The Great Debate: Is there a God?

Tonight, our high school's spiritual life department hosted its annual debate: "Is there a God?" This is at least the third or fourth year now that they've had this debate, though I still haven't been able to attend and see what all the fuss was about. I like to imagine that one of our handful of Hindu students might be sitting there wondering "How about the debate 'are there gods?'" but that's really a digression on my part.

I just like the fact that our spiritual life department--which, after all, is made up of protestant and Catholic ministers--is committed to this event, to raising the question. The debate participants are all teachers, so there's a sense in which no matter what the actual content of the debate is, one of the messages is that there are intelligent, thoughtful, nice people on both sides of the issue--or perhaps I should say all sides because I gather at least one person on the panel answered the question as basically a believing agnostic or a deist. And a related implicit message is that it's possible to disagree about something that's fundamental to one's outlook and to still be civil and even friendly.

Now, that said, I heard some of my students talking about the debate--which, I would reiterate, I have never been able to attend--and one of them was particularly vehement about his dissatisfaction with the debate. As he said, there's nothing new, both sides just made the same arguments they always make. As I probed a bit more, there seemed to be a strong sense in what he was saying that there wasn't a lot of engagement between the two sides. One of the science teachers basically said that the scientific evidence is against God, or makes God an unnecessary hypothesis, or whatever he actually said, and the pro-God response was basically you can't prove God doesn't exist and I feel God's presence. Again, I'm paraphrasing from a 17-year-old's not-totally-coherent account of this debate. So any commentary I'm about to make--and I'm about to make some--is poorly informed. There's a good argument here for avoiding speculation until I have more information, but to meet my Holidailies obligation, I need to get something out and I've already got this much written, so....

My suspicion here is that one of the very strengths I cited earlier--the civil nature of the debate--also defangs both sides to some extent and makes for a less interesting, less convincing debate. You can argue in fairly abstract, non-confrontational terms, but when it comes down to it, the more compelling arguments are also significantly more threatening, in the sense of calling strongly into question a person's deep-held beliefs (and, for that matter, those of the student's parent, you might not appreciate a teacher precipitating a crisis of faith for their son/daughter). Also, if participants were to argue in the strongest terms, students might feel as though a teacher who is arguing the other side from what they believe is unsympathetic or even hostile to them and not just to their belief system. So I suspect it's a challenging line to walk for the participants, to make a case, but to do it in a way that tends more toward interesting than to threatening or uncomfortable.


For my part, I've always had considerable tolerance for strong argument on both sides of this subject, because I've always felt that truth was important. Weird, I know. Hearing the best arguments, the strongest arguments of people on the other side of the issue from me always seemed like an important exercise, because either result seemed positive: either I would be convinced and change my mind, presumably moving closer to the truth--whatever that is--than I was before, or else I would feel that I had refuted the opposing arguments and thus had even better reason than before to believe what I already believed. Of course, this places a lot of trust in my own judgment. The alternative--turning over responsibility for one's beliefs to someone else--seems very problematic to me (even though I could argue in the abstract that it's possible that one could be better off relying on the judgment of someone else). But I have a hard time really believing that argument.

All right, this entry has been a bit scattered and it's not really ending with much of a bang or with a bow on top, but there it is. I welcome your thoughts on any of the matters raised.

Sunday Dispatches

If you’ve been paying attention to this blog since the end of Holidailies, then you know that there hasn’t been anything to pay attention to. This isn’t so much because Holidailies ended as it is because the winter break ended. Yow. 

