Grading Teachers

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Two weeks ago, Stanley Fish wrote a column in the NY Times recalling his classical high school education.  Fish expressed his deep gratitude for the education he received explaining that,

although I have degrees from two Ivy league schools and have taught at U.C. Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Duke, Classical High School (in Providence, RI) is the best and most demanding educational institution I have ever been associated with.

That is remarkably high, and seemingly well-deserved, praise.  Fish’s column, which went on to review three recent books advocating a reconsideration of classical education and the humanities, apparently provoked a strong response from readers.  This Monday, Fish began his column by recounting the many responses he received which described an experience along these lines,

“I had a high school (or a college) experience like yours,” the poster typically said, “and I hated it and complained all the time about the homework, the demands and the discipline; but now I am so pleased that I stayed the course and acquired skills that have served me well throughout my entire life.”

I imagine this is not a terribly unusual situation.  We have all had the experience of coming to appreciate something in retrospect which for one reason or another, often immaturity, we were unable to appreciate at the time.  But, Fish goes on to reflect on the implications of this pattern for the near ubiquitous practice of student course surveys.

Now suppose those who wrote in to me had been asked when they were young if they were satisfied with the instruction they were receiving? Were they getting their money’s worth? Would they recommend the renewal of their teachers’ contracts? I suspect the answers would have been “no,” “no” and “no,” and if their answers had been taken seriously and the curriculum they felt oppressed by had been altered accordingly, they would not have had the rich intellectual lives they now happily report, or acquired some of the skills that have stood them in good stead all these years.

This is why Fish suggests that, “Deferred judgment” or “judgment in the fullness of time” seems to be appropriate to the evaluation of teaching.”  And this is also why Fish concludes,

… student evaluations (against which I have inveighed since I first saw them in the ’60s) are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment, while extremely annoying at the moment, is the sign that you’ve just been the beneficiary of a great course, although you may not realize it for decades.

Needless to say, that kind of teaching is unlikely to receive high marks on a questionnaire that rewards the linear delivery of information and penalizes a pedagogy that probes, discomforts and fails to provide closure.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a teacher and I have been the subject of course surveys of the sort Fish describes, or better, decries.  For the record, I have done quite well on such surveys, so this is not a rant born of bitterness.  However, I find it hard to argue with the logic of Fish’s argument.  The rest of his column goes on to target a proposed education reform plan being advanced in Texas which relies on the student-as-customer model which is closely connected with the ethos of the student evaluation form.

Education in this country, at the secondary and post-secondary level, is unfortunately in a state of disrepair.  Countless books and articles have been written on the subject and some form revitalization is needed.  This much is true.  It is also true that often the problems stem from teachers and professors who are more interested in career advancement and security than they are in advancing the knowledge of their students.  Something needs to be done about this.  However, we should be careful to avoid a cure that is worse than the disease, and the further mechanization, commercialization,  and bureaucratization of education seems to be just such a deadly cure.

In his excellent piece, “The Computerized Academy,” from the Summer 2005 issue of The New Atlantis, Matthew Crawford offered these apropos reflections,

Ideally, a teacher’s judgment about what is good for you is not colored by what is immediately pleasant for you. But increasingly, what is good for the teacher (professionally) is determined by what is immediately pleasant for the student. The career incentives for professors can be managed to some extent by judicious deans and department chairs, for example, by norming a professor’s teaching evaluations against his or her grade distribution and the demands of the course, so that tough grading and a choice of difficult material, even if penalized by students in their evaluations, will not be allowed to threaten a professor’s tenure prospects. Absent such a contrarian, clear-eyed defense of excellence by those in charge, all the pressures on a professor tend toward dumbing things down: giving fewer assignments (less work for him), grading generously (less whining and pleading from students), and choosing subjects that are not too remote from the students’ experience (a sure path to popularity). Since that prior experience is constituted to a large degree by mass forces, there is a certain uniformity of perspective and taste that begins to assert itself in the curriculum.

