Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

or, Are You Smarter than a Five-Year-Old?

Children today are not always taught the old fairy tales, the old nursery stories. Indeed, there is a systematic campaign in some quarters not to teach them. Too often, they are not politically correct; they have no place in the common Marxist/”cognitive science” agenda to alter the culture and control thought for political purposes.

But mostly, we just don't understand them, and don't get the point. I recall in grad school the professorial assertion that they were products of the human unconscious, mostly of psychological interest; the argument was over whether they were truly “pure,” or “mixed with ego.”

No kidding—apparently they were written by people when they were unconscious. I wonder if Hans Christian Anderson realized he was asleep?

Apparently, too, they made no more sense to the Freudians and Jungians than the contents of a typical dream.

Yet fairy tales and nursery tales are the encapsulated wisdom of mankind. In this, the Marxists are partly right: they are our initial social programming. Cultural literacy is an issue here; but more than that, without our fairy tales, we lack our user's manual for life, and are doomed to repeat all our ancestors' worst mistakes, without benefit of their prior experience.

Which, of course, predictably, is what is commonly happening these days, since we have largely forgotten them.

Because of global warming, for example, as we all know, the world is going to end. A correspondent wrote recently, “we are spitting ourselves out... of existence.” Before that, we were going to destroy the world with overpopulation, or pollution, or ozone holes, or resource depletion; we are still running out of oil, and water. But in fact, even in the worst case scenario, even if we grant that it is completely proven, there is no real probability that global warming could end human life on the planet. Nor, realistically, could overpopulation. We ought by now to realize that the idea that “the end of the world is nigh” is almost a human instinct, and we ought accordingly to be skeptical of any such assumptions, ever.

But isn't that the moral of the story of Henny-Penny? That foolish people are always prone to stampede into such panics, and that this makes them prey to any unscrupulous person ready to exploit this instinct for his own ends? Any child who was paying proper attention during Henny Penny's sad tale should be proof against millennial con games of all sorts--including those used so skillfully by charlatans like Stalin, Mao, and Hitler.

How about the laments of feminists? Many of us have accepted their claims following the simple logic that, if there were not something wrong with their current lot in life, they would not be complaining. This is a common formula throughout the feminist ethic, and the victimhood game more generally: if a woman feels oppressed, or feels threatened, or feels harassed, ipso facto, obviously, she is. Recognized “victim groups” have gotten quite far on the same formula—believing it, to be fair, completely, themselves.

But this simple logic should, in a properly-educated child, be immediately tempered by the story of the Princess and the Pea. It is, instead, precisely those most used to privilege who will complain most loudly of their lot—for they are those least inured to oppression, threat, harassment, or discomfort of any kind. One who has always been a slave—why and when should he dare take it into his head to object?

Accordingly, recent immigrants from South Asia, Africa, or the Arab world complain loudly of the discrimination they have faced, here and at home, and are given affirmative action programs. But these are wealthy members of the upper class in the countries they come from. Did the dirt-poor Irish, Polish, Ukrainians, or Armenians of two or three generations ago complain similarly? Just the reverse—because they really were poor, and really did come from a history of oppression.

Missing this important insight, we tend to systematically increase the privileges of the most privileged, and the oppression of the most oppressed, all the while believing we are doing the opposite.

And how much of the world's current folly could have been avoided if only a five-year-old who knew the story of The Emperor's New Clothes had been consulted? It has been rightly observed that the craziest things of all are those things commonly believed by academics: global warming, Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, postmodernism, affirmative action, political correctness, speech codes, queer studies, Fascism in its day. Most are based on a simple logical fallacy that should be apparent to a casual observer within a few minutes. The Emperor's story explains succinctly why this is entirely likely to be so. If it is possible for any intellectual phony or slacker to convincingly present something as “believed by all the best authorities,” then, even if we personally suspect it makes no sense at all, most people who want to appear intelligent and well-educated will pretend to believe it as well, and assert it with that much more energy to avoid the suspicion that they do not really get the point. Anyone who becomes an academic, in turn, considering the hard slog it requires, is probably deeply invested in projecting the idea that they are unusually smart, and deeply insecure about it. The child who truly understands this is protected against most such nonsense, and knows enough to think for himself.

Aesop's Fables, of course, are full of such lessons. The perpetual urge for a big, powerful government with detailed laws and regulations to impose proper order upon us all is well analysed in the fable of King Log and King Stork. The scapegoating of “rich corporate interests,” “rich capitalists,” “rich Jews,” and so forth, and the notion that governments can pay for everything by simply confiscating thier wealth, has been a common fallacy, or con job, in Marxism and well beyond. Hitler, Mugabe, Amin, all tried it. Most left-leaning governments base their core policies on it, in milder form. All with eventual results easily predicted by any child who knew the tale of the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs.

And the apparently shocking, unheard-of notion that scoundrels might take the chasuble of priesthood in order to exploit the vulnerable? It should not so surprise anyone who was once read the story of the Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. They would be far less inclined, as children, to fall for it; nor would they be inclined as adults to suppose it reflected somehow on the truth of the Catholic faith. Any more than the wolf's actions reflected on the true nature of sheep. How cockeyed is that?

