School Dais

Making College ‘Relevant’

2010-01-03T05:04:00.000-08:00

Making College ‘Relevant’
Kate Zernike, NYT, 29 Dec 2009

THOMAS COLLEGE, a liberal arts school in Maine, advertises itself as Home of the Guaranteed Job! Students who can’t find work in their fields within six months of graduation can come back to take classes free, or have the college pay their student loans for a year.

The University of Louisiana, Lafayette, is eliminating its philosophy major, while Michigan State University is doing away with American studies and classics, after years of declining enrollments in those majors.

And in a class called “The English Major in the Workplace,” at the University of Texas, Austin, students read “Death of a Salesman” but also learn to network, write a résumé and come off well in an interview.

Even before they arrive on campus, students — and their parents — are increasingly focused on what comes after college. What’s the return on investment, especially as the cost of that investment keeps rising? How will that major translate into a job?

The pressure on institutions to answer those questions is prompting changes from the admissions office to the career center. But even as they rush to prove their relevance, colleges and universities worry that students are specializing too early, that they are so focused on picking the perfect major that they don’t allow time for self-discovery, much less late blooming.

“The phrase drives me crazy — ‘What are you going to do with your degree?’ — but I see increasing concerns about that,” says Katharine Brooks, director of the liberal arts career center at the University of Texas, Austin, and author of “You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path From Chaos to Career.” “Particularly as money gets tighter, people are going to demand more accountability from majors and departments.”

Consider the change captured in the annual survey by the University of California, Los Angeles, of more than 400,000 incoming freshmen. In 1971, 37 percent responded that it was essential or very important to be “very well-off financially,” while 73 percent said the same about “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” In 2009, the values were nearly reversed: 78 percent identified wealth as a goal, while 48 percent were after a meaningful philosophy.

The shift in attitudes is reflected in a shifting curriculum. Nationally, business has been the most popular major for the last 15 years. Campuses also report a boom in public health fields, and many institutions are building up environmental science and just about anything prefixed with “bio.” Reflecting the new economic and global realities, they are adding or expanding majors in Chinese and Arabic. The University of Michigan has seen a 38 percent increase in students enrolling in Asian language courses since 2002, while French has dropped by 5 percent.

Of course, universities have always adjusted curriculum to reflect the changing world; Kim Wilcox, the provost and vice president for academic affairs at Michigan State, notes that universities, his included, used to offer majors in elocution and animal husbandry. In a major re-examination of its curriculum, Michigan State has added a dozen or so new programs, including degrees in global studies and, in response to a growing industry in the state, film studies. At the same time, it is abandoning underperformers like classical studies: in the last four years, only 13 students have declared it their major.

Dropping a classics or philosophy major might have been unthinkable a generation ago, when knowledge of the great thinkers was a cornerstone of a solid education. But with budgets tight, such programs have come to seem like a luxury— or maybe an expensive antique — in some quarters.

When Louisiana’s regents voted to eliminate the philosophy major last spring, they agreed with faculty members that the subject is “a traditional core program of a broad-based liberal arts and science institution.” But they noted that, on average, 3.4 students had graduated as philosophy majors in the previous five years; in 2008, there were none. “One cannot help but recognize that philosophy as an essential undergraduate program has lost some credence among students,” the board concluded.

In one recent survey, two-thirds of public institutions said they were responding to budget cuts with extensive reviews of their programs. But Dr. Wilcox says curriculum changes at Michigan State have just as much to do with what students, and the economy, are demanding. “We could have simply reduced the campus operating budget by X percent,” he says, “but we wouldn’t have positioned ourselves any differently for the future.”

In Michigan, where the recession hit early and hard, universities are particularly focused on being relevant to the job market. “There’s been this drumbeat that Michigan has got to diversify its economy,” says Mary Sue Coleman, the president of the University of Michigan.

Dr. Coleman says she had an “aha” moment five years ago, when the director of admissions was describing the incoming class and noted that 10 percent — some 600 students — had started a business in high school. The university has responded with about 100 entrepreneurship courses across the curriculum, including “Financing Research Commercialization” and “Engineering Social Venture Creation,” for students interested in creating businesses that not only do well financially but also do society good. Next year, the university will begin offering a master’s to students who commit to starting a high-tech company.

At the same time, Dr. Coleman is wary of training students for just one thing — “creating them to do some little widget,” as she says. Michigan has begun a speaker series featuring alumni or other successful entrepreneurs who come in to talk about how their careers benefited from what Dr. Coleman calls “core knowledge.”

“We believe that we do our best for students when we give them tools to be analytical, to be able to gather information and to determine the validity of that information themselves, particularly in this world where people don’t filter for you anymore,” Dr. Coleman says. “We want to teach them how to make an argument, how to defend an argument, to make a choice.” These are the skills that liberal arts colleges in particular have prided themselves on teaching. But these colleges also say they have the hardest time explaining the link between what they teach and the kind of job and salary a student can expect on the other end.

“There’s no immediate impact, that’s the problem,” says John J. Neuhauser, the president of St. Michael’s College, a liberal arts school in Vermont. “The humanities tend to educate people much farther out. They’re looking for an impact that lasts over decades, not just when you’re 22.”

When prospective students and their parents visit, he says, they ask about placement rates, internships and alumni involvement in job placement. These are questions, he says, that he never heard 10 years ago.

St. Michael’s, like other colleges, has adapted its curriculum to reflect demand. The college had to create new sections of chemistry labs and calculus on the spot during summer registration, and it raised the cap on the number of students in a biology lab. “I’d say, given the vagaries of the business cycle, people are looking for things that they know will always be needed — accountants, scientists, mathematicians,” says Jeffrey A. Trumbower, dean of the college. “Those also happen to be some of the most challenging majors academically, so we’ll see how these trends hold up.”

Still, Dr. Neuhauser finds the careerism troubling. “I think people change a great deal between 18 and 22,” he says. “The intimate environment small liberal arts colleges provide is a great place to grow up. But there’s no question that smacks of some measure of elitism now.”

There’s evidence, though, that employers also don’t want students specializing too soon. The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”

“It’s not about what you should major in, but that no matter what you major in, you need good writing skills and good speaking skills,” says Debra Humphreys, a vice president at the association.

The organization has conducted focus groups with employers before and heard the same thing. With the recession, she says, they weren’t sure the findings would hold. “But it’s even more intense. Companies are demanding more of employees. They really want them to have a broad set of skills.” She adds that getting employer feedback is the association service that “college leaders find the most valuable, because they can answer the question when parents ask, ‘Is this going to help in getting a job?’ ”

Career advisers say that colleges and universities need to do a better job helping students understand the connection between a degree and a job. At some institutions, this means career officers are heading into the classroom.

Last fall at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the career office began integrating workplace lessons into capstone research seminars for humanities majors. In one of three classes taught by Anne Scholl-Fiedler, the director, she asks students to develop a 30-second commercial on their “personal brand.”

“When somebody asks, ‘How are you going to use that English degree?’ you need to be able to clearly articulate what you are able to do,” she says. “If you don’t know, employers probably won’t either.”

At the University of Texas, Ms. Brooks says, many parents drop their children off freshman year asking, “How can my child transfer to the business school?” She tries to establish the value of the liberal arts with a series of courses called “The Major in the Workplace.” Students draw what she calls a “major map,” an inventory of things they have learned to do around their major. Using literature — “The Great Gatsby,” perhaps, or “Death of a Salesman” — she gets students to think about how the themes might apply to a workplace, then has them read Harvard Business Review case studies. The goal, she says, is to get students to think about how an English major (or a psychology or history major) might view the world differently, and why an employer might value that.

“There’s this linear notion that what you major in equals your career,” Ms. Brooks says. “I’m sure it works for some majors. If you want to be an electrical engineer, that major looks pretty darn good.

“The truth is,” she says, “students think too much about majors. But the major isn’t nearly as important as the toolbox of skills you come out with and the experiences you have.”

High School’s Last Test - A 13th Year?

2009-12-22T08:11:00.000-08:00

High School’s Last Test
J. B. Schramm and E. Kinney Zalesne, 22 Dec 2009

THE federal government is about to make a huge investment in high school. As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Congress has appropriated more than $100 billion to public schools, including a competitive “Race to the Top” fund that encourages innovation.

But the real revolution, tucked away in the Race to the Top guidelines released by the Department of Education last month, is that high school has a new mission. No longer is it enough just to graduate students, or even prepare them for college. Schools must now show how they increase both college enrollment and the number of students who complete at least a year of college. In other words, high schools must now focus on grade 13.

To be sure, this shift is long overdue. It has been a generation since a high school diploma was a ticket to success. Today, the difference in earning power between a high school graduate and someone who’s finished eighth grade has shrunk to nil. And students themselves know, better even than their parents or teachers, according to a recent poll conducted by Deloitte, that the main mission of high school is preparation for college.

Still, this shift will be seismic for our nation’s high schools, because it will require gathering a great deal of information, and using it. And at the moment, high school principals know virtually nothing about what becomes of their graduates. Most don’t even know whether their students make it to college at all.

What data they have is anecdotal. “Once a graduate happened to drop by and tell us she was struggling with college writing,” Linda Calvo, the principal of Arleta High School in Los Angeles, told us. “We changed our writing curriculum based on what she said. But her visit was a totally random occurrence.”

A smattering of states, school districts and nonprofit educational organizations have begun to gather data about how students fare in college during their first year after graduation, but their progress has been slow and haphazard. Florida has one of the best systems, but even it can’t account for a high school graduate who enrolls in college in another state. The nation is asking principals to deliver students who can succeed in college, without ensuring they know whether what they’re doing is working.

The Department of Education has begun to solve this problem by instructing states on how to keep good records of its graduates’ progress in college. This gives high schools the two pieces of information it most needs: its college enrollment rate and its “college proficiency” rate (the speed with which graduates complete a year of college-level coursework).

But what’s critical is that the Education Department also helps high school principals and teachers learn to use their data to improve student achievement — to find out which of their educational strategies actually result in student success after high school. If the department could do this, and also reward those schools that demonstrate increasing postsecondary success, we’d see high schools begin to truly meet their mission.

Race to the Top has finally established a realistic purpose for high school in the 21st century. If principals can now get the support they need to fulfill that purpose, high school can once again be a top-notch producer of American potential.

Brain Power - Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them

2009-12-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them
Benedict Carey, NYT, 20 Dec 2009

Many 4-year-olds cannot count up to their own age when they arrive at preschool, and those at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center are hardly prodigies. Most live in this city’s poorer districts and begin their academic life well behind the curve.

But there they were on a recent Wednesday morning, three months into the school year, counting up to seven and higher, even doing some elementary addition and subtraction. At recess, one boy, Joshua, used a pointer to illustrate a math concept known as cardinality, by completing place settings on a whiteboard.

“You just put one plate there, and one there, and one here,” he explained, stepping aside as two other students ambled by, one wearing a pair of clown pants as a headscarf. “That’s it. See?”

For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready.

But recent research has turned that assumption on its head — that, and a host of other conventional wisdom about geometry, reading, language and self-control in class. The findings, mostly from a branch of research called cognitive neuroscience, are helping to clarify when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts.

In one recent study, for instance, researchers found that most entering preschoolers could perform rudimentary division, by distributing candies among two or three play animals. In another, scientists found that the brain’s ability to link letter combinations with sounds may not be fully developed until age 11 — much later than many have assumed.

The teaching of basic academic skills, until now largely the realm of tradition and guesswork, is giving way to approaches based on cognitive science. In several cities, including Boston, Washington and Nashville, schools have been experimenting with new curriculums to improve math skills in preschoolers. In others, teachers have used techniques developed by brain scientists to help children overcome dyslexia.

And schools in about a dozen states have begun to use a program intended to accelerate the development of young students’ frontal lobes, improving self-control in class.

“Teaching is an ancient craft, and yet we really have had no idea how it affected the developing brain,” said Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain and Education program at Harvard. “Well, that is beginning to change, and for the first time we are seeing the fields of brain science and education work together.”

This relationship is new and still awkward, experts say, and there is more hyperbole than evidence surrounding many “brain-based” commercial products on the market. But there are others, like an early math program taught in Buffalo schools, that have a track record. If these and similar efforts find traction in schools, experts say, they could transform teaching from the bottom up — giving the ancient craft a modern scientific compass.

Beyond Counting

In a typical preschool class, children do very little math. They may practice counting, and occasionally look at books about numbers, but that is about it. Many classes devote mere minutes a day to math instruction or no time at all, recent studies have found — far less than most children can handle, and not nearly enough to prepare those who, deprived of math-related games at home, quickly fall behind in kindergarten.

“Once that happens, it can be very hard to catch up,” said Julie Sarama, a researcher in the graduate school of education at the University at Buffalo who, with her colleague and husband, Doug Clements, a professor in the same department, developed a program called Building Blocks to enrich early math education.

“They decide they’re no good at math — ‘I’m not a math person,’ they say — and pretty soon the school agrees, the parents agree,” Dr. Clements said.

“Everyone agrees.”

In a Building Blocks classroom, numbers are in artwork, on computer games and in lessons, sharing equal time with letters. Like “Sesame Street,” Building Blocks has children play creative counting games; but it also focuses on other number skills, including cardinality (how many objects are in a set) and one-to-one correspondence (matching groups of objects, like cups and saucers). Teachers can tailor the Building Block lesson to a student’s individual ability.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon at the Makowski center, Buffalo’s Public School 99, Pat Andzel asked her preschool class a question:

“How many did you count?”

She had drilled them on the number seven. She held up a sign with “7” and asked her students what number they saw (“seven!”); had the group jump seven times, counting; then had them touch their nose seven times. As the class finished counting seven objects on a poster, she asked again:

“How many?”

“I never used to ask that,” Ms. Andzel said in an interview after the lesson. She asks it all the time now, she said, because it drives home a subtle but crucial idea: that the last number they said in counting is the quantity; it is the answer.

“Many of these kids don’t understand that yet,” she said.

The curriculum includes a variety of math-based lessons and activities, as well as software programs, all drawing on findings from cognitive science. When it comes to understanding numbers, for example, recent research suggests that infants can distinguish one object from two, and two from three.

By preschool, the brain can handle larger numbers and is struggling to link three crucial concepts: physical quantities (seven marbles, seven inches) with abstract digit symbols (“7”), with the corresponding number words (“seven”). Lessons like the one Ms. Andzel taught are meant to fuse this numeric trinity, which is crucial for understanding basic math in kindergarten.

Children begin recognizing geometric shapes as early as 18 months, studies find; by preschool, the brain can begin to grasp informal geometric definitions.

It can when taught properly, that is. Many books use a pizza slice to illustrate a triangle, for example, even though slices are rounded at one end. Once a child has fused the word triangle with a specific shape (triangle = pizza slice), it is hard to break that association later on.

“The definition,” Dr. Clements said, “is a three-angled shape. Period.” Building Blocks teaches this definition, illustrating it with triangles skinny and fat, squat and tall.

In all, this curriculum and others link numbers to objects, to rhythms, to the chairs and plates around a table — to the physical world.

“If children have games and activities that demonstrate the relationship between numbers, then quantity becomes a physical experience,” said Sharon Griffin, a psychologist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who found in a series of careful studies that a curriculum she devised, called Number Worlds, raised the scores of children who lagged in math. “Counting, by contrast, is very abstract.”

In a study published last year, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University reported that playing what seems a simple childhood game, similar to Chutes and Ladders (sometimes called Snakes and Slides), accelerates the understanding of numbers for low-income preschoolers.

“Being told 8 is 2 times 4 is one thing,” said Robert S. Siegler, a psychologist who is one of the authors. “It’s another to see that it’s twice as far to the number 8, and that it takes twice as long to get there.”

The Number Instinct

“Use your eyes like cameras,” said Lara Lazo, one of the teachers at P.S. 99, after the midmorning break. “Get ready to take a snapshot.”

The children bracketed their eyes with their hands, making “cameras,” and Ms. Lazo showed them a paper plate with three dots on it — then quickly covered the plate.

“What number did you see?”

A cacophony of “threes” and “fours” erupted.

“O.K.,” she said. “Let’s try it again.”

The lesson is intended to teach a skill called subitizing. “The idea,” Dr. Sarama said, “is to get them to recognize quantity — to say, ‘I see three’ — not by counting, but by instantly recognizing how many are there by sight.”

A crude “number instinct” is hard-wired into the anatomy of the brain, recent research has found. Mammals can quickly recognize differences in quantity, choosing the tree or bush with the most fruit. Human beings, even if they live in remote cultures with no formal math education, have a general grasp of quantities as well, anthropologists have found.

In a series of recent imaging studies, scientists have discovered that a sliver of the parietal cortex, on the surface of the brain about an inch above the ears, is particularly active when the brain judges quantity. In this area, called the intraparietal sulcus, clusters of neurons are sensitive to the sight of specific quantities, research suggests. Some fire vigorously at the sight of five objects, for instance, less so at the sight of four or six, and not at all at two or nine. Others are most active in response to one, two, three, and so on.

When engaged in a lesson or exercise, these regions actively communicate with areas of the frontal lobe, where planning and critical thinking are centered.

“This is what we believe focused math education does: It sharpens the firing of these quantity neurons,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Collège de France in Paris and author of the books “The Number Sense” and “Reading and the Brain.” The firing of the number neurons becomes increasingly more selective to single quantities, he said; and these cells apparently begin to communicate with neurons across the brain in language areas, connecting precise quantities to words: “two,” “ten,” “five.”

A similar honing process is thought to occur when young children begin to link letter shapes and their associated sounds. Cells in the visual cortex wired to recognize shapes specialize in recognizing letters; these cells communicate with neurons in the auditory cortex as the letters are associated with sounds.

The process may take longer to develop than many assume. A study published in March by neuroscientists at Maastricht University in the Netherlands suggested that the brain does not fully fuse letters and sounds until about age 11.

“As these kinds of findings come in, they will have implications not only for teaching, but also education policy,” said Daniel Ansari, an assistant professor in developmental cognitive neuroscience at Western Ontario University.

Explaining Five

In math, there is no faking it. Children either know that five is more than three, or they do not. Either they can put number symbols in exactly the right order, or they cannot. In their studies, Dr. Clements and Dr. Sarama test children one on one and videotape the results for comparisons.

Over the past four years, the couple has tested Building Blocks in more than 400 classrooms in Buffalo, Boston and Nashville, comparing the progress of children in the program with that of peers in classes offering another math curriculum or none at all. On tests of addition, subtraction and number recognition after one school year, children who had the program scored in the 76th percentile on average, and those who did not scored in the 50th percentile.

By the end of kindergarten, a year after the program has ended, those who had had it sustained their gains, scoring in the 71st percentile, on average.

Many hurdles remain for this and similar curriculums based in cognitive science, experts say. Schools may move away from the curriculum; teachers move around, as do students; and in later grades there is always the risk that children who have mastered basic math will not get the attention they need to advance even further.

But for now at least, education based on brain science has helped hundreds of Buffalo children refine their native abilities in math. In one videotaped exam, a 4-year-old boy in a FUBU jersey and long dreadlocks who entered P.S. 99 in 2006 was unable to count or match cards with 3, 5, 2, 1 and 4 on them to cards with equivalent numbers of grapes.

In a video of his post-Building Blocks exam, six months later, he instantly says there are 10 pennies placed in front of him, without counting. He easily matches the number cards to their corresponding grape cards — and puts the mixed-up numerals in the correct order.

“What’s the biggest, nine or seven or five?” asks the teacher giving the exam.

The boy thinks for a moment. “Nine,” he says. “Five is the littlest.” Then he holds one palm above the other and says: “Five is like this. See?”

“Do you see what he’s doing?” Dr. Clements said, interrupting the video. “Right there. He wants to explain. He wants to explain five."

EQ - The Other Education

2009-11-27T09:12:00.000-08:00

The Other Education
David Brooks, NYT, 26 Nov 2009

Like many of you, I went to elementary school, high school and college. I took such and such classes, earned such and such grades, and amassed such and such degrees.

But on the night of Feb. 2, 1975, I turned on WMMR in Philadelphia and became mesmerized by a concert the radio station was broadcasting. The concert was by a group I’d never heard of — Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Thus began a part of my second education.

We don’t usually think of this second education. For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.

In any case, over the next few decades Springsteen would become one of the professors in my second education. In album after album he assigned a new course in my emotional curriculum.

This second education doesn’t work the way the scholastic education works. In a normal schoolroom, information walks through the front door and announces itself by light of day. It’s direct. The teacher describes the material to be covered, and then everybody works through it.

The knowledge transmitted in an emotional education, on the other hand, comes indirectly, seeping through the cracks of the windowpanes, from under the floorboards and through the vents. It’s generally a byproduct of the search for pleasure, and the learning is indirect and unconscious.

From that first night in the winter of 1975, I wanted the thrill that Springsteen was offering. His manager, Jon Landau, says that each style of music elicits its own set of responses. Rock, when done right, is jolting and exhilarating.

Once I got a taste of that emotional uplift, I was hooked. The uplifting experiences alone were bound to open the mind for learning.

I followed Springsteen into his world. Once again, it wasn’t the explicit characters that mattered most. Springsteen sings about teenage couples out on a desperate lark, workers struggling as the mills close down, and drifters on the wrong side of the law. These stories don’t directly touch my life, and as far as I know he’s never written a song about a middle-age pundit who interviews politicians by day and makes mind-numbingly repetitive school lunches at night.

What mattered most, as with any artist, were the assumptions behind the stories. His tales take place in a distinct universe, a distinct map of reality. In Springsteen’s universe, life’s “losers” always retain their dignity. Their choices have immense moral consequences, and are seen on an epic and anthemic scale.

There are certain prominent neighborhoods on his map — one called defeat, another called exaltation, another called nostalgia. Certain emotional chords — stoicism, for one — are common, while others are absent. “There is no sarcasm in his writing,” Landau says, “and not a lot of irony.”

I find I can’t really describe what this landscape feels like, especially in newspaper prose. But I do believe his narrative tone, the mental map, has worked its way into my head, influencing the way I organize the buzzing confusion of reality, shaping the unconscious categories through which I perceive events. Just as being from New York or rural Georgia gives you a perspective from which to see the world, so spending time in Springsteen’s universe inculcates its own preconscious viewpoint.

Then there is the man himself. Like other parts of the emotional education, it is hard to bring the knowledge to consciousness, but I do think important lessons are communicated by that embarrassed half-giggle he falls into when talking about himself. I do think a message is conveyed in the way he continually situates himself within a tradition — de-emphasizing his own individual contributions, stressing instead the R&B groups, the gospel and folk singers whose work comes out through him.

I’m not claiming my second education has been exemplary or advanced. I’m describing it because I have only become aware of it retrospectively, and society pays too much attention to the first education and not enough to the second.

In fact, we all gather our own emotional faculty — artists, friends, family and teams. Each refines and develops the inner instrument with a million strings.

