Overall, I enjoyed Freakonomics. I think that the professed objective of the book (to get people to think more independently, to question everything) is a worthy one. Too often people never examine in any great detail the depth, integrity, or biases of the sources of information that they regularly consume.
That being said, I have one major qualm with the book. I feel like it had a holier-than-thou/patronizing tone. The choice to include little excerpts praising Levitt before each chapter were really infuriating. By the end of it, I just felt like saying, “Give me a break! Sure, you’re saying some controversial things, your thinking is somewhat innovative (although not quite as groundbreaking as you yourself claim), and some of the things you’re saying require some guts, but really? Get over yourself.” It just left me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
“Steven Levitt may not fully believe in himself, but he does believe in this: teachers and criminals and real-estate agents may lie, and politicians, and even CIA analysts. But numbers don’t.” Oh, really? Numbers lie all the time. It just seems like such an amateurish thing to say. Furthermore, “‘Levitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science.’” The audacity of including such a quote in one of your own books! Not even on the cover, trying to sell the book, but inside. The work should speak for itself. It ought to stand on its own merit without having to explicitly remind the audience, “See how good this is? Isn’t it revolutionary?” It just seems cheap. The whole book does in a way. It feels like a sort of hodgepodge of what could have been scholarly articles that lack the requisite intellectual and procedural rigor (or at least transparency of method) and that have been watered down and packaged for “the masses.” But Levitt knows this. It all relates back to audience. Levitt admits that there is no unifying theme (repeatedly). If he just wants to get people thinking (which is quite a feat in and of itself), then maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
All of this is somewhat tangential. Ranting aside, I really did find the book interesting. The breakdown of the hierarchies within the drug world (well, one example of it) was fascinating—especially reading the book for a second time with some familiarity with Venkatesh’s work (yeah Amherst/Soc 12!). I also found the analysis of the names particularly captivating. I would have preferred a collection of scholarly and peer reviewed articles, but that’s a personal preference. It reminds me of “pop lit.” There is a time and a place (often and most everywhere, hopefully) for what, at the risk of sounding pretentious, I would call “real” literature. But once in a while I want to curl up with just a story, something that I don’t have to work at (but that necessarily in return is much less rewarding to the reader, I think). And that’s what Freakonomics offers. And for some people, it’s “pop lit” or no lit. And I guess if it’s “pop economics” or no economics, I’d rather have people thinking.
Ms. Barksdale’s presentation was very informative. The school board at my high school definitely had a presence, but no one ever took the time to explain how a school board really runs or for what duties they’re actually responsible. Dr. Mullins had explained to us the problems that arise when superintendents are elected, and Ms. Barksdale’s talk helped to clarify one specific way in which this becomes a problem. The only personnel that the school board has direct charge of is the superintendent, and if they do not have the power to appoint him, it would seem that this severely undermines their ability to effectively be the superintendent’s “boss” of sorts.
Another thing that I found shocking was that only 9% of Oxford’s school budget is funded by the federal government (with 48% coming from locals and 43% from the state). Because funding for the schools relies so heavily upon property taxes, the areas that are poorest have houses with less value and thus have less money for the schools. These children are already coming to school with a slew of decided disadvantages: they’ve been exposed to language (never mind complex language) much less than their peers from wealthier families, they’ve often never been read to or don’t have books in the home, their home environments are often unstable, and oftentimes they lack the support systems that help students to develop emotionally and socially. Even with the best funded schools, it would be quite a challenge to adequately help these children, but they’re entering underfunded and generally poorly staffed schools, and so the cycle continues.
When Ms. Barksdale described her relationship with B, a young man for whom she has been a tutor and just a generally supportive and stable person, I couldn’t help but feel inspired. It is for kids like B, good kids who aren’t afraid to work hard even when it seems that everything in the world is stacked against them, that I want to become a teacher. And children like him exist everywhere—perhaps more often in poverty, but there are all types of poverty, e.g. emotional, cultural, etc.—although these often overlap. What I really mean is that to enact positive change, you don’t have to travel to the most impoverished or war torn areas of Africa, or even to places of poverty like the Mississippi Delta (although these do offer wonderful and engaging opportunities for service). I plan to be involved in education in some capacity for the rest of my life (most likely teaching English, but I’m also interested in sociolinguistics or perhaps running my own school), but wherever that takes me, whether it involves Mississippi or not, I can at least surely say that I will work to be a positive force in the life of children.
