical flooding are a fact of life in this part of the world, and Hong Kong’s record rainfall in one day, set in the 1920s, is over 500 millimeters, or just about twenty inches. The city has strict regulations about construction, the management of slopes (of which the mountainous city has many, including the hill on which our school is situated), and infrastructure (entrances to the Underground in low-lying areas are all protected by coffer-like baffles to keep out flood waters). Though many things were blown about, the city as a whole was not badly hurt.

Among the blown things were trees and shrubs at my school. The school decided that on our first day back, we would don work clothes, put on gardening gloves, and clear away the windblown rubbish. This film, produced by students, shows the cleanup.

The kind of threat represented by this typhoon I’ll call a Mangkhut menace. Such a menace has a physical aspect that is apprehensible by the senses. It has an identifiable beginning and end. If it is not utterly crushing, like the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, people can decide whether to be resigned to what it has done or to do something about it as the school did. 

The novel coronavirus represents an entirely different kind of menace. It is invisible to the senses, and its coming and going are hard to detect. It is “not good TV”: no blood, no pain, no evident horror. Our visual sense of it is composed of images that do not seem to be connected to anything real, e. g., masked babies or Michelin men in space suits. Its term is unfixed and maybe unknown. There is nothing we can actively do about it; we can only try to stay out of its way. I would call this kind of threat a Macavity^[1] menace or a Macbeth menace.

The problem with the feline antagonist is that he is a “mystery cat” who is both “the Napoleon of crime” and “not there.” We have a second-hand sense of his activity but cannot actually confront him. A Macavity menace baffles the senses, and without special training in detection, it eludes our grasp. If it seems too flippant to name a serious menace after a cat, then call it a Macbeth menace. Is the dagger that marshals him to the murder of Duncan real, or is it a ‘dagger of the mind, a false impression / Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain”? Either way, for Duncan and Scotland it was a disaster. We cannot say while it is underway whether, as in Macbeth, a Macduff or a Malcolm will see us through or, as in “Macavity,” we will remain as helpless as Scotland Yard.

It is possible that such a menace, like Macavity, does not really exist at all. History is littered with the disjecta membra of fake menaces and their hysteria. The ‘Popish Plot’ of the 1670s is a good example. By the time its originator was convicted of perjury, nearly two dozen people had been hanged, some of them then drawn and quartered. Samuel Pepys was among its innocent victims, though he was saved by the passage of the Habeas Corpus Act from having his bowels roasted before his living eyes. 

It is thus that people remain unmasked in Hong Kong. They tend to take infectious diseases as a distant or unreal menace. One of the features of a Macavity menace is that different people may weigh its threat differently. That should not, however, leave us thinking that all such evaluations are equally valid.

William James called the readiness to fall uncritically for every hope or menace, real or imagined, mental vertigo. It is also a kind of mental vertigo to adopt a thoughtlessly skeptical pose. The cure for mental vertigo, James said, is education. He meant, of course, the kind of education that doesn’t forget the wisdom we lose in knowledge, or the knowledge we lose in information^[2] and alternative facts^[3]. It therefore seems vital that education—good education—should continue whenever the menaces of the moment permit.

And so we are offering online lessons. Online education is greatly inferior to the live kind, except in the classroom of Ferris Bueller’s history teacher and those like him^[4]. It is a kind of stopgap that can be tolerated in an emergency, like a crummy spare tire that gets us to the garage. When the emergency ends, though, back to the trunk it must go.

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^[1] After the cat in the T S Eliot poem that bears his name

^[2] As Eliot put it

^[3] As Conway put it

^[4] As I put it in my last posting, Gone and Back Again

Since I write only about teaching & learning in this blog, I mention Hong Kong’s current political situation only because of one consequence it had: for a week last month schools were closed. What is more, my own school’s gates were closed at 2:00 in the afternoon on the days of the weekend and school holidays.[1]

The sociologist James S Coleman found that the single most important correlate of successful schools among those he studied was that they served as functional communities. It should be evident why this is so. As communities, schools provide more than just a place to learn the lessons of the curriculum; they act as a matrix of humanity within which their students can grow and develop in ways no curriculum can prescribe.[2] What the matrix can be is more evident when for a period of time it goes missing. That is what happened at the school.

