What we say we want vs. what we do

I heard an interesting comment on the radio the other day (Wednesday, April 29, 2015).  I looked it up to see who it might have been making the point, and it looks like it was Joseph Stiglitz on The Commonwealth Club. 

He talked about the fact that what people say they want when they think things through is different from how they act in the moment.  That in itself is not interesting.  That's well known.  What was interesting to me was that he went on to say, "Who's to say which is what the truly want?"  Often people take a scornful attitude to this phenomenon.  The answer people give when asked what they would do is seen as untruthful because it does not match the actions.  The actions are seen as foolish because they do not match what they person would do if they thought things through.  I liked this alternate view, that these are just two different things -- w hat people say they want, and what people do.  It's just an observation of human nature, not a judgment.

He went on to say that's why we have thing like child labor laws.  Because we agree that we don't want child labor, but when we act in the moment, we buy what's cheapest.  We have child labor laws not because paternalistic government thinks it knows better than consumers, but because we humans have agreed that we want this to be based on what we want when we think things through, not what we want when we act in the moment.

Educate our children to be pro-active

There's a story all over the news about a cruise ship which turned away from a stranded boat.  Two lives were lost as a result.  Here's one instance of the story:http://www.npr.org/2012/04/19/150897139/cruise-ship-didnt-aid-drifting-boat-passengers-say.  It seems to me that my K-12 education trained me to be passive and obedient, not to go out on a limb.  It seems to me that there's a part of me that wants to turn away from things, to pretend I didn't see.  I hope I would not turn away and let those people die, but I do have a concept of what it is within a person that would cause them to do so.  It seems to me that it has a lot to do with my education.  We need to educate people to be pro-active, not to educate them to be passive.

Not everyone is suited for everything

The blog post "I Used to Be Nicer" talks about how some PhD students just don't succeed.  It quotes a professor who says that, "Students who fail do not think it their own fault that they are failing." Some of the commenters argue that if students don't know they are failing, it is because their advisors have failed to give them adequate feedback.  I don't think that's necessarily the case.  I do see this phenomenon of students not being able to see that they are not suited to PhD work.  When PhD study is not working out for the student, I see them cast blame on the advisor, the courses, whatever.  But even as a non-professor, I can see that that student does not have the disposition to be a PhD student.

I think sometimes it is easier to see other people than to see ourselves.  I see PhD students who are not suited for PhD study, and it makes me wonder, what am I doing that I am not suited for?  When something I'm trying to do does not fall into place, how do I know when it's time to accept that it's not going to work, time to walk away and try something else?

Why we need education

We need good education. We face so many problems.

Babies are born addicted to drugs. Children are denigrated by their parents. Children are bullied by their peers. Teenagers have guns, and kill people. People face long-term unemployment, because once you are unemployed, employers think there must be something wrong with you so they won't hire you. People get beaten for being transgender, or for being Muslim. Political commentators use misleading statements and doctored videos to sow divisiveness and hatred. People get so worked up about things that aren't even true -- the idea that President Obama was not born in U.S., or that Park51 is to be a "Ground Zero Mosque," while our planet is suffering the effects of climate change, including floods, drought, hurricanes, and heat waves.

We need technical knowledge of science and engineering. We need people with skills in policymaking. We need people who can help us transcend divisiveness and hatred, and work together to solve our problems. We need journalists and historians and librarians to help us build our knowledge. If we are going to address the problems of the world, we need people with many different areas of knowledge to work together. We need everyone to contribute. And that is why we need education, to create a world in which everyone is equipped to contribute.

The goal of education should be learning

My experience of school was that in K-12, we were there because we had to be there, and we did boring homework because we had to. When I got to college, I was at a school I chose, studying what I chose to study, and my feeling was, "why did they never tell us before this that school could be interesting?"

However, many students feel about college they way I did before college. I have been reading some comments at http://www.studentsreview.com. Students write things like, "the social life is awful. The adminstration is really starting to crack down on drinking and parties making the social life even worse. They care more about their reputation than students having fun."

When my great grandfather was starting college, his father told him, "you can send a boy to college, but you cannot make him think." My great grandfather took this as a positive challenge, and chose to think.

