Tests & School

[Richard]

I was watching GMA this morning and they had a short segment which I have always thought was a problem in schools--that approximately 75% of teachers are women, that the majority of male teachers are also coaches, and--therefore--there is a noticable lack of solid male role models for students who aren't viewed primarily as jocks in the classroom.

And here's another interesting issue:

There is a new course being offered at UNC-Wilmington in the spring semester of 2009 called “Effective Interactions with African-American Males.” This course is offered for credit in both the Social Work and Education departments and, unbelievably, it is offered, not just for senior credit, but for potential graduate credit, too.

A brief course description may help understand why I think that social work and education are in a tight race to determine which can become the most intellectually vacuous and least relevant discipline in academia today.

Using an African-centered philosophical worldview and a racial socialization framework, this class will use participatory education to equip undergraduate and/or graduate students, to “better” understand and effectively work alongside and with young adult African-American men. The core tenets underlying this class are racial oppression exists, matters, is ubiquitous and pernicious and that those most affected are often ignorant of this reality.

Students will critically examine the social and emotional effects of racism on academic, occupational, cultural and relational well-being of African-American males. Students will discuss relevant readings, media analysis, community-based research, and self-reflection. Students will also examine and develop strategies to restore a healthy definition of African-American manhood and its significance for self, family, and community relationships; culminating in a community restoration initiative proposal.

Any ideas on these two topics?

Richard's $.02

[ZonieDiver]

Using an African-centered philosophical worldview and a racial socialization framework, this class will use participatory education to equip undergraduate and/or graduate students, to “better” understand and effectively work alongside and with young adult African-American men. The core tenets underlying this class are racial oppression exists, matters, is ubiquitous and pernicious and that those most affected are often ignorant of this reality.

Students will critically examine the social and emotional effects of racism on academic, occupational, cultural and relational well-being of African-American males. Students will discuss relevant readings, media analysis, community-based research, and self-reflection. Students will also examine and develop strategies to restore a healthy definition of African-American manhood and its significance for self, family, and community relationships; culminating in a community restoration initiative proposal.

Students will also be required to demonstrate the ability to wear their pants in such a way that they sag below their buttocks but do NOT fall off, as well as properly wearing a hat almost sideways with the price tag still attached, and the correct way to say the word "Word"!

[nmap]

Originally Posted by Richard

Any ideas on these two topics?

Sir, the description could very nearly apply to a pair of graduate classes I was required to take this semester.

So far, one young Hispanic woman (or Latina, or Chicana - she isn't sure which) has complained bitterly of her desire to be White, and the terrible suffering she has endured because of the oppression she endures from the dominant culture. Of course, San Antonio has had an Hispanic majority for as long as she's lived....

Another young woman, likewise Hispanic, is deeply distressed. Her brother has become a successful lawyer and acquired a White girl friend. He now pronounces the family name in a manner that diverges from traditional Hispanic pronunciations.

What any of this has to do with educational policy and leadership eludes me. On a positive note, it provides me with abundant opportunities for annoying behavior.

Seriously, however, such courses may tend to pick at the weave of our society. If one tells anyone that they are disadvantaged and abused long enough, they may come to believe it. At what point do such courses become actively destructive of our society? Perhaps we have already passed that point. I suspect genuine mutual understanding and respect does not come from a course.

[Sigaba]

Here are my two cents.

I think that the obvious bias of the class makes it highly problematic. The class itself has every indication of becoming a grouse session about The Man and how to stick it to him.

However, the concept, teachers learning how to interact with people from different cultures has promise but only in a less politically toxic context.

An autobiographical note in the interest of disclosure.

It can be unpleasant for an African-American student who stresses his education as his chief priority. Such a student can be subject to various displays of displeasure by his fellow African American students. These displays can range from curious forms of racial taunting, to acts of social ostracization, to daily beatings, just in case the point was missed.

In an effort to figure out this dynamic, a student, left to his own devices, may make less than ideal choices. Would such a student find it beneficial to have identifiable resources and instructors who were informed about the broader identity and cultural issues (dysfunctional and otherwise)? A former classmate of mine might have.

[Richard]

Originally Posted by Sigaba

It can be unpleasant for an African-American student who stresses his education as his chief priority. Such a student can be subject to various displays of displeasure by his fellow African American students. These displays can range from curious forms of racial taunting, to acts of social ostracization, to daily beatings, just in case the point was missed.[/URL]

FWIW, I've seen that mentality cross all cultural boundaries in the world of today's teens where the emphasis, for the most part until maturity kicks in, is on coolness and hip-hopness versus being a good student. For the young, white teen seeking peer acceptance and anti-establishment recognition by emulating the so-called 'gangsta' lifestyle, the commonly used derisive term is 'wigger.' Go figure.

