Brief Stats Update: I appear to have written two more books
Posted: October 9, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, education, feedback, higher education, measurement, MIKE, reflection, SWEDE, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, work/life balance, workload 2 CommentsOn May 6th, I congratulated Mark Guzdial on his 1000th post and I noted that I had written 102,136 words, an average of 676 words per post, with 151 posts over 126 days. I commented that, at that rate, I could expect to produce about 180,000 more words by the end of the year, for a total of about 280,000. So, to summarise, my average posting level was at rate of 1.2 posts per day, and 676 words per post.
Today, I reanalysed the blog to see how I was going. This post will be published on Tuesday the 9th, my time, and the analysis here does not include itself. So, up until all activity on Monday the 8th, Central Australian Daylight Saving Time, here are the stats.
Total word count: 273,639. Total number of posts: 343. Number of words per post: 798. Number of posts per day: 1.23. I will reach my end of year projected word count in about 9 days.
I knew that I had been writing longer posts, you may remember that I’ve deliberately tried to keep the posts to around 1,000 where possible, but it’s obvious that I’m just not that capable of writing a short post! In the long term, I’d expect this to approach 1,000 words/post because of my goal to limit myself to that, with the occasional overshoot. I’m surprised by the consistency in number of posts per day. The previous average was a smidgen under 1.2 but I wanted to clarify that there has been a minor increase. Given that my goal was not to necessarily hit exactly 1/day but to set aside time to think about learning and teaching every day, I’m happy with that.
The word count, however, is terrifying. One of the reasons that I wanted to talk about this is to identify how much work something like this is, not to either over inflate myself or to put you off, but to help anyone out there who is considering such a venture. Let me explain some things first.
- I have been typing in one form or another since 1977. I was exposed to computers early on and, while I’ve never been trained to touch type, I have that nasty hybrid version where I don’t use all of my fingers but still don’t have to look at the keyboard.
- I can sustain a typing speed of about 2,500 words/hour for fiction for quite a long time. That includes the aspects of creativity required, not dictation or transcription. It is very tiring, however, and too much of it makes me amusingly incoherent.
- I do not have any problems with repetitive strain injury and I have a couple of excellent working spaces with fast computers and big screens.
- I love to write.
So, I’m starting from a good basis and, let me stress, I love to write. Now let me tell you about the problems that this project has revealed.
- I produce two kinds of posts: research focused and the more anecdotal. Anecdotal posts can be written up quickly but the moment any research, pre-reading or reformulation is required, it will take me about an hour or two to get a post together. So that cute high speed production drops to about 500-1000 words/hour.
- Research posts are the result of hours of reading and quite a lot of associated thought. My best posts start from a set of papers that I read, I then mull on it for a few days and finally it all comes together. I often ask someone else to look at the work to see how it sits in the queue.
- I’m always better when I don’t have to produce something for tomorrow. When the post queue is dry, I don’t have the time to read in detail or mull so I have to either pull a previous draft from the queue and see if I can fix it (and I’ve pretty much run out of those) or I have to come up with an idea now and write it now. All too often, these end up being relatively empty opinion pieces.
- If you are already tired, writing can be very tiring and you lose a lot of the fiero and inspiration from writing a good post.
I have probably spent, by all of these figures and time estimates, somewhere around 274 hours on this project. That’s just under 7 working weeks at 40 hours/week. No wonder I feel tired sometimes!
I am already, as you know, looking to change the posting frequency next year because I wish to focus on the quality of my work rather than the volume of my output. I still plan to have that hour or so put aside every day to contemplate and carry out research on learning and teaching but it will no longer be tied to an associated posting deadline. My original plan had an output requirement to force me to carry out the work. Unsurprisingly, oh brave new world that has such extrinsic motivating factors in it, I have become focused on the post, rather than the underlying research. My word count indicates that I am writing but, once this year is over, the review that I carry out will be to make sure that every word written from that point on is both valuable and necessary. My satisfaction in the contribution and utility of those posts I do make will replace any other quantitative measures of output.
My experience in this can be summarised quite simply. Setting a posting schedule that is too restrictive risks you putting the emphasis on the wrong component, where setting aside a regular time to study and contemplate the issues that lead to a good post is a far wiser investment. If you want to write this much, then it cannot be too much of a chore and, honestly, loving writing is almost essential, I feel. Fortunately, I have more than enough to keep the post queue going to the end of the year, as I’m working on a number of papers and ideas that will naturally end up here but I feel that I have, very much, achieved what I originally set to to do. I now deeply value the scholarship of learning and teaching and have learned enough to know that I have a great deal more to learn.
From a personal perspective, I believe that all of the words written have been valuable to me but, from next year, I have to make sure that the words I write are equally valuable to other people.
I’ll finish with something amusing. Someone asked me the other day how many words I’d written and, off the top of my head, I said “about 140,000” and thought that I was possibly over-claiming. The fact that I was under claiming by almost a factor of two never would have occurred to me, nor the fact that I had written more words than can be found in Order of the Phoenix. While I may wish to reclaim my reading time once this is over, for any fiction publishers reading this, I will have some free time next year! 🙂
The Earth Goes Around the Sun or the Sun Goes Around the Earth: Your Reaction Reflects Your Investment
Posted: October 8, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, collaboration, community, design, education, educational problem, educational research, heliocentricity, in the student's head, reflection, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, threshold concepts, tools Leave a commentThere is a rather good new BBC version of Sherlock Holmes, called Sherlock because nobody likes confusion, where Holmes is played by Benedict Cumberbatch. One of the key points about Holmes’ focus is that it comes at a very definite cost. At one point, Cumberbatch’s Holmes is being lightly mocked because he was unaware that the Earth goes around the Sun. He is completely unfazed by this (he may have known it but he deleted it) because it’s not important to him. This extract is from the episode “The Great Game”:
Sherlock Holmes: Listen: [gets up and points to his head] This is my hard-drive, and it only makes sense to put things in there that are useful. Really useful. Ordinary people fill their heads with all kinds of rubbish, and that makes it hard to get at the stuff that matters! Do you see?
