Still snow, no day.

Anyone notice that I blogged about Cops right between two blog entries lamenting the loss of American intellectualism?

Irony. I haz it.

Snow no day

Just commenting that it's snowing, and although I'll probably fall down walking outside of my building and then slip and slide driving home, the University will not cancel classes. Jerks.

"Americans iz Dum" is Everywhere!

Lots of others are blogging about Jacoby's new book and her editorial in the Post. Open Culture, one of my favorite blogs, has a favorable commentary and compares it to other recent books including Al Gore's Assault on Reason (out in paperback in April).

Joanne Jacobs, another educational blogger, uses the article to decry the criticisms of teachers "teaching to the test" and lambaste rote learning, which as I recall from my days as a French teacher, actually works quite well to get students speaking the language. Makes me feel like saying "Darn Liberal Bloggers" until I remember, oh yeah, aren't I a Hillary Clinton supporter? Guess that makes me a liberal blogger too.

Guilty Pleasures

When my boyfriend was away taking bar classes every weekend, on Friday nights I would order takeout and watch "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted." It's definitely lowbrow compared to when I lived along and watched, at the very least, CSI.

Now I come to discover that this is a guilty pleasure for many. 5 million people a week watch it! And mostly because of the lovable criminals. One I watched recently featured a lady who beat up her boyfriend and got arrested for it. They came to the trailer park, and heard "both sides of the story" from the slightly drunk suspects. At the end the encounter dissolved into the boyfriend saying, "I love her but she beats me!" Now that's entertainment.

"For 20 Years, A Pleasure So Guilty it's Criminal." (Carlson, P. The Washington Post. 2/19/08)

I'm not the only snob

A good friend just sent me the link to this editorial, written by Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason.

I agree with a lot of what she says, but I do think we need to be cautious that reading online is still reading. I encounter a lot of students who are incredibly intelligent every day who rarely read a book. Does it bother me that the literary lions I read in college now seem obsolete? Sure... but I don't think that by forcing people read on paper is the way to get them there. We have to draw a line between preserving the good in the classical canon and throwing out the useful in the current one.

"The Dumbing of America." (Jacoby, S. The Washington Post. 2/17/08.)

Web 2.0

I'm thinking of starting a new blog for using web 2.0 in the college classroom to create a customized learning experience.

It seems there's tons out there for k-12.... "Bloggers to Learn From," for example.

Whattya think?

Rah Rah Rhee

Yikes. A nice example, here, of a machine bureaucracy.

At McDonalds, the quintessential machine bureaucracy, employees receive a detailed checklist entailing how to serve customers. There is a smile. Check. There is eye contact. Check. the customer has to give the order only once. Check. The order is assembled in the proper sequence. Check. Drinks are poured in the proper sequence. Check. Proper amount of ice. Check.

In a machine bureaucracy, management holds all the power, makes all the decisions. The employees - burger flippers, cashiers, and now, at least in DC, teachers - do little more that run off the script. They are easy to replace.

At 27 failing DC schools, at least part of the solution in elementary school classrooms would be scripted lessons. A teacher receives a script and reads it, and that is teaching. It's a "teacher-proof" curriculum, and I think the real goal behind "innovations" such as these is to break the back of the tenured teachers and the union. Once they quit, the schools can hire "better" teachers. Or at least ones who don't remember life before scripted teaching.

Makes me wish you could just fire bad teachers instead of insulting the profession in this way. On some level, policy makers think we are little more than automatons - machines to recite and have students repeat.

Every plan like this has multiple goals. I don't see how it helps to further denigrate teachers and our profession. That being said, there are plenty of crappy, lazy, not very smart teachers out there. We must find a way to rid the system of them without insulting the artistry of the good teachers who are also out there.

Unlike burger flippers, most teachers received certification and a certain level of education to do their jobs. It's not supposed to be a high school or college job to get you through - it's supposed to be the destination.

Ms. Rhee, I'm disappointed. Fire bad teachers and bad principals. Find a way to do it so that we don't become shadows of what once was a great profession.

