Thanks to Tyler Cowen.
After I blogged about my belief that a good teacher tries to bring out what is inside their students (not just transfer brain contents), a reader named Terri Fites commented:
We homeschool, and I see lots of what you said in my kids.
I asked her to elaborate. She replied:
Here is where I learned the most starting on day one of kindergarten with my first child five years ago; it is my job to identify strengths, weaknesses, and to help the learner achieve the goal using what they can. For example, I was embarrassed and appalled that my first child didn’t read or show any interest in reading to herself until about second grade (7 years old). However, I continued to provide the necessary environment–reading wonderful books aloud, having her read a sentence from our selections, occasionally forcing her to read from her own readers. She had a great verbal understanding and would listen to anything I read aloud to her. Eventually, slowly, she transitioned and has NO issues with reading now. Her strength is verbal understanding and listening comprehension. Her weakness is focus on her own activities and sitting still.
My second child came along and was strong in different ways that I had to discover and appreciate. Her verbal skills, although perfectly normal, are not her strength, but music rises out of her at every moment. Clearly we have to do more than music. Using this strength, I make sure to provide plenty of musical CDs in Spanish for Spanish (which she struggles with–we have had tutors come for years with the intent the girls become fluent). We memorize and recite poetry routinely as part of our lessons, and she “sets” hers to song/music. When we do math facts (addition, subtraction, multiplication flash cards), she does best if she hears them in a sing-song voice. Her strengths are effort, music, rhythm, and art. Her weaknesses are verbal reasoning and remembering verbal types of things (not so prominent in math and geography skills so her spatial and math skills overcome this problem remembering things).
I would say, particularly in elementary school, that although the reading, writing, and arithmetic skills needed should not be optional–the timing of learning them and the method of learning them ought to be fluid to a degree. Everybody should learn to read but we’re losing kids because they’re not developmentally ready until second or third grade for some of these verbal/reading things. By then the bulk of the spelling and phonics rules have been expected to have been learned and the child is probably destined to be a poor speller, decoder, and poor at reading aloud. (This would be my husband. Obviously he was able to overcome this, but his spelling and read aloud are not pleasant. He says he remembers the year when words and reading just started coming together for him. Unfortunately, that was fifth grade. Did he need to learn to read and spell then in fifth grade!? I’d argue NO! But, in this case, recognition of a child/type of child is important. He is very, very logical, and the way that spelling/phonics is taught now/then is NOT so logical. A rule is given here. It is broken here. It is ignored here. No explanation is given. A kid learns long A as a_e here or -ay there, but not all the other combinations that make the long A sound– and certainly not all together in a lesson sequence!!!: ea, ae, ei, eigh, ai, etc. The logical child gives up. There are programs out there like Orton Gillingham, for example, designed to teach the “rules” of English in such a logical manner. Or I design my own curriculum. But this is not an option for most school teachers. Autonomy is being denied.) And now, multiplication is being moved forward in school grades, too. And analytical, thinking math is being moved forward. I think we’ll lose students! Good students! “I’m no good at math.” Geesh. Because you can’t do story problems in second grade? Because you’re still mastering the facts and you’re being pushed into application too early?
I got Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic (2008) by Pamela Weintraub from the library and found something surprising: an angry foreword. Weintraub is a science journalist; the foreword is by Hillary Johnson, another science journalist and apparently a friend of Weintraub’s.
In her anger, Johnson says several things I say on this blog.
The more Weintraub investigated, the more virtually everyone with a shred of authority was losing their credibility. . . The so-called “objective” scientists were sending an entire disease down the river and over the cliff [meaning they ignored it] for reasons that seemed frequently to have more to do with mere opinion and crass external forces — cash, prestige, careerism — than with scientific erudition.
She rejected the science writer’s inbred habit of relying on the government official with the highest pay grade or the scientist with a job at Harvard as the final word on a topic. . . . I think of her, with enormous respect, as a “recovered” science journalist.
As one who also suffers from the disease I chronicled with kindred passion in Osler’s Web, I sometimes wonder if the only investigative writers who will possess the necessary temerity to remove the white gloves and tackle those putative experts to the ground will be those . . whose personal experience demands they follow the rocky trail that leads to the truth.
