Category: education

Teaching Children: Adjustment to Individual Differences

Seth Roberts6 Comments

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?

Universities: Expectation versus Reality

Seth Roberts22 Comments

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.

Walking Meetings Much Better than Seated Meetings

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In an interview about his new book The JFK Assassination Diary, Edward Jay Epstein was asked how he, a Cornell undergraduate, managed to talk to the people who did the research behind the Warren Commission Report. “It was a different age,” he said. “People actually communicated by sitting across a desk from one another and talking.” When I heard this, I was amused. I had just discovered that it was much better to meet with students walking than seated. What Epstein considered the good old-fashioned way (seated meetings) was to me the crazy new-fangled way.

As I’ve blogged, this semester I am teaching a class about academic writing. I am trying to apply my no grading/no lecturing method that worked well last year in a much different class (Frontiers of Psychology). In the writing class, my plan was/is to meet with students one-on-one right after class, in the same room. They choose the meeting length. During the meeting they show me what they’ve written and I make comments. During the next class they give a brief talk (e.g., 10 minutes) in which they tell the rest of the students what I told them. The course is much easier to teach than usual: no lecture, no grading, no written comments. Yet the students get as much one-on-one feedback as they want. I think spoken (face to face) comments are much better than written ones because they allow the recipient to ask questions.

Right now we covering how to write a personal statement for graduate school applications. The first set of after-class meetings was a week ago. The class has 12 students. Five signed up for meetings, 10-15 minutes each, an hour total. At the end of the hour I was tired. It was hard to concentrate that long. I went home and rested.

The class meets once/week. I thought of my discovery it was much easier to study Chinese while walking than while sitting (more here). While sitting I got exhausted after 10 minutes. While walking (on a treadmill), I could easily study 40 minutes. Jeremy Howard discovered the same thing. He put it like this:

[On a treadmill] I can [study Chinese] for an hour. Normally if I’m just sitting down I can just do it 20 minutes. . . . And at the end of that hour I was ready to do something else. Whereas at the end of 20 minutes, normally I’d be totally ready for a rest.

This gave me the idea of meeting with my students while walking. I’ve done walking interviews many times — for example, with job candidates and fellowship applicants. I didn’t like sitting for long periods of time and I hoped that walking would reduce their anxiety. It seemed to work.

During the next class, I announced the change: Bring a printed copy of your work (while walking I could not read a computer screen). I said they didn’t need a printed copy today, just in the future. After that class, I had four meetings. In three cases, the student did not have a printed copy so I started with the one student who did. I was pleasantly surprised that the other three students had made printed copies of their work by the time of their meeting so I did all four meetings walking.

What a difference! The meetings felt like no work at all. At the end of them, I felt refreshed. Yet their details (who, when, what, how long, etc.) were very close to what had left me tired a week earlier.

Maybe in the future offices and meeting rooms will have side by side treadmills and you project what you want to look at together on the wall. Another advocate of walking meetings is Nilofer Merchant. She says she listens better, mobile phones are less distracting, and the mood is better.

Humans evolved to specialize and trade. Specialized knowledge needed to be passed down, so we must, under the right circumstances, enjoy teaching, just as a healthy diet must taste good.

 

 

 

A High School Teacher Learns About Teaching

Seth Roberts5 Comments

While reading a blog post about teaching high school math, this caught my attention:

I tend to stay pretty focused on teaching; rarely do I give A Talk. Today . . . I made an exception.

[teacher] “What is it you think I want?”

[student] “You want me to shut up.” . . .

[teacher] “Why?”

[student] “Because it’s your job!”

[teacher] “Because I want everyone to pass this class.”

The class’s sudden silence [made me realize] that my remark had [had] an impact. . . .

I adopt my students’ values and goals, rather than insist they adopt mine. [emphasis added. To be sure, this is an overstatement — the truth is teacher/student compromise — but you get the point.] The kids were shocked into silence [because] they realized that my most heartfelt goal was to pass everyone in the class. I learned a key lesson I still use every time I meet a new class [–] make it clear I want to help them achieve their goals, which usually involve surviving the class.

I was unclear what the “key lesson” was so — I have edited the quote to make it clearer — so I asked the teacher blogger, who replied

The key lesson is explicitly state that I adopt my students’ values and goals, rather than insist they adopt mine. My students’s awareness that I want to give them value as they define it is essential to creating the classroom environment I want.

When I began working full time as a public school teacher [after years doing test prep], I had much tougher kids [than in test prep], and my classes were not as comfortable as I was used to. It was the emptiness or worse, hostility, I got from enough of the students that bothered me. I enjoyed teaching. But I felt something missing around the edges that I’d always felt–expected–from my classrooms, and I couldn’t even really spell out what was lacking—not gone, just not universal. I didn’t know why.