Richard's $.02

[Dad]

Richard
Several years ago there was an article in the Chronicle about a school I believe in El Paso whcih served the poorest of the poor. Parents mostly non English speaking. Anyway, the school reportedly had the highest SAT scores in the state. Put students in Harvard, Stanford, UT etc. If I remember correctly, the whole idea the principal promoted was family involvement and absolutely no excuses for failure. I believe it was the principal said any child will fail if you give a child an excuse to fail. Are you familiar with this school? I bedlieve they also had a dress code, but I am not certain. wondering if they are still experiencing the success they were having. May have been more years ago than I realize

[Surf n Turf]

Originally Posted by Dad

Richard
Several years ago there was an article in the Chronicle about a school I believe in El Paso whcih served the poorest of the poor. Parents mostly non English speaking. Anyway, the school reportedly had the highest SAT scores in the state. Put students in Harvard, Stanford, UT etc. If I remember correctly, the whole idea the principal promoted was family involvement and absolutely no excuses for failure. I believe it was the principal said any child will fail if you give a child an excuse to fail. Are you familiar with this school? I bedlieve they also had a dress code, but I am not certain. wondering if they are still experiencing the success they were having. May have been more years ago than I realize

Dad,
I remembered a similiar article - made into a movie - Stand & Deliever. From Amazon Comments

SnT

Stand and deliver is one of my favorite movies. It's the story of a man who begins teaching at a high school in the slums of Los Angeles, expecting to teach Computer Science. When he arrives what he instead finds is that there is not computer department, and he's stuck teaching basic math to a bunch of social misfits. The beginning of this movie sets the stage wonderfully by showing us the kind of people who inhabit the city as he drives through it on the way to the first day of school. When he arrives at the school we see the students in their natural environment (and a rough one it is). What is a teacher to do?

The protagonist of this awe-inspiring story (Jaime Escalante) is a wonderful example of what can happen when a person chooses to adapt to certain environments and NOT adapt to others. When he's given the task of educating a group of kids that includes some scary gang-member type looking kids, instead of acting like a teacher he acts tough right back (reminding them that they're in HIS domain). Yet, when he's brought into a room with the other teachers and school staff, he goes against the grain. When the school's head advisor tells the principle that everyone is doing their best, he immediately says that he's not. And when she tells the principle that Escalante is asking too much of his students, he boldly tells her that the students will rise to the expectations of their teacher.
This alone makes the movie interesting. But what adds even more drama to situation is the fact that each and every student in the class Escalante teaches has their own peer pressures to deal with. Some students have unsavory friends who would laugh at their taking a class seriously. Some of the students have boyfriends or girlfriends who don't understand their sudden interest in school. And some of the students have to deal with parents who don't understand why their education should come before taking care of their own family.
As the movie progresses Escalante announces to the board that he wants to teach Calculus to his best students, despite the fact that the students hadn't studied any of the prerequisites for the course. Naturally this requires them to study through their summer break, and then six days a week with extra hours!

In any teen environment there is always peer pressure. But what happens when positive peer pressure conflicts with negative peer pressure? When our gang-member type Angel first starts the class he is hesitant to get involved because of his rough and tough friends. When Escalante singles him out however, the pressure of the teacher is greater than the pressure of his "friends". Over time this has a tremendous effect on him. Towards the end of the movie, he's riding with his friend and starts acting stupid, and gets his friend a traffic ticket. When the guy becomes angry with him and wants to fight, Angel just walks away. What does this say about him as a person? To me, it shows that whether he likes it or not, he no longer belongs with his old associates, he's now turning into a responsible individual.

As I said before, at the outset of the movie Escalante is the one who is thrown into pressure groups. He could become just like the other teachers, or just become uncaring like the kids in his class were initially. What he does instead is nothing short of a miracle.
He uses his understanding of human nature, and the natural tendency of people to work better when their thoughts are united to his advantage. His class becomes its own little world, a club for the elite, the strong and the brave. And early on, when one of the students refuses to take a test, the other students quickly turn against her and ridicule her. She then quickly becomes obedient and gets back to work (positive peer pressure was too much for her). The harder the students are pushed and the more is expected of them, the more they feel like a team (how can I forget the scene where a student says that the rest of the class will have a better chance of making it without him?).

The driving force of the scholastic miracle (and this movie) is Escalante. As he himself said, if the students don't have the desire, he will give it to them. And that's exactly what he did. He MADE them want to succeed. He MADE them have the motivation to keep pushing and striving for higher and higher goals. Basically, he educated them on how to be successful and hard-working individuals. People who normally wouldn't have anything to do with each other (computer nerds, homeboys, and rockers) all were united by their desire to achieve and make themselves into something great. They pushed themselves harder than anyone had ever done in their lives, and when push came to shove, they were successful in every way. Every single student Escalante taught passed the exam for college credit. Every one. Motivation is a powerful thing, and sometimes if you don't already have it an extraordinary person can give it too you.
Most of the real-life Escalante's calculus prodigies went on to complete college. When the film was released, several were in graduate school, and one had even joined Escalante as a colleague. "You can get anything you want in this country, as long as you are willing to pay the price and the price is right," Escalante declared, nine years after his story was told on screen. "You don't get anything unless you work for it." He also stressed that schools alone cannot be responsible for educating children, noting that he prescribes the "Three Ts" to parents: Tell your kid, 'I love you'; touch your kid; and time. "It is important to devote time to your kid. The best investment you can make in your kid is time."


http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Deliver-.../dp/6305161917
http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guide...d-deliver.html

[Sigaba]

Your point is well made.