John Watson: [brief silence; looks at Sherlock incredulously] But it’s the solar system!
Sherlock Holmes: [extremely irritated by now] Oh, hell! What does that matter?! So we go around the sun! If we went around the moon or round and round the garden like a teddy bear, it wouldn’t make any difference! All that matters to me is the work!
Sherlock’s (self-described) sociopathy and his focus on his work make heliocentricity an irrelevant detail. But this clearly indicates his level of investment in his work. All the versions of Sherlock have extensive catalogues of tobacco types, a detailed knowledge of chemistry and an unerring eye for detail. If someone had walked up to him and said “Captain Ross smokes Greenseas tobacco” and they were wrong then Sherlock’s agitation (and derision) would be directed at them: worse if he had depended upon this fact to draw a conclusion.
We are all well aware that such indifference to whether Sun or Earth occupies the centre of the Solar System has not always been received so sanguinely. As it turns out, while there is widespread acceptance of the fact of heliocentricity, there is still considerable opposition in some quarters and, in the absence of scientific education, it is easy to see why people would naturally assume by simple (unaided) observation that the Sun is circling us, rather than the reverse. You have to accept a number of things before heliocentricity moves from being a sound mathematical model for calculation (as Cardinal Bellarmine did when discussing it with Galileo, because it so well explains things hypothetically) to the acceptance of it as the model of what actually occurs (as it makes the associated passages of scripture much harder to deal with). And the challenge of accepting this often lies in the degree to which that acceptance will change your world.
Your reaction reflects your investment.
Sherlock didn’t care either way. His world was not shaken by which orbited what because it was not a key plank of his being, nor did it force him to revise anything that he cared about. Cardinal Bellarmine, in discussions with Galileo, had a much greater investment, acting as he was on behalf of the Church and, one can only assume, firm in his belief in scripture while retaining his sensibilities to be able work in science (Bellarmine was a Jesuit and worked predominantly in theology). As he is quoted:
If there were a real proof that the Sun is in the center of the universe, that the Earth is in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the Sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and we should rather have to say that we did not understand them than declare an opinion false which has been proved to be true. But I do not think there is any such proof since none has been shown to me.
It’s easy to think that these battles are over but, of course, as we deal with one challenging issue, another arises. This battle is not actually over. The 2006 General Social Survey showed that 18.3% of those people surveyed thought that the Sun went around the Earth, and 8% didn’t know. (0.1% refused. I think I’ve read his webpage.) (If you’re interested, all of the GSS data and its questions are available here. I hope to run the more recent figures to see how this has trended but I’ve run out of time this week.) That’s a survey run in 2006 in the US.
Why do nearly a quarter of the US population (or why did, given that this is 2006) not know about the Earth going around the Sun? As an educator, I have to look at this because if it’s because nobody told them, then, boy, do we have some ‘splaining to do. If it’s because they deleted it like Sherlock, then we have some seriously focused people or a lot of self-deleting sociopaths. (This is also not that likely a conjecture.) If it’s because someone told them that believing this meant that they had to spit in the face of one god or another, then we are seeing the same old combat between reaction and investment. There are a number of other correlations on this that, fortunately, indicate that this might be down to poor education, as knowledge of heliocentricity appears to correlate with the number of words that people got correct in the vocabulary test. Also, the number of people who didn’t accept heliocentricity decreased with increasing education. (Yes, that can also be skewed culturally as well but the large-representation major religions embrace education.)
So, and it’s a weird straw to clutch at and I need to dig more, it doesn’t appear that heliocentricity is, in the majority of cases, being rejected because of a strong investment in an antithetical stance, it’s just a lack of education or retention of that information. So, maybe we can put this one down, give more money to science teachers and move on.
But let me get to the meat of my real argument here, which is that a suitably alien or counter-intuitive proposition will be met with hostility, derision and rejection. When things matter, for whatever reason, we take them more seriously. When we take things so seriously that they shape how we live, consciously or not, then there is a problem when those underpinnings are challenged. We can make empty statements like “well, I suppose that works in theory” when the theory forces us to accept that we have been wrong, or at least walking on the less righteous path. When someone says to me “well, that’s fine in theory” I know what they are really saying. I’ve heard it before from Cardinal Bellarmine and it has gained no more weight since then. So it’s hard? Our job is hard. Constantly questioning is hard, tiring and often unrewarding. Yet, without it, we would have achieved very, very little.
People of all colours and races are equal? Unthinkable! Against our established texts! Supported by pseudo-science and biased surveys! They appear to be more similar than we thought! But they can’t marry! Wait, they can! They are equal! How can you think that they’re not?!
How many times do we have to go through this? We are playing out the same argument over and over again: when it matters enough (or too much), we resist to the point where we are being stubborn and (often) foolish.
And, that, I believe is where we stand in the middle of all of these revelations of unconscious and systematic bias against women that I referred to in my last post. People who have considered themselves fair and balanced, objective and ethical, now have to question whether they have been operating in error over all these years – if they accept the research published in PNAS and all of the associated areas. Suddenly, positive discrimination hiring policies become obvious as they now allow the hiring of people who appear to be the same, that the evidence now says have most likely been undervalued. This isn’t disadvantaging a man, this is being fair to the best candidate.
