New Highly-Structured Teaching Systems: Direct Instruction, and CT3

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Brace yourselves.  New teaching methods are coming to a school near you.

In a recent post linked to from FaceBook, (Teacher Blasts Popular Classroom Training Program) a teacher describes her run-in with the No Nonsense Nurturer Program, a method for supposedly making teachers more effective.  Before you read the article, which is strongly critical of the coaching technique, you should give a little time for reflection on the problems —some of them perhaps unstated— that the method is designed to address.

I believe that part of the problem with grade school classrooms (and any sort of classroom) today is that students are not accustomed to classroom discipline.  This is just the basic behavior of being quiet and attentive in the classroom, respectful to the other kids, and respectful to the teacher.  Parents may pride themselves on their child being a lot less disruptive than some of the other children, but most people are not aware that kids are a lot worse behaved —in almost every school in the country— than they were a couple of decades ago.  A lot worse.  Some of the parents were probably themselves pretty badly behaved in class, and have probably forgotten what assholes they were as kids, and how much pleasure they got out of torturing particular teachers.  But trust me: modern classrooms are a lot worse.

Ignorant parents are quick to blame the teachers for this lack of classroom discipline.  The teacher is the first and easiest scapegoat anyone can find, and the school administration has also learned that blaming the teacher is a winning strategy from a lot of points of view.  Washington, too, has bought into the axiom that weak teachers should be removed from the classroom, and being unable to maintain discipline in the classroom is a major component of perceived “teacher weakness.”

Now, some people are brilliant at dominating a class, and keeping them on task, no matter how many unruly elements there may be in it.  Such teachers rejoice in the exercise of their charisma, and their ability to get students to do what the teacher wants them to do, and amazingly, students often love these sorts of teachers; it’s almost as though the students want to be given limits to how silly they’re allowed to get.  Much is made of this phenomenon, and a lot of classroom praxis revolves around this empirical observation.  But I think educationists over-emphasize how far this goes; the very best teachers do not dominate the class so utterly.  The older the students are, the less the Iron Lady method is appreciated, and the less it produces the desired results.

Though no one has come out and said this, the No-Nonsense Nurturer Program looks very like a sort of industrial approach to making every teacher a No-Nonsense teacher.  It is uncomfortable for the teacher at first, and the training phase is acutely awkward, as the article describes.  But given the fact that students do not learn a lot of discipline at home, the No-Nonsense teacher can quickly (and figuratively) slap the silliness out of his or her class, and get them on task, and keep them there, without pandering to their constant need for positive reinforcement that they seem to bring with them from pre-school.

Over thirty years, I too have been conditioned by my students to constantly give them little figurative gold stars for every little thing, which an undergraduate in Japan, for instance, would do as a matter of course.  American kids have grown up in an atmosphere of constant praise  —some of them; others, of course, live in a home environment of almost continual verbal abuse and demeaning, and both kinds of home background seem to result in the kids needing constant positive feedback from the classroom teacher— and sometimes they actively and explicitly elicit praise from their teacher, such as, “See how nicely I did my homework?  Look, there’s colored ink!!!”  Some teachers, such as the author of the article, are uncomfortable with being firm with a disruptive student.  From her description of how much she hated being firm with the kid, we see just how much of an elementary school environment has become the expected thing even in a middle- or a high-school classroom.  Can you think back to your own high school days, and recall an annoying kid who deserved to be squelched just so that the lesson could continue?  (Of course, some lessons are boring, and we’re rooting for the disruptive kid!  But, in hindsight, should a teacher be wasting her energy putting up with that sort of crap, or should she better spend her time doing what is expected of her?)

Well, even if we quarrel with the training program (and that’s the only way you can train a bright undergraduate into a drill sergeant), the fact remains that [1] once the training has been accomplished, that teacher is going to run a much more efficient classroom, and that classroom is going to achieve a lot more than they would otherwise, and [2] very quickly, the students will —if the empirical observation of the effectiveness of disciplining students is reliable— come to terms with the strict discipline, and learn to love it.  Or, at least, tolerate it pretty well.  Students will begin to learn that the firmness on the part of the teacher does not signal a deteriorating relationship, and that class time is precious, and there isn’t a lot of time for boosting the fragile egos of each and every kid in class.

Families are less and less capable of training kids to be realistic in their demands on interpersonal relationships with adults outside the home, and things will never improve.  Parents are just too busy being productive on behalf of their employers (who must have been trained in a similar No-Nonsense Nurturing Program for Bosses).  So classroom discipline will have a brief resurgence, until parents decide that it has to be jettisoned, because children are really too fragile for any sort of discipline!

Catholic Schools are much more effective at maintaining classroom discipline, because a nun can be firm with a child without being criticized, because of course, she has the authority of the Almighty behind her, unlike a teacher in a public school, who is, after all, just a poorly-paid flunkie of the school board.

