While study after study shows that teachers who once boosted student test scores are very likely to do so in the future, no research [Jonah Rockoff, economist at Columbia University] can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, “you could be throwing your money away”?
–From “Building a Better Teacher” by Elizabeth Green, The New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2010.

When I first read the above in The New York Times Magazine, I was shocked. This economist questions if we can teach people to be successful teachers.

While I believe that there are natural limits to each person’s ability, I believe that education and training help people increase their natural strengths and mitigate their weaknesses. Being able to teach someone something requires more than just knowledge, it requires the ability to communicate that knowledge. Education and training in methods can help teachers acquire the ability to communicate their knowledge.

Imagine that instead of providing hands-on training to Emergency Medical Technicians we taught them only the theoretical concepts behind the techniques. They learn anatomy, biology and some chemistry; they discuss the theory and the history of the techniques; but they are never taught the techniques themselves. Then, in the field, the technician does not know how provide CPR and someone dies.

In this scenario, would an economist question whether teaching particular techniques and methods in addition to academic knowledge was worth the money?

If you think my scenario sounds far-fetched, please read the following quote. In 2006, Arthur Levine, a former president of Teacher College at Columbia University, wrote:

“Today, the teacher-education curriculum is a confusing patchwork. Academic instruction and clinical instruction are disconnected. Graduates are insufficiently prepared for the classroom.”
–Arthur Levine, quoted in “Building a Better Teacher” by Elizabeth Green, The New York Times Magazine

Despite these two quotes, the article “Building a Better Teacher” focuses on Doug Lemov of Uncommon Schools and his research into what makes good and great teachers. He systematically surveyed and videotaped teachers who students consistently scored well year after year. From his research, he was able to distill many techniques that he found the best teachers employed.

Mr. Lemov’s work shows that research is being done into whether teacher training can help improve educational outcomes. The article convinced me that it is possible to improve communication of ideas using techniques and methods that are not currently a standard part of teacher education.

Future teachers and their future students will be best served by the changing focus of teacher training institutes from high level, abstract pedagogical theory to on-the-ground, concrete teaching methods.

In This Essay

“Do School Libraries Need Books?” from Room for Debate, The New York Times, February 10, 2010

“The Library, Through Students’ Eyes” from Room for Debate, The New York Times, February 14, 2010

“A library without books” by David Abel, The Boston Globe, September 4, 2009

“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, by Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic, July/August 2008

I remember reading in The Boston Globe last September that a private school in Massachusetts had given up its collection of books. I was aghast.

That Cushing Academy gave away collection of books, turning its library into a digital media center, continues to bother me.

Since reading that article, I have thought a lot about the role of libraries in our society. I have library cards for three different library systems here in Massachusetts. I joined the Boston Athenaeum, a membership library, last December after writing about them in a December 11th’s Weekly Review.

Libraries are important places. Digital technology cannot yet replace — and I hope never will — brick-and-mortar libraries.

I love going to physical libraries. I love browsing the stacks.

One afternoon while wandering through the shelves, I came across The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke a collection of fragments from Rilke’s letters, collected into thematic chapters by Ulrich Baer. Without the serendipity of walking through the stacks, I would never have found the book because I would never have thought to look for it.

I walked into the Boston Athenaeum on Saturday to visit again the art exhibit I reviewed last week, An Artist + A Poet. Walking around the new acquisitions displays on the first floor, I found Young Rilke and His Times by George C. Schoolfield. Again, I never would have thought to look for this book but I’m glad to have borrowed it.

That’s one weakness I find in my own Internet research. There is so much information out there, that unless I know what I am looking for, I have trouble finding anything at all. Reading from the Internet encourages us to read shallowly and seek a particular piece of information and continue on.

We have become sifters.

But when we enter a library, we are looking for knowledge in a broader sense than we are when we begin an Internet search. When we begin an Internet search, we are looking for answers to specific questions. When we enter a library, we are looking for answers, yes, but I think we are open to letting those answers inspire additional questions in ways we aren’t on the Internet.

All the same, I am no luddite. I know that the Internet is changing the way that we think and organize information. Perhaps libraries will become obsolete.

But I hope that we continue recognize the value of books and libraries. There are no pop-up advertisements in books, nor banner ads in libraries. Just as online, there are other things — more books, though, rather than more sites — vying for our attention in a library. Yet, I find myself able to become immersed in a book in a way that I have never seen translated online.

I hope that we keep these quiet bowers.

What are your thoughts? Share them with us.

Do libraries hold any special memories for you? Have you moved completely online? Do libraries have a future, or only a past?

This has been the first week that I’ve managed to keep to a form my dedication, made some weeks back, and worked on my Weekly Review several nights rather than just one. I am still overwhelmed by the streams of information that I am trying to swim in. I am learning to manage, though, and I think the quality of the Weekly Reviews is only going to increase in 2010.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Food and Thought
• Of Great Interest
• Whose Great Books?
• Sticks and Stones
• “Innovative” Education
• What is that beautiful building

Food and Thought

• Food and mood by Bina Venkataraman, Boston Globe
• NH panel emphasizes better food choices in schools by Kathy McCormack, Associated Press, as seen on boston.com
• Dairy Groups Fight To Keep Chocolate Milk On Menu by Jeff Brady, All Things Considered, NPR

We have all heard the adage, “You are what you eat.” But it turns out that is true not only in terms of body composition, but of mental and emotional composition as well.

What you eat impacts your mood. And while those cupcakes I had a lunch yesterday may have made me feel better then, if I continue to eat fatty foods, new research suggests that I’ll be much less happy than if I eat a healthier diet. And my brain will function better if I cut the fat.