I have been thinking a lot about how I would handle having to teach a classroom of students with vastly different levels of preparation (which is something I almost assuredly will have to face some day). In my career as a student, I’ve had the fortune of having some excellent teachers who were able to effectively engage most of the students. I recognize that the following strategies would not necessarily work for all subjects (I have an English classroom in mind when thinking of these strategies) and that conceiving and actually implementing strategies are two entirely different things. That being said, I would:
1. Let the students learn from each other (i.e., directed and closely supervised group work—although I would never assign “group grades,” which is another topic entirely). Some of my most rewarding experiences in the classroom have been peer interactions—helping other students to understand something very often clarifies and deepens the “teacher’s” understanding. If it runs smoothly, this approach involves everyone at whatever level of understanding they may have. Although this would probably fall apart, or at least not be as beneficial, the wider the gap was between students.
2. Ground the class in student based discussion rather than lecture (once again, easier in some subjects and classrooms than others). This seems obvious, but once again it allows students to engage with the material on various levels (maybe some of the “lower” students contribute more obvious ideas while what the more advanced students contribute goes beyond the others, but still at least the majority of students are not excluded from the activity because of how little or how much they understand. To be successful, this would most likely require some careful guiding of the conversation.
3. Design homework, worksheets, tests that ask open questions. Students can analyze a piece of literature with varying levels of insight and complexity, but I would try to make sure no assignments were so simplistic that they failed to seem worthwhile to the advanced students but I would try to ensure that they remained accessible to at least the majority of the other students. Again, pretty obvious.
I guess that these “strategies,” if you can even call them that, avoid the real issue and make more sense in a classroom where the differences between students are a reality but not as dramatic as they often are. What seems to be popular is to “teach to the top,” and I agree. I think that doing so doesn’t necessarily mean you lose the other students, but teaching to the bottom almost always means that you lose the top students. I think I would try a two-pronged attack—teaching to the top, with room for students to engage with a text or assignment with varying degrees of complexity, while also trying to lay the groundwork for the students who are far behind. On some regular schedule, I would assign fundamental work (grammar, literary terms, etc.) and as students finished, they would move on to another activity (a discussion or reflection?), allowing me to spend time with students who needed more individualized instruction. I also plan to spend a substantial amount of time correcting and editing papers. While lessons about strategies to approach/organize/write papers are helpful, what I’ve found most helpful is actually digesting individualized constructive criticism (I would probably assign short reflections on the essays they’ve written to try to encourage them to pay close attention to my suggestions). I would hold writing conferences with students, probably once in class and then optional ones after school, allowing for at least some differentiated instruction. I would also direct students to whatever resources were present in the school (for example, at my high school, students from the National Honor Society were responsible for making sure that there were two tutors in the library two days a week—a resource that was sadly underused). If no resources were available, I would try to implement some. Maybe a writers club? A book club?—I don’t know how successful these would be, but I’d try anything to get kids involved and excited about the subject matter. With these ideas in place, I recognize that I would need significant time in the classroom to test what actually works. I think that what is most important is to recognize the challenge that such a classroom would present but to never give up on any student or group of students.
The stance with which I’ve taken the most issue since arriving here in Mississippi is that which supports corporal punishment in schools. I know I’ve already mentioned it (and we’ve had a discussion about it), but it’s something that’s still in my head and just doesn’t sit well with me.
From http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/662/context/archive:
"When a girl is spanked by her father or paddled by a male school teacher, she is being trained to submit," says Jordan Riak, a retired school teacher and the executive director of Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education, a California-based nonprofit group dedicated to getting corporal punishment banned in U.S. schools.