But before discussing that, I want to treat another consequence of the school’s closure. I had to arrange for the 12^th-graders to deliver their “ToK Presentations” using Skype. The work got done, but how minimally satisfactory it was! Instead of live students presenting to a live audience, they appeared, disembodied, on their Skype screens distorted and distended by their computers’ low-grade cameras—extraterrestrial foreheads, chipmunk cheeks, schnozzles, pop-eyes—into quasi-cubist talking heads. Lord knows what I looked like to them, but one shoulders on. The electricity that goes with presenting before a live audience was missing, as was the more natural by-play one usually finds in a classroom. Montag, the protagonist of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, finally escapes from his media-enclosed world and becomes suddenly and almost ecstatically aware of the little things that surround him: smells, sounds, feelings, sights on the periphery of conscious awareness that fill the non-mediated world. I felt during my week of mediated contact with my students as if I had made a reverse journey to the one Montag took.

I was therefore delighted when the school closure ended. One Saturday soon afterwards I met a graduate in one of the little gardens one finds on the school grounds, and we walked over to the building where I teach, and where he and other alumni, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, meet with students in ‘mock interviews’ to help prepare them for the genuine and live interviews to which the Ancient Universities have invited them this month as part of their admission process. (Some of my readers may think that these are private-school students, but the school where I teach is not a  private school.) After leaving the graduate to his interviews, I walked out the other side of the building to take a stroll through the repopulated grounds. Students appeared through the windows of the gym swimming and playing basketball. Across from them, alumni were meeting to play tennis on the outdoor courts. Down a little way among the buildings, some junior secondary (middle school) students played hockey on the multi-purpose courts. Up a few steps were the school’s Boy Scouts, gathered  on a lawn to prepare  meals for themselves on gas camp stoves (this is the Vertical City). Onward, on the field, primary-school students were playing soccer. On the other side of the field stood a forlorn erection called a ‘Jumbotron’ by some. As far as I can tell, the thing has not been used since it was installed.

Why should it have been? Why go to a ball game and then watch television? For that matter, why go to school and watch television? Give me live students and teachers, real bricks and mortar, gardens, courts, and the matrix of humanity.

[1] I originally reported that they had been open since the end of  World War II, but a colleague told me I was wrong: he remembered scaling them on his nocturnal explorations as a boarding student here.

[2] When I was a boy reading Herbert Zim’s Golden Nature Guide to Rocks and Minerals, I was intrigued by pictures of gems in matrix, that is, a surrounding or pervading element within which something takes form and develops. The origin of the word is the Latin for “mother”. I’d like to rescue this meaning from the oblivion that was a result of the matrix in the movie, a kind of totalitarian fakery.

Sometimes graduates come back and tell me about some interesting book they have found or been assigned; sometimes we look at something they haven’t encountered before. That happened last weekend, when a graduate came by and we discussed Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.”

The fishhouses of the title are located on the austere coast of New England or the Maritime Provinces of Canada, where Bishop spent much of her girlhood. They “have steeply peaked roofs / and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up / to storerooms in the gables / for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on. / All is silver.”  The speaker of the poem—let us call her Bishop—finds that “the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly as if considering spilling over, / is opaque, but the silver of the benches, / the lobster pots, and masts, scattered / among the wild jagged rocks, / is of an apparent translucence.”

“Up on the little slope behind the houses, / set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass, / is an ancient wooden capstan, / cracked, with two long bleached handles / and some melancholy stains, like dried blood, / where the ironwork has rusted.” There she and an old man, a “friend of [her] grandfather,” smoke Lucky Strikes and “talk about the decline in the population / and of codfish and herring / while he waits for a herring boat to come in.” I don’t suppose there is too much else to talk about: “He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, / from unnumbered fish with that black old knife, / the blade of which is almost worn away.” Of the fish Bishop says, “The air smells so strong of codfish / it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.”

Water, “cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / element bearable to no mortal” except “to fish and to seals….” Bishop has “seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, / slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, / icily free above the stones, / above the stones and then the world. / If you should dip your hand in, / your wrist would ache immediately, / your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn / as if the water were a transmutation of fire….” “If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, / then briny, then surely burn your tongue.”

From the water comes the old man’s living through codfish and herring, and thus the fishhouses. Bishop’s living also came from this water since she had a private income settled on her by her father’s New England family. These waters are “bearable to no mortal,” and both lives are hard. (After all, Bishop also wrote “First Death in Nova Scotia” and “One Art.”) But in this poem she ends by saying the water “is like what we imagine knowledge to be: / dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, / drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world.”

