Above: My roommate keeps a copy of Dwell magazine our bathroom. The current issue invited me to share my world view. So here it is, the view from my bedroom, which is apparently my world.
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Above: I often stand by these power meters while waiting to meet someone at Charlie’s Kitchen. Once inside, I always order the double cheeseburger with onion rings. When choosing seating, upstairs is better than downstairs; the beer garden is better than upstairs.
Recently I promised to follow up on just how I rewrote that final paper for the course I took at the Ed School this January because I think the strategy I used probably works for many of the classes at HGSE and, to my dismay, many other classes all over the place. In the tutorial below, I walk through how I wrote my paper to show you exactly how these methods might take form in practice. After all, worked examples bring principles to life.
I couldn’t dedicate a lot of time to redraft my paper. Although I worked hard to come up with a new idea that synthesized what I had learned during the course, to demonstrate more fully that I had drawn on the sources explicitly for my inspiration would require a lot more thought and time than I had to spend fixing up a paper for a pass/fail course that I took for fun. I already came up with new ideas and understood old concepts differently. Now I needed to sit down for a few hours, write fast, and be done with it. So I decided start over from scratch. Here’s what I did:
- Don’t pick a thesis topic. Instead claim that the situation at hand—in this case, the historical blight that continues to trouble urban education—is complicated and that the solution must therefore be complicated, too. If you say anything more specific, then your grader can argue with you. Eschew statements of substance. It’s impossible to wrestle with a ghost.
To combat these [aforementioned] structural evils, we must take a multi-pronged approach to balance the differences in access to and use of quality educational resources (including but not limited to adequate school buildings, textbooks, well-trained teachers and supportive administration) that have accumulated throughout the history of our nation.
- Next summarize each of the readings one at a time, one paragraph at a time as they appear on the syllabus. Restrict your attention primarily to the readings you did. If the syllabus is split into sections with obvious themes like “Segregation” or “Finance Reform”, preface those summaries with a paragraph explaining why that theme is important.
To understand why my and many public urban classrooms around the country have a disproportionately high representation of poor and students of color today, we must look into political choices of yesteryear. While it is common knowledge that it is illegal to legislatively mandate segregation, other perfectly legal social forces can still institute de facto segregation silently and efficiently.
Be sure not to inject your own thought. Summaries should not introduce new ideas or material. Tow the party line. The readings were selected because they are important. Demonstrate that you understand how important the readings are by rephrasing their main points. Again, try to leave out substance whenever possible. Justification and nuance only give the grader something to disagree with. You can get the details wrong even if your summary is correct.
For example, if you ask a kindergartner the shape of the world, she’ll invariably respond, “It’s round.” That’s what we teach kindergartners, after all. And her answer is correct. If you push a little further, though, and ask her to draw the shape of world, she may very well draw a pancake. Round, but wrong. What’s the moral? Elaboration is dangerous. Simply restate generalizations mentioned in class without backing them up. The teaching staff will assume you know what you’re talking about.
Multicultural education offers a hope for real change in the lives my students. [...] By presenting academic heroes and ideas from a diverse range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, we validate the identities and experiences of our students. Students from marginalized groups will be able to see themselves in the narratives of a host of historical figures and interpret their stories into realizable, personal action.
Aside: It pains me to offer the above quotation without qualification. Saying that students will automatically learn from role models just because role models are around is shortsighted. Such a strategy is just as effective as locking up kids learning to read in a library because being around books confers kids with ability to read. Sadly, that’s just not how the world works. Using resources is tough stuff. That’s why teachers exist, at least in part. Otherwise we could just shut kids up in prison cells outfitted with the newest and best educational tools and expect them to emerge smart and successful. But when you’re writing a paper, it doesn’t matter if your argument makes sense or lacks evidence, as long as it sounds good.
