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Sunday 9 March 2014
You get the degree, then you get the job--right?
Monday 3 March 2014
Why Teachers Should Read ''The Origins of AIDS''
Why learn about AIDS?
I know AIDS has taken the lives of a lot of good people, millions in fact. I have contributed to charities raising funds for AIDS research, but I have never felt personally concerned about this disease more than about any other (an ancillary benefit of having been a one-woman man for the last 31 years, I suppose). I’ve never been particularly interested in medicine or biology for that matter. So what compelled me to read an extensive, detailed study of the history of the virus known as HIV?Has AIDS education failed?
How many times have you heard it said that what we need is “AIDS education”? So after 30 years of AIDS education and an intense media blitz, how is it that someone like me, who can read and pay attention, is still so ignorant about this disease? AIDS, because it has been described as an epidemic beginning in 1981, is an example of how the population we are all part of is educated on a mass level. My conclusion is: very poorly.How the media covers AIDS
Over the years, every time I encountered a discussion of AIDS it was invariably someone announcing that someone else was wrong about it’s etiology. The news media was only interested in an AIDS story if it involved a celebrity, a scandal or a surprising and dramatic turn of events. It was only news if someone was claiming an unexpected breakthrough or a cover-up. Almost as soon as I had learned that AIDs was caused by a Human Immunodeficiency Virus, I heard someone claiming that AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) was not caused by HIV. I remember “learning” that the source of AIDS was homosexual men. In fact, in the early 80s a homosexual flight attendant from Quebec was identified as “patient zero.” This guy not only had AIDS, and spread it everywhere his airline company flew, but he was reported to have had 200 to 300 different sex partners per year. Great fodder for homophobic evangelicals.This book aims to teach!
So why should teachers in particular read this book? I have to invent a word to answer this question: because it’s teacherly. “Pedantic,” which literal means “like a male teacher,” has become a strictly derogatory term. “Educational” and “informative” are the kinds of descriptors that can be applied to any book. “Pedagogical” would be misleading in that the word would imply that the book is about education and teaching (and etymologically about children). By teacherly, I mean that the book is an obvious, careful and patient attempt to teach the reader. It worked for me. I learned a lot. In fact everything I know about AIDS and HIV--and by this I mean everything that isn’t muddled, foggy and contradictory in my brain--I learned from this book.What we need to learn
I’m not saying that the book answered every question about AIDS; in fact, the author Jacques Pepin (not to be confused with the chef) sounded almost apologetic that the book was about the early history and origins of the disease. Like the author, I agree that in order to understand AIDS we need to know where it came from and how it evolved. Pepin’s prose style isn’t literary or poetic, and he expects you to hang in there while he talks statistics, divisions and percentages and does the math, but every step of the way he tells you clearly and frankly what he is doing, and how certain and precise his conclusions are and aren’t. Every time a concept or procedure is introduced that a lay reader might not understand, he takes the time to clearly explain and lay out the groundwork of the methodologies used to reach his conclusions. So yes, dear reader you are going to learn about “iatrogenic” and “nosocomial” diseases (meaning those caused by doctors and treatment, and in a hospital), and “molecular clocks” used to tell us how long a virus has been around, and “phylogenetics” (the study of the evolutionary diversification of organisms). The book has a lot to say (I mean teach) about colonial and neo-colonial Africa and, in his admittedly most hypothetical and controversial claim, about how the spread of HIV from Africa to Haiti to North America was significantly enhanced by the establishment of plasma banks where poor people and prisoners could sell the plasma extracted from their blood.So where did AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) come from?
Aren’t there some people who have HIV and never develop AIDS?
Where did HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) come from? Answer: SIV.
How did HIV-SIV enter the human population?
How did HIV-AIDS become an epidemic?
http://ghiasi.org/2013/03/the-origins-of-aids-jacques-pepin/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3376824/
http://www.aidsorigins.com/review-origins-aids-jacques-pepin
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10158782.2012.11441482
Saturday 1 March 2014
Testing, Teaching and "Negative Capability"
Teaching for the test
I believe in testing. Some years back, I was even certified as a Government of Canada Language Tester. On the other hand, my experience as both teacher and tester confirmed my (and everyone else’s) misgivings about standardized testing. The problems emerge when “the test” becomes the objective rather than one of the means at an educator’s disposal. Nothing undermines the educational process more thoroughly and renders what is being taught more meaningless than when teachers are forced to teach for “the test.”
