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I set essay midterms across the board this week and have been grading over much of the weekend. I had hoped to have a posting ready today, but it is not to be.

The first-quarter midterms always take more time than any other test: the students are relatively new and have comparatively a lot still to learn and still to absorb from comments made. It’s a good time for individual conferences with students while those not conferring are working on other things.

The silver lining of the workload is that for the next week or two it will lighten up, thereby enabling me to get back to my postings by next weekend.

The comment by Professor William in last week’s posting led me to think about mindfulness for this week’s. It seems to everyone that mindfulness is desirable. Why, then, do we find as little of it as we do? One explanation might lie in contrasting mindfulness with mindlessness and considering whether classroom practices lead to (or require!) the one or the other.  Let me establish the contrast with a number of examples.

To start at the beginning.  Do we tell our students as a lesson opens what they will learn during that lesson? If the answer is yes, we may already be headed in the direction of mindlessness. Curiosity is one of the teacher’s most powerful allies. Why, then, should we undercut it by giving spoilers? The usual answer is that we lower confusion by helping students see where they are going, but this is troublesome.

Consider C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Ithaka,” one of the high points on the last century’s high road. (Every now and then that road comes into view, thank God.) Though it thrilled me when I first read it seventeen years ago (in Alexandria, Egypt! It was written there), I have needed those intervening years to feel that I am starting to understand it. Imagine, then, the unthinking nerve, the banal chutzpah, of introducing the class to it by saying, “At the end of this lesson you will understand (cognitive domain) and appreciate (affective domain) ‘Ithaka.’” No, they won’t, but if they see their teacher cry as he reads it aloud to them, or if they enter the past imaginatively—Homer’s, in which Laestrygonians exist, or Cavafy’s, in which they don’t—they might be mindful enough to launch themselves on their own small journeys of understanding. It’s on such cognitive and imaginative journeys that they will find the mindful study of poetry and not by following a miserable bread-crumb trail to canned meaning. It would be better in students not to get the poem than to fake getting it, have the fakery ratified by a test that can’t distinguish between it and true understanding,[1] and then leave school thinking that that thin stuff was “getting poetry.” Fakery is a kind of mindlessness because it is as detached as inattention and because we drop it as soon as the occasion for fakery is over. Real understanding stays with us. It’s better to say simply that we will be reading a remarkable poem and let the students’ surprise be a little day-trip for them.

Having said all that, I don’t want to leave the impression that I’m one of those educationists who think that everything must be a Voyage of Discovery in order to be an object of learning. Unlike understanding, ordinary knowledge—the kind imparted by “didactic instruction” in Paideia’s terminology[2]—will not take us to the Shores of Many Lands. On the other hand, if learning Principle 19 of Strunk and White[3] helps students to parse Cavafy or to write a balanced sentence of their own, they will see such learning the way athletes see drilling the “fundamentals” as essential to their best performance in games and matches. No sporting coach would say, “All right, we’re going to play ball without practice because practice is boring,” and no classroom teacher should say so either. If drilling, conning, and grunt-work are mixed with production and the free play of mind, students will tolerate them (as they had better, says Flannery O’Connor[4]). The sort of mixing of kinds of learning that a coach takes for granted helps the players’ mindfulness at each one of them.

No teacher using Socratic discussion can know where his class will end up because no teacher can explore ahead of time with students the lacunae in their understanding that a particular discussion might reveal or fill in. The surest way to guarantee mindfulness in students is to tailor questions and discussion to their needs, and these cannot be predicted. Even the formidable Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase stops his questioning after Mr. Hart reveals and clarifies his understanding of a case. I should say especially Professor Kingsfield because as a (somewhat scary) Socratic teacher, he should and does know what questions are called for and what ones are not. The tutors at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, who conduct colloquia on excellent books, spend a great deal of time planning their first question to the class, and somewhat less time anticipating its end. Because the discussion is alive, the participants are mindful of it and don’t drift off to the views out the windows.

On a less exalted plane my 10^th-graders were once reading “The Outlaws” by Selma Lagerlöf. I had an idea where I wanted our discussion of the story to go, and I had wanted to concentrate on Tord’s guilt as he is pursued by phantoms. But a discussion takes on a life of its own even when the teacher is mindful of his aims. In an unsuspectingly inspired moment of discussing Tord’s guilt I asked, “Should Tord have told on Berg?” I think it was the use of “told on” that helped, but the class exploded with answers. Since the students’ answers needed justification by reasoning or by quotation, I had to tease out each student’s responses. (I use a visual trick as an aid with my younger classes. I make a chart with the students’ names and, as they respond, write key words or check/tick marks. The kids see my pencil poised over the paper until they have given a satisfactory answer, and then they get their mark, but sometimes they have to take responsibility for what they say by answering further questions, sometimes for further marks. If they talk baloney, no mark. Are they mindful? You bet. Sometimes one student will offer an important point, and classmates will sigh or moan because they had hoped to offer one like it. You do not get a mark for saying, “I agree with so-and-so,” unless you offer fresh justification or a new point of view.) Discussion continued for two days on themes developed from that one question. I could never have anticipated it and would have been a fool to say that we had to leave off the discussion because we had to move onto the next “objective.” They were learning how to justify views on tattling—tale bearing—snitching—squealing—responsible denunciation—and they were coming to grips with some of Tord’s complicated motives.

By contrast, my lessons on Principle 19 have a very clear aim, known from the outset, towards which all the exercises tend. I ask students to examine collections of sentences and establish parallel constructions where needed. I ask them to form sentences with parallel constructions, given certain facts or ideas that are to be shown as roughly equivalent. I ask them, if they are an able class, to read Dr. Johnson’s comparative criticism of the poetry of Pope and Dryden[5]and explain how it works. I mark Rule 19 on their papers when they make errors of parallelism after they have learned the principle. Because I include some correct sentences in my collections, they can’t rely on the comparative mindlessness of knowing that they will find an error if only they look, or guess, hard enough. And since the sentences require correction, not choosing among multiple choices given (away), they must really know their stuff. Does it help them in any way to hear me state, before they begin learning it, that “by the end of this lesson you will understand and apply principles of grammatical parallelism to writing”? Please! But unlike a lesson “in” understanding, this lesson has a beginning with a particular end in mind. Fine: let there be mindfulness here too.

