Again, the Connecticut Mirror has a report on the state of new rules in Connecticut education. It has a ring of the Keystone Cops. It’s really about how to do proper division. But as Neruda writes about in his poetry, what is proper is almost never understood

And so I left, keeping my silence.

That quote comes from Neruda’s poem Sobre Mi Mala Educacion. The article also illustration the friction that exists between administrators and teachers, whose aims are different.

Thomas’s piece is an interesting companion to this post by Marie Bjerede at O’Reilly on Do It Yourself culture in education, which, I would argue, is befuddling for lack of concreteness. Most people I know working with the Web are self taught. In the old days of Flash, most people learned Flash on their own. DIY is nothing new. In the absence of a school system, people learned what they needed to to get by. But getting by wasn’t that easy for the shoe maker or black smith. And my son wants to make a go-cart. We have an old lawnmower whose engine beckons. He’ll probably be watching lots of Youtube videos. I’ll be reading up on dangerous things that throw flames. DIY, writes Bjerede,

. . . puts us on the path to personalized learning. It weakens the requirement for students to learn together in lockstep, covering the same material at the same pace at the same time by listening to lectures in the same room and turning in the same homework on the same morning. It invites tinkering with different ways to break apart building blocks and put them back together while creating room for new building blocks to fit into those emerging structures.

This may be true. But a frequent critique of media types is the way people use them. We watch and listen to Sesame Street. We watch and listen to a lecture. Or I can watch and listen to an MIT lecturer at Open Course. I’m not quite seeing the difference yet.

Some subjects are best learned by doing them, practicing their known components. Poetry and programming share this characteristic. People have learned to write poetry for ages. People have learned to program for many years. If I sit in a room and listen to the teacher illustrate compositing, I have to take that info and objectify it myself. I have to do it. It’s another given of learning that “knowing something” is NOT a reference to someone else’s opinion on objects or of affective word order. Inside class Poem somewhere inside my Java interface I can call any number of already determined objects if they’re available, like a new stanza:

Stanza myFirstStanza = new Stanza();

We could change if we don’t like the way Java does it and go to Ruby or Python. The concepts travel, just as they do in poetry. DIY seems to be about assisting people learn what they are inclined to learn.

People will learn things for all kinds of reasons. Some people will learn a subject because they want to (very few people in my college experience wanted to learn Texas history); they enjoy learning and doing the thing they learned, even if it isn’t profitable (some people did want to learn Texas history. I say: GFT). Some people want to learn things that are profitable. People interested in learning will always try and figure out how to make a subject more accessible, to people who want to learn and to those who don’t. Currently, games are fashionable in education because they provide another means of access and on the assumption that games do teach. They can be used to trick people who don’t want to learn a thing into swallowing a superficial serving. Maybe. In my opinion, games teach critical intangibles, like how to lose and how to persist. A problem in any institutionalized program will always be how to learn if someone does indeed know what they should know, like brain surgery. Standardized tests can only approximate this but they can’t indicate motivation or the pull of an incentive. Connecticut’s obsession with these tests is cynical.

Institutions can be defined as big roomy places crowded with people who would rather be somewhere else. They could also be defined as big roomy places filled with people who do want to be there but are there for incredible or false reasons.

I’ll end with more Neruda:

Todos los que me daban consejos
están mas locos cada día.

Somini Sengupta’s article in today’s New York Times asks how to make gold out of Facebook’s Big Data pile. Indeed, in all my newsy feeds, a top story (I assume the world of news on finance has grown boring over the years) has to do with Facebook’s valuation. Is it $10 Billion or $100 Billion? Another anxiety in the piece has to do with the social model under the pressure of public holdings. The relationship here is how to make gold out of the data for stakeholders and how the stakeholder model will influence Facebook’s mechanics. It’s an interesting new media question. It should, perhaps, inspire other questions about how to think about internet use.

For example, Facebook could decide to charge users a $1 dollar a month for a subscription, $2 dollars for premium services. Or it could go with a public radio model and ask users to fork over a determination of value. This would, of course, amount to real money, close to a billion dollars a month, if everyone participated. It could inform each user that some of that money would go into assigned investments. This dollar more than competes with other data services.