We will probably never end the horror of child abuse. But our present efforts, besides being terribly expensive, are probably also making matters worse, by scapegoating fathers, by weakening families and by handing children over to professional bureaucrats who necessarily have no special feeling for them. Here's a perfectly cost-free measure we all can take: any child with access to nursery stories would at least be partly armoured against emotional abuse, by far the worst aspect of the problem. They would know the dangers of evil “step-parents,” and what they are capable of. They would understand that parents do not always love their children. They would have understood that parents can also envy their children. They would have learned that the fault was not necessarily theirs, and understood that there was still hope for the future. This is indeed one of the most common lessons of the nursery tales: consider Cinderella, or Snow White, or Rapunzel, or the Ugly Duckling.

Sexual abuse of children, pedophilia, is another hot topic currently. Want to “street-proof” your kids against sexual abuse? What could better “street-proofing” than the stories of Hansel and Gretel, or Little Red Riding Hood? The nursery tales are even far more realistic than modern treatments as to its probable source. Don't even trust grandma--you never know...

Sadly, these lessons are largely or completely lost in modern retellings. In the versions most common nowadays, everything scary or violent has been stripped out, supposedly to protect little ears from any possible hint that all is not wonderful in this world. It isn't. Real wolves are not huggable. In doing so, we are in fact setting our children up for all the real horrors the stories only ask them to imagine.

Of course, the politically correct will object that our nursery tales are only about our own culture; they are no longer “appropriate” for a globalized, multicultural, world. Perhaps they are cultural imperialism, in a multicultural classroom; perhaps they teach intolerance.

Nothing could be further from the truth: only academics could believe this. Nursery stories delight in that which happened not only “long ago,” but “far, far away.” As a result, they systematically encourage multiculturalism, globalism, and an interest in other cultures. Of all forms of literature, they are the most open to assimilating from other cultures. Few familiar English nursery tales are originally English: Grimm is from Germany, Anderson from Denmark, Lafontaine from France, Aesop from Greece, Uncle Remus from Africa, the 1001 Nights from Arabia, Persia, and India. The Nightingale is transparently from China, and the original Cinderella lived in Korea. Folklorists find near-identical stories told in areas and cultures as widely dispersed as Tajikistan and Tonawanda—among the Iroquois Indians.

Besides being of vital importance to individual children, and to the adults they become, this stratum of nursery wisdom could, if emphasized in our education systems, actually become an important element of international, and indeed global, understanding.

Make sure your kids don't leave home without it.

Western Civilization in One Volume

According to the theories of E.D. Hirsch, developing reading fluency is largely a matter of “cultural literacy”--that is, knowing the information that a good writer will assume in his audience. This is an important way in which reading differs from listening: a speaker can judge his current audience and their comprehension, and adjust accordingly. An author cannot, and must make assumptions. Cultural allusions, metaphors, and casual references are not in a dictionary: if a student does not catch the reference, he may not even recognize it for an allusion.

Students entering college, therefore, must have the cultural background the authors they read will typically assume, or they are going to struggle with the readings.

Hirsch found this to be a problem for ill-educated native speakers. But it is bound to be doubly a problem for ESL students, coming from a possibly quite different culture. What does this mean but a different set of cultural references and assumptions?

This leads to an interesting, and vitally important, speculation: what are the snippets of information that a foreign student should have, and may not have, in order to be able to read English fluently at the college level? Hirsch has his own ideas, of course, but they are specifically for American students studying in America; and, of course, one is free to differ on what is important.

I'm thinking in particular of ESL students, many of whome can be from a dramatically different culture, from China, Africa, or the Arabian Gulf. They may well need a background, not just in English-speaking culture, but in European civilization generally. What do they need to catch up on?

This will of course differ widely country to country. The best precise mix could be determined by each individual institution or even teacnher through a standard questionnaire testing for knowledge of each element of this set of basic materials.

Of course, some will raise the objection that Hirsch's ideas have faced in America: that such an established canon “privileges” the culture of dead white European males, and so is a sort of cultural imperialism.

That is not our affair. We are not, presumably, obliging anyone to learn English, or to study in North America. Assuming that they do want to learn English, however, and to study in North America, the authors they are going to have to read in a North American or British college are, by and large, going to be dead Europeans. If we have Marxist notions of perfecting the world by deliberately changing the culture, our ESL students are not the place to do it; any more than we have the right to alter the rules of English grammar to suit our own preferences. That would simply be malpractice.

Here are a few ideas I have come up with. Other suggestions are welcome:

Plato's Cave
Aristotle's Law of Non-Contradiction
Aristotle on the syllogism
Aristotle's argument for the Prime Mover
Anselm's Proof of the Existence of God
Occam's Razor
Descartes' Meditations

Shakespeare's “Julius Caesar”

Genesis
Exodus (highlighting the Ten Commandments)
23rd Psalm
John 1
Luke's birth narrative
The Sermon on the Mount from Matthew
Matthew's passion

The Lord's Prayer
The Nicene Creed

Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”

The US Declaration of Independence
The US Bill of Rights

ML King Jr., “I Have a Dream”

Concise summary of Robert's Rules of Order
The Wedding Ceremony from the Book of Common Prayer
The Miranda Statement

Faust Legend
Story of Jonah
Story of Daniel
Story of Job
Story of Odyssey
Story of Iliad
Story of Robinson Crusoe
Story of King Lear
Story of Romeo and Juliet
Story of Hamlet
Story of The Merchant of Venice
Story of Moby Dick


Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Donne, “No Man is an Island”
Rudyard Kipling, “If...”
“Casey at the Bat”
“In Flanders Fields”
“Twas the Night Before Christmas”

It seems to me that all of this could fit into one printed volume, and might be dealt with in one semester of work. I think every ESL college prep program should include this course. Had they read all of this, I suspect that the average ESL student would in fact be better prepared for reading at the college level than is the typical native speaker at the time of college graduation; for, as Hirsch pointed out, our own schools now neglect to teach this.

