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.

The correlation between ability and effort

One might think that students studying a subject that comes easily to them don't have to work as hard, and that the students for whom the subject is difficult are the ones who put the most work into it.

Or, one might think that when students don't do well, it must be because they don't work as hard, while students who do well must have put a lot of effort into achieving so much.

Someone I work with suggested a third hypothesis: students who do best work hardest, but it's not that the hard work is the cause of the success. Rather, when a subject comes easily for a student, that student will be inclined to put more time into that subject. When you understand the material, the time spent on it is time during which you are engaged and moving forward. When you don't understand the material, the time spent on it is time spent banging your head against a wall. It's hard to stay focused on something when you can't really get your mind wrapped around it. While time spent studying it may increase your understanding, the understanding that you achieve may quickly slip away. I find that certain topics just don't like to stick to my brain. I have a hard time getting them into my brain, and once I do get them in, they just immediately plop right out. In contrast, with other topics, any time a piece of information is floating around anywhere near me, it heads straight for my brain and embeds itself there. I don't even have to be studying the material, or even conscious of it. Some conversation happens near me that I'm not paying attention to, but somehow information from that conversation gets glued into my brain.

Listening to our enemies

Too prevalent in this country is the attitude that the way to deal with conflict is to destroy, intimidate, remove, or silence those who criticize us or disagree with us. Our government invades other countries, tortures prisoners, increasingly curtails civil liberties, and fires people for political reasons. When someone in power is criticized, the person often responds by denying that the offense occurred and/or by arguing that the actions were not only justified, but necessary for national security. When faced with criticism, people go to great lengths to do anything other than admitting that the criticizers might have a legitimate viewpoint. Although refusing criticism and invading a country are very different acts, what they have in common is the absence of listening and dialogue. Silencing dissenters may seem effective in the short run. However, although suppressing dissent, limiting freedoms and imposing punishments may result in obedience it will also fuel rebellion. It's better to inspire people to cooperate willingly than to intimidate them into an obedience which they resent.

Often, dealing with conflict by trying to destroy the dissenters is seen as a sign of strength. So many movies and computer games glorify violent action. In contrast, I see this approach as a sign of weakness. It's a sign that a person lacks the intelligence and mental flexibility to listen to and think about different points of view, and lacks the diplomatic skills to resolve the conflict. Negotiating a solution with someone who has very different goals can be a monumentally difficult task. That's why people resort to violence and punishment, because they are unable to solve the problem with diplomacy. Diplomacy takes a lot of work, a lot of skill, and a lot of time. We resort to violence, intimidation, and deception when we fear that something dire will happen before we are able to solve the problem through diplomacy. There are many times when diplomacy doesn't work and it's necessary to take punitive measures, but we need to remember that punishment/violence/intimidation is not the only approach and it's not something to be glorified.

After a suicide on the campus where I work, and the shootings on the Virginia Tech campus, administrators at my campus held an open forum. I was glad that they seemed to truly listen to students about the problems that occurred in connection with the administration's handling of the suicide.

One thing discussed was that both the incident here and the incident at Virginia Tech were caused by people in distress. Administrators at the meeting emphasized that students who are concerned about the behavior of other students, or who need help themselves, should reach out for help. One administrator said caring for each other is the most important thing we can do for our safety. I think we have to be careful not go so far with our concern that we force anyone with an unconventional personality into psychotherapy to turn them "normal," but I was impressed with the acknowledgement of the important role that caring for each other has in preventing violence.

The Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation was created in honor of Peter M. Goodrich, who was on one of the planes which hit the World Trade Center. The foundation supports the education of children in Afghanistan, and also helps young people from Afghanistan attend high school or college in the U.S. By educating and befriending the people of Afghanistan, we can help reduce terrorism.

There are times when it's necessary to stop someone who is behaving dangerously. There are times when it's appropriate to arrest someone, or dismiss them from a job, school, or organization. But too often, people see the punitive approach as the only answer. It should be a last resort, not the only resort. We need to work on strengthening communities so that violent or punitive solutions are less often necessary. As college administrators, when we hear students complain about our actions, we should invite those students in so that we can hear those complaints in detail. Then we should try to address the concerns as much as possible. If the students ask for a change that we don't think we should make, we should respectfully explain to them why we aren't going to do it. In doing this, we not only address the concerns of our students, we also model for them an approach to dealing with dissent which we hope they will carry with them as they go on into their careers.

