Accession Plan

I was idly looking through the access statistics for my Master's thesis when I realised that a third of the hits were from China, a quarter from Singapore, a quarter from the US — and the balance were from Japan and the Russian Federation. The four cities with the most hits were Beijing, Singapore, Palo Alto (CA, I presume) and Raleigh (NC, I presume).

I wonder a lot about the last two in each case. How odd. Why would anyone want a look at "A Study of the Conditions that Facilitate Servitor Conditioning in Atlantean Temples"?

Why Do Research?

Research has two main aims — to clarify the nature of things, and to do something about them.

It is a process by which humans synthesize theories that describe, explain or predict the world's behaviour in one aspect or another of existence. A fourth kind of theory may evolve — a theory of how to improve conditions from somebody's (or an imaginary) point of view.

We therefore do it to make the world a better place. Note, however, that 'better' is defined in as may ways as there are people.

Research: A Bitch Too Far?

Busy busy, they all say. Too busy for research. It is a widespread lament in schools. But the irony is that if they were indeed too busy for research, they were likely so because of -lack- of research.

Research is a simple thing. You look at something. You wonder if you can more fully DESCRIBE, EXPLAIN, PREDICT or IMPROVE the phenomenon you're looking at. You make sure that your conclusions are supportable, and then you proceed to lay out how you came to them and what they mean.

That's all.

Difficult Circumstances

It's expected, of course, that if you do research in contentious areas (healthcare, education etc) that you will need some social and political awareness. The problem with this is avoiding ideological bias when the findings are ambiguous (and certainly, when they're not). Increasing awareness often increases the sensation of having gained knowledge when this is not necessarily true; indeed, the faux-knowledge virus use the facilities and faculties of your brain to construct a simulacrum of knowledge.

This is why so many people are more easily outraged these days despite the relative ubiquity of verifiable data sources. There is altogether too much of a tendency to take second-order conclusions and tout them as a foundational basis for decision-making and problem-solving. In the process, the first-order data that was made into information chunks is forgotten although a lot is written about the process of information construction.

It's like complaining about pink slime, chemicals, toxins, carcinogens et al in the production of chicken nuggets, while forgetting that the nuggets are still mostly meat, and they will sustain you if there is nothing else available that you'd rather eat. I am reminded here of an old primary-school joke: "What is the main ingredient in milk, by percentage? Water, of course; 90% or more." If there is no water, milk will save you from dying of thirst.

But isn't milk healthier than water? Well, no. It is certainly more toxic than water; it is water with impurities such as fat and lactose and protein in a colloidal suspension that can be disrupted by ionic substances — just add a few drops of lemon juice to milk to see what I mean.

But isn't milk more nutritious than water? Well, yes. Water has no nutrients at all, and yet is necessary for life.

Sometimes, the right questions need to be asked. Yet it is certain that the more powerful the questions (e.g., "How do we decide if we have a good education system or not?") the more powerful the opposition to the answers, the methodology of answering, the idea of getting it answered, and so on.

And so, I am an ongoing survivor of difficult circumstances. I want to know if education can be good without being perfect, while remembering that often the good is the enemy of the best. Then I remember the wise man who wrote, "The best is yet to be," and realise how to resolve that dilemma.

Compulsition

I used to dread 'composition' periods in English because they tended to render me unfit for the rest of the day. When made to write, I am a compulsive writer. I do not always have a compulsion to write, but once the impulse is formed, it compels.

The handing up of a 'compo' book to the teacher always used to make me feel as if I were giving a child away for adoption. I guess it is worse than that, in a way — you're giving away your child to have someone else stare critically and tiredly at it, and then make red marks in pen all over.

And now, I keep writing new stuff into my largest ever. My supervisor stands at the door and knocks (metaphorically). The ferryman grins mirthlessly. And soon I will have to give this one up for adoption into the literature of the time. Argh.

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Note: I hereby define 'compulsition' as a compulsion to continue composing that derives from, or is initiated by, the act of starting to compose.

Out-Take

Doing a PhD is like passing a gallstone.