On Classroom Management

A friend sends along an article from the LA Times about the difficulties teachers face. The subhead reads: “Among the top reasons why teachers are deemed unsuccessful or leave the profession is their inability to effectively manage student behavior, experts say.”

Nicely put, that: "deemed unsuccessful."

Of course, everyone today is worried about maintaining order in the schools; this is the stuff the newspapers love. Kids today have no discipline, and schools have become free-fire zones.

And, indeed, "classroom management," or running a disciplined class, seems always to be the number one thing that school administrators value in teachers. Probably many parents agree. It also seems to be the one thing teachers currently most value in themselves. It is, as the article implies, just about the essence of the teaching profession these days. But should it be? Does it have any relation to actual learning?

There is no question that an orderly, compliant class is much more comfortable for the teacher. It is also easy to observe and evaluate. Indeed, it is about the only thing it is possible to evaluate reliably in a one-hour "classroom observation." This may be one secret of its current prominence, since good teaching is, by comparison, difficult to define, difficult to evaluate, and impossible to evaluate in any one-hour classroom observation. Given that it can be evaluated, this would at least require a lot more work on the part of administrators.

But what about the kids? Is it good for their education? At best, it seems tangential—a question of babysitting, not teaching. Even if it is really important, the simple and less expensive thing, surely, would be to hire a security guard to handle it, a bouncer, and leave teachers to teach.

The studies just have not been done showing that a more orderly classroom results in better student achievement. And consider: for comparison, are the adult societies that can put up the best show of public order the most productive societies? Outstanding in this regard would be countries like North Korea, Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union... By comparison, public events in a country like the US, Britain, France, or Hong Kong, tend to look relatively chaotic. But which type of society has proven, over the long term, more productive, in either practical or intellectual terms?

Why wouldn't it be the same with classrooms?

Of course, there is a necessary minimum, with students not strangling one another and vandalizing the property. Countries that descend into true chaos, like Somalia or Afghanistan, tend to be least successful of all. But they equate, precisely, to a classroom of children without an adult present—that is not a likely scenario in our schools.

Short of that, it is hard to believe that the presence of an adult in a room of twenty or thirty children—not to mention an adult with the power to evaluate you, send you to the Vice Principal, or give you a detention--is not in itself sufficient to accomplish that much.

Beyond that, in the middle range, some may argue that relatively more orderly societies like Germany and Japan are preferable to relatively less orderly societies like Italy and Korea. But at best, that is a point on which reasonable people can differ, more a matter of personal preference than anything objective. Historically, both have been about equally successful economically and intellectually.

So, on the whole, the current emphasis on “class management” seems to be beside the point. Except that excessive order is almost certainly harmful; yet this is what the present system favours. How natural, or healthy, is it really for a young child to sit still and quiet at a desk for hours at time? How educational is it? In fact, we have definite evidence that we learn better while we are physically engaged, and moving. Aristotle insisted on it, which is why we have the word “pedant.” It means “walker.”

The model of the orderly class at its desks was surely designed for the convenience of the teacher, and the system, not for the best education. Some have argued that it is based on the model of the factory, and sees children as products rolling off an assembly line.

Some will probably point out, and with justice, that students do not sit still at their desks nearly so much as they used to any more—nowadays, they are moved around into different configurations for “pair work,” “group work,” and so on. This is true; but it is still pretty sedentary, and it maintains and even accentuates the teacher's total control over the students. Now it is not enough that they sit silently where they've been planted; they must also get up and march about efficiently at the teacher's command.

Besides not being conducive to learning, all this teaches one particular lesson above all others: conformity. This is, I submit, not a good lesson for a future citizen of a democracy, or of a pluralistic, tolerant society, to learn. Nor is it good for creativity, human progress, or for any serious later intellectual inquiry.

This need for discipline also prompts teachers, I think, to deliberately select boring material. They cannot afford to get the children too excited: excited children tend to make noises or run about. Unfortunately, we also know that maintaining interest is the one great essential for learning. Plato insisted on it as the teacher's chief duty.

It also does two more things that we probably do not want to happen. First, it weeds out of the teaching profession anyone who does not themselves highly value conformity—which would also mean, probably, that it weeds out the brighest teachers, the best scholars, the most creative teachers, those least inclined toward prejudice, those most sympathetic to children and their special needs, and those most likely to make a special effort for a student who needs it. Second, it not only gives free rein to, but positively encourages, teachers who are inclined to be bullies. The profession, by its nature, is probably already a magnet for any born bully: it's the fastest route there is to significant power over a large number of others. We badly need to set up barriers to prevent this. Instead, currently, we are virtually requiring it.

