Inaugural Post: 2013

I’ve been away from this weblog for a time, thinking, changing course, working through. A new novel’s coming. A new year, with lots of exploring. New reference points. Those to thank, you know who you are. In any event, I’ve been reading lots of local, Simsbury history. Prepping for courses, with a mindfulness for ecology.

Vibert’s book has renewed my interest in the kinds of history and storytelling that makes better sense than general overviews. The day to day experience, for example, of people just after the initial push-out from Windsor Connecticut into the pine territories of northern Connecticut for tar and pitch to serve the naval concerns of England is a robust knowledge and wisdom. I’d love more mining into this subject. The social network is not new.

Redefining Politics

I have readings ready for class on Tuesday, November 4. I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s voting day, and the day represents a culmination of semester long work in terms of a course plot. In any event, given the elections, which feels strangely distant from reality, this post by Greenstein and Kogan at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reminds me of some frustration about political ecology, by which I mean the way people interact with and shape governance culture.

November 4 will be a good example of this ecology in the ambient round. The relationship on display between the states and the federal government is a part of the Christie/Obama narrative but not part of the larger narrative on display in the governance sales job.

I’ve learned over time that politics should be a form of problem solving. But it’s hard to solve problems when the wrong narrative is being written. We could ask this question and try to make people care. We could ask what drives “the nations long-term fiscal problems” outside of the immediate issue of a destroyed abode after a storm somewhere on the eastern coast.

Several conservative analysts and some journalists lately have cited figures showing substantial growth in recent years in the cost of federal programs for low-income Americans. A recent report the Congressional Research Service prepared for Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) provides one such set of figures.[1] These figures can create the mistaken impression that growth in low-income programs is a major contributor to the nation’s long-term fiscal problems.

In reality, virtually all of the recent growth in spending for low-income programs is due to two factors: the economic downturn and rising costs throughout the U.S. health care system, which affect costs for private-sector care as much as for Medicaid and other government health care programs.

I ask: why should it matter that the narrative that defines a problem be taken more seriously?

When there are critical problems that need solving.

I leave the rest to suggestion.

On Ability-based Methods and Student Writing

The first major papers are done and evaluated. And now some thoughts on my College’s ability-based approach. A fast internet search will provide loads of listed links.

While Ability-based may sound like a buzzword approach, this method of teaching and learning involves defining a set of “abilities” in descriptive form with the student as subject, as in: the student Writes articulate arguments with increasingly sophisticated claims using authoritative, documented evidence, and appeals. Our department has broken such language into different degrees of ability and demonstration in the form of standards of evaluation, often called a rubric, which is somewhat inaccurate. I prefer standards or degrees of evaluation.

The notion is that people can learn to drive forklifts. Some drivers, however, are the “go-tos.” Others keep backing into the walls. Others can do just fine. There’s no real reason to bother with “why” questions or with the typical judgement that standardized tests provide. This method involves standards but resists standardization as the concepts are broad and learnable.

Long ago, I would develop fairly complicated explanations for grades, as I grew tired of justifying them. A meant this and C meant that. In our current model we represent each degree of ability with a number (humans, apparently, are doomed to hierarchies). Doing this assist in understanding that the number or the grade doesn’t matter. What matters is the meaning of the thing. It’s entirely possible to provide a set of explanations on a student paper that illustrate the degree to which they are writing “articulate arguments” or that provide information about how to improve their method of evaluating a source for bias or motive. In a poetry course, we can move the language toward the requirements of the particular discipline or adhere to a general definition of “problem-solving” as poets do it. Practical politics, however, gets in the way. Students express themselves differently when they say I got an A, what’d you get? versus I got a “can assert a conclusion that doesn’t rely upon belief,” what’d you get?

Students will often tell me they want to know what their grade is, and that’s all they want to know. They use code for this; they say, “I want to know how I’m doing.” I might say, “Well, you need more aggressive analysis and stop using hard-core partisans as experts.” “Yeah, but how do I get an A” is the typical coded response, when the response I gave is the answer. I say: just work on improving analysis or find better sources with which to practice. It can get heated because the modern student isn’t typically acclimated to academic or professional material, communication norms, work load, and subject matter. It’s not something one can just explain.

