tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75623285883824458452024-03-08T11:02:36.003-05:00Wide Awake MindsA resource for self-educators and all who love to teach, read, think, and learn.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comBlogger93125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-64234654521295303072016-08-14T16:37:00.000-04:002016-08-14T16:44:50.397-04:00Introducing WordBrewery, a new language-learning website<br />
This is the first update to Wide Awake Minds in several years, but I am touched to see that we still get a lot of search traffic from people discovering our content. As you have probably guessed, WAM has been on hiatus while I pursued other projects. But I wanted to write a quick post today to bring one of those projects to your attention: <a href="http://wordbrewery.com/" target="_blank">WordBrewery</a>, the language-learning website and app I am developing.<br />
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<a href="http://wordbrewery.com/" target="_blank">WordBrewery</a> teaches high-frequency vocabulary in context with real sentences from news sites around the world. It tests each sentence for its expected usefulness to language learners at different levels, so learners only see sentences that will introduce and reinforce the most important vocabulary. It can never run out of fresh content, and it is aimed at motivated learners as well as learners at or above the intermediate level. WordBrewery also has a <a href="http://wordbrewery.com/blog" target="_blank">blog</a> (<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/LanguageUntapped" target="_blank">RSS</a>) about language learning that Wide Awake Minds readers will find valuable.<br />
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Currently, <a href="http://wordbrewery.com/" target="_blank">WordBrewery</a> users can browse curated sentences packed with high-frequency words, retrieve definitions and example sentences for any word, add words and sentences to study lists, and export those lists to CSV files to make flashcards using Anki or other software. We are gradually adding language courses, quiz games, native-speaker audio, and edited sentence translations.<br />
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I need your help spreading the word about WordBrewery so learners who would find <a href="http://wordbrewery.com/" target="_blank">WordBrewery</a> helpful can learn about it and try it out. <b><u>Please take a moment to do one or more of the following</u></b>:<br />
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<li>Visit <a href="http://wordbrewery.com/" target="_blank">WordBrewery</a> and click "Get Started"</li>
<li>Share this post on <a href="https://www.blogger.com/share-post.g?blogID=7562328588382445845&postID=6423465452129530307&target=facebook" target="_blank">Facebook</a> or <a href="https://www.blogger.com/share-post.g?blogID=7562328588382445845&postID=6423465452129530307&target=twitter" target="_blank">Twitter</a></li>
<li>Subscribe to <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/LanguageUntapped" target="_blank">WordBrewery's blog</a></li>
<li><a href="http://wordbrewery.us12.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=de5def825a669f96078a614d4&id=ccf98da72c" target="_blank">Sign up</a> for occasional email updates about WordBrewery</li>
<li>Follow WordBrewery on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/WordBrewery/" target="_blank">Facebook</a> or <a href="https://twitter.com/WordBrewery" target="_blank">Twitter</a></li>
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Thank you so much for reading and for helping me make this exciting project a success.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comWashington, DC, USA38.9071923 -77.03687070000000938.7094713 -77.3595942 39.1049133 -76.714147200000014tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-51723292100667379262012-03-19T22:04:00.002-04:002012-05-21T18:54:11.601-04:00Albert Jay Nock on teaching college studentsAlbert Jay Nock reflecting on his experience of teaching college students - a useful reminder for students to (a) have some purpose or intention behind the course of studies they choose, and (b) make the most of their educational opportunities:<br />
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"What struck me with peculiar force was that only one out of the whole batch was taking work with me because he wanted to learn something about my subject. Most of them were taking it as a filler. They sat where they did because they had to sit somewhere in order to meet some requirement in an intricate system of 'credits,' and the most convenient place for them to sit happened to be in my lecture-room. Some were there for purposes connected with their prospective ways of getting a living. The majority, however, for all I could make out, were there because they were, at the moment, nowhere else; they put me in mind of the cheerful old drinking-song which we used to sing to the tune of Auld Lang Syne: We’re here because We’re here because We’re here because We’re here."<br />
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--Albert Jay Nock, <i><a href="http://mises.org/document/2998">Memoirs of a Superfluous Man</a></i> (free e-book available <a href="http://mises.org/document/2998">here</a>).Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-87079318191734042112012-03-13T23:51:00.003-04:002012-03-13T23:52:30.957-04:00Core Knowledge curriculum "significantly" boosts reading comprehension, study finds<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nG-3oh9-c1k/T2AELmKsrvI/AAAAAAAABwY/scxRYHy7DtU/s1600/coreknowledge.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="92" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nG-3oh9-c1k/T2AELmKsrvI/AAAAAAAABwY/scxRYHy7DtU/s320/coreknowledge.png" width="320" /></a>NYT: "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/nyregion/nonfiction-curriculum-enhanced-reading-skills-in-new-york-city-schools.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print">Nonfiction [Core Knowledge] Curriculum Enhanced Reading Skills in New York City Schools</a>."<br />
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I have always been a fan of the <a href="http://coreknowledge.org/">Core Knowledge</a> program, which is based on the idea that students should learn content rather than just abstract "skills - this idea might seem like common sense, but traditional content such as the names and ideas of historical figures, narratives of historical events, etc. is often dismissed by education scholars as "trivia" that can just be Googled anyway. E.D. Hirsch Jr., the creator of the Core Knowledge program, argues that <a href="http://bit.ly/yypsxB">the content of the traditional core subject areas serves as the building blocks of literacy</a>.<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lVY-BykZY2M/T2AVnAwgIhI/AAAAAAAABw8/jHgjDgHEm64/s1600/5thgrader.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lVY-BykZY2M/T2AVnAwgIhI/AAAAAAAABw8/jHgjDgHEm64/s200/5thgrader.JPG" width="159" /></a><br />
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From the NYT article: "Half of the schools adopted a curriculum designed by the education theorist E. D. Hirsch Jr.’s Core Knowledge Foundation. The other 10 used a variety of methods, but most fell under the definition of 'balanced literacy'.... The study found that second graders who were taught to read using the Core Knowledge program scored significantly higher on reading comprehension tests than did those in the comparison schools. It also tested children on their social studies and science knowledge, and again found that the Core Knowledge pupils came out ahead."Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-14359759153246555552011-04-26T23:12:00.002-04:002012-05-21T18:55:14.680-04:00National education standards will stifle innovationMy most recent education policy op-ed, "<a href="http://www.educationreport.org/pubs/mer/article.aspx?id=14967">National education standards will stifle innovation</a>," appeared today in the <i>Michigan Education Report</i>, a publication of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. In it, I write:<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">"Strict standards risk forcing students and teachers alike into a curricular straitjacket, alienating creative teachers and sapping the motivation of students. It is worth remembering that standards are nothing more than the products of committees of education “experts” quibbling around a conference table about which curriculum objectives to attach to each grade level. The term “grade level” is virtually synonymous with age, and any list of skills and knowledge all students must possess by a specific age is bound to be somewhat arbitrary.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">It isn’t just “at-risk” students who have trouble moving through an arbitrary curriculum at an arbitrary rate; all students learn at their own paces, and individual students usually progress at different rates in different subjects. Most students do not fit the artificial mold of slow progress from “grade level” to “grade level,” accumulating skills and content knowledge at the same rate as the average child born in the same year.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Rigid, uniform and centrally designed curriculum standards make the curriculum less agile and flexible, less able to respond to the needs of students. The stricter the standards regime, the less schools are able to meet individual students where they are — a necessary first step to helping students grow academically."</span><br />
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The article also argues that the centralization of decisions about curriculum also risks making the teaching profession less attractive. You can read the entire article <a href="http://www.educationreport.org/13909">here</a>.<br />
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If you enjoy the article, please pass it along to others who might be interested. Thanks, as always, for reading.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-90943786113895596802011-03-04T23:01:00.006-05:002012-05-21T18:52:19.329-04:00Education-related excerpts from Jacques Barzun, "From Dawn to Decadence"<i>(Note: I am posting additional excerpts, less related to education, from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060928832?ie=UTF8&tag=widawamin-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060928832"><i>From Dawn to Decadence</i></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widawamin-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0060928832" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /> on my <a href="http://ryanmccarl.blogspot.com/">general-interest blog</a>; you can find these <a href="http://ryanmccarl.blogspot.com/2011/03/excerpts-from-jacques-barzun-from-dawn.html">here</a> if you are interested.)<br />
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In a post I wrote a couple of years ago on <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/">Wide Awake Minds</a>, I noted that "<a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/08/some-books-are-education-in-themselves.html">some books are an education in themselves</a>" because of the breadth of topics they discuss and the seriousness of their insights about the world and about human life. Historian Jacques Barzun's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060928832?ie=UTF8&tag=widawamin-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060928832"><i>From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present</i></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widawamin-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0060928832" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /> unquestionably meets that standard.<br />
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Barzun is one of the most erudite writers I have ever read. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_krystal">This <i>New Yorker</i> article</a> describes Barzun's routine as he approached his 100th birthday in 2007, and comments on the range of his interests and knowledge:<br />
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"(Barzun's) idea of celebrating his centenary is to put the finishing touches on his thirty-eighth book (not counting translations). Among his areas of expertise are French and German literature, music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology."<br />
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Here are a few excerpts from what I've read so far:<br />
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Anything that can be said about the good letters implies the book, the printed book. To be sure, new ideas and discoveries did spread among the clerisy before its advent, but diffusion of manuscripts is chancy and slow. Copying by hand is the mother of error, and circulation is limited by cost. ...Speed in the propagation of ideas generates a heightened excitement. ...To the modern lover of books, the product of the press is an object that arouses deep feelings, and looking Durer's charcoal drawing of hands holding a book, one likes to think the artist felt the same attachment. The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.<br />
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...The first generation of international publishers did not merely make and sell books; they were scholars and patrons who translated the classics, nurtured their authors, and wrote original works. Their continual redesigning of letter forms gave rise to the new art of typography.<br />
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...People were now reading silently and alone. ...Books, books everywhere, like home computers today. ...Print brought a greater exactness to the scholarly exchange of ideas - all copies are alike; a page reference can kill an argument by confounding one's opponent out of his own words. A price is paid for this convenience: the book has weakened the memory, individual and collective, and divided the House of Intellect into many small flats, the multiplying specialties. In the flood of material within even one field, the scholar is overwhelmed. The time is gone when the classical scholar could be sure that he had 'covered the literature' of his subject, the sources being finite in number.<br />
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What the world-wide Web did to the <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/demotic">demotic</a> character is hard to define. It made still more general the nerveless mode of existence - sitting and staring - and thus further isolated the individual. It enlarged the realm of abstraction; to command the virtual reduces the taste for the concrete. At the same time, the contents of the Internet were the same old items in multiplied confusion. That a user had 'the whole world of knowledge at his disposal' was one of those absurdities like the belief that ultimately computers would think - it will be time to say so when a computer makes an ironic answer. 'The whole world of knowledge' could be at one's disposal only if one already knew a great deal and wanted further <i>information</i> to turn into knowledge after gauging its value.<br />
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It was said earlier that the great (19th century) invention, the public school, had lost the power to make children literate. Methods useless for that purpose, absurd teacher training, the dislike of hard work, the love of gadgetry, and the efforts to copy and to change the outer world ruined education throughout the West.<br />
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The course offering of the large colleges and universities...had ceased to be a curriculum, of which the dictionary definition is: "a fixed series of courses required for graduation." Qualified judges called the catalogue listings a smorgasbord and not a balanced meal. And large parts of it were hardly nourishing. The number of subjects had kept increasing, in the belief that any human occupation, interest, hobby, or predicament could furnish the substance of an academic course.<br />
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(Rabelais) made public dissections of human bodies when it was still a dangerous innovation; he became a specialist in the new disease, syphilis, and in hysteria; he taught at Lyon, then the cultural center of France, as professor of medicine and astrology, and published both almanacs and scientific papers. He also invented devices for the treatment of hernia and fractured bones.<br />
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In addition, he mastered Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and read widely in history, geography, and general literature. Competent in jurisprudence, he was an attendant of the powerful family of du Bellay in political and other capacities. He was, in short, one of the most learned men of his time and he happened besides to be a literary genius. In his ardor about social and moral issues, he set forth one of the broadest world views of the Modern Era. <br />
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Ethical opinion in our day, while still recognizing (Montaigne's) genius and originality, has been disconcerted to find a skeptic with strong convictions and a radical with conservative leanings. It has failed to grasp the nature of the double mind - the ability to see both sides of the mountain at once. Thinkers of this type are few.... They are not to be written off as undecided or vacillating. Their minds are simply multilinear and perspectivist: when Montaigne was playing with his cat, he wondered whether the cat was not perhaps playing with him.<br />
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Teenagers' cultural contribution is more varied and better recorded, and the thought it brings to mind is the marked difference between earlier times and our own in the feeling about age. When the 19th century novelist George Sand at 28 declared herself too old to marry (by custom she had been an old maid since 25) or when Richard II, 14 years old, alone in a large field, faced Wat Tyler's massed rebels and pacified them with a speech, attitudes were taken for granted that are hard for us to imagine. Nearly to the beginning of the (20th) century, society accorded teenagers roles of social responsibility. ...Cultural expectations were based on early mortality and spurred the young to live up to them. Melanchthon wrote an acceptable play when not quite 14 and Pascal's essay on conic sections, written at the age of 15, won the praise of Leibniz and other mathematicians. Halley - later famous for his comet - was a serious astronomer at age 10.<br />
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A once popular book that used the phrase Renaissance man as a title offered Machiavelli, Castiglione, Aretino, and Savonarola as representatives. They are not the best that might be chosen, but they suggest the interdisciplinary mind, a cultural type more wondered at today than truly appreciated. In a genuine instance, the murmur 'jack-of-all-trades' is likely to be heard.<br />
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Actually, the true Renaissance man should not be defined by genius, which is rare, or even by the numerous performing talents of an Alberti. It is best defined by variety of interests and their cultivation as a proficient amateur.<br />
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Seconding (the Renaissance's) movement of ideas was the astonishing amount of traveling done, despite hardships and hazards. The switchabout of scholars between universities, the tide of artists to the liveliest spot and of gentlemen and ladies to the capital cities - none of this organized - was incessant. It went with a polyglot frame of mind; the nation-state had not yet concentrated heart-and-mind on one country and one language.<br />
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It is a noteworthy feature of 20th century culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual.<br />
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Leisure is a state of mind, and one that the modes of society must favor and approve. When common routines and public approval foster only Work, leisure becomes the exception, an escape to be contrived over and over. It is then an individual privilege, not a custom, and it breeds the specialized recreations and addictions of our time.<br />
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Jacques Barzun <br />
--<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060928832?ie=UTF8&tag=widawamin-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0060928832"><i>From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present</i></a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widawamin-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0060928832" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-75450799975956778622010-12-28T17:58:00.007-05:002011-07-04T17:09:38.085-04:00Interview: Polyglot and self-educator Alexander Arguelles, Ph.D. (Part 2 of 2)<i>(This is part two of my two-part interview with Alexander. The introduction and first part of the interview can be found <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2010/12/interview-polyglot-and-self-educator.html">here</a>. Thank you, as always, for reading.)<br />
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Wide Awake Minds (WAM): <i>Your educational accomplishments, style, and scholarly output seem to be quite different from those of most people in academia. For instance, it seems like you may have originally chosen your particular Ph.D. program (in History of Religions at the University of Chicago) because of what you wanted to learn and know rather than because of your desire to join that particular field as a scholar. Is that true?</i><br />
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Alexander Arguelles (AA): Yes, it is true that I never aspired to join the particular field of history of religions as a scholar. Right after college I did have some other reasons for ending up there, but the main one was that I believed I could do more comparative historical philological work there than I could anywhere else, and I think I was right in that. Quite frankly, I don’t see a Ph.D. as a certificate to be a specialist expert in the narrow realm where it was minted, but rather as a license to learn, and as proof that one has completed the whole formal schooling process. That’s what going there meant to me – completing the schooling process. I discovered when I was quite young that getting good grades was easy and brought many rewards (such as scholarships) in terms of both being taught some things and being given the freedom to teach oneself even more, so that is what I kept on doing as long as I could.<br />