Mazer

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike," is a key phrase in the history of computer games. Unfortunately, some days as I edit my dissertation, I feel that way. Last night, one of my best friends pointed this out at length.

A person who does research constructs a maze and shows people how to navigate it. Such a person can be called a 'mazer', and what he does, logically, is amazing. That is not just a bad joke; historically, the idea of being mazed = being deluded, confused, or bewildered preceded the idea of a physical construct that does such things by about a century.

For that is what 'amazing' means: to amaze someone is to baffle and astound, to confuse or delude. If my dissertation is doing that to people, it's time for me to find the way out as quickly as possible!

Between Nations

Does the history of the International Baccalaureate reflect the history of the last half-century? And if so, how closely?

It's an interesting issue to think about. With the help of the dedicated Tristan Bunnell, a gentleman I have never met but whose reflections and research on the IB have informed my own, I have been drilling into the body of knowledge that exists.

It isn't a very large body of knowledge. I speculate that not more than 5000 pieces have been written in the scholarly literature about the IB, or at least, in a way that is useful to me in any sense.

It is interesting, as well, to read the blogs of people like George Walker, that eminent chemist who was once the IB's Director-General. This is because he had very interesting opinions and gave particularly visionary speeches. However, I have wondered to what extent his articulate(d) views represented the IB's 'official' perspective.

As for Jeffery Beard, the incumbent on that thorny throne? He has been less interesting, and in one case, somewhat repetitive with regard to re-packaging other people's views. I wish him well and hope he will speak more from his own heart.

Yet, for all the personalities associated with the IB and all the things they've said, there is little of substance that I can nail down regarding the deep philosophies and dreams of the IB. True, I can read all the stuff on their website and in the IB Learner Profile (and suchlike), but there is little meat.

What Bunnell and others have tried to do is flesh out the sparse architecture and hollow halls of the huge-looking IB corpus. So far, huge is something you think you see, but is not borne out by the susbtance. Fewer than 10,000 candidates take the November examinations each year; in fact, just one particular school has supplied about 5% of the candidature for that examination since 2007.

Likewise, about 100,000 candidates take the May examinations each year; more than half come from the USA, 10% come from Canada, and 5% come from the UK. It is a predominantly Anglophone examination. Another interesting fact: the average school candidature is about 30 students, and only about 75 schools in the world have an IB candidature of >200 students; for the November examinations, only 1 of these.

So the IB is international, as in 'spanning more than one nation and involving transactions across more than one nation'. But its presence is patchy, and that needs to be changed; in Africa, for example, the huge majority (I think 90% or more?) of IB schools are in Kenya. India and China together field only about 3000 candidates a year, while tiny Singapore sends about 1300.

I could go on. But I am not knocking the IB; rather, I am genuinely interested in its raison d'etre, how it is growing, whether it will achieve its stated goals while retaining its ideals, and how it will make itself more relevant in the less Anglo-dominant world milieu that is unfolding.

Can an educational organisation that broadly distributed have so few staff? It seems almost post-modern, to rely on schools and states to make up the deficit. That too is interesting to me. I am interested specifically in whether some day the IB will become something like an associated UN educational arm, since it is already affiliated with UNESCO. Will IB teachers be like UN peacekeepers in blue helmets?

There, I think, I am beginning to ramble. Or maybe fantasize. But universal education with the goal of making all mankind think critically and broadly is indeed some sort of dream worth dreaming, if not a fantasy.

Principal Investigator

When looking for grant money, the lead researcher is normally known as the principal investigator. It's his team, his overall concept and plan. What's amusing is the frequency with which people misspell the term 'principle investigator' — that would actually be someone who investigates principles, the basic ideas behind something.

But just as 'principle investigator' might mean 'investigator of principles', so too can 'principal investigator' mean 'investigator of principals' — that is, someone who looks into school leaders to see if they're kosher or not. This is the point that tickled me when someone recently called me 'principal investigator'.

I've never set out to be such a one. I've always been happy to contribute bits of research to a research group. And yet, these days, I am getting a lot of phone calls asking me to use my professional training and insight to analyse the performance of school principals.