So in that moment [when I told my students that my goal was to help them reach their goals] I realized that one of my greatest teaching strengths was completely under the radar [= not noticed] not only to the toughest of my public school students, but to *me*. Many of my toughest public school students, the ones that had tracking bracelets or a long history of suspensions or just three years of repeated failures—hell, not only didn’t they realize that I wanted them to achieve their academic goals, they didn’t realize they HAD academic goals, since no one had ever told them that just “passing the class” was an allowable goal. I’d never realized how essential that understanding was to the rapport and engagement I had with kids until I experienced teaching without it.

I’ve only rarely experienced that alienation or hostility since [I learned to be explicit about my priorities]. I still have to be tough and snarl and yell. But now my public school classes give me the same sense of affinity, of understanding, that my test-prep classes did.

All or almost all teachers want their kids to do well. But teachers usually define “doing well” by their own ruler, and set their goals higher than is realistic–and so are often disappointed. I think most people [including high school teachers] don’t understand the degree to which high school students feel their choices in school are completely out of their control. They can’t choose most classes, they are “helped” by giving them more of the classes they hate (double math periods for strugglers).

This supports my view that teaching is much easier when you try to help students reach their goals than when you try to get them to reach your goals. Few teachers I know have figured this out — at best, they get to different students learn differently and stop. I think it’s the beginning of wisdom about teaching. I eventually found, after years of experimentation, that (a) my students’s goals overlapped mine well enough to be acceptable to onlookers and (b) their innate desire to reach those goals was strong enough that there was no need to grade them.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell and Peter Lewis.

Signaling and Higher Education: Email With Bryan Caplan

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I recently emailed back and forth with Bryan Caplan about a signaling view of higher education, which Bryan elaborates in these slides. I wrote to him:

Having looked at your slides, I would say we pretty much agree. I think employers have little control over the content of college education and, as you say, use quality of college because it works better than IQ tests and the like — as you say.

Perhaps we also agree that just as British aristocrats have a lot less power now than they did 200 years ago — the message of Downton Abbey — so are American college professors slowly losing power. MOOCs are one example, blogs are another. Parents and professors are quite happy with the current system, students and employers are not, and they are gaining power. That is my theory, anyway.
I think a signaling explanation does a very good job of explaining why sense of humor matters so much, especially in mate choice. Sense of humor = Nature’s IQ test. Sense of humor signals problem solving ability, which really matters but is hard to measure directly. I used to think that we have two basic tasks in life, manipulating things and manipulating other people (long ago nobody was depressed, etc.) and they were really different.

How Things Begin: Duke Check

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Ed Rickards, a retired lawyer and journalist, writes Duke Check, a blog about Duke University, which I enjoy reading even though I have no connection with Duke. It emphasizes scandals and bad governance but also praises. He started it in 2009. There have been plenty of scandals since then, including the Anil Potti cancer research fraud.

I recently asked him a few questions.

Why did you start Duke Check?

I started DukeCheck — originally Duke Fact Checker — because of a lack of transparency and accountability on the part of the school’s administration. You may want to review this Chronicle profile, especially the comments from the late law professor John (Jack) Johnston, about the need for such a column and my goals. I want to provide stakeholders in Duke — students, parents, faculty, alumni, workers, everyone — with the information so that they can participate and have their thoughts count. I really do not care if they agree with me or not, just so long as they step forward.

After you graduated from Duke, did you have further association with the school (e.g., worked there)?

I graduated from Duke 1963 and Duke Law 1966. No, I never worked for Duke or had any relationship other than alum. I continued to stay in touch, I wrote various letters about my feelings, but the internet is what opened it all up. and made it possible for me to write my blog from either NY (where I used to live) or Coconut Grove (dead of the winter). I have recently closed up NY and live near Princeton NJ . . . on a golf course which is a big switch.

Have you ever been a professional writer?

After brief flirtation with the law, and a job in private equity that was totally boring, I returned to my first love, Journalism, which attracted me while I was in college, and also during the summers when I worked for a local daily newspaper in my hometown. I have worked at the Associated Press, ABC, CBS and NBC, so I have been all around!

[This makes Duke Check a super-hobby — combining the freedom of a hobby with the skills of a professional. This blog, too, is a super-hobby.]

Duke has just opened a campus in China, in Kunshan, which is near Shanghai. The campus is called Duke Kunshan University (DKU). Does the DKU story point to/illustrate any general lesson(s)?

The DKU story will end with an empty campus in Kunshan. Many colleges have hit brick walls with their international adventures and this will be another. 15 years ago, Duke was gung-ho to open in Frankfurt; our president at the time, Nan Keohane, held an international news conference linked by satellite with reporters asking questions in Durham, NY, and Frankfurt. Six years, $15 to 20 million later, it died.

Duke should pursue international opportunities; but trying to export bricks and mortar to China will not fly. For one thing, academic freedom is a very strong tradition at Duke, and no Chinese leader will tolerate it. The new campus cannot teach nor allow religious services. We were founded by Quakers and Methodists.