Last week, my kids attended their first Springsteen concert in Baltimore. At one point, I looked over at my 15-year-old daughter. She had her hands clapped to her cheeks and a look of slack-jawed, joyous astonishment on her face. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing — 10,000 people in a state of utter abandon, with Springsteen surrendering himself to them in the center of the arena.

It begins again.

'NYC Prep' And The Perils Of Poor Choices

2009-08-29T05:21:00.000-07:00

Nancy Eppler-Wolff and Susan Davis, CSM, 28 Aug 2009

"NYC Prep" just had its season finale, and it seems everyone from high school students to TMZ is talking about it; the latest in TV reality shows. It's a perspective on the seamy pettiness of a handful of wealthy teenagers.

These teens were filmed spending most of their time (when not in school) shopping, going to fashion shows, dining at expensive restaurants, and espousing their narrow perspectives on life. Though it's certainly not life typical of all teens, the resulting banality is exactly what happens to you when you don't challenge yourself, or your children.

The lives of the "NYC Prep" teens are largely devoid of healthy risks – so they fill their lives making poor choices. Their wealth pampers them and encloses them in a world of petty gossip and unhealthy risk-taking. One of the boys this season, for example, alludes to using cocaine. Another one of the teens holds parties in her apartment rather than focusing on her schoolwork.

Unfortunately, such unwise risk-taking is not confined to reality television or the wealthy. Any child who has not learned to take good risks will take poor ones instead.

Examples include the 10-year-old who rides his skateboard on a busy street to show his friends how "cool" he is, or the 14-year-old who doesn't try out for the school chorus because she is afraid that she will be rejected. Left unchecked, these choices can severely limit a child's success and happiness.

Children of all ages need to challenge themselves by taking everyday risks that promote confidence, accomplishment, and a greater capacity for tolerance and compassion.

Toddlers take a risk when they move from crawling to taking those first steps. Elementary school-age children take a risk as they venture to raise a hand in class and articulate an answer to a question. Can you imagine what life for them would be like without overcoming those risks? Teens who try out for school musicals, sports, or run for class president are also taking essential risks.

Then there are the risks that come in subtler, more complex forms: taking the risk to study hard for a test – thereby acknowledging that you care about doing well; or confronting a friend about a misunderstanding and putting your feelings on the line.

The opportunity to engage is everywhere. Healthy risk-taking is inextricably linked with healthy development. Without good risk-taking, development falters.

We all want our children to be successful, and confident enough to leap at life's opportunities and triumph over setbacks along the way. And children are capable with our help.

Parents and educators can facilitate good risk-taking not only by being models, but by listening carefully to their children, by attending to their strengths, and by creating situations in which children can safely take the next step. The sooner we help facilitate healthy risk-taking, the sooner our children can make better decisions on their own.

With some encouragement, the boy on "NYC Prep" might challenge himself by testing out his strong verbal skills and joining his school's Model UN team. Or he could use his notable strengths and free time to tutor a child from the South Bronx, or volunteer for an environmental organization. Instead of hiding in the cozy position of cynicism, he could tap into some great potential.

A healthy challenge might feel uncomfortable, even frightening at first, but with the support of a parent or teacher, he could eventually gain the confidence to take a positive risk.

Children need to feel challenged and to engage in behaviors that help them test their mettle. It is only by stretching ourselves that we learn and help realize our own potential. It's up to parents to help children learn to take the healthy risks that make them strong, unafraid of failure, and poised to lead gratifying and productive lives.

Children who are good risk-takers are well prepped for life.

Just Following Orders: An Evil Essay

2009-08-26T08:05:00.000-07:00

NYT, 20 Jul 2009

Mr. [Elliott] Schrefer, author of “Hack the SAT,” occasionally takes the exam in the service of his test-prep business. On this sitting, he set out to understand how the College Board would grade an essay that was morally repugnant yet had excellent structure, language and syntax.

In thoughtful and concise language, he developed over 20 minutes the most “monstrous argument” he could imagine. He praised the intellectual courage of the Nazis — some of the “brightest thinkers” of our time. Their genius, he noted, was in recognizing that not “everyone has the right to the same opportunities, or the right to exist at all.” He concluded that only by “safeguarding racial stratification and genetic superiority can true and ambitious progress be made.”

Top scores go to the essay that “effectively and insightfully develops a point of view on the issue and demonstrates outstanding critical thinking, using clearly appropriate examples, reasons, and other evidence to support its position.” Guidelines say nothing about the quality of the point of view taken.

One of the two judges gave Mr. Schrefer a 5, and the other a perfect score of 6.

Academic Corruption

2009-08-25T19:13:00.000-07:00

Actually, with the growth in the USA of such insider academic advising over the last couple of decades, I'm surprised we haven't faced such a situation - yet. El

Germany Rocked By Allegations of Ph.D. Bribes
Jochen Leffers, Der Spiegel, 25 Aug 2009

Investigators in Cologne are looking into whether a company bribed dozens of professors to advance the academic careers of its clients. A number of Ph.D. holders might soon lose their titles, and academics are worried the scandal will put a dent in the reputation of German universities.

Germany is a country that has traditionally been obsessed with titles -- especially those of the academic variety. Any person with a doctorate is entitled to be addressed as Herr Doktor or Frau Doktor -- and generally speaking, that is what people do. But are all of those titles earned in a legitimate fashion? Most certainly are, but this weekend the public prosecutor in Cologne went public with its countrywide investigation into mass fraud. According to the prosecutor, more than 100 professors from across Germany are suspected of bestowing doctoral titles in exchange for bribes.

The scam involved an academic consulting firm in the Cologne suburb of Bergisch Gladbach that allegedly paid bribes to professors in order to help its clients obtain Ph.D.s more quickly.

But the story actually goes back decades. The last major step in the prosecutor's investigation came in March 2008, when investigators searched the main offices of the Institut für Wissenschaftsberatung ("Institute for Academic Consultancy") in Bergisch Gladbach and carried out boxes and boxes of contracts with its clients and associates within academia. What the well-known establishment did -- that is, giving a helpful boost to Ph.D. candidates -- was no secret in the university scene. But its legality was always a matter that aroused much suspicion. And now the professors are being accused of having possibly awarded Ph.D.s to unqualified candidates.

"We went through tons of material after the raid," Günther Feld, Cologne's senior public prosecutor, told reporters on Sunday. "And that is what produced the concrete suspicion against the people who have now been indicted." The majority of the suspects under investigation, academics from a wide range of fields, are freelance university instructors and lecturers and not professors holding long-term appointments.

The institute at the center of the investigation has been around for over 20 years and buys space in newspapers and trade magazines across Germany advertising its services in helping people obtain doctorate degrees. The company pledges to clients that it will help them find both a good topic to write a dissertation on and a professor well-suited for overseeing the dissertation work. The company can charge as much as €20,000 ($28,700) for these services, with a cut of €4,000 going to the professors. And that is where the illegal part of the arrangement arises: Since it is already part of a professor's job to oversee Ph.D. candidates, in effect, they were getting paid twice for the same job.

'Just Totally Nuts'

Martin D.*, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, is the institute's managing director. This is not his first run-in with the law. In July 2008, a regional court in the western city of Hildesheim sentenced D. to three and a half years in prison and slapped him with a €75,000 fine for bribery. The court found that he had introduced over 60 Ph.D. candidates to a law professor at the University of Hanover, whom he paid to accept the candidates. In many cases, the candidates didn't fulfill any of the prerequisites for pursuing a Ph.D. Germany's Federal Court of Justice confirmed the lower court's decision in May, ending any appeals D. might have. A court also convicted the law professor for accepting bribes. In one case, he actually admitted he had given a better evaluation to one female candidate in return for sexual favors.

Frank Grätz, the founder and long-time head of the institute, fared better. He escaped prosecution after being judged unfit to stand trial for health reasons. For many years, Grätz had been a vocal advocate for the institute and had always claimed that it provided genuine professional services -- including information on legal issues related to earning a Ph.D., access to databanks and literature research and contacts with potential Ph.D. advisers. Before the institute went bust and its Web site was shut down, it used to advertise online that: "We will help you find a professionally competent Ph.D. adviser (whether it is a full or an associate professor), who has a track record for being a successful and fair adviser and expert." To add to his institute's appeal, Grätz also advertised that he kept a "dissertation museum" and a prize for the shortest dissertation.

Manual René Theisen, a professor of business management at Munich's Ludwig Maximilian University, has had his eye on Grätz and other Ph.D. consulting services for a long time. As far back as the early 1990s, Theisen expressed his doubts about this kind of company's questionable business model. As he sees it, it is "absolutely idiotic" for someone to pay a whole lot of money for something they could already get for free. And he gets angry about the thought that someone's dissertation might not be proof of that person's academic achievements.

For many years, Theisen raged against this system -- alone and in vain. What's mind-boggling about all this is not the fact that there are now so many ongoing corruption investigations against professors. Instead, the truly astounding thing is that it took so long to get underway. As Theisen sees it, public prosecutors and university departments just "looked the other way" for too long. "Ph.D. consultancy has grown to become a genuine business sector," he says. "We're talking about millions of euros here."

For law-enforcement officials, finding clear proof of wrongdoing has been a bit of a problem because the Ph.D. consultants operate in a gray zone of sorts. For one thing, offering databank research for sale isn't necessarily illegal, nor is helping people make contact with potential Ph.D. advisers. The thing that really put the institute on the public prosecutor's radar was the fact that the institute was moving money around in the process of offering these services. The German Association of University Professors and Lecturers (DHV) has described this as "a practically impenetrable legal thicket." DHV spokesman Matthias Jarosch believes that the matter puts "the reputation of an entire profession into question."

That is pretty much how Annette Schavan, Germany's minister of education, sees it, too. On Sunday, Schavan said that if the accusations turn out to be true, the credibility of Germany's academic community could sustain major damage. "The public should be able to expect from universities that they handle the process of awarding Ph.D.s with the utmost diligence," Schavan said, adding that she backs the DHV's calls for stricter regulations on granting Ph.D.s. DHV managing director Michael Hartmer recently said on the public television show "MDR Sputnik" that it would be sensible to have people sign an affidavit claiming that they did not receive any unauthorized assistance while producing their dissertations because "it would have a deterrent effect."

The clients of the Ph.D. consultants are usually working academics who wanted to have a doctorate -- and were willing to pay for it. It's still unclear what consequences they might face as a result of the investigation, but Feld believes that there will be no legal ones. "Some media sources leave the impression that the institute's clients didn't even write dissertations," Feld told reporters. "But that's not right. The real issue is whether the professors were bribed to choose certain candidates." Feld adds that his office's investigations have shown that the majority of the institute's clients weren't aware of the element of bribery involved.

Ignorance Is No Dissertation Defense

Still, DHV managing director Michael Hartmer sees things differently. In his view, the clients should not be able to claim ignorance as an excuse. He notes that a simple Google search would have sufficed to clue the clients in on the shady nature of the Ph.D. consultancy business. And he believes that the clients might have their degrees annulled. "These people know that they obtained their titles through academic efforts that were not just their own and that they did so with the help of Ph.D. consultants," Hartmer told the German news agency DDP. "So it is totally clear: If they have already been awarded a Ph.D., they will be stripped of their title."

Still, the fact is that not every client succeeded in obtaining a Ph.D. In the case of the law professor at the University of Hanover, for example, only a handful of the 60 candidates he oversaw ultimately received their doctoral degree. When news of the scandal broke in March 2008, the University of Hanover promptly launched an investigation and invalidated nine of the doctoral degrees it had awarded, including ones for a judge and several civil servants and lawyers. The dean overseeing the law school there says, "We assume that all of the candidates -- and particularly all of the ones dealing with law -- knew what they were getting into." He adds that more investigations related to revoking degrees might be in the pipeline.

Widespread and Persistent

For the time being, Cologne's public prosecutor's office has chosen to refrain from announcing the particular places and people under investigation. According to a report by the German news magazine Focus, however, the investigation involves instructors at universities across Germany -- in Frankfurt, Tübingen, Leipzig, Rostock, Jena, Bayreuth, Ingolstadt, Hamburg, Hanover, Bielefeld, Hagen, Cologne and Berlin. Most of the universities have yet to make a public comment on the affair. However, officials at the University of Bayreuth have admitted to having promptly asked the prosecutor's office to provide information about which professors and Ph.D. students might be involved.

In the meantime, there are still plenty of shady companies to be found on the Internet that are eager to provide such services. Here a few choice examples:

"'Whether it's for term papers, B.A. or M.A. theses, or Ph.D. dissertations, our specialists are ready to help you with their expertise and specialized knowledge in all fields." (a company from Halle)
"Our team of over 400 academically trained ghostwriters work in all specialized fields at a high academic level, at a good price and in an interdisciplinary way. They can meet your deadline and remain confidential. We have the capacity to process even large assignments in line with your requirements." (a company from Löhne)
"When we say academic consultancy, we mean Ph.D. consultancy. We have much experience in this field and would like to offer this service to students wishing to receive a Ph.D. in Eastern Europe and the customary doctoral programs there." (a company with a contact address in Slovakia)
"Are you hoping to complete a thesis or dissertation that requires a lot of work? We can provide you a concrete program for doing so in a manageable amount of time. Short on time? We can solve some clear problems and overcome some bureaucratic hurdles. Looking for the perfect topic for your doctoral dissertation? We can provide you with advice and help you find a Ph.D. adviser." (a company from Leipzig

Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In

2009-07-19T05:30:00.000-07:00

Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In

Jacques, Steinberg, NYT, 18 Jul 2009

The free fashion show at a Greenwich, Conn., boutique in June was billed as a crash course in dressing for a college admissions interview.

Yet the proposed “looks” — a young man in seersucker shorts, a young woman in a blue blazer over a low-cut blouse and short madras skirt — appeared better suited for a nearby yacht club. After Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, was shown photos of those outfits, she rendered her review.

“I burst out laughing,” she said.

Shannon Duff, the independent college counselor who organized the event, says she ordinarily charges families “in the range of” $15,000 for guidance about the application process, including matters far more weighty than just what to wear.

Ms. Duff is a practitioner in a rapidly growing, largely unregulated field seeking to serve families bewildered by the admissions gantlet at selective colleges.

No test or licensing is required to offer such services, and there is no way to evaluate the counselors’ often extravagant claims of success or experience. And Ms. Duff’s asking price, though higher than many, is eclipsed by those of competitors who may charge upwards of $40,000 — more than a year’s tuition at many colleges.

In the last three years, the number of independent admissions advisers (as opposed to school-based counselors) is estimated to have grown to nearly 5,000, from about 2,000, according to the Independent Educational Consultants Association, a membership group trying to promote basic standards of competency and ethics. While initially clustered on the East and West Coasts, counselors are making inroads across the country.

The consultants association has made a particular target of counselors who boast of helping nearly all their clients gain admission to their top-choice colleges.

“When you say things like, ‘We know the secrets of getting in,’ it kind of implies that it’s not the student’s ability,” said Mark H. Sklarow, executive director of the association, in Fairfax, Va. “It suggests that there’s some kind of underground code.”

A reputable, experienced counselor might, for a few hundred dollars, help a student compile a list of prospective colleges, or brainstorm topics for an essay. But others demand tens of thousands of dollars to oversee the entire application process — tutoring jittery applicants on what classes to take in high school or musical instruments to play, the better, their families are told, to impress the admissions dean.

Never mind that admissions officers say that no outsider can truly predict how a particular applicant might fare. “I guess there are snake oil salesman in every field,” said Amy Gutmann, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, “and they are preying on vulnerable and anxious people.”

While the going national rate for such work is about $185 an hour, a counselor in Vermont and another in New York City are among those who charge some families more than $40,000. Their packages might begin when a child is in eighth grade.

“It’s annoying when people complain about the money,” the Vermont-based counselor, Michele Hernandez, said. “I’m at the top of my field. Do people economize when they have a brain tumor and are looking for a neurosurgeon? If you want to go with someone cheaper, or chance it, don’t hire me.”

Dr. Hernandez, a former Dartmouth admissions officer, says she counsels as many as 25 students in each high school grade each year. She also offers four-day “boot camps” every August in a Boston hotel, charging 40 incoming high school seniors as much as $14,000 each.
Lee Stetson, who retired in 2007 after three decades as dean of admissions at the University of Pennsylvania, now has a counseling practice near Philadelphia, where he charges as much as $15,000 for his junior-senior package. Unlike many competitors, Mr. Stetson says he cautions his small group of clients, maybe seven students a year, that he will not handicap their chances of admission to a particular college, nor button-hole former colleagues on their behalf. “I’m hoping they see me more as someone who understands the process,” he said, “than someone who can influence the chances of acceptance.”

While Mr. Stetson was one of the most influential admissions officers in the country, the extent of other counselors’ experience may be more difficult for parents to divine.

On her business Web site, Collegiate Compass, Ms. Duff says she brings “firsthand perspective to today’s admissions landscape,” borne of her earlier work “as a reader” in the Yale undergraduate admissions office. While outside readers help evaluate some candidates’ files, they typically have no decision-making authority.

It is not uncommon for other counselors to exaggerate their backgrounds. Ivy Success, in Garden City, N.Y., which charges some clients nearly $30,000, says on its Web site that its counselors have “years of experience as admissions officers to help you gain an edge in this competitive and uncertain process.”

Victoria Hsiao, a partner in Ivy Success, said in an interview that she had worked as an admissions officer at Cornell for several years in “the late 1990s.” But Jason Locke, the director of undergraduate admissions at the university, said there was no record, or memory, of Ms. Hsiao doing such work. (Mr. Locke did confirm that she graduated from Cornell in 1996.)

Asked about the discrepancy, Ms. Hsiao said she had mainly assisted the admissions office as an alumna who conducted interviews. She also said a partner, Robert Shaw, had been an admissions officer at the University of Pennsylvania. Asked about this in an e-mail message, Mr. Shaw said he had been only “an assistant,” from 1987 to 1988.

“Don’t remember all the details,” he said, adding, “We really don’t want to be a part of your article as we’re not a service for the masses.”

Admissions officers say that for many students, the advice of their high school counselors should suffice. Those applicants who might benefit from supplemental counseling — like those at urban high schools with overworked counselors — are often among the least able to afford such services.

Regardless, colleges say parents should be wary of any counselor’s claim of being able to lobby for a candidate’s admission. While noting that there are “genuinely rational and knowledgeable folks out there doing this work,” Bruce Poch, the dean of admissions at Pomona College, adds, “Some of the independents leave me looking for the nearest emergency shower.”

Though none of the counselors said business was off in the struggling economy, some are making adjustments. Having initially presented the fashion show outfits as serious, Ms. Duff later said she had intended to “create a lighthearted environment,” the better to promote two new advisory DVDs she is offering, “at a price that is accessible.” (One for $45; two for $80.)
Katherine Cohen, the founder of IvyWise in New York City, has a team that charges from a few hundred dollars to more than $40,000. But she also has been emphasizing a spinoff called ApplyWise that for $299 helps students assemble their application in ways reminiscent of Turbo Tax.

Dr. Cohen, a former reader at Yale, is a member of the independent consultants association — despite a claim on the IvyWise Web site that runs afoul of an association admonition.

“Congratulations,” it blares, “100 percent of IvyWise students were admitted to one of their top three choices in 2009!”

Fewer than one of every five admissions consultants can claim to be an association member. Bill Dingledine, a longtime educational consultant in Greenville, S.C., is among those advocating even more stringent certification offered by the American Institute of Certified Educational Planners. It requires counselors to pass a three-hour written examination.

The concept has yet to catch on, at least in part because many counselors’ practices are already booming. Asked how many counselors had sought, and won, that certification last year, Mr. Dingledine had a ready answer: about 20.

No Right Brain Left Behind

2009-07-13T17:27:00.000-07:00

No Right Brain Left Behind: Must Kids Prep For 'Risk-Taking'?

Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY, 12 Jun 2009

On a recent foggy night, the newest wave in educational thinking crashed into this city's oldest high school.

And its waters weren't warm.

"It worries me that we're not thinking big enough, that we're not preparing our kids for a world that will be terribly different from the one we grew up in," says Patrick Bassett, scanning the rapt faces of a few dozen parents in the auditorium of 103-year-old Mission High School, whose alums include poet Maya Angelou and rocker Carlos Santana.

"We need kids to be more risk-taking, more entrepreneurial," he says. "More than ever, we need the right brain to mix with the left."

Although Bassett, president of the National Association of Independent Schools, has been quietly delivering this "Right-Brain Future" talk for a few years, recent economic events have lately sent him on the road non-stop. "My reception has shifted dramatically," he says. "More people seem to want to hear this message."

Here's the Cliff Notes version: As traditional jobs in the left-brain world of finance shrink, the USA's economy will increasingly be tethered to creative innovations rooted in right-brain thinking.

Sachin Desai, 45, attended Bassett's lecture with his wife, Sejal, 44. Both are software engineers; their sons are 12 and 8.

"Growing up in Britain, it was all about linear thinking," he says. "But my kids are American, a place known for coming up with unique solutions and ideas. I fear we're losing that. So it's critical these kids become creative thinkers."

No right brain left behind

An impediment has been a No Child Left Behind educational system that is too geared to test-taking, says Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, the book that inspired Bassett to hit the lecture trail. "What's troubling is that our system is obsessed with standardization at the very time when the future of our economy depends on the opposite."

Some schools have gotten that message. At High Tech High, a charter school in San Diego, students are encouraged to use those skills to practical ends such as dreaming up new sources of energy or calculating ways to stretch the West's limited water supply, says the school's CEO, Larry Rosenstock.

"You want kids who are math whizzes, yes. But you want them to also have the creative talent to apply those math skills to find answers to big questions."

Barrett praises other schools that are pushing students to think outside the box. He cites Fay School in Southborough, Mass., whose students last year teamed with peers at South Saigon International School in Vietnam. Using video chats and a specially created online wiki-space, they designed a "socially conscious business model" that involved both selling products and creating public service announcements to build awareness for disaster relief.

"That's the future," he says. "Kids being analytical and creative to come up with solutions for us all."

Not set in stone

The good news for parents of children who seem predisposed to either a right- or left-brain orientation is that neither aptitude is set in stone, says Po Bronson, co-author with Ashley Merryman of NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, out in September.

Bronson says brain mechanisms controlling intelligence and creativity are in flux through age 25. "People told me as a kid that I had a math brain, and that I shouldn't write," says Bronson, a onetime Wall Streeter who went on to write five best-selling books.

"In the end, creativity is mainly an attitude," he says. "It's about coming up with an original answer to something as opposed to the one we've always seen."

Still, for those who display both left- and right-brain talents, the world is not yet their oyster.
Stephen Welch, 22, of Woodstock, Ga., is a graduate of Georgia Tech in Atlanta. An engineer and a guitar player, he has been accepted at the University of California-Berkeley's engineering program and Boston's Berklee College of Music. He fears either choice will deny one side of his identity; he plans to take a year off to think about it. "I'm struggling," he says. "I feel like it's an either/or situation."

Not so straightforward

That dilemma is not likely to be resolved anytime soon. Reflecting on Bassett's presentation is Ben Quinones, a father of three girls under 10 who attend the private Children's Day School here. He half-jokes that the lecture "was inspirational, daunting and all about figuring out what you're doing wrong."