About the only qualification I have for such a demanding task is the 'A' I got for a module I took a long time ago on principalship. Even then, the module was more on the mechanism of the office and how the accompanying powers might be used to effect school change through a range of human resource manoeuvres.

It was at around this point of self-denial that one of my interlocutors gave me a funny look. "Man," he said, "how much time have you spent reading and researching school management and school leaders anyway?"

Then it dawned on me. I am indeed somewhat qualified to do this because I've spent a fair amount of time on it already. I'm a lot more qualified than a layman even though I'm a lot less qualified than someone who's spent her or his whole life doing academic research on it. Maybe it helps that I've spent almost two decades working with a range of principals both as fellow-professional and slave.

And so, here I am, a principal researcher. I'm still pretty amused.

Replies from the Temple Oracles

I've spent many years researching Atlantean education. The most useful thing that the Temple of Learning did for me is that they began to put their archives online in 1997. Speeches by the hierarchs, replies in the Chamber of the People, words dispensed to the media, and so on.

But there is a game we researchers play. It's called "Spot the Answer" and it is very hard to play, because you are up against the cryptic oracular (as opposed to vernacular, I suppose) of the Temple of Learning.

What happens is this. Once in a while, a Representative of the People will ask a question about educational statistics. The High Priest of the Temple of Learning, having received the question weeks before, has a response prepared. But it is one that has gone through the oracular system of the junior priests, hierophants, sycophants, whatever phantasmal entities live in the ecosystem below him.

So the question might be: "Were the results of the last examination satisfactory?"

And the response might be: "They were neither better nor worse than those of the year before. Here they are, that you might see for yourself."

Now, one might fault the questioner for asking a question that prompted an irrelevant response (or semi-relevant response). However, sometimes the question too is altered in the interests of not providing an answer in the response.

It is true that the Temples of Atlantis are now more open to the people. But this openness is one akin to that of a large department store, which having more space, decides to put all its stock on display.

There is no new stock, and sometimes there are no directions (although one generally knows what stock is on which floor). The most irritating thing is asking a question like, "Where do I find cotton shirts?" and receiving the response, "Shirts we have many, and cotton we have much, and we will show many things to you, for lo and behold there are indeed many wonderful things and we will list them for you, but cotton-picking is not our forte."

You can imagine my dismay when many asked the question, "When can we withdraw our Completely Protected Funds?" and were told, "As you age, so do you receive. Yet not all that glisters is gold, and not all that is yours is yours. But be happy, O people, that what you thought was yours is given to other people to be theirs and not theirs at the same time."

Research Engines, Morality and Ethics

What pains me, a child of the 1960s, is that this age of humanity provides so many more resources than the age of my birth — but people don't seem to use them as much as they should. Take for example this choice paragraph that an acquaintance of mine (to my thinly disguised horror) produced in the course of a discussion:

You say there is 'medical ethics' and 'legal ethics' but no 'medical morality' and 'legal morality' but I say we use 'medically moral' and 'legally moral'. I raise the possibility that this may be that due to Zipfian distributions in English, leading to the words being used interchangeably in when sentences are constructed differently.

The discussion was about the distinction between morality and ethics. I asserted that there were clear empirical distinctions; that is, humans in general have a sense that the terms are not completely interchangeable. Behind my assertion is my belief, on empirical grounds, that the two terms have nuances that are sufficiently different that they overlap somewhat but far from completely.

Now, anyone can check our claims using Google as a measure of modern usage. If the terms used receive roughly the same order of magnitude of hits, you can assume that they are roughly as frequently used. Furthermore, Zipf's law is an empirical finding that the frequency rank of popularity is inversely proportionate to the number of hits in a sample. With this information, anyone can carry out a crude test of his own or someone else's assertion very easily.

Obviously, my interlocutor didn't think of doing this. Here is what I found with Google alone:

• medical ethics (1.84 m hits)
• legal ethics (1.44 m hits)
• medically moral (103 hits)
• medical morality (27.4 k hits)
• legally moral (575 hits)
• legal morality (11.3 k hits)

Clearly, ethics and morality are not interchangeable in terms of frequency of use. But what about Zipfian distribution? Perhaps what he was trying to say was that 'morality' was the 2nd or 3rd ranked term (in order of preference) after 'ethics' in this context. That is, it should appear with 1/2 the frequency or 1/3 the frequency.