"When a school district permits teachers to paddle girls, it is setting those girls up to be victims of future male authority figures, whether it be a boyfriend, husband or employer," Riak claims… Guthrow's research enforces an assertion by Block of the Center for Effective Discipline. “It's all part of a cycle of violence--loss of self esteem, accepting violent behavior,” she says. “The more children are spanked, the more likely they are to engage in digressive behaviors.”
It continues:
One woman writes of her experience with paddling at a Florida high school in a letter posted on the Parents and Teachers Against Violence in Education Web site. She describes how she was made to bend over a male administrator's desk while wearing a miniskirt and was ordered to spread her legs further apart. While another male administrator watched, the paddler first caressed her buttocks with the paddle, then delivered three stinging whacks.
Paddling inherently permits those in power to exploit children entrusted to their care. The requisite presence of a witness provides only a nominal system of checks to protect students. As that Florida woman experienced, this measure can lead instead to a sick sort of voyeuristic “buddy system,” where two people trusted with authority permit each other to indulge in egregious moral lapses. If even some studies suggest (and they do) that paddling is psychologically damaging to our children, isn’t that enough to outlaw it? My God, is the alleged “effectiveness” worth the risk? And what about children who have been (or are being) abused outside of school? The classroom needs to be a structured, welcoming environment. I think that to incorporate violence (or the threat of it) into an environment that many students need as a haven of sorts from violence, instability, and fear is self-defeating. To me, violence of any kind is inexcusable; scaring a child into obedience by threatening physical harm is simply wrong. That point aside, even if a teacher doesn’t consider paddling to be “violence” or is convinced that he/she can “do it the right way,” the system’s flaws (namely the extreme ease with which someone could physically or sexually abuse a child under the guise of discipline) astronomically outweigh any potential positive impact it might have (although I find it hard to believe there is any).
I wouldn’t want that on my conscience…
For my project, I am looking at how poverty affects language acquisition. So far, I’ve had a meeting with Dr. Gutierrez and I have one scheduled with Dr. Rutherford. I also am trying to set up meetings with Dr. Dyer and Katina Lee.
The majority of what I’ve done so far is spent time in the library, wading through massive amounts of research to find what is actually relevant to my project. I’ve skimmed tons of books, but one especially helpful one I’ve found is Language and Social Disadvantage: Theory into Practice, which is edited by Judy Clegg and Jane Ginsborg. Besides directly addressing my topic in a chapter titled “The Effects of Socio-economic Status on Children’s Language Acquisition and Use,” it provides an extensive bibliography that I plan to use as guide for my further research (more specifically, there are eight articles that have peaked my interested and that I plan to read). I am particularly interested in looking into Bernstein’s verbal deprivation hypothesis and his research regarding elaborated vs. restricted codes (and their practical implications for students from various socioeconomic statuses in the classroom).
I found a quote in Language and Social Disadvantage that pinpoints why I find this topic so engaging: “Children may appear intellectually incompetent when, in reality, they are still grappling with the problem of making sense to other people” (20). I think this topic is so vitally important because the language of the classroom is elaborated code and it is all too easy to misjudge students when we assume that a lack of knowledge of elaborated code is simply a lack of knowledge.
I have also read Language and Situation: Language Varieties and their Social Contexts by Michael Gregory and Susanne Carroll, which more than anything has provided a solid background to help me make sense of the more in depth research I am beginning now. There is one more large book I want to tackle (Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, edited by Penelope Eckert and John R. Rickford) before I regroup to focus on articles (as previously mentioned and probably also drawn from Style’s bibliography). I think this will give me an adequate foundation to draw some meaningful conclusions and to outline and write my paper.
Before listening to Mr. Carrington, I had only heard about the Innocence Project in passing. While I think that the idea of freeing wrongly convicted people (complete with media fanfare) is somewhat glamorous but nonetheless intriguing, I found the program’s commitment to ensuring that justice is served (even for those who are guilty—a decidedly less glamorous calling) truly inspiring. Every person, whether he or she has committed a crime or not, is entitled to basic human rights. But even further—when a breach of justice occurs, it is against not only those charged, but it also wrongs the victims and the families. When people are unwilling to honor the rights endowed to each human being, we insult those who have fought to ensure all Americans can enjoy these rights.
