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As I was beginning this posting, one of my students came to me with a question. He had posted a draft paper on line, about which one of my written comments was that “your organization is a bit creaky.” I had not expected that comment to be precisely gettable, but I did expect it to spark a discussion, which is what it just did. In that discussion, following his question, I could tailor my remarks to his understanding, and he could then start to remedy the paper’s defect.

In such small matters (as well as large!) can we discern the difference between close learning and distance learning—online learning—call center education—whatever you want to name it. It is no accident that the desiderata quoted in the title of this posting come to us from John Henry Newman, James Joyce’s choice for best writer in English of the 19^th Century, and an eminently able defender of liberal education. It is also no accident that corporate boards of directors still meet in person, that masses of people expert in the same things tend to congregate (finance: New York; IT: Silicon Valley; entertainment: Los Angeles), and that the best schools in the U.S. tend to be functional communities.

In a community, people see themselves as capable of communicating in a rich and precise way, tailored, as it were, to their particular concerns as expressed in sessions of question-and-answer or conversation. By contrast, what do people see themselves capable of doing or of getting when they direct questions to call centers? About as much as they would feel able to do in online courses “staffed” by “facilitators” instead of conducted by teachers.

As promised, I will briefly discuss the strange paradox I saw in a slide show presented at a recent teachers’ conference I attended. The paradox is that in the OECD countries participating in PISA testing, the correlation between interest in science topics and performance on the PISA science test is negative. The point of the presenter at the conference was that we need to find ways to preserve or improve interest in science while keeping achievement high or raising it.

Much as I enjoyed the presentation, I wondered whether there aren’t other kinds of problem embedded in this paradox. Francesco Avvisati, the OECD analyst reporting the paradox in a larger presentation, thinks there may be. He notes, for example, that “self-enhancement,” which includes saying good things about oneself (including how keen one is on science), is viewed differently in different cultures. Not everyone in this world who is Peter Pan’s age goes around singing, “I’ve Got to Crow!” The tendency to crow or not appears to be bound to the culture of one’s upbringing, and may affect answers. Given that the same regions of the world that produce good test results also have low “self-enhancement,” as it’s called, one wonders whether some cultures talk the talk while others walk the walk. Such differences would complicate taking remedies from one part of the world and trying to apply them in another[1].

It is also interesting to find that teachers’ concentrating on discussing and explaining the applications and uses of science in the modern world is most likely to raise students’ interest in science, while their use of hands-on methods of instruction such as labs is most likely to raise science test scores[2]. Readers of these postings will know that I favor genuine over “virtual” classrooms. PISA’s findings seem to support such a preference because they focus on things that teachers can do but that software cannot. (And “autonomous student inquiries” favored in constructivist classrooms are the worst thing for improvement of interest or test scores, suggesting that teachers’ guidance really matters, which of course all teachers, but not all educationists or software vendors, already know.)

Finally, Avvisati notes that the interest/test score paradox is undercut by a fascinating finding that within any particular school, the correlation between individual students’ interest and their test scores tends to be positive, but that this correlation vanishes when numbers are mixed between schools and average correlations are sought. Avvisati suggests[3] that these results imply “diverging effects on student interest and test scores” in different school cultures.

If he is right, firing the teachers at schools that have lousy value-added averages may do little to improve scores if the schools’ cultures work against good teaching and learning. Maybe some “further study is needed” in the real causes of trouble before NCLB and RAT bring in the headsmen.

I thought there might be some promise in the limited use of didactic instruction online, so long as Real People conducted real coaching and Socratic instruction at its side, but a failed experiment at San Jose State University suggests that this hope may have been misplaced. It appears that the proportion of online material to live teachers was much too great.

That is where the push for e-learning will tend to end up when the prime movers for its adoption are schools strapped for cash and serial optimists from Ed Biz profit centers touting costly quick cheap untested remedies. This is a dangerous combination. Add to it a dash or two of bad thinking and the bad results will be almost guaranteed.

Two examples of bad thinking appear in the Times article linked above. The first is the patronizing rationalization of the experiment’s failure by a teacher at San Jose State. He said, “You have to understand how innovation works…” Those of us who do not know how innovation works will undoubtedly be grateful for this reminder, but some of us may actually think that experimental “iteration” on the backs of students who pay good money for bad instruction is at best a bad bargain, no matter how “innovative.”

The second example is that “some[1]” propose an analogy with mobile phones, which have moved from “clunky and unreliable” to “indispensable.” A moment’s thought will show how unsatisfactory this analogy is: the transmission of vocal communication, a relatively simple process, is not analogous to education, one of the most complex activities known to us. It also overlooks the difference between subscription to a phone service as a bit of voluntary consumerism and the imposition of an untried system of education on young people who have not asked for it.

