Occam’s Razor

Little Cherubs

During services, we parishioners know the cue. At the Unitarian Universalist church that I attend, it is a song from our hymnal. It begins “As we leave this friendly place.” We stand when we sing it. Until this moment, the children have been up near the front of the sanctuary. They have been half listening to the minister or the Director of Religious education tell them a story. With the first bar of the familiar hymn the children, roughly ages five through twelve, exit the sanctuary and head downstairs. It is Sunday school time.

From downstairs, where I am preparing to greet them, I can sense their imminent arrival from the rumble of the floorboards above me. For this week, I am their Sunday school teacher. One thing is for sure: it will not be a dull class. On a typical Sunday, there are about a dozen children in my class, ranging from first through fifth grade. They cascade down the stairs and head straight for the back classroom where I and another teacher are waiting for them. On this day, I am their primary teacher. The backup teacher is there to help if needed, but also to ensure I do not molest any of them. Not that my church members are paranoid or anything, but we have to explicitly declare that we will not engage in any inappropriate behavior.Nor are we allowed to be alone without another responsible adult present.

For some reason, there are few things that I find more terrifying than grade school children. Therefore, I find it a bit ironic that I am here, busily setting up chairs, arranging tables and distributing art supplies. I taught Sunday school about five years ago to some Junior High school students. Since then I gave it a pass. Nevertheless, when the church was one teacher short last fall I decided it was time to get off my duff and volunteer.

Teaching the Junior High students was fun. Yes, like most their age they were overcommitted and scattershot about attending. However, we were able to go on some neat field trips, for we were learning about other faiths. Unitarian Universalists may be unique in that we have no creed. We feel part of our mission is to help each person find their own authentic faith. My junior high students got an eyeful and an earful that year. From being proselytized after services at a Mormon Church, to an incense-filled trip to the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, to a two-hour plus service at a black Pentecostal church where the patrons were literally dancing in the aisles, they got some fascinating exposure to the world of divergent faiths.

For this new group though it was back to basics. Did they know about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? This teaching comes by default in most Christian churches. (Arguably Unitarian Universalists are not Christian, although their roots are in Christianity.) For the most part the stories of Moses, David and Goliath and Solomon are all new to them. There will be no boring lecture for these students. They need to keep their hands busy. They do get a reading. Then it is quickly time for arts and crafts. For a few weeks, we worked on a paper mural describing the story of Moses. A couple weeks later we were writing the Ten Commandments (somewhat sanitized — trying to explain adultery for a third grader is a bit much) on “stone” (cardboard) tablets.

What you do not know from week to week is whether you will impart any actual learning on these children. We do our best, but in many ways, it depends on serendipity. Sometimes the children are on the warpath. There are siblings in the class and sometimes their mission is to make life miserable for their sibling. Mostly what these children are are, well, children. Consequently that means they have short attention spans and all sorts of needs for attention. So it’s “She’s hitting me” and “Can I get a drink of water?” and “He’s not being fair” and “I don’t want to” and infinite variations in between. The only question is whether it will all cascade out into a toxic group dynamics situation.

That usually depends on the success of the first few minutes. Can the children be organized and stay focused? If so, then you are likely to have a good Sunday school experience. Otherwise, watch out. If nothing else teaching younger children has reinforced to me that I do not have a calling as an elementary school teacher. I do not know how teachers do it year after year after year for five days a week. The chaos is constant. If you are lucky, only a couple children will be misbehaving at a given moment. In the worst cases, it becomes a free for all. I am sure elementary school teachers get training in how to deal with it. I suspect though that they learn to cope. You teach in between the plentiful periods of chaos.

I too have learned a few things about elementary school children. One thing I have learned is that while children are not geniuses, all children are master emotional manipulators. It is instinctive with them. They know how to play off parents, how to anger a sibling in five words or less, how to devastate someone’s feelings, and how to work persistently to get what they want from someone. While they may not be able to persevere at their ABC’s, they are relentless when it comes to getting what they want. They will keep up the Chinese water torture technique as long as necessary until results are achieved.

