Academic Responsibilities

Stanley Fish, in his NYTs blog, says that recent commentary about whether Barack Obama should include Larry Summers, lately fired as Harvard's president for controversial remarks about women scientists among other things, in his cabinet is wrong-headed. Most commentaries, he says, deal quickly with the question of WHY he was fired, claiming that it was because he was trying to shake things up.

Fish claims that a university professor should be one who is trying to wake people out of complacency, but not university presidents. That's the real issue about whether he should be in the cabinet: does he have people skills? Fish writes, "It is not a question of intelligence and competence -– everyone agrees that Summers is very smart and very accomplished as an economist; it is a question of tact, patience, poise, self-restraint, deference, courtesy and other interpersonal virtues." The more general point is that teachers have a whole different set of ethical and professional responsibilities than principals (or professors and university presidents). An academic is not an academic. Nor is it true that presidents just have MORE responsibilities -- they are qualitatively different.

Public Intellectuals from a new Zip Code

I've been thinking about why kids at school seem to be so blatantly bored with literature. As a department chair, I watch as teachers fret about the students who don't seem to care... and about students who pronounce their not caring more and more vocally. One response is to create bigger and bigger projects that go along with the reading. Another response is to spell out (usually in 12 point font on power point slides) what's most important about last night's novel reading. Yet another response is to blame the X (kids, TV, cell phones, parents, mercury in innoculations....) I don't think that any of these responses will get to the heart of the boredom.

Instead, I think that English departments need to change: our goal should be to help kids become better consumers of text. And by text I only barely mean "novels and short stories," I really mean documentaries and informational web sites and online newspapers and blogs, etc.

I love novels myself. And I think that reading, say, The Scarlet Letter, is a pleasantly rewarding intellectual and artistic puzzle that helps me think about big ideas like idenity and social norming. But I don't think that literature has any monopoly on helping kids become better readers, thinkers, or citizens. It's ONE WAY, and a way that is probably going out of style faster than you can say "D'oh!".

Today I ran across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (not usually associated with flouting tradition!) which helps me make my claim in a sideways sort of way. The author, Daniel Drezner, in the article "Public Intellectual 2.0," found here, writes that public intellectuals have not died, but have migrated to the blogosphere. Drozner writes:

"To be sure, some important differences exist between the current generation of public intellectuals and the Partisan Review generation extolled by so many. In the current era, many more public intellectuals possess social-science rather than humanities backgrounds. In Richard Posner's infamous list of top public intellectuals, there are twice as many social scientists as humanities professors. In a recent ranking published by Foreign Policy magazine, economists and political scientists outnumber artists and novelists by a ratio of four to one. Economics has supplanted literary criticism as the "universal methodology" of most public intellectuals."

Drezner says, "That fact in particular might explain the strong belief in literary circles that the public intellectual is dead or dying." But for me, it also might explain why kids see, but English teachers don't, that our primary focus on literary criticism is outdated and, um, boring. English departments, even in high school, existed in their heyday after the New Critics (and New York Intellectuals) reign in the 50s and 60s.

Meanwhile, back in high school, teachers still hold novels up as holy relics. The answer, to many teachers, is to force kids to look more closely at the holy relics, and try to encourage kids to see how the old messages might still fit today. My response is that we should help kids see the holy is not just in relics!

What's the reading level of a text? That's a trick question!

Again, from Chris Tovani, 2008

Reading Levels Change

Based on three factors:

Background knowledge - The more background knowledge a reader has about the topic, text structure, and author, the more difficult text he can read

Interest and Motivation - If a reader has interest in the topic or is motivated to read, he will work harder to comprehend.

Purpose - When a reader knows why he is reading something and knows what he needs to get from a text, he can better sift and sort informaion to determine what is important

So, what does this mean for teachers? Shower readers with background knowledge, tap into interests, and create a purpose for every reading assignment.

Thinking Strategies Used by Proficient Readers

This is also from the Chris Tovani program. It's based on research synthesis of P. David Pearson and Janice A. Dole.

"A strategy is an intentional plan that is flexible and can be adapted to meet the demands of the situation.

Proficient Readers:

• Activate background knowledge and make connections between new and known information.
• Quesion the text in order to clarify ambiguity and deepen understanding.
• Draw inferences using background knowledge and clues from the text.
• Determine importance in order to distinguish details from main ideas.
• Monitor comprehension in order to make sure meaning is being constructed.
• Reread and employ fix-up strategies to repair confusion.
• Use sensory images to enhance comprehension and visualize the reading.
• Synthesize and extend thinking.

Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard

Harvard College Library (the Lamont Library) has posted this handout about how to develop the habit of critial reading because, "Critical reading -- active engagement and interaction with texts -- is essential to your academic success at Harvard, and to your academic growth." Success in high schools that are trying to send kids to college, too!

What are the 6 reading habits?

Previewing
Annotating
Outline, summarize, analyze
Look for repetitions and patterns
Contextualize
Compare and Contrast

Each heading is followed by a succint description and several bullet points of examples.

When I annotate, what do I write?

This comes from a "Day of Reading" Seminar with Chris Tovani.

What I annoate, what do I write?

Sometimes I:

Record a REACTION

Ask a QUESTION

Give an OPINION

Make a CONNECTION

Respond to how I would RELATE if I were in that situation.

What is "Theme"... it's like a theme park!

I copied this from the teaching blog "View from 125"

Theme Park Analogy
In my third block class today one of my students, Dennis Vincent Long (he requested I publicize his name this exact way), came up with a good idea to help me explain the term theme to my students. I was going through my cards, asking them what a theme is and he popped out with, “Theme parks.”I was initially inclined to blow this off and keep going. After a few seconds of thought, however, I realized that he was on to a good idea. Think of the original Disney World, the park that is now called the Magic Kingdom. In that park there are four themed areas: Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, Frontierland, and Adventureland. There is also Main Street, USA, Liberty Square, and Mickey's Toontown Fair. Each one of these areas has one big, unifying idea behind it. In Fantasyland all the rides, shops, restaurants, etc. are related to the various pure fantasies that Disney puts out. [Digression—Is the It’s a Small World ride in Fantasyland because world peace and harmony is nothing but a dream?] In Tomorrowland everything relates to science fiction and/or the world of tomorrow. In Frontierland everything is related to the rugged frontiers of America’s past. Adventureland is themed to the different adventure shows Disney has created over the years.As each one of those areas has everything relate to each other, so a theme in a book or a story would be the big, unifying idea that holds that work together. All the other aspects of the book need to relate to that theme. So, thanks, Dennis! If not for your thought today, I probably would not have come up with that analogy. It makes the idea of theme clearer to me, anyway.

National Book Festival Author Webcasts

I copied this from eNotes school blog "The English Teacher Blog"

LOC: National Book FestivalNovember 10th, 2008 by carla
The Library of Congress publishes online a wide variety of materials teachers can use. This includes the webcasts of National Book Festival presentations by authors and illustrators. Are your students doing an author study? See if there’s a clip here they can use. Are you getting ready to read? Let the author say a few words to your students first.
The presentations are organized by the pavilion at which they occurred.
Samples from 2008:
Tiki Barber
Jan Brett
Joseph Bruchac
Judith Viorst
Paul Theroux
From 2007
Jodi Picault
Maria Celeste Arrarás
From 2006
Khaled Hosseini
Louis Sachar
Explore the complete list, dating back to 2001.

Twelve Years of Apples

In "Learning in Depth," Kieran Egan muses about a school curriculum that is based on depth rather than breadth.

Kids should be given a topic during first grade -- apples is his first example-- and learn about it for the next 12 years. She would first make lists of apples and taste different apples, and her portfolio would grow. She would "become active in compaigns to preserve rare apple varieties;" later, she "knows the locations of the major orchards of the world as well as their owners, costs of production, profits, and transportation problems." Other kids would learn about birds, the circus, railways, the solar system, "and so on."

Egan asks us to "Imagine what school would be like if we implemented such a project on a large scale." My imagination tells me that the kids that are curious, inquisitive, independent will do well; the kids who are especially conscious about grades will wonder about how many artifacts need to go into the portfolio for an A; and most kids who are apathetic now will not suddenly have an epiphany of interest given the topic of "the circus."

I agree that teachers and schools should make a move to value depth over breadth, especially in the context of testing requirements that winnow the curriculum. And I really admire the notion that you are encouraging the kind of deep research that encourages students to make connections between static objects and the world. But Egan's hopes are not just unrealistic, but silly. What happens if I really don't care much about circuses, but love insects, the topic of my friend Manny, who like licorice? Does the 10th grade English teacher help each of her 150 students go futher in depth with each of the 150 topics?

