A Weblog

After reading my first post about the effects of the New Capitalism on education, Liz kindly sent me this article on the changing conception of career with regard to teaching from the Phi Delta Kappan. As I had mentioned before, onece upon a time, people choose a job for life. Indeed this is the case with the retiring class of teachers today, but those who are replacing them fall into three categories: the lifers, the explorers, and the capstoners. The first group wants to stay in teaching for a long time; the second sees teaching as a springboard to other things, but are still serious about education while they’re there; and the third have already done other things, are probably late along in life, and want to retire into teaching. In 2001 it was projected that we’d need about 2.1 million more teachers than we already had by 2010. I’m not sure what the numbers are now, but I’d find it hard to believe that many qualified, elementary and secondary school educators just walked onto the scene. So it’s important that we invite and make use of all three types of people. The trick, then, is how to keep them once we’ve got them, and how to make them into good teachers.

For a moment, let’s pretend that the new lifers, the teachers who decided in third grade that what he wanted to do was teach, went to a teaching school, has full certification, and loves and wants to teach forever are the standard. [Of course I take great issue with the way math teachers are trained; but for now, I'll hold those gripes aside.] The explorers aren’t sure they want to teach long-term, but they know they want to teach for a few years. These are the folks programs like Teach for America and the Massachusetts $20,000 signing bonus for new teachers—article on its limitations here—are after. I’m a bit weary of this lot. Most of them don’t stick around; many know that they’re going on to graduate and med school after a few years. They don’t have the time, experience, or training to be good teachers. And while they are usually very serious about their work, the reality of the situation is a bit bleak. After two years of working for Teach for America, volunteers bring raise their students on average from the 14th percentile the 17th. That’s not an awful lot. Even if we pick our teachers from an newly graduated, Ivy-league educated pool, studies have shown that merely being an expert in your field doesn’t make you an expert teacher in your field. [This is shocking, I know.] That’s why pedagogical training is so important. Knowing the facts is one thing; knowing how to teach those facts is another.

Likewise, the majority of capstoners lack any formal instruction in teaching. What’s worse, they often can’t afford the time or money to enter into a certification program. If we’re going to keep either of these groups around for the long haul, and to attract more into the lifers’ group, we need to train and support our fledgeling teachers. As I’ve said before, less than one percent of school budgets go to professional development nationally. Even then, programs like Programs in Professional Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education focus on upper-level administration, not on entry-level teachers. Of course, there aren’t that many places to spend money on training. Many advanced courses—graduate level classes in history, science, math, etc.—are taught during the day and require full-time attention. And these classes are not designed with teachers in mind: they’re for the serious academic, and so, don’t pay much attention to the difficulties presented by the specific subject content. [This body of knowledge is called content pedagogical knowledge; you can't teach chemistry the same way you teach art history. The fields are not the same, so your approach to them shouldn't be the same.] here just isn’t an infrastructure to support our educators.

For a long time it was assumed that the problem lay in attracting new teachers. But in light of the New Capitalism, we see that the real problem is retaining new teachers. We can keep them longer if we give them better facilities, higher wages—these tactics work and are employed just about everywhere—but something we have systematically denied to teachers, something we’d expect in any other field, is the a chance to grow professionally. Before the New Capitalism workers climbed up and down the ladder. In education, the analogue is weak if present at all. We have long expected a classroom teacher to stay in the classroom, to teach the same material year after year, in approximately the same way—repeating the cycle mechanically each fall. It’s no wonder technology zealots believe they can automate the learning process, sending our kids to computers. Society has long held his opinion.

Of course, professional development has the added bonus of continually raising the abilities and therefore qualities of our teachers’ instruction to their students.

Sorry that I’m so slow to write anything. I’ve directed my energy to categorizing all of the posts now that I can. Many of you will remember the Technocrati tags I started putting at the bottom of entries just before the Berkman Center switched their servers. This is a lot easier, and soon I’ll be done; promise. In the meantime, check out the category and search functions. Don’t let the labels fool you—I’m lumping things together in perhaps unusual ways.

