I’ve got a special volunteer teaching assignment tonight, an Honors Program event called “Colloquium” in which students enroll in a series of evening seminars, five all told, each led by a different professor, and each of them centered on a particular book or set of readings. This one’s my first (the second of the term for the students), so of course I decided on something a bit over-ambitious and assigned a long, rambling, urgent, personal, repetitive, provocative book called The Black Swan. It’s exhilarating stuff but who knows what the students will make of it. I’m not sure what I make of it all.
Actually, I think I’ve just described the makings of a potentially great discussion. But I digress….
I’m going through the book a second time in preparation for the seminar. As any teacher can tell you, reading a book with an eye to teaching it is a much deeper and more fraught experience than simply reading it. I guess the simplest way to say it is that I find I have to have at least three voices in my head as I go along: the author’s, my own, and the student voice I anticipate moment to moment as I think about how the discussion might–and sometimes I hope will–go. That’s an impressive number of voices in my head, one channel past stereo. Cognitive surround sound. Immersive, yes, and busy.
Then I’ll hit a statement like this one and suddenly the entire metaframe begins to glow: Taleb’s writing, my reading, my imagined colloquy, even the way I anticipate the room will look and feel:
Assuming there is something desirable in being an average man, he must have an unspecified specialty in which he would be more gifted than other people–he cannot be average in everything.A pianist would be better on average at playing the piano, but worse than the norm at, say, horseback riding. A draftsman would have better drafting skills, and so on. The notion of a man deemed average is different from that of a man who is average in everything he does…. Quetelet completely missed that point. (242)
Taleb’s words resonate for me through many chords and along many soundboards. I think of David Berliner’s tremendous call-to-arms here at Baylor just a couple of weeks ago as he presented the research he and Susan Nichols have done on the damage caused by the current fashion for high-stakes testing, work recently published in Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools. Among the many tragic and nonsensical outcomes of this drill-and-kill approach (many predicted with great accuracy for over thirty years by “Campbell’s Law,” one of the most astounding things I learned at Berliner’s talk) is a monomaniacal focus on the “bubble,” that is, the students who are just below passing and are brought up to just over passing by these tests. These success stories are touted by many advocates of these programs, none of whom seem to know about “Campbell’s Law,” and none of whom seem to have thought hard about what definition of “success” is content with getting students from just-under-mediocre to just-above-mediocre, if in fact the tests and the passing have even that much meaning. And then I think of the truly mournful set of comments on Cole Camplese’s justifiably outraged post about Pennsylvania’s “adequate progress” awards.
I can’t stop dreaming of the day we educators turn the paradigm around. What if we had an education focused on the above-average in everyone, the place of the inner outlier? What if education, inescapably difficult and dispiriting in the parts that don’t come naturally, had as its clear and beckoning aim the hard work of setting up empowering contexts for each person’s excellence to attain its true force and maturity? We say words to this effect at the inspirational moments, at the great matriculation and graduation gatherings. What of the in-betweens? What of the walk we walk–or not?
Instead, we continue to generate models of “assessment” that consume themselves in a feast of invalidity. We generate models of education that boast of adequacy. We go for bell curves and standard deviations, not outliers and positive deviation. We push out the underperforming, ignore the top achievers, and do no justice to the inner outliers in every student, no matter what his or her general aptitude.
And we say we’ve done something worth doing.
Gardner – I thought you might like this book review of “The Math Gene” which embraces a sentiment similar to what you’ve written here.
http://www.maa.org/reviews/mathgene.html
Also, directly on the measurement issues, even in areas that are less contentious than measuring learning, such as measuring inflation, there is a rather severe index number problem. There is no “right answer” to the index number problem. It’s pretty easy to come with examples of tests with easy, medium, and hard questions, where the rankings of student performance change based on the points assigned to the different categories of questions. We can agree that easy gets the fewest points, medium some more, and hard the most, but how much more is in the mind of the beholder. Tests like the SAT just assume their way of adding up the results is the right way. So I think it best to avoid the statistical metaphors entirely when talking about learning.
