Category Archives: Epistemology

One Reason why “Job-Killing” is Bad Language

AP has an interesting report today on the use of statistics.

A recent report by House GOP leaders says “independent analyses have determined that the health care law will cause significant job losses for the U.S. economy.”

It cites the 650,000 lost jobs as Exhibit A, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office as the source of the original analysis behind that estimate. But the budget office, which referees the costs and consequences of legislation, never produced the number.

Many have suggested that the short title of the bill is a bad idea because of the use of the word “killing.” More to the point, the question might be, instead, thoughtful titles in official work by Congress. To inject vehement language into a title is cynical, and, as AP confirms in this case, incorrect. How would it play, for example, if the bill to amend the law used the words “health care law” without use of “Job-Killing”?

One reason: the bill would be a irrelevant. “Job-Killing” in this case is meant to “prove” that facts have been verified by evidence. Is this intentional “error of fact” or the wishful thinking fallacy.

Let’s assume instead a need for a higher burden of proof to write legislation.

Tone, Discourse, and that Dreaded Rhetoric

I’ve read lots of “tone” in today’s papers. Civility, responsibility, guns, blame, and civil discourse have been the themes of the last week or so. Consider David Brooks in his essay titled Tree of Failure. In the column, Brooks’s tone can be considered civil and thoughtful. Here’s how he begins

President Obama gave a wonderful speech in Tucson on Wednesday night. He didn’t try to explain the rampage that occurred there. Instead, he used the occasion as a national Sabbath — as a chance to step out of the torrent of events and reflect. He did it with an uplifting spirit. He not only expressed the country’s sense of loss but also celebrated the lives of the victims and the possibility for renewal.

He calls Barack Obama’s memorial speech “wonderful” and “uplifting.” He characterizes Obama’s approach as “an occasion as a national Sabbath.” The subject of the essay is his take on the “roots” of civility. He writes

Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.

Brooks ties these ideas to “modesty” and a need to re-carve it into our relationships: “Most of all, there will have to be a return to modesty,” he writes. He places “modesty” in contrast to “narcissism.” The frame for this “modesty” is wrapped in the language of Genesis: “But over the past few decades, people have lost a sense of their own sinfulness.” Finally, Brooks calls on the words of Reinhold Niebuhr to make his final appeal, which is an interesting choice.

In addition to Brooks, I took a look at Paul Krugman piece entitled A Tale of Two Moralities. I did this because I also read Charles Krauthammer’s piece Rabid Partisans Hallucinated Shooter’s Reasons and I wanted to see why he comes down so hard on Krugman, which, of course, simply led to the reading of the essays.

Krugman begins his piece this way

On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to “expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” Those were beautiful words; they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.

Krugman’s thesis has to do with his difficult reconciliation might be given divisiveness. He writes,

But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. . . . For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.

The nature of this division, according to Krugman, has to do with points of view that can’t be squared. Here’s how he characterizes the differing views:

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

These “characterizations” are generalized and I don’t necessarily agree with their implications. Having “a right to keep what they earn” doesn’t necessarily lead to charges of “tyranny.” In the first, “liberal” characterization, one doesn’t necessarily need to view a “progressive tax code” in context with “welfare state.” To place them back into Brooks’s scheme, we would need to ask “Who’s the narcissist?” which doesn’t seem like an appropriate question. In any event, it is possible to not to react with spleen to Krugman but to build an argument in disagreement. He ends the piece with this:

It’s not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.

Here’s my disagreement. Developing the two sides and their points of disagreement would have been more helpful, especially on the technical nature of the issues, to Krugman’s thesis. Is it naive to say that we don’t spend enough time examining and debating whether this is that bolt size will do the job better? I think this Krugman’s point.

Charles Krauthammer’s Rabid Partisans Hallucinated Shooter’s Reasons attempts to make the case that blaming Sarah Palin and the Tea Party for the Arizona tragedy is unsupported by evidence and that those who do so are evincing their own style of “hallucination.” He begins the essay in a legal frame:

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the “climate of hate” created by Sarah Palin, the tea party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.

The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous, and so unsupported by evidence.