I have one girl who goes into tears at the drop of a hat. Psychologists might call her “emotionally sensitive”. Maybe she is, maybe she is not. However, she certainly is good at pulling strings. She knows crying will get her some attention, be it good or bad. Other children are quiet and introspective. Others engage in annoying habits or simply head off in random directions at the slightest impulse. Others are itching for a fight. My job is to impart a little learning. Sometimes I succeed. It is hard to measure results.

While the adult in me finds these traits annoying, I am still attracted to their enormous energy. If an adult is a 100-watt light bulb, children on a bad day are going at 1000 watts. Most are incredibly curious. Yet they will flit from thing to thing as fits their feelings and the context of the moment. What I find neatest about these children is how incredibly alive they are. Life just radiates out of them. They are wholly engaged in this thing called living. Moreover, they are still self centered enough to think that we all exist to help or amuse them.

For me the most gratifying aspects of teaching them are not imparting some old Bible stories. They are those few moments when I can pierce through their defenses and tap into some positive aspect of them. The emotionally sensitive girl, for example, reacted quite well when at a quiet spot I would seek her out and tell her simply that I liked her. Her eyes brightened up.

Personal attention: that is what their world is about. They all want it, even the ones who appear withdrawn. What they really need though is someone who can understand and complement something unique about themselves. They like to hear it. They want to know they are not just another kid at a desk, but someone with unique gifts and talents. Their appetite for such attention is boundless.

This apparently is my real mission on those Sunday mornings when I teach. As they go through school, they will meet a myriad of adults. They need to hear from all of us, even though our acquaintance may be ephemeral, that they are both good and special. Despite my initial misgivings, I found that I get something from them too. For a while, I can put away some of my cares and concerns. For a while, I can bask in the pleasure they take in being so passionately, painfully and gloriously alive. Sometimes when I head to work the next morning, I succeed in carrying that energy forward into my adult world. Sometimes on Mondays after teaching, instead of shuffling off to work, I walk with a bit of a spring in my step, a smile on my face, and with a fresh reminder of a time when life was full of enormous possibilities.

Thanks kids.

February 14th, 2006 at 07:14pm Posted by Mark | Sociology | no comments

College Pretenders

The community college system was invented to make college affordable and available locally to ordinary people. You don’t need a 3.8 average to get into most community colleges. You generally need either a high school diploma or a G.E.D. For those who come from families of modest means paying for two years of education at a community college at a rate of $72 a credit hour (where I teach) is a bargain.

Perhaps it is because the tuition is so inexpensive that it is so easy to throw in the towel. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Yesterday I finished yet another semester teaching a course at Northern Virginia Community College. As usual as I recorded the final grades I felt dispirited. But I shouldn’t feel this way. It’s been the same way since I started teaching back in 2000.

I started the semester with 24 students. It had been a long time since I had a nearly full class. So I had some hopes that maybe this semester would be different. As I do at the start of every semester I went through the syllabus with the class to make sure my students knew my expectations. I told them that to succeed in the class it would take an average of four to eight hours of study per week, plus time for the projects. I emphasized how important it was not to rely on my slides alone but to read the assigned chapters in advance. I advised students to underline areas that were unclear and be prepared to participate in class. I said they needed to turn in their homework promptly so that I could give them feedback promptly. I told them I had office hours after every class. If they didn’t understand anything or had any issues they needed to see me during office hours or email me so we could work through their problems. I told them this was a medium level course. It was not English 101, but neither was it Calculus. It would move at a fairly brisk pace. Still, it was a college course. This was not high school.

Since I lecture from Powerpoint slides, I provided them with handouts of my slides. For most lectures I had several examples that I created that we could go through together as a class. Particularly in the first half of the semester we had regular labs. And if this was not enough to cement learning I started out every class with a review of the previous class. Since the class meets once a week, sometimes just reviewing the last class consumed an hour of class time.

So you would think that a student would have all the tools necessary to excel. But the most important tool is motivation. And that is the one tool I cannot supply. The sad fact of the matter is that many community college students simply lack motivation. When push comes to shove I strongly suspect that their coursework comes last. I’m not sure what they are doing with their time. Perhaps they are working three jobs in addition to going to class and are simply exhausted. Perhaps they are downloading smut or doing roll-playing games on line instead of reading and homework. Perhaps they are high on drugs or intoxicated by beer.

