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One regular occurrence of my boyhood weekends used to be the appearance outdoors of my early-rising father, a passionate gardener, as soon as direct sunlight hit the yard. If I had chanced to “sleep in” (till eight), he would tend the part of the garden outside my bedroom window, loudly singing “Oh What a Beautiful Morning!” I don’t think he really intended to propagandize the joys of getting up early, but whether by habituation or genetics, I ended up an early riser too, except in New York City, where one point of pride in college seniors is that none of their classes begin before eleven.  A late-rising former colleague of mine was horrified to hear when I usually got up when not in New York: she referred to four and five as the f-hours and six and seven as the s-hours.

Most teenagers are her soulmates. This identification was particularly strong among my Egyptian students when I taught in Alexandria. Egyptians start their dinner between ten and midnight, and one of my favorite restaurants there, King of Quails, didn’t even open till ten or so. During Ramadan most Egyptians stay up well into the night, many of them only going to sleep after the public waker-up cries the approach of the pre-dawn prayer call, a Muslim’s last chance for food or drink till sundown. To Egyptian teenagers, he is not a waker-up but a settler-down.

One day these same night-owls were in my English class as we read in Walden Henry David Thoreau’s paean to rising early. They were also urbanites and strongly convinced that the country is a dusty sort of place where birds fly around uncooked and spitting cobras lie in wait to teach urbanites the foolishness of venturing outside the city limits. The idea that someone could choose to leave the city and go to the country seemed by itself deeply unsound, but they lost all patience on hearing Thoreau praise the delights of dawn. They dismissed him as a lunatic.

I don’t think this horror among teenagers of early rising is a strictly Egyptian phenomenon. My current English students, generally a very good bunch, are always at their worst of the week when their lesson falls during first and second period, and so I always have to proceed more slowly then than at other times. When I taught at schools where each course met at the same hour every day, I could always tell the difference between my first-period class and the others. The one place where this phenomenon was generally less noticeable was the school that began at 9:00.

So I was predisposed to say Amen to an article discussing the growing movement to push back the opening hour at school; but the Amen is qualified. As I recently noted, American students suffer inordinate sleep deprivation and consequent dumbing-down of their lessons because they work their gadgets when they should be sleeping or preparing to sleep. Even the article about pushing back school opening hours posed its student-protagonist in bed using her mobile phone. If there is not a way to keep gadgets shut off at night, a later starting time for school could just end up leading to a later bedtime for gadget-wielding students.

The good news is that the folks that bring you the SAT have decided to abandon the SAT I essay. That infamous exercise, proven ineffective at “measuring” anything but length, is being laid to rest, and I guess that no one will be sorry to see it go. Even better is that much more of the remaining SAT I will be based on the ability to read analytically and synthetically.  It will also take a page from the IB book by requiring the quoting of lines to justify multiple-choice answers.

Problematic is the decision to tie the test more directly to the Common Core. The bad news is that the Common Core, a twelve-year program, is being suddenly and completely implemented all at once instead of grade by grade over the twelve-year period a sensible introduction should take. Grade 11 students with no training in the Core might find themselves suddenly at sea in a new SAT based on a curriculum they have not studied before. It would be better to implement it in twelve years with this year’s first-graders after the other eleven years were reliably in place. So the other bad news is that the new, new, new, new SAT may confront Grade 12 students a few years hence with many of the difficulties of understanding said to bedevil the current test.

But the good news is that colleges and universities abandoning the SAT entirely report 1) an upswing in the quality of their new students, and 2) a stronger showing in the admissions office of poor and disadvantaged students who can’t afford the price of special tutoring in how to take the SAT. It also gets rid of the US News corollary of Campbell’s Law. That corollary states that Admission Offices admitting students with weak SATs on the promise of better things to come—a decision commonly made with students from disadvantaged backgrounds—will lower their US News ratings and thus exercise a corrupting pressure against their admission of these students. The bad news is that dropping the SAT is not happening fast enough[1].

Further good news is the College Board President’s plan to include questions derived from reading foundational documents in American history. The bad news is that many people, including those who should know better, do not want to take seriously the role of properly taught history in intellectual formation, resulting in students who haven’t had that formation and don’t really know history.