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Unfortunately for me, my concept of what a Ph.D. represents is rather rare, and as a result my own academic career has definitely suffered. I was happy to head out into the wider world to get actual exposure to languages when I was a bit younger, but now I would be quite content to go “home” and have an office on the <a href="http://www.uchicago.edu/index.shtml">Quads</a> or in <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/">Morningside Heights</a> or any other Ivy League town. It doesn’t seem I’ll ever get one, though. I’ve applied for a fair number of professorships advertising for people with international experience and innovative approaches to foreign languages, but I’ve never been gotten any interested responses. It appears I have published in the wrong way – I’ve been told that full-length books like my multilingual dictionary and my analytical guide to Korean verbal conjugation - which I think are far more scholarly than my dissertation and which certainly took a lot more time and energy – are “just reference works” and that they “don’t count” – the only thing that counts being articles in scholarly journals.<br />
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I clearly remember my first advisor at the University of Chicago telling me to enjoy my graduate school years because, once I was a professor, I wouldn’t have nearly as much time to continue to explore and learn new things. As I’ve since had occasion to observe, he was all too often right. Many of my colleagues, instead of continuing to widen their horizons throughout their careers, only have time to delve deeper into their specific area of specialization. I think that is a shame, for I believe the primary duty of a scholar ought to be to continue to learn and study new things throughout life. Particularly in the area of foreign language learning, I think it is a travesty that linguists conduct research by theorizing and by testing on and observing others rather than by learning languages themselves so that they know first-hand what works and how that process works.<br />
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WAM: <i>You are an advocate of reading and studying the "<a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/07/case-for-reading-good-books.html">Great Books</a>," and you cite a desire to read classic works in their original languages as one of the goals of your language study. First, why do you believe the "Great Books" are especially worthy of study? And why not just read these works in translation? What is gained by reading them in the original?</i><br />
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AA: Why are the “Great Books” especially worthy of study? They are the classics! By definition, they are the best, richest, most important texts that have been written, the ones that have proven to be valuable not only in their place and time, but for the way they address and present perennial problems related to the human condition. They are the deepest and most meaningful texts produced over the course of civilization – they are the ones that have the most to contribute to the building of encyclopedic minds. <br />
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I could go on and on, but <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/search/label/Mortimer%20J.%20Adler">Mortimer Adler</a> has already said all of this better than I can. The only new perspective I can add relates to the value of reading them in the original. My principle is that if it is worth reading, then it is worth reading as it was written – most particularly for that large percentage of “Great Books” that are literary in nature and thus whose language has been carefully chosen for its sonic effect or for its ability to evoke images in the mind. <br />
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Translation is an art in itself, and there may be some translations that are better than the original, but that is certainly not the rule – the rule is that they are a reflection at an odd angle, a distorted copy. If you want to get at what was really said, you have to go back to the original – no religious person questions this in regards to his scriptures. Not only does reading in the original give you a deeper appreciation for meaning and style, but when you are truly reading (as opposed to hacking away at a text with the help of a dictionary), you should be able to think in the language as well, and thus to enter more closely into the mental world in which the “Great Book” was first created, for each language has its own mindset and distinct lens through which it sees and portrays the world. I simply can’t imagine relishing an author and not wanting to read his own words as he wrote them.<br />
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WAM: <i>You have said that you believe that the most effective way to learn languages may be on one's own - through one's own efforts and initiative - rather than through formal coursework. Does that principle apply to other fields of study as well? What personal characteristics should a person interested in beginning a self-study program cultivate?</i><br />
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AA: Formal language coursework – particularly if it is well done - can give you the experience, the discipline, and the know-how you need to learn languages on your own, but once you have these things, certainly you can learn better on your own than by being taught in a group. I have by now met a good number of polyglots, and I can’t think of a single one who kept learning most of his languages by studying in a class. As with music, it is indispensable to have a private tutor give you one-on-one guidance at stages, but <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fforeignlanguageexpertise.com%2Fpolyglottery.html&ei=V2caTfmaEI3FnAeIneGvDg&usg=AFQjCNFa0k62QcaX9lhULbvNXalDL8EKVA">polyglottery</a> is inherently an <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/autodidact">autodidactic</a> project. <br />
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I think this principle applies to many other fields of studies as well: teachers should provide a foundation together with continued consultation and guidance as needed, but let the learner do the learning. Quite frankly and seriously, I can’t remember what exactly I ever learned from sitting in a classroom. For me the benefit of my higher education was having access to fantastic libraries with millions and millions of books freely at my disposal. From primary school through graduate school, I always spent considerably more time and energy – at least twice or thrice as much – reading books on my own than I did on my course work. I honestly think that, after a certain point at least, all I really needed was access to the library, that if I had been more free to read on my own, I would have made more progress toward developing an encyclopedic mind and become more established in my languages.<br />
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WAM: <i>If you could master one language or reach an intermediate level in two languages, which would you prefer or recommend? Do you derive more pleasure and educational value from becoming acquainted with an entirely new language or from doing advanced work in one of your best languages?</i><br />
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AA: At this stage in my life, I myself would prefer to master one language than to reach an intermediate level in two, but I don’t know that I would necessarily recommend this. There are plenty of people for whom “basic fluency” is a perfectly adequate level of accomplishment, a veritable passport to travel and experience life in other cultures, and there is no need for them to thoroughly master a language in order to benefit from studying and knowing it. <br />
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There was a period when I was focused entirely upon getting a foundation in as many languages as I could, and when I did indeed thrive upon learning about entirely new and different linguistic structures to the extent that I willingly sacrificed reading in or otherwise using my already more advanced languages. However, that time is long since past, and now the reverse is true. I am not currently learning any new languages, and while I do spend some time each day doing grammatical and other exercises to practice and solidify some of my weaker languages, I spend most of my time reading in my better languages, or working at developing those advanced reading skills in a few others for which I am “almost there.” <br />
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WAM: <i>What goals did you have in mind when you began your intensive language study? Were there any unexpected pleasures or benefits as a result? Any regrets, from an educational perspective, about the way you allocated your study time over the years? Anything you would have done differently?</i><br />
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AA: I assume you are referring to the period of about four or five years when I found myself in a privileged position of having assembled an extensive language learning laboratory and being able to spend essentially every waking hour engaged in language studies of various kinds. My initial goal was simply to explore the widest range of different kinds of languages just to see what was out there. I then refined that to the target of developing a solid foundation in at least one language of every representative type. Later still, I scaled down and began to aim for a solid reading knowledge of at least one language from each major civilization. The pleasure and the benefit was that I learned a great deal, but that was what I was after so I don’t think I would call it unexpected.<br />
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Regrets about the way I have allocated my study time over the years and things I would have done different? Oh yes, with hindsight of course there are a great many things I would do very differently. The message I was given in the course of my own schooling was that it is not possible to learn more than a few foreign languages; I knew this to be simply untrue because during the course of that same schooling, I had actually managed to learn quite a few. By experimenting with different study methods, I got better and better at the process of learning languages, so I thought that perhaps I could learn a great many. And I did, or at least, I gave myself a foundation in a great many, so many that I would now characterize it as “too many” - I would prefer to know fewer languages well than more not so well. <br />
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Going from zero knowledge to the substantial point A of this solid foundation is actually relatively easy when you know what you are doing. However, going from point A to point B takes twice as long, and then from point B to point C twice as long as that again, and so on and so forth until the point Z of true mastery. At that stage, I did not understand this nature of the learning curve. Rather, I thought that getting a foothold was the essential key, and that from there everything would just grow of its own accord given a reasonable amount of periodic maintenance and care. However, there is simply not enough time, either in a given day or spread out over a lifetime, to develop one's ability in great numbers of languages to high degrees. <br />
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So, I have had to consciously abort my studies of lots of languages to which I have given hundreds or even thousands of hours, and there are many others that I rarely get to, so rarely that my knowledge of them is not growing, and when I do give them time, it feels like I am stealing it from others that deserve it more. I have retained the philological overview and knowledge of linguistic structure that I gained from all this, but it still feels like a waste of time and energy, and if I could do it all over again, I would embark upon far, far fewer languages than I did. <br />
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Over the course of my life I have probably studied, in one way or another, about 60 languages, which is an absurdly inordinate number. With what I now know, I think it may be feasible, with a lifetime of scholarly application, to develop and sustain real reading knowledge in something like 20. So, if I could somehow take all the time and energy I have given to those other 40 and redistribute it among the remaining 20 so that I could by now have read more in them, I would - but of course I can’t. As it is, at times I feel like a juggler trying desperately to balance this score, and if I could sacrifice even more so as to have time to write a novel or two, I would – but I can’t there either because I have cut out so much already that what remains has become a veritable part of me.<br />
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WAM: <i>There is a wider range of language-learning materials available to self-educators than ever before. What makes one learning tool better than another and which tools do you prefer?</i><br />
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AA: Unfortunately, the standard of quality is going down at the same rate with which the range expands. So, the short answer to your question (because I’ve given such long ones to your others) is that I prefer older tools. Why? Because it is almost certain that they will be more substantive. Thankfully there are happy exceptions here and there, but most contemporary language-learning materials are palpably dumbed down compared to methods and manuals from earlier generations. Substantive content is what makes one learning tool better than another, and the ones I always preferred to use for getting a foundation in a language were those that have about 2000-3000 carefully selected vocabulary items worked into texts and dialogues that are presented in bilingual format together with intelligent explanatory notes, and which are recorded in their entirety by trained narrators in clear didactic style giving way to normal rhythm, providing about 2-3 hours of solid audio (i.e., without pauses) in the target language only. Digesting and internalizing such courses is the best way I found for getting established in any language.<br />
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WAM: <i>Thank you, Professor Arguelles, for your time and for the good work you do.<br />
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Please take a moment to visit and explore Professor Arguelles' fantastic <a href="http://foreignlanguageexpertise.com/">website</a>. If you enjoyed this interview, consider posting it to your <a href="http://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a> wall, mentioning it on <a href="http://www.twitter.com/">Twitter</a>, or emailing it to a friend. Thanks, as always, for reading.</i>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-22438415499008786512010-12-21T18:36:00.007-05:002012-05-21T21:18:22.093-04:00Interview: Polyglot and self-educator Alexander Arguelles, Ph.D. (Part 1 of 2)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TREgnFTrGuI/AAAAAAAABAU/K8x5dHrqsck/s1600/arguelles1.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TREgnFTrGuI/AAAAAAAABAU/K8x5dHrqsck/s320/arguelles1.gif" width="320" /></a></div>
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Interviewer: Ryan McCarl<br />
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Featured self-educator: Alexander Arguelles, Ph.D.<br />
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Self-educator’s position: Language Specialist, Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization<br />
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Date: 21 December 2010<br />
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A "polyglot" is a person who knows many languages, and <a href="http://foreignlanguageexpertise.com/about.html">Alexander Arguelles</a> is one of the foremost self-taught language learners in the world. In many ways, Alexander embodies the ideals of <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/07/self-education-manifesto.html">self-education</a> and <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/07/beyond-preparing-our-kids-for-21st.html">liberal education</a> that are promoted on <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/">Wide Awake Minds</a>. He has spent countless hours over the years on self-directed education with the aim of developing an "encylopedic mind," and he sees the learning of languages as his "passport" on a lifelong educational journey.<br />
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Alexander grew up hearing his father, another self-taught polyglot, teach himself languages by reading aloud from foreign language texts. By the time he was completed his undergraduate degree at Columbia University, Alexander had been exposed to the <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/07/case-for-reading-good-books.html">"Great Books" method</a> of liberal education and had "obtained a solid foundation in six languages: French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit."<br />
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After graduating from Columbia, Alexander pursued a Ph.D. in History of Religions at the University of Chicago, where he wrote a dissertation on Old Norse and developed his abilities in a number of other ancient and modern languages while making the decision to work systematically at becoming a polyglot later in life. After graduate school, Alexander gravitated away from traditional academic research and toward a career of language learning and teaching. During one five-year period, Alexander devoted himself nearly full-time to the study of languages.<br />
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Alexander's <a href="http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/">website</a> reports that he has achieved his goal of being able to comfortably read classic books in their original languages with little or no use of a dictionary in <a href="http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/about.html#lrt">over 30 languages</a>, but he has a considerable knowledge of many others as well. He has managed to build a personal library of language learning resources for over 150 languages, and he has reviewed different language learning materials in a series of <a href="http://foreignlanguageexpertise.com/videos.html">YouTube videos</a>. His published <a href="http://foreignlanguageexpertise.com/publications.html">books</a> include a multilingual dictionary as well as reference materials on Korean, German, and French. His website, <a href="http://www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com/">www.foreignlanguageexpertise.com</a>, is a treasury of resources on language learning, great books, and liberal education, and self-education.<br />
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Here is a video of Alexander demonstrating some of his language learning routines to <a href="http://michaelerard.com/">Michael Erard</a>, a writer who profiles polyglots (among many other fascinating projects); my interview with Alexander begins below the video:<br />
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Oudgdh6tl00?fs=1" width="425"></iframe><br />
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<i>(This is part one of my two-part interview with Alexander. The second portion of the interview will be posted in the next few days. Thank you, as always, for reading.)<br />
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Wide Awake Minds (WAM): <i>When did you first take an interest in learning? Why did you decide to make it your goal to "develop an encyclopedic mind," as you put it - and what do you mean by that term?</i><br />
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Alexander Arguelles (AA): I have always loved learning. I have been an inveterate reader from my earliest years, and from boyhood onwards I have always carried several books around with me wherever I go, together with a notebook for writing down quotes as well as my own observations and reflections. By early adolescence, I had developed a taste for both serious literature and for histories of all sorts: chronicle-type (important names, dates, battles, events, dynasties, etc.), historiography, the history of ideas, histories of philosophy, histories of literature, other cultural histories, etc.<br />
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I don’t remember just when I first consciously articulated the desire to develop an encyclopedic mind in those precise terms, but it was certainly a long time ago, and even before that I was working in the same direction. <br />
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What do I mean by the term? There are three main components: first and foremost, I want to have a wide ranging and well organized knowledge of facts; second, I want to have a deep understanding of both the true connections between those facts that are actually related and also of the patterns that are represented by those that are merely parallel phenomena; third, I want to digest all of this, to have it available for immediate access right inside my head.<br />
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Why? Well, I suppose I am simply enamored of the idea of making my brain a repository of knowledge, a primary reference source that goes with me wherever I go and in which I have facts ready at hand without needing to look them up in external sources. What do you do with all the footnotes at the bottom of the pages of an annotated scholarly work? I suspect most people tend to skip them altogether, but if you do read them the first time you read the work, and you then read it again, it is simply a much richer and more meaningful experience upon that second reading because you already know the content of the explanatory footnotes. Going through life with an encyclopedic mind is rather like that, that is, a more satisfying experience when you know most of the context that you otherwise have to get by reading footnotes if you even bother to look at all. Conducting yourself in the conscious light of what others have done and thought is more fulfilling than living without that awareness.<br />
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There is so much to know that there is always something new to learn, and while it is always wonderful to do so, still it is somewhat mortifying to first realize that you are completely ignorant of something. I mean, when I first learn the name of an important historical personage or of an ancient civilization, I am excited to add that information to my encyclopedia, but I also feel a twinge of shame that I knew nothing about it before.<br />
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In reality, whenever I move around the world I ship a large physical library around with me, but I really like the idea of having no possessions, and I think it would be nice to have nothing physical, but to still have a full rich world of knowledge inside my mind. I haven’t written it yet and maybe I never will, but I have a fleshed-out dystopian novel in my head in which exactly that is all that is left – what is inside our heads. I fear that for most people that would leave them with very little indeed, but I think it would be magnificent to be able to sit down and write out an encyclopedic work such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculum_Maius#Speculum_Maius">Vincent of Beauvais’ <i>Speculum Maius</i></a>.<br />
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WAM: <i>How can mastering languages - as opposed to another field of study - help one develop an encyclopedic mind? Does the study of languages have any unique educational benefit?</i><br />