So what happened to my twenty-four students this semester? Here is the final tally. Five students simply withdrew from the course. Three decided to audit the class. That left 16 students who were going to try for a grade. In other words a third of the class dropped out or decided getting credit for the course was too much hassle.

Of the sixteen one guy showed up for the first class then stopped coming. He got an F, of course. But we appreciated the money he gave the college. Perhaps he can write his tuition off as a charitable donation. Of the remaining 15 three got F’s. There was 1 D, 3 C’s, 3 B’s and 4 A’s. One grade is incomplete but the woman will likely pass with a B. So out of 24 students, only 50% will have a passing grade.

Looking at the grading sheet of those who got C’s, D’s and F’s it’s pretty easy to understand what happened. For one thing, these students kept skipping class. They were there one week and the next week they couldn’t be bothered. The class starts at 9 AM on Saturday mornings. Perhaps they were out late partying Friday night. But I suspect the real reason is that they just didn’t care. They had nothing vested in the class. Perhaps their parents were prodding them to go to school but they really didn’t want to go. Perhaps lectures and labs was just not their thing. Perhaps they managed to catch colds every other week shortly before class.

But also these students were very scattershot about turning in homework. Like attendance, homework was 10% of the grade so it did count for something. In previous semesters homework was often turned in weeks late, when it was turned in at all. Some of the more brazen students had simply copy and pasted my posted solutions and turned those in. This semester I changed the policy: students had two weeks and no more to turn in homework and receive credit for it. But many students apparently didn’t care enough to do the work. And in the process they didn’t get the practice they needed so they could do well on the projects. So they set themselves up for failure.

And some couldn’t be bothered to turn in projects. I went the extra mile and sent out email notifications to those who did not turn in their projects on time. Mostly I heard nothing. One student said he was having problems. I said turn it in. Even partial credit is better than no credit when the final project is 20% of our grade! But he didn’t. I figure he never even started the project.

I’ve taught enough courses now to have a pretty good idea who is going to succeed and who isn’t. If their eyes are glazed over or closed they are not paying attention. Almost without exception students who come from India or China will do well. Two of the four students who received A’s were from India. The only other Indian in the class received a B. Usually if the students are fresh out of high school or twenty something they lack motivation. I wonder why that is. Do they suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder? Did they skate through high school pulling C’s and expect that they could skate through college with the same strategy?

Do students today even learn how to study? A lot of my students can’t be bothered to take notes. It seems they expect it all to be handed to them. It appears they think a course is something that can be worked on when it suits them. They don’t seem to understand there are consequences for falling behind.

And every semester I see some new twists from students trying to make the course easier for them. This semester I found one couple who were apparently living with each other and taking the course together. The woman tended to miss every other class but no matter. Her boyfriend was there taking the notes. Naturally they wanted to do their final project as a team, something I allowed in the past. But I strongly suspect the boyfriend did the entire project. In another case two guys were partners in a small business. In yet another case a guy who did his homework let the other guy sitting next to him copy and paste it and turn it in. Apparently some students have no ethical grounding. I guess they figure if the can download illegal music with impunity why not do the same with their homework. Why would this be a problem?

As I noted back in 2002, I am a karmic facilitator. It’s a shame though that even though I provide karmic lessons for so many of my students that the lessons seem to bounce right off them.

I am scheduled to teach another course in a couple weeks during the summer semester. I have seven enrolled students so I doubt it will go forward. It is just as well. I try not to take these failures by my students personally. My boss assures me this happens in all the classes. But after this dispiriting semester I need to recharge to go through this whole cycle again in the fall.

May 8th, 2005 at 11:37am Posted by Mark | Sociology | one comment

The Cost of Indoctrination

I went to public school in Florida in the early 1970s. As part of a requirement for graduation all students were required by the state to take a course called “Americanism vs. Communism”. As I recall it lasted a quarter and was part of what would otherwise pass for a history credit.

The course purported to clearly distinguish between the American way of life and the totalitarian/fascist nature of communist governments. In it I learned more than I ever expected to about communist theories and leaders. Our class even had a guest speaker who had lived behind the Iron Curtain. She provided a first hand account of what it was like to live in a totalitarian state. I confess after completing the “course” I had no desire to become a communist. But I had none before the course either.

