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A recent long article in The New York Times focuses on a serious problem in American education: the student who goes to college and then founders. I read the article with interest, as did a good friend and former colleague who is now at a public university. We agree that (as my former colleague says) “the NYT focuses on a solution to the crisis without looking at the source of the crisis.”

That solution, implemented at the University of Texas, is fascinating to read about, but in some ways also frustrating. Its hero, Professor David Laude, is clearly a capable, compassionate and admirable teacher. He also avoids the easy way out: he insists that his shaky students study the same material as his more capable ones instead of shunting them into “remedial” classes that by teaching backward material remedy nothing. He makes such instruction possible in part by shoring up needy students’ fragile self-image with encouragements offered (as if) by a community of older and more experienced students who “have been there” and “know how it felt.”

What is frustrating is that the student-protagonist Vanessa and others like her have had to wait until their university education to receive this kind of teaching and community support. Vanessa reports that in high school she aced her math tests without having to study for them. She had a 3.5 GPA, placing her in the top 7% of her class. But the trout in the milk, as Thoreau would say, is that her ACT score was 22. Readers of these postings will know my reservations about scores on multiple-choice standardized tests, but they can be suggestive, as indeed is Vanessa’s. Not to put too fine a point on it, her score suggests that she was the victim of a branding hoax—a hoax not detected by the Times reporter. If the University of Texas takes the top 7% of students from a high school, and Vanessa is in the top 7% (as she was), then in ordinary life, if not in the world of branding and baloney, she should be ready for university. In fact, her ACT score was the equivalent of an SAT score of 1530, and my former colleague notes that she does not quite meet the “SAT Benchmark” of college and career readiness (which is 1550/2400). Students who exceed this benchmark are far more likely to graduate than those who do not meet it. Even considering the SAT margin of error (±30 points) most generously, one could only conclude that she has not been very well prepared—this though she was in the top 7%. That conclusion is borne out by the trouble she had at UT until Professor Laude took a hand in her education.

Why did a college-bound student not have to study math in order to ace her math tests? Another former colleague of mine actually taught a future Senior Wrangler of Cambridge. That boy didn’t have to study in order to ace his math tests either, but surely he is an exception that should prove a rule?

Maybe not. One of the eeriest objections one hears to the Common Core is that it will make students work too hard, the poor things[1]. Professor Laude proves by actual teaching that working hard is precisely one of the remedies for poor preparation (and, by implication, that it is needed for good preparation; evidently this proof is also needed). Such thinking has been infecting education longer than just recently. Some years ago I was the colleague of a 6^th-grade teacher who “helped” her students “succeed” in reading by forbidding them to check out books of more than 2^nd-grade difficulty. There was quite a row when the librarian, not one to mince words, told her plainly what she thought of such malpractice. When I was in 6^th grade I read the Arabian Nights—some of them!—and Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. Sister St. Catherine didn’t tell me to put them back and read Binky Brown Cuts the Grass. Neither did my parents.

At the same school with Ms. Malpractice, a rather small one, I was the high-school English teacher. The new headmaster, who came there when I did (but stayed only three years), told me to teach a demanding course that would challenge the students but not overwhelm them. I put together four years of work that included reading, speaking, weekly writing, grammar, and discussion using shared inquiry. Authors read included James Baldwin, Isaiah Berlin, Joseph Conrad, Lawrence Durrell, Flannery O’Connor, Selma Lagerlöf, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Thoreau, Tocqueville, Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams, the poets of The Rattle Bag, and writers from the Norton Reader. 90% of my students were non-North American “English language learners,” and some of them had very low Iowa test scores. In two years the high school’s average SAT verbal score increased by 125 points out of 800, and our Iowa tests showed very pleasing year-to-year improvements. (I mention the tests only because these results are crudely suggestive of real improvement).

