The ideological minefield

A couple of days ago, I received an email through my author website that started out, "Are you by any chance the Gordon Bonnet who taught science at Finn Hill Junior High in 1987?"

It turned out that it was indeed from a former student of mine, from the very first year of my teaching career, who (alarmingly!) just turned fifty years old.  When I confirmed that I was the guy, he sent me a heartwarming response about how he had made a career working for the National Parks Service as a wilderness educator, and that his love of nature had in no small part been due to my being his teacher when he was in ninth grade.

This sort of thing is why teachers do what they do.  I can say from my own experience that three teachers -- my high school biology and creative writing teachers, and my college calculus professor -- changed my life in hugely positive ways.  But the glow of receiving that email from my former student was dimmed somewhat by the knowledge that if I were in college right now, I would never -- not in a million years -- choose teaching as a profession, and that's after a 32-year career that, all in all, was pleasant and successful.  Not only would I not recommend the profession to anyone, I would counsel current teachers to keep their options open about finding other ways to use their talents to make a living.

[Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of Michael Anderson (Photographer), Children in a classroom]

The reason is that public education has been turned into an ideological minefield by self-serving demagogues, through the cold, calculated characterization of schools as supposed "hotbeds of indoctrination."  The far right has taken steps -- thus far, scarily successful ones -- to muzzle teachers, stifle their creativity, and prevent them from doing the job they were hired to do with any degree of autonomy.  

This is not a new trend.  I still remember when the New York State Department of Education launched the infamous "Common Core," twelve years ago or so, with the aim of trying to create a curriculum that guaranteed all students receive a certain standard set of information and skills.  While few would argue with that aim as an ideal, the implementation was not only chaotic, it attempted to solve the "standard curriculum" issue by forcing teachers into lockstep -- handing them scripts, each with a certain number of minutes they were to devote to particular topics.  It never went any further than English and math; fortunately for me, by the time they got to science, a lot of the momentum had fizzled, and what they gave us was nothing more than a weakly-revamped version of what we already had.

It's a good thing.  When I saw what was happening in English and math, I said -- in the middle of a faculty meeting -- "the day New York State hands me a script and expects me not to deviate from it will be my last day on the job."

You go through years of training, then undergo a rigorous vetting process wherein you have to demonstrate how creative and competent and knowledgeable you are, and then the b-b stackers in the Department of Education hand you a script to read.  It's maddening... and deeply insulting.

Since that time, it's only gotten worse.  The obvious example is the state of Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis has forced teachers to dismantle or make inaccessible their classroom libraries until each book can be approved by a media specialist.  The ostensible reason is to make sure they're classroom-appropriate -- not only at the correct reading level, but that they don't have material unsuitable for the age of the student.  Just as with the Common Core, the stated goal sounds laudable enough.  Nobody's arguing for students having age-inappropriate material.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist, however, to figure out that this isn't actually about reading level.  From DeSantis's previous commitment to "anti-wokeness" there's little doubt that the whole thing is a smokescreen for what is largely an ideological move.  What likelihood do you think there is of the state-hired "media specialists" approving a book that displays LGBTQ characters in a positive light?  Or presents a realistic picture of what life was and is like for minorities, especially after his recent (successful) demand that Florida schools drop an AP African American Studies course?

The situation in Florida is that a teacher having copies of Knots on a Counting Rope (about growing up Native American) or The List of Things That Will Not Change (about a child being raised by two dads) available for students would be risking prosecution.  (Yes, both of those have already been banned in Florida schools -- along with 174 others, including the biographies of Rosa Parks, Sonia Sotomayor, Jim Thorpe, Roberto Clemente, Harvey Milk, and Jackie Robinson.  Don't even try to tell me this isn't about ideology.)

Then, a disingenuous CNN story yesterday feigned shock over the fact that in many places in the United States, there's been such a massive exodus of teachers that some schools are finding it hard to keep their doors open.  Gee whiz, I wonder why that could be?  In fact, in Florida they've recently created a "new pathway" for teaching positions to be filled by individuals who don't even have a bachelor's degree in the subject they're teaching.  The Florida Department of Education (speaking of disingenuous) not only claims this has nothing to do with the governor's anti-teacher campaign, but denies there's a teacher shortage at all.   "The purpose of this new pathway," a spokesperson said, "was to value the unique experience military service provides while simply offering additional time for these veterans to obtain a bachelor’s degree and other requirements to receive a full professional educator certification."

I'm calling bullshit on this.  Many candidates with excellent credentials are avoiding going into education, and who can blame them?  What highly-qualified individuals in their right mind would want to step into a position where they're devalued and harassed, robbed of autonomy, paid like crap, subjected to arbitrary decisions by policymakers who have never spent ten seconds in front of a group of students, and then threatened with prosecution for addressing the diversity in their own classrooms and presenting history that isn't blatantly whitewashed?  For me -- and again, I say this as a retired career educator who, by and large, had a great run -- it's a case of, "Turn and run.  Fast."

