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A Problem of Fine Distinction

Most of us have seen descriptions of what the letter grades mean. My own favorites are the simplest: A is excellent; B, good; C, fair; D, poor but passable; F, failing. It might be worth examining our sense of the five grades by trying to understand what they mean in particular cases, especially quizzes and tests. I fear that teachers and other people in the field do not often do so. Since to give a grade is to make a judgment, we should have a sense of particular qualitative elements of each grade, or at least have the sort of expertise and connoisseurship that can explain itself. However we do it, in whatever subject, we should be able to make some distinctions between A work and B.

A good assessment must give us what we need to make these distinctions. If a student of English is to get an A, he or she should do things with a depth, a flair, a thoroughness, a subtlety that a B student doesn’t bring to the task. The assessment should therefore give students the chance to show these qualities. Of course it should allow an A student to demonstrate knowledge, but the knowledge is best set in circumstances that also allow the demonstration of skill or know-how and the display of uncommon understanding. Similar distinctions should be possible between the other grades, or why have them?

(In effect, some teachers and schools do not have them, for everyone who attends their classes gets A’s and B’s. I am speaking now of comprehensive schools, not specialized ones with selective admissions. I would be willing to bet that teachers and administrators at such schools giving mostly A’s and B’s cannot readily tell the difference between excellent or good work and fair work without baloney. Of course it is possible that, like the statistically improbable students of Lake Wobegon, the students at such a school are all above average. It is also unfortunately possible that such places are loci of pedagogical or intellectual scandal, as in New York, some of whose “proficiency” tests for promotion could be passed by random guesswork. But let us assume competence, good will, and normal distribution of aptitude for the sake of this discussion.)

A corollary of this idea suggests that awarding grades for tests on a numerical continuum may undercut qualitative distinctions between grades. Imagine a multiple-choice test of one hundred questions. In a standard procedure used by many teachers, a student who answers eighty-nine of them correctly will get a B+, while one who answers ninety will get an A-. On what basis can the teacher giving that test assert that the 90 was excellent work but the 89 merely good?

Perhaps the teacher has devised ten questions unlikely to be answered correctly by anyone but an excellent student. That is fine, but it is probably more than many teachers do, or many of the test banks that go with textbooks and randomly generate multiple-choice and matching questions. Furthermore, the teacher who undertakes the extra work of trying to gauge questions to qualitative distinctions could still be undercut by students’ lucky guesses. Where is the distinction between excellent and good then?

It is often hard to make. Let us take a sample question:

The musical composition called “Emperor” is a. an anthem b. a concerto c. a string quartet d. an aria e. an opera[1]

The answer to this question, combined with those to ninety-nine others like it on a test, might determine whether a student in, say, a music appreciation class (if such things still exist) was excellent, good, or worse.  What makes correct answers to ninety such questions excellent work but to only 89 merely good work? Put this way, I think the question has no defensible answer unless an almost incredible amount of forethought went into the design of the test. (Now, professional test-writers make two or three times as much as professional teachers, but I wonder if even they give this kind of thought to the questions they devise.)

We must also ask How is guesswork discounted? If it is like most multiple-choice tests given in class, the answer is not at all. But let us say that on this test the teacher subtracts .2% for each wrong answer from the total of right answers. A student might have reasoned that no opera would have the title Emperor without an article, that an aria is named after its first line, which Emperor is unlikely to be, and that an anthem would name something or someone more particular, leaving answers b and c.  If test-taking is like gambling—and many courses in “test-taking skills” make it so—the student has increased his odds of a right answer from .2 to .5, making a guess worth the chance. What does that guessed right answer—in effect a coin toss—have to do with music appreciation or even just musical knowledge? A further problem of this question is that the most obvious answer, b, is not the only correct answer, since that name is given not just to the piano concerto by Beethoven but also to a string quartet by Haydn.

If the student had been asked a short-answer question such as Identify a work containing variations on a theme, and name its composer, the student might have written “Haydn’s ‘Emperor’ quartet,”  and the teacher could have been confident that the student knew her stuff. The problem of bad questions would have been sidestepped, and the teacher could at least have been confident that guesswork had been eliminated. (Of course, the teacher would still have had to know that both Beethoven and Haydn wrote compositions called “Emperor,” and he would need a reason for supposing that this fact was somehow representative of the knowledge to be tested and therefore worth including.)

