Category Archives: Education

Kids Can Be Jerks, Creative Solutions Needed

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Over at Dave Hoggard’s blog there’s an interesting post about disciplining students in public schools.  Even more interesting is the discussion going on in his comments section.

Disciplining students is a sticky situation for teachers and administrators these days, and the lack of discipline in many students’ homes doesn’t help matters.  But one comment to Dave’s post had the following statement that I think highlights another problem in schools:

Yes, discipline begins in the home, and there way too little of it
these days. And yes, the issue is complex. And I did not chime in to
advocate corporal punishment, though it sure worked in my 7th grade gym
class. But as former public school teacher for five years I can attest
that David�s basic point is spot on. The system is totally rigged
against the teachers, and as such there is almost no hope for
discipline, except in those classes that happen to have the exceptional
teachers who just plain inspire it. (Emphasis mine).

I agree with the writer that in many ways the system is rigged against teachers, but I also think it is rigged against students.  How sad is it that only exceptional teachers inspire their students?  Shouldn’t it be a core skill?  And unfortunately the same students that cause problems for the teachers cause just as many problems for the other students, if not more.  The "good" kids are being robbed of their teachers’ attention and of the opportunity to learn and be taught.

Celeste and I have been fortunate that our kids have not had any spectacularly bad teachers, but they have had some very average teachers that did little to inspire them.  On the other hand they’ve also had the fortune of having a few very energetic and inspired teachers and in those classes they have blossomed in a way we could hardly imagine.

Oh and in case you’re wondering about our view towards school discipline, our kids would much rather not find out what would happen if we ever got a call from the principal.  Let’s just say that they would have a far greater appreciation for the right to pursue life, liberty and happiness.

Now That’s What I Call Higher Education

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Celeste talked me into taking some continuing education courses at Salem College and I have to say that I’m glad she did.  I’ve posted previously about a drawing class that my oldest son, Michael, and I are taking together, and it’s only gotten better.

My second class started last night, and this is one that Celeste and I are taking together.  It’s called "Wines of the World" and the curriculum consists of us sitting around a table and tasting wines while being regaled with wine history and wine data from the instructor, who drinks right along with us. 

Where were these classes when I was in school full time?  Come to think of it how can I get a gig like this?  I can even create the curriculum myself…

  • Comparative Beer Imbibing (The Relative Merits of Keg vs. Bottle)
  • Beer Augmentation (Ruffles or Doritos with that Bud?)
  • Living With Your Beer Belly (How to Convince Your Wife that Your Belly is Cuddly, Not Gross)
  • Beyond the Beer Bong (Why We Grow Wiser as We Grow Older)
  • Beer Snobbery (How to Spend Ten Dollars For a Six Pack and Pretend to Really Like Your Beer, Really)
  • Beers of the World I (Why Some Beers Don’t Have to Be Ice-Cold to be Good)
  • Beers of the World II (Yes It Smells Bad, but That’s Good)
  • Beers of the World III (That’s Why the French are Wusses, No Beer and Too Much Whine, er, Wine)

The possibilities are endless!

Critical Thinking a Critical Skill

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Anyone with kids can tell you what a challenge it is to teach your kids how to discern "truth" from "advertising."  My kids went through a phase where every product they’d seen a commercial for was the "best" or the "coolest."  It got really annoying when they would suggest a solution for a problem based on an ad that they’d seen.

"Dad, you should use Exxon for gas because it puts a tiger in your tank," my oldest said when he was about seven or eight as we hurtled down the road with fumes spewing from under my hood thanks to an oil leak.  I haven’t liked Exxon since.

The problem has moved beyond advertising since the kids started doing projects for school.  The first stop for any research is the web, and take it from me you don’t want to know what passes for historical information these days. 

As an adult whose done a fair amount of research in my day it is relatively easy for me to separate legitimate info sources from the crackpots, but to a child operating without the same points of reference the job is imminently more difficult.  I can look at a web page and within moments know that it’s a mainstream or "quality" source.  But my kids don’t know Merriam Webster from a hole in the wall so they will give "Joe’s Dictionary Blog" the same weight as the venerable Webster.

Amazingly my kids’ frame of reference has grown exponentially in a very short time.  I think my wife and I have succeeded in giving them an appropriately jaundiced view of the world (i.e. all advertisements are lies, and any product that appears on Nickelodeon the Cartoon Channel or any other kid station most likely causes cancer).

But the kids aren’t the only ones who sometimes struggle with the "truth vs. BS" question these days.  With the kudzu-like spread of information sources beyond traditional media outlets we adults are also learning that we need to re-calibrate our own BS meters.  That means we need to hone our critical thinking skills, and an article I read today called "Media/Political Bias" (Rhetorica) provides a great starting point.

I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

"There is no such thing as an objective point of view.