It's blatantly obvious where this is going; if you hobble educators to the point that teachers resign and public schools close, the only options for parents will be private, for-pay schools (including religious ones) where administrators have free rein to promote whatever kind of worldview they choose.  This, of course, has been the goal of the far right for as long as I can recall.  The idea of an egalitarian, even-handed public school system, where there is a set of brakes on ideologically-biased curricula, has been under fierce attack for decades.  (And it bears mention that far from being the alleged hotbeds of indoctrination the far right claims, in my thirty-plus of teaching, I only met two teachers -- one right-wing, the other left -- who honestly spent time trying to shift their students' political leanings.  Neither one, I might add, was particularly successful.  The rest of us teachers were too busy trying to get our students to reach a level of competence in our subjects to spend our time preaching politics.)

It breaks my heart to write this, but it has to be said, and said loudly.  What Ron DeSantis and others are engaging in is the classic technique of accusing the opposition of what they themselves are doing.  In this case, creating classrooms that promote a specific ideology, that turn what used to be a creative, rewarding profession into something intended to produce lockstep automata -- both the teachers and the students.

And unless things change, fast, my advice to any prospective teachers is to find some other way to help improve the world.  Because right now, the system is set up to destroy the very reasons most of us were drawn to education in the first place.

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The catalyst

When I was in eleventh grade, I took a class called Modern American Literature.

To say I was a lackluster English lit student is something of an understatement.  I did well enough in science and math, but English and history were pretty much non-starters.  I took the class because I was forced to choose -- one thing my high school had going for it was that each student developed his/her English program from a smorgasbord of semester-long classes, which ranged from Mythology to Sports Literature to Literature in Film to Syntax & Semantics -- but that semester I kind of just closed my eyes and pointed.

So Modern American Literature it was.

One of the assignments was to choose one from a list of novels to read and analyze.  I found that I didn't have a very good basis to make my decision, because although I'd heard some of the titles and recognized a few of the authors' names, I didn't really know much about any of them.  So once again taking my "what the hell does it matter?" approach, I picked one.

It was Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  Over the next two weeks, I read it, and I can say without any exaggeration that I've never seen things the same way since.

The story is set in 1714 in Peru, and opens with an accident.  Five people are walking on a rope bridge across a chasm when, without any warning, the ropes come loose and all five fall to their deaths in the river below.  A Franciscan friar, Brother Juniper, witnesses the disaster -- in fact, he'd been about to cross the bridge himself -- and this starts him wondering why God chose those five, and no others, to die that day.  

So Brother Juniper embarks on a quest to try to parse the mind of God.  There had to be some discernible commonality, some factor that united all five victims.  God, Brother Juniper believed, never acts at random.  There's always a reason for everything that happens.  So surely the devout, with enough prayer and study, should be able to figure out why this had occurred.

He searches out people who knew the victims, finds out who they were -- good, bad, or middling, young or old, devout or doubting.  What circumstances led each of them to decide to cross the bridge at that time?  Each was brought to that point by a series of events that could easily have gone differently; after all, if God had wanted to spare one of them, all he would have had to do was engineer a five-minute delay in their arrival at the bridgehead.

Or, in Brother Juniper's own case, speed him up by five minutes, if he'd been destined to die.

In either case, it would have been easy for an omnipotent power to alter the course of events.  So that power must have had a reason for letting things work out the way they did.

But in the end, after going into the histories of the five victims, and considering his own life, he realizes that there is no discernible reason.  There's no logic, no correlation, no pattern.  His conclusion is that either the mind of God is so subtle that there's no way a human would ever be able to comprehend it, or there are no ultimate causes, that things simply happen because they happen.  He feels that he has to communicate this to others, and writes a book about what he's learned...

... and it is promptly labeled as heresy by the Inquisition.  After a trial in which the Inquisitors attempt unsuccessfully to get Brother Juniper to recant what they perceive as his errors and lack of faith, he is burned at the stake, along with all the copies of his book.

It's a devastating conclusion.  It rattled me badly; I spent weeks afterward thinking about it.  And I never looked at the world the same way afterward.

Burned at the Stake, woodcut engraving by Ottmar Elliger (early eighteenth century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The reason I bring this up is a bill that just received Senate approval in Florida that would prohibit schools from using curricula that causes students to "feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin."  On that basis, I would never have had the opportunity to read Wilder's book when I was in eleventh grade, solely because it made me uncomfortable.

This idea is so completely wrong-headed that I hardly know where to start.  One of the purposes of good books (not to mention honest instruction in history) is to shake you up, make you reconsider what you'd believed, push you to understand things that sometimes are unsettling.  I don't consider my own writing High Literature by any stretch, but I think that any book, regardless of genre, succeeds only by virtue of how it makes you think and feel.  If you reach the last page of a book and haven't changed at all since you opened it, the book has failed.  As my favorite author, Haruki Murakami, said, "If you only read the books everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

And this may make you feel "discomfort and anguish."  But sometimes that's what we need to feel.  Note that I'm not saying you have to overhaul your political and religious beliefs every time you read a book, but if it doesn't even make you think about them, something's wrong.  As I used to tell my Critical Thinking students, you might leave the class on the last day of school with your beliefs unchanged, but don't expect to leave with them unchallenged.

