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Not having started my midterm project for one of my courses, due next Tuesday, last night I canvassed my classmates for help. What I needed what a suitable topic. The instructor decided to list broad, unstructured adjectives at me rather than let everyone else give specific examples. At the end of her description she said, “There, I’ll let that sit with you a while and you can incubate at home. Are you comfortable with that?”

“Sure. Usually I like to incubate for as long as possible,” I answered—to what effect, I’m not exactly sure. Donna burst into tears laughing.

There’s something very funny about the word incubate, I think.

Technorati Tags: chicken, incubate, midterm

Yesterday I was finishing off the emotional downward swing I had started a few days before. (The fortune cookie didn’t help.) To make things better, my roommate and I played tennis, though the unfeeling light of autumn mid-day coupled with the clear, seasonal cold didn’t seem to help anything. So I went back inside to mope. My dad and I have weekly plans to swim. We drove to the pool only to find that there had been some horrible, mechanical malfunction which had us dry for at least yesterday. Not to be stymied by external factors, the three of us—yes, we coaxed DJ into a run; we met on the cross-country team, you know—went for a short jog around the neighborhood. The air burnt my lungs. The run strained my back. Dissatisfied with the length of the run, DJ and I tried out tennis once more. This time we were nearer to dusk, the light was somehow warmer, though the air temperature was not. Someone on the street over had started a fire to dispose of his leaves. It filled the courts with the light scent of smoke, which complemented the New England scene provided by the trees which hang over our courts.

Even with all the athletic-related endorphins floating around, I was still in a funk. For a few months, I’ve planned on purchasing a Japanese bloodgood red maple tree. (People who have plants live longer—and we can’t have pets in our apartment, otherwise I’d get a beagle; plus I like plants because they aren’t as transient as some other, frivilous buys.) Home Depot regularly sells them to the tune of ninety-nine dollars. I’ve been holding out for the season clearance. Last night, I figured, it was time to get me my tree. While we were there, I picked up a large pot for my basil plant. It’s doing well, but I think its small, original container must be stifling its growth. Its care-guide suggests re-potting. What better time to pick one up then last night? And so, DJ and I spent our Saturday night rummaging through the plant section of Home Depot for a small tree and an even smaller pot. To take the maple home, we had to pop-off the passenger-side T-top from DJ’s Camero. The tree stuck out and above. Truly, it was a sight to see. The car makes an excellent planter. DJ was careful not to go too fast on the way back. The little guy rustled in the wind, but high speeds could’ve easily snapped the poor thing in two. Rest assured, the tree is fine. In fact, he’s peering at me from across the kitchen table even now as I type.

We dropped the plant materials at home before trekking out to Best Buy for season one of Pinky and the Brain and some alcohol. Last week Liz and Heidi went to local wineries for tastings. They brought back some wonderful cranberry wine. DJ was hooked and last night sought out more. I found myself a Young’s double chocolate stout, a Sam Smith oatmeal stout, and a 4-pack of Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA. By this time, though, we were hungry, not thirsty.

I cooked up a sauce with the two tomatoes on the vine we had left and some basil from my plant, which I have yet to re-pot, some small cheese ravioli, and three Italian sausages, all of which DJ ate. We popped in Pinky and the Brain. I opened the Young’s chocolate stout. Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 DVDs later, I had fallen asleep on the love seat in the living room. I suspect it didn’t help my lower back.

Technorati Tags: bloodgood, maple, tree, pinky and the brain, cranberry, wine, home depot, beer, oatmeal stout, ravioli

I’m starting to think that there’s something to fortune cookies. Tonight after the HGLC mixer, a few of us ended up at the Kong. I ordered the dun-dun noodles and ate them with a pair of chopsticks to show that I hold a functional understanding and demonstrated appreciation for another culture. After the meal my fortune read:

Come back later…I am sleeping. (yes, cookies need their sleep, too.)

Lucky Numbers: 28, 33, 46,5, 15, 2

About a year ago I received two fortune cookies, in a row, both of which were empty. At least this one had the decency to tell me it was skipping out on me. Still I can’t help but feel a little let down.

Recap from Last Time: People use a set of relationships to help make decisions all the time called an ambient filter; some people might call the same set common sense. Stereotypes are a part of common sense.