The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas seemed like they were about as busy as could be, but this first week back has done everything it could to give those weeks a run for their money. Over the course of this week, we’ve had to sort out our seniors into positions for the “second make” (we’re a military school, and at intervals throughout the year, our cadets are eligible for new positions and new rank). Our seniors have two makes, which means they interview for and are promoted to a position at the end of their junior years and then again halfway through (their rank can change at other intervals, but they don’t usually change positions). As a side note, the sophomores and juniors have three makes. This has to be one of my least favorite times of the year. You see, I like my boys. Some of them do a great job in the military system, some of the struggle, but I really do like them all and appreciate them for who they are. But right now, although I’m by no means solely responsible for the promotions for my unit, I am the face of promotions, and since there are so many leadership positions available, and since this is in a real way the “last chance” for these seniors (sort of—they can still be raised to higher rank, even though their positions won’t change again), we’re bound to have disappointed guys. Sometimes it’s a matter of a guy underperforming in his job and so not getting the next position he wants, but at least as often it’s a case of some other kid doing a great job and elbowing him out or having to make difficult decisions between guys who have similar credentials. We agonize over these decisions, but we’re still going to have guys who are disappointed and we may very well look back in a few months and discover that we “made mistakes.” I put that in quotation marks because I’m not comfortable with the terminology, because it seems to imply that we “should have” known better, but the reality is that we try to make the best decisions we can, and for one reason or another, those decisions may not work out. 

Did I mention that this is not my favorite time of the year?

And then, so that our New Cadets don't feel left out, the end of this week marked our invitations to "First Boards." The Boards process is the process through which New Cadets become full members of the unit, by passing some tests, following the rules, etc. We have several invitations to Boards throughout the spring, but of course there's a certain prestige to being chosen for First Boards. In the long run, it's not that big of a deal, but right now it probably feels huge to the guys who are invited... and for some of them who aren't. 

That's right: we find all sorts of ways to disappoint kids around here!

On top of all that, for myself I have to prepare and submit my “Annual Performance Review” self-reflection, documenting what I’ve been up to for the past year. At the same time, we’re coming to the end of the semester, so we’re trying to push all of our cadets to finish the semester strong, getting in any missing work, preparing to the best of their ability, and all that. Plus all the usual day-to-day stuff. 

Not surprisingly, blogging has had to take a back seat to work and home life, especially given that the home internet service which was supposed to start working for us last Tuesday has not, in fact, started working. We didn’t even have time or energy on Wednesday to look into it, and when we did on Thursday, we were told that someone was supposed to call us about it. Sorry about that! Turns out there’s something wrong with our lines (our money is on the DirecTV guy hitting the phone cable when installing his own) and they’ll have to send someone out to take a look at it. That should happen by the end of this week. Ugh. 

So yeah, no way blogging was happening for me. 

We had an up and down Sunday. The weekend as a whole has been a nice recovery period. Then today we went up to church for the first time since before break started, and we went to Fiddler’s Hearth afterward, which as a revelation for us. Wow! We had heard of the restaurant, but we were super impressed. The food we had was all great and we loved the atmosphere. While we were there, a guitar player/singer/harmonica player and a hammered dulcimer / improvised percussionist were performing, and they were great. The place is small enough—and the tables large enough—that we ended up sitting at one end of a table that was already occupied by another couple when we arrived. Actually, it was kind of nice. We could hardly help interjecting ourselves into each others’ conversations, which was no bad thing. I mean, sure, it could have been, but it wasn’t. And when they left and a family with a baby a few months younger than our daughter took their place, that turned out well too. 

Unfortunately, we both spent much of the rest of the day feeling ill, and we never did figure out why. Something we ate? Are we coming down with a  bug? We still have no idea. 

MONDAY UPDATE: Still no idea what had us down yesterday, but I'm feeling better. Lauren doesn't seem to be, but so far she's soldiering on.

The least-half-assed Christmas pageant ever

Today was the kids' winter pageant. It was our first one in a Unitarian church, and it bore more or less no resemblance to the pageants of my childhood. Celebrating an almost ridiculous number of religions, it consisted of a parade of children with little readings--mostly from parents, but also from older kids--about the religions in question. Oh, and in between the congregation sang words that almost fit the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." It was nice enough, I suppose, and it seemed like they were working under entirely different constraints than we did when I was a kid, which is to say that they had no rehearsal time and no idea which kids would be there on the day of the pageant. Lauren ended up doing one of the readings, while holding Thea, who was holding a star. In my mind, that made her the star of the show.