To Teach is to connect the unknown to the known
“To teach,” “to educate,” means to connect something new and meaningful to what students already know. Meaning is context. To learn something means that you are able to understand what it means or at least give that thing a meaning, which in turn means that you are able to place that thing in a context, to connect it to something that you already know. That’s what good teachers do. They help students connect something new with what the students already know.
The Opposite of teaching/learning
If you don’t believe me, consider the opposite of what I am describing. You are sitting in a classroom, a “teacher” enters and begins talking in a language you don’t know and can’t identify. The “teacher” continues for an hour and then leaves. What have you learned?
"Negative capability"
The connection of new and old knowledge which defines teaching and learning rarely happens immediately and doesn’t come easily, which is why in the first class of my first-year undergraduate course I always introduced my students to the concept that the poet John Keats called “negative capability.” “Negative capability,” which Keats described as the ability that all great poets have and I describe as what students need to have, is the capacity and willingness to hold onto information even when those facts and data may not immediately or completely make sense. Students need to have confidence in the knowledge and ability of their teachers. Students need to know and feel that their teachers will eventually help them make sense of what they have learned, help them connect the dots, but also connect all those dots to something that the student already knows about, giving them a fuller context and a meaning. Teaching for the test means that what is being taught is likely to remain meaningless, to be un-connected from any meaningful context.
But it gets worse.
The Wire
If you haven’t had the experience (as I have), consider season four of my favourite television series, The Wire. Yes, it’s fiction, but it does a good job of demonstrating what can and does happen when funding and teachers’ jobs are tied to students’ performance on a standardized test. Schools (in this case a school in an underprivileged neighbourhood of Baltimore) will abandon their students’ interests and, by my definition, their education to a total focus on preparing for the test.
The Polarization of testing
Testing has become a polarized issue. Macro-educators (specialists, administrators, institutions, ministries and governments) give too much importance to standardized testing, and micro-educators ( teachers, especially university teachers) abjure anything that comes close to a sit-down exam.
Traditionally a "discipline" means "an examination is possible"
I was involved in a protracted debate at my university about PhD Comprehensive Exams. I was in favour of a traditional, three-or-four-hour sit-down exam. The majority of my colleagues and the students preferred a take-home style of exam. The single most compelling argument I could offer in favour of the traditional style of exam was that it would require that students study. In the course of the debate, it came to me that the concept of “studying” had all but disappeared from the field in which I taught.
The Definition of "a test"
My definition of “a test” is that it is something that students have to study for. A test should be based on what is taught, not the other way around, and not on something else--you’d be surprised how many teachers test something they haven’t really taught (or maybe you wouldn’t). In addition to causing a student to study (by which I mean to review and reflected upon the course material), the test gives feedback to both the teacher and the student about what has been learned and what hasn’t.
A Test requires attendance
That’s what I believe, but the truth is the original reason I adopted the habit of testing my undergraduates on a regular basis was to be sure they showed up. I’ve seen other professors’ syllabi in which they specify that a student who misses two classes would have to drop the course. This always sounded like a bluff to me, and if it wasn’t it would require taking attendance in every single class. Not only does that seem un-university-like to me, but do you know how much time you would waste every single class taking the attendance of 60 students? I wanted my students to show up because my lectures were so brilliant and stimulating that they wouldn’t want to miss one. On the other hand, I remembered all the really good reasons I came up with for missing classes when I was an undergrad. So I started giving my classes little quizzes every two or three weeks or so. Students who missed the class would, of course, miss the quiz, and if they missed the class after the quiz they wouldn’t be there to pick up the corrected copy. This was my original intention, but something strange happened and I never did use the quizzes to check attendance.