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AA: First of all, I am not nearly as universal in my encyclopedia building as I would ideally like to be: I would love to be more <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/catholic">catholic</a>, but I am very much top heavy in the humanities and weak in the sciences. I find mathematics and most everything from astronomy though zoology inherently interesting in principle, but I am for some reason simply so constituted as to be much more captivated by languages, literature, history, and the like, and as I’ve always had the opportunity to study these latter, my investigations of the former have never gotten beyond the most rudimentary levels. <br />
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Likewise, I value music and art very much, but though I’ve played the flute in a relatively sustained amateur fashion all my life, and though I’ve had a few intensive bouts or periods of creative drawing, still I’ve never given these realms anything like the attention I’ve always given to the language arts. So, there are most certainly many other valid and valuable fields of study besides languages, and I cannot think of a single reason why someone with a passion for the arts or for the sciences should study languages instead. A truly balanced project of learning, of encyclopedia building, would find a better equilibrium between these fields than I have ever been able to sustain, so ideally someone committed to the sciences or the arts should find some time for languages as well, the time I regret I never found for those realms.<br />
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That said, I do think the study of languages does bring some unique educational benefits. Most obviously, languages open more gateways than do other fields of study. This is not true on the philological or linguistic level of studying languages as such in order to see how they work, but rather on the practical level of mastering them as cultural vehicles. When you learn to read really well in a foreign language, you gain access to everything that has been written in it, and not just to a particular field of academic knowledge. Thus, I believe that the cultural mastery of a language manifested in the ability to read it well broadens your horizons and perspectives more than anything else. <br />
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Moreover, when you get to that level, when you can spend hours on end immersed in reading and not only understanding but relishing what you read, you should also, perhaps with a bit of conscious effort if it does not come automatically, be able to develop the ability to think directly in it. Now, given that we think automatically in our native languages, on whose wavelengths or channels we have essentially been programmed to function, I find it inherently liberating to think in a foreign language of my own choice, knowing that I am able to do so because I elected to build up that capacity and worked hard at it rather than just because I happened to acquire it. Being able to do this with living languages means likewise that you can choose what cultural traditions you participate in rather than just being born into one, and being able to do this with dead languages further enables you to enter a realm of <a href="http://bible.gen.nz/amos/glossary/diachronic.htm">diachronic</a> continuity.<br />
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In any case, the fact is that we – or I at least – think in and by means of words. While it is possible to develop new vocabulary to describe new concepts, it is also true to a large extent that words are what give us our concepts. If we have the vocabulary for describing a phenomenon, we are more likely to perceive it than if we do not. Now, different languages have different categories of concepts, and so I think it is obvious that learning foreign languages, particularly those that are exotic for us, will necessarily expand our conceptualization.<br />
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WAM: <i>What changes would you make to the way languages are taught at the K-12 level and during college? Would you require language study for every student?</i><br />
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AA: For the childhood years, when languages are acquired rather than learned, I think that today’s world should offer more opportunities for immersion and use. The necessary exposure has to be regular and relatively protracted, however, more so than most programs are willing to provide. For the older years of high-school and college, when learning proper can take place, I can offer first a status quo and then a radical answer to this question.<br />
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The status quo answer is simply to teach them well. There are no special secrets here. The teacher should be good, as should the textbook. The class size should be as small as possible, never more than 20 students, and ideally they should all be there because they want to be there – or at very least, they should understand why they have to be there. Classes should meet five days a week, Monday through Friday, at the same time each day. For homework, students should do both written exercises and work with audio materials every single day. The program should offer the possibility of continuity, that is, the ability to continue studying over several years to an advanced level. Under such circumstances, languages can be quite successfully taught. Classroom language learning all too often has a bad reputation because few if any of the above conditions are met. <br />
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As for requiring language study for every student, that is a thorny issue. Ideally, yes, of course, in a seriously good school where instruction is as I just described. In practice, though, under most existing normal circumstances, the large number of unmotivated students is one of the main factors contributing to the overall unsatisfactory experience. So for psychological motivation, perhaps it would be good to change tactics, make studying a language an expectation, or better yet, a privilege, rather than a requirement. One thing is sure, I would certainly do away with the new wave of “language/culture studies” majors such as, e.g., “Italian Studies” in which everything is in English translation – that is simply ridiculous - of course anyone majoring in a culture should have to learn the language!<br />
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My more radical answer as to how I would change teaching would indeed entail a paradigm shift, and it would only work for serious, disciplined, and motivated students. My proposal would involve consciously and deliberately teaching them foreign language learning skills so that they could take charge of teaching themselves languages rather than needing a teacher to teach them. In place of the model of a class, that is, of a group being led by a leader, I would want to work towards a model of an extensive resource center containing a variety of self-study materials. Not that all learning would necessarily take place there – much of it could be done outdoors while simultaneously engaged in physical exercise. In this model, instead of being taught a given foreign language itself, students should be taught how to best select and use language study materials on their own. This is what they will ultimately have to do to continue to learn by themselves after they have finished their coursework, so making this a course in itself will enable them to do it better and sooner.<br />
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This is a model that could be implemented in good colleges. I also have an even more radical proposal for a different type of college altogether, one focused very much around language-based education, one from which students would emerge with a solid foundation in half a dozen languages. If I ever get to found and direct such an institute, I would hope that some of the students would be interested in language careers as scholars of polyliteracy, but I envision that most of them would be better prepared as scholars in any field or, quite simply, as better international citizens in a global age.<br />
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<i>(This is part one of a two-part interview. The second portion of the interview can be found <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2010/12/interview-polyglot-and-self-educator_28.html">here</a>. Thank you, as always, for reading.)<br />
</i>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-57109967663850783372010-11-08T11:11:00.003-05:002010-11-08T19:53:30.625-05:00In schools, don't place form above functionMy latest op-ed, "<a href="http://www.ajc.com/opinion/in-schools-dont-place-731869.html">In schools, don't place form above function</a>," appeared today in the <i>Atlanta Journal-Constitution</i> and online at <a href="http://www.ajc.com/opinion/in-schools-dont-place-731869.html">ajc.com</a>. <br />
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In it, I tell the story of Bachar Sbeiti, a student who finished eighth grade three years ahead of schedule, but whose school district refused to allow him to advance because of his age. I argue that it is time to abandon the practice of sorting students according to age and imposing a near-uniform curriculum on every student in a particular age cohort.<br />
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You can find the article at <a href="http://www.ajc.com/opinion/in-schools-dont-place-731869.html">http://www.ajc.com/opinion/in-schools-dont-place-731869.html</a>. If you enjoy it, please consider passing it along to others who might be interested.<br />
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Thanks, as always, for reading.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-48529318298468284502010-10-30T14:04:00.001-04:002010-10-30T15:23:48.868-04:00"Highly qualified teacher" rules protect the status quo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TMxceQy-fWI/AAAAAAAABAM/Lb6IDS9mQMY/s1600/13909-highlightLRG.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="259" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TMxceQy-fWI/AAAAAAAABAM/Lb6IDS9mQMY/s320/13909-highlightLRG.png" width="320" /></a></div>My most recent education policy op-ed, "<a href="http://www.educationreport.org/13909">The myth of the 'highly qualified' teacher</a>," appeared today in the <i>Michigan Education Report</i>, a publication of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. In it, I discuss No Child Left Behind's mandate that all public school teachers be labeled 'highly qualified,' and illustrate how this mandate operates in practice. I argue that this is yet another example of the triumph of show over substance in education policy. You can read the article <a href="http://www.educationreport.org/13909">here</a>.<br />
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If you enjoy the article, please pass it along to others who might be interested. Thanks, as always, for reading.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-44290336278686391212010-10-10T15:25:00.001-04:002010-10-10T15:29:54.582-04:00Books received: Charles D. Hayes, "Existential Aspirations" and Jennifer Ouellette, "The Calculus Diaries"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TLISlyVEVtI/AAAAAAAAA_w/v4Z8SGfO4uQ/s1600/69869531.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TLISlyVEVtI/AAAAAAAAA_w/v4Z8SGfO4uQ/s1600/69869531.JPG" /></a></div>I received two books on self-education for review last month: Charles D. Hayes' <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/096219798X?ie=UTF8&tag=widawamin-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=096219798X">Existential Aspirations: Reflections of a Self-Taught Philosopher</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widawamin-20&l=as2&o=1&a=096219798X" style="border: medium none ! important; margin: 0px ! important;" width="1" /> </i>(Autodidactic Press, 2010) and Jennifer Ouellette's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143117378?ie=UTF8&tag=widawamin-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0143117378">The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widawamin-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0143117378" style="border-bottom-style: none !important; border-bottom-width: medium !important; border-color: initial !important; border-left-style: none !important; border-left-width: medium !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-right-width: medium !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-top-width: medium !important; cursor: move; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px !important; margin-right: 0px !important; margin-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></i> (Penguin, 2010).<br />
<br />
Hayes' <i>Existential Aspirations</i> is a manifesto for self-education - particularly in philosophy, politics, and other fields in the humanities and social sciences - written in an urgent tone. For Hayes, self-education through reading, writing, thinking, and exploring is an essential part of making the most of one's limited leisure time on Earth. Self-education is not solely about self-improvement, though that is a worthwhile goal; it is also about fulfilling our responsibility as citizens of a fragile world.<br />
<br />
The more we learn, the more we realize how much we do not know. Accordingly, even as education empowers us by deepening our understanding of the world and of ourselves, it is also humbling. As such, education is an antidote to the tempting but destructive certainties of egotism, jingoism, and fundamentalism. Like Hayes' other works, <i>Existential Aspriations </i>can broaden readers' exposure to the world of ideas: Hayes generously shares excerpts, quotes, and ideas from his voluminous reading, and he effectively communicates his own ideas and opinions as products of a lifetime of serious reading and thinking.<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TLISrlGpI0I/AAAAAAAAA_0/kPXTLE1MJEU/s1600/73195926.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TLISrlGpI0I/AAAAAAAAA_0/kPXTLE1MJEU/s1600/73195926.JPG" /></a></div>I have not yet had a chance to review Ouellette's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143117378?ie=UTF8&tag=widawamin-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0143117378">The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse</a><img alt="" border="0" height="1" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=widawamin-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0143117378" style="border-bottom-style: none !important; border-bottom-width: medium !important; border-color: initial !important; border-left-style: none !important; border-left-width: medium !important; border-right-style: none !important; border-right-width: medium !important; border-top-style: none !important; border-top-width: medium !important; cursor: move; margin-bottom: 0px !important; margin-left: 0px !important; margin-right: 0px !important; margin-top: 0px !important;" width="1" /></i> (Penguin, 2010), but it may interest readers who would like to read more about self-education in mathematics - a topic I haven't written much about. It has always seemed to me that those students who approach math from the perspective of self-educators have more success than those who go through the motions of math classes without becoming personally invested in the subject or committing to working through problems and concepts independently.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-71443918031710438862010-08-13T12:38:00.002-04:002011-07-04T17:11:08.006-04:00Excerpts from Jacques Barzun's "Begin Here"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TGV0krHV0hI/AAAAAAAAA9Y/AyhYVECIrPM/s1600/jacquesbarzun.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TGV0krHV0hI/AAAAAAAAA9Y/AyhYVECIrPM/s320/jacquesbarzun.jpg" /></a></div>From Jacques Barzun's <a href="http://amzn.to/clXyCj"><i>Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning</i></a>, one of my favorite books on education:<br />
<br />
<i>From</i> "Schooling No Mystery":<br />
<br />
Forget EDUCATION. Education is a result, a slow growth, and hard to judge. Let us talk rather about Teaching and Learning, a joint activity that can be provided for, though as a nation we have lost the knack of it.<br />
...<br />
As for the means of learning and thinking, that is to say, reading and writing, the colleges are at the same point as the grade schools - helpless in the face of illiteracy. The exceptional teacher is still trying in graduate school to get decent writing and intelligent reading out of his bright students.<br />
...<br />
Learning to read, write, and count meant equal opportunity. Lincoln, as everybody knows, had to teach himself.<br />
...<br />
In the name of progress and method, innovation and statistical research, educationists have persuaded the world that teaching is a set of complex problems to be solved. It is no such thing. It is a series of <i>difficulties</i>. They recur endlessly and have to be met; there is no solution.... Teaching is an art, and an art, though it has a variety of practical devices to choose from, cannot be reduced to a science.<br />
....<br />
...Knowing a subject and wanting to teach it are the chief prerequisite to success in the profession....<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TGV0qthKaAI/AAAAAAAAA9g/p3sAw9dhKGg/s1600/beginhere" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TGV0qthKaAI/AAAAAAAAA9g/p3sAw9dhKGg/s320/beginhere" /></a></div><br />
<i>From</i> "Teacher in 1980 America: What He Found":<br />
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The manifest decline is heartbreakingly sad, but it is what we have chosen to make it, in higher learning as well as in our public schools. There, instead of trying to develop native intelligence and give it good techniques in the basic arts of man, we professed to make ideal citizens, supertolerant neighbors, agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexually adept and flawless drivers of cars. In the upshot, a working system has been brought to a state of impotence. Good teachers are cramped or stymied in their efforts, while the public pays more and more for less and less. The failure to be sober in action and purpose, to do well what can actually be done, has turned a scene of fruitful activity into a spectacle of defeat, shame, and despair.<br />
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<i>From</i> "The Alphabet Equals the Wheel":<br />
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All children can learn and do learn. By the time they first go to school they have learned an enormous amount, including a foreign language, since no language is native to the womb.<br />
...<br />
A teacher must believe in the capacity of those he is teaching; it is defeatism to start out with the opposite assumption.<br />
...<br />
Teaching is a demanding, often back-breaking job; it should not be done with the energy left over after meetings and pointless paperwork have drained hope and faith in the enterprise. Accountability, the latest cure in vogue, is to be looked for only in results. Good teaching is usually well-known to all concerned without questionnaires or approved lesson plans.<br />
...<br />
When good teachers perform and pupils learn, the sense of accomplishment produces a momentum that lightens the toil for both. Discipline is easier to maintain and failures become exceptions instead of the rule.<br />
...<br />
...Reform must bear directly on what is wanted, not try roundabout ways next door. The Army is not considered the most efficient of institutions, but when it finds a deficiency in fire power it does not launch a "Right to Shoot Program" or a "Marksmanship Recovery Project." It gets the sergeants busy and the instructors out to the rifle range.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TGV0vsmoWKI/AAAAAAAAA9o/mUECtro1OO8/s1600/jacques-barzun.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TGV0vsmoWKI/AAAAAAAAA9o/mUECtro1OO8/s320/jacques-barzun.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<i>From</i> "The Centrality of Reading":<br />
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There is...no excuse for allowing the exercise of reading to be less certain in its results than the exercise of listening and remembering. To tolerate reading that proceeds by guesswork, as if at a later time some one would surely tighten the screws of the loose mental structure and make it solid and precise, is to commit an injury against the growing mind. To allow the written word to be indefinite is to undo the incalculable technical advance that turned sounds into signs.<br />
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On this pedagogical ground alone, it could be said that no subject of study is more important than reading. In our civilization, at any rate, all the other intellectual powers depend upon it. No one can compute very far without reading correctly; no one can write decently without reading widely and well; no one can speak or listen intelligently without the mass of workaday information that comes chiefly through reading. As for acquiring some notions of history, government, hygiene, philosophy, art, religion, love-making, or the operation of a camera, they are all equally and pitifully dependent on reading.<br />
...<br />
Imagine the art of reading lost - and with it writing, study, and verbal recovery - and it is hard to see how civilized man could survive the shocks and anxieties of his state, let alone serve his multitudinous desires.<br />
...<br />
The linguists who affect to scorn all utterance but the spoken word, the teachers' group in the Midwest that has discovered the uselessness of reading and asks that it no longer be taught in the schools, the zealots who sidestep the issue but sell futures in a world where only the voice and the image will have currency - all appear deficient in imagination, the imagination they would need still more under their wayward scheme. In any case, their prophecy of the end of reading leaves me unmoved, for prophecy concerns the future, and to reach any future we must somehow get from here to there, and that will require reading.<br />
...<br />
...Reading and its necessary twin, writing, constitute not merely an ability but a power. I mean by the distinction that reading is not just a device (in jargon "a tool") by which we are reached and reach others for practical ends. It is also a mode of incarnating and shaping thought....<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>...<br />
With impatient contempt of school dullness and rote learning, educators resolved to emancipate the child and afford him (the superior joys of the free play of fancy, creativeness, and immediate enjoyment; self-expression, novelty, and untrammeled choice in pursuing one's own thing).<br />
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The folly consisted, not in wanting the lofty results, but in thinking that they could be reached directly. I have elsewhere defined this fallacy as "preposterism" - seeking to obtain straight off what can only be the fruit of some effort, putting the end before the beginning. It should have been obvious that self-expression is real only after the means to it have been acquired.<br />
...<br />