I think it is a very bad sign if, when you stroll into the teacher's lounge, the students are spoken of as adversaries.

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/classroom_discipline/8217

Yet that seems to be the common case in teachers' lounges everywhere.

It seems to me that anyone who does not feel a positive affection for all their students should not be teaching. This is what Don Bosco, the great Catholic educator, considered the key to all good teaching: you must love all your students, and be a friend and advocate for them at all times. Nor did he have the luxury of instructing only the well-behaved and well-bred. Just the reverse: his schools were strictly for the urban poor, abandoned street kids, the boys in the 'hood. Boys' Town, in the US, based on his principles, repeated the experiment with the same striking success. Any discipline was handled by the children themselves. St. Philip Neri, another great Catholic educator, said of his rowdy students, "I don't care if they chop wood on my back, so long as they don't sin."


Something is very wrong with teaching, if “class discipline” or “classroom management” has become or remains the linchpin of the profession. And I'm not at all sure it is the students' fault.

The Abell Report

There is precious little useful data in the social sciences. However, Maryland's Abell Foundation has crunched all the available studies to determine what makes a good teacher. Their analysis (http://www.abell.org/publications/detail.asp?ID=59), interestingly, arrives at all the same conclusions I already have, working deductively. The evidence, at a minimum, adds some reinforcement to common sense.

First point: studies show that good teachers do make a difference in student performance. Roughly, the students of a good teacher learn twice as fast as those with a bad teacher. It follows that it is indeed worthwhile to try to improve teacher quality. But how do we do this? Insist that they all have proper training in “pedagogy”?

Well, no. Obviously, the Education Schools have a vested interest in proving this is so, and access to the funding to do the relevant studies. Nevertheless, no study to date, according to the Abell survey, has shown that graduates of ed schools teach any better than those who do not go, in terms of student achievement. Studies also indicate that teachers with higher degrees in education (M. Ed., Ed. D.) do not produce better student results. In fact, a table aggregating sixty studies on the issue (Abell, p. 18) seems to plainly show, on balance, that they produce worse student results—the more education a teacher has in education, the worse a teacher he or she becomes.

Since modern teacher education stands and falls on its supposedly “scientific” basis, plainly, it falls. We should be spending no more money on Education Schools, or on hiring teachers with such qualifications. It is at best worthless, with some indications it is actually harming our children.

So, in choosing teachers, what criteria should we use instead?

No suprises here, at least for me. The single clearest indication of who will be a good teacher is how well the candidate does on a test of verbal ability. The present paper cites directly 20 separate recent studies that produce this same result.

That's what good teaching is, in the first instance: being able to explain things clearly (and, even better, engagingly). The traditional training for a career as a teacher in the past, in the West and in many other cultures, was in rhetoric, and the final exam was often a successful performance in a debate.

Now we need to refer to a fact cited here before, and mentioned again in the present report: those entering Ed Schools at every level regularly score lower on the verbal SAT than those majoring in almost any other subject. Leave aside why this is so—it necessarily means that selecting our teachers from Ed School graduates produces a lower quality of instruction than choosing randomly from holders of any other degree. It is not just that the schools do nothing to teach the one essential teaching skill: they also, for whatever reason, repel those who already have it.

The present study theorizes that the greater verbal ability measured in the best teachers is a proxy for greater intelligence, and that this is the relevant factor. It might well be; nothing correlates better with IQ than the size of one's working vocabulary. And studies also show that the graduates of more “selective” colleges do better as teachers than others. They also show that the holders of avanced degrees in the subject taught produce better student results, at least at high school level.

This too, is simply common sense. Other than an ability to communicate well, the second logical requirement for a good teacher is knowledge of the subject taught. Intelligence is ability to learn quickly; and those who attend a better college presumably also learn more in the same amount of time. And this always matters; you cannot teach what you do not know. Even at the elementary level, a good general knowledge, a wide grounding in the history of human thought, makes a difference. This is precisely the value a living teacher can add: fielding those unexpected questions. Otherwise, the student could do as well on their own with a good book. Moreover, someone who has spent a few years devoted to a given subject obviously has some personal enthusiasm for it: if nothing else, enthusiasm and interest shows, and tends to rub off.

Unfortunately, as the authors of the Abell study point out, academic excellence of this traditional sort is given no status in Ed Schools. When I was going through the system and looked into the possibility of a teaching degree, back in the mid-seventies, there were absolutely no academic requirements for Ed School in terms of marks or schools attended: if you held the general BA, it was purely first-come, first-served.

Rumours hold that the same attitude persists in the marking of students once in. For, the authors of the present study note, the Ed Schools and the teaching profession have developed a distinctly anti-intellectual culture that resents those with other academic qualifications and backgrounds. They are presumably representatives of the oppressor class.

Rather obviously, by circumventing this system, a private school could easily achieve better results at a lower cost. And that is exactly what we find: private schools achieve consistently better student results at roughly half the cost per student; so does home schooling.

In other words: our Ed Schools are a net drag on our society.

Sen Teacher

Some great printables here.

WideWord

A collaborative writing tool, similar to WriteBoard. But some say better.

Read Print

Eight thousand free books online. Of course, these are out-of-copyright books, hence not recent books. Nevertheless, most of the classics will be here.

