Category: education

Top and Bottom Versus Middle

Seth Roberts11 Comments

I liked many things about this talk by Jacqueline Edelberg, a Chicago artist and political science Ph.D., about how she and other moms transformed their local school. Edelberg has written a book about it called How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood Renaissance. The man who introduced her told a story: In a classroom, he noticed a girl drawing a picture. What are you drawing? he asked. I’m drawing God, she said. You can’t do that. No one knows what God looks like, he said. They will soon, she said.

Edelberg’s story did sound miraculous: Her crummy neighborhood public school, within a year, became an acceptable place for her children. The change had many elements, including an after-school program, a farmer’s market, and painted doors, but I think the most important piece — which Edelberg said little about — was this: Parents were allowed to attend every class. Within two years, said Edelberg, all the bad teachers left.

I call this way of governing top and bottom versus middle. In this case the top was the school’s principal (Susan Kurland, Edelberg’s co-author), the bottom was the parents, and the middle was the teachers. Acting alone, the principal couldn’t control the teachers — she couldn’t fire the bad ones, for example. With the parents’ help, she could control them.

It’s as old as Moses:

1. As I’ve blogged, the Ten Commandments was an agreement between Moses (top) and the preyed-upon men in his community (bottom) against the men who were preying upon them (middle) — stealing from them, for example.

There are other examples:

2. One reason surgical checklists — implemented by hospital administration (top) — work so well, I believe, is that they give nurses (bottom) power over doctors (middle). A nurse can tell a doctor to follow the checklist. The details of implementation also empower the lower-ranking members of the surgical team.

3. In China, what are called (in Chinese) human-flesh searches — a kind of cyber-vigilante-ism — go on with the approval of the central government (top). These searches, which are actually mini-crusades, allow ordinary citizens (bottom) to punish corrupt or otherwise misbehaving local government officials (middle).

I predict that someday someone in the American government (top) will realize that a way to greatly improve health care is to empower patients (bottom) against doctors (middle).

Teaching: What I Learned Last Semester

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Andrew Gelman’s thoughts about teaching led me to mull over what I learned last semester from teaching at Tsinghua. I taught two classes: a freshman seminar that covered a wide range of psychology research; and a class for graduate students about R.

Some things worked well:

1. In the freshman seminar, one of the assignments was to design a Mindless-Eating-type experiment. (Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink was one of the reading assignments.) One of the students designed a really good experiment in which people on different buses get different treatments. She happened to be a senior applying for graduate school and her work on that assignment helped me write a really strong letter of recommendation for her.

2. I graded the students on their comments on the reading and set the bar very high to get a full score (3 out of 3): they had to say something that interested me. A fair number managed to do this. The bar wasn’t too high.

3. I had lunch with all the students in the seminar (about 5 per week). The students seemed to like it. I certainly did.

4. There were classroom debates about which paper was the best (one week) or the worst (another week). They got everyone involved, was far less passive than listening to me talk, and gave them practice speaking English.

But there was plenty of room for improvement:

1. Students in the seminar were frustrated by the vague criterion (“interest me”). Toward the end I posted the comments that got the full score and that seemed to help.

2. In the seminar it was hard to get feedback about how well I was being understood. The best I could do was pass out slips of paper and have the students write down what percentage of what I said they understood. More immediate feedback (e.g., when I used a too-difficult word) would have been better.

3. In the R class I hoped the students would analyze their own data. This was too hard for quite a few of them. In the future I’ll give them a data set.

4. One student dropped the R class because my English was hard to understand.

5. In the seminar, some students (freshmen) complained that other (older) students, whose English was better, talked too much. They had a point and I should try calling on people randomly. I also should try to get general feedback after each class (e.g., “tell me one thing you liked and one thing you didn’t like about today’s class”).

6. In spite of my constant complaint that professors treat all of their students alike (e.g., all students get the same assignment) when they aren’t all alike — they differ substantially in what they’re good at, for example — I pretty much did the same thing.

7. I should have at least tried to learn my students’ Chinese names.

One Man Vs. All Education Professors

Seth Roberts16 Comments

According to a recent New York article about Rupert Murdoch, Robert Thomson, one of Murdoch’s top editors,

thinks most [journalists] are liberals overly concerned with writing stories that will impress other liberal journalists and win prizes in journalism competitions.