The story of Facebook is buried deep in contemporary memes. One of these is “Big Data.” I don’t think users would be surprised at how fast data has become a metaphor. Try a search on Google or Bing. It’s all the rage on O’Reilly at the moment. Everyone has data. Some data is protected by law, other data is more ambiguous, a current mood, for example. Facebook has “tons” of it, some of it mine, which I’m uncomfortable with, not because I fear anything about privacy. In conversations between people at the cafe, every third word is the word “data.” When people talk to their mothers, their mothers respond with the word “data” more so than Captain Picard.

Note that I have no issue with data itself. We need to count things. My issue is with how we determine the value of something. To whom is my current mood of value?

All of this isn’t the only possible story. It could be that a user model is designed on the binary: teeny data. That a model is developed on the notion that one does not have to supply information, truthful or not (how much of all that user input is tweaked by users–re age: I’m 29), to use a service, that one does not need to login (what happened to the idea of superlogin–oh, I know?) to attend the party.

Data, given the meme, represents physicality. It comes with proportion; it has potential energy. It shares properties with rare minerals. But must it be this way? I note that at Quora the design concept has built into it a series of fields for email. This means that email is important. One cannot use Quora without an email account.

Someone could ask: why do we have to do it that way? We should pursue user models that ask different questions. I’m going to try one this summer just for kicks.

Most items for the semester’s end are done. It was a speedy and bizarre term, with a few interesting experiments, especially in World Literature and Digital Narrative.

Now to ready up for the summer session. Currently gathering new articles and updating assessment.

But the real work will be school of my own, digging back into Ruby on Rails and javascript, and breaking my fingers on interesting guitar chords. I will be under the rock, yet again, for several months.

This article in The Connecticut Mirror by Jaqueline Rabe Thomas covers some of the flurry of legislation pertaining to Higher Ed in Connecticut. I must say that SB40 and other bills came at us fast and many faculty and staff at my college were deeply involved, to the degree that access was provided to legislators and the legislative process, in the discussion.

Some issues bear comment. The writer, for example, provides this quote. The context is Senator Beth Bye’s opinion on “remediation” as an element in a causal chain:

“As we slow them down, they are less likely to graduate,” said Sen. Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, co-chairwoman of the Higher Education Committee.

Here Bye’s logic appears to be tracing this course: (cause) students are placed into “remedial” courses (note that at the college we call these “developmental” courses, as we don’t see ourselves applying a “fix” or remedy) (effect) therefore, they are less likely to graduate. The effect of a student’s likeliness is the “course.”

The problem with this logic is that very little evidence exists to support it. It may be true, indeed, but we really don’t know if it is true. For example, most teachers in college know students who have been placed into developmental courses. I’ve advised students about their placement into developmental courses, and their reactions are negative. They want to take credit bearing courses. Everyone does. But in this sense, the logic changes: cause: resentment :: effect: dropout. In another case, a student may come into a developmental course and flub the thing because they can never get over their anger, resentment, or apathy at being there in the first place. This kind of analysis, of course, might call for research on the complexity of attitude on success in any endeavor, which we, indeed, know a lot about. The real problem with Bye’s logic is that it is correlative not causal. I have had students who were living out of their cars in my courses and we able to pull it out. I’ve had students who were successful in dev courses and who did just fine. I’ve had students who tested into and flubbed.

Most college teachers know students who have been misplaced into developmental. They also know students who, if allowed into college-level courses, would more than likely be bewildered by the content because they are underprepared, some severely so. We’ve had students who were prepared but who did not function successfully because they simply did not care to do so. The complexities of preparation and maturity are not treated in Senator Bye’s statement.

Next, Thomas writes and includes this:

Bye and many other legislators have referred to these remedial courses as the colleges’ Bermuda Triangle: Just 13.6 percent of the full-time students who take them actually earn an associate’s degree in four years, twice the time it should take, reports the Board of Regents.

“That status quo is not working. There is a fundamental problem… It needs to change,” said Mike Meotti, a top official at the state’s Board of Regents for Higher Education, whose colleges enroll 15,000 new students a year.

There are all kinds of oddities in the first and second paragraphs. The metaphor doesn’t work but is a success at applying fallacy as appeal. Of course, Meotti’s is what I call “trigger statement.” Things that people say in passing without evidentiary requirement. The numbers reference by the Board of Regents is misleading. Perhaps 50 percent completed in 5 years. Maybe small numbers of students who did not take developmental courses earned their degrees in 4 years, too. Look at Complete College America’s front page graph. It complicated things, doesn’t it?

