Texting while learning

A generation now I expect fury over texting and driving will be a thing of the past because we'll have robot cars. But what about learning while texting?  What robot will perform the function of educating college students whilst they simultaneously text their friends to say they are in class?

How the Boarding of the Gazan Flagship Reveals what is wrong with WORLD HISTORY AT SALEM STATE

A year of study into the history of the world -- required of all no less -- offers us no answer to how we should respond, feel, or merely interpret the events of the past month.  I speak of the Oil Spill and the Killing of Peace Activists.  I hope that we have spoken enough over the last two terms about the environment and about the oppressed people's of the world for good people to reach good conclusions about these news phenomena.  But who are the oppressed, or are we all of us oppressed?  (Further, are we the proletariat or the lumpen proletariat?).  And what is the message of a school that offers free parking but inadequate and poorly placed bike racks?  Does it comport with the lessons of World History, that the slave trade was not merely about raping West Africa but of raping (if you will) the ecosystems of the Caribbean and North Atlkantic¿?  I ask you.

Salem State Reviews

Are the teacher's unions the problem in higher education?  They might be, but there's the old line about democracy that comes to mind: they're awful, except for the alternatives.  There is a growing chorus of complaints about the unions and the "education bubble" from all quarters now.  The right has been against the whole idea of actual knowledge for some time, but now the so-called left is after the teacher's unions and the poor quality and high cost of education abroad in the land.  The NY Times magazine cover has a thorough article with a nice provocative title explaining how Arne Duncan, the Gates Foundation, and others are going to "improve" public education.

Here's what I can tell you based on the reviews of Salem State from students.  The big problem they have is not the faculty but the administration.  It turns out that it is the back office -- the registrar, the bursars office, the dorms residence halls -- that make life at Salem trying.  Looking over the reviews volunteered at various sites online as well as the formal survey conducted by the history department (all of it anonymous), students take 6 or more years to graduate (if they ever do) not because the faculty is full of lazy unionistas phoning it in but because the administration seems unable to provide them with the basics of a decent life, including clean toilets and transfer records that persist in the databases.

It is striking how bad the infrastructure of the college is, from its bus service to its website.  There might be a union to blame in there somewhere, but it's not the faculty's.  The place to look is as one should at any large organization that has problems: the top.

The bottom line is that students are the lupenproletariat, unable to see that their money is going to drive an agenda that has to do with many things other than the students' education and well being. 

Who will call them phonies now that Salinger is gone?

There was a piece in the Times last June suggesting that students
today don't go for Catcher in the Rye:
Ms. Feinberg recalled one 15-year-old boy from Long Island who told her: “Oh, we all hated Holden in my class. We just wanted to tell him, ‘Shut up and take your Prozac.’ ”

That is a worry.  Yes, it was a fancy prep school, white
boy, etc., but to deny the universality of this bit of great art -- located in a specific subject but accessible with guidance to anyone --  is to deny the value of literature altogether.  More to the point, I worry that teens don't agree with Holden that everyone is a phony, or perhaps they agree but they're fine with that.  They do trust people over 30.  That means there is no energy for a revolution, no chance for Jeffersonian, generational renewal.

Do you know what your EFC is?

Here are two Facebook messages I got from a student.  The first one I include though it embarrasses me to do so.  But it gives us the context.  The rest of the context is that this is a conscientious student who did well enough in my class but is no academic superstar, nor does this student come from a background that I think pushes education.  Here, for the record are the federal numbers on Salem State:
SALEM STATE COLLEGE
Federal School Code: 002188
Graduation Rate: 43%
Retention Rate: 71%

A final preamble: I realize this presents just one side of the story and that students are often misinformed and confused.  So, I take all this with a grain of salt, but here it is: 
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Hey Dan,
I know you went through a bunch of trouble to get me into your world history 2 class, but I’m actually not going to be able to go to college at Salem anymore. My mom lost her job and apparently she makes "too much" for finical aid and I’m already taking out the maximum number of loans I can. I’m wicked bummed and now I’m stuck on the cape going to community college AGAIN. but I just wanted to say thanks for all your effort for getting me into your class, give my spot to someone who deserves it! And thanks for being such a great professor! I really enjoyed your class and did learn a lot. Keep in touch!
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So I send a Facebook message basically asking, what's up? (Oh, and telling the student that I didn't go to that much trouble, but I did have to provide an override because my course was maxed out.  I always let them know that I'm doing them a big favor, it's good for business.)
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Well here's the scoop, I graduated hs in 2006, went to 4c's for the nursing program, go in, hated it switched majors, applied to Salem and Bridgewater but went to Salem. I love the area so that’s why I went. I applied late and was supposed to get a ton of finical aid (basically everything paid for) which is why I went to Salem vs. Bridgewater, got a finical aid packet there too but I didn't get housing there. and there's nothing in bridgewater! boring place!