The Reported Death of the Humanities

A friend and colleague passes on a link to this piece from The American Scholar, titled “The Decline of the Englsih Department.” It announces and mourns the death of the Humanities in the American University. Since 1970, the proportion of college students who study humanities has roughly been cut in half, from 30% to under 16%. At the same time, business enrollments have grown dramatically, from 14% to 22.

I agree with most of what it says. But I'd like to chip in some of my own thoughts.

The biggest problem with Humanities departments these days, it seems to me he does not mention. It is that they have stopped teaching the Humanities.

The Humanities departments have turned instead to politics--radical, self-indulgent, crazy, elitist politics, too, stuff discredited everywhere else, and of no interest to the average person. Post-colonialism, feminism, “queer studies,” postmodernism, Marxism, Freudianism, any-passing-ism. Junk politics; and getting ahead, in turn, des not involve any longer demonstrating any knowledge or skill in the Humanities. It comes with conforming to specific political positions.

It is not, therefore, at all clear that fewer young people want to study the humanities. It is more likely that more do than ever before. With growing prosperity, one ought to feel more leisure to consider the eternal questions. What is it John Adams wrote? “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.” With growing prosperity, the segue should not be from philosophy to business.

If it is, it may be simply that business departments have become the only remainig haven from the crazy politics of the modern university or college; the only part safe from left-wing indoctrination,which also permeates the social sciences, and, with eco-everything, the real sciences too.

Why, however, have our universities deliberately killed the humanities?

Precisely because it is the fastest way for a culture to commiut suicide. Our culture has been so inclined for some time; the baby bust is another example. The culture that does not study its great books, after all, and does not allow its best and brightest that study, is doing just that: deliberately wiping itself out, within a generation or two or three. Our elites quite openly want to do that: all known evils are blamed on European “colonialism,” dead white males, and so forth.

And that's what an education in the Humanities is supposed to be: a study of the culture's Great Books, or better, of the world's Great Books. This means, at the same time, a study of the culture's, and the world's best thoughts. What could be more important? Indeed, it is usually an early sign of totalitarianism when, as in Soviet Russia, Hitler's Germany, or Maoism China, this is suddenly no longer possible. Free thought, and deep thought, is politically dangerous.

Chace, in his article, makes the point that the traditional “Western canon” of great books leaves out many more recent immigrants—not to mention the many students now coming from abroad.

This is a point I have often made myself; when we limit our thought to that of the West, necessarily, we limit our thought. That is not a healthy thing, regardless of how recent immigrants might feel. But the proper solution is not to burn the best books we have. It is to add the great classics of Asian and North African literatures. Not, mind, recent books—the true classics, that have stood the test of time.

Granted, not all parts of the earth have a great literature, just as not all of us have written a great book. That is their problem; we need not make it ours.

Chace is right, however, to point out that in order to be meaningful, the Humanities must, like any other study, involve an established corpus. It must have some agreed outer boundary: chatting on the street, or the latest popular tune, cannot qualify as great literature. One useful rule of thumb might be to exclude anything written within, say, the last 50 years, in order to ensure some lasting significance.

Chace is also right in pointing out that the Humanities have lost their guiding principles, that “to teach English today is to do, intellectually, what one pleases.” This contrasts tellingly with the supposed rigour of, for example, the hard sciences.

But this was not always so; there used to be just such a rigour to the study of the Humanities. It is called religion.

This is why almost all institutions of higher learning in the world, until quite recently, have been founded as explicitly religious institutions.

Without that unifying vision of what the world is, what life is for, and why we are studying, any given aproach to the world's Great Thoughts becomes, essentially, random and arbitrary. Where there is no goal, there is no path. The sciences, held together by the scientific method, do not face this problem. Furthermore, without this shared, considered goal, the resulting vacuum of meaning positively atttracts popular delisions and the madness of crowds: any passing superstition that seems to go explain two facts together is grasped at with a quasi-religions fervour. Hence our current plague of scientism, feminism, Marxism, Freudianism, postmodernism, queerism, behaviourism, constructivism, connectivism, and on and on. Any ism in a tempest.

Western civilization itself has always had such a unifying vision. That is what defined it as Western civilization. That unifying vision is called Christianity. Try to study or understand Western civilization while avoiding any mention of, and remaining deliberately ignorant of, monotheism and Christianity, and you have created for yourself an impossible task; like trying to understand colour while never opening your eyes.

Yet that is precisely what modern Humanities departments, especially in the “public universities” are most systematically bound and determined to do. It is the one closest thing that they have to a unifying vision: that they are not Christian, but secular, and will not under any circumstances discuss Christianity.

We might want to, and easily could, expand that to "monotheism," to the three great monotheistic religions, which are kindred in any event. But to "expand" it by excluding religion is not expansion; it is contraction down to nothing.

The next problem, which Chace does touch on, is linked to this. It is that we have stripped the Humanities of their proper practical application, making it a significant economic hardship to study them. Historically and logically, a degree in the Humanities, a passing familiarity with the best thought of the culture, is the precisely apt qualification to become a teacher in the schools. Currently, teaching as a profession has been usurped by the social sciences, with disastrous results.

Chace laments that research in the Humanities does not bring in research funding. Traditionally, it brought in the most funding of all: it was the churches who sponsored the entire academic enterprise, and the lower schools as well. But this is a vicious circle: strangle the Humanities, and you strangle the churches. Strangle the churches, and you strangle the Humanities.