In connection with that lack we have some really bad news in the reappearance of Joel Klein in a second launch of Rupert Murdoch’s Educational Tablet, called Amplify. The first launch, a year ago, promised such academic challenges as a game in which Tom Sawyer battles the Brontë sisters. I assume that we are having a second launch because after the first one, people stayed away in droves from Paintball for Literacy, if that’s what it was.

For the second launch we have a new game in which middle-school students “get” to solve the problem of who murdered Edgar Allan Poe by examining the coroner’s report. Now, the cause of Poe’s death has been a persistent mystery for the past 175 years, and there was no coroner’s report because coroners didn’t typically make reports on deaths in the 1830s. What is more, the suggestion of foul play was first made only forty years after Poe died. Where is the history in this game? And if the object is only to cultivate a disembodied skill in deductive thinking and the process of elimination, why not just play Clue at home instead of buying Fun Software from Murdoch & Klein? The bad news is that students might come away from all this fun with a false sense of history, and their school district with an empty wallet.

SOUTH WIND

The days grow long, the mountains

Beautiful. The south wind blows

Over blossoming meadows.

Newly arrived swallows dart

Over the steaming marshes.

Ducks in pairs drowse on the warm sand.

Almost as famous a favorite son of Chengdu as the panda is the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu (712 – 770), praised by Kenneth Rexroth as “The greatest non-epic non-dramatic poet to survive in any language.” His “thatched cottage,” or rather a reconstruction of it, is, with the surrounding park, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the city, though it is also popular among residents. For the benefit of foreign tourists a sign points the way to “Exhibition hall of poetic saint is famous through all eternities.”

On one occasion I was talking with a Chinese man, a lawyer, telling him how much I appreciated Chinese students’ ready familiarity with their country’s poetry. With a somewhat surprised look, he said, “Of course. Poetry is the heart of civilization.” It would be tempting, but wrong, for us to think that they just memorize poems without understanding them. While that may be true in some cases, it was emphatically not true one day in my Theory of Knowledge class.

That class of young Chengdudes (I don’t suppose that is the real demonym for inhabitants of Chengdu) was reading Rexroth’s translation, given above, of one of Du Fu’s most famous poems. My students knew the original. I asked them what the translation conveyed of the original. They fell on it like lions and tore it to shreds. They were most severe with it for losing much of the original’s allusive character, of which they tried to give examples, reserving their strongest contempt for the last line. The problem, they said, was that nothing of what the line and the rest of the poem imply about love and faithfulness remains. They were particularly hard on the ducks. After class one bright student-artist, now studying in the animation department at the University of Southern California, said that it was a nice poem but not a good translation of Du Fu[1]. Traduttore traditore[2].

But that saying (translator traitor) implies another kind of faithfulness. Though in a translator we accept some license to bring a poet’s original work to a language foreign to it, it is harder to dismiss errant reading in one’s own language. (Denis Dutton offers a partial explanation in “Why Intentionalism Won’t Go Away”.) We may allow that some poems, like Shakespeare’s funeral song in Cymbeline, change their meaning in time[3], and that these changes may result in good poetic readings; but not just any reading on any occasion will do. I remember one 9^th-grader offering his opinion that Penelope Lively’s story “At the Pitt-Rivers[4]” was about fish, and I have had a posting about the smut of Emily Dickinson. Both these errant interpretations needed to be corrected, not by ukase but by discussion of how to read closely.

Unacceptability in readings includes, dare I say it, misreadings such as those one finds in Dead Poets’ Society. We are approaching the 25^th anniversary of that movie—a movie I saw during my second year of teaching and never saw or wanted to see again.  I didn’t like it then because it seemed false to what teaching is really like, and I fear I wouldn’t like it now because it seems false to what poetry is really like. Never mind that no such critic as Dr. Pritchard, Mr. Keating’s scholarly antagonist, existed or could exist: Keating, as the article linked above notes, is “forever reading in the book of himself.” Whether Keating was a reader-response theorist before the fact or a narcissist, he seriously misreads Frost, Whitman, and Wordsworth, turning them into a “Song of Keating’s Self.”

