Five myths

As part of the Washington Post’s “Five Myths” series, Paul Farhi today offers us “Five Myths about America’s Schools.” It’s not likely to change much in the American discussion about school improvement, but I’d guess that about ninety-five percent of all teachers, kindergarten through university, would agree with his assessment.

Among the myths: 1) Our schools are failing; 2) Unions defend bad teachers; 3) Billionaires know best; 4) Charter schools are the answer; and 5) More effective teachers are the answer.

My take on all this is that, contrary to everyone’s good intentions, there are few if any solutions to our education problems outside of the schools themselves. Certain kinds of assessment, in mathematics for example, are both valid and reliable and can tell us a lot about student performance, though not always so much about teacher performance. In my field, though, writing instruction, despite decades of trying, there simply isn’t any valid, externally verifiable way to assess student writing and improvement. This makes people outside of the profession crazy, but it’s something that we writing teachers tend to accept as a given. The same is true in most disciplines.

Think, for example, of the arts. Critics and the public might largely agree that a certain film is excellent and another is terrible: Say, Citizen Kane and Conan the Barbarian. Still, not everyone will agree. Mexican writer and critic Jorge Luis Borges thought Citizen Kane sucked, and so did I. Others thought Conan was a pop-culture classic. I didn’t, but there you go.

For all the films that fall somewhere in the middle, it becomes virtually impossible to make a purely objective assessment. Does good acting trump a mediocre plot, or do great special effects make an otherwise mundane plot in some way measurably better? Is My Dog Skip a better film because it features a Jack Russell Terrier than if it featured a cocker spaniel? (Of course it is.)

Likewise, it gets much harder when we try to assess competence in the roughly eighty percent of students who fall somewhere in the middle. Does a particular student write noticeably better at the end of a ten-week class than at the beginning? As an instructor, I believe I can assess that, but another instructor might read samples of that student’s writing and reach a completely different conclusion.

Is a particular excellent student more excellent after my able instruction? Is a terrible writer a little less terrible? Yes, but don't ask me to prove it.

Good writing instruction results from a vast network of intangible features of a particular school’s culture, including a good president or principal, a good department chair, a balance of shared expectations among the faculty and a lot of room for originality, a mix of students who are motivated and at least moderately competent to learn (which can vary greatly even from one class to the next), and the luck of the draw in the abilities of individual department members. There are many other factors, not the least of which are a student’s home environment and upbringing.

My answer then, which will never be accepted by politicians or the general public, is to give us some money and get out of the way. Teachers have been teaching with mixed results but generally reasonable success since at least Socrates, without benefit of standardized testing, merit pay, or charter schools.

And remember that Jesus was a great teacher, but he didn’t publish.

Departments tend to seek excellence, even if from the outside they look largely dysfunctional (my former department being perhaps the best example of this since the invention of the pencil). Bad teachers tend to get pushed into other jobs more suited to their abilities, such as parking enforcement. Good teachers tend to get a few pats on the back from both colleagues and students, which is mostly what motivates us to continue teaching and even improve if we can.

We're not perfect, but neither are truck drivers.

So my suggestion for genuine school improvement is benign neglect: Trust us; we know what we’re doing. Show a little respect. Quit blaming us for all the social problems you can’t solve.

You can read the Farhi five myths by copying and pasting this link into your browser. I could easily add five more, but this is a good start.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-americas-schools/2011/05/09/AFunW27G_story.html

Instant dick

I’ve been using an updated version of Internet Explorer the last few days, and I’ve just noted a new feature that I love. When I place the curser over a word, no matter what Web site I might happen to be on, I get a pop-up definition of that word. My Kindle does this and it’s a welcome shortcut from actually getting out a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words, which as often as not I don’t bother to do.

Who cares if George Will knows five words per column I’ve never encountered in my entire life? I've always suspected George makes liberal use of a thesaurus,anyway, (George Will and liberal rarely appearing in the same sentence together).

Now my computer unpacks George automatically. He seems to be saying exactly the same thing whether or not I can define a few unfamiliar words, but now I can be sure he's not putting one over on me. The scabrous jackanapes.

What I just discovered minutes ago is that this dictionary function also works in Spanish. I was on a Spanish-language news site, stumbling along as usual like a low-performing second grader, when I let my mouse hand drift the curser over the text, and up popped a definition, in English. Presunto violador means alleged rapist. Guess who that article was about? (Hint: Mike Tyson is old news.)

Actually, I could have puzzled out the meaning of that one since Spanish is so rich in English cognates, and after awhile one gets a knack for recognizing them, even if they are rather oblique. Still, I might have guessed wrongly that “desalentador” has something to do with desalination, rather than “discouraging,” which is what it really means. Although what desalination has to do with a presunto violador would have troubled me. Something that might come up in the penalty phase, maybe.

I love these new features of my digital life. My Kindle has always had this instant definition feature. Although I get by just fine without a smart phone or an iPad, meaning I have absolutely no apps in my life, these other developments are more than just gadgets. They change how I read. In a small way, they make reading a richer experience.