It's the difference between teaching and indoctrination, isn't it?  Odd that indoctrination is supposedly what this bill is designed to prevent, when in reality, that's exactly what it accomplishes.  Don't consider our history critically; if something from the past makes you feel uncomfortable, then either don't teach it or else pretend it didn't happen (which amounts to the same thing).  Everything our forebears did was just hunky-dory because they were Americans.  

How far is that from the Deutschland über Alles philosophy of the Nazis?  Small step, seems to me.

We should be reading books that upset us.  Not only does this allow us to understand the past through the eyes of an author who sees things differently than we do, it opens our own eyes to how we got where we are -- and how we can make sure atrocities don't happen again.  Books like The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Elie Wiesel's Night, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, Richard Wright's Native Son, and William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying succeed because they do make us upset.  (All of the above, by the way, have a history of being banned by school boards.)

Good books should make you respond with more than just a self-satisfied "yes, we are all awesome, aren't we?"  They should be catalysts for your brain, not anesthetics.  It's not fun to realize that even our Founding Fathers and national heroes weren't all the paragons they're portrayed as, and our history isn't the proud parade toward freedom the sponsors of the Florida bill would like you to believe.  But discomfort, just like physical pain, exists for a reason; both are warnings, signaling you to think about what you're doing, and do something to fix the problem.  We gain nothing as a society by accepting sanctimonious ease over the hard work of understanding.

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Since reading the classic book by Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, when I was a freshman in college, I've been fascinated by the idea of looking at human behavior as if we were just another animal -- anthropology, as it were, through the eyes of an alien species.  When you do that, a lot of our sense of specialness and separateness simply evaporates.

The latest in this effort to analyze our behavior from an outside perspective is Pascal Boyer's Human Cultures Through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology.  Why do we engage in rituals?  Why is religion nearly universal to all human cultures -- as is sports?  Where did the concept of a taboo come from, and why is it so often attached to something that -- if you think about it -- is just plain weird?

Boyer's essays challenge us to consider ourselves dispassionately, and really think about what we do.  It's a provocative, fascinating, controversial, and challenging book, and if you're curious about the phenomenon of culture, you should put it on your reading list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The eyes have it

A friend of mine has characterized the teaching of science in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college as follows:

1. Elementary school: Here's how it works!  There are a couple of simple rules.
2. Middle school: Okay, it's not quite that simple.  Here are a few exceptions to the simple rules.
3. High school: Those exceptions aren't actually exceptions, it's just that there are a bunch more rules.
4. College: Here are papers written studying each of those "rules," and it turns out some are probably wrong, and analysis of the others has raised dozens of other questions.

This is pretty close to spot-on. The universe is a complicated place, and it's inevitable that to introduce children to science you have to simplify it considerably.  A seventh grader could probably understand and be able to apply F = ma, but you wouldn't get very far if you started out the with the equations of quantum electrodynamics.

But there are good ways to do this and bad ways.  Simplifying concepts and omitting messy complications is one thing; telling students something that is out-and-out false because it's familiar and sounds reasonable is quite another.  And there is no example of this that pisses me off more than the intro-to-genetics standard that brown eye color in humans is a Mendelian dominant allele, and the blue-eyed allele is recessive.

How many of you had your first introduction to Mendel's laws from a diagram like this one?

This is one of those ideas that isn't so much an oversimplification as it is ridiculously wrong.  Any reasonably intelligent seventh-grader would see this and immediately realize that not only do different people's brown and blue eyes vary in hue and darkness, there are hazel eyes, green eyes, gray eyes, and various combos -- hazel eyes with green flecks, for example.  Then there's heterochromia -- far more common in dogs than in humans -- where the iris of the right eye has a dramatically different color than the left.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons AWeith, Sled dog on Svalbard with heterochromia, CC BY-SA 4.0]

When I taught genetics, I found that the first thing I usually had to get my students to do was to unlearn the things they'd been taught wrong, with eye color inheritance at the top of the list.  (Others were that right-handedness is dominant -- in fact, we have no idea how handedness is inherited; that red hair is caused by a recessive allele; and that dark skin color is dominant.)  In fact, even some traits that sorta-kinda-almost follow a Mendelian pattern, such as hitchhiker's thumb, cleft chin, and attached earlobes, aren't as simple as they might seem.

But there's nowhere that the typical middle-school approach to genetics misses the mark quite as badly as it does with eye color.  While it's clearly genetic in origin -- most physical traits are -- the actual mechanism should rightly be put in that unfortunate catch-all stuffed away in the science attic:

"Complex and poorly understood."

The good news, though, and what prompted me to write this, is a paper this week in Science Advances that might at least deal with some of the "poorly understood" part.  A broad-ranging study of people from across Europe and Asia found that eye color in the people studied was caused by no fewer than sixty-one different gene loci.  Each of these controls some part of pigment creation and/or deposition, and the variation in these loci from population to population is why the variation in eye appearance seems virtually infinite.