I’ve just begun the migration from the old Manilla server to the new, expedient, and aesthetic Wordpress server. [It even correctly identifies and interprets en-dashes, em-dashes, and hyphens! I could not be happier.] As a matter of good cheer—and as a bow to good karma—, I’ve kept the automated post that indicates that things are working properly.

Welcome to Weblogs at Harvard Law School. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

You’ll notice that this post also has a comment associated with it. That was made automatically, too. Due to the increased ease provided by Wordpress, perhaps you, too, dear reader, will start posting comments. I dare you; I double-dog dare you to.

On the way to the T this morning, my sister and I heard the beginning of WBUR’s Monday edition of On Point. Guest Richard Sennet, professor of sociology at MIT and the London School of Economics, was invited to discuss his book The Culture of the New Capitalism, something I’ve yet to read but plan to shortly. The New Capitalism is part of the so-called New Economy which sprung up in the late 80s and early 90s with the inflation of the Dot-com bubble. The movement was marked, Sennet said, by three characteristics: increased globalization; highly integrated and new technologies — and while these two are important, sure, their effects on how we work can be best felt when they interact with the last mark of the New Economy — a drastic restructure of business.

The 90s business model demanded lean and quick companies, organized from a tight center. Workers no longer climbed and descended the ladder within a business. A career is no longer for life. Instead, there was a shift from long-term strategies to short-term ones. The New Capitalist values potential ability, not proven histories. The past matters less; it’s about about the immediate future.

While New Capitalism only applies, presently, to a small percentage of jobs — you find this model most frequently in the high tech sector and finance. It still troubles me. If adopted in other fields, say healthcare and education (and as far as I can tell it is), we could be in big trouble. The transient nature of New Capitalism precludes long-term institutional memory. It prevents a worker from planning his job trajectory. At least when we were on the ladder there was something to hold on to. When I heard the radiocast, I immediately thought of some of what this means for education.

The math curricula used in the States has been criticized for its being “a mile wide and an inch deep.” We try to force our kids to learn lots and lots of complicated topics in math without spending time to carefully develop them. The emphasis is on quick, adaptable [rote] learning. We reward the effort required to memorize formulae and ignore the strategy and understanding to develop them. This is tremendously problematic. To see why, we need to talk just a little bit about how people learn.

Generally, there are two parts to knowledge: the actual facts, and how we store the facts in our heads — the relational and organizing structures. Please suffer me the following, perhaps exaggerated and inaccurate analogy. Pretend you’re a cattle farmer and you’ve got some cows and some land, much more than you could ever possibly use. Now if let the cows roam free. The more you have, the harder it is to herd them together. If you have too many, you won’t be able to focus on any of them. You’ll have to spend all your time tracking down the ones which wandered off and got lost. This is how our math and science programs were and many continue to be. The students is presented with lots of isolated facts and no way to connect them.

Now let’s continue to pretend. This time you built a fence to hold your herd. You think this is a great idea; however, this time you forgot to purchase cows.

There was a big push in the early and mid-90s to teach students about organizing principles, ostensibly to draw all those disconnected facts together. I remember having to draw really inane “thought trees” about photosynthesis from a given collection of words. The research shows that these attempts were often ineffectual. It’s important to spend lots of time to develop enough factual content as a base before we try to flesh out the relationships that exist within it. In effect, we had our kids build a fence but didn’t provide them with any cows. What sort of farmers were we raising?

The point is that the New Capitalism doesn’t allow the time to develop a craft. It was once said that the study of behavior is the study of the history of behavior. What happened in the yesterday affects who you are today, and who you are today affects who you are tomorrow. The same is true in learning. It’s crucial to consider the student as a continuous narrative. New Capitalism has an unfair bias towards the future to the exclusion of the past. We might be able to work that way, but it’d be pretty stupid to teach and learn that way.

[And I've said nothing about its emphasis on effort over strategy and its implications to contigent self-worth and motivation theory. Nor have I ranted sufficiently against its prizing immediate gratification and why this is also a stupid idea. Of course, I haven't read the book, so I may have completely misconstrued everything. Unfortunately, I don't believe I have.]

Disclaimer: This post will be about as funny as the last and even more self-indulgent.