...The last phase of the liberalism which by 1910 had proclaimed everybody's imagination, including the child's, took the form of total egalitarianism. Everybody was, by democratic fiat, right and just in all his actions; he was doing the best he could; he was human: we knew this by his errors. It therefore became wrong to correct a child, to press him, push him, show him how to do better. Dialectical speech and grammatical blunders were natural and, as such, sacred; the linguists proved it by basing a profession on the dogma. Literature was a trivial surface phenomenon, the pastime of a doomed elite: why read books, why read, why teach the alphabet?<br />
...<br />
...The conquest of the public imagination by the arts, by "art as a way of life," has reinforced the natural resistance of the mind to ordinary logic, order, and precision - without replacing these with any strong dose of artistic logic, order, and precision. The arts have simply given universal warrant for the offbeat, the unintelligible, the defiant without purpose. The schools have soaked up this heady brew. Anything new, obscure, implausible, self-willed is worth trying out, is an educational experiment. It has the aura of both science and art.<br />
...<br />
Nothing is right by virtue of its origins, but only by virtue of its results. A stifling tradition is bad and a "great" tradition is good. Innovation that brings improvement is what we all desire; innovation that impoverishes the mind and the chances of life is damnable. Above all institutions, the school is designed for only one thing - fruits. But nowadays we despise the very world cultivation. Unweeded soil undoubtedly grows wondrous things that nobody can predict. Such things we have in abundance, but it would be a rash man who would call it a harvest.<br />
<br />
Jacques Barzun<br />
--<a href="http://amzn.to/clXyCj"><i>Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning</i></a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-35305351970652410692010-07-28T13:45:00.000-04:002010-07-28T13:45:48.712-04:00Michigan's meaningless teacher certification reform<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TFBrnt--O5I/AAAAAAAAA9Q/3yhzFpbWxNo/s1600/teachercertarticlecliipart.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/TFBrnt--O5I/AAAAAAAAA9Q/3yhzFpbWxNo/s320/teachercertarticlecliipart.png" /></a></div>An article I wrote about alternative teaching certification appeared yesterday in the <a href="http://www.educationreport.org/">Michigan Education Report</a>, a publication of the <a href="http://www.mackinac.org/">Mackinac Center for Public Policy</a>.<br />
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The article - "<a href="http://www.educationreport.org/pubs/mer/article.aspx?id=13253">Michigan's meaningless teacher certification reform</a>" - can be found <a href="http://www.educationreport.org/pubs/mer/article.aspx?id=13253">here</a>. Thanks, as always, for reading.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-8486921019793969672010-07-05T19:03:00.006-04:002011-07-04T17:11:46.096-04:00Making the most of your commute through self-educationMy work and travel over the past few years have made me spend a lot of time on the road: commuting to and from different jobs and classes, driving between cities to see family and friends, etc. Many Americans spend a great deal of time commuting to and from work on a daily basis, and some of the recent research on happiness (discussed in countless books such as <i><a href="http://amzn.to/a9mb2y">Happiness: Lessons from a New Science</a></i> and <a href="http://amzn.to/cGLihE"><i>Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth</i></a>) indicates that a long daily commute is one of the surest paths to a stressful and unhappy life.<br />
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Anyone who has been stuck in standstill traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago (to give one example) will probably intuitively understand the truth behind such research findings. But many of us have no choice but to drive a great deal for work - and for home-owning commuters in many areas, the collapse in home prices in recent years has made it impractical to sell one's house to move closer to one's workplace. <br />
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But this is one area in which approaching life as a self-educator can make a person more happy and fulfilled. To the self-educator, the day-to-day "grind" of commuting, work, waiting, and errands can be at least partially transformed into a set of opportunities for learning and growth. Our daily schedules, which often seem so packed and overfilled with tasks and obligations, usually contain "hidden moments"* - or even hidden hours - that we are accustomed to wasting, but that can be put to work in the service of learning, goals, and growth.<br />
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Here are a few ways in which I have put my commute to use in the past or hope to put it to use in the future. If any of these ideas appeal to you, I encourage you to think about how you can modify it to suit your own tastes, interests, and circumstances. <br />
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-Visit your local public library and browse the audio book collection. Skip the latest bestsellers and challenge yourself with something you know will be valuable and cause you to grow and broaden your mind: a classic work of literature or a book of history, for example. Listen to these on the road. (Audio books I've listened to this year: James Joyce, <i>Dubliners</i>; Matthew Crawford, <i>Shop Class as Soulcraft</i>; Ayn Rand, <i>Atlas Shrugged</i>; Joseph Ellis, <i>Founding Brothers</i>; Bernard Lewis, <i>The Crisis of Islam</i>; Bob Woodward, <i>State of Denial</i>). Also, many libraries have some sort of interlibrary loan system that you can use to borrow audio CDs (as well as books and other materials) from libraries around your region. (See also: <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/07/case-for-reading-good-books.html">The case for reading good books</a> and <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/10/self-education-and-language-learning.html">Self-education and language learning</a>).<br />
<br />
-Find out what your local <a href="http://www.npr.org/">NPR</a> news station is, and listen to it. NPR has five minute news summaries every hour, and many of their daily programs offer incredibly valuable and in-depth interviews, commentaries, and features. Nothing else on the radio can compare. NPR programs regularly interview and profile people of all political persuasions, and the vast majority of NPR programming consists of informed debate and informative reporting, not opinion pieces.<br />
<br />
-If you have an auxiliary audio jack with which you can attach an iPod, smartphone, or other mp3 player to your car stereo, download high-quality <a href="http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/">podcasts</a> or audio files to your mp3 player and create a playlist to listen to in the car. Great podcasts with high educational value are put out by NPR, PBS, the <i>New York Times</i>, the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, and other websites and media outlets. (Browse the iTunes Store's podcast collection <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/podcasts/id26">here</a> - nearly all podcasts are free.)<br />
<br />
-Consider subscribing to audio versions of high-quality, educational magazines and newspapers. You can arrange to have these automatically downloaded to your digital audio player every morning in time for your commute. I particularly recommend the <a href="http://www.economist.com/"><i>Economist</i></a>, every article of which is made available each week in podcast/audio format for subscribers. Regularly reading the <i>Economist</i> over a period of years is, in my opinion, the single best way to gain a broad knowledge of current events around the world. And the <i>Economist</i> is not, its title notwithstanding, primarily a business magazine; its pages include news from around the world, in-depth special reports about a wide range of topics, business and economics news, science news, book reviews, and more.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://audible.com/">Audible.com</a> also offers audio subscriptions to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the U.S.'s top two newspapers. The <i>Times</i> is better for in-depth investigative reporting about politics and international affairs, and its opinion pages are mostly liberal; the <i>Journal</i> has a business and finance focus, and its opinion pages are mostly conservative.<br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
-If you are <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/10/self-education-and-language-learning.html">studying a language</a>, trying to <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/10/self-education-and-language-learning.html">memorize</a> something, or boosting your vocabulary, create your own digital audio files with the material you are trying to memorize. Listen and speak along with the material as many times as you can - when you can reflexively and immediately generate the material you are memorizing without the aid of the audio, then you will own it.<br />
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-If you are brainstorming ideas for writing or other projects, use a digital recording device (most recent phones and smartphones come loaded with some sort of recording software) to record ideas you come up with on the road. I have sometimes been able to overcome writer's block by verbally "freewriting" on the road - simply talking about the topic I am writing about as though I were brainstorming aloud to a friend, and capturing the ideas on audio to listen to and record on paper later.<br />
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-Minimize talking on the phone, and never text or play with your phone while driving - regardless of what the law says in your state. If you keep yourself busy with strategies like those above - not to mention with the business of careful and conscious driving itself - you'll be much less tempted to fiddle with your phone and risk causing an avoidable tragedy.<br />
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Consider sharing your own thoughts about making the most of commuting time in the comments.<br />
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* = [Note: I originally discovered the concept of putting "hidden moments" to use in Barry Farber's incredible book about self-education and language learning, <a href="http://amzn.to/c0yCoX"><i>How to Learn Any Language</i></a>.]Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-3642248701664860042010-04-08T02:07:00.003-04:002011-07-04T17:13:10.280-04:00Ibn Sina (980-1037), 11th century self-educator and polymath<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S7usylNyusI/AAAAAAAAA8k/Bb68BhvhOAI/s1600/IbnSina.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S7usylNyusI/AAAAAAAAA8k/Bb68BhvhOAI/s320/IbnSina.jpg" /></a></div><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>From</i> "Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina [Avicenna], The Ideal Muslim Intellectual (eleventh century)," in Gettleman and Schaar, <i><a href="http://bit.ly/bpD47v">The Middle East and Islamic World Reader</a></i>. Original source: A.J. Arberry, "Avicenna: His Life and Times" in G.M. Wickens, ed., <i>Avicenna: Scientist and Philosopher</i> (London: Luzac & Company, 1952), pp. 9 and 11-17:</span><br />
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When the Abbasid empire broke into small competing states, brilliant intellectuals such as <a href="http://bit.ly/aA9x0Q">Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina</a> (980-1037) found many rulers willing to patronize their scholarship. The political instability resulting from the weakening of Abbasid authority did not stifle the tradition of cultural and intellectual exchange among Islamic cities and centers of learning. Born in a village near the Central Asian city of Bukhara, ibn Sina continuously traveled in search of knowledge and work. In the course of his voyages he distinguished himself as one of the most famous physicians, intellectuals, and men of science in the world, and Europeans continued to teach from his celebrated writings on medicine up to the eighteenth century. Not only did he master the many texts of ancient thinkers in Arabic translations, but he also added to knowledge in the fields of law, theology, philosophy, optics, astronomy, medicine, poetry, and philology.<br />
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[The following selection is from ibn Sina's autobiography]:<br />
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By the time I was ten I had mastered the Koran and a great deal of literature, so that I was marveled at for my aptitude.<br />
...<br />
(My father and my brother would discuss theology) while I listened and comprehended all they said; but my spirit would not assent to their argument...[T]hey began to invite me to join...rolling on their tongues talk about philosophy, geometry, Indian arithmetic; and my father sent me to a certain vegetable seller who used the Indian arithmetic [and algebra], so that I might learn it from him.<br />
<br />
Then there came to Bukhara a man called Abu Abd Allah al-Natili who claimed to be a philosopher; my father invited him to stay in our house, hoping that I would learn from him also. Before his advent [arrival] I had already occupied myself with Muslim jurisprudence, attending [studying with] Isma'il the Ascetic; so I was an excellent inquirer, having become familiar with the methods of postulation and the techniques of rebuttal according to the usages of the canon lawyers. ...He marveled at me exceedingly, and warned my father that I should not engage in any other occupation but learning; whatever problem he stated to me, I showed a better mental conception of it than he. So I continued until I had read the straightforward parts of [Aristotle's] <i>Logic</i> with him; as for the subtler points, he had no acquaintance with them.<br />
<br />
From then onward I took to reading texts by myself; I studied the commentators until I had...mastered...Logic. Similarly with Euclid['s <i>Elements of Geometry</i>] I read the first five or six figures with him; and thereafter undertook on my own account to solve the entire remainder of the book.<br />
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I now occupied myself with mastering the various texts and commentaries on natural sciences and metaphysics, until all the gates of knowledge were open to me. Next I desired to study medicine, and...[proceeded] to read all the books that had been written on this subject. Medicine is not a difficult science, and naturally I excelled in it in a very short time, so that qualified physicians began to read medicine with me.<br />
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The next eighteen months I devoted entirely to reading; I studied Logic once again, and all the parts of philosophy. During this time I did not sleep one night through, nor devoted my attention to any other matter by day. I prepared a set of files; with each proof I examined I set down the syllogistic premises and put them in order in the files, then I examined what deduction might be drawn from them. I observed methodically the conditions of the premises, and proceeded until the truth of each particular problem was confirmed for me. When I found myself perplexed by a problem, or could not find the middle term of any syllogism, I would repair to the mosque and pray, adoring the All-Creator until my puzzle was resolved and my difficulty made easy. At night I would return home, set the lamp before me, and busy myself with reading and writing; whenever sleep overcame me or I was conscious of some weakness, I turned aside to drink a glass of wine until my strength returned to me; then I went back to my reading. If ever the least slumber overtook me, I would dream of the precise problem which I was considering as I fell asleep; in that way many problems revealed themselves to me while sleeping. So I continued until I had made myself master of all the sciences.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S7us3ioBa-I/AAAAAAAAA8s/b5VOFW6sFQE/s1600/IbnSina2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S7us3ioBa-I/AAAAAAAAA8s/b5VOFW6sFQE/s320/IbnSina2.jpg" /></a></div>--Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina (Avicenna), <i>Autobiography</i>. Excerpted from "Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina [Avicenna], The Ideal Muslim Intellectual (eleventh century)," in Gettleman and Schaar, <i><a href="http://bit.ly/bpD47v">The Middle East and Islamic World Reader</a></i>. Original source: A.J. Arberry, "Avicenna: His Life and Times" in G.M. Wickens, ed., <i>Avicenna: Scientist and Philosopher</i> (London: Luzac & Company, 1952).Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-59787338971009701492010-03-20T20:06:00.002-04:002011-07-04T17:13:31.685-04:00Debate: Will standards save public education?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://bit.ly/cMtG8I" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S6VM7CH6lJI/AAAAAAAAA8c/bcEvhn9qAyQ/s320/standardssave.jpg" /></a></div>I recently read Deborah Meier's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Will-Standards-Save-Public-Education/dp/0807004413?ie=UTF8&tag=widawamin-20&link_code=btl&camp=213689&creative=392969" target="_blank">Will Standards Save Public Education?</a></i> The book is a "New Democracy Forum" debate produced by the fantastic <i><a href="http://bit.ly/968kvA">Boston Review</a></i> (<a href="http://www.bostonreview.net/">www.bostonreview.net</a>). <br />
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It includes contributions by <a href="http://www.deborahmeier.com/">Deborah Meier</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Kozol">Jonathan Kozol</a>, <a href="http://www.essentialschools.org/pub/ces_docs/about/org/execboard/ted_page.html">Ted Sizer</a>, <a href="http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/nash/">Gary Nash</a>, <a href="http://lindanathan.com/">Linda Nathan</a>, <a href="http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/thernstrom__a.htm">Abigail Thernstrom</a>, <a href="http://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty_research/profiles/profile.shtml?vperson_id=321">Richard Murnane</a>, <a href="http://billayers.org/">William Ayers</a>, and Bob Chase (former <a href="http://www.nea.org/">NEA</a> President). The book was published in 2000, but it is more relevant than ever because of the Obama administration's push for national standards, the recent release of the <a href="http://www.corestandards.org/">Common Core standards</a> in reading and math that are likely to serve as the basis of these standards, and the ongoing debate about the future of No Child Left Behind, a piece of standards-and-accountability legislation that has transformed the educational landscape in ways positive and negative, expected and unexpected.<br />
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Here are excerpts from a few of the essays to give you a sense of the debate:<br />
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<i>From</i> Jonathan Kozol, "Foreword":<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Education writing, as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_%28educator%29">John Holt</a> observed when he and I were teaching high school English in the summer at the Urban School in Boston more than thirty years ago, is frequently a way of speaking indirectly of our own biographies and longings and unveiling our own souls. In speaking of "the aims of education" for a city or a nation, even for a neighborhood, we draw to some degree on who we are, and what we like (or don't like) in ourselves, and what we wish we might have been.<br />
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So when I listen to debates on education - whether about standards, pedagogic styles, or objectives, or "assessments," or whatever else - I listen first to voices. Before I pay attention to ideas, I want to gain some sense of character and value - lived experience - within the person who is telling us what he or she believes is best for children.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">I do think...that there's such a thing as "bad" and "good" and "better" when it comes to books for children or to any other facet of our cultural endowment. ...So the question, for me, isn't if we ought to have some "standards" in our children's education. It is, rather, how and where they are determined, and by whom, and how we treat or penalize (or threaten, or abuse) the child or the teacher who won't swallow them.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Many of the teachers that I know in the South Bronx could teach in universities but <i>choose</i> to teach in elementary schools because they love the personalities of children and they also have a moral vision of a good society and want to do their part in bringing incremental bits of justice to an unjust city and an unjust world. They come with all the treasures they have gleaned from their own education. They want to share these treasures with the children, but they also want to find the treasures that exist already <em>in</em> those children, and they know they cannot do this if they're forced to march the kids in lockstep to the next "objective," or, God help us, the next "benchmark," so that they'll be ready - and God help us, please, a little more - to pass the next examination.<br />
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They worry about scripted journeys where there is no room for whimsical discoveries and unexpected learnings. They worry about outcomes that are stated in advance. ...These are teachers who have standards; but their standards may resemble those of Thomas Merton, or Thoreau, or Toni Morrison, more than of a market analyst or business CEO. The best teachers of little kids I know are poets in their personalities: they love the unpredictable. ...If we force them to be little more than the obedient floor managers for industry, they won't remain in public schools. The price will be too high. The poetry will have been turned into prose: the worst kind too, the prose of experts who know every single thing there is to know except their own destructiveness.<br />
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In this way, we'll lose the teachers who come to the world of childhood with ministries of love and, in their place, we'll get technicians of proficiency.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">So the question, again, is not if we "need" standards in our schools but with what sensibilities we navigate between the two extremes of regimented learning with destructive overtones, on one hand, and pedagogic aimlessness and fatuous romanticism on the other. Somewhere between the world of Dickens's Gradgrind and John Silber and the world of pedagogic anarchy, there is a place of sanity where education is intense and substantive, and realistically competitive in a competitive society, but still respectful of the infinite variety of valued learnings and the limitless varieties of wisdom in the hearts of those who come to us as students.</span><br />
