Category: education

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Thanks to Jeff Winkler and Tom George.

Foreign Language Learning Tips

Seth Roberts15 Comments

After I said that I was having trouble learning Chinese, my friend Carl Willat made several interesting suggestions:

My ideas are pretty simple, and I don’t know if they’ll work for you but I’m thinking back on what helped me the most when I was learning Italian. Maybe they will strike you as obvious, or what you’re already doing. I’ll spell them out here anyway, and please just ignore anything that seems useless. I apologize in advance.

The big one, reading out loud and having someone correct your pronunciation, probably won’t work as well when you’re dealing with those chinese Characters instead of words in a recognizable alphabet. But the underlying concept, leaning the way a child learns, might have other applications. This was Roberta Niccacci’s approach and it worked incredibly well for me. She said pronunciation comes before comprehension. I read books out loud to her and my pronunciation got to be very good, though I didn’t understand much of what I was reading. After three or four books I could read like an Italian newscaster. “Keep doing this and you will wake up speaking Italian,” she said, and that’s what it felt like. Read more “Foreign Language Learning Tips”

Teaching Academic Writing: My Plan (Part 2 of 2)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

To review, I am teaching Academic Writing this semester. I want to motivate learning using forces other than grades. Here is my plan.

On the first day of class, I’ll say: Don’t take this class unless there is some piece of writing you want to do. This class will be all about me helping you write whatever you want. Most of the students will want help writing a personal statement for graduate school applications. I’ll tell them there needs to be something else they want to write. Without that the class will be a waste of time.

For the first class — the course meets for 1.5 hours once/week — I’ll talk about writing a personal statement.

After that, the general plan will be:

1. I meet with students after class (in the same place) for however long they want, maybe 5-20 minutes. They choose the duration. During these meetings, they show me what they’ve written. I read it and tell them how they can improve it.

2. During the next class, each student who met with me will give a talk lasting the same length of time as our meeting. For example, if we met for 5 minutes, the talk will last 5 minutes. The talk will be about what I said. After each talk I’ll give feedback.

3. In addition, students who meet with me will add my advice to a shared document (e.g., Google Docs).

4. Each week, one student will be assigned to spend a certain length of time (30 minutes) improving the shared document. For example, making it clearer or better organized. The next class they will give a brief talk saying what they did. Again, I will give feedback.

This accomplishes several things: 1. Customization. Each student can write whatever they want. 2. Doing. They actually write “real” material (in contrast to writing assignments). What they choose to write will probably be stuff like a paper for another class but at least it isn’t a writing assignment. 3. Telling. They will tell other students what they have learned.

Attractive elements of the plan for me include the fact that I never lecture and never grade. I never need to guess what the students need help with. I learn what they need help with by looking at what they’ve written. Even though there are no grades or teacher-imposed deadlines, I give lots of feedback — it really is challenging. Attractive elements of the plan for students are that there is flexibility, they can write whatever they want, they never have to take notes (yet there is a written record to refer to), and they are pushed to understand the material in a non-competitive way.

If a student doesn’t pay attention in class — the presentations when other students tell what I told them — he risks having me make the same comment on his writing I made earlier on someone else’s. Then he would have to tell other students that I made that same comment. The other students wouldn’t like that; it wastes their time. So there is pressure to pay attention. If you miss it during class, you can study the shared document.

More English is not my students’ native language, although they are quite good at it. I think that they are more likely to understand another student say X (in English) than when I say X (in English) because the student’s English will be closer to their English ability. I might use words they don’t know. This is a problem in America, too (professor knows a lot more than his or her students) but it is especially clear here. My point is that this is a good feature of having students give class presentations about what I told them, rather than me telling the class directly, which might seem better. If a presenter makes a mistake, I will fix it.

 

Teaching Academic Writing: My Plan (Part 1 of 2)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

This semester at Tsinghua — which begins this week — I am going to teach Academic Writing in English. The class is in the Psychology Department. It hasn’t met yet; I suppose all of my students will be psychology majors. In this post I am describe my plan for teaching it; future posts will describe what actually happened.