In order to learn, our children need to eat. In order to learn well, our children need to eat well. I know that some mornings at work I am so hungry that I cannot do much other than think about food. And I remember that I really enjoyed the opportunity to get breakfast before class. Rather than banning children from eating at the beginning of a class, we should encourage them.

As if I needed another social justice cause, I think healthy school breakfasts and lunches just got added to the list.

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Of Great Interest

• “The [Three] Great Interest of Man” by Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

I had never encountered the poem “Evening Without Angels” by Wallace Stevens before reading the post above in The Happiness Project. Gretchen looked for the poem because she remembered the lines of the epigraph by Mario Rossi, that she had attributed to Stevens and his poem. While the poem is intriguing, I am more interested in the quote by Mario Rossi:

“…the great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.”

Great literature reminds us of “the joy of having a body”; great art reminds us of “the voluptuousness of looking”; and great music reminds us of “air and light.”

Great literature reminds us of “the joy of having a body” because poetry is a sensual experience for me. Poetry and great novels look to take experiences and ideals and make them tactile, make them real. Great literature gives us access to the interiority of another person, real or imagined, and lets us see the world from their eyes, if only for a minute. You could tell someone that having great riches will not, of itself, make him or her happy, or you could hand him or her a copy of “Richard Cory” by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

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Whose Great Books?

• Creating the Canon by Cynthia Crossen, “Dear Book Lover”, The Wall Street Journal

Once I picked up Harold Bloom’s book, The Western Canon, from the library. I didn’t read more than the first few pages of it and thumb through the list of great works in the appendix. At some point, I am sure that I will read his essays and consider in greater depth his lists.

That seems like a smart thing for a high school English teacher to do, right?

What I liked about Cynthia Crossen’s article was that she was humble. Whereas Harold Bloom wants to create the definitive list for all time, a very quaint and antiquated ideal, one that inspired the first encyclopedias but seems silly now, Cynthia Crossen wants us to read both good and bad books. She quotes Jane Smiley and I think it bears repeating here, as well:

…in order to understand the nature of the novel [as an artform], sometimes the reader has to read novels that don’t work for her and think about why they don’t work.

I do not think the writers that Harold Bloom canonizes are the exclusive holders of culture and excellence in the history of the world. I think about Chimamanda Adiche’s lecture, “The Danger of a Single Story” — which, if you haven’t watched, I encourage you to watch immediately — and how her first stories were about British and American characters because that is all she knew.

We need to include writers from many, if not all, cultures in our school curricula. We cannot use literature to learn about others if we do not read about others.

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Sticks and Stones

• Greg Mortenson on War and Peace interview by Tom Ashbrook, On Point, NPR
• Personal Take on Public Projects in Two Devastated Lands by Janet Maslin, New York Times
• Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Greg Mortenson

Greg Mortenson is not a man paying lipservice to the power of education. He is on the ground in dangerous parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan building schools. Tom Ashbrook interviews him and discusses his new book, Stones into Schools.

I have only just learned of Greg Mortenson and I am very interested in reading both of his books, Three Cups of Tea and his new one Stones into Schools. I like the summary of his work that I found in the New York Times review:

His great conviction, expressed to irresistibly inspiring effect in both books, is that the right kind of educational effort can bridge enormous gaps. Although he reiterates this point without describing exactly what the children in Central Asia Institute schools are taught, he is convinced that encouraging literacy is a way to promote trust and understanding.
–Janet Maslin

Right now, until I get into classrooms, I know that I believe in the power of education in an abstract way. I like to think that reading Mike Rose’s book Why School? and Jonathan Kozol’s books such as Letters to a Young Teacher bring me closer to that reality. Now, I’d like to see Greg Mortenson’s reality.

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“Innovative” Education

• In Search of Education Leaders by Bob Herbert, The New York Times

The title of Bob Herbert’s article, “In Search of Education Leaders” intrigued me. But the actual content of the article disappointed me.

Because Americans are falling behind in global standardized test scores, Harvard has decided to innovate in the field of education. For the first time in 75 years, Harvard University is going to offer a new degree: the Education Leadership Doctorate, or Ed.L.D. The stated hope is that students come out of this program ready to reform and reinvigorate the school systems.

Perhaps I am thoroughly jaded, but this sounds like a program that will churn out education consultants. The economic crisis happened because a large number of consultants were designing new financial instruments for the sake of being innovative. I am afraid that we are looking at a crisis in education.

The reform that we need is simple. We need to have small classrooms staffed by competent professionals. We need stable homes for students so that they have a place to study and work.

Simple is never easy.

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What is that beautiful building?

• Refined times by Alex Beam, The Boston Globe
• Boston Athenaeum: Bullish on the bookish, Editorials, Boston Globe
• Old Boston, new ways by Sarah Schweitzer, The Boston Globe

Since the middle of November, I’ve seen several stories about the Boston Athenaeum. I had not previously known that Boston had a somewhat secretive, private library in the heart of Beacon Hill. I imagine that I walked past it, not knowing what it was, when walking around Beacon Hill this summer at Community Boating.

The place sounds amazing. Yet another cultural institution that I want to join. Though, I think if I joined the Athenaeum, I might never be seen again. Heard from, yes, because they have WiFi, but only because of that.

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I had not realized just how many things come through my newsfeeds in the course of a few weeks. On returning to my newsfeeds after ignoring them to work on my application essays for the Boston Teacher Residency, I had over 1,000 items to review.