We also see our administration going overboard on finances. At a time when money is tight, unbelievably tight, we’re exporting green like mad. The numbers do not add up: number of students, amount we can charge them. This may well be the first thing to implode, academic freedom the 2nd.

“Trying to Confuse You”: Pluses and Minuses of the Professorial Value System

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A Chinese friend of mine is a chemistry major. In one of her classes, the textbook was so hard to understand she said the authors are “trying to confuse you.” They use difficult words, for example. A Berkeley art history major told me much the same thing. In her reading assignments, she said, the writers couldn’t write a sentence without a few big words. They were trying to impress readers, she believed.

Yes, professors write badly — in these two cases, the writing seemed actively bad. Thorstein Veblen wrote a whole book about showing off (The Theory of the Leisure Class). One chapter was about professors. They show off, said Veblen, by doing research with no practical application and by writing obscurely. Obscure writing is showing off because, like useless research, it shows you don’t have to care what other people think (“it carries a pointed suggestion of the industrial exemption of the speaker”).

Veblen said little about the costs and benefits of the behavior he described, beyond calling it wasteful. I say the opposite — not wasteful at all. When, long ago, people bought “useless” (“deadweight loss”) gifts or “useless” hood ornaments or decorated buildings with “useless” ornamentation or performed “useless” rituals and ceremonies that require special products (e.g., special clothes), they subsidized skilled artisans. For a long time, that was incredibly important. Research by skilled artisans led to better tools, the creation of metals, and so on. Helping those artisans make a living supported (increased) research in material science. Pushing people toward “useless” research was valuable because it diversified the research being done — there are many ways to be useless, just as you can misspell a word more ways than you can spell it correctly. The most important discoveries, such as electricity, would not have been made if everyone tried to do research with obvious application. Allowing professors to use big words and write badly is a small price to pay for the valuable “useless” research they perform.

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There is an unrecognized problem with this, however. If you get one group of people to do “useless” research by turning things upside down so that useless is seen as better than useful (professors value “pure” research over “applied” research), it becomes very hard for them to do useful research. For a long time, practically all important research was material science research — how to control the material world. When something useful was discovered via “useless” research, the knowledge could be transferred to everyone else, who had normal values (useful is better than useless). Everyone else went on to use the knowledge in profitable ways — to make better knives, for example. This system (the results of “useless” research are used by other people to make a profit) gave us the world we live in, a world of wonderful products. The products on offer are staggering in their diversity, low cost, and general excellence. The hard drive on my laptop, the clothes I wear, for example.

Against this brilliant control of materials we can put our amazing lack of control of our bodies. A large fraction of Americans sleep poorly. Nothing (such as street noise) is making them sleep badly; they just don’t know how to sleep well. Depression is a huge problem, obesity is a huge problem (in America), and so on. It isn’t just ordinary people. Sleep experts don’t know how to improve sleep, weight control experts don’t know how to lose weight, psychiatrists don’t know how to prevent depression, and so on. Closely related to this is our health care system. It is dominated by doctors, who often use a peculiar and self-serving reasoning I call doctor logic. When I was a graduate student, my dermatologist was surprised when I measured my acne to see if the treatments he prescribed actually worked. It was a new idea to him. An influential Stanford psychiatrist named David Burns, whose famous book has sold millions of copies, has not yet figured out it would be a good idea to measure daily the mood of his patients. (Other psychiatrists are even worse.)

Why are we so smart about materials and so stupid about health — which is far more important? I think it is because the whole system evolved to push our economy forward via advances in material science. For hundreds of thousands of years, that is where improvement was possible: better stuff, such as better tools. The same “habits of mind” (as Veblen would say) and research system has managed to produce plenty of “useless” knowledge outside of material science. This knowledge can be translated into useful discoveries, as I have done (new ways to sleep better, lose weight, be in a better mood, and so on), but these discoveries don’t lead to products, at least not in obvious ways. Control of our bodies is quite different than making something physical. My first interesting self-experimental discovery was that eating breakfast made my sleep worse. That’s very useful, but not at all profitable — there is no obvious associated product. For professors, a problem with my discovery is that it’s useful. (Another problem is that it’s small.) For everyone else, a problem is that it isn’t profitable. The system that worked so well for material science breaks down when it comes to health science.

Yet the fact that you are reading this suggests, at least to me, that a big change is coming.

 

Chinese versus American Math Education

Seth Roberts28 Comments

When she was in eighth grade, a Chinese friend of mine moved from Shanghai to upstate New York. (Her dad worked for General Electric.) In New York, she discovered she’d already learned eighth-grade math — in fourth grade. Her new school moved her to tenth grade math. It was still material she’d already had, but less absurdly easy.

If 80% of American parents knew this, would they abide it? Or would they decide that something is terribly wrong? Now, of course, almost no American parent knows this.