The arresting simile brings us by an unexpected means to an understanding of knowledge. Of course the water in this poem is a harsh water; a Minnesotan dropping a hook for walleye in a lake on a placid summer’s day lives on another water, another knowledge. But this poem is not about the Minnesotan (although another poem might have been). Poetry, like other arts, works with a particularizing energy, as the teacher and, increasingly, his former student understand.

One of these arts is the art of teaching (‘ars docendi’ in Latin). It, too, works with a particularizing energy–the energy old Professor Barzun called ‘perpetual discretion’. It may have to deal with the light-filled waters of Minnesota as easily as with waters “drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world.” Knowledge, like humanity, is various; and teaching by human beings is needed to help students realise that.

Teachers of a certain age will remember the 1960s’ singing comedians the Smothers Brothers and their zany songs. One of the zaniest was ‘The Last Great Waltz’, whose romantic protagonist, fond of the waltz, finds happiness in the arms of a three-legged woman who shares his passion.

In a contemporary story harder to credit than that song, the schools of Tennessee are trying to win the heart, or at least the dollars, of the US Department of Education with a ‘reform’ plan of monumental goofiness. It started with the Department of Education’s astonishing demand that RAT[1]programs have as an “absolute priority” the intention to “measure” students’ “knowledge and skills” across a set of standards including some “against which student achievement has been traditionally difficult to measure.” Not asking whether the difficulty was due to an epistemological problem, Tennessee spent seven years wooing DoE with a plan which is now “in place”.

What a plan! What a place! Unlike the ballroom in the song, which had only one three-legged dancer in the corner, Tennessee’s educational dance-floor is crowded with unfortunate educators who have been fitted by mandate with third legs. It is hard to know who is stumbling worse: the teachers or the principals. Teachers must compose lesson plans to such a demanding rubric that plans taking four or more hours to produce for a single lesson may be rejected. Principals must conduct five observations per year of every teacher, each with a conference before and after. During the observations they must rate the teacher on over 100 criteria—one every thirty seconds—and justify those ratings. ‘Value-added’ tests, given twice a year, assess skills and knowledge only in English and math. Teachers in other subjects are rated by how their school’s students do on the English and math tests. (I wonder what they study in geography class—assuming there is one.) No wonder they can’t walk, much less dance.

Tennessee’s band leader, Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman, insists that the dance go on whether or not everyone on the floor can dance with three legs. He blames on teachers’ laziness and fear of the unknown their reluctance to accept the state’s pedagogical prostheses. Resistance or grumbling can even be heard among principals, not normally a rebellious group, though some of them welcome the program because it has brought principals back into the classroom, which is like welcoming a third leg because it leads to more exercise.

Given the choice of the Smothers Brothers’ “Last Great Waltz” or the Three-legged Tennessee Waltz, I’ll take the Smothers Brothers. One reason is that the tune is catchier. Another is that is less painful to hear. The third is, as Miss Prism said, that “the  good end happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”

 

The simple reason to mark is to let the student (and his parents) know how well he has learned what was taught. But this simple statement hides some complications.

The first is to distinguish knowledge, skill and understanding from one another and to be sure we have assessed each of them effectively. If I ask my students to write an essay on ephemerality in Bashō’s Narrow Road to Oku, the answer should allow me to judge their knowledge of Japan and its writing; their skill in marshaling evidence to make a well-written, coherent argument; and their penetration into Bashō’s world-view and religion. If I ask them multiple-choice questions about Oku, I will not be able to make such a judgment.

We also have a problem with understanding itself. How do we judge that a student has understood something rather than just memorized words that mimic understanding? More fundamentally, if teachers do not actually teach understanding, but only establish conditions in which it can occur, how can they be sure that their students have had the chance they need to establish and communicate the understanding the course requires? Robert Frost said^[1], “How do I know whether a man has come close to Keats in reading Keats? It is hard for me to know. I have lived with some boys a whole year over some of the poets and I have not felt sure whether they had come near to what it was all about. One remark sometimes told me…. And that is enough if it was the right remark…. You ought to be marked for the closeness, for nothing else.” One reason why discussion is so important in establishing marks for understanding is that we need discussion so the one right remark can occur.