So I go to my orientation and they tell me they "ran out of money", the WHOLE reason i went to Salem and Lived on campus is because of all the finical aid money i was supposed to be getting.

I had to take out a lot of loans and my mom had to pay a lot of money for me to go to school. I was supposed to get $ for this spring semester, but for some reason they re did my finical aid packet and I lost my pell and mass grants and my moms EFC number jumped a thousand, weird huh?

so from what I was told was that I went from being needy to not very needy and all ill ever get for aid is the Stafford loans. and my mom has to pay her EFC of $5964 or something. It's ridiculous and she’s barely getting by so it's not worth it. I've written to the president, nothing, the people who work at finical aid know me by first name and they stopped answering my calls and calling me back. I’m never going to win this battle so I have given up I’ve done everything I can it sucks.

So I guess my plan is go to 4c’s AGAIN even though I have my associates, complete that semester and then just go to Bridgewater in the fall and. Graduate spring 11’ go to grad… I just really really really reallllyyy hate Cape Cod, and living at my moms house, but what can I do?
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So, what is the message here?  Well, for one thing it shows that Facebook is a useful tool for students to communicate with faculty, whatever its drawback might be.  And it shows that for all the talk of jobs being a lagging indicator, to quote my pal Ken Gold, "Jobs are the indicator."  And it suggests that education is still beggared by the government.  While the banks run away with the bank and lots of people are making good money taking advantage of college students, the students themselves are often struggling.

Cultural Literacy is Bunk

The latest issue of the National Education Association's journal Thought and Action (Vol. 25, Fall 2009) just arrived, including an article suggesting we reconsider the value of cultural literacy (Cultural Literacy: Is it time to revisit the debate? by Bernard Schweizer, Associate Professor, Long Island University).

I was compelled to put aside my syllabi generating and respond. Out of sheer laziness I have cut and pasted my own letter below, but I will give you the executive summary:
Schweizer is rethinking his opposition to making canon fodder of our students because he is so appalled by their inability to catch literary allusions. He couches the argument in "fight the power" terms by saying that by failing to make our students culturally literate we are preventing them from entering the inner circle inhabited by graduates of Choate and Andover and Harvard and Yale etc. I simply call forth my old Wesleyan Prof. Dick Ohmann who writes that this is exactly backwards. Cultural literacy comes from sharing an experience in the classroom that gets our students engaged in the material. We the teachers are the arbiters of this culture and we must construct this culture in partnership with our students actively and continually. But I said it better below.


January 11, 2010

Dear Editors,

I sympathize with Bernard Schweizer (Cultural Literacy, Fall 2009) in his disappointment with his graduate training, but his desire to reach for the water-logged life ring of “Cultural Literacy” gets it exactly backwards. I can do no better than to reference Professor Richard Ohmann (Emertitus of English, Wesleyan University) whose essay “The Function of English at the Present Time”* presents a critique of the cultural literacy battle; his critique remains incisive today, 23 years after its publication. Still, I would offer Schweizer – and all of us concerned with the intellectual incuriosity of our students – a solution less radical than Ohmann's hope for some sort of social revolution and less accommodationist (a bomb thrower might call it “collaborationist”) than that offered by Schweizer.

Like Schweizer, Ohmann explores the ideas of E.D. Hirsch but turns to Hirsch's foil Bill Bennett for the really juicy quotes. Ohmann takes on Bennett's assertion that students do not get “an adequate education in the culture and civilization of which they are members” by asking simply: “If they don't, in what sense are they 'members' of it? Is culture something hidden in mysteries? Is it not the practices and beliefs of a people?” Hirsch may be more flexible than Bennett, more willing to accept that the choice of what bits and pieces of the culture should be deemed fundamental is a difficult political minefield. But for Ohmann, all purveyors of the cultural literacy agenda “neglect to wonder how one might legislate democracy in spheres of culture and education when there is no democracy, no equality, no empowerment for the many outside those spheres.”