Students feel they need to go to college in order to get a job, and yet, they don't really want to partake of the academic offerings. What can we do? Is the system all wrong? It seems to me that the educational system should be suited to students' interests (giving them skills they need to succeed in life after graduation), and it should be rigorous. That is, students should know that there are certain standards they will have to meet in order to be successful in their chosen career. Education should be aimed at helping them develop the skills they need. A degree should signify that the student has achieved a certain level of knowledge and skill, rather than signifying that a student has sat through a certain number of classes. Students may not know exactly what career they want to follow, so they should be able to try several different areas before deciding which to pursue. Education should also cover the knowledge that all should have. For example, people need to know some history, so that we don't repeat our mistakes, and people need critical thinking, so that they can recognize false claims.

In a sense, this is how our educational system is already structured. Students focus their study on a particular subject, their future career field, while also studying the areas which all people should know. However, it has gotten to be more about the structure of the educational system -- you need a degree to get a job, and you need to take certain classes to get a degree. We tend to lose sight of the fact that the real goal is that you need certain knowledge and skills in order to be able to succeed in life. Students go to school because they need a degree, not because they need knowledge.

Excuses

The article On Deadlines and Dead Grandmothers by Thomas Benton talks about how when exam time comes, professors hear from many students claiming to have dead grandmothers, wanting to delay taking the exam.  The author is torn -- offering sympathy and an extension would be kind if the claim is true, and yet if it is not true, he wants to challenge them.  He concludes by saying, "Maybe if I were a more open and approachable professor, with a longer history of generosity and kindness, fewer grandmothers would have to die."  That is, if the students felt he would give them an extension without a dead grandmother, then they would not have to make up false excuses.  I would like to see an educational system which encourages truth-telling.  I know that if it were easily done, we would have it already, but still, that's what I'd like to see.

Let us encourage those who seek to learn and contribute

My tai chi teacher told me to drop my shoulders and open up my collarbone. Sometimes my body doesn't always do as it's told. When I was learning to rollerblade, the person teaching me would always say, "Push to the side, not to the back." I would tell my feet to go to the side, but they would keep going to the back. Eventually, after the friend who had been teaching me had quit teaching me, my feet started obeying. I hope that in time, my collarbone will also figure out how to obey. I usually practice tai chi almost every day. In our most recent class, my tai chi teacher seemed pretty exasperated with my collarbone's disobedience, and went into scolding mode. After that, I didn't feel like practicing tai chi at home, and I felt like quitting the class.

A few months ago I joined an e-mail group. I fantasized that the members would be impressed by the wisdom of my contributions. Instead, they hated my outlook so much that the moderators rejected my post. I questioned whether I really wanted to be a part of that group after all. In that questioning, I discovered three people who had quit the group because their contributions had been rejected. I decided to stay, at least for now, but I'm reserved. I hesitate to participate fully in the group for fear of being rejected again.

Let us not squash the aspirations of those who seek to learn and contribute. When people tell me how impressed they are with my abilities, I am inspired to live up to those expectations. The world needs all the help it can get. Let us encourage those who seek to learn and contribute.

Todd West: Changing the focus from teaching to learning

The Spring 2010 issue of COA: The College of the Atlantic Magazine includes an interview with alumnus Todd West, principal of Deer Isle-Stonington High School.  Discussing how he addresses the challenge of teaching disengaged students, he said, "It's up to the teachers to be very creative to engage kids who are sitting in class thinking about the number of [lobster] traps they could be hauling and the amount of money they could be making....How can geometry be beneficial, or reading a classic?....We talk about what we want for our kids, which is primarily to be prepared to do what they want to do.  We change the focus from teaching to learning."

I like that way of looking at it.  I think sometimes educators can get caught up on the idea that there is a certain curriculum they have to get through, and their goal becomes to lecture on all the topics.  But a better approach is to address the question of how to help students achieve their goals.

Students forget what they learn in class

Inside Higher Ed, source of many interesting articles, recently had an article called Memory and Sequence about how students usually forget what they learn in class.