I was shocked to learn about the utterly egregious transgressions that occur in a world where precise technology is readily available. There is no law in Mississippi requiring that DNA evidence be collected or preserved, irreversibly harming the prospects for cases that would have had a chance of being solved. Furthermore, the alacrity with which the public will welcome such frauds as the “forensic odontologist” whose “expert testimony” sent at least two innocent men to jail is alarming. In a world where judges are elected, for a judge to act against such idiocy would effectively result in the relinquishing of one’s job. Thus, the problems in the system are self-perpetuating. As long as judges are subject to popular opinion, justice is impeded. And as long as the people of Mississippi cling to their right to elect such officials as judges (and superintendents, for that matter), it will remain that way.
Democracy demands that the public be educated enough to act in its own best interest. We live with the reality that our school system is crumbling, and the majority of people lack the insight to understand how we can fix it. While people cling more fervently to the romanticism of democracy than the reality that perhaps the majority doesn’t understand what is best for itself, the cycle continues.
Listening to Claiborne Barksdale at the Reading Institute has inspired me to change my project topic. I’ve decided that I’d like to look into the effect of poverty upon language acquisition and the consequent effects upon one’s resulting educational career. We keep hearing about the importance of targeting efforts toward children from pre-k to third grade because of the critical nature of this period. By the time students reach school, those with professional parents will have heard somewhere between 32-40 million more phrases than their peers who have grown up in poverty. This statistic is simply mind boggling. Similarly distressing, some students are coming to school with the vocabulary of a two-year-old child while some of their peers are using a larger vocabulary than the parents who are raising their children in poverty. And then we wonder why those living in poverty don’t simply “get a job” or “pull themselves up” when in reality they’ve been slapped with a tremendous handicap from the time their parents began speaking to them.
At my high school, for two semesters I was a teacher’s assistant in a remedial classroom that aimed to help students who had failed the state testing that was required to graduate. While I felt like I was able to make a different with these students, I couldn’t help but feel that we were limiting our own successes by focusing our efforts upon students who frankly were exhibiting signs that they would fail this test for years now. Rather than fix the system (or even try an honest attempt at it), people are instead shocked to find that our students are performing at several years below grade level and focus their attention on these students, perpetually ignoring the root of the problem and in doing so, doing our students a great disservice. When I have students who somehow make it to the eleventh grade unable to add single digit numbers and professing they’ve never read a book cover to cover, we’re failed these kids long before they fail the MCAS.
Anyhow, I realize this is a tangential comment, but it relates to why I think the work of the Barksdale Reading Institute is so important. Claiborne Barksdale talked about not only the importance of targeting the critical pre-third grade age group, but also relying upon “diagnostically driven differentiated instruction.” I have myself seen the importance and effectiveness of this method. In my MCAS classroom, we had students with vastly different levels of preparedness (not to mention students with Asperger’s and Tourette’s). Luckily, we were able to break the class into smaller groups with similar needs. Too often classrooms are understaffed and teachers find themselves in a predicament where they’re forced to not meet the needs of every student (or even most students). In my future as an educator, I plan to implement this strategy to the best of my ability. Although it means a lot more work for teachers because they must prepare lessons for a variety of skill levels, in addition to making sure their classrooms remain structured and that the students who are not being directly addressed by the teacher remain productive, this method grants students instruction that is contoured to their needs. In a system where class sizes keep increasing, a breakdown that addresses subsets of students is becoming increasingly necessary.
I. Sandra Knispel’s talk was refreshing. I think she was on point in saying that there is a stigma attached to what people clump together as “the media.” In reality, most people are only exposed to the most mainstream forms of media, and those that are most visible tend to cater to the lowest common denominator (thus the decline of coverage relating to international news), oftentimes at the sacrifice of integrity or compassion. However, there are still sources out there committed to presenting thoughtful and in depth coverage of stories that matter, rather than simply stories that will sell because of their shock value. Quality stories are present if we’re willing to put in more effort than simply turning on the television and accepting what is presented as truth (not to say that all accessible forms of media are by definition lacking).