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<i>From</i> Deborah Meier, "Educating a Democracy":<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Even in the hands of sincere allies of children, equity, and public education, the current push for far greater standardization than we’ve ever previously attempted is fundamentally misguided. It will not help to develop young minds, contribute to a robust democratic life, or aid the most vulnerable of our fellow citizens. By shifting the locus of authority to outside bodies, it undermines the capacity of schools to instruct by example in the qualities of mind that schools in a democracy should be fostering in kids–responsibility for one’s own ideas, tolerance for the ideas of others, and a capacity to negotiate differences. Standardization instead turns teachers and parents into the local instruments of externally imposed expert judgment. It thus decreases the chances that young people will grow up in the midst of adults who are making hard decisions and exercising mature judgment in the face of disagreements. And it squeezes out those schools and educators that seek to show alternate possibilities, to explore other paths.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Standards-based reform systems vary enormously in their details. But they are generally organized around a set of four interconnected mechanisms: first, an official document (sometimes called a framework) designed by experts in various fields that describes what kids should know and be able to do at given grade levels in different subjects; second, classroom curricula–commercial textbooks and scripted programs–that are expected to convey that agreed-upon knowledge; third, a set of assessment tools (tests) to measure whether children have achieved the goals specified in the framework; and fourth, a scheme of rewards and penalties directed at schools and school systems, but ultimately at individual kids, who fail to meet the standards as measured by the tests. Cut-off points are set at various politically feasible points–in some states they are pegged so that nearly 90 percent of the students fail whereas others fail less than 10 percent. School administrators (and possibly teachers) are fired if schools fail to reach particular goals after a given period of time, and kids are held back in grade, sent to summer school, and finally refused diplomas if they don’t meet the cut-off scores.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The idea that schools are a disaster, and that fixing them fast is vital to our economy, has become something of a truism. It remains the excuse for all reform efforts, and for carrying them out on the scale and pace proposed.<br />
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Educators from the Progressive tradition are often accused of "experimenting" on kids. But never in the history of the nation have Progressives proposed an experiment so drastic, vast, and potentially serious in its real-life impact on millions of young people. If the consequences are other than those its supporters hope for, the harm to the nation’s educational system and the youngsters involved–maybe even to our economy–will be large and hard to undo.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Virtually all discussions–right or left–about what’s wrong in our otherwise successful society acknowledge the absence of a sense of responsibility for one’s community and of decency in personal relationships. An important cause of this subtler crisis, I submit, is that the closer our youth come to adulthood the less they belong to communities that include responsible adults, and the more stuck they are in peer-only subcultures. We’ve created two parallel cultures, and it’s no wonder the ones on the grown-up side are feeling angry at the way the ones on the other side live and act: apparently foot-loose and fancy-free but in truth often lost, confused, and knit-together for temporary self-protection. The consequences are critical for all our youngsters, but obviously more severe–often disastrous–for those less identified with the larger culture of success.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Many changes in our society aided and abetted the shifts that have produced this alienation. But one important change has been in the nature of schooling. Our schools have grown too distant, too big, too standardized, too uniform, too divorced from their communities, too alienating of young from old and old from young. Few youngsters and few teachers have an opportunity to know each other by more than name (if that); and schools are organized so as to make "knowing each other" nearly impossible. In such settings it’s hard to teach young people how to be responsible to others, or to concern themselves with their community. At best they develop loyalties to the members of their immediate circle of friends (and perhaps their own nuclear family). Even when they take on teen jobs their fellow workers and their customers are likely to be peers. Apprenticeship as a way to learn to be an adult is disappearing. The public and its schools, the "real" world and the schoolhouse, young people and adults have become disconnected, and until they are reconnected no list of particular bits of knowledge will be of much use.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">As I write, Miami and Los Angeles are in the process of building the two largest high schools ever. The largest districts and the largest and most anonymous schools are again those that serve our least advantaged children.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Because of the disconnection between the public and its schools, the power to protect or support them now lies increasingly in the hands of public or private bodies that have no immediate stake in the daily life of the students. CEOs, federal and state legislators, university experts, presidential think tanks make more and more of the daily decisions about schools. For example, the details of the school day and year are determined by state legislators–often down to minutes per day for each subject taught, and whether to promote Johnny from third to fourth grade. The school’s budget depends on it. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">In a democracy, there are multiple, legitimate definitions of "a good education" and "well-educated," and it is desirable to acknowledge that plurality. Openly differing viewpoints constitute a healthy tension in a democratic, pluralistic society. Even where a mainstream view exists, alternate views that challenge the consensus are critical to the society’s health. Young people need to be exposed to competing views, and to adults debating choices about what’s most important. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Standardized tests are too simple and simple-minded for high stakes assessment of children and schools. Important decisions regarding kids and teachers should always be based on multiple sources of evidence that seem appropriate and credible to those most concerned.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">A more fair distribution of resources is the principal means for achieving educational equity. The primary national responsibility is to narrow the resource gap between the most and least advantaged, both between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. and during the other five-sixths of their waking lives, when rich and poor students are also learning–but very different things. To this end publicly accessible comparisons of educational achievement should always include information regarding the relative resources that the families of students, schools, and communities bring to the schooling enterprise.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The schools I have worked in and support have shown how much more powerful accountability becomes when one takes this latter path. The work produced by Central Park East students, for example, is collected regularly in portfolios; it is examined (and in the case of high school students, judged) by tough internal and external reviewers, in a process that closely resembles a doctoral dissertation oral exam. The standards by which a student is judged are easily accessible to families, clear to kids, and capable of being judged by other parties.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The intellectual demands of the 21st century, as well as the demands of democratic life, are best met by preserving plural definitions of a good education, local decision-making, and respect for ordinary human judgments.</span><br />
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<i>From</i> Abigail Thernstrom, "No Excuses":<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Deborah Meier suggests the definition of "well-educated" is up for grabs, that there is no consensus on what an 18-year-old should know. Does she really want to argue about the worth of learning geometry or the importance of understanding why we fought a Civil War? And how about a nine-year-old? Would she label the insistence that kids read abhorrent "standardization"? Should the state remain unconcerned when a child does badly on a third-grade assessment? No one is talking about punishment; the point is to provide help. And to do so before the child begins to slip further and further behind, becomes discouraged, and tunes out.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">In setting academic standards, should we trust everyone involved in every school, including the children themselves? Unencumbered by the road map that the state provides, will they magically all decide to drive in a good educational direction?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Meier sees standards as a threat to individuality. But the highly educated are the most radical individuals of all in American society–just cast an eye over the Harvard faculty. The educational system in France could hardly be more centralized, but the French don’t look like lemmings to me. Knowledge is liberating, not confining. And you can’t embark on an intellectual adventure–say, exploring the still unanswered questions about World War II–unless you have a solid grounding in European history, the immediate German context, and the chronology of the conflict. Yes, learning requires digesting, even memorizing, some basic knowledge. But that knowledge, once acquired, becomes the spring board from which the imaginative individual takes off.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">How do our new academic standards stop the creation of smaller, more nurturing schools that are tied to the local neighborhood? And how do they threaten the fabric of American democratic life? ...Thriving democracies require educated citizens.</span><br />
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<i>From</i> Bob Chase, "Making a Difference":<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Public school is–or should be–the place where hope becomes capacity. A student with a high school diploma should be able to go directly into the world of work, and participate fully in his or her job and community. And the high school graduate who goes on to college, as a majority now do, should be capable of doing college-level work without any remedial education. These two goals should be the foundation of any effort to formulate new standards.<br />
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Our schools should be making it possible for students to exceed the income and educational limitations of their class and family. That has always been one of the highest and noblest ambitions of public education in our democracy. And that’s certainly what public education did for me. Now the great challenge is for the schools to make a real difference in every child’s life. </span><br />
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<i>From</i> Gary Nash, "Expert Opinion":<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Meier believes in local control and local empowerment. So do I–to a degree. But the United States also has a long history of vicious and retrograde local school boards. Meier’s position awkwardly places her in company with many figures on the religious right who aim to control local school boards in order to banish evolution in science classrooms, scrap critical thinking, circumscribe world history, and re-institute prayer in the schools. Local control cuts both ways–for progressive or retrograde education.</span><br />
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<i>From</i> Linda Nathan, "Habits of Mind":<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">I am not interested in schools that take the most important decisions about learning out of the hands of those closest to the learners–the teachers. When the state gets in the business of giving schools endless laundry lists that must be taught, we lose our ability to teach well.</span><br />
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<i>From</i> Richard J. Murnane, "The Case for Standards":<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Contrary to Deborah Meier’s view, I believe that standards-based educational reforms have significant promise for improving the quality of American public education. Moreover, I believe that they are critical to reducing educational inequalities that have left many American families with insufficient earnings to support their children.<br />
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I want to make clear that I have enormous respect for Meier as an educator. Central Park East, which she started, is a remarkable school. I also agree with many of Meier’s criticisms of current versions of standards-based reforms. Yet I see America’s children better served by making standards-based reforms work than by scrapping the concept.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The disappointing results of traditional school finance reforms led states to design initiatives in standards-based educational reforms, the goal of which was to focus on students’ achievement rather than on simply providing money to local communities for education.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Meier believes that the problems with current versions of standards-based reforms are so severe that the concept should be scrapped. I reach a different conclusion because I see that the enormous inequality in American education has been largely a legacy of local control. Significant increases in state education funding implemented through grants that left local control unhampered have reduced this inequality only modestly. I also see a number of states–including Kentucky, North Carolina, and Texas–learning as they gain experience with standards-based reforms. For example, over the past decade Kentucky has reworked student learning goals and the methods used to assess students’ skills. It has also moderated the consequences associated with low test scores and improved its professional development strategies. The net effect has been significant increases in student achievement. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Given the dire consequences of educational inequalities, the failure of traditional school financing reforms to reduce these inequalities, and the cautious progress of standards-based reforms in some states, I believe that persevering with standards-based reforms makes sense. I propose two complementary tests that standards-based reforms should pass. The first is that the accountability system make it impossible for schools to continue to provide low-quality instruction to children from low-income families and minority groups. The second is that the accountability system not prevent distinguished educators such as Meier from creating and sustaining schools that provide a remarkably good education.</span><br />
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<i>From</i> William Ayers, "The Standards Fraud":<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The goals of school reform are simple to state but excruciatingly difficult to enact: to provide every child with an experience that will nourish and challenge development, extend capacity, encourage growth, and offer the tools and dispositions necessary for full participation in the human community. Hannah Arendt once argued, "Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable ... and where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world." That’s a lot–much of it dynamic and ever-changing, much of it intricately interdependent. Yet it is what we seek, the ideal of education in a democracy. Today, there is no more insistent or more attractive distraction from that ideal than the "standards movement" that Deborah Meier takes on in her essay.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The "standards movement" is flailing at shadows. All schools in Illinois, for example, follow the same guidelines–these standards apply to successful schools as well as collapsing ones. These written, stated standards have been in place for decades. And yet Illinois in effect has created two parallel systems–one privileged, adequate, successful, and largely white, the other disadvantaged in countless ways, disabled, starving, failing, and African-American. Some schools succeed brilliantly while others stumble and fall. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">The American school crisis is neither natural nor uniform, but particular and selective–it is a crisis of the poor, of the cities, of Latino and African-American communities. All the structures of privilege and oppression apparent in the larger society are mirrored in our schools. Chicago public school students, for example, are overwhelmingly children of color and children of the poor. More than half of the poorest children in Illinois (and over two-thirds of the bilingual children) attend Chicago schools. And yet Chicago schools must struggle to educate children with considerably fewer human and material resources than neighboring districts. For example, Chicago has 52 licensed physics teachers in the whole city, and a physics lab in only one high school. What standard does that represent?<br />
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In the last two years, 50,000 kids attended summer school in Chicago in the name of standards. Tens of thousands were held back a grade. It is impossible to argue that they should have been passed along routinely–that has been the cynical response for years. But failing that huge group without seriously addressing the ways school has failed them–that is, without changing the structures and cultures of those schools–is to punish those kids for the mistakes and errors of all of us. Further, the vaunted standard turns out to be nothing more than a single standardized test–a relatively simple minded gate designed so that half of those who take it must not succeed.<br />
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The purpose of education in a democracy is to break down barriers, to overcome obstacles, to open doors, minds, and possibilities. Education is empowering and enabling; it points to strength, to critical capacity, to thoughtfulness and expanding capabilities. It aims at something deeper and richer than simply imbibing and accepting existing codes and conventions, acceding to whatever is before us. The larger goal of education is to assist people in seeing the world through their own eyes, interpreting and analyzing through their own experiences and thinking, feeling themselves capable of representing, manifesting, or even, if they choose, transforming all that is before them. Education, then, is linked to freedom, to the ability to see and also to alter, to understand and also to reinvent, to know and also to change to world as we find it. Can we imagine this at the core of all schools, even poor city schools?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">If city school systems are to be retooled, streamlined, and made workable, and city schools are to become palaces of learning for all children (and why shouldn’t they be?), then we must fight for a comprehensive program of change. Educational resources must be distributed fairly. Justice–the notion that all children deserve a decent life, and that those in the greatest need deserve the greatest support–must be our guide. There is no single solution to the obstacles we face. But a good start is to ask what each of us wants for our own children. What are our standards? I want a teacher in the classroom who is thoughtful and caring–not a mindless clerk or de-skilled bureaucrat–a person of substance, depth, and compassion. I want my child to be seen, understood, challenged, and nourished. I want to be able to participate in the community, to have some voice and choice in the questions the school faces.</span><br />
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<i>From</i> Theodore Sizer, "A Sense of Place":<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Virtually all American parents want their children "schooled"–that is, to be given the tools and attitudes necessary to flourish into adulthood. Beyond the obvious matters of literacy, numeracy, and fundamental understandings of civics, thoughtful and decent people can disagree, especially about the secondary school curriculum. For example, some will insist that each of their children master calculus. Others will not, arguing that calculus is important for only a small minority of adults. Some will want their children immersed early in controversial texts, ones which (these parents believe) may help ready them for shocks that reality will deal them in but a few years. Other parents may want to protect their children as long as possible from any sort of shock. Still others will seek some middle ground. Some parents will want their children exposed to the ideas of Charles Darwin and to the evidence of the validity of his ideas. Others will not. The list is almost endless. Given that these matters are only partly of science and as much of the heart, single answers to such questions are never universally acceptable. As a result, every parent–whatever my income and educational level–wants a substantial say about these issues. The ideas to which my child is exposed are important. My right to control many, if not all of these ideas, deserves to be a fundamental American freedom.<br />
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Arrogation of this right by central governments is an abridgment of freedom. The myriad, detailed and mandated state "curriculum frameworks," of whatever scholarly brilliance, are attacks on intellectual freedom. "High stakes" tests arising from these curricula compound the felony. Yes, the community has the right to impose some common values, ones that make our freedom a practical reality. And, yes, the community must expect civility and a readiness to compromise when compromise is essential. That said, it is the apparent readiness of contemporary government to reach beyond this that signals government’s failure to respect and trust its own people. Without such trust, there can be no democracy.<br />
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As Meier tells us, freedom is messy. The disagreements over important ideas cause tensions; but such tensions, and the willingness to confront and work through them, lie at the heart of democracy. Meier goes even further: the students’ observation of how adults come to collective understanding in the face of those disagreements is itself a powerful and worthy lesson.<br />
