Reading back over the curling post from the other day, I'm reminded why it's not a good idea to try to write in a place where other people are having conversations. Not that it is impossible, but it does lead to a certain wanderlust in the writing style which comes across as somewhat elementary-schoolish.
Anyway, in the midst of the end of an exceptionally busy quarter - even busier than last, I believe - I wanted to talk a little about the great fun I've been having building curricula. I'm enrolled in, as I've mentioned, a Curriculum Construction class with Dr. Pope, and in addition to the class's final project (a curriculum), I'm writing two curricula of my own for summer workshops I'm planning on teaching in June.
The curriculum for class I'm writing is a group project. Or was. While there are some finishing touches to apply, we're just about finished. In comparison to my own curricula, our progress was quite rapid, I suspect because we could divide the busy-work parts of the process amongst ourselves. The curriculum is a web-search module for a larger journalism curriculum, with a focus on teaching searching tools and strategies through the lens of assessing bias and credibility in the debate on copyright. Everything in the curriculum is built around addressing one of those three issues (that is, search skills, credibility and bias of sources, and copyright issues), and most activities address more than one (or all three).
In true "backwards design" form, we began with a key goal, then built our three lesser goals, then built a final assessment, and then built the actual lesson plans. Working backwards like this was pioneered by Wiggins and McTighe (first names, I suppose, no longer necessary), the former of whom is a graduate of St. John's, Annapolis. I find it fitting that modern curriculum construction theory was devised and propagated by Johnnie.
Anyway, for our final assessment (or "anchor task"), we're asking students to role-play a hearing on copyright law, after doing group research. The research portion covers the searching and credibility assessment goals, and the content is, of course, the copyright portion. What's more, our anchor task is much richer than a test or quiz, and should therefore encourage more buy-in from students. Granted, even the best of lessons can be ruined by class dynamics (and vice versa; poor lessons can be turned to everyone's benefit by resourceful students and teachers), but we feel we've given implementing teachers every chance to succeed.
As for whether our curriculum actually gets implemented anywhere, we'll see. There are, in fact, a few schools we've made contact with - private and public - who are interested, so it's entirely possible that our work was not merely theoretical.
I should say, one of the key issues with our curriculum is standards. Because web-search is a technology issue, it is covered in the most ancillary of ways by current standards. What's more, standards-based instruction would scoff at our "authentic assessment" model, where we try to get students engaged instead of beating them into the ground with multiple choice tests. But I digress into a subject of a future post (or posts).
My own curricula are quite different, not only from our web-search curriculum, but from each other. Anyone who knows me won't be surprised to hear that, of course, nor will they be surprised to discover what the topics of each curriculum are. The first, and more serious of the two, is a poetry curriculum. The second a sabermetrics curriculum. Since both of these will be elective summer workshops that I'll get to teach in June, it occurs to me that one will likely be mostly (or all) girls and the other mostly (or all) boys.
The poetry curriculum places strong emphasis on writing and discussion. The anchor task is an original piece of poetry, not just written, but read aloud and recorded. Along the way, fortunately, students will get to read a collection of excellent poems that I am even now agonizingly selecting. Authors will range from Whitman (of course) to Gabriela Mistral to, in a touch of Paul, Schiller and Beethoven. In preparation it is likely that I'll get into depth about some of the works in my curriculum in this space in the coming months, so be forewarned.
The sabermetrics curriculum is going to be inquiry-based, and will hopefully introduce students to the radically fast-moving world of baseball statistics research. As a student at in a graduate program, I'm actually in a research community, and it is not hard to tell that the current sabermetrics world is much faster moving, more creative, and more vibrant than the education research world. Call me young and naive, but I suspect it has something to do with the essentially non-existent barriers to entry. Baseball research is not centralized in any institution, so any intelligent and hardworking person can "publish" something meaningful (and potentially get hired by a real MLB team, as has happened frequently of late). The result has been an explosion in our understanding of how baseball works and what truly makes a player valuable.
The point of my curriculum is essentially for the students to have fun and maybe covertly learn some math along the way.* But there will undoubtedly be an undercurrent of my patented contrarianism. In other words, the point isn't just to inculcate students to a new way of thinking, but rather to encourage them to think critically about conclusions they hear anywhere.
*And to help them obliterate their foes in their fantasy leagues, of course.
Which is also the point of the search curriculum and, on some level, the poetry curriculum. I would argue that, maybe, that's the point - or at least one of the points - of education. I asked one of my TAs in Dr. Pope's curriculum class this quarter "how far backwards" backwards design really goes. That's a rhetorical question; it goes all the way back if you let it.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Curling
Now that the Olympics are wrapping up, I'm finally getting around to the curling post I've been planning since the beginning. A couple weeks ago the men and women USA were among of the favorites to make the medal round, potentially even challenging host-country Canada for the gold. As it played out, the both USA teams collapsed, losing early and often on their way to last place finishes.
Nevertheless, my own interest in the sport remains unchecked. Unfortunately, as a recent resident of Hawaii and now northern California, I'm not really in a position to actually curl. But each winter Olympics I follow the sport closely and excitedly. Of course, curling is an easy joke target, especially with pants like this involved:
What I love about the sport, though, is not the brooms or the yelling. Or Norway's pants. All of those things are funny, but what makes the sport so fascinating is the strategy. Few sports are as strategic as curling, whilst still being physically demanding (and if you don't buy that, check out the linebacker-like sweepers for gold medalists Canada).
