tough luck education

Boy, education management sure is tough in New York. This from the NYT’s David Hernszenhorn:

The city’s Panel for Educational Policy yesterday approved Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to impose strict promotion requirements for third graders, but only after the mayor and the Staten Island borough president fired and replaced three members just before the vote.

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced the changes to the panel, the successor to the Board of Education, at the start of a meeting last night at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. But word of the dismissals had already spread, and he had to struggle to be heard over the jeers of a seething crowd.

This is a tough fight for the minds and hearts of third graders. The article continues. I’ve plunked in a lengthy portion:

Mr. Bloomberg said he had amended his policy based on comments from panel members, but would not tolerate them voting against him.

Although Mr. Klein said they had resigned, the three panel members said in interviews that they had been tersely dismissed and had intended to vote against the mayor’s plan.

The panel had been viewed as little more than a rubber stamp of the mayor’s policies. But his plan to hold back students based on standardized test scores met stiff opposition, and seemed headed for defeat.

Under the plan, students who score in Level 1, the lowest of four rankings, on next month’s citywide English and math tests, will be forced to repeat third grade unless they score at Level 2 after summer school or their teachers successfully file an appeal on their behalf.

City officials have estimated that the new policy could force as many as 15,000 of the current 74,000 third graders, or about one in five children, to repeat the grade  four times as many as have been left back in recent years based on teacher and principal discretion.

Mr. Bloomberg announced the plan, intended to end the practice called “social promotion,” as a centerpiece of his State of the City speech in January. “This year, for third graders, we’re putting an end to the discredited practice of social promotion,” the mayor declared. “We’re not just saying it this time. This time, we’re going to do it.”

We have lots of discussion at TCC about the “idea” of so called “social promotion.” We don’t like it when the majority of our students have to go through the English and Math foundations courses, sometimes having to do a year of “developmental” work. Often students will complete the work and move into college credit courses and do fine. Many, however, don’t and disappear. Often students enter credit bearing courses by testing into them and bomb. We know that entrance tests don’t predict all that well how students will perform, SAT or Acuplacer. Many students who come to college beamed directly in from high school aren’t prepared to work with the material, to study the material, to manipulate the concepts, to manage the time requirements, and to live with the decorum of college space (for example, a lot of students think it’s okay to get up in the middle of discussion, leave the room, then return. The thought that this may be rude doesn’t seem to alter what they do before class.) Others do just fine: they struggle with the reading, grasp the basics over time, come to class, prioritize, and participate. Fine by me.

There are many guesses about what the problem is with performance and behavior: secondary education, globilization, teacher training and unions, bad management, mass media, Britney Spears, social inequity, political expediencies, and changing socio-cultural situations and trends.

The students and colleagues with whom I speak know that my proposition is tentative and observational: the problem with learning in America is the concept of systematized and mechanized education that treats people as if they were cut of the same genes. As the article above illustrates, whether Bloomberg is right or wrong by padding his Board to get what he wants and thinks he’s entitled to, the status quo is simply more status quo. More of the same, and more of it: standardization rather than standards. The answer is always more rules, more chapels on the green, as Blake would say.

What are the consequences, intended or unintended, of the above proposal? (If 1 out of five of the 3rd graders have to do the grade again, where is the system actually going to put them, with class sizes already brimming over? Are the people who sell or rent out portable buildings drooling?) One will be more pressure on teachers and students to perform in a system that is already choking under its massive foot. Or maybe everyone will pass and all will be well and paradise will be restored. Who knows.

My answer, which will never happen, is less education and more opportunities to learn (a reconceptualizing of learning from the ground up), a more flexible approach to grade levels and grading, moving from grades to things to learn in as much time as time requires, less testing and more active demonstration of knowledge. This answer to the perceived problem is a “game,” really.

food and law

Bill H.R. 339, short titled as the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act, street named, the “Cheeseburger Bill.” (Open the link and type in the bill no. at the search field):

The major text goes:

PREVENTION OF FRIVOLOUS LAWSUITS–The manufacturer, distributor, or seller of a food or non-alcoholic beverage product intended for human consumption shall not be subject to civil liability, in Federal or State court, whether stated in terms of negligence, strict liability, absolute liability, breach of warranty, or State statutory cause of action, relating to consumption of food or non-alcoholic beverage products unless the plaintiff proves that, at the time of sale, the product was not in compliance with applicable statutory and regulatory requirements.