In this claim we come some distance from the commendable wish of the translator that the Other might in some fashion cross the barrier of language, however imperfectly. We are now in a terrain of self-regard whose inhabitants say, “This interpretation is right because it is mine: there is no Other.” If all that matters in teaching poetry is ratifying what a fourteen-year-old says, simply because he has said it, why is a teacher even needed?

Things have actually reached that stage figuratively, if not literally, in the developing trend to gather “student data” and send it to the Cloud or to other repositories. Advocates of the vanishing ecology of privacy have even started to propose legislation to govern how the data will be handled in and distributed from these repositories. Future-of-the-month enthusiasts in education often buy into their latest projects without thinking them through; hence as usual the second thoughts about the decisions to store data—second thoughts that do not come from the education administrators making the decisions or from the commercially connected foundations encouraging them to do so, but from concerned parents, whose stake in their children is not to turn a profit.

Another worrisome thing is the trend towards “data-based education” that tallies, orders, and divines from test results to provide “diagnosis” “in real time” to teachers (and perhaps to a data repository). All they or their employers need to do is pay lots of money for the software systems and tests provided by commercial enterprises, instead of using good teachers, who can make subtler judgments and exercise a more profound influence on students, all in real time. Of course, the tests are largely multiple-choice “instruments” that have no ability to gauge the kinds of skills, understanding, and consecutive thought developed in pointed conversation and in essay-writing. My own brief experience feeding in to this commercial system left me profoundly disquieted by the expense and unsatisfactoriness of it all. It is creepy to think that we are moving towards thinking of education as a kind of “behavior” that can be sized up by multiple-choice tests.

One thing that we must remember in distinguishing between philanthropic educational enterprises (or eleemosynary institutions, if you prefer) and profit-making “educational” businesses is that the mission of the first is to provide education, while the twofold mission of the second includes making a profit. Sometimes that mission eclipses the educational one, as a breaking story about an allegedly corrupt chain of for-profit schools suggests. Past postings of mine have shown that not just for-profit enterprises are subject to corruption pressures, but we should not go off half-cocked buying into these systems.

As an alternative, why not examine a philanthropic institution like Loreto College? It is what in England is called a 6^th-form school, a kind of academic junior-and-senior-year college preparatory school. It is located in a poor inner-city neighborhood in Manchester. 57% of its students live in “council wards” classified as impoverished, and a third of them have parents who did not go to university. Yet it is rated in the top 1% of secondary schools nationally, and a whopping 50% of its applicants to Oxford and Cambridge are accepted. Surely a school that does so well without skimming a profit has something to teach us all?

Yesterday my colleague the geography teacher asked me to visit the Theory of Knowledge class he began teaching this year. His plan is to ask the students to conduct an analysis of vehicular and pedestrian traffic at the school’s three entrances, to draw some conclusions after analyzing the data, and then to try and fit their work into the “Knowledge Framework” of “Human Sciences.” It is an ambitious plan and will clearly call for a kind of work much different from the rote memorization that people say is characteristic of Chinese education.

His classroom’s chairs are arranged around work tables, not in rank-and-file order. I was immediately struck by the atmosphere of the classroom, which was an amiable order-in-chaos. The longer I watched, the more strongly the unobtrusive grounding in orderliness made itself evident under the chat and banter, including banter with the teacher. Each table was assigned a task, and a spokesman from each table presented to the class as a whole at the end of the lesson for classmates’ and the teacher’s comments. The students took the comments seriously. After the class, he and I had lunch in the teachers’ canteen and had a long talk about alternatives to exam-based courses.

It may be tempting to dismiss this kind of productivity as due entirely to privilege: this is a good school, and Hong Kong has a high per capita GDP. That doubtless has something to do with something, but not everything to do with everything. For one thing, the school has a tradition of welcoming and supporting students from comparatively disadvantaged backgrounds, though it is true that they do not constitute a large part of the student population. But Hong Kong itself, including its ‘band 3 schools’ (a term no longer used but often understood) has remarkably good results on the PISA tests, including tests that require what we call “higher-level thinking.” And if this class is any example, Hong Kong has many teachers who are ready to try approaches other than stuff-and-examine—this at a time when the American “education reform movement,” as it is misnamed, has brought back the stuff-and-examine model to NCLB and RAT schools, with their Test Preparation.

