I'm sitting in a coffeehouse using a small computer to glom onto the wifi and blog about how it feels to be sitting in a coffeehouse and blog on a laptop via local wifi.
Recursives...foiled again.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Blog the good blog every bloggle
Ahh, Sunday morning. Time for the paper, a hot cuppa and a deep investigation into the central tension plaguing our educational system. What motivates this, you ask? Well, when proctoring standardized tests, ones mind wanders to loftier topics than ovals and number 2 pencils.
When I was in grad school (mark 2) I learned about a field of literary interpretation which was based in identifying "binary oppositions" - those ideas which stood against their polar counterparts, "good and evil" being the obvious example. At the time, young and naïve as I was, I resisted this as reductionist and simplistic. "The world," I insisted, "is subtle and complex, filled with shades of gray, and possibly also polka dots." Well, now I'm old and naïve and I know that the opposites exist, but not to the mutual exclusuon of each other, but paradoxically, in some sort of symbiotic and even simultaneous coexistence. Layers upon contradictory layers create the texture of life. You can tell how boring proctoring is by the vocabulary I'm willing to use even though I'm writing this on the Blackberry.
This opposition is typified by standardized tests. They are meaningless and useless and yet necessary and even conveniently useful. They stress multiple choice test taking skills and short timed writing neither of which either reflects student intelligence, skill or ability or reflects college and life assessments. They level the playing field so colleges can judge students from different schools who transcripts may not be comparable even if their grades were honest and accurate. But the test prep industry springing from the (true) student perception that these scores will determine college acceptance simply replaces the home grown school-based dishonesty of grade inflation with an external (and economically biased) dishonesty which turns performance into a "how well you can take a test" exercise further invalidating any comparison or even educational integrity of the test.
We crave simple predictors and concrete measures because we understand innately that the world is a messy place. We blind ourselves to the truth that neither a subjective judgment nor an objective one is likely to provide any real insight. We buy into a system which confers authority on the brand name colleges and thus makes them the objective to the detriment of actual learning, but those "top" colleges (also a statistic which is both useless and invalid) din't provide any "better" education than another. Their name creates the job market demand and the system is perpetuated - not because it represents a real stratification intellectually but because a presumed stratification which already exists feeds into itself.
So we have this tension - between knowing and not knowing, between thinking and doing, between objective and subjective. And yet we know that all of our systems don't succeed OR fail, but somehow succeed AND fail.
Solutions? I have no idea. Do we change the entire culture, workforce and socio-economic-educational system around the entire country? Maybe, for a start. But it won't work. And yet it will, but so will doing nothing.
When I was in grad school (mark 2) I learned about a field of literary interpretation which was based in identifying "binary oppositions" - those ideas which stood against their polar counterparts, "good and evil" being the obvious example. At the time, young and naïve as I was, I resisted this as reductionist and simplistic. "The world," I insisted, "is subtle and complex, filled with shades of gray, and possibly also polka dots." Well, now I'm old and naïve and I know that the opposites exist, but not to the mutual exclusuon of each other, but paradoxically, in some sort of symbiotic and even simultaneous coexistence. Layers upon contradictory layers create the texture of life. You can tell how boring proctoring is by the vocabulary I'm willing to use even though I'm writing this on the Blackberry.
This opposition is typified by standardized tests. They are meaningless and useless and yet necessary and even conveniently useful. They stress multiple choice test taking skills and short timed writing neither of which either reflects student intelligence, skill or ability or reflects college and life assessments. They level the playing field so colleges can judge students from different schools who transcripts may not be comparable even if their grades were honest and accurate. But the test prep industry springing from the (true) student perception that these scores will determine college acceptance simply replaces the home grown school-based dishonesty of grade inflation with an external (and economically biased) dishonesty which turns performance into a "how well you can take a test" exercise further invalidating any comparison or even educational integrity of the test.
We crave simple predictors and concrete measures because we understand innately that the world is a messy place. We blind ourselves to the truth that neither a subjective judgment nor an objective one is likely to provide any real insight. We buy into a system which confers authority on the brand name colleges and thus makes them the objective to the detriment of actual learning, but those "top" colleges (also a statistic which is both useless and invalid) din't provide any "better" education than another. Their name creates the job market demand and the system is perpetuated - not because it represents a real stratification intellectually but because a presumed stratification which already exists feeds into itself.
So we have this tension - between knowing and not knowing, between thinking and doing, between objective and subjective. And yet we know that all of our systems don't succeed OR fail, but somehow succeed AND fail.
Solutions? I have no idea. Do we change the entire culture, workforce and socio-economic-educational system around the entire country? Maybe, for a start. But it won't work. And yet it will, but so will doing nothing.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
I'm a "bad" driver. Take 1
Ahh, flashback to the I'm a Bad Neighbor series.