I’ve been using this method going on nine years. I started in English Literature courses, providing students explanations and means for improvement on their work rather than grades, and boy did I get hell for from students. The ire I’ve received in response has always been difficult to deal with but no more difficult necessarily than the responses I used to get to grades. “Why a C? I need an A to keep my GPA or I won’t get into my program” Or, “I’ve never got D in my life! You’re the worst fucking teacher ever.” From there, the conversations would go haywire.

This semester has proven interesting in the evolution of this system of evaluating as I reviewed some of the best papers I’ve ever read at midterm. More than half of the students nailed the assignment. Student work in an ability-based model theoretically provides a narrative of learning. Students should begin early unable to demonstrate satisfactory work but after practice, writing, and reading, should improve. Why? Because early work involves foundational stuff like summary writing, research basics, short analyses, comparison work, and then the student can move to making a claim or taking a position. Those who stick with the approach typically do improve. Those who want top scores early and won’t take time to understand where they might improve if they put their noses to it typically drop (this is merely a hypothesis). Some students think this makes me a shitty teacher, who explains nothing, and doesn’t give a crap about their needs or wants. (I had a student recently whistle with disbelief at what students have said on the “professor rating” web site; I don;t dare look myself.) Other students grin, bear it, and make out fine in the end. Statistically my success rate is pretty good ( I often grab stats on how students do after they move on), and students who come back by the office claim that the torture paid off. For teachers, anecdotal evidence can be instructive. We deal with people as people and need to know what they do with what they learn.

This last round of bulk good work, some of it excellent, is good and excellent because it demonstrates that the students are learning into the abilities. Some students are still guessing about the difference between an argument and a statement of fact. Here’s an example of guessing: “So ‘n’ so argues that Romney or Obama said that if elected every one will get healthcare.” In the ability-based model guessing amounts to a boolean expression. Why: because people can learn to discriminate between these concepts. When students identified and evaluated evidence in relation to an argument, they got it right, maybe not expressed as well as Keats could express but good enough to show that they can do the job.

This doesn’t, however, validate the pedagogy I employ. Too many variables get in the way of this. What the student success does tell me is that they are learning and they’re learning beyond my assistance. It’s important often to avoid pedagogy validity arguments as in some cases courses might simply get lucky with a whole bunch of stars or struggle with a whole bunch of people who needed more preparation or lots of assistance.

Some of the methods are risky. Firstly, I don’t read and comment on drafts anymore. I don’t ask students to provide drafts that I then give back with comments, as my own teachers did and as I once perpetrated. This is not a methodological crime. Past experience has taught me that this method leads to the encouragement of poor study and editing habits, especially for raw freshmen who need more learning in study habits than anything having to do with good writing. Instead, I ask students to read other student drafts and edit against the abilities in typical peer review sessions. How students edit their peers tells me a lot about their own habits of reading and resilience in the face of problems. I ask students to provide me with their edited copy for kicks.

This is risky as final papers may indeed show a great deal of missed opportunity or lack of learning in comparison to more polished work that teachers traditionally poor over in prep for final copy. When it works, the amount of learning a student shows is apparent in comparison to past work. A writer notices the difference between the past and present if they make decisions on their own. This gives me more dramatic information about what I need to do in the classroom. If the majority of students are still having issues with paragraph divisions and transitions, then I can see that in unadulterated copy, and I can work with this issue more in class. In addition, heavily edited drafts by teachers may produced more polished final drafts. This, however, may not assist students when they’re asked to write for later courses where assistance from the professor is no longer provided.

Secondly, I do a hell of a lot of modeling, which is where a screen and word processor really come in handy in a writing course. Using the computer I can build a set of paragraphs and show students what synthesis and analysis looks like on the fly. They see and hear my thought process; they see how I correct spelling; they see how I clean up a cut and paste job from an online article with embedded links or superscripting. We discuss the process a lot. We throw an article up on the screen and we talk about why a writer fell down on the job, either leaping to a conclusion or providing an irrelevant example to support an otherwise perfectly reasonable argument. Then the students are expected to go out and read, practice, and study the notes they generated in discussion, in modeling, and in draft revision, as I will typically grab a student draft and take it apart for all to see (of course, only if agreed upon by the poor student under glass) and then put it back together using the concepts we’re trying to learn: elements of persuasive writing, paragraphing, analysis, quoting and reference, and idea development.