Now, why doesn’t Microsoft Word have this same feature? You’d think it would be a basic component of such an advanced word processor.

Maybe it is and I just haven’t discovered it yet.

Lucky shot

President Obama was wonderful in his interview with 60 Minutes last night: calm and resolute; neither humble nor arrogant; just, well, presidential. And then, the next morning, he signed the legislation ending “don’t ask, don’t tell,” another campaign promise he made.

Just another day at the office for this extraordinary president.

If you missed the interview, I highly recommend a viewing. A story and the full interview are available here (copy and paste into your browser):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/no-evidence-pakistan-knew-of-bin-ladens-hideout-top-security-official-says/2011/05/08/AFxXpNSG_story.html

So now Obama enjoys what I predict will be a growing bump in his approval ratings as a result of killing bin Laden. Gas prices are dropping and are predicted to be down by fifty cents a gallon by summer; job creation in the private sector continues to rise. Maybe killing Osama isn’t the end of al-Qaeda, and some encouraging economic news isn’t the end of the recession for most Americans, but things certainly look a lot brighter today than they did a week ago.

It’s still over a year to the 2012 election, but I have to believe that Republicans are growing increasingly nervous. The best they can come up with for now is a little sniping from the sidelines. First, they criticize Obama for making too many references to himself in announcing the death of Osama. Eight in nine minutes by my count, including some real whoppers such as, “Tonight, I can report. . . .” which could have been better phrased in the passive, “Tonight, it can be reported”; or “Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation,” which might have be phrased as, “Today, that tall black guy in the White House launched a targeted operation. . . .”

But I don’t think this kind of petty denigration is going to play well anywhere but on the Rush Limbaugh show. Even worse for the Ree-Pubs, senior Bush administration officials are stepping out of the shadows to take at least partial credit for the kill and criticize Obama for stopping “enhanced interrogation techniques,” also referred to as torture except in the Bush administration. Rummy Rumsfeld said that early tips obtained through waterboarding led to Osama’s bloody end. "Trigger" Dick Cheney said the same and suggested that Obama has put the United States at risk by reaffirming our commitment to national and international law regarding torture.

And Cheney wanted to take the head shot since he has the experience, but that's another matter.

All this from the administration that, after the initial invasion of Afghanistan, got absolutely everything else wrong for the next seven years. I won’t go on about it here. For a partial list of absolutely everything else the Bush administration got wrong for the next seven years, email me privately.

Actually, I’m surprised that no one I’m aware of is making the argument that Obama acted recklessly, despite his fortunate outcome. He gambled his presidency and to a large degree the standing of the United States in the world on intelligence that he described as circumstantial and on an operation that had what he described as a 55/45 chance of success. He said he worried that the Navy SEALs would find only a “prince from Dubai” instead of the terrorist leader responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: “I mean, we could not say definitively that bin Laden was there. Had he not been there, then there would have been some significant consequences.”

No shit. So it’s no wonder White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan described the decision rather ungrammatically as “what I believe was one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory." The outcome, one way or the other, fairly or unfairly, would largely define how history would see Obama the man and probably his entire presidency.

The tall black guy in the White House rolled the dice and won. I’m betting that not the least important thing he won is his reelection.

Lucky shot.

Laughter, the best medicine

I wondered how John Stewart and Stephen Colbert would cover the death of Osama bin-Laden because there’s certainly nothing funny about any of this.

Except there is. I should have had more faith. Colbert especially managed to pull off possibly his most hilarious bit ever.

It’s a good thing to gloat; it’s even better to laugh about it. Colbert’s schoolboy glee was pitch perfect.

If you missed the episode, go to Colbert Nation Online and navigate to the May 2nd episode. And then you might as well watch May 3rd too, but I came up with the piñata idea first.

Final respects

Some Muslim clerics have objected to bin Laden’s burial at sea, declaring that it did not meet Muslim standards for a proper burial and was an insult to the faith. Actually, a variety of options were considered, and burial at sea was finally considered to be the most appropriate under the circumstances.

I have obtained a secret partial list of other choices that were ultimately rejected. Personally, I think burial at sea was about the nicest thing we could have done with his corpse considering his storied career.

Here then, the top ten possible options to “lug the guts into the neighbour room,” as happened to poor Polonius in Hamlet:

1. Burial at sea.

2. Strap him into a suicide bomber’s vest and blow him up in Times Square.

3. Chipper/shredder ala Fargo.

4. Cut off his head and throw his body by the side of the road. (An al-Qaeda favorite.)

5. Sell him on eBay.

6. Bury him somewhere in Afghanistan, then release a cryptic treasure map. (Pun intended.)

7. Strap him to a cruise missile and shoot him at Qaddafi.

8. Tie him to the back of a truck and drag him around Lower Manhattan.

9. Osama piñata!

and the last appropriately respectful way to lug the guts out,

10. Bury his ass at ground zero.

Of course, all of this would have been more fun if we'd taken him alive, but still: Good times.