Well, a quick look at the data shows that the relative frequency is 1/100 or so, which is clearly a) of a different order of magnitude, and b) would rank the terms as somewhere roughly between 64 and 128 positions apart. In other words, his assertion is probably false at a high level of confidence — morality cannot be substituted for ethics in such cases.

So why do people conflate morality and ethics? It boils down to a lack of historical context. The Romans translated the Greek ethikos as Latin mores without realising that to the Greeks, ethikos implied the customary conduct of a person within a polis as imposed by a city-state's sociocultural milieu. That is where the confusion came from, because to a Roman, mores/moralis was more about individual character and self-moderated behaviour towards society.

That is why 'morality' should refer to attitudes and behaviours towards society, arising from the basis of personal choice — the term is aesthetic or 1st person in nature, whereas 'ethics' should refer to the behaviours and conduct that a group of people consider normally acceptable (whether or not individuals might have reservations). It is as easy as that, and while etymologists and philosophers still have some hairs to split, the point remains that these distinctions are validated by extremely widespread usage.

Integrated Programmes (Part I): We Had Lift-Off Or So We Thought

Integration is the opposite of differentiation. What then can we make of a system that creates integrated programmes for students while claiming to differentiate students? Analogically, it would seem that the programme is designed to reduce the amount of information by letting students go through more years of undifferentiating education.

In Atlantis, an 'integrated programme' is one which removes high-stakes examinations between primary school and university, so that only two main examinations remain: a primary school streaming examination and a senior high terminal examination such as the A-levels or IB Diploma. The results of the former examination are now often circumvented by something called the DSA (Direct School Admissions, not to be confused with the ISA, which does not stand for Indirect School Admissions), which are criteria cooked up by individual schools to allow them to admit students they like and exclude students they don't.

Three integrated programmes were launched at the end of 2003. The Citadel of the Wyverns, the Gryphon Academy, and the Temple of Flaming Books (recalling a certain Chinese Emperor) all started off with their own quaint notions of what they could do with time not spent preparing for a third main examination at the end of the 10th grade. I say quaint, because not much was new about these new programmes—some of their features were Victorian and some even more antiquarian than that.

Perhaps the most interesting thing was the degree to which educators, given free rein and liberty to be creative, failed to do much that was extraordinary or novel. Rather, a lot of stuff was lifted from other sources, repackaged, and smushed (for want of a better, more aptly onomatopoeic word) together to create something very much like existing Grade 10 programmes with a few extra bells and whistles but not so many tassels and hassles.

The second most interesting thing was the research that came out of it. The Citadel was dead against having any research done (especially by its own people), but the Hierarchs of Atlantean Learning had decreed that some research should be — and so, some was. The Academy was just as resistant, but quietly did some of their own. The Temple did a lot of their own, and made sure every one of their students could recite the key information points (KIPs) when asked.

This research had not been released to the public yet, when it was claimed by the Hierarchs that such programmes were all brilliant, exciting, stimulating, good for the youth of Athens Atlantis and so on. And because they were so good, all remaining major high schools should be made to do the same thing.

The resultant Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, a jerky and discombobulating affair (and a true Nutcracker Suite) which is still unfolding, has been (and will continue to be) affording educational observers with much amusement.

But I would like to point out one very important finding: people who have gone through an Integrated Programme do not show significant superiority (and that's putting it mildly) over those who have not when they sit for their terminal qualification examinations. The superiority of Integrated Programmes must therefore be in non-academic areas, but that is even more difficult to prove — perhaps almost as difficult to prove as the contention that having a programme specially for Gifted and Talented Atlanteans will prevent some final catastrophic crisis.

Only time will tell. And Khronos, unlike Kronos, is a very quiet and subtle Power.

The Teaching Machine

I remember the days in a certain school when the staffing levels were such that every year, the school magazine could fit on a single page all the information on who had joined, who had left, who had got married or spawned or suffered a death in the family. One year, I leafed through the latest magazine, only to realise that the information on who had joined and who had left was... missing.