When presented with something challenging I find it helpful to switch the focus or the person involved. Would I be so challenged if it were to someone else? If the new revelation concerned these people or those people? How would I feel about if I read it in the paper? Would it matter if someone I trusted said it to me? Where are my human frailties and how I can account for them?
But, of course, as an educator, I have to think about how to frame my challenging and heretical information so that I don’t cause a spontaneous rejection that will prevent further discussion. I have to provide an atmosphere that exemplifies good practice, a world where people eventually wonder why this part of the world seems to be better, fairer and more reasonable than that part of the world. Then, with any luck, they take their questioning and new thinking to another place and we seed better things.
Let the Denial Begin
Posted: October 7, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, community, education, educational problem, educational research, equality, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, measurement, principles of design, resources, STEM, stereotype threat, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, women in computing 5 CommentsIt is an awful fact that women are very underrepresented in my discipline, Computer Science, and as an aggregate across my faculty, which includes Engineering and Mathematics (so we’re the Technology, Engineering and Mathematics of STEM). I have heard almost every tired and discredited excuse for why this is the case but what has always angered me is the sheer weight of resistance to any research that (a) clearly demonstrates that bias exists to explain why this occurs, (b) identifies how performance can be manipulated through preconceptions and (c) requires people to consider that we are all more similar than current representation would indicate.
Yes, if I were to look around and say “Women are not going to graduate in large numbers because I see so few of them” then I would be accurate and yet, at the same time, completely missing the point. If I were to turn that around and ask “Why are so few women coming in to my degree?” then I have a useful question and, from various branches of research, the more rocks we turn over, the more we seem to find bias (conscious or otherwise) in both industry and academia that discourages women from participation in STEM.
A paper was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS, to its friends), entitled “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students”. (PNAS has an open access option but the key graphs and content are also covered in a Scientific American blog article.) The study was simple. Take a job application for a lab manager position. Assign a name where half of the names are a recognisably male name, the other half are female. (The names John and Jennifer were chosen for this purpose as they had been pre-tested to be equivalent in terms of likability and recogniseability.) Get people to rate the application, including aspects like degree of mentoring offered and salary.
Let me summarise that: the name John or Jennifer is assigned to the same application materials. What we would expect, if there is no bias, is that we would see a similar ranking and equivalent salary offering. (All figures from the original paper, via the SciAm link.)
Oh. It appears that the mere presence of a woman’s name somehow altered reality so that an objective assessment of ability was warped through some sort of … I give up. Humour has escaped me. The name change has resulted in a systematic and significant downgrading of perceived ability. Let me get the next graph out of the way which is the salary offer.
And, equally mysteriously, having the name John is worth over $3,500 more than having the name Jennifer.
I should leap to note that it was both male and female scientists making this classification – which starts to lead us away from outright misogyny and towards ingrained and subtler prejudices. Did people resort to explicitly sexist reasoning to downgrade the candidates? No, they used sound reasoning to argue against the applicant’s competency. Except, of course, we draw back the curtain and suddenly reveal that our sound reasoning works one way when the applicant is a man, another if they are a woman.
Before you think “Oh, they must have targeted a given field, age group or gone after people who do or don’t have tenure”, the field, age and tenure status of the rating professors had no significant effect. This bias is pervasive among faculty, field, age, gender and status. The report also looked at mentoring and, regardless of the rater’s gender, they offered less mentoring to women.
Let’s be blunt. Study after study shows that if there are any gender differences at all, they are so small as to not even vaguely explain what we see in the representation of female students in certain fields and completely fails to explain their reduced progress in later life. However, the bias and stereotypes that people are operating under do not so much predict what will happen as shape what will happen. We are now aware of effects such as Stereotype Threat (Wiki link) that allows us to structure important situations in someone’s life so that the framing of the activity leaves them in a position where they reinforce the negative stereotype because of higher anxiety, relative to a non-stereotyped group. As an example, look at Osborne, Linking Stereotype Threat and Anxiety, where you can actually reduce the performance of girls on a maths test through reminding them that they are girls and that girls tend to do worse on test than boys. Osborne then compared this with a group where the difference was identified but a far more positive statement was made (the participants were told that despite the difference, there were situations where girls performed as well or better). The first scenario (girls do worse) was a high Stereotype Threat scenario (high ST), the second is low ST. Here’s the graph from Wikipedia that is a redrawing of the one in the paper that shows the results.
The effect of Stereotype Threat (ST) on math test scores for girls and boys. Data from Osborne (2007) (via Wikipedia)
That is the impact of an explicit stereotype in action – suddenly, when framed fairly and without an explicit stereotype or implicit bias, we see that people are far more similar than we thought. If anything, we have partially inverted the stereotype.
To return to my first paragraph, I said:
what has always angered me is the sheer weight of resistance to any research that (a) clearly demonstrates that bias exists to explain why this occurs, (b) identifies how performance can be manipulated through preconceptions and (c) requires people to consider that we are all more similar than current representation would indicate.
The PNAS paper, among others, clearly shows that the biasses exist. A simple name change is enough, as long as it’s a woman’s name. The demonstrated existence of stereotype threat shows us how performance can be manipulated through preconception. (And it’s important to note that stereotype threat is as powerful against minorities as woman – anyone who is part of a stereotype can be manipulated through their own increased or reduced anxiety.) So let me finally discuss the consideration of all of this and the title of this post.
I am expecting to get at least one person howling me down. Someone who will tear apart all of this because this cannot, possibly, under any circumstances be true. Someone who will start talking about our “African ancestors” to start arguing the Savanna-distribution of roles, as if our hominid predecessors ever had to apply to be a lab manager anywhere. Most of you, I hope, will read this and know all of this far too well. Some of you will reflect on this and, like me, examine yourself very carefully to find out if you have been using this bias or if you have been framing things, while trying to help, in a way that really didn’t help at all.