The last point is the most important, I think. You can curse the careerism of Harvard medical school professors and the servility of science writers but that does nothing, or not much, and what you are upset about (careerism and servility) is unsurprising. Less obvious, at least to me, is that there is a way to overcome the careerism and servility. It still surprises me that I was able to figure out interesting stuff about sleep, obesity, depression and so on that the experts in these fields hadn’t figured out — and that sometimes contradicted what they said. (For example, I found sugar isn’t fattening.) As Johnson says, one reason I was able to learn so much was that I wanted to sleep better, lose weight, be in a better mood, and so on. Unlike the experts in those fields, for whom research was a job.
A recent Ph.D. from Berkeley named Dragan commented here:
Probably the biggest disappointment of my professional life was realizing that Universities are not very much like what I imagined them to be.
I asked him to elaborate. He replied:
My peers dreamed of being in the sports or movies, of being lawyers, of being rich. Those dreams didn’t seem so great to me. Instead I fantasized about being a scholar and later in life climbed up the educational ladder towards a PhD at a leading research university. The closer I came to becoming a professor — my professional goal in life — the more disappointed I became.
I am somewhat embarrassed to remember this, but I used to say things like: “Universities are places where people can devote themselves to a life of study, investigation, and imagination. In exchange for a home like this, we provide society with ideas. And, of course, we teach.” I guess I thought that there should be a home for people who are capable and devoted to intellectual pursuits, a rather naive notion it seems.
I wanted a place where I would be judged primarily by my intellectual and creative ability. Instead I have been made keenly aware of the importance of networking, of doing favors for the right people, of who to cite, whose criticism to acknowledge and whose to ignore. I used to despise such things, now they’re second nature. The irony, that I now know far more about popularity than I did back in high school. One of the first things I learned is that it is imperative to do research that brings money and/or prestige. In other words: popular research. I didn’t know such a thing existed.
What if I don’t want to do popular research? The most common advice I received during my graduate studies: “Wait till you’re tenured to do that,” always said with good intentions.
Only one person told me: “Do what you believe in. Tenure and accolades will come in time.” I liked this advice more. But the professor who gave it was fully tenured before I was born. Perhaps things were different in his time? I suspect they were. Last year, two retired professors, each from a major research university, assured me that they would never get tenure in this day and age. They took years with their research and published few yet original papers. “You have to wait until tenure nowadays,” they said.
This is not what I thought I’d find. Nor did I expect to find that efficiency and money-making are priorities here. I love what I do, or at least what I want to do. If I could afford to, I’d do it for free. I mean that as an academic, money seems relatively unimportant. Yet universities seem to be run by people who aren’t academics and whose primary interest is making money, rather than fostering research. It occurs to me that these two aims may be in conflict.
Don’t get me wrong: I am not saying that academia is altogether bad. I can honestly say it beats unemployment and the handful of low-wage jobs I had as a teenager. And there are days when all the things I just wrote about seem less important and I focus on my research or my teaching. But other times I think, silly me. If only I was smart enough to get rich in the first place, I could have done anything I wanted to — like pursue research that actually interests me.
As a professor (with tenure) at Berkeley, I was fascinated by how mediocre I was. By the usual metrics, I was in the bottom quarter of the distribution. Yet I had made discoveries that I knew were important — for example, a surprising way to lose weight, a really surprising way to improve mood. Although these discoveries impressed me, they did not impress my colleagues.
High-frequency trading is a misnomer. It’s actually short-latency trading, a name that makes clearer why it is so unsavory. As Michael Lewis explains in Flash Boys, short-latency traders use a buy order on one exchange to quickly buy that stock on other exchanges before the original buy order reaches the other exchanges. Lewis writes:
The deep problem with the system was a kind of moral inertia. So long as it served the narrow self-interests of everyone inside it, no one on the inside would ever seek to change it, no matter how sinister or corrupt it became — though even to use words like “corrupt” and “sinister” made serious people uncomfortable.
I thought of health care. Our health care system — centered on treating symptoms with drugs you take for the rest of your life — serves the narrow self-interests of those inside it, such as doctors and medical school professors. That is surely one reason its predatory aspect is rarely mentioned.
But I also noticed how poorly Lewis, an excellent writer, describes the problem. “Moral inertia”? No, the problem is not that Person X or Person Y is slow to get outraged. “Corrupt”? No, no one is being paid off to look the other way or vote a certain way or introduce a certain bill. “Sinister”? It’s unclear what that means. Is Lewis just using a fancy synonym for “bad”?
Elsewhere Lewis uses the word predatory, which seems accurate. Short-latency traders preyed on those who sold stock, taking advantage of their ignorance. Of course, no one is forced to buy or sell stock and the loss on one trade is small. But everyone gets sick.