The pageants of Christmases past were, by and large, the usual Christian fare: Mary and Joseph and shepherds and angels and wise men and wise guys. My mother was often critical of these--not the kids, of course, but the adults who were running it. Really, we were a fairly small, rural church--you can't expect off-Broadway Christmas pageants. As volunteer things not infrequently are, it was probably half-assed more often than not, put on by someone under-qualified and not particularly ambitious, either.

Neither of those adjectives described my mother in this arena, however, and one year she put her money where her mouth was, running the Christmas Pageant.

The first thing she did was throw out the script. We all know the story, so why bother telling it badly? Mom spent her working life teaching elementary school, mostly 5th grade, and at some point she had acquired a big book of Christmas stories that she would read to the kids. My mom loved reading out loud to the kids, and anecdotal evidence suggests that they enjoyed being read to. For that matter, I seem to remember loving when our teachers would read us stories throughout elementary school too. I wish I could remember the title--or, really, anything--about the story she chose, but I'm pretty sure it was something about bells. And then I'm pretty sure she paid someone in the community to write for our pageant a script based on this short story. Mom was determined to do it right and spare no expense.

My memory of the event is, admittedly, pretty vague. I think it was well received... but perhaps not as well-received as Mom would have liked for all the trouble she went to. In any case, that was her one and only foray into the dramatic scene of rural northern Ohio churches. I won't say, though, that it was because of a bad experience. I like to think there were just more half-assed things going on that she had to prove she could do better than whoever was making a mess of it.

Seriously, though, I think what sticks with me, with all the specifics stripped away, is the simple fact that she wanted to do something different and she wanted to do something well. The same old same old just wasn't good enough. And that's one of things I love my mom for teaching me by her example.

Choices, Virtues, the Mind

"Think of a reasonably consequential decision or choice you made recently. Tell yourself why you made that choice."

This is how one of the presenters at the previously-referenced faculty development day began her portion of a presentation. She went on to cite research that I'd read in another forum explaining how our decision are often, in fact, influenced by factors in our environment that we may not even be consciously aware of. As she said, "We are good at inventing stories or explanations to describe how we arrived at a certain decision, but actually have little sense of what really went on." For instance, she gave the example of performing some kind of charitable act. We may tell ourselves that we performed some act of kindness because that's the kind of person we are--someone who does good things. The research suggests, however, that we're more likely to be good to others when, for instance, we've just had something good happen to us. Or when we're in a nice environment (for instance, outside a bakery from which wonderful smells are emanating). Likewise, we may not help someone in need because we're in a bad mood, or because we're in a hurry or because we're in an ugly, smelly part of town.

I'd previously read research along these lines, so this wasn't a surprise to me. It's really just an extension of a long history of research going back at least as far as the Milgram experiment, all suggesting that our ethics and behavior are more than a little circumstantial, as opposed to be merely an extension of our "character."

At least, that is, as we commonly think of character. As the presenter noted, our ordinary conception of character seems to be certain characteristics (often thought of in terms of virtues and vices) that we "have" that we then act on. For instance, I am generous, so I give things freely to other people. I am honest, so I tell the truth. I am lazy, so I sit around eating Cheetos and putting off my work. It turns out that it's more complicated than that.

I think Aristotle, over 2300 years ago, had some handle on this, or at least helps point the way.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

In other words, these "characteristics" are simply ways that we characteristically react, ways that we respond more often than not (at least in view of the person judging us to be so). It is, though, too simplistic to say, simply because environmental factors play a role, that decision making--moral or otherwise--is merely a matter of context. Even in the original studies, there are people who go against the statistical tendencies, who behave a particular way despite their circumstances. We can't discount the effect that environment can have. As educators, for instance, we should be keenly aware of the kind of environment we are creating for our students both inside and outside the classroom. Part of what we are doing, I suspect, if we're doing things right, is creating an environment where students will build habits of excellence or virtue (along these lines, I think I need to read more about the Habits of Mind). We should also be educating our students to be more conscious of the subtle influences can alter their behavior away from what they would want their behavior to be. Of course, we adults need to cultivate the same consciousness.