From a teacher’s perspective, observing a range of student performance is a good thing. This range provides a framework for evaluating the story of learning in a particular course. For several years I’ve been struggling with low performance, low preparation, and heavy drop rates. I don’t see an end to this trend. But sometimes the story of performance is encouraging, some times not so encouraging, but it’s valuable nonetheless in instructing the instructor.

A Scale Question and the Closing of the American Mind

I have engaged friends at the college with a simple question: how big can a federal republic get before it collapses? Hopefully I can grab some answers. It reminds me a Ryan Avent post at The Economist in reference to something Romney told a press conference (for some reason the video is no longer available embedded at the magazine). Romney said:

Do you believe in a government-centred society that provides more and more benefits, or do you believe instead in a free enterprise society where people are able to pursue their dreams? …We have a very different approach the president and I between a government-dominated society and a society driven by free people pursuing their dreams…

Here Romney is alluding to scale, while at the same time setting up a false dichotomy and a false set of choices that use typical and meaningless political buzz words. Avent remarks on this to some degree:

To me, this perfectly illustrates the massive blind spot in current GOP orthodoxy. The belief that there is an irreconcilable conflict between government benefits and the freedom to pursue dreams can only arise among those who have never had to worry about the reality of equality of opportunity in America. For most Americans, public schools are a critical piece of the machinery of economic mobility. Things like unemployment insurance and social security, meagre though they are, sometimes mean the difference between destitution and the possibility [sic] of a second chance or a non-wretched standard of living. For many Americans, the ability to even contemplate dreams for a better life is down to the small cushion and basic investments provided by governments, provided for precisely that reason, because an economy in which only those born with a comfortable financial position can invest in human capital and take entrepreneurial risks is doomed to class-based calcification.

Avent points to the “class” appeal in the Romney quote. But I’d rather go after the dichotomy and then an inaccurate and infantile use of terminology: “We have a very different approach the president and I between a government-dominated society and a society driven by free people pursuing their dreams . . . ” The false dichotomy has to do with the stated choice of beliefs. The audience is supposed to “believe” first in either a “government-centred society” or a “free enterprise society.” Romney provides a definition for each: the first is a “society that provides more and more benefits” while the second is a “society where people are able to pursue their dreams.” It is taken as “fact” that a society that provides “more” benefits is a society in which people are inhibited from pursuing dreams. This is not, however, a “fact,” as we can imagine societies where healthcare is provided as a major “benefit” by the government and have, under such great “benefit weight,” demonstrated ample ability to “dream.” Example: Norway, whose ranking on the Human Development Index is nothing to laugh at, unless, of course, you’re inclined to accept gross generalization.

The other side of the coin is the “free enterprise society,” defined as a place where people are free to “pursue their dreams.” It is treated as a fact that such is a place where the government “does not provide more benefits” is expressed as a legitimate counterweight, which is just an odd phrase to utter in the company of people with brains. Is there such a thing as “unfree enterprise”? Is it not possible for people in a “free enterprise society” to have their dreams crushed? Another problem is Romney’s method of using rhetorical amplification by subtly equating “government-centered” with “government-dominated,” when the first phenomenon can be refuted by even fifth-grade research, and neither is effectively defined in the context of a reality-based system of classification. “Government-centered,” I assume, is a keyword for a Fascist state.

This is argument by trigger words. “Benefits” is the first case is another way of saying that people are handed what they should otherwise work or “dream” for. One should both “work” for a college education and then, after graduation, “work” for a high standard of living. An underwritten education, on the other hand, signifies that the college student in this scenario is “dominated” by the government. By extension, one could argue the principle of the slipper slope and claim that underwriting would lead to a narrow or hollow curriculum. But Madison would have a lot to say about that, and it avoids constitutional realities. For Madison, the people underwrite.

Romney’s are not smart arguments. They belittle the American electorate and Close the American Mind.