That is when I got curious. So I asked the (ahem) Human Resource Department (which, as my better half reminds me, normally exists to treat humans like resources and not humans). Apparently, that sent up a warning flare, hoisted a red flag, and gained me a black mark. They told me nothing. So I resorted to a very simple method.

I got out the phone extensions list for the previous year. Then I got out the phone extensions list for the current year. And I painstakingly cancelled all the names that appeared on both lists. That is when I realised why all the information was missing. The 'exchange rate' was too high to publish without looking as if the school was becoming a rather unhappy place.

It has often been said (and so far, I've not reliably found a first attribution for it) that teaching is a profession that eats its young. My examination of a certain school also threw up two interesting things: the profession sometimes mummifies and varnishes its older members, and sometimes, it summarily mortifies and vanishes others. According to several studies, the main determining factor as to how a given member is treated is whether that person gets along well with the principal or not.

You see, my dear friends out there who have just become teachers, the key competency is not how well you teach, but how well you get on with the principal. Think about it, and if you ever get to become a principal, try not to use that as a criterion for teacher retention. I say this with forlorn hope, because the studies also show that when people become principals, their value systems are very likely to change so that loyalty and conformity become much more valued traits.

And that, I think, is the best way to explain why school magazines can sometimes reveal things about the teaching machine, and how it works. There's a long and interesting article here, if you're interested. And of course, a careful look at one specific edition of a certain school's magazines will also reveal something a lot like this.

I've always enjoyed taking machines apart to find out what makes them tick. Now, when I do it, people call it 'educational research'. Sometimes, in my more lucid moments, I wonder what kind of research is not educational. Haha.

Who Coined 'Globalization'?

According to my friend at St Hilda's, who enterprisingly turned to the OED during my rant, the first use of the word 'globalization' was way back in 1930, by W Boyd and M M Mackenzie, and not by Theodore Levitt in 1983. However, a lot of American commentators (it seems a stretch to call them researchers under the circumstances) still claim that Levitt was the first one to use the term — this despite the fact that shortly after his death in 2006, the New York Times appended a correction to his obituary which denied this claim.

In this age of the Internet, I was able to find uses of the actual word 'globalization' at least as far back as 1959, with claims dating back to 1944, within ten minutes of beginning my search. When a key commentator in my field, such as Joel Spring, gets it wrong, it makes me wonder how on earth I am ever going to bulletproof my research. (In his defence, he cited this from another colleague, who cited the OECD. Ho ho.)

It is A G Hopkins's 2002 book, Globalization in World History (Pimlico/Random House), that I have found most useful so far. It divides the phenomenon into historical phases — archaic, proto-, modern, and post-colonial — tracing its origins back to the pre-industrial Chinese diaspora which first created a global economy and shook the foundations of the world.

Of course, the difference between Spring and Hopkins is that the former is an educationist and the latter is an historian. Educationists, unfortunately, are often so focused on the idea of education that they have been known to ignore the facts. Historians, on the other hand, have been known to obsess about facts so much that some have ignored education.

I do think, however, that all educators should be historians, even if not all historians educate. It is hard to think about educating anybody without knowing something about history — especially in this age of the globalization of knowledge-based disciplines.

Thinkering

The problem with tinkering is that you spend too much time reflecting and mucking around with something. You get to know your material and its behaviour very well, but at some point, you begin to forget what you really set out to do.

This is why you should complete a master's thesis in under two years and a doctoral thesis in under five years. Beyond that, it's all rather frustrating because you have gone into a 'look, another nice shineeee piece to add!' mode and have forgotten that you don't need all the nice shineeee pieces and could perhaps save them for another sculpture.

Sigh.

Sooo... What Makes a Good School?

Let's just look at the question in terms of how a school is run, and not in the complex cultural terms that would entail a look at the roles of tradition, alumni, mission, philosophy, and other social dynamics that are often linked with a long history.