Even after clearing out almost all items prior to November 27th — a few of the headlines caught my eye and seemed worth reading — I still had in excess of 400 items to review. So, here are some of my favorites from that review.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Progress is so Retro
• Observation
• Chit-Chat
• Well, you could always teach
• Cheating School? The Pressure to Perform

Progress is so Retro

• The ancient ingenuity of water harvesting by Anupam Mishra, TED Lectures
• Demonstration of the 13th-century astrolabe by Tom Wujec, TED Lectures

Not everything that we create today is better than what has been created in the past. Here in Massachusetts, there is an ongoing debate about the Cape Wind Project which aims to build wind turbines — which are windmills, sophisticated windmills but windmills just the same — in Nantucket Sound. And whenever I hear that debate, I wonder how many modern problems we could solve by looking back at the past.

These two TED Lectures, while not specifically addressing that, are variations on that theme.

The ancient water harvesting projects technology of India’s Golden Desert “are often superior to modern water megaprojects.” Anupam Mishra works to preserve these water harvesting techniques.

In Tom Wujec’s talk on the astrolabe, he asks, “What have we lost with more advanced technologies?” Using the astrolabe to tell time, one knew the time but would also know when the sun was going to rise and when it would set, and would know that for all the heavenly bodies on that particular astrolabe.

What other problems could be solved by returning to the knowledge of our fathers and forefathers? New does not always mean better. The strategies for living described by Seneca make more sense to me and give me more for which to strive than anything I have learned in my psychology courses.

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Observation

• An informal lesson by Michael Doyle, Science Teacher

The first step of the scientific method is observation. The first step of being a novelist or a poet is also observation. Though I know many people who would disagree with me, I like to pretend that being a writer is being a scientist of the human condition. But to understand the human condition, you need to understand the universe. Dante references stars and constellation and their movement through the sky in The Divine Comedy.

What is time? Is it simply a number on a dial or in a liquid-crystal display? Or is the whole placement of stars and planets in the universe? Does our sense of time change from looking at the stars? These are the questions I had while reading Doyle’s post, “An informal lesson.

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Chit-Chat

• Eight Tips for Knowing if You’re Being Boring by Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
• Make Sure the “Fun” is Fun for YOU by Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
• Let the small talk begin by Beth Teitell, The Boston Globe

When people ask me what I studied at college, I joke, “Literature and art history, with a minor in philosophy. I’m economically useless but great at a party!” With so much exposure to culture and ideas, you would think I would always have something to chat about.

Reading my blog, would you be able to guess that I hate small talk? My job requires me to make small talk to make a customer feel more at home or while doing routine maintenance on a customer’s account. I attend dances weekly and need to chat with the other dancers. And I strike up conversations with people on the street when I’m walking around Boston.

I don’t think I am very good at it. Which may be why I don’t like it. But with the holiday season in full swing and frequent holiday parties, it is a good skill to practice. And with the importance of social networks for getting jobs and for advancement, it becomes all the more important. Just because I’m passionate about books and paintings and sculptures doesn’t mean that other people are. To make successful small talk, I’m going to have to dabble a bit in everything. Perhaps one of my resolutions will to become more at ease with small talk and trying not to be boring.

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Well, you could always teach

• Teacher shortage gives way to teacher glut by Heather Hollingsworth, Associated Press, as seen on boston.com

I want nothing more than to be a high school English teacher in Boston. I want to share my passion for books and ideas with kids just as they become young adults. I want to help them find meaning in a chaotic world and mold who they become based on the literature they choose as their own.

But that seems like a daunting task. From what I’ve heard, there are more English teachers than open positions. The Boston Teacher Residency, a great internship-like program from people who want to enter the teaching field, had 600 applicants in 2008 for 75 spots. Of those 75 spots, only 5 to 10 of them were for English teachers.

The fact is that we need more teachers, even as we face declining state budgets. Teachers have too many students in their classrooms to effectively teach them all. If we want to remain competitive in this new century, we need to fully fund education and pay educators attractive salaries.

In my ideal world, teaching would not be viewed as a fall back career. Teaching would be viewed with equal respect as law and medicine, pay as well, and be as difficult to enter.

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Cheating School? The Pressure to Perform

• Mass. investigating a charter school by James Vaznis, The Boston Globe

I dislike many things about charter schools, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), high-stakes testing and our implementation the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), and the Race to the Top. I think all of these programs have a negative impact on public schools and on learning. And when all of the above are acting in concert, we multiply the problems without creating any solutions.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is investigating a charter school in Springfield, MA, for alleged misconduct in administering the MCAS. The school ran the risk of being closed if the students at the school did not improve their MCAS scores. I am afraid that in the era of high-stakes testing, this is only the first of these stories to break and that many other schools, both public and charter, may be manipulating testing to keep their doors open.

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I have implemented the first stage of my strategy, using a feed reader to manage my feeds. Consolidating all of the different streams of information down so that I just have to deal with the one website each day has been a blessing. I am still tinkering with this aspect of the strategy: I am thinking of moving to an offline feed reader because I’m not sure how long Reader saves all the posts I highlight with a star.

I failed this week to implement the second stage of my strategy, writing a little bit of the Weekly Review each day instead of all at once. There is always tomorrow to begin the Weekly Review: November 13th to November 19th!

Want to Learn Poetry from Matthew Koslowski?

I am developing a one session course to introduce adults to reading poetry for pleasure. The tentative title is, “Bawdy&Body: An Introduction to Poetry for Adults.” If you live in eastern Massachusetts, or around here, and would be interested in attending such a course, contact me.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Who is Allowed to Speak?
• Beaker Would Have Trouble in Danvers High School
• Karen Armstrong on the Core of Religion
• Zero Tolerance
• Biased by Design
• Sleep Your Way to Happiness

Who is Allowed to Speak?

