Category: education

Tsinghua Graduation Memento Statement

Seth Roberts1 Comment

The first class of Tsinghua psychology majors in a half-century is graduating in a few days. (The Tsinghua psychology department was closed in the 1950s — Soviet-style university reorganization — and reopened in 2008.) The seniors asked their professors for statements to be included in a memento book. My contribution:

I remember our first day of class (Frontiers of Psychology). It was my first time teaching in China. It was on a Monday, maybe it was your first class at Tsinghua. Some things surprised me. Moving from students in the front row to students in the back, English ability got worse. Each student said their name. When one student said her Chinese name, everyone laughed. I still do not understand this. This had never happened in my American classes. A student had her picture taken with me. This too never happened in America. There were two graduate students in the class. Both of them volunteered to be teaching assistants. In America, no graduate students attended my undergraduate classes, and you need to pay them a lot of money to be teaching assistants. (At Tsinghua, that was the only time graduate students came to my class.) The graduate student who became my teaching assistant told you, “Don’t say My English is poor. Say My English is on the way.” I can tell you now I disagree. It is confusing to say My English is on the way. There is nothing wrong with saying My English is poor. I say 我的汉语不很好 all the time. We were all so new that we weren’t sure when class ended! That was the first thing you made me learn: The length of a class period. I enjoyed having dinner with you. You were less afraid of me than my Berkeley students. I especially remember dinner with 徐胜眉, who told me the Chinese side of the debate about the Chinese takeover of Tibet. Most people in America, including professors like me, had no idea there is another side. I had had a big gap in my knowledge and hadn’t even realized it. The most important thing I learned from you was how to teach better. The homework you did was very good but I was puzzled how to grade it. From talking with you at dinner and listening to you in class, I could tell that all of you were excellent students. It did not seem like a good idea to make it difficult to get the highest grade, but what was the alternative? This was the puzzle that you pushed me to solve. Eventually I changed how I teach quite a bit, as you may know from talking to students from last year’s Frontiers of Psychology. Thank you for that, and may you teach your future teachers as well as you taught me.

Because my students were so good, they made me see the deficiencies in usual teaching methods especially clearly. It really did seem idiotic to take perfectly good work and carefully divide it into piles of best, good, and less good (and give each pile a different grade). Surely there were better uses of my time than making such distinctions and better uses of their time and mental energy than trying to do exactly what I wanted.

When I visited Berkeley to be considered for an assistant professor job, one of the interviews was with graduate students. One of them asked, “Which do you like better, teaching or research?” “Research,” I said. They laughed. All Berkeley professors prefer research, but you’re supposed to say you like them equally. I was unaware of this. I did like research more, and still do, which is why I am surprised that I talk about teaching so much. I told a friend at lunch recently that it was weird how much I talk about my teaching ideas.

Occupational Specialization as Far Back as the Bronze Age

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Linear B is an ancient form of Greek, used around 1500 BC (the Bronze Age) in Mycenean Greece. Stuff written in Linear B gives us one of our oldest views of human life and can reveal things that other ways of looking at the past (e.g., bones, genes, tools, pottery) cannot. At the end of The Riddle of the Labyrinth (2013) by Margalit Fox, a book about how Linear B was deciphered, is a section about what the deciphered tablets turned out to say.

One thing they revealed is considerable occupational specialization. According to Fox (pp. 273-5),

Mycenaeans plied a range of trades. Many tablets reveal the names of occupations . . . metalsmiths . . . textile work . . . tanners . . . leatherworkers . . . priests and priestesses . . . soldiers, rowers, and archers . . . swordmakers and bowmakers, chariot makers and chariot-wheel repairmen . . . goldsmiths and perfumers . . . woodcutters, carpenters, shipbuilders and net makers; fire kindlers and bath attendants; heralds, hunters, herdsmen, and beekeepers. . . . bronzesmiths.

Occupational specialization is at the center of my theory of human evolution. The decipherment of Linear B showed that it has existed as far back as we can see. Today there is an enormous amount of occupational specialization, but it also flourished when accumulated knowledge was much less.

