You get the degree, then you get the job--right?

You get the degree, then you get the job--right?  When did that ever happen?  Not in my life time. Well, not exactly not in my life time.  I remember one of my senior colleagues at his retirement party talking about when he had just completed his PhD and had to decide which of three University offers he was going to accept.  As he sagely pointed out, that was a time that must seem like a fantasy land to young PhDs these days. Many of the professors who taught me in my first year as an undergrad in 1970 got their jobs of the basis of a PhD in progress.  Without any statistical back-up, my intuition is that the days of “you get the degree and then you get the job” ended around 1970.  

The reason is pretty simple, straightforward demographics--”the baby boom.”  If you have read Boom, Bust and Echo, you can fine turn the demographics to your own case. I can remember when the accepted wisdom was that two years of high school was enough to get you into the labour market.  Smart people graduated high school, and post-secondary education was considered really heady stuff--mixed with a good dose of cynicism. The standard joke where I grew up was “you went to university to get a BS degree, then you got a PHD--Piled Higher and Deeper.”  Jokes notwithstanding, I was convinced that my only chance of a good life was getting into university, and I was far from convinced it would ever be possible--but I did get in.  Except it seemed that so did everyone else, and the new truism was that a University degree, in terms of employment, was the equivalent of Grade 10 (two years of high school) in the old days, only maybe not quite as good because there weren’t as many job openings as there used to be.

I remember the TA (Teaching Assistant, a PhD student--we only got to see the Prof on closed-circuit TV) in my first-year psychology course telling me, when he heard that I was doing a BA in English, that I would never get a job. I don’t remember exactly how I responded but no doubt I said something like “I’m not here to get a job; I’m here to get an education” which I had heard said a dozen times before, and a hundred times since.   In the back of my mind I was of course praying he was wrong.  

As it turned out, in my case, he was wrong.  I got my first teaching job while I was in the 4th year of my BA and I’ve never been unemployed since.  This sounds good, but keep in mind I’ve never said "no" to a job offer and every job I’ve ever held I’ve felt like I just managed to squeeze in and was lucky to have it.  My early jobs teaching ESL had little if anything to do with my education but I was always struggling to make a connection.  In fact, I wasn’t able to make substantial use of what I learned in my BA until twenty-five years later--I was lucky.

The disconnection between university education and employment isn’t new; in fact, I suspect its origins trace all the way back to the beginnings of universities, but recently the situation has gotten acute.  One study suggests that unemployment rates for recent university graduates have reached 25%; another claims that university graduates are actually earning less than high-school graduates.  An American study claimed that 60% of university graduates are either unemployed or under-employed (working part time, at a McJob, etc). 

Last week I read a “good news” article published online by one of my former students vaunting the fact that, based on a longitudinal study conducted by Statistics Canada on the “Labour Market Premiums Associated with a Postsecondary Education,” a BA degree correlates to an additional $724,000 in earnings.  The study followed university students from the 70s and concluded that, over the 20-year period analyzed, men with a BA earned $724,000 more than high-school graduates.   Woman earned $442,000 more.  Since the men under study were in their 50s in the 90s (roughly my cohort), the study really doesn’t have anything to say about the current crisis except perhaps the implied wishful thinking that history will repeat itself. 

More than anything else, the article made me think about how the author, my former student, was an interesting case study of the Byzantine twists and turns between point A and point B, between university education and employment.  He seems to be doing very well, but I remember him being very straightforward that he wasn’t interested in “a job”; he wanted to “a writer” and there was “no plan B.”  He works as a writer and editor for a headhunting company.  He gained some notoriety as a undergraduate by publishing a poetry chapbook.  The signature poem of the book was a sardonic account of his interview with the placement officer in charge of finding internships for students.  My former student is a smart guy, as well as a good writer, and is bound to be conscious of the irony that he now works in the field he once satirized.  My point is simply that if we had told him during his BA that he was being prepared for a career in work placement or human resources, he would have run in the opposite direction.  Similar cases are numerous, my own included. When I ask myself why I never became a lawyer, the first answer that comes to mind is that this was the field my father recommended to me.  As if blindly being determined by the fates I, in turn, recommended law school to my son, who is also not a lawyer.  To this list of incongruities I can add on a pile of anecdotes about lawyers who became construction contractors, an engineer who became a literary critic, and a dentist who became the owner of a used book store.