My readers should consider a basic idea. Let’s illustrate with a simple arithmetic question.

Let’s say 100 students enter college and 10 percent of those students graduate within four years. That means that 90 students failed to complete within 4 years. Let’s also assume that 5% of the graduates worked hard and that 5% had a pretty easy time of it. Continue: 70% percent of the second cadre (the 90 who didn’t complete) didn’t work hard or had personal problems or whatever other circumstances prevented graduation.

The basic question is this: does this represent a problem? Or, does this hypothetical illustrate human reality in a social construct?

In my 20 years teaching in higher education I’ve wrestled with my own basic questions. One of them is this: can all students in a writing course do well enough to meet passing requirements? “In” is a significant word here, as the students “in” a course got there via any number of methods: they met a prerequisite. They did okay on SATs or Accuplacer. Every semester and every course I teach provides a laboratory and a caseload of anecdotal evidence. And the question changes when asked of 100 level and 200 level courses.

Consider my recent Creative Writing: Fiction course, which started in the teens and ended with low single digits. Many students did not complete the source. (It is important to distinguish “did not” versus “could not.”) The prerequisite for the course is any literature offering, which presupposes a year of straight writing courses, successful achievement in all. This means that the students should have been prepared for the course. But there are a few givens, which some of my readers will grasp. Writing fiction, number 1, is not easy. Story writing concepts are not easy to grasp and demonstrate. The underlying pedagogy is not easy to keep up with. The formal demands of the pedagogy put lots of intellectual pressures on students. And, finally, students need to do lots of work to show that they know how to develop a character, write dialogue, and establish a coherent narrative. This is true of most college courses. Since I have taken creative writing courses and chemistry courses, I have a good sense of comparative difficulty. Guess what: you can’t compare them. I studied harder for creative writing than I did for chemistry. Hours out of the day devoted to writing. A few moments to Chemistry, as, at the time, I was disinterested.

So, my basic question comes back: is being unsuccessful in the course an example of a problem, let alone requiring legislation? What pass rate constitutes a successful benchmark in any college course? What if the answer were 100%? If I pass everyone, someone will cry foul. But why?

I would be reluctant to establish a benchmark. Rather, we look to our anecdotes for “stories.” How many students “should” typically do well enough in any number of courses? Every teacher has an answer to this question: the answer is: those that pass. There is no benchmark.

But there are average benchmarks for those students who pass as scored divisibles. Typically, the majority of students in a course with a pass rate fall at the top of a bell curve. Very few students perform with excellent achievement, but they do well enough. Most people expect a range of performance and a range of achievement explanations. And most people know that as students approach a professional standard, the numbers change dramatically with expectation. In my graduate program, for example, a C would have been considered a failing score in any course. This assumes an “ecology” of economies of scale across professions requiring graduate degrees.

The point of the above is that the issue of college success, college entrance, and learning in institutions is a complicated affair. The Connecticut legislature can do what it wishes to accomplish what it choses. But in my estimation, it’s judgement of the question of college entrance is at best a red herring.

Concept Problems
Consider this bit in Thomas’s article:

Before the vote in the House late Friday, Rep. Mary M. Mushinsky, D-Wallingford, said she plans to support the bill because, “Remedial coursework is too much a barrier to earning a degree.”

And this barrier disproportionately affects black and Hispanic students, reports Complete College, a national nonprofit organization funded by the Gates Foundation and others. Seventy-two percent of black freshman are sent to remediation compared with 56 percent of white students, the organization reports. Graduation rates are similarly uneven.

Here is where I would call Thomas to task in not contextualizing or parsing these numbers. These numbers are uneven across the board, as exposed in Connecticut’s achievement gap, hence this amounts to conflation. CT Mirror has reported on this:

In West Hartford, test scores are rising. But the difference in the percentages of low-income students and their more affluent peers who achieve proficiency has been stuck at around 20 percent despite years of reforms. Although Connecticut is typically praised for its schools, disparities in the performance of students from different socioeconomic backgrounds–which are often referred to as the “achievement gap”–reveal that, in truth, the state has significant inequities in its educational system.