And some system! Teachers of a certain age remember the Chatty Cathy doll, which produced “conversation” when a ring and string were pulled. It’s hard not to see instructional software as essentially a big Chatty Cathy. Will the users who get the software on Christmas tire of it by December 26? Attrition in MOOCs has been high.

And one proponent of Chatty Cathy says that the next challenge is “scaling creativity.” If the success of educational software depends on people who, as if from the Grand Academy of Lagado, can say or even “think” such things, we may anticipate many more failures before we turn back to good live teaching and give it the funding it deserves.

The MOOCs’ first green was cash,

And promises were rash:

With programs such as these,

Who needs old Socrates?

But savings must be made,

And profits must be paid,

So MOOCs brought no relief;

Thus teaching sank to grief.

Thus dawn sinks down to day:

No MOOCs at San Jose.

(With apologies to Robert Frost)

No regular posting this week: houseguests arrive from South Africa today for a holiday visit, and I am still mulling over some material encountered yesterday at a teachers’ conference in Wan Chai.

More soon, I hope, but I couldn’t resist reporting on a curious finding by the OECD in the wake of its 2012 PISA results: the “test score/interest paradox”.  Broadly speaking, it is a very surprising correlation between scores on the PISA science tests and interest in science topics as shown in a poll of students that accompanied the tests. The correlation is negative. That means that in general, there is a tendency for “countries” whose students who do not show a comparatively high interest in science topics to do better on the tests than those whose students report a high interest!

The discovery of this graph led me to the OECD report on PISA, which I will be digesting in due course. In the meantime, a curious observation. If you divide the graph in quadrants—low interest/high scores, high interest/high scores, low interest/low scores, and high interest/low scores, there is only one PISA entity (national or municipal) in the high interest/high score quadrant (and that just barely). This unique outlier is Hong Kong.

Why do 90% of today’s American high-school students not want to study science, technology, engineering and math? According to The New York Times, it is mainly because these subjects are taught in ways that don’t engage the interest of students—traditional ways, which haven’t changed since Sputnik. Why, then, are shoals of Asian students attracted to these subjects, which are taught there in ways just as old-fashioned, if not more so? Until that question is answered, calls for pompoms and tap dancing by math teachers will be pointless.

The Times article sideswipes a more real issue twice: once when it mentions that students whose families provide a solid upbringing with a culture of support for schooling are more likely to succeed in these subjects, and once when it mentions that scientists and technicians are perceived as clueless nerds. A couple of years ago I noted a third reason, also reported then by the Times: “It’s too darn hard.” This does not mean that merciless math teachers require eighth graders to study differentiation, but rather that students whose classrooms have been sandboxes of Jungle Gym Math for years crumple under the pressure when they finally have to study something difficult, and don’t manage the effort needed because they simply haven’t learned to do so.

Like the Times, I am all in favor of qualified teachers. They presumably like the subject they chose to qualify in, and did well in it. They can therefore proceed confidently and enthusiastically where an unqualified teacher will have to rely stepwise on his or her teacher’s guide, a sure recipe for boredom. But in a milieu where they are disrespected, or where their pay on an hourly basis as a teacher is not much different from the janitor’s, why should qualified persons want to teach? It will do no good to jump up the curriculum and then hire mediocrities to present it in classrooms. (And it will do no good to try and gull qualified candidates with make-believe ad campaigns and have them quit after they discover what much teaching is really like.)

But even with a good curriculum and teachers, teaching will fail without some readiness by the students to meet the demands of schooling part way:

1.     They need nurture (by parents or others) in a culture that promotes and values learning.

2.     They must disabuse themselves of idiotic stereotypes, such as that of the nerd[1].

3.     They must not suppose that teachers need to earn their respect like a dividend; rather, they must regard respect as part of the capital endowment of civilization.

4.     They must be ready to roll up their sleeves and do a job of work.

On Valentine’s Day 2005 I had taken a black South African family out to lunch in a place of entertainment in suburban Johannesburg designed to look like an Italian town. After we left the restaurant and were walking along one of the “streets”, we were approached by a “giant” on stilts moving at a slow and stately pace. The younger son hid behind his daddy as the giant strolled by. After leaving, we went to a shopping mall and were looking at the Valentine’s Day flower arrangements at a florist’s near the entrance from the parking lot to the mall.

A hubbub from the parking lot got me to look out and see what was happening. Well! Nelson Mandela himself was walking towards the door, with a few people following him and at his side. I went back into the shop and told the family, “Mandela is coming!” We went out, and as he came through the door, I advised the boys to go up to him because he likes children. The first surprise for those who have not actually seen Madiba before is how tall he is. Maybe that explains the differing reactions of the boys. The elder boy went up to him and received a greeting and a pat on the head, but the younger looked up with the same expression he had on his face on seeing the “giant” in the “Italian town.” Madiba respected his cautiousness and didn’t approach him, but instead continued his own slow and stately walk into the mall, where applause and cheers broke out as he made his way to a book store. His justly famous smile was even more radiant close up, if that were possible, than in his pictures, especially when he was greeting the boys.

