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Wednesday 26 March 2014
“Critical Thinking Skills” and “Family Values”
Tuesday 18 March 2014
When Should You Repay Your Student Loan? How about . . . Never!
To Owe Is to Own
Do you remember this line: “So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, / Retain that dear perfection which he owes / Without that title.”? “Owes” used to mean “owns.”?Avoiding Debt
I’ve always had an aversion to debt. I think it has something to do with when I was five and my mother, as she was leaving to go to work, telling me, “If there is a knock at the door, just sit on the floor and be quiet. Don’t answer the door; they might be bailiffs.” Of course, like everyone else, I’ve understood that it is impossible to get on in the world without a car loan, a mortgage, a credit card and a line of credit. Nonetheless, I’ve always been fairly obsessive about paying my debts and as soon as possible. You too I imagine.Why Must Debts Be Paid?
Graeber is an anthropologist and he must have been a good teacher because the book is full of those “dumb questions” that a student might ask which turn out to be really profound, epiphanic, inspiring and unanswerable. For example: “Why should we pay our debts?” And the corollary: “Why are we so absolutely convinced that we should pay our debts?” Or, “What is money?”Is Barter Really the Root of Economics?
Graeber’s ambition in the book is to dispel all those preconceived notions that come to us through the study of economics--that discipline created by Adam Smith in 1776 at the University of Glasgow--like that “barter,” people exchanging one commodity or service for another, is a primordial, primeval human activity as well as the historical basis of economics, and that we are morally obliged to pay debts. It intrigued and amused me to learn that economists (and anthropologists) are unable to trace the historical origins of money or agree upon a definition of what it is. The camps divide into those who think of money as a commodity (meaning that it is worth something, like gold and silver coins) and those who think money is an IOU (a way to contract and measure debt). These days it seems obvious that money is either paper or pixels, and not worth anything in itself. Graeber argues that money and debt are pretty much the same things: money is a measuring system (like meters and feet) and debt is what money measures. If you have a twenty-dollar bill on you, it means that the government of the country that issued it owes you twenty dollars worth of something. The problem these days is “of what?”The "Yellow-Brick Road": The Gold Standard
In the old days, the government was supposed to have enough gold in storage so that all the money it issued could, in theory if not practice, be exchanged for gold--what was known as the “the gold standard.” It was interesting for me (I’m a lit prof remember) to discover that L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, was an allegory in opposition to the gold standard. Farmers in Kansas needed government loans, but the treasury refused them because the USA didn’t have sufficient gold reserves. The “yellow-brick road” was the illusion of the gold standard leading to a fraud, the Wizard of Oz, who was just an ordinary old man (Oz is the abbreviation for ounce, the typical way gold was measured). The gold standard came to an absolute end in the USA in 1971 when Richard Nixon announced that American dollars could no longer be redeemed for gold.Money Is a Debt that Can Never Be Paid
Even today there are people who believe that gold is the only real money. However, according to a CBC documentary I watched not so long ago, a lot of individuals and countries hold papers that say they own gold, but the gold doesn’t actually exist. So if you have an American twenty, the American government owes you twenty dollars worth of something, but not gold. No need to worry about gold, because it is fairly obvious that the American government has no intention of paying its IOUs period. Economics really does become the purview of literary critics, I mean people skilled in analyzing works of fantasy and imagination, when you consider that the USA currently has a debt of over 17 and a half-trillion dollars. That’s American dollars, so it owes trillions of its own IOUs.You Can Create Your Own Money
Think about it. You’re out having a beer with your friend George and he runs out of money. You pay the bar bill and George gives you an IOU. The same thing happens a week later and the week after that. Instead of getting George to pay, when you go out to dinner with Rosemary, you pay your half of the bill by giving her a couple of George’s IOUs. George keeps writing IOUs and pretty soon everyone in your and George’s circle of friends has George’s IOUs. When does it end? It would end when people start refusing to accept George’s IOUs, but why would they? If they keep getting what they want (beer and meals; maybe they can even get the bar and restaurant owners to start using George IOUs), what motivation is there to stop accepting George’s IOUs? At a certain point, everyone knows that George is never going to pay off all his IOUs, but it is in everyone’s interest to pretend that he can and will. It will all end when George has given out so many IOUs (like say 17 trillion) that people can no longer pretend to believe in them or George himself refuses to write any more IOUs, even though he is only being asked to write IOUs to pay a debt that he owes in his own IOUs (because at a certain point George began to receive and repay in his own IOUs).USA: The Most Indebted Country in the World
Both of these scenarios have taken place in the US government recently. The USA has the biggest debt in the world at 17 and a half-trillion dollars, or over $55,000 per citizen, but every single country in the world is doing the same thing and is in debt. The only debate is about those countries that we know will never be able to pay off their debts. Even in these cases, it seems like they "own” the banks and the countries that they owe money to, and we hear constantly that they can’t be allowed to go bankrupt. Governments are considered conservative and fiscally responsible if they announce the intention to balance their budgets and eliminate deficits, meaning to stop going further into debt, some year in the future.Canadian and Québécois Debt Levels
In this context, should a recent university graduate pay back her student loan? Jeez, I don’t know! But here are some of the facts of the Canadian/Quebec case. The Canadian debt is currently approaching 700 billion, which means we each (every man, woman and child) owe over 20,000. (Yep, if you were born yesterday, you are already in hock for $20,000.) The Quebec debt is at 265 billion.History of Non-repayment of Canadian Student Loans
Beginning in the 1990s Canadian students started to borrow a lot more money and were having increasing difficulty in paying back their loans when they graduated. In 1980 around 9% of graduates were unable to repay their student loans; by 1990 the level of non-payment was at 17%. By 1997, non-payment of student loans reached a total of 70 million dollars. The federal government passed a law making it illegal for a student to declare bankruptcy until 10 years after graduation. The Canadian Federation of Students took the government to court claiming discrimination under the Canadian Charter of Rights but lost the case on the grounds that student borrowers were not considered a social group. The government later reduced the length of time before a student could declare bankruptcy to 7 years (thereby falling into line with what Graeber identifies as the ancient Judaic tradition of forgiving loans after the sabbath--or seventh--year).Canadian Student Debt Is Equivalent to a Small Country
The Federation of Canadian Students has begun to maintain its own “debt clock” showing how much Canadian students owe in Canada Student Loans. The amount is now over 15 billion. If they keep going, eventually they will be able to declare themselves a country (they are currently between Jamaica and Guatemala in debt size), or maybe the Federation will come to the realization that it’s members own this one.Sunday 16 March 2014
What Is the Relationship Between University Education and Employment?