The authors write:

Human eye color is highly heritable, but its genetic architecture is not yet fully understood.   We report the results of the largest genome-wide association study for eye color to date, involving up to 192,986 European participants from 10 populations.  We identify 124 independent associations arising from 61 discrete genomic regions, including 50 previously unidentified.  We find evidence for genes involved in melanin pigmentation, but we also find associations with genes involved in iris morphology and structure.  Further analyses in 1636 Asian participants from two populations suggest that iris pigmentation variation in Asians is genetically similar to Europeans, albeit with smaller effect sizes.  Our findings collectively explain 53.2% (95% confidence interval, 45.4 to 61.0%) of eye color variation using common single-nucleotide polymorphisms.  Overall, our study outcomes demonstrate that the genetic complexity of human eye color considerably exceeds previous knowledge and expectations, highlighting eye color as a genetically highly complex human trait.

And note that even this analysis only explained a little more than half of the observed variation in human eye color.

Like I said, it's not that middle-school teachers should start their students off with a paper from Science Advances.  I usually began with a few easily-observable traits from the sorta-kinda-Mendelian list, like tongue rolling and hitchhiker's thumb.  These aren't quite as simple as they're usually portrayed, but at least calling them Mendelian isn't so ridiculously wrong that when students find out the correct model -- most often in college -- they could accuse their teachers of lying outright.

Eye color, though.  That one isn't even Mendelian on a superficial level.  Teaching it that way is a little akin to teaching elementary students that 2+2=5 and figuring that's close enough for now and can be refined later.  So to teachers who still use brown vs. blue eye color as their canonical example of a dominant and recessive allele:

Please find a different one.

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Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week was about the ethical issues raised by gene modification; this week's is about the person who made CRISPR technology possible -- Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna.

In The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, author Walter Isaacson describes the discovery of how the bacterial enzyme complex called CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to edit genes of other species with pinpoint precision.  Doudna herself has been fascinated with scientific inquiry in general, and genetics in particular, since her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix and she was caught up in what Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out."  The story of how she and fellow laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier developed the technique that promises to revolutionize our ability to treat genetic disorders is a fascinating exploration of the drive to understand -- and a cautionary note about the responsibility of scientists to do their utmost to make certain their research is used ethically and responsibly.

If you like biographies, are interested in genetics, or both, check out The Code Breaker, and find out how far we've come into the science-fiction world of curing genetic disease, altering DNA, and creating "designer children," and keep in mind that whatever happens, this is only the beginning.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

End of an era

Today is my last day as a classroom teacher.

We still have finals week yet to go, but for all intents and purposes, this is it.  The last day of class.  This year, when I say goodbye to my students, it's really goodbye.

I'm of two minds about retirement, which I suppose is only natural.

First, I've taught biology (and various other subjects) for 32 years, and I am seriously ready to do something different.  While I love my subject -- I still get ridiculously excited when I get to teach genetics and evolutionary biology -- there are parts of it that I will not miss.  Over three decades, and I still haven't figured out how to make The Parts of the Cell interesting.  And while I personally love biochemistry, it doesn't seem to be a Fan Favorite.

And that's putting it mildly.

I also am rather notorious in my school for my antipathy toward Staff Development.  I detest bureaucracy, and the increasing motion in New York -- and, I suspect, elsewhere in the United States -- toward micromanagement and a standardized-tests-über-alles approach to education absolutely infuriates me.  So I won't miss curriculum mapping and high-stakes exams and administrative b-b stackers who don't have the slightest clue what makes teaching vital and relevant and interesting.

But.  I still love the students.  The relationships I've formed over the years have meant a great deal to me, and the trust and interest and friendship the students have shown me are something I value more than I can put into words.  Also, that "Aha!" moment you see in kids' eyes when something finally makes sense, when suddenly some piece of the universe becomes clear to them -- there's nothing like that in the world.

The room where I spent a significant chunk of the last 27 years

I also have been privileged to work with a truly incomparable staff.  Our school district is very, very lucky, from the leadership on down to the rank-and-filers like myself.  In particular, the science department in our school is made up of incredibly talented, caring, and smart individuals, who have exactly the right attitudes toward education and have been, one and all, a delight to work with.  I'll truly miss the camaraderie.

The science department's yearbook photo this year.  We were supposed to include in the photo something that was important to us, and "make it memorable."  We nailed the latter part, at least.

There are also more specific, personal memories that I'll cherish forever.

• The moment in my Critical Thinking class a few years ago, when I was talking about how (or if) we can establish knowledge in the absence of hard evidence.  I said, "I want you right now, with what you have right here, to prove to me that pandas exist!"  And a student silently reached into her backpack... and pulled out a stuffed panda.  After we stopped laughing, I said, "You win this round."  At the end of the semester, she gave me the panda, which still sits on my desk.
• Superintendent's Conference Days.  This may come as a surprise, given my general hatred of staff development as described above -- but I always know that on conference days, the physics teacher and I get fried chicken from the village grocery store for lunch, and that chicken is damn tasty.
• My first day of teaching in Trumansburg High School, when I was teaching in three different classrooms, and second period accidentally went to the wrong one.  I started calling roll, and (of course) no one answered.  After three tries of getting someone, anyone, to answer "Here," one of the students said, in a small voice, "I think the kids you're looking for are next door."  Thereby establishing myself as slightly daffy, a reputation that still haunts me for some reason.
• The student who asked me, in complete seriousness, if Friday the 13th ever fell on a Sunday.
• The incredibly talented artist who, as part of a senior project focused on human faces, did an amazing portrait of me, which I still cherish.
• Finding out that despite my having moved here 27 years ago knowing no one, I've met two students who are distant cousins of mine.
• All the times students have asked me questions that made me step back and say, "Whoa.  I've never thought about that" -- resulting in my learning something along with them.