The variety of tasks helps mindfulness. So do my questions: the students know that in order to pursue their thoughts I have to be paying attention to them, which flatters their consciousness and raises the stakes of their own attention.

As a last word this week I propose that a teacher with the best will and technique in the world will have little success with students who are determined not to be mindful in a classroom. I mean “are determined” in two senses: that they have made a determination and that their prior circumstances impel them. I hope soon to continue my discussion of mindfulness, including turning my attention to some difficulties that teachers have little or no control over.

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[1] Such a test produces the “montillation effect,” and neither ratifies true understanding nor smokes out counterfeit.

[2] For a summary diagram, see page 7 of this PDF

[3] “Express co-ordinate ideas in similar form.”

[4] Reading O’Connor’s pungent writing after a steady diet of Edspeak is like eating Sichuan cooking after a week of mush and milktoast. I’d much rather find myself disagreeing with a few of the things she says than reading something generally disagreeable and entirely dreadful.

[5] See the 4^th paragraph of this extract from Johnson’s Life of Pope

If you don’t believe that the difference between excellent and good is the difference between 90% and 89%, you probably have the power of resisting a certain kind of specious quantitatively based argument. Let’s test that power on another argument, this one appearing, or at least implied, in a recent BBC article. Beyond the percentages, I also want to consider the possibility that rightness of attitude matters more in learning than convenience of mechanism.

The article reports research showing that people who study material in harder-to-read fonts learn more of it than those who study the material in easier-to-read fonts. The participants who learned the material when it was presented in 12-point Comic Sans grayscale font did 14% better than those who studied it in 16-point Arial pure black. When the authors of the study retested in classroom conditions, a difference in success remained, though the article does not say whether the classroom learners were also 14% better.

One of the authors of the study says that the “disfluency” (I don’t know if this is Edspeak or its cousin Psychobabble, but it means  “laboriousness”) of a task of learning impels the student to try harder in order to get it, which leaves the task better learned. He then argues that students’ reading-matter should be routinely set in Comic Sans type because in time of recession people must spend their educational money wisely on “cost-effective teaching strategies.”

I will not get involved in the Font Wars[1], including the F*** Comic Sans movement, except to say that some fonts are more pleasing to the eye than others and that in general a variety of fonts in reading-matter makes for an agreeable diversity of print and is a sign of a nicely inclusive generosity. On these grounds alone, a font monoculture seems inadvisable. The picture is further complicated, as it usually is, by experimental evidence that Comic Sans is easier for dyslexic students to read than many other fonts, which seems to undercut the findings of the study reported in the article.

So will we see another Revolution, this one in Typesetting for Success? Will we watch the expenditure of millions on Learning-friendly Fonts? One hopes instead that the advice of Professor Dylan William, quoted in the same article, will prevail. It focuses (as did one of my postings) not on teaching but on learning for the answer. “What really matters most when reading is mindfulness,” he said.  “It’s not printing things badly that’s needed, but more thoughtful reading.”

The two techniques (not “strategies”) Professor William recommends are reading in groups and following along with a finger. Those of us who have been exposed to teachers of “speed reading” know that most of them advocate using a finger to aid in reading. I have saved my own students the hundreds of dollars they might have paid “speed reading” people by showing them how to read using their fingers. Some adopt the method; some don’t. Those who do, report that it works. It certainly did for me when I learned it in university by watching over a classmate’s shoulder as he used it with his own work. If I gave it up later, it was more for ease of life than for lack of results. Reading in groups can be effective, whether it be listening in a group to someone read aloud or forming study groups for studious reading.

(Who knows that the students might not even be influenced to take up these techniques by seeing snippets of movies in which they are used? I refer to Good Will Hunting and The Paper Chase. Students are unlikely to end up reading as well as the Matt Damon Character in GWH, and they may not feel the same urgency of need as students at the Harvard Law School in TPC to master their material, but they might at least be intrigued by the possibilities that clips from these movies suggest.)

The point is that the intrigue, the interest, the responsibility would devolve on the students, which is where they belong. A properly motivated student will study whether the material is in Comic Sans or Arial, Times New Roman or Bookman Antique. A student with a motivated finger, a notebook, and a pen in hand stands a decent chance of learning; a shtik fleish mit tzvei eigen—a piece of meat with two eyes—will fail to learn, no matter what automatic mechanisms are chosen and bought for its edification.

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[1] They are vicious, complete with fulminations and anathemas, as in the days when the homoousians and the homoiosians duked it out in the early Church; and they don’t even have the debatable justification that salvation depends on the outcome. Or I don’t think so. Maybe someone has argued that Comic Sans will cause the Collapse of the West. My own view is that CS is not a nice font, but that seeing it doesn’t cause seizures and moral degeneration.

Many of the difficulties associated with testing and other assessments would fall away if they were viewed in a different and better light. Let’s try looking at them as I propose to do in this posting, and see whether this look helps us to draw some useful conclusions. There seems to be a need: why else is the word “testing” so often associated with the words “mania” (mental illness) and “high stakes” (gambling)?

First, we should agree that there is no such thing as an objective test and then ask ourselves what other kinds of test there can be. I’ve never cared for the expression “objective test” because it doesn’t convey much except as a label for something that asks a lot of simple questions and requires choosing simple answers, usually by pointing. Let’s run through Webster’s definitions of the word and eliminate them one by one.

Does it form a “final cause,” as Aristotle called it? That is, does it constitute a purpose that shapes what aims towards it? All good sense tells us that it doesn’t, though the Testing-and-Accountability people have turned tests into final causes. If we didn’t feel the imperatives they artificially impose on testing, people would assume, correctly, that the purpose of taking, say, English is to learn English, not to do well on an English test. (Then they would buy more novels and fewer test prep books!)

Does the test exist independent of the mind? Well, yes, but only in a trivial sense, for every test is in that sense objective: there they are, indubitably, on the desk, whether multiple-choice or essay. Surely that isn’t what we mean either.

Does it verify by scientific methods? In most cases, no, though some people claim that some tests are sometimes scientific. I think these claims need careful examination because “scientific” is usually used as a recommendation but is applied without much rigor. This is not a definition to rally around.