Joseph Stiglitz writes this about what amounts to a correction of the terms:

Inequality in “market incomes” — what individuals receive apart from any transfers from the government — has increased as a result of ineffective enforcement of competition laws, inadequate financial regulation, deficiency in corporate governance laws, and “corporate welfare” — huge open and hidden subsidies to our corporations that reached new heights in the Bush administration. When, for instance, competition laws are not enforced, monopolies grow, and with them the income of monopolists. Competition, by contrast, drives profits down. What is disturbing about Romney and Ryan is that they have done so little to distance themselves from the economic policies of the Bush administration, which not only led to poor economic performance, but also to so much inequality. Understandably, perhaps, Romney has not explained why those, like him, in the hedge fund and equity fund business should be able to use a loophole in the tax law to pay 15 percent taxes on their earnings, when ordinary workers pay a far higher rate.

Election Time and Beginning Thoughts on Conservatism

So, the course continues, the debates are done, and the decision coming around the bend. At the college a few colleagues and I are having discussion related to the election. They stem from Romney’s exposition on the 47%, ponderings on the issue of inequality across the states, and energy.

I my opinion the later two issues are the issues of the day.

My current concern is an issue I’m trying to get going on campus and that’s a discussion of the parties and what they mean for the day to day in the United States. Since 2000 and earlier, perhaps even going back to Goldwater, it seems to me that the Republican Party as a thread of the conservative movement has crumpled to an unfathomable blob of odd ideas. This crumbling does’t explain the current polls, as of this day, or the positions of either candidate, which are fairly clear to me but, rather, the persistence of tropes attributed to our moiety system. True or no, conservative tropes are difficult to list as real factors in our politics.

One trope, for example, which forms the central image of the economic narrative is taxation as a means of defining a relationship between the individual, the state, and the federal government. I have yet to be convinced by friends that taxes provide a good measure of political position attributable to a party. “We need to lower taxes” as a question of identification with a position is difficult for me to understand. Why? Because one could associate with liberal or conservative ideals and have no opinion about the question of taxes. The story goes that autonomy is affected somehow by the federal government’s taxing power, that taxes are somehow related to freedom of movement, autonomy, and many more values. Conservatism has become associated with local control and the effective power of money as the means of maintenance. Local control becomes a trope when the image of individual autonomy butts against an external abstract force.

The conclusion here defines the problem, as this conclusion would require that conservatism and liberalism merge as a common notion or conflict whose core is the individual. Is sustainable economics “conservative,” “liberal,” “progressive”?

In Burkean terms, which would require an anachronistic set of definitions, in my opinion, there is no liberalism against which the ideas of an early conservatism would apply. Conservatism has gone through a series of reformations. The Glorious Revolution shifted Tory focus of sovereignty onto the new divisions of Parliament, following “whose the authority of the day” syndrome, if such a syndrome makes any sense.

But that’s just a small part of the history. What serves as a marker is to create a broad brush division in England after Restoration: those who supported rule my monarchy and those who defended rule by the new construct of “the people.” Which, of course, should lead back to James Madison or to supporters of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism.

Do Women Need Wooing by Candidates?

My students and I have been following the presidential campaign and doing research work. Many students are dropping, which has been the norm for many years. (I always ask why but never can come up with a good answer.) Some are “getting into it” and learning a lot about the political theater and the ups and downs of dependency news cycles. Many students are rushing into views without first examining what the research says about issues. In the early portions of the course, students are expected to develop a fairly reasonable description of points of view on an issue and to evaluate those views against standards. This is alien to many of them, who see persuasive writing as mainly about supporting their position with cherry picked evidence that supports that view only. I’m after understanding the varieties of views on an issue and then proceeding into position taking once the lay of the land appears.

Which is why I raise the issue of this panel at The Guardian, which really doesn’t help unpack an issue. It aims to provide “advice” to Mitt Romney on making appeals to women using the language of enticement, that is: to woo.

Here’s Jill Filipovic’s advice:”To appeal to women voters, Romney needs to talk to women like we’re people with rational political interests, and knock off the condescension.”

The problem I have with the subject of the panel is that the objective seems to appeal to condescension in the first place. Why would women need to be wooed by a candidate, since “to woo” in Old English would imply “affective bending” or the kind of behavior given to infatuated people not to people who serious about differentiating ideas.

In argumentation we have a good idea of the notion of an appeal as a form of support. We don’t think of appeals as evidence but as a means of developing an ethical image or mutual relationship. If people have a sense of compassion, they, for example, should be concerning for poor children. And, so, one would appeal to the compassion of an audience when asking for donations. The obverse proves the approach, as one would not appeal to an audience’s sense of selfishness for the same outcome.

