New directions in teaching

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, an article on the use of “machine teaching”: “The hope is if we can quantify the student’s learning process, then maybe we can come up with a more efficient curriculum or lesson.”

Two observations:

This model of teaching allows for no possibility of conversation or improvisation or discovery: it is always already clear “what knowledge [the researcher] wants to impress upon the learner.” I think of the “little vessels” in the opening scene of Dickens’s Hard Times , schoolchildren waiting to be filled with facts.

This model of teaching assumes that efficiency is a desirable end. But what counts as “a more efficient curriculum or lesson”? Is it inefficient to spend a semester teaching Infinite Jest ? Is it inefficient to spend a class meeting on a single Dickinson poem? Or two or more hours looking at a single painting? What would a “more efficient” approach to such works require? What would be gained and lost in taking such an approach? And why didn’t Socrates just come out and say what he meant instead of asking all those questions? Not a very efficient philosopher.

Related posts
Models for education (Sages, guides, and improvisation)
New directions in assessment (Scanning brains to determine the effects of college)

[I twice had the pleasure of spending a semester on Infinite Jest, and I spent many a class meeting looking at single poems. But I don’t know how to spend hours looking at a single painting.]

Name the actor

He reminds me of the scholarly gentleman on packs of Club cigarette papers. Can you identify this actor? Take your best shot in the comments. I’ll drop hints as needed. Disclosure: I would not be able to guess correctly.

Here are links to posts with ten more mystery actors, from Naked City , Route 66 , and “the movies”: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Collect them all!

*

A hint: The actor is probably best known for his television work.

*

The answer is now in the comments, courtesy of an eagle-eyed Crow.

Overheard

[One teenager to another, on a park bench. ]

“I’m a little too patty-caked out.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

Bertrand Russell on reverence in education

My son Ben pointed me to an essay by Bertrand Russell, “Education as a Political Institution” (The Atlantic Monthly , June 1916). An excerpt:

In education, with its codes of rules emanating from a government office, with its large classes and fixed curriculum and overworked teachers, with its determination to produce a dead level of glib mediocrity, the lack of reverence for the child is all but universal. Reverence requires imagination and vital warmth; it requires most imagination in respect of those who have least actual achievement or power. The child is weak and superficially foolish; the teacher is strong, and in an everyday sense wiser than the child. The teacher without reverence, or the bureaucrat without reverence, easily despises the child for these outward inferiorities. He thinks it his duty to “mould” the child; in imagination he is the potter with the clay. And so he gives to the child some unnatural shape which hardens with age, producing strains and spiritual dissatisfactions, out of which grow cruelty and envy and the belief that others must be compelled to undergo the same distortions.

The man who has reverence will not think it his duty to “mould” the young. He feels in all that lives, but especially in human beings, and most of all in children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something individual and strangely precious, the growing principle of life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world. He feels an unaccountable humility in the presence of a child — a humility not easily defensible on any rational ground, and yet somehow nearer to wisdom than the easy self-confidence of many parents and teachers. He feels the outward helplessness of the child, the appeal of dependence, the responsibility of a trust. His imagination shows him what the child may become, for good or evil; how its impulses may be developed or thwarted, how its hopes must be dimmed and the life in it grow less living, how its trust will be bruised and its quick desires replaced by brooding will. All this gives him a longing to help the child in its own battle, to strengthen it and equip it, not for some outside end proposed by the state or by any other impersonal authority, but for the ends which the child’s own spirit is obscurely seeking.

“[N]ot for some outside end proposed by the state or by any other impersonal authority, but for the ends which the child’s own spirit is obscurely seeking”: a strong rejoinder to the utilitarian mantra of college-ready and workplace-ready .

Thanks, Ben.

Related posts
Diana Senechal on literature and reverence
Michael Oakeshott on education

Talking ties

My daughter Rachel passes on this observation. She knew I would like it:

Yes, ties take time to tie and sometimes get uncomfortable. However, a tie tells everyone you meet, “I respect you, my job, and myself, and I’m willing to take the time to show it.”

Harry K. Wong and Rosemary T. Wong, The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher (2009).

I started wearing a tie in my last three years of teaching, for two reasons. Certain candidates for the Republican presidential nomination had appropriated the elements of my style, making it impossible for me to wear button-down shirts and jeans and sweater-vests in good conscience. And I had come to realize that my old square-end knit ties were now vintage ties and that such ties were once again being made. So I began to buy, tie, and wear. I wasn’t thinking about respect though. I was having fun.

I was once told of a teacher who told his students that teachers who wear ties “think they’re better than you.” He of course wore no tie. I hope that at least some of his students saw his us-and-them strategy for the cheap trick that it was. I know Rachel would have.

Tidy?

[Click for a larger view.]

Elaine has been tidying, so much so that I have joked that our house is becoming a Kondo-minium. But not everything is tidy, not yet. This end table, for instance.

Fambly music

Rachel and Ben (aka our children) perform Zach Gill’s “Beautiful Reason.” With special guests The Cicadas.

Who would we be without music? Wait — don’t even try to answer that question.

B.V.D.

Another Mencken footnote, this one from a discussion of abbreviations:

Under date of March 29, 1935 I received the following from Mr. P. B. Merry of the B.V.D. Company, Inc.: “From the standpoint of business psychology and because of the great public curiosity as to the meaning of our trademark, we would not care to have you publish any information regarding its origin, but for your personal use, if you request it, we will be glad to tell you the history of B.V.D. ” I did not request it.

H. L. Mencken, The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States , 4th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936).

Says Wikipedia: “The brand was founded in 1876 and named after the three founders of the New York City firm Bradley, Voorhees & Day (thus ‘B.V.D.’).” End of mystery.

Also from The American Language
The American v. the Englishman
“[N]o faculty so weak as the English faculty”
“There are words enough already”
The -thon , dancing and walking
The verb to contact

A belated Louis Armstrong post

[Lewis Louis Armstrong’s draft card.]

Louis Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901. But the mythic July 4 is a better fit.

When I signed up with the National Archives last month as a Citizen Archivist (after reading this interview), I was surprised to find Armstrong’s draft card, or at least its recto, sitting there, just waiting to be transcribed. The verso is still unavailable from the Archives.

To date, I’ve transcribed a grand total of two documents, Armstrong’s draft card and a letter to Muzak asking for free advice about implementing a “music while you work” program at a Naval Air Station. Writing is a much greater pleasure than transcribing.

Related reading
All OCA Louis Armstrong posts (Pinboard)

On the news

In a comment on a 2014 post, I wrote that “Elaine and I have developed the unfortunate habit of saying ‘fewer’ in unison every time we hear [an inept ‘less’] on the news.” And thus tonight: “ . . . they’ll sell less iPhones.” In unison: “Fewer.” Can’t help it.