Dartmouth or Drano?

This past week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, "Compare a plumber to going to Harvard College — being a plumber, actually for the average person, probably would be a better deal. You don’t spend ... four years spending $40,000, $50,000 in tuition without earning income.” [Extracted from Pipe dream: Skip college, become a plumber]. His comments sparked controversy and raised questions about the advantages of pursuing a college degree with tuition rates that have skyrocketed some 400% in the past thirty years. Bloomberg added, "The people who are going to have the biggest problem are college graduates who aren’t rocket scientists, if you will, not at the top of their class" and that "Success in college and careers requires good writing and critical thinking skills as well as good math and science skills." [Pipe Dream] Perhaps Bloomberg meant more precisely that if you attend college and don't do well there, you may be wasting your time and money, and maybe you would be better off learning a trade. This point about doing well at a trade is one I understand. After Superstorm Sandy devastated the northeast region, I returned to my island home to the clanking noise of gas company workmen dismantling my now turned-off gas meter -- it had been submersed by flooding seawater and required replacement. Faced with being homeless for weeks or possibly months, I was elated to return home to my new gas meter one week later, replete with red ribbon and tag for the plumber-I'd-have-to-find to reconnect to my home. I quite literally collared a plumber who was working on my street two days later and -- a half-hour later and $125 poorer -- my gas was reconnected with my house and I was reconnected with my home. That's a lot of money for time spent with no cost for parts, but I'm not complaining. So to be or not to be a plumber? In an economy where jobs are being eliminated as quickly as others are being created, Bloomberg notes that it's "hard to farm that out and it’s hard to automate that." [Pipe Dreams] That said, I decided to poke my nose further into the issue and discovered Trends in Higher Education, which pointed out the much higher job loss and unemployment rates of high school level educated workers compared with college educated ones. And this makes sense. As our world whirls forward with innovation and technology, it follows that certain jobs that once required manpower no longer do. A drive up the parkway shows how toll collectors have been mostly replaced by EZ Pass, and tours through modern factories reveal marvelously complex robotics completing intricate manufacturing. The end result is a loss of blue-collared jobs. At the same time, computers and technology have impacted white-collared jobs, too. Think of the accountants who have lost clients to Turbo Tax and lawyers to online legal resources like Legal Zoom? A Georgetown study showed the advantages of a college education in "The College Advantage: Weathering the Economic Storm.", where it confirms much higher job loss in blue-collar jobs during the Great Recession of 2007 and the overall job recovery for college graduates. In addition, the report suggest that college graduates recoup the money invested in college on average in 11 years and that the economic advantage is enormous over the course of a career. So, what's the final answer? Plumber or college graduate? Perhaps the answer is as simple as this -- you better be great at whatever you choose to do. And this, I believe, is as simple as common sense.

Epiphany and True Grit

Pondering what critical thinking is, I viewed a few videos on YouTube and stumbled upon "Imagine: How creativity works," in which I found several interesting points, some of which confirmed and sort of explained some understandings I already had, and others which I found surprising but, with explanation, made some sense. The presenter Jonah Lehrer discussed how insights are made and what science and neurology have discovered about the process. One point Lehrer made was that the brain tries to find solutions in one part of the brain, but when the answers or solutions aren't forthcoming, it begins to use other parts of the brain, one being the "interior superior temporal gyrus" (yeah, right!). This part, it seems, becomes active when the ordinary solutions don't seem to be working, and it seems to be operating when one is in a more relaxed state. Epiphanies (sudden realizations) seem to come from this part of the brain. From the video it appears there are times where one has to grind away to find the solution to a problem and there are others where one needs to step away and relax to find the answer. One critical thinking activity I have my students complete is to try to connect a box of nine dots using four, continuous straight lines without ever lifting your pencil. To so To solve the problem, one has to go outside the box of dots; however, in most cases, people just don't do that. Visually, it seems, the constrain themselves within the box. I usually give students a week to try to solve the problem, and my advice to them is to draw a new set of dots each time they try and advise them to see what isn't working. As the week progresses, I offer some visual clues (abstract pictures with the meanings "Think outside the box") In addition, I offer some quotes to provides some guidance, such as Edward Albee's "Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly." I endeavor to challenge my students to think and to work hard. Last year, I had one student named Emily who really became obsessed with trying to find the solution. And I mean obsessed. After nearly a week of failed attempts, Emily was posting on Edmodo how she had nine (that's right 9!) pages of failed attempts, and I was honestly becoming concerned about the frustration Emily was expressing from her posts. I told her to look over her failed attempt and to think about what was not working. Later, whatever happened, Emily discovered the solution. Once it occurred to Emily to go beyond the box of dots, she found the one and only solution. Here, you can see how she found it. This experience seems to line up with what Lehrer mentions about how the minds works in a dual state to find new and fresh solutions to problems. And Emily showed both the grit (determination to succeed) and ability to find the solution.

