Mesothelioma and the future of learning

I want to talk about mesothelioma. Mesothelioma is the lung disease caused by asbestos exposure. Mesothelioma is a horrible disease. Mesothelioma is also a very lucrative disease for some trial lawyers and Google Ads. Actually, I don't know how much income Google derives from mesothelioma, but I understand that mesothelioma is a high paying keyword, that is the people who advertise mesothelioma services pay something like $10 a click through as opposed to just pennies a click through for other words. What this tells us about the nature of mesothelioma in the American economy, particularly in the face of looming health care changes, is surely a subject of interest to more than just mesothelioma specialists and those that have mesothelioma or those who have friends and loved ones suffering with mesothelioma. Yes, mesothelioma is interesting in a real life and death way.

But I'm more interested in what this little fact suggests to us about the future of higher education. As I sit at the nexus of various players in the higher ed economy, where the state, the textbook giants, the open source and closed source startups meet, I wonder what the business model for the future of higher education is.

To some speaking about the business model of higher education may be anathema, but I mean it in the broadest sense: in our current human ecosystem in the US, with changes in technology, culture, and resources, what will happen to humanities teaching after the state is done preparing our children to be good citizens and consumers in the 21st century.

There are a lot of us looking to the future and wondering how we will educate in a generation, and it is 3-dimensional chess. Yet while we discuss the "Classroom of the future" a meeting I was button-holed into yesterday, who is involved from the professorial class to consider what sustains our enterprise? It's not something we professors are good at I suppose, but I do know we are good at thinking outside the box. Right now we don't even have a box, but a bunch of competing boxes open and attracting students (if you can excuse the tortured metaphor). Will the future be made of online departments of "Mesothelioma studies". If the ads at right show up with that magic keyword, and you click on them, perhaps it will.

"U.S. Math Tests Find Scant Gains Across New York"

So the NY Times reported this morning: the 4th and 8th graders did not make great progress in New York over the last two years, they did no better, perhaps worse, based on the federal tests, despite the fact that the state's tests show great progress. Diane Ravitch calls it fraud.

"Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city teachers’ union, said the federal results showed that the state tests were not reliable yardsticks. 'We’ve designed a school system that is just test-taking prep, and we have teachers saying, ‘I know I am not teaching children what they need to learn,’ ' he said."

This comes as especially interesting news after my initial interview with one of the biggest textbook publishers yesterday for a job creating "Problem sets" for their online history textbooks. To me the job has potential, especially if a decade from now we are closer to the "Teaching machines" of 1950s science fiction that will give our kids individualized, supportive, engaging education in a range of subjects. Typically, in a good short story from the era, the school day took an hour of teaching or perhaps was done while the child slept -- always by a kind and patient machine.

So that's what the job would be, programming the machine. The most delicious part is that it pays much better than being a member of the faculty at SSC. Of course the goal now is merely to "support teaching" but there's no reason to believe that we would stop there. We've squeezed the costs out of all sorts of things, from switchboards to assembly lines by replacing people with machines, why not the university as well? Once we're done with that we could replace mothers with machines and free the moms for work. What work they would actually do, I don't know.

MCAS Hits Home, or, What does Molly have against Nuclear Submarines?

A bit of a digression from higher ed this time to comment on the recent report of the state of Massachusetts on my eldest daughter's reading comprehension ability, which apparently is not up to snuff as far as they're concerned. Fortunately, the interweb now allows the interested parent to see the actual questions and reading assignments on which this assessment is based. It turns out that there were 12 multiple choice questions (and one short answer question but we cannot see the answer to that one). She got the first 8 right. These were on a reading about a boy getting milk in the snow.

She got one of the next 4 questions right, in other words, as well as a chimp who couldn't read might have done. This reading was on the launch of the nuclear submarine Nautilus. I can only assume that Molly doesn't like subs. I have to ask: what is our school doing to bridge the gender gap and ensure that little girls are as intrigued about Cold-War submarine history as little boys? I can only hope they are on the case.