The more you see the centrality of occupational specialization to human nature, the more you will see how modern schooling malnourishes almost everyone who undergoes it — which is almost everyone. Human nature takes people at one place and time — such as Mycenaean Greece — and pushes them to become adults who do all sorts of different things (woodcutter, herald, beekeeper . . . ). It takes people who start off the same or almost the same — same place, same food, same weather, similar genes — and creates diversity among them. Modern education tries to do the opposite: Take a diverse set of students and make them the same. One example is No Child Left Behind. Another is that in almost every college class, all students are given the same material, the same assignments, and graded on the same one-dimensional scale. We don’t need everyone to be the same; in fact, we need exactly the opposite. The more diverse we are, the sooner we will find solutions to pressing problems, because they will be attacked in many different ways.

Useful Knowledge: Arithmetic and Chinese

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Long ago, a friend told me that when she was in first grade, she had a lot of pennies. She knew how to add but not subtract so after she spent some, she would have to count them again to know how many were left.

I have finally reached the last lesson (Lesson 12) in my beginning Chinese textbook, which I have been using (fitfully) for more than a year. Later lessons build on earlier lessons. When I didn’t know a word in a later lesson, I scanned the new-word lists from earlier lessons to find it. I have just discovered there is a word index.

The Jenijoy La Belle Tenure Case at Caltech

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Jenijoy La Belle is a Professor of English at Caltech. Her tenure case, which started in the 1970s, is the main topic of this interview. Because of one person — Robert Huttenback — she was at first denied tenure. Amazingly, she managed to get tenure anyway. In the middle of the fight, which promised to become very embarrassing to Caltech, Huttenback became Chancellor of UC Santa Barbara.

Here is a related story from another interview:

One day on a Saturday or Sunday, I was in Baxter [Baxter Hall of Social Sciences and] picking up my mail upstairs. There was nobody else there but Huttenback and a young Turk— a young professor of economics, I guess, who is now of course a famous full professor somewhere, perhaps even retired. They were in the office that Jenijoy was going to have and next to it was the men’s toilet. And they were talking about playing a joke. The goal was to make the situation as uncomfortable—more than uncomfortable, offensive—for Jenijoy as possible. And I will not—I remember exactly what they were doing, but it is so crude that I will not tell you.

Here is one of La Belle’s comments:

In 1982, someone sent me a clipping from the Santa Barbara News and Review, from a column that sounded more like gossip than news. But it simply began: “Even in UCSB circles familiar with Chancellor Robert Huttenback’s perquisites of power, the situation has caused comment. Why do university cars and drivers transport Freda Huttenback, his better half, on personal business? Campus employees, from maintenance to clerical workers, tell us of receiving a Xeroxed map to the Huttenbacks’ home and directions to chauffeur her wherever she asks. These trips have reportedly included visits to a Ventura chiropractor. “Huttenback defends the practice by calling his wife a consultant to the university on interior design matters, saying that she occasionally needs a university car and driver for decorating business. Huttenback first denied he or his wife ever used the car for personal errands: ‘Whoever told you that must be someone I fired,’ was his reply.”

Huttenback was eventually convicted of fraud. He defends himself here.

New University of California: A Good Idea

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A California assemblyman named Scott Wilk has proposed a “New University of California” whose only purpose would be to provide certification tests — tests that show you have learned the material of this or that college class. Here is what his bill says:

(1) The New University of California shall provide no instruction, but shall issue college credit and baccalaureate and associate degrees to any person capable of passing examinations.

(2) The New University of California is authorized to contract with qualified entities for the formulation of peer-reviewed course examinations the passage of which would demonstrate that the student has the knowledge and skill necessary to receive college credit for that course.

This is not online education. You can learn the material however you want — for example, by reading a book.

An unsigned New York Times editorial called the idea “ particularly ludicrous” but did not say why. I think it’s a good idea. It gives students much more power: They can choose the learning methods and materials and times that fit them best (listening to lectures at work, for example), in contrast to the one-class-fits-all approach at almost all colleges. The cost in time and money will be much less than attending a typical university. The proposal helps employers because passage of these tests reflects a skill useful in many jobs: ability to learn on one’s own.

