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Last week I examined the perplexity facing students caught between the demands of solid reading and the push to make learning into a kind of Quick Quaker Oats^®. Since there is no way to resolve the conflict between these demands, I came down in favor of 1) complexity and 2) taking time, as my imaginary students did in that posting.

A major educationist publication[1] has also recently plumped complexity. To understand why this is both good and bad news, we must examine what it says. Briefly: educational testing shows that the strongest “differentiator” between students who met or exceeded “benchmark” scores and those who didn’t was the ability to answer questions “associated with complex texts.” It was not the ability to answer questions related to “cognitive processes, such as determining the main idea or determining the meaning of words and phrases in context.” Part of the bad news is that these are the kinds of question usually found in Testing and Accountability instruments and Aptitude or Achievement Tests.

What helps to make bad news of this is that some of our commonest “measures” of complexity miss the boat. Consider how “complexity” is often “measured” by “quantitative means”[2]. Most of these “measures” work by the mysterious substitution of “proxy values” for the actuality of complexity. These mysteries are arcane—some would say arbitrary—and they lead to questionable “measurements.” Take as an example Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, in which this sentence appears: If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? I ran this speech through my MS Word Flesch-Kincaid Readability Tool, which analyzed it as having 8^th-grade readability. F-K also rated Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60 (“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore”) as having 2^nd-grade readability. Uh-huh.

The solution to problematic findings of readability like these should lie in the abandonment of a wrongheaded mythology of measurement in favor of connoisseurship and the cultivation of finesse and its application to the selection of reading, but that is not what our Appendix proposes. Instead, it claims that what we need is something called a Coh-Metrix report on readings, weighing them against more than sixty indices. Or, if sixty are “daunting for the layperson or even a professional educator unfamiliar with” them, further research may identify and “isolate the most revealing, informative factors.” I will await this research without bated breath.

Consider another issue visited by our Appendix. Showing how education research results occasionally lead to a valuable conclusion, it claims that students must approach their complex reading “independently,” that is, without lots of scaffolding, guidance, slicing, dicing, and “scanning for discrete pieces of information.” The Vegematic^® approach to reading instruction so commonly used deprives them of this opportunity. If, as I said last week, reading is like coming to an unexplored country, we will not learn to be explorers when our trip is a Cook’s tour laid out in advance.

Consider by analogy the unexplored country of Pieter Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Well, it is perhaps unexplored by your students, who, let us say, must make something of it. If they are to explore independently, they may not run to the internet for a study guide, because in doing so they give up their independence. On the other hand, they might need to hear the story of Icarus and to have their exploratory glance discreetly turned in a productive direction. Give them two more items: Matisse’s The Fall of Icarus and William Carlos Williams’s poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” After some quiet time of Google-free looking, reading, note-taking, and thinking, bring them together for a session of Shared Inquiry about the three items. By the time it is finished, the students will have done some independent but guided exploration of that country. What they produce may not be Meyer Schapiro or Simon Schama, and that is what will be good about it in the context of education: it will be their own best-exploring selves testing independent conclusions by discussing them with their classmates and you. You will know whether your students have struck gold during their explorations if they can say why Icarus might be the center of the Matisse picture while almost invisible in Breughel. But not every quest strikes gold, and that fact of life must be respected. There are times when the guide, if he is also a teacher, must forbear to yak about the lie of the land. (This does not mean the teacher is a constructivist: the teacher may guide exploration with tips and advice, propose ancillary readings, and subject findings and understanding to Socratic questioning.)

If the analogy holds, as I think it does, a course in complex reading allows students to encounter something unexpected and to deal with it in their own terms. With the added confidence and sophistication that experience brings, they will achieve a finer and solider understanding because they will have done it more or less independently. The I.B. course in Theory of Knowledge has been many things to many people. It has been many things to me! One that it has been to me is a course in complex reading. For many years I began and ended it with readings by William James. I had my reasons, but one of them was to prove something to the students. Every year they would invariably oblige me by commenting that the last reading in James was much easier than the first one. I could then gratify them by saying, “No, they were equally difficult, but in the intervening year you became far better readers.” That is the good news.

Flannery O’Connor didn’t have much patience with people who wanted to summarize fiction, including hers. If someone could “tell what it was about,” she thought, what was the point of writing it in the first place? To one audience she offered, as a parody summary of her story “Good Country People,” that it was “about a lady Ph. D. who has her wooden leg stolen by a Bible salesman whom she is trying to seduce.” The point was taken in laughter. To another audience she said that if the wooden leg was going to end up symbolizing anything, the symbolism would have to grow on readers as a part of their encounter with the story and not because someone had told them in a class. She knew that, her comments notwithstanding, stories usually do have subjects and themes and sometimes also symbols, but she knew that an encounter with a good story is radically different from, and better than, an encounter with a list of “elements.”  She was arguing for a kind of reading that places the work first and comes to it the way a traveler comes to an unknown country.

O’Connor died in 1964, the year I first saw Cliff’s Notes (first written in 1958 in Nebraska and nowhelpfullycalled CliffsNotes) at the local book store. I remember thinking it peculiar to buy one book whose purpose was to “tell me about” another book. In the years since, I have looked at a few of those “study guides,” but never finished one. Sometimes a summary can be good and funny. Take for example Desmond Skirrow’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn Summarized”: Gods chase/ Round vase./ What say?/ What play?/ Don’t know./ Nice though. That standard is rarely met.