But the fundamental question remains. Does such a test offer a way to distinguish between excellent work and good? I have my doubts. It might at least certify that a mind can retain factual detail, which is important; but where is the assessment of skill and understanding?

The problem demands a solution, and I hope to touch on some in future postings.


[1] The idea for this example comes from Professor Barzun’s discussion of Banesh Hoffman’s book The Myth of Measurement.

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(No) Comment

Though it would take time for me to tell all the ways in which I gained from being a student in Kenneth Koch’s course of modern poetry, I want to mention one in particular: what he taught me about making comments on students’ papers through the comments he made on mine. That is by way of saying a few things about comments in general.

The first is that properly prepared students are avid for comments. I heard a contrasting view before my third year of teaching, when I attended the summer workshop of a “project” famous for “developing” the “writing process.” The leaders of this workshop contended that students do not read their teachers’ comments, so there is no point in the teachers’ making them. This claim, supposedly based on “research,” was repugnant and in my experience a demonstrably false bit of Bracknellian[1] nonsense, but I entertained it provisionally at least to try and understand in what circumstances it might be true.

I cast back to the team teachers of my 11th-grade English class, Mr. Z. and Mr. M. Any paper returned by Mr. Z. had comments such as “v. good” or “✔”. Those from Mr. M. had notes on my wordiness, my pompousness, or, occasionally, my concision and clarity. Errors of usage came under the red pencil, as did errors of grammar. The virtues he occasionally noted had specific names and were not subsumed with everything else under v. good.

But mostly I thought about Professor Koch (pronounced Coke), whose every returned paper was a course in writing. As you might guess of the teacher of a class in the modern poets who was himself a poet, much of our work consisted in writing poetry. If we studied Whitman, we would write a Whitman imitation, and Yeats, and Pound, and Lawrence. We also wrote a term paper in prose, a midterm essay, and final exam essays, one of which could be a poem.

Unlike many or even most schoolteachers who examine their students’ poems, Koch would subject our poems to genuine criticism, including particular praises and reproofs. The reproofs were as gentle as he could make them if he thought the writer had made a good attempt, but if something was “unWhitman-like,” it was unWhitman-like. He did not accept the notion that students’ poetic work was exempt from discipline and criticism, and most of his students left his class with a realistic estimation of their talents at poetry. He was clear, however, that he wouldn’t let lack of talent get in the way of a decent grade if the student did well on the paper and the essays and gave the poems a try. I was in the unusual position of having him like my poems more than my prose, so my advantage worked the other way around.

The prized comment was “very exciting,” always combined with particulars. It brings me to another important point about comments. Students value the comments of teachers who take them and their work seriously enough to be excited by it, or absorbed, or at least demonstrably occupied. “V. good” doesn’t cut it. If that is what students face when they get their papers back, then of course they would not value the comments. One 9th-grade student during my student teaching submitted a homework assignment early on that said in the middle of a prose passage, “Mr. V are you reading this?” I wrote in the margin, “Of course. I assigned it.” He came to me the day after I returned the paper and thanked me for paying attention to his work. I had his attention for the rest of the semester.

That brings us to a third point. Professor Barzun said that teachers who offer their students the criticism their writing needs and deserves will “work like dogs.” If that was true of his colloquium in important books with its twenty students, or of Koch’s course in modern poetry with its forty, it is terribly true for a high-school teacher with an unspeakably large number of students. Writing, a skill or talent, requires the teacher to be a coach and editor; coaching and editing must aim at particular people. Teachers with large loads of students are bound to have trouble managing this demand unless they have extraordinary fortitude and stamina. The difficulty lies in the quality and intensity of attention required and in the degree of detail that has to come under the teacher’s active notice. It took me a long time to develop that kind of editorial stamina, and even now I have to pace myself when grading writing, taking breaks to stay fresh and open, not burnt out. New teachers daunted by the job should know that the needed ability will probably come, but they must not suppose that it will be easy. Candidates considering jobs at schools where they will have large loads of students may have to inure themselves to dealing with an insufficiency of time and knowing that even with the best will, their work may be “not altogether satisfactory.” Perhaps teachers working in these conditions end up not offering the kind of comments that students take to, but through no grave fault of their own. How sad, then, if they end up moths in a flame!