As a lawyer turned CEO of semi-conductor start-up Lakota Technologies, Quinones says he sees firsthand the importance of not only fact-driven left-brain skills, but also more intangible right-brain weapons of creativity and adaptability.

"Things were so different, so straightforward when I was in school," he says, almost wistfully. "But globalization is driving this. For my kids, simply grasping a set of left-brain skills will never be enough."

Currently Reading

2009-07-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of the Japanese-Americans During WW2, Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis

Slave Revolution in the Caribbean: 1789-1804, Laurent Dubois and John Garrigus

White Supremacists, Regine Heberlein, ed.

Latin America And Its People, Cheryl Martin and Mark Wasserman

No Longer Letting Scores Separate Pupils

2009-06-15T04:53:00.000-07:00

Winnie Hu
NYT, 14 Jun 2009

Sixth graders at Cloonan Middle School here are assigned numbers based on their previous year’s standardized test scores — zeros indicate the highest performers, ones the middle, twos the lowest — that determine their academic classes for the next three years.

But this longstanding system for tracking children by academic ability for more effective teaching evolved into an uncomfortable caste system in which students were largely segregated by race and socioeconomic background, both inside and outside classrooms. Black and Hispanic students, for example, make up 46 percent of this year’s sixth grade, but are 78 percent of the twos and 7 percent of the zeros.So in an unusual experiment, Cloonan mixed up its sixth-grade science and social studies classes last month, combining zeros and ones with twos. These mixed-ability classes have reported fewer behavior problems and better grades for struggling students, but have also drawn complaints of boredom from some high-performing students who say they are not learning as much.

The results illustrate the challenge facing this 15,000-student district just outside New York City, which is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stamford sorted students into as many as 15 different levels; the current system of three to five levels at each of four middle schools will be replaced this fall by a two-tiered model, in which the top quarter of sixth graders will be enrolled in honors classes, the rest in college-prep classes. (A fifth middle school is a magnet school and has no tracking.)

More than 300 Stamford parents have signed a petition opposing the shift, and some say they are now considering moving or switching their children to private schools. “I think this is a terrible system for our community,” said Nicole Zussman, a mother of two.

Ms. Zussman and others contend that Stamford’s diversity, with poor urban neighborhoods and wealthy suburban enclaves, demands multiple academic tracks, and suggest that the district could make the system fairer and more flexible by testing students more frequently for movement among the levels.

But Joshua P. Starr, the Stamford superintendent, said the tracking system has failed to prepare children in the lower levels for high school and college. “There are certainly people who want to maintain the status quo because some people have benefited from the status quo,” he said. “I know that we cannot afford that anymore. It’s not fair to too many kids.”

Educators have debated for decades how to best divide students into classes. Some school districts focus on providing extra instruction to low achievers or developing so-called gifted programs for the brightest students, but few maintain tracking like Stamford’s middle schools (tracking is less comprehensive and rigid at the town’s elementary and high schools).

Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, said research is showing that all students benefit from mixed-ability classes. “We see improvements in student behavior, academic performance and teaching, and all that positively affects school culture,” she said.

Daria Hall, a director with Education Trust, an advocacy group, said that tracking has worsened the situation by funneling poor and minority students into “low-level and watered-down courses.” “If all we expect of students is for them to watch movies and fill out worksheets, then that’s what they will give us,” she said.

In Stamford, black and Hispanic student performance on state tests has lagged significantly behind that of Asians and whites. In 2008, 98 percent of Asian students and 92 percent of white students in grades three to eight passed math, and 93 percent and 88 percent reading, respectively. Among black students, 63 percent passed math, and 56 percent reading; among Hispanic students, 74 percent passed math and 60 percent reading.

The district plans to keep a top honors level, but put the majority of students in mixed-ability classes, expanding the new system from sixth grade to seventh and eighth over three years. While the old system tracked students for all subjects based on math and English scores, the new one will allow students to be designated for honors in one subject but not necessarily another, making more students overall eligible for the upper track.

The staff of Cloonan Middle School decided to experiment with mixed-ability classes for the last eight weeks of this school year.

David Rudolph, Cloonan’s principal, said that parents have long complained that the tracking numbers assigned to students dictate not only their classes but also their friends and cafeteria cliques. Every summer, at least a dozen parents lobby Mr. Rudolph to move their children to the top track. “The zero group is all about status,” he said.

Jamiya Richardson, who is 11 and in the twos’ group, said that students all know their own numbers as well as those of their classmates. “I don’t like being classified because it makes you feel like you’re not smart,” she said.

The other day in Jamiya’s newly mixed social studies class, students debated who was to blame in an ancient Roman legal case in which a barber shaving a slave in a public square was hit by a ball and cut the slave’s throat. At one point, Jamiya was the only one in the class of 25 to argue that it was the slave’s fault because he sat there at his own risk — which the teacher said was the right answer.

Cloonan teachers say they had not changed the curriculum or slowed the pace for the mixed-ability classrooms, but tried to do more collaborative projects and discussions in hopes that students would learn from one another. But Joel Castle, who is 12 and a zero, said that he did not work as hard now. “My grades are going up, and that’s not really surprising because the standards have been lowered,” he said.

In a recent social studies class, the top students stood out as they presented elaborate homemade projects about Roman culture — mosaics, dresses, weaponry — while several of their classmates showed up empty-handed. One offered the excuse that his catapult had disappeared overnight from his bedside.

“A catapult thief?” questioned the teacher, Mimi Nichols, in disbelief before directing him to find his project by the next day.

Afterward, Ms. Nichols said that the less-motivated students had still learned from their classmates’ example. “That in itself is valuable,” she said. “For children to see what is possible.”

10 Things to Find Out Before Committing to a College

2009-05-25T06:05:00.000-07:00

Lynn Jacobs and Jeremy Hyman

US News and World Report, 25 Mar 2009

Often we find that students, and their parents, tend to focus on bells and whistles when making their college selections. They fixate on things like the looks of the campus, the size of the library, the honors and study-abroad programs, even the quality of the football team. Hey, these are all fine and good. But we urge you to also think about some things that, while often overlooked, constitute the bread and butter of your college experience. Before you decide, here are 10 things you might not have thought to consider:

1. The number of requirements . These vary widely from school to school. And while it might look very impressive to see a long list of required courses, it's not so great to find yourself mired in courses that don't interest you, while you're unable to take electives in areas that do. It's even less great when you realize that some of these most unpleasant requirements were instituted by some legislator who insisted that everyone in the state needs to take State History 101. Or by some pushy department in 1950, which couldn't get students to take its courses in any other way.

2. How flexible th os e requirements are . Schools that require specific courses, with no substitutions allowed, can really put you in a bind if you'd rather take more advanced courses—or need to take more remedial courses—to fulfill that requirement. So check to see that the school allows a choice of levels to satisfy the various requirements. Also, keep in mind that anytime a school needs to route hundreds or thousands of students through Course X, Course X is going to become a sort of factory that neither the students taking the course nor the teachers teaching the course are going to like much.

Insider fact: Most professors view teaching these required courses asthe least desirable assignments—since they have to teach everyone who comes into the school—and try to avoid them like the plague.

3. Whether you can get into the classes you want to take . In the past few years, college enrollments have risen but faculty sizes often haven't grown commensurately. This can make for yards-long wait lists for some classes and shortages in first-year classes for students who didn't register on the first possible date.

4-Star Tip. If you're considering a state university in an economically distressed state (Florida, Michigan, and California come to mind), be sure to check the availability of courses before sending in your acceptance.

4. The availability of the major you want to take . Do not assume that the college you are considering actually offers every possible major. Especially if you have a very specialized major in mind, it's critical to check the list of majors at the college (the University of Minnesota, for example, offers 171 majors; nearby Carleton College, 47). Also, check out whether your major is available only by application or to a limited number of students. At certain colleges, some majors are not open to all, especially those that require talent or previous training, like music or art, or those that are extremely popular, like psychology or journalism.

5 . Whether the school has a writing requirement . You might have thought that if the school has a free-standing writing requirement (sometimes called a W course), this is a sign that the school cares about teaching you to write. Au contraire. It's actually quite often a sign that it's not typically expected that professors assign papers in their classes, and that if it were not for the requirement, you might never see a paper in your classes. Since learning to write papers is, in our opinion, one of the most important things you can accomplish in college, consider any writing requirement to be a red flag that the college isn't all too keen on teaching writing.

6. Whether — and how often — graduate stu dents teach their own courses. At many state universities and even some research universities, a significant number of instructors are graduate students. It's important to know how much of your instruction, especially in the first years of college, will be pawned off on them. A class in which a regular professor gives the lectures and the grad students lead discussion sections is perfectly normal and nothing to worry about: Indeed, it's often a good thing to have the material explained from an additional, different perspective. But a real issue arises at schools where grad students are allowed to teach entire courses on their own (that is, where graduate students are the lecturer). Some schools (for example, the University of California and the University of Texas) have policies that grad students who teach their own classes must have completed all the coursework for the Ph.D. and must have had extensive experience teaching sections and grading before they're entrusted with their own courses. But other schools will happily take entering grad students, with no teaching experience and no real graduate training in the field, and hand them their own courses to teach. The odds that the course will go well in these conditions? Well, you figure it out.

Extra Pointer. Graduate students at universities are often compared to residents at teaching hospitals. But the analogy is misleading. Residents are full-fledged doctors who have completed their medical degrees; graduate students are not professors and have not completed their academic degree.

7 . The student/faculty ratio . If you attend a school with 5 to 10 students per faculty member, you're likely to get a lot of individual attention from the faculty. A range of 11 to 15 is quite common at better state schools and equates to large intro courses but upper-division courses of a manageable size. Once you hit 16 to 20, you shouldn't be expecting much hand-holding from a professor—or even a chance to view your professor from closer than 10 feet (which in some cases could be a good thing). Over 20, you're probably at a university in such deep doo-doo that even a stimulus package won't be of much help.

8 . The percentage of students who graduate . If you go to a school with a graduation rate over 80 percent, that's great. A rate of 60 to 80 percent is quite normal. But under 60 percent should raise some eyebrows. At this point, the institution is operating with the idea that a lot of the students won't actually finish their degrees, and the program tends to be weighted toward the lower division, with much fewer resources devoted to the upper-division program. And while you're looking at graduation rates, check out the average time to degree. Seven years might be more than you're bargaining for.

9 . Whether you ' re require d to take computer-taught or on line classes . To save money, some universities are using computer programs for course instruction. Or you have to learn from lectures posted online, rather than live instructors. It's the new do-it-yourself method of instruction.

10. The a vailability of first- year experience courses . These show that the university really cares about helping entering students acclimate to the big U. Which is a nice touch.
So how do you find all this out? Check out the college guides and rankings and the college websites themselves. Ask admissions officers, students at the schools, and recent graduates. Send E-mail to appropriate college officials (they should want to answer you, if they want you to come to the school). These are not state secrets. And all of this information will help you make the best possible choice and get the most out of your college experience.

17 Ways College Campuses Are Changing

2009-05-25T05:48:00.000-07:00

Lynn Jacobs and Jeremy Hyman,

US News and World Report, 20 May 2009

The fifth-century B.C. Greek philosopher Heraclitus used to exclaim everything changes, nothing stands still. Well, colleges are in flux, too. Here are the 17 biggest differences between college today and college just 10 years ago:

1. Booming enrollments. It's estimated that in 1999, 15 million students were enrolled in American colleges and universities. Today, the number is 19 million. And college enrollment looks to be growing-as far out as the eye can see-at a rate of 4 percent or so a year. Some unpleasant byproducts: humongous class sizes at many schools, interminable wait lists for popular or required classes, and more teaching by adjuncts and graduate students.

2. Skyrocketing tuition. According to the College Board, tuition for the academic year just past was approximately 6 percent higher, at both public and private universities, than it was the year before. And indeed, the rate of increase was approximately 6 percent a year for the decade before that. The inflation rate, on the other hand, ran about 3 percent per year for that same 10-year period. Public outcry has caused many universities to put a hold on tuition hikes for the time being. But when the economy strengthens a little bit... .

3. Increased government support. To some degree, the pain of out-of-control tuition increases has been lessened by a slew of recently introduced tax advantages, including the Hope credit, the lifetime learning credit, the student loan interest deduction, and the tuition and fees deduction. Very good information about all of these (including family-income caps and other requirements) is available at Sallie Mae's Web page.

4. New demographics. The male-female ratio is almost 60-40 at most schools. Forty percent of students are over the age of 25. And with many more first-generation students, foreign students, minority students, and returning students, expect a much broader mix of people in your classes.

5. More female bosses. Ten years ago, approximately 19 percent of college presidents were women. Now, four of the eight head honchos at Ivy League schools are women. And recently arrived University of California President Mark Yudof has proposed two new female presidents for UC-Davis and UC-San Francisco.

6. Community college explosion. Community colleges are flourishing, with new ones sprouting up all over the place. Indeed, more than 40 percent of U.S. college students now are enrolled at community (or junior or two-year) colleges. As before, community colleges are attracting students who are interested in getting associate degrees or some college experience before transferring to four-year colleges. But in a new twist, some students at four-year colleges now are picking up courses at community colleges from time to time--when they want to be closer to home, need less expensive credits, want to take classes with a professor rather than a TA, or can't get into classes they need at their own school.

7. New online opportunities. In addition to distance-learning institutions, such as the University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, and Devry University, a number of big-name schools have put up selected courses at free, "opencourseware" sites. This is something great: top-notch professors in your own living room at no charge! Check out www.oyc.yale.edu (for Yale University), www.ocw.mit.org (for MIT), www.webcast.berkeley.edu (for UC-Berkeley), and www.ocw.consortium.org (for a general, worldwide directory).

8. First-year experience (FYE) courses. Used to be, first-year students had to "sink or swim" at the big U. But now-in an attempt to ease the pain (and also to stem the very high dropout rate at many schools)-colleges have forged new small-group classes, taught by regular faculty, especially for newly incoming students. Trouble is, no one has yet figured out quite what to teach. Some are seminars, where students study "big idea" books such as Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, or Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Others use 500-page, skills-teaching textbooks such as David Ellis's Becoming a Master Student or John Gardner's Your College Experience: Strategies for Success. And still others blow off the reading thing altogether and content themselves with once-a-week meetings in which you can befriend a prof, commiserate with 20 students just as worried as you, and--if you're lucky--have a pizza at the big U's expense. For two samples of imaginative FYE programs, check out UCLA's "Fiat Lux" program and the University of North Carolina's first-year seminars brochure.

9. Obsession about majors. Many schools encourage students to declare majors right when they come in. Many parents discourage students from considering majors in which there isn't a clear path to a high-paying (or, at least, some kind of) job. And many students think it's a point of special pride to do a double (or sometimes even triple) major. Not to mention picking up a minor or two on the side.

10. Diverse foreign languages. Used to be, most students fulfilled the language requirement by taking French, Spanish, or German. Now students have discovered Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese--the languages half the world's population actually speaks. And, in a nod to globalization (and student enrollments), some schools (most notably, the University of Southern California) have recently boarded up their German departments. Ach du lieber!

11. Proliferation of interdisciplinary programs. Interdisciplinary studies that used to be small programs have recently developed into full-fledged majors. These include fields such as gender, queer, Jewish, African-American, and Islamic studies, as well as area studies, such as Asian, Latin American, Middle Eastern, American, African diaspora, and European studies.

12. Emphasis on "service learning." Colleges are falling all over themselves to join the volunteerism spirit by setting up educational experiences, at home and abroad, in which learning is placed in the context of community service. Premeds are encouraged to volunteer at clinics or hospitals, art ed students are directed to mentor in the public schools, and environmental science students go into the community to help businesses reduce their carbon footprint.

13. New teaching tools. Overhead projectors, white boards, and transparencies have been sent to the junk pile with the advent of PowerPoint. "Smart" classrooms allow professors to integrate materials from the Internet directly into their lectures. And "clickers" allow instructors instant feedback on how well their students have grasped (or slept through) the last 10 minutes of the lecture.

14. Increased use of "E-resources." E-reserves have replaced required readings at the library. Textbooks now come electronically with the profs being able to custom-order the chapters they want. Courses have their own Web pages, where you can not only consult the syllabus and download lecture notes; you can often chat with other students in the course and sometimes even the professor. And, in the new spy vs. spy game, universities provide faculty with plagiarism-detection software such as Turnitin, while students cruise the (new electronic) paper-mills, where for only $9.99 you can take your chances at being thrown out of the big U.

15. More study abroad. Every university worth its salt has dozens of cooperative arrangements for junior-year (or indeed any-year) study abroad (though it's good to know that at many of the receiving institutions, the students aren't being offered the real university, in the real language, with the real faculty, but rather a special institute developed solely for visiting students. Caveat emptor) Since this is a "prestige item" for many colleges, there's often big fellowship money available for student travel.

16. Longer time to degree. The four-year college degree has largely faded, despite much hue and cry: Today, five, six, or even seven years is more common. Some reasons: more onerous requirements, bad advising, students working while at college, and students taking more semesters off. But the gravy train might be coming to an end: States are beginning to place caps on the number of semesters students can attend while paying in-state tuition. Hey, times are tough everywhere (especially in California and in Florida).

17. Increased consumerism. More and more, students and their parents are viewing college as a purchase--one for which you're entitled to get your money's worth. Bad grade? Go in to complain to the prof. Bad course? Tell the chair or the dean. Bad school? Transfer ASAP.

Race Goals Are Easier, Not Better

2009-04-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune, 24 Apr 2009

Here's a quick history quiz for you. Which nationally prominent leader said this:

"Edicts of nondiscrimination are not enough. Justice demands that every citizen consciously adopts a personal commitment to affirmative action, which will make equal opportunity a reality."

Was it the Rev. Jesse Jackson? The Rev. Al Sharpton? Sister Souljah?

No, it was Gov. Ronald Reagan of California in his 1971 executive order. He sounded more liberal, at least on this issue, than the racial-quota fighter who became president nine years later.

Times have changed, but on race not all that much, as far as Julian Bond is concerned. The civil-rights-era hero, now chairman of the NAACP, whipped out that old quote like an ace up his sleeve during a debate at the Library of Congress this month to argue that what was good for Reagan two generations ago is good enough for America now.

I'm not as certain of that as he is. Sitting in the audience at the debate, I was struck by how much America's persistent problems with race have changed, while so many of our leading affirmative action proponents have not.

Yet I was also struck by how replacing race-based affirmative action with the class-based kind is easier to say than to do, especially at elite colleges and universities.

That's one reason why Bond opposed the evening's proposition: "Should affirmative action be based on wealth and class rather than race and ethnicity?"

President Barack Obama thinks it should, he has said in writing and out loud. "We have to think about affirmative action," he said in at last summer's convention of black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American journalists in Chicago, "and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren't getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more." It is safe to say that, in the fashion of President Richard Nixon opening doors to China, Obama's position later helped him with white voters and didn't hurt him very much with blacks.

Defending Obama's position in the debate was Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at New York University and an expert on wage and wealth gaps. Past discrimination in jobs and lending has left such a wide wealth gap between the races, he argued, that diversity-minded colleges would end up with a healthier mix by race, ethnicity and class if they focused on household wealth as Obama suggests, instead of race.

Bond's teammate Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, disagreed. Bollinger was president of the University of Michigan during the 2003 Supreme Court cases that upheld and clarified affirmative action at that school. Then and now, he said, "we want both racial diversity and ethnic diversity" plus "diversity based upon income and class." And the most effective way to do that, he said, is to take race into account, as well as class.

Otherwise, "and this has been studied by many people," he said, "if you use only income, you will increase the proportion of white students and decrease the proportion of African-American and Hispanic students."

You can see or read the hourlong debate at the Web site of its sponsor, the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, http://millercenter.org/.

Yet that's also why the debate's other participant, John McWhorter, a best-selling author and Manhattan Institute senior fellow, was right to point out a more important hidden danger: When diversity policies lower achievement bars, they can hurt as much as they help.

When he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, he recalled, it was only after the affirmative action ban "that efforts were actually made to teach black and Latino students throughout the state to actually qualify for what the admission procedures were." It hadn't happened before that, McWhorter said, and it wasn't going to happen as long as state universities could rely on racial "preferences," a word that proponents hate despite its accuracy.
With that, he exposed an eternal truth: If we did the tough job of providing quality educational opportunity to every American kid from preschool on, we would not need special programs to build diverse students bodies. They'd be diverse already.

Even so, I do agree with Bond and Bollinger that too much is made of the argument that affirmative action admissions leave a stigma on black and Hispanic students. People get into selective colleges for all sorts of reasons – including legacy preferences, athletic scholarships and geographic diversity – without feeling stigmatized. In the end, it's not how you got into college that counts; it's how you leave.

Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness

2009-04-24T04:46:00.000-07:00

"We decided on the following goal: to grade all 50 states and Washington, DC, on their K-12 school systems in order to identify both leaders and laggards in the tough business of school performance. "

An interesting report with interactive graphic from the US Chamber of Commerce on how state educational efforts stack up in the following areas:

Academic Achievement

Return on Investment

Truth in Advertising About Student Proficiency

Rigor of Standards

Post-Secondary and Workforce Readiness

21st Century Teaching force

Flexibility in Management and Policy

Data quality

http://www.uschamber.com/icw/reportcard/default

Lessons at a Video Game Convention

2009-04-20T06:04:00.000-07:00

Patricia G. Greene and Heidi M. Neck

16 Apr 2009

Grand Theft Auto. America’s Army. Spore. The Sims. Chain Factor. Halo. Guitar Hero. City of Heroes. Left for Dead. Fable. World of Warcraft. Everquest. Warhammer. These are titles of video games our students are playing when not attending or studying for our classes! On average college students are spending 50-100 hours mastering each of these games. This may make you question: How much time are they spending on my class?

We are entrepreneurship professors at a very entrepreneurial institution, Babson College. Recently we became interested (some of our colleagues would say obsessed) with video games, not simulations, and how they can be used in higher education. Over a whimsical e-mail exchange in late 2008 we asked each other, “If we could create a video game where students could ‘experience’ entrepreneurship, what would it look like? What would it feel like? What and how would they learn?”

Be careful what questions you pose in life because our view of the world has been dramatically altered after embarking on an “expedition” to answer the question. We can’t give away the answer just yet but we can share part of our journey. In fact, we’re eager to share our exploration of this space to see how those of us in higher education might best embrace the reality of virtual worlds.

We must confess; we are not gamers. For the most part we are still stuck in the days of Pac-Man, Asteroids, and Centipede, but we openly admit that our cool factor is increasing because we have been caught playing Wii Tennis and Guitar Hero! But there’s something invigorating about learning something entirely new and we don’t think we realized exactly how much we didn’t know until we played a little hooky and took a field trip to the industry Mecca - GDC. For the uninitiated, this is the annual Game Developers Conference. The week-long conference started with two days of “Summits” devoted to different areas of gaming such as artificial intelligence, mobile gaming, casual games, and virtual worlds. We attended the serious game summit that “spotlights the rapidly growing serious games industry that features the use of interactive games technology within non-entertainment sectors. The summit provides a forum for game developers and industry professionals to examine the future course of serious games development in areas such as education, government, health, military, science, corporate training, first responders, and social change.”