- Sprinkle in numerical examples whenever possible. The earlier you can unload a statistic into the paper, the better. Numbers always make arguments more authoritative. You can easily pull numerical examples from sources you didn’t actually read ahead of time. They can be used without presenting appropriate context and they quickly add to your paper’s reference count. In the following example, the statistic I quote has no direct relation to my claim. But the words sounds more or less similar, so the numbers do their job: my argument carries force. Notice how I follow up with another another sweeping, data-free assertion? It doesn’t follow from anything I’ve mentioned, but that’s beside the point. Numbers are really powerful. Use them to your advantage.
Racially and economically segregated neighborhoods immediately translate into racially and economically segregated schools. In 1997, for example, Public School District 65 in the Bronx enrolled only twenty-six of the eleven thousand elementary and middle school-aged children who were white. The result was a legal segregation rate of 99.8 percent (Kozol, Shame of a Nation, CP p. 4). As a matter of course, such segregation persists in public urban university classrooms for much the same reasons.
- Acknowledge your own personal failings. Without being specific, produce broad mandates that will make up for your human frailties. Papers in education need to draw on personal experience and exhibit emotional appeal. Try to make your writing obviously smack of social justice, even if you end up being backhandedly racist. Any sentiment backed by good intention is ipso facto valid in this sort of class. The image of the noble savage was an especial favorite in this class. Of course you’ll need to swap out the word savage with something more suitable like “diverse”, “urban”, or “disadvantaged”. Do not define your terms. It’ll only make you sound condescending and/or prejudiced.
As an instructor at an urban public school it is vital that I understand the social forces that have shaped my institution and positioned the students in my classroom so that I can be sensitive to their uniquely “urban” needs. To this end, as an urban educator I must celebrate the diversity of my students and expose and repurpose the mechanisms that have nurtured systematic inequality in order to level the playing field for my students.
- To illustrate the validity of your thesis, include at least one source to disagree with. If you can show that someone else is wrong, then you must be right. This tactic has been enormously successful in all sorts of political campaigns. (E.g., if evolution can’t explain the origin of life, then God must exist.) Moreover, there’s a fantastic chance that your professor will indicate which of the readings is wrong in lecture or during a class discussion. Just reiterate whatever the class decided was mistaken. Ostensibly, the course prepared you to write your paper. Don’t do any extra work. It’s already been done for you.
In fact, [Hirsch] goes further to say that to merely understand the cultural circumstances of knowledge is not enough; he believes the truly literate person can wield this background information in her writing and that this incorporation is necessary if she wants her voice to be heard by other literate people. Of course, cultural literacy is really a polite way of signifying membership in the dominant power structure. Students from diverse backgrounds have learned to think, communicate, and live differently, not worse.
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Lastly, address some of the shortcomings of your approach. You merely need to acknowledge their existence and provide a slightly refined restatement of your thesis as the solution.
If you can’t come up with a chink in the armor of your framework, then try to answer the following interview question: What is your greatest weakness? Your answer should pretend that a strength is actually a weakness and then explain how in reality your weakness is a strength. You know, “My greatest weakness is that I work too hard.” “I’m a perfectionist.” Straw men always fall easily.
[I]t is not straight-forward how to assess a very bright student who does not display her intelligence according to outmoded though prevailing measures of standard success. Strict rubrics and standards seek to normatively define achievement, rather than to democratize education (Slater, p. 20). Therefore, it is important to expose the individuality of each student by providing [assignments] that engender creative and personally meaningful expression and accompany such exercises with opportunities to explain the thought process that help to generate the end product.
- In your conclusion, don’t be afraid to paint that better world we all could live in. That is, if only people took what you learned in your class seriously. Again, infuse your words with the spirit of social justice for a strong finish.
While multicultural curricula, as I have outlined here, will not immediately change the large-scale structures that have created a landscape of imposed segregation and inequality in our urban environments, the long-term, coordinated efforts to celebrate the diversity in our student populations will eventually change the way students of privilege think about and understand their diverse classmates. As an urban educator, it is my hope that I will instill the values typified by multicultural curricula in my students so that they will choose to improve society over the natural but selfish inclination toward individual gain.