It is sad to think that summaries and notes, already sweeping whole works aside, will become even more deeply entrenched in education, but that is likely to be one result of a movement gaining some currency to reduce homework loads in school. Under the formula commonly propounded, it should be limited to ten minutes per night per grade. This would mean that, for example, 8^th-graders would have eighty minutes of homework a night and 12^th graders two hours. In addition, no homework is to be assigned on weekends or over holidays.

In an anthology I have used with 10^th-graders appears “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a short story by O’Connor. Like Wallace Stevens’s unseen nightgowns, this story is strange and wonderful, though dark as O’Connor’s work usually is. It ends with Julian, the protagonist, running and crying “Help!” for his stricken mother against darkness that “seemed to sweep him back to her, postponing from moment to moment his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.”

Let us imagine a tenth-grader at home facing this story. She is taking five academic subjects and is at a school with the ten-minute-per-grade homework policy. That means that, roughly speaking, she is “allowed” about twenty minutes at English homework per night. The story has about 6500 words. Assuming she can read 250 words per minute—and that exceeds the speed at which quite a few tenth-graders can actually read—it would take about twenty-six minutes of steady reading merely to get through the story, already well into two nights of homework. Having interrupted her reading directly before the crisis of the story, she backtracks and does a bit of rereading, actually taking the full two nights’ allotment to read the story.

To read it once, not twice. To read it without taking notes. To read it without ruminating on that last sentence: how can the darkness sweep Julian back to his mother? How can it postpone his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow? To read it without being able to use the reading to support her own answers to any of the five questions that appear in the anthology at the story’s end. If we want to allow our tenth-grader two hours to read and reflect on O’Connor’s story, we must allow six school nights for the completion of the assignment. Since homework is not to be assigned on a weekend, it would take her more than a week of often-interrupted work allotments to study the story. What is more, we have not even spoken about other work that might take place concurrently, such as writing or grammar. Let us therefore recklessly imagine as an alternative that she exceeds her time limit because she is fascinated by the story and, as a result, succeeds in working out for herself the relationship in the story of darkness, guilt, and sorrow.

Let us also imagine her elder brother, a twelfth grader allowed a generous twenty-four minutes per subject. He has been assigned to report on the arrest of Samuel Pepys (pronounced peeps) in 1679 for participating in the “Popish Plot” to unleash terror in England, including the assassination of the King. How many days or weeks would it take him to come up with the needed factual detail and a synthesizing assessment? Let us imagine him working overtime to do so because he too has become interested in the subject instead of his clock.

He discovers that there was no “Popish Plot.” He discovers that Pepys was not even Catholic. He discovers that in the court trying the case Pepys was not allowed to confront the lying witnesses against him or to impeach their testimony. He discovers that Pepys could be held indefinitely without charges and was in fact held without charges for weeks. He discovers that if convicted of the charges finally brought against him—without due process of law—Pepys would be hanged, drawn, and quartered. He discovers what that punishment was.  He ends up giving a report not just on Pepys but also on background to the U. S. Constitution’s protection of habeas corpus and due process of law.

Much of the good that our two students get out of their extra work would be lost if, constrained by unreasonable time limits, they had to resort to “study guides” in order to get “the basics” of the O’Connor story or “a lesson” in civics. These guides are not the same thing as what they purport to “study.” They do the students’ thinking for them, and they deprive them of the chance for a bracing encounter with salutary complexity. They are like food that has been chewed by someone else, given to students with the instruction not to take the time to chew it themselves.

 

Some years ago a school I then worked at adopted a program called Looking for Learning developed by a consultancy in England. Two of the principles at the heart of the program were that pedagogy must focus on the learning that is occurring and that the best people to evaluate teachers are their peers. There were many reasons to admire this program, including the lucid, jargon-free presentations of Mr. Martin Skelton, but one of them requires some explanation.

The program took the long view: slowly slowly catchee monkey. We teachers had two monkeys to catch. One was to learn to recognize learning when it occurred in a classroom, and the other was to trust each other enough to give and take praise and criticism honestly and helpfully. Tricky monkeys.

Recognizing learning takes more than one might think at first. To suggest why, consider typical classroom visits by administrators. They take a seat in the back of the classroom, watching what the teacher does and taking notes. If they favor the method of record-keeping called “scripting,” they are so busy writing that they hardly even look at the teacher. Consider by contrast the evaluation that an old established high school of my acquaintance gives to applicants for teaching positions there. Short-listed applicants are required to teach a lesson. Two observers, an administrator and a teacher, attend. One of them watches the teacher, and the other watches the students. Afterwards they discuss what the teacher did and how well students were learning as evidenced by their behavior in class. They jointly arrived at a hiring recommendation, which the headmaster typically accepted.