Historical Thinking and other Unnatural Acts

My history 101 sections are going brilliantly well, for what it's worth. It won't get me a job and it won't change the world, and it all happens in a national, regional, and local context that constrains the outcomes. But we've been having fun, point one. And we've been engaged in the kind of historical thinking that all the right thinking people who think about history think we should be thinking. So I turned back to Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Thinking-Other-Unnatural-Acts/dp/1566398568) to review and see where the gap was between my class and nirvana. Here's what I found.

Wineburg writes in the context of the history wars of a decade ago and concludes, as many historians did, that the battle over what to teach in history obscured the more fundamental question of why teach history. We've already reviewed carefully what the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks say about teaching history (indoctrinate youth so they will be willing to fight and die to uphold Western Civilization, or at least pass a test). But Wineburg says it is something else: we study history to transcend ourselves, to be humanized in a way that, he argues, only history can humanize us. The only trick is the balance between studying people at another time and place and seeing that they are both exactly like us and nothing like us.

That's all well and good until we arrive at an essay near the end that recounts the supposedly transcendant class exercise about the so-called "Critical Period" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Critical_Period) in American history. The lesson culminated in a class discussion that ended up being about the question of whether there is moral law that superceeds national law. They revisited the Nuremberg Trials.

As recounted, the class discussion was wide ranging and energetic, but there's the rub: the students made repeated reference to specific historical events and questions in making arguments about whether there is indeed a higher moral law. Aha! Where and when did they learn these? One must assume that either they spent hours hearing them, or reading deeply contextualized references to them. In other words, they had loads of content in their heads before they started thinking historically, or doing what historians do.

Squaring the circle of student knowledge remains the fundamental problem. In lieu of deeply historical understanding of, say, Mesopotamian civilizations, I simply ask students about their own civilization. That alone takes us from them having lots of answers to them having lots of questions -- high school was about answers, college is about questions -- but we do all of this with the barest base of factual knowledge.

Wineburg's right in his critique of teaching history -- which he shows goes back nearly 100 years without change. But he celebrates the kind of well-informed students he thinks we'd all like to have at the table before the conversation begins.

What can we expect of working students?

This year's students seem to have more responsibilities outside of school than those I had last year. I've not run numbers, but I cannot think of a student last year who had children to care for but this Fall I've got at least a half dozen if not more.

But, as in the past, the most common responsibility outside of school is working for pay. Of course school is more important than working at Foot Locker (Someone came to class in their refs outfit from that shoe store and we learned that they have removed the peas from all of their whistles so that they are merely ornamental. A typical assault by corporate America on the freedom of the working woman!). Yet the immediacy of work conflicts with the importance of school.

Consider the example of a young woman who failed World History with me last Fall and is back for another go. Last year she never bought the text the class and didn't make a regular habit of attending class. This year, she still has not activated her Salem State email account and still has not bought the book. Then she fell ill. We spoke one evening last week about what she needed to do to avoid a repeat of last year. She's already missed two classes on account of the illness and needs to get ahold of the book. Equally important she needs to get well and come to class, I reminded her. The problem she tells me with both of these needs is work. She can miss class, but she cannot miss work.

That really hurts. Sure, it could be a dodge, an excuse for which any other would do as well. But knowing this student I don't think that's the case. Instead, the consequences of missing work are more immediate and potentially harsher than missing school. She's already given up playing sports for Salem State and has taken summer classes to get back on track. So somehow in America it is not worth the government paying a student $10.00 and hour to go to class, but it is worth letting Foot Locker pay that student $10.00 an hour to work at the mall. I guess we get the society we deserve.