Last year I taught a class called Frontiers of Psychology. I discovered that I could teach the class without grading. I never gave grades (nor tests), yet the students did lots of work (the assignment completion rate was about 99.9%) and apparently learned a lot. Behind my removal of grading was my belief that long ago people learned everything without grading. Maybe I can use those ancient sources of motivation, rather than fear of a bad grade or desire for a good grade. The details of the course centered on three principles: 1. Customization. As much as possible, I tried to allow each student to learn what they wanted to learn. For example, they had a very wide choice of final project. 2. Doing. “The best way to learn is to do” (Paul Halmos) — so students did as much as possible. For example, they did experiments. 3. Telling. Students told the rest of the class about what they had read or done. I gave plenty of feedback but it was always spoken. For example, after each class presentation I pointed out something I liked and something that could have been better.

It was like the discovery of anesthesia. All of sudden, no pain. No difficult grading decisions. No written comments (explaining the grades), which I wondered if the recipient would understand. The class was a pure pleasure to teach. For the students, no longer did they need to worry about getting a bad (or less than perfect) grade.

Can I repeat this with a much different class? At the same time I taught Frontiers of Psychology, I also taught Academic Writing in English for the first time. It was pass/fail, so I didn’t grade there, either, but I wasn’t happy with how it went. (I didn’t want to teach it again . . . but, a month ago, I learned I am teaching it again.) This time I am going to take what I learned from my Frontiers of Psychology experience and try to create a better class.

In the next post I will describe my overall plan. Throughout the semester I will post about how well my plan is working. Supposedly “ no battle plan survives contact with the enemy” but my Frontiers of Psychology plan worked fine. I didn’t change it at all. Maybe my Academic Writing plan will work, maybe it won’t.

Movie directing and teaching.

 

 

 

What is College For?

Seth Roberts13 Comments

David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, tries to answer this question:

Are universities [he means undergraduate education] mostly sorting devices to separate smart and hard-working high school students from their less-able fellows so that employers can more easily identify them? Are universities factories for the dissemination of job skills? Are universities mostly boot camps for adulthood, where young people learn how to drink moderately, fornicate meaningfully and hand things in on time? My own stab at an answer would be that universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called technical knowledge and practical knowledge.

My answer: Almost all college students want to figure out what job to choose. The answer will depend on what they do well, what they enjoy, and will have a big effect on the rest of their life. The better the answer, the more successful and happy they will be. For them, that is above all what college is for.

This doesn’t even occur to Brooks as a possibility. I suppose professors like this state of affairs (a smart person — Brooks — can’t even think of this). If no one mentions it, they are that much further from having to consider it. Trying to help students reach this goal means giving up power. The more a college helps students learn what they enjoy and what they are good at, the less professors can do exactly what they want.

There is nothing terrible about college classes. I don’t say that this or that humanities course is “useless”. The trouble is lack of balance: too many normal classes, too few “classes” that explicitly help students to learn about the world of work and how they might fit into it. Only a few colleges — often low-prestige “trade schools” — do much to help students learn about possible jobs, what they enjoy, and what they are good at.

Judging by how Berkeley courses are taught — they do little to help students decide what job to do, unless they are seriously considering being a professor — most professors have little or no interest in helping students this way. I suspect, however, they don’t know what they might gain from doing so. At Berkeley I taught a class called Psychology and the Real World whose goal was exactly that: help students find their way (a particular problem for psychology majors, few of whom go to graduate school in psychology). They could do almost anything, so long as it was off-campus. It was little work for me and the students learned a lot. I enjoyed seeing them begin to find their way. This is what I think isn’t obvious to professors: the more you help students learn what they want to learn, the easier and more satisfying it is for you.

Criticism of My View of Education: My Answer

Seth Roberts2 Comments

My criticism of college education can be boiled down to this: It is too much one-size-fits-all. It takes too little account of differences between students. Those differences are no accident. They reflect the fact that a good economy needs to produce many different things. Human nature has been shaped to provide exactly that.

Bryan Caplan posted about this, and one reader (Tim of Angle) replied:

Roberts is criticizing colleges for not doing something that they aren’t really trying to do. . . . Our educational model is built around hiring teachers who are (supposedly) good at thing X and paying them to train other people to do thing X. Nobody claims that the way the teacher does thing X is the only way to do thing X, nor even the best way to do thing X; what colleges do claim is that the way the teacher does thing X is a successful way to do thing X, and it hopes that the teacher can train students to do thing X competently at least the way the teacher does thing X.