Curling shares the virtues of turn-based strategy games; where there is significant strategy in games like soccer, hockey, and basketball, the strategy of those games depends tremendously upon the ability of players to recognize the strategic situation at any given time. In curling - even with the 73 minute clock during the Olympics - everyone can tell what the situation is at any given time. Lapses in perception or concentration are rarely to blame for failure in curling; rather, it is failure in strategy which is most damning (and the frustration of a stone gone an inch too far).
The strategy of curling is intricate enough, on a small scale, but what makes the game so engaging is the strategy across a match. Not only does a team need to manage each end with foresight and guile (much like chess), but they also need to manage the entire match. Having the last throw in any given end is a huge advantage, and ends are limited. Scoring one is not always, it turns out, a good thing in curling because of meta-strategic concerns.
You may be surprised to learn, as well, that curling has stood the proverbial test of time. Though only recently reinstated into the Winter Olympics, the sport as a whole has been around for longer than almost any other sport currently played in the world. While no exact date is known, indications are that the sport began in Scotland sometime between 1500 and 1550. That, my friends, is at least 460 years ago. Soccer - in one form or another - has been around longer, but not much else has (with the exception of things like racing and fighting, which have been around longer than humans).
Now that the Olympics are over, I can't really urge you to watch curling. As a game that is hard to broadcast with commercials (though NBC, of course, managed), it is unlikely to break into even American counter-culture anytime soon. Alas, the new crop of curling fans that this Olympics - like every Winter Olympics - has created will have to wait for four more years.
Nevertheless, my own interest in the sport remains unchecked. Unfortunately, as a recent resident of Hawaii and now northern California, I'm not really in a position to actually curl. But each winter Olympics I follow the sport closely and excitedly. Of course, curling is an easy joke target, especially with pants like this involved:
Curling shares the virtues of turn-based strategy games; where there is significant strategy in games like soccer, hockey, and basketball, the strategy of those games depends tremendously upon the ability of players to recognize the strategic situation at any given time. In curling - even with the 73 minute clock during the Olympics - everyone can tell what the situation is at any given time. Lapses in perception or concentration are rarely to blame for failure in curling; rather, it is failure in strategy which is most damning (and the frustration of a stone gone an inch too far).
The strategy of curling is intricate enough, on a small scale, but what makes the game so engaging is the strategy across a match. Not only does a team need to manage each end with foresight and guile (much like chess), but they also need to manage the entire match. Having the last throw in any given end is a huge advantage, and ends are limited. Scoring one is not always, it turns out, a good thing in curling because of meta-strategic concerns.
You may be surprised to learn, as well, that curling has stood the proverbial test of time. Though only recently reinstated into the Winter Olympics, the sport as a whole has been around for longer than almost any other sport currently played in the world. While no exact date is known, indications are that the sport began in Scotland sometime between 1500 and 1550. That, my friends, is at least 460 years ago. Soccer - in one form or another - has been around longer, but not much else has (with the exception of things like racing and fighting, which have been around longer than humans).
Now that the Olympics are over, I can't really urge you to watch curling. As a game that is hard to broadcast with commercials (though NBC, of course, managed), it is unlikely to break into even American counter-culture anytime soon. Alas, the new crop of curling fans that this Olympics - like every Winter Olympics - has created will have to wait for four more years.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Nicht Diese...
Some old fashioned writing this Sunday evening (or Monday morning). A reflection.
There was a time when I kept a journal. As a high schooler, I wrote and wrote and wrote for no one but myself, trying out poetic devices, exploring thoughts on religion and love and politics, rarely, but occasionally, chronicling the day's events. In retrospect there was nothing all that peculiar about this habit of mine; after all, I was a teenager, and aspired even then to be an intellectual because of, and often in spite of, the community of peers that my private high school afforded me.
I say in spite of because there's a certain stigma attached to intellect in our competitive culture. There's nothing quite so satisfying as the smart guy who loses all the same, faced with the hard-working idiot. Mastermind has dark connotations, so too genius, in a more twisted and historical way. At the time - and maybe still today - I was caught in the paradox of intellect. Our culture honors the intellectual, but punishes and chides all the same. We value intellect, but we despise the person who recognizes their own intelligence.
Perhaps, more than anything, we despise the egotism of the self-promoter not because he is selfish - after all, there's a certain synonymity between "selfish" and "conscious" - but because he often refuses to acknowledge that, ultimately, there are always greater minds. In some sense, our fetish for specialization is a rebellion against the great minds of the great generalists throughout history, who strove to know as much as they could about as many different subjects as they could. "How dare they encroach upon my specialty!"
That's not the point, but I'm not sure what the point is. Even though I have become a writer of prose - after one time being a writer mainly of (poor) verse - I still hold a certain lesson from poetry dear: you don't have to have a "point." That's not fair to poetry, because most poems have a point in one sense or another, but there's a kind of beautiful chaos in the endeavor of poetry that prose simply cannot replicate. Even the most pointed and purposeful poetry is clothed, nonetheless, in a poetic diction, a formalism of meter and rhyme, that prevents easy unfolding. A poem may be compelling, then, but hardly in the way that a persuasive essay is.