Students want to be tested
As it turned out, attendance never proved to be a big enough issue to disturb me. Students who didn’t show up usually failed or did poorly, and if a student was brilliant enough to do well without attending regularly, more power to her. Even in a class of 60, I gave 5% of the mark for participation which, of course, required that I be able to identify every student in the room by the end of the semester--not as hard as it sounds. The strange thing about the quizzes is, as I came to discover, that students really liked them.
Students like being tested
I remember turning up at the classroom one day around 20 minutes before class (which was my habit) and being surprised to discover that most of the students were already there. One of the students came up to me to announce that they were studying, had even formed study groups and mine was “the only course that people had to study for.” At first I thought she was complaining, but she seemed so cheerful about it that I took her announcement as a compliment. As I got to know the students better, especially those that had more than one class with me, I suggested that we could drop the quizzes, but the students wanted to keep them. I started analyzing my evaluation process and informed students that overall their marks were lower on the quizzes than on the other forms of evaluation--the essay outline, the essay and exams. Still students asked to maintain the quizzes.
Testing is teaching
The quizzes were painless little things, multiple choice, circle the correct answer which could be done in less than ten minutes at the beginning of the class. (There is a sample at the end of this post.) They were closely tied to the lectures and to notes that I put up on the course web site. I understood that students appreciated and even enjoyed being tested, and the tests gave me the chance to go over the material a second time (or more) that a number of students hadn’t gotten the first time. It was also a source of endless curiosity for me why students found some questions easy and others hard. In fact, the quizzes confirmed the theories of teaching and learning that I’ve been talking about in this post.
Students learn what connects to what they already know and think about
Let me explain. When I taught American Literature, I always had a few quiz questions on Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. It didn’t surprise me that students always got the answer right to the question: “Why was Blanche Dubois fired from her job as a high-school teacher?” The answer “that she had had an affair with one of her students” was bound to have caught the attention of students not that far out of high school themselves--not to mention that anything sexual or scandalous is libel to stick in the mind. Still it surprised me that students always seemed to know that the hotel where Blanche went with various men was called “the Flamingo,” until one day I was driving down Main Street passed the pub which I knew to be the favourite hang out of students from the university and I noticed for the first time that the run-down hotel next door was called “the Flamingo.” It is so obvious. Students hold onto information that they can connect to, that has meaning/context for them, that’s what learning is.
The Evils of standardized testing
I believe that testing can facilitate the learning process, but it can also have the opposite effect. The motivation/inspiration for this posting was the photograph (below) that one of my former students who now has school-age children shared on Facebook.
The woman who took this photograph of her daughter in tears as she tried to correct her homework wrote a short piece explaining the image and telling the horror story of her daughter’s struggle to complete a standardized test that American schools are now imposing. I have never read so many heartfelt responses to a single posting. Even for someone like me, a career educator with a super bright child, I can remember how turning my kid over to the educational system felt like surrendering him to kidnappers. If I made one false move the system could punish my child in retaliation.
This photograph of a little girl in tears is a perfect icon of an educational system gone terribly wrong. One not governed by teachers and parents but by a Wall-Street mentality that sees pain and suffering as evidence of austerity, productivity and good business. This image made me think about how that terrible, moving photograph of a Vietnamese girl running down the road naked and burned after a napalm attack helped to turn the hearts and minds of Americans against the Vietnam War. It also made me think about another famous photograph of a young Black man being attacked by a German Shepard, which Malcolm Gladwell (in David and Goliath) describes as provoking a turning point in the civil rights movement in the States. I’d like to think that this image of a little girl’s sadness could provoke some positive change.
In Quebec we talk a lot about “values” these days. Any society which would wittingly put pressure on and cause stress for five-year-olds for motives as feeble as standardized testing and statistics gathering has a serious problem with its values.
Instructions: Circle the letter of the best answer or completion to each of the following questions or statements.
Saturday 22 February 2014
Best News Ever for Teachers: Everything Works!
Tuesday 18 February 2014
Good Teachers Are Always Underdogs
The graph above shows the relationship between performance and arousal which could be applied to a number of different activities, including teaching. If you are bored and uninterested, your level of performance will be low. A certain level of excitement, passion and arousal will optimize your performance; however, if you become too aroused, over-excited and hyperactive, your level of arousal will have a negative effect on your performance.