The answer to the problem of students’ not taking their teachers’ comments seriously does not lie in abandoning comments. Rather, it lies in establishing conditions in which teachers know what comments are worth making and have the working conditions in which to produce comments worth reading.  On the students’ part it means coming to an assignment prepared and ready to seek and take advice, the way my 9th-grader could do once he had satisfied himself that I really recognized him.


[1] This coinage refers to Lady Bracknell, who says that “statistics are laid down for our guidance.”

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℞ Stone Tablets

Sometimes it’s a pity that a valuable dictum cannot be presented on a stone tablet by a prophet. Lightning and thunder might help it make an impression too. My dicta of the day are sometimes called Campbell’s Law or Campbell’s Laws, after Donald T. Campbell, a social scientist who died about fifteen years ago. They appear not on stone tablets but on page 49 of a paper he wrote he wrote in 1975:

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures, and the more apt it will be to distort or corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

The next few pages of the paper give examples of corrupted processes from law enforcement and government administration, but they end with a clincher drawn from the world of education. A program of compensatory education in Texas was corrupted by the private contractors hired to administer it. It turned out that success was to be determined by the performance of the targeted students on a test, and the contractors “coached” their students in order to produce good results.

Campbell reports that the contractors “defended themselves with a logical-positivist, operational-definitionalist argument that their agreed-upon goal was defined as improving scores on that one test,” but that their methods were generally regarded as scandalous. How far we have come since this scandal was reported in a 1971 paper can be gauged by the fact that not just the city of Texarkana but much of the United States since No Child Left Behind is doing the same thing. Campbell saw it coming and warned that “when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.”

Education, he points out, is not uniquely corruptible: the problem lies in the very idea of gathering simplistic data, deciding that they represent or encapsulate a complex state or process, letting them become normative, using them to determine whether someone has done something right, and attaching these evaluations to a system of rewards and punishments. He was pessimistic about the possibility of circumventing his laws, and the growing “testing-&-accountability” fiasco is bearing him out.

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Reading and Wisdom

The Introduction to Great Books series was originally intended for use in high schools, though a visit to its web site suggests that its main readership is now adults in reading groups. It is excellent to find people of any age reading Kafka, Conrad, Dinesen, O’Connor, and Tocqueville, but sad to think that the joys and rigors of such encounters may not be a part of many high-school English curricula any more.

If students have been properly trained in reading, study, and discussion for a number of years (maybe having read the Junior Great Books series), they will be able to handle these authors and others even more difficult: William James, Thomas Kuhn, Sir Karl Popper. It is not just their vocab­ulary that will grow, but also their range of expression and thinking.

The vocabulary and understanding grow in a healthy and productive way because the students encounter words alive in the reading and not dead on a test-prep list. The health is threefold. It assures them that the words they are learning are used by real writers and so worth learning as part of a real and not a fake landscape of language that they are exploring. It sets up oppor­tunities for emulation or trying-on in writing and discussion, during which they can explore and test good usage and fit words to thoughts. And it gives them a chance to learn how to be rigorous and to increase their intellectual stamina.

William James reports that H. P. Bowditch, “who translated and annotated La­place’s Mécanique céleste, said that whenever his author prefaced a proposition by the words ‘it is evident,’ he knew that many hours of hard study lay before him.” He had enough humility and eagerness and a strong enough sense of obligation to the masterpiece he was encountering to be ready to tangle with it hard and long. Even­tually what had been evident to Laplace became evident to Bowditch too. The same process, on a less exalted but no less important level, occurs or can occur in high school with students who have effectively met a series of demanding but rewarding readings with study and careful conversation.

The sense that something is evident becomes stronger and more confident as it is tested, proved, probed, and exercised. And here we come to a benefit of a good course of reading and discussion that will escape capture by checklists of little skills and attainments, which embody the reductive fallacy in their pedagogical assumption (in this case the fallacy is that high-school reading is nothing but a string of discrete “competencies”). At some point, often but not always foreseeable, the student passes into an intellectual terrain to which James refers when he says that “the art of reading (after a certain stage in one’s education) is the art of skipping.”

But he makes that observation in an analogy whose second part is that “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” Here we have something diffi­cult or impossible to manage in a pedagogy aimed entirely at taking baby steps even on the verge of adulthood through a course of explicit, identifiable minor achieve­ments: how do we cultivate wisdom and understanding when they cannot be handled reductively? We come back to the problem Gilbert Ryle noted in his essay “On Forgetting the Difference between Right and Wrong.” It is that we are talking about something different from knowledge and skill.