High-stakes testing

Interesting not-yet-published study of the day:

Researchers looked at high-stakes testing and found that kids with higher IQs tend to under-perform on them--more so, in fact, than "average" students. However, if the students were asked to journal for 10 minutes before the tests, their results were in the higher range that would be expected.

The idea is that under stressful conditions, the brain tends to revert to a more emotional response rather than engaging the centers of reason and logic. By writing in a journal first, the kids were able to settle themselves and get in a better frame of mind before commencing.

I would bet that some kind of relaxation / breathing / meditation could serve a similar function.But it got me thinking back to my days teaching English. Most days, I would have students start by writing in journals, either writing about something we'd be discussing or writing in response to some writing prompt (they were also free to free write if they had something on their mind). I wonder if this helped class discussions to go better, not only because they had organized their thoughts (if writing about the topic we'd be discussing) but also because it settled them into a less-stressed frame of mind?

In other news, I enjoyed our professional development workshops today.

Happiness: commitments, chasing dreams

Recently, I  blogged about the "pursuit" of happiness and the problematic nature of that pursuit. And now, it's graduation season.

If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front. -- David Brooks, "It's Not About You

Brooks is considering a different problem, but I think he has some interesting things to say on the same subject that I was writing about some days ago. He continues:

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.

 I was struck by this formulation of what adulthood is really about and it struck a chord in me. Perhaps because of "expressive individualism" we are resistant to this, to being "tied down," yet historically speaking that has been precisely the way that humans have constructed meaning for their lives--through the webs of their interpersonal relationships, through their relations to a community, as well as through their achievements. 

All of this, however, is not necessarily and either/or prospect. The point of life is not simply to tie ourselves to commitments and, mule-like, slog them through our three score years and ten, whether we like it or not. There is an art to choosing our commitments, not to mention revising our commitments, de-committing, moving on. 

Nonetheless, I do think that if we buy into the ideas of expressive individualism too uncritically, it leads us to unhappiness. We chafe too easily at our commitments, we desire freedom and change for their own sake, rather than because our situation really needs them. We are, to go back to the way I put it in my other post, chasing happiness instead of chasing the other ends that offer significance to our lives. 

There is a balance to be struck here, and it is not the same balance for everyone. Some people really do need to march to the beat of their own drummer, chase their dreams, etc. I suspect that's been the case with most of our great artists, musicians, writers, our innovators, our movers and shakers. And it's not just them, of course: all of us need that at times, and some more than others. The important thing, I think, is that we have to spend some time thinking about these matters to find what works for us, the balance between freedom and commitment, between self and others, and whatever other poles we could define these issues around. If we don't give it serious thought, we are likely to follow too slavishly a path not of our own choosing or to be pulled from the path on which we could find happiness by the voices whispering to us of some other way of living that we dimly believe even if we shouldn't.

Motivation and Education

Recently, a friend and colleague posted the following video on his Facebook wall, from the TED conference:


It's worth watching, but the synopsis of it is this: extrinsic motivation--sticks and carrots both--work well for straightforward tasks, but they actually hinder performance on tasks that demand "even rudimentary cognitive skills." People do far better when their motivation is intrinsic.

While posting it, my friend remarked that the talk "has excellent application to what's wrong on Wall Street and in education in regards to intrinsic/extrinsic motivation." I haven't questioned him specifically about this, but it got me to thinking about how this might apply in education.

My initial thoughts, I must admit, were not terribly positive. Schools, if you think about it, seem built almost entirely on external motivators. We force kids to be there in the first place. Once there, we have a more or less rigidly proscribed curriculum, even granting the space for electives. Within each day, we mark off how much time they will be forced/allowed to spend on any of the subject they must study. And while intrinsic motivations certainly drive some of our students, we have ever-present carrots and sticks in the form of grades and the justification that "you need this to get into [a good] college." And then as parents we offer our kids rewards and punishments based on those other rewards and punishments. We may talk about encouraging kids to "find their passion"--we may even believe in the exhortation--but even when they have we require them to study all sorts of other things and to do so on a rigid schedule. That's just what school is. For most people, it's hard to imagine school any other way.