Good luck and happy writing!
Above: The morning I left Israel was warm and wet. The rain was sudden and unsatisfying. Fortunately it did not delay our departure. From my window I spied on this security vehicle, whose presence, I assumed, guaranteed that my luggage would not be forgotten before we crawled onto the tarmac and sped five thousand miles home.
Above: This is the carnage wrought by my roommate after a recent trip to Haymarket to stock up on fruits and vegetables for the week. An empty glass cleaned of its delicious salsa verde contents stands sentinel over the garbage disposal, as small fruit bodies await their final, environmentally friendly demise.
I recently purchased my first digital camera. Following my friend Emma’s suggestion (and perhaps inspired a little by Emerson), I want to find one beautiful thing every day. Okay, so this picture was taken a week ago. But I like it. Try and keep me honest. I dare you.
This winter I ventured over to a part of campus that I hadn’t explored in the ten years I’ve been hanging around Harvard. In January, I took a two-week boot-camp style overview course on the ‘Foundations of Urban Education’ at HGSE. As many of you may know, I’ve always had a sweet tooth for teaching and learning. As an undergraduate I helped teach in the Mathematics for Teaching graduate program at the Extension School. After graduation I ended up at a publishing company where I wrote the chapter exams for middle school math books. (If you’re a sixth grader in California, I’m sorry.) At the same time I started in a spunky, free-thinking masters program in education at UMass Boston before getting whisked away to teach introductory computer science elsewhere in the university. Along the way, I hung around an urban charter school in Dorchester as part of my coursework. To be sure, education is really important to me.
So at first I wasn’t sure what to make of my HGSE course. These days I spend most of my time in the lab with delicate scientific instruments, goofy and less delicate scientists, and large, slippery, and quick-moving frogs. The pressures of real-time classroom conservation in a field that I’d been away from for so long with people who live and breathe this stuff everyday was, to be perfectly frank, intimidating. We had received our course pack and reading list in early December. Because time was at a premium, all of the lectures were prerecorded and posted ahead of time. And the teaching staff encouraged us to hit the books nearly a month before the first day of class. Yowsers. I had a lot of catching up to do.
But then the course started. I assumed course discussion would reflect the same sort of openness and thoughtfulness I had enjoyed at UMass. But if I learned anything in those classes, it was that I need to dispense with assumptions, suspend judgment, and, as we say sometimes in biology, let the data speak for itself. And, oh, did my classmates speak.
Never before had I encountered such persistent intellectual bullying. Not just at Harvard, but anywhere. It was shocking to me that some ideas could be heretical; certain topics entirely taboo. The main theme of the course was exactly what I expected: there are large groups of people (mostly blacks and Hispanics) who have been systematically disadvantaged throughout their history in this country. On the other side, another group (of wealthy, white men specifically) has manipulated mainstream social and political structures so that their children are systematically advantaged. To level the playing field we need a swift injection of money and multiculturalism. All of this seems completely reasonable if done reasonably. I want to give a voice and power back to the dispossessed; don’t you?
The sermon was predictable. Course material provided us with sound bites that we could wield quickly in a pinch. But the way I was supposed to think was fundamentally unchanged. In fact, it felt like that was by design. Opinions that weren’t recognizably aligned with the gospel truth were denied flatly. Those ideas that actively disagreed with mantra of the noble but disadvantaged youth—savage is no longer politically correct, but the sentiment is—were silenced. My classmates rode around on the white horse of moral supremacy to quash discussion and avoid making concrete suggestions for fear of criticism. Whenever someone took a definite stance, someone else inevitably asserted their fears that the dominant power structure was secretly creeping in to rob the poor of their humanity. Now don’t get me wrong, many times that was exactly the case.