To bring the point home, Krauthammer identifies those he believes have made the “charge” and then rounds things off with a repetition of the thesis

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, The New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

Krauthammer goes on to explore the apparent issue with the shooter, Loughner, and his mental health problems and then places martial metaphors in their context. He writes

Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he was hardly inciting violence.

Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power — military conquest.

When profiles of Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive — and creative — political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill — while intoning, “I’ll take dead aim at (it)” — he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.

The above is a long quote, as I want to illustrate Krauthammer’s method. He ends the piece with a pointed expression at Krugman: “The origins of Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman’s?”

I would make the case that Krauthammer’s fundamental point may be correct: that Loughner’s motivations might have been spurred by mental illness rather than by “politics.” I write “might” because the facts are actually not in as of yet. Krauthammer’s method, however, falls flat and makes his conclusion, which may indeed be hasty, very difficult to take as serious polemic. It would’ve been entirely agreeable to simply disagree with Krugman (or The New York Times, with what exactly about it’s reportage?) straight down the line instead of accusing the opposition of being delusional and “rabid” which draws in the specter of unnecessary ad hominem and a reflective charge of being “rabid” also. Why? Because it is possible to be incorrect without being delusional. Indeed, the approach should have been to establish exactly where the disagreement is because in Krauthammer’s case, as in Brooks’s and Krugman’s, it’s difficult to agree on the precise issue at hand.

Guitar Adventures Part 2 (Notes on Learning)

My guitar adventures continue. It’s now been nine months since I began and have a few tunes, chords, and scales under my belt. As with anything worth learning, I’ve had to do research and reading on the instrument and music in an attempt to understand the big question “Why.”

Firstly, the guitar is such a physically demanding object. It’s not heavy, but it demands that the whole body be engaged to hold, cradle, and play. In addition, the instrument physically changes the player. The first few months of practice is difficult because the strings of an acoustic guitar require calluses on all four digits of the left hand (right for left handers). The strings are also difficult to press down. The player must then develop physical strength in the fingers, wrist, and thumb. The physical strength has to be accompanied by precision or fine manipulation of the strings. I came to this thinking that all I would need was to play notes and chords, but certain chords, such as A7, require the avoidance of a middle string as well as other strings that should not be played or the A7 chord might become an E. After a time, the calluses, strength, and precision develop but at first even the C major chord seemed impossible, let alone moving from C major to F and then to the multitude of G chords.

The last physical problem to overcome was the ability to stretch the fingers over four or five frets on the board with a certain degree of comfort, while the thumb remains fixed behind the guitar neck, and to do so with speed, which involves strength and flexibility. I don’t have the largest of hands, but the B chord illustrates the problem. The first finger must depress all of the first five strings on the second fret, which is the F# fret. The second, third and fourth strings must be depressed on the G# fret or fourth fret by the remaining fingers, including the pinky.

The instrument also alters the brain. It’s simple enough make the C shape and then to strum with the right hand. After a few months I was able to go quickly from C to F and then to G or something else and strum this progression to a strict beat. But the fingers of the right hand also have to pluck according to patterns, which often involve plucking a string with the pointing finger and the next string with the ring finger, assuming that the left hand has also depressed the string corresponding to the pluck (unless the player is plucking an open string). But then the question is “Where do I look? At my right hand or my left hand?” Guitarists must do as pianists do: train their brains to work both hands in codependence. I still find this immensely difficult as my brain has forty four years of training not to work this way, as in typing, where one letter is made after the first. Nobody types simultaneous letters on a keyboard. Remember the trick where one hand pats the head while the other circles the heart?

The other issue here is with fingernails. I’ve grown the nails of my right hand as I’ve chosen to learn music where plucking is the principle means of making noise. The nails aren’t enormous but they would be long enough to paint. So, the left fingers are calloused at the tips and the rights are long-nailed, but I persistently break my pointing finger’s nail (because that’s the finger I use make holes in my walls, apparently), which makes for strange sounding plucks with that finger.