Frost thought that some colleges rid their curricula of the “poetry nuisance” by not teaching the understanding and knowledge of poetry at all, but “turn[ing] it out to disport itself” with plays and games. The resulting pseudo-understanding he called “sunset raving,” in which the aficionado faces the sunset and goes “oh”, “ah.” The problem: how do we mark oh’s and ah’s and other inarticulate responses? He approved of enthusiasm but he wanted it “taken through the prism of the intellect.” That refraction allows the kind of marking that “oh” and “ah” make difficult.

Of course, we must then set the kinds of assessments that will  allow us to do that kind of marking. Frost could never have imagined that we would reach a point where students’ proficiency in subjects like poetry  is determined entirely by answers to multiple-choice questions. How can we find the ‘right remark’ by a student who is only asked to point?

We also have problems extrinsic to particular courses. They arise because a grade can be used for other purposes than its simple and ostensible one as an indicator. They can, for example, be used in aggregations to determine a student’s suitability for admission to a desirable university or for the award of a scholarship. When grades stop being simply indicators and start being a basis for making consequential decisions, they become subject to the pressure of corruption^[2]. This is true not just for actual grades but also for ‘predicted grades’ such as the IB program requires its teachers to give. Predicted grades were originally required to allow the comparison of expectation and results–by the teacher as a check on wishful thinking and by the IBO as a check on faulty marking. Now they are often used as the basis of university admission decisions. No prizes for guessing what kind of corruption pressure is the result.

And what about the practice of grading ‘on a curve’? In this bizarre marking, one’s letter grade depends not on how good one’s results were, but how they compared to the results of others in one’s class. Lady Bracknell’s ghost must be satisfied to be vindicated in asserting that “statistics are laid down for our guidance.”

It’s enough to make people ask, as in a recent article for The New York Times, “Why Can’t Everyone Get A’s?” The writer did not mean to ask why everyone is not doing excellent work in rigorous courses. In fact, he ridiculed rigor as ‘macho’. He meant to ask why the whole system of inappropriate and corrupted marking is not thrown over for the sake of its unfortunate victims.

Frost’s answer was that ‘we are all being marked by each other all the time, classified, ranked, put in our place, and I see no escape from that. I am no sentimentalist. You have got to mark, and you have got to mark, first of all, for accuracy, for correctness.’ That minimum accomplished, you can then establish conditions in which it is possible to mark for taste and judgment. Finally, you will be able to mark for imagination, initiative, enthusiasm and originality.

Too much fun is of all things most loathsome.—Blake

I am back after a long absence because more needs saying about lanterns (see my last posting) and other lights. I realized the need last March at an education conference I was attending. Now, one reason to go to education conferences is, like an epidemiologist, to detect menacing strains of pedagogy as they begin to establish footholds in the educational world.

My vigilance was rewarded with the sighting of a theory called “Agency.” I had no idea what to expect when I entered the crowded presentation room, so it took a few minutes of enthusiastic chirping for the presenter’s ideas to become “clear.” In this program each pupil is the “Agent” of his or her education. The opposing “idea” seems to be a desire for some kind of old-fashioned prison regime in which pupils do nothing but suffer arbitrary impositions by their teachers that destroy their autonomy and kill the joy of learning, etc. It was an example of the kind of cartoon dialectics often favored by education reformers, in which grotesque caricatures of antithetical ideas fight each other before the New Synthesis sweeps the field.

The accompanying slide show began with children on the floor putting pieces of cardboard together. It progressed through other children on the floor putting pieces of cardboard together. It continued with pictures of selfless teachers scavenging pieces of cardboard for their children to put together. It compared what each classroom’s children put together with the others—but not invidiously, of course. The culmination was a series of pictures of a Parents’ Day in which the parents ‘got down’ (the presenter’s word) and helped their children put pieces of cardboard together. There was of course no coercive hickory stick in sight, literal or figurative. The problem was that there did not seem to be any reading, writing or ‘rithmetic either. This lack did not bother the presenter, who said that since children do their best learning when they are playing, they should play all the time.

We also learned how the presenter did SWOT audits. My British readers do not need to worry that the purity of Agency was compromised by swotting, or hard study before tests: this acronym refers to assessing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats presenting themselves to a school. (In my experience, schools rarely summon the fortitude needed to do a truly honest and helpful SWOT audit.) One striking result of the audit was that teachers who objected to the Agency program were identified as “threats” to the school. You can guess what kind of backward subversives they must have been and what a menace they must have posed by objecting to content-free lessons and subject-free curricula.