David Tyack in his landmark work The One Best System (Harvard University, 1974) cautioned us against looking for a magic formula that would apply to all schools. His survey covered the entire history of urban education in the US, and showed both the successes and failures of the various systems that the 'US education system' really was.

Much more recently, a consortium (Bryk, Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu & Easton) has come out with Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons From Chicago (University of Chicago, 2010), an interesting look at the Chicagoan educational landscape of about 500 schools from 1990 to 2005. They've identified five main points which lead to the success of urban schools (at least in Chicago):

1. Strong leadership, in the sense that principals are “strategic, focused on instruction, and inclusive of others in their work”;
2. A welcoming attitude toward parents, and formation of connections with the community;
3. Development of professional capacity, which refers to the quality of the teaching staff, teachers’ belief that schools can change, and participation in good professional development and collaborative work;
4. A learning climate that is safe, welcoming, stimulating, and nurturing to all students; and
5. Strong instructional guidance and materials.

I think my immediate response (quite apart from the 'ah, another elite US university study that the innocent will think applies to urban centres worldwide' response) was that I didn't see anything new in this piece of work. Indeed, Education Week seems to say (subscription required) that what makes this book different is the level of detail and the amount of data collected.

How disappointing. But then again, what else could be expected?

There are several things that are missing from this list. Here's an example: controlling your intake. In these days of political correctness, the idea of elitism is a no-no. But let's face it, if you had some sort of meritocratic basis for selection, you could have nothing but students who are above-average in producing results. Then you would have a successful urban school. And if you have students who are good at it, a principal can pay less attention to those aspects they are good at and develop other aspects, thus enabling his school to tack on the 'holistic education' label which I find so reprehensible.

But just like any other post-colonial output (by which I mean that which is put out after the colon does its job), your intake is the key to the fragrance of success. Control that, and you will be able to produce good regular output. It will be a programme that is breath-taking in its simplicity, smooth in its processes, consistent (also coherent and cohesive) in its product quality. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Well, that was the gratuitous post-colonial joke out of the way. But seriously, there is nothing new at all in this latest book. It's probably an excellent piece of research that tells us a lot about Chicagoan elementary schools, but it tells us nothing that we have not already learnt about schools in general. And as usual, it leaves the special development of lead teaching staff who are also administrators to the realm of the implicit.

Almost every piece on school success talks about principals and teachers. The point is that in most schools, there are at least two extra layers: between the principal and the teachers, the senior teaching staff who are also educational leaders and who actually are directly responsible for large chunks of the five factors mentioned; and the service staff who support the physical endeavour — janitors, custodians, IT support professionals, the secretariat, PR, HR, finance staff, and so on.

As far as I know, the only paper that talks about the neglected first extra layer is here and I haven't actually found one on the neglected second extra layer. Anybody know where such things might be found?

Indirect Thinking

Let's take a look at a hypothetical case, the subject of a thesis in the field of education. Supposing you have a school whose results are among the best in the world, statistically speaking. To what might you attribute the cause of this happy state?

Asking this about the results is somewhat similar to evaluation of any product. The logical causes are the management, manpower, materials, machines, or methods. There might be some overlap, but these generally fall into separate categories.

Then five kinds of research problems might be said to arise, one for each of these putative causes. You need to see if any of these is sufficiently and provably superior to the equivalent somewhere else in order to possibly attribute good results to it.

In the case of my research, extensive brain-contorting (and sometimes brain-convulsing) work has shown that I can only prove the case for one of these categories.

And yet, in the general media and in our general way of thinking, we tend to attribute success to the other four categories more than we attribute success to this one. Why?

Perhaps, the problem with schools is the self-fulfilling nature of education. It's easy to show that superior students produce superior results. What we'd like to know is if they are superior in any other ways besides previous results, and how they got that way. Are they smarter, do they drink more coffee, have they got richer parents, are they motivated by fear (or pride, or greed, or any other one of a thousand human motivations)?

When a school spends huge amounts of money on staff, structures, and administrators, how can it be shown that this has any impact on the final result? And yet, people assume that it has.

