Turning the tables

By ninety degrees

My old office had a Steelcase desk in one corner and two single-person study tables tucked alongside. When the math department moved into new quarters, my new office had a desk unit complete with an extension that left no room for my student study tables. One of the tables quickly found a new home as study location in the hallway just outside my office. The second was soon claimed for the men's restroom, stuck in the corner of the entry way, a convenient place to drop off books and binders before doing one's business. Everyone was happy as we settled into our new digs.

In the subsequent years, two small problems have arisen with the restroom table. For several weeks in a row, the table would mysteriously vanish from the men's room and reappear in the entry alcove of the women's restroom. A stealthy tug-of-war ensued. The table was quickly stolen back by the men each time the women absconded with it. No culprits were ever identified, but I claim credit for having resolved the matter. I bravely visited the warehouse in the college's maintenance yard. Amidst the broken bookcases and banged-up desks I located a small cast-off table that I promptly requisitioned for the women's restroom. Once it was delivered, peace reigned.

The second problem arose during the past year. Despite years of being positioned with its long dimension aligned with the restroom's door, suddenly the table was positioned perpendicular to its old orientation. Naturally I switched it back. A week later, it was turned again. Grumbling, I restored it. You can anticipate the sequel. For several consecutive weeks, the table oscillated back and forth.

Just as mysteriously as it began, the table twisting came to an end. Did the miscreant simply give up or did something cause him to decamp. What will happen when school resumes in the fall? The anticipation is killing me.

Cheerfully innumerate

Happily ignorant

I'm sure we all remember in Season 17 when Marge Simpson expressed to Lisa her regrets about blowing off the calculus final in order to party with her boyfriend Homer: “Since then, I haven't been able to do any of the calculus I've encountered in my daily life.” Ah, yes. Thus do our mistakes return to haunt us, and—as we all know, a working knowledge of calculus is crucial for success as a homemaker.

The obvious basis for the humor is the effective disjunction between calculus and housekeeping. The more subtle reason is perhaps more significant: a sense of relief in the viewer. “Ha, ha! Thank goodness it doesn't really matter that I didn't learn any of that useless stuff!” It salves their guilty consciences over their collegiate screw-ups and omissions. “Math! Who needs it? Only nerds! (And I'm not one. Hurray!)”

 Brian O'Neill seized the opportunity to write a semi-humorous article for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette after discovering that Google's Laszlo Bock found no significant connection between college grades and job qualifications. He cites Bock as saying in a New York Times interview that “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless.”

What? Algebra grades don't predict job performance? Grades in English composition don't correlate with corporate success? Shocking!

And why should they? I concede that the classroom is an artificial environment that does not in general (and is not intended to) emulate future work experience. The integration of the knowledge you acquire in the classroom is a separate skill, as is the selection of the right tools for doing a particular job. Why are heads exploding (or pretending to explode) over these “revelations”? People don't begin entry-level jobs with all of their skills and knowledge pre-melded into a unitary capability. Who knew?

A degree really signifies that you are able to achieve a goal, which is why many companies care more about your persistence in achievement than they are in the grade point average you attained. This, however, is the point at which people bewail the math classes that prevent attainment of a degree: “I can't do the math required for a college degree, so math shouldn't be required.” But college degrees are a sign of a range of qualitative and quantitative skills, so this argument suggests a watered-down college degree is okay. Should it have an asterisk on it? Should it be labeled “college degree lite”. Does everyone deserve a college degree even if he or she is illiterate or innumerate? Note how readily the argument generalizes:

“I can't do the _____ required for a college degree, so _____ shouldn't be required.”

Student success would soar! And student job options would correspondingly shrink.

Oh, but Google says academic success doesn't correlate with occupational success. Please pause to consider that Bock was describing what they discovered in the people they hired. Go ahead and visit Google's job opportunity site. They need account managers and executives more than anything else (at least during this summer of 2013). Minimum qualifications? Looking at today's listings in order, I see BA/BS (MBA preferred), BA/BS, Bachelor's (MBA preferred), BA/BS, BA/BS, BA/BS, BA/BS, BA/BS, BA/BS, BA/BS (and that's just page one). You get the idea.

Shall we do what Google says and ignore college attainments, or as Google does? While Google may not ask for GPAs and specific college majors, it still wants to know you can complete a certain level of education. If you can't, they're less interested in you (although they will in some instances accept “4 years relevant work experience” in lieu of the bachelor's).

Students without math skills may nevertheless thrive in the many occupations that minimize the need for numeracy, but those students dramatically constrict their options and straiten the path to success. And it's too late to have Euclid himself as an instructor: “Give him a coin, since he must profit from what he learns.”

Bill Priest revisited

The other side of the coin

In my recent post on Bill J. Priest and the creation of the Dallas County Community College District, I commented that the biography by Kathleen Krebbs Whitson is a “hagiography,” that is, an account of the life of a saint. According to Whitson's book, the never-wrong Priest was often betrayed by incompetence and intransigence—always in others. For example, here is her report on Priest's travails in his pre-Dallas post as founding president of American River Junior College in Sacramento in 1955:

Priest was hired as the Superintendent/President of the new college. He had the arduous task of not only beginning a new college, but also absorbing an existing college, Grant Technical College, into the new organizational structure. Grant Technical College had actually been the top two years of a kindergarten through fourteenth grade school in the local public school district. The faculty of the college levels, however, had tenure. That was the first hurdle. The new college being founded would not have tenure for the faculty. This was one of the first conflicts. The established faculty felt they should be grandfathered [with tenure] in the non-tenure for faculty policy. They sued and won. Now Priest was faced with a faculty in which some had tenure and some did not. Many of the former faculty of Grant Technical College felt that none of the new rules should apply to them. This perpetual problem more than doubled the efforts of establishing a new college.

Certainly Priest's task would have been greatly eased if only the tenured faculty of Grant Technical has simply rolled over and allowed him to strip them of their job security. What ingrates they were, failing to appreciate the great man's effort to reduce them to at-will employees!

Whitson's coda to Priest's ordeal in assimilating Grant Technical has this interesting twist:

There were continual lawsuits and the attorney was less than competent. He lost nine cases out of nine. Fortunately the Board of Trustees gave full support to Priest in the challenges he faced. In Priest's estimation, they were a quality board with a focus on the educational good for students.

Poor Priest! Saddled with a “less than competent” lawyer. (Who hired this lawyer, anyway? Did the president have no role in staffing the new college district?)

It's easy to offer a different take on this report. Was the attorney incompetent or was Priest pushing too hard against the rights of his faculty members and simply getting rebuffed by the courts? I'm curious to know more about what these nine lawsuits entailed.

By the way, the colleges of the Dallas County Community College District have tenured faculty in addition to part-time and temporary faculty, so it appears that Priest was unable to create an at-will system of faculty employment in right-to-work Texas. Furthermore, the two-tier system that was created at American River Junior College (now just American River College) went away as tenured faculty became the rule rather than the exception at the Sacramento institution. Neither in California nor in Texas was Bill J. Priest successful in establishing himself as an unfettered benevolent dictator. His accomplishments notwithstanding, Priest belongs to the patronizing era of father-knows-best. No doubt the great man would be aghast at the shared-governance practice that emerged in his wake.

Self-diagnosis

This ought to hurt a little

It usually happens right after the first exam of the semester. Somewhere between one third to two thirds of the class is disappointed with the results. Nearly everyone expected an A or a B. Many are surprised they earned a C, D, or even an F. I give an assignment:

Send me an e-mail message by noon on Wednesday that contains two things:

1. A description of what you think went wrong on your exam and why you didn't score better.
2. A description of what you plan to do to deal with the problem(s) described in #1 and how you're going to do it.

