Lift Up Your Hearts!

Today marks our Constitution's 222^nd birthday, in honor of which I present another depressing civics quiz.  The questions are drawn from the test prospective U.S. citizens must pass, and if these standards applied to all, apparently 97% of Oklahoma's public high school students would be in danger of losing their citizenship.  I'm sure no one is under any illusions that the problem is limited to Oklahoma.  Here are the questions; for the answers, and what percentage of the students surveyed answered each question correctly, see the original article.

1. What is the supreme law of the land?   
2. What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?
3. What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
4. How many justices are there on the Supreme Court?   
5. Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
6. What ocean is on the east coast of the United States?
7. What are the two major political parties in the United States?
8. We elect a U.S. senator for how many years?
9. Who was the first President of the United States?
10. Who is in charge of the executive branch?

What I find interesting about this quiz is that, although I did get answer every question correctly, I would say few if any of my answers were due primarily to what I learned in school, but rather to merely living life.  When it comes to history and politics, I admit to being abysmally ignorant; I wangled my way out of Pennsylvania's required semester of American Government by taking an extra year of independent study physics.  (Don't ask me why they let me get away with that, but I trust the Statute of Limitations covers it somehow.)  I loathe politics in general and other than voting am shamefully neglectful of my civic duties.  Yet even with my notorious lack of observational skills, I couldn't avoid learning enough to pass the test.  Perhaps my additional years on this planet do count for something.

I don't expect most of my Loyal Readers to wade through the entirety of Paul Gottfried's Voices Against Progress: What I Learned from Genovese, Lasch, and Bradford at the Front Porch Republic, but I include the link for those of us who were students at the University of Rochester during those times.  I find it fascinating to glimpse the political maneuverings that were going on over the heads of mere students.  I knew neither Eugene Genovese nor Christopher Lasch; I stayed as much as possible in the science and engineering part of the school, and never set foot in that "hotbed of the New Left, the University of Rochester history department."  But everyone had heard of Genovese, whom we usually referred to as Our Resident Commie, and his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, the Resident Feminist.

Of even more interest is how the thoughts and ideals of these people changed over time.  I don't regret having avoided the U of R history department in the 1970's, but find myself wishing I had known these folks as friends.

The future may belong to the Indians, or perhaps the Africans—or anyone who grows up in a multilingual environment.  Adding to the evidence of the benefits to the brain of speaking multiple languages is the research of Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University.  (Newsweek article by Sharon Begley.)

When the world's tallest vehicular bridge,^* the Viaduc de Millau, opened,

German newspapers described how it "floated above the clouds" with "elegance and lightness" and "breathtaking" beauty. In France, papers praised the "immense" "concrete giant." Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power?

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King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green (Puffin Books, 2008)

I bought this book for my grandson, who so enjoyed Roger Lancelyn Green's The Adventures of Robin Hood.  His mother reported that the Robin Hood book was "perfect" for him, but I wish I had read it myself, first, so I could compare it with King Arthur, since I'm having second thoughts.  King Arthur has been read by and to children for half a century, and there's nothing at all inappropriate about it, but there are not a few battles in which people's heads get lopped off, and a few babies conceived under less than ideal circumstances (Arthur in a scenario not unlike Solomon's), and—perhaps more disturbing for a child—a couple of examples of children raised by others instead of their own families. (More)

  The Element:  How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, by Ken Robinson (Viking, New York, 2009)

I've written before about Sir Ken Robinson, Creativity, and Education, and put an order in with our library as soon as I heard about his new book.  It finally came through, as library books are wont to do, at a time when hours for leisure reading are scarcer than arts classes in a standardized-test-obsessed school system.  But unlike Last Child in the Woods, The Element is a quick and non-technical read.  Robinson's 2006 TED talk is a good summary of the ideas in The Element.  The book goes into more detail, with more examples, and expands a bit further.

I use the term the Element to describe the place where the things we love to do and the things we are good at come together.  I believe it is essential that each of us find his or her Element, not simply because it will make us more fulfilled but because, as the world evolves, the very future of our communities and institutions will depend on it.

Robinson is convincing enough, and encouraging in his belief that it is never too late to find and nurture one's Element, but he is frustratingly short on practical advice.  So many of the examples he gives are of people who knew from childhood what they were good at, and what they wanted to do.  They may have been obstructed at every turn, may not have been able to do what they knew they were born for until much later in life, but at least they knew.

Now, I can quickly name three passions that at least begin to stir in me the excitement he speaks of, what another friend refers to as the "fire in the belly":  writing, education, and genealogy.  But not only were they not passions of mine during the years when I was in school and presumably focusing and honing my skills for the future, they were actually anti-passions:  I disliked my English and history classes, had negative interest in family stories, and teaching was not even in the vicinity of my career thoughts.  Nothing excited me, really.  I focused on science and math because I was good at them, which kept me going until some point in college, when they no longer came easily and my fair-to-middling interest was not sufficient to inspire the hard work necessary to master them.  How do we help the me's of this world to find their Element?