Not all essays persuade, however. Sometimes they border on poetry. Indeed, John Dryden was one of the founders of the essay, and his Religio Laici, like the majority of his work, is in verse. Though perhaps that's poetry bordering on essay?
It is odd that we draw such a distinction, truly. Poetry comes from the Greek word meaning "to create." What difference, then, between Montaigne and Dryden, Plutarch and Sappho?
Ah, specialization is our specialty. Today we divide not just writing from poetry, but different kinds of writing and poetry from each other. The essay is a form distinct from the story, which is in turn distinct from the academic essay, the memoir, the novel, the novella, the biography, the autobiography, the treatise, the manifesto, the confession. Do we allow more experts, or fewer by such divisions? By that I mean, by splitting our brilliant writers into such camps, do we not maybe lose our brilliant writers?
That's not fair, either. A great many writers straddle such narrow definitions. Indeed, the best writers are the very cause of new terms and genres. The novel sprung into existence as a way to categorize the work of Cervantes, the essay for Montaigne. The same in music, where the Opera became a term necessary to characterize Monteverdi. The same in poetry.
Since I was a high schooler, I have learned a great deal about how little I know. I expect that, now, at a still-young 24, I have a great deal more to learn about how little I know. What is insufferable about intellectuals, it turns out, is not how much they know, but how little. Socrates was killed for it.
A turn of phrase, a turn of phrase. I have collected, in my short life of reading, a great many connections and associations - many of which are historical, and most of which are European, with occasional Hawaiian or Buddhist allusions mixed in - which allow me to express myself without expressing myself. That is another of the intellectual's tricks, and perhaps the heart of the poet's art. T.S. Eliot's Wasteland would not have gotten far without tricky, intellectual allusions. Nor would Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (the longest inside joke in history, perhaps). "Oystery Gods gaggin' Fishy Gods."
For a long time, between high school and graduate school, I stopped writing. Oh, I wrote for classes at St. John's, and I would occasionally pick up a pen ruefully in the time in between then and Stanford. Poetry, never, but occasional essays, arguments for why surfing matters - a concept that only fellow surfers will understand - or a history of the beautiful Platonic romance that closed my Freshman year of college.
Perhaps that is the object of these wanderings. The last of my poetic fervor expended itself in the poems composed for two women. The first, an illusive goddess who rekindled in me the concept of love - albeit in my hoity-toity (spelling?) way - sending me into thralls unmatched by any but my first (and less Platonic) romance. The second, my one-month-from wife, who is so much more real and wise. No goddess - for how long do such relationships last? - but instead a life. There was one poem each way, with Jericha, and that was enough. Indeed, those first poems probably say more about our relationship - even now - than anything else we could write (just as toddlers already display so many of the personality traits they will have as adults).
I suppose, for me, there is too much poetry in living for me to write poetry. I have become polemical, instead, arguing fiercely for a position on education, music, politics, or culture. Usually arguing a position untaken, or untakeable, and explaining why it should not be so neglected. A natural contrarian, I have become, who can turn "because" into "in spite of" and back again. To what end? It profits me little that I oppose so vehemently a great many things which are simply "the way it is." Why oppose, for example, specialization? It leads to such a beautiful, functional world. Why oppose citation? It leads to such easy access to knowledge. If only it were so simple.
I oppose simplicity. Or rather, I suppose simplification, which likely means I oppose myself as a writer. The vast majority of my writing - and probably all writing - is an attempt to simplify, to make expressible the inexpressible nature of being. If writing is an argument, then the most direct, simple argument wins, and the writing that best takes the complex and makes it appear simple will always be favored. I am opposed to sophistry, you might say, even though I will acknowledge that I am as good a sophist as can be found. That's perhaps a bit too self-congratulatory, for there are a great many sophists in this world better than I.
When I allow myself to write honestly - or, at least, without regard for how complicated a narrative I weave - I find that I use the word "perhaps" with astounding frequency. Perhaps. It's a versatile word, but what it does more than anything is act as a crutch. There is no better word for avoiding conclusions than perhaps. Perhaps there is no better word for avoiding conclusions than perhaps. See the difference? One is certain, the other... Perhaps.
Judicious use of "perhaps," (and "seems," and "this suggests," and "I think," and "possibly") might be a mark of intellectual rigor, laziness, or both. Judicious use of perhaps might, also, be my least poetic trait as a writer. Good writers avoid pointless, empty words like "perhaps." It means nothing. Or it means everything.
Now I'm stealing from Demetri Martin* (I run the gamut; Socrates to Important Things), which perhaps indicates that our winding road is nearing its end. What is that end? Hard to say. What the journey? Equally hard.
* To wit: 'Sort of' is such a harmless thing to say. Sort of. It's just a filler. Sort of - it doesn't really mean anything. But after certain things, sort of means everything. Like after 'I love you' or 'You're going to live.'
Nicht Diese Tone, I titled this blog, and though I addressed it in my opening post (gulp, five months and about 60 posts ago), perhaps a return to that theme is in order. The title is German, meaning "not these tones." In retrospect, why a negative? Of all the phrases from Beethoven's Ninth, why this one? I suppose it's the contrarian in me, the intellectual who doubts the value of intellectuals; the liberal who despises the term "liberal;" the musician, astrologer, and student who wants to be everything and, sometimes, just wants to be nothing and play computer for six hours. How to describe these qualities ("and this, and so much more"), how to 'fix myself in a formulated phrase'?