In some cases, this is easier to show: a science lab or a dance studio are strongly facilitating aids to improvement in their respective disciplines. In some cases, this is harder to show: can a 35-year-old ex-government policy wonk do better than a grizzled 67-year-old matriarch as a school leader? Do oak panels depicting past triumphs and famous alumni encourage modern students to do better? Or is all of this simply reducible to the ancient axiom, 'Money Breeds Success'?

It would be kind of sad if I had to reduce my answers to the two ideas that a) people with good previous results tend to produce good future results in the same general area, and b) money breeds success. I would have done no better than many previous generations of researchers, then.

But hold on, you might say. How about all the examples that buck the trend? The poor minority kid who becomes valedictorian, the uncouth gangster who becomes a leader, the ramshackle makeshift hut that becomes a centre of great learning? What about the rich kids that flunk out, the expensive schools that flop?

I'd have to say, "Exactly." They buck the trend, they are newsworthy precisely because they are some distance away from the norm. The statistics don't lie. Live in a rich estate, go to an expensive school, you'll do better academically. You'll do better in life too.

Yet, there is one small factor that gives hope to the rest of us. It's sometimes the case that a person from a less-advantaged background can show superlative success because of a rare confluence of factors: seizing a rare opportunity, showing great personal drive, having enough coffee, and so on. This success may have vastly disproportionate effect across time, thus shifting things enough for society to change somewhat.

It is this sort of success story that partly drives the altruist in us. The human altruist (teacher, doctor, pastor) doesn't mind providing services to anyone. But somehow, it's a lot more satisfying when someone makes maximal use of such services to do far more than you'd expect from the statistics. I don't mind teaching smart kids who assume they are smart all day — it's great if they learn to be smarter or if they learn that 'smart' is something that they were taking too much for granted. It's even better, though, when people who kept telling themselves they weren't smart suddenly realise that they are smarter, and can be even smarter. (Yes, however you want to define 'smart'. What I mean is 'good at something'.)

And it's best when the norms are shifted so that there is a broader range of successes. Which leads me to one last point about schools. A school should be able to take in anybody and help that person become a better person. What a school shouldn't be doing (unless compelled to by higher authority) is to deliberately deny students who look like they are going to be harder to teach. Without these students, how on earth are teachers going to learn? Heh.

Educational Research is a Crapshoot

In my inbox today, I found a piece of educational research which made me gasp in delighted horror:

Whiteboards' Impact on Teaching Seen as Uneven: While experts see whiteboards as powerful tools for improving instruction, teachers vary widely in their ability to use them effectively.

No, really? Haha, you could substitute 'whiteboards' with anything used in the classroom, and get the same conclusion. It's the teachers' ability to use anything effectively that is the main factor in teaching impact, not the type of tool. Morons.

Which leads me to the other thing that caught my eye — the use of the word 'crapshoot'. The etymology of this term is fascinating. 'Crap', like 'scrap', is one of a bunch of words that describe cast-offs, stuff thrown away after separation from the stuff that is useful. 'Shooting craps' is playing a dice game in which rolling the right numbers gets you something and all else is 'crap' — normally a roll of 2 or 3 on two dice.

It's also interesting to compare this to the etymology of 'raffles': late 14c., from O.Fr. rafle "dice game," also "plundering," perhaps from a Gmc. source (cf. M.Du. raffel "dice game," O.Fris. hreppa "to move," O.N. hreppa "to reach, get," Ger. raffen "to snatch away, sweep off"), from P.Gmc. *khrap- "to pluck out, snatch off." The notion would be "to sweep up (the stakes), to snatch (the winnings)." (Taken from my favourite etymology site.)

The reason this is related to educational research is Thomas Kühn, famed for his ideas on paradigmatic change in the sciences. Kühn talked about a situation in which there were plenty of scientists but no science, occurring when the vocabulary used by people doing research had not stabilised (i.e. not enough common definitions) and hence there was no way to conduct peer-reviewed or objective (objectivised?) analysis.

In other words, you have to restrict meaning artificially (and remove the rest as 'crap') or else you have no meaning. But you never know if your restrictions are meaningful — you restrict meaning solely so that you can conduct fruitful dialogues with others.