Now let us go back to the monkey. During the first two years, what did the teachers at my school learn from Mr. Skelton and his associates about looking for learning? Almost nothing: instead, and more important, they learned how to trust one another, an ability they needed to cultivate first. They—we—did so by adopting a teacher-driven improvement plan and then seeing it through without the oversight of any school administrator. Of course the ostensible object of the plan was to improve the school, but the hidden objective was to bring the faculty over a period of years to the position of being able to work trustfully and productively together. What we teachers did not know at the time was that Mr. Skelton was also working with the administrators and encouraging (or developing) their ability to trust teachers to evaluate. They showed their learning by accepting our plan and, later, when we started reviewing each other, by letting it proceed without hindrance.

The result was a system of teachers’ watching one other and their students, of sizing up what was happening in the classroom, and of making recommendations. In short, it was what we sometimes called “formative evaluation.” As the best formative evaluations always do, these at their best combined the essential ingredients of trust, judgment, and finesse.

Finesse! Or, as Professor Barzun has it, “perpetual discretion,” the ability always to make and use fine distinctions and to size up situations flexibly and accurately. How different in approach, process and effect from sizing a teacher up by using a value-added learning equation. It admits fine differences and distinctions. It is human and humane. It produces more than the three results OK, not OK, and fired. I think that “judgment” has turned into a dirty word in education partly because people have talked themselves into feeling exempt from judgment and partly because they have experienced judgments made according to unclear, arbitrary, or unfair principles. And trust is the great enabler that binds the other two.

It was therefore encouraging and gratifying to find trust building up at my school during the operation of the first part of our program, and it is encouraging to know that it is identified as an essential ingredient in Finland and the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools. Two qualities of the Montgomery County program that stood out for me were the parity of teachers and administrators in the Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) panel they have and the emphasis they place on having developed the trust needed to make the panel work—a seemingly Finnish degree of trust, but grown and developed on American shores. As in our school’s program, trust took some years to develop in Montgomery County.

How much is that trust worth to Montgomery County? Though I hope they consider it priceless, it can be valued at $12,000,000—the amount the schools rejected from the federal RAce to the Top (RAT) program. To accept it, they would have had to abandon trust, finesse, and judgment, adopting instead a scheme of teacher evaluation based on value-added learning as assessed by test scores and formulas. Dr. Jerry Weast, the Superintendent of the Montgomery Country Public Schools, said, “We don’t believe the tests are reliable. You don’t want to turn your system into a test factory.”

You don’t want to turn your schools into any kind of factory, including a test factory. You don’t want to produce your teachers as if at a tool and die shop. You don’t want teachers graded by an on-off switch. Rather, you want to have schools characterized by the qualities constitutive of Looking for Learning and Peer Assistance and Review: trust, finesse, and judgment.

 

High schools, even those whose missions aim to produce “motivated global contributors” and “inspired life-long learners,” usually try to prepare their students for college. But what should a student be prepared to do in college?

In many cases, the answer appears to be “not much.” Louis Menand reports in The New Yorker on a study showing that the average college student studies thirteen hours a week and that a third of college students study less than five hours a week. If these incredible figures are true, they explain why nearly half of the students in the study did not engage in significant learning during their first two years of college.

(Now this study was itself the object of a blistering critique of its statistical methods, which included, as such studies so often do, an arbitrarily chosen standard of “significance.” Even one of its proponents notes that selection bias has not been controlled for and that the data are not randomized, and he notes criticisms of using tests as the basis for making “consequential decisions[1],” but he recommends using the test anyway. Why? I recommend that it be pushed away with a barge pole.

(I would also add that the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the basis of the study, is deeply suspect as an “instrument” for “measuring” learning or, as the test’s proponents themselves have it, “added value.” It asks students to demonstrate how they have learned in college by pretending to make an aircraft-purchasing decision on the basis of examining FAA reports and stories about plane crashes. I have said elsewhere that the transfer effect is real, but I have also said that it can take a long time for an education to ripen. Are the only fruits of education that matter the watery ones whose growth has been forced? And will colleges under the gun to produce students who can “think critically” on this test start requiring courses in procurement administration?)

The news flurry over the “worthlessness” of college hid an issue worth discussing: What kind of college should high school prepare its students for? The study mentioned above, flawed though it may be, notes that liberal arts majors “learn more” than majors in other fields like business, engineering, and computer science. Menand notes that liberal arts majors tend to have had better preparation in reading and writing than majors in other fields, and that the ability to read and write well tend to fit one for success in learning. Thus, in the “debate” between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs about what kind of education to pursue, Jobs seems to be right: the collegiate place to be is the College of Arts and Letters.

It is possible that some Colleges of Arts and Letters are suspect as loci of learning, but I don’t want to address that issue in any detail now. It is also possible that education in the US should stop thinking that one sort of education is suitable for everyone. Instead, it might consider adopting the European model of multiple tracks of education with schooling for some that culminates in A Levels or Baccalauréat or Arbitur, though my own preference would be for culmination in a variety of types of assessment such as the I.B. program offers.

In that case it would follow that academic high schools should offer preparation for a solid and rigorous liberal arts education. That would mean a comprehensive program of many complementary elements, and one that prepares its students to read and write well. It should be generous in the assignment of reading, writing, and other homework and inventive and various in its techniques of assessment.