So all in all, it's been a good run, and retirement was a really hard decision to make.  But it's the right one at the right time.  I've got a lot of things I want to do -- writing, mostly, although I'm sure that a large part of my retirement will be occupied with "let dogs in, let dogs out, let dogs in, let dogs out" -- and I'm content with turning over the reins to a new teacher.  (Really new, in my case.  I know the person who was hired to replace me, and she's a first-year teacher, right out of the starting gate -- and is incredibly talented, dedicated, enthusiastic, and smart.  I have to admit to feeling better about leaving given that I know the students are in good hands.)

So this is it.  In a few hours, the last bell will ring on my teaching career, and that'll be that.  I'm gonna try not to cry, but we'll see how long that determination holds.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side; Jared Diamond's riveting book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  Starting with societies that sowed the seeds of their own destruction -- such as the Easter Islanders, whose denuding of the landscape led to island-wide ecological collapse -- he focuses the lens on the United States and western Europe, whose rampant resource use, apparent disregard for curbing pollution, and choice of short-term expediency over long-term wisdom seem to be pushing us in the direction of disaster.

It's not a cheerful book, but it's a very necessary one, and is even more pertinent now than when it was written in 2005.  Diamond highlights the problems we face, and warns of that threshold we're approaching toward catastrophe -- a threshold that is so subtle that we may well not notice it until it's too late to reverse course.

[If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Science, the arts, and creativity

'Tis the season for school budget votes, when school districts find out how much they're going to have to cut from the instructional program, and younger, low-seniority teachers find out if they're actually going to have a job in September.

It's a fraught time of year for anyone in education, and I say that even though it's been a very long time since I've had to worry about my job, and as a "core teacher" (more about that in a moment) I've never had any concerns about my subject being cut.  But when I see the effect this has on other teachers and the morale of the school in general, it breaks my heart.

What is even more troubling is the distinction being made between "core" classes and electives, sometimes called "specials."  The attitude is that the "core" -- English, Social Studies, Math, and Science/Technology -- is somehow more important than the other classes.  And calling the other classes "specials" is disingenuous at best; to quote Eric Idle's character in Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail, "You're not foolin' anyone, you know."  Whenever there are budget cuts, the "specials" are the first to go.  The message is that we can do without art and music and other electives, but everything else is sacrosanct.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mukul urp, CLASSROOM, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What's tragic about this is that the opposite is apparently closer to the truth.  Educational researcher Andreas Schleicher just addressed the UK House of Commons last week to bring to light this very issue -- that not only are the arts and music and so on critical because they're creative and fun and are often the high point of students' days, but they give students essential skills for flourishing in today's job market.  And since that's ordinarily the one thing the politicians accuse schools of failing at, this got some people to sit up and take note.

"I would say, in the fourth industrial revolution, arts may become more important than maths," Schleicher said.  "We talk about ‘soft skills’ often as social and emotional skills, and hard skills as about science and maths, but it might be the opposite...  the true ‘hard skills’ will be your curiosity, your leadership, your persistence and your resilience."

Schleicher also spoke out against the drill-and-test mode that is becoming the norm in the United States, and apparently in the UK as well.  He suggests that our desperation to convert everything into numbers -- what the educational policy wonks call "measurable outcomes" -- has led us to emphasize the subjects in which that's easier.  Math and science, especially, can be focused on "getting the right answer," giving you an easy metric to measure success -- if that's the kind of success you're looking for.

"When you look at the types of tasks that British students are doing better [than other countries], they are more those that are associated with the past than the future – the kind of things that are easy to teach and easy to test," Schleicher said.  "It is precisely those things that are easy to digitise...  [But] the modern world doesn’t reward you for what you know, but for what you can do with what you know."

In other words, the creativity you can bring to bear upon a problem, and your ability to see connections in disparate realms.  "Lateral thinking," it's often called.  But this is the kind of thing we educators usually fail to teach -- because it's hard to incorporate into your typical lesson, and hard to measure.  Much simpler just to keep students thinking inside the box, thinking that every problem has exactly one right answer, and (to quote another brilliant educational researcher, Sir Ken Robinson), "It's at the back of the book.  But don't look."

The saddest part, for me as a science educator, is that science itself is not usually taught as a creative endeavor.  In many classrooms, science is a list of vocabulary words and standardized solution methods, both of which could be memorized and regurgitated without any real understanding taking place.  But the truth is, the best science is highly creative, and requires a leap, questioning assumptions and looking at every piece of our understanding in the light of curiosity and exploration.