The example of Shanghai must also discourage glib dismissals of Chinese methods. It has the best PISA results in the world, but its per capita GDP is only 40% of the US’s and a slightly lower percentage of Hong Kong’s. Half its students come from a background of urban and rural poverty. The Shanghai metropolitan area’s population is greater than that of 40 PISA countries, and even the city proper is more populous than 33 of those countries. (I exclude the “city states” of Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore.)  What this means is that excellent education, including “critical thinking,” is being effected on a huge scale in a population that by the standards of “developed” countries can hardly be called privileged.

But the dismissalists will call Shanghai a showcase that gives a false impression of China’s education. After all, China ranks 94^th among the world’s countries in per capita GDP. Go to the rural areas, and things will not look so good. Well, that is exactly what Andreas Schleicher recently did. This OECD advisor on education visited rural Chinese schools, including one primary school near the Burmese border serving only impoverished farm villages. He reports to BBC that the education there is of a high standard in spite of the comparative paucity of resources. Maybe Shanghai’s is better, but the rural education appears to be good. The next PISA results will be more inclusive of the variety of Chinese education, but if a city of twenty-five million cannot be taken as suggestive, the explanation may lie in its being dismissed as sour grapes.

The last dismissal is that Chinese culture and American are different and therefore incomparable. It presents an opening a mile wide, but I will step in at only one point. A recent study done at Boston College showed that American primary and secondary students are by far the most sleep-deprived in the world, and that this deprivation is largely due to the use of electronic appliances after what should be bedtime. The authors of the study claim that if these students would turn off their gadgets and get a good night’s sleep, they would do better in school. As it is, their sleepiness leaves teachers having to dumb down their classes. In China’s rural areas no one can afford the gadgets to lose sleep over.

But no teacher whose “effectiveness” is being “rated” by “value”- “added” “metrics” will find the VAM formula modified for the sleep deprivation that is beyond his control. Just so, none of the yes buts applied to China’s schools are also applied to the VAMs by which American schools are now being rated (except, in some places, a weak and useless metric for  “disadvantage”). I know that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, but inconsistency can be foolish too.

On Friday I had the required viva voce discussion of a completed I.B. Extended Essay with its student author. The subject was politics, and I, having studied politics in college, was his supervisor. The rules governing supervision forbade me to supervise closely or to edit his work: I might offer suggestions and advice, but the work was to be largely the student’s own. The essay will probably gain its author the not-often-given grade of “A”, but I did not have too much to do with my student’s success, except to establish conditions in which understanding might come to him.

I merely suggested that he do a search in the local city and university libraries for political science writing on the role of party politics in governance. He caught fire during his search, and even went so far after his review of “the literature” as to arrange for an interview with his “Legislative Councilor,” the local name for a legislator. The result was an original piece of work with a surprising but effective and well-grounded thesis about local politics. I could not have seen this thesis coming with a telescope.

I credit him with some kind of creativity, though not to a degree that would be exalted in the annals of history or political science. There was no suggestion of the outcome of the paper in the original proposal, which was for a pedestrian piece of descriptive writing, not out of place in high school, but unremarkable. The problem in using the C word to describe what he did is its well-known resistance to definition, systematic study, or other means of capture and domestication such as “scaling”.