Does it ensure that the material examined is not affected by personal perspectives or feelings? Here we have a problem. The designer of the test always uses personal perspectives or feelings to decide what is important and therefore included. He or she also decides on wording, presentation, and “how much it counts,” which also require a perspective. Are the test-writer’s perspective and feelings somehow privileged against the “charge” of “subjectivity,” i.e., having a point of view? If a test were truly independent of perspectives, then anyone from any culture with any background could be expected to do equally well on it, assuming they knew the same things (whatever that means); but we know that that is not the case. (See my posting about the immigrant who thought the Eagle was a bird, not a spacecraft.)

Is that what we want in a test, assuming it can be achieved? I hope not in high school, where students should be learning to recognize and justify their take on things. A “subjective” test might help not hinder them in such endeavors.

Feelings, perspectives, and ideas shape those facts and give them weight (or weightlessness). For example, fill in this blank: Columbus __________ America in 1492. It would be rather difficult to do so without a perspective on Columbus and on the Americas. The question is not whether perspectives per se are suspect or distorting, but what makes some perspectives useful or sound and others useless or unsound. Bertrand Russell’s “lunatic who thinks he is a poached egg” has a “perspective” that we may legitimately discount. Thomas Kuhn notes that even the equation f = ma depends for its meaning on the “perspective” of the scientist who encounters it. The object of testing should not be to eliminate perspective but to hold it to some standard of fitness. Please note that I’m not saying there is “no right answer.” That is something that a 9^th-grader says before he or she learns what finesse is. I am saying that perspective and feeling can have a perfectly valid place in testing.

I would therefore argue in favor of tests that demand a grasp of factual detail and also of significant ideas, the two examined from a perspective articulately and sensibly maintained by the student and appropriately judged by the teacher or marker. Yes, I have used the J-word, one of the only words that matter in the evaluation of anything at all advanced. Otherwise, there is no alternative to tests that give the highest grade to Funes the Memorious, whose command of tens of thousands of unconnected facts is not just useless but harmful.

The answer to the danger of arbitrariness of judgment is not “objectivity.” It  is the achievement of good judgment by teachers and the nurturing of their connois­seurship in subjects where it is needed.

But since good judgment is still not perfect, its vagaries can be minimized by ensuring ampleness of assessment. I mean not just lots of tests but a mixture of kinds: oral and written, ex tempore and prepared in advance. A good example would be the basket of assessments for the International Baccalaureate program’s “language A1” courses: two handwritten essays, one on works studied and one on a work not seen before; two oral presentations, one prepared ahead of time and the other, the fearsome “Formal Commentary,” prepared in twenty minutes and executed in fifteen (the commentary, not the student); and two papers written ahead of time by the student on a theme he or she has chosen. None of these counts more than 25% of the final grade awarded by the IBO. Two of these are graded by the teacher, whose work is vetted by a “moderator.” The others are graded by professional “examiners.” The moderators offer comments to the teacher after the moderation is finished, and all teachers can attend workshops where they learn to teach these courses and to mark course material. These seem to me to be sounder precautions against arbitrariness and poor judgment than the whisking away of judgment and evaluation by ostensibly but not actually “objective” tests.

Another guarantee of sensible evaluation is to have teachers who have learned the subjects they are teaching—seemingly obvious until we discover that upwards of 40% of high school teachers teach subjects they did not major in. Yet another is collegiality in the faculty room, with all the good things it produces. A third, connected to collegiality, would be frequent table-talk about assessments, with more experienced teachers and newer ones discussing how to go about making them.

If we can manage some of these changes in how we view tests, much of the insanity and gambling will fall away.

The best and most versatile classroom I taught in was the emptiest one, the one with the most usable space inside and nearby, the one with the least of mandated clutter, the one with the fewest gadgets. It also had highly rearrangeable furniture that could be adapted to any number of needs.

(My desk, a hand-me-down from a principal, was the size of an aircraft carrier. That was inconvenient. Even its spacious desktop, seemingly a blessing, was a trap, tending to swallow up small or even not-so-small items and to allow the formation of geological features if neglected. The way I handled the inconvenience of the desk was to put it at one end of the room and ignore it whenever possible. I didn’t teach from it.)

A bad classroom is not necessarily a cheap classroom, nor is an excellent one necessarily expensive. The question I have of any classroom is Will you adapt to the needs of the lessons given, or must the teacher adapt his lessons to your design? The more the classroom’s features are fixed or assembled, the less they can be harmonized with a teacher’s plan.

If a course is going to embrace Socratic discussion, a conference table would be ideal, but in a flexible classroom serving a number of pedagogical purposes there can’t be such a big thing. My classroom had small tables shaped in half-hexagons and free-standing chairs. The tables could be arranged in a somewhat ungainly but workable ring that served as a conference table, and that was the “default setting” of the classroom, or its arrangement at rest. Everyone was in the front row: the perfect setting for colloquia, seminars, and the spotting of surreptitious texting and game-playing. And, if needed, I could get up to make a point, come into the center of the “table,” and do a little theater-in-the-round.

I sometimes put a hexagon in the center for demonstrations. After my Theory of Knowledge classes had read about the “need to know” in José Ortega y Gasset, I would have them gather around the hexagon, and I would throw five dice, playing “Petals around the Rose”. The class’s task was to figure out how I got the number that I called out after each roll. Students who didn’t need to know could sit on the periphery, but most had an interest, and some became obsessed. It becomes easier to understand how Andrew Wiles could take eight years to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem if you have had a problem eat away at you and just had to solve it.

Sometimes the room filled with hexagons, or at any rate the conference table divided in pieces. The I. B. English A1 students had to study poems and a Shakespeare play in detail, and their examination was a twelve-minute talk given in private to the teacher after having been prepared in twenty minutes on an extract from one of the works studied. The presentation was followed by three minutes of questions and answers or conversation with the teacher. The students were not to know which extract they would speak on, and they could not use books or any notes prepared by them before the examination. It was a daunting challenge, and one thing they had to be able to do was talk in their own words about what they had read. The ideas had to be their own, not downloaded ones. How else to have this happen but get the kids to work over the poems in detail and talk about them with each other and me, taking notes as they worked? The classes would break into small groups with guiding questions set by me. After studying the poems or play at home, they discussed them with each other, taking notes on their work and answering my questions. I would stroll around the class, “eavesdropping,” as I put it, on their endeavors, guiding as needed. Of course, where a lecture became necessary I could talk to the class as a whole, re-establishing the conference table or having them face the blackboard, where I would write things down.