Except for the few fatalists who signed up for the class in full expectation of miserable failure (why are they even there?), the students tend to take the assignment seriously. Interesting and often thoughtful responses come in:

I think part of my reason for scoring so low was I didn't thoroughly double check my work. I missed a good amount of points by not double checking that I knew answers to, or just wrote down wrong but still knew the right answer to.

An excellent observation. We have a long class period and I allow my students the entire time for the exam. They have ample opportunity to review and check their answers. Getting out the door before the class period is over is not a good priority.

I skipped the last two sections of the chapter so I didnt get enough practice with the word problems. I also made a lot of simple mistakes that could have been avoided if I would have checked my work carefully.

Self-knowledge. A beautiful thing. The next step is to actually do something about it.

I didn't push myself hard enough to finish all chapter homework. which would of help me master solving linear equations, inequalities and problem solving ect.

Indubitably. Hardly anyone succeeds without practice, and that's what the homework is for. Thanks for noticing.

I think my problem for the test was I didn't study enough.

Yes, I do recommend the practice of studying. Do please give it a try.

1. I think what was wrong with the exam and why I got such a low score was the fact that I barely got any sleep. 2. Study more, go to bed early, and be more prepared. Also I should try to understand certain problems more

Okay, I think you raise some good points. People do better on exams when they are well rested. However, I sense an element of denial. Of the last five class days, you missed three. See the problem?

Must be present to win

A cry for help

One of my students—let's call him “Dick”—sent me a distressed e-mail. He was not doing well in class and was hoping for some wise words of guidance from his teacher. His semi-coherent message ran thus:

hey Dr.Z dick here,
hey i wanted to run over a little bit of questions, 1.please tell me if there is anything you can pinpoint from my work that i can work on to develope the grasp of this sections.i do not want to fail and sometimes i feel i can grasp it then sometimes i fail it.i do not want to fail this class i meet with tutors every week twice and home tutors and i can do decent but cannot prove my worth on every other test.im using the dropin ctr efficiently...any help you can recommend i do not want to lose my financial aid as it is viable to my continued succession.i can retake the course next semester as a retry but do not want to receive a W as it may discontinue my aid as well..
dick,

I often reply immediately to such messages, both to reassure the student and to prevent them from getting lost in the in-box maelstrom. Students benefit most from timely feedback. This time, though, I sat on my hands and just stared. And stared. And walked away from the computer.

Dick was in class the next day. I asked him to see me at the end of the period. He dutifully approached me as his classmates filed out of the room.

“I got your message, Dick, but I have to say I'm puzzled. Isn't it obvious what you need to do?”

“Huh? I'm trying everything I can, Dr. Z!”

“Even attending class? You routinely miss one class session per week and you often skip two. I'm less impressed about the frequency with which you meet with tutors if you don't attend actual class sessions.”

“Well, uh, sometimes I can't make it.”

“So it seems. But if you can't attend class, you can't reasonably expect to pass it. And where is the work you're doing with your tutors? I didn't see any homework from you for the last two chapters. So far, in fact, you've missed about thirty percent of the homework and quizzes. You'd barely be passing if you got perfect scores on the remaining seventy percent, but you're nowhere close to that.”

Dick had nothing to say, but he was nice enough to look embarrassed.

“Dick, I was astonished by your message, especially since it should be perfectly obvious that you desperately need to come to class and pay attention to the lessons. You can't skip out on a third of our sessions and survive. Few students could get away with that. I need to see you in class, on time, every day for the rest of the semester. That's my advice.”

He nodded his head. He even showed up the next day. Two days in a row. That's good! I wait to see if he makes it to three, which has occurred before—but rarely.

One thing sticks in my mind, though. Dick was clearly surprised—startled, even—at my advice. The notion of actually coming to class regularly had never occurred to him.

Corporations are people

Well, kind of

Nothing is more important to the continuing success (or failure!) of an organization than its hiring process. Bring in the wrong people and you're doomed. Bring in the right people and you have a fighting chance. Hence I never pass up an opportunity to serve on one of my college's hiring committees. Despite the onerous task of wading through dozens of thick application packets, it's worth it in order to participate in the selection of my future colleagues, supervisors, and support staff. It's also educational.

As you might imagine, some applications make more interesting reading than others. Each candidate's personal statement of interest strives to distinguish the candidate from other, supposedly less qualified, applicants. The candidate has to tread the fine line that separates persuasive self-promotion from repellent bragging. One must also take into account one's audience and do the necessary homework to research the target institution. I have quite lost track of the number of letters addressed to Large Community College that say, “My lifelong dream is to work at an educational institution as excellent as Medium Community College.”

I presume that was a search-and-replace failure while preparing different packets for LCC and MCC. Proofread your submissions, people!

Of course, there are more subtle errors than merely getting the college's name wrong. One particularly fascinating example springs to mind as a perfect illustration of a candidate that did too little homework in preparing his application for a faculty position. Here's a paraphrase of the key paragraph:

In an era of shared governance in community colleges, I have vital hands-on experience that prepares me to be especially effective and productive as a professor at your institution. While serving as department chair at Country City College, I was tasked with the job of providing instructor-perspective input to the Dean of Education in creating faculty assignments. Although the actual responsibility of making faculty teaching assignments rests with the Dean of Education, it was frequently necessary, in order to meet semester deadlines, for me to present the Dean with detailed faculty-assignment proposals as a fait accompli. I thus, in effect, did a significant portion of the Dean's job during the four years I was his faculty advisor and therefore possess actual administrative experience at the management level that should enhance and inform my contributions as a new faculty member at Large Community College.

As the members of the LCC hiring committee sat around a long conference table and passed around the application packets for comment, several of us took special notice of the unique qualifications of the candidate from Country City College. Imagine—we could hire someone who had actually done a big part of his ineffective supervisor's job!

We were not prepared to make any decisions at that point because the hiring committee was awaiting the arrival of its chair, who had to wrap up a prior meeting before joining us for candidate screening. When he arrived, the application from the CCC professor was on top of the stack at his end of the conference table. He spotted it and immediately picked it up.

“Well, here's a name I recognize! He was a faculty rep on my advisory team when I was Dean of Education at Country City College!”

The polite student

A cure worse than the illness

An armed society is a polite society

—Robert A. Heinlein

The weight of events was heavy on our thoughts. The news reports were frightening and the college district had reacted. Department meetings featured safety lectures and the college had conducted an “active shooter” drill, in which the campus cops and local law enforcement rehearsed their emergency response procedures and tested their readiness for a Virginia-Tech-type situation.

It was not unusual for a student to approach me before the start of class for a private word, although it was just a bit strange to have one standing so close. I knew him better than most students. He had been enrolled in one of my classes before. He was unfailingly polite and applied himself diligently to his work. He spoke very quietly, so it helped that his lips were close to my ear.

“I don't want you to worry, Dr. Z, if any of the students give you any trouble,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows.

“Thanks,” I said, “but that hasn't really been a problem so far.”

“That's good,” he replied. His eyes flicked toward his classmates who had nearly filled the classroom. “It's just that I know some students get resentful when you're a strict grader and these days you never know how they might react. I just wanted to say that I've got your back.”

His coat was unzipped. With his left hand he pulled it open slightly so that I could see the holster nestled near his armpit.