Secondly, the fret board of the instrument (and sound in general) is bizarre. This problem has to do with the intervals between the Major notes, say from A to B or G to A and how these intervals translate onto the machine. The open string of the guitar’s first string is E. The first fret is F and the third fret is G. But where’s A on the first string if one wants to go from E to F to G to A and then to B. This required study, as all Major (7 tones) and Minor (5) tones can be played on every string. The open 3rd string of the guitar is G but A happens on fret 2, so A is two frets up from G on the first string. This was my first big “Why” question, which required a few books for assistance, one of which is Kadmon’s Guitar Grimoire, which is about as serious a book on scales and modes as I could find. With it’s help I was able to learn tone intervals and how to visualize them on the fretboard. But Kadmon has also confirmed the notion that this is all bizarre.

John Timmons has helped a lot and I’ll continue to pester him (he was also kind enough to provide me an instrument that’s a little easier on the hands, which was an amazing gift), and with these books I can persist without too much guess work.

So, at this point I have a few songs, a few chords, and some chord progressions to work on. I’m in a constant state of relearning. But I don’t play the songs all that well and my brain is still fighting me because of this relearning. In Taoism, our relationship to nature is a significant issue (this was Keats’s problem with birds and their ease with songmaking). In this mode of thinking about things, being able to do something “without thinking” is a principle goal. After lots of hard practice, we learn to walk pretty much without having to thinking about it. One measure of human transition has to do with becoming aware of what was once hidden behind the wall of habit and expectation. Purposeful learning should, therefore, tend toward disawareness. Language acquisition is similar. My goal, therefore, is to practice enough so that play happens “naturally.” At the moment, I’m far from this “state of being.”

Let the Blame be Spread Like Salt

Evan Thomas in this Newsweek article takes a straightforward and somewhat odd position, adding to the ever-growing advice-giving genre. He writes

His only hope to be an effective president, to secure his legacy, is to tell the whole truth about the deficit, the debt, and the only real way out—to be, as he put it, “straight” with the voters.

This seems simple enough. Thomas goes on to hint at what a program of honesty would look like. He writes

There may not be a single political professional in Washington who would agree with this advice. I’ve never met one. Generally, the suggestion that a politician call for tax increases and cuts in Social Security and Medicare is greeted with hoots of derision.

Thomas here suggests that Mr. Obama’s solutions should include the above. I can hear this speech by the President: “American people: we’re going to cut Social Security and Medicare today. Good luck to you.” Later in the article, Thomas gets to what might be called the “ethic” of doing the right thing (the right thing of course can be inferred) by making an appeal to sacrifice.

Only the president can make the case for sacrifice, and it won’t be popular. As it is, most people already think they are doing their share by paying taxes and resent the idea of paying more, especially if their house is underwater, and they believe (rightly or wrongly) that financial geniuses on Wall Street are to blame. To call for sacrifice, the president will have to be willing to make a sacrifice himself. Obama can offer his own political career. He can put his reelection on the line. He can make the 2012 election a national referendum on doing the right thing.

I’ll get back this shortly but first provide another quote that illustrates Thomas’ take on yet another problem area with deficit and economy: the state employee question:

A real growth spurt, in any case, will require government spending on badly deteriorating infrastructure and massive research and development. But there is no money—not in the federal treasury, nor at the state level. Thanks to massive (and largely unnoticed) giveaways to public-employee pension plans, big states like California, New York, and New Jersey are even closer to bankruptcy than the federal government. A column by David Brooks of The New York Times recently noted that New Jersey badly needs a new tunnel to New York, but can’t afford it because the money has been spent on generous benefits for public employees. In California, the state is paying its bills with IOUs.

The question of growth spurting is a current hot topic. Investment in infrastructure and RnD are positive things, of course, and would likely be even better if states would shrink their operations and maneuver “giveaways” to this research. Thomas’s application of the oft-used accusatory phrase “Thanks to” is nice icing, as in “Thanks to you, I’m in the friggin’ poor house.”