Accountability that will not endanger the pursuit of excellence and reward conformity is the goal.  Figuring out the mechanism that will get us there is the task at hand. The indiscriminate expansion of choice and the introduction of market pressures into the classroom does not seem to be the right mechanism for the task.  At the very least, it is fraught with serious and troubling side effects.

Book v. Computer

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

The results are in (at least tentatively).

From the Freakonomics folks at the NY Times:

More evidence that technology doesn’t always equal higher test scores: a new working paper by Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd examines the effects of home computer and internet access on test scores.  Consistent with the research of Ofer Malamud and Christian Pop-Eleches, Vigdor and Ladd found that “the introduction of home computer technology is associated with modest but statistically significant and persistent negative impacts on student math and reading test scores.”

Meanwhile from a study reported on by The Chronicle of Higher Education:

What’s surprising … is just how strong the correlation is between a child’s academic achievement and the number of books his or her parents own. It’s even more important than whether the parents went to college or hold white-collar jobs. Books matter. A lot.  The study was conducted over 20 years, in 27 countries, and surveyed more than 70,000 people. Researchers found that children who grew up in a home with more than 500 books spent 3 years longer in school than children whose parents had only a few books. Also, a child whose parents have lots of books is nearly 20-percent more likely to finish college. For comparison purposes, the children of educated parents (defined as people with at least 15 years of schooling) were 16-percent more likely than the children of less-educated parents to get their college degrees. Formal education matters, but not as much as books.

This may of course assume that one doesn’t necessarily believe that quantity trumps quality.  For more on both studies visit Rough Type.

Is Sport a Religion?, Part Two

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

More thoughts on the intersection of sport and the sacred from Religion Dispatches.

In “Can We Take the Religion of Soccer Seriously?” Gary Laderman explores the parameters of what may be properly called sacred, particularly in the context of how religion is covered in “the new media landscape.”

And in the wake of two near deadly goring incidents, Jeremy Biles’ “Sacred Bull” gives a fascinating account of bull fighting’s “sacred appeal” in Spanish culture concluding with intriguing reflections on beauty, violence, tragedy, and the sacred.

The Sound of Silence

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

Nicholas Carr, who appears to be ubiquitous in certain circles these days, reviews In Pursuit of Silence by George Prochnik.  Worth the read if only to come across this:

A sound designer tells Prochnik that the thunderous beats pumped out by the sound systems in Abercrombie & Fitch outlets are engineered to create “a state of celebratory arousal” that reaches its climax with the purchase of a hoodie.

Deafened | The New Republic.

Some Dim Dazzling Trick of Grace

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments
Image: AFP

Unintentionally, yesterday’s post on sport as religion dovetailed suggestively with the preceding one, “Distracted from distraction by distraction.”  In that post I had continued a series of reflections on Nicholas Carr’s analysis of the Internet’s impact on our brains in his latest book, The Shallows combining a brief rejoinder to a strand of criticism frequently directed at Carr with strikingly apropos lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”  Distraction was the recurring theme.  The Internet according to Carr habituates our mind to perpetual distraction, and in the long run our ability to think deeply and creatively suffers.  Eliot already laments a culture of distraction in the mid-20th century and seems to be describing us with eerie foresight.

Whether or not we finally judge sport to be a kind of religion, it is certainly a distraction; more precisely, it is a diversion.  As one comment noted, perhaps a bit harshly, it is escapist entertainment diverting us from ordinary life.  Sports may be more than this, and I will suggest that it is, but it is at least this.  And as our embrace of Internet-empowered distraction also demonstrates, we love to be distracted and we crave diversion.  We can hardly stand it if we are without either distraction or diversion for more than a few moments at a time.  We complain incessantly about our busyness, but were it all to stop we would hardly know what to do with ourselves.

This is not, however, a new problem.  Although the condition may now be intensified and heightened, it has been with us at least since the 17th century, and almost certainly before then.  It was in the 17th century that Blaise Pascal began assembling a series of notes on scraps of paper in preparation for a book he never wrote.  When he died at the age of 39 he left behind hundreds of barely organized notes which were later collected and published under the French title Pensees, or thoughts.  Pascal is today remembered, if at all, either for his law of fluid pressure or an argument for God’s existence known as Pascal’s Wager.  Neither quite does justice to the depth of his insight into what it is now unfashionable to call the human condition.