All the prevailing emphasis on education’s instrumental value overlooks, however, an important result less easy to fit into the voc. ed scheme. When my students ask me what I thought of going to college, and I think they will not suspect my answer of being humbug, I tell them that it was like being born a second time. You can probably guess that this sentiment was not due to my having learned at last how to interpret FAA reports. Closer to the mark might be a line from Whitman that I first read in my poetry class with Professor Koch. It said of listening to an orchestra, “It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possessed them.” I could say that about some of the material I experienced in college. And just as Whitman must not have expected his every hour to be like an orchestral concert, I did not expect that kind of response to every item I encountered as an undergraduate. Professor Barzun notes that a simple count of buildings and their types will not reveal that Manhattan’s dominant building is the skyscraper. By analogy, a statistically based test of “value addition” will not reveal the dominant type of learning in a good college education. If I were to place a sign above the gates of an excellent college describing in five words or less what lies ahead, I would propose this one: “ARDORS WRENCHED HERE.”

 

For some years now I have been paying the costs of two South African boys’ education. The boys are brothers; their father is a single parent, Mom having died of cancer two years ago. The school they go to, chosen by their parents when Mom was still alive, is in general pedagogically “conservative,” has a full slate of activities for the students, and has a good reputation locally. For years all of its seniors have passed the “matrics,” South Africa’s school-leaving tests (the national pass rate is about 60%). Most of the students live near the school, but it draws students from all over Johannesburg. Discipline is consistent and firm but not harsh by South African standards. Students carry a diary requiring parents’ signature daily, in which the parent or teacher may write about current concerns. On the whole, the school’s parents support the school’s practices and decisions.

When the boys get home from school, they start their homework and continue at it with short breaks till they are finished. When they were younger, dinner waited till homework was done; now, dinnertime is often a break time after which homework continues. The elder boy, 13, was a poor student in his early years but has gradually improved till now he is an honor student and was recently chosen as a kind of sub-prefect. The younger boy, 9, has always been an excellent student, a budding athlete, and, as his father says, “the induna [great leader] of the playground.”

At home there is no doubt that the demands of school must be met. Dad’s own schooling started at a public school and continued at a mission school not far from the family’s village in the rural north. For a long time the mission was the most prominent institution in the area, its priests, brothers and nuns generally respected throughout the countryside. Dad named the elder boy after one of the priests, who chose to be buried in the mission’s churchyard rather than in his European homeland; and he still speaks fondly of his history teacher Sister Mary Hugh, as did his classmate the late novelist Phaswane Mpe. His parents, both orphaned, were taken in at the mission and received their schooling there. It is one of the givens in this family that schooling matters.

However the value of schooling becomes or remains a part of parents’ fundamental beliefs, one thing seems clear: the instillation must be affirmative or positive, not negative. Though the boys are sometimes punished for the occasional lapse, it would be destructive to try and punish them programmatically into a “respect” for school that would actually be only a sullen and fearful acquiescence. In fact, the boys like their school very much. Here is the probable basis of an element of effective parenthood: parents bring beliefs forward from childhood experience through growth to adult application.

Hence my concern on reading that state legislatures are considering and even passing legislation fining parents for their children’s educational misdemeanors such as truancy. If parents’ child-rearing practices are leading to truancy, delinquency, and failure, such laws will only punish the barn after the horse gets out. Diane Ravitch says that “[p]arenting education needs to begin when a woman is pregnant. The window is open from prenatal days until age 5.” This comment jibes with those made by an occupational therapist who used to be my colleague. She thought that much of the needed physical and mental discipline leading to effectiveness in school had to be instilled at a young age by parents who had a sense of how to do it and felt doing so as a positive and continual obligation.

Ravitch goes on to say that “the root problem” lying behind poor child rearing “is poverty.” In a similar if more general vein, Dr. Johnson says, “Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.” Ravitch says further that “we should be giving [poor or unknowledgeable parents] a helping hand,” which seems to echo Dr. Johnson’s dictum that “a decent provision for the poor is the true test of any civilization.”

I think, though, that if we did more digging we would find a double taproot. One part is as Ravitch & Johnson claim, but poverty cannot be a sufficient cause; otherwise, the South African family I have told you about would have completely different experiences of education, for they were and are poor. Nor does relative affluence necessarily guard against fecklessness, as many teachers of more economically fortunate students know. If beliefs lie behind action and inaction, maybe those also need examining as part of a possible explanation of what is going wrong.

Whatever happens, we are not going to do any real explaining or any real fixing if we spend our time wondering, as Ravitch puts it, “If only we could find the right person to punish.”

 

Some years ago I read a Pushcart Prize piece whose title was also a precise description: “One Thousand Words on Why I Should Not Talk during a Fire Drill.” A perfect illustration of the notion that sometimes more is less, the essay warns against two practices that are regrettably too common among teachers: 1) attaching minimum word limits to writing assignments and 2) assigning writing as punishment. The Pushcart piece is of course unreadable: counting its 1,000 words one by one is easier than making sense of them because engaging seriously with its repetitiveness is like giving oneself the Chinese Water Torture.

The student assigned a punishment piece knows that no literary virtue will matter in the finished work and suspects that the teacher assigning it will not actually read it attentively. The teacher thereby doubly undermines good writing by trivializing it and by depriving the student of the intellectual and affective engagement that it should receive in normal circumstances.