I have questions: why does Thomas claim that only the President can make the case for “sacrifice”? Certainly the President could make the case to “cut Social Security,” but so could the leadership of the GOP and AARP. Dean Baker makes a different case:

Of course the facts are very clear. There is no truth to the whining about out of control government spending. According to the Congressional Budget Office, non-interest federal spending was 18.8 percent of GDP in 1980. In 2020 it is projected to be 18.6 percent of GDP.
. . .
And of course the whole long-term deficit nightmare story is driven entirely by our broken health care system. If per person health care costs in the United States were the same as in any of the wealthy countries with longer life expectancies we would be looking at huge budget surpluses, not deficits.

Thomas’s point, of course, goes to the President’s credibility and a wish-list; I take Baker’s arguments above as treating evidence specifically, regardless of what may or may not be on the President’s mind. As Thomas writes, the President could act like other exemplars of “sacrifice”:

But rather two large and noble groups: people who serve in the armed forces and every parent who has sacrificed himself or herself for a child. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen routinely put their lives at risk for something other than the modest pay they get. Mothers sacrifice themselves—their sleep and careers and peace of mind—for their children on a daily basis, often without really thinking about it. In every case they are subordinating their physical and material well-being to something greater than themselves: the love of a child, or their comrades in arms, or their country.

This finally gets us to the quick of the matter, I think. But the problem here is that the infrastructure that supports the “soldier” is a massive part of the US budget and parents really don’t have much of a choice, as the poop doesn’t clean itself and we don’t pay parents what they’re probably worth.

Ultimately, the problem with all this is that the framework Thomas draws is under dispute. My position is that supplying advice to Presidents in this manner won’t actually solve any problems. I’d rather see the author ask more questions and perhaps cite research that concludes that California’s “giveaways” are indeed significant enough to hoist up with such prominence. He doesn’t even ask if “giveaway” is the word he should use. The CCEA Outlook study is a good example of things people might consult.

Tinderbox, Emberlight, Apartment 9: On Collaborative Linking and Learning

In this year’s first iteration of New Media Perspectives, we’ve started a long-term project called Apartment 9. The specific assignment for students can be found here.

For Apartment 9, students are provided proper names to grow inside the world using Tinderbox. The students also know the nouns of the other students in class so that they can call to each other with ideas from one side of the room to the other. “Does anyone have a parrot,” for example. As we’ve just started, these proper nouns are the first pieces of the puzzle. Students develop their places and characters, send me their files, and I add those individual maps to the master Apartment 9 document on my computer. Then, with the air of the screen and projector, we start interlinking the maps, reading sections of text, assessing the potential for links, and traversing the narrative to ascertain how the reader might react if, for example, in one space Slater the Dog is walking down the street and suddenly becomes Slater the Cat sleeping on a jazz club piano after the reader has clicked on a link.

In Apartment 9, bubble worlds, simultaneous choices, and competing figures of speech are permitted.

To lead up to the project, students read hypertexts, built a smart-phone simulation, engage new media concepts, embark on some system interpretation, and were provided some tutorial lessons on Tinderbox and Emberlight. We also introduce useful pattern concepts that help to concretize the often baffling relationship between making something and understanding it as a user. Making an essay for example without really worrying about pagination is very different from composing an essay with explicit visual and tactile references to its structure.

Since we’re dealing with maps and worlds, we developed some pattern principles such as color, size, and spatial proximity. In addition, the more distant a note from another “linked” note, the more spacetime is expanded, like a slow fade in film might convey a big time jump. We also work with container hierarchy, juxtaposition, explicit referencing, natural English work order, visual irony, and a variety of stacking methods. The big question at the moment is how to represent an initial state of a world that could grow for as long as we have CPU with which to calculate it.

We have yet to link in the Monday Wednesday NMP course, but the Tuesday/Thursday people are pretty much done. In moving through the collaborative linking process, which might move the reader from one student map to another student map, or from one voice to another voice, the significance of the Tinderbox/Emberlight relationship is becoming that much more powerful. For example, a student asked yesterday if they could link to an Emberlight note from Facebook. The answer is yes, as each note in Emberlight comes with its own URI. Thus, a student could link to some portion of the Facebook Graph and then provide the note URI in a update or Facebook Note, allowing re-admittance back into the note and to the structure of Apartment 9 as a whole, where every note is a place to begin in the world (at least ideally). This is incredibly powerful, as the web is held together by links and link APIs, and thinkers may want to consider these powerful tools for collaborative work of their own stamp. Conceptually and physically, Apartment 9 could be a container for Facebook and Google, depending how one traverses space to space.