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Simply, the detailed contours of culture–and, willy nilly, schools are crucibles of culture–are too important to be given to central authorities unilaterally to define and then to impose. Yes, there must be compromises between what I want and what the community wants. However, I personally want to be a party to the definition of those compromises. Yes, there is the matter of empirical evidence: I cannot simply walk away from such evidence when it suits my prejudices. However, I expect that government will never assume that it always knows best.<br />
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I know that we all cannot agree all the time. Save at the obvious margins, why should we? Variety is no sin. For my children I would like a choice among schools that play out the necessary compromises between the values of the state and those to which I am thoughtfully committed. From among these I can elect a school which reflects my deepest and fairest sense of the culture in which I wish my child to grow up.<br />
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This sort of parental authority and choice is well established for wealthy American families. By choosing to live in a culturally congenial district or selecting a private school, they can buy whatever education seems best to them. If such choices make sense for rich folks–and rich folks will fight hard to protect their right to choose their children’s schools–why not make them available to everybody? Intellectual freedom doesn’t stop at the door of a bank. Intellectual freedom is what characterizes a confident, mature democracy. Intellectual freedom reflects the trust of government in the ultimate wisdom of its people.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Deborah Meier is unusual in that she has designed and led both elementary and secondary public schools. Each is a "place," and each fiercely protects its own boundaries. All are schools of choice. All are small, self-conscious communities. All expect to be alliances of teachers, children, parents and their relevant neighborhoods. All are places where the necessarily endless confrontation of important ideas about which people may disagree proceeds in a respectful way; they are places where relationships are as important as abstractions. All have sophisticated notions of what intellectual excellence is and therefore how it might be represented. All aim ultimately at "enduring and worthy habits of mind," at what sort of thinking adults these young people may become, at how they think and act when no one is looking. To the limit of their school systems’ regulation, all connect their students with the world beyond them. All are intensely demanding, of everyone involved.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Perhaps, with all good intentions, we Americans infantilize our older teenagers by holding them to the same sorts of routines and standards as those younger. The policy hammerlock on the definitions of the substance of a high school education deplored by Meier needs to be broken. But perhaps also we need a fundamental redefinition of the obligations a growing adolescent must accept for himself and for the community of which he is a part, and then of what structures will help him reach of those obligations. Most adolescents are eager to take responsibility. They deserve our imaginative effort to give them the opportunity to express it in constructive ways, ones that help them build principled and informed minds.<br />
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Simply, it may be not enough only to refine what is best for high schools. It may be better to redefine what is best for the learning of our older children.<br />
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Such a prospect is miles away from the school world implied by the proceedings at the recent education "summit." The assumptions there were familiar, predictable and represented devices used with limited success for fifty years. Something bolder, more democratic and more reflective of the realities of growing up in a modern, information-rich society is badly needed. Deborah Meier has started us down that important road. </span><br />
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<i>From</i> Deborah Meier, "Deborah Meier Responds":<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">I recently came across a speech by Joseph Priestley given on the dedication of New College, in London, in 1794:<br />
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"Whatever be the qualifications of your tutors, your improvement must chiefly depend on yourselves. They cannot think or labour for you, they can only put you in the best way of thinking and labouring for yourselves. If therefore you get knowledge you must acquire it by your own industry. You must form all conclusions and all maxims for yourselves, from premises and data collected and considered by yourself. And it is the great object of this institution to remove every bias the mind may be under, and to give the greatest scope for true freedom of thinking and equity."<br />
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If becoming an educated person depends, as Priestley says, upon one’s own industry, how best can we engage the industry of youngsters and their communities, in their own behalf? This question lies at the heart of democratic society–even more than in Priestley’s time. Priestley could dismiss the laggards as unfit for a good education. We cannot.<br />
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But what should we do? Should we rely on efficiency, prescription, and compliance as a means for meeting Priestley’s challenge?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">I believe that we have hard evidence that the best reform strategy involves reinventing schools on the model of the small, locally grounded schools I know best. The last thing we need is more of the centralization and standardization that has always dominated schools (and classrooms) serving the poor. That has been part of the problem.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">(Abigail Thernstrom believes) that the tests–even some of the sillier ones Massachusetts has adopted–measure the only important qualities of a well-educated person, and that they must be imposed at all costs. That my New York students’ subsequent life histories are not indicated by their SAT scores, which were never much affected by the school’s work–despite Kaplan-sponsored test coaching–doesn’t puzzle her. She’s stuck on measuring merit by one, and only one, criteria even when the evidence tells her otherwise. As though the purpose of schools were test scores based on schooling, not life scores based on living.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">What if indicators that are far more significantly correlated to later college and life success for low-income and African-American youngsters are no longer counted, and reforms guided by them die out? For example, while going to a small school correlates with later success in school, it does not substantially raise test scores. Other indicators turn out to be more attainable and equally powerful: perseverance, high attendance, strong relationships with adults outside the family, and participation in extra-curricular and service-learning experiences. Smallness also correlates with school safety and a greater sense of personal efficacy. How sad if we lose track of these in our relentless pursuit of test scores.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Ted Sizer, above all people, helped me to see the value of not agreeing on a single definition of a good school. In fact, close as our views so often are, we didn’t design the same secondary school when we had the chance. And our graduating standards are not duplicates of each other. We probably didn’t choose to send our kids to the same schools, and we did not ourselves attend schools with the same "standards"–"save at the obvious margins." Figuring out those "obvious margins" is a heady task, and one we ought to be engaged in–instead of developing ever longer laundry lists of what every eight-, ten-, fourteen- and eighteen-year-old should know and be tested on–or off with her head.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">...</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">I agree with Sizer that "990 minutes of delivered instruction" is just a drop in the bucket. What has always amazed me is how powerful that drop can be–if we use our hearts and minds. But, as Priestley would have noted, you can’t force hearts and minds. They must labor on their own behalves. My concern about standardization and high-stakes testing stems precisely from my conviction that what makes some schools overcome the limitations of time is the power of the relationships that are developed inside them: among members of the faculty, between young people and adults, and finally among young people. Only a very powerful faculty can build those enduring and rigorous relationships with the young; only a faculty that also accepts responsibility for developing its own standards will be tough enough to police its own kids and its own colleagues. Schools that do less cannot offer enough to overcome the odds facing too many youngsters.</span><br />
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You can purchase a copy of <i>Will Standards Save Public Education?</i> <a href="http://bit.ly/d9NvV7">here</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-18604562989108957382010-03-12T11:29:00.013-05:002011-07-04T17:14:57.174-04:00Evolving thoughts about technology and educationThis morning, I am writing from the <a href="http://www.macul.org/">MACUL</a> (Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning) <a href="http://macul.edublogs.org/">education technology conference</a> in Grand Rapids, MI.<br />
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A couple of thoughts and takeaway lessons from my experience at the conference so far:<br />
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First, the profession of education is exciting, and it is important for teachers to be able to step back from the daily grind of teaching once in a while to participate in conferences like this. Not every "professional development" experience is valuable, but academic conferences like these provide an opportunity to gain quick exposure to a wide range of new ideas that can expand teachers' visions of what is possible in the classroom and of what it means to be an educator.<br />
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Second, I have a lot to learn. I thought I knew quite a bit about technology and the Internet - but I already feel behind the curve with things like digital audio and video technologies, and new tools are springing up every day. Even those of us who are "plugged in" and who read and/or write blogs, get our news from <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/08/google-reader-rss-feeds-and-self.html">RSS feed readers</a> (like <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/08/google-reader-rss-feeds-and-self.html">Google Reader</a>), and communicate by means of email and <a href="http://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a> can easily fall behind the times, because the times are rapidly changing.<br />
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Keeping up with technological innovations in a well-informed way is a very real challenge that does not happen automatically; it has to happen through self-education, on one's own initiative. This does not necessarily mean adopting every new gadget that comes along; instead, what is important is to be knowledgeable about the tools that are out there so that you can make informed decisions about which to use and which to bypass.<br />
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(A key word here is "tools" - I do not believe that technology should lead us around by the nose and cause us to drop the traditional academic curriculum and give up the aim of real literacy - the ability to read and converse with challenging, idea-rich texts - in the name of new "literacies" which may, after all, be fads. I see more value in using educational technology as a means of delivering a traditional, rigorous liberal arts education in a more exciting, individualized, and self-paced way than has been possible to this point.)<br />
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Technology also provides ways to "scale up" great teaching and scarce educational opportunities: I was unable to make it to the <a href="http://www.law.uchicago.edu/">University of Chicago Law School</a> to see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Walzer">Michael Walzer</a>, one of America's most accomplished political philosophers, deliver a lecture in January; now, however, I can simply <a href="http://www.law.uchicago.edu/audio/walzer012010">listen to the lecture online</a> or download it and listen to it in my car or on a run.<br />
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At the beginning of the year, the professors in my Teaching with Technology course at the University of Michigan asked us to draw a picture of our ideal classroom, incorporating technologies that we thought we might use.<br />
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My ideal classroom, as I imagined it then, was filled to the brim with books but included no computers. I'm not sure I am entirely ready to abandon that vision just yet - I am deeply troubled by the relative absence of serious reading in many schools and the deterioration of print culture underlying the struggles of newspapers, magazines, libraries, and retail bookstores. Internet access will do a person little good if he or she can't make sense of texts - or lacks the background knowledge, cognitive tools, or drive to use the Internet to find meaningful, useful, life-enriching knowledge.<br />
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Those caveats aside, however, I feel like I have been awakened to the wide world of possibilities of educational technology. For that, I have to thank not only the <a href="http://macul.edublogs.org/">MACUL conference</a>, but also the creative and inspired instruction of <a href="http://ics.soe.umich.edu/">Jeff Stanzler</a> and <a href="http://www.cellphonesinlearning.com/">Liz Kolb</a> at the University of Michigan School of Education, the example of my friend and classmate J.P. Horne (creator of <a href="http://coachingecon.com/">www.coachingecon.com</a>, a resource for his economics students), and the powerful ideas of Terry Moe and John Chubb's <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Liberating-Learning-Technology-Politics-Education/dp/047044214X">Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education</a></em>.<br />
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These learning experiences have been exciting for me as a self-educator entering the field of education: it is important to me to belong to a profession that feels limitless and filled with infinite opportunities for creativity, learning, and growth. Changes and innovations in technology, policy, and pedagogy are guaranteed to keep educators on their toes - and I see that as a challenge and an opportunity rather than as a threat. We live in exciting times.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-62807924993247006182010-03-12T09:46:00.001-05:002010-03-12T10:04:39.682-05:00Live blog: MACUL education technology conference, Grand Rapids, MI<iframe src="http://www.coveritlive.com/index2.php/option=com_altcaster/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=996578193b/height=550/width=470" scrolling="no" height="550px" width="470px" frameBorder ="0" allowTransparency="true" ><a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=996578193b" >MACUL education technology conference, Grand Rapids, MI, 3/11</a></iframe>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-9184998059054139792010-03-06T14:21:00.018-05:002010-03-06T15:47:00.495-05:00First thoughts about Diane Ravitch's changes of heart on school reform<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S5Ksazhd2FI/AAAAAAAAA8U/W4hg4WqD2a8/s1600-h/24ravitch_280.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 280px; height: 186px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S5Ksazhd2FI/AAAAAAAAA8U/W4hg4WqD2a8/s400/24ravitch_280.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5445604475951503442" /></a><br /><br />I'm planning to purchase Diane Ravitch's <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465014917/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0">The Death and Life of the Great American School System</a></span> as soon as possible - it sounds like a fascinating and heartfelt book about a great educator's rethinking of long-held positions on school reform. The reviews have been mostly glowing. (For a kind but critical review, check out <a href="http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/bio.cfm?id=8">Chester Finn</a>'s take in <a href="http://www.forbes.com/">Forbes</a>: <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/02/diane-ravitch-education-schools-opinions-book-reviews-chester-e-finn-jr.html">http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/02/diane-ravitch-education-schools-opinions-book-reviews-chester-e-finn-jr.html</a>)<br /><br />However, the tone of many of the stories about Ravitch's change of heart suggest to me that the politicization of education and school reform has become a serious problem. We need to refocus on whether a particular idea or a particular reform will strengthen student outcomes, and we should be less concerned about whether the proposal comes from the left or the right of the political spectrum.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S5KsPXQvwJI/AAAAAAAAA8M/macjoq896pk/s1600-h/51484090.JPG"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 185px; height: 280px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S5KsPXQvwJI/AAAAAAAAA8M/macjoq896pk/s400/51484090.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5445604279386620050" /></a><br />School reform is not just another political issue: it is an issue that directly affects the lives of millions of students and their communities. It affects the social and economic future of society and the health of democracy.<br /><br />Those who wade into these debates bear an especially heavy burden, and to handle that burden responsibly, we should read widely and listen with an open mind to ideas and proposals from as many perspectives as possible.<br /><br />It seems to me that there may be more common ground than the current political lines-in-the-sand suggest. For instance, the progressive vision of small, personal, relationship-driven schools (advocated most prominently by <a href="http://www.deborahmeier.com/">Deborah Meier</a>) seems more compatible with a flexible and choice-driven school structure than with large-scale, one-size-fits-all models of schooling.<br /><br />Above all, perhaps, our education policy debates might become more sane if we stood back for a moment from debates about means - <em>how</em> and <em>by whom</em> education services are to be delivered (by public or private schools, charter schools, virtual schools, home-based schools, etc.) - and agreed first and foremost that educational outcomes (what knowledge, skills, habits, and dispositions students walk away with at the conclusion of their schooling) are what matters most. <br /><br />It seems silly and shortsighted to pick a fight with a school that is truly serving its students and community well just because it is a particular type of school. Likewise, it seems wrong to stand up against any and all reform measures that target schools that are clearly <em>not</em> serving their students and community well simply because one is concerned about the broader implications of the reform or the political affiliation of those who are promoting the reform. <br /><br />The simple reality is that there are excellent public, private, charter, virtual, and home-based schools, and there are extremely poor public, private, charter, virtual, and home-based schools. The means of schooling are less important than the outcomes.<br /><br />(Image sources: Education Week (<a href="www.edweek.org">www.edweek.org</a>) and Barnes & Noble (<a href="www.bn.com">www.bn.com</a>)).<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Further reading:</span><br /><br />Diane Ravitch's homepage: <a href="http://www.dianeravitch.com/">http://www.dianeravitch.com/</a><br /><br />Diane Viadero, "<a href="http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/03/04/24ravitch_ep.h29.html">In New Book, Ravitch Recants Long-Held Beliefs</a>," Edweek.org, 3/5/10.<br /><br />Steve Inskeep, "<a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124209100">Former 'No Child Left Behind' Advocate Turns Critic</a>," NPR.org, 3/2/10.<br /><br />Chester E. Finn, "<a href="http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/02/diane-ravitch-education-schools-opinions-book-reviews-chester-e-finn-jr.html">School's Out: On Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System</a>," Forbes.com, 3/3/10.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-65016568019473054812010-03-04T21:08:00.006-05:002011-07-04T17:14:33.495-04:00Interview: Self-educator Hoossam Malek<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S5BoIwV9mMI/AAAAAAAAA8E/okbdnklZ-vU/s1600-h/011copy.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5444966449116190914" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S5BoIwV9mMI/AAAAAAAAA8E/okbdnklZ-vU/s400/011copy.jpg" style="cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 245px; margin: 0 10px 10px 0; width: 218px;" /></a><br />
Interviewer: Ryan McCarl<br />
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Featured self-educator: Hoossam (Sam) Malek<br />
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Self-educator’s location: Baltimore, Maryland<br />
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Date: 4 March 2010<br />
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I met <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/ppl/webprofile?action=ctu&id=47505642&pvs=pp&authToken=F7Z9&authType=name&trk=ppro_getintr&lnk=cnt_dir">Sam Malek</a> three summers ago, when the two of us were summer interns at Lehman Brothers, an investment bank, in Chicago. Sam has one of the most incredible minds I have ever encountered: his worldview is informed by a deep understanding of mathematics and economics as well as an insatiable curiosity and drive for growth, understanding, and academic and professional excellence.<br />
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The son of first-generation Syrian immigrants, Sam is proficient in Arabic, English and French. After earning a B.A. in Economics at Princeton, Sam spent a year working with the American Red Cross through AmeriCorps VISTA in West Baltimore City. He then worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, VA for three years while taking advanced courses in mathematics. He enrolled in the full-time M.B.A. program at the Chicago Booth School of Business and graduated towards the top of his class while also earning an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies. He began a career as an emerging markets bond analyst at Lehman Brothers in the turbulent late summer of 2008, and has since moved on to another firm where he focuses on high-yield Middle Eastern bonds. <br />