I am not attempting to whitewash the university for its part in the current crisis; on the contrary, I think the institution, I and my colleagues have a lot to answer for.  We have promoted this crisis in many active ways, but mostly our crime is not caring or at least not caring enough.

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?

I had read a lot of good reports about this book, how it was the truth about AIDS that nobody wanted to talk about.  How many times had I heard that before? Although I’d never read a complete book on the subject, I had a hunch that this might be a book worth reading.  Not because I was interested in AIDS per se, but because its spread had become such a cultural and educational phenomenon.  

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?

It is the result of a virus, specifically the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

Aren’t there some people who have HIV and never develop AIDS?

This is where the story starts to get complicated, but at the same time its pretty simple.  To answer this question we need to answer the next question first.

Where did HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) come from?  Answer: SIV.

HIV is the human form of SIV; that is, Simian Immunodeficiency Virus.  “Simian” refers to monkeys and apes.  Long story short:  AIDS comes from monkeys.  No, not homosexual, drug-addicted monkeys.  In fact, the form of HIV which has killed millions can be traced to the common chimpanzees of central Africa.  SIV has existed in ape and monkey populations for hundreds of years.  The divergent forms of HIV which have now been identified (yes, there are many kinds of HIV)  can be traced back (using “molecular clocks” and “phylogenetics”) to different times and places.  HIV-2 came from a specific variety of SIV found in apes in eastern Africa.  HIV-2 is a slow developing form of the virus.  People seldom die from HIV-2.  HIV-1 is the killer virus; the typical time span between contracting the virus and the development of AIDS is 10 years.  There are 8 identified, divergent strains of the HIV-1.  HIV-1 group M (for Main) accounts for 99% of infections and is the cause of the pandemic.  Every strain of the HIV virus is different in terms of rate of mortality and ease and type of transmission. In general, the chance of sexual transmission of HIV is about 1 in 1000.  (In other words, the statistical expectation is that if a man with HIV had sex 1000 times, the virus would be transmitted once.  However, if the man also had an STD and/or was un-circumcized the possibility of transmission would increase.)  The transmission rate through blood (transfusions, shared needles, etc) is 1 in 10.

How did HIV-SIV enter the human population?

Simple answer is that African tribesmen hunted and cooked monkeys.  It is easy enough to imagine people being bitten and scratched by monkeys.  By back tracing the various strains of HIV now in existence the virus (which was SIV and became HIV) entered the human population at 8 different points/occasions some time between 1900 and 1930.  For convenience of reference Pepin gives 1921 as year one of HIV.  Under “normal” circumstances the 8 people who had contracted the virus would have died within 10 years and that would have been the end of the virus and the disease--which brings us to the next question.

How did HIV-AIDS become an epidemic?

This is really the question that The Origins of Aids sets out to answer.  The answer lies in the geo-politics of colonial and neo-colonial Africa, the sex trade, African customs and traditions, industrialization and urbanization, and, in a detailed exposé of ‘how the road to hell is paved with good intentions,’ how attempts to combat sleeping sickness, malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy and various STDs through mass inoculations with unsterile needles led to HIV-1 M, which infected only one person in 1921, being transmitted to millions world wide. 

No doubt if he stumbled across this blog, Dr. Pepin would tear his hair out reading my clumsy, facile attempt to summarize his work.  I recommend you don't depend on this trailer.  If I've piqued your curiosity, read the book.   

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

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.

PS:  Here’s an example of a literature quiz for first-year students:

First Quiz   
Instructions:  Circle the letter of the best answer or completion to each of the following questions or statements.

1.  The word “quaint” in the phrase “your quaint honour” in the poem “To His Coy Mistress” is  . . . 

a.  a synonym for “great.”

b.  a metaphor for “cute” or “old fashioned.”

c.  a metonym for virginity.

d.  a pun on the word “queynte.”

e.  a hyperbole.

2.  The Latin expression “carpe diem” means . . .

a.  “god is dead.”

b.  “broken by the gods.”

c.  “I think therefore I am.”

d.  “buyer beware.”

e.  “seize the day.”

