Category Archives: teaching

Tinkering and Learning

Annie Murphy Paul has a short piece on her blog about “The Joy of Making Things,” and it argues for a more hands-on, experimental approach to learning than one typically finds in school:

Research in the science of learning shows that hands-on building projects help young people conceptualize ideas and understand issues in greater depth. In an experiment described in the International Journal of Engineering Education in 2009, for example, one group of eighth-graders was taught about water resources in the traditional way: classroom lectures, handouts and worksheets. Meanwhile, a group of their classmates explored the same subject by designing and constructing a water purification device. The students in the second group learned the material better: they knew more about the importance of clean drinking water and how it is produced, and they engaged in deeper and more complex thinking in response to open-ended questions on water resources and water quality.

I haven’t read the study being referenced here, but it sounds like the intervention employed a kind of inquiry-based, learning-through-design approach. I would add that one possible advantage to this method, aside from the question of which way helps students “learn the material better,” is the affective dimension: How do students feel about the subject? What attitudes toward water resource management (or science more generally) were formed as a result?

Some of my own work (such as this) suggests that approaching a subject from an attitude of play and experimentation can profoundly affect later perceptions of (and practices within) that subject. Unfortunately, school isn’t typically set up to allow students much room to experiment, especially in this age of increasingly high-stakes standardized testing.

Proposition 30 and California’s Future

Fellow Californians:

There’s a lot of money being spent to spread misinformation about Proposition 30. Please take the time to educate yourself about it before deciding how to vote. It boils down to a 0.25% increase in sales tax for four years and an income tax increase on people who make more than $250,000 a year (rich people, in other words).

What you won’t see in the voter information guide, though, is the human cost if we fail to pass this initiative. K-12 education will suffer the most, but a loss for Prop. 30 will also gut our already stressed higher ed. systems. Here’s how one writer over at the Huffington Post puts it:

If Prop 30 fails, both the University of California and California State University systems will get a $250 million cut. UC would likely increase tuition by a minimum of 20 percent to respond to the shortfall; CSU would likely raise tuition and admit 20,000 fewer students to respond to its own cut, according to reports. Community colleges would get another $338 million cut in the middle of the 2012-13 academic year, and faculty could expect more job losses and furloughs, not to mention a lack of a pay raise.

So, tuition will skyrocket, vital programs will be cut, and lots of teachers could lose their jobs. A college education will become an unattainable dream for many young Californians.

The thing is, we will all end up paying the costs for these people one way or another. Either we pass Prop. 30 and educate our kids to become productive members of our society, or we wait a few years and spend even *more* taxpayer money to care for (or incarcerate) those who fall through the ever-widening cracks.

I’ve said in the past that I’m not a big fan of California’s initiative system, but this one represents an important course correction. Our education system, from grade school through college, used to be the pride of the state, and California prospered because it understood the importance of investing in its own future. We’ve since lost our way, preferring to build prisons instead of human capital, but Prop. 30 would be an important move back in the right direction.

 

 

 

Video Clips from UC Davis Rally

Here are a couple of important moments from today’s Occupy UC Davis rally. The first is Nathan Brown, UC Davis English professor and author of this early response to the pepper-spraying incident:

The second is Chancellor Katehi’s eagerly awaited public response to what happened:

Nope, there’s nothing wrong with your Youtube connection; that’s all she said. I can’t speak for other people in the crowd, but I was hoping for something more than a weak apology and a vague promise to work at making things “better.” If there was a moment for her to try to restore confidence in her administration of the campus, and to avoid having to resign, that was it. And she blew it.

On “Shit My Students Write”

Apparently, it’s been around since last November, but I just learned about a site called “Shit My Students Write.” It’s a Tumblr site that posts bits of less-than-stellar student writing, ostensibly as “evidence of the true cost of educational funding cuts.” I have chosen not to include examples of these posts, for reasons that I hope will become clear, but you may want to take a moment to visit the site and get a sense of what’s there.

Back? Of course, there’s nothing especially new about this activity, except maybe the use of social media to accomplish it. Teachers have been mocking the efforts of their students since time immemorial. I taught at one university in which some instructors put up a “wall of shame” in the teachers’ staff room, and they posted whole student essays that were, for whatever reason, deemed risible. The department believed this was in bad taste, and had it removed.

I understand why teachers do this. I’ve stared down enough stacks of papers in my time to know how potentially crazy-making it is to grade student writing. You get tired. You get punchy. And then you run across some absurd gem a student has written that forces you either to laugh or cry. At that moment of choice between derision and despair, it’s probably better to laugh at it.

But there’s a difference between laughing to oneself and posting student writing in a public forum for everyone else to see. It’s a bit like getting drunk and posting a bunch of stuff to your Facebook page that, in the cold light of day, shouldn’t really seem all that funny. Or rather, in the case of “Shit My Students Write,” it isn’t funny enough to override the potential danger that a student might find their own writing posted there. Maybe some of them wouldn’t care, but then maybe some of them would.

How would that feel, to find out a teacher of yours has publicly posted something you wrote for the express purpose of mocking you? It’s as if Henry Higgins, not content with stuffing Eliza’s mouth full of marbles and making her “enunciate,” also paraded her through the streets of London and invited passersby to poke fun at her. I don’t think Pickering would have stood for it.

My Fair Lady is an apt analogy for another reason, and that’s the fact that sometimes student writing sucks (to the point of seeming funny) precisely because teachers are asking them to do something new and difficult. Some of the examples on “Shit My Students Write” are surely the result of intense ignorance or laziness, but others may very well be the result of an honest attempt to complete a difficult (or vague) assignment. Students are made vulnerable when we ask them to write, precisely because the gap between where they are and where we want them to be is so very obvious. It takes a certain amount of trust in the teacher, whether warranted or not, for them to turn in anything at all.

Do I think teachers who post (bad) student writing in public forums are monsters? Of course not. But I do think that fewer teachers would do it if they spent more time considering the implications of that act.