Something’s not quite settling about the foundations I’ve detailed in the last post. It looks like the only thing we could say about women using ambient filters is that society conditions women to be bad at math (either by depriving them of the ability to hold tenured positions due to sexism, providing hostile working and learning environments, etc). Ah, but that ignores the nature of human existence. Like our filters, which can add or drop a relationship any time, our environment is not fixed.

This might sound a little Marxist to you; it should: Vygotsky (who got it from Engels who was inspired by Marx) loved the idea that man can shape his environment in order to shape himself. Whoa. Let’s pause a moment to digest the educational implications of that statement.

I’m told that in olden times, a person might tie a red or white string on his finger in order to remind himself to do something. Apparently, this was before they had paper and pencil and could write notes. Regardless of the specifics of the method, the general process and effect are the same: make something on the outside to trigger a response on the inside. This the the all-powerful idea of the sign. And if you dig deep enough, you can say all sorts of interesting things about social (as well as societal) effects on learning. Marx said the use of the tool makes us characteristically human; Vygotsky argues in favor of the sign. (Personally, I like the sign better.)

I know, I know, we’re moving slowly. So I’ll speed it up.

Now back to math: who were the principal investigators of mathematics since very early on? Men. And who developed the system of notation and verbal description we commonly use today? Men. And is it very likely that those who study a field of knowledge (which, by the way, may be entirely blind to the natural inclinations of its investigators) are going to devise a method of symbology that makes sense to them? Yes. And is it very likely that these representations of knowledge are going to make sense to its authors precisely because these representations automatically exploit their personal frameworks for understanding? Yes. (That is, would anyone ever record something that he understands in a way that cannot understand? No—at least not on the community-level.) Ah, then would you grant me that if there are biological differences between the way men and women think, doesn’t it make sense that because men have dominated math forever that the language of mathematics as we know it will necessarily be kinder to the male intellect than to its female counterpart? Sure it does.

So what have we learned through our very heavy-handed Socratic dialogue? It is very possible that while real mathematical knowledge doesn’t care what gender a person is, the representations we use today (in the symbols, language, and presentation at large) are biased in favor of men. Weirdly enough, that means there are innate difference between math and women. Exposition of mathematics has changed very little in the past century. The curriculum and its implementation exist primarily for historical reasons. The way people form common sense about math, therefore, hasn’t changed much, either. The trick, if what I say is correct and its effects are large, is to recast the relationships we use to describe math, and the methods by which we establish them, in a way that is meaningful to a larger audience. Of course, uprooting blatantly sexist myths about the role of women in math and science couldn’t hurt, either.

But here’s the really interesting part: we’ve shown that common sense doesn’t exist exclusively within the mind. Instead, we can leave it on the outside, in what we say, write, draw, make, build—in anything, even tangible things!—and that a throrough treatment of creative problem solving (and thought more generally) has to take into consideration the external consciousness we store in everyday objects.

(Yes, Lauren, I know. Historians have long recognized this fact. Ulrich studies teapots, I get it. Archaeologists, too. Sure. But is there anything new under the sun?)

Technorati Tags:marx, vygotsky, sign, semiotics, education, innate differences, mathematics, science, women, memory, knowledge, representation, distributed cognition, symbol, understanding, language

Leverett had its annual Sophomore Dinner (the follow-up to the universally dreaded Sophomore Outing) on Monday night. Being a member of the tutor staff, I was there to form the cohesive bonds required to form a healthy, responsive House community. Next time, I think they should serve more wine. After a fairly riveting bout of Two Truths and Lie, the dinner ended. The cool tutors met in the back of the room to catch up and gossip. Among them was my friend and not cousin Lauren, a PhD candidate in the American Civilizations Department. She does most of her stuff in women’s religious groups during the Progressive Area, but for an upcoming conference in New Hampshire on history and pop culture she’s got to stretch a little bit out of her comfort zone. Religion, it seems, doesn’t count for popular culture. I suggested that she write about the mentalists, Harry Houdini, and Robert Barret Browning. Everybody knows that magic rules. Isn’t Job everyone’s favorite character on Arrested Development, after all? I rest my case. Lauren, stubborn in her religiosity, has decided to retell one of the oldest stories from the Catholic church, this time with a Progressive Area twist: the age-old tale of the clergy pederast.

Now it should be noted that both men and women took small boys during the fifty years straddling the dawn of the twentieth century. The girls, it seems, were left out. Perhaps we think so only because we lack historical evidence demonstrating otherwise; but maybe it’s because there’s an innate difference between boys and girls that makes one more attractive to clergy than the other. I have to be careful here. This is a serious topic. And serious topics require reverence. Readers, try not to infer my personal beliefs from what I say. I can already hear several of you groaning in agony. I don’t hate women, or even children.