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WAM: <em>On </em><a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/">Wide Awake Minds</a><em>, I promote a vision of education as a lifelong process in which certificates and degrees are important thresholds or signposts, but not signals that we have become "educated" persons with no need of further intellectual growth. You are someone who has gone far beyond the requirements of your profession and continued to pursue new learning opportunities at every stage of your life.</em><br />
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SM: What you are saying about thresholds - that you don't just cross a threshold and then be done - is, I think, very important. Human beings, especially here in the United States, are sometimes encouraged (unfortunately) to see life as a series of doors that you go through for whatever reason. Even that - to stop and think about that and reassess it may be very uncomfortable for some people.<br />
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Why learn? Why have a job? We have to put food on the table, we need to exist. We need knowledge to do our work as human beings. God puts you on this planet, and if you're lucky you have health - but education is supposed to take us beyond that and help us thrive in a difficult world. We don’t just get an education to check it off the list, but to survive and thrive.<br />
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It's kind of like the saying: "The truth can set you free." Life can be pretty oppressive at times. But education can prepare us for that by giving us foresight, the ability to be proactive, the ability to manage our passions, and the ability to see clearly in spite of whatever is going on around us. We are sentient people, not just rational creatures that see everything clearly - education can help us channel our emotions and not be slaves to them.<br />
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For example, you and I both do some of our work remotely, over the Internet, and I sincerely believe that that's the future of a lot of labor markets. This idea of making a living without waking up and going to a physical office building will be very uncomfortable for a lot of people. But there are ways to make the prospect of an uncertain future and new work environments more manageable and exciting; some of these ways include being aware of the world, seeing things, reading things, knowing things - in short, education.<br />
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And some people seem to be driven to go beyond the basics of what they need to know. Earlier tonight I was reading a friend's blog - he is in the field of bioengineering, but he really wants to be a philosopher. His post was explaining to his readers what an "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom">axiom</a>" is. Not everyone wants to be that thoughtful about the world around them, but some people need to - for these people, learning itself is a powerful need.<br />
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WAM: <em>What you said about your friend's blog is very interesting - do you see anything significant about the fact that he was using the format of a blog? For example, was he "working" as a philosopher or exploring his identity as a philosopher? Was he self-educating by clarifying his thoughts on an issue and distilling these thoughts into a blog post? Was he performing the function of an educator, teaching his readers about a topic important to him?</em><br />
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SM: Absolutely, his use of the blog format is very significant. He has 800 friends on Facebook and seems very Internet-savvy - not only can he test the waters as a philosopher or public intellectual, but he can try to create a market for his ideas and attract a readership for his views. If readers with limited time feel compelled to go to his blog and read his writing, then he may be on to something that he can use to build new opportunities.<br />
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One good thing about technology is that it creates these marketplaces of ideas - not just for testing ideas, but for communication. If you feel passionate about something, you can go online and talk about it with others. Passion and sincerity are contagious - people will sense them in your writing and respond. My friend is lucky because the invention of blogs and the Internet gave him the opportunity to experiment and branch out beyond the narrow function of his career.<br />
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WAM: <em>Right - it's not just about making money, but about finding yourself, finding your voice and an audience.</em><br />
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SM: Yes, and there is plenty of space for experimentation. Technology really matters a lot. For instance, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/">Facebook</a> really facilitates networking - it's an efficient way to connect one set of resources, human resources. I get ideas from Facebook by scrolling through what my friends are writing and discussing with each other. I've recently become interested in networking - have you ever studied <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_theory">network theory</a>? The whole idea is that you can have normative ideas about what a "smart" or "efficient" network looks like. Basically, a smart network links as many people as possible who would not automatically have any connections; it also places a premium on building strong ties. I studied this at <a href="http://www.chicagobooth.edu/">Chicago</a> and really took it to heart; I started to think about how I can add value by connecting people I know who would not otherwise be connected. This is something that I am starting to have a lot of fun with - which is surprising, because I had thought of myself as an introvert, and I think at business school I was seen as a bit of a recluse. Using Facebook is a great way to strengthen your ties with others in an efficient way.<br />
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Another example of technology's importance is <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> - it's the essence of what you are talking about in your work on self-education. It's one of the most valuable inventions of the past two decades – I’ve learned so much from it. I use it all the time. And I don’t sweat whether each thing I read on Wikipedia is fully accurate - when I turn to Wikipedia, it's because I want to get a quick grasp of a subject or idea, not because I am doing a complete, thorough research project. <br />
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You know the concept of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns">marginal return</a> in economics? Well, I don't turn to Wikipedia to read about subjects I have expertise in, unless it's to fill in a forgotten or hazy detail - I turn to Wikipedia when I am totally ignorant of something, and it's free and it takes a minute or two. The bang for your buck when you visit Wikipedia at that early stage of total ignorance is huge - suddenly, at no cost, you have a basic understanding of something you knew little or nothing about before. This has the potential to democratize learning; you don’t have to go to a university and pay tens of thousands of dollars to get an overview of a subject, you can just do some reading online.<br />
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WAM: <em>So what value do universities add?</em><br />
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SM: They can and do add value, but I think they are trying to do too many things. You go to school to learn, to be instructed, to grow up - not to worship some professor doing famous research. I think the universities are trying to do too much, and the economics of it are getting all screwed up. There is a mismatch between what I invest in a college education and what I am getting.<br />
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One of the best educational experiences of my life was working at the <a href="http://www.richmondfed.org/">Virginia Fed</a> while taking math classes - the clear purpose of those classes was to learn math. But at universities, so many people are paying $40,000 a year and studying crazy things - I don't think it always makes sense. I'm not saying I don't think people should study the humanities or gender studies or whatever. But if a person is 18 years old and has declared that they are majoring in Near Eastern Studies - that is B.S., it doesn't make sense to me. You probably can't even write or do real independent thinking, and suddenly you've decided that you are going to be an expert on the Middle East? That you’ll commit at least two of your formative years to studying one small aspect of the world? University education should either be more general, or more specific to learning a marketable skill. You have the rest of your life to indulge in different topics but I am not so sure that should be the thrust of your college years.<br />
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I wish I could have taken time off before college to get some life experience - to go work and see why we do what we do. Take a kid who is 18 and gets into <a href="http://www.harvard.edu/">Harvard</a> or <a href="http://www.uchicago.edu/">Chicago</a> or wherever, who doesn't really know anything about life - about relationships, about why we work - and you load him up with hundreds of courses and specialties to choose from. How could an 18-21 year old person really know what he wants to specialize in? And worse, half of these don’t even empower him to make a decent living. I'm sure he knows he's interested in that subject, but is that the same thing as wanting to become a specialist?<br />
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This is why many countries have service programs. The year I did with <a href="http://www.americorps.gov/">AmeriCorps</a> after graduating from Princeton was very, very helpful for me - it really made up for a lot of the sheltering that took place in my life before that.<br />
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Some of my best educational experiences took place during my high school years - there is a certain honesty to the learning that takes place in those years. It's the honesty of studying things because you are interested in them and want to learn them, and you can learn a pretty decent range of stuff.<br />
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For me, the value of going to college at Princeton was exposure to things I had never thought about; but it was too much, too soon. If my undergraduate classes at Princeton could have been stretched out over the course of my life, they would have been much more useful.<br />
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WAM: <em>Earlier, you used the economic concept of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diminishing_returns">marginal return</a> to talk about a non-economic issue - namely, the value of consulting Wikipedia for answers to our questions. I wanted to ask you about your ability to draw on your knowledge of economics, math, and finance and use that knowledge to solve problems and inform your understanding of the world around you. Your academic knowledge seems to be very "real" and active to you - you seem to perceive a lot of connections between the work you did in school and the problems you think about today.</em><br />
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SM: That question made me think of a writing professor at Princeton who assigns essays with tight constraints. Constraints, even if they are artificial, can force the brain to be more disciplined about what it is doing. They can make us better thinkers. So I do have a tendency to impose constraints on my thinking - to think within the discipline of economics.<br />
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And some of economics really does seem to be useful to me. Economics provides me with heuristics, quick ways to explain what I mean - for instance, you understood what I was talking about when I discussed Wikipedia in terms of marginal returns. Economics has also informed the way I live my life: I try to get quick wins from very diverse experiences. On Wednesday night, for example, I am going to a networking event in Baltimore City. I won't know a soul there - it could be a little intimidating and difficult. But I know that I am early on in the curve <em>because</em> it is a difficult experience. You know the cliché, "get outside of your comfort zone"; when you feel fear, you should also get a sense of opportunity. The fear lets you know that you are confronting a new experience, an experience that is more likely to be valuable to you because it is new. It's kind of like the network theory idea: there are gaps in your network that prevent it from being as efficient and high-value as it can be, and you are most likely to fill those gaps by meeting some entirely new people - and that might involve some feelings of fear.<br />
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I guess I am using technical concepts to talk about these things - possibly I am overeducated and it's just easier for me to talk in these terms. But I encountered these ideas in the classroom because they have stood the test of time.<br />
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WAM: <em>Most people encounter plenty of ideas that have stood the test of time in the classroom, but these ideas do not seem to gain the same hold on most people's minds as they have on yours. We all encounter at least some of these ideas, but you have made them your own - you have made them part of your worldview, part of the way you perceive and make sense of the world. How can educators bring these ideas alive for their students - and how can self-educators bring these ideas alive for themselves?</em><br />
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SM: Earlier in our conversation, you talked about the importance of getting students to "buy in" to the learning experience. It's easier to get that buy-in or commitment when the value of something is self-evident - and a lot of what makes the value of something evident is more experience. There's something about experience that makes you more convinced by ideas, because ideas help you explain and make sense of your experience. As a student you haven't experienced a lot - even someone in 12th grade really hasn't experienced a lot of the adult world that these ideas help to explain.<br />
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I would suggest that teachers not push a student beyond the capacity of what's reasonable unless the student has a certain amount of drive or interest in a subject. Trust and personal relationships can also be a big factor - if a student trusts you as a person and an authority figure, he is more likely to listen to you when you tell him something is important. When I was in high school, the one subject I struggled with was science. Science didn't really enter my world - I don't see the world of science as clearly as I see other academic worlds, and its value and relevance was never as obvious to me. Now, as a highly educated person, I see science's value and am ready for it - but back then it wasn't personal enough. It's kind of a hard subject to self-educate on, but I bought a couple of books, and I love to go down to the <a href="http://www.amnh.org/?src=googlemaps">American Museum of Natural History</a> and hear others talk about it.<br />
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Childhood experiences are very important. I come from an immigrant household - I grew up seeing how my parents interacted with other adults and reacted to the nightly news. My parents are from Syria; I remember watching my dad's reaction to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Jennings">Peter Jennings</a> on the nightly news and not really knowing why he would get riled up about some of the things Jennings said - that piqued my curiosity and desire to explore. It's no accident that I am a bond analyst studying Middle Eastern bonds; it's no accident that I was on a business trip to Saudi Arabia last month or got an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies. These interests don't happen by accident.<br />
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Different people have very different backgrounds. But teachers have to assume that there has got to be something in the makeup of who their students are that they could speak to or draw on - there have to be ways to connect the things you are trying to teach to students' lives.<br />
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WAM: <em>Thank you, Sam, for your time and for the good work you do.</em><br />
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---<br />
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Thanks, as always, for reading!</em>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-80553527658810057682010-03-02T22:06:00.007-05:002010-03-02T23:31:51.065-05:00Teacher licensing tests don't tell us enough about quality<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S43Tix2RvNI/AAAAAAAAA70/Z6fh0JKTACA/s1600-h/12229-MITestLRG.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 293px; height: 238px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S43Tix2RvNI/AAAAAAAAA70/Z6fh0JKTACA/s400/12229-MITestLRG.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5444240119010802898" /></a><br />An education policy article of mine appeared today in the <a href="http://www.educationreport.org/pubs/mer/"><em>Michigan Education Report</em></a>, a publication of the <a href="http://www.mackinac.org/">Mackinac Center for Public Policy</a>.<br /><br />The article - "<a href="http://www.educationreport.org/pubs/mer/article.aspx?id=12229">Teacher certification tests don't tell us enough about quality</a>" - can be found <a href="http://www.educationreport.org/pubs/mer/article.aspx?id=12229">here</a>. Thanks, as always, for reading.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-66615878121526804862010-02-26T23:39:00.008-05:002010-02-26T23:47:16.553-05:00Charles D. Hayes on self-education in the "September" of life<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S4iiT1usQxI/AAAAAAAAA7c/GkgMLJApw5E/s1600-h/Hayes_2004.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 150px; height: 218px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S4iiT1usQxI/AAAAAAAAA7c/GkgMLJApw5E/s400/Hayes_2004.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442778611401376530" /></a><br />Self-education advocate <a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/">Charles D. Hayes</a> just mailed me a copy of his newest book, <span style="font-style:italic;"><a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/books/septuniversity.htm">September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life</a></span>. He argues that self-education can help people find purpose and meaning later in life by "erasing the concept of retirement." Hayes writes: "The more we learn and expand our knowledge of the world, the more meaningful our understanding becomes."<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S4ijxPLqhgI/AAAAAAAAA7s/rlhavZibL44/s1600-h/SU_cover_big.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 135px; height: 200px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S4ijxPLqhgI/AAAAAAAAA7s/rlhavZibL44/s200/SU_cover_big.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442780215961617922" /></a><br />You can read more about the book and support the work of a great self-educator by purchasing a copy <a href="http://www.autodidactic.com/books/septuniversity.htm">here</a>. I am planning to interview Hayes on <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com">Wide Awake Minds</a> this spring.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-33515968318296524032010-02-10T10:12:00.017-05:002010-02-11T19:27:02.851-05:00Reflections on my first three weeks of full-time teaching<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S3Lyre-qYVI/AAAAAAAAA7U/WeqS60zvaQI/s1600-h/Overhead-migration.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 134px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S3Lyre-qYVI/AAAAAAAAA7U/WeqS60zvaQI/s400/Overhead-migration.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5436674529053794642" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />I am currently in my third week of full-time preservice teaching, and I have been fully immersed in planning, designing, teaching, and grading three 10th-grade World History and Geography classes (one course or "prep," three classes of 26-34 students). I am having a blast so far - I've never enjoyed any job so much, and the experience has been very challenging, rewarding, and educational. The school day flies by, but for the first two weeks, I found myself putting in ridiculously long hours planning and grading at home. Finally, I am settling in - and today, the school is closed due to a snowstorm (I had forgotten how much anticipation and joy a snow day can create), so I am taking the opportunity to update <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com">Wide Awake Minds</a> for the first time in a few weeks. Thank you for sticking with the blog through such periods of silence. (If you haven't done so yet, please consider joining the Wide Awake Minds <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Wide-Awake-Minds/156130463632?ref=ts">Facebook page</a> as well).<br /><br /><em>Curriculum: reading, writing, and ideas</em><br /><br />One of my teaching goals this semester has been to push back against what I see as low expectations about the quality and quantity of reading and writing thought to be appropriate for non-honors/non-AP high school social studies classes. I am building a lot of writing into my world history curriculum, including making highly-structured extended essay prompts account for around 1/3 of each unit quiz grade and offering a lot of writing-intensive extra credit opportunities - but I'll save the details on the writing dimension for another post.<br /><br />Reading tasks in my World History class take several forms. It is crucial, I have learned, to pair practically every resource (reading, video, visual image, audio, etc.) with some sort of assigned task to actively engage students and ensure that they take what you are asking them to do seriously.<br /><br />First, I give 2-4 page (usually closer to two, and often including visual images with explanatory captions) take-home assigned readings, and I assess whether students have done the reading (and been paying attention in class) two school days later with a somewhat informal, generously-graded short-answer "warm-up" quiz that also offers opportunities for students to earn bonus points if they have been paying attention to current events (on some occasions, they can earn even more bonus points by drawing connections between current events and the World History curriculum).