Yet the course has bothered me to this day. And this was because it was not really learning. It was indoctrination, courtesy of the Florida state legislature. While it certainly had its educational aspects, it was neither fair nor balanced. No communists were invited to counterpoint. No mention was made that Communism was a direct result of the brutal oppression of the Russian people. Nor was the very real exploitation of the workers at the time (both in Europe and here in the United States) and the fact that laborers lived lives in poverty with no hope of a better future given any mention as the conditions that bred communism. The course was really about the evils of communism as perceived through the lenses of a nation twenty years or so into The Cold War. It did not provide a genuine understanding of communism. It did not provide context. It was not really education.

At the time this was an isolated example. Today though students have to pass more and more “courses” that are really just indoctrination. In some cases the courses are worse than indoctrination. Why? Because they present themselves as unbiased when they clearly are not.

The best example that I can think of is the modern sex education course taught in our public schools. In many school districts abstinence is openly preferred. Indeed this is Bush Administration policy. Any suggestion that sexual curiosity between boys and girls of that age might be natural is rebuffed. Homosexuality is often not discussed, and when discussed is discussed in a tightly scripted way so that the size and scope of homosexuality is difficult for the student to understand. In many school districts masturbation is not discussed. Even discussing birth control is off limits for many students. Instead of discussing sexuality in context, sex education has become a discussion of the potential horrors of premarital sex. It does little to give a student any idea how to actually cope with their feelings. Sex education has become indoctrination. It usually fails to present the balanced set of information needed by students to make informed choices.

In Cobb County, Georgia school officials require a sticker on biology textbooks indicating that the Theory of Evolution is simply a theory, and not a fact. The educators in that school district are apparently not sufficiently advanced to understand there are multiple definitions for theory. The first definition is “A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena” not “An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture”, which is the least used definition. Nor apparently could they be bothered to find out from scientists which definition applies to the Theory of Evolution. Hint: it’s not the second. Another school district in Pennsylvania wants to require students to also learn about so-called “Intelligent Design Theory”. And you can be certain that if this theory is discussed no mention that it falls into the “assumption” category of theories will be made. It’s much easier to talk about theories in general and let every crackpot theory in than to limit discussion to theories with actual merit.

Let’s be clear what is going on here. Increasingly we are sending this message to our children: we don’t want you to have the best-known information. We will tell you what the truth is. But our version of the truth is based on our faith and prejudices, not on an impartial assessment of the facts. We think it is better to ignore certain facts, present facts selectively, and provide alternative viewpoints with no basis in reasoned analysis than to present the modern understanding of the current world put together by academics with no axe to grind. The message is pretty much this: it’s okay for us to lie to you. It’s for your own good.

So what is the purpose of education then? How does a student handle the real world without a clear understanding of it? Increasingly our children cannot. Perhaps this is why although global warming is as much a theory as is the Theory of Evolution we’d rather live in denial. Those pesky, abstract, non-biased scientists can be really annoying telling us things we don’t want to hear.

Imagine if driver’s education course included no mention of what to do if you see a stop sign. Most of us would be appalled to put our children in the driver’s seat without this basic understanding. But for many of us parents we would rather pamper our prejudices than do what is best for our kids: just give them the best-known facts. Life will be complicated enough for them in the 21st century. Why make it needlessly difficult?

Where is our sort of brave new world thinking also happening? I bet you can find it resurgent throughout the Muslim world. It’s been going on in the Vatican for millennium. Spanish bishops are still scared to admit that condoms prevent sexually transmitted diseases. I bet you won’t find this sort of wishy washy learning happening in most of today’s emerging high tech economies. I bet in India “Intelligent Design” is not taught along with the Theory of Evolution. Guess which society is going to be better prepared to move and adapt to the future?

There is a cost to ignorance. There is a cost to selectively presenting the facts. There is a cost to lying. For a country that claims to worship freedom, it’s odd that we won’t give our children the freedom to learn free from our own petty biases. Let’s give our students the freedom to see the clearest picture of the universe, as we know it. We do them no favor by placing them in a world where they must always engage with one arm tied behind their backs.