Though much writing and research may have gone into justifying the “agentic” approach to “study,” the book that for me comes closest to the heart of the program, as it was presented at the conference, is my copy of the Calvin & Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book. Do you remember Calvin’s “agentic” presentation on bats? Funny bit, but imagine him after completing an entire ‘agentic’ education conducting a magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography of your sphincter of oddi.

Unfair? Not at all. Let’s look again at the lights of my title. In my last posting I gave as examples of lantern-bearers the students and graduates of my school who studied and performed music, particularly choral music. I have been present at a number of final concerts in the Hong Kong Music Festival to hear my school’s choir take the prize. Their gathering afterwards on the grounds of the Tsuen Mun Town Hall is a taste of “the glory of existence” like that felt by the lantern-bearers at the links. Well, getting Stevenson’s ‘fine light’ requires work: fueling the lanterns; trimming their wicks; carrying and tending them; affixing their beams; and working in concert with the other lantern-bearers at the links. The same is true of the choir’s victory at the World Choir Games in South Africa and the standing ovation they received at the Royal Albert Hall. And of course it is true of the less spectacular glory of singing in the quads and the staircases.

And since it also requires direction, something must be said about the old choirmaster, who is now the headmaster of the school. There is a wonderful photograph floating around of the choirboys tossing him into the air after one of their performances. How many hours did he plan and teach the boys? How many hours did they rehearse under his baton? How was their joy in that photo made possible by his work and theirs? If they had spent two years cutting cardboard instead, what would the picture look like–if there had been one? Just how happy were they? At a school assembly after the old headmaster had resigned, a representative of the school’s management committee announced to the students that the choirmaster had been selected to succeed him. A fine moment: the minority who had been paying attention to the speaker started cheering and applauding; as the news spread through the hall, the applause spread as well, led by students whom he had spent years training and rehearsing. At about that time he was coincidentally short-listed for the Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Award.  According to the tenets of ‘Agency’, though, he would be seen as a threat to his pupils’ self-direction.

For the emblematic light of Agency and our presenter is the ignis fatuus: insubstantial, ephemeral, indistinct, amorphous, unheated swamp gas. The reason I call it by its Latin name instead of the more familiar name “will o’ the wisp” is that it is not a “fine light” but a “foolish fire.”

There are few things better than a good letter, says this old teacher and aficionado of writing, so I was delighted recently to receive two extraordinary emails, one on top of the other, from a recent graduate who has gone to study abroad. The first one, long delayed, was an account of a trip he & a few classmates took during the summer to another country known for the esteem in which it holds its poets, artists, craftsmen and other heroes. In it he tells about the poetic and other monuments they visited (and the food they ate, speaking of their own heroic labours).  A fine letter about a fine trip, and incidentally a refutation of Yeats when he says of the young, ‘Caught in that sensual music, all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect’.

But the second letter: it would not be too much to say it was dithyrambic, at least in tone, and happy, as Wordsworth was happy in saying, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.’ When Barzun said that entering university should be ‘a revelation of wonders undreamed of’, he was speaking of experiences like my former student’s. He reports working hard to do well in his chosen course of study, which has been gratifying; but he saves his greatest and most enthusiastic praise for his co- and extracurricular activities, particularly reading poetry and making music, but also his projects at building things.

Poetry and music! How sensible in a STEM major, which is what he is. He is a positive echo of Darwin, another STEM major (do we see why this is an idiot acronym?), who neglected what my former student has been embracing. Darwin reported in later life, ‘If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week…. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness….”

Happiness! It is easy to forget this desideratum, or to lose sight of it among the other things we hope education will do. (I speak here of honest, informed, non-magical hopes. By contrast, much contemporary thinking about education seems to aspire to Lady Bracknell’s assertion that ‘ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.’)

The type of happiness I want to speak about now is reported in Robert Louis Stevenson’s wonderful essay ‘The Lantern-Bearers.’ It is the type my former student has been experiencing. Briefly, the lantern-bearers exist in a town of Stevenson’s boyhood, where every autumn they ‘tasted in high degree the glory of existence.’ They did so by carrying bull’s-eye lanterns lit but hidden from passersby. They were devoted to this fine but hidden light, which they shared when congregating on the links outside town where they shone their lights.