• UMass-Amherst cancels talk by ex-radical leader by Abbie Ruzicka, The Boston Globe, via boston.com
• Canceled UMass talk teaches poor lesson by Arthur Dirks, Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe via boston.com
• Former radical to speak at UMass after all by Mark Pratt, the Associated Press, via boston.com
• Ex-radical denied travel OK to Mass. for speech by the Associated Press, via boston.com

One night I shared with my then-girlfriend Jessica a radical idea: I think that schools should be forums for people to express all their ideas, no matter how outlandish we might view them to be, in a context of discussion and debate. To goad her a little bit, I said that I think it entirely reasonable to have a Knight of the Ku Klux Klan address a classroom one day and a member of the Black Panthers to address it another.

She asked me if I would let a jihadist radical address students. When I said yes, she asked me curtly, “Would you allow him to speak before or after you searched him for hidden bombs and weapons?”

I believe in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Ray Luc Levasseur, founder and former leader the United Freedom Front, was invited to speak at a forum at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system. I did not hear about his invitation until it had been withdrawn amid a great deal of controversy in the Boston Globe. The forum was arranged by the UMass Libraries to openly discuss terrorism.

Mr. Levasseur was involved in criminal activities that did involve bombings. Yes, people died because of his activities. But I think that by villifying Mr. Levasseur and refusing to discuss with him his aims, his purposes, and his thinking we have lost an opportunity. What would Mr. Levasseur say of his activities? I wonder.

The head of the Special Collections and University Archives, Robert Cox, reflected on the hubbub in a Boston Globe article:

“The UMass Libraries developed this forum as an opportunity to focus on terrorism, one of the most difficult social issues confronting the country,” Cox said. “However, it is now clear that, given the strong reaction generated by this event, we can no longer achieve the kind of meaningful exchange intended.”

I can understand the fear and the hesitation to let someone speak. But I think that if the United States of America wants to stay true to its core principals, no matter how flawed our implementations of the same have been throughout our history, we need to allow people forums to speak.

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Beaker Would Have Trouble in Danvers High School

• Mass. school principal bans ‘Meep!’ by the Associated Press, via boston.com

A principal in Danvers, Massachusetts, a suburban town about 25 miles north of Boston, has banned students from saying, “Meep!” No, this is not a joke.

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Karen Armstrong on the Core of Religion

• The Freelance Monotheism of Karen Armstrong on Speaking of Faith
• Karen Armstrong | Profile on TED.com
• Karen Armstrong Wins the 2008 TED Prize
• The Charter for Compassion, the foundation started by Karen Armstrong after winning the 2008 TED Prize

Human beings can make a religion out of anything. By that I mean, adherants to any group — be it a band, an author, or a sports team — can become devotees and fanatics. In narrowing our focus down to the Truth of That Thing, we begin to create walls between us that are artificial.

Ask anyone wearing a Boston Red Sox cap walking down the streets of Boston how they feel about the Yankees, and you’ll hear, “Yankees Suck!” This has become ritualized. This response is as much an expression of devotion as the call and responses in a Catholic Mass.

Karen Armstrong, in her TED Lecture “Let’s Revive the Golden Rule” below, reminds us that religion at its heart is all about compassion. “Compassion” from the Latin “x” — meaning, “a” — and “y” — meaning, “b” — yielding “to feel together” or more starkly — and I think more meaningfully — “to suffer together.”

If we are not using our religion to strive for compassion, to strive for sympathy with our fellow human beings, we have forgotten a fundamental tenet of what it means to be human.

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Zero Tolerance

• The Trouble With ‘Zero Tolerance’, Editorial, The New York Times, via nytimes.com
• 25 Chicago Students Arrested for a Middle-School Food Fight by Susan Saulny, The New York Times via nytimes.com

There is a place for a Zero Tolerance Policy. A child bringing a gun to school should result in that child being expelled. But that child should also receive counseling to help the child become a healthy and productive adult.

But to criminalize behavior such as food fights in middle schools? That is taking the Zero Tolerance Policy too far. In a Chicago middle school, 25 students between the ages of 11 and 15 were arrested for participating in a food fight.

Not suspended. Arrested. Put in handcuffs, put in a police wagon, and forced to sit in jail for up to eight hours.

The New York Times editorial cited above says that some places have extended the Zero Tolerance Policy to include swearing or talking back to adults. Imagine: children sent to the juvenile justice system for swearing. How afraid have we become of our own children that we’re ready to arrest them for participating in childish behavior? What is a child going to learn for being arrested for swearing? Not that swearing is wrong, but that the system is corrupt.

I am thankful to see that some school districts are coming to their senses. The school system of Clayton County, Georgia, has developed a three-strike system. Although I doubt the wisdom of a three-strike system, it is certainly better than a one-strike system. But allowing the juvenile justice system to focus on high-risk children who need attention and counseling is a drastic improvement.

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Biased by Design

• An Unexplored Area of Bias by John Spencer, Musings of a Not-So-Master Teacher

John Spencer came up with an interesting experiment. He developed authoritative content and fictional content. He presented the content to two different classes in two different versions.

To the first class he presented the fictional content in slick, professional web design. Then he presented the authoritative content in ugly, amateurish design.

To the second class he presented the authoritative content in the professional web design. Then he presented the fictional content in the amateurish design.

He then asked the students which information was true and which was false. Which do you think they chose? Do you think it varied between classes? Read his blog post to to learn what he found out.