I love this phrase, “the inner outlier.” I’m working on first year curriculum right now and that feels like an important goal: to get students to recognize their own inner outliers. Thanks.
Hello DrC
MK Doyle discusses similar concerns on his Science Teacher blog.
http://doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-jersey-drinks-kool-aid.html
http://doyle-scienceteach.blogspot.com/2009/03/blame-crash-on-science-teacher.html
Cheers
j
I wondered why you brought that book to class but never mentioned anything about it…
As a student I would have to say that this educational reform would be highly beneficial for me, but I have to wonder how teachers, as individuals, can engage each student and the student group simultaneously. In order for the teacher to inspire and drive each student, it would require a tremendous amount of personal attention, time and understanding that, given the large class sizes in some schools, would be outside the numbers of hours in a day. Presumably, there would have to be something outside of the actual teacher to inspire and drive students to think and create. A teacher’s “assistant”, for all practical purposes, that presents an outlet for creativity and thinking that can also teach. Much like the Turtle perhaps.
That’s a great observation. Also, the first two words of your comment are especially encouraging and come at a great time. Thank you.
I’ve got to mull all this over some more, but here’s a quick response (because too much mulling and the response never arrives):
One of my dreams is that students can learn to be and to seek out these “assistants” because of what the teacher helps them discover about learning the skills of choosing thinking styles (to use Papert’s language in Mindstorms). The turtle, the textbook, the classroom, the computer itself all become vehicles, opportunities, for those discoveries. I think we need teachers to help with those discoveries–I know I do, and that’s why I love to learn from students and colleagues and books and records and movies etc. etc.–because we’re always in need of a nudge to get us to think about perspectives instead of merely adopting them. But that nudge is the beginning, not the whole deal. We eventually become each other’s assistants, and when we can manage it, our own as well. The process is never perfect, never final, always possible.
I’m not sure that makes sense, but I’ll keep trying. Thanks for the nudge.
@Lanny Wonderful points here, and your advice about statistical metaphors is good (though I will cling to “outlier” as an ironic honorific). Thanks for that link, too. I read the review with great interest.
@Libby I’m honored to contribute to the very important work you’re doing. College was for me a time to dream, and dream intensely, about my own inner outlier. Even in the mid-seventies, though, I was warned that college wouldn’t be quite the liberation that way that I might have wanted. It turns out that those warnings were true in a small way, and false in a much larger way. What shifted, I think, was my understanding of what “liberation” could mean, and how radical transformation could come in many varieties. In any event, I hope your work goes well. It’s sorely needed.
@lucychili As always, you bring good cheer and fellowship. “in the 21st Century economy, conformity isn’t really a marketable skill.” Amen to that. The post about New Jersey’s commitment to “21st century skills” is truly horrifying and goes far beyond Blackboard’s co-optation of Web 2.0 in its potential for causing harm to young minds. Glad to learn of another blogger out there trying to keep the public awake…. Thanks for those links.
Hi DrC
Here is me belatedly posting my antipodean sass about black feathered outliers.
It is meant in good spirit =)
My feeling is, as an antipodean, that black swans are a natural and probable form,
that white swans might be unexpected, that pouches are proper, and that eggs can be hatched by mammals.
ie I think outliers and bell curves are subjective, that they are founded on the assumption that familiarity begets righteousness.
http://everything2.com/title/baby%2520duck%2520syndrome
I think this habit is not rigorous or scientific and that it results in us preferring the piece of elephant we know to a shared understanding of something more holistic.
Both in ecology and in economics we need to practice our seeing and sharing in ways which appreciate the value of both known and unknown elements in complex systems and to rediscover the kind of humility which comes from knowing that we do not have all the answers.
Cheers from the Deep South
Janet