3.  The relationship between a sign and its referent can be . . . 

a.  discursive, non-discursive or logical.

b.  iconic, motivated or arbitrary.

c.  cultural, natural or ecological.

d.  physical, biological or neurological.

e.  phonetic, syntactic or grammatical.

4. The idea that words get their meanings from referents; that is, from things in the world is called . .

a.  constructionism.

b.  anthropologism.

c.  semiotics.

d.  linguistics.

e.  essentialism.

5.  How did the people of the Country of the Blind explain Nunez?

a.  He came from a strange and mystical place called Bogota.

b.  He came from rocks and was still unformed.

c.  He was a messenger from God.

d.  He was an alien from another world.

e.  He was a mountain climber who had fallen in an avalanche.

6.  Three traditional forms of irony are . . . 

a.  non-discursive, non-referential and aesthetic.

b.  poetry, prose and drama.

c.  verbal, situational and dramatic.

d.  Greek, Latin and Christian.

e.  textual, sociological and psychological.              

7.  Jacques Derrida defined “deconstruction” as . . .

a.  recognizing literature as the best writing that a society has produced.

b.  being true to one’s principles, beliefs and convictions.

c.  being conscious of the historical sedimentation of language.

d.  acknowledging that truth is beauty and beauty truth.

e.  the analysis of tropes and figures of speech in a literary text.

8.  “Vegetable love” is an example of . . .

a.  an oxymoron

b.  personification.

c.  a simile.

d.  an allusion.

e.  hyperbole.

9.  A “feminist” reading of “To His Coy Mistress” would be  . . .

a.  a sociological and resistant reading.

b.  a psychological and psychoanalytic reading.

c.  a formal and textual reading.

d.  a literal and historical reading.

e.  a reading of the poem as being ironic.

10.  How did the short story “The Country of the Blind” end? 

a.  Nunez returned to Bogota.

b.  Nunez and Medina-Saroté were married

c.  Nunez was accepted as the one-eyed King 

d.  Nunez lay down in the mountains, staring at the stars.

e.  Nunez was locked up because he was insane.

Best News Ever for Teachers: Everything Works!

The most brilliant statement I’ve ever heard about teaching and learning was “Everything works!”  Early in my career I taught basic-level ESL to new recruits at a military base. As my buddy Bob used to say, if you can teach a language, you can teach anything.  Your baseline assumption in teaching a language is that your students don’t understand what you are saying--a good assumption to consider no matter what you are teaching.  You’d be amazed how slow some teachers are in catching on to this idea, and resolve that talking faster and louder is the best possible response to students’ looks of incomprehension.  Figuring out what your students already know, what they are capable of doing and understanding, and adding something new to that mix is what I mean by the word “teaching.”  The questions is:  “How?”  And the answer is, guess what:  “Everything works!”

I was having lunch at the officers mess with Gustine Schuster when Dave Eliot joined us and began bubbling enthusiastically (Dave was a chronic enthusiast) about a new method he was trying out and that “It actually works!”  Gustine responded coolly (which was odd because Gustine was typically the epitome of personal warmth), “Everything works!”  Dave hardly missed a beat as he tried to continue his success story.  “Dave!” Gustine had to finally call him up short,  “everything works!”  In the history of teaching and learning languages, as Gustine explained, every numbskull, irrational, idiotic method of teaching can claim some degree of success.  In fact, some methods have succeeded quite well even though logic dictates that they shouldn’t have. People, especially children, are programmed to learn, especially languages, and they will manage to learn something, no matter how flawed the methods used in teaching them.  People who think they have taught children to talk are like those people who think they have taught a cat to use the litter box.  (Duhh, that’s what cats do!)  The truly amazing fact is that so many people have studied a language in school for 7, 8 or 9 years and still can’t speak it.  If the people in charge of those language courses were cat owners, there would be feces everywhere!