Some years ago, I read a book by Neil Postman--one of his early works, in collaboration with Charles Weingartner--called Teaching as a Subversive Activity. In essence, TaaSA was contrasted with (another of his book titles) Teaching as a Conserving Activity, with the latter being the way that education can and does serve as an indoctrination into the dominant cultural values while the latter is a more Socratic exercise in questioning our assumptions, dragging them out into the light and, as frequently as not, beating them senseless. Postman's work seemed most suited for an English or history/social studies classroom, and the essence of it rested in allowing the class to set the course of study, with the teacher acting as the facilitator. As I recall, students would basically be allowed to decide what they would study, and the study was centered around questions: students would ask questions that were important to them (particularly questions with no certain answer or at least no easy answers) and the teacher would help facilitate the exploration of those questions--not giving them answers though perhaps some guidance--and more questions, too, pushing them to think more deeply. This would seem to fit the bill as education driven by intrinsic motivation.

Now, all that said, there are students who--despite the constraints of school, either have and maintain an essentially intrinsic motivation or, conversely, have a curriculum that is easy enough (at least relative to their abilities) as to actually respond to external motivation. Or perhaps it's just that we all respond differently to the stress of external motivation, even if the overall trend is to have a negative effect.

As I continue thinking about this, though, I can see another application of this to education: the teachers' perspective. Teachers are, in large part, motivated by intrinsic forces in the first place. We didn't go into education for the high salary, though the summer vacations may have played a role in our decision-making process. The point is that a great many teachers are self-motivated to be good teachers. And then what happens? In public education, they're boxed in by half a million stupidities imposed on them from administrators and legislators, most of which get in the way of the things that really help teaching and, at the same time, tend to demotivate. I believe that, given more freedom, most teachers would rise to the occasion, would take the time and autonomy to become better educators and offer more to their students. At least, the educators who aren't already worn down and cynical or inherently lazy.

I think in many cases this is a strength of private schools: with smaller classes and typically smaller class loads, with greater autonomy in the class room thanks to freedom from standardized tests, freedom from requirements to submit lesson plans, and, well, just plain greater autonomy in the classroom, I think that private school teachers often have great success (yes, it also helps that we can be and usually are more selective). At the school where I had my best teaching experience, when I sought a sense of what my English department chair expected us to do, his answer was simple: make our students better readers and writers. To that end, we had a few common texts at each grade level but were otherwise almost completely free. Free to choose texts, free to decide what kinds of assignments and classroom procedures to implement. And, I should add, also supported: colleagues were free with their time and ideas, funds were available for professional development. But I think the centrally important idea was that we had a very basic goal and had a lot of freedom to reach that goal as we saw fit.

Lacking training and qualifications: procrastination, anxiety, stress and meditation

I recently had a student come to me fairly distraught. He's stressed out, he can't sleep, he can't stop procrastinating, which makes him more stressed and sleepless in the end, all of which adds up to make him very unhappy. My heart goes out to this young man, and I wish there was more I could do for him. He's already receiving help from psychologists, psychiatrists, and pharmacists, so there's no easy referral here. In a very real sense, I'm not professionally trained or qualified to help him... except in fairly anecdotal ways, essentially "here's what's work for me (or someone I know)" or "here's what I'd try if I was in your shoes." Somehow, in the face of such difficulties, that seems insufficient.