Well, yes. Not everyone is a liberal, of course, but basically everyone wants to impress their colleagues. Scientists have an amusing spin on this: They call it “peer review.” The amusing part is that somehow no one else’s opinion should matter. (E.g., all journals must be peer-reviewed.) Scientists get away with this bizarre view of economics (thinking someone should pay you and get nothing in return) perhaps because it is indeed difficult to assess the quality of this or that bit of science if you’re not in the field and because science has produced huge benefits for the rest of us in the past.

As I said, this is just human nature. As far as I can tell, professors act this way — try to impress colleagues — in every academic department. In schools of education, the result is this:

Amy Treadwell . . . received her master’s degree in education from DePaul University, a small private university in Chicago. . . . But when she walked into her first job, teaching first graders on the city’s South Side, she discovered a major shortcoming: She had no idea how to teach children to read. “I was certified and stamped with a mark of approval, and I couldn’t teach them the one thing they most needed to know how to do,” she told me.

It’s no secret that many schools of education do a poor job of training their students to teach — which is nominally one of their main goals. I am just repeating what Veblen said long ago.

What’s new is this: One man, Doug Lemov, working mostly alone, has figured out how to make people better teachers. One man. Not a professor. Did he build on the work of others? No, he started from scratch. He’s made a list of about 50 techniques. They are teachable. He gives workshops about them. As far as I can tell from this magazine article, Lemov has done a better job of figuring out how to train teachers than all the education professors in the world put together. If you arrived on earth from outer space, and didn’t understand human nature, you’d think this couldn’t possibly be true, but apparently it is. It’s like something out of a comic book.

More Movement, More Learning

Seth Roberts13 Comments

This comment on my boring+boring=pleasant post persuaded me to look for research on how movement affects learning. I found this comment by Anne Green Gilbert:

Movement is the key to learning. I first became aware of this as a third-grade student . . . Movement was central to my teacher’s curriculum. . . . Everyone liked school that year, we all got along, and the knowledge imparted is still in my memory bank forty years later. . . .

When I became a third-grade teacher myself fifteen years later . . . I remembered this concept and used movement and dance to save myself from drowning in a classroom so heterogeneous I felt I was teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. Spelling words by forming the letters with bodies, forming punctuation marks and expressing the feeling of sentences through movement, learning multiplication by moving in sets of threes and fours, discovering the difference between lunar and solar eclipses through planet dances, and choreographing our way across the Oregon Trail somehow made everyone equal. The gifted children discovered a new and exciting way to learn, the slower learners quickly became actively engaged and successful, the non-English speaking students could finally understand the curriculum through our new nonverbal approach. Instead of dreading the long school day, we eagerly awaited our next movement experience. Attendance went way up; test scores rose substantially: there was laughter; racial tension dissipated. . . .

Five years after my own experience as a third-grade teacher in Illinois, I was training teachers at the University of Washington and received a federally funded grant to conduct research in the Seattle Public Schools. During the 1977 school year, 250 students from four elementary schools studied language arts concepts through movement and dance activities for twenty weeks. The third grade students involved in the study increased their MAT [?] scores by 13 percent from fall to spring, while the district wide average showed a decrease of 2 percent! The primary grade project [?] students also showed a great improvement in test scores. Most significant was the direct relationship the research showed between the amount of movement the classroom teacher used and the percentage increase of students’ test scores.

I find this very convincing: three situations, many measures. The way the movement lessons attracted diverse students is especially interesting; IQ tests were invented to reduce diversity in classrooms.

Partly I’m struck how this idea seems to have been ignored . “Everyone liked school that year.” Which seems to imply less liking of school other years. So the third-grade teacher used lots of movement, her kids loved it, but somehow second- and fourth-grade teachers didn’t imitate her. (Perhaps they did later.) “When I became a third-grade teacher myself . . . I remembered this concept.” Implying it wasn’t taught in her teacher-training program. On the other hand, it was emphasized in the teacher-training course that the commenter took (“I remember learning in my M.Ed that people learn better while moving and that we should therefore incorporate kinesthetic activites into instructional design”).

I’ve read many studies about learning by experimental psychologists and never encountered any study of the hedonics — what makes learning more or less pleasant. Learning is one topic, motivation (e.g., thirst, hunger) is another. There are a few studies of curiosity (in animals, not people) but they don’t show how to vary it. A professor of psychology might pooh-pooh the Gilbert stories: Sure, third-graders don’t like to sit all day. But my treadmill/language-learning story suggests it’s not that simple.

