The Ambler

Much mischief would vanish from educational discourse if the terms objective and subjective vanished first. Since that happy consummation is unlikely to take place, we must be careful how we use them. Currently, usage seems to coalesce along a continuum, on which the “subjective” side is the side of judgment, opinion, emotion, evaluation, flightiness, and interiority, while “objective” refers to measurement, fact, rationality, disinterestedness, groundedness, and consensus.

A moment’s thought will show us that this continuum is not very clear or very helpful. For example, many of us profess the value of statistical significance in scientific studies. Fine, but the .5 level of statistical significance as a gold standard for data is an entirely arbitrary construct—a subjective construct, if you will. I don’t mean to downgrade the validity of the concept of statistical significance, but to suggest that the usual subjective/objective=bad/good opposition is not a very helpful way of analyzing its value. The same goes for “value”-“added” “metrics,” whose sometimes huge “margin of error” is simply ignored by the people using the statistics as a way of evaluating teachers. One case highlighted a teacher whose “metrics,” when taken with the needed caution about margin of error, showed that she might be the worst teacher in New York—or better than half of them. Partisans of the idea that numbers confer precision were not even discomfited by such results: they simply ignored margin of error in using VAMs. Sounds rather arbitrary and flighty to me.

When The New York Times reports that “subjective” evaluations of teachers don’t work in Texas, one must turn over the story a bit to see that the real problem is not “subjectivity.” That is a red herring. The real problem is twofold.  Evaluators who are trapped in their offices by balls & chains of paperwork, or who stay there by choice in regal disdain of teachers, are unwilling or unable to get out to the classrooms very often. One solution would be peer evaluation. Another would be to cut the burden of administrative paperwork.Implementing such solutions has nothing to do with replacing “subjectivity” by  “objectivity;” rather, it requires replacing an inadequate and arbitrary system of judgment by an adequate one well grounded in good sense. The solution would also require people who see a spade to call it a spade. Gwendolyn Fairfax’s superb dodge won’t do[1].

The honest art of judgment lacks the magical appeal of numbers and formulae, but it allows—requires—the people using it to look each other in the eye and themselves in the mirror. That is not a question of objectivity vs. subjectivity; it is a question of intellectual and moral courage.

At St. John’s College, Cambridge, they still say grace in Latin before dinner, a gong signaling the students when they may begin to eat. This is no surprise to one of my seniors, who will be going to another Cambridge college where they say grace in Latin. He is hoping to join one of the choirs there, perhaps even King’s College Choir.

But what moved the singer & rapper Niyi to throw over his musical career to study English and education at St. John’s so that he can become an English teacher? His chief inspiration came from the English teachers he had while studying his A-levels. And what keeps him going at Cambridge even though, he reports, his first exams were “a disaster”? He counts no fewer than eleven people there ready to help him out, from the woman who makes his bed to the chaplain, to his senior tutor, to his individual teachers.

This is obviously a place that cares, in its way, for the success of its students. While it would probably be impossible to duplicate this level of care in most colleges, it is worth remembering that Niyi thanks people for his success, not software. Something tells me that at the right school he will be a great success as a teacher, and that like the drama teacher in my recent posting on Rooms of Requirement, he will have a classroom in which humane values prevail.

The dream school would have a “Room of Requirement,” that deus ex camera in the Harry Potter books that provides whatever its users require. It is also the attic of the ages, a repository for everything from Harry’s dangerously annotated potions book to Professor Trelawney’s empty sherry bottles.

But if a school can’t have a Room of Requirement, the next best thing would be a room like my school’s “Drama Storeroom” presided over discreetly by the drama teacher from a curtained-off desk. Unlike the Room of Requirement, the Drama Storeroom, contrary to what its name suggests, is, yes, a storeroom, but it is also and maybe more importantly a refuge. Things in storage are not quite so heaped & crowded that there isn’t room for stuffed furniture, desks, and some equipment.