The results were pleasing to me, and to most students[2] and parents, but not all. A few of them, from the U.S., thought I was “too hard.” One came to me and, lips white with anger, leveled her charge: “You think everyone here is going to Harvard!” Actually I thought no such thing, but not long afterwards the new, new headmaster called me in to say that I needed to be less demanding and assign less work. I obliged, and the Iowa tests of my last year there told a new and different tale.

There is more than simple teaching in Professor Laude’s approach. What needs to be said, however, is that much of the extra work he does to give students confidence and endurance is what any strong functional community does as a matter of course, not as a part of a job but as a part of communitarian values and fellow-feeling. In my posting on Potemkin Schools and elsewhere I made the point that sociology and good sense have shown the best schools are functional communities. In such communities those who have been through a difficult experience help others to know that they will get through it too. W. B. Yeats said, “There’s no fine thing / Since Adam’s fall but needs much laboring.” By contrast, the sort of magical thinking that says “Little Ben may be unable to tie his shoes, but that shouldn’t preclude his going to Brown” will guarantee a hard fall and maybe failure for students who fly in to Brown, or UT, on their fake wings.

A last point: the Times article is headlined “Who Gets to Graduate?” Shouldn’t the question suggested by Vanessa’s experience be “Who Gets to Be Educated”?

One fascinating concomitant to a 2007 study of the incidence of ADHD in Northern Finnish adolescents is that although ADHD may be roughly as common in Finland as in the US, the ratio of Finns to Americans receiving medication for it is about 1:12. Finland’s adolescents are famously successful in their studies, evidently without anything close to the extent of medication suffered by American children. What is going on?

A deeply troubling answer is suggested by the statistic[1] that American “boys who were born in December [and hence the youngest in their class] were 30 percent more likely to receive a diagnosis of ADHD than boys born in January” and that “boys were 41 percent more likely to be given a prescription for medication to treat ADHD if they were born in December than if they were born in January.” It is possible that mere stupidity allows immaturity to be confused with disease, but Stephen Hinshaw, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley, has discovered that ADHD diagnoses can vary widely according to demographics and education policy. He notes that No Child Left Behind gives a strong incentive to diagnose ADHD because it allows extra time for tests to be taken and, in some districts, exemption of such tests from the reporting requirement. Even more troubling is a report that students are receiving prescriptions for Schedule II controlled substances  (with a “high potential for abuse” and the possibility of “severe psychological or physiological dependence”) simply to enable them to do better on their schoolwork and standardized tests regardless of medical condition. One of the mental health professionals who study this phenomenon notes that Americans “as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmacological interventions for these children and their families.” Thus, drugs may be turning into a kind of cheap and perhaps profitable quick fix, as it were.

My colleague the psychology teacher tells me in highly expressive language that there is no need or excuse for this extensive overmedication of children. Coincidentally, the figure he gives of kids who he thinks actually need medication is roughly the same as the figure of those who receive it—in Finland. This is not the same as saying that “ADHD Does Not Exist”; rather, it is saying that we are making a problem larger, not solving it.

P.S.:  A study was presented Friday by a CDC official showing that more than ten thousand toddlers age 2 – 3 years are receiving ADHD medication, including Schedule II controlled substances, even though, as the story drily notes, “impulsivity and hyperactivity are developmentally appropriate for toddlers.”

Haste is sometimes pedagogically dangerous, as can now be seen in an understandable flap over the Rialto (California) Unified School District’s “critical thinking” assignment on whether or not the Holocaust occurred.  Like many other school districts, Rialto’s was laboring under the mistaken notion, encouraged by RAce to the Top, that it is better to adopt the Common Core in a hurry than to take the time needed to think through what its adoption means and requires. In the resultant rush, the district’s Language Arts teachers, of all people, undertook to set their 8^th-graders a task that occupied the British historian Sir Ian Kershaw for years as he ratified his unequivocal answer to the question.