A prosaic ‘realist’ such as Stevenson despises but the Gates Foundation approves of may complain that the boys smell of hot tin, they burn their fingers, they meet in a damp sandy dirty hole, they have unremarkable conversations, and there is no way to ‘measure’ what they are learning and thus no value reliably added. This ‘realist’ would miss the point. I have written about my school’s ‘Cave of Music’, but there is more to say about its musical lantern-bearers. Some of them gather before 7:00 a.m. in the damp of early morning to make music. (Sound, unlike the light of a bull’s-eye lantern, is not easily hidden). Some break into song in the stairwells or gather to sing Renaissance madrigals at sundown in the quad outside my window. Some, the rascals, when they think I am not looking, take out their sheet music to confer secretly during class. Some pursue their music after graduating. Another former student, who joined his college choir abroad, is back home and has joined a choir of alumni who still sing under the baton of our headmaster, who used to be the choirmaster. (Who says administrators can’t be lantern-bearers?) The group of graduates reported above, who visited the monuments of poetry and history, are lantern-bearers. And so is my letter-writing ‘STEM’ student.

Education must allow them to bear their lanterns, for Stevenson says, ‘The true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides.’

 

Sometimes we can be grateful and baffled at the same time by articles we read about education. A good example is one sent me by a friend, an invaluable conduit of research and a thinker about teaching whose letters and conversation go beyond thought-clichés. This article includes a review of three studies comparing students according to the technology of note-taking they used. “In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand.” The authors of the studies offered an explanation: since longhand can’t keep up with the professor’s words the way keyboarding can, longhand note-takers are ‘forced to process, condense, and use their own words’. All this real-time thinking done in the heat of the moment becomes memorable as well as effective.

This discussion took me back to university, and in particular to the classroom of Professor ‘C Minus’ Schilling, the superb but exigent teacher of a course on American foreign policy. I had developed a technique of note-taking by which I would try to discern the controlling ideas and the underlying outline while taking notes, marking the outline points with the ‘Romans’ and ‘Arabics’ of the old-fashioned outline form as the lecture proceeded or later that day.  In the margin I would make quick judgments of what was in the main body: an exclamation point marked a good item, while a star marked something of central importance. Question marks identified puzzles or dark matter. Statements of questionable value got the mark of ‘BS’.

I had neither an eidetic memory nor the power of instant synthesis, so these notes helped, particularly in C Minus’s class, where my and my classmates’ pens would smoke across the page as his lectures proceeded. Did this real-time ‘processing’ that we did while taking longhand notes help us to comprehend and remember what C Minus said? It is hard not to think so; hence my smile of recognition as I read these findings.

But I wasn’t smiling at another part of the article. You would think that research verifying the value of longhand notes would yield only one conclusion—but no, our author went in an unexpected direction. Instead of promoting individual note-taking in longhand, she promotes ‘designated note-takers’ to type for the rest of the class in turn, posting notes on a class web page.

The ostensible benefit is that each student thereby has his notes scrutinized by the teacher and learns thereby to do better. There is some merit in that claim, but not as much as in the practice we used to call ‘comparing notes’. In the case of C Minus’s class, a bunch of us would go over our material from time to time, editing in light of our discussions and anchoring our insights in conversation. The system was a bit like the one used by the study group in The Paper Chase to ready itself for classroom encounters with the direful Professor Kingsfield, though that movie had not yet appeared when I took Schilling. Contrast this and the ethos of having the material ‘just a click away’ and you will understand where the problem lies.

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While preparing this posting I Googled C Minus’s name and was saddened to learn that he had died in 2013 after a 59-year career at my university. Students who braved his severe marking to take his course were nearly uniform in praising it as a highlight of their undergraduate studies. Students who visited his office after receiving one of his low grades on the midterm came away convinced that, yes, they deserved the mark they got and resolved to do better on the final exam. I was prouder of the B+ I got from him than of many of the A’s I received from other professors.

His unique style of lecturing included remarkable and sometimes hilarious ‘enactments’. I remember especially his imitation of a MIRV-missile attack. He had the curious habit of reinforcing his points by drawing series of parallel line segments on the blackboard. By the end of the lecture the board would look like one of Jasper Johns’ line pictures (do a Google image search of Jasper Johns Lines). I eventually realized that he would start a new doodle when he shifted to a new argument or main point and could use the doodles to help organize my notes.

One day a classmate asserted that the Spanish-American War was promoted by American business interests in general for their profit. He said, ‘That’s an interesting thesis, Madam, but there is not a shred of evidence to support it.’ I looked at a classmate of mine, and we both started ducking as we wrote, like ‘Milton’s Daughters Taking Dictation’ by Romney. The panzer cannon let off its first BOOM, and then for the next twenty minutes C Minus shot the thesis to rubble.