The last time I had to go in, something I rarely and reluctantly do, I bumped into one of my seniors. He is finished for the year, having taken his IB exams, but he was there to finish the editing of the movie he has been producing and directing for the last two years, which will have its premiere next month. An 11^th-grader was on the far side of the room playing his guitar. Two other 11^th-graders were half working on their project and half loafing at ease and inviting their souls.

The reason I am reluctant to go in is that the drama teacher is one of those individuals who can be cool without being lax. Her room is therefore an entirely comfortable place for the students who hang out there, whether they have a project, a song to sing, or just the need to decompress. Of course, in the run-up to a play or musical, the Drama Storeroom is a beehive, but even then it remains a room of ease as well as a locus of work.

Such it was recently, when the school musical played to full houses. Book, lyrics, and music were written by the drama teacher; the instrumentals were produced by a graduate; of course the vocals were live. It was a pleasant show, though it entailed a lot of work on the students.

One day one of those students asked to be excused from an essay test, so I wrote the drama teacher saying he was welcome to go if he really had stuff to do, but I didn’t want him to use the preparations as an excuse to cut a class. (I am not cool.) The drama teacher wrote back saying that he was indeed needed, so I in turn said “Fine, just make sure to wag a finger at him if he is being sly.” He ultimately showed up for the essay test, so I guess they had a little chat. He felt no upset or animus towards me, showing that whatever the drama teacher had said, it was just the right thing to say, as usual.

This teacher is clearly a paragon, but if she taught in Florida, or Tennessee, or other RAT[1] states, she would not be evaluated on her knowledge, on her hard work, on her discretion, on her sympathy, on her insistence on high standards, and on her humanity. Instead, she would be evaluated at least partly on how students did on “objective” tests, and these not in drama but in other subjects. Some of the students might not even be her students!

Not far from the drama storeroom is an incommodious but acoustically friendly place that I call the Cave of Music because so many of the school’s instrumentalists use it as a kind of practice space. Most of them are in the Chinese orchestra, but one plays his marimba there. One day he was practicing away, and I realized that the piece he was playing was the praeludium to Bach’s first suite for unaccompanied cello. I couldn’t resist going by, and I found him there. “Can you play that praeludium through?” I asked. “You mean…” and he played the first two measures. I nodded. He then played the entire movement for me with the poise of a polished performer. When he ended I applauded, and he took a bow. Though it was not quite like hearing the late Janos Starker play the same movement, it had its charms. The music that comes out of the Cave is a fine thing, whether Chinese classical music or Bach on the marimba. What the Cave of Music shares with the Drama Storeroom is that it is a humane space for something besides test preparation.

If a more vivid and startling opening exists in an essay than the sentence beginning George Orwell’s “Marrakech,” I don’t know it:

“As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few minutes later.”

This and the two paragraphs that follow describe with vivid plainness a quotidian horror of a kind that often provoked Orwell to keen thinking about mankind under conditions that he thought could be bettered, but were not. Marrakech led Orwell to wonder why people in fortunate circumstances tend to think of those “beneath” them in dehumanizing ways: “Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects?”

This use of a mass noun (stuff) to describe people who should qualify as individuals was startling in 1939. How things have change since then is evident from the lack of surprise that greeted a recent report on American education, which referred to students as human capital—as, really, just another kind of brown stuff. Is it any surprise that in an ambience of acceptance like this, the de-individuation of students implicit in the MOOC and “blended learning” models of education is gaining ground?

To Jacques Barzun’s dictum that “All systematic devices for generating good writing are a mistake” we may now add a caution by Harvard’s President Drew Gilpin Faust about the related topic of machine-graded writing. She is justifiably worried that grading software will miss “irony and elegance” or, for that matter, anything “it hasn’t been programmed to see.” The critical approach of MIT’s Les Perelman has been to have satirical fun with grading software. These eminent cautions matter because we seem to be moving towards a swarmteaching paradigm that will require the adoption of mechanized and mediated inspection of students’ knowledge. What if it doesn’t work very well?