There was a time when poetry was written, and though it is still written, what magic is left after the placing of such lines as "All truths wait in all things," and "It is impossible to say just what I mean." Ginsberg was reduced to a string of "Holy, Holy, Holy ..." Perhaps profound in its own right. Perhaps too self-indulgent.
But we live in self-indulgent times, which I also oppose, and also embody. Maybe paradox is the real lesson. Maybe it always has been. Or rather, maybe paradox and order, chaos and structure, sway ever across some abyss of human meaning. Death, there's the real question, the ultimate contrarian, and the hardest thing for a contrarian to oppose. And yet we have a society built around death (or built around a religion built around death, to paraphrase Nietzsche). Those poems that haunt me and inspire me sit on that precipice. Prufrock, a poem afraid of death, Song of Myself, a poem of celebrating life. Of all the paradoxes of being, that may be the most poignant, and, ironically, the most taboo in our modern age.
In truth, I have little to contribute to such looming questions as "what is the meaning of life?" Ultimately, I resist the question as unsophisticated, at least as it is commonly asked. No, ask it like Eliot, for then it is complicated enough to warrant my austere notice. Or something like that... The true story is, I first recognized the terrible power of the fear of death watching, of all things, Stargate SG-1. How's that for a paradox? What can I say, after all, that is profound?
Nicht Diese, indeed.
There was a time when I kept a journal. As a high schooler, I wrote and wrote and wrote for no one but myself, trying out poetic devices, exploring thoughts on religion and love and politics, rarely, but occasionally, chronicling the day's events. In retrospect there was nothing all that peculiar about this habit of mine; after all, I was a teenager, and aspired even then to be an intellectual because of, and often in spite of, the community of peers that my private high school afforded me.
I say in spite of because there's a certain stigma attached to intellect in our competitive culture. There's nothing quite so satisfying as the smart guy who loses all the same, faced with the hard-working idiot. Mastermind has dark connotations, so too genius, in a more twisted and historical way. At the time - and maybe still today - I was caught in the paradox of intellect. Our culture honors the intellectual, but punishes and chides all the same. We value intellect, but we despise the person who recognizes their own intelligence.
Perhaps, more than anything, we despise the egotism of the self-promoter not because he is selfish - after all, there's a certain synonymity between "selfish" and "conscious" - but because he often refuses to acknowledge that, ultimately, there are always greater minds. In some sense, our fetish for specialization is a rebellion against the great minds of the great generalists throughout history, who strove to know as much as they could about as many different subjects as they could. "How dare they encroach upon my specialty!"
That's not the point, but I'm not sure what the point is. Even though I have become a writer of prose - after one time being a writer mainly of (poor) verse - I still hold a certain lesson from poetry dear: you don't have to have a "point." That's not fair to poetry, because most poems have a point in one sense or another, but there's a kind of beautiful chaos in the endeavor of poetry that prose simply cannot replicate. Even the most pointed and purposeful poetry is clothed, nonetheless, in a poetic diction, a formalism of meter and rhyme, that prevents easy unfolding. A poem may be compelling, then, but hardly in the way that a persuasive essay is.
Not all essays persuade, however. Sometimes they border on poetry. Indeed, John Dryden was one of the founders of the essay, and his Religio Laici, like the majority of his work, is in verse. Though perhaps that's poetry bordering on essay?
It is odd that we draw such a distinction, truly. Poetry comes from the Greek word meaning "to create." What difference, then, between Montaigne and Dryden, Plutarch and Sappho?
Ah, specialization is our specialty. Today we divide not just writing from poetry, but different kinds of writing and poetry from each other. The essay is a form distinct from the story, which is in turn distinct from the academic essay, the memoir, the novel, the novella, the biography, the autobiography, the treatise, the manifesto, the confession. Do we allow more experts, or fewer by such divisions? By that I mean, by splitting our brilliant writers into such camps, do we not maybe lose our brilliant writers?
That's not fair, either. A great many writers straddle such narrow definitions. Indeed, the best writers are the very cause of new terms and genres. The novel sprung into existence as a way to categorize the work of Cervantes, the essay for Montaigne. The same in music, where the Opera became a term necessary to characterize Monteverdi. The same in poetry.
Since I was a high schooler, I have learned a great deal about how little I know. I expect that, now, at a still-young 24, I have a great deal more to learn about how little I know. What is insufferable about intellectuals, it turns out, is not how much they know, but how little. Socrates was killed for it.
A turn of phrase, a turn of phrase. I have collected, in my short life of reading, a great many connections and associations - many of which are historical, and most of which are European, with occasional Hawaiian or Buddhist allusions mixed in - which allow me to express myself without expressing myself. That is another of the intellectual's tricks, and perhaps the heart of the poet's art. T.S. Eliot's Wasteland would not have gotten far without tricky, intellectual allusions. Nor would Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (the longest inside joke in history, perhaps). "Oystery Gods gaggin' Fishy Gods."