Nor may the assignment of word limits be the best way of dealing with writing that is not given for punishment. Better than setting an arbitrary word limit would be marking up a short first draft with the kinds of questions and comments that any draft should provoke at need:

• Prove.
• Example? Illustration?
• Could you explore this in greater detail?
• Explain.
• What are you implying?
• Chain of reasoning is incomplete.
• Background?
• So?

Students addressing them would be taking one of the needed steps towards quality in writing without pumping up their stuff with words words words. But it is hard to move against a current carrying notions with it that length equals quality. The I. B. Organization has minimum requirements of length for many of the assessments it requires of the students taking its courses, and the SAT I Writing sample, according to one of its critics, rewards length and ignores errors.

Length-lovers should have a chastening look at Lincoln’s second inaugural address, the Mount Everest of political discourse in English, which is under two pages long and uses fewer than seven hundred words. It is figuratively and literally lapidary, having been carved in stone on an interior wall of the Lincoln Memorial. It is sad to think that, submitted as a high-school thesis in government, it might “lose points” for its brevity.

One of the reasons Dr. Johnson’s conversation was famous was his ability to say things briefly. Asked one time why in his Dictionary he defined pastern as “the knee of a horse,” he disarmingly said, “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.”

His distillations could be acidic and painful. He once disparaged fishing as “a stick and a string with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.” Mary Monckton, later Lady Cork, insisted that she found Laurence Sterne moving. Johnson replied crushingly, “That is because, dearest, you’re a dunce.” Dorothy Parker had also mastered the pungent quip. When someone came to the Algonquin Round Table to announce that Calvin Coolidge had died, Parker asked, “How could they tell?” But Coolidge was famous for a brevity that was a parody of itself. Asked once what the preacher’s sermon at church had been about, he said, “Sin.” When asked what the preacher had said: “He was against it.”

In a postscript to his XVI Provincial Letter[1] Blaise Pascal apologized that “I made this letter longer only because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.” In this thought we see both why brevity is not automatically the soul of wit and why brevity can be solid stuff. The important conditions of good-quality brevity are that, except the rare gem of repartee, it take time or carry a context with it.

Major General Sir Charles Napier was famous in his day for many things, one of them a one-word military dispatch that he sent by telegram. Since telegrams were billed by the word and extremely costly, the medium carried a built-in impetus to brevity. In 1844, at the conclusion of his campaign to conquer the Sindh in northwestern India, he sent this wire to London: PECCAVI. It is the Latin for “I have sinned.”

And Evelyn Waugh wrote what must be the shortest letter on record as a post card, a medium that used to encourage (often witty) brevity in its users. He learned that his first wife had had an affair with his friend John Heygate, who came to regret the affair and confessed it at church. His confessor would absolve him only on the condition that Heygate obtain Waugh’s forgiveness. In reply to Heygate’s written plea Waugh wrote JH OK EW.

All these examples suggest that wit is the soul of brevity. Unfortunately, most of the time most of us will not produce such gems and must meet demand with longer, less coruscating and more time-consuming expedients like selection, development, elaboration, synthesis, and other requirements of ordinary writing. When we forget this, we are in the same danger as those who report events in real time. The danger, often realized, is that they sound like the people you hear on their cell phones in the grocery store: “I’m in the produce section now.”

A related danger lurks in “threaded discussions” of the kind one finds after some newspaper columns and blog postings. This twin danger is that, being mediated, these “discussions” lose the zest of immediacy that only live conversation provides, and that no compensating virtue such as wit or pungency will take its place. Instead we find pedestrian writing full of red herrings and goony insults. The exceptions that prove the rule prove it all too infrequently.

And so we come to an article in The New York Times about teachers who use “social media” in their classes to encourage students to “speak up.” I experimented with them and regretfully gave them up. I say regretfully because it was clear that my painfully shy students found them a tolerable alternative to classroom discussion and conversation with the teacher, and one doesn’t happily give up such helpful innovations.

The problem was that the same mediation that made these encounters tolerable to the painfully shy left most students and me impatient for something zestier and less etiolated (though my students didn’t say so in quite these words). And there were the bandwidth problems that slowed everything down, turning such “discussions” and the attention they demanded and then thwarted into cases of arrested envelopment. There were also students who welcomed the slowdown of intellect imposed by the medium’s snail-pace as a chance to be contented in a semi-vegetative state. I ended up preserving live discussion when I could spark it into flame, and I told the shy students that they could make arrangements with me for supplementary discussion.

A conversation is fleeting unless a Boswell or a recording gadget is taking it down, and though we might regret that Boswell took down a scant fraction of the conversations Dr. Johnson actually enlivened, in general we are glad to have old discussions fade away. Boswell’s diaries reveal that even he was highly selective of his material. How much briefer—or more selective—we should be, and yet how much less brevity and selectivity of writing some contemporary media encourage.

That is why my rule of thumb for how long students should talk or write is usually “short enough to be interesting but long enough to cover the subject.” I would add here that purpose and medium matter too.