So, when Lauren and I convened (with the other cool tutors), I asked her how her mentalists were treating her. She insisted that she’s not writing about mentalists—which I told again told her was a poor choice—but about gender issues. So I told her that I, too, had been thinking about gender issues for one of my classes. In my Introduction to Creative Thought class, I’ve structured my weekly assignments around some serious efforts to establish a satisfactory, background-independent framework for creative problem solving. (You can see my general relativist training seeping into the vocabulary and aims, can’t you?) Of course, there are social inhibitors and enhancers. And it’s hard to incorporate society objectively into a working definition. And thus, in a very roundabout way, I explained that gender issues are very important to me, too.

Without telling you too much about my hair-brained problem solving schema, I will say that society influences just about every decision we make. Even when we’re alone, we’re not. Post-modernists love this idea. Even when you think you’re alone, the experiences culled from daily life shape the little voice in your head, opening the flood gates for society and everything that associated with it to come rushing in and drown you, the individual, out of your own mind, even without any direct, external presence. Sure, I’m being a little melodramatic. Exaggeration can be dangerous, but here it’s well worth sitting down and inspecting which thoughts are really, truly, exclusively your own. Go ahead, I dare you.

The idea is that whenever anyone approaches a problem, any problem, he makes some decisions about which relationships will be useful in finding a solution. (Yes, sticklers, I know that problem identification is not well-defined. To those of you who care, I appeal to any appropriate variant of the very robust berry picking model for information retrieval.) For example, when writing a sonnet, I might include several relationships between words I use and the number of syllables they include in my relationship set. Chances are I wouldn’t have to rely on the relationship “Wings help birds fly.” The way we choose which elements to include in a problem’s relationship set I call a filter. Filters are important because people collect what seems to be an uncountable number of relationships as they go about their daily routines. It’d be computationally impossible to consider all of them all the time. Indeed we pick up rules so often that it’s easy to do so without giving them due attention.

On the Cosby Show, Claire asked husband Cliff the following:

A parent and child were driving along one night, when, unfortunately, another car hit theirs. Only the child survived the immediate wreckage but was in critical condition. At the hospital, the attendant ER doctor gasped to see the boy on the stretcher. “I can’t operate on this boy; he is my son,” the doctor exclaimed. But how can that be?

Cliff, stuck in his ways, forgot that women can be doctors, too. When approaching the problem, he secretly used the relationship “Doctors are men.” And so the filter that’s almost always on—unless we consciously recognize and change it—I call the ambient filter. Some people might call it common sense. Where am I going with this? Ah, gender roles comprise part of our ambient filters.

This post is starting to get a little long, and I know, being a reader myself, that it’s hard slough through overtly boring entries. To read about how filters relate to why women don’t do math, continue on to the next post.

Technorati Tags:information retreival, knowledge, information, stereotypes, filters, gender, mathematics, berry picking, logic, reasoning, education, philosophy

After graduation, there’s that lurking temptation to do the unthinkable: to sell your soul and jump into finance. Now I’m not hating on any of you who did this. Business is an important, even necessary part of society. So we need people to do it. The work is hard; the hours are long; but I hear the pay is pretty good. And actually, I think that my job is from a social health perspective far worse. You see, I’m in the education field.

People who go into the high-paced financial markets, well, they really can do very limited damage. Right out of school, few of us are in a position to ruin countries economically or otherwise. They keep the harm to themselves. High levels of stress combined with few hours to sleep leave the worker mentally and physically drained. Then, in those few hours they do have to themselves, many seek refuge in drugs or alcohol. Not all do, of course. But even those who do don’t really leave a lasting gash on society. Ah, but then there are those like me. The quiet, horrible types who try to help out others.

At least in business, there isn’t any real pretension to altruism. In education, that’s all we claim to do. Invest in the children today to save the world of tomorrow, and the like. However, it’s seldom that easy. Oftentimes, people deign to do charitable acts which tend more to harm than to help. Remember that obnoxious girl who tried to order her food at Boca Grande in Spanish? It took her fourteen times as long as everyone else and made everyone in the restaurant (except, possibly, the girl—she didn’t stop, after all) feel uncomfortable. That sort of thing happens a lot in education, but the effects are more permanent. Try as we might, people like to simplify complicated processes because, well, that’s human nature.