The kind of 12-year committment Egan describes is more like an avocation. Kids will learn deeply about things, will spend countless hours on specific topics... but rarely on randomly chosen topics. In my experience, those avocations, even in high school, tend to be things like "vampires," and "wizards," rather than "apples." That's not to say, of course, that someone might put together a great portfolio on "vampires," but the number of kids who could follow through on vampires from age 6 to age 18 would be, I venture to guess, small.

There are better ways to value depth over breadth. A teacher could ask a student to read three books in a year about a single topic, or by a single author. A teacher could create a writing class around the topic of a single topic, "air," "water," even "apples," and ask kids to investigate facets of the issue. A school department could have a "theme" for a year. In my school, for instance, the social studies department is focusing on "genocide" next year.

Egan says that such programs have already begun. In Japan, for instance, "students make fortune cookies, slip a piece of paper with a topic inside, then randomly choose a cookie -- and their topic." It wouldn't be long before some young wit writes "boobs" on the slip. At least there might be more interest in that than "circus."

From Twista to Twain? Tim Shanahan weighs in

UIC professor Timothy Shanahan doubts here in his blog that while it's important to pay attention to literacy trends in kids, like IMing, reading teachers should keep their eyes on the prize. He challenges those who would argue that teachers should be investing much validity in the forms of literacy that come easily to kids. He writes:

One basic flaw is the claim that the skills students use when playing video games are commensurate with those evident in reading. We don’t have good measures of cognitive equivalence across tasks, so there just isn’t convincing support for the idea that understanding the conflict in a video war is equal to understanding the conflicts in novel like, The Scarlet Letter.

Book Review: Galbraith "The Predator State"

Benjamin Friedman's review of James K. Galbraith's book is in the Nov. 6 issue of The New York Review of Books.

After you read this book review summary, consider David Gelernter's NYT magazine article "Capitalism to the Rescue" from Oct. 3, 2008. The article suggests that venture capital will cause spur green change better, and more efficiently, than government.

Is Bush conservative? He sucessfully proposed large tax cuts; he has provided "faith-based" social programs; he has opposed abortion and same-sex marriage. On the other hand, the new Medicare prescription drug benefit is unprecedented (Christopher DeMuth says it adds $20 trillion in unfunded liabilities) and without provisions for funding. NCLB mandates, with exactness, when states must test kids, what "failing is," and what a school board should do when a school "fails." Most recently, Bush has taken over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, approved $85 billion rescue of AIG, asked Congress to approve $700 billion bailout.

The same criticism can be made about Republicans in general. Galbraith argues that Bush and Republicans "have ceased being genuine conservatives because the conservative policy agenda has ceased to be helpful... or relevant, to today's issues." Among these old ideas: free trade, a balanced federal budget, and keeping inflation in check by limiting the increase in the supply of money. The question is what should replace traditional Reagon-era conservativism.

Liberals have bought into the rhetoric of the free market and accept "regulation only where it can be shown that markets fail." Liberals "praise the 'free market' simply because they fear that, otherwise, they will be exposed as heretics, accused of being socialists." They should reject this fundamentalism. Conservatives have abadoned old traditions and replaced them with greed (the predator state of the title).

Galbraith puts forth a different worldview, based on the belief that free markets generally do not achieve favorable outcomes, for individuals or business, that elementary economics and conservative politicians claim. They do not allocate scarce resources efficiently or distribute goods and services to those who value them the most. Liberals must acknowledge the failure of markets to deliver wha'ts promised. Sometimes buyers and sellers can affect prices, they cooperate among themselves to their benefit; large actors determine not just whether they will buy or sell, but whether it will be produced at all; that selers can use advertizing to influence buyer's behavior; that the government intervenes in favor of individual buyers (AIG).

"predation" "the systemic abuse of public institutions for private profit or, equivalently, the systemic undermining of public protections for the benefit of private clients" is at the center of today's system. Income inequality is widening. The majority of American families earn less today than at the beginning of the decade. Pay for CEOs has exploded. A very large proportion of tax cuts goes to families at the top of the income scale. The government rushes to bail out big firms, and to protect their creditors (and executive pensions), but declines to help ordinary citizens. . The government awards rich contracts to companies owned or run by politcal supporters and former colleagues. Currenlty, financiers control businesses, but done care if they're productive, honestly run, whether they deliver benefits to customers, workers, communities, or anyone other than whoever controls them. Democrats are in the bag, too, particularly its support of the technolgoy sector of the financial markets. There is a "new class" of people who don't fear big government, because it supports them.