The whiteboard was available for what used to be called blackboard work by students, who would come up and write answers, solve problems, or fix bad sentences. Students usually enjoy that and feel a bit of an edge knowing that they are going to produce an answer in writing in front of their classmates. Whiteboard work also gives the more fidgety and restless students a chance to do something. (They are the same students who volunteer to pass out dictionaries and to rearrange tables: at last a break from sitting down.)

I could use a collapsible lectern, too, for formal speeches, and have the class face the speaker. This minimalist classroom had no facilities for Power Point talks, which I liked. Power Point has a way of homogenizing discourse, and it diverts attention from the speaker. (My colleague the geography teacher had a New Yorker cartoon posted on his classroom door. An executive devil in hell is interviewing a job-applicant devil, who is sitting attentively. The executive devil says, “I need someone well versed in the arts of torture. Do you know Power Point?”) It is also frustrating to have the almost inevitable delays as things that don’t work properly have to be fixed. Time is short and knowledge is great, and we don’t need this.

Along one side of the room was a counter at above-knee height. At one end was the classroom’s computer. In the center were reference books: a classroom set of hardbound “college dictionaries,” the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, Fowler, a thesaurus (old-fashioned arrangement), the American Heritage Dictionary, The King’s English by Kingsley Amis, and Modern American Usage by Wilson Follett (and edited by Jacques Barzun, Carlos Baker, Dudley Fitts, James Hart, Phyllis McGinley, and Lionel Trilling!). I also had a set of national flags the size of index cards, each on a small pole with a stand. Students would place their national flag in a display area on the counter. I usually had between thirty and forty flags on display.

But all this could be swept aside at need. 9^th-graders did set designs of The Admirable Crichton or The Miracle Worker and had the choice of 2- or 3-D designs. The 3-D designs, sometimes really elaborate constructions, had to rest on the counter during their period of display. (All of them were judged for faithfulness to stage directions and artistic flair by the art teacher and me.) And sometimes students used the counter as part of a classroom stage.

We also used space outside the classroom. On one side was a walk shaded by very large lilac trees and an apple tree, good places for practicing scenes or working up notes on poems. On the other was a quadrangle of lawn with two or three shade trees. A walk up to the next building had a balcony that could be used for, say, Balcony Scenes. I had two pairs of students volunteer to learn and enact the entire Balcony Scene from Romeo and Juliet instead of doing smaller excerpts. One of the boys even wore a doublet and hose (“those pouffy things and tights”) for the show. When students chose to do the Breakfast Table Scene from The Miracle Worker, we could use a large nearby porch and have pitchers of water and a bowl of scrambled eggs from the cafeteria. The whole thing could be hosed down after the show. Students working on scenes from plays could work outdoors, staying out of each other’s hair and keeping their presentations at least a bit under wraps. The seniors, in the run-up to their I. B. exams, could work under the shade-trees on their final review. I would circulate among the groups, making suggestions and telling them stuff I thought they needed to know.

The ranks-and-files devotees might think that this would be an inchoate jumble, but it was not. They might also wonder whether  students bothered those in neighboring classrooms, and here too the answer was (usually) not. After a period of some years, a competent teacher learns how to manage things by being subtly omnipresent and taking a dozen pulses more or less simultaneously. For their part, students who have the modicum of manners and sense not to turn a flexible system into a barroom brawl or a donnybrook appreciate the chance to have flexibility in their classroom and lessons. So did I.

The East Side of Manhattan used to embrace an extraordinary variety of neighborhoods, from the Silk Stocking District to the Lower East Side, the East Village, and the Bowery. It also comprised most of District 2 of the New York City Schools. In the 1990’s District 2 saw another new era in education. Diane Ravitch reports[1] that a method of reading instruction came into force called Balanced Literacy, designed, so it was claimed, to bridge the gap between enthusiasts of “whole language” English instruction and those who favored phonics and other traditional methods. It worked the way all plans do that try to bridge the gap between irreconcilable differences or to compromise something that will work with something that won’t.

After about ten years a “study” of the district showed that reading scores had improved and vindicated Balanced Literacy and District 2’s methods of imposing it. Before accepting the study’s claims, let us go over Ravitch’s review of what Balanced Literacy does and how the program was put in place.

The idea is to break up reading into lots of little processes (as usual, called “strategies”). Then the teacher, who plays a marginal role in the classroom, gets the students to recognize those processes while reading books that they choose, alone or with small groups of their classmates, actually saying the name of each “strategy” as it is used in reading. “A student might say, for example, ‘I am visualizing,’ ‘I am summarizing,’ ‘I am making a text-to-self connection’…. In theory, students who become conscious of reading strategies become better readers.” The teachers’ role was minimized in a bit of semi-constructivist[2] enthusiasm that would leave students learning mostly without their intervention.

Ravitch also reports that the district’s program entailed having all staff “focus relentlessly” on the faithful implementation of Balanced Literacy. This “focus” included daily propagandizing, monthly day-long meetings for principals, and frequent inspection tours of classrooms by principals and district officials to see that the teachers were following their instructions, with penalties imposed on those who did not. In the course of his tenure (1987 – 1998), the superintendent of District 2 replaced two-thirds of the district’s principals and half its teachers, many of them, Ravitch suggests, for not teaching Balanced Literacy as demanded.

After the 2000 Census figures became available, further “studies” took note of new demographic data for the neighborhoods of the district. These studies showed that many of them had gentrified and that most of the improvements in reading could be explained by demographic changes rather than by the effectiveness of Balanced Literacy. Some note was made of the district’s poorer schools and how Balanced Literacy appeared to be a complete failure there. The original study praising District 2’s embrace of Balanced Literacy cost six million dollars and a number of years to undertake, and it led to the widespread adoption of methods District 2 had used before the new studies had a chance to catch up with it. The usual Study Wars ensued.