But haste is not Rialto’s (and other districts’) only or even predominant danger in working up the new curriculum. One of the lurking dangers  is the notion that “critical thinking,” being taken as a constituent of advanced intellect in general, can be abstracted from the subjects in which it is found and bottled as a separate stuff, a kind of mental A-1 sauce to be added to any dish. What else could explain the otherwise untenable view that skill in history is a language art[1]? It is one thing to assert that the transfer effect is real, but quite another to deny that transferring must be done with care.

In fact, Grade 8 is nowhere near the age at which this kind of project can or should be undertaken[2]. The Modern Researcher[3], now in its sixth edition but originally meant as an aid to graduate history students at Columbia, discusses what is needed in order to do historical research. “No matter how it is described, no piece of evidence can be used in the state in which it is found [emphasis in the original]. It must undergo the scrutiny” of a mind practiced in the methods of historical research.

This means that a Rialto 8^th-grader must be able to answer the following questions of his or her sources:

·     Is this object or piece of writing genuine?

·     Is its message trustworthy?

·     How do I know?

These questions lead to others:

·     What does it state or imply?

·     Who is its author or maker?

·     What is the relation in time and space between the author and the information, overt or implied, that is conveyed by the item?

·     How does the statement compare with others on the same point?

·     What do we know independently about the author and his credibility?

Only when all the “safeguards” implied in these questions are in place, can the young historian then ascertain the truth by “systematically applied” or “informed” common sense. Sounds like a tall order to me! And the order is being given not in a history class but in a language arts class. What is more, a suspicious part of me fears that all this might have turned out to be preliminary to a class debate on the subject. Since the object of class debates is usually victory rather than truth, the canons of critical historical thinking are likely to be violated in the hopes of gaining “debating points.” Some “critical thinking”![4]

To see the genuine article in its proper disciplinary matrix[5], look at the web site of The Concord Review. This admirable publication features history papers by high-school students. The quality is remarkable, and the work is genuine. Schools with students who produce such work begin the students’ preparation early—perhaps even earlier than 8^th grade. What is more, rather than seeing “critical thinking” as some kind of all-purpose additive sprinkled by English teachers, they develop in their students the sense of how thinking goes in each different subject taken. It is painstaking work and lasts years.

One of the dangers of the Avalanche Method of curriculum development favored by the Haste Brigade is that all this trouble will be overlooked or the work insufficiently planned. The consequence will be 8^th-graders who assert by implication that Simon Wiesenthal and Primo Levi are liars[6].

In 1999 a Sam Gross cartoon appeared in The New Yorker showing the heavens and the Earth. In the foreground on a cloud stands God in his beard and gown. He has his arm on an unfortunate looking boy. Both of them are looking at Earth. God says, “I have the whole universe to look after, so I’m putting you in charge of this planet.”

I thought of this cartoon last week when I read that Arne Duncan is at it again, this time proposing to rate teacher training programs. Unlike the unfortunate boy in the cartoon, Duncan has a proven track record of stumbling at the hurdles. Consider, for example, that Duncan is making this proposal as we approach the end of the milestone year of 2013 – 2014, when No Child Left Behind mandated that 100% of Americans high school students would be proficient in English and math. Everybody knows, but nobody says or reports, that NCLB has been a complete failure. He might have called for the repeal of this act, but instead he made an own-goal end run around it in the program called RAce to the Top (RAT), which is as useless as NCLB, as its unfortunate progeny prove. During Duncan’s five or so years the US has languished on its accustomed seat of mediocrity on PISA results while Asians surged ahead of the Finns and Canadians on tests of ability to solve problems they were not familiar with. His announcement of readiness to work up another program should therefore be regarded with the same caution as an offer by Laurel and Hardy to move another piano.

One person whose antennae of danger are up is Professor Linda Darling-Hammond[1] of Stanford, who quickly penetrates to the absurdity of judging teacher preparation programs by the test scores of new teachers’ students on standardized tests, a proposal that Duncan is actually airing. Her alternatives, including an evaluation of a portfolio, need supplementing by guarantees of an effective practicum effectively supervised, but they are moves in the right direction.