For a long time, between high school and graduate school, I stopped writing. Oh, I wrote for classes at St. John's, and I would occasionally pick up a pen ruefully in the time in between then and Stanford. Poetry, never, but occasional essays, arguments for why surfing matters - a concept that only fellow surfers will understand - or a history of the beautiful Platonic romance that closed my Freshman year of college.
Perhaps that is the object of these wanderings. The last of my poetic fervor expended itself in the poems composed for two women. The first, an illusive goddess who rekindled in me the concept of love - albeit in my hoity-toity (spelling?) way - sending me into thralls unmatched by any but my first (and less Platonic) romance. The second, my one-month-from wife, who is so much more real and wise. No goddess - for how long do such relationships last? - but instead a life. There was one poem each way, with Jericha, and that was enough. Indeed, those first poems probably say more about our relationship - even now - than anything else we could write (just as toddlers already display so many of the personality traits they will have as adults).
I suppose, for me, there is too much poetry in living for me to write poetry. I have become polemical, instead, arguing fiercely for a position on education, music, politics, or culture. Usually arguing a position untaken, or untakeable, and explaining why it should not be so neglected. A natural contrarian, I have become, who can turn "because" into "in spite of" and back again. To what end? It profits me little that I oppose so vehemently a great many things which are simply "the way it is." Why oppose, for example, specialization? It leads to such a beautiful, functional world. Why oppose citation? It leads to such easy access to knowledge. If only it were so simple.
I oppose simplicity. Or rather, I suppose simplification, which likely means I oppose myself as a writer. The vast majority of my writing - and probably all writing - is an attempt to simplify, to make expressible the inexpressible nature of being. If writing is an argument, then the most direct, simple argument wins, and the writing that best takes the complex and makes it appear simple will always be favored. I am opposed to sophistry, you might say, even though I will acknowledge that I am as good a sophist as can be found. That's perhaps a bit too self-congratulatory, for there are a great many sophists in this world better than I.
When I allow myself to write honestly - or, at least, without regard for how complicated a narrative I weave - I find that I use the word "perhaps" with astounding frequency. Perhaps. It's a versatile word, but what it does more than anything is act as a crutch. There is no better word for avoiding conclusions than perhaps. Perhaps there is no better word for avoiding conclusions than perhaps. See the difference? One is certain, the other... Perhaps.
Judicious use of "perhaps," (and "seems," and "this suggests," and "I think," and "possibly") might be a mark of intellectual rigor, laziness, or both. Judicious use of perhaps might, also, be my least poetic trait as a writer. Good writers avoid pointless, empty words like "perhaps." It means nothing. Or it means everything.
Now I'm stealing from Demetri Martin* (I run the gamut; Socrates to Important Things), which perhaps indicates that our winding road is nearing its end. What is that end? Hard to say. What the journey? Equally hard.
* To wit: 'Sort of' is such a harmless thing to say. Sort of. It's just a filler. Sort of - it doesn't really mean anything. But after certain things, sort of means everything. Like after 'I love you' or 'You're going to live.'
Nicht Diese Tone, I titled this blog, and though I addressed it in my opening post (gulp, five months and about 60 posts ago), perhaps a return to that theme is in order. The title is German, meaning "not these tones." In retrospect, why a negative? Of all the phrases from Beethoven's Ninth, why this one? I suppose it's the contrarian in me, the intellectual who doubts the value of intellectuals; the liberal who despises the term "liberal;" the musician, astrologer, and student who wants to be everything and, sometimes, just wants to be nothing and play computer for six hours. How to describe these qualities ("and this, and so much more"), how to 'fix myself in a formulated phrase'?
There was a time when poetry was written, and though it is still written, what magic is left after the placing of such lines as "All truths wait in all things," and "It is impossible to say just what I mean." Ginsberg was reduced to a string of "Holy, Holy, Holy ..." Perhaps profound in its own right. Perhaps too self-indulgent.
But we live in self-indulgent times, which I also oppose, and also embody. Maybe paradox is the real lesson. Maybe it always has been. Or rather, maybe paradox and order, chaos and structure, sway ever across some abyss of human meaning. Death, there's the real question, the ultimate contrarian, and the hardest thing for a contrarian to oppose. And yet we have a society built around death (or built around a religion built around death, to paraphrase Nietzsche). Those poems that haunt me and inspire me sit on that precipice. Prufrock, a poem afraid of death, Song of Myself, a poem of celebrating life. Of all the paradoxes of being, that may be the most poignant, and, ironically, the most taboo in our modern age.
In truth, I have little to contribute to such looming questions as "what is the meaning of life?" Ultimately, I resist the question as unsophisticated, at least as it is commonly asked. No, ask it like Eliot, for then it is complicated enough to warrant my austere notice. Or something like that... The true story is, I first recognized the terrible power of the fear of death watching, of all things, Stargate SG-1. How's that for a paradox? What can I say, after all, that is profound?
Nicht Diese, indeed.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Intellectual Property
How can you own an idea?
I know, that's a prompt for a middle school discussion of copyright, but that doesn't mean it's not an important question. Indeed, we have a whole cultural and legal mechanism that allows us to "own" ideas, but the very concept of intellectual property has a far from clear history. Even today, there is a large ideological rift between open intellectual and artistic resources on the one hand and proprietary resources on the other (and, as is common in such debates, the more "practical" side of the argument has co-opted the language of the more idealistic, so that things like Facebook, Twitter, and Google get called "open" when they decidedly are not).