As I read Ravitch, I imagined the poor kids at their books: “Driven by hunger…I’m visualizing…a fox tried to reach some grapes…I’m making a text-to-self connection…hanging high on the vine…I’m making a prediction…but was unable to…I’m making a text-to-self connection… although she leaped with all her strength…I’m making an inference…As she went away the fox remarked…I’m making a prediction… ‘Oh, you aren’t even ripe yet.’…I am summarizing.”  Next I imagined the poor teachers working at schools that had been turned into re-education camps, monitored day-in-day-out by gimlet-eyed commissars for signs of deviationism, listening to their students stammering out their self-reflexive lines but mandated not to intervene with techniques approved by experience.  I thought of the students from educationally shaky backgrounds, who would need extra inter­vention by the teachers but would not get it because of the constructivist chaos of the lessons. It is unimaginable till reported.

It is also avoidable. People in the field of teaching should have a strong enough sense of history and humanity to be able weigh and choose among alternatives for education, rejecting what is harebrained, vicious, or fanatic and approving what is sound, innovating cautiously at need rather than in a succession of paradigm shifts followed by Cultural Revolutions. They would do so without waiting for battlefield reports from the Studies Wars. As Hofstadter puts it, some things are “better vindicated by the educational experience of the human race than by experimental psychology” or, by extension, the other “scientific” disciplines often used in the Ed Biz in lieu of good sense, a cultivated imagination, and a sense of reality. I’d rather trust a historian, a critic, or an educated generalist of large and generous views on what can be accomplished—or not—in education than I would a specialist of narrow attainment and ungenerous tendency.

In his essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” Sir Isaiah Berlin distinguishes the narrowness of the hedgehog from the subtlety and finesse of the fox (clearly a different fox from the one at the grape arbor). It’s the hedgehogs who in Gulliver’s Travels do their tailoring by trigonometry—and who in the Ed Biz gain credibility with schemes such as I have just outlined. We need more foxes and fewer hedgehogs in teaching.

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[1] in The Death and Life of the American School System

[2] an educationist doctrine that students must “construct” their own lessons with a minimum of teacherly interference.

When I started reading that a public school in New York was called Quest to Learn, I thought at first that I’d bumped into either a send-up or another article on branding—like, say, a story about a new convenience store named Quest to Graze or about a family farm calling itself Quest to Bring In the Sorghum Harvest. The impression of parody or irony deepened as I read that the school offered a course in video games called Sports for the Mind,  “a primary space of practice attuned to new media literacies, which are multimodal and multicultural, operating as they do within specific contexts for specific purposes.” Things became yet more complicated when the reporter advised us readers that this class was “really…a class in technology and game design [emphasis added].” Is the reporter winking and nodding at the helping of baloney offered as a course description while letting us in on its secret?

We are no closer to disambiguation after a long description of a lesson in “enemy movement” in this class, during which the teacher navigates his “sprite” through a maze pullulating with hostile “spiky-headed robots” and into a goal zone. The lesson reaches its climax when the teacher attains the goal with a mere two seconds to spare, causing the students to cheer, pump their fists, mock-swoon, etc. All that’s needed to make it a perfect Hollywood teacher movie moment is the swelling choir of brass and string instruments, but it doesn’t make sense. If this is a lesson in “enemy movement” in a course on the design of technology and games, the reader wonders why no designing has been done; no enemies’ moves have been analyzed; no principles of design have been elucidated, explained, or practiced; and no learning of any kind has been seen or verified.

The key to the mystery appears to be a question-and-answer about sixty lines into the story: “Had he taught anything? Had they learned anything? It depended, really, on how you wanted to think about teaching and learning.”  When I see a line like this, I begin to fear that the writer will start talking about “paradigm shifts,” and that is exactly what happens. Another idea for liberating our thoughts about teaching and learning from actual teaching and actual learning requires “new thinking.” We see it here rising like a turkey that believes it’s a phoenix from yet another educational ash-heap. The ashes came from a bonfire in which “teachers gave up the vestiges of their educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon[,]… reconfigured the foundation on which a century of learning has been built,….blurred the lines between academic subjects, and reimagined the typical American classroom” in order to see what would happen if they did so. Surely only one thing could happen, which explains why so many of education’s pell-mell reforms fail. (William Spady, who has spent much of his professional career promoting “outcome-based education,” used to describe its adoption as requiring a “paradigm shift.” During a two-day workshop for administrators given in 1990, which I attended as a teacher on sufferance, he and his faithful sidekick appeared on the second day wearing t-shirts proclaiming that SHIFT HAPPENS. So it does.)

The argument for all the turmoil this article advocates comes down to three propositions: that children are becoming game-oriented, and so education should too; that kids find games fun, so they should find their classrooms fun in much the same ways; and that classrooms will be left behind if they do not innovate, usually in ways requiring lots of expensive purchases and consultations.

To take the last argument first, some years ago I went to an Indian cultural center operated by the Indian High Commission to watch a film about education in India. The setting was a school whose classroom was the shade under a large tree. Students sat on the ground, except when the teacher addressed them. Then they would spring up with alacrity so they could be standing when they answered him. If this is a feeder school for Bangalore or the Indian Institutes of Technology, where is our argument? I mean that question in two senses. Where is the argument from necessity if (at least some) Indians can become the engineers and designers of tomorrow by starting under the shade-trees of today? And where is the general hope in methods that require funding of a school on a scale achievable only by supplements from an immense private foundation and a school district with a budget in the billions? Many schools, even in the U.S., do not have much bigger facilities budgets than that Indian school’s watering bill (though it might repay study to examine how Finnish schools, generally acknowledged as the world’s best, make do with rather less funding than American schools get).

To answer the second proposition we may start with William Blake’s apt and characteristic observation that “I love fun, but too much fun is of all things most loathsome.” This from a man who penned a poem that is one of the great short critiques of grimly bad education. He still managed to see, as we should, that we must not overdo a good thing. We then move past Blake to view the photograph that appears at the top of the article I am writing about. It shows three children, gadgets in hand, looking excitedly and intently at something, presumably a game screen, behind the photographer. If this is what education-by-games means, surely it must be worth doing if they are so involved in it? When I saw this picture, I thought of another, taken in the early 1960’s by Alfred Eisenstadt. The kids in this picture are just as absorbed as, and perhaps more worried than, our three students. What are they so absorbed by? A puppet show. The proposal attached to the New Paradigm is to enter an arms race of thrills requiring gadgets whose costs will be immense but whose benefits to students may be achievable much more cheaply.