But the little boy came closer in his wide-eyed stare to the imaginative truth about Madiba than the rest of us. At the end of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, the Narrator, at a garden party given by the Prince de Guermantes, has just had the climactic insight into time and memory that makes it finally possible for him to begin his life’s work, which is to write the book the reader is finishing. He catches sight of the immensely old and distinguished Duc de Guermantes just as he rises from a chair. “I now understood,” he says, “Why the Duc de Guermantes… had tottered when he got up and wanted to stand erect…and had trembled like a leaf on the unapproachable summit of his eighty-three years, as though…perched upon living stilts that keep on growing, reaching the height of church towers….” In the book he now hoped to write, the Narrator proposes to “describe men…as…occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place… prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through—between which so many days have ranged themselves—they stand like giants immersed in Time[1].” The man I saw in front of me was not just a very tall and stately distinguished old man; he was a giant in the times and days that he embodied as he slowly walked past.

May your classroom be full, but not too full, of eager students.

May your students not be jaded.

May they have had a good night’s sleep.

May they greet you when they encounter you.

May they look you in the eye but not get in your face.

May they never say “whatever.”

May they get their work done—by themselves.

May they be fired up by sparks of interest but not by Spark Notes.

May their parents appreciate what you do for them and see you as an ally.

May you be the master, not the slave, of your classroom’s gadgets.

May your school’s and classroom’s routines serve not thwart your needs and your students’.

May your classroom’s main source of light be sunshine.

May its main source of sound be live voices.

May your bag of tricks be bottomless, and may you find no water balloons there.

May the only added value in your life be the value added to your abundantly deserved retirement accounts.

May your administrators be educators.

May they see the dangers in thoughtlessly preparing individual students for standardized tests.

May they never think that schools are a business or education a product.

May they share your horror of baloney and pink slime education.

May they back you up not cut you down.

May your school’s mission be expressible in under ten words, none of them a superlative.

May nothing in your building leak.

May your school’s IT network work.

May you possess or achieve the serenity to accept the human condition and the keenness to relish the good things you have.

 

Those happy tap dancers who brought you NCLB[1] and RAT[2] are now launching an educationist show boat in an ad campaign called TEACH. I mean, of course, the Department of Education and Microsoft, helped along by an insurance company and an advertising agency. We don’t know whether Arne Duncan or Bill Gates will get to be Cap’n Andy, but you can bet there’ll be lots of smiling and singing. The acts in the show boat—commercials, announcements, recruiters—will try to persuade bright young persons that teaching is “creative, invigorating and meaningful.” One way of doing so: show them films of kids capering through wildlife preserves chasing frogs and of classrooms brimming with students dazzled by whirling papier mâché planets and surround-screen projections of the solar system[3].

And on whose authority do we know the creative potential of teachers? The head of “creativity” from Cap’n Andy’s ad agency assures us that “if you find different ways to communicate with and teach kids, where it’s not just that same old thing, using a video game or projecting the solar system in the classroom… that’s what’s going to get those test scores raised.” Either the ad man hasn’t seen all his commercials yet, or in his “creativity” he is showing his shakiness in sentence construction. If the students he hopes to reach are as shaky as he, maybe Cap’n Andy should have a bigger casting call than just for STEM[4] teachers and try to bring in a few ENG teachers too.

The problem with even that plan is that since this is a show boat rather than reality, you can bet that the acts won’t include “creativity” like scripted teaching, or any “invigorating” faculty meetings for curriculum mapping, or of “meaningful” interaction with students in online “classrooms,” or of faculty meetings to discuss RAT implementation, or of grading the essays of students who have spent twelve years pointing at answers on multiple choice tests instead of writing. You won’t see a teacher at his VAM review being told that he is a failure at teaching because of his score on a “measurement” that its proponent admits bears no relationship to “teacher observables.”

If these bright young persons do their own research in addition to watching commercials, they may conclude that the problem with all those pictures of frog-chasing kids is that NCLB & RAT test for English and math but not for science, so it’s hard to see how any teaching about frogs or planets will “get those test scores raised.” They might conclude that the data, if not the song and dance, suggest that becoming a teacher is like playing high-stakes roulette.

If they watched the 1936 version of Show Boat, they might conclude that the line most apposite to TEACH is Hattie McDaniel’s: “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

[1] No Child Left Behind

[2] RAce to the Top

[3] Yes, those very examples, which are taken as representative of the profession in two of the ads. Raise your hand if your classroom has surround-screen projection and your school offers easy and frequent field-trip access to a wildlife sanctuary for field work.