A few Friday's ago, i was driving a child to school. I moved into the right lane on the local poseur-highway to get around a slower driver. I drove and then shifted back to the center after I passed him. Then a cop pulled me over claiming that I performed an unsafe lane change, cutting off the other car by 1/2 a car length.
I was accelerating, he was dropping back...I looked in my mirror and over my shoulder. There was very little traffic. After the lane change he didn't flick his lights, honk his horn or flip me off. Nothing. There was nothing wrong with what I did so I was a bit taken aback. I told the officer (nicely) that I checked and felt I was safe. He said I wasn't "even close." Yay for police.
The tyicket is $85 and 2 points on my pretty clean record. I'm not so happy about that but I could swallow it if I felt that the 2 points wouldn't kill my insurance premiums. The company refuses to tell me what it would do to my rates, though. Maybe nothing, maybe a lot. Yay for companies.
So I plead not guilty and asked for a court date. I went in today and wandered through the maze that is the court house. I found the right office and eventually was called in by the prosecutor. She said that I could plead to "unsafe driving" which would remove the points, but would cost me $450 up front. Yay for governments. The beauty is that my rates could still go up if my license is audited and I am found to be an "unsafe driver" -- it wouldn't be a point surcharge but I wouldn't qualify for the preferred rates so same difference. Thus, the plea was no solution. So now I have to wait till the cop can be in court so I can get called back to take more time off and state my side of what is effectively a "he said, he slapped me with a ticket." Joy.
A few Friday's ago, i was driving a child to school. I moved into the right lane on the local poseur-highway to get around a slower driver. I drove and then shifted back to the center after I passed him. Then a cop pulled me over claiming that I performed an unsafe lane change, cutting off the other car by 1/2 a car length.
I was accelerating, he was dropping back...I looked in my mirror and over my shoulder. There was very little traffic. After the lane change he didn't flick his lights, honk his horn or flip me off. Nothing. There was nothing wrong with what I did so I was a bit taken aback. I told the officer (nicely) that I checked and felt I was safe. He said I wasn't "even close." Yay for police.
The tyicket is $85 and 2 points on my pretty clean record. I'm not so happy about that but I could swallow it if I felt that the 2 points wouldn't kill my insurance premiums. The company refuses to tell me what it would do to my rates, though. Maybe nothing, maybe a lot. Yay for companies.
So I plead not guilty and asked for a court date. I went in today and wandered through the maze that is the court house. I found the right office and eventually was called in by the prosecutor. She said that I could plead to "unsafe driving" which would remove the points, but would cost me $450 up front. Yay for governments. The beauty is that my rates could still go up if my license is audited and I am found to be an "unsafe driver" -- it wouldn't be a point surcharge but I wouldn't qualify for the preferred rates so same difference. Thus, the plea was no solution. So now I have to wait till the cop can be in court so I can get called back to take more time off and state my side of what is effectively a "he said, he slapped me with a ticket." Joy.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Literacy 2.0
I have been hearing about and reading about people bemoaning the state of reading these days. They complain that with all the phones and videos and tv's and the like, the next generation will not have the skills to sit and read. We are become, they complain, an oral culture again. Our story tellers record their ideas, film their world, and share via the voice and the eye. That's why our students never read books. They can get their visual news with a click of the mouse and can watch movies on their phones. Why read.
Hogwash.
What I think we are entering is a post-literacy generation and, strangely enough, it is the same progression which each era has engendered. When my students 15 years ago tried to read novels from the 1700's and 1800's they had trouble making it through the lengthy description. But they could breeze through a 1000 page 20th century work. Our eyes and brains become accustomed to new modes of writing, not NO modes of writing. I bet that a student from 1900 would have had trouble reading old English or that the rise of the penny press and its sensationalist writing, or the dime novels and their pulp stories held, for the older generation then, the promise fo the demise of "real reading."
Living on the web, using wikipedia, texting incessantly (all signs of the new apocalypse) are all reading intensive activities. They demand a new skill in reading and writing and a different approach to text. But this need not be seen as inferior...simply different. Did you ever compare a letter home from a Civil War soldier to one from a Revolutionary War soldier? How about one from a Gulf War soldier? An in 20 years, an email from a soldier to his family will look even more different. This isn't bad. It is just different. Maybe there will be a reduction in the formal writing and reading (which we define as "the way we did it properly when I was growing up") and maybe the language itself will change to allow new phrases, words and spelling which will look so non-traditional as to be abhorrent to traditionalists. But that's how language works. We split infinitives these days. And we end with prepositions. Our parents might have used what was then slang and what is now standard. Life and language move on. Our children will read and write. We may not get it. We may force them to keep doing it "our way" because our way is "real" or "right" and they will grow up living in more than one world linguistically. And that will make the next generation exactly the same as we are. The gap has always existed. We just see it accutely because we are on the other side of it now.