Would today's teachers and school administrators benefit from some sort of training to help them relate to the issues that today's students face as young people or are these just recurring issues that cut across generations and cultures?

Or is the first step getting people in classrooms who want to teach and can do their best to motivate students to learn?

Originally Posted by Richard

FWIW, I've seen that mentality cross all cultural boundaries in the world of today's teens where the emphasis, for the most part until maturity kicks in, is on coolness and hip-hopness versus being a good student. For the young, white teen seeking peer acceptance and anti-establishment recognition by emulating the so-called 'gangsta' lifestyle, the commonly used derisive term is 'wigger.' Go figure.

Richard's $.02

[I'm of the opinion that hip-hop has been thoroughly co-opted as a cultural movement. In its initial form, it was meant as an alternative to many of the behaviors and viewpoints its current practitioners advocate.]

[Sigaba]

The Los Angeles Times published the first in a series of articles on California's public schools on 4 May 2009.

As the article is lengthy, only a portion is included below. The entire piece is available here.

FAILURE GETS A PASS
Firing tenured teachers can be a costly and tortuous task
A Times investigation finds the process so arduous that many principals don't even try, except in the very worst cases. Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare.
By Jason Song

May 3, 2009

The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see.

He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown why he had been absent: He had been in the hospital after an attempt at suicide.

Polanco looked at the cuts and said they "were weak," according to witness accounts in documents filed with the state. "Carve deeper next time," he was said to have told the boy.

"Look," Polanco allegedly said, "you can't even kill yourself."

The boy's classmates joined in, with one advising how to cut a main artery, according to the witnesses.

"See," Polanco was quoted as saying, "even he knows how to commit suicide better than you."

The Los Angeles school board, citing Polanco's poor judgment, voted to fire him.

But Polanco, who contended that he had been misunderstood, kept his job. A little-known review commission overruled the board, saying that although the teacher had made the statements, he had meant no harm.

It's remarkably difficult to fire a tenured public school teacher in California, a Times investigation has found. The path can be laborious and labyrinthine, in some cases involving years of investigation, union grievances, administrative appeals, court challenges and re-hearings.

Not only is the process arduous, but some districts are particularly unsuccessful in navigating its complexities. The Los Angeles Unified School District sees the majority of its appealed dismissals overturned, and its administrators are far less likely even to try firing a tenured teacher than those in other districts.

The Times reviewed every case on record in the last 15 years in which a tenured employee was fired by a California school district and formally contested the decision before a review commission: 159 in all (not including about two dozen in which the records were destroyed). The newspaper also examined court and school district records and interviewed scores of people, including principals, teachers, union officials, district administrators, parents and students.

Among the findings:

* Building a case for dismissal is so time-consuming, costly and draining for principals and administrators that many say they don't make the effort except in the most egregious cases. The vast majority of firings stem from blatant misconduct, including sexual abuse, other immoral or illegal behavior, insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as showing up on time.

* Although districts generally press ahead with only the strongest cases, even these get knocked down more than a third of the time by the specially convened review panels, which have the discretion to restore teachers' jobs even when grounds for dismissal are proved.

* Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare. In 80% of the dismissals that were upheld, classroom performance was not even a factor.

[Sigaba]

The source is here.

(Note: The Organization of American Historians is one of the two primary professional organizations for historians in the United States. The other is American Historical Association.)

Five Stealth Transformations of American Higher Education
John Zeugner

OAH Newsletter 37 (May 2009).
Copyright (c), Organization of American Historians.

Recent studies and data collections (Spellings, AFT, AAUP, NCES, DOE) have begun to adumbrate the elephant in the living room of American higher education. Below are five partial tracings of the behemoth’s outline—ones that, though crucial and controlling, somehow do not get much attention in the formal analyses. After a brief itemization of these five mostly hidden aspects, I proffer one possible future scenario that might allow the beast to placate and at the same time demolish its keepers.

