Thanks to Paul Sas, Ryan Holiday, and Casey Manion.
I could watch these video clips (also here) all day. You may have learned about Doug Lemov from this NY Times Magazine article. The quote “without great teachers, nothing else matters” is from the website of the organization (Uncommon Schools) that Lemov founded. The clips show techniques he has isolated that great teachers use in elementary school.
My research is fundamentally about deficiency diseases. I find things present in Stone Age life but absent now whose absence causes problems. Sometimes I work backwards (from present to past): why am I not sleeping well? This turned out to have a Stone-Age-related answer. Sometimes I work forwards: I study something present in Stone-Age life but not now and learn it makes things better: standing (better sleep), morning faces (better mood).
So I know a lot about deficiency diseases. One curious thing about them is the opportunity they present. Without scurvy, we wouldn’t have discovered Vitamin C. Once we’ve discovered Vitamin C, we can figure out the optimal amount, possibly leaving us better off than before scurvy became a problem.
This is what I thought as I watched these clips. Formal education is unnatural. No wonder it’s so hard. These clips, however, show that with considerable understanding of psychology you can solve the problems it presents. And perhaps leave us better off than before formal schooling began.
Thanks to Alex Chernavsky.
There is a high school in Osaka called (in Japanese) Ocean Science High School. It specializes in training students for fish industry jobs. During my visits to Japan, what’s most impressed me hasn’t been high-end restaurant food, as great as it is, but the way everyone seems to take pride in their job and doing it well. At one point a friend’s car got a flat tire. We limped to a service station. The attendant fixed the flat in 3 minutes, running around as if we were in a race. Typical for Japan, but unlike anywhere else I’ve been. I hope someday I can learn how this attitude is taught. Surely it has something to do with schools like Ocean Science — not Fish Industry — High School.
The current issue of The New Yorker has an excellent story by Jonathan Franzen. I enjoyed reading it (unlike most recent New Yorker fiction, unfortunately) and it’s closely related to stuff I blog about.
It tells what happens after a girl is raped by a boy with powerful parents. Her coach wants her to report it but her parents dissuade her. They are afraid of what the boy’s parents would do to them. The mother is active in the local Democratic Party and says “I wish it had been anyone else.” They have three other children — this one, they seem to decide, is disposable.
The story is so wrenching because the parent-child bond is usually so strong. But smaller abandonments happen all the time. When I was a graduate student at Brown, I was a teaching assistant. One of the papers I graded turned out to be plagiarized. I told the professor about it; he did nothing. I’m sure I know why: It would have been costly for him. Time-consuming, for example. He abandoned the student. Teachers, like parents, should teach right and wrong.
I posted yesterday about a Columbia University valedictorian named Brian Corman who plagiarized part of his speech. Was this the first time he’s plagiarized? Of course not. It’s merely the first time he’s been punished for it. I believe he’s plagiarized many times and in some cases the teacher noticed. The teacher did nothing — thereby abandoning the student — because to do something would have been costly for the teacher. Had Corman been punished earlier, he would (a) not have been valedictorian (it would have gone to someone more deserving) and (b) not face ridicule for the rest of his life, since this episode will be preserved by Google. Likewise, Adam Wheeler — a flagrant liar who almost graduated from Harvard without being caught — will be ridiculed the rest of his life. He too was abandoned by his professors, who surely noticed before now that he plagiarized.
That Brown, Columbia, and Harvard professors put their own comfort ahead of doing right by their students is unsurprising, given the examples set by countless university presidents and underlings. (Examples here.) Why did Columbia University President Lee Bollinger show a shocking lack of understanding of the purpose of free speech? (He’s a law professor whose specialty is freedom of speech.) Because he thought it would be crowd-pleasing — and it was.
Columbia, you have a problem. First, President Lee Bollinger. Then former provost Jonathan Cole. Then several business school professors. Now this.