I don't claim that listening to each other and treating each other with respect will fix all the problems of the world. I think there may always be some psychopaths beyond the reach of reason. I just think we need to remember that violence or stricter rules or more punishment to silence dissent are not the only way to solve problems, and we need to glorify the heroes who fight for a better world using methods such as listening, teaching, negotiating, sharing, giving, empathizing, and learning.

School can be fun, so why isn't it?

When I was in elementary and secondary school, I was good at school, and there were some classes I liked more than others, but overall, school seemed to be about reading boring books and doing boring homework. It was a chore. I did a lot of reading and writing on my own, but for the most part, the things I did for school were things I would not have done if I didn't have to.

Then I got to college and it was fun. I felt like, "In all those years I've been in school, why didn't anybody ever tell us learning could be fun?" I could take whatever courses I wanted to. (There were some requirements, but taking whatever I wanted to take resulted in the requirements being fulfilled, so I didn't have to worry about them much.) In my free time, I had conversations with other students about the interesting ideas I was studying in class.

Now it's even more that way. Now that I have my degree, I don't have to ever take another course or get another degree unless I want to. And I have wanted to. Since finishing my bachelor's, I did get another degree and also took some nondegree courses and some training classes.

For me, the change from school being something I wanted to do rather than something I had to do took place when I started college. I know that some people had more positive pre-college experiences than I did. Those were generally people who went to private or magnet schools, or were homeschooled.

There are also people in college who look at school more as a chore imposed on them than as an opportunity to learn. When it's like that, it's not fun for the students or for the professor. Professors want to teach students who are interested in learning. They know they have a responsibility to make the material interesting and relevant for the students, but they can only go so far. Professors have to spend far too much time dealing things like cheating. You would think that a student caught cheating would be ashamed and accept the penalty, but all too often, they spend a lot of time arguing with the professor, acting indignant that the professor would accuse them, even when their guilt is clear. Also, students come to professors begging for higher grades. They say they need to pass the course in order to graduate, or to maintain a certain GPA in order to keep their financial aid. They think that the professor ought to increase the grade for that reason, that any decent person would. I just don't get why it doesn't occur to them that it's the student's responsibility to earn good grades, not the professor's responsibility to give good grades to anyone who asks for them.

The problem here is that for students, the goal of education is to get good grades and a degree, rather than to learn. The students want a degree because that is what will allow them to get a good job. It's very sensible for students to care more about the degree and grades than about learning, because that is the way the system is set up.

However, there are alternatives. Sudbury schools (named after the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts) are elementary and high schools in which students can learn whatever they want to learn. In that respect, it's somewhat similar to my experience in college, and even more so to my experience now as an adult who already has a college degree. I learn things that are useful to me to learn. I don't worry about degrees or grades.

Why can't all education be like that? I think the reason is because employers want to be sure that particular degrees represent particular knowledge. The current system is supposed to ensure that, though I'm not sure how well it does. I know some smart people who got bad grades and/or failed to graduate. And sometimes people graduate without knowing as much as they should. I guess employers should not rely on degrees as the sole indicator of knowledge, but they can use it as one clue.

I think schools believe there is certain information that students should know, whether it is for employment or for being a well-educated citizen of the world. Therefore, schools impose certain requirements. These requirements don't necessarily match what students are interested in learning. Therefore, we end up with students who are just trying to graduate but aren't particularly interested in mastering the material. I think it's true that there are certain areas of knowledge that people should know, so I don't know if there's really any way around this.

Presenting material in a way that makes sense to students

Once you have mastered something, it often seems pretty easy and obvious. Teachers need to remember what it's like to not already know the material they are teaching. They have to constantly remember to put themselves in the shoes of the students. They need to listen to students in order to understand where there are gaps in the students' knowledge, and then they need to present the material needed to fill that gap.

When a teacher does present material in such a way that it makes sense, we may be tempted to take it for granted, but it actually can take considerable effort and skill to put the material together that way. Although I'm not currently a student, people do sometimes try to explain to me how to do things, and sometimes it's frustrating trying to make sense out of their explanations. It's as if someone is giving you directions to get somewhere, and they say, "Turn right at the McDonald's. Three miles before that, bear right at the fork in the road. Before you leave, make sure you bring cash with you because the destination you are going to doesn't take credit cards. After the fork but before the McDonald's, take a left at the third traffic light."

Usually people do give driving directions in order, but when people try to explain other things to me, sometimes I find it as jumbled as this example.