The serious response: Frivolous here means: cases without merit. The bill, in my reading, doesn’t prevent cases from going to court, but it does limit how one defines “liability.”

Another question though: is this an example of the law evolving? Or is it the law “reacting” or “overreacting”?

One of the concepts that the American Constitution keeps delivering is the notion of interpretability. The fact that we still fight over ammendments to the document is a good thing.

Here’s my real response to the above bill (sometimes I wish I was in Congress so that I could write up funny-sounding bills and write overtly regulated law): “PREVENTION OF FRIVOLOUS BILLS AND DUMB TITLES–no bill shall be written that presumes to dictate or determine definitions of and for any rational human being as regards personal responsibility in association with the word food . . .”

Free societies, if free they are, come with all kinds of risks. Can we legistate out all of them in life?

traveling

The subject may be travel. People, a hypothesis goes, travel because they want to see something new, have new experiences, or revisit the past. This is distinguished from the functional kind–trips to meet friends or enemies, to conduct business, to find things.

Music and reading, therefore, are kin to the first kind of travel. If a reader picks up Homer’s Odyssey for the first time is this text, this story, really as old as the date suggests? What about Joyce’s Ulysses? The mental journey seeks something new, a new experience, or a revisiting or reexperiencing of a prior experience, feeling, and or image (to reexperience Marquez, Dario, or Wordsworth).

With music we seek this reexperiencing, new combinations of notes. Is this correct? When a band comes out with new songs, a new CD, is it the possibility of combinations that draws? Why the scintillation prior to reading new poems and fiction?

What’s on the other side of the forest? What does Tintern Abbey really feel like
–travel for verification of a theme?

Buey que vi en mi niqez echando vaho un dma
bajo el nicarag|ense sol de encendidos oros,
en la hacienda fecunda, plena de la armonma
del trspico; paloma de los bosques sonoros
del viento, de las hachas, de pajaros y toros
salvajes, yo os saludo, pues sois la vida mma.

Ox that I saw in my childhood, as you steamed
in the burning gold on the Nicaraguan sun,
there on the rich plantation filled with tropical
harmonies; woodland dove, of the woods that sang
with the sound of the wind, of axes, of birds and wild bulls:
I salute you both, because you are both my life.

Ruben Dario from Far away

land work

I’ve been gearing up for lots of land work.

Every semester appears to get busier and busier, but who can know, since the last one is gone into the past. I like to ask this question: where is the physical yesterday? Anyway, the students are busy, too: I’ll have papers coming in next week for four out of the five courses I teach. Hopefully the texts will be in order–documentation, organization, and that the processes have been at work, the ones that aren’t under my control. The best college work is the kind done outside of the teacher’s control, the kind that people do on their own time and using their own mental resources, their own powers of synthesis.

Consider British Lit. We swing into Mill’s On Liberty this week and continue the revenue of ideas.

What does Mill mean by Liberty, since it will have to be defined and continues to go through the paces of the art and practice of definition. Liberty to do what? Is Liberty an action, a state of being, an interdependency, a thing that people want or don’t want? Is one in “Liberty” or does one do “liberty”? Is it an illusion given answers to the former?

The definition matters.

Freedom of movement, because we have legs.
Freedom of speech, because we have vocal cords.
Freedom to think, because we do.

souls and monsters

We had a pretty good discussion of Shelley’s Frankenstein in MBL this evening. People will be coming back with a couple of relevant questions that demand reading the tensions between Frankenstein and his creation, now known as Victor Jr or VJ. Is the bargain they come to reasonable given the context of the agreement? Does this bargain reestablish a legal or natural balance to their affairs: legal in terms of justice; nature in terms of the cycles Frankenstein disrupts through his application of scientific knowledge, if indeed he disrupts anything?

Moreover, what is the nature of VJ? Since he is a human creation, animate in a seeming death/life process, is he life in the classical sense, souled? Upon death, will he go to Shelley’s or Milton’s heaven? As his life get’s closer to being created, it seems that Frankenstein dwindles in stature and behavior.

Outsiders, darkness, questions of the spiritual–it’s all in Shelley.