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Sleep Your Way to Happiness

• A Fundamental Secret to Happiness? Get Enough Sleep by Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project Blog

After the last two Weekly Reviews, where I said in both introductions that I’ve not been sleeping well, I saw this post on The Happiness Project Blog. Although the Ms. Rubin talks a lot about the virtues of sleep, I was heartened to read that she doesn’t like to sleep either:

“It’s strange that turning off the light is so hard. You’d think, ‘What could take less effort than going to sleep?’ and yet I find that it sometimes takes a lot of effort to put myself to bed, even when I’m actually feeling sleepy. It’s just so much fun to stay up — or sometimes I feel too tired to take out my contacts.”
–Gretchen Rubin

As long as I don’t miss work, I can keep burning the candle at both ends, right? Right?

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The Weekly Reviews are a lot of fun to write. I enjoy scouring the web for interesting articles and blog posts. But, all the same, the project had begun to become a unmanageable. There are so many websites and blogs to check out everyday. I had been afraid that I was going to miss something.

What I repeatedly missed was my own deadline. You may have noticed that the past two weeks I had postponed my Weekly Review until Saturday.

I have been working hard but I haven’t been working very smart. Then I remembered a quote from one of my favorite writers:

Novels are written in the same way that farms are made productive, or houses are kept clean, or baseball penant races are won: with steady work each day.
–Andre Dubus

Substitute “Weekly Reviews” for “Novels” and you get the same concept. Rather than gathering up work throughout the week and then trying to throw something together slapdash on Thursday night, starting this week I will be working on the Weekly Review throughout the week.

Thursday afternoon I spent some time setting up a feed reader through Google. Though I’m not quite sure how I feel about it yet — unlike Gmail, the posts disappear after you’ve read them unless you ask them to stay — but I am glad to consolidate many of my different websites into one place.

In addition to that, I’ve also setup Literature&Literacy on Feedburner.com. You can now subscribe to Literature&Literacy through an RSS Reader or through email.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Fixing Education
• Fighting What You Believe
• Failings
• The Humbling of Philip Roth

Fixing Education

• Teach Your Teachers Well by Susan Engel, Op-Ed, The New York Times via nytimes.com
• Grade the Teachers by Michael Jonas, The Sunday Boston Globe via boston.com
• Teacher Training Termed Mediocre by Jennifer Medina, The New York Times via nytimes.com
• How to Improve American Education by Charles Wheelan, Ph.D., The Naked Economist, Yahoo! Finance
• Subversive Elevator Music by John Spencer, Musing of a Not-So-Master Teacher
• Former NBA Coach Switches Gears At Charter School by Mike Pesca, All Things Considered, NPR via npr.org

There has been a lot about this since Arne Duncan came out and said that he wants to improve teacher training programs. Newly minted teachers come out of these programs and feel overwhelmed by having to manage a classroom.

Most actual training for particular jobs happens on the job. I have read that it takes a year to just begin to feel comfortable at your job. When I first began my job at the bank, I remember feeling overwhelmed. I know that many of my other friends felt the same.

It is quite easy to take potshots at educators:

• They work in a rarefied realm where they are not held accountable for their results.
• They don’t work very hard because they cannot be fired.
• They work only half a year! Every time you turn around they have another vacation! They get summers off!

People pay lip service to the idea that educators play a vital role in our nation. But I do not believe they actually believe that. Teachers are paid very poorly for the work that they do, especially as class sizes grow and resources are reduced. If people truly believed that teachers and educators were vital to our economy, they would pay teachers more.

There is no end to commentators and news writers who are willing to offer advice on how to improve our education system. Everyone has an opinion on this matter.

One idea that is being passed around is the idea of merit pay for teachers. I believe in what Alfie Kohn writes in Punished By Rewards that you can get diminishing results when you attempt to tie rewards to performance. And there are economists and business theorists who believe that as well. I remember seeing articles arguing that Golden Parachutes are necessary because CEOs who are not allowed to pursue ideas that may fail will not innovate and will not advance the economy.

I also fear that you will get unethical behavior. I have met salesmen and saleswomen who will do whatever they can to get a sale, tell customers whatever they want to hear. Do we want teachers and principals who are fighting to get rewards rather than educate our children?

We need to go back to basics. We need to have a national conversation about the why of school, its purpose.

If we decide public education is vital to the lives of our children and our success as a nation, we need to align our teachers paychecks with that belief. People choose careers in college based in part on what they expect to get paid after leaving school. There are some people who want to be teachers and would be excellent educators, but instead become engineers or computer scientists for fear that they will be unable to support their future families on a teacher’s salary.

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Fighting What You Believe

• Knocking Out the Beliefs That Hold You Back by April Dykman, Get Rich Slowly

Get Rich Slowly was one of the very first blogs that I started reading. Practical, down to earth financial advice for people who understand that there is more to life than earning money.

Much like Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Get Rich Slowly has a broad definition of rich. Rather than limiting richness to wealth, these blogs talk about living a rich life.

Granted they take it as a starting point that you cannot live richly if you are living in debt with no financial plans.

April Dykman is a new staff writer at Get Rich Slowly. And she never thought she would be able to make a living as a freelance writer. She had had this belief before she entered college. One of her professors reinforced that belief.

And for years she clung to that belief.

That belief became part of her personal narrative. Each of us keeps this personal narrative of who we are and what we can and cannot do. Many of these beliefs are locked away in our minds, invisible chains that restrict our realities.

Read through April’s article and ask yourself, what narratives are you carrying with you that are holding you back?

Top of Page | These Things Caught My Eye

Failings

• Analysis: College students need lessons in failure by Justin Pope, Associated Press via boston.com
• What If We’re Afraid of the Wrong Things? by John Spencer, Musings of a Not-So-Master Teacher

I found a fortune cookie fortune in the pocket of a pair of trousers the other day as I was cleaning:

The two hardest things to handle in life are failure and success.