The extent to which people who extolled the enlightened practice of listening burrowed their heads in the sand to hide from new ideas would have been laughable were these people not actual educators who interact with actual children. In group break-outs, my classmates railed against me (and other heretics) with passion but without evidence. During an exercise on curricular planning, for example, I suggested that mathematics isn’t itself hierarchical and that our classes need not be. Algebra doesn’t need to precede geometry. We just insist it does because of an accident of history that has been frozen into the curriculum. I didn’t mention my experience in math education. I wanted my ideas to stand for themselves. A classmate of mine insisted that math follows a linear order. Basics first. Advanced topics later. And that’s that.
Another time, I pointed to models of inequality that abolished race but were unable to dismantle financial segregation. Consequently I suggested that we should investigate how people acquire and maintain wealth and incorporate what we learn into our classrooms. This time another student, at a loss for words, told me that segregation was about race. It just is. Full stop. My TF consistently commented that my response papers could be stronger if concluded something that I believed contradicted my main arguments. Naturally, her arguments recapitulated the party line: in this case, that honors tracks are categorically bad. Like Lisa Loeb, I was only hearing negative, “No, no, no. Bad.”
My meeting during office hours with the professor was the most surprising example of this multiple-ways-of-knowing, except-in-this-class philosophy. Initially I had scheduled time with her to talk about careers in education, but by the time our appointment rolled around it was clear that our conversation would focus on my final paper and its subsequent rewrite. I should admit two things about my final exam. First off, I was confused about what a semi-reflective, semi-analytical paper ought to look like and my first guess was bad. My paper was disjointed and poorly written. Second, I put a lot of original thought into it. The version I submitted contained what I believe to be a thoughtful proposal for urban educators that integrated, if indirectly, most things we had read, discussed, or otherwise touched on in class. In lecture, our professor asked, “how can we best respect the diversity in our classrooms?” To come up with an answer, I defined respect and diversity, drew meaningful connections between them and proposed a framework for thinking about diversity which differed usefully from those found in our readings. But my response wasn’t “recognizable” to my TF or professor. And more, importantly, it seems, my paper didn’t explicitly retell the history of inequality in American schools. They needed a book report narration to prove that I had done the assigned readings. These were important, after all. At one point during our meeting I asked directly if I should just parrot back the readings one at a time for my redraft. At this point the professor responded that she would not usually want to sound so “anti-intellectual”, but that yes, that would indeed suffice.
The point of my favorite reading, one by Hirsch, argued that in order for a marginalized voice to be heard, it needs to speak the same language that those in power speak. The class had universally dismissed Hirsch, because they claimed (incorrectly) that he privileges rich, white viewpoints. In doing so, they proved his point: if you don’t sound intelligible, no one will treat you intelligently. So figure out how intelligent people sound and talk like them, but say what you think. The conversation I had with my professor, who specializes in civic education, marginalized voices, and social justice, did just the same. My point wasn’t recognizable, so it didn’t exist. (Like my TF, she also decided that my paper was about the necessary evils of tracking.) I’ll tell you how I rewrote my final paper in case you ever take a class at HGSE. There’s a recipe you can follow. It doesn’t require much thinking but guarantees success.
This winter I’m taking a course on urban education. Our first topic: segregation and desegregation in schools.
Firstly, what do we mean by segregation? As a working definition, I’ll offer that segregation is the spatial pattern of people across some attribute. So we could talk about segregation by race, by income, or by favorite ice cream flavor. Once we pick something to measure against, we find that every city is segregated according to this definition. What matters is in what way the segregation manifests and the consequences on the populace the pattern has. Segregation patterns can be uniform, with all groups distributed more or less evenly within a region, or clustered. Likewise, we could also calculate the extent to which subpopulations are isolated from each other—which also gives a rough estimation of how often members of one group is likely to run into someone outside of their group. I think when we talk about ‘segregated’ groups, we typically mean highly clustered populations that are isolated from the other groups in the city.
I don’t think that clustered, isolated groups are necessarily bad on their own. I love visiting the North End and Chinatown. Because they’re both T-accessible, it’s easy for me to get there. (Though, both neighborhoods have had rough pasts.) And Harvard Square is the nicest place I’ve ever lived. Score one for segregation!