1. The Growth of Contingent Faculty

This is of primary and immediate importance because this transformation conditions how all other transformations play out. Latest counts (themselves a few years out-of-date) indicate that at least fifty percent of all instruction in all universities is conducted by contingent faculty; at least sixty percent of all instruction in the first two years of all universities is delivered by contingent faculty; and that nearly seventy percent of instruction at two-year institutions is carried out by contingent faculty. Equally indicative is the universally accepted observation that three-fifths of all new hires are on the contingent track. Contingency has many names: adjuncts, visiting professors, staff appointments, instructors, TAs, professors of practice, administrative staff teaching appointees, lecturers, and outside mentors. All of these contingent faculty are underpaid, most without any benefits, and all are on temporary, highly insecure contracts. Thus substantial university instruction has been outsourced to an exploited, anxious, overworked contingent group. That decision, most probably driven by economic exigency, but undoubtedly exacerbated by an ever-diminishing tenure system (with its star salary system), profoundly shapes inattention to the student learning process, and puts extraordinary emphasis on immediate status quo satisfaction. Such focus panders to student evaluations, and banishes controversy and academic freedom. Given such working conditions, the possibility of curriculum development and evaluation recedes dramatically (see #2 below), and the precariousness of contingent faculty employment accelerates the collapse of rigor (see #3 below).

2. The Atomization and Dissolution of Curriculum

The end result of graduate education’s specialization and single discipline focus is a curricular vista without horizon markings, and the end result of tenure track’s usual rubrics of advancement is a candidate proffering facility in some microscopic arena and not much else. Consumer culture dictates an obsession with choice and elicits shallow responses, thus the university, in instructor and receptor, cannot comprehend, much less implement, core education. Most attempts at general or core education disintegrate into disguised specialized courses veneered with a “skills focus.” Linkage, connection, integrated intellectual scaffolding, and collaboration are wholly aleatory and unrewardable. The recent Spellings report in its call for uniformly exchangeable units of credit legitimizes pebbles of knowledge consumption. The university seems powerless to interdict its cornucopia nature and thereby accelerates its marginalization.

3. Investment Contracts and the Collapse of Rigor

The acceptance of massive debt always is predicated on some kind of contract and parents and students who incur $30,000 to $80,000 debt have expectations of some kind of reward, some measured success. Superior grades become the visible emblem the university bestows upon its regular renters, graduation its ultimate seal of contract completion. As the contract becomes ever more expensive, ever more certain become its terms. Presumably some tipping point arrives when the massive expenditure finally admits its premise—the direct purchase of degrees.

4. The Enshrinement of Facilities

Given the disciplinary differentiation inherent in the reward structures for faculty, there cannot be much consensus on what constitutes “the educational experience”; by default potential students and their parents end up evaluating facilities and consulting rating systems that, as the Spellings Report makes clear, have no capacity to judge student learning within any particular university setting. And in a market-driven splendid meshing, the compensation gap between tenure track and contingent faculty (who do the majority of the teaching) partially generates funds to keep competitive in the facilities game. The differential underwrites the lush accoutrements apparently required to fill the dorms—the cable connections, the meal options, the fitness rooms, the counseling, advising, and recreational settings.

5. The Digitization of Content

Perhaps the most difficult to grasp, this development is the most relentlessly accelerating transformation. As the software of data collection and analysis sophisticates, traditional scholarly inquiry methods get jettisoned or marginalized. The concept of intellectual property revises daily so that notions of “ownership” etiolate in the virtual universe. Collaboration and speed drives all before it. Knowledge that cannot be reduced to algorithms or emotional icons becomes worthlessly antiquarian. The cartoon graphic domain transforms thinking itself.

While new institutions of learning may emerge that can find marketable, relevant aspects of these transformations, it seems doubtful whether they will resemble current universities. One possible scenario might go as follows: heavily endowed elite institutions perpetuate themselves in the current irrelevant model, turning out “educated leaders” (à la the U.K.) who self-replicate leadership positions and articulate “liberal arts” values in governing, media, and entertainment arenas. But universities with less than one billion dollar endowments explode into satellite, credentialing operations linked directly (à la Japan) to company research institutes, or feeder employment agencies, or massive distance learning entities, or proliferating national service/military academies both at state and federal levels, achieving the “de-stealthing” of the five transformations above, and the full implementation of them.

(<jzeugner at wpi dot edu>) is professor of history, emeritus, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. He also taught extensively in London, Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe.

A brief description of Professor Zeugner's career path and research interests is below. The source is from 2005 and is available here.

John Zeugner
Professor of History
John Zeugner, completed his undergraduate degree in 1959 at Harvard College. He spent the next eight years free lance writing in Florida, with brief intervals on active duty with the U.S. Coast Guard, or editing for American Heritage Magazine, or serving as a tennis pro in Sarasota, Florida. He returned to graduate school in 1967, finishing a masters and doctorate in American Studies and American history in 1971 from Florida State University, when he began as an assistant professor at WPI, teaching 20th century American cultural and diplomatic history.

As a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Osaka and Kobe universities in Japan from 1976 to 1978 his interest in Asia was vastly increased. He returned to that country as an invited visiting professor at Keio University in Tokyo from 1981 to 1983, and at Kobe College from 1994 to 1995. He initiated and served as a first faculty advisor at WPI's overseas project sites in London (1987, '90, '91), Venice ('89, '90, '97), Taipei, Hong Kong, and Bangkok ('91-'95), Tokyo and Kobe ('95-'96) Melbourne ('94) and Ho Chi Minh City ('94). He did the preliminary exploration that led to the WPI Project site in Coimbatore, India in 1996. He was director of the Asian project efforts from 1989 to 1996. Seven times teams he has advised have won the President's IQP award competition at WPI. He won the Trustees Outstanding Teaching Award in 1985, and was the first recipient of the Trustees Advising Award in 1991. His publications include fiction, journalism, and scholarly articles. He has been awarded a National Endowment For the Arts Discovery Grant for fiction, and has been listed in Who's Who in America since 1985.