It's a lot easier to understand things if we have a framework to fit them into. I'm bad at understanding mechanical things. Because I can't visualize how the whole thing works, when I learn one piece, it tends to fall out of my brain very quickly because there is no hook to hang it on. In contrast, it's easy for me to visualize connections between people. I am above average at remembering facts about the friends or relatives of people I know because I can envision how those people are connected, and then I can hang the facts on that framework.

When presenting new material, it is helpful for the teacher to present a framework for the information. A single piece of information will make more sense and be easier to remember if the student knows how it fits in to the big picture. It can be a challenge though. The way to help students understand bits of information is to first show them the big picture that it fits into, but the way to help students understand the big picture is to show them the bits which together form the big picture. I think it can be done though. You can start by giving them a general idea of the big picture, and then as you teach each bit, you can talk about how that bit fits with the big picture and with the bits that have been learned before.

Looking at the clouds

When I told my mother that I was reading about research on education, she said, "They should consider how much time people spend looking at the sky, because that helps you learn. People should spend more time looking at the sky. But not when they're driving." It's true. A fancier way to say it is that we should consider whether allowing ample processing time enhances learning. I remember when Chak was finishing up his PhD, he often mentioned that in his Acknowledgements section, he was going to mention his shower, because that's where he got many of his inspirations.

Sometimes with all the emphasis on No Child Left Behind and being competitive in the global marketplace, it seems like we should be jamming information into students as much as possible, but maybe that's not the best approach. Maybe students' time should be more balanced, so they have time to chew on and digest what they have learned before they spit it back out for the exam and then promptly forget it.

Education vs. Research

A candidate for a job at a university may be asked about his/her view about education vs. research, or such a candidate may ask the same about the university. Either way, the answer always seems to be that both are important, and that good research makes education better. However, in practice, there can be a lot of variation in how much emphasis is placed on each.

When I first came to my job, I felt that faculty and staff worked together to serve students. Now I still feel that my purpose is to serve students, but somehow this seems to have become a minority viewpoint. It seems that increasingly, the prevailing view is that the purpose of faculty is to write grant proposals, and the purpose of staff is to serve the faculty.

On more than one occasion, people have commented that we should not emphasize undergraduates or education too much in our publications or web site, because if we do, people will think that we are not a prestigious research university.

Sometimes I feel that faculty think students are good to the extent that they work on research, but that otherwise, anything faculty have to do dealing with students (such as advising or teaching or meeting prospective students) is considered an interruption to their real work.

I do think research is a good thing. It's good to learn more about the world, to explore ideas, to find out what does and doesn't work. That's what research should be about, though too often it seems to be more about getting money, not only in the university context, but also in business and in nonprofit organizations.

Though I think research is a good thing, I think that universities are educational institutions, and as such, the primary goal should be education. I do believe that research is a part of education. We want to teach students to be learners, and that's what research is, it's the process of continually learning more about the world.

I know that research prestige may attract the best faculty and students and may open doors for graduates of the school. I know that money is needed in order to run a university. Perhaps it's because I'm not in the position of having to run a university, that I can afford to be idealistic. But in my view, our goal should not be to bring in research funding but to educate students.

Values

It seems that the word "values" is often used to mean "conservative values." I'm a liberal, but I have strong values too. I strive to be kind, honest, and fair in all that I do. I don't gamble, drink, smoke, or swear. I'm a vegetarian. I use mouse traps that catch mice alive and then I drive the mice I catch out to the country.

I try to live in ways that are good for the environment. I recycle and buy recycled products, I buy organic food, I walk to work, I use cloth rags and towels rather than paper towels, and I use environmentally friendly personal care and household cleaning products. One of my family traditions is to re-use wrapping paper. The trick is to hold things together with ribbon instead of with tape. On Christmas Day as we unwrap our gifts, we have the ribbon box and the paper box in the middle of the floor. As we unwrap each gift, we fold up the ribbon and paper and put each in the appropriate box. Then when we are done, we are all cleaned up and have the paper and ribbons ready for next year.

When choosing which companies to do business with or invest in, I'm guided not only by cost and convenience, but whether the company's practices are in line with my values. I do business with financial institutions which practice socially responsible investing.

I prefer community over big business. I avoid malls because I don't like being in such a materialistic environment. I prefer to shop at small, local businesses rather chains. I garden and go to the farmer's market. I believe kids and grownups should spend little time on computer games and TV, and plenty of time on playing outdoors, playing with kids, playing with grownups, running around, dancing, reading, and doing creative things, whether it's building furniture, drawing pictures, making music, doing pottery, writing, or some other sort of arts, crafts, or engineering. When I hang out with others, I prefer to do something outdoors or at someone's home rather than going somewhere such as a bar, restaurant, or mall.