Here are some fairly random excerpts to give you a taste:

[I]ssues of attitude are of paramount importance in finding your Element.  A strong will to be yourself is an indomitable force.  Without it, even a person in perfect physical shape is at a comparative disadvantage.  In my experience, most people have to face internal obstacles of self-doubt and fear as much as any external obstacles of circumstance and opportunity....Fear is perhaps the most common obstacle to finding your Element.  You might ask how often it's played a part in your own life and held you back from doing the things you desperately wanted to try.

[Richard Wiseman, author of The Luck Factor] has identified four principles that characterize lucky people.  Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities.  They are especially adept at creating, noticing, and acting upon these opportunities when they arise.  Second, they tend to be very effective at listening to their intuition, and do work (such as meditation) that is designed to boost their intuitive abilities.   The third principle is that lucky people tend to expect to be lucky, creating a series of self-fulfilling prophecies because they go into the world anticipating a positive outcome.  Last, lucky people have an attitude that allows them to turn bad luck to good.  They don't allow ill fortune to overwhelm them, and they move quickly to take control of the situation when it isn't going well for them.

Effective mentors push us past what we see as our limits.  Much as they don't allow us to succumb to self-doubt, they also prevent us from doing less with our lives than we can.  A true mentor reminds us that our goal should never be to be "average" at our pursuits.

There is abundant evidence that opportunities to discover our Element exist more frequently in our lives than many might believe....I don't mean to say, of course, that we all can do anything at any time in our lives.  If you're about to turn one hundred, it's unlikely that you're going to nail the leading role in Swan Lake, especially if you have no previous dance background....Some dreams truly are "impossible dreams."  However, many aren't.  Knowing the difference is often one of the first steps to finding your Element, because if you can see the chances of making a dream come true, you can also likely see the necessary next steps you need to take toward achieving it.

In "The Pro-Am Revolution," a report for the British think tank Demos, Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller underline the rise of a type of amateur that works at increasingly higher standards and generates breakthroughs sometimes greater than those made by professionals—hence the term Pro-Am....[They] call Pro-Ams "a new social hybrid," noting that they pursue their passions outside of the workplace, but with an energy and dedication rarely given to acts of leisure.  Pro-Ams find this level of intensity restorative, often helping to compensate for less-than-inspiring jobs.

In the last part of the book, Robinson deals with reforming, or rather transforming our educational system.

Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform.  Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism.  In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support....This system has had many benefits and successes.  It  has done well for many people whose real strength is conventional academic work, and most people who go through thirteen years of public education are at least moderately literate and capable of making change for a twenty.  But dropout rates, especially in the United States, are extraordinarily high, and levels of disaffection among students, teachers, and parents are higher still.

Used the right way, standardized tests can provide essential data to support and improve education.  The problem comes when these tests become more than simply a tool of education and turn into a focus of it.

Many of the people I've talked about in this book say that they went through the whole of their education without really discovering their true talents.  It is no exaggeration to say that many of them did not discover their real abilities until after they left school—until they had recovered from their education.  As I said at the outset, I don't believe that teachers are causing this problem.  It's a systemic problem in the nature of our education systems.  In fact, the real challenges for education will only be met by empowering passionate and creative teachers and by firing up the imaginations and motivations of the students.

Too many reform movements in education are designed to make education teacher-proof.  The  most successful systems in the world take the opposite view.  They invest in teachers.  The reason is that people succeed best when they have others who understand their talents, challenges, and abilities.  This is why mentoring is such a helpful force in so many peoples' lives.  Great teachers have always understood that [their] real role is not to teach subjects but to teach students.  Mentoring and coaching is the vital pulse of a living system of education.

As if I don't already have a huge backblog, Jon keeps posting things in Google Reader/Facebook that I think those who can't see them will be interested in.  In this case, since I can't comment at GeekDad, I'll comment here.

When GeekDad's son was 12 years old he entered his school's science fair, which called for inventing something new and useful.  (More)

A Sane Woman's Guide to Raising a Large Family, by Mary Ostyn (Gibbs Smith, Layton, Utah, 2009)

This book sounded useful to Heather, who wishes both to have a large family and to retain her sanity, so we bought it for her as a Mother's Day gift.  Naturally, I read it first.  (Book-gift recipients are accustomed to that behavior from me, I'm afraid.)

I recommend A Sane Woman's Guide to all families who aspire to sanity, even if their hopes don't include a large family.  Although I don't agree with all of Mary Ostyn's advice, it's a surprisingly useful collection of ideas in a slim 192 pages, amusingly presented. Here's the table of contents for a quick preview, followed by a few, rather random, excerpts. (More)

I wrote a long comment to Mark Shiffman's Front Porch Republic article, Why we do not own a Television; not being one to waste an item on a single use if it can be recycled, I reproduce it here.  You'll have to follow the link to see the context (and other readers' comments), but I think what I wrote is pretty clear on its own.