Robert Reich Lectures at Berkeley

Seth Roberts12 Comments

Yesterday I worked in a Berkeley cafe. The student sitting next to me said she was taking a course from Robert Reich called Wealth and Poverty. Most famous profs she’d found disappointing, she said, but not him. I was impressed that Reich was teaching undergraduates. Most profs in the Goldman School (UC Berkeley’s public policy school) don’t teach undergrads. The class is once/week for 1.5 hours (followed by a half-hour “salon” — meaning discussion) in a large lecture hall (Wheeler, 5 pm Wed). It met in a few hours. I went.

The topic was communities attracting large businesses, such as Boeing. Today’s topic should make you feel bad, Reich said. That was one of his goals, clearly — to make students neither complacent nor despondent. And he wanted them to be sophisticated: He didn’t want them to have a “bad-guy theory of the world”. Fine. I liked the way he walked around the big room, instead of staying on stage, and he had a great conversational manner. I also liked the way he used the first ten minutes to sum up what he’d said earlier.

What I didn’t like was the content. It was example-free — unless you count saying that Boeing moved to Chicago. As the lecture continued, my eyes widened: Is this what a good undergraduate lecture at Berkeley is like? There were no stories! Not one. He discussed, in purely hypothetical terms, how Boeing might decide where to move. They’re considering a number of cities, Chicago, Long Beach . . . Los Angeles. What will Los Angeles offer them? Tax breaks and subsidies, said Reich.

STUDENT What about good weather?

Reich didn’t answer. He went on to ask, rhetorically, were the tax breaks and subsidies a good thing? No, because they left less money for education. At this point I left. Except for being surprised by the low-quality content and amused by the student’s comment, I’d been bored. As education, it was thin gruel. The disjunction between Reich’s excellent intentions, great reviews (the room was packed), and great manner and his dreary content didn’t remind me of the name-dropping throat-clearing Yale prof but of the Los Angeles graduation where none of the speakers told a story. Somehow this simple point about how to teach — tell a story — had been forgotten.

Boring + Boring = Pleasant!?

Seth Roberts23 Comments

Fact 1: For the last few weeks, I’ve been studying Chinese using a flashcard program called Anki. It’s an excellent program but boring. I’ve never liked studying — maybe no one does. Fact 2: I’ve had a treadmill for a very long time. Walking on a treadmill is boring so I always combine it with something pleasant — like watching American Idol. That makes it bearable. I don’t think listening to music would be enough.

Two days ago I discovered something that stunned me: Using Anki WHILE walking on my treadmill was enjoyable. I easily did it for an hour and the next day (yesterday) did it for an hour again. The time goes by quickly. Two boring activities, done together, became pleasant. Anki alone I can do maybe ten minutes. Treadmill alone I can do only a few minutes before I want to stop. In both cases I’d have to be pushed to do it at all. Yet the combination I want to do; 60 minutes feels like a good length of time.

I’ve noticed several related things: 1. I could easily study flashcards while walking. This was less mysterious because I coded walking as pleasant. 2. I can’ t bear to watch TV sitting down. Walking on a treadmill makes it bearable. This didn’t puzzle me because I coded TV watching as pleasant and sitting as unpleasant (although I sit by choice while doing many other things). 3. I have Pimsler Chinese lessons (audio). I can painlessly listen to them while walking. While stationary (sitting or standing), it’s hard to listen to them. 4. When writing (during which I sit), it’s very effective to work for 40 minutes and then walk on my treadmill watching something enjoyable for 20 minutes. I can repeat that cycle many times. 5. Allen Neuringer found he was better at memorization while moving than while stationary. 6. There’s some sort of movement/thinking connection — we move our arms when we talk, we may like to walk while we talk, maybe walking makes it easier to think, and so on.

You could say that walking causes a “thirst” for learning or learning causes a “thirst” for walking. Except that the “thirst” is so hidden I discovered it only by accident. Whereas actual thirst is obvious. The usual idea is that what’s pleasant shows what’s good for us — e.g., water is pleasant when we are thirsty. Yet if walking is good for us — a common idea — why isn’t it pleasant all by itself? And if Anki is good for us, why isn’t it pleasant all by itself? The Anki/treadmill symmetry is odd because lots of people think we need exercise to be healthy but I’ve never heard someone say we need to study to be healthy.

The evolutionary reason for this might be to push people to walk in new places (which provide something to learn) rather than old places (which don’t). To push them to explore. David Owen noticed it was much more fun for both him and his small daughter to walk in the city than in the country. He was surprised. When I drive somewhere, and am not listening to a book or something, I prefer a new route over a familiar one. If I am listening to a book I prefer the familiar route because it makes it easier to understand the book.