Beware the popularity of Jared Diamond

Well blog followers and advertisement clickers, soon we will be back in full swing. As the semester approaches, I can report that the higher educators of Salem State will be trying to do more with less: an increase of 25% in my insurance premiums (IE I will pay not 20 but now 25% of the premium for my family) and an increase of 10 to 20% in class sizes. All the more reason for you to click those ads because every fraction of every penny (and that's what it is worth) keeps food on the table.

I'm now preparing two different World History I classes, what we now call a F2F (face to face) and a hybrid class (half the class time but online work). It should be amusing and much better than last year when I used a textbook. I will be lecturing, but since it's the 21st century my lectures will all be 5 minutes long and be available to students pretty much whenever they want by Youtube, Screencast, and other sources. As some of you know, I'm a technophile at heart so I enjoy having to write my own html embeds and search the web for swf to flv converters. But it sure takes time.

Now what about this Jared Diamond fellow? I'm laying out the scope of big arguments about human history as existing between polls of environmental and cultural determinism. Diamond is the environmental guy, one step away from those that insist we're all just DNA slaves out to propogate. The complaint here isn't about his turgid prose or the fact that he gets so much wrong (see the lastest research on Easter Island, for example). In fact, the complaint isn't about him at all as much as it is about his popularity. (Yes, you can discount this all to jealousy -- as long as you click those ads!) He is popular because he writes what are essentially "Just so" stories. The world is as it is because this is the way it had to be thanks to geography, climate, and biology. It is interesting to note, however, that he is attacked from the right for being to presentist in his approach: that is for writing environmental jeremiads rather than well-researched histories.

I don't question the man's integrity or motivation. It's just that he's not a historian. Perhaps arcanely I still believe that the humanities professor is obligated to speak inconvenient truth to power in a way that is empowering. The scientist Diamond is not so missionary.

Too few students get a college education, not too many

Before we begin, a reminder that all things have value only to the extent that they are valued in the marketplace, hence the value of this blog is currently $11.25. But you can increase the value of this blog by clicking on the ads on the right hand of the page and by telling two friends to tell two friends to do the same.

I'd slowly started to believe the cry that too many people are going to college. You've heard a lot of this over the last year, from people like Charles Murray, co-author of the Bell Curve. I'd started to believe, until I looked at the actual numbers. Of course I had to find them by accident instead of really looking, but the result is the same: I know now that too few Americans go to college, not too many. Massachusetts boasts a very high rate of BA or higher at 38% (22% BAs with 16% Grad or Professional Degrees and another 7% get an Associates degree). For the nation as a whole, that number is only 27% (17% BAs, plus 10% Grad or Professional Degrees).

So, that leaves two-thirds to three-quarters of our population undereducated. So, before we start erecting more barriers to education or looking for ways to get rid of the students who arrive unprepared for college because our public schools are failing our lower income students, why not see if we can actually do what we said we were going to do and have an educated population? That and more leisure time, much more leisure time, would be good.

The Critical Thinking Shibboleth, or It matters what you think about

I've had a revelation: it matters about what you think critically. Maybe I'm slow to realize this and you, dear readers, knew it all along, but I find it to be a very profound insight. Or perhaps this is an act of translation from one way of thinking about a problem to another.

We all know what we in higher education are supposed to do to make the American economy competitive, to make the Massachusetts economy competitive: generate workers with the critical thinking skills and mental flexibility to be the high value workers of the future. That sounds good, but I've never really believed it. If an individual cannot turn critical thinking on and off, she will sink down a rabbit hole of despair. This is not some problem of false consciousness. It is a problem of mental exhaustion.

In fact, we want people who think critically about some things and not others. It is one thing to think critically about the current campaign to sell soap, but it is another thing entirely to think critically about the human experience, the nature of society, and the relationships of power within it. In other words, critical thinking is not a skill like being good with your hands; it is a skill that exists only in a context. Just as we cannot define life in the abstract -- we must point to examples -- we cannot describe critical thinking as an abstract skill because it is as much an attitudinal or emotional state as it is a rational one.