I like, and strongly endorse, as well, Chace's idea that Humanities departments have a very practical mission in teaching clear expression and writing competence. Rhetoric is an extremely valuable skill not just in teaching, or preaching, but in business (aka salesmanship) in politics and the military (aka leadership) and in the law. It used to be the core of the curriculum. Bizarrely, now, nobody teaches it. The Humanities used to, could and should. They do not now: it is currently even considered fair practice for those writing theses in the Humanities to hire an editor to fix their prose before submitting it—as if clear writing, and clear thought, were not part of what was being assessed.

You'd think a grown-up culture would know better.

Qualifications for ESL

A colleague recently challenged me to say what I considered the proper background for an ESL instructor. So I've given it some thought.

Back in the early days of “ESL,” there were only two or three real qualifications considered: being a native speaker, holding a university degree, and being on-site in a non-English-speaking country.

All of these actually make sense: a non-native speaker, inevitably, will model English incorrectly a certain amount of the time. Someone with a university degree is likely to have demonstrated some additional facility, and is more likely to speak “educated English”--i.e., more standard English. Being on-site in a non-English speaking country also demonstrates some experience with, understanding of, and sensitivity to, non-English-speaking cultures, as well as a certain talent for communication. These are necessary in an ESL classroom.

Nowadays, specific training is becoming much more de rigeur; as the field “professionalizes.” But what specific training is proper, for this subject? Content knowledge might be the obviously important element in other fields, but after all, everyone knows their native language pretty well... right?

Accordingly, the training emphasis has tended to fall on teaching techniques, along the lines of a degree in education. This is, for example, the CELTA way. And more and more, everyone is requiring CELTA.

This is a sad mistake. We have no idea what teaching techniques do or do not work; or rather, we have strong evidence that the products of education schools do worse than random chance. All a formal training in “education” seems to produce is a boring conformity in classes, which is itself detrimental to learning. And the boredom factor, with the b.s. factor, also probably drives out brighter and more dedicated practitioners.

Granted that we want to raise the bar beyond just using anyone with a backpack and a university degree: what qualifications really would be more appropriate?

I submit that the primary qualification here as anywhere else should be subject knowledge. True, everyone knows their own language fairly well, but language is the most complex thing human beings have ever created. It is always possible to be better at it than the next guy, up to the level of sublime genius. Up to the level of a Shakespeare.

And this really does matter to the students, at any level; it reduces the number of errors they will, inevitably, be taught. Better language is also easier to learn from—it is strikingly easy, for example, to memorize a speech from Shakespeare. Moreover, facility with English is almost ipso facto facility in teaching: that is, in communicating ideas and information.

So, how does one determine English ability?

Not that hard, surely, since every university in the USA has been doing it for decades. Consider the verbal sections of the SAT and GRE tests. All one need do, as a recruiter at an ESL school or college, is to ask for official GRE or SAT results, and hire in descending order of verbal score.

Of course, the GRE, SAT, etc., measure only written English; there may be additional considerations. But a personal interview can quickly establish the key requirements for spoken English. Does the interviewee speak in RP or American Standard English? If not, he is of significantly less value to the students. He will be harder for them to understand, and they will be harder for others to understand if they learn their spoken English from him. Does he speak clearly, distinctly, and with animation?

As a practical matter, this may be all you need, in order to hire a good ESL teacher. But little of this is a matter of training. Surely innate abilities can also be cultivated?

Yes they can; as noted before, getting a university education is commonly understood to improve one's expression; or at least to certify it as good; as in the common term “educated English.” It makes sense, then, not just to ask for a university degree, but also for an advanced degree. Emphasis should obviously be given to those degrees that most teach and most require knowledge of and skill with the English language.

This means the germane academic qualification is a higher degree in the humanities. Not education—education is taught as a social science. Rhetoric would be an obvious choice; as would drama. Philosophy, with its need to reason clearly, is perhaps as good; hence also theology. Literature is about at a par with rhetoric, merely emphasizing the written rather than the spoken form. Classics would be very good, for its deep knowledge of the language's cultural underpinnings. Degrees in other languages, taken by an English native speaker, would also be relevant, in terms of demonstrating an intimate knowledge of both language and the language learning process. Linguistics—sometimes currently accepted as a formal ESL qualification--is questionable: in theory, it is the study of language per se, but in practice a degree in linguistics requires very little actual facility with the language, and the field as a whole has produced no verifiable results. At least it shows an interest.

It has not been established that knowledge of formal grammar is important to language learning. It goes in and out of fashion; there are good arguments on either side. Accordingly, I cannot see making this a professional requirement.

Actual length of overseas residence also counts, I think, in determining who would be the best ESL teacher. There is no end to learning about cultural differences. A foreign wife is a very good sign, although it is probably not permissible to take such things into consideration.

I would add a knowledge of educational technology. Here, at least, there are real things to be learned, and demonstrable progress. I think it is fair and indeed obvious to say that any class of students whose instructor does not know currently know how to incorporate a YouTube video into a lesson, or an interactive online exercise, is disadvantaged in their learning.

So there you are: if I were hiring for my own school, or seeking someone to teach me English or any other language, that's what I would look for.

