Area dad Paul Moyers is in the market for a computer “with only the basics”:
In addition to doing his own research, Moyers enlisted the help of his 24-year-old son Keith, who, according to Moyers, knows a lot about computers. The younger Moyers reportedly suggested his father consider an iMac due to its ease of use and straightforward tech support. While Moyers was initially open to the idea, he swiftly ruled out a Mac due to the computer’s price and the fact that it didn’t come with Windows.
Bikur Ha-Tizmoret (The Band’s Visit) (2007)
Written and directed by Eran Kolirin
Arabic, English, and Hebrew with English subtitles
Eighty-seven minutes
The premise is simple: the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Orchestra, a police band, travel from Egypt to Israel to perform at the opening of an Arab arts center and end up in the wrong place, a small desert town. With no hotel and no bus out, they turn to an Israeli restaurant proprietor and her friends for help. The Band’s Visit is a beautifully made film — not a feel-good film, but a feel-okay, maybe, sort-of film, with orchestra members and locals awkwardly bridging a cultural divide. It’s the best film about hospitality I’ve seen. Perhaps the finest moment: Egyptians and Israelis meeting on the common ground of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Summertime.”
The New York Times reports on the fate of marginalia in the digital age. My favorite writer of marginalia might be William Blake. From his annotations to Francis Bacon’s Essays Moral, Economical and Political (1798):
Bacon: A king is a mortal god on earth, unto whom the living God hath lent his own name as a great honour.
Blake: O Contemptible & Abject Slave.
The New York Times reports that fewer and fewer young people are blogging. A Tumblr user explains:
“It’s different from blogging because it’s easier to use,” she said. “With blogging you have to write, and this is just images. Some people write some phrases or some quotes, but that’s it.”Is the so-called “new literacy” among young people already over?
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 2011. $25.
Are you better off than you were four years ago? If that famous question from the 1980 presidential campaign were put to college seniors, the answer, for too many, would seem to be “Not really.” Tracking the academic progress of 2,322 students at twenty-four four-year institutions, sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa find that for a great many students, college makes no change in their ability to think, reason, and write. The numbers are bleak: after two years of college, forty-five percent of the students surveyed showed no significant change in performance on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized (and challenging) test of critical thinking, problem solving, and writing. After four years of college, thirty-six percent showed no significant change. Is our children learning? Not always.¹
The strength of Arum and Roksa’s work is its methodical presentation of data to confirm what many observers of education might know only as anecdote and hearsay. Are professors asking much of their students? Arum and Roksa find that they aren’t. What Arum and Roksa see in higher education is, as they dryly put it, a “student culture focused on social life and strategic management of work requirements.” The average student, they find, spends twelve hours a week studying. Thirty-seven percent of students spend less than five hours a week studying. The work of many courses requires little reading (not even forty pages a week) and less writing (not even twenty pages per semester). Here, as elsewhere, Academically Adrift suggests that college tends to perpetuate social inequality: the less selective the college, the less likely it is that students are doing much reading and writing. As Arum and Roksa see it, administrators and faculty have a “moral imperative” to change the shape of undergraduate education, by asking more of and giving more to students.
Of course some students don’t expect a return on their college investment in the form of learning. Their aim is to acquire a credential. When I talk about these matters with my students, I make an analogy to shopping at the supermarket. If the point is merely to get a receipt and get out, it makes perfect sense to grab something, anything, and head to the shortest line. No waiting on Register Four! But having something to show for your effort is another matter. And if everyone has a receipt, it’s what’s in your cart — or what you take away from your education — that counts.²
An unexpected benefit of this book: one can draw from Arum and Roksa’s work a handy guide to genuine learning in college. Three things to do if you want to learn: Take courses with professors who have high expectations and require significant amounts of both reading and writing. Talk to professors about the work of the class in office hours. And study alone. Despite a current emphasis on collaborative learning and group work, Arum and Roksa find, it’s students who spend more time studying alone who learn more.
¹ Ronald Reagan asked the question that begins this paragraph. George W. Bush asked the question that ends it.
² The moral: Feed Your Head.
Another Academically Adrift post
Time-management in college
A supplement to Academically Adrift
Improving Undergraduate Learning: Findings and Policy Recommendations from the SSRC-CLA Longitudinal Projects (Social Science Research Council)
Worker, or employee? Daughter Number Three has a good post about language and labor.
On a related note, I’d like to welcome Wisconsin legislators to Illinois. Stay as long as you need to, please.
In Annandale, Virginia, wheaten terrier Ms. Beatha Lee has been elected president of the Hillbrook-Tall Oaks Civic Association. She was described to members as “a relatively new resident, interested in neighborhood activities and the outdoors,” with experience “overseeing an estate of 26 acres” in Maine. Ms. Lee promises to govern “with an even paw.”
(Thanks, Ben!)
Bob is an undergraduate (3.5 GPA) at a Midwestern public university:
I hate classes with a lot of reading that is tested on. Any class where a teacher is just gonna give us notes and a worksheet or something like that is better. Something that I can study and just learn from in five [minutes] I’ll usually do pretty good in. Whereas, if I’m expected to read, you know, a hundred-and-fifty-page book and then write a three-page essay on it, you know, on a test let’s say, I’ll probably do worse on that test because I probably wouldn’t have read the book. Maybe ask the kids, what’s in this book? And I can draw my own conclusions, but I rarely actually do reading assignments or stuff like that, which is a mistake, I’m sure, but it saves me a lot of time.Coming soon: more about Academically Adrift.
Mary Grigbsy, College Life through the Eyes of Students (State University of New York Press, 2009). Quoted in Richard Arum and Josip Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011).
“We believe proper grammar is sexy. We will show no mercy”: at Pepperdine University, the Grammar Gang is correcting mistakes.