Consider a poet who writes a poem on a weblog and links to a relevant note in Apartment 9 (or to a poem some other writer has placed in Apartment 9). The poem becomes, therefore, a part of that space, and the space becomes a part of the poem, extending the fiction ad augmenting the reality of it.

David P and Trent W visited class last night and watched the students work at connecting their ideas in Tinderbox and were quite taken by this activity, claiming that they wished they’d been able to do this and then watch it all go onto the web for further relationship building. Why? I’d suggest that the power comes from revision and additional ideas that grew as we sought linkage and remediated errors. New ideas came, new link ideas, and fresh eyes could see weaknesses better. They also saw, I think, the pedagogy: Apartment 9 feeds well into the next phase of the course where the floor plan has already been laid for work with Inform 7. We can build further dimensions of Apartment 9 (again it’s a world, a virtual world) in a whole separate vision for constructing digital objects and yet still link them all together with the aid of a web-based z-machine.

Future work with Apartment 9 opens up several learning possibilities, such as work with object-oriented concepts, linkages to other objects, such as eportfolios, Alice games, and a whole host of other potential digital creations, and when Emberlight ventures into the mobile world, things will get even more interesting. Of particular interest will be to fashion search, agent, and navigation principles around figures of speech massaged into prototypes, such that notes that contain elements such as flashback and plot turns take on the attributed of those assigned prototypes and thus can be pumped into sections of Apartment 9 for study and organization.

For example, we have a working prototype called recipes and an agent that finds them. Anytime, therefore, a student writes in a recipe, the note will appear in a separate Tinderbox/Emberlight container, turning Apartment 9 into a tool for cooks.

Interestingly, we have all the problems of world builders: how to organize, what to build, how to keep some semblance of quality, boundary definition, and system coherence. But what will it look like in 5 years?

Do Students Study Enough and the Problem of Achievement

I’m always amazed at how resourceful and smart my students are in whatever area I’m into at the moment. Even those students who self report that they were unhappy in high school show loads of potential. Invariably, however, many of the men and women in my courses just don’t put in the time required to learn as much as possible. And, unfortunately, the “work hard” ethic isn’t as easy to explain or understand as politicians would think. I could always say, “Well, my students just don’t work hard enough” and walk away. One response might be: “Yeah, what are you going to do about it?” My response: “There’s not much I can do about it.” In academic circles, this subject of student success falls under the category of underachievement.

Freshman writing and research courses aren’t that hard. But I would assume that without adequate context, time, and good study habits any college course can be daunting and even impossible to understand. In my second semester Composition II course, for example, I ask students to do research and write papers around three general questions

What is the best way to design urban or suburban spaces to enhance quality of life? What standards should be used to determine quality of life in the city or suburb? What technologies are being used or should be used to enhance quality of life in urban or suburban spaces?

We come at the research process by evaluating subjects against three standards: is a researchable topic substantive, topical, and debatable. This is a matter of information literacy. If a student choses to go with transportation, they must prove that the subject is debatable, topical, and that lots of people are engaging the issue. Transportation is a go and would fit nicely inside any of the research questions blockquoted above.

Megan Balduf’s article Underachievement Among College Students published in the Journal of Advanced Academics in 2009 provides substantive reference to studies on underachievement that pose different questions:

In previous studies of collegiate underachievers, both motivation and goal valuation were key factors in determining why students were not succeeding. In a recent study, Hsieh, Sullivan, and Guerra (2007) found students whose GPAs put them on academic probation (below a 2.0) had goals that were counterproductive to academic success. These poorer performing students were less likely to search out assistance in reversing their underachievement (Hsieh et al., 2007). Shim and Ryan (2005) found that students who valued mastery—mastering the content regardless of the academic gain—had higher motivation, while performance-avoidance—shying away from challenge and situations that could result in failure—related to lower motivation. Underachievers tended to have lower motivation and difficulties dealing with stressful situations and challenges (Preckel, Holling, & Vock, 2006). A study of Turkish collegiate underachievers found that the majority of participants (67%) had low motivation and a slightly higher percentage (69%) had issues with preparing for their coursework (Baslanti, 2008). Overall, Baslanti’s study found that students who had previously experienced academic success encountered situations in college wherein low motivation contributed heavily to underachievement. (278)