What I found most interesting was her discussion of censorship. In a world where most of “the media” must rely on funding from advertisers and many news sources are owned by a handful of powerful companies, the consumer must consider both the agenda of the journalist or organization by which the journalist is employed and the constraints placed upon him or her when writing a story. I would be interested in examining in some depth the perceptions of “the media” by the American public. Because, while many people are distrustful of journalists, I don’t think they are necessarily suspicious for the “right” reasons. While people by nature have political biases and admittedly many journalists allow this to color their work, I doubt that the “average American” is cognizant of the ways that a story can be and often is shaped by business obligations or financial necessity.
II. Dr. Winkle raised the point that in examining the law, we must recognize the difference between issues of law and issues of fact. I found this intriguing because it is tempting (and comforting) to simply think of laws as meaning one thing, conveying one idea that is set in stone for generations to come. Instead, the understanding of our laws is shaped by who interprets them, lending a great deal of subjectivity to the matter.
I also found it interesting (and unsettling) that education is not a constitutional right (and thus individual states play a great role in it). I guess I already knew this, but I hadn’t really thought about it because I consider education to be one of the most fundamental rights to which a person ought to be entitled.
Once again, it seems that most everything has some ties to economics. Our discussion reminded me of Dr. Mullins talking about how the landscape of Mississippi precipitated the growth of cotton in the Delta and thus the legacy of poverty in this area. In the same way, the White Citizens’ Council grew out of economic fears and acted as the chamber of commerce, giving rise to the council schools that would become today’s private academies.
Our first two days of work have been exciting. On Monday, I worked at the Winter Institute and began to figure out how to tackle the task of making connections between curriculum objectives and human/civil rights. With a bit of trial and error, I think that we’ll be able to get an effective system down pretty quickly.
After some housekeeping details in the morning, we had the chance to listen to Dr. Mullins speak and give a tour of campus. Although a lot of the things he says make sense if you think about them, I think they only seem somewhat simple because he has a way of describing them that’s accessible. He discussed how the rivers flowing into the Mississippi flood when the Mississippi River floods, creating the agriculturally rich land known as the Delta (with top soil as deep as 20 feet!). Because of this rich land, most of the cotton was located in this area. Consequently, the Delta was home to many slaves (and then “share-croppers,” who might as well have been slaves). However, having an economy that relies solely on one crop led to increasing problems with the advent of machinery that could replace many of the workers. But even when they weren’t tied to their work and consequently the land, these people weren’t free because their former masters had given them a lifelong sentence by denying them an education. When workers are educated, they seek opportunity elsewhere, and so the farm holders had kept their workers at bay by ensuring that they stayed ignorant. When technology rendered them unnecessary to their “employers,” they were left with nothing, causing many to flee to cities.
One fact that Dr. Mullins mentioned that particularly struck me was that 63/149 of the superintendents in Mississippi are elected rather than appointed (and only 100 some odd superintendents are elected in the entire nation). This process inherently yields less qualified professionals because of its limited scope (superintendents are drawn only from the county in which they serve). It seems to me that it should be obvious that the best candidate gets the job—whether he or she is from Mississippi or not—most especially when we are in an age when many schools are horrendously disorganized and oftentimes impeding rather than empowering students. It reminds me of how a candidate can’t seem to win on a platform endorsing education, and that instead he or she must “sell” education to the public under the guise of a commitment to economics when really the two are the same. It’s just frustrating to watch people refuse to do what would benefit everyone (themselves included).
On a tangential note—I learned the other day that corporal punishment is still allowed in some states (with Mississippi leading the nation with greatest percentage of students “paddled”). This really disturbs me, and I can’t seem to shake it. Although I recognize that I am somewhat idealistic, I don’t think I can ascribe this entirely to naivety. Maybe paddling is effective, but I cannot justify scaring a child into obedience. I feel like a classroom should be a safe haven for kids. I cannot fathom a single situation that warrants abusing a child, never mind introducing fear/abuse in an environment that is supposed to be conducive to learning and growth. I’m convinced that there’s a better way.
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