Thanks to Tyler Cowen.
By the start of my third year of teaching, in 2007, half of my New York City Teaching Fellows cohort had quit teaching. Some for health reasons, some due to differences with their school’s administration, and some due to the difficulty of teaching during the day and going to graduate school at night. Teaching poor students, writing fifteen-page papers on pedagogy and compiling lesson plans proved to be too much.
The day before classes began that year, the principal told me that our students needed to earn an economics credit to fulfill graduation requirements. He asked if I wanted to teach the class. I hadn’t taken economics since freshman year of college, but I reluctantly agreed. The principal said he had an economics curriculum in his office and he would return shortly with the material. He didn’t return and never gave me the material. . However, I was able to develop a curriculum on the fly. I had read Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and watched Gopnik’s Lighting Up New York documentary. I got the idea to make a curriculum based on Gopnik’s four theories of New York City crime reduction: Broken Window, Abortion, Child Boom and Korean Immigration. To supplement my curriculum I read Freakonomics and Park’s The Korean American Dream. I didn’t have to teach math anymore, because I was teaching economics, but I was still teaching English. My class focused on reading poetry and short stories and writing short essays.
By that time I had earned my Master’s degree from the City College of New York, and had learned two principles that proved helpful. During an evening class, an African-American female professor, who insisted we call her Doctor, advised us to use the don’t ask, apologize principle to get around policies with school administrators. For example, instead of asking if I could take my English class to read poetry in Central Park, I should take them knowing that I could simply apologize if I were reprimanded by an administrator. She also told us about a research study done by Lisa Delpit, an education researcher, who advised teachers not use please with inner-city male students. According to her study, when students in that demographic hear the word please they feel they have a choice. For example, a teacher should say, “Go back to your seat,” instead of “Go back to your seat, please.” In my experience, she was right. The command without please worked better.
I can’t recall using any other teaching techniques that I was exposed to during graduate school. There should have been more instruction on how to motivate students to study and how to get parents to make their children do their homework. Talking to my students, I learned that, when they get home, most of my female students took naps and most of my male students played video games. Very few of them did any homework, read or studied.
I didn’t give any homework or quizzes in my English class, which had about 20 students, because most of my students didn’t do any schoolwork at home. I had my English students do all of their writing assignments during class time. I didn’t give any homework in the economics classes as well, which had about 30 students, but I had felt compelled to give quizzes to assess how well the students understood my lessons. I knew that the majority of my students weren’t going to study at home, but I hoped that I had explained the material well enough that they would be able to do well on quizzes. I initially did a quiz review the day before the quiz, but that didn’t seem to help the dismal passing rates. I tried doing the quiz review immediately before the quiz, but that didn’t help. I eventually moved to telling my students exactly what was going to be on the quiz, but surprisingly even that didn’t help. When students don’t understand a lesson or do well academically, teachers are supposed to take responsibility, but that’s very difficult to do when most of the students are very apathetic.
After I wrote my recent post about Korean innovation, I noticed an example in downtown Berkeley. A few months ago, the Korean bakery Paris Baguette opened a branch in a good location (next to a BART station) that has seen two businesses — two different cafe chains — fail in the last 5 or 6 years. It seemed to be doing well. There were more customers than I’d ever seen with the previous business (Tully’s Coffee). Paris Baguette has about 20 American branches.
Jane Jacobs once called Berkeley a “pretentious suburb” but it is where Peet’s — the original of Starbucks — began and where Chez Panisse is. It had a farmer’s market and an emphasis on organic food long before the rest of America. (A new survey suggests the health benefit of organic food is small or zero.) If you could call a location an “early adopter” Berkeley would qualify, but that would be understating it. Via the Free Speech Movement and the whole notion of student protest, little Berkeley shaped an entire decade (the Sixties). But it seems to have been a long time, like half a century, since anything important started here. The Bay Area, however, remains enormously innovative (Google, Twitter, Intel, and so on).
A few days ago, I learned from a Crest ad that a large fraction of pregnant women, such as half, suffer from gingivitis (inflamed gums). It’s called pregnancy gingivitis. The ad recommended better dental hygiene, such as brushing your teeth more.