I freelance for a publishing company in the math textbook division. Right now I write tests for an accompanying middle school textbook series. And let me tell you, while it’s hard to write a good math textbook problem, it’s very easy to write a bad one. Many states, and indeed the country at large, have pushed for more so-called real-world math. These over-contextualized problems do wonders to confuse and hinder understanding. The research shows how bad they are, but people seem to love them. Or, rather, they love to make their children do them. No one actually loves to do them. That’s why many parents won’t help their children do their math homework. (And whoa, what a message that sends the kids: math is unimportant; it’s okay not to be good at math; do it now and soon it’ll be over. Why don’t we accept a similar level of ignorance in other fields? It’s embarrassing not to be a “reading person” but perfectly fine not to be a “math person.”)

Motivated by the enthusiasm and reward real-world problems brought Agatha Christie (to be honest: I don’t know anything about Agatha Christie aside from this quotation, which pops-up in math education reading from time to time. In fact, up until recently I thought she was Angela Lansbury), I rely on her words. They float around in my head and guide my writing:

I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours I found it quite enthralling.

And so I try to sneak in problems that use only thinly veiled real-world examples, but are secretly robust, real math problems. I’d include some examples, but I’ve signed a non-disclosure contract.

Some of my problems don’t have numbers at all, and even ask students to draw and label their answers. Of course, for every problem I come up with that I think is mathematically constructive, I submit six or seven others that I think are damaging. And here’s the problem: I actively hurt children. I help to spread and reinforce American mathphobia, one problem at a time. Because of me (and those like me), children learn to believe that math is boring, calculation according to some magic set of standards that devious, smart, and totally absent people make up. Still, it’s nice to know that I’m fighting back the cancer of classically construed middle school math, albeit not by much.

And the textbook series that I’m writing for isn’t extremely terrible. The authors sprinkle in short and extended response questions among the rote drill calculations. Some of the questions are open-ended. And they’re big on listing the standards each problem uses. Yet the text introduces the meat of each standard through by example, leaving the student to abstract and generalize rules on his own. (This is quite generally a dangerous practice.) Obvious over-contextualization aside, these margin notes do encourage basic metacognitive reasoning. In a small, roundabout way, they ask the studenst to think about what they’re thinking about. More practically, the kids (and their parents) know up-front what material they’re accountable for. And they get to see that these problems weren’t made up completely at random. Someone thought about them. So the cost of the materials is justified, right? Yes, I think it’s a political ploy. A good one, though.

And this is the most frustrating part about it. The standards trick people into thinking that there is some golden set of content and skills that a person should have in order to be considered mathematically competent or numerically literate or whatever fashionable buzzword you can come up with. The fact of the matter is, there isn’t. Math isn’t about what you know, it’s about how to organize what you know. I don’t know much graph theory; does that mean I’m innumerate? No way. I can do more geometry than plenty of professional graphy theory mathematicians, I’m sure. They know what they like; I know what I like. The crazy thing is, I know how to reason the same way as the graph theorists. The take home: the mathematical content of a textbook is really a vehicle for the abstract reasoning behind it all. For this reason, curricula can really be a lot more flexible than they are. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to say that kids shouldn’t learn arithmetic. I will argue that maybe they should learn it another way. Even when we publish fancy standards in our books but forget to change the way we approach those standards, we really haven’t done anything. Kids have been learning how to add in just about the same way for over a century. Meanwhile there’s been lots of ground-breaking research done on how people learn, think, and understand over the course of the last one hundred years. Why do we so willingly ignore it?

But I do have a curriculum, and I use it. Meanwhile, I can only do so much to take into account the kids who’ll be using my books. We’re never going to meet. I don’t know anything about them, except, possibly their average age and vague geographic location. It’s important to have a good sense of what they know, how they understand it, and how they learned it. Projecting two years into the future about strangers is hard stuff. I have to write blind to my reader.

Whatever its impact, I’m very lucky to have the opportunity to work on textbooks. With some careful thought and hard work, maybe I can make a small contribution for the better in middle school education (before running back into academia to play for the rest of my life).