“Everything works!” is an important idea for teachers because it is the antidote to the tyranny and dogmatism of obsessions with methodology.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that teaching should be method-less.  On the contrary, I think every teacher should have control of the theory and practice of a dozen different methodologies, and have another half dozen in mind that haven’t been fully developed.  The sad truth is that if you asked the average university teacher what his methodology is, he wouldn’t understand the question.  (Is “standing at the front of the room and talking” a method?  Oh, wait a minute, last week I used a power-point presentation.  Is that a method?)  And tenured university professors are supposed to be at the pinnacle of the pedagogical pyramid--they are certainly the most privileged and best paid. 

The media, administrators, institutions and specialists love to announce that a new methodology is going to solve all of education’s problems, including ones that have yet to be encountered.  My former boss, who was a pretty good ESL teacher in his day, used to describe the meetings he attended in Ottawa (where all the “big” decisions about language teaching across Canada were made) sardonically.  As he recounted,  everyone was looking for the next “silver bullet” solution--a methodology that everyone would use and would solve every problem,  the ultimate panacea, the single medicine that everyone would use to cure every disease. 

The problems with this administrative daydreaming are multiple, but at the top of the list is the fact that this obsession with methodology seems to invariably lead to a neutralizing and nullifying of the effect of good teachers.  Any science experiment is designed to eliminate variables, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that pedagogues looking at a learning situation from a distance are always trying to find a way to eliminate the teacher variable.   The 60 Minute expose on the Khan Academy is a pretty good example of what I am talking about. 

The Khan Academy began with Salman Khan trying to help out his cousin by given her some extra online instruction.  In simple terms, a good teacher (Khan has all the markers: hard working, knowledgable of his field, unassuming, generous, straightforward and enthusiastic) making good use of the technology for a motivated student, but big money (aka Bill Gates) and big institutions with encouragement from the media are transforming his work into a methodology which they are calling “flipping the classroom.”  To Khan’s credit, in the interview I saw, he did his best to shy away from the “silver bullet,” methodological claims.  “Flipping the classroom” implies that students do the “learning” at home on a computer and come to school to do the “homework,” solving the problems and completing exercises.  In this new scenario teachers become a custodial presence, hovering in the background--the least essential cog in a technologically advanced wheel--while their students work by themselves on computers.

Am I saying the Khan Academy doesn’t work?  No, I’m saying everything works! The technology, resources and knowledge base that the Khan Academy provides can be valuable tools for skilled teachers to use.  It should not be used to undermine the effectiveness, influence and individuality of classroom teachers.

How did I become so jaundiced about methodology?  I’m not, but my first six weeks as an ESL teacher for the Department of National Defense I was obliged to intensively learn and then follow the Audio-Visual Method in my own teaching.  The core of the method was to show pictures to students and require that they repeat, chorally and individually, a particular affirmative sentence that corresponded to that picture.  Then they would have to learn a yes/no question that required the newly-learned response, and then a “wh” question.  Got it?  Here we go:

Everybody repeat now:  “There is a pen on the table.”

Very good, and again:  “There is a pen on the table.”

Excellent, and now the yes/no question:  “Is there a pen on the table?”

And the answer:  “Yes, there is a pen on the table.”

Having practiced this for 30 minutes of so, we can move on to the “wh” questions and, for fluency, contractions.

The “what” question:  “What’s on the table?”

Answer:  “There’s a pen on the table.”

The process is actually kind of fun for about 45 minutes, but imagine doing this for 5 hours a day, 5 days a week.  It was mind-numbingly boring, equivalent to Chinese water torture.  Of course, when you are working for National Defense the fact that something is boring is no reason not to do it--almost the opposite.  Pain is good!  So all we teachers had workbooks that we were required to follow and there were Senior Teachers patrolling the hallways who could drop into our classrooms at any time.  We teachers figured out pretty quickly that no-one was going to learn to speak English by doggedly following this method.  Behind close doors we did all the things that “the method” did not permit:  offering translations, writing on the board and letting the students take notes (yes, note-taking was verboten for beginners), rehearsing skits, learning vocabulary from Playboy and Playgirl magazines, getting our students to listen to popular music with English lyrics, etc, etc, but always ready to switch to a choral drill from the workbook if there was a knock at the door.