Compared to an ordinary college degree (say, from Berkeley), a degree or certification from the New University of California fails to show that you did well enough in high school to get admitted to Berkeley. This could be remedied by showing your prospective employer a letter of admittance to Berkeley.

Why Fujoshi? Experiment by Tsinghua Freshmen

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In January I blogged about teaching a class in a new way. The obvious novelty was that I did no grading, but I was also pleased by the high quality of the student work.

The class, at Tsinghua University, is called Foundations of Psychology. It’s required of psychology majors and is taken by freshmen. Last time there were about 25 students. The biggest assignment was a final project where I allowed students to work on their own interests. They could do almost anything they wanted related to psychology and they could work alone or with others. I “graded” their work via a checklist: X points for doing this, Y points for doing that, and so on, with the possible points adding up to an A. The checklist was different for every project. They had about five weeks.

Here is a summary of one project, by Vista Zeng:

In the Frontiers of Psychology class this term, we, a group of three freshmen (Vista Zeng, Joy Wu and Michael Wu) conducted an experiment on Fujoshi. Fujoshi is a subculture that started in Japan and spread in East Asia. It has influenced many of our classmates and friends. When recruiting participants, we found 14 Fujoshis out of about 720 female students in Tsinghua University.

According to Wikipedia, fujoshi is synonymous with yaoi fandom:

Yaoi fandom refers to readers of yaoi (also called Boys’ Love, BL), a genre of male-male romance narratives aimed at a female audience, and more specifically those who participate in communal activities organized around yaoi, such as attending conventions, maintaining or posting to fansites, creating fanfiction or fanart, etc. Most fans are teenage girls or young women. . . . In Japan, female fans are called fujoshi.

It’s easy to raise questions like “why don’t those girls enjoy heterosexual romance narratives?”, “why is boys becoming fans of female-female romance narratives and creating another sub-culture (yuri) not so big an issue?”, or “why did this phenomena first occur in Eastern society?”. Vista Zeng believed that the main reason may be the traditional ethics in Eastern world (China and Japan, to be specific) on women. Traditional Chinese moral principles assume that women are not supposed to appear in these sexual scenes, so the girls turn to male homosexual products to satisfy themselves, and to avoid the condemnation from our society.

Since there are very few researches on this topic, and all of them use research methods like interviewing, Vista decided to conduct an experiment to test her explanation. Joy and Wu joined the project.

The study included 30 Fujoshis and 30 non-Fujoshis in Tsinghua University. [The students recruited about half of their Fujoshi subjects going door to door in the dormitories, the other half by making announcements in classes.] The subjects were asked to read several paragraphs including erotic scene, and the only difference between them was the gender of the two characters. The first story includes two male characters, the second one a man and a woman (“he” and “she”), the third one a man and the reader herself (“he” and “me”). (The idea was inspired by the study about judgments of intentionality by Joshua Knobe, which the class introduced.) What’s more, a neutral paragraph was put between two paragraphs. The subjects were asked to estimate her emotional feelings (we mainly focused on embarrassment and the sense of guilt) on a scale before and after reading each paragraph aloud in front of 3 strangers, and the 3 observers would also estimate the subject’s extent of embarrassment.

The answer to our assumption was yes. The most important finding was that the Fujoshis felt less guilty than non-Fujoshis when reading the male-homosexual paragraph, but far more guilty when reading the heterosexual one, showing that they agree with the idea that women are not supposed to appear in these sexual scenes. We also found that women are prone to put themselves into the sexual scene in which women are constantly involved, and they are therefore embarrassed and guilt about their own feelings.

We think our study found an example about how the traditional ethics from thousands of years ago still influence the teenagers nowadays in China, and implied a lack of sense of equality and self-esteem of Chinese women – they don’t see their natural desire and rights legitimate. However, the Fujoshis are also the ones who dare to show their demands of sexual narratives (generally, we found Fujoshis more open to sexual topics than Non-Fujoshis), which can be seen as a progress in Chinese society. We are glad that we conducted the first experiment on Fujoshi (as far as we know) and got such findings which are worth thinking about.

 

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How Meritocratic is Chinese Higher Education?