To the first argument I reply with Flannery O’Connor, always helpfully astringent and final: “Ours is the first age in history that has asked the child what he would tolerate learning,” or, I would add, how he would tolerate learning it. Since the kids are not in the position to know the answer to the question What will I learn?, we must put our discretion and the courage of our convictions at the service of the education we lay out–not for their amusement, but for their instruction.

Years ago we had a new American 9^th-grade student whom I’ll call JB. His father was in business development for a large international firm, and whether JB remained in our school or not would depend on whether his father’s efforts were successful. From the start I thought that the boy had something special either to offer or to take away from an English class.

I was right, but sometimes what he had to offer was more than I felt like taking. He had an astonishing facility at classroom leadership that quietly but firmly challenged his teachers. One day he and almost every one of his classmates arrived in class tardy. As usual, his presence was unobtrusive as he sidled in, not at all exultant in successful mass action. My usual punishment for tardies was to have the offender sit in the school yard outside the classroom to meditate for half an hour or 45 minutes on the need for punctuality.

A tardy student had the choice  of sun or shade. For the time stipulated, he or she would sit in a chair without books or electronic entertainment for the course of the meditation. After ten or fifteen minutes of silence and nothing to do, meditation would usually lead the latecomer to a bit of regret that he was alone, silent, and idle. Views that had tantalized the tardy student when they lay on the other side of a beckoning window palled when they surrounded him. Passersby would tease him or her for having to meditate. Thirty to forty-five minutes thus spent usually led meditators to a firm resolution to be on time in the future: it was not the kind of school where punished students meditated and then enacted violent revenge on The Enemy.

But a whole class! Students must learn to expect a certain consistency and firmness from their teachers, yet I wondered whether having them all “meditate” would be an instance of that foolish consistency which is the hobgoblin of little minds. No, I decided, it wouldn’t be, so I quietly told them to take their chairs and follow me outdoors. I placed them without fuss at some distance from each other one by one. When JB’s turn came to sit in mediation, he looked at me incredulously and said in his usual quiet way, “You are going to have an entire class meditate?” “Well,” I answered, “The entire class was tardy.” It was the last time he engaged in one of his exercises in alternative leadership.

That was good because it meant that he could give his entire effort to improving his writing. One knows that some students have a latent talent for writing that has been warped by uncorrected bad habits. JB was one of those. He could find ideas, good ones, but he always had to track in a lot of rubbish with them: clichés, paragraphs that wrote themselves only slowly and tentatively into a topic, the too-frequent use of it is and there as expletives, too much passive voice, and rhetorical inflation.

When he brought a draft in for the doctor’s visit, we spent some time at it. He was, as I guessed he would be, a quick study; and he rebelled much less energetically against rules and strictures of usage and editorial advice than against the demands of punctuality and regular attendance at class. I don’t usually expect 9^th-graders to be sensitive to all the stuff that he got—and was evidently getting for the first time. In the course of the year his writing improved remarkably, going way beyond where 9^th-graders usually go.

His father didn’t turn up the hoped-for business, so JB left our school after only a year—something that I heard he had done before. Maybe a feral style in one so talented was the result of transferring from school to school before his long-term instruction, as opposed to his annualized value-added learning, could add up. Maybe the schools he attended concentrated on averaged additions of value without regard to individual sums, as it were, or to dividends to be gained by individuals in the future. I was sorry to see him go.

A number of years later I had an email from—who else?—JB, who now writes for a living. He credited me with turning him towards the long-term concern with his writing that ultimately determined his choice of a career. I report his story not to toot my own horn but to suggest how some important conditions of teaching and learning can escape the various nets of value-addition, the obsession with skills instead of skill, and a counterproductive present-mindedness of concern that ignores what my former colleague called “seed-planting.” I am sorry to think that under value-added learning the main satisfaction that a year with JB would bring a teacher is relief at an end to adolescent rebelliousness and a minuscule rise in “average scores.” I am sorrier to think that much of what JB accomplished during that year would escape the standardized tests set to capture evidence of 9th-grade learning.

Lest my readers think that these conditions matter only for kids headed in writerly directions, I want to mention the Benelux Boys. One was from Holland; the other was a Dutch-speaking Belgian. I had them both for the International Baccalaureate Program’s course in Theory of Knowledge. Both were capable and diligent, one of them more so than the other. They didn’t start to study seriously in English till they were in high school.

I taught ToK, as it is known, using among other things a somewhat difficult reading-list drawn from all kinds of writers of the present and past: Aristotle, St. Anselm, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Kuhn, Susan Sontag, Karl Popper, Malcolm Gladwell, Isak Dinesen, William James, Jacob Burckhardt, Hannah Arendt. The class was fundamentally a colloquium with lots of discussion and Socratic questioning, though we did many things other than read, parse, question, and discuss. They included writing, which I examined and commented on closely.

The Benelux Boys acquitted themselves well in that course and were graduated, the Dutch boy with high honors, and were both accepted for the international business program offered in English at the University of Maastricht. After their first year they showed up in my classroom for a visit. The purpose was to thank me for the ToK course.

In the chapter “The Road to Life Adjustment” from his classic Anti-intellectualism in American Life Richard Hofstadter deplores the persistent deprecation in American education of the “transfer effect,” by which intellectual attainments taught in one course transfer their effectiveness to efforts made in others. He notes this persistence in the face of solid evidence and the authority of such respected educators as Jerome Bruner. That book, forty-five years old and fresh as May, should give pause to today’s narrowly focused educational efforts to establish a curriculum for the “delivery” of instruction aimed at “adding value” over the course of a year instead of a lifetime, and at educational demands made for the sake of vocational training taken narrowly.

The Benelux Boys told me that ToK gave them a better preparation for their business course than anything else they had studied because it taught them how to work productively within a language, how to read and parse, how to ask questions of a reading and of each other, and how to evaluate what was presented to their consideration. They also said it conferred an advantage on them over their European classmates whose education had been more overtly a kind of  “vocational preparation.”