This is the real reason why educational research is a crapshoot. You throw the dice, discard what looks unnecessary, keep the good rolls. You record all the good rolls and pretend that this is all you need. On the face of it, there are more non-bad rolls than bad rolls. But what people often don't realise is that there are a lot of rolls that don't do anything at all, or which terminate a sequence but don't add value.

Nobody really knows how much value education adds to people except in terms of other social constructs which we don't really know the value of either — things like money, reputation, knowledge, power. But we have to assign values to all of these, because otherwise, our tenuous hold on human reality weakens and we either spin free of the maelstrom or are sucked under. Most of us prefer to just spin around in the whirlpool until our time is up.

The Inconstant Gardner

Quite a while ago, I remember reading a book by John Le Carré called The Constant Gardener. At that time, it struck me that something was wrong about the title. It wasn't until a while had passed that I realised what had been bugging me.

The thing that was bugging me was the beatification of 'St Howard Gardner', a phenomenon which is truly catholic in its application over a wide range of school systems and abortive attempts at educational enhancement. In Gardner's book, Intelligence Reframed, he confesses his alarm at seeing the implementation of a mishmash of his own ideas. This, to my mind, was one of the pieces of evidence that Gardner never intended to be this far down the road to canonization.

That book, published in 2000, was yet another of his many revised standard versions of his one big idea — that of multiple intelligences. He began by deciding there were roughly three areas of intelligence, more or less corresponding to the ancient criteria of truth, beauty and goodness. Then he extended this to five, then seven, then eight and a half, and so on. The only thing that remained constant about his idea was the concept that there were several (an indeterminate number of) kinds of intelligences.

The empirical fact, as anyone can tell you, is that humanity is so varied and complex that there are an infinite number of expressions of intelligence, all of which fit one criterion: the thing done is considered by other humans to be an intelligent deed. It is so circularly defined that there is actually no meaningful standard for intelligence; Arthur Clarke, inventor of the geosynchronous satellite, was moved to say, "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."

The only reason we continue to attempt to canonize the blessed Howard is that it is so much more convenient to categorize subjects and intelligences. The two things are related. We tend to say things like, "He's a genius at organic chemistry," and, "She's brilliant at thermal physics."

Such statements imply that the intelligence involved is highly specialised, and that perhaps the person referred to could be differently competent in some other area. But these areas themselves are artificial subdivisions of artificial divisions of knowledge. It is always amusing to get teachers, for example, to define their areas of knowledge — and then without pause, to goad them into explaining what is defined by these areas, and what they contain that is qualitatively different in terms of values and ideas related to humanity.

(For example, ask a teacher to define 'Chemistry' and then ask what Chemistry defines, and what it is about Chemistry that makes it different from any other subject in terms of values and the useful general skills. Most of them wouldn't be able to give you a definitive answer — that is, one which did not require further elaboration.)

When writing student references, the most useless thing is actually the students' grades in different subjects. These tell you nothing at all about the person as a human being. On the face of it, they should be able to tell you how industrious or intelligent the student is; actually, some reflection will tell you that they tell you nothing of the sort. Consider a person who gets a top grade for History: what does it tell you about this person, apart from the naked fact that this person was able to give answers on a specific day of a specific year that met a certain arbitrary standard?

This is why anyone who tries to sell you a multiple intelligences model should be slapped around a few times. All you need to do is ask him, "Would you consent to be evaluated in terms of this model?" Then you make him do a bunch of random meaningless things and ask him to evaluate himself by questionnaire. The result will have more in common with his self-image than with his actual level of performance when measured against the population at large.

Vicarious, Wakeful

I'm sitting around at 3 am figuring out why it is that I am elated for the sake of some student I haven't really come to know very well. This student posts that the Extended Essay, all 4000 words of it, which has been festering like some radiant pustule for a very long time, is done. It is 'ready to ship', as they say.

I realise that this is a good thing. And although I am not quite experiencing the same thing, I am happy for that student. I can only hope that on the day my own dissertation is done, all 120000 words of it, which has been festering like some radioactive boil for a very long time, that people are equally happy for me.

OK, back to work.