What's the solution? the government is involved in bigger economic initiatives: how much to invest, the directions to be taken by new technology, the question of how much urgency for environmental issues, the role of educaiton, and of scientific knowledge, and culture. Also a much wider use of regulation, of standards for wages and prices, markets, of carbon emissions, health care, utilities.

But, asks the author, how do we know that the same "predators" wouldn't influence these things? Also, pointing to the failure of markets is not the same as showing that nay specific planning would be superior.

Happiness, Part II

This is a related post concerning the 60-Minutes story about happiness.
Ben-Shahar says that it's not just those overindulging in work who are unhappy: "There's a lot of unhappiness on college campuses. And it's not just at Harvard. Over 94 percent of college students nationwide are stressed and overwhelmed. And students are paying a very high price for this pressure." I've witnessed this as a high school teacher in a district with extraordinarily high expectations for kids: in athletics, in academics, and especially in getting an acceptance letter to a prestigious college. The problem with competitiveness for getting into college is that it's a game with unknowable rules. As a freshman in high school, you don't know if you're heading to the big leagues or the bush leagues for college choices. You don't know the kind of ACT score you'll get. The ACT will determine if you're headed, generally, the kind of college you're headed to. And even if you could know that you're going to post a 34 on the ACT, you don't know if that's going to land you at the University of Michigan or Standford. So, you try to make sure that you have all the attributes that will shoot you into the highest collegiate orbit -- volunteering at the animal shelter, joining the debate team, the chess team, the Gaussians, Model U.N., and the yearbook. It's the unknowability of the college-selection process that makes it so stressful. You don't know how much is good enough. Maybe you should add another club? Maybe you should START a club? The most strategic students are thinking about maximizing themselves every second of the day.

Denmark is Happiness

The family was driving back from St. Louis on Sunday night from a nephew's graduation when the clouds massed blackly to the west as winds blew a thick river of airborne dirt across I-55. I flipped on the AM radio to find some weather reports (70+ MPH in Peoria, tornado watch across several central Illinois counties), when I came to this "60 Minutes" segment with Morley Safer about the happiest country in the world: Denmark.The story proposes several different hypotheses about why Danes rated first prize in a international survey of happiness.Low Expectations. Professor Kaare Christensen at the University of Southern Denmark did a study of Danish happiness. He says in the 60 Minutes piece, "What we basically figured out that although the Danes were very happy with their life, when we looked at their expectations they were pretty modest." When you don't expect too much, you aren't too disappointed.Sameness and Security. Danish newspaper columnist Sebastian Dorset, claims that, "contentment may stem from the fact that Denmark is almost totally homogenous, has no large disparities of wealth, and has had very little national turmoil for more than a half century. 'We have very little violence. We have very little murders. So people are, feel very safe,' he says." That security is more basic than being less worried about knife attack. It's also about the Danish safety net. One student says:
"I'm being paid right now for not going to school. I'm being paid forparenting," another male student tells Safer. "It's 100 percent paid for by thegovernment for half a year."
Denmark also provides free health care, subsidizedchild care and elder care, a social safety net spread the length and breadth ofthe country.
The cost of these safety nets would be staggering to an American: a 50% tax rate.Anti-materialism. Americans, according to Harvard Psychology lecturer Tal Ben-Shahar, want it all. "In America, part of the ethos, part of the American dream, is that more is better and the more is better usually applies to the material realm. And that doesn't pan out. That doesn't work. It doesn't make us happier," he says. Intead, American are stressed, not happy, because of high expectations. According to the report, "wanting it all is a bacterium that stays with us from youth to old age - wanting a bigger house, fancier car, more stuff. And when we get more, there’s always someone with even more stuff, who's just as unhappy.Brave New WorldThis reminds me of some of the discussions I had this year while teaching Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in my English 2 Honors class. Our discussions kept running into a problem involving the word "happiness." Kids wanted to say that Huxley was suggesting that a life of sex and drugs and pleasure and comfort and outward.... um... happiness didn't really make you... er... happy. Instead, true happiness existed when you were doing something important, like when the character Helmholtz Watson writes poetry out of his loneliness and yearning. It involves going after beauty and truth! John Savage and Watson seem to agree that beauty and truth (and thus happiness) can only come from discomfort and... a-hem!... unhappiness.
Part of our discussion in class involved ferreting out words that would represent better the difference among various kinds of "happiness": "feeling no pain" and "being excited and laughing a lot" and "knowing that you're engaged in something meaningful." In the 60-Minutes story, one Danish student said that Danes don't feel happy, but content. But then why was the survey about "happiness" rather than "contentness"? Weren't the survey-creators smart enough to know the difference? Even in our sophomore English class we were more discriminating than that. There's "content" (laying on the beach in Jamaica, ), there's "joyful" (riding on a roller coaster, watching Spinal Tap), and there's "feeling signficant" (curing cancer, writing a great novel).
So what about this language problem about happiness? Why, in our everyday speech, do we find it hard to discriminate between "happy-content" and "happy-feeling significant"? We have this romantic notion of what "happy" is... which it really isn't (at least completely).
Are you "happy" with your life? Would you describe yourself as "happy"? To answer these questions, you have to call up some images of people you consider happy. Is your image an episode of "Seinfeld"? Is it a photo-op of Hollywood newlyweds? Is it a picture of yourself sipping champagne in a yacht? Celebrating a walk-off homerun in front of sixty thousand fans?
Is a "happy" life a stringing-together of as many joyful moments as possible? as many "content" moments as possible? as many "significant" endeavors as possible?
It's interesting in itself that the original study tried to figure out who was "happiest" rather than "who lived the life most worth living."