Long before any modern debate, however, Plato confronted the very issue, matter-of-factly stating that, when it comes down to it, owning an idea is essentially impossible. As soon as you hear someone else's idea, understand it, and express it to yourself, it becomes yours. And thank goodness, because the number of original ideas floating around is very small (and those few truly original ideas that do exist are likely insane). There's a particular myopia in believing that any of our ideas have never been thought of before or elsewhere, or even that seemingly new ideas don't come from a huge, continuous background set of repeated ideas. The world is, after all, very old, and people have been on it - and have spoken and written - for a great many generations. There are, at present, well over 6 billion people on the Earth. So show me a completely original idea. And, what's more, show me an idea that is owned.
Of course, we have a cultural and economic model - as I mentioned - for "owning" ideas, but it has nothing to do with where ideas come from. Intellectual property, like the first forays into physical property, is the domain of the socially and culturally adept. Indeed, one might look at the University (or the Record Label, for that matter) not as a way of generating new thoughts, but as a way of ensuring that you publish your thoughts, protecting your intellectual property. It doesn't matter that most researchers in every field are heavily dependent upon each other and upon the mass of research and theory that predates them, because they have a system of intellectual property built around them to keep all but the most determined students out. Participating in the free flow of ideas in academia, in other words, comes at great cost (all of the journals and reviews and books that academics are forced to produce so that, ironically, their employers can afford to pay for all of the journals and reviews and books they need to provide their faculty). Some academics fight this commercialized view of ideas, but it's a tough fight. After all, their own survival depends, to large degree, on their intellectual property.
Owning ideas, however, contributes to social injustice. When access to the best and brightest is limited to the most able to pay, it's no wonder that rich begets rich and poor begets poor. Meritocracy is maintained, perhaps, in the sense that it is much easier to become a meritorious leader when starting off able to afford and willing to pursue an education. The "American Dream" notwithstanding, there is a strong sense of caste in the United States that rests, in most part, upon our inability to provide free access to the one resource most at the heart of learning: ideas (we might also say wisdom, but that's a more complicated word).
From an individualistic perspective, there seems little point in coming up with ideas if other people have already had them (unless, of course, other people didn't publish them), but that seems to me a mistake. A society with open access to ideas will perhaps produce more redundancy, but will also therefore produce a citizenry ready and able to adapt their thinking to particular situations. New ideas may be few, but the peculiarities of any one problem may require a precise combination of ideas (and skills) heretofore untried. At the very least, the processes (and there are many) of problem solving are ideas that no one should "own," and yet problem solving is so rarely taught.
Ultimately, we are all constrained by the culture of intellectual property, but I believe it is worth it to ask questions of the system sometimes. Indeed, if there was more critical reflection going around, we might find that much of what we do "because we have to," we don't actually have to do.
I know, that's a prompt for a middle school discussion of copyright, but that doesn't mean it's not an important question. Indeed, we have a whole cultural and legal mechanism that allows us to "own" ideas, but the very concept of intellectual property has a far from clear history. Even today, there is a large ideological rift between open intellectual and artistic resources on the one hand and proprietary resources on the other (and, as is common in such debates, the more "practical" side of the argument has co-opted the language of the more idealistic, so that things like Facebook, Twitter, and Google get called "open" when they decidedly are not).
Long before any modern debate, however, Plato confronted the very issue, matter-of-factly stating that, when it comes down to it, owning an idea is essentially impossible. As soon as you hear someone else's idea, understand it, and express it to yourself, it becomes yours. And thank goodness, because the number of original ideas floating around is very small (and those few truly original ideas that do exist are likely insane). There's a particular myopia in believing that any of our ideas have never been thought of before or elsewhere, or even that seemingly new ideas don't come from a huge, continuous background set of repeated ideas. The world is, after all, very old, and people have been on it - and have spoken and written - for a great many generations. There are, at present, well over 6 billion people on the Earth. So show me a completely original idea. And, what's more, show me an idea that is owned.
Of course, we have a cultural and economic model - as I mentioned - for "owning" ideas, but it has nothing to do with where ideas come from. Intellectual property, like the first forays into physical property, is the domain of the socially and culturally adept. Indeed, one might look at the University (or the Record Label, for that matter) not as a way of generating new thoughts, but as a way of ensuring that you publish your thoughts, protecting your intellectual property. It doesn't matter that most researchers in every field are heavily dependent upon each other and upon the mass of research and theory that predates them, because they have a system of intellectual property built around them to keep all but the most determined students out. Participating in the free flow of ideas in academia, in other words, comes at great cost (all of the journals and reviews and books that academics are forced to produce so that, ironically, their employers can afford to pay for all of the journals and reviews and books they need to provide their faculty). Some academics fight this commercialized view of ideas, but it's a tough fight. After all, their own survival depends, to large degree, on their intellectual property.
Owning ideas, however, contributes to social injustice. When access to the best and brightest is limited to the most able to pay, it's no wonder that rich begets rich and poor begets poor. Meritocracy is maintained, perhaps, in the sense that it is much easier to become a meritorious leader when starting off able to afford and willing to pursue an education. The "American Dream" notwithstanding, there is a strong sense of caste in the United States that rests, in most part, upon our inability to provide free access to the one resource most at the heart of learning: ideas (we might also say wisdom, but that's a more complicated word).