We learned about the human-interest sides of the gaming industry, such as a sign of experience, and therefore status, is not only wearing jeans and T-shirts but also wearing GDC shirts from previous conferences. As business school professors, well let’s just say, we didn’t bring any T-shirts, or at least any we would wear in public. As any good conformist would do, however, we bought GDC shirts on the first day and trust us when we say the crowds in the GDC store were on par with those in an Apple store during the holiday season. Never have we been at a conference where “while supplies last” really means something.

Gaming is serious business both economically and socially. Consumers spend $25 billion a year on video games and game components and there are an estimated 800 million gamers worldwide. But the social upside of gaming is either misunderstood, or at the least, not yet well or broadly understood. Games such as Grand Theft Auto and Postal have inappropriately defined the industry as one that promotes aggressive and violent behavior.

But for the sake of argument we must consider the corollary. If games can promote negative behavior can they not also promote positive behavior? The opening speaker of the Serious Games Summit, Austin Hill of Akoha, asked a compelling and poignant question, “What if playing a game could make the world a better place?” And we quickly learned that some games are making a world a better place. Games that aim to have a positive social impact are among the fastest growing of all serious games segments. These games are unleashing the imagination of our youth – an imagination that should be cultivated to navigate the complexity and uncertainty of the “real world.”

We learned that lines between the real world and virtual worlds are blurring. During a case study presentation on an emerging virtual world game for young children, the designers spoke about the challenge of very young gamers not seeing the distinction between the physical and virtual worlds. The purpose of the game was to have children design a virtual toy that they would then go buy in physical form. The language of the game encouraged children to make their toy “real.” The children did not understand the terms “make it real” because the virtual toy in their mind’s eye was already real. Whether virtual or real, it was all about play.

Gaming, serious and casual alike, can promote a culture of empathy. During one of the very first sessions the speaker presented a selection of quotes from young gamers. One young gamer said that gaming made him emotional. He felt hardened by reality but games allowed him to release emotions that would have otherwise remained dormant. Rather than desensitizing our youth, games are allowing students to explore what Will Wright, creator of the Sims franchise and Spore, called the “possibility space.” Every game has a beginning and end but today’s advanced games allows each player to create a unique path while seeing, experiencing, and perhaps even feeling the consequence of their decisions.

The necessity of collaboration was ubiquitous. Even the GDC bookstore inspired us to think about education and gaming in a different way. The number of books on display that crossed disciplines, modes of learning, future levels of intelligence, and task oriented programming was quite striking. We saw books on creativity, managing leadership, developing a team, and getting your product in market. Ironically this is what we see at our business school conferences. The world is getting smaller.

Taking center stage in the store were books on art, mythology, writing and storytelling, sociology, and anthropology. The world is getting more integrated. While many of the speakers throughout the Serious Games Summit talked about the importance of teams with each team member having an important skill set, they also talked about the need to have team members understand the perspective of others. It wasn’t enough to be the pure programmer or be the pure content expert. You needed to have an understanding of what the other was going to do to have a truly excellent product. We started thinking further about our academic tradition of silos and what this really means for the future of higher education. The world, virtual and real, does not exist in silos.

Overall, the future of cyberspace is analogous to the future of business – new worlds, new actors, new ways of navigating, new outcomes, new pathways, and broader, more integrated, ways of thinking. What will our avatar look like? And will it be buying a new corporate jet with federal government stimulus money?

In general, our classrooms are filled with discussions related to the economy and global business challenges. It’s not only a good time to review our business models but to rethink the actual role of business in society and how we teach. We teach business from traditional models developed, for the most part, many, many decades ago. Is this really the best we can do? Are games possibly teaching the things we don’t, won’t or can’t?

At the beginning of the Serious Games Summit we had decided to use a video game design approach to help us try and think in a more “gaming way” about what we were learning and its application to entrepreneurship within higher education. To do so, we bought a box of cards called The Art of Game Design: A Deck of Lenses, by Jesse Schell. The box (with accompanying book) claims to be “The Ultimate Creativity Toolkit for Game Design.” Our approach was simple. Randomly pick a card from the deck at the beginning of every session, write it down, and see if it speaks us in some way at the moment or later. The cards we chose, 15 in total, created an uncanny story of our experience at the GDC. We offer a glimpse of three of the cards chosen over the course of two days.

The first card chosen from our brand new deck of game design cards was The Lens of Secret Purpose and it asked, “Why am I doing this?” Yes, we laughed but our purpose was simple. We are curious; we are insatiable learners; and we passionately believe that we need to find better ways of teaching and learning.

Another card was The Lens of Endogenous Value that asked us to consider the “relationship between value in the game and the player’s motivations.” We extended this to think about the motivation of our current generation of students and the connection or disconnection to our pedagogy. Higher education must be more than workforce development, even in times of economic crisis. Perhaps especially in times of economic crisis.

Yet another card chosen was called The Lens of the Crystal Ball, which happened to be the last card we chose of the conference. The card stated, “If you would know the future of a particular game technology, ask yourself these questions. What will ____ be like two years from now? What will ____ be like four years from now? What will ____ be like ten years from now? Why?” Think about it. Higher education is a game. We have a start, finish, and many possibility spaces – the pathways our students choose to navigate their college experience. The difference between video games and higher education as a game is the pace of change. A game introduced today will look considerably different in four years. Can we say the same about curriculum?

The world of game design is about play, experiencing and creating empathy, collaboration, and future thinking. It emphasizes purpose and value, and recognizes the constant need to adapt and embrace new technology. Imagine the world today if we replaced the words “game design” in the first sentence of this paragraph with the words “higher education.” We definitely think the time has come to embrace the reality of virtual worlds!

Dreamers and Doers

2009-04-09T06:06:00.000-07:00

John Schwartz

NYT, 4 Jan 2009

Nicolas Naranjo knocked on Evan Kimbrell’s door at midnight.

At other colleges, this might have been a prelude to a fraternity prank or an invitation to help float the keg at the end of a party. But Mr. Naranjo, who had just arrived in the United States from his native Colombia some weeks before, wanted to talk about starting a business. He had an idea about a hop-on, hop-off bus service for college tours around the Boston area. Mr. Kimbrell had tried to start a bus company the previous year and knew the pitfalls — and was happy for the break from his studies to talk business.

This is life in the E-Tower at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass. Babson focuses on business, and E-Tower focuses, even more tightly, on entrepreneurship. The residents of E-Tower hash out new business plans at Monday night meetings, and they talk shop throughout the day and night.

“We’re really a dorm of dreamers and doers,” says Prinya Kovitchindachai, who is hoping to market a vile-tasting pill, imported from Thailand, that he touts as a hangover treatment.

“College students are the largest group of binge drinkers,” he says, quietly gleeful at the prospect of such a large market so close at hand. Friends have helped him bone up on the basics of international shipping, of securing shelf space and — in a consultation with a neighbor who was wearing a towel and still dripping from the shower — of creating Web sites.

“Any school can teach entrepreneurship,” he says, “but at Babson, we live entrepreneurship.”

Now, let’s not get carried away: as a reporter and as a parent, I find myself on plenty of college campuses these days, and many of the students I meet are indistinguishable from the dull-eyed slackers I went to college with (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and Pluto was still a planet). But then there are those who have this . . . THING, this go-getting excitement to start something, make something. They want money, sure. But the overwhelming desire seems to be to carve out something of their own.

Today’s students have grown up hearing more about Bill Gates than F.D.R., and they live in a world where startling innovations are commonplace. The current crop of 18-year-olds, after all, were 8 when Google was founded by two students at Stanford; Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004 while he was at Harvard and they were entering high school. Having “grown up digital” (to borrow the title of Don Tapscott’s recent book on the Net Generation), they are impatient to get on with life.

“They’re great collaborators, with friends, online, at work,” Mr. Tapscott wrote. “They thrive on speed. They love to innovate.”

The easiest way to find kids like these is to check in on entrepreneurship education, in which colleges and universities try to prepare their students to recognize opportunities and seize them.
For those who haven’t been paying attention, the idea of entrepreneurshipmight bring up the Memo Minder, the lame invention by the “Future Enterpriser” played by Bronson Pinchot in “Risky Business.”

Reader, you date yourself: that was 1983. In the intervening decades, Tom Cruise has grown up and entrepreneurship programs have boomed.

A report issued last year by the Kauffman Foundation, which finances programs to promote innovation on campuses, noted that more than 5,000 entrepreneurship programs are offered on two- and four-year campuses — up from just 250 courses in 1985. Full-scale majors, minors or certificates in entrepreneurship have leaped from 104 in 1975 to more than 500 in 2006. Since 2003, the Kauffman Foundation has given nearly $50 million to 19 colleges and universities to build campus programs.

Lesa Mitchell, a Kauffman vice president, says that the foundation is extending the reach of its academic gospel, which used to be found almost exclusively in business schools.

Now, the concept of entrepreneurship is blossoming in engineering programs and medical schools, and even in the liberal arts. “Our interest is in the whole curriculum,” she says. “We need to spread out from the business school.”

Either as class projects or on their own, students in an array of disciplines are coming up with ideas, writing business plans and seeing them through to prototype and, often, marketplace. In their spare time, students in agricultural economics at Purdue invent new uses for soy; industrial design majors at Syracuse, in a special collaborative laboratory, create wearable technologies; a psychology major, through the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, starts a limited liability company offering neuromarketing services.

Richard Miller, the president of the Olin College of Engineering in Wellesley, recalls a time that academically packed programs like engineering believed that teaching business and entrepreneurship would require watering down curriculum. “We think differently now,” he says. Dr. Miller says a personal turning point came back in his days at the University of Southern California, when visitors from McDonnell Douglas told a classroom of engineers that the project they were working on in class was actually the subject of a patent worth $200 million. “What’s a patent?” they asked.

Clark University, a liberal arts college in Worcester, Mass., offers a minor in entrepreneurship that can be fitted into just about any degree plan. “It’s too important to be taught by business professionals to business students,” says George Gendron, the founder and director of its innovation and entrepreneurship program. The program, he says, is intended to help students find “what they’re passionate about,” and to learn how to apply themselves to it practically, whether in business or in the growing area of social entrepreneurship, which focuses on societal change.

Even at Babson, entrepreneurship isn’t all about business: in E-Tower, Austin Conti and Gerald Praysman are writing a screenplay about the Middle East that they hope to sell using the techniques for spotting business opportunities. And Gabriel Schillinger, a freshman, is engaged in social entrepreneurship. A nonprofit organization he helped start in high school, For Darfur Inc., put on a concert by Kanye West in Florida that raised $300,000 for Doctors Without Borders, and he is trying to build on that early success.

The entrepreneurship movement has its critics, especially among those who see college as a time for broad academic exploration. Daniel S. Greenberg, author of “Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards and Delusions of Campus Capitalism,” finds the increasingly fervent campus embrace faddish and narrow. “I just don’t think that entrepreneurship ranks so high in terms of national need, or in terms of what can effectively be taught in the limited time available” in the college years, he says. “What aren’t you studying because you’re studying entrepreneurship?”

Leonard A. Schlesinger, Babson’s president, says that the question of whether innovation really can be taught is “an age-old debate.” Mr. Schlesinger, who has served as chief operating officer of Limited Brands, says that if teaching entrepreneurship is an academic fad, it is one the school has pursued since 1978 — “a fad like wearing pants and underwear.”

Schools do not teach the spark of creativity so much as provide the tools for students to capitalize on that spark, he says.“I’m going to teach you to find opportunity.”

Especially in a bad economy, he adds, the curriculum “gets our people to be much better prepared for the structure and dynamics of the job market they’re likely to face. The thought process and logic that we teach is at the core of stimulating innovation, stimulating innovation is at the core of any developed economy.”

“I’m not trying to be arrogant,” Dr. Schlesinger notes, “but the world needs what we do.”
The urge is strong at E-Tower.

With word of a visitor on the premises spreading, some two dozen dorm residents crowded into the common room to talk about their projects. They were brimming with excitement about their plans, and eager to share them with a reporter who, as more than one noted, might be able to help them make a connection in the business world or get them a little publicity. Prinya Kovitchindachai pressed one of his hangover pills into my hand. I tried it, and grimaced at the taste. “It’s much better if you’re drunk!” he insisted.

Another student grabbed me as I was leaving. He asked that I not use his name in the article. The people with whom he was dealing in his start-up trading business, he said nervously, “don’t know how old I am.”

Wall of Rejection Letters Is Teens' Group Therapy

2009-04-07T22:04:00.000-07:00

Peter Schworm, Boston Globe

With each maddeningly thin envelope, each remorseless rebuff from another top-choice college, Kellen Mandehr died a little death. In search of catharsis, the senior at Newton South High School posted the offending documents on the school's "Wall of Shame," a hallway bulletin board blanketed with dozens of college rejection letters.

With each punch of the stapler, each slam of his fist, Mandehr won a small measure of payback. And a large measure of liberation.

"It was definitely a good feeling," he said yesterday, reminiscing by the mural of rejection letters. "I pounded it pretty good."

High school seniors everywhere have traditionally posted their rejection letters as an act of collective defiance against the high-pressure and hypercompetitive college admissions process. But this year, with top-tier colleges rejecting more applicants than ever before, dejected students say they are especially in need of what amounts to a group hug.

At Newton South, rejection letters from most of the country's most selective colleges, from Amherst to Wesleyan, from Bowdoin to the University of Southern California, tell the grim tale. A demographic bulge in the number of high school students, combined with a sharp rise in the number of colleges they apply to, has created a numbers crunch.

Newton South students did their part, with about a third of the class of 425 students applying to at least 10 schools, with an average of about seven.

Nearly all Newton South seniors will wind up at a strong four-year school this fall. Still, the sting of rejection, particularly for high-achieving students whose sights have been trained on the Ivy League since grade school, is hard to shake.

"These are kids who are used to getting their way their whole lives," said Newton South college counselor Barbara Brown. "For many, this is their first major disappointment. That can be very difficult, especially in a community like this."

So in their moment of need, the reeling students rally together. By making a personal setback public, sharing the letters can be cathartic, students say. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, students find comfort in a communal, almost collegial, show of solidarity against an impersonal, seemingly arbitrary system.

"It's unifying, and kind of celebratory," said Max Lorn-Krause, who was denied at several schools and plans to study theater at Ithaca College. "It's a rite of passage."

Calling the postings the Wall of Shame is meant to be sarcastic, students say. In many ways, posting the rejection letters is a way to find acceptance.

"At first, it was painful. I basically had to lie down and not be out in the world for a while," said Alex Kaufman, who said he was denied at nearly the entire New England Small College Athletic Conference, which includes Amherst, Williams, and other top liberal-arts colleges. "There's nothing worse than getting a rejection letter, but knowing you're in the same boat as lots of other people, that definitely helps."

When Sofya Rozenblat, 18, got the bad news from Dartmouth College, her first choice, she was crushed. She shed some tears. Stapling her letter on the wall the next morning, she recalled, started the healing process, she said.

"It's very therapeutic," she said. "Letting everyone know made me feel so much better. I realized that almost everyone gets rejected, so it's one more thing we all have in common." Now, the setback seems distant as she looks forward to starting at the University of Michigan.

At Newton, the Wall of Shame serves as kind of a water cooler for college-related gossip and reflection. Some sigh and shake their heads, muttering.

Some walk by and glance, then turn their head away in disgust, then reflexively snap it back, like a car crash. Some juniors walk by and gulp.

A few pore over them, reading each stock phrase of gentle letdown - "very real regret" (Duke), "sincere regret [Yale], "so sorry to tell you" [MIT], "I am sorry to bring you disappointing news" [Wesleyan], "careful and concerned consideration" [Brown], and "we wish you every success with your further education" [Georgetown].

A few students have written editorial comments on the letters. "Don't worry, I got in other places!" wrote one student rejected by Bowdoin.

The wall started four years ago by a pair of friends who both applied early to Dartmouth, Brown said. One got in, one didn't, and a tradition was born.

Brown said the college admissions season is always filled with heartache. The race to get into elite colleges can be all consuming, and rejections can take on tragic proportions.

Daniel Rabinowicz, 17, had his heart set on Brandeis, but the affection was not returned.
He is heading to Clark or Northeastern with his head held high, however. "That rejection letter can be tough," he said. "But look at this, and you know you're not alone."

Currently Reading

2009-04-07T21:38:00.000-07:00

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, Anthony Esolen

Deadly Scenarios, Andrew Krepinevich

Covering The New Yorker, Francoise Mouly

Economic crisis threatens small, rural schools

2009-04-02T14:29:00.000-07:00

Terence Chea, AP, 13 Mar 2009

In this rustic corner of California wine country, parents are fighting to prevent the closure of a one-classroom school established before the Civil War.

Near Las Vegas, families are trying to rescue two elementary schools with dwindling enrollment. And in a rural area outside San Diego, a 60-year-old schoolhouse closed because it had just seven students.

Rural schools such as these are being threatened as the economy forces deep cuts to education. Districts nationwide are preparing to shut down many campuses, and small, isolated schools are vulnerable because they serve fewer students and cost more per pupil to operate than larger schools.

"All over this country, the pressure is on to close rural schools," said Marty Strange, policy director of the nonprofit Rural School and Community Trust in Arlington, Va. "They are a target in these hard economic times."

Among the schools targeted is Wooden Valley Elementary School, which has one teacher, one teaching assistant and 20 students from kindergarten to fifth grade. Surrounded by ranches and vineyards in the rolling hills of Napa Valley, it is one of the oldest one-room schools still operating in California.

An icon of American culture depicted in the television show "Little House on the Prairie," the one-room schoolhouse dominated education before buses allowed children to attend schools more than walking distance from their homes.

A century ago, there were more than 200,000 one-teacher schools in the country, but that number dwindled to 335 in 2006, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.
In rural San Diego County, enrollment at Palomar Mountain School was only seven students when it closed last year after six decades.

Outside Las Vegas, school officials recently postponed a vote to close Lundy Elementary and Goodsprings Elementary after parents protested. Both schools have fewer than 10 students, and Goodsprings is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In Northern California, Wooden Valley has staved off closure many times before, but parents worry that the state's budget crisis is so severe that it could finally shutter a school that has existed in some form since the 1850s.

District officials have proposed closing their two smallest schools to help offset $10 million in cuts to its $115 million annual budget. The 17,000-student district also is looking into increasing class sizes, shortening the school year and laying off nearly 10 percent of its 900 teachers.

"We're in difficult straits," Superintendent John Glaser said.

Parents are raising money and lobbying district officials to keep open the old school, where children of different ages learn and play side-by-side. A decision is expected later this month.
"By closing our school they are taking away our way of life," said Wanda Berger, the school's PTA president and mother of two students. "It's the way our founding fathers went to school, and education was pretty strong back then."

California schools, which rank near the bottom nationally in per pupil spending, are preparing to make drastic cuts after Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature last month reached a budget deal that reduces K-12 education spending by $8.6 billion — more than 10 percent — through June 2010.

"These cuts are completely devastating," said Bob Wells, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators.

California school districts are set to increase class size, close libraries, eliminate sports programs, scrap electives such as art and music, and lay off tens of thousands of employees.

The districts are also preparing to close dozens, possibly hundreds, of schools with low or declining enrollment and send the displaced students to other campuses.

"We can't afford to keep open all the schools we got," said Scott Plotkin, who heads the California School Boards Association.

School officials say small schools like Wooden Valley are not cost-effective and that students can benefit from the resources of a larger school.

But advocates say that when rural schools close, children face longer commutes and parents become less involved. They also note that studies show that small schools lead to better grades and lower dropout rates.

"If we really cared about raising student achievement, we'd be creating more small schools, not less," Wells said.

The 20 students at Wooden Valley attend class in a schoolhouse built in the 1950s near the original wooden schoolhouse.

Teacher LeeAnn Ohlandt said it is a challenge teaching students at six different grade levels, but she encounters far fewer behavior problems than at her previous school.

"I love it," Ohlandt said. "I've become part of their families. I get to see these kids grow."

Although Wooden Valley does not have the resources of a larger school, parents say their children learn better social and communication skills and are not exposed to the teasing and bullying common in many schools.

Korinne Norlund, who has six children attending Wooden Valley, said she would home-school her kids if Wooden Valley closed.

"It's a very safe environment emotionally," she said. "There's no ridicule of any kind. It's just something you don't get in the average public school."

Colleges are the ones fearing rejection letters

2009-04-01T17:12:00.000-07:00

G. Jeffrey MacDonald

USA Today, 1 Apr 2009

For college-bound students, it's time to make decisions — and to navigate a transformed landscape where acceptances and wait-list status might have different implications than they did just a year ago.

Decision letters being sent out this week reflect the worries of administrators, who fear admitted applicants may hesitate to commit in this climate of economic uncertainty. Private colleges especially are preparing for lower than normal matriculation rates by accepting more applicants, expanding wait lists and bolstering efforts to woo admitted students, says the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Four-year colleges "are attempting to hedge their bets as best they can, (in case) students simply downshift and opt for a less expensive option," says Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

To secure their futures, schools are courting applicants with a previously unseen intensity:

•Santa Clara University has enlisted its president, provost and 400 alumni volunteers to phone all admitted students and encourage them to enroll.

•The College of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, Minn. (for women) and Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minn. (for men) doubled their joint transportation budget this year to $50,000 to fly in more than 160 admitted students from across the country for campus visits.

•Lynchburg College in Lynchburg, Va., this year has doubled (from five last year to 10) the number of local receptions it's sponsoring around the state for admitted students.

•Every student admitted to California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, Calif., is expected to get a note from someone with a common interest or geographic background.

Not all schools are worried about enrollments next fall. California community colleges, for instance, fear the opposite: A glut of new students may mean some get turned away. Ivy League universities with generous financial aid programs expect strong turnouts. Flagship public universities, such as the University of Washington in Seattle and University of Texas in Austin, are more selective as they manage a surge of applications from value-seekers.

The right fit and right price.

But in a year marked by layoffs and lost college savings, administrators say, enrollment predictions at most schools aren't worth much. More than 90% of respondents to an online survey of 593 teens in February said they were revising college plans to favor less expensive schools. Even some public colleges are admitting more students in case large numbers opt not to enroll, says Tom Taylor, vice president for enrollment at Ball State University, which has not adjusted admission criteria.

Before this year, choosing a college "was more about finding the right academic fit, social fit and which community you liked best," says Katherine Cohen, CEO of ApplyWise.com, co-sponsor of the online survey. "Now, how you're going to pay for that fit is just as important."

Navigating this new environment requires updated strategies, experts say. When actively courted by a college, students may need extra effort to stay focused on evaluating which school is the best fit, says Jane Shropshire, a college admissions consultant in Lexington, Ky.