Some of you, who are my students, will read this and will see that research that you have done is reflected in these figures. Yes, we treat women differently and we appear, in these circumstances, to treat them less well. This does not, under any circumstances, mean that we have to accept this or, in any way, respect this as an established tradition or a desirable status quo. But the detection of an insidious and pervasive bias, that spans a community, shows us how hard my point (c) actually is.
We must first accept that there is a problem. There is a problem. Denying it will achieve nothing. Arguing minutiae will achieve nothing. We have to change the way that we react and be honest with ourselves that, sometimes, our treasured objectivity is actually nothing of the kind.
Bad Writing, Bad Future?
Posted: October 5, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, community, curriculum, design, education, educational problem, educational research, in the student's head, measurement, principles of design, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, universal principles of design Leave a commentI was recently reading an article on New Dorp public high school on Staten Island. New Dorp had, until recently, a low graduation rate that was among the bottom 2,000 across the United States. (If you’re wondering, there were 98,817 public schools in the US in 2009-10, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 65,840 being secondary. So New Dorp was in the bottom 2% across all schools and bottom 3% of secondary.) New Dorp’s primary intake is from poor and working-class families and, in 2006, 82% of the freshmen entered the school with a reading level lower than the required grade.
However, it was bad writing that was ultimately identified as the main obstacle to success: students couldn’t turn their thoughts into readable essays. Because this appeared to be the primary difference between successful and unsuccessful students, Deirdre DeAngelis (the principal) and the faculty decided that writing would become a focus. If nothing else, New Dorp’s students would learn to write well.
And, apparently, it has paid off. Pass rates are up, repeating rates have dropped, scores are higher than any previous class. Pre-college enrolments are up but, interestingly, the demographic makeup has remained the same and graduations rates have leapt from 63% to a projected 80% this Spring. (Yes, I know, projected data. I’ll try to check this again after it’s happened.)
The article, which I encourage you to read, goes on to discuss why this change of focus was so important. There was resistance – the usual response of “We’re doing our job, but the students aren’t smart enough (or are too lazy)” from certain groups of educators. Yet, students responded with increased participation and high attendance, rewarding efforts and silencing critics. What was interesting is that analysis of why students couldn’t write indicated that most could decipher the underlying texts and could comprehend sentences but had major deficiencies in the use of key parts of speech. Simple speeches were fine but compound sentences and sentences with dependent clauses were hard to decipher and very difficult to write. How can you use ‘although’ correctly when you don’t know what it means?
As understanding of speech grew, so did reading comprehension. Classroom discussion encouraged students to listen, think and speak more precisely, giving them something to repeat in their writing.
It’s an interesting article and I’m re-reading it at the moment to see exactly what I can extract for my own students and where I have to read to verify and expand upon the ideas. From a personal perspective, however, I think of one of the best reminders of what it is like to be a student who is confused or intimidated by writing.
I go to Hong Kong.
If you’ve been to Hong Kong, you’ll know that there is a vast amount of signage, some in Chinese characters and some in English, but there is really far more Chinese neon and it is all over the landscape. I can read some Chinese (duck, soup, daily yum cha, restaurant, men, exit – you get the gist) and I understand some Chinese so I can get a feeling for some of what is happening. But I have no grasp of any subtlety. I cannot create a sentence or write a character reliably. I am a very good communicator in my own language but in Chinese I sound ridiculous. I scrawl characters that good natured colleagues interpret very generously but it is the scribbling of a child.
In Hong Kong, unless I am speaking English, I appear illiterate. It is easy to say “Well, don’t feel bad, why would you have learned Cantonese in Australia” but let’s remember that when looking at the students of New Dorp. Why would anyone have encouraged them in creative writing, written expression and the development of sophisticated literary argument when a large percentage of their parents have English as a second language, effectively reduced access to schooling and, most likely, a very tight time budget to spend with their children due to overwork and job crowding?
A student who can’t write effectively, if we haven’t actually really tried to teach them how to write, is no more stupid or lazy than I am when I don’t try to learn all of Cantonese before going to Hong Kong. We have both been denied an opportunity. I am lucky in that I can choose when I go to Hong Kong. A student who can’t write has a much harder road because their future will be brighter and better if they can write, as evidenced by the increased success rates at New Dorp.
I look forward to seeing what New Dorp gets up to in the future and I take my hat off to them for this approach.
Banned Books Week: Time to Hit the Library!
Posted: October 3, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, banned books, blogging, community, curriculum, education, educational problem, ethics, higher education, in the student's head, principles of design, reflection, resources, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools Leave a comment
It’s Banned Books Week until October the 6th so what better time to talk about the freedom to read and go off and subversively read some banned or challenged books? There’s a great link on the American Library Association’s site with the top 100 Banned/Challenged Books 2000-2009. Some of them are completely predictable and some of them are more surprising. The reasons given for withdrawing books are, in the words of the ALA site:
Books usually are challenged with the best intentions—to protect others, frequently children, from difficult ideas and information.
However, it is always easy to see where such noble intentions have been subverted and politics or other overtones have come into play. Let’s look at the Top 10 from 1990-1999 as an example:
- Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz (7)
- Daddy’s Roommate, by Michael Willhoite (-)
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou (6)
- The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier (3)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (14)
- Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck (5)
- Forever, by Judy Blume (16)
- Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson (28)
- Heather Has Two Mommies, by Leslea Newman (-)
- The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (19)
Book 1 is scary and has gruesome illustrations. Book 2 deals with homosexual parents.Book 3 contains a rape involving an eight year old girl. Book 4 is about bullying and also contains a masturbation scene. Book 5 is … book 5 is Huckleberry Finn!!! Of course, HF is probably in here because of the fairly extensive use of racial pejoratives and stereotypes, even if argument can be made that the book itself is anti-racist. Book 6 is a magnificent book but, between the deaths and a dead puppy, it’s not exactly an easy book. Book 7 has teen sex in it but nowhere near the same tone or difficulty as some of the previous. Book 8 is a surprisingly depressing book that manages to balance a fantasy world with death and disappointment. Book 9, well, what a surprise, another book on homosexuality has made the list. Finally, we have Catcher, full of profanity and sexual depiction.
