History Lessons

I thought about entitling this "When we die, this is who will replace us."

This is from a friend's facebook page talking about just one day, and one question of one day, in his history class:

Most disturbing question of the day: While discussing ancient migrations from Siberia to Alaska, a student in my U.S. History class asked if this means we now think that the Puritans were NOT the first people to settle in America.

Yes. We now think that.

One of the comments was from another teacher: "I have you ALL beat. A student of mine asked me if I had served in WW2, and she was serious."

Years ago another friend of mine had students in her North Carlina history class who didn't know which came first, World War I or World War II. Another one thought the Civil War (ours, presumably) came after World War I.

ed. majors, learning to mold the minds of our future.
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Clemen's notebook

I want this where I can find it for class. It is an interesting map of the ethno-linguistic state of Europe in 1914. After August of that year things changed rapidly. It's a bit large.

The High Cost of University

Our budget has been slashed by the state legislature by over 15%. This is on top of severe but not crippling cuts for about three years running. Now we are laying off staff (i..e. working folks, remember them?) and talking about making faculty who don't produce enough research teach another section. Last year the administration cut a day's pay out of our paychecks.

Still no word yet about pay cuts or lay offs among the administration positions, oddly. So this little news clip has some salience. Quoting an article by David Hogberg in Investor’s Business Daily:

Analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that from 1989-2009 the number of administrative personnel at four- and two-year institutions grew 84%, from about 543,000 to over 1 million. By contrast, the number of faculty increased 75%, from 824,000 to 1.4 million, while student enrollment grew 51%, from 13.5 million to 20.4 million.

The disparity was worse at public universities and colleges, where personnel in administration rose 71%, faculty 58% and student enrollment 40%. Private schools also saw administration and faculty growing faster than student enrollment, although faculties slightly outpaced administration increases.

Another Republican speaks

About pre-school programs.

Of course, the government wants their hands on your children as fast as they can. That is why I opposed all these early starts and pre-early starts, and early-early starts. They want your children from the womb so they can indoctrinate your children as to what they want them to be. I am against that."

Yes, you too can vote for this man to be president of the USA ... at least in a primary somewhere.

from here, via Andrew Sullivan.

and for you mothers out there desperately trying to find a pre-school program for your kid, shame on you.

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Private education companies

This is not the argument that I will, eventually (probably when I really need to procrastinate), make in a post. But it is a bit of empirical evidence. It involves a $1.6 million settlement with students by Kaplan, Inc. a for-profit educational company, a subsidiary of The Washington Post.

Here is the conclusion of an article on what is merely the latest law suit against the company.

As a result of the settlement Kaplan will pay about $500,000 to 43 students who took out loans to attend the school but who could never graduate (or get good jobs to pay off their loans) because the school wasn’t able to offer the clinic training students needed to graduate or obtain licenses.

And the degree only costs $16,000.

I especially like the part about 'could never graduate.'

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Handwriting skills

Apparently not all children have been taught handwriting, particularly cursive writing (though Maeraed seems to be doing fine in that department). Many people seem to think that typing is the skill you need - otherwise, how are they going to text? Or blog? Or twitter? On the other hand, there are good reasons for requiring good old handwriting.

New research shows writing things out by hand not only increases brain activity, but also helps develop fine motor skills and can even predict how well a student will do in school, the Chicago Tribune reports.

So everyone should write something by hand this week.

preferably with a fountain pen.

Why students sometimes don't get it

Increasingly we encounter students who can read perfectly well, but they can't "read" in any real sense. Here is a sample on Amazon from a bored student reviewing Ostler's first rate Empires of the Word.

this book is really boring I bought it for a class and I totally hate reading it. I'm half way through and I'm only on ch.5! The chapters are soooooooooo!!!! long! its riddiculous! this is a pretty thick book and it has really small writting! The author just talks over and over again about the same thing! Don't recommend it to read just for fun but if it is for a class then goodluck!

That's it. In its entirety. Another review said it read like "a textbook." Many books on Amazon get that tag. As near as I can make out what they really mean by "reads like a textbook" is that it is not a simple narrative, a story. And the chapters "are soooooooooo!!!! long!" Probably has big words too.

reminds me of the history grad student who told me he didn't like reading "whole books."

American exceptionalism

One of the biggest jokes on the planet. Whatever the truth once was, how can you read stories like this and not feel the fetid breath of history (as in "He's history!" blowing down the nape of your neck.