My lunch with Gustine and Dave took place just as we were being allowed to emerge from the Dark Ages of the the Audio-Visual Method--so Dave’s enthusiasm for a new method was understandable.  We all agreed that the Audio-Visual Method really sucked (before this expression was current), and the teaching of language went through an intense period of methodological experimentation.  In pre-audio-visual teaching, I used what was called Grammar-based Instruction (following the erroneous notion that there is anything more than a tenuous connection between grammar and spoken English), but post-audio-visual I was introduced (and actually got certificates in) Criterion-referenced Instruction, Teaching by Objectives, Communicative-based Instruction, Communications Strategies, Suggestopedia, Student-Based Learning Strategies, Teacher Effectiveness Training, Real Materials Instruction, Educational Technology, TPR (Total Physical Response, which I really liked because it meant role-playing and theatre) and a bunch I can’t remember and some I invented myself, not to mention the tidal wave that followed computers coming into vogue.  I tried them all, and they all worked.

If you were applying for a language-teaching job during this period, the correct answer to the question “What method do you use?” was:  “I’m eclectic.”  In more general terms the shift was toward anything that could be called “communicative.”  Once again, the tendency was to have teachers step back and let students “communicate” as if through this process of not-teaching them students would, accidentally or through magical osmosis, learn English.  And, once again, it worked!  However, my favourite example of the “Communicative Method” not working was when the British Council at Reading University, where all the top gurus of the “Communicative Method” were employed, accepted a lucrative contract to teach a cohort of Libyan business men.  As the story goes, after a few days of the “Communicative Method,” the Libyan business men revolted because, in their view, the teachers were refusing to teach them, which sent all the leading lights of the Communicative Method running for their old grammar books and audio-visual materials.

And now the punch line of this posting:  after a number of years of teaching at the military college (where I taught as much literature as language), I was seconded back to the military base as a replacement language teacher for the summer.  Since I hadn’t taught basic level ESL for years, I was at a bit of a loss, and had little choice but to return to my old audio-visual materials and methodology, even though I knew perfectly well that a communicative approach had become pretty much de rigueur over the years.  I was surprised to discover that the students I ended up teaching took to the audio-visual approach with enthusiasm.  When their regular teacher returned, he approached me, with deference and concern, for an explanation of what I had done with his students.  His students were in rebellion because they wanted to be taught with the audio-visual approach, and nothing but the audio-visual approach would do.  I did my best to explain the audio-visual approach, and threw out all the expected cliches (“a change is as good as a rest,” “variety is the spice of life”) but ultimately, all I could tell him is that “everything works!”

Good Teachers Are Always Underdogs

What kind of underdogs?  Pit bulls, I hope.  I read Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath:  Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants recently and, as usual, I found myself endlessly bobbing in agreement, especially when Gladwell talks about education, which he does a lot.

Much of David and Goliath is on a theme that I have passively been considering as a book subject for years.  (Ahh, indolence!) Though the themes and education examples might be similar, my point of entry would have been much different from Gladwell’s.  I wanted to develop an idea I first encounter in E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful:  “the concept of enough.”  The problem with capitalism, the reason it is destined for eventual and inevitable failure, as Schumacher argues, is that it is based on a belief in infinite growth.  The idea of “enough” is anathema to capitalist greed, to the idea that more is always better, and to Ayn Rand’s and her acolyte Alan Greenspan’s (Chair of US Federal Reserve 1987-2006) notion that selfishness is a virtue. (See Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964.)

In his book, Galdwell adopts a more cogent and, from what he writes, well established conceit of the “inverted U.”  An “inverted U” is what you get when you graph the results of increasing some “x” in order to get benefit “y.”  At a certain point the benefits of x begin to produce less significant y benefits, and ultimately too much x begins to create disadvantages.  An obvious x example might be food, and the y benefits health.  (This is my example, not Gladwell’s.  Yes, I dare to out-simplify Gladwell!)  The availability of food benefits health up to a certain point, then the benefits become negligible and ultimately the over abundance of food can produce negative health results like obesity and diabetes, etc.

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.