Thirty years from now will people think how could they [meaning us] have been that stupid? Faced with pregnancy gingivitis, they brushed their teeth more? Pregnancy gingivitis is supposedly due to “hormones” that increase during pregnancy. In other words, a health expert actually thinks — or claims to think — that pregnancy gingivitis has a different explanation than other gingivitis. Yet he doesn’t know what causes other gingivitis. For example, here is what Mayo Clinic experts say causes gingivitis. This makes no sense. But it is worse than most nonsense, since fetal health is at stake.
Several years ago, I greatly increased my flaxseed intake because I discovered it improved my balance. My gums suddenly went from red (inflamed) to pink (not inflamed), no doubt because flaxseed has lots of omega-3, which is anti-inflammatory. Gingivitis is — usually? always? — caused by too little omega-3.
My theory: pregnancy gingivitis happens because pregnant women need more omega-3 than usual. A growing brain needs lots of omega-3. If this theory turns out to be true, the gums of pregnant women should be monitored to make sure they are getting enough omega-3. Nowadays pregnant women are given omega-3 to take but there is no test to make sure it is enough. That pregnancy gingivitis is common suggests it often isn’t enough. Actually, everyone’s gums should be checked to make sure they are getting enough omega-3.
A Marginal Revolution commenter wrote:
South Korea being prosperous has had no benefit to me, yet I have borne the cost.
I say: Wait ten years. No country combines innovation and quality like South Korea. Samsung illustrates quality but the innovation is less clear. Here are examples.
1. Food preparation. In Seoul, a friend took me to an American-style buffet. Nothing could be worse, I thought. But I was blown away by original treatments of familiar things. One was an octopus salad. It was truly chewy and crunchy, in contrast to most restaurant salads. Whoever designed it understood underlying principles — they weren’t just mindlessly copying. The fruit on offer included burnt sugar grapefruit — small pieces of grapefruit with a little bit of added sugar, then torched. The burnt sugar adds complexity. A simple small cheap attractive practical dish — not grilled grapefruit with too much brown sugar.
2. Cafes. Seoul is bursting with little cafes that are pleasant places to spend a few hours. They are well-decorated (many individually-decorated), serve interesting food and drink, and make Starbucks look cold, hard and stodgy. You can easily spend $6 on dinner and $6 on a drink afterwards but the $6 drink seems worth it. One Korean explained the profusion of beautiful useful cafes on competition (“Koreans are very competitive”). Another Korean said it was the TV series Sex in the City (“The characters spent a lot of time in cafes”). There are two Korean cafes near where I live in Beijing.
3. Bakery. Korean bakeries have what Americans expect in a bakery, such as bread and croissants, but also have many more products, both baked goods and other food, than American bakeries. There are many Korean bakeries in Beijing.
4. Airport. Incheon Airport was voted the best airport in the world for 7 years; in the most recent two years, it was voted second best. I’m not sure this reflects innovation that future airport architects will want to study; new airports have a huge advantage for which I cannot adjust. But Incheon has free wifi that works; Beijing International Airport has free wifi that doesn’t work.
5. Door lock. Nice houses and apartments in Seoul have a kind of digital door lock I haven’t seen anywhere else. Via Google I found this — which, lo and behold, comes from South Korea. These locks are better in several ways than other electronic door locks. For example, the keys are lit. My guess is that new houses and apartments in America don’t have these locks because Americans don’t even know they exist. Apparently a South Korean company (Milre) figured out that substantial improvement was possible. There isn’t even an English Wikipedia entry for Milre, yet it will have more effect on your life than, oh, 99.999% of the current entries.
6. Pop music. Gangnam style, obviously; K-Pop, slightly less obviously, if you don’t live in Asia. Gangnam style = K-Pop plus humor.
Keep in mind South Korea is small (population 50 million; the population of Japan is 130 million). A country that is a lot more prosperous now than 30 years ago is a good place to innovate because all the crummy old stuff is being replaced — that is clear. It is also a big plus for innovation if its citizens are well-educated. If you understand that, and how bad the United States is at innovation (housing, health care, cars, education . . . ), you will see that helping South Korea become prosperous was a great investment. Inadvertently great, but great nonetheless.
In Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, the authors (Dan Senor and Saul Singer) argued that Israel is unusually innovative because no one defers to their superiors, everyone challenges everyone else (“The Israeli said, “What does “excuse me” mean?”). In The Ethnic Theory of Air Crashes, a chapter in Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell repeated the theory that Korean Air had a lot of crashes because co-pilots were too deferential. Which is only to say we have a lot to learn about innovation and South Korea.