One phenomenon that happens in politics is the need for people to give candidates advice. They even want to write their speeches for them. The ability to appeal to people should not require wooing, however.

Cheri Jacobus has a different take:

So excuse me if I find the question posed as a bit biased since it is President Obama who needs to change his tune with women. Whatever Mitt Romney is doing to move women to his side, he should keep doing it! He is leading in the popular vote 52% to 45%, and for the first time in this campaign, now leads in the electoral college.

Jacobus view asserts that the subject of concern can be neutral or unbiased. If the subject had been “how can Obama woo women” then we’d still suffer from the original problem and then suffer from a second: the fallacy of the one-sided coin.

What Does Learning Look Like: Reflections on MOOCs and Classrooms

This article by Amanda Ripley titled College is Dead. Long Live College is somewhat unnerving. I have all my current assignments ready for students in a software package called Digication, for reasons too long to mention in this post. Students will upload papers to each assignment and I’ll use the software to wade through them all and assess them. I manage the day to day of calendars, directions, and certain instructional aspects of my courses using a WordPress MU install run by Sixnut (that’s the name of the college strung in the opposite of the normal spelling).

Some students get confused and look for assignments in our version of Blackboard and say, “I couldn’t find the assignment.” But that’s another story. I have students who run up against technological problems. They run their home laptops off of current because their batteries are killed and so if the cat knocks the cord out the device goes blank. Or their printers color cartridges are down to dust so their drafts won’t print (who was the genius who decided that a black cartridge wasn’t ink enough to print a black and white essay?). And the price tonnage of ink prohibits just running to the store for more. I have a student who couldn’t participate in peer review sessions because he fell, broke his arm, and smashed his computer as his backpack took a good portion of the impact. Or so he says, though the sling he wears is some sort of proof. Many of my students don’t know how to solve common issues with their latest pricey equipment, which is typically far more advanced than mine. I sat with a student the other day, showing her/him how to actually close out running software on the latest greatest Mac and to find that hitherto unfindable paper. Sometimes those desktops are a real mess.

Most of my students have everything they need to do everything but the task at hand. This technological ambience is a phenomenon of everyday experience. Therefore, the question of how to make a college course a place were mindfulness is encouraged is now an apparent issue in design. The author writes:

This fall, to glimpse the future of higher education, I visited classes in brick-and-mortar colleges and enrolled in half a dozen MOOCs. I dropped most of the latter because they were not very good. Or rather, they would have been fine in person, nestled in a 19th century hall at Princeton University, but online, they could not compete with the other distractions on my computer.

It could be argued that the digital native is always at some task. I’ve noticed in class that these tasks rarely have much to do with what I want people to focus on, though often it’s hard to tell what’s in peoples’ heads. While some students appear off in the ether during a lecture or discussion, they are indeed listening or at least prove so later in response to a question or submitted work.

Ripley spends a lot of time developing her experience with a Udacity physics course. There’s a video intro, the instructor introduces himself, and then he and the students get down to business

“This course is really designed for anyone … In Unit 1, we’re going to begin with a question that fascinated the Greeks: How big is our planet?” To answer this question, Brown had gone to the birthplace of Archimedes, a mathematician who had tried to answer the same question over 2,000 years ago.

Minute 4: Professor Brown asked me a question. “What did the Greeks know?” The video stopped, patiently waiting for me to choose one of the answers, a task that actually required some thought. This happened every three minutes or so, making it difficult for me to check my e-mail or otherwise disengage — even for a minute.

“You got it right!” The satisfaction of correctly answering these questions was surprising. (One MOOC student I met called it “gold-star methadone.”) The questions weren’t easy, either. I got many of them wrong, but I was allowed to keep trying until I got the gold-star fix.

My colleague John Timmons figured the repetition question out years ago in his online courses and approaches the question of testing in a sensible way, allowing student to relearn as they’re assessed. I’ve tried to mimic this approach in my own brick and mortar courses in a variety of ways. We’ve understood the importance of feedback and examine, in new media, how the digital can be advantageous in this regard. Trial and error, learning from mistakes, and the significance of testing guesses against experience is important for growth; games teach these lessons, as does getting lost in the mall as a child. If it was good enough for Sir Gawain, I claim, it’s good enough for me.