Gladwell’s salient examples are, of course, unexpected and much more surprising (which is why he is always so interesting to read):  class size and money.   I can absolutely relate to both, and it was satisfying to see my own foggy intuitions clarified and even quantified.  As a counterpoint to endless debates about “the poverty line,” in my book Enough (yes, the one I haven’t written!), I wanted to answer the question:  “where is the comfort line?”  How much money is enough?  With his typical nonchalant boldness Gladwell gives us a number:  $75,000.  

Statistical studies researched by Gladwell indicate that there is a direct correlation between between happiness and money up to an income of $75,000 per year.  Between $75,000 and $100,000 money does not seem to significantly influence happiness, but people who become abundantly wealthy frequently report that their wealth has become a source of unhappiness, the cause of new and challenging problems in their lives and the lives of their families.  As Robin Williams once joked about the Hollywood crowd, “Cocaine is God’s way of telling us we are making too much money!”

Gladwell also points out that for decades politicians and administrators have been obsessed with reducing class sizes in American classrooms—but downsizing classes hasn’t resulted in improved performance in the educational system.  Gladwell’s interviews with teachers and statistical data amply demonstrate that smaller class sizes do not translate to better teaching and learning, and I would be quick to agree. High-school teachers Gladwell interviewed reported the ideal class size to be between 18 and 32 students.  A class of fewer than 18 students can be as big a problem as a class that is too large. 

I have always felt that I would rather teach a class of 60 than a class of 6 (having done a lot of both), but I was never able to explain that feeling to myself—especially since the class of 60 would demand more than 10 times as much energy, preparation and correction.  The basic ideas which Gladwell raises, and which fit with my experience, are 1) that you need a certain mass in the room to guarantee that there are 5 or 6 people ready to question and debate what is being taught, and create a classroom dynamic and 2) students need to feel they have a peer group in the room in order to learn.  This second idea implies that if students feel they are not up to the level of the group, they will tune out.  The student with the courage and gumption to ask the so-called “dumb question” (which in my experience always ends up being the most profound, insightful and challenging question) is a valuable asset in every classroom.  That student who dares to ask the ostensibly simply, redundant, intuitive, knee-jerk question is not only energizing the room and providing a teacher with the opportunity to summarize, clarify and repeat information (repetition is the essence of education), but is helping to maintain  the participation and confidence of students who would otherwise simply turn off.

In the past, when I have questioned my preference for larger classes, I came up with a number of my own potential reasons.  One of the reasons I considered was my possible “messiah complex”; that is, that I was sacrificing myself for the greater good, the good of my colleagues.  Throughout my career the university was obsessed with budgets, which means saving money by having larger classes.  By teaching larger classes, I thought I was allowing my colleagues to teach smaller classes while overall we maintained a good average class size.  However, no colleague ever thanked me for teaching a larger class.  On the contrary, teachers of my ilk were openly criticized for selling out to the administration, making large classes routine, and thereby putting pressure on everyone else to teach large classes.

When my first rational would not hold, I had to admit that the satisfaction I derived from teaching larger classes was narcissistic, a hold-over from days working in the theatre.  A full house appealed to my ego, all the more so when the audience was full of charming young people and I was a one-man show.  True enough, but ultimately I decided that I liked teaching large classes because it was more work.  I will need an analogy/allegory to explain, which, I suppose, is sort of my version of the inverted U.

The title of my fable is:  “The Three Waiters, and the Three Tables.”  One of the jobs I never mention in cvs is the three years I spent working as a waiter and bartender.  I consider that experience to have made a valuable contribution to my teaching.  However, the analogy is also based on my experience of being a customer.  Here it is:  you go into a restaurant and there is only one waiter and there are three tables full of customers, but you end up getting quite good service.  However, you go into the same restaurant on another day and there are three waiters working and you are the only customer, and this time the service is terrible.  What happened?  

For anyone who has worked in a restaurant the logic, though counterintuitive, is quite clear.  There are “down times” in the serving business when there aren’t many customers, so it’s the time to refill the salt shakers and clean the counter and straighten out some business with the other waiters who usually don’t get much chance to talk to each other.  In other words, serving the customer which, if the waiter were alone and busy, would be his number one priority, in this new and more generous circumstance drops down to priority number three or four.  Add to that, three waiters with only one customer know that they are not going to be getting rich tips and are likely to be more lethargic than motivated.