A classic example is Albert Einstein.  Before Einstein's time, physicists had been puzzled that all the experiments done to determine the speed of light found that it was constant -- that its speed didn't vary depending on whether you were moving away from or toward the light source.  How on earth could that be?  No other wave or particle acted that way.  So they came up with convoluted ways around what they referred to as "the problem of the constancy of the speed of light."

Einstein turned the whole thing on its head by saying, "What if it's not a problem, but simply inherent in the behavior of light itself?"  So he started from the assumption that light's speed is constant, in every frame of reference, even if you were heading toward the light source at 99% of the speed of light.

The result?  The Special Theory of Relativity, and the opening up of a whole new realm of physics.

To quote Arthur Schopenhauer: "Talent hits a target no one else can hit.  Genius hits a target no one else can see."

Hard to see how today's educational system, with its mania for the memorize-and-test model, will produce the next generation's Einstein.  The next generation's Einstein will be lucky if (s)he gets out of school with an intact sense of creativity and curiosity.

So Schleicher is exactly right.  We should be increasing arts and music education in schools, not cutting it.  "STEM" curricula and other "core" subjects are important, don't get me wrong; but the emphasis they get is seriously unbalanced.  And for heaven's sake, let's stop considering something real if we can test it and measure it.  I'll end with another quote, this one from writer, researcher, and professor Robert I. Sutton: "To foster creativity, you must reward success and failure equally, and punish inactivity."

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In 1919, British mathematician Godfrey Hardy visited a young Indian man, Srinivasa Ramanujan, in his hospital room, and happened to remark offhand that he'd ridden in cab #1729.

"That's an interesting number," Ramanujan commented.

Hardy said, "Okay, and why is 1729 interesting?"

Ramanujan said, "Because it is the smallest number that is expressible by the sum of two integers cubed, two different ways."

After a moment of dumbfounded silence, Hardy said, "How do you know that?"

Ramanujan's response was that he just looked at the number, and it was obvious.

He was right, of course; 1729 is the sum of one cubed and twelve cubed, and also the sum of nine cubed and ten cubed.  (There are other such numbers that have been found since then, and because of this incident they were christened "taxicab numbers.")  What is most bizarre about this is that Ramanujan himself had no idea how he'd figured it out.  He wasn't simply a guy with a large repertoire of mathematical tricks; anyone can learn how to do quick mental math.  Ramanujan was something quite different.  He understood math intuitively, and on a deep level that completely defies explanation from what we know about how human brains work.

That's just one of nearly four thousand amazing discoveries he made in the field of mathematics, many of which opened hitherto-unexplored realms of knowledge.  If you want to read about one of the most amazing mathematical prodigies who's ever lived, The Man Who Knew Infinity by Thomas Kanigel is a must-read.  You'll come away with an appreciation for true genius -- and an awed awareness of how much we have yet to discover.

[Note: If you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds will go to support Skeptophilia!]

The problem with tradition

It is a frequent source of bafflement to me that so many people don't change what they do when confronted with incontrovertible evidence that there's a better way.

Sad to say, the educational establishment is one of the worst in this regard.  For example, it's been known (or at least, strongly supported) that a person's facility for learning a second language drops off significantly after puberty since 1967, when the research of linguist and neuroscientist Eric Lenneberg showed that the brain's plasticity with regard to language more or less goes away after age 12.  So for fifty years we've been pretty certain that the way to create bilinguals is by early immersion programs -- kindergarten or (better) preschool.

But how do we do it, fifty years later?  In my school district, which is forward-thinking in a lot of respects, we start teaching foreign language in grade seven.  I.e., we wait until the point that the human brain becomes really bad at it to start doing it.

When I tell my neuroscience students about this -- that if they had been put in an immersion program at age two, they could now speak whatever language they wanted, fluently, without once memorizing a conjugation table or vocabulary list -- they are pissed.

"Then why do we still do it this way?" they ask.

Good question.  "'Cuz it's the way we've always done it," is about the best I can do.  Which has got to be the crappiest justification for anything I can think of.

So my expectation is that the recent research done by Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer, of (respectively) Harvard, Boston University, and Northeastern University, is going to impress a lot of people and have zero cumulative effect on how we approach anything.

Their paper, released last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is called "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence," and it proposes a novel approach to problem-solving: giving people a chance to work together interspersed with solitary work periods enhances the quality of solutions generated.

It's kind of counter to how we've been taught to work, isn't it?  In school, we're mostly instructed to work alone, that working together is "cheating."  The emphasis is on solitary work... except for very controlled situations of "cooperative learning" that are all too often exercises in frustration for the best students, because the individuals who are the most concerned about learning the concepts or getting good grades (or, hopefully, both) are highly motivated to do the lion's share of the work, while the less-engaged students have no particular incentive to do more than the bare minimum.  If I can think of a single teaching strategy that I have heard more students rail against than any other, it's "cooperative learning."  I can't tell you how many times I've heard kids say, "I'd rather just do it myself and get my grade rather than doing it myself and then giving my grade to five other students who sat on their asses the entire time."