If we don’t talk about it, we risk educating not a “mind of a high order” but someone like Funes the Memorious, the title character of a story by Borges. Poor Funes! He couldn’t skip or overlook anything. “My memory…is like a garbage heap,” he tells the narrator of the story. He could remember tens of thousands of futile details but had almost no ideas. James would say that he lacked the power of reasoning because he had learning but not sagacity. Of course, Funes would have been able to ace the kind of test that treasures the quick manipulation of learned detail. Of Funes and people like him one is tempted to ask, with T. S. Eliot, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/ Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

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By the Numbers

Statistics…are laid down for our guidance.—Lady Bracknell

Teaching is an act of perpetual discretion.—Professor Barzun

When Lady Bracknell first said that, Oscar Wilde expected his audience to laugh at her. One mark of how far our culture has moved from 1895 is the sense we get now that Of course they are laid down for our guidance! Why else would we have them? It is almost not a joke that the apocryphal woman with four children, hearing that one in every five births is Chinese, decided not to have another baby because she didn’t want it to be Chinese.

Nearly as mixed up as the Sinophobic mother is often the educationist or politician whose calls for action proceed from misused statistics and end in trouble. Educationists’ or politicans’ desire to give young people an education should be driven by the wish to see particular individual graduates who are knowledgeable, capable, and discerning. The stats should be an afterthought for the record only, especially if they are drawn from results on standardized tests.

A story that appeared recently in The New York Times will illustrate an aspect of the problem. The principal of an elementary school populated mainly by poor immigrants and other seemingly backward students, well liked by those students, their parents, and school-district officials, had to be fired in order for her school to qualify for funds under a certain Federal program. The reason was that the students, many of them fresh off the boat, scored poorly on standardized tests. The law required either the principal to be fired or the school to be closed down.

Now, that may sound all right to the firm-action enthusiasts, but it is not all right in a world that values discretion: not so much circumspection, though of course teaching often requires it, as separating, distinguishing, and using latitude of choice and decision properly and effectively (Merriam-Webster). Intellectually, the mandate is on a par with the Sinophobe’s decision to have no more kids.

The test for which the principal was fired required students to read a passage about the first moon landing aboard the Eagle spacecraft. One of the questions was whether the passage was fiction or nonfiction. One of the students reported answering that it was fiction because he reasoned that no one can actually ride to the moon on an eagle. Given his background, he had no idea that a space ship could actually fly to the moon, or that its name, in italics, is distinguished from a label, in Roman type. His not knowing the answer was not due to stupidity, nor was it due to a failure of school in his new homeland to teach him reading.

But there is a more troubling element in this test. Telling fiction from nonfiction is a rather sophisticated operation. Many adults cannot do it reliably, as some media recognize with pleasure and profit. If we think it important to ask ten-year-olds to make a distinction that those media happily depend on adults’ not making, we must do so with discretion and not a one-size-fits-all question.

I have not seen the test, but I guess that the students were given a multiple-choice question like This passage is a work of a) news b) history c) fiction d) persuasion. The question was probably worth one point like all the others. Though the answer can be graded easily by a machine, and though the answers to many such questions may easily produce something that could be called a statistic about educational attainment, there are problems. Such questions leave out of account all parts of a judgment except the result, and they prevent us from using our discretion to size up a student’s attainments. This particular question also omits to deal with the problem of classification that it presents without allowing an entirely satisfactory answer. The structure and requirements of a certain kind of standardized test actually rule out questions that would elicit thoughtful answers, forcing a sometimes unsatisfactory choice among a number of givens.

School districts and other government entities want numbers on the cheap and are impatient with demands for subtlety and discretion. They then use these results to decide on the awarding or withholding of money that districts or schools need for their programs. Also, teachers with very large numbers of students naturally look for ways to lessen their burden of work: there is a strong and understandable temptation (that should be resisted if possible) to use machine-scorable tests or their hand-graded simulacra. So it’s not surprising that these tests are widespread, but it is sad, and it is destructive of good education. At some point people will stop—have stopped—thinking of an education as something incidentally sized up by a variety of means including examination and instead think of an examination as the goal towards which an education proceeds. If what mattered in education were what can be examined by multiple-choice questions, much that is good in teaching and learning would be swept away. Even more would go if the resulting statistics were laid down for the guidance of those who must continue to teach and learn.