Attacking the problems individually, I started with procrastination. Part of me thinks that there must be some very excellent book out there about procrastination, because I don't think I've known very many students--going all the way back to my own student days--who didn't struggle with procrastination. Most adults I know struggle with procrastination; so do I. I'm not sure whether that makes me well-qualified or poorly qualified to give advice, but that's how it goes. Although I have previously (not to students!) defined excessive alcohol consumption the same way, I compared procrastination to a a loan on future happiness at a high rate of interest. It's probably a bad metaphor for a high school student, since they haven't really dealt with debt yet, but whatever. The point is that as good as it may feel in the moment to avoid his homework in the moment on Friday and Saturday and Sunday morning and afternoon, it's going to feel far worse when he's stressed out Sunday night, when he can't sleep because he has to stay up late or ends up feeling overwhelmed, than it would have felt to bite the bullet and do the work earlier (and yes, I realize that procrastination doesn't always or for all people come to such a bad end--for many of us most of the time it's more of an inconvenience, but I was speaking to his experience, after all).

He acknowledged that all of this made sense, but said he "just couldn't" stop procrastinating. So we talked about strategies for minimizing distractions. I suggested that procrastination isn't a state of being, it's an action. I do understand the feeling of "can't," but at the same time, in most cases, I don't think it's as hopeless as all that. Procrastination is an action and a habit, and I suspect the key is to replace it with a different, more positive habit--which gets us back to minimizing distractions, setting a schedule for yourself to spend time working earlier rather than later, and then just doing it. Sometimes easier said than done, but there it is.

And I also recommended to him to look into meditation. He said to me that the only time he can relax is when he is asleep--a state that he can't actually reach that easily without pharmaceutical help, which has its own problems. So we talked about meditation, not because I'm an expert on meditation or can scientifically justify it (though I do know there's been some positive research around meditation), but because I think it works. Honestly, I can't really remember being as emotionally volatile as all that, but then I've been practicing meditation to a greater or lesser degree for a long, long time. We talked about focusing on the breath, about how meditation ultimately isn't, at least to start, about not thinking but about focusing on something that's basically neutral. You count your breathing, say for instance inhale on a four count and exhale on an eight count. The mind, for most people, is always focused on something, so the focus we demand of it is on repetitive numbers and the sensations of breathing.

And I told him that it very well may not work for him, but he should give it a try and then try it again and again and again. Because ultimately I guess I believe less that "meditation only works for some people" and more that "meditation works, but it takes practice to become any good at it." And let me be the first to admit that I'm no Zen master. I don't meditate for hours--or even half hours!--every day or even every week, but even without that level of doing it, I've still found it to be helpful. So, lacking professional training or qualifications, I offered him what I've seen work, because that's what I had to offer. Ultimately, I'm not sure that's much different than what the professionals do, at least in the sense that there's not one "right" way to help someone work things out for himself (which is what is ultimately needed), and so they, too, try to help the person gain some insights and to acquire some tools for managing the stresses they face. As long as I don't claim to be some kind of guru with the answers and as long as I don't recommend anything way out, I guess I'm safe enough, though whether I'm actually helping is another question. Obviously, I hope the answer is yes, but the best any of us can do is a good-faith effort.

Being respected vs. being liked

At the military school where I work, we have periodic "makes" for the cadets to be promoted in rank and/or changed in position. This can be a tough time for the boys who don't get the position they had hoped to get, because there are more boys than there are positions. Although we try to move people around to different positions, we also try to run something of a meritocracy, putting boys in positions that are not just good for them but also for the unit.

Without going into the details of it, one of the issues that came up is that some boys in the unit are well liked by their peers but not well respected. That is to say, the cadet in question may make them laugh or be "a good guy," but for one reason or another, they don't respect him. And when I look around, I see a number of guys like that.

This dichotomy came up again recently in a meeting with my fellow counselors. We had been asked to read an article about how peer pressure affected teens, causing them to take more risky behavior--and an important point here was that the pressure wasn't even of the "hey, you should do this" variety, it was the sort of pressure that exerts itself merely by the subject being watched by his or her peers. In other words, they are trying to conform to what they think will make their peers like them. In a more anecdotal bit, the article noted that "some real-world driving data suggests that teenage boys take more risks behind the wheel when one or more boys are in the car, but drive more carefully if they are with a girlfriend." In other words, it's not so much that teens automatically influence each other negatively but that the perceived expectations of what will impress one's peers has an effect.