But if you want true creative problem-solving, the Bernstein et al. study suggests, having people work alone isn't the best way to do it.  Neither is the throw-them-together-for-hours, let's-beat-the-problem-to-death approach.  It works best to have them work together for a while, divide up the task -- then reconvene to compare notes and integrate what each of them has accomplished, evaluate it, see what else needs to be done... and repeat as many times as needed.  The researchers write:

People influence each other when they interact to solve problems.  Such social influence introduces both benefits (higher average solution quality due to exploitation of existing answers through social learning) and costs (lower maximum solution quality due to a reduction in individual exploration for novel answers) relative to independent problem solving.  In contrast to prior work, which has focused on how the presence and network structure of social influence affect performance, here we investigate the effects of time.  We show that when social influence is intermittent it provides the benefits of constant social influence without the costs...  Groups in the intermittent social-influence treatment found... optimum solution[s] frequently (like groups without influence) but had a high mean performance (like groups with constant influence); they learned from each other, while maintaining a high level of exploration.  Solutions improved most on rounds with social influence after a period of separation.

Even before reading this study, it's the approach I've recommended for years to my AP Biology students for writing up labs.  Each of the labs we do is focused around a single question, often one that is simple to ask but not so simple to answer.  For example, our first lab approaches the question of enzyme reaction rate.  In every introductory biology class, you learn that enzymes speed up chemical reactions.  Our first AP lab asks the question, "By what factor?"  Does a typical enzyme double the rate of a reaction?  Make it go ten times faster?  A hundred times?  A thousand?

The lab procedure is designed to give the students enough data to answer the question, but getting from the raw data to a defensible answer isn't simple.  So my students work in teams, and I recommend to them that they break the task up -- one member of the team does the calculations and graphs, one writes up the procedure, one organizes the data into tables or charts, and so on.  Then they should get together, and look at what they've got, and see if they can solve the problem -- use their work to come up with an answer as a team that they can then defend.

The problem is, there's no way I can mandate this approach, and I'm afraid that some groups still end up with one or two students doing pretty much all the work, and the others going along for the ride (and because of that, not really learning much from the experience).  I simply don't have the time to have them do the lab write-ups during class, so I can't supervise them and make sure they're working on it consistently and fairly.  But I know from experience -- and the Bernstein et al. paper supports this conclusion -- that they clearly learn the most if that's how they approach the task.

And the paper also has implications for the corporate world.  In problem-solving on the job, it would improve solution quality to use a hybrid approach of teamwork and solitary work.

You have to wonder why people don't look at something like this and think, "Let's at least try this and see if it works."  But habit and laziness keep us doing the same thing over and over, even when it's been demonstrated (over and over) that what we're doing doesn't work, or at least isn't optimal.

Maybe after 31 years of teaching, I'm getting cynical.  I hope that's not true, but I have to admit my first thought on reading this was, "Wow!  Cool!  This won't change anything!"  I seriously hope I'm wrong about that.  Because there's a lot of truth to the old adage that if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Stress test

I ran into a piece of research today that left me scratching my head.

It was on the topic of teaching and stress, which (as you might imagine) I'm pretty interested in.  I'm a veteran teacher with 31 years in the classroom, and I can vouch for the fact that it can be a pretty stressful job.  So I thought that "Empirically Derived Profiles of Teacher Stress, Burnout, Self-Efficacy, and Coping and Associated Student Outcomes," by Keith C. Herman, Wendy M. Reinke, and Jal’et Hickmon-Rosa of the University of Missouri, would be intriguing.

Understanding how teacher stress, burnout, coping, and self-efficacy are interrelated can inform preventive and intervention efforts to support teachers.  In this study, we explored these constructs to determine their relation to student outcomes, including disruptive behaviors and academic achievement.  Participants in this study were 121 teachers and 1,817 students in grades kindergarten to fourth from nine elementary schools in an urban Midwestern school district.  Latent profile analysis was used to determine patterns of teacher adjustment in relation to stress, coping, efficacy, and burnout.  These profiles were then linked to student behavioral and academic outcomes.  Four profiles of teacher adjustment were identified.  Three classes were characterized by high levels of stress and were distinguished by variations in coping and burnout ranging from (a) high coping/low burnout (60%) to (b) moderate coping and burnout (30%), to (c) low coping/high burnout (3%).  The fourth class was distinguished by low stress, high coping, and low burnout.  Only 7% of the sample fell into this Well-Adjusted class.  Teachers in the high stress, high burnout, and low coping class were associated with the poorest student outcomes.

So far, so good, as it looks like the researchers were merely establishing a correlation.  But study co-author Herman was interviewed for a press release when the study was published, and from what he's saying it's pretty clear they thought they'd established causation:

It’s no secret that teaching is a stressful profession.  However, when stress interferes with personal and emotional well-being at such a severe level, the relationships teachers have with students are likely to suffer, much like any relationship would in a high stress environment.  It’s troubling that only 7 percent of teachers experience low stress and feel they are getting the support they need to adequately cope with the stressors of their job.  Even more concerning is that these patterns of teacher stress are related to students’ success in school, both academically and behaviorally.  For example, classrooms with highly stressed teachers have more instances of disruptive behaviors and lower levels of prosocial behaviors.