“I've got a concealed-carry permit and you can rest easy. I've got your back.”

Hoping that my face did not show my surprise, I calmly replied, “Thanks. Thanks for letting me know.”

Mission accomplished, he returned to his seat.

The class continued without further complications, but every so often I threw an extra glance in the student's direction. Everything seemed the same on the outside, but the entire atmosphere of the room was changed for me. While my rational brain had reasonably reassured me that the active-shooter scenario was merely an extremely remote possibility (how many colleges are there? how many of them got shot up? we're talking good odds here!), my animal hindbrain insisted on stroking the panic button. Now, however, there was some additional solid data to process: A loaded gun was present in my classroom.

While gun-rights advocates like to quote Heinlein's aphorism about gun-mediated courtesy, they appear to care little for simple numerical arguments. Guns are an accelerant. People without guns can scream at each other and live to argue another day. Put guns in their pockets and the odds that someone will get hurt skyrocket. If a gunman strides into a movie theater and starts to shoot innocent bystanders at random, an armed citizen could presumably take him out, save lives, and be a hero. On the other hand, the result might just be more people killed in a crossfire—especially in a darkened theater and especially if more than one armed citizen joins the fight. And when the police arrive, at whom do they shoot?

I didn't feel safer with an armed student in the class, even though he was ostensibly “on my side.” He just made me nervous and acted as a constant reminder of worst-case scenarios. The worshipers of the Second Amendment extol the etiquette-enhancing qualities of firearms, but they ignore the risk-impact of the proliferation of guns while focusing on the deterrence of rare and extreme events. Their grasp of probabilities is shaky.

Still, it's not as though there is no evidence on the side of the gun advocates. History suggests that Tombstone was a very polite town. Quiet, too. At least over at Boothill.

Professor Google

Live and interactive!

This is not a rant about students relying on things like Google and Wikipedia for their schoolwork. It's not that at all. It is instead a rumination about the tendency of some students—at least one in particular—to rely on an information-at-your-fingertips approach to education. The student I have in mind appears to have lost—to a remarkable degree—the trait of self-reliance. Let's call this student “Shawn.” He took my algebra class. He took it twice, having flunked it the first time. In both semesters I was treated to Shawn's pop-up arm, which waved for my attention at the least provocation. As a highly interactive instructor, I welcome student questions and want them to feel that their queries are welcome. Shawn, however, was trying my patience (along with that of his classmates).

It took me a while to figure out what was going on. Ever in the moment, Shawn had abandoned thinking. If something—anything—gave him pause, his arm shot up. He wanted immediate clarification from the instructor in preference to actually thinking about it himself. Somewhere along the line he had discovered that the path of least resistance involved asking the professor.

Back in the old days before the World Wide Web and Google, I sometimes fussed for hours (or even days), wracking my brain trying to recover some odd bit of information. I'd pull books off the shelf and page through them. Did I read it in this one? Should I dig out the encyclopedia? Did a friend mention it to me in conversation? Should I try calling him? (Which one?) As you may have heard, we call these the “good old days.” I confess, however, that the Internet and Google have become two of my most cherished friends. Facts and factoids are at my fingertips and I discover or rediscover things with alacrity and pleasure.

Shawn doesn't have Google in the classroom. He has me: Professor Instant Gratification. (I had a lesson to learn as much as Shawn did.)

The starkest example of Shawn's abandonment of thinking arose during a lesson on nonlinear systems of equations. I had created an elementary introductory problem involving a parabola and a line, writing their equations on the board and telling the students we were going to discover the points where their graphs crossed each other. The computations were straightforward (amazing, isn't it, how simple the answers are for Example 1?). Then I told the students we were going to examine the plausibility of our solutions by graphing the two curves and considering their appearance.

I plotted two points (the axis intercepts!) that satisfied the linear equation and sketched the line. Shawn was keeping his peace and presumably keeping pace. The quadratic equation was a little more challenging to graph, but it was still pretty elementary, so I created a short table of values to find some points that would help us sketch the parabola. In rapid succession, I plugged in x = 0, x = 1, and x = 2.

Up went Shawn's hand.

“Yes, Shawn?”

“How did you compute those values?”

“The values in the table?”

“Yeah. Where did those come from?”

Mind you, we had done the parabola to death in the previous chapter. We had graphed vertical parabolas and horizontal parabolas. We had found their axis intercepts with the quadratic formula (if necessary). Several old quizzes and the most recent exam had featured the parabola most prominently. All of the students, including Shawn, had had multiple exposures to the mundane task of plotting a parabola. He had had even more examples of plugging in conveniently chosen numbers to evaluate algebra expressions for graphing. Shawn's question was extraordinarily lame.

“Shawn, I want you to think about that.”

“What?”

“I want you to think about that. I'm finding points that lie on the graph of a parabola, picking x's and computing y's. You've done that yourself, right?”

“Lots of times.”

“Okay. Do it now.”

Long pause.

“Oh,” he said.

“Right,” I said, hoping that he was indeed right in what he was thinking.

It was not easy, but “think about it” became a standard response to many of Shawn's too-quick questions. By degrees, he eventually became more self-reliant instead of instantaneously asking the professor. He never learned to postpone gratification to quite the degree I would have liked, but he got a little better. He stopped asking questions without thinking and I stopped answering so automatically.

And Shawn's classmates got more rest for their eye-rolling muscles.

Oh, no! Not again!

Déjà vu all over again

Most of us in the teaching profession like to get to know our students and try to find ways to kickstart the process at the beginning of each new school term. One of my colleagues hands out a questionnaire. Another has the students take turns introducing themselves to the class. I usually give an e-mail assignment, which I call a quiz. The instructions are simple: send me a message that (a) includes the name of the class on the subject line (no blank subjects, please!), (b) tells me why you're taking the class in question, and (c) includes your full name (in case I can't tell who you are from the hell-girl-666@inferno.net e-mail address). Since it's a “quiz,” they get points for it.

Like I said, it's simple. I get some useful contact data and a perspective on what my students are looking for (although I can't be much help to those who are taking the class “because the voices in my head told me to”). I also find out which of my students are capable of following instructions, which happens to be an extremely important survival skill in any college class, but perhaps to an even greater degree in math.

Every semester, of course, there's a few students who just can't be bothered to earn a few easy points by sending their instructor a short e-mail message. I presume their lives are full of fun, excitement, and distractions. (I'm envious.) I reply to each message individually and then, after the submission deadline, send out a global message to the entire class roster: “If you didn't get an individual response from me with your quiz score, that means I didn't get an e-mail from you!”

I repeated that message in one of my classes this week. One of my students raised his hand. It was “Stan,” an apparently smart but disorganized student who was repeating the class, having flunked out the previous semester. He had earnestly assured me that this semester would be different.

“Dr. Z, I didn't get an e-mail from you.”

“Right, Stan. That's because I didn't get a message from you. Did you follow the quiz instructions and send me an e-mail message with the requested information?”

Stan paused for a moment before giving me a tentative answer.

“Yeah, I did. I sent you a message.”

“Okay, Stan. When did you send it? Before the deadline? It's possible it got sidetracked by the spam filter and I can search for it in my trash bin.”

“Um, last time. I sent it last time.”

I was confused for a moment, then figured out what he meant.

“Oh, you mean last semester?”

Stan nodded his head. I bit my lip.

“I think we have a problem, Stan. Doing it last semester doesn't exempt you from doing the assignment again this semester. You also took exams last semester, right?”