That even Harvard MOOCs are not immune to the pressure to impoverish discourse and evaluation in favor of mass grading is shown by the effort of Professor Gregory Nagy to produce his MOOC CB22x on the ancient Greek hero. How will he grade thousands of students? By assigning multiple-choice quizzes instead of papers. Two difficulties, which I have treated in the past, present themselves. One is that the grade for the sort of qualitative understanding needed for such a course will turn on fine distinctions that cannot be justified. At some point the difference between Excellent (A) and Good (B) may come down to one answer on one multiple-choice question. That is absurd.

The other problem is that the questions themselves remove material from the purview of maieutic discourse where some of it belongs, placing it squarely (and incorrectly) in the domain of simple recognition. An example of this possibility is Professor Nagy’s question about whether Zeus’s will is to cause the Trojan War or the Iliad. This would be an interesting question for the chance it would give a class to discuss the problem of agency in the ancient world, using as examples Zeus and the lesser gods. Students might note that Homer himself invoked not Zeus but Calliope to “cause” his poem by inspiration, and wonder how her agency and Zeus’s collaborated or collided. They might shape these ideas in a well-written, polished essay after the discussion, drawing on their knowledge of the Iliad. But not in CB22x, where the answer is simply that Zeus willed to cause the Iliad. Professor Nagy’s claim that multiple-choice questions are almost as good as essays and discussion appears to be disproven by his own example.

The second component of machine grading is that students will be required to “read” on-line texts, and that their “reading” will be “checked” by seeing how they “annotate” it. Recall for a moment Jack Torrance in The Shining, typing away at his manuscript in the Overlook Hotel. His wife hears the typing and thinks he is working. In fact, he is typing again and again, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Students who have adopted Jack’s philosophy on a MOOC could tag & paste this saying at random on their “reading” to show the nanny machine that they are “doing” it. Who is going to know otherwise in a blizzard of thousands of “notes”? Not Professor Nagy. By contrast, two good questions asked in a live class could reveal sloppy or undone reading. I know: I have used them to do so. It is harder for a student to decide to bamboozle a live teacher than a machine nanny. One morning in my Modern Poetry course in college, Professor Koch sniffed out massive neglect of a homework assignment. He went around the class asking students questions that they couldn’t answer. Finally the usually genial Koch burst out angrily with “Why don’t you read the goddamned poems?” After that, we did. We did.

Third will be “online discussion boards.” Just what we need: classroom discourse like “Comments” columns, home of what Shakespeare called the reply churlish.  (There are exceptions that prove the rule.) But churlishness is not the only problem: Kevin McGrath, a coordinator of CB22x, sputters, “You have a group who are—they talk about Christ, or about pride. They haven’t really engaged with what’s going on.” In a classroom the reply churlish could be checked, and the pronouncement pompous punctured. In a MOOC, who will rout the rubbish?

An answer may be in kinds of hybrid courses being tried out at various places and examined in the New Yorker article linked above[1]. The examination must be very careful and ready to detect wishful thinking and tendentious reporting. Dr. Faust’s worries are justified, and perhaps the answer will turn out to be the one Amherst has given: a No to MOOCs with Harvard. That should be no surprise. Robert Frost, who taught poetry at Amherst for a number of years, thought talking about poetry and marking for the understanding of it a very subtle thing. One of his students reported a class where a classmate gave a stupendous reading of a poem they were studying. Frost looked at him and said, “You get an A forever.” No MOOC will ever say that.

The “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) act gave the US twelve years to achieve an unprecedented mass apotheosis by 2014. In comparison, putting a man on the moon involved one man and one moon. The man was already highly proficient, and the moon was obligingly predictable. The thousands of engineers and scientists that were mustered to help this one highly proficient man meet his objective contrast to the teachers and their drivers mustered to help millions of less-than-proficient children achieve a proficiency that they do not have, often do not want, and sometimes simply cannot manage. Now, a year from that wildly improbable deadline, we are nowhere near achieving the goal—as any sensible person could have predicted.

But sense is not part of the cutting edge of education. Hence “RAce to the Top” (RAT), thanks to which music teachers’ skill at instruction is being evaluated according to their students’ scores on English tests. Sometimes it is evaluated according to the scores of children who are not their students. It is only a matter of time before the RAT goes belly up as well.