I can’t sleep. But moments ago I nearly nodded off. During that in-between-dream-and-wakeful-worlds time I suddenly simplified a solution to my blockmate Verena’s QFT homework. She had to verify some result about the Lorentz group — at least I thought I had. So I jumped up, ran to the computer, and wrote a technically inclined email to her about SL(2,C), a group of manifold importance to mathematicians and physicists alike. Satisfied, I went back to bed only to realize, again while nodding off, that I was wrong. What I wrote applied not to the special linear group but to the projective special linear group, PSL(2,C).

Neither of those emails contained the revelation mentioned in the title. No, it is this: if I think about this stuff to ease myself to sleep, maybe I do, indeed, want to be a mathematician when I grow up, at least for a little bit. Anyway, now you and I both have something to contemplate before bed.

Disclaimer: Okay, I admit it: despite the title of this post, no one, not even me, will think that this story is funny. It made me smirk at the time, but I sneak into this class. I happen to know that none of you do. I’d see you. There are only eleven of us, and it’s a small room. But if you feel brave, or are work wasting time, or are my mom (Hi, mom!), I invite you to read on. But know that what follows is in no way funny, so don’t take it out on me when you don’t laugh.

In mathematics, as in physics, it is sometimes useful to treat the electric and magenetic fields separately. Historically, the electric field gets the symbolic designation E, while the magnetic field gets B. [I'm not especially sure why. Magnet in German is der Magnet. And Maxwell, the guy who settled the theory way back when, was British. I'm not sure who fixed the notation, but it's screwy. And to make matters worse, sometimes physicists use an alternate quantity, the magnetic strength, H, instead. But now I'm starting to confuse myself. I hated electrodynamics. The important player in this story is E, anyway.]

I know, I know. Why would ever want to split up the E and B fields when we could combine them into a single, more manageable tensor? Well, it turns out to be useful when constructing the Ernst potential when studying the geometry of spinning black holes, and that’s exactly what we were doing in class on Wednesday.

Yau had, as he always does, scrawled several chalkboards worth of equations for our benefit and understanding of a rather subtle and technically difficult proof of the uniqueness of a charged, stationary, axially symmetric black hole — the so-called Reissiner-Nordstrom-Kerr black hole. These equations made use of the aforementioned fields E and B. By this time he had introduced another important player, the guage potential — a sort of secret symmetry [It ammounts to the relabelling of space. Even old New York was once New Amsterdam, when they changed the name, however, the geography was pretty uneffected. Nature doesn't care what you call it. That's the whole point of guage symmetry.] — which he denoted by capital lambda. While this notation is conventional, it’s not universally accepted. Some people also use A instead. Yau does. But the text he was lecturing from does not. As a result, he mixed As and uppercase lambdas freely. Eventually this bugged someone enough to ask about it.

But Yau had already overloaded E, too, using it simulateously for the electric field and the Ernst potential, which [indirectly] depends on the the electric field! [I told you this wasn't going to be funny. Stop rolling your eyes.] A little braver now that someone else had expressed his confusion, another man spoke up.

“This E over there and this one over here aren’t the same E, are they?” he asked, pointing accordingly.

Yau realized his abuse of notation and set to redress the error of his ways.

“Oh. I’ll just erase this one, then,” he said. And then he did. The whole affair had a touch 1984 to it. Problem solved. Now there was only one, unambiguous E. Inconvenient history never happened. Not if it’s not recorded. The Founding Fathers knew this well. Orwell knew it. And apparently, Yau knows it, too.

Even if it’s not funny, you can understand, perhaps, why I smiled, though.

Yesterday, the Associated Press published an article explaining “a growing national debate over whether the nation’s newest education experiment is — unexpectedly — encouraging school segregation.”

Because of the penalties listed in the No Child Left Behind Act, schools who “underperform” lose funding. If you’re a public school administrator, and your school’s doing just fine, what are you going to say to a poor, stereotypically troubled and troubling child who wants admission? No way. It only makes sense, right? If you take him, his tests scores could jeopardize your already delicate budget. And that kid who just immigrated and can’t yet speak English and so will almost certainly fail the mandatory state assessment — well, she’s out, too.

It’s economically advantageous to segregate against poor students under the law. So, now we see school doing just that. But to say it’s unexpected, as the AP says, is simply just wrong.