The chilling conclusion I have reached about the Massachusetts State Curriculum for History and Social Science is that we don't actually want students to think critically at all. The thrust of the curriculum is clear in the introductory remarks which state plainly that the goal is to acculturate students to a mythic America of "liberty, justice, and equality." The appearance of critical thinking within the curriculum is just that, an appearance with no reality.

Here, for example is one goal of the World History Curriculum that calls for students to analyze -- that is to examine in detail and draw conclusions about -- the causes and effects of Islamic expansion:

WHI.3 Analyze the causes, and course, and effects of Islamic expansion through North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and Central Asia.

But of course the analysis is already done for them and the causes and effects are laid out simply:
A. the strength of the Islamic world’s economy and culture
B. the training of Muslim soldiers and the use of advanced military techniques
C. the disorganization and internal divisions of Islam’s enemies
D. the resistance and/or assimilation of Christianized peoples in the Mediterranean

So in fact the student's goal is to find out what ABC & D are and then put them into a coherent essay or identify them in a multiple choice test. That's an exercise in a certain kind of thinking to be sure, but critical it ain't.

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Class

If you're rich, your car doesn't break down; if you're poor, it does. If you're rich you don't get into a car crash; if you're poor, you do. If you are rich and you do get into a car crash your safer car and the fact that you are in the habit of wearing a seat belt means you will escape with minor injuries. If you are poor, chances are your car is older and thus not as safe and chances are greater that no one ever got you into the habit of wearing your seat belt. If you are rich your car starts every time; if you are poor, sometimes it does not.

If you are rich all of your teeth are in the right place; if you are poor some of them are missing or misplaced. If you are rich you're less likely to be fat than if you are poor, and in any case you dress better to hide the extra bulk.

These are just a few of the ways in which socioeconomic class is written onto the bodies of college students. I have two students in wheelchairs, both car crash victims, one of whom is a double amputee with burns and missing fingers. Often, I suppose, chronic diseases and health risks are associated with other factors that shape learning outcomes during high school, but one can't help be struck by the difference between the students at Salem State and those at Amherst, Wesleyan, or Williams. There are the alphas and the gammas, the haves and have not. I don't imagine any of us are naive about this fact, but in this academic year I have been struck by the degree to which class is written on the body, visible to us all. What especially strikes me, of course is the public health component of all of this, more so than the fashions or the cultures.

Anyone can drive carefully of course, but all things being equal, things are not that equal. Newer cars are built with different steel than older cars, stronger steel, better able to protect the precious cargo.

Shibboleths Renewed

I never went in for the pablum teachers give, "I learn as much from my students as they learn from me." But perhaps the equation is more balanced than I thought. First, I wonder how much they actually learn from me, which may be little or nothing at all. Second, I actually learned something from my Salem State Students, something that perhaps I knew but had forgotten.

A bit of background:
For the first three weeks of this semester student teams have been considering various arguments for why we study World History. The idea of spending so much time on this question while my colleagues are teaching the diet of the Middle Ages came to me when my chair lamented his students' lack of interest in a Holocaust film. "They were more interested in the commercials," he said. My response at the time, out loud foolishly enough, was that if they were interested in the commercials I would make the commercials the text, the subject of inquiry and study.

Most students are incurious when it comes to World History, the response to which is typically for the teacher to somehow entice them: entertaining lecture, plea for the holiness of the subject, what have you. But my students were curious about one thing. They came to class the first day, many of them, with one question in mind: "Why the hell do I have to take this course." And so that is where we began. They read Bill Bennett, they read the State Curriculum Framework for the subject, and they read a Marxist interpretation, and they watched the Governor speak on the subject. In the process they had to find out what Marxism is, what nationalism is, what the humanities are, etc. Then they had to present their own plea for the subject.