What I see at my school is that we have competing ideas of cool, and I think what it boils down to is the difference between being liked and being respected. Some kids are desperate to be liked, to be "cool," and they tend to express that through making jokes (sometimes when they should be more serious), through putting others down, through risky behavior, etc. At the same time, our military system puts an emphasis on character and virtue, and so there exists as well a competing set of values that amount to respect, and this is based on showing good character, on doing one's job, on showing respect to others, and the like. These aren't completely separate, of course: kids may well try to have it both ways and may find a way to succeed.

In a sense, perhaps they always are. Depending on who they're around or how broadly they're thinking at any given moment, aren't most kids trying to please multiple constituencies: their friends, their teachers, their parents, their minister or priest, etc? They may weight different people differently and not even try to impress some of them at all, but I think it's fairly common. That's why, of course, parents don't see their children the same way that their peers do or they way their teachers do: because the kids are not showing everyone the same thing. It's not just kids, of course: we all show different sides of ourselves in different situations.

Given this, perhaps my dichotomy of being liked vs. being respected is too simplistic, but it still seems like a valid distinction, and I want to take it further to suggest that a mark of maturity is that we become more concerned with being respected than with being liked. The two are not mutually exclusive, but it's important to recognize that, well, sometimes they are. Putting it in the context of teaching, one might be very well liked by a class if one were to assign very little homework, give high grades, and do very little real work in class, but the teacher would not be well respected. Not all students make the distinction, I realize, but enough do. In fact, many students are pretty discerning: respect is also not conferred just for being difficult. In the case of teaching, things like fairness, accessibility and helpfulness, clarity of explanations and expectations, knowledge of content, not giving mere busy work: all of these things and more go into whether a teacher is respected. My point, though, is not to go into the particulars but just to note that a mature person in teaching or any other profession will be more concerned with being respected than with being liked.

Even as I type this, however, I know there are fields where this is not necessarily true: where being liked, being chummy with one's superiors, is actually more important than doing a good job, of striving for respect. But the fact that some institutions are broken and allow people with under-developed character into powerful positions does not change the greater importance that a mature person of character will place on respect over mere likability, and those of us who are involved in the education of children either as teachers or as parents should be working to help them move toward that more mature basis for judging themselves and their peers. The more we do so, the greater the extent to which they will form subcultures that push their members in exactly that direction. Which, of course, makes our jobs a lot easier.

Rethinking AP classes and tests

A recent article in the New York Times explored the way that The College Board is "Rethinking Advanced Placement." The focus of the article was on AP Biology and AP US History, but the overall philosophy of the change is moving from an emphasis on memorization to an emphasis on the skills and processes of the discipline. For my part, I think this is a needed change to keep--or finally make--the tests relevant to colleges.

I would compare this to the two English tests, the AP English Language and Composition (usually taken junior year) and AP English Literature and Composition. I have a fair bit of experience with both and can say that both do a relatively good job of testing skills rather than, for instance, particular works. Although I spent a couple years teaching an AP English Language and Composition course, what it really amounted to was tracking the juniors who were the stronger readers and writers into a separate class, not a year of cramming for the test. One school at which I taught didn't have any specialized course, just a couple nights going over the format of the test for any juniors who wanted to take it. I make a point of all this because the nature of the test allowed for students who were good readers and writers, who could analyze others' arguments and make their own, to do well.

In other words, by and large the same things that the test looks for are the things that college professors--and good high school English programs--look for from their students.

Years ago now, I read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, which examined high school American history texts and courses, and one of Lowen's assertions was that high school history (largely "social studies") programs do little to prepare students for university history programs. In fact, college professors in history have to spend their time at the introductory level unteaching students, because the study of history is not a collection of facts but a toolbox of skills to utilize the sources from which we learn about history and to make and interact with arguments about not only what happened but also why it happened, how it happens, and the like (if I seem vague, I'll confess that it's because I have only a layman's view of what historians actually do).