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Trips in Deep Water

Those of us who remember particular school trips fondly and who have subsequently become teachers now realize that there was much more to them than met our young eyes, and more than often meets parents’ eyes. The amount of planning most of them need would surprise someone not familiar with the work, but there is more: Even the most innocuous-seeming ones can turn difficult or perilous in an instant. Difficulty and peril can’t be entirely eliminated except by avoiding life or by shuffling through it in wrappings and shin-guards. Somewhere between this stance and a blithe disregard of caution lies the right way to take a school trip. Exactly where needs some teasing out.

So does the possibility that school trips are less than meets the eye; that they do not amount to much more than an excuse for a cut-up. In an earlier posting I said that school-wide play days, honestly so called, could serve this purpose. I think that trips should generally have more important goals. Some questions follow, which examine trips’ usefulness balanced against their potential for poor learning and for trouble.

Since no trip is risk-free, the first question must be What about this parti­cular trip makes it worth at least a minimum of risk? It must yield a modicum of value, to be assessed with a clear eye and no baloney. The Activity Director’s “Default Setting” should not be “yes;” it should be “tell me more.” His or her judgment should not be compromised by having to sidle up to a “core value” claiming that “our school values field trips for their own sake” or its equivalent in Edspeak such as “our school seeks out the intrinsic benefits of mobile experiential learning.” Though the trip might have many kinds of value, the most important kind would be curricular value: students will learn something the curriculum requires them to learn. Other values, such as “bonding” or “team-building,” might better find their cultivation in work and activity on the school grounds.

The next question is How does it fit in with other plans and activities, both curricular and extracurricular? An administrator must be ready, like Solomon, to decide at need between competing activities, or, like P. T. Barnum, he will end up with all of them in the tumultuous tent. Something is educational—or “miseducative” (John Dewey’s word)—partly intrinsically and partly as a result of its juxtaposition with students’ other opportunities—demands—distractions. Dewey thought that a whirligig of weakly connected or disconnected activities would be miseducative:  If the kids are in a whirl of things to do, the learning will be faulty, or they will learn the wrong thing.

Will the trip include too many attractive nuisances or too much opportunity for idle mischief—I mean inappropriate behaviors? Nuisances can become more attractive to students who are not absorbed by the main event. How sure are we that they will be? Long stretches of vacant or repulsive time are an invitation to the boredom whose ensuing choice is often subversion or trouble.  Rather have too much to do than too little.

What is the state of relations in general between parents and the school, in particular between parents and the teachers acting as chaperons? A school with healthy, trusting relations will have more leeway for trips than one whose relationships are mistrustful, adversarial, or litigious. This relationship should be the object of a clear-headed examination notwithstanding any claims to the contrary, such as a “core value” stating that, say, “Parent – school cooperation is foundational to our mission.”

If special understanding or expertise is advisable, does a chaperon have it? If not, will there be someone readily available who has it? A class going to a beach will want to know that a chaperon can read the surf, spot rip tides, and use a lifesaver’s can. If not, there had better be a lifeguard. How will availability of the needed expertise be ascertained?

Do all adults understand that they are not to play for popularity among students by disregarding rules, especially those that other chaperons are visibly enforcing? It’s surprising how many “grown-ups” will say to themselves and even to students, “Well, Mrs. Dust may think that’s a good rule, but I am a hero, so I will disregard it.”

Do the students understand procedures for gathering, for quieting down, and for receiving urgent instructions? Have these been reviewed and, if necessary, drilled? As an example, a group of students, no matter the size, should be able, when signaled, to become silent and attentive within seconds.

Some comments to follow the questions:

No first-year teacher should ever lead a school trip except under the direction of another teacher experienced in leading trips.

Chaperons other than teachers should be known to and approved by the school’s administration; otherwise, they should not “count” in determining the student – teacher ratio of the trip or be allowed in charge of small groups when the large one breaks up.

Students should not consider attending a trip their right irrespective of prior behavior and reliability. If deciding what this means ends up being a sticking-point among warring factions, it might be better to give up the trip than to have a stinker-student win a battle to go and then destroy a trip’s chance for peace or safety.

Though of course a student’s coming to harm is the salient disaster of any trip in which it occurs, a word might be spared for the teachers in charge, irrespective of blame. Having been assigned duty on a trip, maybe because no one else was available, an inexperienced chaperon on a trip that goes bad is like Pip during his first time in the whaleboat in Moby-Dick. One moment, things are going as planned; three minutes later, Pip is a castaway, feeling “an immense concentration of self in the middle of…a heartless immensity,” whose “ringed horizon [begins] to expand around him miserably.” That horizon, seemingly with only menace, guilt, and sorrow in the offing, must feel like the most distant in the universe.