I was discussing undergraduate education at Berkeley. Berkeley professors are hired mainly based on their ability to do research. Undergraduate classes are not about training researchers (= the next generation of professors at research universities, such as Berkeley); that’s what graduate school is for.

In most Berkeley undergraduate classes, professors aren’t teaching students to “do” anything, at least anything that most of us would recognize as “doing”. (Engineering, art, architecture, foreign language and perhaps statistics classes are exceptions.) In most classes, students are introduced to an important fraction of an academic field. In a social psychology class, for example, they learn about social psychology research. The class is not about how to do social psychology. It is about what has been done and what has been learned. If the class consisted entirely of students who wanted to become psychology professors, that would be fine. In fact, only a small fraction of Berkeley psychology majors (5%?) go to graduate school in psychology. The students in most Berkeley classes (outside of the more vocational areas, such as engineering) will go on to do many different jobs. Few in any class will become professors.

I think one theory of higher education is close to what Tim of Angle says. The practice, at least at elite universities such as Berkeley, is quite different.

A different theory of higher education revolves around signalling. College performance provides a useful signal to future employers, that’s why it exists in present form. At Berkeley, I never heard this motivation (will this provide a good signal to employers?) brought up in discussions about grading or anything else. It’s utterly clear, on the other hand, that where you go to college (Harvard versus College of Marin) is indeed a powerful signal to employers and, yes, if you can go to Prestigious College X, you really should. How many “axes of excellence” there should be — how many separate categories or dimensions we should use to rank colleges — is a different discussion.

Economic Stagnation and Recent College Graduates

Seth Roberts11 Comments

In an excellent article about the college-loan “bubble” — the government has made it easy for students to get loans that a large fraction of them will repay only with great difficulty — Matt Taibbi writes:

We’re doing the worst thing people can do: lying to our young. Nobody, not even this president, who was swept to victory in large part by the raw enthusiasm of college kids, has the stones to tell the truth: that a lot of them will end up being pawns in a predatory con game designed to extract the equivalent of home-mortgage commitment from 17-year-olds dreaming of impossible careers as nautical archaeologists or orchestra conductors.

I agree with Taibbi’s big point — college students are being very badly treated — but I would summarize it differently. The worst thing older people can do to young people is construct an economy that has no place for them. Humans are the only animal that specializes. We learn a specialized skill and use it throughout our life to make a living. Not allowing someone to do this is not allowing them to be human.

Due to lack of innovation, too few jobs are being created. New jobs in new industries doing new things are jobs for which young people are especially well-suited. The problem with stagnation — stagnation in new goods and services — is (a) problems stack up unsolved and (b) jobs especially suitable for recent entrants to the job market aren’t created.

Failing to provide college students decent jobs is Horrible Thing #1. Burdening them with a great deal of debt before they enter a stagnant economy is Horrible Thing #2. I have blogged many times about Horrible Thing #3: Not helping students learn and develop their individual skills.

More Evidence Linking Fermentation and Complexity: Wild-Fermented Wine

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I came to believe that we need to eat fermented foods to be healthy partly because this idea solved an evolutionary question: why do we like food that is sour, umami-flavored, and complex? I realized that all three preferences could be explained the same way: All three push us to eat more fermented food. For example, fermented milk (yogurt) is sourer than fresh milk.

Fermentation also increases complexity. An example is miso. I noticed that miso by itself was sufficient flavoring for soup. I had to add quite a few spices to produce the same amount of complexity that miso alone produced — miso was a super-spice.

Wine is a fermented food, of course, but long ago all fermentation was “wild” — it proceeded from whatever fermenting agents were in the air, on people’s hands, and so on. Fermentation increased complexity not just because the microbes metabolized the food but because there were many kinds of microbes. Australian winemakers were recently given a lesson in the connection between wild fermentation and complexity:

We were tasting two glasses of pinot noir, blind, and the questions were: is there any difference between them? If so, how are they different?

Glass One was full purple-red in colour and smelled fresh and fruity, delightfully primary, with a bright raspberry aroma that was almost like bubble gum. It was pristinely clean, delicate, light on the palate and charming, but ultimately rather simple.