Professor Barzun exposed the difficulty in discussing “The Paradoxes of Creativity[1]” and noted that the same word is used to describe the drive that led to Michelangelo’s frescos in the Sistine Chapel and a mysterious and precocious power about which it has been seriously claimed that “after kindergarten, schools do not draw on creative ability.” Barzun does not try to define creativity, much less “scale” it; but he does analyze the word as having four distinct “layers of meaning”: 1) the “commonplace quality of initiative,” 2) “the ordinary, widespread knack of drawing, singing, dancing, and versifying, modestly kept for private use[2],” 3) “the trained professional artist, including the commercial,” and 4) “the rare bird, the genius, whose works first suggested the idea that a human being could be called a creator.” He notes that “[t]he specific traits of creative genius have never been ascertained, nor any correlation with genetic, medical, or environmental factors.” This has not kept social scientists from attempting (and failing) to do so. Hence the unhelpful designation as geniuses those who score at one end of the bell curve on intelligence tests—the opposite end from idiots (this used to be the psychologist’s designation when I was a boy). I have written elsewhere about this foolish system. Even Edison’s distinction between inspiration and perspiration as constituents of genius runs into the contrary examples of Flaubert, who sweated over every word; and Balzac, “who had to write trash for ten years before his genius erupted” in the production of over a hundred novels in under twenty years. (Flaubert’s sour comment on this eruption was, “What a man Balzac would have been, had he known how to write!”)

Generalizing from Barzun’s focus on art, I would say the four levels of meaning in our general term “creativity” could be taken as 1) having initiative or being eager for results; 2) having a knack, propensity or talent; 3) having this talent developed and fully realized by training, study, and practice; and 4) being a genius, about which more below. Suffice it to say now that geniuses are rare.

My own student, while not a Balzac, a Flaubert, or a Machiavelli, took his material and worked on it in an engaged and productive way and produced an original and creditable thesis where none had existed before. I would be inclined to say that he was thoughtful, diligent, and keen with concept-work: a combination of numbers 1) and 2) with the likely prospect of eventually achieving 3). Reaching this level is an accomplishment, which I duly celebrated in our viva voce. It also seems more clear-headed than it would have been if I had merely said he had been creative, which tells us very little if anything. And it seems truer than if I had said he was not creative because he had worked under the discipline of political science instead of having been free as a bird.

Ah, freedom! But freedom is not creativity, as Barzun further notes. He proposes that many people, when they talk about creativity, really mean “a release from compulsion and regimentation.” Thus, the “cult of creativity springs from the hatred of abstractness, dependence, repetition, and incompletion in work (emphasis added)”—undesirables whose roots ultimately go back to our culture in general and not just, or even primarily, to our schooling. The problem with hidden hatreds is that under the guise of “unleashing,” they can lead to the “creation” of wreckage. One alternative to cultivation of this hatred might be more work like the Extended Essay, which finds and answers a concrete question, encourages independent thought, puts things in a new way, and has a beginning, middle, and end—the whole in the context of an academic discipline holding out the promise of development to level 3).

In another and rather less satisfactory alternative, we are told in The New York Times about “departments of creativity” in colleges, where creativity is defined as “the ability to spot problems and devise smart solutions.” The reason for this alternative’s comparative unsatisfactoriness is that it is too narrow and lacks what Thomas Kuhn called a “disciplinary matrix.” Some works of genius are solutions, but not all: to what problems are Macaulay’s Third Chapter or Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony solutions? And on a less exalted level, what problem did my own extended essayist solve? It is true, the Times reports, that one college program has led among other things to the production of portable toilet-stall door locks made of coat hooks and Lincoln Logs; and we must be grateful for any level-2) inventiveness that increases our privacy rather than strip it away; but this doesn’t seem anywhere near exhausting the possibilities of “creativity” in school. Nor will we do so by attempting to “scale” it. Barzun quotes from a study rating jobs according to an Index of Creativity, giving as an example of “exceptional” creativity “the amateur botanist who strictly limits hours at his regular job and often spends 20-hour days to complete botanical experiments.” So much for “scaling.”

And still the question persists: what is genius? Dr. Johnson called genius[3] “that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgment is cold and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates.” So “Dictionary Johnson” could not capture its meaning in a definition, though he is strongly suggestive of what genius does. William James described “minds of a high order” as a enabling “genial play with … massive materials, … an easy flashing of light over far perspectives, [and] careless indifference to the dust and apparatus that ordinarily surround the subject and seem to pertain to its essence.[4]” Compared to it, he says, the “mania for completeness” is positively vulgar. He makes this comment on p. 993 of a 1300-page book. It suggests that he thought that though “careless indifference” is the right mode for some kinds of mental phenomena, meticulous attention and hard work are another mode, also required in their turn—another of creativity’s paradoxes unlikely to be unraveled by Baby Einstein or Departments of Creativity.