On Dancing Bears and Goats -- Coffee, Regular or Decaf?

Before reading on, click on this link and complete the "Awareness Test." Perhaps you have already seen this "Awareness Test." If so, then you know what to look for. This is analogous to finding the arrow in the negative space of the FedEx logo. You cannot NOT see it once you know it's there. The problem I find having completed my Instructional Design and Development course and now involved in Creative Thinking is that there is a divide -- perhaps in my view a chasm -- between the objectivity of measurable learning objectives desired in IDD and the nebulous and seemingly unquantifiable nature of creative thinking. Simply said, how does one measure creativity, exactly? As I face completing my first lesson on creating a lesson incorporating and fostering creative and critical thinking, I run into the wall when trying to create measurable objectives for these. And, frankly, the idea seems almost antithetical. That is, the very idea of conforming to measurable objectives cries of closing the door to the act of creative thinking. In the "Awareness Test," one is so focused on counting the number of passes that one misses the dancing bear altogether. And can one really count the passes and appreciate the dancing bear at the same time? It seems they are two separate experiences. Which bring me to Black Holes, a concept of space I find fascinating. Physicists and astronomers know they exist, but you cannot "see" them. They are so powerful they consume all around them, so gravitational that even light cannot escape their grasp. Black Holes seem to me to be that aspect of learning relevant to creative and critical thinking in that it somewhat defies some precise, measurable and certainly observable objective. I am enjoying reading Making Thinking Visible, as it presents a number of "Thinking Routines" to provide strategies to foster and enhance critical and creative thinking. But again, evaluation tools? Even the notion of evaluation adds the component of extrinsic motivation -- one of the creative thinking "killers." Which brings me to dancing goats. I love coffee -- it helps me awake in the morning, and it is morning when I relish thinking most. In Starbucks I found some artwork and historical information on coffee. (See pictures.) It seems an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi discovered coffee quite by accident when he noticed his goats, who had been eating the red berries, had sudden bursts of energy. When he tried eating the berries, he found the same burst we know to come from caffeine. How does this relate to creative thinking? Simple. He observed. He speculated. He tried. And he discovered. Ah, coffee! Which brings me to decaffeinated coffee. Again, another historical accident was the discovery of decaffeinated coffee, the result of coffee beans that had become soaked in sea water. It appears the beans lost their burst. Again, no one was looking for this. Rather, they simply noticed it, and learned from it. Edison quipped about his attempts to create the light bulb: "I have not failed. I've just found 10000 ways that won't work." I am delighted to find new "Thinking Routines" to provide my students with "tools" to effect better creative and critical thinking skills. I haven't read anything yet to help with these objectives. I think they may be in that Black Hole.

UDUTU and "Green Beer"