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A friend of mine taught at Harvard for a few years. Her husband needed a job, so he taught a writing class. He said his students were so bad it appeared to be an experiment: How stupid can you be and succeed at Harvard? They had not been admitted based on SAT scores or grades, that was clear. In a recent article called “The Myth of American Meritocracy”, Ron Unz described considerable evidence of exactly what my friend’s husband noticed: Harvard admission not based on the usual “meritocratic” measures, such as SAT scores and grades. For example, he found evidence of an Asian quota. If Asians weren’t penalized for being Asian, far more would be admitted.

In a follow-up article, Unz wrote:

Near the beginning of my article [about meritocracy] I had noted that although complaints about official corruption of every sort are a leading topic on the Chinese Internet and also in Western media coverage, I had never once heard such a claim about admissions to elite Chinese universities. This led me to conclude that the process was entirely meritocratic, and a couple of individuals with good knowledge of China confirmed this. However, during one of my recent Yale Law events, a student from China stated that he and his friends were firmly convinced that any of China’s 350 Central Committee members could easily obtain an admissions slot for his friends or relatives, so my claim was incorrect. This conflicting evidence may be reconciled if the number of such corrupt admissions each year is so tiny—perhaps a few hundred out of over eight million—that it is completely invisible to the general public. I should note that the New York Times just ran another major story on colleges in China, emphasizing every possible unfair aspect of the system, but nonetheless indicating that admissions were entirely meritocratic and objective.

Here is one reason that there is zero discussion of corruption in admission to elite Chinese universities (such as Tsinghua, where I teach): Rich Chinese universally want their children to go to college outside China, especially America. The more money you have, the easier this is. I’d guess all children of Central Committee members attend college outside China. None of them attend Tsinghua, as far as I know. At least among my students, this is utterly obvious — that education outside China is superior and anyone who can go outside China will. The brake on this is purely cost. One of my students said she didn’t want to burden her parents with the cost.

The test that Chinese high school students take to get into college is the gaokao. One of my students got the highest gaokao score in Beijing. An astonishing achievement. He didn’t get in to any American university. The Chinese public was shocked. Many newspaper articles were written about it. The rest of my students knew about it. His family is not well-off. This is why he failed where thousands of Chinese students from rich families — who didn’t bother to take the gaokao, but surely would have had a lower score – succeeded. Although he went to Tsinghua as a freshman, he too wanted to escape Chinese higher education. First he transferred to the University of Hong Kong. Then he transferred to MIT.

Why is Chinese higher education so bad that everyone who can avoids it? One of my students (a psychology major) said that as the economy quickly improved, the government quickly expanded the college education system. There weren’t enough good teachers to fill the slots. That’s one reason. Another reason is a certain ethos. I asked a friend of mine, a Tsinghua student not majoring in psychology, “In what fraction of your classes do the professors lecture by reading from the textbook?” 80%, she said. That’s at Tsinghua. Below Tsinghua it’s worse. Of course students go to college outside China for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. The most obvious is prestige: It is prestigious to go elsewhere.

Lack of higher education meritocracy in China has a more subtle aspect. It is much easier to get into elite universities, such as Tsinghua, if you live in Beijing or Shanghai than if you live elsewhere, especially poor provinces. Is this unfair? It isn’t easy to say because the gaokao is different in different places. I don’t know the official reason for this (different textbooks?), but the difference in tests makes it easier to have lower admissions cutoff scores for students from Beijing and Shanghai. A Beijing student at Tsinghua will usually have a lower gaokao score than a student at Tsinghua from a poor province. Of course it is much more expensive to live in Beijing and Shanghai than elsewhere. Moreover, a big chunk of the gaokao is about English proficiency. A student’s English proficiency depends heavily on amount and quality of English education, which depends heavily on family income. The richer you are, the better your children’s English.

All this makes political sense. Richer people — whose children have better English — have more political power than the less rich. Those who live in Beijing and Shanghai have more political power than people in poor provinces. Allowing their children get into Tsinghua with lower gaokao scores (Beijing and Shanghai residents) or writing the gaokao so that their children have an advantage (English proficiency) is one way to keep them happy.