Anyone with a sense of the history of misbegotten educational movements in the U.S. must be wondering what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards the schoolhouse to be born. My candidate for Beast of the Year is the Common Core. Its goal is “to create the next generation of K–12 standards in order to help ensure that all students are college and career ready no later than the end of high school.” Any educationist material referring to a “next generation” strongly tempts me to take out my Baloney Bingo board, but let it pass for now: we have a more ominous target to take aim at. What did we learn from NCLB’s promising universal proficiency in twelve years? Not what we should have if CC promises universal college and career readiness by the end of high school. And it does so by requiring that all 12^th-grade students, some of whom now use study guides over a period of weeks to get through Of Mice and Men, will in twelve years be able to read Thomas Paine and G. K. Chesterton unaided[1].

Did I say twelve years? Sorry: that was NCLB. New York is already testing its students on the Common Core, which has not yet been implemented in its schools. Students report being nervous, which shows they have more sense than their state’s education administrators. I wonder how the teachers feel. At least New York’s teachers don’t receive bad ratings if the students in their music classes can’t pass an English test, but that is cold comfort. Will they receive bad ratings if their students do not succeed in a curriculum that has not been implemented?

It’s back! The undead duck (canard in French) that class size doesn’t matter is on the loose again, quacking now in The New York Times. The question must therefore be asked:  why do teachers say they would reject a $10,000/year raise if it meant an increase of 3 in class size? Why do parents want smaller classes for their children? The obvious answer is that class size does matter.

Garlic, stakes, & silver bullets don’t seem to work, so let’s examine the “science” behind the claim. Very little of it is reliable, even by the wildly generous standards of the Ed Biz, but one study most people seem to accept is the Tennessee STAR Study. In it there appears to be no difference in the “educational effect” of classes of fifteen and of twenty-three.

This is a difference in class size of 8, nearly three times the number a plurality of teachers would not want  $10,000/year to accept. Something appears not to add up, but the reality[1] is not that the educational effect is equal. Rather, it is that a class of fifteen is no better at preparing its students for the Stanford Achievement Tests in English and Mathematics than is a class of twenty-three. Raise your hand if you think that everything learned in a classroom—even an English or math classroom—is assessed by the SATs. No hands at all? Very good! This class is obviously not gulled by studies that use inadequate proxy values.

As yesterday’s posting points out, much that students learn in a classroom goes beyond what can be transmitted by didactic instruction or assessed by multiple-choice tests. What is more, the SATs do not penalize students for wrong answers, thus giving them a probabilistic “gift” of 20% of their guesses as right answers. I have dealt with “test-taking skills” that have nothing to do with knowledge, but the answers gained by the use of these “skills” or by guessing are counted no differently from genuine knowledge. Let a student try to bamboozle the teacher of a small class in a carefully graded essay or a personal interview and see how far he gets.

This is what the parents and teachers who want small classes recognize. When a writer therefore says that mandating large classes is “good policy but bad politics,” she has got it quite wrong. It is bad policy; and the politics, which simply recognize that truth, are good.

The learning most easily forgotten is the kind of knowledge transmitted by the didactic instruction of textbooks and lectures. We are so used to this kind of learning that some of us may even ask, “Is there any other kind?” One answer is playing itself out remarkably in San Jose, California, but before focusing on it, here are answers to that question given by Mortimer Adler[1] (and others): 1) the kind of understanding promoted by questioning, dialogue, conversation, recitations, and other live dialectical processes; 2) the kind of skill cultivated by a good coach who requires practice at which he notices, advises, models, encourages, and reproves. In both cases the teacher involves the student, who emerges from these encounters wiser and more skilled than when he entered them.