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More from the Didact’s Dictionary

cutting edge n. [used with “on the”] or adj. [with hyphen] A cliché used to describe an educational movement, technology or technique whose uselessness, waste, or harm has not yet been proven by experience in classrooms. Examples from the past: open classrooms, new math, whole language, and mobile computer labs.

Edspeak n. The skein of bad language tangled around the field of education, sometimes praised by its users as “professional.” Its characteristic vices are vagueness, feigned objectivity, love of cliché, baloney, regressive sentimentality, euphemism, faddism, and scientism–sometimes all in one sentence, though no prizes are given.

essay [Fr. essai, try] n. [archaic] A composition in which the author tries to present or discuss a point with economy, skill, intelligence, rhetorical art, and respect for the reader.  Some schools have replaced it with the I-search paper and FAQs (qq.v.).

FAQs n. A composition in which all the reader’s needs are anticipated except those that are ignored. (Cf. “classic prose[1],” whose motives are not need but curiosity, delight, and respect.)

Gloucester, Duke of n. A British aristocrat who described The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to its author as “another damned, thick, square book.” His type was to have been made obsolete by the Jeffersonian ideal and by public institutions of learning like the University of Virginia, which he (Jefferson, not Gloucester) founded.

I-search paper n. [a nonce word that has outlasted the nonce] A kind of non-fictional composition that makes a virtue of absorption in one’s own world, just what high-school students need.

index n. The search engine of a book. It is read when Google is offline by research grunts needing quotations unimpaired by explanatory and connecting ideas.

multitasking n. [non-standard] claiming to divide the attention into an undiminished quotient, as in 3 ÷ 3 = 3.

peer editing n. editorial homeopathy, in which like cures like.

threaded discussion n. [non-standard] an artificial typed conversation. It simulates talk the way molasses simulates quick­silver but without being able to leave a good taste in the mouth.

!?! An end mark used by writers whose skill is not as great as their indignation.


[1] Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth, passim.

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Hey, Culligan Man!

I sometimes share with my students Robert Frost’s observation that “unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you’ve had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.” The reactions vary from the predictable ad hominem argument that “he’s just saying that because he’s a poet” to more nuanced thinking, but almost never anything like even provisional acceptance. Most students would never consider, say, that “natural selection” is a metaphor. Most of them, even if they have heard of a cliché, would not think of it as a dead metaphor that has been dug up by its employer for a bad job of verbal zombie work.

The danger to which we expose ourselves in being strangers to the metaphor is not a Night of the Living Dead, though bad writing and speaking do arouse horror in some of their readers and listeners. Rather, it is in an inability to produce sound thinking by metaphor or, when presented with it, an inability to get it. William James in 1890 described the mind as a “stream of thought,” an excellent metaphor and, I venture to guess, ultimately more successful than the one educational theorists favored forty years ago: that the mind is a computer.

(Except, of course, the behaviorists among them, who didn’t recognize the mind. An old joke has two behaviorists at sexual inter­course. After they are finished, one says to the other, “You enjoyed that a lot. How did I like it?” This post-coital query was probably framed by someone who at work in an education research lab claims that educated people meet behavioral objectives. He would probably shake his head walking away from Rodin’s Thinker, who clearly doesn’t amount to much.)

But sometimes we feel unsafe because we are at home in the metaphor. One metaphor around which teachers should feel unsafe is that “a teacher’s job is to deliver instruction.” The immediate reaction is that it makes no literal sense. To deliver something we must first have something to deliver, such as a bag of groceries, a report, or a water softener. “Instruction” is not a thing except as an illicit reification. “Deliver instruction” makes no metaphorical sense either. When I was seventeen I did part-time work as a delivery boy, and I can find no figurative (or literal) resemblance between teaching and that job.

When a teacher does focus instruction on a particular part of his subject, there is still no “delivery” as of a little parcel. It is not a delivery—not anything like it—to get students to understand Strunk and White’s Rule 3 (“Enclose parenthetic expressions in commas”) if they have not understood it before.

