Tough cries to rally around
Calvin: "I've decided to stop caring about things. If you care, you just get disappointed all the time. If you don't care, nothing matters, so you're never upset. From now on, my rallying cry is, 'So What?!'"
Hobbes: "That's a tough cry to rally around."
Calvin: "So what?!"
The original Calvin and Hobbes strip is more of a snarky commentary on Gen X, I think, but I think the same holds true for some cries I'd like people to rally around. "So what" is one of them, in its earnest form. Another is "depends."
Was struck, after writing my aphorism post, by some of the claims by a keynote speaker at the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE) conference, Yong Zhao. A few examples that flooded the #iste12 tag on Twitter:
(1) Literacy shouldn't be the national goal; it should be the floor, not the ceiling.
I'm probably in philosophical agreement with this, if we can assume that the definition of "literacy" above is limited to simple comprehension of written text and not the expanded conception of literacy practices in media literacy. (The way I would put it is, "this type of literacy is the floor, this type is the ceiling"; but all that says is that there is a developmental spectrum for learning that needs to accomodate both simple and complex skills.)
But this is also deceptively perverse thing to say given the actual state of literacy in the country, and given whom phrases like "the state of literacy" tends to affect. I don't think anyone would look at schools that are genuinely struggling with print literacy among their students and say, "we just need to raise the ceiling for these kids." There are myriad factors that actually keep literacy low in particular schools, and they're connected to other factors, like parental involvement in the home, access to reading material, and other social issues closely related to (for one thing, if not technically the only thing) poverty. The fact of the matter is that the kid who spends a lot of time reading at home, with parents who read to her, will most of the time be able to read at a far higher level of fluency than the kid who doesn't. That is to say that in the U.S., many affluent students are already born with high floors before they enter school and many low-income students are not. It is the school's primary responsibility to provide that floor -- it's the basis of a functioning democratic education system.
(2) Test scores do not show your teaching ability, your student's learning, or the quality of your school.
Education is not about fixing someone's deficits, it's about enhancing their strengths.
Depends. Students who can't pass the "floor" reading tests are most likely actually struggling with reading. They do have a deficit that needs to be "fixed," along with the many strengths that also need to be enhanced, perhaps to spur their motivation to continue developing their literacy skills. Students who struggle with standardized reading questions also struggle with any form of reading. It would be more difficult for this student to read a news article, a book for pleasure, ad copy on a website. As I said in a previous post, it's likely that "better" or "more accurate" standardized tests would actually be much harder for students most at risk.
(3) Think about everyone as entrepreneurs: black collar creative workers [a reference to Steve Jobs's iconic turtleneck] who create jobs for themselves.
PISA [Program for International Student Assessment, an international reading/math competence assessment] scores are negatively correlated with global entrepreneurial success.
These are both simple (and common) cries to rally around, but they're both wrong. The misguided focus on entrepreneurial innovation is most likely appealing to people's visceral "like" of exceptional celebrities like Steve Jobs or Lady Gaga (also mentioned) or the Apple brand. Steve Jobs, being an exceptional person who may have also benefited from a historical bubble of tech innovation, is not replicable. But if we put Steve Jobs in relation to learning and entrepreneurship, we answer the easier question: "Do I like Steve Jobs? Doesn't that mean I would like more of him?" But that doesn't answer more important questions, like: Was Steve Jobs who he was precisely because it would be impossible for there to be another one? Do we actually need more entrepreneurs? (Recent research suggests that, e.g., venture capitalists never actually recovered after the dot-com crash, and that our perception of their importance or success is for the most part a fiction.)
The actual PISA results [PDF] are widely divergent in areas with high wealth inequality like the U.S. Poor schools in the U.S. are dead last in reading and math, a far cry from the U.S. overall average (#17) and an even farther cry from the reading average among the most affluent U.S. schools (under 10% free and reduced lunch), which is #2, after Shanghai. That is to say that the U.S. has both the best and the worst schools in the world.
(4) Creativity can't be taught, but it can be killed.
A silly aphorism. Compare: "Creativity can be taught, but it can't be killed." The latter is probably the more relevant aphorism for teachers, whose job it most certainly is to foster creativity. Some students are auto-didacts, but most aren't, and good teaching does spur and build children's creativity. I don't see how a teacher could function in the classroom if, at some level, he or she did not believe this to be true. (Well, I can imagine it -- that teacher would simply look for what they believe to be the "naturally creative" ones at the expense of everyone else. I've seen this happen many times, always to the detriment of student learning. It's easy teaching -- assuming that some kids "get it" and some kids "don't" -- and completely antithetical to collaborative learning. It's why I don't assign "directors" or "group leaders" in production or writing courses.)
Anyway, this all goes to reinforce my sense that the "Solutions Too Easy" button on the Media Literacy Remote Control we used in our model lesson on Monday is precisely the most important button for people who think that they already have a handle on other issues represented there -- private gain versus public good; reality checks; embedded values; stereotype alerts. In an intellectual community, "no one should expect easy answers" is a tough cry to rally around. (Immediate reaction to too-pithy final sentence: Eh, depends. So what?)