I often hear professors complaining that students don't know the material they should have learned in the pre-requisite class.  They may blame the students for not being smart enough or studious enough.  If they did  not teach the pre-requisite class themselves, they may blame the instructor of the pre-requisite class.

But it seems to be a systemic problem.  Instead of casting blame on individuals, maybe we can try to understand why it occurs, and how to overcome it.  As the article points out, students forget things when they don't practice them.  A class I took a few years ago had several exams over the course of the semester. As I reviewed for an exam, I realized that I no longer remembered that things I had learned three weeks previously.  I appreciated having the exam, because it forced me to remind myself of those things I had forgotten.  Sometimes courses test the material learned in one unit, then move on to the next unit and test the material in that unit, and never again ask about the material learned in the first unit.  It is less work for professors to write fewer and shorter exams and to grade fewer and shorter exams, and professors also experience less resistance from the students that way, but I think it is a disservice to the students not to force them to review by giving cumulative exams.  And it doesn't just have to be about exams.  Instructors can be creative in coming up with ways to get students to refresh their knowledge of material previously covered.  Studies have shown that students who review their notes after class retain the material better than students who do not.  We need to instill such practices in our students.  I think that part of doing that is reasonable workloads.  When I don't even have enough time to read the all the required material once, I will not leave some material unread in favor of reviewing material I have already read.

Forbes College Rankings

Last week, Forbes published their 2009 college rankings.

The article about the rankings is at http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/02/colleges-university-ratings-opinions-colleges-09-intro.html.

The rankings themselves are at http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/94/colleges-09_Americas-Best-Colleges_Rank.html.

A discussion of the methodology can be found at http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/02/best-colleges-methodology-opinions-ccap.html.

It's interesting to see the results, and I'm glad that the two schools that gave me degrees made the top 20, but I'm not sure that it really means anything. For one thing, the major sources of data include RateMyProfessor.com andPayScale.com, which are not scientific samples. Moreover, the rankings are based on formulas made up by the people doing the analysis. For example, the RateMyProfessor.com data counts for 25%. Who's to say exactly what weight each variable has in making something best? It's just something made up subjectively by humans, but because they make it into a formula, it's supposed to pass for objective and scientific.

"Best" is not something that can be precisely measured. Yes, there are some colleges that are clearly better than some others on certain variables, but it's not like there is one "best" college that will be best for all students. Different students want different things.

I enjoy working with quantitative data. I just don't like it when people think that quantifying something unquantifiable makes it more scientific.

How to be a good administrator

I work under some excellent people who serve as role models for the kind of administrator I'd like to be (including our department head, associate dean, and dean). Specifically, some things I want to keep in mind are:

• Before making a decision, talk to all affected parties. Tell them what you are thinking about doing and ask for their input.
• Before making a decree about how people should change what they do, first understand why they do things the way they do. Usually people do things the way they do because it serves their mission and is effective and efficient. Their reasons for doing what they do will continue to exist after your decree, so if you don't take those reasons into account, people will just try to subvert your decree in order to do what they believe is best.
• Requiring signatures from more people doesn't mean more people will engage in decision-making. It means people will just sign without paying attention to what they are signing, or will ask their secretaries to sign for them. It means that the people who have to obtain the signatures will be annoyed by all the bureaucratic hurdles that get in the way of what they are supposed to be doing: getting an education in the case of students, giving an education in the case of faculty, or serving students in the case of staff.
• Don't be so dazzled by your own brilliance that you can't hear what anyone else says.
• Listen to the views of your people. Don't just assume they are wrong. Engage with their ideas. Then make your own decision about how to proceed, and explain the reasons for your decision. Say you are sorry you can't adopt all their ideas.
• Assume the best of your people. For example, if someone seems to be doing something wrong, when you ask them about it, you might ask, "Am I missing something?"
• If someone seems to be doing something wrong, do ask them about it. Don't just turn away from it.
• Continually seek feedback about how things are going. Let your people tell you what does and doesn't work well, what they do and don't like, so you can figure out ways to improve the systems.
• Take responsibility for your decisions. While you may have been influenced by the input of others, in the end, it was your decision. Don't let those who disagree cast their blame on the people under you.
• When someone sends you an e-mail, assume that the person did not want that e-mail to go to anyone other than the people to whom they sent it. Therefore, do not cc additional people in your reply. Or if you cc additional people, only include your own reply, don't include the text of the other person's message.
• In general, you should trust that the people doing their jobs are the ones who best know how to do their jobs. However, don't use that as an excuse to ignore them. You need to understand what they do. You need to know their problems and concerns so that you can address them. You need to know how hard they work and what skill they use so that you can give them the recognition they deserve.
• Someone used the phrase, "Management by walking around." The idea is that when you walk around the workplace and chat with your people, you get to know what they do and what their concerns are. They get used to talking to you, so they are more likely to share with you when something comes up. When you must be in your office rather than walking around, keep your door open as much as possible. Let people know they can drop in. If someone has what they consider a small concern, they won't bring it to you unless you keep channels open in this way.
• Think things through carefully.
• Always be gracious and calm when interacting with others.