Two North American students of mine one year were about as different as it is possible for two students to be. One of them took two years to learn to write a coherent paragraph with a topic sentence and was still a bit shaky at the end of that time. She was diligent and she was attentive, but it took attention, diligence, and rewrites to produce that paragraph. She struggled to read Alan Paton. At the other end was the boy who in our school’s homegrown writing assessment was the only one for years to get a perfect score, which he got every time he took it. He could and did read Moby Dick very well. I mentioned in a previous posting that I sometimes share a piece with one class but not with others. With his class I decided to share D. H. Lawrence’s study of Moby Dick. His first reaction, a sound one, was that the study was idiosyncratic, brilliant and very exciting. His second reaction, also sound but more prudential, was to ask what would happen if he tried writing like Lawrence for his International Baccalau­reate examiners. I told him that unless he was feeling a great deal of confidence in his risk-taking, he might want to stick to a more orthodox style of essay-writing for the examiners but that he was free to try and imitate Lawrence when writing for me. He did, and his tries were very good indeed. Then, for his semester final, he practiced going conventional and did a good job that way too.  Both of these students learned something important, but it wasn’t off the shelf and I wasn’t their Culligan Man.

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Troubling Trio

Three articles appearing within one week in The New York Times taken together illustrate one of the many difficulties in wishing that teaching and learning might be studied as a science: we must take education where we find it, not reduced to a lab-like artificiality from which few helpful conclusions can be drawn. They also suggest that the reality surrounding education is itself troubled and that research focused on an ideal but unreal classroom will yield results irrelevant to problems in the air around the real one, and that good education can take place only when larger troubles are recognized and dealt with.

The first article reported that ten law schools plan to add a blanket .333 to the grade point averages of their graduates. The reason for the raise is to make graduates’ transcripts more appealing to potential employers. The word “preposterous” seems to have been invented for this version of putting the cart before the horse. A grade should be given not to attract future notice but to evaluate past performance. In the reality of these law schools the future invades the past, hijacks it, and alters it.

But it is more, or worse, than preposterous. Think of what the students at such schools are learning outside the official curriculum. What kind of lawyer will be graduated from an institution whose education includes an invitation to collude in the misrepresentation of his academic accomp­lishment? Imagine medical schools’ adding academic gas to their graduates’ transcripts so the Mayo Clinic will hire them more readily. Imagine the Mayo Clinic’s patients!

Related to this article was another one reporting on schools and districts that graduate valedic­torians in litters. One school graduated nine, as many as the puppies my boyhood friend’s spaniel Kristen had. It is sad to think that one difference between Kristen’s puppies and these valedictorians is that the puppies were more likely to find a secure adulthood: when valedictorians are a dime a dozen, who will take a second look at them?

The third article concerns students, usually in middle school, who write horrible things about their classmates and post them on line. I am a high-school teacher and therefore do not really know the heart of middle-school darkness, but the reports that come to me sometimes sound like Colin Turnbull’s writing on the Ik of Northern Uganda. They do not jibe with my own memories of middle school, and I do not want to venture for long into that terrain. Still, the phenomenon of “text bullying” made me think of a New Yorker cartoon from the 1950’s.

It showed a boy scrawling a message on a fence about his current enemy—let us call him Billy Newsome because I can’t remember the caption exactly. The message said, “Billy Newsome is a communist.” Children are very good at absorbing the angst of the month from their environment, and many of them look at a blank fence or wall as an invitation to write about it. (Pity they don’t always see an invitation in the blank page.) The two come together in graffiti.

We usually have taboos erected against the intrusion of graffiti. We don’t want the clutter of “spontaneous me” a permanent feature of the public life. Hence graffiti are usually associated with juvenile lowlife and vandalism. In any case, graffitists have a practical limitation in the number of walls available for undetected writing. But the internet has an infinity of blank walls that crave inscription, and many children who, unrestrained by taboos not yet developed for these wide-open spaces and not monitored by parents, are happy to chip in with comments attuned to the insecurities of the moment. Knowing that someone may be looking tends to restrain the writing, but who is looking at the graffitist’s gadget except maybe his cheerleaders?

The article reports a strong desire among many parents to have schools police students’ texting and even their opportunities to text, whether or not they are at school. Naturally, there are also parents who want schools to lay off. The result is that teachers, who are already sorely pressed to teach, and administrators, sorely pressed to run schools, are being drafted into service as the life-monitors of students whose parents buy them potentially troublesome gadgets but don’t give them the preparation in morals and etiquette to use them. What if the parents can’t give them that training or make it stick?