A fish rots from the head, as they say. I disliked The Sociopath Next Door (repetitive, preachy) but it may be relevant here.
Thanks to Bryan Castañeda.
At the Chinese University of Hong Kong, students have real power over teachers because of the importance of teaching evaluations. If your teaching ratings are low, you can be fired.
A friend of mine works there. Recently he taught a two-hour class. One student tended to be extremely late, often arriving only 10 minutes before the end of class. One day,
MY FRIEND (friendly) You come so late, why do you bother to come at all?
STUDENT I have another class after this one.
She was serious.
What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, a collection of essays, has just been published by New Village Press (who sent me a copy). Several of the essays are very good, such as those by Pierre Desrochers, Janette Sadik-Khan (in charge of improving New York City’s streets), Daniel Kemmis, Robert Sirman, and Mary Rowe, but my favorite was the one by Janine Benyus. Benyus came in contact with Jacobs when Jacobs phoned her to ask her to speak at the 1997 Toronto conference Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter. Benyus was thrilled to be speaking to the person whose writing she’d studied to learn how to write. Benyus wrote about increasing appreciation of the value of biomimicry, learning how nature has solved this or that problem to help us solve the same problem.
[On the Galapagos Islands] I watched a quiet engineer named Paul stand motionless before a mangrove as if in deep conversation. He finally called me over and pointed: “This mangrove needs fresh water but its roots are in saltwater, which means it somehow desalinates using only the sun’s energy. No fossil fuels, no pumps. Do you know how we do it? We force water through a membrane at 900 pounds of pressure per square inch, trapping salt on one side. When it clogs, we apply more pressure, more energy.”Then Paul asked the question I’ve been working to solve ever since: “How is it that I, as a desalination engineer with a five-year degree and twenty-year experience, never once learned how nature strips salt from water?”
What do the following have in common?
All can be seen as cases where guardians abuse the trust they’ve been given by trying to profit from it. Jane Jacobs wrote about guardian/commercial ethical differences in Systems of Survival. Jacobs’s answer to why two ethical systems? why not twenty? was that there are two different ways to make a living: taking and trading.
Jacobs wasn’t trying to tell people how to act. She was trying to describe and explain differences in behavior she’d seen. As a one-pass view of how people make a living, taking and trading is a good division. Looked at more closely, teaching (education) and learning (science) are also central. They underlie both taking and trading. Following Jacobs’s logic, maybe they need different ethical codes to function well. Yesterday I spoke to a Tsinghua professor who complained that other Tsinghua professors simply taught what they wanted to teach, as opposed to what would help their students. I said, yeah, I’d blogged about it (“ For whom do colleges exist?“, “ For whom do law schools exist?“).
I’ve spent seven months living in Beijing. Since that started (October 2008) I’ve wanted to learn Chinese. I’ve tried many things. Now, finally, I think I’ve found a method that works for part of it (written vocabulary).
There are four aspects:
Content. I’m learning the basic 800-odd words covered in Learning Chinese Characters by Alison and Laurence Mathews, which are those required by a certain standard Chinese Language test (HSK Level A). I use their make-a-story method for each character.
Study Method. I use Anki. It’s like flashcards, but with a near-optimal mix of old and new cards. Comparison of Anki with similar software. When I used actual flashcards, I didn’t do a good job of mixing old and new cards. I found a Anki deck already made for the Mathews book. The Mathews will be glad to know that the (free) Anki deck plus (free) Anki software make their book more valuable. I constantly consult it for help.
Catalyst. I walk on a treadmill to make studying pleasant.
Minimalism. When I told a Chinese friend I was just learning the meaning of each character, not the pronunciation, she frowned. After that I tried to learn the pronunciation, too. But now, trying to learn the pronunciation at the same time, the whole thing goes too slowly. The pronunciation is much harder than the meaning and less useful. Learning just the meaning is much faster and makes the whole thing seem more doable.
More The origin of Anki-like programs. An approach similar to the Mathews’s.