I've heard people complain that people should not bring their kids to restaurants. "Advice goddess" Amy Alkon says that kids should not be brought to a wedding reception. She writes, "Who says America isn't a monarchy? It's ruled by millions of tiny tyrants named Cody and Madison, presiding over adult-sized serfs called parents whose single greatest fear is not being liked by their children." I find her disrespectful attitude toward kids offensive. I don't believe kids should be spoiled, but I don't think spoiling comes from including kids in activities. Instead, it comes from indulging kids with too many material things and failing to expect them to behave responsibly. I believe kids are part of the family and should be listened to and treated with respect.

I think it's wrong to condemn people based on concrete things such as religious affiliation or the number or gender of one's of sexual partners. Instead, I think the measure of morality is in treating others with kindness, respect, and honesty. People sometimes interpret liberals' tolerance of diversity as spinelessness, as not taking a stand for what is right. We have beliefs about what is right, they just aren't the same as what the conservatives believe. Conservatives see immorality in diverse sexual practices. I see immorality in the discrimination which our country institutionalizes in its marriage laws. Liberals show that they have strong moral beliefs when they express their objections to war, holding prisoners at Guantanamo without trial, torture, capital punishment, permissive gun laws, and animal testing.

Some people think it must take a lot of self-repression to avoid swearing and alcohol and meat and junk food, but it doesn't. Meat-eaters don't feel deprived if they live on a diet which does not include split peas or tofu, and in the same way, I don't feel deprived by how I live. To me, my lifestyle is much more fun and interesting than what is considered a mainstream lifestyle.

Research should serve a purpose

Usually students in the social sciences take courses in research and statistics because it's required, not because they want to. They go through the motions of designing studies, analyzing data, etc., because it's required, but they don't think it will be useful in their life outside school. At least that was my experience with my classmates.

Out in the workplace, schools do evaluations because it's required for their accreditation. Human services agencies collect data because it's required for their funding. They hate doing it and feel like it's a waste of time.

Research has the potential to be valuable. For example, some people claim that educating teenagers about contraceptives will prevent unwanted pregnancies, thus decreasing abortion rates. Others claim that educating teenagers about contraceptives will encourage premarital sex, thereby increasing unwanted pregnancies and the abortion rate. Research is the way we can get some actual facts about the impact of sex education programs.

Research that is done just to go through the motions because that's what we've been told what we're supposed to do is not really research. Research means seeking out information to find out what is actually going on in the world. If you have people fill out surveys, but the questions in the surveys are not useful questions, or if you don't use the results of the surveys, that you haven't really obtained useful information. People need to be less focused on going through the motions and think about what information they would actually like to obtain and use.

In school, I studied about control groups and so on. I learned about how to design a proper scientific study. However, that's not what I do in my work. In my work, I know I have to give an orientation at the beginning of each semester. I don't think I would gain much by doing a scientific study with a control group of students who don't get oriented. Instead, I want to get feedback from students about how orientation could be improved.

When I took research courses, we were encouraged to use multiple choice questionnaires so that the responses could be anaylzed with statistics. However, for the orientation, I don't really care about numerical ratings. What I do want to know is what the students' comments about the orientation are. Did certain parts put them to sleep? Was the font on the slides so small they couldn't read it? Would they rather not have slides at all? Was there anything they wanted to know that wasn't covered? Those are the kinds of things I need to know so that I can make orientation useful to students. In order to find those things out, I hand out an evaluation form with a few open-ended questions. I read the comments I get, and make changes to orientation based on this feedback.

The point is not that it's better to ask open-ended questions than to seek quantitative data. The point is that you should seek the sort of data that is actually going to be useful to you. People often believe that doing surveys and research is useless. It's not that research is inherently bad, but that too often, people go through the motions just for the sake of saying they are doing research. When people actually use the techniques of research to collect information they can use, then research is great. In fact, it seems like a waste of time not to do research, because then you are carrying out programs without getting any information on whether those programs are actually accomplishing their goals.

Would you like fries with that?

You order a burger and they say "Would you like fries with that?" You order a medium popcorn, and they say "Would you like a large for only 20 cents more?" You call a financial company and ask to cancel a service, and they go on and on about all the benefits you would get if you kept the service.