No matter how much we may try to ignore it, human communication always takes place in a context,
through a medium, and among individuals and groups who are situated
historically, politically, economically, and socially. This state of affairs is
neither bad nor good. It simply is…

Critical questions for detecting bias

  1. What is the author’s / speaker’s socio-political position? With what
       social, political, or professional groups is the speaker identified?
  2. Does the speaker have anything to gain personally from delivering the
       message?
  3. Who is paying for the message? Where does the message appear? What is the
       bias of the medium? Who stands to gain?
  4. What sources does the speaker use, and how credible are they? Does the
       speaker cite statistics? If so, how were the data gathered, who gathered the
       data, and are the data being presented fully?
  5. How does the speaker present arguments? Is the message one-sided, or does
       it include alternative points of view? Does the speaker fairly present
       alternative arguments? Does the speaker ignore obviously conflicting
       arguments?
  6. If the message includes alternative points of view, how are those views
       characterized? Does the speaker use positive words and images to describe
       his/her point of view and negative words and images to describe other points
       of view? Does the speaker ascribe positive motivations to his/her point of
       view and negative motivations to alternative points of view?"

The author goes on to dig more specifically into the current debate on bias in the media, and makes a very strong argument for the fact that there is both liberal and conservative bias in the media (it depends on who you talk to), but that the stronger biases in media are commercial bias, temporal bias, visual bias, bad news bias, etc.

Anyway you might want to keep these questions in mind as you try to parse through the white noise that is modern info-communication and wonder whatever happened to Walter Cronkite and the certainty of "That’s the way it was…"

Freaky Economics from My Alma Mater

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It seems that the Freakonomics guys aren’t the only ones practicing "freaky economics."  Check out this Wall Street Journal piece that links to several interesting, non-traditional applications for economics.

The coolest part to me is that my alma-mater, George Mason University, is home to the economics department from which the author hails.  GMU’s first Nobel laureate was an econ-guy at the school, and as further proof that my wife is the brains in the family, she was an Econ major.  I, of course, was an English-Lit major which had a decidedly less, um, rigorous curriculum.

Steve Jobs’ Commencement Speech at Stanford

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Dana Blankenhorn has a transcript (apparently not verbatim, but close) of Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford.  Dana says it’s the best commencement speech ever…and I haven’t heard enough of them to agree or disagree. I can tell you, though, that it is definitely worth reading.

He talks about dropping out of college because he was aimless and felt he was wasting his working class parents’ money.  Then he did an amazing thing: he dropped back into college.  He just started going to classes that interested him, sleeping on friends’ floors and collecting bottles to turn in for food money.  Here’s what he said:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy
instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every
label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had
dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to
take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif
and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between  different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.
It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science
can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. 

But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh  computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the  Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had  never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have  never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and 
since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal  computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that  calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the  wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when  I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10  years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You  can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that  the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in  something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever–because  believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the  confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

He then goes on to talk about two more major events in his life, being fired at Apple and being diagnosed with cancer.  Here is his take on death:

No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don’t want
to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No
one has ever escaped it.

And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the  single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears  out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But  someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and  be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it’s quite true. Your  time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t  be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other  people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out  your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know 
what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

I’m a Proud Alumnus

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As a graduate of George Mason University I was somewhat surprised to find a link to this Sextravaganza story on Fark.com.  Not that GMU is a conservative campus, but it isn’t exactly a big party school. 

The last time I can remember anything even remotely risque occuring at GMU was when Anthony Kiedis and Flea from The Red Hot Chili Peppers were arrested for flashing some coeds after their concert at the Patriot Center in the early 90s.

Not that GMU is a small school (28,000) students, but most of its students are commuters so there isn’t the same, uh, social scene that you find at other similarly sized schools.  Heck it still doesn’t have an NCAA football team, not even Division 1-A (they have a club team), so this kind of notoriety is the only way anyone outside of the DC area will ever hear about the school.  Better notorious than anonymous I guess!

Consider the source, not the source’s source

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Fred Wilson, a New York based venture capitalist who writes the A VC blog, has an interesting post about the policy of his daughter’s school to require some offline citations in the bibliographies of student papers.  This struck he and his wife as somewhat "antiquated."

His wife wrote a note about the "antiquated" policy to the school’s principal and he replied saying (paraphrasing the post’s paraphrase here) that the school’s policy was intentional because the internet was instant gratification.  By requiring student’s to use offline sources they felt there would be more thought and consideration given to the work.

I disagree.  Just because you can get sources faster online, or more slowly offline, doesn’t cause you to be more or less deliberate in your thinking.  That comes from the experience of having your conclusions evaluated and torn apart by others. (Fred addresses this in his post).

Schools shouldn’t concentrate on whether sources are online or offline. They should concentrate on teaching their students how to identify and evaluate legitimate sources, how to apply their own critical thinking to those sources and how to avoid the growing tendency to ignore sources that disagree or disprove their preconceived notions.

After all the National Enquirer could be considered an offline source.