Balduf’s study approaches the question of underachievement this way

The purpose of this study was to answer the following research questions. To what factors did first-year college students at an elite university attribute their underachievement, and what interventions or remediation did they feel might reverse that underachievement? (279)

The definition of underachievement Balduf takes for a frame comes from McCoach and Reis

For the purposes of this study, underachievement was defined as a “severe discrepancy between expected achievement . . . and actual achievement” (282)

The results of Balduf’s study, which drew from voluntary participants, are as follows

In response to the factors that contributed to their underachievement, three major themes emerged: lack of preparation for Queen Mary College, problems with time management, and issues with self-discipline and motivation. These themes recurred throughout participant responses in the interviews. (284)

Generally speaking, these results sound reasonable and square with the results of other studies (288). They also fall in line with my own observations and conversations with students when they’re hit with assessments they find surprising or demonstrate through questions and submissions that reflect avoidance of the material. Often students will say, “Well, I got As in all my high school courses” or “I really didn’t need to study all that hard in high school.” And so, some students will admit that they really don’t know how to study, don’t know how to move through a study week, or don’t know how to prepare to prepare for college work, which collapses several issues into the vague admittance: “I don’t know how,” which can be translated to mean: “I don’t know how to sit with a piece of reading, take notes, map classroom discussion into study time, wrestle with vocabulary, and review and revise.” These interpretations snake back into students’ previous learning experiences where “grind stone” habits were never engendered.

A key and murky issue is the problem of motivation. As referenced by Balduf, students who want to learn material regardless of the assessment framework (grade or ability-based) typically do well, as I would assume that the habit of learning is less of a concern for these students than those who are confused about what to do with subject matter. This is not the same a goal problem. A student may have the goal of grabbing a nursing or computer science degree and be unable to learn the material because they’re really not interested in the material or don’t know how to become interested in it or are simply frustrated by the enormity of the work and content. In addition, these same students may be struggling through illness, working a lot to assist their families or just working a lot, or may have long standing behavioral issues. It’s hard to know for sure without being able to follow a student through their lives and observing their problems in action.

It’s typical for me to encounter student work that has neglected basic diligence. Often students have trouble reading assignments, even finding them on my course weblog. It’s often the case that students will submit work that doesn’t reflect the details of an assignment. In these cases, my only option is to forgo assessment. I remind the student that they should review things better and take more time. In many cases, students will simply fall too far behind to take advantage of the pedagogy and will not benefit from catchup, which is sad because all my students are smart enough to do the work.

Withal, I don’t find academic studies on underachievement all that useful as being able to identify and describe a problem is one thing, while deriving a model for solutions is difficult in a national culture that values political gain and tu quoque arguments over providing people opportunities for achievement later in life. We have solid examples and knowledge about good learning methods and frameworks. We know that learning thrives when students have provocative, challenging, and disciplined environments in which to stake their claims. We spend billions on political campaigns, and the rhetoric of those campaigns often has to do with monetary waste. This is the worst sort of hypocrisy. We don’t need to “throw” money at schools. But we should invest in people wisely knowing full well that when students skate through high school (I think they should be reading and debating Aristotle by the time they’re 12 years old), they will hit an entirely different animal in college, which should be a choice, unlike the compulsory early learning grades.

So, do students study enough? The answer is of course not. More importantly, do we?

More on Devices

Many semesters ago, even prior to the issues brought up in this post, I had one of my first encounters with the laptop and smart device as a tool for critical thinking and information literacy. In Composition II, we’d been talking in class about Connecticut’s brain drain subject and the thought occurred to me that we should be able to find relationships between levels of education in a population and measures of quality of life, such as median household income, the point being to show that if educated people left the state, quality of life would be affected negatively. Here’s the simple question: is there a relation between income and higher education? (It’s harder to measure whether higher education makes people nicer.) This issue is related to relatively new ecological inquiries into smart cities and future predictions about the role of cities in the United States. You can read more about this issue in this article by Richard Florida in The Atlantic.