A restaurant employee who threw away some moldy strawberries was told, "Next time don't do that. We can cut off the moldy parts, and serve the parts that don't have mold on them."

If a company seems to be interested in giving me a quality product and helpful service, I am glad to give them my money, but I don't like dealing with businesses which are trying to squeeze a few more pennies out of me anyway they can. If I tell them what I want, they should have some respect for the fact that I know what I want, and not try to push more stuff on me. I have canceled accounts with companies for this reason.

I think we should start a movement that any time an employee tries to squeeze more money out of us, we say, "Never mind. I don't want to order at all." We should be polite to the employees, because they are just doing what their boss says. But it's a free market economy and if we don't like dealing with companies more interested in squeezing money out of us than in giving us what we want, then we can vote with our money and refuse to give them our business.

Measuring teaching

I read an article that had to do with how to measure how much teaching faculty are doing. Apparently the old way was to ask the professor what percent of their time they spent on teaching, research, and service. The problem with that is that one doesn't know how much teaching work actually gets done. According to the article, the new improved way of measuring teaching productivity had to do with counting the number of credit hours taught, and multiplying by the number of students taking the course.

To me, this is still not good enough. It is a measure of how much teaching gets done, but it gives no indication of the amount the students learn, and student learning is the point of teaching.

Student learning is difficult to measure. You could look at student grades on the assumption that good grades are an indication of mastering the material. However, anyone with any familiarity with education knows that student grades will vary from professor to professor depending on how a particular professor grades.

Another way is to use some sort of standardized test. All calculus classes in the university/state/country/world could have students take the same test at the end. The students' scores on this test would then not be determined by the professor's grading practices. The drawback of this approach is that standardized tests have a way of not entirely getting at what is important. Standardized tests may test memorization of specific items. A good education should also help students improve in things like critical thinking and creativity. Also, one size does not fit all. It may be beneficial for students in different regions or different disciplines or from different backgrounds to approach the subject matter in a different way.

Perhaps theoretically in any subject there is a defined body of knowledge which all students should learn. And perhaps theoretically one can devise tests of critical thinking skill as well as tests of content knowledge. However, developing a test which is appropriate for classes in different schools in different locations is so challenging as to be impossible for all practical purposes. ETS puts a lot of effort into it, but I don't think the SAT and GRE are very good measures.

Another idea is to use course evaluations. However, course evaluations may tend to be betterfor teachers who make the class fun and/or easy. These factors do not always result in better student learning. Certainly a teacher who gets the material across and makes it seem fun in easy is a good teacher. But the class could also seem fun and easy because the material is not being covered fully.

To overcome the limitations of course evaluations done at the end of the semester, one could survey students a year or two later, when they have taken more advanced courses which use the material they were supposed to have learned in the course being evaluated, or when they have needed to use the material in the workplace. Perhaps at this time, students will have a better perspective on how much they really learned in the course.

I think none of these approaches is perfect, but combining the approaches can give you a picture of how well the courses are succeeding in bringing about student learning.

Computing class rank

Portland High School eliminated their practice of computing class rank. The idea is that they will put a new policy in place in time for sending out transcripts of seniors applying to college. An example of a different kind of policy is to have summa cum laude, magna cum laude, and cum laude instead of specific ranks for everyone.

The reason why they suspended the class rank system: honors and AP classes counted for more than "general" classes. This was criticized as being discriminatory against minorities, because minorities are disproportionately represented in general classes.

I think honors and AP classes should count for more. I think this discriminates against people who don't do well academically, and this discrimination is exactly the purpose of class rank: do distinguish students from each other based on their academic achievement.

The problem is not the class rank system. The problem is that minorities are less likely to succeed in honors and AP classes. That is what we should be trying to fix.

And we should also remember that the measure of one's ability to do well in school is not the same as the measure of the value of what one contributes to society. A lot of the things someone can do to make a difference in the world have little to do with school performance.

Teachers who ask questions

It is considered a good teaching practice to ask the students questions, but that doesn't mean all questions are good. You have to ask the right kind of questions and respond to them in the right way. Just the fact that you ask questions doesn't automatically mean you are being a good teacher.

I had a professor who asked the class questions, but I felt so insulted by the questions that I did not want to answer them. She was not interested in listening to what anyone had to say. She had a particular answer in mind. If the first person she asked gave a different answer, she would just move on and ask someone else. Then when she got to someone who gave the answer she wanted (or when she gave up asking) she would go on with the lecture exactly as she had planned it. There was not interaction, no response on her part to what students were thinking. Her questions did not enhance my learning, they just made me feel condescended to.