"It can really turn one's head to get a call from a department head or the president of an institution and make one think: 'Wow. This is really a remarkable level of attention,' " Shropshire says. But, she says, prospective students need to ask current students "whether this is the kind of school where this lavish attention will continue."

Another issue: whether to negotiate for a bigger financial aid package. Families increasingly believe they can bargain for a better deal, Nassirian says. But unless a student's situation has recently changed, such as if a parent got laid off, he says there's no point. "It's no more realistic than to go to CVS and negotiate the price of cough syrup," he says.

Others disagree. Both Cohen and Shropshire say their clients have often met with success when they've compared financial aid offers and asked a school to beef up its award. Becker College Dean of Admissions Karen Schedin says a family recently faxed its award offer from a similar school in a bid to get more money from Becker. She says Becker likely will respond with a better offer — maybe $1,000 or $2,000 higher.

"They are bargaining," Schedin says. "Hopefully, if we can adjust it a little, this family will say 'good enough' and come."

More persuasion, opportunity.

In some cases, students appreciate schools' efforts. Kurt Roscoe of Ridgefield, Conn., went in February to a new type of reception on Becker's campus, for admits interested in majoring in computer-game design. The event helped persuade him to enroll.

"Students majoring in game design were there, and they explained that students in game design are rather tight-knit and stick together," Roscoe says. "That made me feel a lot better, because usually ... you have to worry about bullying or getting looked down on because of your (game-design) major. I didn't really feel that I'd have that problem at Becker."

Students on wait lists, meanwhile, need to be aware they're part of a school's insurance policy, Shropshire says. Wagner College in New York City, for instance, has increased its list to 140 names, up from about 85 last year. But while the school may put more students in limbo, wait lists may also lead to more opportunities than in years past.

"My college counselors think this year I have a better chance of getting off the list because of what's going on with the economy and kids not being able to afford the tuition and other costs," says Meredith Bates, a high school senior in Bethesda, Md.

We Need the Liberal Arts Now More Than Ever.

2009-03-27T15:53:00.000-07:00

Sanford Pinsker, 6 March 2009

"A liberal-arts education is supposed to provide you with a value system, a standard, a set of ideas, not a job."... ...Caroline Bird.

More years ago than I care to say, my parents were alarmed when I decided to major in English rather than become a pre-med student. "How will you earn a living?" they worried out loud, and then answered their own question by insisting that I "wouldn't." My aunt's reaction was even worse. As she liked to put it, "I have a nephew in business and another in law, and one that fell into stories and never came out." Not surprisingly, I was the last nephew, the one prepared to throw his life away on what my collective family regarded as "foolishness."

The liberal arts have always been a tough sell, and this was true long before people thought of "liberal" as a political temperament rather than its much older definition as the subjects available for study by free men and women. "What good," Sam's mom once asked me during a particularly awful parents' weekend, "can a course [offered by the philosophy department] on 'death and dying' do?" I was caught between a sip of coffee and a bite of doughnut, between the proverbial rock and the proverbial hard place "You'll have to ask Professor Binkley about that one. I can only tell you that I've glanced at the syllabus and the readings he assigns are first rate." That was not good enough for Sam's mom, who continued to think (out loud) that there wasn't a whiff of the "practical" in any of this: "We're all going to die -- right? So, what good does reading what a lot of old fogies have to say about it?

That was then, a time when most undergraduates had their collective eyes on the main chance. Granted, there were a few hard core Romantics who thought about heading West and becoming beatniks, but even those folks knew that sandals and bongo drums really weren't in the picture. What most of my fellow students wanted to know had to do with final exams and what material was likely to be on them.

In this regard my favorite memory is of a fellow student in an introduction to philosophy class who didn't say a word for the first six weeks. But one morning, to our amazement and that of our teacher, he began waving his hands with some urgency.

"Yes, Mr. Jacobs, do you have a question?

"I do," he replied.

"What is it?" Dr. Whiting asked.

"It's this: On p. 57 -- and I have it highlighted -- Socrates unequivocally declares that knowledge is virtue."

"You are correct."

"But then, on p. 62 -- and I have it highlighted -- Socrates seems to imply that knowledge might not be virtue. And to make matters even more complicated, on p. 83 -- and I have it highlighted -- Socrates appears to be returning to his original position about knowledge and virtue."

"Yes, Mr. Jacobs. You have clearly stated the situation. What, then, is your question?"

"Well, Dr, Whiting, my question is this: For purposes of the exam, is knowledge virtue?"

Mr. Jacobs, alas, never understood why he was such a dolt in that class as well as in many that followed. The liberal arts washed over him without soaking a pore. I insist, nonetheless, that he was the exception rather than the rule, and that students who learned how to ask real questions were much better off than those who simply memorized, and regurgitated, "answers."

Again, that was then. As for now, wrinkle lines have largely replaced the innocent look that my college classmates sported. There have been too many solemn talks around the kitchen table for students to regard high-end or even low-end colleges as a given. Tuitions continue to soar at precisely the moment when dad's portfolio is heading ever southward. My morning newspaper featured a quotation from Arthur Keiser, founder of Fort Lauderdale's Keiser University: "Career colleges are really benefitting from the downturn in the economy."

I hope my last paragraph makes it clear that I don't live on a cloud (or under a rock) and have somehow missed the global economic crisis. I know, I know -- and that's why I want to argue that a liberal arts education is more essential than ever. Students will not only have to learn how to recognize when somebody is speaking rot (the last election should have provided plenty of practice) but also how to have nimble, adaptable minds. At its best, a liberal education prepares a student to be a lifetime learner. An exposure to, say, a Socratic dialogue or a James Joyce short story can, in future decades, become an extended study of The Republic or Ulysses -- read with others or alone. As recent events have dramatically shown, those who put their stock in big apartments, fancy cars, and shiny diamonds have had many moments to ruminate about what is permanent and what can be passing. Unfortunately, most of these people don't have the intellectual scaffolding necessary to prop them up in bad times.

We badly need people with cutting edge ideas, but I would argue that thinking "outside the box" can only occur when people know what a box is, and what was originally in it. The liberal arts provides both a history and a context for contemporary assessments. Given the world most undergraduates will inherit, they will need liberal arts study more than ever. A trained mind and a willingness to pursue ideas wherever they might lead us is essential to a democracy. I have no doubt that cheaper models of undergraduate education will expand in the next few years (online sites are but the beginning), but I have my doubts about how much real education they can deliver. As with most things of importance, the bottom line is the wrong place to look for the things that truly matter, and this is doubly so when assessing the lifetime worth of a genuine liberal arts education.

Currently Reading...

2009-03-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

The American Patriot's Almanac - Wm J. Bennett and John T.E. Cribb

Human Smoke - Nicholson Baker

Alternate Gettysburgs - Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg, eds.

Two Years Are Better Than Four

2008-05-11T08:35:00.000-07:00

Liz Addison
26 Spetember 2007 , NYT

Oh, the hand wringing. “College as America used to understand it is coming to an end,” bemoans Rick Perlstein and his beatnik friend of fallen face. Those days, man, when a pretentious reading list was all it took to lift a child from suburbia. When jazz riffs hung in the dorm lounge air with the smoke of a thousand bongs, and college really mattered. Really mattered?
Rick Perlstein thinks so. It mattered so much to him that he never got over his four years at the University of Privilege. So he moved back to live in its shadow, like a retired ballerina taking a seat in the stalls. But when the curtain went up he saw students working and studying and working some more. Adults before their time. Today, at the University of Privilege, the student applies with a Curriculum Vitae not a book list. Shudder.

Thus, Mr. Perlstein concludes, the college experience - a rite of passage as it was meant it to be - must have come to an end. But he is wrong. For Mr. Perlstein, so rooted in his own nostalgia, is looking for himself - and he would never think to look for himself in the one place left where the college experience of self-discovery does still matter to those who get there. My guess, reading between the lines, is that Mr. Perlstein has never set foot in an American community college.

The philosophy of the community college, and I have been to two of them, is one that unconditionally allows its students to begin. Just begin. Implicit in this belief is the understanding that anything and everything is possible. Just follow any one of the 1,655 road signs, and pop your head inside - yes, they let anyone in - and there you will find discoveries of a first independent film, a first independent thought, a first independent study. This college experience remains as it should. This college brochure is not marketing for the parents - because the parents, nor grandparents, probably never went to college themselves.

Upon entry to my first community college I had but one O’level to my name. These now disbanded qualifications once marked the transition from lower to upper high school in the Great British education system. It was customary for the average student to proceed forward with a clutch of O’levels, say eight or nine. On a score of one, I left school hurriedly at sixteen. Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Everybody should have an education proportional to their life.” In my case, my life became proportional to my education. But, in doing so, it had the good fortune to land me in an American community college and now, from that priceless springboard, I too seek admission to the University of Privilege. Enter on empty and leave with a head full of dreams? How can Mr. Perlstein say college does not matter anymore?

The community college system is America’s hidden public service gem. If I were a candidate for office I would campaign from every campus. Not to score political points, but simply to make sure that anyone who is looking to go to college in this country knows where to find one. Just recently, I read an article in the New York Times describing a ‘college application essay’ workshop for low-income students. I was strangely disturbed that those interviewed made no mention of community college. Mr Perlstien might have been equally disturbed, for the thrust of the workshop was no different to that of an essay coach to the affluent. “Make Life Stories Shine,” beams the headline. Or, in other words, prove yourself worldly, insightful, cultured, mature, before you get to college.

Yet, down at X.Y.C.C. it is still possible to enter the college experience as a rookie. That is the understanding - that you will grow up a little bit with your first English class, a bit more with your first psychology class, a whole lot more with your first biology, physics, chemistry. That you may shoot through the roof with calculus, philosophy, or genetics. “College is the key,” a young African-American student writes for the umpteenth torturous revision of his college essay, “as well as hope.” Oh, I wanted desperately to say, please tell him about community college. Please tell him that hope can begin with just one placement test.

When Mr. Perlstein and friends say college no longer holds importance, they mourn for both the individual and society. Yet, arguably, the community college experience is more critical to the nation than that of former beatnik types who, lest we forget, did not change the world. The community colleges of America cover this country college by college and community by community. They offer a network of affordable future, of accessible hope, and an option to dream. In the cold light of day, is it perhaps not more important to foster students with dreams rather than a building take-over?

I believe so. I believe the community college system to be one of America’s uniquely great institutions. I believe it should be celebrated as such. “For those who find it necessary to go to a two-year college,” begins one University of Privilege admissions paragraph. None too subtle in its implication, but very true. For some students, from many backgrounds, would never breathe the college experience if it were not for the community college. Yes, it is here that Mr. Perlstein will find his college years of self-discovery, and it is here he will find that college does still matter.

Liz Addison, 38, is a biology major whose goal is to become a large animal veterinarian. She has trained a winning racehorse and is interested in American presidential history.

What’s the Matter With College?

2008-05-11T07:49:00.000-07:00

RICK PERLSTEIN
September 30, 2007, NYT

When Ronald Reagan ran against Pat Brown in 1966 for the governorship of California, the defining issue was college. Governor Brown was completing the biggest university expansion in modern history nine new campuses. California’s colleges and universities had been instrumental in turning the nation’s biggest state into the world’s seventh-biggest economy and an international cultural mecca and they formed the heart, Brown presumed, of his re-election appeal. Ronald Reagan’s advisers agreed and sought to neutralize the higher-ed issue by having the actor announce his candidacy flanked by two Nobel Prize winners.

Reagan had other ideas. For months he told campaign-trail audiences horror stories about the building takeovers, antiwar demonstrations and sexual deviance “so vile that I cannot describe it to you” at Berkeley, the University of California’s flagship campus. Reagan’s advisers warned him that disparaging the jewel of California civilization was political suicide. The candidate snapped back: “Look, I don’t care if I’m in the mountains, the desert, the biggest cities of this state, the first question: ‘What are you going to do about Berkeley?’ And each time the question itself would get applause.”

It’s unimaginable now that a gubernatorial race in the nation’s largest state would come down to a debate about what was happening on campus. But it seemed perfectly natural then. The nation was obsessed with college and college students. It wasn’t just the building takeovers and the generation gap; the obsession was well in gear by the presidency of John F. Kennedy. (In October 1961, Harper’s devoted an issue to the subject.) The fascination was rooted in reasons as fresh as yesterday’s op-ed pages: in an increasingly knowledge-based economy, good colleges were a social-mobility prerequisite, and between 1957 and 1967, the number of college students doubled. Reagan actually cast himself as this new class’s savior, asking whether Californians would allow “a great university to be brought to its knees by a noisy, dissident minority.” To that, liberals responded that these communities’ unique ability to tolerate noisy, dissident minorities was why universities were great.

Now, as then, everyone says higher education is more important than ever to America’s future. But interesting enough to become a topic of national obsession? Controversial enough to fight a gubernatorial campaign over? Hardly. The kids do have their own war now, but not much of an antiwar movement, much less building takeovers. College campuses seem to have lost their centrality. Why do college and college students no longer lead the culture? Why does student life no longer seem all that important?

Here’s one answer: College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.
For nine years I’ve lived in the shadow of the University of Chicago — as an undergraduate between 1988 and 1992 and again since 2002. After growing up in a suburb that felt like a jail to me, I found my undergraduate years delightfully noisy and dissident. I got involved with The Baffler, the journal of social criticism edited by Thomas Frank, who went on to write “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”; every Sunday, I trekked down to the neighborhood jazz jam session, where ’60s continuities were direct. The bass player was a former Maoist, the drummer a former beatnik.

Early in May of this year I had lunch with the beatnik, Doug Mitchell, who received his undergraduate degree in 1965 and then went to graduate school here and is now an editor at the University of Chicago Press. “I suspect I got in this university primarily because I had a high-school friend who got a pirated copy of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Capricorn,’ ” he said. “I put that on my reading list. And the admissions counselor was utterly astonished: ‘How did you get this?’ It was truly banned in 1960.” He settled into an alienated suburban kid’s paradise. “We had a social life that kind of revolved around the dorm lounge, because that’s where everybody hung out after midnight. And some people got way into it and didn’t survive. They would never go to class. They would argue night and day in the lounge!”

Mitchell and his friends enhanced their social life with special celebrity guest speakers, lured to their dorm lounge with little more than chutzpah and a phone call — people like Anaïs Nin, Eudora Welty and Ralph Ellison. One kid, a loudmouthed New Yorker (overrepresented at Chicago, which didn’t have Jewish quotas), confronted Ellison over the latter’s distaste for Charlie Parker. Mitchell shakes his head in wonder. “It was extraordinary to see this kind of head-to-head thing go on practically the first week you showed up on campus. The scrappy kids who were there wanted to mix it up with whoever came in.” Mitchell’s stories tumbled forth: baiting rednecks by reciting Lenny Bruce routines; listening to Elaine May and Mike Nichols records (they helped invent modern sketch comedy at the Compass Theater two blocks from campus in the 1950s); the midnight concert students organized in which John Cage shared the bill with Chicago jazz players. “We seemed to have boundless verve. I had a friend who said, ‘Why don’t we call Dexter Gordon and get him to come to our dorm lounge and play?’ Then we called John Coltrane and said, ‘Would you like to do a concert with Ravi Shankar?’ The point I’m trying to make is that the adventure of going to college consisted of a kind of freedom that you couldn’t imagine until you turned 18, you were no longer under adult control and you made your own schedule. This is the most liberating moment Americans have in life.”

Mitchell was beaming, but his face fell when I told him about my conversation the previous evening with Hamilton Morris, a New Yorker finishing up his first year of college. His parents are documentary filmmakers; his father is Errol Morris. He attended a high school of the arts where “they sort of let me do whatever I wanted.” He is a filmmaker, a painter, a photographer, an experienced professional stand-up comedian. His life precollege was exceptionally fulfilling, and he expected it to remain so here at one of the nation’s great universities. Then what happened?
“I hated it from the first day,” he told me. “People here are so insanely uncreative, and they’re proud of it.” His fellow students “had to spend their entire high-school experience studying for the SATs or something and didn’t really get a chance to live life or experience things.”

What was most harrowing was Hamilton’s matter-of-fact description of a culture of enervation — “that so many people hate it with a passion and don’t leave.” I heard similar things from several bright, creative searchers on campus — the kind of people in whom I recognized my own (and Doug Mitchell’s) 19-year-old self. I sat down with a group of them at the Medici cafe, a campus fixture for decades, and they described college as a small town they were eager to escape. “Everyone I talk to has that kind of feeling in their bones,” Mike Yong, a Japanese-literature major, insisted. “Even if they’re going into investment banking.” Someone offered the word “infantilizing.” Murmurs of assent, then the word “emasculating,” to louder agreement. One even insisted his process of political, social and creative awakening had happened, yes, during college — not because of college but in spite of it.

Is their diagnosis a function of college itself today, or just this particular college? Hamilton Morris told me stories that suggest the former. He visited his adviser and described his frustrations with the university. Her response: “You’re not meant for college. You should really drop out.” He struck up a conversation with a student on his floor “who as far as I can tell doesn’t have any friends at all, and nobody talks to him. He has no desire to transfer — even though he’s unhappy. I feel like a lot of people are like that as well. You know: ‘College sucks anyway, so I might as well stay here.’ ”

Most of my interviewees were happy. Caroline Ouwerkerk was ecstatically so. As I futzed with my digital recorder, she gushed, “I’ll talk all day about the university, whether or not I’m being recorded!” She gushed about the housing system, which sorts students randomly into teamlike “houses,” where “someone is caring for you right from the start.” She gushed about her job with the university-sponsored Community Service Leadership Training Corps and about her volunteer work advising prospective students. We met in the spacious lobby of the campus art museum, where she had already been three times but had yet to see the paintings; she was always there for a reception or a meeting. I asked if many of her fellow students felt alienated from society, as many young people did in the 1960s. “I don’t think anyone really feels that,” she responded. “I am so impressed with so many of my peers at the university, with what they’ve accomplished before they go there in their high-school years, what they’ve accomplished now.”
Caroline is smart. She is passionate. She has a social conscience and a mature grasp of the extraordinary privileges life has handed her. A reporter slotting her in for an interview also discovers she’s astonishingly overscheduled — “Right now it’s probably the worst time to ask me what I do for fun!” — but even her fun is impressive: an anthropology major specializing in food culture, she has been all over the city discovering exotic new ethnic restaurants. Caroline is a pristine example of what the Times columnist David Brooks called, in a 2001 Atlantic Monthly article on college, an Organization Kid. She is, indeed, a cog in the organization — specifically, the bureaucracy that schedules students’ self-exploration, the very facet of campus culture that Mike Yong and his friends find most “infantilizing.” Organization Kids don’t mind it.
Most people make their accommodation between the two extremes. Their numbers include, interestingly enough, most of the campus activists. Jonathan Hirsch is a right-of-center example. As the president of Chicago Friends of Israel, one of the actions he led was taking over the Q. and A. session at a panel on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the Friends considered unbalanced.
Hirsch is a case study of a phenomenon that wouldn’t have made sense even to Ronald Reagan in 1966: the saturation of higher education with market thinking. It cuts against the presumption that the campus should be a place radically apart from the rest of society — its own “city-state,” as the British poet Stephen Spender wrote in a 1968 essay entirely typical of the era’s what’s-happening-on-campus genre. A biology major, Hirsch is most passionate about biotechnology. His ambition is to work for a venture-capital firm. He became excited telling me about the summer job he had at the University of Chicago’s Office of Technology and Intellectual Property and about sitting on a committee to help set up a university “biotech incubator, where a new biotechnology company can be started up.” He also expresses disappointment in Chicago’s relative lack of market mojo: “Stanford commercializes a lot of stuff very well. This university has a lot of stuff that would be great, but we don’t act on it.” I asked whether incentivizing science according to its marketability might distort the university’s mission to nurture ideas on the basis of intellectual merit, regardless of commercial potential. He’s a bright kid, but I’m not sure he understood the question.

Just before these interviews, there had been a wave of campus activism: Chicago was considering replacing its idiosyncratic Uncommon Application in favor of the so-called Common Application used by many top-tier schools. “I love the Uncommon Application,” Hirsch said. Then he added, “But at the same time I want the value of my degree to go up.” One thing that the U.S. News & World Report rankings measure, he explained, is “selectivity,” and the Uncommon Application (goes the theory) kills Chicago’s selectivity rate by keeping more people from applying. Interestingly enough, when I later spoke to a pro-Uncommon Application advocate, his argument for it was likewise couched in economic terms.

I brought up another goal of campus activists to Jonathan Hirsch: reversing Chicago’s decision, unusual among top-tier universities, not to divest from the military government of Sudan in protest against the genocide in Darfur. He responded: “I understand their whole position. But, well, I’m not going to intrude myself on the investment decisions of the university.” He then began a sophisticated critique of the marginal utility limited, he says of the divestment strategy as politics. When I later presented his arguments to a group of Darfur activists, they laid out their own position in market language: “In terms of the prevailing trend in corporate social responsibility, as a large corporation, albeit a university, we want our university to remain competitive in that respect.”

There is something that these very different students share. Just as the distance between the campus and the market has shrunk (perhaps not that surprising at Chicago, home of the market-based approach to almost everything), so has the gap between childhood and college and between college and the real world that follows. To me, to Doug Mitchell, to just about anyone over 30, going to college represented a break, sometimes a radical one and our immediate postcollege lives represented a radical break with college. Some of us ended up coming back to the neighborhood partly for that very fact: nostalgia for four years unlike any we had experienced or would experience again. Not for these kids.

Hamilton Morris, with his hip, creative parents, is an extreme case of a common phenomenon: college without the generation gap. (As I write this at a coffee shop near campus, a kid picks up her cellphone — “Hi, Dad!” — and chats amiably for 15 minutes. “When we went to college,” a dean of students who was a freshman in 1971 tells me, “you called on Sunday — the obligatory 30-second phone call on the dorm phone — and you hoped not to hear from them for the rest of the week.”)

Morris is an exaggeration too of another banal new reality. You used to have to go to college to discover your first independent film, read your first forbidden book, find freaks like yourself who shared, say, a passion for Lenny Bruce. Now for even the most provincial students, the Internet, a radically more democratic and diverse culture — and those hip baby-boomer parents — take care of the problem.

Caroline hopped on a community-service track in high school, continued in college and plans on a career working in the same kind of service bureaucracy after graduation as she does now. Jonathan will experience the same sort of continuity — he has embraced a worldview in which erasing the distinction between the university and the world outside it is the entire point. Some of these kids, indeed, might end up having more of a “college” experience when they enter the workplace than beforehand. The workplace may be more surprising and maybe even more creative.

Why aren’t people paying attention to the campuses? Because, as a discrete experience, “college” has begun to disappear. My radical, alienated friends brought up the University of Chicago’s marketing materials: bucolic images of a mystic world apart, where 18-year-olds discover themselves for the first time in a heady atmosphere of cultural and intellectual tumult. But college no longer looks like that. They wondered how long the admissions office thought it could get away with it before students started complaining they’d been swindled. I posed the question to a brilliant graduating senior, someone I’ve been friends with for years. “They’re assuming that the marketing is for students,” he explained. “It’s not. It’s for parents.”