Summer's begun

Today I created two new blogs, one for Henry (henrydavidlange.blogspot.com) and one for Charlotte (charlottecatherinelange.blogspot.com). Check them out! Here's a picture of both of them!

The Elitist Democrat

Today George Will published a piece that characterizes Barack Obama as a typical example of the elitist democract who

Obama may be the fulfillment of modern liberalism. Explaining why many
working-class voters are "bitter," he said they "cling" to guns, religion and
"antipathy to people who aren't like them" because of "frustrations." His
implication was that their primitivism, superstition and bigotry are balm for
resentments they feel because of America's grinding injustice.

By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture -- the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."

Will goes on to say that liberal elitists have been swallowed hook-line-and-sinker four marxist principles about false consciousness, which make this liberal elite as out of touch with the "real" democrats. Not only out-of-touch, but haboring a "doctrine of condescension." The fact that it's marxist seems to be the main reason that it's wrong to Will.

A similar attitude is given by Mark Bauerlin here. Here's the center of his argument: that this elitism and ego-centricism of the liberal professors weakens the debate in universities:

The dangers of aligning liberalism with higher thought are obvious. When a
Duke University philosophy professor implied last February that
conservatives tend toward stupidity, he confirmed the public opinion of
academics as a self-regarding elite -- regardless of whether or not he was
joking, as he later said that he was. When laymen scan course syllabi or
search the shelves of college bookstores and find only a few volumes of
traditionalist argument amid the thickets of leftist critique, they wonder
whether students ever enjoy a fruitful encounter with conservative thought.

It's a cheap shot, but it works when "elite" is considered a pejorative term. Hillary Clinton is swinging wildly at Obama now, repeating the "elitist, out-of-touch" refrain at every campaign stop. It works when "Marxist" is a pejorative term. (odd, now, in the middle of a recession caused by Milton Friedman-esque freemarket and deregulation polices which allowed for the unethical and unsustainable mortage crisis, which, infuriatingly, the average taxpayer is now paying for with a bailout of Bear Stearns.

Why don't liberals fight back in a similar way? Why aren't liberals marking conservatives as callous, indifferent to the realities of poverty? Why aren't they telling stories of individual people out of work and screwed by the past 8 years of Republican indifference? Reagan won huge points by telling the story of the welfare mom who kept having babies to get more welfare checks. Why not trumpet the opposing stories of the uber rich? Is it because that most Americans would really like to change places with the uber rich?

The Dumbing Of America - washingtonpost.com

The Dumbing Of America - washingtonpost.com

- Week 753: Hot Off The Riddle - washingtonpost.com

- Week 753: Hot Off The Riddle - washingtonpost.com

Merit Pay for Educators

Check out this new Time Magazine article reporting on the "merit pay debate."

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1713174,00.html