Sunday 16 February 2014
How to Make Love to a Logophile?
What does it mean when John gives Mary flowers?
For more than a dozen years, I taught an introductory literature course to 60 or so first-year undergraduates, 80% of whom were young women--a number of whom would typically report being interested in questions of love and romance. Every year in the first class I described the following scenario and asked the class what word they would use to describe this young man’s actions.
What is the verb for when a man pursues a woman?
As I presented this hypothetical heterosexual scenario, I could feel Judith Butler and the gender police breathing down my neck, but bear with me. So what do we call what John is doing? Over the years I noticed a shifting in the tenor of the answers. The typical mid-90s answer was that he “was cruising,” “on the make,” “hitting on her” and, cutting to the chase, “trying to get laid.” At the millennium the answers became strident: “he’s a sexual predator,” and “it’s patriarchal oppression” and “hegemonic domination.” In more recent years the pendulum swung back slightly and it was typical to hear reported that it’s not about him but them: “they are friends with benefits” or “they’re dating” or “hooking up.”
Without "wooing" and "courtship" is romance dead?
As I called the room to order, I reminded my students of what they already knew: that the expressions they had given me did not include the correct verb for the scenario I had described. When pressed, someone would eventually come up with the proper expression: “to court.” Eliciting the older and much more English verb “to woo,” even among students who claimed to have read Romeo and Juliet where the lexeme is used a half dozen times, was a much greater challenge. I eventually asked my students when they had last used the expressions “to court” or “to woo” in conversation. The point of my questions was to provoke philological reflection on the relationship between language and culture using an example that I knew mattered to a lot of them. What does it mean that there are no current, earnest words for courtship? Does this gap in the vernacular prove that romance is no longer part of our daily culture? The number of advertisements I see for dating and match-making companies and web sites tell me that there is a void in the culture which consumer capitalism has been moving rapidly and vigorously to fill.
"Making love" before 1920 and after
The scenario I have described used to be called “making love.” Thanks to Edith Wharton’s novel, The Age of Innocence, we can now date the shift in meaning to what Wharton called the “French sense” of the expression (i.e., having sex) to just before 1920 in the USA. We might also associate this American shift of mores with the automobile, which F. Scott Fitzgerald likened, in his famous essay on the 1920s, to a bedroom on wheels.
"Making love" in the 19th century
It would be perfectly reasonable for us to imagine a conversation between two men in the 19th century in which one mentions fairly casually to the other, “I noticed you making love to my sister last night.” Modern readers are likely to misinterpret Algernon’s meaning when he tells Jack, in The Importance of Being Earnest, “The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.” Not a very nice sentiment, but not quite as bad as it sounds. “To make love” in this context means to display the courtship rituals I have described above; it does not mean to copulate.
"The Rules" for making love
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates the earliest usage of “to court” meaning “to pay amorous attention or make love” as 1580. The OED dates the Old English verb “to woo” as 1050. Oddly, the OED describes “to woo” as “Now somewhat homely” but contradicts itself by adding “also poetic.” (Much as we might love the OED--and I do--we should remember that the original version was significantly compiled by a homicidal maniac confined to a lunatic asylum. See: The Professor and the Madman.) “To court” is also a problematic expression because of its elitism since it explicitly refers to what goes on in the royal court and more specifically what went on in the court of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine where the rules of “courtly love” were first written. The rest of us peasants and plebeians were to get by in whatever way we could, clubbing women over the heads in Neanderthal fashion and dragging them off to our caves I suppose. I feel like the Grinch in saying so, but a lot of the behaviours which people today point to as evidence of “true love” are the remnants of the rules of “courtly love” codified in the 11th century under the supervision of Queen Eleanor and her daughter. Over the last 30 years, Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider have turned their version of The Rules of “courtly love” into a not-so-cottage industry.
Making love to a logophile
Oh yes, the answer to the question posed in the title of this post: a “logophile” is a lover of words, so the answer is almost redundant-- with words!
Wednesday 18 September 2013
Parti Québécois Hypocrisy Has a New Face
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