Maybe Rep. Mushinsky is correct to claim that “Remedial coursework is too much of a barrier to earning a degree.” Again, the problem is that this statement amounts to belief not factually based analysis. It also introduces a balance problem for legislators. We could, for example, list the five most significant barriers to “earning a degree” and then go about addressing them. What solution, for example, would work well enough so that students taking entrance exams would all pass and be admitted with smiles into college-level courses? This is a vexing issue, to be fair to the advancers of SB 40. But, it invokes an old-time paradox: if everyone is excellent then everyone is mediocre.

Teachers will not determine who can and cannot learn. They should not make judgements about this. Indeed, an underlying principle in learning is that all humans can do it. My understanding of cognition amounts to this conclusion: the brain is made for learning. But learning in school is a manufactured context. Mass education in institutions is a relatively new idea in human history. But mass learning in an socio-ecological sense is not. Everyone, for example, learns how to eat, with some exceptions, say in the case of brain injury. Every culture provides for contextual learning. What’s even newer now is a concept of mass higher education.

I would argue that mass education, K-12, higher ed, has presented an economical quandary for most industrialized nations, a set of problems we have yet to solve. In the United States, we have yet to totally commit to it. To educate a public takes an enormous amount of resources, but our country refuses to scale it to reasonable proportions, just as it refuses to scale other resources, like law enforcement and public transit, preferring to meet a standard of “just barely get it to work” and then “listen to the complaints.” And much of the arguments about “developmental education” are about money. Thomas provides some information about this in her article:

The 100,000-student college system has had its state funding cut by nearly $30 million this year.

But Bye isn’t buying that argument.

“There are community colleges in the state who are making money on these courses. They need to figure something else out,” she said, noting that she suspects the pushback is because significantly less faculty will be needed. “What we’ve done with this bill is we’ve drawn a line in the sand. We had to say to them, ‘Look we’re the parents here. No more of this.’”

One of the issues we’ll be talking about at the college is how to spread our recourses around to meet Connecticut’s legislative mandate. We’re also scratching our heads wondering how diminishing developmental courses will save money, as the numbers of students to be served will not diminish and will likely rise, given the intent of the legislation: to reduce barriers to access and to increase the numbers of degrees conferred. The last I checked 100% subtracted by zero equals 100%. Minus, of course, $30 million.

Let me finish with my own riddle. What has three wheels, four doors and an engine? Hint: it’s not a bicycle.

Another question: thousands of people will be graduating from college this and in the next several years. What are they going to do?

Yes, around here.

This is the subject of the upcoming Proof and Possibility series talk, brought to us by Jesse Abbot and Rabbi Howard Herman: Wednesday, April 18th at 7PM in 6-127/128, a room so big it has two numbers, a room just large enough to contain such big ideas.

More from Hemon on narrative

Narrative imagination—and therefore fiction—was a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We processed the world by telling stories, produced human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

From Alexsander Hamon’s The Aquarium

It is not unusual, of course, for children of Ella’s age to have imaginary friends or siblings. The creation of an imaginary character is related, I believe, to the explosion of linguistic abilities that occurs between the ages of two and four, and rapidly creates an excess of language, which the child may not have enough experience to match. She has to construct imaginary narratives in order to try out the words that she suddenly possesses. Ella now knew the word “California,” for instance, but she had no experience that was in any way related to it; nor could she conceptualize it in its abstract aspect—in its California-ness. Hence, her imaginary brother had to be deployed to the sunny state, which allowed Ella to talk at length as if she knew California. The words demanded the story.

Wow. Amazing material: More Ryan Andrews.

Today in the fiction course we covered some of the fundamental techniques in story writing as they are revealed in Hope Larson’s Bear Creek Apartments and Ryan Andrews’s Our Blood Stained Roof. The link to quirky Cartoon Boy wouldn’t work on the college computer for some reason and I can’t remember the method we used to find Andrews, which was a cool find as a plan B, fantastic stuff. All these works are very much worth of study: conflict, complication, irony, resolution, all those fundamentals used by storytellers to entertain the audience.

The final panel of Our Bloodstained Roof is specially interesting because of the way the meaning of the eyes begins to take shape after analysis, reminiscent of James Marshall’s ability to express psychological states with simple dots and lines.

Students of fiction will neglect commonalities across media. It’s not necessary to neglect this. New Media study asks us to look for relations and to study how different creative problems are solved. Andrews understands mis en sine. Larson understands fable. Kerschbaum’s irony sizzles. Even the grad students in MFA programs don’t learn much more than this. No more so than Dostoevsky. The thing we have to improve is our ability to see and penetrate.

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