Who had, you know, gone to college back when it was college.

Rick Perlstein is the author of “Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus” and the coming “Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972.”

"I hate finals!"

2007-12-16T09:07:00.000-08:00

Students at high schools throughout the country have been waiting for winter break since the first day of classes, and my school is no exception. But one more thing stands in their way...those looming end-of-semester final exams--finals week--and projects. For some students, the last two weeks of school can be hectic and stressful; for others, it's about the same as the rest of the semester.

"I hate finals. I hate school. Studying is worthless and time consuming." As a principal, these are comments I commonly hear at this time of the year. Another common comment is the more succinct, "Finals suck!"

However, others generally realize that finals themselves aren't so bad, but that people make them more stressful than they truly are. One senior told me, "Finals are overrated just because of all the pressure that's put on you. They aren't that hard." Some students have told me that finals week is a "joke" because most of the time they're just tested on material that they've previously seen in quizzes.

While some students don't take finals seriously, others stress out. One freshman recently told me, "I'm scared to death. I'm terrible at math and I have my Algebra 1 final on Monday at 8:15...and I'm not a morning person."

A junior who also has an upcoming math final said she started studying for it two weeks ago and will continue to study up to the day of her final. "I go to tutoring and the library every day trying to study. I practice the review sheet and go to my teacher if I don't understand problems." Even though she told me that she is worried about her math class, she said, "I try to stay focused and not think negatively. I take it easy and one step at a time."

Besides having exams to study for, many students also have projects that are due and this can be just as stressful as they try to manage their studying time.

One student said she has a group project that is due and projects really add stress. "You're trying to focus on one thing and then you have eight other things to focus on."

While many students are worried about their math classes, some said they were worried about their science class. One junior said, "I don't know crap about weather. It's confusing and we have to turn all this stuff into a simple presentation. It's hard to do that." That student also has a portfolio presentation due in her photography class...which is a major part of the final grade.

Cramming and procrastination can add to students' stress levels. One senior said he is stressed and procrastinates about studying, and wishes he didn't wait until the last moment to start studying or work on his projects. Many of the students agreed that cramming doesn't help with reducing stress levels. Even though one junior admitted that she crams when writing papers, she said, "Cramming is for losers who don't care about school." An interesting observation. The same student also said she doesn't let the end-of-semester woes stress her out. "If I have something to do I'll get it done."

Besides some students worrying about math or English or science, others worry about their History exams. One freshman said she has definitely been studying for her US History exam and even bought a study guide to help her understand some of the complex concepts in her textbook. Another freshman is also studying for her History final which she claimed is "kicking my butt." She said she doesn't handle stress well and usually nearly ends up in the emergency room because of anxiety attacks related to her test anxiety. She said her mom's even had to call in to school on occasion to tell us she won't be attending classes because of the stress attacks.

Students aren't the only ones that stress out about the last few weeks of school. Teachers have just as much pressure on them to wrap up the semester and grade final exams accurately. One teacher said on his final he uses the same format as the previous two tests and doesn't have the final weighted heavily. He said he doesn't go out of his way to make tests difficult. Students have two hours to complete exams and he said most complete the final in 45 to 50 minutes just like the other tests. He said while he doesn't make the final test cumulative, students do have to retain and use some of the information they previously learned.

"Some of the basic information is cumulative and you have to be able to refer to it," he said. The teacher said he's more worried about the papers he has to grade because sometimes it takes hours to grade one honestly.

Another teacher said 10 years ago he may have been stressed out but not anymore. "I've come to the point where I drop material if I have to. Writing finals isn't fun and grading them is less so, but I don't let it stress me out like I used to."

Other stress factors in high school students' lives include finances and adjusting to tougher grading scales in comparison to their junior high experiences, as well as relationships, college goals, and academic performance.

Encierro - 12 July 2007

2007-10-21T19:59:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of Hemingway, on 12 July 2007 my friend and I ran with the bulls during Fiesta San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. Our wives watched from the fences as hundreds of runners, a dozen bulls, and a half-mile closed course which runs uphill through the old part of Pamplona to the Plaza de Toros made for an exciting 10 minutes during the week-long festival. My friend is in the NBC t-shirt and I am standing to his right. This picture was taken just as the bull in the picture got up after falling down and we paused...before he turned and came back at us. A few minutes later he gored several runners, including two American brothers from Philadelphia.

Currently Reading...

2007-10-21T19:27:00.000-07:00

Improving Schools From Within - Roland S. Barth

Generation MYSPACE - Candice M. Kelsey

11th Annual Edition The Year's Best SF - Judith Merril, ed.

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

The Atlantic, 150th Anniversary Issue "The Future of the American Idea"

Fair Play: The Moral Dilemma of Spying - James M. Olson

American Expressionism: Art and Social Change 1920-1950 - Bram Dijkstra

How Out Of Sync Are College Prep Standards?

2007-08-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

As a private school offering a college preparatory high school program to its students, the majority of which have college firmly envisioned in their future plans, our curriculum is as dynamic as the Earth’s ever changing climate. But much like the varied perceptions and on-going debates among scientists and others over what exactly are the causes and dangers of our planet’s climactic changes, similar debates among educators argue over the educational background a college bound student should have before exiting high school.

In April 2007, a study released by Iowa-based ACT Inc. highlighted the enormity of the gap between what high schools as a whole are teaching in their college-preparatory courses and what colleges really want their incoming students to know.

The study by the Iowa City producer of the ACT college-admissions tests is based on a national curriculum survey of more than 6,500 middle school, high school, and post-secondary English, reading, math, and science teachers. The testing company conducts such a survey every three to five years to help shape the content of its assessments.

The new survey found that college professors generally want incoming students to have a deeper understanding of a selected number of topics and skills…while high school teachers in all content areas tend to rate a far broader array of content and skills as important or very important.

According to the report from the ACT’s education division, the blame for this gap is largely due to the state academic-content standards that high school teachers must follow. “State learning standards are often too wide and not deep enough. They are trying to cover too much ground—more ground than colleges deem necessary—in the limited time they have with students.”

Earlier studies by the ACT have also focused on gaps in students’ college readiness by examining how high school students' course taking relates to their scores on admissions exams and their grades in college.

The new study strikes a similar theme, but looks more closely at the actual content knowledge and skills that high school teachers say they are teaching within their courses, and how important they rate that content compared with ratings by postsecondary instructors.

More than half the states are now working to better align high school standards, tests, and curricula with college expectations. An equally large number have created “P-16” (Pre-school through college) councils to help coordinate goals and activities across the various levels of education, from preschool through college or graduate school.

In general, the ACT survey found, college professors take a dim view of their states’ academic-content standards for high schools.

Nearly two-thirds of those respondents (65 percent) said their state standards prepare students poorly or very poorly for college-level work in their respective subject areas. In contrast, a majority of high school teachers said their state standards are preparing students well or very well for college-level work.

The study also highlights significant differences between high school instruction and college expectations in specific curriculum areas. For example:

In writing, college professors tended to value the basic mechanics of writing (such as sentence structure and punctuation) more highly than high school teachers did. High school English teachers rated topic and idea development as the most important set of skills.

In mathematics, professors rated being able to understand and rigorously apply fundamental skills and processes as more important than exposure to more advanced math topics. High school math teachers tended to view the latter as important. Professors also placed far more emphasis on reading comprehension (being able to understand new material by reading a textbook).

In reading, the survey found a general lack of reading courses in high school and a decline in the teaching of targeted reading strategies after the 9th grade. In contrast, college professors of remedial courses rated such strategies as very important and reported devoting a large percentage of time to teaching them.

In science, high school teachers consistently rated content as more important to student success than science process or inquiry skills--which is in direct contrast to both middle school and post-secondary science teachers.

What the survey suggests is that our content for “college preparatory” standards should focus on the most essential knowledge and skills needed for college readiness rather than covering the gamut of topics so readily available or popular, and to focus our content standards on a smaller subset of big or powerful ideas that could guide students’ development within a content area.

And so the debate goes...

Motivating the unmotivated...

2007-06-28T08:29:00.000-07:00

Over the years, I've watched them collapse, falling hard into the seats of the faculty work room, heard them muttering from the experience of working with students who wouldn't learn. I've listened to the long sighs of frustration and then the discussion of the "fact" that students are largely unmotivated, unwilling slugs taking up our time and best performances as teachers.

And though I, too, sometimes fell into this occasional form of educators "locker room talk" about students, I long ago found myself regretting my prior ignorance. Over the years, I have tried to take time to get to know students, to talk honestly with them about who they are and what they want...from me, the school, themselves, and their education. Listening to them, they have taught me a great deal and I no longer believe that the real issue regarding the ways many of them often perform -- or fail to perform -- in the classroom is as simply defined as motivation.

Students have made it clear that they embody many sources of frustration regarding the learning process before we ever encounter them, frustrations that are difficult to set aside for the 50 minutes at a time they are in a classroom. And they carry in many problematic attitudes about the nature of learning. They come from diverse backgrounds. Some arrive immediately after junior high, but many others come to the Upper School after years of academic and social struggling in the "mainstream" high school educational system.

In general, our students are likely to be apprehensive about traditional classrooms -- paper and pencil work and "book learning" -- and to perceive themselves as being outsiders when they consider the teacher's world. They are often uncomfortable with formality. They are often lacking study skills. And they are often struggling to work jobs, deal with financial responsibilities and limited funds, sometimes even having to assume an adult-like role in raising themselves and their siblings, all while trying to complete high school and, in most cases, prepare to go to college.

If all that isn't enough, coming to a new school challenges their social identity and often shakes their confidence as they leave the academic world of their friends and siblings. Many of them come from worlds that have been shaped by experiences far different from what they face here. When I think about all that is going on with them socially, psychologically, developmentally, and economically, it is no surprise that many students often do not see their classes or teachers as the pivotal points of their existence.

Even knowing all the problems they carry with them, we always want to believe that their classes should be something they cherish and to which they would give themselves over completely. We want the best from students. If we could have our way, they would come to us as active learners, seeking assistance and insight at every opportunity. They would thrive on academic challenge, and they would challenge us to teach better than we have ever taught before. They would question every aspect of their education and seek an understanding of the "how's" and "why's" of the factors that touch their naturally curious minds.

Oh, what a wonderful experience that would be ... but, let's face it, that's not what most students do, either here or at any school. What a disappointment! How easy it is to blame them! And how easy it is to get frustrated ... and how easy it is to fall into the belief that they are passive, uninvolved, apolitical airheads. How easy it is to assert that they shun responsibility, that they never question anything that relieves them of responsibility, and that they often drag other students down with them by using their social networks in the classroom to undermine the value of the lessons being presented to the potentially "good" students. How foolish to think we do not have to teach them how they learn and how to learn!

The fact is -- as we have learned -- classrooms don't have to be deadly arenas of mortal combat between teachers and students, and students who seem unmotivated don't have to remain in the unmotivated stage. But making a change often requires a great deal of time, as well as sometimes uncomfortable levels of soul-searching and rethinking on all our parts. And, most difficult to accept, it requires that we all -- students, faculty, families -- accept some of the blame for what we are given in our students' responses to our demands.

Many of them don't know that they have the right to ask for anything other than what they are given. For the most part, they are the products of years of experience in schools where they were essentially told to sit down, shut up, listen, and learn - an experience that taught them that the teacher is the source of all knowledge and that learning is something magically injected into them at some point without their awareness. They rejected that idea of voodoo education then and, as we've learned, they will reject it again if we push it, even though they struggle with the internal desire to "make it this time" in school.

Contrary to the occasional lounge talk I've heard and been part of, students are here spending their time and money because they do want to learn and because they want a better life for themselves. Granted, they often don't know how to acquire what they want or how to make themselves learn what is presented to them. But, when asked for their opinions (often a new experience for many of them), they express that there are instructional areas that they have strong opinions about. They include:

• Individualized instruction. They all want to have their individual needs met. They want to feel like they are more than part of a crowd, that their individual talents and abilities are respected and deemed worthy.
• Teachers who are real people, who recognize them as human beings -- teachers who care about them and not just their test performance.
• Wanting to be challenged and supported, not decimated and abandoned.
• Wanting caretakers who check on them regularly, who support their individual learning, who inform them individually of their progress, and who assign a variety of tasks that give them the opportunity to learn in modes that fit their individual styles and that are designed to meet their level of learning.
• Teachers who talk at their level, who can joke and take a joke, and who let them talk and learn with other students.
• Receiving clear, complete explanations and concrete examples, thorough (but brief) explanations of difficult concepts, and opportunities to have their questions answered.

When thinking about what students want, classes that deliver the same old message of "sit down, shut up, and listen so that you can memorize facts to dump onto a test sheet" are certainly not going to motivate them. It seems clear that most students are not necessarily unmotivated or unwilling learners; they are simply uninvolved in the depersonalized environment of the traditional classroom. They are willing to learn; they simply may not be able to endure the way they are taught. We know that if we really want to see motivation in our students, we --teachers and parents -- have to be motivated to continually challenge ourselves as well as to rethink what it is we are doing to and demanding of them. To paraphrase Dean Smith, the former basketball coach for the University of North Carolina, "We don't motivate anybody. We create the environment for motivation to develop."

How motivated are you?

Concerns about cyber-networking?

2006-03-08T12:22:00.000-08:00

Like most schools, we are doing our best to emphasize the dangers of social networking sites like MySpace.com. It's one of the most popular sites among teens and claims nearly 60 million members, with many of our students as frequent visitors to the popular teen chat website.

For the most part, parents and teens get the message. But warnings may not be enough to convince the kids to be safe. I've talked with concerned and frustrated parents, teachers, and administrators who have tried talking with their students…but teens can be especially skeptical of parental-like advice from anyone.

If the kids think you're just paranoid or nosey, let them read about the dangers of MySpace and similar sites for themselves. Sad stories related to these sites unfold every day. Just browse news stories on Google News or Yahoo! News for "MySpace.com" and you're bound to find one. This really happens, and predators are often willing to travel across the country to lure children and teens. Let them read these stories and try to explain how they may be impervious (e.g., restricting data about themselves and their families) where other kids are not.

An example of the dangers of on-line networking is the Lafayette Parish Sheriff's Office’s urging parents to be more cautious about their children's Internet usage following at least four incidents involving cyber predators on popular online teen networking Web sites like MySpace.com.
http://www.theadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060120/NEWS01/601200310/1002

One common problem with these sites is the issue of “identity theft” where teens or adults can anonymously create derogatory sites using another person’s name or identity. When discovered, notification to the site’s webmaster will get it removed, but such sites are a growing problem for teachers, administrators, and corporations. As is often the case, these sites are initially created by teens as a form of “humorous” (their perception) satirical venting, but they can quickly go too far when others from around the world join in and add comments or pictures that can be outrageously inappropriate and even libelous—which can result in legal prosecution.

MySpace, Xanga, and Facebook are all a part of a modern teen’s life and, for the most part, fairly harmless ways for teens to connect. However, besides the more obvious “I didn’t have time to do my homework!” excuse (common when someone spends far too much time networking in cyberspace), there are real dangers for them out there that they may not realize. Here at school, we monitor and ban their access to such sites from our computers. But do you know where your children are cyber-traveling outside of school? You might want to look for yourselves and let your children show you. This could turn out to be one of the most crucial conversations you will ever have with them.

College Course Indecision and Expenses

2006-02-19T12:14:00.000-08:00

Ask young students at breakfast what they want to be when they grow up and the answer will change three times before lunch. Ask them when they are 18 and the answer is unlikely to be any more decisive.

General statistics of college-bound students show that nearly eighty percent of them have not chosen a major by the time they finish high school and enter college. But they are still expected to pick schools, and apply to and start degree programs without knowing where they want to end up. It is little wonder 50 percent of those who do declare a major, change majors—with many doing so two and three times during their college years.

While it is difficult enough watching children struggle to find their life’s path, it can also be costly. With tuition averaging nearly $13,000 a year at public universities, indecisiveness can drain college savings accounts as students restart course sequences or transfer schools—often losing credits in the process. Ultimately they risk extending their college days beyond the four years parents planned to finance.

According to the College Board, five and six-year students are not uncommon, and roughly 40 percent of those who start a four-year degree program still have not earned one after year six. But while the graduation rates are better at private schools where higher tuitions provide incentive not to linger, long-termers can still be found. Such extended stays are not new, and the overall numbers have been consistent over the last few years. However, this creates problems for colleges as the longer students take to graduate, the fewer the slots there are for new students coming in.

Some schools (e.g., the University of Wisconsin) have instituted an ‘excess credit’ surcharge to encourage students to move on with their lives. The surcharge, which kicks in at 30 credits above the 135 normally needed to graduate, doubles a student’s tuition. Though assessed on a case-by-case basis, it is currently being applied and other schools are taking note.

There are a variety of good reasons for dragging a college career into its fifth and sixth years—from taking time off for foreign study, to taking advantage of internships or needing to balance academics with part-time employment to pay tuition. But changing majors is the one thing that drives up an education’s cost while potentially driving down a student’s self-esteem. It is also the easiest to avoid.

The key is helping students—preferably while still in high school—identify those areas of study best suited for them before the college tuition clock ever starts ticking. We have our juniors take the OASIS-2 (Occupational Aptitude Ssurvey and Interest Schedule) and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to do just that. A student’s responses to questions regarding personal interests, temperaments, value systems and academic history are matched to those majors where they are most likely to find success and satisfaction. The choices they are presented with are much broader than most parents and many high school students would generally know about.

I have taken these tests. The results accurately reflected not only the major choices I dealt with some 35 years ago but also the odd career path I followed. Had I taken these tests when I was much younger, it probably would have saved me a great deal of time and agony in developing a realistic career path.

While surveys and tests such as these can help focus a student’s attention on potential courses of study, there is often a tendency to apply the results too inflexibly with a “the test says I should be a florist, so that’s what I have to be’” attitude. But we favor another exercise to help undecideds identify and translate interests into majors and eventually careers they will succeed in and enjoy. When all else fails, follow the path that best uses your demonstrated talents and interests, and passions. The point is to help them understand what things excite them and what careers are connected to those things, and which majors would lead them towards those careers.

However they get there, encouraging students to think things through before choosing a school or program can help them avoid future frustration, academic let-down or feelings of failure. It is also key to helping them graduate in as few years as possible and move into their ‘real’ lives before they out-spend their college savings accounts.

Tips for helping choose a major

What can we do to help their children get through college in a timely fashion? Here are some suggestions compiled from conversations with academic advisors who work with undecided college students:

• Refrain from pressuring them into making quick choices or pursuing majors associated solely with high income professions. Not everyone should or can be a doctor or a lawyer.
• Focus their attention on pursuing courses of interest, even if the immediate relationship to a major or career is not obvious.
• Help them understand that piling on majors and minors will harm rather than help them in job interviews. Potential employers will want to know why they did not just get a master's degree.
• Encourage their participation in job shadowing—going to work with people to see what their jobs actually entail and asking people they meet how they got into their careers.
• If they do enter school undecided, encourage them to follow a course of study that keeps their options open until they decide. Declaring a major just to have one can rack up the years and money spent as an undergraduate. For the first several years, having an Undeclared or General Studies major can help relieve some of the pressure and help them make better decisions in choosing a major.
• Refrain from giving them advice based on the job market of twenty-some years ago. Today’s employers need a different kind of worker and favor different degrees. As soon as doubts about their current major surface, encourage them to reassess. The sooner they change directions, the more likely they will stay on course for a four-year graduation. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics at http://stats.bls.gov/ provides a great deal of useful information to help with this.
• Urge them to take full advantage of campus advisory services to avoid floundering, shifting from one course of study to the next, and prolonging their dissatisfaction and their academic careers.
• Help them understand that a major is not a career. There are multiple paths to most careers, just as there are multiple careers that can be had from a single major. Encourage them to explore their options.
• Help them prepare academically before arriving at college to avoid spending their high-priced time on as few remedial or review classes as necessary.
• If a student is undecided, consider seeking out a college with the resources to acquaint them with all the options to make a well-founded decision. Not all schools have or emphasize such programs.
• Understand that the student-to-counselor ratio averages 450:1 nationally at the high school level (compared to our private school offering a student-to-counselor ratio of 35:1). Do not rely on high school counselors alone to guide students through the exercise of choosing a major if you are faced with a high student-to-counselor ratio; consider using the services of an academic placement counselor to help you.

School Success--Work smarter, Not Harder

2006-02-07T11:21:00.000-08:00

There’s a story of a woodsman who worked day after day chopping down trees. One day he was grumbling to a friend that it seemed like he was working harder and harder and getting less and less done. The friend asked when was the last time he sharpened his ax, and the woodsman replied, “I don’t have time to stop and sharpen my ax!” If you find yourself feeling like the woodsman—going from one task to another and never seeming to make a dent in your list of things to do—it might be well to remember the old adage “a stitch in time saves nine.” Taking a bit of time to organize your life to manage responsibilities better could prevent many hassles and considerably reduce your stress. Consider implementing the following time management tips.

■ Have to’s vs. Want to’s. Consider all the things that take time in your life. Make a list of all the things you HAVE to get done, and the things you WANT to get done. The Have to’s usually include such things as family responsibilities, school work, sleep, eating, and personal hygiene. The Want to’s can include such things as student activities, recreation, keeping in touch with friends, watching television, physical activity (although some might place this in the Have To category).

■ Budget your time. You can’t save time or store it up—like it or not, you only have 24 hours in a day. How much time can you spend on each thing you need or want to do? List everything that needs to be done in a typical day and how much time each will take. For example, if you sleep for 8 hours and it takes you half an hour to shower and get dressed for school, then half an hour on the bus to get to school, there’s 9 hours gone from your 24. If all that needs to be done adds up to more than 24, something has to go or be cut back.

■ Keep a list. Take a few minutes each day to make a master list of all the things you have to do that day—day planners are great for this, but a sheet of paper works fine. Putting things down on paper means you don’t have to waste energy trying to remember them and frees your mind for more creative work.

■ Prioritize your list. No matter how carefully you plan, there will always be times when things on your to-do list are in conflict. How do you determine which should take priority? Ask yourself:

• Which is more important in the scheme of life?
• Which has a more urgent deadline?
• What would happen if you didn’t do it?
• Is this a now or never opportunity?
• What is the best use of my time right now?

A simple system to use is to mark the things that must be done with an A, things that should be done with a B, and things that would be nice to do but aren’t very important with a C. Many people informally do this, just by the order in which they tackle the jobs on their list. However, be careful not to waste all your time completing the C items and then find that the important things are undone at the end of the day.

■ Figure out what times you want to set aside for Have to’s and what time you have for Want to’s. Remember that all work and no play will wear you out, so be sure to save some time for relaxing and taking care of the Want to’s on your list.

■ Cross out or check off what you have done. Most people receive a certain amount of satisfaction from checking things off their lists. It helps reinforce the feeling that you are getting things accomplished. Some people even add things they’ve already done to their lists, just for the pleasure of crossing them off!