From an individualistic perspective, there seems little point in coming up with ideas if other people have already had them (unless, of course, other people didn't publish them), but that seems to me a mistake. A society with open access to ideas will perhaps produce more redundancy, but will also therefore produce a citizenry ready and able to adapt their thinking to particular situations. New ideas may be few, but the peculiarities of any one problem may require a precise combination of ideas (and skills) heretofore untried. At the very least, the processes (and there are many) of problem solving are ideas that no one should "own," and yet problem solving is so rarely taught.
Ultimately, we are all constrained by the culture of intellectual property, but I believe it is worth it to ask questions of the system sometimes. Indeed, if there was more critical reflection going around, we might find that much of what we do "because we have to," we don't actually have to do.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
The Meaning of Grades
One of the biggest assumptions of our education system is the need for graded assessment, or evaluation. For many colleges, grades and SAT scores make up the entire admissions process. For policy makers, the debate centers around how to improve those scores, taking for granted that they are good measures of learning.
I would argue that the main thing grades assess is a student's ability to get a good grade, and the main thing a standardized test score assesses is a student's skill in taking standardized tests. How many students generate strategies for getting a good grade that have nothing to do with learning? I know I was one, even though I was never as grade-motivated as many of my peers. Likewise, how many people take test-prep courses or work with tutors not so they can learn better the content of tests like the SAT or GRE, but so they can develop test-taking strategies?
The problem with placing evaluation of students above assessment - and then making those evaluations determining factors in student's lives - is that doing so obfuscates the purpose of education for students, and therefore undermines their desire to actually learn. Considering the competitive nature of most evaluation (in order for some to succeed, many more must fail), it is no wonder that students begin to play their appointed roles as "drop-outs" and "failures." How many brilliant minds do we lose to frustration, both among said "failures" and among the "achievers?" How much creativity and critical thinking is stomped out because, in the end, those things are hard to evaluate?
I do not believe that assessment should be abolished, by any stretch. Teachers, whether wittingly or not, are constantly assessing their students. Even a lecture hall with 100 undergraduates and a single Professor has some level of assessment built in ("ah, look who's asleep in the back again"). Most teachers will tell you that they know - usually early in the course - who in their classes gets it, who doesn't, who needs extra help, who is a trouble-maker, who's passing notes to who, and who they can trust to run down to their office to pick up a forgotten hand-out. Most teachers are excellent assessors of their students.
The problem is, those dozens of qualities and skills that teachers assess constantly are narrowed into a single evaluative measure. A to F. What's more, most of those qualities are cut out of the evaluation process. What matters, come grade time, is not a student's work-ethic, or his trustworthiness, or his interest in the material, or his sense of humor.* What matters is how well he 'gets' the material, and how well he is able to navigate the structure of the evaluation the teacher chooses.
* I choose these in particular because of Valentine's Day. We "assess" our lovers largely on these criteria - as well as a few others like attractiveness. In our culture, it seems perfectly natural that the criteria we place at the heart of love - which we tend to say is one of the most important activities in our lives - are ignored by our education system. Indeed, a culture that designed things like sense of humor and trustworthiness and appreciation of beauty into their education systems would seem unsophisticated and barbaric to us. It seems just the opposite to me.
Because we need to be able to communicate student abilities across vast distances of time and space, we transform the myriad assessments a teacher makes of her students into a single letter. The necessity for this is a social one: we need to know how good the student is doing, and we don't have time to listen to the full report. A state senator or school board member especially can't sift through thousands of pages of teacher write-ups, nor do teachers have time to write reports about each of their hundred or more students. The system is what it is because, on some level, it has to be just that.
Education reform is uncommon. Our system is very similar to what it was one hundred years ago, and despite the noise made by just about every presidential candidate, it is likely to resemble its current form for decades to come. Digital technology is a disruptive force, to be sure, just like the television was. The pervasiveness of the Internet and mobile phones might effect the delivery of educational materials more than TV ever could have, but the content and the evaluations are likely to remain much the same. Indeed, if anything the downsizing of the role of the teacher - the transformation from teacher to computer - necessitates an even more rigorous protocol of traditional multiple-choice and true-or-false tests.
I believe that digital technology can have the opposite effect, but only if educators strive to use it in a more progressive way. On the way to doing that, however, there are a great many steps. One is developing technologies - or implementations of technologies that exist, at least - which undercut the need for an evaluation-driven system. I don't believe that means that computers will do the assessments that teachers once did; rather, computers can deliver content and learning environments in a way that students don't see as evaluative or, strictly speaking, educational. How many students of my generation have learned a significant amount of history though computer games, for example?
Another important step is transforming attitudes about education. Education and teaching, as words, should give way to learning (indeed, not all cultures differentiate the three: imagine if we believed teaching and learning to be the same thing). The role of formal education should be questioned, not on the assumption that it will be abandoned, but rather with an eye towards its purpose, and whether technology can help it better fulfill that purpose.