The same sort of argument came up when there was a big push for vouchers for charter schools. It’s true, test scores generally rise when public schools have to compete with charter schools. However, it’s a zero-sum game. For every student who jumps ships from a public to a charter school [or the other way around], that students state allocation leaves with him. Some say this puts the onus on schools to be the best they can so that they don’t lose students. But that’s a fairly unreasonable expectation unless you provide sufficient funds.

Imagine a doctor denying a patient treatment, “Oh, no. No medicine for you, not until you get better.” That would teach America never to get sick again. Sure, we ought to have standards, but this is ridiculous.

Charter schools were bad, but they weren’t everywhere. They were only a local evil, plaguing, for the most part, cities and large metropolitan areas where there are enough students and therefore government subsidy. My small hometown of 10,000 residents can only furnish enough kids to graduate less than sixty each year — not nearly enough for the economics to provide us with a charter school. Our partner school, the one with which we share football, hockey, and my senior year, cross-country teams, is even smaller. [To be fair, each class starts with about 120, but after you figure in attrition to private and vocational institutions, drop-outs, and death (there are less than a handful in the last category), it's suprising if there are more than 50 students left in good standing by senior year.]

No Child Left Behind is worse: it’s national. No one can escape it. [Even if a state tried to, they'd forfeit almost all federal support. So while it's not compulsory to comply in theory, it is in practice. Isn't that tantamount to extortion?] The flow of well-to-do, advantaged populations to well-to-do, advantaged schools will continue, as it always has. But now, schools are going to be [and this article says they are] on even more careful watch to keep the disadvantaged out.

What we need to do, you see, is get rid of the many millions of dollars it costs to develop, administer, assess, and analyse large tests like the MCAS [which, despite the lone open-ended math essay question still ask SAT-type, multiple choice which do not prove a kid understands anything other than how to take a test; the AP sucks less, but still an awful lot. They let me take a TI-89 calculator which can do symbolic manipulations to the exam in high school.]. Instead, we need to invest it in the teachers. Less than 1% of school budgets nation-wide are dedicated to professional development. I can’t wait to be a comfortable, gentleman academic.

Today’s post is interactive. Since I’m reading all about learning theory, I thought I’d play scientist and sign up for Survey Monkey. There are only three questions, and one of them asks for your birth month. Nothing hard. Nothing tricky.

Click here to take survey.

After a week or fifty responses, whichever comes first, I’ll let you know what I was up to and whether it worked.

Today (Friday) marks the one-week anniversary of a very important grown-up event: last week I sponsored Teymour during his road test. Now, this may not seem like a big deal at first glance, but I promise you it is. Remember when you, unless you’re Liz, a sixteen year old, scared and anxious to pass your driving exam. For those of you who aren’t Massachusetts I should explain a little. Here we require an adult, at least 21, and who has had his license for at least three years (or so), to sponsor the newbie, to loan a car, insurance, and license while a usually gruff state trooper monitors from the passenger seat. Last Friday, I was such a sponsor for Teymour.

His appoint was at 4pm exactly, though I somehow misunderstand him and thought it wasn’t until 4:30pm. I picked him up from the T at 2pm to practice driving. It had been a good five or six years since I drove the course, but since it was sufficiently short, I remembered it pretty well. Go out from the parking lot, take your first, legal right — this was almost a trick direction, as the immediate right is a one-way in the opposite direction — pull over, back up in a straight line, make a three-point turn, and head back to the RMV. Simple. Thankfully, I never had to back up in a straight line nor did I have to parallel park. Had either been required I’m sure I would’ve failed. My driving instructor, Mr. Lantini, had arranged a signal to guide me through the complications of parallel parking during the test, but, due to its illegality, I was all the more terrified by the possibility.

Luckily Teymour wouldn’t have to face such trials. Unfortunately, he drove over the curb during the initial practice run. Two hours later, however, he was ready to go. We were almost late. Remember I had misunderstood his appointment time. We raced back, as fast as an overly cautious, novice driver can go, really. It was only 4:03pm when we arrived.