I am afraid by contrast that if the Department of Education comes up with another plan like the other plans, some years hence we will be sweeping up another broken Steinway, or sweeping it under the rug.

Having just returned from an Easter trip to South Africa, I will devote this week’s posting to a look at an educational world rather different from the one most of my readers are familiar with. The story that I now relate begins with a black man from the rural areas of Limpopo Province, then known as the Northern Transvaal. He had little formal education but served in the South African forces arrayed with Britain’s against Hitler’s Afrika Corps. He, like his white compatriots, served “for the duration.” Unlike them, he received no recognition, and indeed not even any pay, though when he was demobilized back to the Transvaal the South African government gave him a coat and a bicycle. He and his wife later died in suspicious circumstances. Poison was suspected, but no investigation ever took place. His orphaned children ended up living at and receiving their education from a rural mission school.

That school, one of the few mission schools to remain open after the Bantu Education Act ended state funding of religious schools that did not practice apartheid, had the backing of the Cassinese Benedictines, the Ursulines, and a dedicated bishop. They say that charter schools are competing against Catholic schools in the US, but I wonder what charter school company would try competing with that kind of charitable dedication in a hostile political environment. At any rate, the school still operates and is still a beacon in the region. One nearby public school produces not a single student who can pass South Africa’s school-leaving exams; this school, by contrast, has a 90% pass rate.

The orphaned siblings received their sixth-grade education from the mission school. One of them met and fell in love with another orphan at the mission. After their schooling was “completed” (at Grade 6), they were married and had a son. Johannesburg, the City of Gold, attracts people from all over South Africa who are seeking their fortunes. This included the young husband and wife. They worked in the city and had a house in the Alexandra township. One day the boy was snatched from his front yard by a kidnapper, probably a “muti killer”, someone who kills children in order to use their body parts in witch doctors’ recipes. (The parts are “at their best” when removed from the child while it is still alive.) What the snatcher did not count on was that Mom was a championship runner. When she heard her boy’s screams she bolted out of the house after the kidnapper, who dropped the boy and ran on.

The parents decided the boy could no longer live in the township. Instead, they left him in the care of relatives in Limpopo who turned out to be unreliable. The mother eventually quit her job in Johannesburg to return to her village. She said she did it because she was tired of being shouted at by white people, but I think it was actually because she knew she would have to bring her boy up in person, and because she was an active woman who felt hemmed in by domestic work. That is when her son started his education at the mission school. He ended up graduating from its high school. He still speaks fondly of his teachers there, and his classmate the tragically short-lived author Phaswane Mpe dedicated his first and only novel to one of the sisters. As a young man the orphans’ son undertook a university course at one of the abysmal “tribal colleges,” but was unsuccessful. After a long period of time he is now in the last year of his remedial university education at a real university, about to receive a degree in social work.

His sons attend a Catholic school in Johannesburg, Catholic schools providing the best and cheapest alternative to the public schools, which in spite of some successes, still often fail to educate their black students sufficiently. The boys’ school has had a 100% pass rate on the school-leaving exams for many years now, and the boys have no doubt that they will get a solid university education. The main question is what to study and what career to prepare for. The elder son plays basketball for his school; the younger son plays in off-campus soccer and water-polo clubs; both do well in their studies. The father, a widower, has been a successful guide to them. Miraculously, even with the memory of his kidnapping, he is not a helicopter father, though he takes care to see that his sons are not exposed to undue danger and bad influences.

And he sees that his sons are effective students. No TV or gadgets till homework is done. No computer on school days except for homework. Bedtime is bedtime, though the elder boy sometimes reads in bed. I am optimistic about their prospects and hope that they will do well.