Advising

I think some of the common practices in the advising profession may not be ideal. Specifically:

1. It's not ideal if an advisor has so many advisees that they don't know who they all are. Students are less comfortable approaching an advisor if they have to explain who they are.
   
2. It's not ideal if advising is the only thing that the student sees the advisor for. It's better if the advisor and advisee know each other in another context, such as if the advisor is the student's instructor or research supervisor. I think that students don't want to go see an advisor who doesn't know them. I think it's hard for advisors to know how to advise a student when they don't know the student.
   
3. It's not ideal when the student has to go meet the advisor in the advisor's office in an unfamiliar building. The formality and unfamiliarity of the setting will make it harder for the student to feel comfortable talking to the advisor.
4. It's not ideal when students have to make an appointment with an advisor. Appointments should be an option, but students also find it convenient to be able to drop in any time, especially if they feel they have a quick question which is not substantial enough to warrant their requesting an appointment.

I am glad that I can avoid many of these traps in my job. I pretty much know all the graduate students in my deparmtnet. I interact with them in a variety of contexts. Students can drop in any time. For some of the students, I'm in a building that they go to for other reasons, so they can drop in whenever they happen to be in the neighborhood.

If I ever find myself in a more traditional advising job, I think I would want to overcome the shortcomings by doing things like:

1. Making sure my advisees know who I am, for example, by speaking to them as a group at an orientation, and trying to learn who they are.
   
2. Getting involved in activities or committees where I would interact with students.
3. Holding drop-in hours at an accessible location such as student union at a convenient time.
   

Too much bureaucracy

Students I tried to help yesterday included:

1. An undergrad who in order to be allowed to take a graduate level course had to get signatures from four diffferent people.
2. A PhD student in his final semester trying to register in absentia. In order to do so, he needed three forms. Two are signed by two people, and the other is signed by six people. There was also a 4th form requested, but I got him out of that one in the following way: I emailed person 1, who told me to email person 2. I e-mailed person 2 who sent a message back to me and person 1. Based on this, person 1 then sent me an email saying he approved. I then forwarded the email from person 1 to persons 3 and 4.
   

Of all the signatures needed, none are mine. I am the person who makes it my job to know the rules, but I'm no longer allowed to sign anything because I'm not a faculty member. The people who do sign may not know all the rules, so sometimes a form goes through that doesn't meet all the requirements, and the form gets rejected. If that happens, then, after collecting all those signatures, the student has to do the form over again and collect all the signatures again. Also, faculty sometimes go to conferences in other countries, so if the person whose signature is needed is away, the student is out of luck.

Students are here to learn, not to run around collecting signatures. There are times when it is good to have someone check that what a student is doing fulfills the requirements, but there's no use in getting signatures from people who don't really check what they're signing. Sometimes it seems like the administrators spend their time thinking up more hoops for students, staff, and faculty to jump through, taking more and more time away from what we are here for, which in my opinion ought to be educating students. My job is to help students with paperwork, and I like doing it, but I things are getting out of hand.