We all knew that he was destroying the thesis and not our classmate, who was not kept by the experience from asserting other ‘theses’ later in the course. On the last day of class he ended early with the unexpected announcement that he ‘objects in principle to students’ conducting evaluations of their professors.’ He then said, ‘For all I know, you will find the packet on my table of interest’ and left the classroom. One of us went up to inspect it, and it turned out to be forms for the students’ ‘course evaluation guide’. We filled it the forms in, ignoring C Minus’s last word of the term, and one of us took the forms to the Guide. When it came out at the end of the year, C Minus ended up with the strongest overall rating in the department.

Last week I wrote about a successful businessman who said that the most important thing a student can learn for a successful career in business is how to write because when you learn how to write, you learn how to think. Along these lines I will cast back to my tenure, before teaching, in an engineering and construction company whose president became Secretary of State. (Before his work in business he had served in three other cabinet positions.) Occasionally a memo from the president would cross my humble desk. When one did, I was always impressed by its lucidity and freedom from jargon, cliché and baloney.

These four qualities help us to know what to look for in good writing; others can be found in Clear and Simple as the Truth by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner. Take for example their dictum that ‘classic prose’ is to be read not solved. If you don’t immediately know what kind of bad writing I am talking about, look at the winners of the late Denis Dutton’s Bad Writing Contest to see. Another justly famous kind of badness is Orwell’s translation of a famous passage from Ecclesiastes into polysyllabic flab.

How do we judge good and bad writing? This posting went into some detail, but for today’s discussion I want to reprint an excerpt from an essay by a high-school student that got an undeserved 4/6 from the New York State Regents, a passable mark. It opens, “In life, ‘no two people regard the world in exactly the same way,’ as J. W. von Goethe says. Everyone sees and reacts to things in different ways. Even though they may see the world in similar ways, no two people’s views will ever be exactly the same. This statement is true since everyone sees things through different viewpoints.” It is entirely free of content except the title extract, whose sense is repeated three times, the third time with question-begging. A good writing teacher (but not software that marks writing) could help the student see and solve these problems. A good writing test would give such writing  a failing grade.

Arum and Roksa say that college students are more likely to learn when they have teachers with high expectations, and of course this goes for high-school students too. It’s therefore a pity that so many ‘universities’ systematically prevent this from occurring by basing personnel decisions on surveys taken of students who are more interested in ease than in expectation. But a teacher must not just ‘have’ expectations; he or she must act on them, and schools and universities must establish and maintain conditions in which this teacherly action is possible. It is hard work, so there must not be too much of it to do properly.

Two of my students got full marks on their IB Literature Extended Essays, which I supervised. The IBO prescribes five hours of contact time between student and supervisor, though the supervisor must obviously spend the preparation time needed to make the contact valuable. What is more, the supervisor is forbidden to edit or proofread drafts. The two students and I conferred at all stages of the work, and as the diplomats say, the discussions were productive. The students are bright and productive; they had a thing or two to learn not just about their subjects but also about writing and thinking; and they learned it. (One was on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; the other was on Calvin and Hobbes.)

Oh, yes: two others did not get full marks. One of them still got an A, adopting a risky strategy for rewriting midway through the process, in which the risk paid off. The other, whose best writing is as good as high-school writing gets, was not motivated by the task and wrote as if not motivated. This brings us to a very important point that ‘value’-‘added’ ‘metrics’ overlook: a teacher with the best will in the world can lead the proverbial horse to water but can’t make him drink.

One thing the teacher has, or ought to have, in addition to functioning good judgment, is the fortitude to use it, and to back it up with grades, including failing grades. If little Dobbin wants to make messes on the sidewalk and eat the flowers from the garden, he must be made to learn that it is not all right. It’s the same as with Alex’s sailing school (see last week’s posting): you’ve got to learn to right the boat, and you’ve got to do so by actually righting a boat. As with sailing, so with writing: the way to learn writing is to write. The writing must be criticized, and it must be done again and again. That is what Arum and Roksa’s ‘writing-intensive course’ is.

One way to show what schools and universities are doing would be to subject student writing to the Newspaper Test. In this test five A and five B papers are selected randomly and published anonymously in the daily community newspaper with this introduction:

‘STU is proud to present this random selection of excellent and good student writing so the community can see how well its students are learning this essential task.’