A lawsuit to break the system of tenure for teachers in California is receiving sympathetic media coverage. That coverage is notable because of mistaken assumptions and sloppy thinking strewn through it and the suit like boulders in New England farmland. Traditional New England values included the notion that there are some things we must do even if they are difficult, usually by combining hard work and canniness: hence the reputation of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee and General Grant’s Connecticut farmer[1]. It is safe to say that the plaintiffs and their reporters are not Connecticut farmers, or they would be examining some of the alternatives.

It is hard to know which is the biggest obstacle in the field, but let’s start with the chief piece of “research” cited by the plaintiffs in the suit, and taken at face value in the coverage. Last June I wrote a posting sharply questioning that very research. My readers are invited to examine the questions and comments, but I will focus here on just one problem, which the researchers themselves admit: there is little connection between their judgment of “effectiveness” and what they call “teacher observables.” Put in clear terms, it means that their classification system is almost entirely disconnected from the ability or even the need to see the good things “effective” teachers do or the bad things “ineffective” teachers do. Thus, while some “ineffective” teachers may indeed hand out stupid worksheets to their classes so they can drink coffee & catch up on their Facebook, other “ineffective” teachers may do everything right but be victimized by an unreliable[2] statistical “method.”

In Philip Dick’s story “The Minority Report,” people are identified and imprisoned for “Pre-crime,” i.e., crime that clairvoyants have said they will commit at some time in the future. Our researchers’ methods and their advocates in lawsuits and school administration do Dick’s precogs one better by detecting “Un-crime,” that is, the statistical stigmatization of “bad” teachers without reference to any time, any observed bad behavior, or indeed any behavior at all. Ironically, on the same day as the latest report on the lawsuit, the Times ran an article on bringing up moral children that distinguished between guilt, the result of particular acts that can be avoided or atoned for, and shame, a generalized and ineffaceable state of odium not due to any act in particular. Evidently what leads to good morals in children can be dispensed with in adults, for the label “ineffective,” like the state of “shame” or the judgment “pre-criminal,” inheres without regard to actions.

At least the Connecticut farmer knows that his fields have a chance if only he takes the time & makes the effort to remove the rocks and till the soil. By contrast, the parents and students of California have no guarantee that witch-hunting by statistics and “No man, no problem[3]” management will do their schools any good. What intelligent potentially good teacher will enter a system that reserves the right to stigmatize and fire him for no identifiable misbehavior? This system could remove rocks that are not in the field while leaving behind the rocks that are.

As for tillage: what if the people replacing terminated teachers are themselves no great shakes? A study released nearly a year ago plausibly claimed that only 7% of teacher education programs “provide strong support” to candidate teachers. In the posting I wrote on this study I also suggested that school administrators might adopt some of the practices the study recommends for schools of education. Why, they might even invite teachers to help each other improve their work by peer evaluation! But it would take a lot of work and dedication. Ways of doing so are out there, including  one I have written about.

The catch with the alternatives sought by the plaintiffs in the California lawsuit is that though they appear to promise less work and more automatic science than farming in Connecticut, they also promise less success than the farmer will get by sizing up the scope of his problems realistically, rolling up his sleeves, and proceeding with probity, good sense  and hard work to solve them.

The usual rhythms of the school week are a bit altered these days as the IB students, whom I teach, move towards their examinations in May. (They had also been altered by the school’s massive and successful participation over the month of March in the citywide music competition.) One very pleasant preview culmination took place last Friday with the opening of the Visual Arts students’ exhibition of work in the school’s gallery. Since the students have to show some skill with their artistic means and be able to explain or give a rationale for their work, we could enjoy not just looking at the pictures, sculptures and installations but also hearing the students talk about their work. The headmaster and other teachers and adults were in attendance, but I was especially pleased to see the place filled with students who came to see their classmates’ work. There is a particular sculpture that I hope will end up enlivening the ground floor of the IB building, and I would like to see some of the pictures on the walls too.