Last month, the results of the most recent Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, tests were announced. It was the first time that Chinese students had participated, and children from Shanghai ranked first in every single area. Students from the United States, meanwhile, came in seventeenth in reading, twenty-third in science, and an especially demoralizing thirty-first in math. This last ranking put American kids not just behind the Chinese, the Koreans, and the Singaporeans but also after the French, the Austrians, the Hungarians, the Slovenians, the Estonians, and the Poles.

I'm sure we're ahead of somebody.

aren't we?

there is, of course, a slight trick to these results. Reassured?

Check out North Carolina

Budget crisis

The state of North Carolina is in deep financial trouble. One way to balance the budget is to not spend money so the University system is facing some very stiff budget cuts. These are the kinds of deep cuts that will seriously effect the system's ability to actually teach students something worthwhile. In fact, one possible solution our administrators here at Appstate have come up with, right after "firing a whole bunch of instructors" is to reduce the number of courses required for a major.

You have to think about that for a minute. NOWHERE have they suggested we cut the number or pay of administrators, NOWHERE have they suggested we get rid of administrative structures that don't strictly support the function of teaching students and research.

Why would that matter? Here is a little tidbit from the local political reporter Scott Mooneyham in discussing the budget:

All involved might want to take a hard look at how a decade’s worth of similar budget flexibility has affected the 16-campus University of North Carolina system.

Just in case Gov. Perdue, Tillis and Berger have forgotten, during a five-year period of that budget flexibility, the number of university administrators grew twice as fast as the number of students.

Why wouldn’t they? The motives and incentives of the decision-makers -- the university administrators -- became too heavily weighted toward rewarding those like themselves.

Meanwhile, the state’s budget writers had literally and figuratively passed the buck. In the process, they lessened public accountability.

Save administrators! Cut back on classes! Fire instructors!

want to drive on a bridge designed by an engineer from a school that reduced the number of classes for an engineering degree?

Advice for Christian students... or anyone

Via Andrew Sullivan comes this page of good advice from Stanley Hauerwas in First Things. It is good advice. Even if you aren't a Christian. You should read the WHOLE thing (as I tell my students), especially if you happen to teach at a college or university.

First, the inescapably Christian part:

“The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter). Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.”

I like that last part about history.

Here is the part Sullivan likes (me too).

But there is much more. Here is a part I like, partly because it has some relevance to my particular institution:

It’s not easy for anyone who is serious about the intellectual life, Christian or not. The curricula of many colleges and universities may seem, and in fact may be, chaotic. Many schools have no particular expectations. You check a few general-education boxes—a writing course, perhaps, and some general distributional requirements—and then do as you please. Moreover, there is no guarantee that you will be encouraged to read. Some classes, even in the humanities, are based on textbooks that chop up classic texts into little snippets. You cannot become friends with an author by reading half a dozen pages. Finally, and perhaps worse because insidious, there is a strange anti-intellectualism abroad in academia.

And if you were going to boil it down to a few sound bites:

But you are a Christian. This means you cannot go to college just to get a better job.

And, of course, you cannot read enough Trollope. Think of books as the fine threads of a spider’s web. They link and connect.

You cannot and should not try to avoid being identified as an intellectual.

Also, go to the bookstore at the beginning of the term to see which professors assign books—and I mean real books, not textbooks.

Although many professors are not Christians (at some schools, most aren’t), many professors have a piety especially relevant to the academic life.

So read the whole thing. Even if you aren't a Christian, or aren't a very good one, the advice is good and provokes thought.

High School

I went to HB Plant high school in the Palma Ceia part of Tampa. Don't worry - after about 15 years, some constructive drinking, and a move to Minnesota I recovered.

This guy apparently didn't.

But he does make much more money than I do.


though he had to sue his own brother to do it.

hmm.



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Illegal Immigrants in the Tar Heel State

Last spring I had an overt, died in the wool, white supremacist in my class on Migration in World History. One day he went on one of his rants about how awful illegal immigrants were because they were causing our community college system to collapse by crowding into classes where they couldn't speak English. I told him I thought that was nonsense and I was in a position to know, being a professor within the higher education field. Students who get into community colleges speak English, and there are not that many of them. How could the people accused of being willing to work for sub-American wages be able to send their children to schools charging out of state tuition rates, as North Carolina does. He didn't buy it.

Providentially when I got home that night I found in the local paper this article by Scott Mooneyham (a columnist who covers state politics) which provided me with the hard numbers to make the point I wanted to make. So the next class I asked my class a few questions.