Share information and work together

Yesterday I attended a presentation about survey design. One of the people attending said that a Noel-Levitz study found that if you report back to students about what changes have been made because of the survey results, student satisfaction will increase. It's the kind of thing that is too often forgotten. I believe that faculty, staff, and students are one community and should work together toward the goal of creating the best educational environment for students. Working to improve the university is not something the administrators should do in secret, it is something they should do in teamwork with other members of the community.

When experience in the field contradicts the conclusions of science

The third idea I want to write about from When Children Don't Learn: Understanding the Biology and Psychology of Sex Differences comes from what McGuinness writes about educational psychologists vs. teachers. She says that teachers made certain observations about children's learning, but educational psychologists did not believe them because they could not explain the claims scientifically. Regarding discoveries made by teachers and the few scientists who took those discoveries seriously, she writes "Often their work did not appeal to the general educational community because what they claimed was counterintuitive, as, for example, their unanimous insistence that reading is more related to hearing than seeing. Similarly, all these talented teachers discovered that effective remediation techniques require the integration of multiple sensory and motor tasks. It is only in the past two years that research on the brain has revealed the neural basis for this insight" (p. 56).

This parallels a gripe I have long held about the medical profession not believing in ailments suffered by patients until they can explain the physical cause. Too many doctors seem to think that if they can't explain it, it doesn't exist.

Whether it's education or medicine, these examples point to the fact that at times there is a gap between scientific understanding and experience. I'm not saying that experience is always right. Sometimes conclusions arrived at through experience are erroneous. I think that when there is a gap between experience and scientific understanding, we should not conclude that the experience is wrong, nor should we conclude that scientific understanding is wrong. The existence of a gap is simply a pointer to the need for further inquiry. Until the question is resolved, I think both sides need to keep an open mind.

Trying to understand the world

As I did in my previous post, I'm commenting on something which I read in When Children Don't Learn: Understanding the Biology and Psychology of Learning Disabilities, but which is peripheral to the main idea of the book. When McGuinness introduces the major theories about learning disabilities, she writes, "All theories are only approximations to the truth. The truth is always elusive and changeable, but some theories are more true than others" (p. 34).

I think this is an important point which is often overlooked. I think that reality is so vast and infinite that we can't expect to explain it all. I think sometimes people who know a lot about something fall into to the trap of thinking they know everything. I think it is easy to think that the corner of the world that we can see is all there is, to think that when we know everything about our corner, then we know everything. I think the brightest people are those who have a large enough view to be able to glimpse some of the vastness, and who therefore know that they don't know everything.

However, the impossibility of explaining everything does not mean that we should stop trying. The last part of the quote from McGuinness is, "some theories are more true than others." The more we pursue understanding through scientific inquiry, the closer we can get to understanding reality.

Too many rules

I have been reading When Children Don't Learn: Understanding the Biology and Psychology of Learning Disabilities by Diane McGuinness. Rather than trying to condense all my comments into one post, I'm going to write about different ideas in different posts. I have not yet finished the book, and for now I'm only going to comment on ideas that are peripheral to the main point of the book.

The first thing I want to comment on is something McGuinness writes in the preface: "children blossom with individual care and languish or rebel the moment they become less important than the system. If the system is too inflexible, too inhuman, then ultimately even the winners are losers. They have learned to play the wrong game" (p. vii). She writes this comment regarding a contrast between two schools. In one school, children blossom when their creativity is supported, while in the other school, students are valued only for their ability to earn top grades. The danger she points out is that when grades are emphasized, students come to value grades more than they value learning.

I think this is a danger in any system that tries to control behavior with rewards and punishments. I heard a story of a student at another college who visited my alma mater, Haverford College. Haverford has an honor code which, in addition to covering academic integrity, asks students to be considerate and respectful with all members of the Haverford community. The student visiting Haverford said that at her college, there are many rules, and students try to figure out how to get around the rules, while at Haverford, students are expected to be good, so students try to figure out how to be good.