Synopsis - Globalization, Technology, and Culture
An inquiry, through anecdotes, of the practice and theory of globalization, technology, and culture. Although much as been attributed to information technology-the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Asian Economic Crisis of 1997-2001; the mummification of the Japanese Economy-this globalized technology's most lasting impact may be its reconfiguration and packaging of what has been called "knowledge." Utilizing the writings of Bell, Rifkin, Barber, Iyer, Friedman, Hoogevelt, Rosecrance, Johnson, and McLuhan the paper provides a post-industrial, post-modern, probe of the sentiment, "We've got algorithm, we've got music - who could ask for anything more?"

[Richard]

Some people still realize the value of an educational system which values and encourages the opportunities it can provide for the entire range of the needs of a society.

Richard's $.02

The Case for Working With Your Hands
Matthew B. Crawford, NYT, 24 May 2009
(Part 1 of 4)

The television show “Deadliest Catch” depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, “Dirty Jobs,” shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.

Is there a more “real” alternative (short of inseminating turkeys)?

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people.

After finishing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago in 2000, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. The academic job market was utterly bleak. In a state of professional panic, I retreated to a makeshift workshop I set up in the basement of a Hyde Park apartment building, where I spent the winter tearing down an old Honda motorcycle and rebuilding it. The physicality of it, and the clear specificity of what the project required of me, was a balm. Stumped by a starter motor that seemed to check out in every way but wouldn’t work, I started asking around at Honda dealerships. Nobody had an answer; finally one service manager told me to call Fred Cousins of Triple O Service. “If anyone can help you, Fred can.”

I called Fred, and he invited me to come to his independent motorcycle-repair shop, tucked discreetly into an unmarked warehouse on Goose Island. He told me to put the motor on a certain bench that was free of clutter. He checked the electrical resistance through the windings, as I had done, to confirm there was no short circuit or broken wire. He spun the shaft that ran through the center of the motor, as I had. No problem: it spun freely. Then he hooked it up to a battery. It moved ever so slightly but wouldn’t spin. He grasped the shaft, delicately, with three fingers, and tried to wiggle it side to side. “Too much free play,” he said. He suggested that the problem was with the bushing (a thick-walled sleeve of metal) that captured the end of the shaft in the end of the cylindrical motor housing. It was worn, so it wasn’t locating the shaft precisely enough. The shaft was free to move too much side to side (perhaps a couple of hundredths of an inch), causing the outer circumference of the rotor to bind on the inner circumference of the motor housing when a current was applied. Fred scrounged around for a Honda motor. He found one with the same bushing, then used a “blind hole bearing puller” to extract it, as well as the one in my motor. Then he gently tapped the new, or rather newer, one into place. The motor worked! Then Fred gave me an impromptu dissertation on the peculiar metallurgy of these Honda starter-motor bushings of the mid-’70s. Here was a scholar.

Over the next six months I spent a lot of time at Fred’s shop, learning, and put in only occasional appearances at the university. This was something of a regression: I worked on cars throughout high school and college, and one of my early jobs was at a Porsche repair shop. Now I was rediscovering the intensely absorbing nature of the work, and it got me thinking about possible livelihoods.

(cont'd)

[Richard]

The Case For Working With Your Hands
(Part 2 of 4)

As it happened, in the spring I landed a job as executive director of a policy organization in Washington. This felt like a coup. But certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. It sometimes required me to reason backward, from desired conclusion to suitable premise. The organization had taken certain positions, and there were some facts it was more fond of than others. As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn’t fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style — that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning. As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having a lot of fun.

Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I don’t feel tired even though I’ve been standing on a concrete floor all day. Peering into the portal of his helmet, I think I can make out the edges of a grin on the face of a guy who hasn’t ridden his bike in a while. I give him a wave. With one of his hands on the throttle and the other on the clutch, I know he can’t wave back. But I can hear his salute in the exuberant “bwaaAAAAP!” of a crisp throttle, gratuitously revved. That sound pleases me, as I know it does him. It’s a ventriloquist conversation in one mechanical voice, and the gist of it is “Yeah!”

After five months at the think tank, I’d saved enough money to buy some tools I needed, and I quit and went into business fixing bikes. My shop rate is $40 per hour. Other shops have rates as high as $70 per hour, but I tend to work pretty slowly. Further, only about half the time I spend in the shop ends up being billable (I have no employees; every little chore falls to me), so it usually works out closer to $20 per hour — a modest but decent wage. The business goes up and down; when it is down I have supplemented it with writing. The work is sometimes frustrating, but it is never irrational.