Although it is perhaps not as profound of a gap, the same thing seems to exist in the sciences, where learning science in high school is often a rather different enterprise than the practice of science at the university level (to say nothing of doing science as a profession). AP classes purport to be doing college-level work, but in some disciplines it seems that the AP tests have more or less prevented that from happening.

I believe that one of the effects of this rethinking of many AP tests could be that it puts a greater burden on high school departments as opposed to the teachers of AP classes. Again, I go back to my experience at the school where students were, essentially, prepared to take the AP Language and Composition test not by a class but by their overall experience in the discipline over the course of three years. We trusted that students, at each grade level and by each teacher, were achieving the same goal that our department chair set before us: make them better readers and writers. And by doing that, we prepared them not only for tests but for college and beyond. The alternative is that one teacher tries to teach the skills and processes of the discipline in just one year (or, on a block schedule, one semester)--I'm sure it can be done, but I should think by far fewer students than could achieve a similar level of competence through a couple years of poor to mediocre classes followed by one "AP" class. Now, if all we want from our students is to memorize a boatload of "facts," that can more or less be done in a year (which is not to say that it's easy to do so--or particularly worthwhile).

Commence Living

Today, I went to a graduation ceremony that was most like any I've ever been to. I say that with, now, 13 high school graduations at four schools under my belt as either a student or faculty member, along with a singular college graduation. Today's was at Cleveland State University, as my sister-in-law graduated along with four or five thousand of her closest friends. My largest graduation before this was with perhaps four hundred.

In this case, it was held in a basketball arena, with all the intimacy that implies. They sold concessions and--thankfully--had free wi-fi. Henry Louis Gates was one of the honorary degree recipients, and he gave a pretty good speech... just not a very good graduation speech (at least not according to the unscientific poll I conducted). All told, we have four speakers, plus the college president, who also spoke his fair share despite not actually giving a prepared speech. Given how many pairs of feet needed to walk across the stage, that seemed like about three too many--if not four--but so it goes.

I had a realization, though. Graduations have never really meant that much to me. Sure, sure, they mark the end of one part of life and the beginning of another; they celebrate, in a broad sort of way, our accomplishments. But I guess the thing about it was that it never seemed like that much of an accomplishment. I can't remember ever not knowing that I would go to college. So high school graduation was no big deal--it's not like I was going to fail high school! And sure, I achieved at a high level, but that was without that much effort.

Even college, where I finally learned to work hard, it wasn't as though the outcome was ever in doubt--of course I would graduate. "Congratulations" didn't seem all that meaningful. Today's ceremony, however, was a bit different in that regard. I would not be surprised, from the speeches I heard and what I know, if a lot of these graduates hard a hard time and/or were the first in their families to earn a college degree. For many of these students, I realized, a college education was not a given. Far from it. So I suppose congratulations were in order.

At the same time, I was particularly struck by one moment in the keynote speaker's address. She was a CSU professor, and she told a story about talking with a senior in her office recently, and the discussion turned to politics and the economy and world events, and the student--despairing of the state of the world--said "Someone should do something about these problems." And the professor told her "You are the one who should do something." It's a normal enough moment in a commencement speech, I guess, but it struck me as, well, ridiculous in a way. Because although it may very well be the case that some of these graduates will go on to do great things, I suspect that most of them are just hoping to land some kind of job where they can be told what to do and bring home an adequate paycheck to support themselves and their stuff habit. It's not just that they may not have an interest in changing the world--it's that they probably don't have the slightest idea how to go about it. And to be clear here: I'm not talking specifically about Cleveland State students--I'm talking about college graduates more generally, right up to the most prestigious universities in our country. Schools like to talk about educating the leaders of tomorrow, as a percentage, they're probably turning out a lot more of the followers of tomorrow.

And you'd have to think this professor knows that, but perhaps if she inspires just one person to step outside the box and forge her own path instead of treading trodden trails, perhaps that will be worth it.