The same logic applies to teachers and teaching.  Teaching too little and too few students can result in a gearing down, a loss of commitment, focus, energy and motivation.  This is a malaise that is all too prevalent among tenured university professors where the system encourages, if not requires, that they make teaching a third-or-fourth-level priority in order that they succeed at their careers as researchers or administrators or in their careers outside the university.

Obviously there are lots of exceptions to the argument I am presenting here.  Class size has to depend on who and what and how you teach.  A teacher who knows the students, the subject and the pedagogical methodology is the person best qualified to determine an optimal class size.  Unfortunately, on one hand, class size and teaching hours are typically determined by administrators who, no matter how good they once were as teachers, inevitably come to be governed by a system of administrative values like uniformity, orderliness, standardization and economy. On the other hand, unions, collectives and some individual teachers will inevitably lobby for and negotiate smaller classes and fewer teaching hours.   Good teachers, those determined to do the job the best way they know how no matter what, will find themselves, sooner or later, in the position of underdogs, Davids forced to find a way around the Goliaths who are always getting in the way.

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.

John’s eyes always light up when Mary enters the room.  He always talks in a tender, flattering manner to her.  He takes her out to dinner and buys her flowers and small gifts. Etc. Etc.

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 19^th 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 11^th 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!

Parti Québécois Hypocrisy Has a New Face

PQ hypocrisy has a new face:  Jean-François Lisée, elected as the PQ Member for Rosemont in 2012.  When he was a journalist with L’actualite, I don’t remember ever feeling that he was unmeasured or unreasonable in the presentation of his ideas.  When he debated Mordecai Richler on English-language television, he seemed not only more on top of the issues but the more reserved and rational of the two.  I was therefore very curious to see how he would defend the Charte des valeurs in his press conference on RDI this week.  His presentation and responses were brisk, vague and evasive:  sure signs of a politician who knows he is skating on very thin ice, or just a man forced to defend a policy that he doesn’t believe in.

When I quoted Premier Lucien Bouchard’s address to the Anglophone community of Quebec at Centaur Theatre, March 12, 1996, in my last posting, what I didn’t mention was that Jean-François Lisée was the Premier’s speech-writer at the time, as well as  the organizer of the event.   We can safely assume he had a substantial hand in preparing the speech, if it wasn’t entirely his work.  So here, once again, is what Jean-François Lisée supposedly believed in 1996:

If we're looking for shared values between Quebecers, a number of them come immediately to mind: parliamentary democracy, equality, freedom of expression, pluralism, a taste for each other's culture, a somewhat greater sense of fun than most of our neighbors.

This week, Jean-François Lisée, defender of the “Charte des valeurs,” no longer believes in “freedom of expression” or “pluralism” or “a taste for each other’s culture.”  A “sense of fun”?  That’s not even on the map anymore!

If you want some sense of the depth of his newfound hypocrisy read the first entry of his journal on his official web site concerning the program of Africa-Quebec cooperation that he seems so proud of and moved by.  Of course, under the Charte des valeurs which  Minister Lisée now espouses, these “professionilized,”  Senegalese women in their brightly coloured costumes, which he was so moved by, would not be allowed to hold  a job in Quebec’s public and parapublic services unless they were ready to abandon their head scarves.  How’s that for a message of welcome!  And a message of respect for the people of Senegal invested in cooperation with Quebec!

What does Jean-François Lisée really believe in?  Not much it would seem. If his support for the charter of values is an attempt to follow through with the strategy outlined in his book Emergency Exit: How to Avert Quebec's Decline  and provoke a new conflict with the federal government and a referendum on Quebec’s powers within Canada, then he should say so clearly. Like the rest of the PQ, his sense of “values” this week seems pretty vacuous and negative.  Like the rest of the PQ, he seems ready to surrender his values of pluralism and openness in favour of the political exigencies of the moment. Like the rest of the PQ, he seems ready to surrender his earlier beliefs for a charter of non-values, a charter of anti-values, a charter in opposition to minorities’ expressing their beliefs and values, in a vain attempt to claim some sort of petty, short-term, ethnocentric political victory.  History, the one which won’t be controlled and written by the PQ, will judge him poorly.