[4] Science, technology, engineering, mathematics

San Francisco is among the top ten cities in the country for both restaurants per capita and bars per capita—the only city so distinguished. Years ago a single “establishment” often served both purposes, facilitating liquid dining with large but undistinguished spreads of “complimentary” food. Businesses usually closed at noon on Good Friday, though that afternoon’s foot traffic went less towards Notre Dame des Victoires than to Paoli’s, Alfred’s, Jack’s, and Sam’s. But any afternoon of the week or year was bound to see lots of lubricated togetherness ballasted with stodgy fried gobbets and cocktail weenies. You could say it was a meal, I guess.

And you could say, I guess, that it is an academic conference when Queens University of Ontario, conducting a gathering on Transforming Our Learning Experiences, has a call for proposals that includes Research Paper Presentations of twenty-five minutes (with 10 – 15 minutes reserved for “entertaining questions”), Facilitated Poster Sessions, and Educational Speed Dating[1] sessions of twenty minutes. The longest sessions in the conference are fifty minutes: anything lasting hours or a day is banished to the “pre-conference.”

Those in attendance, like the Good Friday devotees of old San Francisco, can take time off from work by using something serious as an excuse for something easy on the mind. They can while away an afternoon filling up on dubious nutrients like Educational Speed Dating, Poster Sessions, and other cocktail weenies of intellect. They can lay out empty calories by “presenting” “research” in ten-minute talks. The main immediate problem in replacing the Symposium with the Happy Hour is that the participants will probably get only bottled water to drink. The main enduring problem is the lingering worry that schooling being transformed into something like this sort of teachers’ conference.

For the first time in my teaching career, I am teaching only 12^th-graders. What a huge distance of growth and maturation a student covers in his high-school years, and yet how vulnerable a senior can be! I share a bit in the anxiety of my students as they approach the launch of their university careers, partly in how I prepare them through coursework, sometimes in how I help them outside the classroom, and often in the work I do recommending them for college.

I have been fortunate to work always in schools that respected my choice to write, or not to write, a reference for a particular student. I understand that in some schools the teachers do not have this fundamental choice granted them. One principal grumbled one year when I refused to write a reference for a reprehensible little horror in my senior English class, but he stopped short of commanding me to write it. Students and their parents should see that choice as properly belonging to the teacher, and the parents should see that their students work and act in a way that will lead teachers to give them good references. Administrators should support this relationship.

Regrettably, I have not always been so fortunate as to avoid having to work with a dishonest college counselor. One year, after a colleague and I caught the counselor forging our names to recommendations we had not written for a couple of our students, we told the students that we would only write directly to the universities they applied to, requiring them to give us addresses and pre-stamped envelopes. When at last the forger-counselor left our school for browner pastures, I went back to posting references through the office.

Some counselors, though not criminals like this, “edit” teachers’ letters once they are turned into the office. I think the best way to ensure that teachers write good letters for their students is to show them how to do so, and then get out of their way. It also removes the temptation to “edit” out negative comments.

(If a student asks a teacher for a reference, the teacher should be honest with the student if he cannot write a good one.)

Having said all these negative things about counselors I must quickly report that my favorite “teacher” in high school was my own counselor, one of many good ones I have had the pleasure of working with. One must also note that the paperwork burden imposed on a college counselor by a class of students applying to ten or fifteen universities each is monumental. Though nightmares like the Common App breakdown this year seem more frequent than they should be, in general, IT has helped counselors manage this paperwork burden.

Where are the simplicities of yesteryear? I applied to three universities. Amazingly, these simplicities are occasionally to be found even now. One student of mine knew exactly which university he wanted. He applied to it and no other, and he was admitted. Maybe more such thinking would simplify the burden.

For, getting back to myself, even when minor editing has been made easy by word-processing, one still has to aim a letter at the intended audience. British universities? American? Other? Sometimes different approaches are required of me.

One reason that I do my best for the process in spite of the way it consumes time and attention is that I like the feeling that the universities soliciting these letters actually pay some attention to what they say. It suggests that there is a personal element, an element of thought in the process—that it is not a process at all, but a judgment.

* * *

Just after writing this posting I ran across an article about colleges that deny admission or retract offers of admission to students after discovering compromising material about them on the internet. The chief offenders seem to be presenters of material on drug or alcohol binges and vicious comments about others, particularly teachers. The article also mentioned action against the holders of obnoxious email addresses. (One year we advised a student to adopt a new email address for his admission material since his old one was horrible. I was not fond of him and would not have minded his keeping the horrible address, but a teacher is nothing if not selfless….) In another place I have written about the need to teach young people to cultivate a proper sense of audience in order to inoculate them against e-rubbish. What will happen when their essays are graded by machines that can be gulled, or when they are not assigned essays at all? I think we can already see.