I let that sink in. Stan achieved enlightenment.

“Oh, so I should do all the assignments this semester even if I already did them before?”

Oh, yeah.

An angelic experience

Learning on the wing

Like a moth to a flame (or an archangel to a young Jewish virgin), I was drawn irresistibly to the opportunity to attend a faculty training event on the existence of angels. When it first came to my attention, I was initially struck by how inappropriate it seemed as a topic for a professional development activity. While not quite as bad as giving nurses continuing education credit for attending a Catholic indoctrination session, the angel seminar simply seemed irrelevant and beside the point. Where was scholarship in this? What useful lessons might I learn?

The presenter was TM, a young woman who holds a doctorate from the California Institute of Integrated Studies. She is an alumna of the CIIS program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, but I suspect “cosmology” in this context has very little to do with what science-types consider to be cosmology. That's just a guess, of course. You can visit the program webpage and consider the course content for yourself.

To give credit where it's due, Dr. TM declared in her opening remarks that she did not expect attendees to change their opinion about the existence (or non-existence) of angels as a result of her 90-minute presentation. That demonstrated TM's connection to reality, recognizing that the material she would present lacked the evidentiary weight necessary to persuade non-believers. Among the two dozen attendees were several who nodded their heads in sad acknowledgment that some people just aren't open-minded enough to embrace the reality of God's messengers. Others, like me, sat still, resisting the impulse to roll our eyes. It was prudent of TM to allow for our skeptical presence. We were, however, very well behaved throughout the event.

TM was much enamored of Carl Jung's notion of synchronicity, a concept I have never been able to take seriously. As TM explained, a synchronicity occurs when a strong interior impulse, condition, or sensation is reinforced by an exterior manifestation that generates a transformative moment of understanding. Jung's own favorite example, according to TM, was the appearance of a beetle at the window during a psychotherapy session with a female patient who was telling him about a dream about a golden Egyptian scarab. Since the beetle at the window was the nearest local analog to Egypt's golden scarab, Jung deemed it a synchronicity—an acausal simultaneity between his patient's inner life and the external world. (J. B. S. Haldane might have preferred to regard it as a manifestation of God's inordinate fondness for beetles, having scattered hundreds of thousands of species of beetle throughout the world.)

As TM hastened to explain, “Synchronicities are not just happy coincidences!” In response, one of my neighbors muttered, “No. Synchronicities are happy coincidences which people invest with heavy significance.” Only the closest people heard the riposte, but a couple of us nodded. (I was one of them.)

So, where were angels in all of this? As you might suspect, angels are implicated in synchronicities, especially when they manifest as exterior confirmations (i.e., as if they exist in the physical world) of interior emotions or yearnings. The archetypal example is The Annunciation. TM asked the attendees if anyone recognized this special event. I helpfully raised my hand and offered a description: “That's the event reported in the Bible of the archangel Gabriel appearing to Mary and announcing that she was to bear a son who would be the savior.” TM beamed at me and added some details. First of all, the yearning of the Jews for the coming of their messiah would be manifested in the hopes of young Jewish maidens to become the savior's bearer. Second, it didn't matter whether Mary was pregnant or not when Gabriel made his announcement. Either way, Mary would have a deep interior desire or anticipation that was acausally linked with the archangel's appearance.

TM was particularly interested in the parallels between synchronicities and annunciations. The incident with Mary and Gabriel is the most famous, but angels were also reported to have advised Joseph not to divorce Mary and later to flee to Egypt to avoid Herod's slaughter of the innocents. In her dissertation research, TM made the case that annunciations in religious history (by no means limited to Judeo-Christian sources) were anticipations of Jung's theory of synchronicity and fit well into the Jungian model. Furthermore, the parallels remain even if the angels did not actually exist. (Surprise!) That's because it's not strictly required that the coincidental confirmation of the interior sensation be an actual event in the physical world. The angels could, in fact, be confirmatory figments of the imagination.

At this point, I got to learn something—and by this I do not mean that I learned there's a lot of silliness in this field. After all, who should be surprised that there are parallels between supposedly different forms of delusion? No, in this case I learned a bit of Bible lore that I had not heard before, and which I found interesting and intriguing. According to TM, Gabriel does not appear in the earliest Bible texts. His role is magnified by redactors who found fault with Mary's inner conviction that she was indeed fated to become the mother of the messiah. If this is correct, then Mary's synchronicity was a progression from “I want to bear the messiah” to “I will bear the messiah.” That's pretty thin gruel. Having an archangel with a name showing up to put his stamp of approval on Mary's inner yearning makes the story much more satisfying.

A few of us got fidgety near the end of the event as some of the attendees hastened to offer personal examples of synchronicities. My inner yearning for it all to end was confirmed by the external manifestation of a yawn, but I'm afraid it lacked the acausal quality that would have classified it as a synchronicity.

A seraphic school seminar

Guardian angel

John Vasconcellos was a well-known figure around the State Capitol. A big teddy bear of a man, his rumpled figure had all the debonair flair of an unmade bed. He briefly achieved national fame when his “self-esteem” initiative drew mocking attention from the Doonesbury comic strip. John himself, however, was unfazed, even if his more substantive contributions to the state of California passed unremarked.

Anyone who serves in a California community college tends to associate the name of John Vasconcellos with his landmark education reform bill, AB 1725, which in 1988 rewrote the sections of the state education code dealing with our schools. One legacy of that legislation is a greater emphasis on professional development for faculty members. On most community college campuses, professional development opportunities are embodied in various seminars and training programs, especially on “flex days” when faculty assemble in the absence of students to rack up their required hours. The flex days, how ever many there are, are ordinarily scheduled at the beginning of each semester. We hear talks, participate in meetings, attend panel discussions, enroll in training sessions, or watch subject-specific demonstrations.

Some flex sessions are great. Most are okay. A few have been dreadful enough to be entertaining. (I recall one in which a colleague quipped—but was it a quip?—that he was thinking of killing himself and several people in the room offered to help. Now that is supportive!) In other words, flex is like any other activity, with its ups and downs, successes and failures. In general, though, we all give it the good old college try and make the most of it.

However, sometimes you run into professional development opportunities that strain credulity just a teensy-tiny little bit. In looking at the flex program books posted on various California community college websites, I have encountered seminars that strike me as, well, odd. Do teachers really need an introduction to “qigong breathing techniques”? I suppose it could be lumped in with those other activities involving movement and health activities, although yoga and various stretching routines seem to be more popular options. No doubt the “Happy Fanny” workshop announced at one school is one of those feel-good PE-type sessions—especially with that Middle Eastern dance component.

But qigong and fannies cannot compete with my favorite among all of the spring sessions I perused. The angel seminar wins it going away:

An Inquiry into the Existence of Angels

There are many who claim that any lingering belief in angels is merely the residue of imaginary wishful thinking. There are others who hold that angels (wings, halos, harps) literally exist. How is one to reconcile such contradictory beliefs? In this session, you will discover how C.G. Jung’s theory of synchronicity provides a vehicle for the exploration and possible reconciliation of this question. Rather than echoing the skeptic who says angels cannot exist or the religious enthusiast who affirms their immanence, this study asserts that by expanding our understanding of both synchronicity and angels, we might be able to resolve the conflict.

It may well be that you are having an uncharitable reaction to the description of this 90-minute program, indicating that you are one of those anti-angel skeptics. If so, how close-minded of you! Are you not open to the possibility of a synchronicitic reconciliation of (A) angels don't exist and (B) sure they do! (Synthesis: Angels maybe exist!)