My misgiving concerns the growing tendency that I have witnessed in universities to abandon any responsibility for skills training and only minimal concern for exactly what knowledge a student is acquiring. I have witnessed and been a participant in the lengthy processes involved in attempting to develop a program of studies for both undergraduate and graduate studies. However, once a program exists, an entirely different level of forces comes into play which will determine exactly what any individual student is going to study and learn in a particular program:
- the popularity of certain courses (students do get to “choose” courses, but the truth is in any given semester the choices are likely to be very limited; courses and programs that don’t attract students get cancelled),
- budgets (courses that require extra funds or have low enrolments get cancelled),
- available teaching personnel (as lecturers unionize they have collective agreements which give them priority to teach courses that have been assigned to them in the past. If a particular lecturer is deemed not up to the job, the easiest and perhaps only solution is to cancel the course. Courses are cancelled when no-one can be found deemed qualified.)
- what tenured faculty feel like teaching (Tenured faculty have a very strong if not absolute influence on the courses they themselves teach. A professor might, for example, insist on only teaching courses directly related to his research--and be accommodated. The most heated conflict I ever witnessed first-hand was between two professors over which would teach graduate seminars).
Programs do, of course, specify “required” and “optional” courses, but these requirements tend to be very flexible. Professors, administrators, and students themselves can get around requirements with equivalences, reading courses, and exemptions according to the exigencies of the moment. In the end, what an individual student ends up studying (within the very loose confines a program's design) is left to the student’s inclinations and to chance. As a professor and even as a program director I never once sat down with a student’s complete transcript at the end of her degree to consider if the courses a particular student had actually done, as a whole, made sense. There was never any discussion of what a student had actually done, how it related to the designed objectives of the program or how it might relate to employability. This situation, which verges on haphazard, is celebrate in university calendars as students' being able to “customize their undergraduate studies.”
Thursday 13 March 2014
How Universities Have Promoted the Unemployment Crisis
- Skill Types
- Business, Finance and Administration Occupations
- Occupations in Shortage
- Human Resources and Business Service Professionals (NOC 112), Administrative and Regulatory Occupations (NOC 122)
- Skill Types
- Natural and Applied Sciences and Related Occupations
- Occupations in Shortage
- Other Engineers (NOC 214), Architects, Urban Planners and Land Surveyors (NOC 215), Mathematicians, Statisticians and Actuaries (NOC 216)
- Skill Types
- Health Occupations
- Occupations in Shortage
- Managers in Health, Education, Social and Community Services (NOC 031), Physicians, Dentists and Veterinarians (NOC 311), Optometrists, Chiropractors and Other Health Diagnosing and Treating Professionals (312), Therapy and Assessment Professionals (NOC 314), Nurse Supervisors and Registered Nurses (NOC 315), Medical Technologists and Technicians (NOC 321), Assisting Occupations in Support of Health Services (NOC 341)
- Skill Types
- Occupations in Social Science, Education, Government Service and Religion
- Occupations in Shortage
- Managers in Health, Education, Social and Community Services (NOC 041), Judges, Lawyers and Quebec Notaries (NOC 411), College and Other vocational Instructors (NOC 413), Policy and Program Officers, Researchers and Consultants (NOC 416)
- Skill Types
- Business, Finance and Administration Occupations
- Occupations in Excess Supply
- Managers in Communication (NOC 013), Secretaries, Recorders and Transcriptionists (NOC 124), Clerical Occupations, General Office Skills (NOC 141), Office Equipment Operators (NOC 142), Library, Correspondence and Related Information Clerks (NOC 145), Recording, Scheduling and Distributing Occupations (NOC 147)
- Skill Types
- Natural and Applied Sciences and Related Occupations
- Occupations in Excess Supply
- Computer and Information Systems Professionals (NOC 217), Technical Occupations in Physical Sciences (NOC 221)
- Skill Types
- Occupations in Art, Culture, Recreation and Sport
- Occupations in Excess Supply
- Managers in Art, Culture, Recreation and Sport (NOC 051), Technical Occupations in Libraries, Archives, Museums and Arts Galleries (NOC 521), Athletes, Coaches, Referees and Related Occupations (NOC 525)
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.
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