To my total surprise and (almost) mortification, I write in defense of television.  I agree with some of the comments that DVD is the only way to go, but most if not all of the content I find valuable on DVD originated in the TV and movie media, so despising them completely would be a bit hypocritical on my part. (More)

Here's a perfect funding opportunity for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundatation, or anyone else who is interested in both technology and education:  Sponsor grants—available to both universities and private video game companies—for the production of really good educational games.

Although video game technology has made tremendous progress in recent years, educational software is for the most part stuck in the past.  Entertainment is where the commercial money is, but with proper funding there's no reason why the best and brightest of our video game designers couldn't revolutionize gaming as a learning tool.  (More)

I awoke this morning to e-mails from two family members, each containing a link to a video.  They seemed as unrelated as can be...until I realized that each is a powerful statement of how we underestimate the abilities of ordinary human beings—from frumpy housewives to scruffy street children.

I'll admit it:  I did not get through Susan Boyle's Britain's Got Talent performance dry-eyed, her triumph over the sneering judges being overlaid on some pretty deep emotional memories associated with that song.

The lecture could have been better organized, especially at the end where the speaker is clearly running out of time, but the autodidactic abilities of these children will astound you.  And maybe frighten you, when you consider what a double-edged blade the Internet is.

SFSignal asked of several present-day science fiction writers, "What non-sf/fantasy books would you recommend to someone whose reading was predominantly in sf/fantasy?"  I found the responses notable for two reasons:

One of the respondents was John Kessel, whom I remember from the Science Fiction Society of the University of Rochester.  (I remember him as Jack, rather than John, but that could be either a no-longer-used nickname, or my own faulty memory.  In any case I'm sure it's the same person.)  Although an avid SF fan for much of my early life, I've been away from the genre for a long time and have read none of Kessel's books, but it was a pleasure to see that he succeeded in turning an avocation into a vocation.

The most delightful response to the question, however, came from John C. Wright.  It is neither typical of the responses nor what most people would expect from a science fiction writer.  I excerpt it here for those of my readers who care very little about science fiction but a lot about book lists and good reading.   (More)

A brilliant student, Marcus sailed through grade school. He completed his assignments easily and routinely earned As. Marcus puzzled over why some of his classmates struggled, and his parents told him he had a special gift. In the seventh grade, however, Marcus suddenly lost interest in school, refusing to do homework or study for tests. As a consequence, his grades plummeted. His parents tried to boost their son’s confidence by assuring him that he was very smart. But their attempts failed to motivate Marcus (who is a composite drawn from several children). Schoolwork, their son maintained, was boring and pointless.

The story above is from a Scientific American Mind article entitled The Secret to Raising Smart Kids. (I've changed the name because in the original it is "Jonathan."  Apologies to any Marcuses who might read this.)  I insist that Marcus was probably right:  most seventh grade schoolwork is boring and pointless.  Be that as it may, the article investigates a question I have wrestled with for decades:  Why do so many bright students fail of their promise, surpassed sooner or later by their apparently average, ordinary classmates? (More)

Declining by Degrees:  Higher Education at Risk premiered on PBS in 2005; I watched it for the first time this week, intrigued by this Netflix summary.

Debunking commonly held notions about the rite of passage known as the college experience, this PBS documentary follows 30 students and their teachers along the path of higher education, from admission to graduation, and exposes the disappointment, disorientation and deflation many students feel—in both public and private schools. This revealing study also addresses the quality and readiness of America's future work force.

"Disappointment, disorientation, and deflation" fairly describes how I felt watching the show.  Here's what I learned: (More)

I've written often enough about threats to the fundamental right of parents to educate their own children:  the dreadful situation for homeschoolers in Germany, my concerns for Switzerland, and the unwarranted judicial intrusion in family life and education touched closer to home, in California.  California ultimately upheld the legitimacy of home education, but it appears North Carolina is the next battleground.

As with the Terri Schiavo case, it is family problems that allowed the court's nose into this tent.  It illustrates a serious problem with our "no fault" attitude towards divorce:  despite the husband's admitted, ongoing, adulterous affair, his desire to send his children to public school has been allowed to trump his wife's desire to continue homeschooling.  What is truly worrisome, as it touches homeschooling is the judge's power and attitude, as well as whatever precedent his decision may set. (More)

"What is VPK?" asks an article in our city's magazine.

Pre-math, pre-reading and social skills.  How do I teach my child all this information before she enters kindergarten?  Many parents used to ask themselves that precise question not too long ago.  However, for the past four years, concerned parents have decided to enroll their children in what is called VPK, or voluntary pre-kindergarten education....VPK is free [that is, tax-funded]...regardless of family income.

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