Privileged Suffering

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There’s a famous passage in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in which a planet-sized computer, tasked with finding “the meaning of life” finally reports its results after hundreds of years of analysis. The answer, it says, is 42. That’s my feeling about grades, they provide an absurdly simple answer to very complicated questions. You feel like something happened, but in fact nothing happened. Still, as this story about grade inflation at Princeton shows (“Type-A-Plus Students Chafe at Grade Deflation“), just because something is totally absurd, doesn’t mean it can’t have efficacy in the world.

I’m never sure what grade inflation really means, in the end, but at Princeton they have apparently brought it under control, reducing the total number of A students from 50% to 40%. The problem, apparently, is that no other schools have followed suit. This means, as a student reports, the possible “nightmare scenario, if you will, is that you apply with a 3.5 from Princeton and someone just as smart as you applies with a 3.8 from Yale.” I suppose it’s true that in a highly competitive environment that .3 would make a big difference, if you define ”a big difference” as settling for Standford when you wanted M.I.T.

Despite the right-wing’s ongoing paranoia about college students, I think this reflects the profound conservatism of most undergraduates. (the 60s were a rare exception.) As Doug Henwood said recently (talking about health care reform), American culture is rooted in traditional notions of rugged individualism; these exercises in meritocratic-hair-splitting are one of the best illustrations I’ve seen recently. Education is (or should be) a collective enterprise, and it’s a shame we can’t bring ourselves to adopt forms of learning assessment that don’t generate these bizarre competitions.

Posted in: Professional, Writing

It’s Complicated

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If there’s any liberatory impulse in education it’s the existential challenge of complication. Especially in undergraduate education, the goals is to move students away from the simple, emotion-dominated decision making common to both adolescents and commercial culture, and towards the more complex, nuanced, rationality-dominated thinking that is the ideal goal or most important skill of both adulthood and intellectual culture.

Adults and intellectuals can fall (back) into simplistic thinking almost as easily as adolescents, depending on the subject and circumstances. (Love comes to mind.) That’s why I favor research that works as a counterweight to conventional thinking; it’s complicating adult simplicity. That’s especially true of intellectuals my age (especially but not all men) and technology (which we love as much as our dogs). This piece (“Study: Not All Kids Are Computer Whizzes“) fits the bill nicely.

Actually this is a brief radio interview with Dr. Allison Druin (University of Maryland; Director, Human-Computer Interaction Lab. You can find out more about her research here). One off the great cliches of computers in general and computers and writing in particular is the idea that the younger you are the more you know about technology. In my experience, it’s more true that the bigger the age difference the greater the differences in technological knowledge.

Men my (50-ish) age know a lot about the personal computer but often little about game consoles. Men 30 years younger are most often the opposite. Dr. Druin’s research, too, suggests that there may well be developmental and cognitive differences in how we use new communication technologies, in this case, search engine results. Young kids, as it turns out, tend to find conventional search engine results difficult to interpret. Dr. Druin is investigating alternatives that may work better.

Posted in: Writing

@TEOTD

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Every writer has a weakness; mine’s spelling. It’s probably worsened by my sometimes spastic typing skills, and my sometimes sticky keyboard. (My other weakness is eating breakfast sitting here at the computer; bagel crumbs get in everything.) So I was fascinated to hear researchers suggest that texting might in fact teach a certain kind of language awareness that might help students learn to spell (“Phone texting ‘helps pupils to spell“).

I’m not quite sure that Britain and the United States have quite the same context surrounding language in general and learning in particular. I haven’t taught in Britain, but here the problematic use of texting codes is often closely related to an entire complex of issues related to that matrix of ideas that surround identity and authority in schools. In my experience it’s rarely a lack of spelling skill, in other words, and more a matter of resisting what some students consider an alien way of thinking.

That, in turn, may well be related to the sheer mass of media exposure described in another recent report (“Report: Media use by teens, tweens grows to 53 hours a week“).It’s not the media use that worries me– although I’m old fashioned enough to wish that there was more reading– it’s the advertising. I’d like to know how much of this media exposure is accompanied by commercial advertising directed at children. Ads are bad enough for adults; for children they are a disaster.

U.S. advertising is profoundly anti-social because it’s so narcissistic. Education is nothing if not social, and it demands attitudes and skills– putting off rewards, discipline, listening, cooperation– that contradicts (and hopefully partially counters) consumer culture. Children may well be learning important linguistic sensitivities by texting, but they only have the phone in the first place because advertisers convinced them they had to have it. I have to wonder if that dynamic is really helpful.

Posted in: Language, Writing

Yes and No; Mostly No

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Sometimes it’s refreshingly difficult to tell where a writer is coming from; sometimes it’s maddening; other times, it makes you wonder if the writer is trying to be deceptive or, alternately, is just too clever by half. I alternated between the last two thoughts reading a recent review of the Harvard professor Louis Menand’s recent book of essays, “The Marketplace of Ideas” (“The Opening of the American Mind“). I still can’t tell if I should feel deceived…

It’s hard to disagree with the idea that a kind of low-minded professionalism has crippled U.S. higher education. We surely suffer from a profoundly self-centered institutional culture that’s sharply protective of its own material interests. I think everyone in academia has personal experiences with this phenomena. I knew a professor who hated the faculty union’s egalitarianism. Since he was the most famous person in the department, he would say, he should be better paid.

More broadly, this political short sightedness is reflected in the gulf that separates the super privileged in the richest institutions and the rest of the system. The concentration of financial and social capital at the top of the U.S. educational hierarchy– from kindergarten to graduate school– would make the most powerful corporate oligarch blush. Economic crisis seems to have only acerbated these problems. Regressive policies– from tuition hikes to furloughs– are the order of the day.

Given this conservatism, it’s hard to imagine what Menand means when he claims that the academy is liberal because, “95 percent of humanities and social-science professors voted for Kerry; zero percent voted for Bush.” Is this really a good measure of cultural or political diversity? Could it be, instead, that Bush’s often explicit anti-intellectual ethos alienated a lot of teachers? Whatever the merits of Menand’s ideas, if he sticks to this one, he’s lost my vote.

Posted in: Writing