But all this will not keep us from talking about Creativity. Barzun notes that “[i]n a new reference book of contemporary quotations, there are fifteen entries for Creativity and only three for Conversation, two for Wisdom, one for Contemplation, and none for Serenity or Repose.”

As New York City prepares under a new mayor to make some basic changes in its “system” of holding schools accountable for their students’ performance, a few observations are in order. The first is that the “system” has generally been a failure. This much is admitted even by The New York Times, a qualified admirer of the “system,” whose editors say that only one in four of New York’s students now meet the Regents’ standard of “college readiness”—this although the “system” has been “in place” for a number of years. Amazingly, they task the new mayor with “bashing his predecessor” about these results. What should the new mayor have done? Thank him?

I would say not, after reading a report by the city’s own Independent Budget Office on the program. It is true that the IBO issues this faint praise of the “system”: that it “is a significant improvement on accountability methods based solely on standardized test scores.” The “system’s” first problem, of course, is that it used to be the “unimproved” kind—a kind that people of good educational judgment immediately recognized as worthless and harmful, an opinion later confirmed by research. But good educational judgment is what the businessmen and lawyers appointed by the old mayor lacked, as how could they not? And the “unimproved” “system” was never completely replaced.

The second problem is that this “significantly” improved “system” is itself not very impressive. I mean not just in that it has left three-quarters of New York’s students unprepared for college, but that its ostensible basis in statistical rigor ends up not meaning much.

Example 1: In the five years from 2006 to 2011, five “grades” of A to F were issued to nearly a thousand elementary & middle schools. Table 6 of the report shows that fifty-eight percent of these schools received three or more different grades in successive years. This extraordinary volatility of results was due not to successions of genius phases and vegetative states, but, as the report said, to the volatility of the method used to get them. The report specially noted that because of its volatility, the “system” had a very difficult time distinguishing the passing grade of C from the failing grade of D.

Example 2: The volatility was so extreme in some cases that schools changed by two or more letters in successive years[1]. The “system’s” answer to these changes eventually was to disregard them when the change was for the worse, and to accept them when it was for the better. As the IBO’s report drily notes, “observing such volatility should lower one’s confidence that the measure is capturing systematic rather than spurious differences between schools.” Indeed.

Example 3: The “peer-related” school evaluations, which supposedly rank like schools against like, are based on a formula that weighs the number of black and Hispanic children as 30% of its total and assigns the same weight to students with special needs (as signified by their having an Individual Education Plan (IEP))[2].  Thus are a school’s “peers” found. In the IBO report’s data we find negative correlations between test scores and numbers of students in these two groups. That is, more of these students mean lower scores. However, the coefficients of correlation, unlike the weightings in the formula, show that the components have rather different effects on the final numbers: -0.114 for black and Hispanic students, but -0.457 for students with special needs. A couple of things jump out at the reader: -0.114 is a rather weak correlation on which to base a third of a formula that can lead to consequential decisions, and equal weighting of factors with such different correlations seems evidently flawed. What is more, the table from which these data are taken shows that in many of the cells, the numbers lack an acceptable level of statistical significance (16 out of 40, or 40%).

Example 4: In “peer groups” of schools with like “results” in this demographic crap shoot, particular schools whose statistical “proximity to the horizon” of that group was more than two standard deviations from the mean were ignored as outliers. Teachers of a certain age will remember Jaime Escalante, the gifted Bolivian who taught at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, helping to turn it for a few years into a comparative powerhouse of college preparation even among students who did not pass the AP calculus test. The difference between judgment and statistics is the difference between the movie Stand and Deliver and the blank screen of an outlier. Let the inquirer who favors judgment ask Escalante for his secret. He said, “The key to my success with youngsters is a very simple and time-honored tradition: hard work for teacher and student alike.”