Technorati Tags: mathematics, textbook, publishing, math problems, writing, education, contextualization, real-world, education policy, mathphobia, curriculum, teaching, learning, careers, politics, charity

It’s odd, I know. But this morning I was sure that my right foot was home to six toes. Like many of you, I imagine, I fall out of bed—which is actually a couch despite my having access to a bed à la Fox Mulder—onto the floor. I then slump across the room to shut off my radio alarm clock before waddling over to the bathroom for a morning shower. However, this morning, after I had found the appropriate water temperature, I slipped my right foot into the tub. Because my footing is not especially sure in wee hours of the early dawn, I have to muster my full concentration not to fall. And then I saw it: a sixth toe. It was tucked nicely between my middle toe and I guess what would be called my ring toe. It wasn’t especially offensive, just, well, weird. I looked up and back down to refresh my visual sense. Yep, still there: six.

There was a problem with the way I was counting, though. I do this a lot. People think that because I have a degree in math, I’m naturally good at arithmetic. I’d like to dispel that rumor here. In fact, I’m going to let you in on a secret. You’ll be privy to some of the inner-workings of my mind. Most of the time, I don’t actually add or count: I see and intuit. Let me explain. When I was much younger, I used to stare down at the tiles on my bathroom floor for tens of minutes. Sure, it doesn’t sound like a lot, but you try it. It’s a lot harder to do than it sounds. Each tile measured about an inch and a half across and varied in color from a dark brown with a smooth finish to a rough, speckled beige and white. My current bathroom floor reflects a similar choice in design, except the palette runs across the blues. There in the bathroom, I’d sit on the toilet and stare down at the floor, trying first to focus on one tile, then a group of two, then three, and so on. Then I’d close my eyes and try to visual groups of dots. I’d work hard to make sure that I had the right number by arranging the pattern, rather than counting. I played other tricks, too. I still do. I try to focus only on one color or to spell things with the contours of the tiles. I wanted my visual arithmetic to become automatic. Unfortunately, I was unaware of certain natural cognitive impediments, and so, I must report that like most others, I was stuck within the realm of 7+/-2. (I could distinguish the numbers zero through nine; now I’m up to twelve. After that, the dots in my head become unwieldy.)

I do the same thing with written arithmetic—up to a point. I try to intuit the response, though it is much harder to explain just how I go about doing it. Especially this morning. The point is, I didn’t count my toes, I just recognized a pattern that represented six. (What is the number six? It’s six fire trucks without the fire trucks.) At last I resorted to convential counting. To my relief I counted only five. Moving among the toes individually had done the trick. So much for that Gestalt business. It’s too complicated.

But this is interesting. I had long been aware that my audio senses can become numb to stimuli. As a kid I discovered that if I repeated the word “enter” quickly and without pause it would temporarily lose its meaning even though I knew what I was saying. So often I forget that these sorts of rules ought to apply more generally. In fact, my sixth toe convinces me more of a fact (which is really a conjecture) that I stumbled upon the other night after tutoring introductory physics: training a computer to see and understand a scene in motion is probably a lot easier than training it understand a static scene.

Last Friday I met my tutee Katy, for the first time. She’s a pre-med post-back with an MFA in the visual arts. Somehow vectors and derivatives have been taken out of the art history curriculum. So we drew lots of position-time, velocity-time, and acceleration-time diagrams. And we talked about jerk (the slope of acceleration) and higher order derivatives, though we didn’t quite use that language. But what I stessed most is this: Absolute position doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. In fact, there’s a lot of ambiguity in the way we measure. Because of the ghosts of our coordinate systems, we should be careful only to pay attention to changes in quantities we measure, and not to the quantities themselves. If I’m here now, and five feet over there later, I’ll have moved five feet no matter if you started measuring my position from the fire hydrant across the street or from that sketchy all-night barber shop in the back corner of Beijing. It’s possible that your eye knows this, too.

I’ve since learned that some video compression techniques take advantage of change to keep the space it takes to store video down. If a pixel doesn’t change its color, why record it twice? Only report the things that aren’t the same from frame to frame. It makes sense. And when I attempted to learn the piano, my teacher said to watch the jumps an interval, not the notes. I bet computer eyes (if not your human eyes) can track trajectories. Most visual landscapes are complicated. Last night’s asparagus dinner occluded most of my dish at the beginning, yet I was not surprised to find it at the end of the meal once the asparagus was gone. My eye (and my mind) were able to reconstruct the plate even though I couldn’t see most of it. It’s like it was there the entire time. And so it was! Computers have a harder time with that sort of thing. How are they to know what to fill in behind or under or around? (I love using prepositions without objects. Where is it? Oh, it’s between.)