Looking at this list, we see sex, racism, homosexual relationships and death being the major themes. (Notably, to be banned for sex, depictions that range to the explicit are required for heterosexual activity, but it is merely the existence of the relationship that can suffice for homosexual relationships.) Those numbers at the end are, by the way, where they feature in the top 100 of 2000-2009. Let’s look at that to see what appals and is too complicated for children or library users in the first decade of the 21st Century, I’ve bolded the new entries:
1. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
2. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier
4. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
5. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
7. Scary Stories (series), by Alvin Schwartz
8. His Dark Materials (series), by Philip Pullman
9. ttyl; ttfn; l8r g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
I’ll come back to Harry Potter in a moment. Number 2, the Alice series, covers a wide range of topics, including our old friend sex, so it’s for the sexual content that it made the list – topping the list in 2003. Number 4 is a children’s book based on the observed behaviour of two male penguins who became a couple and raised a hatchling. (You can read about Roy and Silo here.) Number 8 has some nasty moments across the trilogy but, in the main, has drawn most of its criticism because of a negative portrayal of religion in general, and Christianity specifically. Number 9 is on the list because, from a Banned Books story in 2010, “Preoccupied with sex and college, the teen girls encounter realistic situations that feature foul language, drugs and alcohol in a less than casual way.” Finally, the new number 10 contains references to suicide and death, as well as the usual teen cocktail of drugs, alcohol and sex that guarantee requests for banning. Oh, and there’s also a gay friend and there is a reference to child molestation. But none of it is graphic and it’s written up as a series of letters to a friend.
So the themes are now sex, drugs, bad language, homosexual penguins (Penguin Lust!), discussion of real teenagers and… fantasy novels? Let me return to Harry Potter which contains teens who are so heavily plasticised that they appear to have no real functioning genitalia, never smoke drugs, don’t swear seriously even when being threatened with death and are laughably vanilla in so many ways that the dominant fantasy conceit of the HP universe is not the magic, it’s that teenagers would actually function this way! This, and the inclusion of His Dark Materials, appear to show the direction that book banning has taken over the last decade: removing a point of view for reasons that appear to have little to do with protecting children from difficult ideas and information, but to remove them from ideas that have been stated as unacceptable by some form of organised body.
I strongly suggest looking at both lists, side-by-side, so that you too can have the moments that I had of cocking your head to one side and thinking “why is that on there?” Then coming to the slow, and unpleasant realisation, that the answer is not “because it’s too dark or encourages drug use” but “because of an organised campaign by a group who are trying to orchestrate the removal of a book that, ultimately, is a fairy tale and of no more harm to children than any other”.
There are sometimes good reasons to restrict access, by age or maturity, to certain materials and, definitely, there are lines that you can’t cross and expect to show up on a public library on the shelves – this is a far cry from completely removing or destroying a work. But what appears to be happening now is that the political reasons for banning are starting to dominate, with Internet and local organisation allowing a majority to form that can request a book’s withdrawal. Fortunately, the Internet can bring books to anyone but, with existing models, e-Books may not be as widely available as we often think so the local and school library forms a valuable point for students. I read voraciously when I was younger and, despite reading many of the banned books on the lists, I don’t appear to have turned out too badly. (I know, I know, anecdotal existential evidence doesn’t count. But I can say that not everyone who reads The Chocolate War turns into a psychopath, so why is it always in the top 5? If anything, it made me aware that the adult advice on bullying was generally an empty mechanism that never dealt with the real problem: bullies are not always cowards, don’t fear the same type of repercussions and, sometimes, are in charge. I know – how subversive!)
Let me leave you with an example of how things have changed in the last two decades. One inclusion on the banned book list only showed up in the last decade, despite being published decades earlier, and it’s number 69 on the 2000-2009 list. I’m scared how high it will be driven in the 2010-2019 list and it is yet another example of why we have to be very careful about how we construct any list of books that we wish to treat differently. Or ‘sanction’. You might have heard of it.
It’s called Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.
October Reflection: Planning for 2013
Posted: October 2, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: authenticity, blogging, cyberpunk, eat your own dog food, eating your own dog food, eating your own dogfood, education, educational problem, higher education, measurement, reflection, resources, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, universal principles of design, work/life balance, workload Leave a commentWhen I was younger, I used to play a science fiction role-playing game that was based in a near-ish future, where humans had widely adopted the use of electronic implants and computers were everywhere in a corporate-dominated world. The game was called “Cyberpunk 2013” and was heavily influenced by the work of William Gibson (“Neuromancer” and many other works), Bruce Sterling (“Mirrorshades” anthology and far too many to list), Walter Jon Williams (“Hardwired” among others) and many others who had written of a grim, depressing, and above all stylish near future. It was a product of the 80s and, much like other fashion crime of the time, some of the ideas that emerged were conceits rather than concepts, styles rather than structures. But, of course, back in the 1980s, setting it in 2013 made it far away and yet close enough. This was not a far future setting like Star Trek but it was just around the corner.
The game had some serious issues but was a great deal of fun. Don’t start me talking about it or we’ll be here all night.