Ultimately, I believe the highly-structured system of homework, test (or essay), grade that we've developed needs to change, and that modern technology makes possible - but not necessary - that change. Education researchers have been fighting that fight for a century (with a remarkable lack of success), as have many teachers and - unwittingly - a great many students. Politicians, businesses, and parents, however, tend to resist change (painting in exceptionally broad strokes), not for any good reason, but because either it's too politically risky, because they like discrete and scalable evaluations, or because that's the way they did it when I was a kid. After all, you gotta learn to buckle down and do your homework so you can get an A so you can get a job so you can have money so you can send your kids to 'good' schools so...
Alas, perhaps challenging the assumptions of education involves challenging the assumptions of a whole culture, an even bigger task.
I would argue that the main thing grades assess is a student's ability to get a good grade, and the main thing a standardized test score assesses is a student's skill in taking standardized tests. How many students generate strategies for getting a good grade that have nothing to do with learning? I know I was one, even though I was never as grade-motivated as many of my peers. Likewise, how many people take test-prep courses or work with tutors not so they can learn better the content of tests like the SAT or GRE, but so they can develop test-taking strategies?
The problem with placing evaluation of students above assessment - and then making those evaluations determining factors in student's lives - is that doing so obfuscates the purpose of education for students, and therefore undermines their desire to actually learn. Considering the competitive nature of most evaluation (in order for some to succeed, many more must fail), it is no wonder that students begin to play their appointed roles as "drop-outs" and "failures." How many brilliant minds do we lose to frustration, both among said "failures" and among the "achievers?" How much creativity and critical thinking is stomped out because, in the end, those things are hard to evaluate?
I do not believe that assessment should be abolished, by any stretch. Teachers, whether wittingly or not, are constantly assessing their students. Even a lecture hall with 100 undergraduates and a single Professor has some level of assessment built in ("ah, look who's asleep in the back again"). Most teachers will tell you that they know - usually early in the course - who in their classes gets it, who doesn't, who needs extra help, who is a trouble-maker, who's passing notes to who, and who they can trust to run down to their office to pick up a forgotten hand-out. Most teachers are excellent assessors of their students.
The problem is, those dozens of qualities and skills that teachers assess constantly are narrowed into a single evaluative measure. A to F. What's more, most of those qualities are cut out of the evaluation process. What matters, come grade time, is not a student's work-ethic, or his trustworthiness, or his interest in the material, or his sense of humor.* What matters is how well he 'gets' the material, and how well he is able to navigate the structure of the evaluation the teacher chooses.
* I choose these in particular because of Valentine's Day. We "assess" our lovers largely on these criteria - as well as a few others like attractiveness. In our culture, it seems perfectly natural that the criteria we place at the heart of love - which we tend to say is one of the most important activities in our lives - are ignored by our education system. Indeed, a culture that designed things like sense of humor and trustworthiness and appreciation of beauty into their education systems would seem unsophisticated and barbaric to us. It seems just the opposite to me.
Because we need to be able to communicate student abilities across vast distances of time and space, we transform the myriad assessments a teacher makes of her students into a single letter. The necessity for this is a social one: we need to know how good the student is doing, and we don't have time to listen to the full report. A state senator or school board member especially can't sift through thousands of pages of teacher write-ups, nor do teachers have time to write reports about each of their hundred or more students. The system is what it is because, on some level, it has to be just that.
Education reform is uncommon. Our system is very similar to what it was one hundred years ago, and despite the noise made by just about every presidential candidate, it is likely to resemble its current form for decades to come. Digital technology is a disruptive force, to be sure, just like the television was. The pervasiveness of the Internet and mobile phones might effect the delivery of educational materials more than TV ever could have, but the content and the evaluations are likely to remain much the same. Indeed, if anything the downsizing of the role of the teacher - the transformation from teacher to computer - necessitates an even more rigorous protocol of traditional multiple-choice and true-or-false tests.
I believe that digital technology can have the opposite effect, but only if educators strive to use it in a more progressive way. On the way to doing that, however, there are a great many steps. One is developing technologies - or implementations of technologies that exist, at least - which undercut the need for an evaluation-driven system. I don't believe that means that computers will do the assessments that teachers once did; rather, computers can deliver content and learning environments in a way that students don't see as evaluative or, strictly speaking, educational. How many students of my generation have learned a significant amount of history though computer games, for example?
Another important step is transforming attitudes about education. Education and teaching, as words, should give way to learning (indeed, not all cultures differentiate the three: imagine if we believed teaching and learning to be the same thing). The role of formal education should be questioned, not on the assumption that it will be abandoned, but rather with an eye towards its purpose, and whether technology can help it better fulfill that purpose.
Ultimately, I believe the highly-structured system of homework, test (or essay), grade that we've developed needs to change, and that modern technology makes possible - but not necessary - that change. Education researchers have been fighting that fight for a century (with a remarkable lack of success), as have many teachers and - unwittingly - a great many students. Politicians, businesses, and parents, however, tend to resist change (painting in exceptionally broad strokes), not for any good reason, but because either it's too politically risky, because they like discrete and scalable evaluations, or because that's the way they did it when I was a kid. After all, you gotta learn to buckle down and do your homework so you can get an A so you can get a job so you can have money so you can send your kids to 'good' schools so...
Alas, perhaps challenging the assumptions of education involves challenging the assumptions of a whole culture, an even bigger task.
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