With all the benefit to be gained in high school by the marvelous reading available, it seems a deep, deep shame that some schools and districts are spending their book budgets on books of test preparation instead of novels, histories, or anthologies like the Introduction to the Great Books, and that they can claim it is better for their students to have read such stuff than to have worked their way through the writers I named above. I mean not just in preparation for careers in the clouds but careers as writers, businessmen, and human beings who lead good lives.

We can tell a good exam by what it does and by what it does not do:

Does

• distinguish between remembering and understanding
• require students not just to know stuff but to use it
• distinguish between sound evaluation and unjustified holding-forth
• require at least some qualitative distinction among the grades awarded, to be judged by the teacher
• require good writing whenever it requires writing at all
• allow the marriage of cow and bull (see below)
• provide opportunity for learning as well as for demonstration

Does not

• reward guesswork
• reward bull or baloney
• comprise disjecta membra
• invite the “montillation effect” (see below)

Since there is so much positive to say about a good exam, we can afford to turn first and briefly to what a good exam does not do, thereby getting it out of the way. In my last blog but one, I discussed the rewarding of guesswork and hope that I made a good case against the kind of test that does so.

What I didn’t speak about is another kind of guesswork, called “bull.” In using bull the student essayist slings concepts, generalizations, and abstractions untamed and undisciplined by connections to the world of persons, places, and things, usually in the hope of slipping by with a passable grade. Professor William G. Perry discussed this problem in his essay “Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts.” The essay is very much of its time and place, but it discusses what seems to be an ever-present problem: how to balance the need for concept-work and ideation with the need for an anchor in reality that a command of relevant detail provides. He calls familiarity with such detail “cow” to suggest a balance with the “bull” of empty ideas, and with tongue in cheek recommends a marriage in every good essay. Where an essay is inflated with senseless abstraction and other kinds of hot air, it needs deflation with a sharp red pencil. And, of course, a chaotic collection of snippets that never rises above recall and naming must be downgraded too.

In a prior posting I discussed the “montillation effect,”  in which a student can get  a good or even perfect score in a “test” of “knowledge” that that student doesn’t even understand. We have to be sure that in testing comprehension we are not just inviting students to mimic it, repeating what they have heard about the “montillation of traxoline.”

Another couple of problems come to mind when I think about vocabulary lists. Suppose that you have given your students some words with definitions to be learned: base – a number that is raised to a power; horse – large solid-hoofed herbivorous mammal; network – a thing reticulated or decussated at equal intervals with interstices between the intersections; reed – fibrous core of rattan used in basket weaving; syzygy – a pair of Gnostic aeons male and female. Now, I’ve exaggerated a problem in such lists: that it might leave a student lost—farblondzhet! How does one gain purchase on some of this stuff? The temptation will be simply to memorize the definitions without knowing what they mean. That temptation will be especially strong in a student who knows that he will be examined on his vocabulary by, say, a set of matching questions linking definition and word, a task that has nothing to do with understanding.

The second problem lies in coming to terms with context: even though syzygy is a great word for playing hangman, most of its uses will depend on a grounding that the student is unlikely to have or ever to get: astrology and Gnosticism. Many more words than syzygy will seem bewilderingly uncontextualized to a 9^th-grader, a fact that teachers of “test-taking skills” may be reluctant to admit. Learned this way, such words will seem to students like beached monsters of the deep. The study of words learned in context is far likelier to lead to their being useful and used aptly in a carefully prepared essay question, which itself makes their use more likely. A properly set essay question will invite the use of vocabulary learned during the study of a text containing new words.

Setting good essay questions is harder than one thinks, but it is essential to elicit the best possible responses from students—responses that show they have been doing real live thinking while working up their answer. Studying for my teaching credential, I was given distinctions between essay and “objective” tests that were mainly of utility for the teacher: setting an essay test was “easy” but we would be paid back in having to grade responses. Harder was the construction of a good multiple-choice “objective” exam, but it led to more reliable and less troublesome assignment of grades. For the present I don’t want to get into the false distinction between an “objective” test and an essay test, but I do want to assert that forming a feasible yet demanding essay question takes careful thought. That sort of thinking does become easier with familiarity, unlike putting together a hundred multiple-choice questions, which will always require a certain amount of grunt-work. But the question, however long in formation, should demand thinking of all students while offering opportunities for imaginative, thoughtful, well-informed thinking and writing (or their lack) that will distinguish each grade of student from the others.

A word, or more than a word, might be said about letting tests give students a chance to learn as well as to perform. There are a lot of ways to ensure that this happens, but one way that can be really effective is to give out essay questions ahead of time and require that students work up notes to answers in the classes before the exam. If you are expecting to have time for two essays during the exam, set five or ten questions beforehand and give them out. Some questions can test understanding and application of material covered explicitly; some might require them to extend their thinking to deal with problems or issues not explicitly covered. Class then becomes a chance for work, solitary or in groups, silent or talkative at need, with the teacher intervening in individual or group cases, maybe even giving a special mini-lesson to the class as a whole. It is amazing how productive one or two weeks of such preparation can be. Let them bring notes taken in their own hand (but not printed or copied) to the exam, and watch the notes multiply, though students must be warned that the notes may not constitute, in effect, a pre-written essay. Choosing which questions to have them answer is fairly simple: roll a ten-sided Dungeons and Dragons die or use some other random process. That gets the juices flowing even more than—one hopes—they already were.

Implied in the use of questions requiring students to handle stuff that may in some respects be new to them is a rejection of the use of “study guides” before tests. High school students’ study guides should be their own notes. If they don’t learn how to anticipate intellectual demands and respond to them with a readiness they have achieved themselves, they are missing one of the main learning-opportunities an exam can provide.

So, yes, students planning on university or demanding work must learn to handle encounters with surprise. Having done so, they will have the salutary experience, as Professor Barzun says, of disorientation, bewilderment, or momentary dismay followed by a “rallying of forces.” If students’ response to an exam must oscillate between boredom and cave-in, something is wrong in the preparation that such an exam or the study for it  has given them.