Hogwash.
What I think we are entering is a post-literacy generation and, strangely enough, it is the same progression which each era has engendered. When my students 15 years ago tried to read novels from the 1700's and 1800's they had trouble making it through the lengthy description. But they could breeze through a 1000 page 20th century work. Our eyes and brains become accustomed to new modes of writing, not NO modes of writing. I bet that a student from 1900 would have had trouble reading old English or that the rise of the penny press and its sensationalist writing, or the dime novels and their pulp stories held, for the older generation then, the promise fo the demise of "real reading."
Living on the web, using wikipedia, texting incessantly (all signs of the new apocalypse) are all reading intensive activities. They demand a new skill in reading and writing and a different approach to text. But this need not be seen as inferior...simply different. Did you ever compare a letter home from a Civil War soldier to one from a Revolutionary War soldier? How about one from a Gulf War soldier? An in 20 years, an email from a soldier to his family will look even more different. This isn't bad. It is just different. Maybe there will be a reduction in the formal writing and reading (which we define as "the way we did it properly when I was growing up") and maybe the language itself will change to allow new phrases, words and spelling which will look so non-traditional as to be abhorrent to traditionalists. But that's how language works. We split infinitives these days. And we end with prepositions. Our parents might have used what was then slang and what is now standard. Life and language move on. Our children will read and write. We may not get it. We may force them to keep doing it "our way" because our way is "real" or "right" and they will grow up living in more than one world linguistically. And that will make the next generation exactly the same as we are. The gap has always existed. We just see it accutely because we are on the other side of it now.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Word of Face
I remember a line used by some comedian in the way back when. He said "I am responsible for spreading all the new jokes -- I know one sophomore in every high school in the country." Humor was simpler back then. But his point was clear -- to spread a piece of information like a joke required a human network and the youth, with its penchant for not shutting the heck up, is an effective tool for the passing of that data.
It seems to me that now, social networking like Facebook has become the new word of mouth. All those little lines, jokes and jabs that we would say around the water fountain and which would get into wider distribution only if someone in our peer group decided to repeat them (often to his own gain...attribution skills are sorely lacking amongst the younger set) can now be spread over the internet. I make a pun and instead of having to keep it to myself (which would often be the prudent course) I can tell the world so it can appreciate my brilliance. Computers, it has been said, make human contact unnecessary. They replace one grapevine with another more powerful one. I can force others to hear what I say instead of waiting for an opportunity when they are willing to listen.
Neat, huh?
It seems to me that now, social networking like Facebook has become the new word of mouth. All those little lines, jokes and jabs that we would say around the water fountain and which would get into wider distribution only if someone in our peer group decided to repeat them (often to his own gain...attribution skills are sorely lacking amongst the younger set) can now be spread over the internet. I make a pun and instead of having to keep it to myself (which would often be the prudent course) I can tell the world so it can appreciate my brilliance. Computers, it has been said, make human contact unnecessary. They replace one grapevine with another more powerful one. I can force others to hear what I say instead of waiting for an opportunity when they are willing to listen.
Neat, huh?
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Oh, Anna
Do you think my cleaning woman knows that she has become the local bogey man, the threat by which we keep our children in mind? Right before she comes to clean, we tell the kids "you'd better clean up your stuff or Anna is going to come and clean it for you and you'll never see it again!" And eventually all I need to do is to hold up the book, paper, sneaker or such and look at the offending child and whisper "Anna's gonna get this." Soon, just the mention of the name "Anna" will be enough to get them to sanitize the house.
Is this wrong of me? Anna doesn't know that we harbor such deep feelings about her attempts to clean by stuffing everything in one drawer after she has finished folding the garbage and shining the videotapes. Am I wrong for having a cleaning woman? Are there people who use an invocation of my name to inspire fear and revulsion in their children?
I hope so.
Is this wrong of me? Anna doesn't know that we harbor such deep feelings about her attempts to clean by stuffing everything in one drawer after she has finished folding the garbage and shining the videotapes. Am I wrong for having a cleaning woman? Are there people who use an invocation of my name to inspire fear and revulsion in their children?
I hope so.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Because I seem to react to the use of certain words angrily, I have been asked to present a list of words that bother me.
You may not use the following words:
******
****
****
****
****
***
************
*****
****
*******
*****
****’*
***-*****-****
*****
******
*****
**
*** *******
****(*)
**** ******
Episcop*lian
**** (*** **** **********)
You may not use the following words:
******
****
****
****
****
***
************
*****
****
*******
*****
****’*
***-*****-****
*****
******
*****
**
*** *******
****(*)
**** ******
Episcop*lian
**** (*** **** **********)
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