Yes Johnny, Spongebob probably does rot your brain.

There was some news recently of the research in the journal Pediatrics that cartoons like Spongebob are detrimental to the performance of cognitive tasks.  Granted, the study was small, but it did indicate that watching certain kinds of TV are not good for kids.

It is good that there is research to tell us these sort of things, otherwise they remain at the level of nagging teacher suggestions to stop watching too much TV.

What is more concerning to me is the logic used in the commentary that was included in the journal along with the above research, since it relies on a developing notion that the ‘digital generation’ are somehow going to come out of this influx of stimuli okay, since they are used to dealing with multiple stimuli and are able to adapt to their new environment.

I have heard other people, including administrators and teachers, who buy into the logic that students are developing multitasking skills that enable them to complete tasks with greater distractions.

This is not what the research says.  And the simple fact that there need to be laws against texting and driving suggest that there need to be some major qualifications to any claim of the adaptivity of the new generations.

What Christakis relies on is the absurd scientific position, that, since there is not enough solid research out there, we should be careful of being naysayers of the changing times.  But the consequence of this position is that society then runs a giant, uncontrolled experiment about the influence of media on child development.

I am not so sure I would be as pessimistic as Mark Bauerlein, who in his book, The Dumbest Generation takes the hell in the handbasket approach to the influx of technology.

And I am pretty sure that the American education system will continue to produce successful and intelligent individuals.  Those kids whose success is at stake are the same kids who have always been at risk.  Now they just have another reason for failing.  Technology has the benefit of empowering people to unprecedented levels, but it is precisely those nagging teachers and parents who take responsibility for this technology who are able to give that opportunity to everyone.

 

Teachers Versus Computers

Idaho passed its controversial education reform bills during the past legislative session.  A centerpiece of this plan was to give every high school freshman a laptop, and require all students to have a certain amount of online credits be required for graduation.  The specter of a purely computer based training system replacing traditional teachers suddenly came into view.

The recent study that compared an old-fashioned lecture with an interactive lesson mediated with technology also touches on the future of education, when specialists are no longer the best teachers- though they never were in the first place.  I think that the fact this study was news worthy (it’s not really – everyone already knows old smart people talking for hours is not effective pedagogy) is a sign that people are thinking about the near future when technology will effectively obviate teachers.  This is not feasible too soon, but is very much in the scope of how technology is developing.  It is very Kurzweilian: with technology, we can take any discrete human action, identify its most effective processes, and replicate it with an advanced enough system.

I measure my conservatism against Kurzweil on many points, since my vague feeling of discomfort at technological advancement is what he proselytizes against.  So let me make a preliminary claim about the long term need (in 50-100 years) for human teachers: that teachers  encapsulate one of those paradoxes of society: one part minister of institutionalization, one part personal human relationship, and the latter is something in need of cultivation, not replacement.

The human relationship part of teaching is the significant dimension that will be the most difficult to surpass.  We speak of ‘Mentors.’  The original Mentor,  the close friend of Ulysses, was put in charge of his estate before the war, and was the teacher of his son Telemachus.  The idea of being a close friend to your child’s teacher has a utopian dimension to it.  As an archetype for teachers, the idea of a mentor as a person with a close personal relationship may very well be a less effective means of training and specialization in the short term but still seems ideal.

Consider that utopian aspect of the scenario where you put a close friend in charge of teaching your children, or live in  a community where youth can build authentic personal relationships with a variety of people who can offer guidance to them on matters of knowledge and other issues: of character, ethics, different points of view.  Fantasy institutions, Sesame Street, Hogwarts, blur the line between the realm of teacher and realm of family.  Radically effective pedagogical methods will no doubt become mediated completely with technology.  But by removing teachers, these methods are the pure and direct institutional forces of the state and of the corporation.

The failure of the education system (it’s not really failing, but just to be dramatic) comes when teaching becomes an impersonal training that is divorced from human relationships between teacher and pupil.  The present failure of teaching comes precisely at the point where parents do not trust teachers, when the collaboration process breaks down, and there is  a rift between home and school life.  It is a system, though, worth trying to fix.  It will be a much longer time before computers actually care about failure.   Those who do not trust teachers today will have no choice but to trust the results of a purely objective and impersonal pedagogical processes tomorrow, and they will have much less recourse than they would in a community they can participate in.

Who Owns Rathdrum Mountain?

On Mondays and Thursdays, I stand outside before school on playground duty, looking to the North, where Rathdrum Mountain looms above the prairie, hoping to catch the morning sun.  One rare morning when the sun was indeed shining, something quite close to the summit gave off a bright reflection, and brought to my attention a slight speck – perhaps a structure next to a bald spot on the mountain.  Surely, they are not allowing development up there, are they?