Speaking of teachers: the last but not least problem, in the “value”-“added” teacher “metrics” that go along with the “system’s” school ratings, is that “value added is difficult to predict based on teacher observables.”  So we have a “system” of school ratings that do not strongly correlate even with the questionable data that they comprise, and we have a system of rating teachers with a weak connection to what they actually do. Bashing seems in order to me.

A posting managed in the gaps between meetings with parents: I am writing this on Parents’ Day, a Saturday that my school (in Hong Kong) gives over to meetings with students and their parents at which report “cards” are distributed. Actually, they are not cards at all, but a page of scaled summaries and narrative comments by the teachers. Each teacher (like me) has a number of “advisees” whom he monitors, trying to get the big academic and extracurricular picture of each. The advisor hands out the reports at Parents’ Day meetings and is also available as a subject teacher for more detailed conversation on students’ subjects if parents wish it.

(The reports are prepared over a period of weeks, allowing for the accumulation of needed detail and the correction of mistakes. Exams are returned to students beforehand, also with ample time for care and detail in the marking.)

My duties are comparatively light this year: I am teaching only Grade 12, whose exams and reports follow a different schedule to accommodate the demands of exams by the Hong Kong Education Bureau and the International Baccalaureate Organization. I occasionally have a G12 drop-in, but it’s the younger students’ parents who attend these meetings more assiduously.

The usual Chinese practice is for the student and his parents to meet the teacher together. It is a great way to gain some understanding of the family dynamic that lies behind the student’s work. It also provides a chance, if need be, for the parents and teacher to conduct a full-court press on matters of concern. It is rarely or never a time for adversarial contests, confrontations or scenes. If the parents have some doubt about a teacher, they usually seek administrators’ advice in separate meetings, or meet with the teachers privately. And if by the time of Parents’ Day a serious academic or disciplinary issue has already developed, chances are that the parents would already have been called in for a meeting.

Having the meetings on a Saturday makes it more likely that both parents will attend, though some students come with mother or father only. One exception was my first meeting of the morning, with a Grade 10 student and his mother, who had set up a Face Time link with the father at work in Singapore. That was a first for me: talking to a screen as well as two live collocutors. The meeting was productive and helpful as a result of its being a four-way conversation, but I can see why people who can possibly do so prefer live meetings to e-meetings. (And why teachers and students should prefer live classes to e-classes!)

He who praises everybody, praises nobody.—Samuel Johnson

Since I first heard this line of Dr. Johnson’s, I have felt the rightness of it, and even as a boy I recognized or felt the wrongness of unmerited praise. Dr. Johnson thought that people who gave praise incontinently lowered its value. Some teachers and parents may believe that while this view is true in general, an exception would surely be praise for the child with low self-esteem.

As it turns out, a study reported in Psychological Science claims that extravagant or “inflated” praise is more harmful to children with low self-esteem than to those with high self-esteem. The harm is that the unfortunate children react to the over-praise by shying away from difficult tasks afterwards. The study did not clarify for me whether the kids refused to take risks because they became anxious about losing their praiseworthy status or because they treasured the comments and would rather have them than the satisfaction of a job well done. It was also unclear from the experiment whether extravagant praise over a long period of time has a different and more beneficial effect.

My own practice as a teacher is to acknowledge progress but to make strong or extravagant praise only rarely. I don’t like to become overblown, saying such things as “you are showing such wonderful subject-verb agreement!” or “I’m thrilled that you are using paragraphs!” Using descriptions like “workmanlike” or “solid and gets the job done” strike most students as honest and reliable, though the praise-addicts among my students would rather have more and sometimes resent me because they don’t get it.

For many years I used a stamp and an inkpad for summary praise. The stamp showed a fist with an extended thumb. For good work I would stamp “one thumb up,” and for outstanding work I would stamp “two thumbs up.” Thumb-up work would be posted on a special “Good Writing!” bulletin board. Because students believed I did not “praise everybody,” they looked forward to seeing new compositions posted—their own and others’. First-time postings for students who didn’t normally “make it” usually elicited pleasure, sometimes elation: “I’ve always wanted to get on that board!” said one pleased young man.