Pascal knew that we needed our diversions and distractions and that without them we would be miserable.  His description of the younger generation sounds wholly contemporary:

Anyone who does not see the vanity of the world is very vain himself.  So who does not see it, apart from young people whose lives are all noise, diversions, and thoughts for the future?  But take away their diversion and you will see them bored to extinction.  Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.

But Pascal is not merely an old crank berating a younger generation he fails to understand.  Pascal applies the same analysis indiscriminately.  Young or old, rich or poor, male or female — for Pascal it just comes with being human.  “If our condition were truly happy,” he explains, “we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.”  As things stand, however,

Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things …. What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition, nor the dangers of war, nor the burdens of office, but the agitation that takes our mind off it and diverts us.  That is why we prefer the hunt to the capture.

We need distractions and diversions to keep us from contemplating our true condition, frail and mortal as it is.  For this reason we cannot stand to be alone with our own thoughts and seek to fill every moment with distraction.  Pascal’s view is admittedly rather grim even as it resonates with our experience.  Yet, Pascal knew there was more than this to the human condition.  There was also love and passion, knowledge and creativity, wonder and courage.  Pascal knew this and he insisted that we recognize both the glory and the misery of humanity:

Let man now judge his own worth, let him love himself, for there is within him a nature capable of good; but that is no reason for him to love the vileness within himself.  Let him despise himself because this capacity remains unfilled; but that is no reason for him to despise this natural capacity.  Let him both hate and love himself; he has within him the capacity for knowing truth and being happy, but he possesses no truth which is either abiding or satisfactory.

Pascal insists that we reckon with all that is good and all that is bad in us.  It is our awareness of the possibility of goodness, however, which heightens our misery.  And, yet again, it is our awareness of our misery that is part of our glory.  In the end Pascal believed that “God alone is man’s true good” and Christ the “via veritas.”  With St. Augustine, whose influence permeates Pascal’s thought, he would have prayed, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.”  Perhaps this is why at times spirituality and the language of worship suffuses our most prominent and powerful diversions.

Augustine and Pascal in turn both helped shape the thought of Walker Percy, a 20th century Roman Catholic novelist.  Percy blended Pascalian insight with a touch of existentialism in his best known novel The Moviegoer (1960) in which the main character, Binx Bolling, finds himself on a search.  “What is the nature of the search? you ask.”

Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked.  The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life …. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something.  Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Near the middle of the novel throughout which Bolling has been amassing clues he thinks are somehow related to the search, he despairs:

… when I awake, I awake in the grip of everydayness.  Everydayness is the enemy.  No search is possible.  Perhaps there was a time when everydayness was not too strong and one could break its grip by brute strength.  Now nothing breaks it — but disaster.

However, through a rather tortured relationship with a very broken young woman named Kate whom he has come to love, Binx begins to see grace in the ordinary.  Near the very end of the novel, while he and Kate are sitting at a service station discussing marriage and the worries that still fill Kate’s mind, Binx notices a man coming out of a church.  It is Ash Wednesday.  Binx watches while the man sits in his car looking down at something on the seat beside him.  The man’s presence puzzles Binx:

It is impossible to say why he is here.  Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world?  Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants?  Or is he here for both reasons:  through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?  It is impossible to say.

If sport diverts us from ordinary life, what do we make of it?  Is it as Pascal would have it a mere distraction which facilitates our unwillingness to acknowledge our true condition?  Or, taking a cue from Percy, might it be a rupture of the “everydayness,” the ordinariness of our lives that may awaken us to the possibility of the search?  My sense is that they are both right; each is a possibility.  Sports can be merely a distraction conducive to living in bad faith in denial of the truth of our situation.  It is odd, however, that something very much like a spiritual or religious aura so often surrounds sport.  Maybe it is because bursts of grace and beauty appear suddenly and unexpectedly even in the midst of our diversions to remind us that we ought to be searching for their source.  Maybe it is because “through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one” we receive “the other as God’s own importunate bonus?”

It is impossible to say.