Moral judgments aside, self-selection can have a big influence on patterns of segregation, at least it can in models. The positive feedback loops reinforce small, individual choice to generate large-scale patterning. Schelling’s model of segregation is a classic, good first example of what I mean. In this model individuals exhibit only a slight preference to have neighbors that are similar to them. The individuals in this model are not racist. (Or maybe they are. I don’t have a good functional definition of racism yet.) When individuals find themselves in a neighborhood that is too unlike themselves, they move somewhere else at random, possibly to a neighborhood more dissimilar from themselves than the last. Even with this mild, partially blind behavior, a totally segregated structure emerges.
In more relaxed models that completely ignore race, even more realistic patterns of segregation form. In this class of model, individuals simply choose to live in the nicest area they can afford. As if by magic, isolated poor and rich neighborhoods form. Depending on the details of the model, wealthy suburbs appear spontaneously. If we use socioeconomic status as a proxy for race, it’s the same old story. Except this time, we have a systems-level mechanism that generates isolated, poor communities that lack the power to advocate for equitable resources and very rich communities with disproportionately high share of public goods insulated by a buffer of middle class individuals. Race was not the cause; money was.
When was ask whether it’s morally justified for a white family to send their kid to a predominantly white school, I think it’s important to know what about the school is so attractive. Do all parents value differentiated cultural and social understanding across many kinds of experience? Are they likely to value it more than a pretty campus or reputation of success by its graduates? Sure, in some cases the choice may be motivated largely by racism. But I’d expect that in many cases, it’s mostly a matter of ensuring access to the most and best resources possible for their child. It just so happens that low-resource groups aggregate, even in the absence of race.
I believe that diversity (of background, experience, perspective, and the like) is important in schools because, as has been mentioned a few times by others, students learn how to navigate social situations outside of school from the people they meet in school. But when we talk about diversity, do we really mean racial diversity? As an example, imagine that an elite, wealthy, mostly white college in the Northeast has recently been chastised for admitting a student body that is not sufficient diverse. Consequently, the school begins recruiting wealthy black students from Africa, some of whom attended the same boarding schools as students already enrolled in the college. In time, the student body comes to be half white, half black with an even mix in all classes and housing situations. In what sense, if any, has the college increased diversity on campus? Do you think the college has produced the diversity they were previously lacking?
While I think that racial segregation is a problem, I don’t think race is necessarily the capital-C cause. In a world without racism, economic segregation will still exist. But I’m willing to bet that in a world with no financial disparity, a lot of the troubles we associate with racism would evaporate. And so, I think race will play a secondary part in the solution to segregation. In fact, I think that race may even obscure the issue of access to equitable education for all. (I’m not sure if that’s what we’re really trying to achieve, but I think it’s a good start.) Instead, I believe that the struggle of the American education system is one of power and status. As such, I think we should talk about resource allocation (including strategies that move students to resources as well as bringing more resources to students), causes and effects of socioeconomic segregation, and cultural and pedagogical practices that systematically discourage/motivate students to learn the skills required to become an informed and capable citizens.
This semester I’ve helped teach a biology-meets-math sort of a course. There’s been some debate among my labmates about what such a course ought to include and about the merits of math in biology more generally. It’s true, I’ve never explicitly used control theory to calculate how much liquid I should pipette into my experiment. And I very seldom think about the principle of detailed balance when I peer into a microscope. So why would we take a room full of experimentalists and teach them about dynamical systems on abstract graphs—how could this possible improve their biology?
My students were wondering the same thing when they showed up to the first section this semester. That week we were discussing a paper by van Oudenaarden on yeast’s ability to regulate and maintain its internal osmotic pressure despite living in a varying external environment. The technique they used was indirect but powerful. Assault the cell with pulses of carefully measured salt concentrations and then watch as a judiciously chosen protein read-out accumulate in the nucleus in response. A mess of genes and proteins and other factors have been associated with osmoregulation and the trick was to pick out which of these players are most important and when.