Ohmann saw hegemony at work in the strange bedfellows the cultural literacy agenda made of Hirsch and Bennet. He saw too that education is about sorting the haves from the have nots, a view Schweizer seems to share. Nevertheless, Ohmann wrote at a time when all cultural critics recognized television as our common culture. To the culture czars television is a vast wasteland. Technological change and the success of the empowerment movements of the last few decades (helped in part by those in the academy) has robbed us of even that dubiously valuable common ground. First cable television and now the internet have allowed us to slice our media environment into slivers so thin they can no longer be termed “mass”. Communities that want to see themselves reflected on the screen, whether they be gay, Latino, or even white men, can choose their own particular channels and websites. Certainly there still are broadcast networks, but ask your students how many of them watch scheduled programs. Then see how many shows they have in common. (If your students are like mine, you will find as I did that they are as culturally estranged from their instructors as they are from one another.) The Balkanization of our culture means that not only can we not refer easily to Orwell and Ghandi and Hemingway, we can't even call on our common knowledge of Fonzie, Big Bird, or Walter Cronkite.

In other words, even without asking the politically difficult question of what our canonical texts should be, we are hard pressed to find common points of reference. Without a common language of experience, art or metaphor we are reduced merely to grunt and gesture with our students. What then are we to do?

Certainly we could have a committee convene and dictate a set of cultural content for our students to memorize and then test them on it as they make their way toward post-secondary education. But wait, haven't we already been trying that since the Clinton era? That's what the dreaded “standards movement” is all about. If my students are any indication, it just doesn't work. The State of Massachusetts thinks they know who Chairman Mao is, but if they ever did, most certainly don't now.

Instead, can we not empower students to use the powerful tools at their fingertips (and increasingly their thumbs) to fake their way into the privileged circles that Schweizer identifies. Rather than warning students away from Wikipedia and Google as so many teachers do, why not insist that they look up all of the things that they don't understand? One need not approach Bill McKibben's essay on climate change (the subject of Schweizer's extended analysis) with a mind that has already read Hemingway's short stories or Orwell's Animal Farm to follow his argument. Indeed a close examination of the context of McKibben's references reveals that students need not know the “classics” at all to understand the essay. Yes McKibben writes that the “Snows of Kilimanjaro are set to become the rocks of Kilimanjaro”, but he is writing about the climate atop a real 4,600 meter mountain in Tanzania (I just looked the height and location up on Wikipedia), not the themes of Hemingway's short story of the same name. Yes, he “paraphrases Orwell” when he writes that we will all be hot but some will be hotter than others, but it is a bogus reference having nothing to do with economic or political inequality and thus nothing really to do with Animal Farm. I certainly want students to have the intellectual curiosity to look up Orwell and the sophistication not to focus on the fact that his real name is Eric Arthur Blair (a headline fact on Wikipedia).

This last example seems to prove Schweizer's point that “cultural literacy” is less about being smart and more about being part of the in crowd. Scratch beneath the surface a bit and I expect we'll find that most of our economic and cultural elites – the ones Schweizer identifies as attending the fancy prep schools and ivy leagues – know a lot less about the things they reference than they seem to. How many know, for example that when FCC chairman Newton N. Minow gave his “Wasteland Speech” on May 9, 1961 (thanks Wikipedia!) he actually said that when television is good it is better than theater, magazines, or newspapers? Does E.D. Hirsch? Does Bill Bennett? The point is this: our students may not have the same facts in their heads as their betters do, but the real enemy is willful ignorance and an incuriosity that is gleefully shared across class lines.

We do need to find a common language to speak to our students, but not by parroting the trivia of a snobbish elite. The answer, of course, is to actually listen to them as individuals and find the cultural references that help make the point. In your classroom, the culture czar is you. Perhaps at the end of the semester, your 25 or 125 or 325 students will be able to wink to one another with knowing references. Make sure those references are to texts that are meaningful and vibrant and, yes, classic, and perhaps those references will stay with them after graduation. Better still, perhaps the learning bug will bite them too.

Daniel Albert
Assistant Professor of History
Salem State College, Salem, Massachusetts
dalbert@salemstate.edu
exchaoordo@gmail.com


* Richard Ohmann, Politics of Letters, (Wesleyan, 1987).  

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.