And it frequently requires complex thinking. In fixing motorcycles you come up with several imagined trains of cause and effect for manifest symptoms, and you judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a mental library that you develop. An internal combustion engine can work in any number of ways, and different manufacturers have tried different approaches. Each has its own proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire.

As in any learned profession, you just have to know a lot. If the motorcycle is 30 years old, from an obscure maker that went out of business 20 years ago, its tendencies are known mostly through lore. It would probably be impossible to do such work in isolation, without access to a collective historical memory; you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians. These relationships are maintained by telephone, in a network of reciprocal favors that spans the country. My most reliable source, Fred, has such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I have been able to offer him in exchange is deliveries of obscure European beer.

There is always a risk of introducing new complications when working on old motorcycles, and this enters the diagnostic logic. Measured in likelihood of screw-ups, the cost is not identical for all avenues of inquiry when deciding which hypothesis to pursue. Imagine you’re trying to figure out why a bike won’t start. The fasteners holding the engine covers on 1970s-era Hondas are Phillips head, and they are almost always rounded out and corroded. Do you really want to check the condition of the starter clutch if each of eight screws will need to be drilled out and extracted, risking damage to the engine case? Such impediments have to be taken into account. The attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand. The mechanic’s proper response to the situation cannot be anticipated by a set of rules or algorithms.

There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversity of it may go unnoticed by those who design the work process. Mechanics face something like this problem in the factory service manuals that we use. These manuals tell you to be systematic in eliminating variables, presenting an idealized image of diagnostic work. But they never take into account the risks of working on old machines. So you put the manual away and consider the facts before you. You do this because ultimately you are responsible to the motorcycle and its owner, not to some procedure.

Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you, and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.

Put differently, mechanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. The slap of worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because the mechanic, if he is the sort who goes on to become good at it, internalizes the healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate concern. How else can you explain the elation he gets when he identifies the root cause of some problem?

This active concern for the motorcycle is reinforced by the social aspects of the job. As is the case with many independent mechanics, my business is based entirely on word of mouth. I sometimes barter services with machinists and metal fabricators. This has a very different feel than transactions with money; it situates me in a community. The result is that I really don’t want to mess up anybody’s motorcycle or charge more than a fair price. You often hear people complain about mechanics and other tradespeople whom they take to be dishonest or incompetent. I am sure this is sometimes justified. But it is also true that the mechanic deals with a large element of chance.

I once accidentally dropped a feeler gauge down into the crankcase of a Kawasaki Ninja that was practically brand new, while performing its first scheduled valve adjustment. I escaped a complete tear-down of the motor only through an operation that involved the use of a stethoscope, another pair of trusted hands and the sort of concentration we associate with a bomb squad. When finally I laid my fingers on that feeler gauge, I felt as if I had cheated death. I don’t remember ever feeling so alive as in the hours that followed.

Often as not, however, such crises do not end in redemption. Moments of elation are counterbalanced with failures, and these, too, are vivid, taking place right before your eyes. With stakes that are often high and immediate, the manual trades elicit heedful absorption in work. They are punctuated by moments of pleasure that take place against a darker backdrop: a keen awareness of catastrophe as an always-present possibility. The core experience is one of individual responsibility, supported by face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

(cont'd)

[Richard]

The Case For Working With Your Hands
(Part 3 of 4)

Contrast the experience of being a middle manager. This is a stock figure of ridicule, but the sociologist Robert Jackall spent years inhabiting the world of corporate managers, conducting interviews, and he poignantly describes the “moral maze” they feel trapped in. Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. Nothing is set in concrete the way it is when you are, for example, pouring concrete.

Those who work on the lower rungs of the information-age office hierarchy face their own kinds of unreality, as I learned some time ago. After earning a master’s degree in the early 1990s, I had a hard time finding work but eventually landed a job in the Bay Area writing brief summaries of academic journal articles, which were then sold on CD-ROMs to subscribing libraries. When I got the phone call offering me the job, I was excited. I felt I had grabbed hold of the passing world — miraculously, through the mere filament of a classified ad — and reeled myself into its current. My new bosses immediately took up residence in my imagination, where I often surprised them with my hidden depths. As I was shown to my cubicle, I felt a real sense of being honored. It seemed more than spacious enough. It was my desk, where I would think my thoughts — my unique contribution to a common enterprise, in a real company with hundreds of employees. The regularity of the cubicles made me feel I had found a place in the order of things. I was to be a knowledge worker.