Students in subjects other than art are busily preparing for their exams, sometimes in class and sometimes out. I finished my last scheduled class presentations, so this week I offered some review of the use of sound in poetry, and I set an optional review paper for the students to write for mock marks. Most students signed up for both activities. Other teachers have been doing the same.

One teacher, absent for maternity leave, will be returning after the Easter holiday. Her substitute is a man who has retired from teaching at three outstanding schools in the United States as well as schools in Hong Kong. His mixture of knowledge, meticulousness and geniality is impressive, and the students have taken to him as well.

(It was interesting to hear him talk about his brief and unsatisfying tenure as an administrator at a school that was not so good as the places where he was accustomed to teach. He said that the principal would announce a series of teacher observations by coming in to his office and saying “OK, let’s hit ‘em!” It sent me down Memory Alley to recall an administrator of my acquaintance who used to address the teachers as “you people,” and another who would refer to the experienced teachers as “dead wood.” And I also thought of the degradations practiced on teachers of Atlanta by their administrators. The good administrators I have worked with would never even think of saying or doing such things. The old sub also told me about an administrator who told his teachers that there had to be an increase of 10% a year in their students’ grades from one year to the next, thus anticipating “value”-“added” “metrics” and Campbell’s-Law corruption in one fell thought. I wondered what happened to teachers foolish enough to stay at that school for ten years.)

I spent much of this week marking the essays we set for applicants to the school’s IB program before we start interviewing them. I will be taking part in the interviews after the Easter holiday, and I am marking essays for the IB Organization as a ToK examiner. Sometime I may write a parody of Frost’s “After Apple Picking” called “After Essay Marking.” Farmers and teachers work hard at picking apples and marking essays because they don’t like what they “grow” to fall to the cider heap. Dead wood indeed.

P. S.:  After posting this I appeared in the hallway and was corralled by some twelfth-grade IB students: it is their last day of class before the exams, and we had to pose for pictures together. When my higher-level students joined me, I told them, “Think of Cleopatra’s barge.” Did they laugh at the the thought of the barge or at knowing they were finished with it? And the sub: one of his students drew his portrait and gave it to him, while another picture they gave him depicted some hang-dog expressions with the caption, “Say it ain’t so. Do you have to go?” Some people want to replace this with “blended learning” and “virtual” (but not virtuous) classrooms?

Regular readers of these postings will know that I have taken issue with the stereotype of Asian students as memorizing machines who cannot work through problems that they are unfamiliar with. I therefore welcome the release by PISA of its latest results confirming that this stereotype is false. I will explore their findings along this line below, but first I want to report some really surprising data of another kind that can be found in the linked report[1].

These data show that while there is a strong positive link between performance in problem-solving and the use of computers at home, the same is not true of the use of computers at school. In fact, only a third of the PISA “economies” showed a significant positive correlation between computer use at school and scores on the problem-solving test. Most “economies” showed no correlation or a negative correlation. What is more, PISA data show that “differences in performance on computer-based assessments are not larger than differences in performance on paper-based assessments, across students of varying familiarity with computers.”

What this means is that schools and school districts that are jumping up their class sizes and teacher-student ratios in order to buy computers for the schoolhouse may be spending a lot of money chasing a will-o’-the-wisp “classroom of the future.” I have written about the lack of research behind the rush to computers and other Marvels of Technology, but now we have some credible research by a disinterested international organization suggesting that it is far from a guaranteed good thing. What is needed first is to discover why some countries’ classroom computers help their students while others’ do not.

It would also be nice to discover why some classrooms lead their students to better problem-solving than others; and so we come back to the main business of the report. Which 15-year-olds solved unfamiliar problems best on the PISA test? In order, those from Singapore, Korea, Japan, and China (comprising Macau, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei). Immediately after these top performers comes Canada. The US is somewhat higher than the OECD average; but lest we draw too much comfort from that, we must examine OECD’s “Country Note” on the US, which advises us that schools in Massachusetts, widely regarded as the best in the US, produce math students two years behind those in Shanghai.