And now it is here. My plans for the near future, the imminent and the inevitable, now include planning calendars for a year that was once a science fiction dream. In that dark dream, 2013 was a world of human/machine synthesis, of unfeeling and mercenary corporate control, of mindless pleasure and stylish control of a population that seeks to float as lotus eaters rather than continue to exist in the dirty and poor reality of their actual world.
Well, we haven’t yet got the cybernetics working… and, joking aside, the future is not perfect but it is far less gloomy and dramatic in the main that the authors envisioned. Yes, there are lots of places to fix but the majority of our culture is still working to the extent that it can be developed and bettered. The catastrophic failures and disasters of the world of 2013 has not yet occurred. We can’t relax, of course, and some things are looking bleak, but this is not the world of Night City.
In the middle of all of this musing on having caught up to the future that I envisioned as a boy, I am now faced with the mundane questions such as:
- What do I want to be doing in 2020 (the next Cyberpunk release was set in this year, incidentally)
- Therefore, what do I want to be doing in 2013 that will lead me towards 2020?
- What is the place of this blog in 2013?
I won’t bore you with the details of my career musings (if my boss is reading this, I’m planning to stay at work, okay?) but I had always planned that the beginning of October would be a good time to muse about the blog and work out what would happen once 2012 ended. I committed to writing the blog every day, focussed on learning and teaching to some extent, but it was always going to be for one year and then see what happened.
I encourage my students to reflect on what they’ve done but not in a ‘nostalgic’ manner (ah, what a great assignment) but in a way that the can identify what worked, what didn’t work and how they could improve. So let me once again trot out the dog food and the can opener and give it a try.
What has worked
I think my blog has been most successful when I’ve had a single point to make, I’ve covered it in depth and then I’ve ducked out. Presenting it with humour, humility, and an accurate assessment of the time that people have to read makes it better. I think some of my best blogs present information and then let people make up their own minds. The goal was always to present my thought processes, not harangue people.
What hasn’t worked
I’m very prone to being opinionated and, sometimes, I think I’ve blogged too much opinion and too little fact. I also think that there are tangents I’ve taken when I’ve become more editorial and I’m not sure that this is the blog for that. Any blog over about 1,100 words is probably too long for people to read and that’s why I strive to keep the blog at or under 1,000 words.
Having to blog every day has also been a real challenge. While it keeps a flow of information going, the requirement to come up with something every, single, day regardless of how I’m feeling or what is going on is always going to have an impact on quality. For example, I recently had a medical condition that required my doctor to prescribe some serious anti-inflammatory drugs and painkillers for weeks and this had a severe impact on me. I have spent the last 10 days shaking off the effects of these drugs that, among other effects, make me about half as fast at writing and reduce my ability to concentrate. The load of the blog on top of this has been pretty severe and I’m open about some of the mistakes that I’ve made during this time. Today is the first day that I feel pretty reasonable and, by my own standards, fit for fair, complex marking of large student submissions (which is my true gauge of my mental agility).
How to improve
Wow, good question. This is where the thinking process starts, not stops, after such an inventory. The assessment above indicates that I am mostly happy with what came out (and my readership/like figures indicate this as well) but that I really want to focus on quality over quantity and to give myself the ability to take a day off if I need to. But I should also be focused on solid, single issue, posts that address something useful and important in learning and teaching – and this requires more in-depth reading and work than I can often muster on a day-to-day basis.
In short, I’m looking to change my blog style for next year to a shorter and punchier version that gives more important depth, maintains an overall high standard, but allows me to get sick or put my feet up occasionally. What is the advice that I would give a student? Make a plan that includes space for the real world and that still allows you to do your best work. Content matters more than frequency, as long as you meet your real deadline. So, early notice for 2013, expect a little less regularity but a much more consistent output.
It’s a work in progress. More as I think of it.
Educating about Evil
Posted: October 1, 2012 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: advocacy, authenticity, blogging, community, education, educational problem, ethics, feedback, higher education, in the student's head, racism, student perspective, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools Leave a commentWhile we focus on our discipline areas for education, we can never lose sight of the important role that teachers have in a student’s life. As I’ve said (in ones way or another) repeatedly, we have large footprints and a deep shadow: thinking that we are only obliged to worry about mathematics or the correct location of the comma is to risk taking actions that have a far greater impact than intended.
This is why I have no time for educators who sleep with their students, because they have reduced anything positive or supportive that they ever said to the student into a part of the seduction and it contaminates the relationship that the student will have with authority, possibly for the rest of their life. In the strongest terms I condemn this, not the least because it is almost always illegal, immoral and wrong, but because it is, at its heart, unscholarly, unthinking and anti-educational. If you want to teach, then you’ve put yourself in a position where your voice is going to carry more weight – and this brings responsibilities. Naively enough, one of the key responsibilities for me is that we must think carefully about our actions so that, by our thoughtless action or inaction, we do not facilitate evil.
I do not have a belief system that gives me a convenient Devil so, for me, evil is a concept that is very abstract, but no less real for not having a trident and cloven hooves. I know it when I see it. I know it when I see its hand at work and it is the shape of evil’s hand that I generally discuss with my students. Let me show you.
Elizabeth Eckford, girl in dark sunglasses, attempting to enter Central High in the Little Rock School District. (Photo: Will Counts)
Can you see it? Let me show you from another angle.
The girl screaming racist abuse is Hazel Massery. The year is 1957. (Photo: Will Counts)
That’s a 15 year old girl standing at the front who is, under established legal precedent, trying to enter a previously all-white school. The girl behind her, about the same age, is yelling this: “Go home, n____! Go back to Africa.” Those soldiers you see are national guardsman, stationed not to help an isolated 15 year old girl but, instead, to keep her and the other 8 students who haven’t shown up today, from bringing their black selves into this white classroom.