But the feel of the job changed on my first day. The company had gotten its start by providing libraries with a subject index of popular magazines like Sports Illustrated. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, it now found itself offering not just indexes but also abstracts (that is, summaries), and of a very different kind of material: scholarly works in the physical and biological sciences, humanities, social sciences and law. Some of this stuff was simply incomprehensible to anyone but an expert in the particular field covered by the journal. I was reading articles in Classical Philology where practically every other word was in Greek. Some of the scientific journals were no less mysterious. Yet the categorical difference between, say, Sports Illustrated and Nature Genetics seemed not to have impressed itself on the company’s decision makers. In some of the titles I was assigned, articles began with an abstract written by the author. But even in such cases I was to write my own. The reason offered was that unless I did so, there would be no “value added” by our product. It was hard to believe I was going to add anything other than error and confusion to such material. But then, I hadn’t yet been trained.

My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract of an article there is a method that merely needs to be applied, and that this can be done without understanding the text. I was actually told this by the trainer, Monica, as she stood before a whiteboard, diagramming an abstract. Monica seemed a perfectly sensible person and gave no outward signs of suffering delusions. She didn’t insist too much on what she was telling us, and it became clear she was in a position similar to that of a veteran Soviet bureaucrat who must work on two levels at once: reality and official ideology. The official ideology was a bit like the factory service manuals I mentioned before, the ones that offer procedures that mechanics often have to ignore in order to do their jobs.

My starting quota, after finishing a week of training, was 15 articles per day. By my 11th month at the company, my quota was up to 28 articles per day (this was the normal, scheduled increase). I was always sleepy while at work, and I think this exhaustion was because I felt trapped in a contradiction: the fast pace demanded complete focus on the task, yet that pace also made any real concentration impossible. I had to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. To not do justice to an author who had poured himself into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.

The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever.

Now, it is probably true that every job entails some kind of mutilation. I used to work as an electrician and had my own business doing it for a while. As an electrician you breathe a lot of unknown dust in crawl spaces, your knees get bruised, your neck gets strained from looking up at the ceiling while installing lights or ceiling fans and you get shocked regularly, sometimes while on a ladder. Your hands are sliced up from twisting wires together, handling junction boxes made out of stamped sheet metal and cutting metal conduit with a hacksaw. But none of this damage touches the best part of yourself.

You might wonder: Wasn’t there any quality control? My supervisor would periodically read a few of my abstracts, and I was sometimes corrected and told not to begin an abstract with a dependent clause. But I was never confronted with an abstract I had written and told that it did not adequately reflect the article. The quality standards were the generic ones of grammar, which could be applied without my supervisor having to read the article at hand. Rather, my supervisor and I both were held to a metric that was conjured by someone remote from the work process — an absentee decision maker armed with a (putatively) profit-maximizing calculus, one that took no account of the intrinsic nature of the job. I wonder whether the resulting perversity really made for maximum profits in the long term. Corporate managers are not, after all, the owners of the businesses they run.

(Cont'd)

[Richard]

The Case For Working With Your Hands
(Part 4 of 4)

At lunch I had a standing arrangement with two other abstracters. One was from my group, a laconic, disheveled man named Mike whom I liked instantly. He did about as well on his quota as I did on mine, but it didn’t seem to bother him too much. The other guy was from beyond the partition, a meticulously groomed Liberian named Henry who said he had worked for the C.I.A. He had to flee Liberia very suddenly one day and soon found himself resettled near the office parks of Foster City, Calif. Henry wasn’t going to sweat the quota. Come 12:30, the three of us would hike to the food court in the mall. This movement was always thrilling. It involved traversing several “campuses,” with ponds frequented by oddly real seagulls, then the lunch itself, which I always savored. (Marx writes that under conditions of estranged labor, man “no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions.”) Over his burrito, Mike would recount the outrageous things he had written in his abstracts. I could see my own future in such moments of sabotage — the compensating pleasures of a cubicle drone. Always funny and gentle, Mike confided one day that he was doing quite a bit of heroin. On the job. This actually made some sense.

How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up among these walking wounded, a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I had a master’s degree, and it needed to be used. The escalating demand for academic credentials in the job market gives the impression of an ever-more-knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. On paper, my abstracting job, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. In that job I had made quite a bit more money. I also felt free and active, rather than confined and stultified.

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions (like when I dropped that feeler gauge down into the Ninja). In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

An economy that is more entrepreneurial, less managerial, would be less subject to the kind of distortions that occur when corporate managers’ compensation is tied to the short-term profit of distant shareholders. For most entrepreneurs, profit is at once a more capacious and a more concrete thing than this. It is a calculation in which the intrinsic satisfactions of work count — not least, the exercise of your own powers of reason.

Ultimately it is enlightened self-interest, then, not a harangue about humility or public-spiritedness, that will compel us to take a fresh look at the trades. The good life comes in a variety of forms. This variety has become difficult to see; our field of aspiration has narrowed into certain channels. But the current perplexity in the economy seems to be softening our gaze. Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

Matthew B. Crawford lives in Richmond, Va. His book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” from which this essay is adapted, will be published this week by Penguin Press.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/ma...abor-t.html?em

[Sigaba]

Source is here.