Haverford's honor code is effective because it expects honorable behavior and holds people accountable when they don't live up to that expectation. School administrators are similarly effective when they expect their teachers and staff to serve students, and hold them accountable when they fail to do so. However, some administrations are unable to trust that their teachers and staff will work in the best interests of students. These administrators take the approach of regulating what teachers and staff do at a very detailed level. When they take this approach, they make following the rules the ultimate goal, rather making serving students the goal. Most people who work in the field of education do so because they want to serve students. Working in an environment where complying with regulations is top priority dampens the enthusiasm of many who initially were motivated to serve students.

Thus whether we are talking about student learning, students' non-academic conduct while at school, or the conduct of teachers and others who work with students, I think we need to consider whether all our rules and restrictions really support the things we want to support. Our ultimate academic goal for our students is not top grades but learning. The traits we want to encourage in our students are not dutiful obedience, but creativity, critical inquiry and analysis, confidence, integrity, and compassion. We want our teachers and other staff to care about student learning and development. While rules are always necessary, we need to remember the reasons for those rules, and make sure the rules are just the means to an end, and don't become an end in themselves.

Tests of educational achievement

Two stories, both told to me by the same person. The first happened to a family member. The second is from a book by Don Mitchell. Both are about a school system's testing of what a child had learned at home. In both cases, the child was perhaps around 5 or 6 years old.

1. The examiner marked the child down for not knowing something about Pinocchio. The examiner did not ask, and so never found out, that the child could identify on a map all the states in the country.
2. The examiner showed the child a picture and asked the child to say what it was. The child studied it for a long time, and then said, "It could be a unicorn, but I don't see a horn." The examiner wrote, "Is not able to identify a horse." Then the child said, "It looks like a bit like a horse, but the ears are wrong," and the examiner crossed off what she had written.

In both these cases, the child was smarter than the test was prepared to measure. In these examples, the measure of educational achievement was a one-on-one interview, but these stories make me wonder about standardized tests. These days, the makers of standardized tests attempt to be more sophisticated and measure things like critical thinking and writing, rather than memorization. But can a standardized test ever measure anything other than how well people do on standardized tests? The tests do give us a general idea of what people know, and are useful when we want some imperfect information on a large number of people. But we should not think that they tell the whole story of what an individual knows.

How Children Learn by John Holt

I have been reading How Children Learn by John Holt (second edition).

Some of the points he makes:

• Children are naturally curious. They are eager to understand the world and do the things that adults do. Unfortunately, schools do not always teach things that children find useful, or teach in a way that promotes optimal understanding.
• Children need to develop their own understanding of the world, not just to hear explanations from adults. For example, it's not enough to explain the concept of written words. Children need to be around books and develop their own perceptions and understandings of the concept of written words before they will be ready to learn to read specific words.
• Explaining things to children that they aren't ready to hear or don't want to hear frustrates children rather than contributes to their learning.
• The journey toward increased understanding is not a straight line.Children try doing things in different ways. Even after they have done something right once, they will do it wrong sometimes. However, in time, without being corrected, they will come to consistently do things right. He quotes Professor David Hawkins as saying, "All of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand." (pp. 222-223)

Here are a few of the specific things he talks about:

Holt describes how sometimes in a room full of people, he will start playing the cello. After playing a piece, he will invite everyone in the room to try his cello. Usually the children will all try it, but the adults will not, except maybe if they already know how to play the cello. When children try the cello, they mimic Holt's actions, but only after some time do they start to pay attention to how the actions correspond with the sounds, and experiment with changing the actions to change the sounds. In contrast, if adults do play it, they try to figure it out before they even start engaging in actions. Holt says that adults can do this because it is easier for them to make sense of data, to see the relationship between the movement and the sound. He says that for children, the world is full of confusing stimuli, so it is harder for them to make sense of things. Therefore, children gather lots of data, by engaging in actions such as playing the cello. According to Holt, a child "is much less likely than adults to make hard and fast conclusions on the basis of too little data, or having made such conclusions, to refuse to consider any new data that does not support them. And these are the vital skills of thought which, in our hurry to get him thinking the way we do, we may very well stunt or destroy in the process of 'educating' him" (p. 75).

I have seen teachers make the mistake of ceasing to gather data because they think they have the answer already. They think that they understand a student's question and get engrossed in pontificating their answer without taking in the data that what they are talking about does not actually answer the question that the student has.