I had another professor who asked good questions. He asked questions that made me think. He would ask a question about something I had never thought about before, and his question would fill my head with ideas about the topic. That's the kind of questions teachers should ask.

Health care in the US

When I try to call my doctor, usually I get a busy signal or an answering machine saying the office is closed. I get the answering machine even during business hours. The answering machine does not invite me to leave a message. It just says call back when we are open. If I'm asking for a prescription refill, after I get through to a person, that person will transfer me to an answering machine where I listen to a message saying it may take them up to 48 hours to reply to any messages, and then they let me leave my information on the answering machine. If I ask them to call in my prescription to a pharmacy, they require me to give them the pharmacy phone number, so I look it up in the phone book. The pharmacy is two blocks from them. I would think that they might keep phone numbers of local pharmacies handy in their office.

When I go to my doctor for an annual checkup, she does spend time with me, but if I go in for a sick visit, she tends to seem rushed. I also get the impression that doctors think their function is to write prescriptions, and if my problem can't be cured with prescription drugs, then they aren't all that interested in it.

When I went to my doctor saying I was still feeling the effects of an illness I got some time ago, she sent me for a test to see if I still had the illness. It turns out, that test only works in the early stage of the illness. She didn't know that. Doctors are supposed to know stuff like that.

I think I have a relatively good doctor. Others I have been to were worse. My doctor usually sees me not too long after the scheduled time of my appointment. At another doctor's office, I usually had to wait a long time after the scheduled time of my appointment. I had another doctor notice a rash which I was not concerned about. I told her what it was, since it was a problem I had had before. She told me it was something different, and told me what to put on it. The thing she told me to put on it ended up making it worse. My brother was also made worse by a medicine a doctor recommended. Another doctor I saw pushed free samples of medications on me, even after I told him repeatedly that I did not want them and never had the symptoms that the medication was meant to alleviate. Some comments that were made about a doctor some of my family members went to: "He's not bad, especially if it's the nurse practitioner who sees you," and "He's okay as long as you're not sick."

I think my doctor is pretty conscientious. I think the problem is with the health care system. The impression I get is that the doctors I have been to are all dealing with too many patients, so they can't really give good attention to the patients or to their own learning. I think it's admirable that they continue as primary care physicians in the poor conditions created by our health care system, rather than become specialists who only help rich people.

I was reading about careers as a CNA. (That stands for certified nursing assistant.) It sounded terrible. Nursing homes and hospitals are so understaffed. Patients who can't go to the bathroom by themselves have to wait a long time to be taken to the bathroom by a CNA because the CNA has so many patients who all need care at the same time. Imagine the discomfort of not being able to go to the bathroom when you need to.

CNAs have a very tough job. They get little pay and little respect. If someone is working as a CNA, it's most likely that they put up with having such a terrible job because they actually care about helping people. Yet we drive these caring people out of the field because of the poor working conditions.

People talk about the placebo effect as if it's just about stupidity or something, that it's just wrong for patients to get better when given a pill that has not actual pharmacological effects. I think that many people miss the important lesson of the placebo effect. What the placebo effect tells us is that just having someone pay attention to you and care for you has a healing effect. The way our health care system is set up, so that health care professionals have to deal with many more patients than they have time for, is detrimental to healing. If doctors, nurses, CNAs, and others could really take the time to attend to the needs of patients, I think patients would be healthier and perhaps the needs for medications and surgeries would even decrease.

I went to a naturopathic doctor the other day. She explained that they study the things MD's study, but they also study things like homeopathy, clinical nutrition, etc. That seemed to make so much more sense to me. Doctors should not be limited to prescription drugs as the only tool for healing, when other remedies also exist. Doctors should be people who heal, by whatever means works, not people whose job is to write prescriptions.

It's easy to see that our health care system leaves a lot to be desired. I can find that out just by dialing my doctor's phone number and not being able to get through. The hard part is figuring out how to fix it. I don't like to hear people complaining about what morons the politicians are for not fixing health care. It's a difficult, complex problem which is not easily solved.

I think one of the difficulties has to do with the fact that we live in a capitalist system, and yet we believe that there are certain things, such as education and health care, which should be open to all. Wealthy people can get better health care. The problem is how to make health care available to all while at the same time funding it in such a way that high quality can be maintained.