June 8, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Five Ways to Fix America’s Schools
By HAROLD O. LEVY

AMERICAN education was once the best in the world. But today, our private and public universities are losing their competitive edge to foreign institutions, they are losing the advertising wars to for-profit colleges and they are losing control over their own admissions because of an ill-conceived ranking system. With the recession causing big state budget cuts, the situation in higher education has turned critical. Here are a few radical ideas to improve matters:

• Raise the age of compulsory education. Twenty-six states require children to attend school until age 16, the rest until 17 or 18, but we should ensure that all children stay in school until age 19. Simply completing high school no longer provides students with an education sufficient for them to compete in the 21st-century economy. So every child should receive a year of post-secondary education.

The benefits of an extra year of schooling are beyond question: high school graduates can earn more than dropouts, have better health, more stable lives and a longer life expectancy. College graduates do even better. Just as we are moving toward a longer school day (where is it written that learning should end at 3 p.m.?) and a longer school year (does anyone really believe pupils need a three-month summer vacation?), so we should move to a longer school career.

President Obama recently embraced the possibility of extending public education for a year after high school: “I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training.” He suggested that this compulsory post-secondary education could be in a “community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship.” (I helped start an accredited online school of education, and firmly believe that the coursework could also be delivered to students online.)

If the federal government ultimately pays for the extra year, it would be a turning point at least as important as the passage of the 1862 Morrill Act that gave rise to the state universities or the 1944 G.I. Bill that made college affordable to our returning service personnel after World War II. Every college trustee should be insisting that we make the president’s dream a reality.

And for those who graduate from high school early: they would receive, each year until they turn 19, a scholarship equal to their state’s per pupil spending. In New York, that could be nearly $15,000 per year. This proposal — which already has been tried in a few states — has the neat side effect of encouraging quick learners to graduate early and free up seats in our overcrowded high schools.

• Use high-pressure sales tactics to curb truancy. Casual truancy is epidemic; in many cities, including New York, roughly 30 percent of public school students are absent a total of a month each year. Not surprisingly, truants become dropouts.

But truant officers can borrow a page from salesmen, who have developed high-pressure tactics so effective they can overwhelm the consumer’s will. Making repeated home visits and early morning phone calls, securing written commitments and eliciting oral commitments in front of witnesses might be egregious tactics when used by, say, a credit card company. But these could be valuable ways to compel parents to ensure that their children go to school every day.

• Advertise creatively and aggressively to encourage college enrollment. The University of Phoenix, a private, for-profit institution, spent $278 million on advertising, most of it online, in 2007. It was one of the principal sponsors of Super Bowl XLII, which was held at University of Phoenix Stadium (not bad for an institution that doesn’t even have a football team). The University of Phoenix’s enrollment has clearly benefited from its advertising budget: with more than 350,000 students, its enrollment is surpassed by only a few state universities.

The University of Phoenix and other for profits have also established a crucial niche recruiting and serving older students. Traditional colleges need to do far better, using advertising to attract paying older students and to recruit the more than 70 percent of the population who lack a post-secondary degree. They have a built-in advantage, since attending a for-profit college instead of a more prestigious, less expensive public college makes no more sense than buying bottled water when the tap water tastes just as good.

• Unseal college accreditation reports so that the Department of Education can take over the business of ranking colleges and universities. Accreditation reports — rigorous evaluations, prepared by representatives of peer institutions — include everything students need to know when making decisions about schools, yet the specifics of most reports remain secret.

Instead, students and their parents rely on U.S. News & World Report rankings that are skewed by colleges, which contort their marketing efforts to maximize the number of applicants whom they already know they will never accept, just to improve their selectivity rankings. Meanwhile, private counselors charge thousands of dollars claiming to know the “secret” of admissions. Aspiring entrants submit far too many applications in the hope of beating the odds. Everyone loses. Opening the accreditation reports to the public would provide a better way.

• The biggest improvement we can make in higher education is to produce more qualified applicants. Half of the freshmen at community colleges and a third of freshmen at four-year colleges matriculate with academic skills in at least one subject too weak to allow them to do college work. Unsurprisingly, the average college graduation rates even at four-year institutions are less than 60 percent.

The story at the graduate level is entirely predictable: in 2007, more than a third of all research doctorates were awarded to foreigners, and the proportion is far higher in the hard sciences. The problem goes well beyond the fact that both our public schools and undergraduate institutions need to do a better job preparing their students: too many parents are failing to insure that their children are educated.

President Obama has again led the way: “As fathers and parents, we’ve got to spend more time with them, and help them with their homework, and replace the video game or the remote control with a book once in a while.” Better teachers, smaller classes and more modern schools are all part of the solution. But improving parenting skills and providing struggling parents with assistance are part of the solution too.

At a time when it seems we have ever fewer globally competitive industries, American higher education is a brand worth preserving.

Harold O. Levy, the New York City schools chancellor from 2000 to 2002, has been a trustee of several colleges.

Amazingly, Mr. Levy has nothing to say about the roles teachers or their unions play in the quality of today's education system.