This weekend I am rubbing noses with UDUTU amidst St. Patrick's Day weekend! As St. Patrick's Day falls on a Sunday -- not your typical "drinking" day, as Monday follows Sunday -- it seems it will be a three-day celebration. In retrospect, it arguably started last weekend, as one town held its St. Patrick's Day parade and many patrons in the establishment I work in on weekends were garbed in green. For me, however, the holiday means I'm saddled with an added day of work -- this Sunday, a day normally allocated to my grad work! A separate distraction this week has been finding out the new evaluation criteria for, get this, Language Arts and mathematics teachers, that will be tied to student performance and growth, a topic bandied about for some time. I received a link to this post, which, mind you, is SATIRE, about a teacher suing parents for the poor performance of their child. And I just had to smile as I reflected back to the simpler days of time in college reading Swift's "A Modest Proposal," another jewel of satire whose meaning, alas, was widely missed by the readers of his day. (It takes place in Ireland, so it's an Irish theme this week's post.) Hopefully, these changes taking place in evaluation reform will be far more bark than bite! In my last post, I mentioned the poem "A Birth" by James Dickey, and I find now that I am trying to turn the vision of my e-Learning topic and storyboard into an actual module, the meaning of the poem is all-too-fitting. To paraphrase the poem, the narrator creates a pasture, only to find a horse in it. The idea, I think, is that an idea comes to mind; however, the initial idea morphs into something else, something more complex and unique. Further, he cannot control the horse, the fence posts fail to hold. Such suggests how the creative process is limited by the realities of the world. A parent creates new life in the birth of a child, and yet, that child is a life unique and independent of the parent - or author- who created it. Back to UDUTU - I find that many of the ideas I have envisioned may be impractical or even impossible to execute, so my new philosophy is to work through UDUTU as one does a riptide: let it take you out and away and wherever it will, and, all the while, keep your head above water, swim parallel to the shore (your desired learning outcome), and make it safely back to shore whatever way you can. Let the journey begin!

Dancing with UDUTU

I think I've finally figured out the pattern to the MAITS program. Almost always, we're challenged to learn about a new concept and, at the same time, tackle that by learning a new tool, too -- often the means of reporting or sharing our learning. This week's challenge: to create a pre-storyboard for our e-Learning module, which, in my case, centers around the use of an apostrophe to form the possessive. Using Gagne's nine events, we are to call upon our ID skills and lay out a blueprint for our module. In this case, I'll be dancing with UDUTU, yet another unfamiliar tool, a partner I haven't danced with yet. The challenge of creating this storyboard is that I'm not altogether sure if what I envision myself creating is actually "do-able." In other words, I'm left guessing a bit whether the interaction I see happening is going to be implementable. I sure hope so. After listening to Amy mention "Capstone" time and again this past year and whatever, I haven't really had a vision of what that could be. But, warned again by Amy that we better like it and be invested in it, this project -- and the idea that I could use e-Learning as the teaching and learning vehicle for grammar -- is very appealing. It certainly meets some of the key criteria for e-Learning -- self-paced, independent, individualized, and so on. If I can create engaging modules for students to learn certain grammar concepts, then that is one less thing to take up valuable class time...of which there is so little as it is. For this project, I'm counting heavily on the prefix "pre" in storyboard, as I've learned there are a few walls to encounter and work over, through, around, whatever, to get to the final product. That said, I'm gearing up for the challenge. Here's a link to a challenging poem by James Dickey titled "A Birth." The poem's about creating a story is like creating a life -- how it takes on its own identity and begins to control itself, like a parent of a child. Anyhow, this project reminds me of that. And if I can find a way to use e-Learning to teach my students what they can learn on their own, it will free up my time to do what would be far too difficult for them on their own, things like reading, interpreting, and discussing poems like "A Birth." Enjoy creating!

Buzzing about Socrative!