 

Teachers speak of a moment or short period when a student suddenly gains a massive understanding: the time when at last “the nickel drops.”[1] But I have found that a class has a personality too, and that its nickel sometimes drops in a miracle of shared timing. (Of course every class has its outriders in both directions, but the advanced riders help their classmates find their way in the new terrain, and those in back gain in confidence and understanding from seeing their classmates familiarize themselves with ground that at first only The Teacher seemed to understand.) Since the ethos of a class can do much to help or hinder individual students, dropping nickels bring music to a teacher’s ear.

Unlike knowledge and skill, whose gains are usually slow and steady, understanding can come in a rush, as it did when Helen Keller figured out what “wah-wah” was, triggering the miracle that Annie Sullivan worked for as her teacher. Good teachers cannot and do not “deliver instruction” of this kind. Instead, they lay groundwork, do their planting, and then cultivate the budding grove. Like Japanese gardeners they take account of the specific features of the terrain and the planting to get the best out of a class.

This sometimes means adapting a plan to a particular class’s needs and sudden gains. I managed such an adaptation recently in my Theory of Knowledge class.

The International Baccalaureate program’s excellent but difficult course in ToK presents to its teachers a measure each of problems and opportunities. Unlike traditional subjects that have a coherence conferred by time and experience, ToK lacks this advantage. The order conferred by the “ToK Diagram” does not come with advice on such questions as “Where and how do we enter the Roundabout?” and “What do we do once we get there?” The entire curriculum consists of questions, and there is no Answer Key.  Indeed, there is no official textbook, though enterprising authors have produced a few that are widely used in spite of the IBO’s recommendation against relying on them. The students who take it, usually juniors or first-term seniors, are just starting to develop their ability in “abstract operational thinking” as it is called, and some of them are late bloomers who have trouble with the concept work the course entails.

The opportunities are more than worth the difficulties. I have written elsewhere[2] about the skill and understanding that accrue to students who take this course and take it seriously. It also has the potential for being a showroom of intellect and of classroom techniques, where the inventive teacher can try things on for size that might not have a place in something less experimental or flexible. When taught pass – fail, as I think it should be, ToK allows risk-taking by students: What they lose in not having their noses to the gradestone they gain in the chance to think in unaccustomed ways without serious penalties for the inevitable missteps. It also provides a great opportunity for conducting a colloquium, which students heading to college should experience.

We ToK teachers can do so much. During the unit on the arts my colleague the art teacher and I have asked students to do a criticism of a picture that comprises three steps: description, interpretation, and judgment. Classes have come up with critiques of Picasso’s Guernica, Magritte’s Le Retour, Whistler’s mother, and the Christ Pantocrator of Daphni. Applying the three-step critique to another art form, they criticize a favorite piece of music of theirs, which they may play in class if the thing to be played is under five minutes. I usually give a sample critique before they do theirs. In the past they have heard Louis Armstrong’s Dipper-Mouth Blues, Hank Williams’s Honky-Tonkin’, and the 8^th Piece from Schumann’s Kreisleriana. They in turn have brought in everything from heavy metal to the Moonlight Sonata.

When we discuss how emotion can be a way of knowing, it is one thing to read about the need to know in Charles Sanders Peirce or José Ortega y Gasset, as they have done, and another to experience the need to know when they play “Petals around the Rose” with five dice and Teacher doesn’t tell them the solution or tell them the name of the game. They can contrast Western thinkers’ grounding of natural law in reason and Mencius’ grounding it in feeling with his thought-provoking example of a baby approaching an unfenced well[3].

When discussing logic and mathematics we can see how proof by contradiction depends on our taking as true an unproven axiom of Aristotle’s. We can ask why students accept a logical proof by contradiction in math when they don’t accept one in St. Anselm’s ontological proof of God’s existence, and they can read the proof to decide if, when, and why they part company with St. Anselm.

The physics teacher and I used to conduct the natural science unit together. She would apply her knowledge of physics, do Young’s Double Slit Experiment, and discuss peer-reviewed literature, while I would introduce Kuhn and paradigm shifts. We would supply each other’s shortcomings, play to each other’s strengths, and produce a good series of talks, demonstrations, and discussions.

The danger in a course with such various material is that it can become a disordered jumble of tricks and snippets. The opportunity, realized in a successful offering, is in giving students the chance to stand back from their studies, to examine them with a critical eye, and to see subjects not as endless strings of deliverables but as the husbandry of wisdom nurtured and pruned by people who know and love it.

In Modern Times Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp endures being fed by a feeding-machine, which can also stand as an image of a student being taught by a teacher who lacks the “endless discretion” teaching requires and views himself as “delivering instruction,” particularly in a mechanical way. The aim is rather to have the flexibility to meet the needs of a particular class.

And so we come back to my ToK class. Its personality had two salient traits. The first was, in general, to think of knowledge as something to memorize. Two corollaries: to teach is to tell what is to be memorized, and to learn is to memorize it. While this is of course sometimes true, as it ought to be, it doesn’t cover skill or understanding, which cannot be handled by telling and memorizing, not even in an on-line course. The class therefore had trouble taking seriously material that it didn’t have to get by heart. Its second trait was a tendency to silence during discussion time. Tendency is maybe too weak a word. Except two or three chattering standbys, the students in this class almost never spoke unless called on.