January 20th, 2005 at 08:33pm Posted by Mark | Politics 2005 | one comment

Back to School

After more than a year off from teaching it’s back to the classroom tomorrow morning. It appears that (ever so slowly) information technology (IT) is becoming hip again. The collapse of the dot com world followed by the outsourcing of IT jobs made students leery about investing time and money in IT. So lots of proposed classes ended up canceled and I took up other interests, like blogging. But the economy must be slowly improving. And apparently not every IT job can be outsourced. So community college students are trickling back into web technology courses again.

The course I am teaching is a basic HTML course, with a dash of cascading style sheets and Javascript thrown in. I’ve taught it at least three times before. At this point it has become a low maintenance course. The slides are tweaked from semester to semester to keep them current. But the lesson plans, projects and even the exams are pretty static. This is good because I already have a lot on my plate already. I agreed to teach the class with some misgivings.

Those misgivings include my parents, now 30 miles away instead of 600 miles away, and my 84-year-old mother who spent two late nights at the emergency room over the last week alone. I opted for the Saturday class since it fits my schedule and allowed me to travel as business needs dictate. I just didn’t hear from my boss at the college that I had actually been assigned the course I requested. By that time we had tickets to see shows in Canada. So I missed my first class. Fortunately the college found a substitute. I offered to let someone else teach the course, but my boss declined. I guess she knows I teach a quality course.

One of the saddest things about teaching at a community college is to see how many students are student wannabees. As an introductory course my course is often their first real college experience. And while you can get a fine education at a community college at a bargain rate it is still incumbent on the student to actually perform at the college level. So many of them arrive with the high school mentality and figure they can skate by in a community college too.

The community college offers guidance, counseling and numerous other programs to help students. Yet it appears that many of my students don’t know about them or won’t take the time to attend. In a typical semester about half the class drops out or mysteriously fade away.

Of course I warn my students orally and I put it in the syllabus: the average student needs 4-8 hours a week plus time for projects. They need to read the material in advance, not hear me restate it. If they find themselves lost or confused by the material then they need to call me or see me after class. Yet so many of my students find that when the rubber meets the road they have other priorities. Often it is a job: the boss wants them to work late. Often they are working two or more jobs. Sometimes a child gets sick and they have no backup, or figure it doesn’t matter if they skip a class or two or four.

Still I feel something of a failure when this happens. It will probably happen again this semester. But this time I am determined to try harder to stem the attrition rate. I truly want every student to succeed. I have to get better at coaching my students. They need more encouragement from me. I certainly have tried to be encouraging in the past but I need to try harder.

So today I was at the Northern Virginia Community College campus in Sterling acting as much like a student as a professor. I waited in line at the campus police office for my parking sticker just like everyone else. It was good to be there on a Friday because teaching a Saturday class gives you a false perspective. I get lots of working adults when I teach on Saturdays. On a Friday the campus is full of young adults. There were times when I felt youthful being among them. In my own 47-year-old way I still feel youthful. Seeing so many fair faced young ladies in shorts or short skirts, many with ample bosoms on display almost made me feel like I could start flirting with them. I had to forcefully remind myself I was not 18 anymore. As an instructor and a married man I was allowed to look, but not to flirt and certainly not to touch. And anyhow, ick! If I were 18 I’d want nothing to do with some 47 year old!

I find that despite the heartaches of teaching at a community college it is still rewarding. When I see a student succeed I feel like I have accomplished something important. I particularly like the students who pick up my enthusiasm about information technology. The best students will see me as not someone they need to accommodate in order to get a good grade, but as a man with a lot of valuable knowledge and perspective that can lead them into an exciting career.

I learned recently that I am less than eight years from retirement. That still boggles my mind but as a civil servant I am allowed to retire at age 55. But I don’t think I will stop working. Teaching is often hard work but I seem to have the bug. It would make an excellent next career. Perhaps after I retire I will be looking for full time openings at NVCC. I know I’ll never get rich on their salaries but my pension will pay the bills. It may be that my current job is yet another springboard for my last and most important career: teaching.

September 3rd, 2004 at 09:27pm Posted by Mark | Life 2004 | no comments