Anyway, I’d just like to report that my right foot only has five toes. That is all.

Technorati Tags: vision, visual literacy, visualization, memory, counting, patterns, toes, tiles, occlusion, repetition, shower

Earlier this week my friend Emma the Grecian Sailor lamented that grading for her fluid mechanics class takes up too much of her time—there are only precious few good sailing days left this season, you know. And she’s right. How does one give a responsible, formative assessment fast enough to have time left over to bat around on the Charles? This question is as old as grading itself. Likewise, Verena has complained that Physics 15b has taken over her life. So, to my grad school buddies, I have an illustrative anecdote and suggestion: Like a magician would, confuse your students—divert their attention.

A few years ago, I helped teach what has since become a notoriously large freshman honors math course: Math 23ab tries to train those heretofore uninitiated in mathematics to think, write, and speak like a mathematician. We try to sneak in a little multivariable calculus and linear algebra along the way. (I threw in a little geometry and physics, too, when I could.) But being high-performing over-acheivers, these kids were super-aware of their grades. When one of the teaching staff gave one student a full zero out of ten points on her set, she objected and cried—in class! We had an emergency staff meeting to discuss the matter. The grading, it seemed, had to change.

Isadora and I complained that the last set had taken us each more than twenty hours to grade. (And for those of you economists and computer scientists out there, we weren’t doubling up on the work. Each course assistant graded exactly one problem from the set each week. If the problems were shorter, sometimes two.) As is usually the case in any collaborative venture, we couldn’t come to a consensus. We did have some wonderful lunches together at the faculty club, though.

To address the problem personally, I devised the following tactics:

• Never grade out of a small, round number. Tens, twentys, and hundreds are strictly out. Kids can figure out their percentage right pretty easily if you do. And that means they’ll protest their grades more often. You don’t want them to pass their sets back in once you’ve passed them out. It’s just no fun.
• Use outrageously large, unround numbers instead. Typically, I’d increase the worth of each question the further we were into the semester. Say, for example, a question might be work 268 points in September; 94760 in January. When the point values climb, students are less likely to care if you took 79 points off for something. Also, they almost never divide out to find their percentages anymore. Who cares what 6432/7356 is? Those are mean-looking numbers, after all!
• Vary point values throughout a single set. If I had more than one question to grade, or one multi-part question, I’d mix it up. Part A might be worth 2305 points, whereas Part B was out of 7342. It shifts the focus off the grades, and off of you.
• Don’t worry about strict consistancy. Setting up and maintaining a rubric is hard work, especially if you change your mind thirty-three sets into a hundred. Because the point values are so wacky, the students will assume that your grading schema is complicated and often won’t challenge or compare grades. It risks entering the rigamarole of your mind. That said, try hard to be fair.
• Write encouraging remarks on their work. My favorites were wizard, way-to-go, good effort, and ingenious. Always follow your comments up with an exclamation mark.
• Never grade in red. It puts them in a bad place, psychologically. And by bad, I mean nervous and contemptuous. I prefered orange Crayola markers. If I felt especially fiesty, I’d use purple.
• Give explanatory feedback when appropriate. One former student reminded me that I had once graded her set, “This is impossible. [short explanation] See solution set. 10/10.” To be fair to me, she had it conceptually correct, except for, of course, the part that was impossible, which I circled in orange.
• Write clear solution sets and post them in a timely manner. Another student, who had turned her set in late, told me that she used my solution set for help. I asked if she cited it. She had. My answers looked right to me. And so she got full-credit.

Hopefully, these techniques will redirect the students’ attention from their grades (product) onto their arguments (process). The idea is to retrain them, many of whom hold strongly developed outcome-orientations, to care about how they got the answer, and not merely that they got the answer. (Last night Michelle told me that a biologist told her that you can train just about anything larger than an amoeba, and that includes people. Of course people in social learning theorists have been saying that for years.) [Check out an old post for more.] And with any luck, it’ll make your life as a grader a little more comfortable.