And then I saw this article through boston.com. I think that it is timely, especially with all the talk of fixing education swirling around. But I also thought this so important that it deserved its own discussion.

I fear that my generation has been too mollycoddled. We grew up during the age of self-esteem and the idea that hurt feelings were too much to bear. Self-esteem means nothing. Self-respect means everything and the only way to gain self-respect is to earn it.

Throughout my life I have been told that I am a gifted mind, that I can do whatever I set my mind to, and a lot of other things that I believe are platitudes. These were fed to me to encourage me. I don’t know whether they served their purpose.

When I was in college, I shared some of my poems with a professor I admired. He thought my works were utter drivel and told me so. Afterward I discussed the conversation with my adviser, thinking he would keep the conversation to himself, and let vent to my feelings.

I had been hurt and because I was not used to being told that I couldn’t do something. I gave up. My adviser tried to encourage me to think of this time as an apprenticeship.

But I had never been given the tools to handle failure.

So rather than think of this failure as a temporary setback, as an assessment of where I was on that day, I became a failed poet. There is a world of difference between being a beginner with a handful of failed poems and being a failed poet.

And perhaps if I had had experiences with failing prior to that, I would have been able to see the difference. Perhaps I could have picked myself up and begun to work again.

Top of Page | These Things Caught My Eye

The Humbling of Philip Roth

• Darkness visible by Richard Eder, The Boston Globe via boston.com
• Roth on Roth by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal via online.wsj.com

As with John Irving, I am not familiar with the work of Philip Roth. And, again as with John Irving, after reading these two book reviews though I want to read Philip Roth as well.

The Humbling follows a down and out actor. The theme is the end of inspiration and the end of creativity. I don’t know Richard Eder’s taste in books but I can tell that The Humbling is not his cup of tea.

A great actor is suddenly unable to act; the misery and the humiliations to which this leads bring him to the verge of suicide. It is not the business of a review to be telling what happens. It is telling, though, that the reader rather wants him to go ahead with it.
–Richard Eder on The Humbling

Yet even that dismissive review entices me on. Philip Roth is considered one of our times’ greatest writers. I want to read the book for myself and see if I can detect Roth trying to convey the struggles of creativity after a life time.

Running a blog is a job in and of itself. Since starting this blog, my respect for journalists has grown because I have learned how much time it takes to craft a single post.

My essays are pure opinion pieces. I read a book, a poem, an essay, or a news article. Then I think about what I’ve read and then look at my world and see if its relevant, judge if I think others might enjoy reading about my interaction with that work.

And it takes me between two and four hours to write these essays.

Yet I’m hooked. I love writing here because I feel more alive because I am again engaging the world in ways that I haven’t since college. Each essays calls upon me to look at my world and analyze it and reflect upon it.

This is another great gift of literature.

And, yes, I call even bad newspaper essays literature.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Finger, Painting
• Do You Want Factory-Farmed Children?
• When the High Jump Becomes a Pole Vault
• Mommy, Am I Responsible Yet?
• Judging Motives to Evaluate Blame

Finger, Painting

• Art experts find possible new Leonardo drawing, Rob Gillies, boston.com
• Painting Could Be Previously Unknown da Vinci Work, All Things Considered, NPR.
• Fingerprint May Reveal the Handiwork of Leonardo Da Vinci by Dave Itzkoff, Arts Beat, The New York Times.

Known by many names this portrait of a woman in profile may be a Leonardo da Vinci. (Photocredit: Wikimedia Commons)

A painting previously thought to be a 19th-century German work may be an unknown Leonardo da Vinci work.

Da Vinci was said to use his hands and fingers to spread paint on his works. The experts who have examined the work found what seems to be a fingerprint and palm print on the work. Using sophisticated imaging techniques, they have isolated the supposed fingerprint.

It matches known fingerprints of Leonardo da Vinci in 8 points, a respectable match. According to art collector Peter Silverman, the man who first bought the painting for $19,000, a match of 11 points is enough to convict someone.

I have my doubts about this painting. Although I’ve not made an exhaustive study of Leonardo’s catalogue, the supposed work is not in the style that made him famous. A quick Google search turned up only one drawing of a woman in profile. His other portraits of women tend to be show the women in three-dimensions instead of two. Consider Lady with an Ermine and Mona Lisa.

Fun fact about this style of painting. In the Italian nobility, this style of painting was passed from household to household as a sort of primitive dating service. Eligible males would be shown the painting and, if they were interested, would arrange to meet the woman pictured.

Do You Want Factory-Farmed Children?

• Teaching, Farming, and the American Way by Michael Doyle, Science Teacher

It would be, I think, a good deal more accurate to call it an art, for it grows not only out of factual knowledge, but out of cultural tradition; it is learned not only by precept but by example, by apprenticeship; and it requires not merely a competent knowledge of its facts and processes, but also a complex set of attitudes, a certain culturally evolved stance, in the face of the unexpected and the unknown. That is to say, it requires style in the highest and richest sense of that term.
–From “Discipline and Hope” by Wendell Berry

Where do you think the above quote came from? A book about education? This is an blog about education, after all, isn’t it? The quote comes from a book on essays about agriculture and culture.

From the beginning of that quotation, I deleted an important sentence: “The fact is that farming is not a laboratory science, but a science of practice.” What Berry writes is applicable to a wide range of fields. Teaching, counseling, and selling all first come to mind.

I found this quote at a blog I’ve discovered in the past week Science Teacher by Michael Doyle. He uses that quote in arguing that just as we have lost something by handing over our farms to large corporations — so-called “factory farms” — we risk losing something in handing our education over to what may become “factory schools.”