Since I opened with Dr. Johnson, let me close with him. Of published writing he could be a severe and caustic critic. During the controversy over the “ancient” Ossian “manuscripts” “found” by James McPherson, in which Johnson claimed that McPherson had written them himself, Dr. Hugh Blair asked him whether he really thought that any man of the modern age could have written them. JOHNSON: Yes, sir. Many men, many women, and many children. But he zealously promoted writing, too[1]. And with aspiring writers who came to him with the request that he give them literary advice and criticism he was usually gentle, though not dishonest. JOHNSON: I do not say that it cannot become good writing.

This seems like the right touch. One of my students, who would dearly love an IB grade of 7 in English, but who always gets 5s and 6s, came up to me and said, “I guess there is not much chance of my getting a 7.” I replied, “I don’t want to rule it out, but it seems unlikely, though I would be happy to have you prove me wrong.”

This week I report on some reading I did on a couple of current stories related to teaching. There was a lot to read about one of them, the Beacon School lab fire in Manhattan. For those of you who haven’t read about it, a science teacher was doing a demonstration of combustion in a lab when fumes from the “combustion accelerant” (fuel) exploded outward, engulfing a student and critically burning him while injuring a classmate. It turns out that the school’s labs lacked needed safety equipment and procedures, and that this particular demonstration has a history of going dangerously awry.

One experienced science teacher and safety administrator was reported as questioning the idea of using a fuel known to produce inflammable fumes at room temperature for a show in which the students “look, look at the colors.” I like pretty colors as much as the next person, but I’d rather see them on a Matisse or a Helen Frankenthaler than in lab fires that can explode. I wrote a former colleague of mine, Dr. H., a retired chemistry teacher, to ask him about the demonstration. He said there is a safer way to handle these chemicals that involves making aqueous solutions of the salts and igniting them in a procedure he described using a Bunsen burner. He said that then the students can examine the controlled burns with hand-held spectrometers.

But one of the strange things about this demonstration is that there doesn’t seem to be much learning of chemistry involved.  Dr. H’s first assumption was that the fires would be set in order to provide students an opportunity to investigate the ignited chemicals’ properties. I don’t think he even envisioned lab fires as spectator sports. And the Beacon School’s website itself says that it focuses strongly on inquiry-based learning, though no inquiry is intended in this demonstration, which is not even an experiment. But I am not blaming the science teacher, apparently an earnest young woman who could not be expected to have Dr. H’s experience and understanding. I would like to know whether she and teachers like her have the chance to discuss their plans with other, more experienced teachers and to take advantage of this shared experience. One also reads that this demonstration was the object of a federal warning, not as widely circulated as it evidently should have been. Why not?

Properly equipped science laboratories are rather expensive, and I fear that some schools, in a misbegotten effort to save costs, cut corners. We do not know the explanation for Beacon’s unsatisfactory laboratories and must reserve judgment till we do know, but I have another former colleague, the science department chair at a school where he and I taught, who resigned rather than continue to teach in unsafe labs. The school accepted his resignation and did not make the needed improvements in its labs’ safety. So far no one has been caught in a lab fire there, but that is not very reassuring. I guess that New York City will be on the safety violations instantly, but it would obviously have been better to have a more effective pre-accident inspection and safety instruction program.

Speaking of investigations: more indictments and guilty pleas are coming out in the Atlanta cheating scandal. Having commented on it on and off for over three years, I am interested to see how things finally end up; but it looks as if the reprehensible former superintendent of Atlanta’s schools is in trouble. What puzzles me in retrospect is how she attained the great reputation she had before the tarnish started showing on her halo. See my posting linked above for some of my reasons, but consider what Stephen Jay Gould said in warning about being data driven: “If the data appear to be too good to be true, it’s because they probably are.” Look at the incredible improvements reported in Atlanta classrooms, and you will see what I mean—classrooms bursting with little Stakhanovs of learning who needed only a data-driven superintendent to “unleash” their potential, and nothing like the critical eye turned on them or their schools that was turned on the original Stakhanov when his heroic exploits in the mines were reported by Pravda. The wrongness of Atlanta’s data seems obvious now. Why didn’t it then?