Maybe the practical lesson is that we enjoy learning dry stuff when walking but not when stationary. Pity the 99.9% of students who study stationary. Ideally you’d listen to a lecture while walking somewhere, perhaps around a track. Now and then I’ve interviewed people while walking; it worked much better than the usual interview format (seated). The old reason was I disliked sitting. Now I have a better reason.

The Twilight of Expertise (by-the-book professors)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Imagine if, to get the news, you had to go somewhere and have it read to you! What a joke. From an article in the Washington Monthly about on-line education:

If Solvig needed any further proof that her online education was the real deal, she found it when her daughter came home from a local community college one day, complaining about her math course. When Solvig looked at the course materials, she realized that her daughter was using exactly the same learning modules that she was using at StraighterLine . . . The only difference was that her daughter was paying a lot more for them, and could only take them on the college’s schedule. And while she had a professor, he wasn’t doing much teaching. “He just stands there,” Solvig’s daughter said.

The excellent article misses something big, however:

A lot of silly, too-expensive things “vainglorious building projects, money-sucking sports programs, tenured professors who contribute little in the way of teaching or research” will fade from memory, and won’t be missed.

Via Aretae.

North Korea and Penn State

Seth Roberts27 Comments

In an excellent talk last week about North Korea — linked to his book The Cleanest Race — Brian Myers, a professor in South Korea, said that people don’t fear dying, they fear dying without significance. Without their life having meant something. Life in North Korea is far more attractive than Americans realize, he said. The border between North Korea and China is easy to cross, and about half of the North Koreans who go to China later return, in spite of North Korea’s poverty. How does the North Korean government do such a good job under such difficult circumstances? Partly by playing up external threats (U.S. troops in South Korea), the obvious way politicians win support, but also by telling the North Korean people they are special. Maybe it plays this card because it has to — they can’t afford a police state — but there is no denying how well it works. In contrast, Myers said, the South Korean government offers its citizens no more than consumerism. That doesn’t work well, and South Korea, in spite of high per capita income, has high rates of depression and suicide.

I think the attractiveness of North Korean life has a lot to do with why Penn State students like Penn State so much. This American Life did a show about Penn State a few months ago. Life at the nation’s top party school said the description. Sounds boring, I thought, so I waited to listen to it until I’d run out of stuff to listen to. It turned out to be one of their best shows ever. Mostly it’s about the large amount of drinking — this is why they did the show — but at the very end is a short segment about how much Penn State students love their school. Not much detail but I was convinced. The attractive school cheer (“We Are Penn State”) comes up in conversation! A few people reading this won’t know that Penn State has an extremely successful football team. A large fraction of the students attend its games. After graduation, a lot of them continue to attend the games.

Here is a powerful and neglected force in human life. The bland technical term is group identity. As the South Korea comparison indicates, governments don’t routinely use it to govern. As Penn State exceptionalism indicates, colleges don’t routinely use it either. Faculty routinely disparage football. Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education was written by a professor — of course. The Penn State chancellor seemed mystified that his students were so proud and supportive of their school. (They’re just that way, he seemed to say.) A lot of my self-experimentation has been about discovering what we need to be healthy, such as morning faces. I can’t self-experiment about this but I would if I could. It’s yet another thing that people must have routinely gotten in Stone-Age life but don’t get any more — unless you happen to be a rabid sports fan or an alumnus of a college with a sufficiently successful football team. Or live in North Korea.

Chimamanda Adichie on Academia

Seth Roberts12 Comments

After a few years of being a writer, Chimamanda Adichie — author of my Short Story of the Year — wondered if she should be a professor. (Her father is a statistics professor.) And she wanted to learn more about Africa. So she enrolled in an African Studies program at Yale. In an interview, she said:

I met very lovely people at Yale, so it wasn’t an entire waste of time. . . . After two years of the program . . . academia I discovered — particularly political science as it is done in the US — is not about the real world. It’s about academia. I would joke and say that what they do is they create straw men, and they beat them down. While all this is going on, the real world is going on in a parallel universe. It is completely disconnected from what happens in academia. I didn’t understand most of what I read. It wasn’t written in English, it was written in political-science jargonese.

This is the usual critique, but it is well-put. If you spend enough time in academia, as I have, you can see it becoming that way, disciplines turning inward, becoming less and less interested in reality. Becoming more and more ivory-towerish. Statistics, for example, became less and less concerned with real-world problems; but I could say the same about every other area (engineering, English, etc.).

This is glaringly obvious, roughly as clear as the sun rising in the morning, but some Berkeley professors denied it. “English departments have really lost their way,” I would say. No they haven’t would be the reply.