I confess that I am one of those cynics who has been known to remark that a good course in probability is the best cure for folks who cannot stop seeing significance in random occurrences and coincidences. Still, I must admit that it behooves one to examine carefully the credentials of the seminar leader. Perhaps there might be some substance here:

The faciliator earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Religion from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Program at California Institute for Integral Studies.

Whoa! “Cosmology”? (Of course, angels are indeed reputed to hang out in the heavens.) What exactly is this peculiar doctoral program? Here's the on-line description:

Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness (PCC) graduate programs in San Francisco are dedicated to re-imagining the human species as a mutually enhancing member of the Earth community.

They attract intellectually engaged individuals who are in varying degrees dismayed by what they see happening in industrial societies and who are striving to find meaningful ways to develop their gifts to serve the future of the world.

We support those called to meet the Earth community's unprecedented evolutionary challenge by offering students a challenging and supportive learning community in which to find their voice and vision as leaders.

Please return to the links on the upper left of the screen to explore the PCC mission, faculty, curriculum (including our Integral Ecology track), current students, alumni and community, as well as how to apply to the program.

Okay! That's clear enough, isn't it? Well, I don't know about you, but my doubts are completely assuaged. Perhaps I should write the angel-seminar school and suggest a topic for a follow-up seminar next year. I hear that business about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin is still outstanding.

Catch 22 goes to school

Academic dual citizenship and its discontents

One of my friends is in postdoc limbo, having completed his degree and thus been thrust into academia's outer darkness. Since PiD is no longer a graduate student and faces a very discouraging job market, he is now at the tender mercies of the schools that hire part-time instructors on a term-by-term basis. To earn something approaching a living wage, he currently shuttles between his old school—a university that tosses him an occasional class or two—and a neighboring community college, which uses adjunct faculty for many of its classes. The two institutions don't cooperate in any formal way, so it's up to PiD to juggle the offers and cobble together a schedule that doesn't require him to break any laws of physics to meet his classes.

Fortunately, PiD has found enough similarities between the course offerings at the two colleges so that he can adapt materials he uses at one school for use at the other. In particular, boilerplate text concerning student conduct was borrowed from his university syllabus and incorporated into his community college syllabus. It had been battled-tested at the Big U, so it seemed suitable for Medium Community College. PiD had every reason to assume that all was well because MCC requires its instructors to submit their syllabi for review and approval before the start of each semester. The BU language passed muster with the MCC administrators, so clear sailing was to be expected.

As I'm sure you can well imagine, PiD's education was about to move into a new and more surrealistic phase.

He called me recently to share a conundrum. It seemed an unfortunate but typical college situation: He had clear and unmistakable evidence that a student had committed plagiarism. PiD had found the original source material and the student's surreptitious use of it was extensive and blatant. He reported it to the department chair:

“I have a clear case of plagiarism by one of my students and I need to initiate MCC's academic discipline process.”

The chair was characteristically helpful.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“I mean the student will flunk the class, per the language in my syllabus regarding plagiarism, and I need to refer him to the college's disciplinary process.”

“Um, well, I don't think we have a formal process.”

“So what do I do then? My syllabus says plagiarism is a flunking offense and that the student can appeal by means of the college's disciplinary process. The evidence I have is unambiguous, but I presume we have a way for the student to state his side of things and get due process.”

“Okay. Well, you have to do what's in your syllabus.”

“Yes, of course. So how do I do that?”

“You should check with the academic dean.”

“Okay. Good. Does he enforce academic discipline?”

The chair seemed to think that might be the case. PiD contacted the dean.

“Yes, I agree with the chair. You have to follow your syllabus. We approved it and you need to follow it,” said the very helpful dean.

“Yeah. How exactly do I do that?”

“You know, I'm new here and just learning the ropes, so I don't want to depart from MCC's established practices. I need to refer you back to your department chair.”

As PiD well knew, Big U had a fully functioning review process in place to handle cases of academic misbehavior by its students. To his dismay, however, he had discovered that MCC was letting each department go its own way and there was no college-wide protocol for dealing with plagiarism. His current department had essentially nothing in place. The chair referred PiD to the college's statement of academic standards, which did mention that students were expected to be good citizens who behaved in a scholarly way, but neglected to stipulate any penalties or adjudication process for dealing with instances of not living up to those expectations. There was, of course, that helpful policy of reviewing instructor syllabi each semester, but apparently no one bothered to tell instructors when they cited nonexistent processes. (To add the cherry to the sundae, the department specifically required that syllabi contain a statement on the evils of plagiarism—but in reality was unprepared to deal with its occurrence.)

The last I heard, PiD was preparing a carefully constructed message to the cheater that his plagiarism had been discovered and that (a) his case had been brought to the attention of the department chair “in accordance with the provisions of the course syllabus” and (b) he would receive a failing grade in the class “in accordance with the provisions of the course syllabus.” If the student is bold enough to object, he can try his own luck with the chair. (That sounds like a “process,” doesn't it? Close enough!) Maybe she'll send him to the dean!

Oh, oh. Good luck, PiD! The dean ain't got your back!

Clairvoyance: the real thing

My colleague knows the future

Deliveries from the college's repro services ramp up in the days preceding the start of each semester. Our course syllabi and first-week handouts begin to appear in our campus mailboxes. The initial trickle turns into quite a flood as the first day of instruction approaches—and woe betide those who submitted their print-jobs too late to ensure delivery before the semester begins. (You could end up on the doorstep of repro services, hat in hand, while disgruntled employees poke among the just-printed but undelivered jobs to see if your syllabus is ready for the class that's meeting in thirty minutes.)

In our math department, the deluge of printed matter is always punctuated by a singular event. During the last week of summer vacation (or the last week of winter break), a heavily-laden delivery cart arrives from repro services, groaning under stacks of boxes of shrink-wrapped bundles. This particular shipment stands out from all the others because it is addressed to one person, a colleague who always submits her entire semester's worth of print-jobs in advance.

The entire semester. On the first day of instruction her office is stuffed with every handout, worksheet, quiz, and exam that she intends to use in her courses for the duration of those courses. She will not have to write or copy a single instructional document during the entire academic term. Despite having witnessed this for several years, I am still unable to fully grasp the concept. It's quite foreign to me.

I know what lesson plans are. Why, I've even used them. Or, rather, tried to use them. I confess that my “lesson plans” have eroded over my years of teaching. Careful outlines with boxed examples and key concepts have withered away to Post-it notes containing pre-cooked problems with the kinds of results I want. (Well, sometimes. In the interests of full disclosure, I admit that my cluttered brain contains many memorized examples that I can call on at will, or reconstruct on the fly, depending on what comes up. I mean, how hard is it to cook up on the spur of the moment a quadratic equation with complex roots? Who needs a Post-it for that, right?)

Moltke's dictum that “no war plan outlasts the first encounter with the enemy” applies to the classroom as well as to the battlefield. I simply cannot imagine following my colleague's example of preparing every quiz and exam in advance of meeting my students and then managing to stick with my original plans. In fact, I prefer to hold off on writing my exams until after holding a review session with my students, which usually means writing the exam the night before I administer it. It's not procrastination. It's how I find out what I need to test them on. It's a process of reacting and adapting to each class at each moment of time during the semester.