As these articles illustrate, problems in the classroom often start outside, in the honesty and virtue—or otherwise—that students, their parents, and the schools’ administrators bring there. How we foster or combat these external influences will have as much to do with the success or failure of teaching and learning as what we do in the classroom.

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Splendor in the Class

Some teaching is good even if it makes lousy TV. Movies and TV programs about classrooms tend to cloud this perception when they show an Oscar-winning actress reading Wordsworth to her classmates, looking and sounding like an Oscar-winning actress reading Wordsworth to her classmates. I love a good reading of the Immortality Ode as much as the next guy, but I don’t mind that Mrs. Knickerbocker (Yes. She taught me English in 10th grade) was not Natalie Wood, or that I am not Robin Williams.

And teachers must sometimes take what they can get in bad TV when judging how their students have done. This is especially true when judging understanding, that most fugitive kind of learning. Robert Frost reported the difficulty among his students in Amherst College, saying, “I have lived with some boys a whole year over some of the poets and I have not felt sure whether they have come near what it was all about. One remark sometimes told me.” He added that this kind of understanding “will have to be estimated by chance remarks, not by question and answer.” While a teacher can frequently get more than this glimpse, teaching is better off dealing with these glimpses as and where it can than by ignoring them in favor only of responses that manifest themselves in “behavior.”

Hence the thinness, the insufficiency of “behavioral objectives” and “rubrics”* for determining some kinds of understanding, however apt they may be for determining others. Sometimes we must say with Frost that “one remark was their mark for the year; had to be—it was all I got that told me what I wanted to know. And that is enough, if it was the right remark.”

I had a telling remark one time from a 9th-grade Syrian student who discovered in class that he had a liking for Thomas Hardy. That in itself was wonderful, but when I asked him why he liked Hardy, he said, “His pessimism is attractive,” which was astounding. I guess that comment was not in any catalogue of “appreciative behaviors” ordinarily available to 9th-grade teachers. Even though Because he was below above behaviorist radar, he was well liked and even admired by his classmates. When he recited “Ah, Are You Digging on my Grave?” they listened. Their stillness and silence were a kind of understanding, and it, too, should be a part of what a teacher evaluates.

Sometimes we are distracted from the important job of looking for learning by attending to virtuoso “teaching,” beguiled from the sight of what is learned. Mr. Martin Skelton, a consultant on education, showed my colleagues and me a video of a class he had observed. It opened with the teacher calling on students to show recently learned tumbling moves, and they ran out like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show under his capable direction. Afterwards many of us commented on the coherence of the lesson, the enthusiasm of the students, and the engagement of the teacher.

Mr. Skelton’s question was, “Did you notice that no learning took place?” No, none of us had noticed that, but it was true, as we could see when we viewed the video a second time. No original instruction took place, nor was any student held accountable for muffed moves. If it had been part of a Christmas program, it might have had a purpose in entertainment, but as a lesson it was pointless. One teacher, feeling chagrin at the failure of perception, rationalized by saying that the teacher was “consolidating,” but we all got Mr. Skelton’s point.

The aim of the ensuing discussions was to consider how we might “look for learning” in the classroom to help decide whether our classroom teaching was working. The good teacher must have a good eye and a sturdily modest ego. It is often diffi­cult to know if the kids are learning, for sometimes we hide a dreary shower in razzle-dazzle or the “wonderfulness of me.” Nor does it help to be tied up in notions of crude visibility of learning when assessing it, though some learning is of course remarkably visible. Think of Archimedes springing out of his bath (Behavioral objective: Behavior indicates appreciation of conception: 5/5: Springs out of bath and shouts, “Eureka!”), but remember the “chance remarks,” the passing glimmer on the face, or the misstatement fruitfully rephrased.

* This word, like so many others, is (mis)used in the Ed Biz. It originally refers to the red ochre (rubrike) words printed in an order of Catholic worship, which guide the worshippers in what to say or do. Its descendent definitions in standard English therefore have to do with established rules, customs, or practice. Its nonstandard descendent in the Ed Biz refers to guides of numerical grading that assign points according to demonstrated attainment in tasks, tests, or projects. What are we to call these guides if not “rubrics”? How about the term used in the International Bacca­laureate Organization? It is mark schemes. Rather British, but we could do with a little hands-across-the-seamanship.