The earphone sets, and the coaching team at the back of the classroom is probably a bit much, but it is just the sort of training scheme that you would expect from the industrial approach to all things that obtains in the latter 20th, and early 21st century.

Arch

Jef Rouner Explains Why Some Statements Are Wrong, and Not Opinions

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I'm not sure who Jef Rouner is, or even whether it's a he or a she, but they sure write a funny article.

Some people, s/he says, make certain statements, and claim that because it is an opinion, it cannot be wrong.

Wrong.  Jef Rouner goes through all sorts of reasons why such statements could still be wrong, or even when they're opinions, they could still be not worthy of any sort of respects, and just a hair this side of wrong.  When reasoning with incomplete data, not-wrongness is no longer black and white; you can be not wrong, or you can be wrong in various degrees.

I have my own opinions, or rather, points of view, regarding the subject.

First of all, a conclusion from various premisses is not an opinion.  If it has been made according to logically correct rules, then it will be right, otherwise it will be wrong.  To make a statement like "It is widely accepted that Democrats raise taxes.  I don't want higher taxes, therefore, in my opinion, nobody should vote for Democrats, and anyway, that's my opinion, so you can't say I'm wrong" are so incredibly wrong that one cannot even begin to explain why to someone who is not ready to listen to a long story.  Firstly, Democrats have raised taxes, but so have Republicans.  (Check out how high Reagan raised taxes.)  Secondly, this opinion is presented in the form of an argument, signaled by the use of "therefore".  Still, such a statement should simply be altered to say that, in the opinion of this person, people should all vote the way he or she would like them to, regardless of their personal preferences.

Jef also points out that to express the opinion that "David Tennant was the best Dr. Who" is not justifiable from anyone who has not seen episodes of the TV series from before 2005 (where, presumably, David Tennant would have had stiff competition from other incarnations of Dr. Who).  We're all familiar with close acquaintances who have outrageous opinion, who either have not seen evidence contrary to their beliefs, or have deliberately closed their eyes to such evidence.  I think we can all agree that the opinions of those sorts of people can be assessed as just plain wrong, even if they are opinions.  Read the article; it is beautifully written.

Arch

The Greek Crisis

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This might not completely float your boat, but here are two articles that give a little insight into the Greek economic crisis.

The first one, titled "11 Things About the Greek Crisis you Need to Know" tries to explain what is going on from the point of view of a Eurozone Agnostic; in other words, somebody who thought the Eurozone was a bad idea from the start.  Given that, he tries to explain how various interest groups are reacting (and over-reacting) in ways that make sense to them.  This is excellent reading, because we need to know what the assumptions of these people are, before we decide on our own positions.  The Greek Crisis is important to all of us, and the article goes some distance towards explaining why.

The second article "Thomas Piketty Explains the Greek Crisis" I have not read yet, but the comments accompanying it declare that the author has strong feelings about income inequality, which in my book means that he can't be all bad.  OK, I just hopped over and read a summary of it.  It is a report of an interview of Thomas Piketty which was conducted in German, and someone who has translated it into English is still working out how to publish it without violating copyright laws.

The whole business has to do with the mechanics of modern post gold standard economics.  There are a number of things that go up and down with time: bond prices, gold prices, stock market, and exchange rates, not to mention rates of inflation and tax rates.  All these things are given symbols, such as x and y and t, and Economists have equations that say what each of these things should do: go up, go down, etc, depending on the values of the other things.

The relationships are not rigid; they are somewhat fluid.  Economists however go on the assumption that the relationships are a lot more rigid that the rest of us believe, and they have observed how, for example, a poor state such as Kentucky, manages to stay above water, while still owing tons of money to a rich state such as, for example, Massachusetts.

Within a single country, the first article explains, it can all be managed.  The debt is never paid off, but we carry on.  Between countries, there is inflation, and the currency is devalued, and we carry on.  But with a single currency, devaluation is not possible, so the country that is under-performing gets screwed into the ground.  Read the article; it helps you get your head around all this sort of thing, using classical economics.

Many countries will never be able to be the economic powerhouses that the industrial countries are.  This does not mean that agriculture should be completely abandoned and industry must be the only way.  (The industrial nations will be least happy with that eventuality; after all, everyone has to eat.)  Even in the US, agricultural states always have deficits relative to the industrial states, hence the need for government subsidies.

The second article is even more interesting.  Mr. Piketty points out that Germans, who are being hard-assed about the lending, is a country that has never paid its debts.  It was forgiven enormous proportions of its debt by international agreement, and paid of the remaining debt using a variety of methods which are not available to Greece right now, because, I suppose, we cannot tinker with the currency.  (After this, the Brits will never agree to using Euros.)

One of the available solutions is to simply and painlessly encourage Greece to leave the Common Market, and give them their own currency, and give them massive international aid.  Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece are also in trouble, and the same prescription might be necessary for them as well.  However, the writer of the first article opines, the other countries of the Eurozone will make an enormous fuss about how Greece will leave the common market, to make an example of Greece to scare Ireland and Spain and Portugal (and Italy) into better fiscal behavior.  But better fiscal behavior is really not possible.  The Common Market (a.k.a the Eurozone) is a lovely idea in the abstract, but in practice, the economies are too unequal to be able to compete in the same league.