“Just the facts, Ma’am,” Sergeant Friday used to say. That may be fine for someone whose job is to gather evidence, but a prosecutor must synthesize a case from that evidence, a judge must pass judgment on it—and a student must be able to act on it; and for these activities information alone won’t do. The kind of stuff transmissible by lecture and textbook tends to be “just the facts,” but they are far from the end of learning. A university student needs to understand that his education requires him (we hope!) not just to absorb information but to analyze it, synthesize from it, and judge the results. To learn to do so requires more than a lecture can give because it requires live, personal interaction.

And that is what the California State University at San Jose appears to be discovering. Its engineering course in circuits has gone from a pass rate of 59% to 91%. This remarkable improvement in a single year is the result of having the didactic instruction delivered on line, combined with the adoption of small classes that focus on projects. Presumably these projects are authentic, and the projectors are guided by a teacher who can coach and question as the projects proceed. The reporter says, “it is hard to tell” whether the improvement is due to the adoption of the online lectures or the adoption of the small classes. No, it isn’t hard to tell. Any experienced teacher knows  what will happen when you supplement lectures with a live work in progress. If online lectures free up teachers to get down with their students, they are bound to have good results when the teachers take their mandate seriously. Here is an example of people who have made an important discovery about the value of 1) and 2) above. It would be a pity if everyone thought the victory was due to the canned talking heads alone.

One problem with “blended learning” is that though good teachers have been doing the real thing for years without calling it an awful name, it is now turning into a chant that replaces thought, a bit like “Four legs good, two legs better” in Orwell. The other is that in an age where restaurant-goers can be persuaded to pay good money to eat dishes of foam from the blender, school-goers may end up paying good money for “blended learning” of a similar kind. One really hopes that CSUSJ and other public universities can proceed along the trail blazed by Provost Ellen Junn[2] and not end up feeding their students easy dishes of foam for three or four years.

All teachers know of sentimental turns like the answer to the question “What do you make?” asked of a teacher, or of movies like Dead Poets’ Society and Mr. Holland’s Opus.  We have all seen those urban-legendary lists of Teacher Rules from 1872, compared to which we presumably bask in the meridian sunshine of modern education. What many teachers really bask in appears in Pryzbylewski’s classroom in Season 4 of The Wire. Which will it be? Little wheels spin every day for teachers. Now, it is true that little wheels spin for everyone, but why add to their number by choosing a chancy profession? For that is what teaching is becoming.

You may place your first bet when your parents pay, or you borrow, tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance your education for a job that in many places does not pay very well. Will you find work, as one friend did, at an excellent school that pays well and offers housing for faculty and families? Or will you get work in Union City as another friend did, commuting by jalopy from Manteca because it is too expensive to live where he works?[1] Which of these friends do you think has a hope of paying back his student loan? Of course, you could be a Finn in Finland, where university education up to the master’s level is both compulsory for teachers and tuition-free. In that case the bet will be smaller to start, but since Finnish teachers earn salaries competitive with engineers’ and other professionals’, they stand a better chance, if chance it can be called, to find themselves solvent five years into their career.

Which brings us to the second spin of the wheel: will you be a teacher in five years’ time? The odds are nearly even that you will not, but as usual the raw odds do not really tell the tale. They are far higher if you are spun into some Ed Biz Horror Show. Consider Pryzbylewski, or Prez, as he is called in season 4 of The Wire. Now, he goes to education because he is a failed policeman, but let us pass over the unpleasant truth that some people in the U.S. choose teaching faute de mieux. Prez finds himself having to teach a very difficult group of students how to perform well on the standardized tests they must pass so the school is not closed for failing the provisions of NCLB.[2]

I won’t spoil the plot if you haven’t seen The Wire; instead I’ll move on to the next turn of the wheel: what kind of administrator will you work under? Much is made of poor teachers, but little about poor principals. Will he or she be a competent educational leader, a Marshal Stalin, or a Captain Bligh? The unfortunate truth is that many administrators run their schools ineffectively. That is partly because they have not been very well educated in administration and do not have the instincts of leadership. It is also due to the deficiency of governing principles for them to run things by. They might do worse, with good will and competence, than to follow Edwards Deming’s 14 principles, which have been successfully applied in business[3], and could be adapted to education administration too. Instead, all too often the principle of administration in a U.S. school is “My way or the highway.” This even though “my way” often runs counter to good sense or is supported by only the flimsiest trash “research.” Teachers who don’t adopt “my way” often lose on this spin of the wheel. “No man, no problem,” as the Marshal said of the Cossacks. But no sooner does this kind of “educational leader” get one “problem” solved than he is often off on another scheme, and thus the wheel spins again.