"Rhee Weighs Ideas to Fix 27 Schools." (Haynes, V.D. The Washington Post. 2/18/08)

Pedagogy and Learning

First, just to clarify...

pedagogy, n. The art, occupation, or practice of teaching. Also: the theory or principles of education; a method of teaching based on such a theory. (From OED, 2005)

learning, vbl, n. 1. The action of the vb. LEARN. a. The action of receiving instruction or acquiring knowledge; spec. in Psychol., a process which leads to the modification of behaviour or the acquisition of new abilities or responses, and which is additional to natural development by growth or maturation; (freq. opp. insight).

So. There we are. The question is, how to we update learning? And is our desire to have the theory of how people learn getting in the way of how people actually learn? I watched one of my students stand in front of the classroom yesterday and ask if the rest of the class remembered 2nd grade, when they were excited about learning. She held up a textbook as an example of the irrelevancy of current education practices to their lives, and said, "Let's get back to 2nd grade." It was inspiring, to say the least.

And then I come across these two items in other blogs. It's a movement, people!

This from 2¢ Worth. "Our efforts should not be to integrate technology into the classroom, but to define and facilitate a new platform on which the classroom operates. When the platform is confined by classroom walls, and learning experiences spring from static textbooks and labored-over white boards, and the learning is highly prescribed, then pedagogy is required."

"Podcast: With Dean Shareski on _Natural_ Global Collaboration and Networked Learning." (Burell, C. Beyond School. 2/13/08)

"Is Pedagogy Getting in the Way of Learning?" (Warlick, D. 2¢ Worth. No idea of date.)

Ok, ok - I'm a horrible snob.

But this book seems dead-on to me. The review in the NYT is also funny. This phrase, thought, is what struck me as something that plays out in my daily life - at work, in my classes, in my encounters with students, on TV.

"something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way."

I recall a time I had an argument with a friend about a particular issue. I love this friend dearly, so I'm going to attempt to change details. It wasn't about the friend, really, but the idea expressed. We were having a conversation with a conservative about the issue of obesity in America. The view of the conservative young man was that people were responsible for their own weight, health, etc - it was their fault for being fat, basically. This view has been repeated on the Republican campaign trail - we need to create health care programs that encourage people to take care of themselves, realize the costs, etc. My friend was adamant that it was the responsibility of the government to regulate the things that make people fat. She started vehemently defending the idea that it's the availability of junk food that is making people fat.

I later asked her if she had any data on the issue, because there could be many reasons why people, especially in certain populations, are overweight. Lack of safe places to exercise, cultural factors that encourage heaviness, and an overabundance of junk food could all be factors. Without some information, thought, her argument was based on little more than an opinion.

Now she turned her ire on me - it was clear she was passionate about the issue, but knew little about it. "I'm not going to do research on every issue, Nicole, this is just something I feel." I tried one last time to make my case that a little information would help her to make a good argument when confronted with conservative, "pull yourself up by the bootstrap" jerk-faces, but then I gave up.

I know not everyone can/has the desire to attend a graduate program, but I believe that graduate programs improve your writing skills, teach you to verify your opinions and views with research, and generally improve your ability to think critically about issues. I don't like it when people argue with me and they've done no research, and I've done plenty. Not that all research is right, but if you argue with a basis of "this is how I feel...." it's impossible to argue with that. And then I'm left feeling as if my years of work and study on a particular issue means nothing in our culture.

I have so much more to say now that I've started writing about this - moral relativism, the academic tendency to believe in quantitative rather than qualitative data - but I'll hold off.


"Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?" (Cohen, P. The New York Times. 2/14/08).

Irony

I open my planner today at 3:17pm, and come across the road map/compass slip that you put into the ruler that keeps the place on your day. I had all these big plans to outline the big things I need to accomplish this week (Stephen Covey's "Big Rocks"), and really take back my life by defining my own roles.

But now it's 3:24pm and I've spent most of the day doing what everybody else wants me to do.