<br /><br />Second, in the final days of each unit, I distribute 3-page summaries of the textbook chapter covered by the unit; these are created by the textbook company. I pair these chapter summaries with a multi-page, short-answer assignment (due roughly three school days later) I create that focuses on core concepts and is aligned with the shared, district-wide marking period final exam in World History and the Michigan <a href="http://www.michigan.gov/mde/0,1607,7-140-38924_41644_46818---,00.html">state standards</a> (HSCEs) in World History. I ask students to complete these chapter summary assignments as independent homework in order to study for their unit quizzes, and I ask them to take responsibility for themselves to ensure that they have a solid understanding of the core concepts we have covered; I do not assign the textbook itself, but I regularly suggest that students check a copy out voluntarily or access it online if they would like to deepen their understanding.<br /><br />Finally, one of my goals as a high school history teacher is to bring a little bit of the intellectual excitement and engagement with the history of ideas that I have experienced into the sometimes boring and sterile world of the standard high school curriculum. I believe that this can be done within the parameters of standards-and-accountability systems such as the Michigan state standards. While not every necessary building-block of knowledge is destined to be experienced by high school students as equally exciting or relevant, none of the core academic content areas, when they are taught passionately and creatively and received by open minds, should be the least bit "boring." <br /><br />I have experienced the social sciences not just as a student and teacher, but as a reader who has struggled through many challenging and provocative political and historical documents, as someone who has had many spirited discussions about politics and history with intellectually-inclined friends, as an alumnus of the University of Chicago with fond memories of discussing the Great Books in my first-year humanities and social science seminars, and as a former graduate student of international relations who has engaged in intense, high-level seminar discussions and thesis-writing with some of the greatest political thinkers in the country. In short, I have experienced the study of history (and the pursuit of knowledge, the research and writing processes, and the acts of non-fiction reading and writing) as an exciting and <em>high-stakes</em> activity, and I want to give my students some sense of what that experience feels like.<br /><br />To that end, I am trying to sneak high-quality reading and viewing materials - the Great Books, "good books" on the outskirts of the established canon, and excellent contemporary writing and other media - into my students' hands and minds as often as possible. <br /><br />In the first week of class, the take-home reading on nationalism I assigned them included excerpts from a recent <a href="http://volokh.com/category/nationalism/">debate</a> between bloggers Jonah Goldberg (<a href="http://author.nationalreview.com/archive/?q=MjE5NQ==">National Review Online</a>) and Ilya Somin (<a href="http://volokh.com/">The Volokh Conspiracy</a>). <br /><br />In another in-class activity, I asked students to write down examples of how they saw nationalism expressed (through flags, rallies, music/anthems, heroes, traditions, rituals, love/hate passed down across generations, "us vs. them" mentality, exclusivist behavior, love of the "homeland," etc.) in a series of YouTube clips that included a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQisGiMHl-Y">Michigan vs. Ohio State pre-game "hype video,"</a> a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1TeHq2ofZA">clip</a> from a British documentary about Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War, a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzs98u0m38g">clip</a> about Slobodan Milosevic and the Bosnian War, a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmCAnyt4aaA">news story</a> about recent controversies surrounding the issue of nationalism in Japanese schools, a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvm1Nz4yPio">CBS feature story</a> about ultranationalism in contemporary Russia, and a patriotic American slideshow set to the music of Lee Greenwood's post-9/11 anthem "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RINqibpWOzQ">God Bless the USA</a>."<br /><br />Last week, I had my students read and answer a four-page questionnaire about excerpts from Adam Smith's <em>The Wealth of Nations</em> and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' <em>The Communist Manifesto</em> - the central ideological documents of capitalism and communism, respectively. I assigned the students into groups (I randomized this process rather than allowing students to choose in order to ensure (1) that the class activity would be the primary thing bonding each group together and (2) that the most advanced readers would be distributed around the room rather than clustered together in a single group), and each group chose to either read the readings aloud or individually and then worked together to proceed through the questions and discuss possible responses.<br /><br />We are currently wrapping up our unit on the Industrial Revolution. Then, we will move on to study the late 19th-century social reforms aimed at ending the slave trade, banning child labor, promoting women's rights, and creating free, universal public education. In every case, instructional time is very limited, but I hope to be able to bring in excerpts from some of the most important documents that fueled each debate. I want to find new ways to promote student understanding of these documents (even among my struggling readers) through creative <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructional_scaffolding">scaffolding</a>, and I want to steer students toward high-level, idea-conscious historical thinking.<br /><br /><em>Trying new things and seeing what works</em><br /><br />This semester is a time for experimenting with different instructional methods, and I am thoroughly enjoying the process of trying new things and seeing what works and what does not. I plan to share some of the success stories on this blog and post some of my course materials on my <a href="http://www.ryanmccarl.com/">website</a> for those who are interested. Many of the ideas I generated before I began full-time teaching did not pan out for one reason or another, but some ideas have seemed to work - and the act of teaching and reflecting on teaching has helped me generate many new ideas every day.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-25644707621252198712010-01-16T14:10:00.008-05:002010-01-16T15:21:01.487-05:00Renewing our commitment to public libraries<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S1IYbyV09gI/AAAAAAAAA7E/qO7JVrtpViM/s1600-h/loutit1.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S1IYbyV09gI/AAAAAAAAA7E/qO7JVrtpViM/s320/loutit1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5427427366583727618" border="0" /></a><br />I am writing this post from <a href="http://loutitlibrary.org/">Loutit District Library</a> in Grand Haven, MI - one of the most beautiful local libraries (and towns) I have ever been in. As a high school student in neighboring Muskegon, MI, I came to Loutit on a weekly basis with my grandfather or my friends to purchase grocery-bags full of books in Cheapstacks, the used book store in the library's basement. <br /><br />Once, some friends and I chipped in together to purchase a $5 bag of books and calculated that we had just paid 8.6 cents for each of the books we had bought - books that would go for five, ten, or fifteen dollars each in a for-profit used book store and for much more in a new book store. Many of the books that have set the course of my life, my thoughts, and my writings originally made their way to me through Cheapstacks or from the shelves of Loutit Library, the Norton Shores Branch Library in Muskegon, or the <a href="http://www.lakeland.lib.mi.us/">Lakeland Library Cooperative</a>'s inter-library loan network in West Michigan.<br /><br />When I return to my family's home in Muskegon, I always sift through the shelves and boxes of books that I have so far been unable to bring with me, and I am constantly finding something new or forgotten - some book that I purchased on a whim, usually from Cheapstacks, many years ago - that has suddenly taken on new meaning and relevance in my life and my self-education. (My <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2010/01/high-school-subjects-self-taught.html">most recent post</a>, on the out-of-print book <em>High School Subjects Self-Taught</em>, described one such find). Today, I purchased a stack of classic books by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and others to make available to the high school students I teach in a school near Detroit: I'll place these on my desk and trade students a book for a promise that they will read it.<br /><br />I cannot express strongly enough my belief in the importance of public libraries. I hope that the digitization craze, whatever its benefits and efficiencies (and they are many), does not delude us into thinking that our public libraries are expendable, or that <a href="http://books.google.com/">Google Books</a>, however amazing it is, will meet all our needs as readers and lifelong learners.<br /><br />The truth is that many small, local public libraries in America have found themselves out of step with the times and with the needs of their communities; they have found themselves pushed to the margins of their communities, with sharply reduced hours and few new acquisitions. They are fighting a constant battle for financial survival - and they risk losing the debate about their relevance.<br /><br />But a visit to Loutit Library can renew one's faith in the importance and the possibilities of local public libraries as integral parts of the <a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/11/building-educational-infrastructure.html">educational infrastructure</a> of communities. A few years ago, the Grand Haven community decided to make a massive investment in the library - completely renovating the building and building a new library almost from scratch. The community also fought against a proposal to tear the library from the heart of the community and move it to the outskirts of the city, leaving a hole in the historic downtown.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S1IYbsIlboI/AAAAAAAAA68/wAoCr8w0yqk/s1600-h/loutit.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 70px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S1IYbsIlboI/AAAAAAAAA68/wAoCr8w0yqk/s320/loutit.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5427427364917571202" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Today, I saw the results for the first time, and they are staggering: beautiful, spacious reading areas with ample natural lighting, well-designed artificial lighting, and comfortable chairs; a large public computing area; free wi-fi throughout the building; a fireplace; private study rooms; a "teen room"; a reference librarian; conference rooms where local groups and book clubs can meet; a filled calendar of <a href="http://host7.evanced.info/loutit/evanced/eventcalendar.asp">free events</a>; a large and well-stocked genealogy and local history room; and, of course, a remodeled Cheapstacks. Since the renovation, use of the library has surged by 35%. And the vast majority of what goes on in a library is self-education.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S1IYcNwMuvI/AAAAAAAAA7M/5qnXjJP4Ubc/s1600-h/loutit2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S1IYcNwMuvI/AAAAAAAAA7M/5qnXjJP4Ubc/s320/loutit2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5427427373942094578" border="0" /></a><br />I have always liked the idea, expressed in the title of a recent book, that "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Good-Design-Change-Your-Life/dp/0743294742">good design can change your life</a>"; the case of Loutit Library demonstrates that good design in libraries (and schools) - made possible by a commitment to invest the resources necessary to make good design possible - can change the educational life of a community.<br /><br />See also:<br /><br />Chad D. Lerch, "<a href="http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2010/01/in_a_bad_economy_residents_flo.html">In a bad economy, residents are flocking to libraries</a>," <em>Muskegon Chronicle</em>, 1/4/10.<br /><br />Myron Kukla, "Library traffic surges as economy struggles," <em>Grand Rapids Press</em>, 12/27/09.<br /><br />Cathy Runyon, "Hard choices ahead; local libraries face state revenue shortfalls," <em>North Ottawa Weekly</em>, 1/16/10.<br /><br /><a href="http://loutitlibrary.org/index.php">Loutit District Library Homepage</a>.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.ala.org/">American Library Association</a>.<br /><br />Ryan McCarl, "<a href="http://www.wideawakeminds.com/2009/11/building-educational-infrastructure.html">Building the Educational Infrastructure</a>," <em>Wide Awake Minds</em>, 11/13/09.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-81069512909659483942010-01-10T14:40:00.005-05:002010-01-10T15:42:20.121-05:00"High School Subjects Self-Taught"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S0o1XSX5W9I/AAAAAAAAA6g/_W9PC1e2Z2g/s1600-h/Picture+1.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 187px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/S0o1XSX5W9I/AAAAAAAAA6g/_W9PC1e2Z2g/s320/Picture+1.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5425207375306513362" border="0"></a><br />Whenever I return to the home I grew up in, I sift through the shelves and boxes of books that I have so far had to leave behind in my transitions from city to city over the past few years. I recently stumbled upon an old, out-of-print book on self-education: <em><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=fWusKAAACAAJ&dq=High+School+Subjects+Self+Taught&client=firefox-a&cd=1">High School Subjects Self-Taught</a></em> by Louis Copeland, with an introduction by the late mathematics educator <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/10/obituaries/william-l-schaaf-94-professor-and-author.html?pagewanted=1">William L. Schaaf</a>.<br /><br />In fact, since I started this blog and began my project of researching and writing about self-education last year, I have started noticing references to self-education - direct and indirect - all over the place. I am beginning to collect these as I find them in the hopes that they might be able to inform the book I am working on.<br /><br />A few things to notice about the following quotes:<br /><br />--Learning is presented as a valuable end in itself as well as a means to other ends; schooling is presented as an opportunity for learning.<br /><br />--The ultimate responsibility for learning rests with the learner himself or herself.<br /><br />--The learner's motivation and desire to learn is critically important.<br /><br />--It is never too late to learn: the fact that one's schooling is complete, or one's experiences in school were unsatisfactory, does not mean that the opportunity to get an education has passed. For self-educators, there is always a "second chance" to learn.<br /><br />---<br /><em>From</em> William L. Schaaf, "Introduction" and "Suggestions for Studying this Book," in <em>High School Subjects Self-Taught</em> by Louis Copeland:<br /><br />Modern life and contemporary events make a heavy demand upon the education and resourcefulness of the individual. In dealing successfully with personal, social, and vocational problems, a basic education is an unquestionable asset.<br /><br />The primary value of an education is not simply the attainment of knowledge, but rather, though ideas as well as information and skills, to develop the power of thinking and to cultivate understanding and appreciation that will serve many purposes. These purposes may concern self-improvement and advancement in your business or vocation; efficient conduct of your household and personal affairs; intelligent consumer activities; adequate participation in civic and community life; helpful guidance where your children are concerned; effective and enjoyable use of your leisure time, devoted to recreation, hobbies, or other avocational pursuits.<br /><br />Possibly you never had an opportunity to attend High School; or, having begun your studies, you were, for one reason or another, unable to complete them. Perhaps you finished your high school course some years ago, but since graduation you have forgotten a good deal of what you once learned, and have come to appreciate its significance somewhat more fully than you did when you were in school. In any event, you now wish to refresh yourself on many of these matters, and perhaps may even want to strike out in one or two new directions.<br /><br />One is never too old to learn if one has the desire to do so. It is an accepted fact that, under ordinary circumstances, you can learn just as well at 25 or 30 as you could at 15 years of age; indeed, there are good reasons why you may learn even more effectively as an adult than as an adolescent. To be sure, it isn't always easy to stick to it. There are pressing demands and inevitable distractions - the business of earning a living, the fatigue at the end of the day, the need for relaxation, the desire for recreation. But that is just where your determination comes in; if you <em>want</em> to badly enough, you will be amazed at how much you <em>can</em> learn, even at 40 or more!<br />...<br />A moment's reflection will reveal that there are, in all, but a half dozen or so large fields of human learning and achievement into one or another of which virtually all subjects fall. These fields includes: (1) the <em>social studies;</em> (2) <em>language and literature;</em> (3) the <em>fine arts;</em> (4) <em>foreign languages;</em> (5) <em>mathematics;</em> (6) the <em>physical sciences;</em> (7) <em>philosophy and logic;</em> and (8) the <em>practical arts.</em><br />...<br />No matter how great the sacrifice or how considerable the effort in mastering these subjects you will be amply rewarded. No one can ever take your education away from you.<br />...<br />Merely reading a book may no more result in learning than listening to a lecture. To learn something requires active effort on your part. You must have a goal. You must know how you are progressing. And above all, you must <em>want</em> to learn.<br />...<br />Here are some additional hints on how to study effectively:<br /><br />1. Try to understand the <em>general scheme</em> of what you are trying to learn. If it is fairly complicated, <em>make an outline</em> of the main terms.<br />2. <em>Several short periods</em> on successive days are usually better than one lengthy period of study.<br />3. Use <em>various ways</em> of making yourself think over what you are studying.<br />4. Try to associate new facts or ideas <em>with something you already know.</em><br />5. Form the habit of <em>reviewing</em> mentally every paragraph or section <em>before you go on</em> to the next one. See how much of it you can recall; this will help you to remember it.<br />6. Sometimes <em>reading aloud</em> helps one to remember material; it is better to read rapidly rather than slowly.<br />7. When you have to stop studying, interrupt yourself at a <em>logical point,</em> but make note of some cue which will enable you to pick up the thread when you begin again.<br />8. When you have learned something new, try to <em>make use</em> of it as soon as you can; the oftener the better.<br />9. When you have completed a reasonable amount of material, take time out to <em>summarize</em> what you have covered. You may want to write out your summary.<br />10. Always have a <em>good dictionary</em> handy. Make frequent use of it. When you have discovered the meaning of a new word, try to use the word yourself.<br />...<br />The important thing is to adopt a plan and then <em>carry it out regularly and faithfully;</em> success is never achieved by good intentions or casual activities.<br /><br />William L. Schaaf<br /> --<em>From</em> "Introduction" and "Suggestions for Studying this Book," in <em>High School Subjects Self-Taught</em> by Louis Copeland (Garden City Publishing Co., 1946).Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7562328588382445845.post-36063860855300710812009-12-29T17:29:00.004-05:002009-12-29T17:38:50.510-05:00The reading habits of Samuel Taylor Coleridge<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/SzqE8jnbuMI/AAAAAAAAA6Y/KwNNcyhUOgc/s1600-h/coleridge_st_02.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 242px; height: 320px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_dbkE5wB5Kaw/SzqE8jnbuMI/AAAAAAAAA6Y/KwNNcyhUOgc/s320/coleridge_st_02.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5420791277381466306" /></a><br />Where do the allusions, ideas, images, and thought-fragments that populate the mind and the writings of a great thinker come from? We can often find out by consulting a biography:<br /><br />From John Livingston Lowes' <em><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=wQfx5OX-qRQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Road+to+Xanadu+-+A+Study+in+the+Ways+of+the+Imagination&client=firefox-a&cd=1">The Road to Xanadu - A Study in the Ways of the Imagination</a></em>:<br /><br />How did Coleridge actually read books? Few more significant questions can be asked about any man, and about Coleridge probably none. Coleridge...was reading Maurice, but he was doing more: he was also going back at first hand to the sources of Maurice's information. He made, accordingly, a memorandum of another book to read.<br /><br />Coleridge (at least during the years of the Note Book) read with an eye which habitually pierced to the secret spring of poetry beneath the crust of fact. And this means that items or details the most unlikely might, through some poetic potentiality discovered or divined, find lodgement in his memory.<br />...<br />Coleridge not only read books with minute attention, but he also habitually passed from any book he read to the books to which that book referred. And that, in turn, makes it possible to follow him into the most remote and unsuspected fields. And his gleanings from these fields, transformed but recognizable, will meet us again and again as we proceed. For to follow Coleridge through his reading is to retrace the obliterated vestiges of creation.<br />...<br />When Coleridge once started on a book, he was apt to devour it whole.<br />...<br />We have to do, in a word, with one of the most extraordinary memoires of which there is record, stored with the spoils of an omnivorous reading, and endowed in to the bargain with an almost uncanny power of association.<br />...<br />Even you and I, at vivid moments, know the sudden leap of widely sundered recollections, through some flash of association, into a new and sometimes startling unity. And that, assuredly in no less degree, is also the experience of poets.<br /><br />John Livingston Lowes<br /> --<em><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=wQfx5OX-qRQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Road+to+Xanadu+-+A+Study+in+the+Ways+of+the+Imagination&client=firefox-a&cd=1">The Road to Xanadu - A Study in the Ways of the Imagination</a></em>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01626605478233269742noreply@blogger.com