There's a neat counter-argument to my mode of instruction, and I presume it's the one my colleague would use if we were to discuss our differing approaches. She could tell me that course content is pre-determined and learning outcomes are pre-defined. (She's right, of course. All classes have official definitions that can be found in the college catalog.) One can then reasonably focus on those pre-ordained objectives, testing students to gauge their mastery and ensuring a kind of standardized approach that avoids subjectivity and random variation from term to term.

I don't, however, think that I am capricious or random in my instructional approach. I have the prescribed goals carefully outlined in my syllabus and I certainly test student mastery of desired learning outcomes with my exams. But I do not try to anticipate in advance whether a particular class needs more or less emphasis on a particular concept or set of concepts. Every sample from the student population is different in some way from every other. Every semester I need to find out their aggregate strengths and weaknesses and attempt to direct my instructional efforts in the direction that seems the likeliest to do the most good. It's not exactly a science, of course, and it's certainly not predictable. My crystal ball is way too cloudy for that.

I have a grudging admiration for my colleague's industriousness in generating all of her course material so far in advance, but it's mostly the credit one gives to prodigious labor, whether or not the result strikes one as praiseworthy. In addition to being awestruck when I witness the massive delivery from repro services, I also shudder with horror.

Do you really want this job?

Advice you shouldn't need

I have one of the best jobs in the universe. I'm a college faculty member with seniority and tenure, so my job comes with a high degree of security and a sense of doing something worthwhile. I am fortunate indeed, so I understand that other people might be eager to apply to be my colleague. What I do not understand is why so many of these people do such a bad job of applying. Perhaps it would be better not to describe their mistakes. Folks who do not figure it out on their own are probably not good choices for future colleagues.

On the other hand, teachers can't help teaching and we should not discourage people from learning. Here, therefore, is a brief list of suggestions. You may be struck by how obvious they are. Or should be.

Fill out the application

No, really. Fill it out. Don't leave parts of it blank unless they're really supposed to be blank (like the section where you list the misdemeanors on your rap sheet). Sometimes this mistake is made by adjunct faculty members who are applying for a tenure-track position at the school where they already teach. “Oh, they already know me. I'll just hit the highlights.” Sorry. Get a clue. There will be people on the hiring panel who don't know you—like those from outside the department. It's also likely that the screening rubric will explicitly require the application screeners to evaluate the applications strictly on actual content. (“Do not base your rating of an application on personal knowledge.”) Blank spaces earn no points from the screening committee in deciding who gets an interview.

Don't hide information

This is something of an ancillary to the previous point. Hiring committees typically screen dozens of applications. If you put information where it's not expected, it may not be seen. One recent unsuccessful candidate neglected to indicate that he was bilingual on his application—something that would have fit well in the item related to personal experience with academic and cultural diversity. He buried his knowledge of Spanish in a block of miscellaneous skills in a résumé attached to his application. I found it, but I know others did not. That was probably worth a point that most other screeners didn't give him.

Know your references

I have seen half a dozen candidates in recent years shot down by their letters of recommendation. Don't ask for a letter of recommendation from someone who will damn you with faint praise or—even worse—explain why you aren't ready for a teaching career. Don't ask for recommendations from people who don't have a positive opinion of you. Also, don't submit letters of recommendation from your students. You have too much authority over your students to make their comments entirely credible. If you do have fan letters from students, pass them along to the dean or department chair from whom you will ask for a letter of recommendation.

Rehearse your presentation

So far as I know, every college asks its applicants to give some kind of teaching demonstration. At a university you might conduct a seminar. At a community college you can expect to give a mini-lecture. At my school, interviews typically include a 10- to 15-minute teaching demo. We send out a topic (or short list of topics) for the candidates to prepare. Some ill-advised applicants attempt to squeeze a one-hour lecture into their allotted time, tearing through the material four or five times as fast as they would in class. That's missing the point entirely. We want a representative sample of each candidate's style and skill. The smart candidate will rehearse the presentation a few times to ensure that it flows well and fits the time permitted. I have seen candidates attempt to address their assigned topic off the cuff, with no evident preparation. The results are predictably poor and haphazard. At least two candidates seemed not to remember the exact assignment and needed to be prompted; neither of those candidates advanced to the next round.

It really is all about you

Yes, I know that most of us in the teaching profession are self-sacrificing martyrs who put the interests of others before their own. We're all candidates for sainthood. In an interview for a faculty position, however, you're supposed to persuade us how wonderful you are. During your interview, the focus is indeed on you and on no one else. And here I will make my point: Don't talk about other people. Stay focused on giving the committee a complete picture of your splendid qualifications for the job. Do not try to build yourself up by tearing others down. I have seen more than one instance where a candidate felt it necessary to poor-mouth rival applicants. In one particular case, a part-time faculty member thought that his principal rival for the full-time position was another adjunct instructor. He proceeded to say bad things about his part-time colleagues, building himself up by denigrating their talents. (If only he had known that he was the only part-timer among the finalists.) He didn't get the job.

Don't burn bridges

You might not get hired the first time you apply. I didn't. Neither did most of my colleagues. The rule is try, try again. It is therefore a bad idea to send nastygrams to members of the hiring committee and the college administration when you finish out of the money. It is my understanding that the dean of instruction has a long enough memory to remember that you sent her a letter (“I was clearly the best candidate among the applicants and the person you chose is not worthy to buff my briefcase”) and is likely to bring it up if she ever sees your name on a list of candidates again. Not kidding. This really occurred.

Good luck, future faculty members.

Publish and perish?

Wisconsin GOP channels Joe McCarthy

There's this history professor back at the University of Wisconsin, ensconced in an endowed chair at the Madison campus. He decided it would be nice to start a modest little blog. He even had a catchy title: “Scholar as Citizen.” You can already see that it was a fail-safe proposition. Soon the hit-meter would be recording Internet traffic on a gargantuan scale. No doubt.

He posted his first blog entry on March 15, not even a couple of weeks ago. Its title was as irresistible as the name of his blog: Who's Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (I've probably lost you now; the title is so seductive you've certainly already clicked on the link.) The inevitable happened: over half a million hits in a handful of days.

I am so jealous.

But I don't envy what happened next. The Wisconsin Republican Party decided that UW Madison's Bill Cronon, the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies, is a dangerous radical who must immediately be stifled into silence—even, ideally, hounded from academia. The state GOP filed an open-records request with UW demanding access to Professor Cronon's e-mail, hoping to find something embarrassing if allowed to root through his archives. (Remember, a handful of words in a private e-mail can be inflated into an international scandal if ideologues are willing to clutch their pearls and shriek in affected outrage; the ginned-up “Climategate” furor proved that.)

Cronon has published his own detailed commentary on the Republican fishing expedition, correctly pointing out its McCarthyist antecedents and winkling out the purely political motivations of the GOP's incipient smear campaign by closely reading the text of the Republicans' open-records request. He declines to be intimidated.

Smart ALEC

Cronon's greatest sin appears to have been his discussion of the American Legislative Exchange Council. What, you've never heard of ALEC? As Cronon pointed out in his original post, ALEC much prefers to lurk in the background. Its on-line archive of “model legislation” is not open to the public and membership in ALEC is strictly controlled. (Are you a right-wing elected official or a deep-pockets teabagger with money to contribute? Come on down!)

ALEC drafts legislation which Republicans are wont to introduce in their various state legislatures, pulling ready-made extremist boilerplate off the ALEC shelf to add to their bill drafts. It's like “writing” a term paper by downloading an Internet document, except that technically it's not plagiarism. ALEC is eager for legislators to attempt to enact the components of its political program.