I have had a growing desire to go tromp around up on the mountain, although I understand much of it is private.  And tromping around private land in North Idaho is an invitation to get shot at.  So, I wanted to see whether one could really summit Rathdrum Mt. without risk of Idaho separatist insurgent attacks, or at least without breaking the law.

My wife is a professional information getter, and has some wicked skills at finding perfectly free and public info about things such as land.  After a bit of  guided research, I am still not completely confident of summiting Rathdrum Mt, but I can say that there is certainly a good amount of land back there that is accessible.  According to the internet, Rathdrum Mountain is, to a large extent, owned by the following organizations:

Patriot Investments, a Forest Capital Partner: timber investing firm out of Boston.  They seem to own most of the area around the summit.

The U.S. of A.  Oddly, this is different than

B of LM, Or the Department of the Interior,

The US Forest Service

Idaho Department of Lands,

All of which own other parcels;

Rathdrum City,

Inland Empire Paper Company – The Cowells!  I can get a use permit for IEP lands, which stretch from Rathdrum to Mt. Spokane.  I think this might be a good investment.

William Fanning, Real Estate Broker

Gale Easterday, of Easterday Ranches, a Washington-based cattle feed corporation.

Other Timber companies such as Stimson, JD, Connolly-Kroetch…

And lots of private individuals who I hope do not shoot me if I pass by the public road in front of their lots.

Now, I am being unfairly stereotypical of North Idahoans only for fun.  Almost all of them  are very nice.  And, as an Idaho teacher, I don’t want to get in trouble with the great Gem State.  It does rub me the wrong way, however, that private lands prevent access to much of the public lands of that area, and that the pristine forests of North Idaho are mostly accessible only to forestry and development.  And allow me a little liberal venting after putting up with the dominant conservative rhetoric of the region.

As for the summit, Google Earth’s Satellite image of that point does show us some building there.  Check these coordinates 47.846807,-116.927544.

This is on the Patriot Investment Land, bordering the USA land.  Perhaps it is secretly owned by the UN, for the future site of the headquarters for the supreme world council.  Forestry – the perfect cover for world domination!

A century of Ohs

I propose that for the rest of the century we continue to add Oh- in front of the year, just as we did in the previous decade: Oh-nine, Oh-ten, Oh-eleven, (2011) etc.  This is not possible very often, so in the 21st century we should be allowed to.

Post Falls Outlet – Go Oriental Products Lady!

My wife suggested I go down to the Post Falls Outlet because the Van Heusen store was closing up. Along with Bass, these were two of the last stores in this outlet, which is all but empty, making it more post-apocalyptic than Post Falls -vast stretches of empty buildings and huge parking lots.
There are, as far as I could tell, only two stores left: a kitchen place, and this Asian Goods store. After finding a good shirt to buy off the all but empty racks, I stopped in to see if it had any good tea.

The back of the store was dark, and the front window had a tv in it that was picking up the last bits of the analog frequency of some Spokane station through the fuzz. The lady there was talking to a couple who had been attracted there like me, only to be caught by the proprieter in a long one sided conversation – the BS headlock – as one of my friends aptly named it. After they escaped, it was my turn, and since I didn’t have anywhere to go, I allowed myself to get pulled into a conversation with this very interesting but clearly bored woman with broken English.

She had escaped Vietnam during the war with a GI who married her and brought her back to Idaho, where they live up in the country. She said she was around 70, but looked a bit younger (and her illustration of being able to kick my head off was also something I wouldn’t expect an elderly lady to be able to do) but I would believe that her healthy ways had preserved her youth.

So, when the Illuminati UN does take over the world, the US falls and Idaho is left to defend itself against Satan and the Communists, I am sure this lady will still be there, off the first Post Falls exit, selling tasty Jasmine tea and Asian kitsch in the ruins. I do believe she teaches martial arts, so maybe we will be living in the abandoned Van Heusen store next door.

Sherlock Holmes

I have not seen the new series of Sherlock Holmes that PBS is running, but I do want to point out that the earlier Sherlock Holmes on the ‘Mystery’ hour was awful. I can’t even find references for it on a quick Google search, so I suspect it’s not that popular these days. Although incredibly Hollywood, I think Robert Downy, Jr, is currently the best Holmes of the contemporary era until I see otherwise, since Holmes:
– does drugs, which makes him a bit eccentric, and not all hoity-toity British
– knows how to fight, which means he does not get beat up by thugs very often
– understands chemistry and other fields well, and does not rely on purely ‘deductive forensics’ one might say.
– is always in desperate need for adventure.

Whatever self-possession Holmes has, it cannot be his main character trait. There is a strain of Holmeses that fit better with ‘All Creatures Great and Small’ than with the original text. There are great spin-offs (The Mentalist, eg) but when depicting the original tales, there has to be some of these, which happen to fit into a Hollywood movie better than a PBS series.