I see the hand of evil all over this incident but, via these photographs, but I see it most with its scaly digits clutched around Hazel Massery’s mouth. She had a family with troubles and a background entrenched racism, and Hazel was a troubled girl but, in this moment, she was a hysterical, screaming puppet, baying for the blood of a 15-year old girl who was just another human being. The people around Elizabeth are yelling “Lynch her!” “Drag her away!” Women who look like your grandma are spitting on her. But look at Hazel Massery. It’s hard to find a more spectacular example of the evil of the mob than this?
Fifty-five years ago this month, nine students tried to make it into the school and, finally, after being turned away three times by National Guardsman, they managed to enter, escorted by soldiers of the 101st Airborne. Some of the people in that crowd, smiling, chuckling, taking pictures – they are teachers. Elizabeth’s ongoing problems at school, and they were many, included one teacher who would not even take anything directly from Elizabeth’s hands because of the colour of Elizabeth’s skin. Elizabeth was systematically abused, isolated and bullied up until the time that the school got closed and she had to try and complete her studies by herself.
After months of abuse, one entry from Elizabeth’s experience reads: “She said that except for some broken glass thrown at her during lunch, she really had had a wonderful day.”
When I was a teenager, I attended a talk where a minister said that he had always expected the test of his faith and integrity to be a suave man with horns and a tail, wearing a good suit, who offered him a dollar to smoke a cigarette and spit on the Bible. As he got older, he realised that evil, in many forms, was much harder to recognise and, of course, that sometimes doing nothing counted as evil, if you didn’t take the opportunity to do good. (As I later realised, in the style of Edmund Burke!)
You know, I don’t expect that much of a lot of people, if no-one has gone to the trouble to actually educate them and shake those xenophobic beliefs that seem to accumulate when we’re in small, scared bands and huddled in the dark. But I do expect a great deal of anyone who takes up the role of educator. I expect them to stand up for the truth. To go looking for the light if they realise that they’re in the dark. To treat all students as what they could be rather than what they have been assumed to be.
But, base level, in any activity regarding students and mobs, formed from stupidity and bigotry, I expect the teachers to be in a circle around the students and facing out, standing between the mob and their charges, certainly not facing in and taking part in the discrimination.
There’s a Vanity Fair article where you can read more about this. We have, I am thankful to say, come a very long way but it is quite obvious that there is still some way to go. The VF article talks a lot about the good people of the community, who stood up, who helped up, who realised that this was wrong and you should read it because it is a story of hope. But let us never lose sight of what evil looks like, because I need to train my students to see it so that they can stamp on it.
Push it back into the darkness where it belongs and blind it with truth, facts, science, reasoning, enlightenment and goodness. In 100 years time I want someone who sees that picture to not even be able to understand why this would have happened. I want cute kids to cock their heads to one side and look confused – because they can see an obviously visual difference but not inequality or divide, and hence not establish it as in immutable categorical statement of worth or ability. I think we’re all part of the glorious pathway that will lead to that great and wonderful time. Naive? Yes. But we have to start somewhere and, fifty-five years ago, Elizabeth and eight other brave young people did just that. We’re just carrying it on.
Six ‘Easy’ Pieces? Richard Feynman and the Undergraduate Lectures
Posted: September 30, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, community, curriculum, education, educational problem, educational research, feedback, feynman, Generation Why, higher education, in the student's head, measurement, reflection, teaching, teaching approaches, thinking, tools, universal principles of design Leave a commentRichard P. Feynman was a Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist, who made great contributions to physics and the popularity of physics through his books and lectures. Among many other useful activities he developed Feynman diagrams, which provided a useful pictorial abstraction of the rather complicated mathematical expressions that govern the behaviour of subatomic particles.
Trust me when I tell you that this is easier to understand than the expressions.
This is a great tool in many ways because it makes the difficult more easy to understand, the abstract able to be represented in a (closer to) concrete manner and, above all, humans like pictures. Feynman was very interested in teaching as well because he felt that students could offer inspiration and because teaching could be a diversion when the well of theoretical physics creativity was running dry. He was an opponent of rote learning and any approach to teaching that put the form before the function. He loved to explain and felt a strong duty to explain things clearly and correctly, with an emphasis on a key principle that if he couldn’t explain it at the freshman level, then it wasn’t yet understood fully.
In the 60’s Feynman was asked, by Caltech, to reinvigorate the teaching of undergraduates and, three years later, he produced the Feynman Lectures on Physics. I’ve read these before (I used to study Physics – I know, I seem so nice!) and so have many other people – it’s estimated that more than 3 million copies have been sold in various languages. I picked up a copy of the ‘cut-down’ version of the lectures “Six Easy Pieces”, recently re-published in Penguin (AU$ 9.95! Hooray for cheap books!)
Reading the 1989 Special Preface to the original lectures, re-printed in “Six Easy Pieces”, a strange fact emerges, which is that Feynman’s lectures did not necessarily succeed for their target audience, the undergraduates, but instead served to inspire the teachers. As Goodstein and Neugebauer noted, while the class started with 180 undergraduate students, many of the students dreaded the class and, over time, dropped out. While the class remained full, it was because of the increased occupation by faculty and graduate students.
In the original preface, by Feynman, he appears to have noticed that something was amiss because he reflects on the fact that he didn’t think it was a great success. One problem was that there was no feedback from the students to him to tell him how he was doing, whether they were keeping up. (Feynman provided very little outline and all of the homework assignments were created by other professors sitting in the class, furiously noting what had been covered and then creating the other work for recitation.) Feynman’s aim was to challenge and interest the best and brightest, he sought to not only direct the lecture at the smartest in the room but to present work so that even the most brilliant in the room would be unable to cover it all. Feynman’s preface contains terms such as ‘sufficiently clever’, which may seem fine to some but to me indicate clearly that he, an astoundingly smart and still empathic human being, had at least an inkling that something had gone wrong between his vision and what happened in the classroom.