In this discussion, I wanted to move away from guesswork and to an examination of statistics and I didn’t want to run to the teacher’s computer while the students sat passively waiting for my thinking to go somewhere. Rather, we put the laptops and the phones to work. Students set about looking for some method of examining the above question. After a few moments, a student found median household income at about 28K and reported percentages of higher degrees in Hartford, CT at about 12%, the source being the US Census. This was a good start but not enough to generate a solid hypothesis. The next question would require a search of other urban centers, such as Chicago and Boston, and then to examine those ratios. So the student set off seeking this information out. Several students suggested that, while the same measures showed higher returns than Hartford, these cities (and even towns surrounding Hartford) might not make for good comparison as Hartford is a fairly small urban environment and has a particular metro area. Question: to which cities, therefore, should we compare Hartford? The students set to work, even though this is a difficult question. More questions came: does the drift in population in an urban center tell us something about that area’s economic and cultural vibrancy? One way to search this is to examine whether over a hundred year period populations trends down or up? We went off on a search for this: guess what the answer points to?

The point of all this is that the students in the room, with their laptops and their phones, were seeking out the info, weighing the sources, and asking questions. I find this sort of wrestling with real problems a good method of generating engagement. It’s a routine now for me to ask students to have their devices ready and their laptops on, even if the occasional student decides that a game of this or that is better than the topic at hand. And if a student gets a call, they will quickly tell the thing to shut up.

It’s a good question: should information tools be incorporated into classroom discussion or should they be kept hidden? What are appropriate uses of communication tools, such as data-service phones and other hand-helds? One size doesn’t fit all contexts. But for me, devices have become an excellent addition to classroom learning ecologies.

A Question about Interpretation and Influence

Something bugging me. It’s been bugging me since 100 Days 2008. But it’s come back since I’ve been reading Hargood and Millard on Narrative and Theme.

It’s bugging me in a good way.

But here’s the story.

Let’s say you watch John Timmons’s video perusals. Of course, a first viewing will produce an interpretation or reaction, whatever it may be.

Then read my response to it in the form of Grandfather’s Favorite Spot.

Then go back and view John Timmons’s video again. The idea is that the interpretation of the video will be permanently altered because of the fiction and the viewer can never have their original interpretation back. The video is permanently changed, even if the viewer discounts the second work. (An opposing issue would seem to be “forgetting.”)

The same phenomenon is at work in the following example:

Let’s say a viewer encounters Carianne Mack Garside’s watercolor called progress.

Then the viewer encounter a re-contexting of it in poetic form. This poem, for example. This will happen if one purchases the 2008 book which places the context for these works in juxtaposition.

If the viewer goes back to the painting after having read the poem, the interpretive context is “permanently” altered. I observed and thought about this during the gallery show of the 2008 work. Blake opens his Experience poems with a pointer to the notion, thus the theme of innocence and experience is baked into the concept.

Hear the voice of the Bard,
Who present, past, and future, sees;

I’m not making an argument for the degree to which the original interpretation is changed. But that original experience is lost forever. It may not be profound and in some cases it won’t matter all that much to world affairs, as when a person on the lot finds a better car than the one they first saw and might have purchased. But I am seeking a name for the phenomenon.

Summer Projects

Monday is the Solstice. 8:30 or so and dusk can still be seen. Great.

This summer I have a few projects. Some are trivial. Prep for Fall teaching, bone up some programming. Other things not so much. In May I decided to learn how to play the guitar. And 100 Days is pulsing like the desert sun. I’m, therefore, writing at mediaplay, where the summer work is stored.

Today, boosted by this film by John Timmons and loads of images by other’s in the collaborative, I learned about an old man who lives in Osaka and whose father may or may not have died in the bomb blast at Nagasaki. He’s still with me. I see him holding his photograph. And I see the mother on the porch and hear the thinking of the fictional narrator, whose thought process is really my own.