Harvard Goes Online--And Free

Harvard's first free online course is up.

Maybe this is that way all university courses will go. But in the meantime, it is darned good advertising for Harvard.

Hat tip to Cheri MacLeod.

The Death of the Textbook

California, hit by a budget crunch, recently announced it would try to do without textbooks for science and math. Students would go to the Internet instead. My students here in Qatar inform me that this is already the case in Qatari schools: instead of textbooks, every student is issued a laptop suitable for web browsing.

In principle, delivery through the internet and through computers is infinitely preferable to delivery on paper. It is much cheaper, and much better quality, allowing multimedia, personalization, interactivity, quick search, and infinite linkability. It will happen, and probably very soon.

Traditional textbook publishers had better adapt, or die.

Summary Street

This web site will check your students' summaries against the original text and advise on accuracy. No doubt far from perfect, but a conversation piece for lab class at a minimum.

WordSift

A remarkable resource from Stanford University. Enter your sample text, and WordSift gives you a frequency table sorted by rarity--great for compiling a vocabulary list from a reading. It can also flag any words from the Academic Word List, GSL, or several subject area-specific lists, and give your synonyms and examples on context of any of the flagged words.

Translation Party

As far as I can figure, this is just a wonderful way to waste time--but too wonderful not to post it here. Type in any English sentence, and this page just keeps translating it back and forth between English and Japanese until it finally produces an identical translation twice in a row. This is declared to be "equilibrium," though it most often turns out to be nonsense.

For example, here's the result of typing in the first two sentences of this post:

In this figure, this is the best way - is very much Rashiiarimasen to waste time is to post only knows. Only before and after the conversion to any type of English sentence, the last two times, Japanese and English, in order to maintain this page to generate a translation of the same line.

Clear enough?

What is clear is that there is still a future for ESL teachers.

Using Wolfram Alpha to Teach ESL

Here's a video with lots of ideas on how you can use Wolfram Alpha in the classroom.

SitePal

SitePal gives you a talking head to post on your web page or powerpoint slideshow, or to email, saying whatever you want it to say.

Has obvious applications for listening practice. And way too much fun to be legal.

UEFAP.com

A set of reading exercises that, taken together, cycle through the full Academic Word List, courtesy of Using English For Academic Purposes.com (UEFAP.com).

The parent site offers many other resources to do with EAP.

Animoto Now Allows Videos

Animoto used to be a great resource for making slide shows with music. It now also allows you to incorporate videos.

To demonstrate Animoto, I made this little slideshow last Canada Day.

Book Tips

You can search, read and download over 1 million out-of-copyright or non-copyright books and magazines at Google books. That's a pretty good-sized library; lots of fodder for realia and reading exercises.

http://books.google.com/books

To limit your search to free materials, click “Advanced Book Search” to the right of the search bar, and choose “Full View Only” on the next page.

More free books:
http://feedbooks.com/

No Comment for Now

http://noapologies.ca/?p=3288

Tonuna

Begora! Here we have a competitor for "Ask 500 People." The difference is that it is very UK-centric, not international.

Veewow

This site lets you compile playlists of YouTube videos. You can keep all your ducks in a row here for listening or speaking practice.

Amy Walker

Amy Walker does 21 different English accents on YouTube. Useful for demonstrating the varieties of English pronunciation. Her "Toronto" sucks, though. Previously featured in the CALL newsletter.

Swivel

Here's a great site for examples of the visual presentation of data; I say, that's charts and graphs, son. Credit John Allan.

How Not to Evaluate Instruction

Writing in the latest edition of TESOL Arabia's Perspectives, Kelley Fast makes the familiar point that the practice of classroom observation as a means of judging the quality of teaching has no validity. “Research shows that there is a problem defining what 'good' teaching is as there is no proof of any one method being 'best.'” She also cites the—putting it politely, I think--”questionable validity” of the checklists commonly used for such observations. These cannot work, because “criteria for effective teaching differ for every instructional situation” (here she quotes O'Leary). As she notes, the practice of classroom observation probably harms the quality of teaching, producing worse, not better, technique: it discourages sensitivity to situation and student needs, discourages student-centredness, and discourages all teaching innovation. It also, I would add, necessarily promotes a dreary sameness to all instruction, which works directly against the need to sustain student interest.

The practice thrives nonetheless, and seems actually to be growing. It is perhaps possible to understand why in the case of elementary and high school teaching: young children are presumably not yet capable of deciding what is best for them, and so of judging the abilities of their own teachers. It may be pointless, but at least it puts a false patina of professionalism on the teaching trade. But is is doubly disturbing to see the practice growing in the field of adult EFL. For it seems here the only justification can be unspoken racism: an assumption that foreigners too, non-English speakers, are not fully capable of knowing what is best for themselves. They are, in this regard, like children.

This, of course, is the essential assumption behind all colonialism. We ought to know better by now.

The proper way to judge the effectiveness of an intructor at the tertiary level, as instructor, is to ask the students.


Kelley Fast, (2009) "Classroom observations: Taking a developmental approach," TESOL Arabia Perspectives, 16 (2) pp. 6-10.