These traits make it difficult for a teacher to “establish the conditions in which understanding can take place[4],” and understanding is very much what ToK is about. Until the week before last, our discussions were short. Any attempt to sustain them ended up less like Plato’s Symposium than like Dr. Burney’s Evening Party[5].

Then last week something happened resembling in its suddenness a spring thaw on a frozen lake. Maggie, who had never said a word except when called on and then only “yes” or “no,” had questions every day. A number of students besides Grace took up a thread offered by Katie, who would start strands of conversation even though they never ended up tapestries in this classroom. Murty had some remarkable thoughts about sagacity, one of the twin powers of reasoning identified by William James. And Matt, whose papers showed extraordinary insight but who spoke in monosyllables, asked a question that led to our discussing how different thinkers seem to have an affinity for different subjects and intellectual pursuits.

Here was an opportunity. Given the tenor of the students’ remarks, I decided to change the order in which I would present my ToK units. We were finishing math, and I decided that we should read Pascal’s piece from the Pensées about the two kinds of mind and then move to history instead of the natural sciences as I had originally intended. The students’ comments and questions suggested that they would relish a contrast in type of thinking that considering history would provide, and that they were ripe for Pascal.

And so we began. This week has gone wonderfully. Finally I could see ahead of me the opportunities that good discussion brings to a class. Though leading a Socratic discussion has its challenges, there is nothing like it to develop and fix understanding.  Not much of the academic year remains, but it should be a very fruitful time, and they will continue the course next year. I won’t say that I wish we could postpone summer vacation, but I can say with some confidence that when June finally arrives, the class will have turned out a success.

 

A posting of mine last year worried that the language of branding and the language of education would end up more or less the same, leaving the claims made for a school sounding like the claims made for Baby Einstein^®. As we know, Disney offered refunds to buyers of these “educational” materials after doubt was cast by advocacy groups on the advertisements saying that they had educational value. Now, instead of carrying false educational claims, these videos merely undercut the advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics that children under two not watch TV at all.

The irony is that while a profit-making company scaled back what it asserted for its “educational materials,” actual schools, and not necessarily profit-making ones, have been inflating the claims they make for their curricula, according to The New York Times.

The baloney scrutinized by the Times has to do with schools that say they teach “advanced” or “rigorous” subjects, when evidence suggests that they don’t. The number of US students completing ostensibly “rigorous” curricula has gone up more than two and a half times between 1990 and 2009, from 5% to 13%. But the trout in the milk is that achievement as gauged by AP and SAT scores has remained flat or gone down.

What does this mean? Part of the explanation became apparent when the Times reported that one unfortunate student was ill prepared for pre-AP by her middle school, where in eighth grade she had to take something called Jungle Gym Math. “It had some geometry. Some algebra. It jumped around.” I can just picture the class, down the hall from the Sandbox History classroom where they dress in sheets. They bob for apples. They jump around. I can picture some alleged adult at that middle school thinking it would be appealing to “brand” math by using “jungle gym” in the course title. The right-minded alternative would have been an articulated year-to-year curriculum that brought students to a level of readiness in 10^th grade that would leave them able to take AP (or IB, my preferred program). When they got to 8^th grade, an articulate teacher would tell them, “There’s a jungle gym class already. It’s called ‘recess.’ You are 2/3 grown up, and so you will take a math class. It’s called ‘algebra,’ and that is what it really is.” No branding, just generic integrity.

When I was a boy, I remember seeing a parody Learn-to-Draw book, showing how to draw a portrait in four stages, each represented by a panel. Panel 1: a circle. Panel 2: a potato. Panel 3: the potato with smiley-face features. Panel 4: John Singer Sargent’s drawing of Henry James. What is wrong with these pictures is the same thing that is wrong with programs that spend years with beanbags and bedsheets and then suddenly take the victims and toss them into trigonometry and differentiation.

Why do they do it? To be able to say that they have a “nurturing environment” in middle school and “rigorous college preparation” in 11^th and 12^th grade? The only answer conceivable lies somewhere between baloney and b*******.[1] What makes this particular kind especially reprehensible is that it victimizes young people by playing fast and loose with their education.

How fast and loose? Those scoring failing grades (1 and 2) on AP tests number 42% of those who take them.

 

No posting this week.

At the website of a lady known for her advice on homework I recently read a few pages that prompted some reflection of my own. These thoughts are based on my experience, and they also draw on my memory of an article that appeared in The Economist in the early 1990s[1].

That article discussed the difference between the United States and European countries in the amount of homework assigned to high-school students. American pupils tended to have much less than their European counterparts. It made the claim, which I have not seen anywhere else, that an education study showed the assignment of graded homework to be the most closely correlated predictor of success in university—even more closely correlated than, for example, the family’s “socio-economic status” or the level of the parents’ education.

Though startling, this finding makes some sense. If students know that they must do homework in order to succeed in a course, and if they have been brought up with the discipline and support from their parents and teachers to attend to it, they are developing intellectual and also moral habits that will prepare them for their university careers, where homework is a serious fact of life.