At the end of the preface, Feynman reflects, in a rather melancholy tone, “I don’t think I did very well by the students”. He is concerned that, based on the way that the the students handled the questions in the examination, that the system is a failure. A colleague points out that maybe 12-24 students appeared to really get it but you don’t have to be a very good mathematician to release that 24/180 (a nudge over 13%) is not the best rate of transfer. As Feynman gloomily responds (quoting Gibbon):
“The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous”
Feynman finishes, with his characteristic insight, that the direct individual relationship between student and teacher is paramount, where the student discusses things and works with, and discusses, ideas. That it is impossible to learn very much by sitting in a lecture. But he sees himself torn between what he sees as the right way to proceed and the number of students that we have to teach.
And, 49 years later, we, the inheritors of Sisyphus, are still trying to push that same rock up the same educational hill. Richard Feynman, a grand communicator and superlative thinker and scientist, tried his hardest to make the lecture work and even he couldn’t do it. He had mountains of support and he was unhappy with the result. He is clearly articulating all of the ideas for which we now have so much evidence and, yet, here we still are with 1000-person lectures and students who might be able to plug some numbers into formulas but don’t necessarily know what it means to think inside our discipline or discuss ideas in a meaningful dialogue.
From a personal perspective, Feynman’s Lectures on Physics are one the reasons why I gave up physics. I was struggling to see how it all fitted together and I went to seek help. (I was also a terrible student in those days but this was one of the rare occasions when I tried to improve.) One of my lecturers told me that I should read Feynman’s lectures and because it was designed for undergrads, if I couldn’t get that, I wouldn’t be able to catch up – basically, I didn’t have the Physics brain. I read it. I didn’t get it. I sorted the world into “physicists” and “non-physicists”, with me in the second group. (This is probably not a bad outcome for the physics community and, years later, while I can now happily read Feynman, it certainly doesn’t excite me as much as what I’m doing now.) I imagine that Feynman himself, while not lamenting me leaving the field, would probably be at least mildly perturbed at such a weaponisation of his work. From reading about him, his books and prefaces, I believe that he expected a lot of his students but he never actually wanted to be unpleasant about it. His own prefaces record his unease with the course he produced. He has no doubts about the physics and the aim – but his implementation was not what he wanted and not what he believed to be the best approach.
So, when someone questions your educational research supported ideas for improving learning and teaching, grab a copy of “Six Easy Pieces” and get them to read all of the preface material. Feynman himself regarded a lot of areas in educational research as cargo cult science, which applies as well to any poorly constructed scientific experimentation, but it is quite obvious that on at least some of the most important issues regarding knowledge transfer, he had a deep understanding and commitment to improvement, because of his direct experience with undergraduates and his ability to openly criticise himself in order to improve.
Fragile Relationships: Networks and Support
Posted: September 29, 2012 Filed under: Education | Tags: advocacy, collaboration, community, curriculum, education, ethics, grand challenge, higher education, reflection, relationships, resources, tools Leave a commentI’ve been working with a large professional and technical network organisation for the past couple of days and, while I’m not going to go into too much detail, it’s an organisation that has been around for 28 years and, because of a major change in funding, is now having to look at what the future holds. What’s interesting about this organisation is that it doesn’t have a silo problem in terms of its membership across Australia and New Zealand, which makes it almost unique in terms of technology networks in this neck of the woods. There’s no division between academic and professional staff, there are representatives from both. Same for tech and non-tech, traditional and new Unis, big and small players. It’s a bizarrely egalitarian and functional organisation that has been developing for 28 pretty good years.
Now, for some quite understandable reasons, the original funds provider is withdrawing and we have to look at the future and decide what we’re going to do. I’ve been out talking to possible organisation sponsors or affiliates but, until we decide what form we’re going to take, I’m trying to sell a beast behind a curtain by offering a dowry. This is not a great foundation for a future direction. As it turns out, trying to find a parent organisation that will be a good host is challenging because there’s nothing quite like us in the region. So, we’re looking at other alternatives. I have, however, just moved on to the executive of the organisation to try and help steer it through the next couple of years and, with any luck, into a form that will be self-sustaining and continue to give the valuable contribution to the ANZ community that it has been making for so many years.
The problem is that it takes 28 years to produce a network this strong and, if we get it wrong, relationships are inherently fragile and the disintegration of a group is far easier (and requires zero effort) than the formation. I have one of those composite stone benches in my house and I often ponder the amount of work it took to produce it and get that particular shape up on my bench top.
And how easily it could be broken, irrevocably, with one strike of a sledgehammer.
Knock knock!
(This is why my wife won’t let me use the sledgehammer to cook with.)
Human networks don’t need a sledgehammer strike to fall apart, they just need neglect. There are many examples of good low-cost networks that manage to keep people linked up, regardless of their level of resource, and I often think of the computing education community in the US, made of the regional committees, the overarching groups like SIGCSE and how the regional groups provide sustenance and a focus point, with the large conference coming into town every so often to bring everyone together.
2012 is an interesting year in so many ways and, every time I turn around, there seems to be a new challenge, something to look at, something to review to see if it’s worth keeping and, in many cases, something new to steward or assist. But I suppose that it’s important to remember that all of these things take energy and, at some stage, I’m going to have to sit down and organise how all of these tasks will go together in a way that I can make this work effectively for 2013.
Nick Falkner 