His philosophy of teaching messes well with my own as well as the philosophies of Jonathan Kozol and Mike Rose. He reminds us of the purpose of education, writing “Historically, public education’s priority has been to create a functioning citizenry; the current trend is to produce careerists. The two have critical, but subtle, distinctions. A citizenry that cannot grasp subtle but critical distinctions will ultimately fail as a republic.”

I look forward to exploring more of what he has to say.

When the High Jump Becomes a Pole Vault

• Raising the Bar for Public Education by Signe Wilkinson

I appreciate the editorial cartoons that I’ve seen from Signe Wilkinson. After some investigation, I learned that reprinting her comics here may be an infringement of copyright and will post links to her comics from now on.

Mommy, am I Responsible Yet?

• When Does Responsibility Begin? by Neal Conan, Talk of the Nation, NPR
• What is the Age of Responsibility? by Aaron Greenblatt, Governing Magazine

A lot of our rules on when people are responsible enough to assume tasks are arbitrary: 16 for most to get a driver’s license; 18 to vote, enter into contracts and join the military; 21 to drink alcohol; and 25 to rent a car from most car rental places. Many of these rules came about in a hodgepodge manner.

I know in Massachusetts in general and Boston in particular, with our large student populations, there have been some concerns about the drinking age. The drinking age is 21 because the Federal Government mandates that the drinking age in order for states to receive federal monies for highways. Some groups such as the Amethyst Initiative argue that the high drinking age just promotes binge drinking. Others quote statistics that show once the drinking age was increased incidence of fatal car accidents fell.

Can we judge responsibility for these tasks in an age-based manner? I don’t know that we can, but I don’t know how we could do it any differently. License people to drink alcohol? That would have people up in arms and would not solve any problems. We can get into circular arguments about American versus European attitudes towards responsibility and drinking.

According to neuroscience and cognitive science, the prefrontal cortex — that part of the brain that regulates decision making and self-control — continues to develop until around the age of 30. Should we prohibit the entering into contracts prior 30? Should we prohibit marriage until 30 so that executive function can fully grow and mature? Abuse of drugs including alcohol can inhibit the full maturation of the brain, how do we consider that?

Judging Motives to Evaluate Blame

• How we read each other’s minds by Rebecca Saxe, TED

I love TED Lectures.

I have watched a handful of them and most of them have been fascinating and engaging. The title of this one, however, is inaccurate. The webpage file name is more accurate (”rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html”).

There seems to be a specialized area in the human brain dedicated to the interpretation of people’s motives and assessment of moral responsibility. When we listen to stories of actions, we consider if what the person was thinking and intending when assigning blame.

Rebecca Saxe designed an experiment. She told a story of a woman called Grace who was making coffee for her friend and sweetened it with a white powder. There were three versions of the story:

• In one version of the story, the box was labeled poison, Grace believed it was poison but put it in her friend’s coffee anyway;
• in the second version, the box was labeled poison, Grace believed it was sugar but it turned out to be poison;
• and the final version the box was labeled sugar but turned out to be poison.

Rebecca and her team measured brain activity in this region and saw that the amount of activity corresponded with how much blame the test subjects though Grace deserved in each case.

But what if they used magnetic interference to affect the functioning of that part of the brain? They did that. Watch the presentation to find out if it made a difference.

Exploring back archives of interesting blogs is a wonderful idea. I came across a number of great essays on The Word Blog on boston.com. Anyone have any suggestions of good blogs about language, literature, or education? I am going to need to setup an RSS Reader…

Otherwise, it seemed like a slow week for news that interested me that had deep coverage. Some of the stories were too short, leaving me wondering for more. As we roll back our print media, we lose the ability to cover depth of different topics. Many things tantalized me. But the stories I found really fulfilling was one about imaginative play and its positive effects on early childhood behavior and education.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Getting Her Message Across
• If Imagination Be the Food of Learning, Play On
• Chartering a Course
• Can Grammar Make Us Better People?
• Self-Assessment
• What Are You Doing Wrong?
• 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner
• Stopping by the Wal-Mart on a Snowy Evening

Getting Her Message Across

• “Her message finally got across” by Sarah Schweitzer, The Boston Globe

How many of us, in a romantic flight of fancy, have imagined throwing a bottle into the sea and having someone receive it?

One woman from Illinois and her boyfriend made throwing bottles in the sea an annual ritual on her birthday. After having a champagne picnic on the beach of Thatcher Island, she would throw the bottle into the sea. She was smart to use a champagne bottle — they are thicker than regular wine bottles because the built up carbon dioxide could not be contained otherwise — and are strong enough to survive a 3,200 mile trip. The story is bittersweet. And well worth the read.

If Imagination Be the Food of Learning, Play On

• “Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?” by Paul Tough, The New York Times Magazine
• “How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect” by Benedict Carey, The Boston Globe
• “Schools Adopt Art as Building Block of Education” by Winnie Hu, The New York Times

I just wrote about the spirit of playfulness and how it increases my own sense of vitality. Then I read an article in the New York Times Magazine about how group-based imaginative play, that is to say play in which a group of children gather and adopt roles, improves a child’s ability to perform tasks. Your child can’t stand still? Tell him to imagine that he’s a soldier guarding the house and is stationed where you want him to stand and he will be more successful.

We often imagine play to be hedonistic or an abandonment of responsibility: think of going on a vacation and you conjure images of getting away and forgetting our day to day lives. But play does not need to be this. Practicing the piano is a form of play if you enjoy playing the piano but it’s not hedonistic. Reading literature is a form of play but, with any luck, you learn something about yourself or your world and can as a result be more responsible.

