In my last column I discussed the problems caused by our notion that universities must be populated by researchers who are working on finding out new things and publishing about those things, instead of seriously teaching.
If it takes a murder to make clear what the problem is, then consider the case of Amy Bishop “a Harvard-educated biology professor who felt she had unfairly been denied tenure,” who recently murdered her colleagues at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
The Chronicle of Higher Education says that “The dean of the chemistry department, William N. Setzer, described Ms. Bishop as smart but weird. As for why she had been turned down for tenure, Mr. Setzer said he had heard that her publication record was thin and that she hadn't secured enough grants. Also, there were concerns about her personality, he said. In meetings, Mr. Setzer remembered, she would go off on "bizarre" rambles about topics not related to tasks at hand—"left-field kind of stuff," he said.”
I have been on enough tenure committees to know that the real reason she was turned down for tenure was that people thought she was nuts. But that is really unimportant. Why does it matter that a faculty member have a publication record at a university that is very far from being one of the top research universities in the country? Why do students at such a school need to be taught by Harvard PhDs whose specialty is neuroscience when they are studying biology?
Students at schools like this study biology prior to going into a field in the health sciences because they are required to do so. Why does it matter that their teachers have a research track record in a specialty that in no way relates to the needs of the students? Why do we keep pretending that every university in the U.S is a serious research university? When do we start demanding a curriculum and teachers who teach things that students actually will need to know how to do in their future lives? Can’t we just let Harvard and Yale etc train researchers and let the other schools train citizens?
According to the Chronicle: Nick Lawton, the son of Professor called her a competent lecturer who was willing to help students who needed it. But her teaching was "not inspired."
Her teaching is not once mentioned as a possible reasons for her tenure denial because I am sure it was hardly even considered. Who cares if a professor at a teaching institution is any good at teaching? Not the system. What they care about, even at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, is how many grants she had gotten and how many papers she had published.
The system is so stupid it is beyond comprehension.
People all over the country are reading about this situation and I think they need to understand the underlying real issue. Yes there are crazy people who do crazy things. But the system encourages professors to worry about all the wrong things. The idea that all professors must publish and get grants creates awful teachers, and irrelevant courses, and unhappy students, (as well as some really miserable professors.)
Wired News surveys eight of the best online education resources for students, parents and teachers.
I'm OK--You Have Self-Esteem
Remember transactional analysis?
I'm OK--You're OK (or not, as the case may be)?
In an excellent post at Public School Insights, Claus von Zastrow recycles the evergreen debate on self-esteem, which is harder to come by these days, when even sterling academic achievement is no guarantee of employment, let alone robust self-confidence. He points to the fact that our culture provides all the wrong incentives--fame, greed, selfishness, braggadocio and other wrong-headed ideas about success.
I was reminded of a research project (conducted by Geoffrey Cohen of University of Colorado-Boulder) which dared to suggest that kids perform better when given the simple assignment of writing for fifteen minutes about their strengths, to re-affirm their competence.
Like TA, Values Clarification and polyester Saturday shirts, self-esteem as a workable premise for improving student learning is seriously out of fashion these days. Mostly, we see articles like "Are We Good-Jobbing Our Kids to Pieces?"--followed by 186 comments from people who are convinced that while they're OK, other people's children have been given way too much empty praise, causing their egos to blow up like fraudulent balloons. Use the word "self-esteem" in any educational context, and you're likely to be hit with a barrage of platitudes about grade inflation, college admissions based on the wrong stuff, and our miserable international test-score standings.
The concept of self-esteem is, as von Zastrow notes, squishy, involving considerable latitude of opinion around ego health and evaluating achievement, when you deconstruct it through an epistemological lens. Policymakers who believe that American kids are wallowing in unsubstantiated self-esteem often paradoxically believe it's a good idea to reward them for grades and test scores (because those are tangible things, presumably, rather than feelings). Coaches who declare that it's good for kids to lose occasionally still schedule extra practices on Sunday mornings to prevent that from happening. We idolize Susan Boyle, the mousy Scottish lady who apparently kept her singing talents hidden for 50 years--but we don't want our children to be silenced by their own personal Simon Cowell when they subject their early work products to scrutiny. That's why refrigerator magnets were invented.
Every first-rate classroom teacher understands the paradox here: you have to have a base of self-esteem to withstand and benefit from honest and productive criticism of your own work. And sometimes, kids come to school with very little sense of their own worth. The research on self-esteem and social learning is pretty consistent: you need to feel OK in order to learn effectively.