At my own university we expected to work roughly two to three hours outside of the classroom for every hour we spent in it. That figure includes reading, but, yes, it worked out to about 30 – 50 hours of homework a week. Students who are taught to manage demanding loads of work handle it much more effectively than those, like me, who come to their freshman year from high schools where homework made up a much smaller part of the week. These favored students’  intellectual habituation includes stamina, facility at handling ideas in print, ability to seize the important matter in a long assignment, and relatively good skill at keeping ideas in mind for current and future use. Their moral habituation includes a sense of their obligation to work seriously and the ability to regret ignoring their work or doing it poorly.

But it is not just universities that expect a high level of attention paid and work done inside and outside the classroom. High-school programs like the International Baccalaureate require constant attention to the demands made not just by academics but also by extracurricular pursuits in the program of Creativity, Action, and Service (CAS). And individual schools can can have their own demanding programs  too. A school that I worked at in Egypt used to play host annually to a group of students from a justly famous New England college preparatory school known for the rigor of its program and its students’ success at gaining admission to excellent universities. These students spent a good portion of every day on their trip to Egypt pursuing their regular studies and the additional work generated by their Egyptian explorations. This work included reading short stories by the wonderful Naguib Mahfouz. The teachers invited me to speak to the students about the stories and told me that they would be receptive to any insights I might be able to give. True to advance billing, they were marvelous, even though I dealt with some relatively arcane stuff such as a disguised appearance of the Azrael, the Death Angel of Islam, in one story and the affinity of another story with the ending of Proust’s chapter “Madame Swann at Home.” They took good notes and asked good questions. They appeared bright-eyed and keen, not gaunt from Dickensian workloads. One teacher came back to me after the talk and told me that a couple of them even thought they might have a look at Proust! When I complimented their interest, attentiveness, and diligence, she said that they had been well prepared. So they had.

This kind of preparation, whether in the IB program or in the homegrown program at a good secondary school, cannot take place without hard work and discipline. It is therefore distressing to read the homework lady’s prescription that homework must not exceed two hours a night for seniors, and ten minutes less per night for each grade under 12^th. My distress is not due to a belief that all students regardless of educational goal should have heavy homework loads, which I do not hold. It is due to a problem with truth in packaging. If the homework lady and the NEA are making a blanket recommendation for a maximum of two hours’ homework a night, then they are being unrealistic or perhaps not entirely frank about what is needed if a student’s goal is solid college preparation.

The homework lady also recommends letting teachers know, by means of a typical weekly agenda kept to the hour, what occupies a student’s time after hours. The page containing the agenda strongly implies that the purpose of communicating the agenda to a teacher is to let him know that Junior has other things to do than homework. Very well, if the student and her parents have previously discussed the work week with a realistic eye to making hard choices and setting genuine and not magical goals. But if the point is to get a teacher to accept a student’s uncritical choices of how to spend time, it is misguided. One of the possible occupations on this agenda is personal computer use. What if the student blocks out two or three hours a day? Must parents and teachers accept this choice? My own approach would be to tell such a student, “You make your decisions, and I will make mine. You cannot magically think yourself into a day that includes both solid learning and lots of leisure.”

What should the homework itself consist of? The homework lady’s recommendations are a combination of good sense and dogmatic silliness.  An example of the latter is her pronouncement that homework requiring the student to ask for help is bad homework. Now, if the student is so lost that he or she has to get Mom, Dad, or a friend to walk her through the whole thing, something is wrong; but it may not necessarily be the assignment. I say nothing of tasks that a student just copies off without actually learning anything. But what about a sensibly set task of investigation leading the student possibly to discover something that he or she doesn’t already know? If the point is not just to copy down “sources” that confirm a student in his (possibly bad) ideas, then “asking the source for help” might be very productive indeed. Such an assignment combined with a teacher conference to go over what was learned would be even more productive.

As we move toward a model of education in which learning is a “mechanized deliverable,” maybe the object of this dictate and others like it is to smooth the way for an on-line instruction requiring no subtle interventions of the kind that a teacher, but not a machine, can make. What doesn’t fit isn’t allowed.

One more example of misguided advice about homework will show another problem. The homework lady says that “Read two chapters in the novel” is a poor assignment and gives alternatives. Well, a student who is accomplished enough in reading to manage two chapters in an assignment should also have been taught what to do with those chapters and not need spoon-fed suggestions for analysis. An example of the kind of training one should be able to count on is the method of reading prescribed by the Introduction to the Great Books in its program of “Shared Inquiry.” If a student has already become accustomed to write down questions about 1) what he doesn’t understand, 2) what seems important, and 3) what he agrees or disagrees with, and if these questions end up forming the basis of a discussion that helps secure understanding, then the kind of specification recommended by the homework lady becomes unnecessary—which it should be, for such tips encourage the student to expect intellectual hand-holding. Remember: I am a high-school teacher, and of course the lower grades and probably 9^th grade might need more structure at first, but a teacher’s object should be to remove these structures as soon as possible, even if it causes students some discomfort at first. If they can react to discomfort by rallying their forces, they have taken a step forward.

I don’t want to suggest that the homework lady has nothing good to say. I think she is exactly right to despise make-work and to frown on imbecile work sheets and problem sets that don’t have a productive goal.  But a lot is at stake in the debate over homework, and we must be prepared to bring to that debate a subtlety akin to what we bring to the understanding of our students. One size never, ever fits all.