Studies of physics classes in particular have shown that after completing a traditional class, students can recite Newton’s laws and maybe even do some calculations, but they cannot apply the laws to problems they haven’t seen before. They’ve memorized the information, but they haven’t learned it — much to their teachers’ surprise.

The “teacher surprise” here is interesting to consider. One of the reasons for surprise may have to do with what teachers have learned to consider as the definition of success in a course, which is often times geared to the narrow focus of a particular task, such as covering Chapter 5 through 7 so what’s in Chapters 5 through 7 can be “learned.” I remember having to memorize the nerves of the hand in Anatomy class because in Anatomy class it is important to learn all the hand’s nerves. But the meaning of the hands nerves to a non-major is difficult to fathom.

The intent of a course may simply be to memorize facts and to take a few multiple choice tests. The facts that form the subject of the course may be important to recall. The question is: should this be the intention of “any” course of study, which determines the flavor of feedback a student may be intended to receive? Question 2: should people be surprised to learn that rote learning or even the application of heuristics may not constitute problem solving or the ability to diagnose. If memory serves, my history courses in undergraduate school had a lot to do with reading about historical events and having to recall them on essays. But my memory fails in the details. What I do know is that I understand history now much differently than I used to; now it’s something I depend on. I’ve forgotten the nerves of the hand, though.

I’m not generally surprised at Richard Arum’s conclusions in Academically Adrift. In my work with academic curriculum over the last several years, I’ve come to the conclusion that expected application or knowledge testing isn’t always a part of courses in huge doses. In this context, I reflect back on my high school and undergraduate experience and remember that it was in the high school band where I had the best memory of learning, seconded by graduate school. One reason is Aristotelian in process, meaning that students are expected to go from general basics to specificity over the course of an arbitrary period of time, although the “arbitrary time aspect” isn’t Aristotle’s fault.

In the band, we worked as a team; in the band, we had all sort of ways of applying what we learned; we often failed and walked away with lowered heads only to rear back upright when the competition was won; and when we sucked, the leader was never at a loss to cuss the hell out of us. I earned experience by watching that same teacher “outside” of the classroom in his devotion to discipline, art, and the machines of his trade, and to the amount of work he did to manage hundreds of students, and when he tackled the mysterious glue sniffer on the lawn prior to an afternoon marching practice, then waited for security to arrive, I saw him in a new light. I still remember him as a courageous person, personally flawed, sure, but he understood humanness and would do anything for his charges. If you didn’t practice, he always figured it out. He would apply the appropriate level of derision to your shitty of character. With the guitar, you can either play a scale or you can’t. And when you can, there’s always the opportunity to improve, and if you don’t improve, YOU need to work harder at it. In band performances, either you got clapped at or you were nailed by tomatoes. But we needed the master teacher. We knew that if trouble encroached on the field, he’d tackle it, even if it meant personal damage.

The power of the digital is its ability to be trained or designed for individual people. It’s entirely possible to construct a learning environment where aid is available from a variety of sources and time streams and where asynchrony can work to the advantage of individuals. Maybe one person will take six months to learn what another person can learn in a month. Traditional teaching environments won’t allow for this obvious problem. Thus, a student who can’t demonstrate the requisite amount of learning in fifteen weeks “fails.” (This is indeed a certain kind of failure, but I can’t think of any successful game that operates this way. Failure in life should best be seen as a stage in learning.) A student can pay up and take the failed course again. The business plan, however, won’t allow for a student to pay once and take more time to demonstrate the required learning. There are also rules of fairness and the question of the value for the amount paid. The digital provides for disruption of all this.

But institutions don’t currently work this way, though they could. And so the digital disrupts the “structure” of a modern college degree regardless of the nature of the degree. I would posit that modern, mass education will always fail people if arbitrary, exacting structures provide the definitional framework, unless it is, indeed, judged as an “exclusive” system, like military training.

What prevents change? Definitions of value and organizational imagination.

Ripley’s essay is devoted heavily toward anecdotal evidence. While I appreciate Niazi and colleagues’ experience with MOOCs, their experience is a small slice of the story continuum. However, stores about peoples’ experience with online learning is significant circumstantially and to provide context and for asking good questions about priorities, such as the theme of good teaching and the arbitrary notion of periods of learning.