You need to include reading things that are outside of your normal interests, works that are really challenging and include elements of the absurd if you want your reading to be playful. Although it can be disorienting, “a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.” Works that challenge you and works that include the absurd are stirring and stimulating. When you experience the absurd, it can make the rest of the world appear more sensible and, if this study is valid, actually makes you more perceptive of the world.

I hate extrapolating from studies of animals, but I remember wondering on a study of laboratory rats. They were split into three groups: rats prevented from playing, rats who could play but in a dull environment, and rats who could play in a stimulating environment. There were noticeable and statistically significant differences in the weight of the brains of the rats. The rats who could play in a stimulating environment had the heaviest brains.

Learning carries over from one subject to another. The more we know, the more connections we can make, the more we can think critically. Our ability to closely read a novel increases our ability to analyze a news report or a historical document. Learning to interpret and read a painting allows us to make a connections with literature and history, allows us to imagine a narrative. Some schools are now using art and architecture to fully engage their students. We remember things that delight us and fill us with wonder. Before now, were we limiting our students to playing in dull environments?

Chartering a Course

• “Study Shows Better Scores for Charter School Students” By Jennifer Medina, The New York Times
• “Charter school plans advance to next stage” by John Laidler, The Boston Globe
• “Boston public-school apartheid?” by Chris Faraone, The Boston Phoenix
• “Charter schools see more attrition” by James Vaznis, The Boston Globe

What is the purpose of public education? I believe that education is a civil right, equal to that of voting. Even more important that voting, actually. Somewhere along the way, however, education has become a commodity. Jonathan Kozol makes a passionate argument about this in one letter in Letters to a Young Teacher.

And charter schools may be limiting our ability to provide an egalitarian education. As I discussed in my post, Children Left Behind, the claims made by charter schools need to be viewed in a wide context when evaluated.

Faraone quotes the the Massachusetts Teacher Association study mentioned in Vaznis’s article:

“The number of seniors is routinely below 60 percent of the freshmen enrolled four years earlier. Looking at it another way, for every five freshmen enrolled in Boston’s charter high schools, there were only two seniors.”

I haven’t investigated this but when those schools cite their college acceptance rate, do they acknowledge how many students left the school? Faraone points out that at least two charter schools in Boston only enrolls students for ninth-grade. Students have only one opportunity to get into these schools but can leave and go back to the Boston Public Schools whenever they want. When we evaluate the successes of a charter school, do we factor their failures? How can we best do that?

Can Grammar Make Us Better People?

• “More books to give (or get)” by Jan Freeman, The Word Blog, boston.com

Jan Freeman published a column of books that explore the English language in the Boston Globe in November of 2008. She had more picks than she could fit into her column. One, in particular, caught my eye: Grammar for the Soul: Using Language for Personal Change by Lawrence A. Weinstein. I don’t know if proper punctuation and grammar can be employed for personal change, but the title and her little blurb about certainly made me think about seeking it out at my local library.

Self-Assessment

• “What if my greatest weakness is my greatest asset?” by John Spencer, Going Acoustic.

I stumbled across John Spencer’s blogs — he keeps a half dozen of them, I swear — through a link on TeacherLingo. He’s a teacher out in Arizona and I appreciate his perspective. I’m not sure he titled his post well, I’m not really sure he answers the question he poses. But it’s important to remember the power teachers have and the responsibility that comes with it.

What Are You Doing Wrong?

• Drive-By Education Experts, by Signe Wilkinson as seen on boston.com

I was wrong to reprint Signe Wilkinson’s editorial cartoon here on my blog. I have removed the cartoon. It may have been copyright infringement. If it was, it was made out of ignorance. If it was not, better safe than sorry. I have updated the link, however, since Ink Tank on boston.com seems to change the ID number of images.

2009 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner

• Germany’s Mueller Wins Literature Nobel by Lynn Neary and Renee Montagne, Morning Edition, NPR
• European Reaction to Nobel Is Varied and Sometimes Harsh By Nicholas Kulish
• Does Winning A Nobel Translate To More Book Sales? by Lynn Neary, Morning Edition, NPR

Herta Mueller, a Romanian-born German author, won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature today. I am not familiar with her work. Although she has written 20 novels, only 5 of them have been translated into English.

I was a little surprised at the lack of reporting of this in the Boston Globe and New York Times today. Though, granted, I’m not sure when the Swedish Academy contacts an author and when they hold their press conference and if there is time for the print papers to include stories that day.

And, yes, winning a Nobel Prize does boost book sales. I certainly want to know more about this year’s winner. Though, I’m predisposed: one of my goals is to read at least one work by every Nobel Laureate.

Stopping by the Wal-Mart on a Snowy Evening

• “N.H. looks to road not taken” by Sarah Schweitzer, The Boston Globe

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
–From “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

For a time, Robert Frost lived on a small farm in New Hampshire. His uncle, fearing that he would never be a man of any means, bought the farm for him. Now, the town that the farm resides in, fearing in this recession that it will be a town of no means, is looking to relax its zoning laws in such a way that the Frost Farm may be surrounded by commercial developments.

Although the town will try to keep the Frost Farm safe from too much encroaching, unless they specify that an area around the Frost Farm is a buffer zone, there is no way to protect the Farm. I hope they build a buffer zone because we need to be reminded of the important of hermitages and monasteries, of those special places that allow us to get away from commerce and business and be alone with ourselves, something increasingly more difficult in our always on, always connected culture.

Let Frost Farm be a reminder of a safe space to breathe.