Holt says children need time to "mess around" with things in order to develop their own conceptual frameworks. He quotes Seymour Papert, a professor at MIT. Papert was fascinated by gears as a child and played with them a lot. When faced with math concepts in school, he understood them by thinking about what they meant as applied to gears. Thus Papert's "messing around" with gears helped him with learning math in school. Unfortunately, math is sometime taught as an abstraction, which makes it more difficult for students to understand.

Holt says that in schools, the students are the ones who need the most practice talking, but the teachers are the ones who do the most talking. When teachers do hold discussions, they often try to elicit certain answers. I remember teachers who did this. Whether it is a teacher or anyone else, if a person does not seem to want to understand what I think, I prefer not to bother to talk to them. The same goes for kids. They will practice speech when people listen to them. As Holt summarizes it, "we get better at using words, whether hearing, speaking, reading, or writing, under one condition and only one -- when we use those words to say something we want to say, to people we want to say it to, for purposes that are our own." (p. 124)

He describes a child doing a puzzle. The child tries to put a piece in the wrong place and it won't go. The child becomes upset. Holt suggests setting the piece aside for now. The child puts some other pieces into place and then easily finds the spot for the piece that had caused trouble before. What teachers need to learn from this is that there are times when a lesson can't be learned, and rather than force it, they should set it aside. The child will learn it better later, when he is ready to learn it.

Holt says that children go through cycles of courage and fear. When getting used to being in a swimming pool, sometimes they want an adult to hold them tightly, while other times they want to jump right in. If we give them reassurance when they seek it, they will rapidly learn to do many brave things. On the other hand, if we push them to do things they are afraid to do, they will become timid and will not learn as fast.

Holt has experienced much opposition to his ideas. Holt addresses the arguments against his views throughout the book. One of the main themes of those who disagree with him is that if children are allowed to direct their own learning, they won't learn the things they need to learn. To counter this, Holt gives some examples of how children get interested in something and pursuing that interest leads them to learn many things. In one example, a child read an article on scuba diving which sparked his interest, and that led to further reading about diving for historic objects, which led to interest in and study of archeology and ancient history. In another example, taken from My Country School Diary by Julia Weber, students wondered about why wool clothing shrunk. That led them to look at fabrics under a microscope, to spin and weave cloth, and to calculate how many hours of work it would take to make cloth. They calculated the area of different shapes of cloth. They visited a factory where cloth was made, and studied the history of labor conditions and the impact of factories on the community.

Holt also discusses his methods. He believes that while experimental methods have their place, they are not the only way to discover truth, and relying on experiments alone will result in a limited understanding of the world. He points out that during experiments, children feel tense and try to behave as the experimenter wants them to. He believes that he learns more about children by observing them in their everyday lives.

I went through the education of a social scientist, and was taught about how scientific experiments are the only way to understand things, how otherwise we will be affected by our own pre-conceived ideas and by the un-representativeness of our sample. I accepted that way of thinking when it was taught to me, but over time, I've come to see things more the way Holt does. I do see how bias can be present in personal observation, and I do think that there are times when the experimental method is most effective. However, sometimes scientists don't realize that bias is also present in the experimental method. Also, I've found that experimenters want to classify human thoughts into neat little categories, but if you listen to a thought for all that it is, it usually contains more than the little pre-determined box indicates.

Administrative staff as educators

It's common to consider professors or teachers to be the only people at a school who educate the students, but staff can be educators too, whether they are the president of the college or the janitor. As administrators, our leadership style can be a model which students follow when they go out into the world as professionals and as citizens.

What I hope to model in my dealings with students:

• Good leaders listen to the concerns of their people.
• Good leaders communicate honestly with their people rather than giving them PR BS.
• Good leaders take responsibility for their mistakes.
• Students can get good results if they approach people in a spirit of positive dialogue.

What I don't want my students to learn:

• Leaders should try to push their vision on other people without listening to the concerns of people affected.
• Leaders should put a positive spin on everything they have done.
• People who express dissent with leaders are troublemakers whose opinion is wrong.
• When dissent is expressed, the proper response is to take tighter control and shut out dissenters.