■ Break up large projects or tasks into smaller, easily accomplished parts. Set mini-deadlines for yourself by which to accomplish each of the smaller tasks. This way, you won’t find yourself trying to cram it all in at once right before the deadline.

■ Be realistic about the time needed to accomplish tasks. Review each project to estimate how long it will take to complete, then add a bit more time to be safe. Block off time on your daily schedule for each item. You might be able to get your English essay written in two hours so you think you’ll leave it to the night before it’s due. But will you be able to do that when you also need to spend an hour on your algebra homework and an hour finishing a history project that’s due?

■ Allow some flexible time for crises and interruptions. Inevitably, when you have every minute of your day scheduled, something will happen to throw a wrench into things. Try to allow some wiggle room for getting things done.

■ Fight procrastination. Do it now if it’s important. Difficult or unpleasant tasks won’t be any easier if you put them off.

■ Avoid distractions. If you find yourself being interrupted frequently, turn off your phone or computer and go someplace that you don’t normally go. People can’t interrupt you if they can’t find you.

■ Learn to say no. If you find this difficult to do when people ask you to do something, say “let me think about it for a while,” or “let me check my schedule and get back to you.” This gives you a little time to decide if you really want to do it or have the time to do it.

■ Avoid over-commitment. Be realistic about what you can do in the time you have. It doesn’t do you or anyone else any good to take on something that you don’t have time to do. You’ll be stressed, others will be frustrated with you, and your reputation will suffer.

■ Know when to ask for help. Admitting that we’ve taken on too much or are feeling overwhelmed can be difficult, but there’s no need to suffer alone. Learn how to delegate things that can be delegated. Ask family or friends to help out when your load gets too heavy. Next time you find yourself saying “I wish I had more time…” let that be a signal to you to stop and evaluate how effectively you are using the time you have. Like the woodsman, you may find it worthwhile to stop and sharpen your ax.

■ Stress Busters. If you find your best efforts at time management have still left you feeling stressed, try some of these stress busters.

• Learn a few new jokes and share them.
• Hang out with positive people.
• Do something physical—go skating, bowling, biking, dancing, or play raquetball.
• Take a hike in the woods with a friend.
• Pamper yourself with a manicure, pedicure, massage, or a new haircut.
• Perform a random act of kindness.
• Go play on the playground with some little kids.
• Reminisce with some old scrapbooks or photos.
• Read a novel just for fun.
• Listen to your favorite CD.
• Don’t sweat the small stuff.
• Get some sleep!

School - Student Connections

2006-01-10T03:16:00.000-08:00

One of the more subtle yet most important missions of our Upper School is to develop a connective relationship between our students, families, faculty, and school because studies have shown that students are more likely to succeed when they feel connected to the school. School connection is the belief by students that adults in the school care about their learning as well as about them as individuals. The critical requirements for feeling connected include students’ experiencing solid academic expectations and rigor combined with support for learning, positive student/adult relationships, and physical and emotional safety.

Increasing the number of students connected to school influences critical accountability measures such as improved academic performance; lessened incidents of fighting, bullying, or vandalism; lower absenteeism; and greater school completion rates.

Strong scientific evidence demonstrates that increased student connection to school promotes motivation, classroom management, and improved school attendance. These three factors in turn increase academic achievement.

Likewise, there is strong evidence that a student who feels connected to school is less likely to exhibit disruptive behavior, school violence, substance abuse, and emotional distress.

Upper School strategies for increasing the likelihood that students will feel connected to school include solid academic standards and expectations and providing academic support for all students; applying reasonable and fair disciplinary policies that stress positive reinforcement; creating trusting relationships among students, teachers, staff, administrators and families; supporting capable teachers skilled in content, teaching techniques, and classroom management to meet each learner’s needs; fostering positive parent/family expectations for school performance and completion; and ensuring that every student feels close to at least one adult at school.

Does this guarantee success? Unfortunately, not always…but our experiences have shown that our philosophy does create a comfortably inclusive environment that allows each of our students to connect in whatever way they feel will allow them to most likely achieve success—personally, socially, academically.

Connecting With Students

2005-12-21T08:15:00.000-08:00

As a second-career teacher of World History and World Geography in Pleasant Grove, an impoverished section of South Dallas, most of my students read well below grade level and had little motivation to learn. Those students had never been celebrated throughout their education, and were used to being tracked and having teachers with an “another day-another worksheet” mentality. When they were given something challenging or original, they would often rebel because they were so used to worksheets and the one simple answer concept of education. To me, this was a tragic situation and I made it my mission to show my students their untapped potential.

I found that success for them (and me) lay in making two kinds of connections with my students—connecting them with important ideas and establishing a connection with them as individuals.

Being a traditionally low-performing school with a new principal whose mission was to raise our standardized benchmark scores, we were given a great deal of leeway to be creative and find ways to get our students excited about their education. For me, that meant organizing my curriculum around key concepts rather than rote memorization of facts and integrating my curriculum’s concepts with those of the math and English departments. Too much of what I saw going on in the school was the result of a previous focus on pieces of knowledge rather than understanding, and a disconnection between the knowledge and the student’s own lives and experiences. Knowledge, in my opinion, might get the students to answer the who, what, when or where on the state’s tests, but it falls way short of helping them answer the more meaningful how and why questions.

I soon discovered that previous teachers had just given the kids worksheet after worksheet over the years in the hope that the worksheets would pound knowledge into their heads, that the repetition would create memory. Well, it didn’t, and I was very surprised to also find a subtle attitude among many of the faculty that nobody really expected the students to understand anyway…just that they needed to do better on their annual state tests.

Because I disagreed with both of these ideas, I used a center based classroom in which they were challenged and expected to step up to that challenge of understanding…which would then, I hoped, lead to knowledge. To do that, I had the students work with units that raised important ideas in geography and History. Why were so many of the world’s great cities located near ports? Why is the daily weather in the month of October so different in Dallas, Sydney, Lagos, Rome, Berlin, Lima, etc.? Why is the world charted geometrically, and how do we use that to efficiently navigate from point to point? How has globalization changed the way we travel, communicate, and live? How have we adapted to and altered the environments in which we choose to live? What would happen to Pleasant Grove if the Trinity River overflowed?

When creating lesson plans, I always tried to imagine myself as one of my students, asking whether the lesson would be an engaging use of my time, and as a teacher, asking whether the lesson would be an effective way of demonstrating meaning.

I also learned early on that connecting with my students was even more important than connecting them with the curriculum. I had been taught that being assertive and inflexible with the rules would make the students work harder. But that soon proved to not be the case, and connecting with the students did get them to work and encourage them to accept living within the classroom rules. I soon discovered that my curriculum had to come from a place that the students were comfortable with, and that began with our student-teacher relationship.

To do this, many of my classes began with games based on questions with point values such as found on Jeopardy. A variation of “Where in the world is Carmen San Diego?” using inflatable globes and a story sequence posed to student teams also proved successful, and led to them fully understanding how to read and use geographical coordinates to locate specific destinations. For many of my students, what I call edutainment (educating in the guise of them being entertained) was an extremely important and successful concept.

Illustrations were also important for my students, as so many of them were visual learners and symbolically astute, even though they weren’t aware of it at first. Show them an advertising symbol (such as the Diamler-Benz star or Nike swoosh) and they would know it right away. And so a simple Mayan or Egyptian picto-graphic drawing on the board at the beginning of class could generate exciting discussions of their meanings, their cultures, and why we don’t use that form of writing today. Each student would then have to do such a picto-graphic block (using a marker and piece of light brown construction paper) and these were posted outside the room in the hallways, generating a great deal of excitement as they proudly explained them to their friends who were not in my classes. I discovered that many of my students would then more intensely study the Egyptian picto-graphs on their own and then use them to write secret messages to each other so that their parents or other students couldn’t read them.

Because of their limited experiences and travels with the world outside their impoverished neighborhoods, videos and power-point presentations showing images of the Earth’s power and discussions were important. For example, because the process of a hurricane forming over the ocean meant little to those who had never been to the ocean, our discussions and projects emphasized what mattered most for them to understand—relationships, causes, and effects.

The final assignments were the student generated Thug Nasty Big Eartha (World Geography) and Cruisin’ Time (World History) projects. Students had to assume the role of producer of a new CD and select a project from a number of options that demonstrated the Earth is a thug nasty and time is an own ya place. Students had to write lyrics for songs such as the hit singles Big Eartha’s House or Nevah Again (a holocaust warning) and design a CD cover. The projects focused on the Earth’s power (how the Earth exerts its supremacy) or the impact of a historical event that affects our lives today. And because so many of my students had difficulty completing schoolwork at home, many stayed with me in the afternoons or during lunch for the time, space, and support they needed to complete them.

And did all this work? I don’t really know because it was a very busy transition year for me and I’ve since moved on from that environment. But if things such as students being willing to talk openly with me about personal or social issues (of which there were many at the school), leaving thank-you notes on my desk, coming to my classroom to share other successes or ask for my help, and raised state test scores were an indicator, I guess it did.

Childhood...what childhood?

2005-12-09T06:02:00.000-08:00

It was never easy to be a kid, but it must be much more difficult to be a kid in today's world. But kids, for the most part, don't know that because they've never experienced any other kind of childhood. It wasn't always like this--this being the obsessive, over-parented, angst-ridden, schedule driven method of child rearing I see so much of today. And I'm not sure how I might have turned out if I had grown up in a world where my parents scheduled my life in such a manner that I wasn't allowed to waste (in their opinions) time, to pick my own friends, to just go off on my own for several hours and just explore or laze about, to play games without adult supervision, and to get into minor scrapes--which inevitably meant banged up knees and elbows--that taught us how tenuous friendships were and how important it was to consider how our words or actions affected our friends and friendships.

I grew up in the country near Florin and Elk Grove, California, in the 50's and 60's, and we literally roamed the countryside and sought ways to entertain ourselves as often as we could get away with it. There was one television in the house, and Mom had first dibs on it for her soaps... with Dad being next in line for the evening news...and my brothers and me being last. If we were home, we could watch the Mickey Mouse Club or Crusader Rabbit or Woody Woodpecker because that was generally when Mom was busy starting to get dinner ready so we could eat together when Dad came home from work. Adults went to work and came home, we went to school and came home, and after school we wandered as far as our bicycles could carry us and still get back to the house by dinner time and dark. We made forts in the many hay stacks in the barns and the fields; climbed trees to fetch bird nests, hide from our friends, and build dangerously frail platforms to just perch and idly talk about whatever came to mind; waded barefoot in the creeks and irrigation ditches to catch pollywogs, frogs, fish, bugs, muskrats, turtles, and snakes; swam wherever there was enough water of any sort to allow us to more-or-less submerge ourselves; and dug holes--we called them forts or tunnels--wherever we could get away with it. School was important, but learning for us also included the importance of experiencing the natural world and being able to figure things out for yourself...without the aid of a parent, teacher, tutor, computer, or the Internet.

Oh, we made a lot of mistakes...for which we received motherly treatments that generally included chastisement for doing something so irresponsible, copious applications of--ouch--iodine, and frequent trips to the doctor's office for yet another tetanus shot--one of the hazards of being barefoot most of the time in an area where rusty nails and broken glass were to be found everywhere we went.

But we learned a lot, too, and discovered that:

we could do just about anything we put our collective minds to doing
planning did not always guarantee success and plans worked well...until we tried them
risk had two categories--unnecessary and calculated
many things you would never suspect as being dangerous were
fessing up generally proved a far better option than lying
we couldn't do everything we wanted to do--but that isn't necessarily a bad thing
there were consequences for not doing the things we needed to do
some consequences were permanent and couldn't be undone
you shouldn't spend more than you have
going to jail was something that should not to be emulated or praised
if you broke it, you were expected to fix it or replace it
taking something without the owner's permission was not borrowing
farming--especially dairy farming--was hard work
work was something to be praised

I tend to look back on my childhood rather nostagically these days...the result of watching too many parents over-supervise and over-schedule their children's childhoods. I am glad I grew up when and where I did, and in the way my parents allowed me to experience childhood. I'm not sure how I would have turned out today...and am glad I don't have to worry too much about it.

Technology, Teaching, and Multiple Intelligences

2005-11-08T12:05:00.000-08:00

Alan November makes the claim that as instructional technology has exploded over the last quarter-century, so has our scientific understanding of intelligence. From Binet's understanding of a measurable, finite capacity to read and calculate one-hundred years ago through Piaget's discoveries of cognitive development and ultimately the symbolic systems approach of the late 1900s, we have continued to grow in our understanding of...well...understanding! Ironically, as our understanding of human cognition has become more sophisticated, our willingness and ability to measure it as a known quantity has declined proportionately.

While psychometric testing continues to play an important role in education and psychology, we now understand that it is no longer the sole measuring stick of intelligence. At the dawn of the new information age, Howard Gardner’s description of intelligence as posited in his 1983 book, Frames of Mind, provides us with a good, working definition of human cognition as we know it today:

“The ability to solve problems and create products which are of value in one’s own culture.”

Consider the implications for this simple statement. Intelligence is no longer how closely a subject can approximate the correct answers on a norm-referenced test (e.g., TAKS, TASP, SAT, ACT, etc.). Intelligence now refers to all the possible approaches to productive activity which meaningfully contribute to society. For example, a learner may fail to achieve on an instrument measuring verbal and mathematical aptitude, but may be able to express ideas and find solutions using other facilities that are intelligence strengths: visual, musical, kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal, intrapersonal and existential. This notion much more closely approximates the standards society has for productive workers in today's age of WIKI (What I Know Is ) and continuously shared information.

But not all workers are writers or scientists. Everyone can make a positive contribution. This day and age many of our most valued thinkers and artists are those who do so “outside the box” --the box being the traditional concept of intelligence formulated primarily in the 20th Century. The implications go beyond what is immediately evident, though. Gardner’s definition is not simply a succinct statement of human intelligence. Look at his definition again and consider it as a definition of artificial intelligence. Does this hit the mark in describing instructional technology as we apply it today?

“The ability to solve problems and create products which are of value in one’s own culture.”

I agree with Alan November's contention that it does, and that the measurement of successful instructional technology today and in the future is how well artificial intelligence accommodates human intelligence. If you accept this premise, then you are ready to begin the discussion of multiple intelligence's theory and its implications for instructional technology. Technology, like education itself, is no longer a one-size-fits-all proposition. Instructional technology succeeds only as much as it helps learners complete real world tasks that mirror the demands of our modern information age society.

Teaching College Prep...

2005-09-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

As the principal for a college preparatory high school program specifically geared for students with learning differences, I can say that many students enter college with a number of wildly preconceived notions and myths that statistics and experiences belie. Some of the prevailing myths being generated by students, parents, and the media include:

The partying goes on all the time on and around campus, leading many of the current class of seniors to believe that college represents a bacchanalian (e.g., "Animal House") hiatus between childhood and the real world. This prevailing view of college life is historically passed on when former students are home from college for the holidays and return to visit their former high school teachers and friends, often regaling them with the wildest of their college out-of-class expereinces and, in many cases, fantasies.
Based upon the "word on the street" experiences of college students, rumors persist that a large number of the social science classes they will have to take at some point are--with some justification--often viewed as "jock" (easy) courses because a substantial number of athletes often major in that area while attending college. The antithesis of these courses are the dreaded math and science classes.
Another common myth is that community or junior college instructors demand far less than instructors at four-year institutions. Related to this is the belief that students will either not have to or, if they do, write fewer papers if they attend two-year institutions.
Yet a fourth myth is that students will often be asked to read only one textbook, as can happen in high school, and that instructors just "teach the textbook."
Finally, it is thought that college students, especially those at large universities, will be able to pass through lower-division courses as anonymous bytes on a diskette, just faces in a cavernous lecture hall. Some people go so far as to believe that attendance is of little importance or consequence.

Such are the expectations of what one will face in college among a sizeable portion of our high school population. One of the greatest challenges confronting a secondary-school teacher is to prepare students for college in realistic terms, since far more colleges, two-year as well as four-year, demand much more than these myths suggest. What studies on this topic have shown is that a strong majority of college instructors expect students to read beyond a single textbook, to write papers (plural), and to take essay exams--all of which suggests some points as to how high school teachers can prepare students for facing college level classes.

Based on a number of studies, there often exists some variance between two-and four-year institutions in that two-year colleges often require more per-course examinations and fewer textbooks than four-year institutions. As far as any other differences, studies for both types of colleges suggest that core academic courses will be challenging.

As a teacher and administrator, I know how challenging it is to prepare any but the most naturally gifted students for college. Various states (Texas is one) make this all the more difficult by requiring standardized bench mark and exit-level testing of a simplistic nature, forcing teachers to spend too much time on mechanical multiple-choice exams instead of writing document-based questions as is more common in Advanced Placement and college level classes. Then, too, we principals often demand that teachers try a lot of new time-consuming techniques that don't necessarily help prepare students effectively and work with classrooms of students whose abilities range up and down the scale of educational background, academic skills, and post-high school aspirations.

However, experiences with our students confirm what many of us have known all along--high school students expecting to go on to higher education must, above all, be taught to read and write effectively. As a history teacher, I required students to work on a family tree and write a book review, take essay type exams that required synthesis of thought and clarity in written explanation, and to work with me as we trudged step-by-step through the researching, drafting, and revising of term papers. Thus they learned to interpret historical evidence and experienced a variety of history writing beyond their textbooks. Not every high school student is a college-bound "scholar." But teaching with regular quizzes, essay examinations, and document-based papers, combined with the Socratic discussion method, can only better prepare students of diverse backgrounds and capabilities for college. Education is a disciplining process and, as educators, we owe it to ourselves to help realisitcally prepare our students for whatever future successes they are capable of achieving.

Education for the future...

2005-09-05T17:19:00.000-07:00

What skills will you need for the new global economy? When considering the future and the many challenges we face in a world that is growing technologically flat (as Thomas Friedman claims in The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century), the following tips may offer you more opportunity in an increasingly challenging global job market:

Learn a language. Chinese and Spanish may be useful, but English remains the dominant language for the near future. Whatever language you learn, challenge yourself to learn it to the greatest extent possible.
Crunch numbers. Math skills rule in accounting, engineering, banking, science, and computer engineering. Mathematics also teaches you to successfully solve increasingly complex problems in an orderly manner. Challenge yourself to go as far as you are mathematically capable.
Study acting. The ability to successfully communicate remains a critical skill in today's world. Writing is important, but the communication skills you can learn in an acting or speech class are also important for business, sales, communication, and retail careers.
Learn to do laboratory work. Science skills will remain important in future problem solving. Chemistry, in particular, will remain especially important for solving the complex global energy and environmenatal issues facing us all.
Think global. Study History and geography to better understand the global culture, environment, and development of nations. Travel whenever you have the opportunity as there is no better way to learn about and appreciate other cultures.

Teaching

2005-09-05T06:59:00.000-07:00

To instruct is an easy matter; but to educate requires ingenuity, energy and perseverance without end.

Frances Ward

2005-08-25T01:36:00.000-07:00

Don't be afraid to ask questions.

Teaching and Topic Sensitivity

2005-08-24T15:55:00.001-07:00

Here is an interesting response to my 16 August blog which cited an article by Thomas Sewell and then asked, "But how biased is reporting in Middle Eastern affairs? And is it as biased as the Thomas Sewell article "Trashing our history: Troops in Iraq" claims it to be? How do we teach the war in today's news?"

To give readers an idea of how difficult it often is to answer such a question, I provided some links to various web-sites offering varying points-of-view on the subject of purported media bias and concluded with: "Not easy is it? Believe me, it rarely is...but it's all a part of the process that enables us to become informed citizens and better participants in a democratic society. "

I offered no solutions to the original article or questions, and sought to show how difficult it is for teachers to touch on subjects of great import that are often of a very sensitive nature. The following response to my blog is a case in point.

Hey El Duce
You're still in denial..... about Viet Nam... after all these years...
What happened, in the USA, during Viet Nam is called *democracy*....
Yet you still *can't* & I mean *can't* face the truth......
Back then our leaders lied... the pentagon lied.....
Eventually, the American People realized, they were lying....
Eventually the American People stopped the war... not the media....
Today you are spreading right wing, neo-con propaganda, (lies) on your blog.....
Eventually your students will realize.... you are lying....
It was not the media that killed 59,000 American soldiers, in Viet Nam....
It was liars like you.....
How many times, back then did I hear "The Viet Cong is in it's last throws".....
Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies, Lies............. You should be ashamed......
Was it the media that just frightened U.S. warships out of the Red Sea.....?
Nope it was *neo-con* lies..............
I knew you couldn't keep a clean blog....

Wow! Anyone ever listen to the meandering recorded speeches of Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini? As a teacher, you might ask yourself and your students the following:

Have you ever heard such rhetoric before? Where and by whom? For what purpose?
Can you guess the political leanings of this writer? How? Based on what I wrote and what he has written in response, why might he think as he does?
Where do you think the writer's opinions come from?
To whom was he speaking? Me or the author? Or both?
Do his comments lead you to believe that he thinks the portion of the original editorial I cited in my blog was written by me and not Mr. Sewell? Why?
Do you think he even read my blog, Mr. Sewell's editorial, and the web-links? And if he did, how might he come to the conclusions he presented in his response to my blog?

Now, imagine being a high school teacher and being faced with a response like this to a topic like the one I originally posited on 16 August. How--as a teacher--would you respond to such a diatribe without stifling honest, open debate and an opportunity to teach? Think about it...and think about what it must be like to be a teacher who teaches many such topics during the day. Anyone want the job? If you don't, be thankful for the many who do...and who do it well.

The Danger of WWW Research.

2005-08-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

How often do teachers or parents tell their students to get on the Internet (the World-Wide Web) and research a topic such as a famous person, place, event, invention, etc? It happens all the time as the www has virtually replaced the use of available texts and library resources for so many of us doing research today. But do we warn and teach our students or children how to be skeptical users of the www just as we were taught to identify the author's point-of-view and question the value of the material we culled from research books? If we don't, then we had better start...or else we'll have no one to blame but ourselves when a student unwittingly brings us some "research" on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.--for example--from a web-site such as the one found at http://www.martinlutherking.org/.

This .org URL and the web-site itself makes it look like a historical treatise of the life and times of MLK, Jr., and claims that it is "A true historical examination." There is a quiz under the banner "Attention Students: Try Our MLK Pop Quiz," and the site offers sections titled Historical Writings, Truth About King, Death of the Dream, The King Holiday, Civil Rights Library, Jews & Civil Rights, and Suggested Books.

A quote from Newsweek magazine dated 19 Jan 1998 is displayed prominently on the home page and states: "That night King retired to his room in the Williard Hotel. There FBI bugs reportedly picked up 14 hours of party chatter, the clinking of glasses and the sounds of illicit sex--"

Further down the page is a link in its center inviting students to:

"Bring the Dream to life in your town! Download flyers to pass out at your school!"

Opening the link will show a page that states:

"Bring the dream to your school! This is the time of year many students are asked to write reports about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. Print out these flyers and pass them around your school. There are four flyers per sheet and include our website information."