Drive to the east of the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron and you will see some of the oldest exposed rock on earth. Drive to a certain small town there one day about thirteen years ago, and you would have seen some venerable outcroppings of humanity. Mr. S., the guest of honor at a party I attended, was retiring after thirty-five years of teaching the same grade in the same room of the same schoolhouse. One of the guests was the teacher he succeeded, who had taught him in that grade in that schoolhouse. Does it get any stabler than that?

By contrast, one of the schools I taught at had a 25 – 30% annual turnover in students. Its student body was drawn from families with parents on the move. In such circumstances one does one’s best with the students who appear in class only to vanish all too soon. (Well, some of them couldn’t vanish soon enough, but a teacher is nothing if not patient. I sometimes wonder whether being a farmer and cattle baron was Job’s second career, he having learned patience during a first career in the classroom.)

Schools in the U. S. operate across this spectrum, but in spite of the difficulty it would encounter working across such a spectrum, and in spite of other difficulties of implementation, schools and districts are moving towards the “acceptance” of a “formula” that “grades” teachers’ “effectiveness.” I am referring to “value-added learning,” which is not a formula, does not grade, does not measure effectiveness of teaching, and is meeting widespread (though not enough) resistance. It is not a formula because the variables are not commen­surable; it does not give an accurate grade because it does not evaluate things of an identifiable kind against a common standard; and it does not measure effectiveness because “effectiveness” here is the unjustified reification of sets of statistics into The Thing Effectiveness.

Take a number of students in a ninth-grade classroom in their first year of high school. At the beginning of the school year they take a test whose writers claim it can assess what they know in, say, English. In their second year, at the start of tenth grade, they take a test attached to  the same claim. It is in some cases the very same test, kept without provisions for security from year to year. Call the average score of the 9^th-grade class AS₁ and the average of their 10^th-grade scores AS₂. According to value-added learning, if AS₁ is less than AS₂,“value” has been “added” to the test-takers’ growing minds. This “value” is deemed by the proponents of this idea to have been “added” by their 9^th-grade teacher.

There’s some illicit deeming going on here. The late great biologist Stephen Jay Gould in his book The Mismeasure of Man warned against reifying statistics, that is, taking numbers and turning them into “things” such as “intelligence” or “value.” Alfred Binet was allowed to finesse a concern about the nature of intelligence when, asked what intelligence was, he was reported to have said, “It is what my test measures.” We might be charmed by such insouciant superbity if we did not know the mischief caused by the misuse of intelligence tests since Binet invented the first one. This time we must be on guard against the mischief, and the first question for the guard to ask is On what basis or authority is it asserted that the score on a multiple-choice achievement test is “value”?

In any case, this view of value omits to consider the long-term good a teacher can do for students—what a former colleague of mine called “seed-planting.” She thought, perhaps naïvely or unbusinesslikely, that a good teacher’s benefit to a student can be lasting or can unfold only in the fullness of time. Professor Barzun thought it wise to give a teacher’s instruction ten or twenty years to see what it amounted to. The present-orientation of “value-added learning” discounts all that. To my former colleague’s pedagogy its question is, “Why are you planting all those trees and perennials—why are you cultivating that joyous and varied field—when you should be concentrating on a patch of what can be sown, grown, and mown in the same year?”

Cut grass lies frail;/Brief is the breath/Mown stalks exhale.—Philip Larkin

Cut grass has worth:/Better mown field/Than tree-clad earth.—Value-added Learning

It also asserts that all “value” is to be imputed to the teacher with no control for other variables. Did the student do independent reading? Did a newly invented gadget distract a number of students from their studies? Did a curtailed school lunch program leave students hungry and unready to learn? No matter, says “value-added learning.”

But even if we unwisely take the assertion of “value” as given, we still have two problems. One is that tests like these typically measure what they claim to measure only to a certain degree of accuracy. Where is the “value” in such tests? If someone wanted to say that “our tests allow us to make some tentative claims with a certain amount of confidence,” we might find in that statement a trustworthy caution. But that is not what these tests will be asked to do. They will be asked to show an exact and definite amount of “value” in a class, whose addition to prior values will in turn yield exact determinations of teachers’ effectiveness.

The other problem is what I will call Big Mac Immodesty. The Economist publishes from time to time its Big Mac Index to the relative value of the world’s major currencies. This index’s inventors assert with tongue firmly in cheek that the Big Mac hamburger is a mini-test of that value. They advise their readers to take the index with a “generous pinch of salt.” Do the proponents of “value-added learning” approach their instruments with the same becoming modesty? Not at all. In the Big Mac Index at least a cow is a cow and a bun is a bun, but in “value added learning” what bits of pedagogical produce are fungible across years? No matter: they will yield their numbers and we will use them. Our Big Mac index is to be swallowed salt-free and uninspected.

Then we get to the problem not faced by Mr. S before his retirement. In his school there was little or no turnover of students from year to year. What about schools whose populations turn over rapidly? Regardless of whether scores go up or down from year to year, they will not be measurements of the same kids. In such cases how can they be said to add anything to anything? If a statistical fluke leaves a school with an influx of poor students to replace an outflow of good ones, are its teachers to be blamed when “value” is “subtracted”? What if a school is reported to have poor test scores, prompting an exodus of students to neighboring or charter schools? Evidence suggests that these educational migrants tend to be brighter and more motivated than the students they leave behind. “Value-added learning” will not report an exodus; it will report a decline in “value,” and the teachers “responsible” for this “value-subtraction” will be deemed “ineffective.”

We also have problems with Campbell’s Law (See my posting “℞ Stone Tablets”): testing is causing corruption, with schools scheduling outings for their Special Ed groups on Testing Day, subjecting poor students to “counseling out,” etc.

Mr. S. briefly touched on his relief that he was retiring when he did, this even though he survived educationist vicissitudes from the early ‘60’s to the late ‘90’s. (Another former colleague, when trying to achieve detachment from the ups and downs of his career in teaching, would sometimes look at me with a smile and say, “Dem vicissitudes!” Indeed.)  I sometimes wonder what Mr. S. thinks of this nonsense, but more, I hope that he is having a delightful retirement, secure from depredations on his reputation and pay, and free at last of  the bad consequences of educationist baloney.