There is also plenty of research showing that people running successful drug rings and beating up their spouses have high self-esteem. Teachers don't want to be nurturing the next generation of narcissists.
Self-esteem in isolation can become a psychological defense for anti-community behaviors. One of the most chilling and sordid examples of this was the HS athletes in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, who raped a mildly retarded 8-year old girl with a baseball bat, detailed in Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz. Plenty of self-esteem there--plus a healthy dose of entitlement, nurtured by a community obsessed with high school sports.
Most of the people railing against the excess of self-esteem in American schools aren't thinking about our national adulation of sports heroes or entertainers. They're pushing to keep "standards" in place--to hold teachers and students accountable, to increase rigor, to raise the bar--plus a half-dozen other academic clichés. If students feel too good about themselves and their work, the reasoning goes, they will not see a need to try harder to beat our economic competitors. The problem with this get-tough rhetoric is that students won't produce more if they feel bad about themselves, either. It's a balancing act between sincere encouragement and honest critique. And it happens in the classroom, not in Policy World.
I'm OK--You're OK (or not, as the case may be)?
In an excellent post at Public School Insights, Claus von Zastrow recycles the evergreen debate on self-esteem, which is harder to come by these days, when even sterling academic achievement is no guarantee of employment, let alone robust self-confidence. He points to the fact that our culture provides all the wrong incentives--fame, greed, selfishness, braggadocio and other wrong-headed ideas about success.
I was reminded of a research project (conducted by Geoffrey Cohen of University of Colorado-Boulder) which dared to suggest that kids perform better when given the simple assignment of writing for fifteen minutes about their strengths, to re-affirm their competence.
Cohen: If a student starts off the year feeling more stress due to negative stereotypes, and then performs poorly during the first few weeks of school, this can establish a downward cycle of increasing stress and poor performance that is hard to break. The self-affirmation exercise, by reminding students about what is really important to them, could help reduce that stress.
Like TA, Values Clarification and polyester Saturday shirts, self-esteem as a workable premise for improving student learning is seriously out of fashion these days. Mostly, we see articles like "Are We Good-Jobbing Our Kids to Pieces?"--followed by 186 comments from people who are convinced that while they're OK, other people's children have been given way too much empty praise, causing their egos to blow up like fraudulent balloons. Use the word "self-esteem" in any educational context, and you're likely to be hit with a barrage of platitudes about grade inflation, college admissions based on the wrong stuff, and our miserable international test-score standings.
The concept of self-esteem is, as von Zastrow notes, squishy, involving considerable latitude of opinion around ego health and evaluating achievement, when you deconstruct it through an epistemological lens. Policymakers who believe that American kids are wallowing in unsubstantiated self-esteem often paradoxically believe it's a good idea to reward them for grades and test scores (because those are tangible things, presumably, rather than feelings). Coaches who declare that it's good for kids to lose occasionally still schedule extra practices on Sunday mornings to prevent that from happening. We idolize Susan Boyle, the mousy Scottish lady who apparently kept her singing talents hidden for 50 years--but we don't want our children to be silenced by their own personal Simon Cowell when they subject their early work products to scrutiny. That's why refrigerator magnets were invented.
Every first-rate classroom teacher understands the paradox here: you have to have a base of self-esteem to withstand and benefit from honest and productive criticism of your own work. And sometimes, kids come to school with very little sense of their own worth. The research on self-esteem and social learning is pretty consistent: you need to feel OK in order to learn effectively.
There is also plenty of research showing that people running successful drug rings and beating up their spouses have high self-esteem. Teachers don't want to be nurturing the next generation of narcissists.
Self-esteem in isolation can become a psychological defense for anti-community behaviors. One of the most chilling and sordid examples of this was the HS athletes in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, who raped a mildly retarded 8-year old girl with a baseball bat, detailed in Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz. Plenty of self-esteem there--plus a healthy dose of entitlement, nurtured by a community obsessed with high school sports.
Most of the people railing against the excess of self-esteem in American schools aren't thinking about our national adulation of sports heroes or entertainers. They're pushing to keep "standards" in place--to hold teachers and students accountable, to increase rigor, to raise the bar--plus a half-dozen other academic clichés. If students feel too good about themselves and their work, the reasoning goes, they will not see a need to try harder to beat our economic competitors. The problem with this get-tough rhetoric is that students won't produce more if they feel bad about themselves, either. It's a balancing act between sincere encouragement and honest critique. And it happens in the classroom, not in Policy World.
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