And what do the flyers say?

One is in a business card format with Dr. King's picture and a message that states, "I have a dream..." Quoted nesxt to Dr. King's portrait is George Orwell: "In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." And at the bottom is a claim for "A Historical Examination..." and the address for the MLK web-site.

Another has the title of "The Beast as Saint: The Truth About Martin Luther King," and yet another is titled "Which holiday honors a liar, cheater, and traitor?" Can you imagine the outcry that would occur if a student--especially a younger student--downloaded one of these flyers and brought it to school to use as a source reference for a report on MLK, Jr.?

If all this seems as odd to you as it did to me, then you must scroll down to the very bottom of the web-site's page to find the following link in small print: Sponsored by Stormfront. And what is Stormfront, a student might wonder, as they clicked on the link. Imagine what they might think or be even more curious to explore when they find themsleves linked to Stormfront.org, a racist forum for what they claim is the "white nationalist community." Whoa!

The news is frequently filled with warnings of the dangers of the www--the chat rooms; blogs and vlogs; on-line gambling; and ready access to drugs, pornography, and predators. But the www also teems with ill-intentioned sites such as this one, and their easy accessability, professional appearance, and purposefully obfuscatory language make them especially confusing and--when combined with their undeveloped reasoning abilities--dangerous to the understanding of the average primary and secondary school student. As an educator, being aware of such dangers--and informing and monitoring our students as they explore the www--is yet another important task to be added to our already extensive lists of such tasks.

2005-08-20T11:54:00.000-07:00

Too many bureaucrats use this word far too often!

Proof of Residency?

2005-08-18T02:56:00.000-07:00

WARNING: The requirement to prove you are a resident of the State of Texas has been upgraded from irritating to ludicrous.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,166018,00.html

I, too, have had personal experiences with the type of bureaucratic mishandling of the proof of residency requirement faced by Carl Basham in the article at the link posted above.

One is when I recently received a postcard from the Texas Department of Public Safety stating that I needed to bring proof of my social security account number to them to renew my driver's license. There is no explanation as to why--after retiring from the US Army in 1993, moving from Europe to Dallas and declaring Texas as my home of residency, obtaining a Texas driver's license with my DD-214 ( Certificate of Discharge with my SSAN because the armed forces use your SSAN as your service identification number) and DD-2A (retired servicemember's ID card which has my SSAN on the front)--they now won't allow me to renew my driver's license without providing them again with proof of my SSAN. I would like to know what they did with the copies of those records I left with them the last time.

Another is a similar experience to Mr. Basham's when my youngest son tried to register for a summer class with the Dallas County Community College District. The residency requirements are posted at:

http://www.dcccd.edu/Future+Students/Admissions+and+Registration/Admission/Residency.htm

At the time, my 20 year old son--who had attended Texas school's since 3rd grade and graduated from a local high school with honors--had just completed his sophomore year of college at the University of Texas at Dallas. But when he went to register, the combination of his high school transcript, current college transcript, latest 1040A income tax return, and Texas driver's license--all of which showed his residency for at least the past six years at our home address in Dallas--were not enough evidence to allow him to be considered for the in-state residency tuition rate. It was not until we provided them a copy of our 1040 and driver's licenses did they allow the in-state tuition rate. Why wouldn't they accept the other documentation when taken together?

He had been out of high school for more than a year so his transcript was invalid because they said he could have been living anywhere for the past couple of years.
His college transcript was not an "official" transcript, but the one only he could print from the UTD system by accessing his account with them using his personal identification number and did not offer proof that he had been attending school in Texas.
His tax return was only for a summer job and not for a job he had worked for a year or more, so it did not prove his residency.
His driver's license, which contained our home address and was more than a year old, was considered by the registrar to be invalid because it did not expire in less than 3 years. I still haven't been able to firgure this one out.
He could not provide any rental agreements or utility or telephone bills as proof of residence because he lives at home while attending an excellent college just 2 miles from our home and his phone is on our family plan.

One of the really strange parts of our conversation with the registrar was that they would have accepted a letter of employment on letterhead stationary from a company with a Texas address stating he had worked there for a year as proof of residency. I asked if they called to verify such letters and was told they did not. When I mentioned how easy it was for any semi-technically literate teenager today to create such a letter and offer it falsely as "proof" of empolyment, the answer I received from the registrar was a shrug and a blank stare.

My son's and Mr. Basham's aren't the only cases of such bureaucratic tomfoolery. One of my teacher's had a similar experience with her son and the Dallas County Community College District. I only wish the registrars who so diligently guard the doors of our local community and junior colleges were in charge of our borders. After my experience with them, if they were, the illegal immigration problem would undoubtedly not be much of a problem at all because nobody would ever have the requisite identification they would need to be allowed to enter the country--unless, of course, it was a letter of employment on forged letterhead stationary that nobody would bother to verify.

2005-08-16T18:46:00.000-07:00

If you don't advocate for yourself, who will? Ask if you don't understand; it's expected by your teachers.

How do we teach the war in today's news?

2005-08-16T03:19:00.000-07:00

Thomas Sewell asked the following question in a recent Town Hall editorial:

Has the education in our schools left us so ill-equipped that we cannot see through even the most blatant hypocrisy of today's press in their reporting of such events as our war in Iraq?

Is today's reporting of our war in Iraq a re-creation of the media's role in the Vietnam war, where American victories on the battlefield were turned into defeat on the home front by the filtering and spin of the media? Even the current Communist rulers of Vietnam have admitted that they lost militarily in Vietnam but hung on because they expected to win politically in the United States -- as they did. Will the warring Iraqi factions who do not support a democratic society do the same?

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/printts20050810.shtml

But how biased is reporting in Middle Eastern affairs? And is it as biased as the Thomas Sewell article "Trashing our history: Troops in Iraq" claims it to be? Here are some pertinent links to get you started on answering this difficult question yourself because, as is the case in America, you must research the question, form an opinion, and then be able to defend it.

New Mexico Media Literacy Project--the largest and most successful independent, activist media literacy project in the United States. http://www.nmmlp.org/
Mideast media coverage watchdog. http://www.honestreporting.com/
Writers Debate Media Bias, Iraq Coverage. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1834539
Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting--a national media watch group offering well-documented criticism in an effort to correct media bias and imbalance. http://www.fair.org/index.php
Ohio State University Communication Research News. http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/talkbias.htm
Media Bias in Iraq. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001000753
Media Bias (Wikipedia). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias

Not easy is it? Believe me, it rarely is...but it's all a part of the process that enables us to become informed citizens and better participants in a democratic society.

Why blog?

2005-08-15T16:20:00.000-07:00

Imagine creating a blog for your course(s). What would you do with your blog?

When deciding if, how and why (not necesssarily in that order) to blog with students, teachers might consider four main structures:

Teacher posts--Blogs where a teacher posts announcements, links, and news items and no one, I mean no one, replies.
Teacher posts - Students respond-- Blogs where teachers post as noted above, but students repond in the comments section after postings. Discussion occurs, but it is mostly in response to a verbal prompt from the teacher.
Teacher and students post and all respond--Blogs where students post and teachers post and everyone responds to anyone at anytime.
Students maintain own pages--Blogs where a class home page is a clearinghouse with links to "Member blogs" and students maintain their own pages. Students and teacher read and respond to all from the writer's blog. The downside here is the time and energy to maintain all the sites.

Here are some examples of blogs in education.

Chris Burnett publishes 8th grade student work on her classroom blog: http://www.visitmyclass.com/blogs/burnett/
Jim Rusconi's showcases how a blog can act as a place to present ideas for professional development and stimulate discussion: http://novemberlearning.com/blogs/JimRusconi/
The Seton Hall blog is an online meeting place for the current group of Executive EdD students at Seton Hall University in New Jersey: http://novemberlearning.com/blogs/setonhall/
“The Secret Life of Bees” blog. Even the author joined in this literature circle: http://weblogs.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/bees/
The Galileo Li-Blog-ary features all the school library has to offer, plus offers specific notes to individual classes working on research topics: http://www.galileoweb.org/galileoLibrary/
Ms Jackson posts science homework, assignments and tests on a weekly basis: http://www.glnd.k12.va.us/schools/ghs/teachers/cjackson/archives/week_2005_01_02.html
This is a school blog from Lewis Elementary in Portland, Oregon: http://lewiselementary.org/
Will Richardson's journalism class blog: http://central.hcrhs.k12.nj.us/journ2/
See how a class from Colorado Springs teamed up with elementary students from Uzbekistan to create an International recipe exchange: http://www.connectuz.net/index.php?showtopic=81

2005-08-14T10:26:00.000-07:00

If I had only gone to kindergartern...

Educational Leadership

2005-08-12T05:30:00.000-07:00

Titles do not equal leadership. Titles establish a chain of command, and that can get you as far as compliance, but it will never get you true commitment.

Leadership is a topic of interest that lends itself to often raucous debate no matter what your chosen profession. Much like the nature v. nurture arguments of the psycho-sociological world, arguments for and against the importance of either the born or the learned aspects of leadership can be made for any case study on the topic.

Leadership was an on-going topic of discussion and reflective thinking for everyone in a leadership position during my time with the Department of Defense, and the discussion continues to this day amongst professionals of all professions. Based on my experiences and the consensus of survey results from many who have both led and been led, interpersonal skills are more critical to good leadership than technical know-how. Taking that idea into consideration, the traits of good leadership can be summarized in the following 12 points.

A good leader:

• Keeps cool under pressure
• Clearly explains missions, standards and priorities
• Sees the big picture; provides context and perspective
• Can make tough, sound decisions on time
• Adapts quickly to new situations and requirements
• Sets high standards without a “zero defects” mentality
• Can handle bad news
• Coaches and gives useful feedback to subordinates
• Sets a high ethical tone; demands honest reporting
• Knows how to delegate and not “micromanage”
• Builds and supports teamwork within staff and among units
• Is positive, encouraging and realistically optimistic

This summary outlines what was and remains expected of the leaders directly responsible for the lives of their charges and the defense of our nation and its ideals. After more than three decades of experience in the government, public, and private sectors of education, I often wonder why we are so hesitant to ask no less of those so-called "leaders" responsible for educating and developing our future citizens?

2005-08-12T03:54:00.000-07:00

"Fahrenheit 451" could become a reality if we allow it. Let your elected officials know how you feel about your right to privacy and your use of the library.

Boomerang Kids

2005-08-11T05:31:00.000-07:00

Boomerang kids is the term given to those students who leave high school, attempt college, and return home within a year or less because they were failing and either dropped out or were academically released by the school.

When pondering the issue of boomerang kids, one must remember that America offers opportunity, not guarantees. It is amazing to me how so many people fail to grasp this very important concept and how many schools fail to even teach it. To carry this concept a bit further, the American higher education system also offers a variety of opportunities--the opportunity to learn and the knowledge that learning is a personal responsibility demanding drive, hard work, and realistic aspirations from the learner. It offers no guarantees...except that it is available to all who (1) have the aptitude and (2) can find a way to fund it.

In today's educational arena, parents, educators, and legislators spend a great deal of time and effort in trying to quantify and chart the myriad factors that determine educational success in the hope that we can then better predict the outcome of our student's learning. A continuous chain of standardized testing beginning--strangely enough--even before entering kindergarten, an on-going clamoring for a "more rigorous" curriculum, and a structuring of our student's lives in and out of school to the point they are entering adulthood without really having experienced childhood are all attempts by society and our educational systems to guarantee our children are successful in school and life. In my opinion, however, you have a much better chance of predicitng the roll of a pair of dice...and this is why.

In my years as a teacher, administrator, and leader, I have seen students with nearly perfect SAT scores attempt college and fail, and students with SAT scores most colleges wouldn't consider to be acceptable for college level work try and succeed. I have come to call this the "Bubba-Gump" factor, a tribute to the still important and often undervalued virtues of self-worth, hard work, humility, citizenship, and honesty so poignantly portrayed in the Academy Award winning movie, "Forrest Gump."

As educators, we are often faced with the concerns of anxious parents, faculty, and administrative boards who want to know where we failed these boomerang students and how we can guarantee the success of those now following. But we must ask ourselves, did we fail them or did they fail themselves when they chose to:

not use the skills and knowledge we helped provide them;
not heed our warnings and advice;
not be honest with themselves regarding their choice of school, their talents and strengths, their weaknesses, their passions, and their choice of academic major;
avoid or not take advantage of the help offered by peers and school staffs;
pursue a social rather than an educational agenda.

I have no definitive answers for these issues. Don't get me wrong, I am not complacent about them, but I have learned that there are so many factors which influence the decisions made by our students that are often beyond our control for which we either cannot or should not be held responsible. And I use myself as a prime example.

I graduated from high school and began college at 17. I was intelligent enough to do the work and succeed in college, but I didn't because I was far less interested in my academics than my social development. As a result, I lost my 2S deferment and was drafted into the service. At that point, I began making decisions that led to a challenging and successful career of some 23 years; the completion of both a Bachelor's and a Master's degree program; and the transition to a second career that I personally find challenging, enjoyable, and rewarding. Because of my earlier choices, I did not have the opportunity to finish my Bachelor's degree until I was 34 years old (17 years after beginning college) and my Master's when I was 39.

In most countries of the world, this would have been impossible. But in America, this was possible because the opportunity remained available to me until I was ready to make better personal choices and commit myself to making the effort required to take advantage of it. The opportunity is the only guarantee America offers its citizens. The rest is up to the individual and the personal choices we make which ultimately determine our successes or failures. I know this because I was a boomerang kid.

Advice for parents when your kid returns home.

Don't treat your 20-something like a 15-year-old. Adult children don't need to be nagged about what they eat or wear or how they spend their money. The obvious exception would be when their habits disrupt the household.

You have a right to set your rules -- but be careful not to cross into monitoring your son or daughter. For instance, if you don't want significant others staying the night, set that rule -- but don't try to control your child's dating life.

Don't fall back into childhood patterns and roles. For example, parents shouldn't do all the grocery shopping and wash all of the clothes. Such actions can enable lazy sons and daughters and keep them from becoming independent.

Before moving in, set ground rules and negotiate routines. Set a plan with a time frame for the living situation.

Don't preach or lecture.

Be patient. Some people take longer than others to settle into a suitable career.

Give advice when asked for it, but be sparing with glib, unrealistic or moralistic suggestions.

Partially bankrolling startup adults is helpful if you can afford it, but total support destroys incentive for work.

Demonstrate respect for and interest in your young adult's current lifestyle -- no matter how disappointed you might feel.

Advice for kids when they move back home.

Don't expect a free ride and few household responsibilities, as it was during childhood. Contribute financially in some way.

Give parents plenty of space, and develop an active life of your own outside of the home.

Respect and obey the rules of your parents' house, out of courtesy. But if the rules cross into meddling and controlling, assert your boundaries -- and work more quickly on your plan for moving out.

Show appreciation for your parents and treat them well. Living at home again can be a great opportunity to get to know your parents on a whole new level as people.

2005-08-10T17:35:00.000-07:00

Multisensory learning works best for those being taught

and those doing the teaching.

Teaching Responsibility and Judgment?

2005-08-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

Today's Dallas Morning News carried a story about a high school athlete who had "broken the rules" and still wanted to play football. But the student, a talented athlete who has drawn interest from major college football programs, not only broke the rules, he broke the law and is now awaiting an October 17 trial on six counts of aggravated robbery, each a first-degree felony punishable by a prison term of five to 99 years or life. According to a police report, he admitted taking part in the robberies of six people at gunpoint during two incidents in January and is now out on bail pending his trial. But the most amazing part of this whole story is the response to this young criminal’s actions from his coach, principal, and district superintendent.

The student was a star receiver for a large high school before being arrested on aggravated robbery charges and being placed under house arrest. However, now that school has started, he doesn't have to be in until 7:15 p.m. on weekdays, is not prohibited from participating in extracurricular school activities, and his coach has welcomed him back to play football…along with all the students who have not broken the law. "Kids are kids," the coach said. "Sometimes they make bad decisions. But you can't throw away a kid's life."

Amazingly, the principal and school district superintendent support the coach's stance and said the student should be allowed to play football. Their logic? "My question is, why shouldn't he play?" the superintendent said. "You're innocent until proven guilty. Our job is to educate students and give them another chance. This may be his only route to a college education. Who are we to take that away, by making him sit out? We're doing what's best for the kid, not what's best for the coaches association or best for society."

Fortunately, I have no children who attend the school or district in which this debacle of skewed judgment and illogical reasoning is occurring. A "Kids are kids" explanation for a premeditated action in which a student in senior high school robs people with a loaded pistol and physically assaults them with a weapon is so ludicrous that I cannot imagine how anyone with even an ounce of judgment can justify it. And just as ludicrous as the coach’s comments are the spineless positions of the principal and the district superintendent in supporting the coach.

In today's educational environment where such buzzwords as personal responsibility, safe learning environment, and zero tolerance (for such actions as weapon and drug possession, bullying, and racism) are constant points of concern and discussion by students, families, teachers, and administrators, it is particularly disturbing to watch this silly drama being played out in the news media. As a parent and an educator, I would have to question the soundness of the judgment of the coach, principal, and superintendent, and wonder whether or not I could reasonably trust them with my children's education and safety.

“Kids are kids” is an approach one takes when a student commits an action that does not include a weapon, willful physical harm, or the like. It is not an approach one takes when confronted with a premeditated action that includes armed robbery and pistol-whipping unarmed, honest citizens.

As an educator, I am resigning myself to being confronted with the usual round of general public and legislative backlash that follows such unjustifiable actions. Regretfully, the strange stance of this coach, principal, and district superintendent also lends support to those who will argue that America's educational sky is falling and cannot be left to the educational professionals to save.

Point-Of-View

2005-08-10T04:21:00.000-07:00

One concept that a great many educators--especially those in urban and innercity schools--use today is to identify more precisely the environmental imprint a student brings to class before deciding exactly how to teach a specific subject. I said a great many because there are also many teachers who do not necessarily ascribe to this idea and don't use it. In educational jargon, environmental imprint refers to the experiences, ideas, opinions, and knowledge base a student already has in reference to a specific topic and will use as a point of departure when taking in, processing, and learning the material presented. In my experiences teaching throughout the world within the Department of Defense, a large urban school district, and in a private school whose mission is to provide a college preparatory education to learning different students, this concept is quite valid and an important tool every teacher needs to have in their personal toolbox of teaching techniques. Whether they use it or not is a personal choice that may be situationally or preferentially determined, but the tool must be available and ready to use when needed or desired.

A personal and--I think--humorous example of how one's environmental imprint affects learning occurred to our family while living in Europe in the early 1990's. We were living in Sembach, Germany, at the time, and my wife and I decided to take our two younger sons on a train trip to Paris. It was in November and an added bonus to our trip was for our family to experience the French celebration of Armistice Day--what we refer to as Veterans Day. Armistice Day is a national celebration for the signing of the armistice ending World War I on 11 November 1918 and the end to a horrific struggle which haunts many to this day. However, the importance of one's environmental imprint became apparent to my wife and I when we took our sons to the Louvre to see Da Vinci's Mona Lisa and the many other masterpieces housed in that former royal palace. Much to our surprise, our youngest, a very intelligent ADHD child, soon discovered a greater interest in the name plates placed beside the many works of art than in the artistic pieces themselves. Imagine our puzzlement at this unexpected turn of events...until we realized what he was doing. As it turned out, he was most fascinated in anything by the artists Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael Sanzio, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Donatello di Nicolo Bardi. Why? Because at six years of age, he was both surprised and delighted that so many of what were considered important works of art had been created by his favorite comic heroes at that time, the Ninja Turtles--Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, and Donatello.

Reflectively, watching my son tour the Louvre on a journey of educational discovery tempered by an imaginary world he had come to embrace as a youngster made me realize just how potent and important the environmental imprint concept was to interest and learning. Today, my son is a junior in college who is continuing his pursuit of art on a personal journey that--I think--may have begun when he discovered the surreal blending of fantasy and reality he found in the galleries of the Louvre and the adventures of the Ninja Turtles.

2005-08-10T04:05:00.000-07:00

Books are the carriers of civilization. Read them and learn our story.

Education As A Profession (1)

2005-08-09T16:49:00.000-07:00

I never cease to be amazed at the effontery of people who will demurely defer to the perceived omniscience of doctors or lawyers or engineers or successful businessmen...yet will show little respect for the knowledge, dedication, and experience of a professional teacher. This is especially true when a teacher, student, family, and school are struggling to help a student who is floundering with a difficult or awkward academic or school related social issue. "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" goes the old mot we all heard while growing up...the less than subtle message being that if one cannot make it in the real world (whatever that is), then they can always resort to teaching as a lesser but readily available profession for anyone to earn a living.

This patently erroneous concept of what is required of good teaching reminds me of the story of the blind men who were positioned around an elephant and, after each touched a portion of the animal that was nearest to them, were then asked to describe what an elephant is like. And of course, each had a different perspective: one touched the tail and described a rope; one touched a leg and described a large, sturdy pillar or tree; one touched the trunk and described a snake; and one touched an ear and described a large, flat animal of incredible flexibility. They were all basically right--and they were all a little wrong.

In my opinion and based upon my experience, that's the way it is whenever anyone attempts to describe the profession of teaching. Each of us has a different perspective on the matter, often depending on what portion of the profession we know and even when we knew it. Change is constant in vibrant institutions and professions, and it's fair to say that if you haven't seen the phenomenal changes taking place in the world of education and the science of learning over the last decade, you know much less of the profession of teaching than you think you do!

As the school year and this web log progress and grow over the next nine months or so, I will return to this topic again and again to add relevant points for discussion. I also plan to discuss current successful teaching strategies and practices, and to offer up experiences of life as an educator among today's teenagers, their often overly anxious parents (described by Hara Estroff Marano in "A Nation of Wimps" and Dr. Mel Levine in "Ready or Not, Here Life Comes"), and legislative bodies composed--for the most part--of lawyers and businessmen who are wont to pass laws to assauge parental angst and gain voter support without fully understanding their full impact on teaching, teachers, and student learning.

The Journey Begins

2005-08-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions, but none of them has done away with the need for character or the ability to think.

B. Baruch

After attending a recent educational conference where educational technology consultant Alan November gave a dynamic demonstration on the ease, use, and power of blogging in today's world and its potential as a powerful educational tool, I made a personal commitment to myself to create and maintain a web log that follows my travails as a high school principal navigating the worlds of technology and education during a typical school year. To this end, School Dais is an attempt to self-teach an old dog new tricks in an e-world of ever changing social, technological, and educational demands. I will make every attempt to offer up insights, observations, and topics for discussion that are relevant and interesting, but make no promises. I will also surely wander off topic periodically as something strikes a chord with a subject that piques my interest, and I may even offer insights into my personal life--although I am generally a rather private person and such journalistic meanderings will undoubtedly be rare. But whatever the outcome, I am looking forward to what I hope will be a grand adventure, a memorable and successful school year, and a new appreciation for the rapidly expanding concept of blogging.