1. How many students go to NC community colleges?
Answer: about 300,000. Most of the students thought many times more.

2. What percentage of these are illegal residents?
Answer: community college officials say that in 2008 it was 112 students, which is considerably less than 1%. Actually it's about .00038. Most students thought it was as high as 20% and several thought as high as 50% (no, I don't know what planet they live on either).

3. How many times the instate tuition rate do out-of-state students pay?
Answer: It varies a bit, but Mooneyham gives the figure for out-of-state tuition as $7,700 per year. That seems to be about 5 times as much. Students were all over the map on this one, though one or two out-of-state students got it right.

What I didn't ask them, but should have, was how much this costs the state of North Carolina to educate this horde of illegals in community colleges.

Answer: it doesn't - in 2008 the state made about $185,000 off of them. Also, since the state requires that they have graduated from an American high school, it is difficult to believe very many of those 112 were unable to speak English. Most of the ones I know personally speak English exactly like the locals, sadly. As to how overcrowded this makes our community colleges? Not at all. They go to the back of the line and are only admitted if space is then available.

just my luck, the day I did all this the class white supremacist was absent. Oh well.

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They still need us! They really really need us!

Teachers that is. Especially ones that demand that you read.

David Frum notices that as manufacturers start to rehire, there is a serious problem with the population they are expecting to hire from.

As manufacturing work gets more taxing, manufacturers are looking at a work force that is actually becoming less literate and less skilled.

In 2007, ETS — the people who run the country’s standardized tests — compiled a battery of scores of basic literacy conducted over the previous 15 years and arrived at a startling warning: On present trends, the country’s average score on basic literacy tests will drop by 5 percent by 2030 as compared to 1992.

That’s a disturbing headline. Behind the headline is even worse news.

His explanation is not convincing (the vast majority of potential hires are natives and the products of American schools), but at least it's a start for a discussion of just what we are doing about education. In this state, that would be cutting budgets massively at both the state and local level and stagnating teachers' salaries along with a few unpaid leave days.

But we must do everything we can not to raise taxes back to the level of, say, the 90s.

Sunday Animated Lecture

Via Andrew Sullivan comes this humorous and enlightening animated lecture on the geography of time. There is a lot of interest here, especially for us old fuddy duddies who have to teach the wired generation.

Take a look and see what you think. I love the drawings in it.

Without Comment

Another thing about education

It can involve a lot of work on the part of the educators.

Especially at the end of the semester.

Which is why posts have been a little thin lately. But I can see light at the end of the tunnel.

especially when one has cats and dogs that must be tended to.

The value of an education

This just in from the Washington Monthly.

* Oh my: "A report by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities indicates that the U.S. is one of only two nations on Earth in which people aged 25 to 34 have lower educational attainment than their parents."

Meanwhile, just about every state is raising tuition much faster than the rate of inflation.

although that doesn't explain the size of my last pay raise.

Research - a modest proposal

One of the contributors to National Review Online, George Leef, has a comment on the teaching v. research question that continually roils the upper reaches of our education system. It is a topic of some interest to my own department even as I type (when actually I should be doing some research).

In my view, for every published book or article that really makes a worthwhile contribution to knowledge in a field, there are dozens that make no contribution and wouldn't be written if it weren't for the obligation to get things in print. In a more sensible world, professors would be paid to teach and research work would mainly be done on a contract basis with those who want to fund it. [my emphasis]

Well, time is money and tempus fugit and all that.

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Ban the Rainbow!

But keep the Confederate Flag. There is a secondary question here, but on the surface it is goofy enough. A principal of a Florida High School has attempted to ban all symbols that suggest support for gays - including most definitely the rainbow.

Davis [the principal] also testified that he believed rainbows were "sexually suggestive" and would make students unable to study because they'd be picturing gay sex acts in their mind. The principal went on to admit that while censoring rainbows and gay pride messages he allowed students to wear other symbols many find controversial, such as the Confederate flag.

The Confederate flag? Symbol of, what exactly? Armed rebellion and slavery? Desperately trying to topple the Federal government? That's OK, but the rainbow makes you think dirty thoughts?

Well thank God we have educators like Mr Davis to protect our school children from being corrupted by rainbows.


Secondary question: Why, in a field overwhelming dominated by females, are principals and other top administrators usually male? Just curious.

This post has been brought to you by the color lavender. Now don't have any dirty thoughts.