Kiddos composing Christmas Songs

Preparing for the K-1 Christmas program, a Kindergartener suggested that we make up our own Christmas songs this year.  Brilliant!  I have had marginal success, but what is more interesting are the pitfalls that come up:

-if you sing a song before you try to come up with words, there is no escaping that song and variants

-a surprising number of kids stare at you blankly and continually suggest traditional favorites

-much of what you get is a corruption things already out there, although you may not realize it – I thought one girl actually made up the line “Christmas is coming to town”; I would accept this from a Kindergartener, but it turns out that it is actually a real Christmas song.  Also get lots of baby polar bears, baby tigers, baby penguins playing in the snow.

Corrupted Christmas motives combine into marginally cute songs: children are postmodern filters.

Understanding by Design

Moving from the white tower of higher ed to elementary music teaching, I expected to find very little that was intellectually stimulating.  For the most part, this has been true.  One blip of interest, however, is a text that all the teachers at my school are studying: “Understanding by Design” (Wiggins and McTighe 2005).  I am impressed with the intellectual depth and applicability of their project.

In a way they are really just reviving Dewey and Constructivism, but they are also reviving something like the notion of ‘faculty’ which I am intrigued with.  They are doing this in the face of the push toward standardized curriculum and assessment, which is essentially behavioristically defined: students do things to show they have mastered material.

But we know that our own understanding is not the same as our assessed abilities.  Understanding is a capability that is engendered through study, but is not assessed through performance of that study.  Rather, by triangulation, as it were, we are able to assess a student’s understanding of a concept: not through mirroring the content at  a later point, but by using understanding as a capability and applying it to different areas.  Student synthesis can be evaluated by activities that are vastly different than the learning activity.  This opens the potential for active learning without fear of poor assessment.

 

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After a long move cross country, starting up a new job, and slowly settling down, I have not thought much.  But methinks it is time to get back into the swing of things.

Richard Hofstadter’s ‘Anti-intellectualism in American Life’

Another book I just finished, perhaps hinted at in the last post, is R. Hofstadter’s history of the intellectual climate of the US.  I can’t begin to describe how accurate and pertinent this book seems to me, even considering that it was published in 1963.  Not only does it have many of my ‘personal’ views pegged as products of a history I was only peripherally aware of, I think it is one of the most insightful perspectives on the current state of politics in this country I have ever heard.  The right wing populism that has emerged in the last ten years is not a product of Karl Rove, as is sometimes claimed, but is in many ways a revitalization of a very old theme.

The value of a historical perspective – one of many, of course – is to realize that the past contained other possible cultural situations: religious leaders, for example, that would establish universities like Harvard and appreciate humanistic education; intelligent politicians who understood the practical needs of governance but still inquired into philosophical and scientific perspectives; farmers and businessmen who appreciated knowledge and learning.

It seems to me that the issue Hofstadter is dealing with is the crux of future political action in this country.  To gain control over these social forces and steer them away from their fascist and dehumanizing ends would mean to strike at the root of the problem, which seems to be primary and secondary education.  Hofstadter doesn’t say as much, but since he spends a lot of time on the educational system, it seems like this is the main arena for change.  Perhaps one of the weaknesses of the book, though, is the lack of clarity about ‘what is to be done,’ for despite his distanced voice, he does seem quite committed to some sort of activity.

Hofstadter’s final chapter was also quite influential on my thinking, since my engagement with Marxism, especially my interest in Adorno, cultivated a deep alienation from American culture, which I think a lot of academics and intellectuals share these days.  The idea that I could still say ‘hey America is great, but I still want to change it’ is actually quite difficult to formulate.  He represents a rare breed: optimists.

There are a few aspects of his perspective that are worth critiquing, though.  While he criticizes the egalitarian forces that radically dumbed down education in the early 20th century, he really does not give an account of what education should look like.  As with many reformers, the bulk of rhetoric is about the bad stuff.  The fundamental problem remains, however: since society preconditions educational success to such a large degree, how can a rigorous, meritocratic and competitive system not reinforce the status quo?  I think it is precisely because the power of class ideology, race, etc., that a Rawlsian answer doesn’t work, for example.  The task really is Herculean: give everybody a really good education.  Because that is such a challenging and significant task, I am unsympathetic to reformers (the Charter/Home School/Voucher folks) who just want to make good education available ‘for those who want it.’

Another point I wish he would have talked a little more about is the difference between the specialist-which is what higher ed. is increasingly creating, and the intellectual.  You can be a really ignorant, backwards mechanical engineer, and be well paid and highly educated.  What is the sort of intelligence we are looking for?  I can’t say I have a good answer.  His best analysis, though, is precisely on the ‘Hundred Percenter’ and the ‘Self-made Man’ and the familiar characters that are more pertinent mentalities to think about.

There are a lot of other issues that I could write about, but it would get pretty diffuse.  In many ways, though, this book has liberated me from a lot of dead end views on contemporary society and revealed something of a path forward.