This Osaka is perpetual. It is always present, like the El Paso I still remember from my last visit or the corridor of Park Street in Hartford. I wonder where the old man is now. I wonder what he’s eating. I wonder if his mother is alive.

The last couple of days have seen graduation to a new level of guitar playing. The funny part is that I go from beginner to a little more than beginner as I have thousands of hours left to go toward mastery of something I don’t really know much about. Luckily I have friends who do. I’ve learned a piece that weeks back I couldn’t even have attempted without a lot of pain and frustration. What’s amazing about all this is that I’ve re-connected with the thrill of just learning something new, something that I’ve always wanted to do but hadn’t had the time to consider seriously.

The brain is physically changing. And that’s thrilling. I often joke that I want to connect a program to my head that will teach me to do things. It’s a joke of course. The fun part would be missed. It’s totally thrilling to learn something new.

On Going Back to School

I’m teaching myself how to play the guitar. I have the Idiot’s Guide and a Fender acoustic, whose neck is too small for my left hand but is nonetheless playable. Too small, because at the size of my fingers, it’s tough to play something like A without the index rubbing up against the third string.

This whole enterprise is 1) a humbling experience. I used to play trumpet in high school. I was pretty good, moving to first chair in the marching band and jazz band at the ripe age of 14. We traveled to Mexico city in 1979 or 80, we won lots of awards in jazz. After high school I played in a band that did a few weddings and parties, playing Chicago-like music. But tennis, computers, and a novel drew me then and I lost interest in gigs, music, and lugging around equipment. So, I must start from scratch. The first order of business was to strengthen both hands, toughen the tips of my left hand fingers to withstand razor sharp acoustic strings, and start training my brain to recognize left and right hand relationships. It’s like I’ve hit the first grade again, struggling to make sound.

After three weeks, I can pluck Clair de Lune, play a nursery rhyme (barely–I think it’s Pop Goes the Weasel), and strum a few cords. Barring’s getting easier and I have lots of interesting warmups. I know how to read notes and patterns but I haven’t yet passed my first set of self-imposed quizzes. I won’t move to brighter things until I have those basics done, though I do read ahead into the book.

2) I have that learning anxiety that everyone feels when facing the unknown: will I be able to master basics and thus move on to things more advanced, like varied accompaniment? The first impasse has been proper plucking technique, which is a brain knotter. When the player goes from first to third string with annulas and index respectfully, the player experiences one of those cognitive surprises, as in “how does one do that without going mad?” But when the movement grew easier, typically on the second day, then easier on the third day, I felt that elation people feel when what seemed impossible one day is now possible. When does a person know they learned something?

In the fiction writing (which is different from verbal storytelling), this feeling of elation may take years to experience as the ability to compress an image (or understand the arc) is one of those sneaky things. It’s important to know what sort of a learner one is. I’m an obsessive, so when I want to learn something, that particular skill will become the sole object. This is true of software, programming, gardening, wine, cooking, and Beowulf the work, which drives my wife crazy, as during the learning of something, such as “the shop saw” or some particular character in a new novel, I have a hard time “listening” to what she had to say five minutes ago. The problem is, there’s always something to learn next. The guitar should keep me going for years, as the “objective” is to learn flamenco and some tunes my wife may be able to sing a long to when we’re sitting about the fire pit (which I need to learn how to build, too).

3) As a dedicated generalist, it’s hard to always keep focused on one thing at a time, as the world is loaded with “too much to learn and too many distractions” which may tends to greed, glossing, over-confidence, and the adulteration of expertise. So, I’m forcing myself to repeat repeat repeat in an effort to fight dilution and the urge to learn a cool progression before I really know what I’m doing.

The person at the head (of course, this metaphor is misleading) of a classroom should always be reminded what challenges feel and sound like and how failing over and over again tests ambition. I feel like I’m back in the first or second grade, plinking my way through a few trivial sounds. But I also feel that sounding out the C chord to a degree better than the day before is really explosive and that moving smoothly from C to G7 is actually possible. Wow, the little things.

We can also do this with a new electrical grid and new energy forms. That’s said, then.