Also, I’ve added a link to the Rimantic Circles Weblog in the lists at the right of this page.

futures anxiety

Jason Iorio has concerns. It’s about this post, I assume, and the future. He writes:

My lack of interest in Programming is starting to become obvious to me. I never thought industrial-level programming was going to be my cup of tea, but I was hoping one of the classes I’ve taken was going to jump out and grab me by the armpit hairs. But it seems like I was a samurai trying to learn blacksmithery to make my own swords or something. Didn’t happen.

So what to do? How to proceed, and where to go? I’ve always been more of the idea man, and there is a place for that in the computer gaming world, but how to get to that point is the question. I mean, no one’s going to come looking for a Chief Creative Emperor or what-have-you anytime soon. Professor Steve said in his contacts that they’re always looking for people to write on video game projects. But can a job writing plot and dialogue for a game really lead anywhere? Maybe, but to the Czar-hood that I would really need to explore my own ideas?

Good, edgy writing–and writers–is–are–always in demand, but that’s only a part of the story. There are a lot of variables here. Good skills at articulation and competent discourse are key to every discipline, but the form and structure of those will always vary, as has always been the case. Good writers and speakers (i.e., people who need to articulate ideas to an audience in whatever form) adjust situation to situation. Reports, email, letters, conversation (determining which ones matter is a skill dance?), design documents, group talk, meetings–it doesn’t matter. We must read, listen, and pay attention to what’s going on. We all have to understand story. Which one we really need to learn is sometimes difficult.

Rick DeMarinis has written a similar story to Jason’s above. It’s called Horizontal Snow (The Voice of America 1991), originally published in Story. The first few lines go:

Because of a snag in my thinking I lost interest in both vector analysis and differential equations and had to drop out of college and hitchhike home twelve credits short of graduation.

The protagonist doesn’t have an easy time of it in the story. Help comes from unlikely places. He survives.

writing dialogue

Lots of discussion is going on at Narratives and Wanderlust about dialogue. There are issues with this but I wonder how many people have sat in a public space and listened to what people say? No need to bring up the shade of Truman Capote in this regard who supposedly got in trouble for doing this to his own advantage. But good dialogue has something to with listening for sound and tension in general conduct.

Obviously, a listener can’t study their own talk. What do people say is mere factual catalogue. Why people say is the deeper issue.

“Could you please stop that tapping?”

“Could you please stop tapping your foot?”

“That tapping is really bugging me.”

“You tap your foot a lot.”

“You’re going to ruin your shoes that way.”

Five instances of the same situation but totally different contexts and intents.

I like the last one.

“You’re going to ruin your shoes that way.”

“You mean the way you ruined me?”

“It’s obvious that you have no respect for your elders.”

“My god, I have fifteen years on you.”

“I wish this damn rain would quit.”

And so forth.

writing and writing

Diane Greco has some good thoughts on Comp Studies. She writes:

At first it seemed odd to me that the field of composition would even have theoretical developments. A writing classroom really isn’t a laboratory; it’s not controlled enough. Neither is any observation of a writer’s process. Even if you have a writer explain every single word she writes, as she writes it, you are only getting one person’s process. And presumably there are as many writing “processes” as there are writers. Even so-called “basic” writers will differ significantly (meaning, in a way that precludes generalization from one writer’s experience) in how they go about putting words on paper. Not to mention how artificial the experimental set-up is — if I had to write while explaining myself to myself, I doubt I would be able to write very much or very well at all.

She goes on to discuss three major writing theory camps: cognitivists, expressivist, and social constructionist. Here’s the zinger, though. She writes, “. . . I think maybe these ‘theoretical developments’ are necessary and important — but not for what they tell us about writing. Rather, these theories are important because they’re the stories composition teachers tell themselves about what they’re doing.”

I like this. I’d claim the narrative goes deeper though into a string of theories that are very difficult to work into a syllabus, especially given time and what we assume needs teaching: a little research, a little documentation, a little style, and a little argument or exposition. Sometimes I read College English and invariably put it down, wondering “Haven’t I seen this before?” and go instead to the stories in Confrontation.

Various approaches to writing can give context, but it will always be a loaded context. The desks, the chairs, the blackboards are all in the same place. Ultimately, it’s school, a version of mind.

My favorite approach to composition studies is still progymnasmata tailored to writing. Writing in this case becomes performance.

heights

In writing a poem about heights, it struck me that we have no word for the love of them, as we do for their fear, acrophobia.

In other words, is the draw of height and its description itself a poem if there is no word for it?

What does this mean?