And OECD has offered some concrete advice to American schools: Adopt the Common Core, which appears to promise better scores in PISA math tests. The catch, of course, is that it must be adopted and implemented carefully after due planning and in the needed stages—not the way New York is doing it.

The startling oxymoron “sterile manure,” coined by Barzun to describe intellectual “superstitions of the day,” came to mind as I recently read an article about research on the brain. The article discussed the educationist vogue of localizing trait-bundles of intellect and character in one or the other of the “hemispheres” of the brain. Its writer observes that neurology has thoroughly debunked the left-brain-right-brain opposition. This is true even though some brain functions have been shown to be more or less localized in particular parts of the brain.

The superseded “knowledge” is manure in that, as with all manure, its users rush to spread it, which it was with careless thoroughness in the 1990s. What teacher of that decade doesn’t remember the hours at conferences spent with The Brain Lady[1] or her equivalent? And what teacher of that decade remembers what The Brain Lady said? The problem with that manure of intellect is that it was sterile because nothing of lasting value came of it.

Dare I say it? Peer reviewing is not necessarily a guarantee of quality. As with schools, so with researchers: some peerages are more equal than others. Review by peers with low standards contributes to the “plausible wrongness,” as Barzun put it, of much of the research that establishes or confirms the superstitions of the day, such as—what shall we call it?—hemisphericism. I mean not just its unprofitable reductionism of intellect as a duality, but also the bad thinking that follows in its wake: the absolutely invidious preference expressed by many teachers for one “hemisphere” over the other—usually the right brain, the “good” hemisphere. Can my younger readers believe that such thinking was common twenty years ago? Probably: such “research”-based faddism is still far from uncommon.

And there is a chance, sometimes a good chance, that the manure, in addition to being sterile, will be poisonous. I refer among other things to young persons inculcated in shortcoming who justify their intellectual vices by citing reductionist “research” in their own favor, e.g., “I couldn’t possibly do math homework because I am right brain.” (Please note: I am not arguing that intellectual or developmental differences do not exist among students or that teachers should not take note of some of them. I am arguing that false categories can lead to plausibly wrong stereotyping, including self-stereotyping.)

Now, the Brain Lady was an earnest, sincere, charismatic presenter. If, in addition to her educationist credentials she, as well as people like her, had also received the formative training that a good liberal arts education (particularly history) imparts, she might have been able to use her considerable gifts to greater and more beneficial effect. We, in turn, might be spared the intellectual false starts and wrong turns so sadly characteristic of the field of education.

As we move towards this spring’s IB exams, my English students this week finished the last poems that the Higher and Standard Levels would study together. The remainder of the course, extending to the beginning of the pre-exam reading period, will be for HL only. Yesterday’s lesson was therefore the last we had as an entire class. At its end the class applauded.

The hand was of course touching, but more to the point of these postings, it is indicative: I think they were applauding themselves as much as or more than me. It indicates a sense that a course is a kind of production with a beginning, middle and end; that they were a part of the production; and that they had reached The End. It indicates that the teacher is something more than a delivery boy (we may appreciate soft water, but we don’t applaud the Culligan Man) and that those applauding are more than passive recipients. It indicates that the students are a group and not just a collection of terminals.

Of course exam results will tell a tale as well; but if as I believe they will, these students’ results turn out to be good, the course will have succeeded while at least partly avoiding Barzun’s four constituents of hateful work. By immersing themselves in literature and responding to it they will have avoided needless abstractness. By doing much of the interpreting, understanding, and improvement themselves, they will have avoided an abject over-dependence on the teacher. By handling successively new material in due course, they avoided repetition[1]. By proceeding through an articulated and structured course culminating in a series of summary assessments, they avoided incompleteness. These results seem worth a hand.