While ALEC tries to hide in the shadows, its influence on public policy is potentially revealed whenever its model legislation is actually published as a legislator's introduced bill. Cronon was rude enough to connect the dots and expose ALEC's influence in recent Republican legislation, especially in Wisconsin. But ALEC's close-mouthed membership and blocked website prevent the average citizen from peeking at the man behind the curtain. What else might these right-wing ideologues have in store for us? How can we find out? Must we wait till the legislation actually appears?

I may be able to help a little. You see, I have a copy of ALEC's Source Book of American State Legislation. It's in the form of a small paperback that I glommed onto while working as a legislative aide in Sacramento, where some ALEC-friendly Republicans were pushing draconian tax-cutting measures like the infamous Proposition 13 and the subsequent (and lesser-known because it failed) Proposition 9. I no longer recall precisely how I acquired it (my boss was hardly likely to have been one of ALEC's favorites), but I suspect I picked it up out of curiosity from the discard pile outside a Republican legislator's office and decided to keep it.

The book begins by offering a bogus quote from Abraham Lincoln, the long-since refuted litany that begins, “You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.” Perhaps it's significant that ALEC's book opens with a hoax, especially given the hollow-shell justifications of Republican politicians who claim that collective bargaining must die if workers are to prosper. I presume they will soon introduce measures to establish more prisons and workhouses to manage the poor.

Is the old ALEC paperback out-of-date and of little use to us today? I think not. Although it carries a publication date of 1980, the 92-page booklet is oracular in its contents. The nutcase wet-dreams of yesteryear are the standard policy planks of today's teabagger politicians. Here, for your edification, is a sampler of the Source Book's list of model legislation. The headings are from the booklet and the descriptions are excerpted from the actual text. A few may seem like motherhood and apple pie (both of which, come to think of it, are now more controversial than they used to be), but there are some real nuggets of crazy in here. The first item is especially pertinent (complete with Wisconsin reference!).

Controlling the Bureaucracy

Public Services Protection Act. The suggested Public Services Protection Act prohibits contractual agreements between all governmental subdivisions of the state and any public employee union or association. This prohibition safeguards against the incidence of public employee strikes which are inseparable from the collective bargaining process and present a danger to the health, safety and general well-being of all state residents. Since 1959, when the first compulsory public sector bargaining legislation was enacted in Wisconsin, there has been a dramatic increase in public employee unionization and in the incidence of public employee strikes.

Enterprise Zone Act. The suggested Enterprise Zone Act establishes a mechanism for the establishment of enterprise zones—areas of inadequate population and limited economic activity which have been released from most government controls and regulations in order to promote economic and population revitalization.

Fiscal Responsibility

Tax Limitation—State Constitutional Amendment.. To prevent taxes from increasing year after year, a state constitutional amendment has been suggested that would limit the total amount of taxes that can be imposed by the state. The tax revenue limit would be an appropriate percentage of total annual personal income in the state, and has ranged between 6 per cent and 14 per cent in those states where the amendment has been proposed.

Spending and Debt Limitation Amendment. The suggested Spending and Debt Limitation Constitutional Amendment would limit the growth of state spending to the estimated growth of the state economy as established by law.

Death Tax Reform Act. The suggested Death Tax Reform Act remodels the state estate tax computation system. Reform of this system is necessary in order to ease some of the financial burden imposed on a decedent's estate, thus providing that more of the value of the estate be passed on to family and other heirs. [Various thresholds on estate taxes protect families and small businesses, but these are deemed inadequate by those who want to protect inherited wealth by completely eliminating what they insist on calling the “death tax.”]

Fundamental Rights.

The Right to Work Act. The suggested Right to Work Act establishes public policy with respect to compulsory or “closed shop” unionism. The Right to Work Act protects the right of each person to join or decline to join any labor union or association without fear of penalty or reprisal.

Sagebrush Rebellion Act. The suggested Sagebrush Rebellion Act establishes a mechanism for the transfer of ownership of millions of acres of unappropriated public lands from the federal government to the states.

Student Freedom of Choice Act. The suggested Student Freedom of Choice Act would prohibit the collection of mandatory student activity fees in state-operated colleges and universities.

Criminal Justice

Crime Victims Compensation Act. The suggested Crime Victims Compensation Act enables the creation of District Crime Victims Compensation Boards to hear claims and to make monetary awards to innocent persons who suffer catastrophic loss as as result of violent criminal victimization.

Improving Education

Textbook Content Standards Act. The suggested Textbook Content Standards Act establishes the requirement that textbooks and teaching materials adopted for use in public schools accurately portray American history, tradition and values. Abraham Lincoln said, “The philosophy of the classroom today is the philosophy of the government tomorrow.” [There's no citation, of course. Is this another bogus Lincoln quote? If so, how nice to find it in an item about accuracy in textbooks!]

Honor America Act. The suggested Honor America Act requires that all public elementary and secondary school students recite the Pledge of Allegiance during each school day.

Governmental Affairs

Washington, D.C. Amendment Rejection Resolution. The suggested Washington, D.C. Amendment Rejection Resolution provides legislatures with a formal method of detailing their reasons for opposition and rejection of the proposed Washington, D.C. Constitutional Amendment. [In other words, the black citizens of D.C. are disenfranchised and we want to keep it that way.]

Energy

More American Energy Program. Tight supplies of crude oil and refined petroleum products have stirred a great deal of interest in the increased production of domestic conventional fuels and the development of alternate fuels and renewal energy resources. [This entry starts off well, outlining a seemingly reasonable program of tax incentives for solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass energy projects. It includes elimination of redundant bureaucratic regulation—sounds good, but could mean deregulation in practice—and one-stop permit processes. Then comes the next “reform,” which is the poison pill in the mix.] Requirement that state departments of energy regulations and standards meet, but not exceed in restrictiveness, those required by the Federal Clean Air Act of 1977. [ALEC loves states' rights except when California enacts stricter air standards than those promulgated by the feds. Right.]

Resolutions

Voluntary School Prayer Resolution. Resolved, by the Legislature of [name of state], each house concurring, that this legislature respectfully urges the Congress of the United States to propose a constitutional amendment authorizing the several states to enact legislation permitting voluntary, non-denominational prayer in their public schools.

Plus ça change

As you can see from the above compendium, ALEC's 1980 legislative program is not only alive and well, much of it is already embodied in measures introduced or enacted across the country. It was impolitic of Prof. Cronon to point this out. He dared teach us some contemporary history. By the terms of ALEC's accuracy-in-education standards, he would have been well advised to concentrate on adumbrating our nation's Christian heritage and the anti-union convictions of the Founding Fathers.

Let us all be grateful that he didn't!

Scholastic solidarity

On the ramparts

I am a math teacher.

I teach in a public school.

I am a union member.

All of these things are good things, at least in my opinion. I realize that some people think otherwise. First of all, math is clearly an unpopular subject, despite its beauty and utility. When you admit to being a math teacher to a stranger, prepare to hear, “Oh, I could never do math” or “Math was my worst subject in school.” You will surely die of asphyxiation if you hold your breath waiting for the first person to say, “Math was my favorite subject!” They are few and far between.

Then there are those people who snidely refer to “government schools” when speaking of public educational institutions, as if they are somehow inherently inferior to private or sectarian schools. Actually, when you allow for our non-selective open-admission policies, we do pretty well. Our best students are as good as any you'll find anywhere else. Our worst have no counterparts at the private schools because they were never allowed in in the first place—but we do the best we can to help them anyway.