Glass Two had a darker colour and blacker fruit aromas, more complex and mysterious. Similarly, in the mouth it was fuller-bodied, richer and deeper, with greater textural interest, fleshier and denser, with more tannin. A beautiful wine, too, but much more profound and captivating than Glass One.

Winemaker David Bicknell then announced to the gathering [of winemakers] that the only difference between the wines was that Glass One had been fermented with a pure yeast strain and Glass Two had undergone a wild ferment. That means no yeast had been added: the juice had been fermented by whatever yeast strains happened to be in the air at the time.

“Both wines were picked from the same Upper Yarra Valley vineyard on the same day, and everything in the winemaking was the same except the yeast,” announced Bicknell, who is the winemaker at Oakridge. The class was asked to try to pick the wild ferment and say which wine they preferred. The great majority nominated the correct glass, and liked it more. There was nothing wrong with Glass One: it was simply that Glass Two was better – every way you looked at it.

The “class” was a wild-yeast workshop at the recent Australian Wine Industry Technical Conference in Sydney. The “students” consisted mainly of experienced winemakers. . . . The environment, especially the air, contains hundreds of thousands of strains of yeast, most of which occur naturally. The species present depend on what flowers, fruits, trees and grasses are in that locality. Recent New Zealand research has shown that yeasts are territorial, and the species present vary according to the place. . . .

Pairs of Hardys’ Eileen Hardy chardonnay and Mount Pleasant Hunter chardonnay, all 2013 vintage, one of each “wild” and the other seeded with cultured yeast, showed more permutations of character. With Mount Pleasant, the wild wine was cloudy in appearance, and quite stinky, but also showed density of flavour and richness, while the regular wine was good but not as interesting. The winemakers seemed to think the stinky one would clean up after a period of lees-stirring.

Of the Hardys wines, the regular ferment looked bright and clear in the glass, and was pristinely clean, intense and lively, with a spring water-like lightness of texture. The wild ferment was cloudy, smelled of cashews, bread, smoky oak, sulfides and spices, but the real difference was in the mouth. Its texture was far more rich and dense, fleshy and rounded, smooth and harmonious.

Eileen Hardy winemaker Tom Newton said he believed the sulfides were related to the wine’s greater textural density. Indeed, all winemakers I’ve quizzed who practise wild fermentation believe it gives their wines greater length of palate and improved texture as well as extra flavour complexity.

Even riesling responds to this ”rougher than usual handling”. Kerri Thompson’s wild-ferment Clare Valley riesling was a graphic illustration. Served beside a conventional Clare riesling, which was a perfectly good wine in its way, her KT Pazza Riesling 2013 was turbid (not clear) and smelled of apple, pear, yeast and a hint of nuttiness from time spent in old barrels. It was a more expressive, more textural and more layered wine than the conventional one. It’s on sale soon at $29.

And perhaps the most beautiful, exotic, fascinating wine of the day was Cullen’s Kevin John Chardonnay 2011. . . . Biodynamically grown and wild fermented, it’s a pioneer and benchmark of the genre. It’s so complex it’s difficult to describe, although honey and oak and what I call “balsamic” (like the smell of balsamic vinegar, without the vinegar or sweetness) aromas are all involved, welded to a razor-sharp, crisply tart, long and linear palate structure.

Will Australia become the new California? Decades ago, California winemakers figured out how to make wines that were the equal of French wines. No doubt French winemaking had stagnated. Australian winemakers have just been taught how to make much better wines for the same price. As far as I know, Californian and French winemakers have yet to learn this lesson.

Wine is a very old food. One remarkable thing about this demonstration is how long it took — how long it took to learn this lesson. Sure, we like hand-made this and artisanal that, but in so many ways we prize uniformity, no more so than in our educational system, to which we entrust the most precious thing we have: our children. Who are treated by that system in a factory-like way, in the sense that all children in a class get the same teaching materials and are given the same tests. I have yet to hear an education theorist say that the best education produces diversity not uniformity. When I let my students’ underlying diversity be expressed (for example, in what they chose to learn), teaching became much easier. Win-win. Essentially what the winemakers are figuring out: When you let the natural variation of yeasts be expressed, making great wine becomes much easier.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Thanks to Alex Chernavsky and dearime.

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Thanks to Nicole Larkin and Tim Beneke.