The statie was nice — she was a jovial, round, black woman. While I normally don’t, this time I’m willing to draw on stereotypes. She was gregarious, sweet, and unassuming. She was sympathetic to Teymour. He’s old at 21, after all. Even as a foreigner — Teymour is from Paris, France, and holds both a French and Canadian passport — by American standards he was an American driving old maid. She told us that after work she doesn’t leave her house, or, if she does, she makes her husband drive: people are just too crazy to brave the road, she told us.

Teymour acted suprised whenever she gave her orders. He was almost genuinely confused when she asked him to stop and back up. I remained silent and disinterested. If the sponsor is caught coaching, the road test is automatically forfeited; nobody wanted that.

The cop looked at Teymour’s permit. “You came all the way down here from Cambridge” she asked.

“Yep,” Teymour responded. I had warned him not to sound too much of a dandy, but he just can’t help himself. Even a single word gave him away.

“Why’s that? It’s an awful long way.” To avert an awkward pause, and to make sure that he didn’t say, “Because I heard it was easy here,” I broke in.

“Oh, I live in Avon,” which is a neighboring town. You’ve got to go where the car is, the statie agreed. She continued. Eventually Teymour admitted that he isn’t an American citizen. Why was he here, then? School, of course. Oh, he went to Harvard. Gosh, that’s impressive. I can’t tell you how much I wish he hadn’t mentioned that. When I was in Scotland with Alli and DJ, we scorned DJ when he got drunk and told as many people as he could find that we went to Harvard. Everyone expects more, be it money or otherwise, even if we don’t have it.

She asked, “You must have a lot of student loans, then, right?” He didn’t. “So are you rich or something?”

There it was, that horrible, pained, extended silence.

Again, I sighed, smiled, and spoke, “I have plenty of student loans.” To be fair, I’m sure I do. I haven’t yet received any paperwork to confirm the amount of my loans, but I’m sure they’re substantial. Anyway, this was enough to appease the cop. She offered her hand. I gave her a flat high-five, to which she responded, “That’s the American way!” She left her hand out. Not to leave her hanging, I repeated the gesture. We were all in good spirits again.

“Take a left at this light.” We were almost back in at the RMV. Things were going well. Teymour turned into the parking lot. We were done. He was done. He had passed. I let him drive me back to Cambridge on the highway. I had to take the wheel from him three times to avert an accident. We made it, though, safely.

It’s hard to explain the sort of father-son relationship a road test can engender. I’m very flattered to have had the opportunity. The license hasn’t come in the mail yet, and I certainly will never let Teymour drive my car again.

Each Thursday after church choir, I usually drive to Jamaic Plain, park on or near Green Street, and then walk to the combination convenience store and Dunkin Donuts to pick up a bag of Twizzlers. Many people believe there are two types of Twizzlers: black licorice and red. But that’s not quite true. Red isn’t a flavor, unless we’re talking about hospital gelatin desserts. Red Twizzlers come in cherry and strawberry flavors. And while neither even remotely approximate the fruit, it is important for me and my tastes to choose cherry and never strawberry.

If the weather is nice, I like to stroll the streets nearby in a loop on the way back to my car, with the bag displayed prominently in my left hand, and a single strip of the candy in my right. I try not to chomp at the Twizzlers too quickly. I like the bag to last me the entire circuit.

In high school, there was a teacher, Lou Pearlstein, who always carried a small stash of red Twizzlers in this way. It didn’t matter where—in the halls, in class—he was always chewing. I never met Lou in a classroom environment. He taught high school physics, and I was only a lowly eighth grader when he had his heart attack. Don’t worry; he didn’t die. No, in fact, he was quite alive. He did, however, manage to drain the teachers’ common emergency fund during his recovery, though. There were politics involved. But I was young and naive and he sometimes shared his Twizzlers with me, even though I wasn’t his student.

Mr. Pearlstein was a big, round man—not especially tall, but firm. He looked like a proper physics teacher. He also looked like good football coach, which he was not. In fact, he didn’t coach at all. But he did keep his right hand in the front of his pants like football players sometimes do when they play in the cold. It was kind of him to let me select which Twizzler I wanted straight from the bag rather than handing it to me himself. Hygene was important to him.

I hope the Twizzlers aren’t what caused his heart attack.

Happy Maundy Thursday, everybody.