How NOT to talk about students

Overheard on the university bus today:

1: Yeah, I mean, so many of these kids just don’t have the support they need.

2: How old are they?

1:They’re in like, 2nd grade. I mean, most of them are so ghetto. It’s like they get zero love from their parents.

2: Oh my gosh. That’s so pathetic, and like, sad.

For the record, I don’t like confronting people on the bus. It can almost never go well, regardless of how flippant, convincing, nice, angry, or confident you can be.

What’s remarkable is just how much privilege and bias these two exhibited in so few words. What was even remarkable was that I recognized one of the students as being in the same teaching class as me last semester. It’s like our cultural awareness discussions never happened. Let’s do a quick run-down

• You cannot label kids as ghetto. You cannot label anyone as ghetto. To do so shows first and foremost implicit racism, and it’s also making an enormous amount of assumptions about where they live, how they live, how they were raised. It’s a veritable ocean-load of cultural and lifestyle assumptions, and outside of that, you’re labeling that whole collection as definitively negative. To label a kid as ghetto is to label them as someone who probably won’t succeed. That is so egregious it should be a crime. It is effectively abuse by neglect. Our children deserve better than that.
• You cannot assume that because a kid might be “ghetto” (however you think that’s defined), that their parents are lazy and neglectful. Probably because you have no idea what the actual situation is. Parents die sometimes. Sometimes each parent works 2 jobs to feed their kids and keep them under a roof. Some kids are homeless. If you’re too busy working up an image of busy you won’t have time to give them your attention and love.

A full disclaimer: I am not an expert in muliculturalism. But I know enough to not make heinous assumptions about a student’s family and situation. If going to a school and volunteering is more about making yourself look charitable and humble, don’t do it. If you’re doing it because you want to pad your resume, don’t do it. Even if you have to do it for a grade, or for community service, when you enter a school, your only motive should be to help each and every kid in the best way possible.

A Communal Education

What if instead of a million notebooks scattered throughout a lecture hall, students consolidated work. A collection of thoughts, ideas, tips, tricks, mechanisms, references.

Oh wait. That exists already. It’s called wikipedia.

But no Wikipedia page can walk you through a class. A journey into Wikipedia can lead you along many different paths. Which is, in it’s own right, a unique educational foray.

What if students made class wikis, that collected notes and lectures into a coherent project? Would there still be an incentive to go to class? Would this actually inspire a different kind of peer-to-peer collaboration? What happens when peers disagree on the basic information transfer that happens during lecture?? Would this work for a math or physics class as well as it would a history or evolution class?

Would the University frown on this? Once the essence of a class is established in a wiki (not only the information, but the progression, the references, the inside jokes), is there still value inherent in the establishment? How would the public react to this? Would it allow us to compare pedagogical techniques between universities and professors? Would it allow the general public to understand science and become more scientifically literate?

Would students stop taking notes in class and start engaging with the class? Why aren’t universities working on collaborating an easy collection of basic information for us to navigate so that we can skip unnecessary lectures that only function as an audiobook for the text? Would there not be value to a student created collection of knowledge? What will students choose to share and focus on compared to what professors would? How much would this change between Universities?

What would happen if your organic professor required each student to write a blog post about a mechanism? Would it be purely technical, or would you add an aesthetic to make it more accessible? Or would you just add the application of the mechanism in industry and research? This would be such a basic level of synthesis  that it’s embarrassing the University barely does it. And it would teach students to learn how to communicate difficult concepts with everyone.

A wiki would take the concept of your discussion section and make it real, tangible, and alive. Are you willing to try this?

The Education (I mean….culture) Crisis of ‘Merica

The word curriculum means something along the lines of “all the courses of study”. It is the full complement of courses offered by an institution. To say something is extra-curricular is somewhat misleading. But it’s what schools call any activity students do under the supervision of school employees (teachers) and that they pay for.

LZ Granderson writes for CNN. His articles are usually pretty intriguing. He’s a gay black family churchgoing man. In his most recent post, he mentions that America isn’t very smart. Because it’s not. Here are some of the statistics he pulls out:

• newly released ACT scores revealed that only one high school graduate in four in the class of 2011 could meet the benchmarks for college readiness in all four core subjects.
• The National Institute for Literacy found that nearly 47% of the Motor City’s adults are functionally illiterate. Not surprisingly, Detroit’s unemployment is near 12%, and the city is the country’s poorest metropolis according to the census.
• Four of our poorest states had four of the lowest ACT composite scores — Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas.

A cursory glance at the most recent aggregation of ACT scores shows that the national average is a dismal 21. Some will tell me that’s because the scores need to reflect a bell curve.

No. No they don’t.

The ACT test is a test for college readiness. If America is full of geniuses, we do not need the ACT score range to look like a bell curve. There are more ways to figure out who to accept to a university and what to do with your life.

LZ properly points out that there is a link between socioeconomic status and level of education, and why that fact leads to the failure of programs like No Child Left Behind.

What does this have to do with extra-curriculars? LZ properly points out our nation is one that is fueled by sports. Football teams have amazing booster clubs and it’s because people love football. I don’t because it’s not particularly exciting and generally involves cold weather; football also is remarkably dangerous, especially considering the amount of safety equipment they wear. Lots of people like blaming football and other extra-curriculars for why students fail—they’re not paying attention to school!

But can life really be only about your books? How dull! What would my life had been if I had not taken the stage with my community theater group? What kind of character would I have if Coach hadn’t taught me how to go from JV to the top of the list not by only improving my technical skills, but serious life skills as well? Quiz bowl taught me to appreciate knowledge and curiosities. Swimming opened gateways for the rest of my life. Forensics allowed me to make new friends I would have never otherwise met.

And if kids are doing bad in high school, why are we not focusing more on elementary school? Provide more incentive to become a teacher and you’ll attract more people, which will allow schools to select for those who will be the best teachers, and not just the smartest students. Valuing education as a culture will probably enrich our extra-curriculars by bringing talent to diverse fields (not just engineering/medicine—we can be more than just an industrial nation!). It’ll also probably get rid of the popularity of football (again, with the injury thing, it’s against common sense). We need to get rid of the idea that school is a rite of passage that’s simply mandated by the government: ergo, something students can simply slide by without performing well. Time for a paradigm shift. (I hate that phrase)

Okay. I really don’t like football. It’s sexist. People die from heat exhaustion all the time. People die early from brain injury, whether it’s a stroke or suicide. Their bodies are wrecked. It’s a sport that is based on how hard men can hit each other and less about smart game play (see: basketball). It’s a huge waste of money, talent, and lives. Go play something a little less ridiculous (see:anything else).