And the people who say “government schools” don't seem especially to mind driving on “government roads” or eating “government approved” food or drinking “government filtered” water.

Finally, of course, there's that business about union rapacity and the efforts of union members to destroy our way of life...

Excuse me? What folks so fondly imagine as “our way of life” is a union product. Really!

Look for the union label, idiots!

The forty-hour work week? Paid vacations? Who invented those? Not the robber barons. Not the corporate executives. Civilized work hours and reasonable recreation periods are the result of union efforts and collective bargaining.

Want to go back to the “good old days” before unions? Good luck! Planning to take your kids with you and put them to work to support you? (Those child-labor laws are so restrictive! Five-year-olds used to be really useful in those factories!)

The supposedly liberal mainstream media does a pretty lousy job of covering stories about labor unions and working conditions. Look how supinely they parrot right-wing smears: Why call an upset teacher a “union demonstrator” when you can call her a “union thug”? Why refer to a union executive as a “union leader” when you can tag him as a “union boss”? I once wrote a letter to my local paper to complain about a reference to “union bosses” in what was supposed to be a straightforward news report. Why, I asked, are my elected union officials being described as “bosses,” as if to suggest criminality and racketeering? The newspaper published my letter, but I've never seen any improvement in its coverage.

Sometimes I get snarky comments from acquaintances (seldom from friends, since I avoid making friends with idiots) who whine about the cushy jobs that teachers have. They tend to focus on things like summer vacation (we don't get paid for summer months, you know) and supposedly short hours (as if we're off the clock when our in-class hours are done). They look at a fifteen-unit load and express amazement that we work “only” fifteen hours per week. (Like I said: idiots.) They have no clue at all.

When they tell me I get too much time off, I tell them they get too little. Get a union, I suggest.

Of course, a lot of us still have to work during those summer “vacations” to make ends meet. Perhaps our rapacious union reps didn't extract as many concessions as the uninformed segment of the public thinks. Time to take to the streets again!

---

See more at Why Teachers Like Me Support Unions! Thanks to Steve Lazar for kicking this off.

Lumpers and splitters

Considering a “stupiphany”

The secondary school math curriculum used to be extremely predictable in the middle decades of the twentieth century. High school freshmen took elementary algebra, sophomores enrolled in geometry, juniors refreshed and extended their first-year curriculum with intermediate algebra, and college-prep seniors took trigonometry. That's just the way it was in many places across the United States (and certainly when I was in high school).

Eventually, though, many changes occurred. While that old-fashioned core curriculum survives in many ways, it certainly drifted. Algebra trickled down into middle school and high school seniors started taking introductory calculus (or something called “analysis”). Perversely, however, the old high school courses also migrated into the college curriculum, where we originally called them “remedial” and then relabeled them with the less pejorative “developmental” tag. I think that such remedial courses used to be the province of what we call “continuation” high schools, but today most developmental math is taught in community colleges. My college, for example, teaches more developmental math than anything else. We even teach basic arithmetic to those who failed to learn it in elementary school.

And we teach developmental math over and over and over again to students who fail it the first, second, or even third time. Success rates hover between fifty and sixty percent for most of the classes, indicating the degree of recycling that goes on. It's maddening to both students and instructors.

Most of my colleagues in the math department know the secrets to success in a math class. In fact, they're hardly secrets because we share them constantly with our students: attend class regularly, pay attention, study the material, do the homework, and ask for help when you're stuck. While luck plays a role (catastrophic illness, financial distress, and family emergencies can derail anyone), most student failure is based on the neglect of those fundamental guidelines.

Of course, we don't just enunciate the principles of successful math learning and then sit back and wait for our students to succeed. We try to meet them halfway (or more than halfway). We offer tutoring centers, accommodations for learning disabilities, on-line support, and different course formats. These days the traditional classroom-based lecture class is often supplemented with on-line instruction or hybrid classes that combine in-class and on-line elements. Students may be able to enroll in self-paced computer-based math labs, too.

And then there are the “splits,” which try to slow down the pace of the curriculum by slicing the courses in half. Students having trouble with our one-semester elementary algebra might be permitted to take half of the course during fall semester and the second half during spring. You can spot these courses in college catalogs where they bear labels like “Algebra 1A” and “Algebra 1B.” Many schools have even done this with arithmetic. You can struggle during the fall to learn your times table and save fractions till spring.

I wish I were kidding, but I exaggerate only slightly.

Guess what? The students who enroll in the splits aren't particularly more successful than those enrolled in regular lecture classes, on-line classes, or math labs. Are we rescuing a few additional students with each new approach, or would they do as well (or as badly) if we just ushered them all into a classroom and made them sit in rows?

I believe we do achieve some marginal additional success with the multiple formats because students do learn in different ways and one-size-fits-all is almost never true. Still, I wish the benefits were more than marginal.

This reflection on student success and failure in developmental math was stimulated by a recent post by a pseudonymous community college dean. “Dean Dad” traveled to California last month to attend the San Diego meeting of the League for Innovation in the Community College. He was particularly struck by the remarks of a Bay Area faculty member:

Prof. Myra Snell, from Los Medanos, coined a wonderful word: “stupiphany.” She defined it as that sudden realization that you were an idiot for not knowing something before. The major “stupiphany” she offered was the realization that the primary driver of student attrition in math sequences isn’t any one class; it’s the length of the sequence. Each additional class provides a new exit point; if you want to reduce the number who leave, you need to reduce the number of exit points. If you assume three levels of remediation (fairly standard) and one college-level math class, and you assume a seventy percent pass rate at each level (which would be superhuman for the first level of developmental, but never mind that), then about 24 percent will eventually make it through the first college-level class. Reduce the sequence by one course, and 34 percent will. Accordingly, she’s working on “just in time” remediation in the context of a college-level course. There is definitely something to this.

Um. Under the given assumptions, I can't fault the math (0.70⁴ = 0.2401 and 0.70³ = 0.343), but it is just a tiny bit simplistic. If we squeeze all the remediation into one course, then we'll be rewarded with a 49% overall success rate at the end of the college-level course. Yay!

Except that it certainly wouldn't work.

This is a classic optimization problem—the kind that you see in calculus. Two countervailing factors have to be balanced in order to achieve the best possible outcome. For example, if you want to enclose the maximum possible rectangular area with a given length of fence, you have to balance the contributions of length and width, because one can be increased only at the expense of the other—yet both contribute equally to area. (Thus the ideal figure turns out to be a square. Big surprise!)

In the case of developmental math classes, the splits offer more failure opportunities. On the other hand, they reduce the curriculum to bite-size chunks that more students might be able to master. The more you cram into a course, the more likely the students are to be overwhelmed. The trade-offs are rather obvious.

(Frankly, I prefer that split classes be taught at the same pace as regular classes, because stretching them out to semester length attenuates the reinforcement that most students need. At the halfway point the successful student moves on to the second-half split while the unsuccessful student repeats the first-half class without having to wait till the next term.)

I don't think that Prof. Snell's “stupiphany” is quite as significant as suggested by Dean Dad, although I presume her presentation would be more nuanced at greater length than it is in a one-paragraph summary. (She did, apparently, couch her presentation in terms of timely intervention.) The tension between length of sequence and course content will continue. The experiments will certainly continue. In fact, I can even tell you the direction in which they will go. The splitters having had their day, the lumpers anticipated Snell's observation and are putting accelerated curriculum into place. Courses are being designed and curriculum is being implemented. Hang on to your hat as developmental math tries to speed up.

That's probably a future post.