Yesterday marked the first day I used Socrative in class. I'm sure several of you may have used or are using it frequently in class, but, for whatever reasons, this was my first step into the waters of using BYOD in class. I put together several multiple-choice questions together on the short story "Contents of the Dead Man's Pockets"d and had students partner to complete the quiz at their own pace. As Liz Calderwood has used Socrative with our students already, they came in all set to go, only asking for the room number to access the material. If I could sum up the response in three words: Everybody love it! The students were on task, active, and able to interact and collaborate on the material. The application allows the teacher to monitor each group's progress and provides results that are easily downloaded. What I found, however, was that more students were attentive to and engaged in our discussion of the questions after they had completed them on Socrative and the deeper discussions we had about the story that resulted. Socrative offers a variety of options as well that include test formats to polls to short written responses. I see endless ways of dovetailing this interactive application into my classroom teaching to engage my students, increase their collaboration and participation, and monitor the progress of their learning. I also continue to use Edmodo as our learning hub, and partnering up with social studies -- where the students are learning about the Bill of Rights and the Amendments -- we have applied several of these in mini-research topics in English. For example, we explored the topic of flag burning as an expression of free speech, then continued with listening to the Dixie Chicks' song "Not Ready to Make Nice," after which the students learned the story behind the song online. Many of the students expressed their surprise and interest in this kind of research. Now we are considering the Establishment Clause, known better as the separation of church and state, and the controversy of the words "under God" in the "Pledge of Allegiance." Enthusiasm was tepid intinitially until I had them follow a recitation of the pledge in which I replaced "under God" with "under Allah." That fired up quite a bit of interest, to say the least. Now I have the students preparing for an in-class debate next week. I have posted several balanced links to resources on Edmodo, one of those being Pro/Con.org , which offers links to resources to BOTH sides of several controversial issues such as the Pledge controvery. I have told them to come prepared like lawyers to a trial with facts and evidence to support their side and to be prepared to counter the other sides' arguments. Further, students will have their smartphones on hand to do more fact finding during the debate, too. And all this from a teacher who once had a stranglehold over students NOT to bring cell phones into class! The world, and most certainly the landscape of learning, is changing, indeed!

Dollars and Sense: R & D in Education

So, my cohorts and I have finished our Learning Strategies graduate course recently and today is the first day of spring break. I enjoyed learning about a variety of learning theories and paradigms and exploring how they dovetail and interweave in my teaching. Indeed, I have gained a retrospective view of how I have been teaching and gained insights on how and why certain approaches I use are successful. Such has afforded me a "rear-view mirror" of where my teaching was and where it has led to over my fourteen-year career. More importantly, my knowledge and understanding of learning theory has made me more cognizant of fine-tuning my lessons to make them even more powerful, impacting, and effective. With that said, it's a sunny and beautiful day on this first day of spring vacation. And I need it.
Recently I watched a speech by Professor Roland Fryer, an economist professor at Harvard University and found a number of the points he made in his speech compelling. So, why have I included Fryer in this post? Simple. It's because Professor Fryer is endeavoring to use his understanding of economics and statistics to improve education. As the youngest black professor to earn tenure at Harvard University, Professor Fryer is trying to give back and make an impact on improving education. As Fryer says, "Facts are our friends. We need more facts and less politics if we're ever going to really change educational reform." Fryer is trying to gather educational data and statistics to discover effective teaching strategies. One of the ideas he mentions in one speech includes paying students in poor performing schools to take the tests and increasing the payments based upon their performance on the test. This simple idea, it seems, is showing evidence of being not only effective but also cost effective. That is, the money required to pay students for their effort and achievement works out to be less than the thousands spent with little or no effect. So where did this idea come from? Again, simply enough, from Fryer spending a summer talking with the kids themselves. From those conversations, Fryer discovered that the students found no reason for education, and when Fryer told them that they could make a ten percent return on their education, this idea had no meaning for these kids. They couldn't see that far down the road. However, paying these students gave them a tangible incentive to read and to learn. And the program seems to be working.
Several years ago, I attended a seminar on improving students' reading skills, and one of the ideas offered was the Drop Everything And Read (DEAR)program, where time is allotted each school day for EVERYONE to read. And by that, it means EVERYONE -- teachers, students, secretaries, even janitors. I brought my idea back to my school with the suggestion of trimming away two minutes from each of our eight periods to create the block of time to implement DEAR in our school. Unfortunately, teachers decided against the idea, citing their need for the instructional time in class. So I approached my team's teachers, and we created the time within our team's core content classes. After implementing the program within our team, our students showed marked improvement on their Gates reading tests and on the GEPA state testing, so much so that the administration decided to change Study Hall to Literacy. Now students use a twenty minute block of time simply to read, and reading skills have improved as a result. The lesson and point: we need to keep an open mind to new ideas and approaches to improving education.
In closing, Fryer remarks how companies invest far more capital in research and development than we do in education. As our country and the State of New Jersey looks to make dramatic changes to curriculum, testing, tenure, and more, perhaps we need to take a more serious look at what works and what may not. The age-old wisdom of the adage, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water!" seems all too fitting here.
It's nice out. I've gotta go now.