In support of her case against summative classroom observations, Fast cites:

Cosh, J. (1999) Peer observation: A reflective model, ELT Journal, 53 (1), 22-27.
Gebhard, J.G. (2005) Teacher development through exploration: Principles, ways and examples. TESL-EJ, 9 (2), 1-16.
O'Leary. M. (2004) Inspecting the observation process: Classroom observations under the spotlight. IATEFL Teacher Development Newsletter SIG, 1 (4), 14-16.
Leshem, S. & Bar-Hamam, R. (2008). Evaluating teacher practice. ELT Journal, 62 (3), 257-265.
Williams, M. (1989) A developmental view of classroom observation. ELT Journal, 43 (2), 85-91.

DimDim

Odd title--that I grant. But DimDim offers free, open source multimedia videoconferencing with live voice and video: in other words, a live classroom for anyone on the web.

Bricks and mortar? We don't need no stinkin' bricks and mortar!

Filminute

THis is the site for the international one-minute film festival. For our purposes, it is a great source of videos for listening practice, and for discussion topics, all free. Heck, your class might even want to enter as a class project.

Open Courseware Finder

Get ready for this one: a search engine dedicated solely to finding free courses on the Web. "Get a quality education for free!" Tear down those little red walls, indeed!

6Rounds

Here's what looks to be the ultimate chat site on the web currently: live videoconferencing melded with the social network concept. Obvious possibilities for conversation practice. So far it looks like audio is not part of the package, but it seems to be planned for the future.

Openlifegrid

Here's a new Web 2.0 site where you can actually build your own world. Possibilities for simulating real-life situations--and conversations--are infinite.

ImToo.Com - YouTube downloader

This site offers a free YouTube downloader. By downloading videos, you can avoid the problem of slow Internet connections during class—and of using quota time. From the May, 2008 newsletter; credit Cheri MacLeod.

The Academic Word List Highlighter

This handy site lets you paste in a text, and it will highlight all the words from the Academic Word List, or from one of its specific sublists. Very sueful for vocabulary.

ICT Training for Language Teachers

Boot camp for language teachers wanting to learn how they might use computers in the classroom, plus lots o' links. From Graham Davies of Camsoft.

Wikipedia in Simple English

Here's a positive boon to the EFL classroom: a version of Wikipedia translated into simple English. At this writing, they already have close to 60,000 articles.

Plato on Learning and Play

“Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds.” ~~ Plato

"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind." -- Plato

"A free man ought not to learn anything under duress." -- Plato

TechVideoBites

This site offers an almost enndless supply of tech-realted training videos, suitable for teacher development as well as listening exercises.

Learning Tools

Here is a collection of tools from UBC for making learning objects. Whether a given tool actually works seems hit-and-miss, but there are some interesting ideas here. From the October, 2008 CALL newsletter.

Weboword

In the true spirit of Web 2.0, site members are jointly creating a visual dictionary of the English language. So far, it is tiny. But don’t just use it to look up what others have done. Consider having your own students contribute—thereby learning their target vocabulary thoroughly, while gaining a legitimate sense of accomplishment. From the May '09 newsletter.

Death in Rome

Another interactive fiction adventure from the Beeb. Good for testing reading comprehension.

The Roots of English

Here's a nice writing challenge with a secondary value. Students compose a poem with the words supplied, and are then told whether the words they have used come from French, Anglo-Saxon, or Norse roots.

Here's what I managed:

tremble tattered foot
screech sky
love is drink
loud the secret cry

Mostly Anglo-Saxon.

Battle of the Atlantic

From the BBC and the British taxpayer, a very short interactive fiction with a lot of text. Good for reading comprehension.

History Channel Games

Of possible ESL use, but great for teaching history at the el-hi level.

Student Writing Coach

This one is a little scary. Students are guided through the process of writing an academic paper, prompt by prompt, sentence by sentence, in a selection of genres. It just makes it all seem too easy.

Crack the Case

A nifty little bit of interactive detective fiction courtesy of Biography Channel. Great for painless reading comprehension practice.

Multiple Intelligences

The idea of “multiple intelligences” still seems to be all the rage in educational circles. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education points out that it has been empirically disproven. It is, to use an apt phrase from the article, "persisting without adequate evidence." It has “survived long past the stage of empirical disrepute,” for political, or even religious, reasons. People want to believe that “everyone is equal” in the false sense of being equally intelligent, equally moral, or equally competent. This is obviously untrue on even the most casual observation, and “multiple intelligences” is one fudge to try to work around the evidence. It argues that, if someone is indeed not so good at mathematics, it must then follow that they excel at dancing, or at the ethical use of the environment, or at getting along with others; so that there is some ultimate balance.

Surely this is a religious, not to say romantic, and not a scientific, notion. Which is fine, in itself; there is nothing wrong with having a religion. When, for example, John Locke or Thomas Jefferson argued that all men were created equal, this too was a religious, not a scientific, notion. They meant that, since all are equally created by God, all are equally loved by God, and therefore have equal rights in his eyes. It does not follow that he would make them all the same—rather the reverse, that he would want to make them all different, else what's the reason for more than one?

But when a religion makes a scientific claim, or claims to base itself on science instead of faith or first principles, it must be held to the standards of science. If the claim is empirical, it is possible to falsify it, and if it has been falsified, it must be abandoned.

Accordingly, the thesis of "multiple intelligences" belongs in the dustbin.