Some sucked wind, but one class in particular has 5 solid presentations, and in that one class I learned something. The students took on the now current notion that education depends on good teachers more than money or parents' educational attainment or race or anything else. The idea is seductive for legislators (no need to spend more money) for liberals (we don't have to deal with race or class) and for teachers (higher pay and recognition for the job we do). But the students think it might be wrong. Their idea is simple: one student's good teacher is another's nightmare. They may be wrong at one level; there are certainly better and worse teachers in absolute terms. But they are right at a deeper level.

Human beings don't come in standard models. The more we try to say that they do, the more children we label as pathological, learning disabled and the like. From grading to the MCAS maybe we have the wrong idea. I think that team deserves and "A."

Team Based Learning

Well, it's been a while. It's a bit tough to get excited about teaching when the department chair is telling me he'd like to hire me but he's afraid they're going to have to eliminate all the 1-year contracts in favor of the much cheaper adjunct model. This in the face of a massive budget cut from the governor following on from the Governor's inspiring speech about the importance of education. So much for Obama's new America -- and that's even before watching the Dow plummet to the soundtrack of the new Treasury Secretary mincing his words and talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Still, we're all about Team Based Learning this semester, putting the students in teams and making them do the learning for themselves, and that's been fun. They've now had a chance to look at why everyone else thinks they should be taking World History and come up with their own explanations as to why they should be taking World History (or alternatively why they should not). It's taken us this long to get to the point where Friday the teams will present their ideas, but that's the nature of learning here. They're actually learning something useful, but I have to do it in such a small way that any pretense of "coverage" is out the window.

Meanwhile, Transportation History is going smoothly, alternating between a lecture and a discussion a week. Today it was about how the RR in America were about liquidating nature (Cronon) and how they were different than the British model. Mostly they wanted to hear abou the bogie, that set of 4 wheels that sits at either end of the rail car and is an innovation peculiar to American RR because the Americans had lower capitalized lines and therefore needed to make tighter curves. Still, they seem to be all aboard. We'll find out Friday.

The kids are alright

The three readers of this blog may begin to develop the inaccurate impression that I support the emergent plot line of the right: we have overreached in our effort to provide college education to the mass of Americans who are unable to make the grade. I'd no sooner blame the kids who fail my classes for that failure than the boys in Gaza who take up arms. In fact, they are creatures of their environment, groomed to be just what society has wanted them to be for the last generation, a permanent class of pliable consumers and ready workers for the dull, poorly paid jobs a debtor economy provides.

Take the case of a SSC athlete who graduated from a good state public school thanks to METCO (thanks to a loyal reader for research on this). Now METCO is intended to bus black kids from poor schools to good schools in white towns in Massachusetts. According to the state, "It is a voluntary program intended to expand educational opportunities, increase diversity, and reduce racial isolation, by permitting students in certain cities to attend public schools in other communities that have agreed to participate."

But somehow this student graduated from one of these good school without having been able to take advantage of the educational opportunities allegedly afforded to him or her by the METCO program. Clearly the student's parents made an effort by opting into the METCO program, but somehow the system didn't work. Perhaps the kid is a bad seed, unable or unwilling to learn. More likely METCO doesn't live up to its promise. I offer this bid of evidence: on a snowy morning Marblehead Public Schools announced that school would be in session but that no METCO kids would attend. No bus, no black kids. If the school district took seriously its commitment to integration, the proper decision, inconvenient as it would have been for all of us parents and school workers, would have been to cancel school. That they did not suggests continuing inequality perpetuated in what is allegedly one of the most liberal states in the nation.

Beyond this is the litnay of commentary epitomized by mark Bauerlein's book, The Dumbest Generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and Jeopardizes our future. These are what I'd call the "kids today" jeremiads, as in "Kid's today don't know what it was like to walk in the snow five miles to school in bare feet, each kid carrying her bible and slide rule." True enough, they don't, but then we don't know what it is like anymore to live without tomatoes in January. I'm certainly skepitcal of "progress" but don't blame the teachers and the students for the world you have wrought.