By matching their salt pulse inputs with fluorescently labeled protein outputs, the researchers were able to come up with a simplified model of the cell’s vastly complicated internal logic. And while their model is a cartoon of reality, it was extremely good at predicting previously unmeasured behavior when different cells and different cell types were subjected to new concentrations of salt. Combing the literature helped the researchers identify the parts that popped up in their model. They pared down a hair ball of chemical interactions and were left with a relatively simple mechanism.
This experiment is wholly unlike the classic experiments I usually think to do as a biologist. For example, how would a biologist determine whether the moon affects the tides? Now, hold on. I know that the moon and tides don’t normally reside within the realm of biological experimentation. This shouldn’t worry you. Biology, just like any other discipline, has its own methodologies. And these methodologies make some knowledge easy to dig up and verify and others hard. So, what does biology have to say about the tides?
First off, you’d do a knock-out study. Blow up the moon, but keep everything else the same, and see how the tides changed—if at all. Perfect. They stopped. What next? Well, there’s an obvious follow-up study: over-express the moon. Put two of them up there; maybe three, just in case. Now that the tides are back, we have some strong evidence that the moon in some way seems to influence the tides.
Part of the beauty of the van Oudenaarden input-output approach is that it didn’t require us to muck about with the genetics of the yeast. No knock-outs, no knock-ins. They kept the cells normal and genetically intact. Instead, they did what my friends in the cognitive neuroscience labs do with children subjects. They asked the cells a question: “What will you do with this salt concentration?” And then they listened for the response. From the answers the cells gave them, the researchers were able to infer something about the decision-making process. In this case, they drew it up as second-order linear, time invariant system. Here is an example where math allowed a biologist to do something very surprising. Math was used to talk to cells, ask them questions in their own language (so to speak), and learn something about them from their answers. Doesn’t that sound nice?
When I was a sophomore in college, math had got me down pretty bad. You see, it’s never math’s fault if you don’t get an answer. My friends and I used to joke that math was that really hot cheerleader in high school. And who did she date? Well, the star quarterback of the football team of course. She wouldn’t even look at any of us; I wasn’t good enough to be the waterboy, let alone make it onto the team of professional mathematicians. At least that’s how I felt.
Looking to crawl out of my math-induced low, I did what I thought you’re supposed to do in such a situation: I went to one of my professor’s office hours for advice and consolation. And he responded, I suppose, in the way that he thought you were supposed to respond in a such situation: he told me that I’d probably do well as a science writer, like for the New York Times. It was as if the cheerleader had spit in my face. A science writer—really? But I wanted to study quasi-Fuchsian groups or sympletic geometry or something exciting and esoteric like that. I left those office hours feeling less supported than I had when I entered.
Well, it looks like that professor knew me better than I did myself. That’s right, I’m going to start posting (hopefully regularly) for Complex Systems and Society. The idea as hatched (not by me) while I was hanging around the Santa Fe Institute, essentially the Mecca of complex systems, earlier this summer. Look there for accessible commentary from researchers on current research. I’ll probably write about evolutionary game theory, sociobiology, and other stuff I don’t have the background to write about with much authority (not that that has stopped me before, mind you). Now that doesn’t mean I won’t write here anymore—I’ve been remiss in my duties, I know—because I will. I have three entries drafted already.
My first set of posts over at Complex Systems will detail what goes on in my head as I read Foundations of Social Evolution. So far it’s been a treatise on the Price equation, which describes natural selection with a hierarchy of effects. The concept is something I’ve run into a handful of times. Each encounter left me running away without a proper understanding. Forty-four pages into this book and I still don’t have a firm purchase on it. The fledgling computer scientist in me likes that it’s recursive, though. With some persistence and a little luck, I’m sure I’ll have something useful to say before my first deadline rolls around.
Anyway, this is a note to you, faithful reader, to wish me good luck on my foray into science writing. Look for something over there by August 2.