Yes, yes. We’ve all heard that the pen is mightier than the sword. Somehow it’s easy to forget, though, just how powerful those silly little words can be. The Republicans seem to know. They’ve sent out now ubiquitous catch-phrases—who doesn’t know to Support Our Troops?—to rally Americans to their causes without actually giving any cause to do so. These slogans are short, to the point, and entirely devoid of content. And still they have proven to be incredibly powerful. Remember when Colbert talked Geoffrey Nunberg, linguist and author of Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show, into the ground with only three carefully crafted phrases? (If not, search through the archive tapes for the show originally aired August 21, 2006. Comedy Central has clips: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)

Last night, I pointed out to my roommate DJ that a Democrat has finally smartened up and done the same. Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick, whose website browser icon is funnily DP—I wonder if his marketing team are aware of this—, has used similarly effective however empty campaign slogans. The weakest of his tag lines claims that Patrick is No Ordinary Leader. Now this is good, sure, but it’s not great. It tries to exploit the constant dissatisfaction that most of us harbor against whatever we currently have (be it our government, job, or any other part of life). More than that, it presumes that ordinary is bad and that unsual is good. Just to keep us in line, I’d like to point out—and I know that I’m using an unfair extreme–that Hitler was No Ordinary Leader. I’m not going to argue with you now, so take it at face value when I say that Hitler was bad. A good leader, sure; a bad man, certainly. But like I said, Patrick’s got better ones.

Next in order of efficacy, I think, comes his invitation to join him. Together We Can his posters say. My sister’s boyfriend Andrew finds this one particularly stirring. Last night he told me, “It evokes a partnership between me, the common man, and the candidate for the leadership embodied in the State’s chief magistrate,” or something. “Also, this guy went to some farmers out west somewhere and told them, ‘I’m not a farmer. I don’t know about this stuff. Tell me what I should do to help you.’ He’s really thinking out of the box,” he went on to tell me. My roommate DJ nearly drowned in his own tears (of laughter) upon hearing this.

Andrew proves my point. Perhaps now I should make it.

Together We Can is genius simply because it promises nothing. Patrick’s team were very careful never to use punctuation after any of their slogans on any of their signs. Of course not. They’re fragments. You can’t put a period after a fragment, after all. Doing so might point out raise the attention of a lazy reader. Then he’d realize that you haven’t said anything at all. To Andrew I asked, “Together we can what?” Patrick doesn’t tell us. Instead, he lets our imaginations run wild. That’s right, I am going to help run this State. I am important. Wrong. This slogan is so compelling because it calls on the reader to finish the sentence according to his personal whims and then pretend that it’ll happen, that he’s effected the change, and it spares him the hassle of doing any, real work. People love to feel like they’ve contributed something useful; on the other hand, they hate to exert themselves. This slogan let’s you think you can have your cake and eat it, too. (I’ve never understood that saying.)

But undoubtedly the best slogan I’ve heard so far, Patrick saved for until after he won the primary. Now it’s showing up on bumper stickers. Patrick asks us to Believe Again. I can’t begin to explain how impressed I was when I read this slogan. I wanted to run up and shake him and cry and clap my hands uncontrollably. It’s really quite amazing. This slogan reaches the largest audience possible. Being the most devoid of content, it has the greatest reach. Believe Again entices the voter to conjure up the most romantic, idealized form of government possible. But it doesn’t stop there, the implications are unstoppable. It’s an easy jump from government to general quality of life. Improving one naturally improves the other, right? No matter what you believe in, Patrick does, too—at least according to this slogan. And shouldn’t you support someone who holds such a coincident and intimate commitment to those things you hold so dear? It’s hard to argue against him, because you’d have to argue against yourself. Imagine a leader who would allow you to Believe Again.

To test my claims that these are, indeed, worthy of the Republicans, DJ asked quite blankly, “Are you suggesting we Cut and Run?”

To which I answered, “It’ll take No Ordinary Leader.”

To which he countered, “But don’t you Support Our Troops?”

But then I hit him full-force with, “Together We Can. I want to Believe Again.”

It was over. The conversation left both of us stunned.

DJ then noted that we should write for the Colbert Report, or, maybe I should write for the Colbert Report, or, possibly, just to them, to let them know that someone else figured out how to play the word game.

What’s worth mentioning is that Patrick’s slogans are even more sinister than the Republican’s because they aren’t immediately negative. (No Ordinary Leader comes closest to being overtly aggressive, but is pretty sissy when flanked by Cut and Run and Support Our Troops. Notice, however, that Support Our Troops also makes the people who say it feel like they’ve really accomplished something even though they’ve taken no physical action.) Patrick’s tag lines get stuck in your ear, and, while there, make you feel better about him and about yourself. How empowering! I really can’t get over just how brilliant they are.

Moral: If don’t want people to disagree with you, don’t say anything that they can disagree with.