As for Captain Bligh: He can be found everywhere from Atlanta to your own home town. An example from my own experience was that of a colleague at a school where I used to teach. The veteran of nearly thirty years of teaching, she was highly successful with her I.B. and non-I.B. students and took pride in being able to motivate the brighter and lesser luminaries in her classes. Though her colleagues sometimes wished that she was less loquacious, all respected her professionally and many counted her as a friend. But not the new principal, who took an immediate and strong dislike to her. For the next few years we had to watch him repeatedly and publicly browbeat and humiliate her. The last straw came when her husband, a distinguished scientist, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. My colleague asked for a long weekend off to attend his investiture, but the principal refused permission.  Shortly afterwards she announced her retirement at the end of the academic year. I saw her two years later, and she was a changed woman, but not at our own little roulette table. I hear now from a friend who has been in teaching for over twenty-five years. Among those who passed through his classroom was a future Senior Wranger of Cambridge, and he had the reputation of being particularly good at engaging his brightest students, though he claimed no credit for the success of the future Senior Wrangler. But starting a couple of years ago he came under the baleful eye of a new principal, who would call him in for “meetings” that included shouting, name-calling, and threats. He wrote me recently to say he is burnt out. In both cases, a bad roll of the wheel.

The RAT roll, occasioned by the RAce to the Top program, is the chance a teacher has of being rated “ineffective” by “value”-“added” “metrics”[4] imposed on schools by the Department of Education. The relationship between these “metrics” and actual teaching is thoroughly debunked, but the crazy spin continues.  Now we have a Federal lawsuit brought against the State of Florida by a number of its teachers. Florida evaluates its teachers using VAMs of students who are not in their classes. In what kind of world do teachers literally need to make a Federal case of an absurd educational practice in order to end it? The alternative is to be spun out of teaching by a bad and arbitrary turn of the VAM wheel.

The last turn of the wheel  is the danger of being victimized by “reforms” that cut your job or your pay.  One example: being replaced by an on-line “learning” “facilitator” as schools move to replace better, more expensive teaching by cheaper, lousier teaching. There are other kinds of budgetary danger too—in this case, your budget. What if, after thirty years of teaching, you find yourself paid not according to the usual formula (seniority plus degrees) but according to your VAM rating? The chance that your pay could be cut by this arbitrary process is a real, looming danger.

Someone carefully considering a teaching career must consider all these possibilities. In the right circumstances, teaching is an incomparable pleasure, but do you want to enter a profession where finding yourself able to continue to retirement is a matter of luck?

A perfect storm of marking: my senior IB English students wrote a practice exam paper, and my junior IB English students wrote a commentary on something they are reading. The Theory of Knowledge students submitted paragraphs on historiography. I am marking ToK papers for the I. B. Organization. In spite of good will and a butt of iron tempered by twenty-five years’ sitting at the desk after class, I was behind. I thought of the sign the father of a boyhood friend of mine had on the desk in his study: “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”

Time for triage, since I will be working, as Barzun says, like a dog, but with triage; otherwise, I will sink without a trace. The seniors need affirmation and general words of encouragement, which are easier to write quickly than are proofreading and detailed comments, which the juniors need. The ToK classes revisited the material discussed in the paragraphs. Clearly the juniors “win” the attention of my red pen.

All this happens when I am not in the classroom teaching my students, but something has happened in my conditions of work to make it easier to manage than it was during my first or second year of teaching. I mean more than just experience. At my current school I have about half the classroom contact hours I had at that first school, and 55% as many students.

Even so, I am not done. Enjoy your week. Next week, I will enjoy mine.