Arch

Myths About the Confederacy

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In a recent post: Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? --possibly an article in the Washington Post-- James Loewen presents a persuasive case for the view that the Confederate States have won a propaganda war after they had lost the Civil War.  This article is worth reading by every American.  Some of the pseudo-facts mentioned by Mr. Loewen are so deeply imbedded in the minds of Southerners that they have now become accepted as facts, and are even taught to middle schoolers in many states.  I'm going to summarize some of the points in that article for the busy executive (and the slow reader).

A.  Many southern states voted to secede to retain slavery, rather than to protect States' Rights.
In fact, Mr Loewen argues--and presents evidence-- that it was the Northern States that were fighting for States' Rights, to not enforce a law that required runaway slaves to be returned to their owners.  This was a Federal Law, which the Northern States opposed.  The Southern States wanted no part of individual states voting to not enforce this law.  The specific documents Mr Loewen quotes make very interesting reading, especially a paragraph in the Texas declaration of secession, which very clearly states that African Americans did not participate in the struggle for independence from the British (I'm paraphrasing), and therefore did not deserve to be given any rights other than those of slaves.

It is not our intention to aggravate the hostile feelings of the African American community at this difficult time, but such feelings can only be made even worse by the attempts of certain Southern politicians (and Southern Society, generally) to whitewash the events of the Civil War.

B.  Support for the Confederates in certain states, e.g. Maryland and Kentucky, was not as great as one may infer from the number of war monuments in those states.
Mr. Loewen points out that visitors, and even residents --and certainly children-- in those states are led to believe that those states supported the Confederate cause.  Perhaps it was that Confederate politicians and families in those states were just richer, and could afford more monuments.  That would make sense, especially if they were the ones who had the benefit of slave labor.

C.  To this date, history texts are written in such a way as to obfuscate the true reasons for the Civil War.
Children are taught by texts that subtly suggest that the Civil War was a war of independence to reject Northern Tyranny (which it might have been, in the view of some), and that the South was struggling to preserve State rights, and not fighting for the preservation of slavery as such.  To my mind, this point of view goes way beyond placing a gentler, more generous take on the motives of Southern Politicians, after their having suffered a defeat.  This goes way beyond the mental adjustments that might be necessary for healing a fractured union.  It presents the Northern Unionist forces as aggressors, and the Northern cause as unjustifiable.  It also falsely reports the extent to which there was popular support for the war even among states that formed part of the Confederacy.   Maryland, for instance, was divided on the issue, and from what I understand from the facts Mr Loewen reports, a Confederate general extorted what amounts to tribute from the residents of a certain Maryland county (or municipality), in order not to raze the town to the ground.  Well, it is war, after all.  But it shows to what extent the citizens of Maryland must have supported the Confederacy: not very much.

Arch's Summary:
The way certain politicians --notably those who support flying the Confederate Flag in State Capitols, and so forth-- understand their history might flow from a deliberate intention to deceive, and from cynical political motives.  Or it could be from having been lied to by generations of Southern elders and teachers, the victims of a massive and deliberate campaign of disinformation.  Are they the liars, or were they simply lied to?  At any rate, kids in Texas are learning lies, and since Texas determines which texts are used in schools all over the US, kids across the US are learning lies in school.

[Added later]

However, we have to face the fact that the stated reasons for the Southern leadership to go to war were numerous.  What the Confederate Flag (sometimes called the St. Andrews Flag) stands for, and stood for, is very vague, and hardly a simple thing.  Over time the meaning of any emblem can change, and in different ways for different people, and the Confederate Flag is no exception.  This article about the Confederate flag, also in the Washington Post, seems to have a good overview of the subject.

In addition, talking about fairness, specifically, certain critics point out that it was far easier for the North to abandon the historically pro-slavery stance which was common in the 18th century in American colonies than it was for the South, simply because the North had mineral and energy resources which the South did not have, and could use coal and steam to generate wealth without the use of human labor.  Nevertheless, as the article on the Flag (linked above) points out, some Southern leaders were scornful more than a century ago at the rhetoric of their fellows about the reasons for going to war.  Call a spade a spade, and an ax an ax, they said; most of us were pretty clear that we went to war in defense of preserving the institution of slavery.  But to keep harping on that fact is, in the view of the South, somewhat self-serving on the part of Yankees and their descendants.

The fact remains that history books must be written in clearer language, to include all the causes for the Civil War, distinguishing between the main causes, and more technical reasons, so that young people can draw their conclusions about which reasons were the material ones, and which ones were mere excuses (and bear in mind that often in war, some stated reasons are only excuses).  Clear documentation, in this case, is essential, and direct quotes extremely helpful, and better than explanations.

Arch