Now, just hang on a moment.

Saying that teacher stress levels are correlated with student behavioral problems and poor academic outcomes is decisively not the same thing as saying that teacher stress levels caused the problems and poor outcomes.  It's a possibility; I'm certainly not at my best in front of the classroom when I'm under stress, whether or not it came from my job.  But isn't it at least equally likely that teacher stress could be caused by having a class full of disengaged students who would rather act out than study?

[Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Or, of course, that both the teacher stress and the student misbehavior could be caused by some third factor.  One of the biggest predictors of poor academic performance (and dropout rates) is poverty, as been shown by multiple studies (most strikingly by Lacour and Tissington in 2011).  And it doesn't stretch credulity much to imagine that classes full of students who live in impoverished conditions would cause a lot of stress to teachers, who (after all) went into the profession because they care about kids.

So the Herman et al. study doesn't come close to establishing a causative relationship between teacher stress and student behavior.  But it's way easier to throw the responsibility of reducing their stress back to the teachers, and ignore the other factors that almost certainly play a role.

I understand that no matter what, teaching has its stresses; and I preach to my students the importance of finding stress-relievers in their lives, so I'd be hypocritical not to acknowledge that it's necessary for me as well.  And Herman does seem to have his heart in the right place.  "We as a society need to consider methods that create nurturing school environments not just for students, but for the adults who work there," he said.  "This could mean finding ways for administrators, peers and parents to have positive interactions with teachers, giving teachers the time and training to perform their jobs, and creating social networks of support so that teachers do not feel isolated."

All of which I can get behind.  But the fact is, none of that is likely to improve student outcomes until the root causes are remedied.  I suspect that when public schools fail, it will prove to be -- as with many social problems -- the result of a variety of factors (almost certainly of which poverty is one).  But simply saying that if we give teachers options for stress relief, we can fix what's wrong with public schools, is facile thinking to say the least.

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This week's featured book on Skeptophilia should be in every good skeptic's library: Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things.  It's a no-holds-barred assault against goofy thinking, taking on such counterfactual beliefs as psychic phenomena, creationism, past-life regression, and Holocaust denial.  Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, is a true crusader, and his book is a must-read.  You can buy it at the link below!

Leadership by the unqualified

I'm going to ask a question that will undoubtedly be uncomfortable for the 33% of Americans who are still in support of what our current administration is doing:

Why are you content to have people in jobs for which they are manifestly unqualified, and about which they display nothing short of catastrophic ignorance?

Surprisingly, I'm not talking here about Trump himself, although I'd argue that those charges could just as easily be levied against him.  The fish rots from the head on down, as the saying goes.  But here I'm referring to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who was interviewed by Lesley Stahl a few days ago on 60 Minutes, the results of which are nearly unwatchable, if you (like me) hate seeing someone completely humiliating themselves in public.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What's especially appalling about this interview is that Stahl was not trying to nail DeVos to the wall.  In fact, some of her questions strike me as softball.  And DeVos still couldn't give a coherent answer.  As an example, Stahl asked her if, under her leadership, schools in her home state of Michigan had gotten better.  After all, she allegedly got the nomination from Trump because of her work promoting charter schools there, so her influence in Michigan far predates her appointment to the Department of Education.  Here's her answer:

I don't know.  Overall, I -- I can't say overall that they have all gotten better.  There are certainly lots of pockets where the students are doing well.  Michigan schools need to do better.  There is no doubt about it...  I hesitate to talk about all schools in general because schools are made up of individual students attending them.

"I don't know?"  The Secretary of the Department of Education is asked about the current status of schools in her home state, and she says, "I don't know?"  For one thing, how can she have gone into this interview not having at least prepared an answer for this question?  I mean, if there's an expression that means the opposite of "out of left field," that's what this question was.

And she can't talk about schools in general, because they're "made up of individual students attending them?"  What the hell does this even mean?

But those were far from the only problems.  When Stahl asked her if she'd visited any underperforming schools, DeVos answered with a flat no.  Stahl, whose cool, collected persona slipped, betraying a moment of pure astonishment, said, "Maybe you should."

DeVos looked confused, and echoed, "Maybe I should."

Then DeVos tried a salvo of her own.  "The federal government has invested billions and billions and billions of dollars in the educational system," DeVos said, "and we have seen zero results."  Stahl, who unlike DeVos had actually done her homework, said that this wasn't true -- that test scores over the past 25 years had risen steadily.

DeVos gave her a walleyed stare for a few seconds, and said, "What can be done about that is empowering parents to make the choices for their kids.  Any family that has the economic means and the power to make choices is doing so for their children."

"What can be done about that?"  What can be done about what?  Rising test scores?  Heaven knows, we can't have that.  And what on earth did that non-answer have to do with the question Stahl asked?

And on and on it went.  I honestly at some point had my hands over my eyes because I couldn't bear to watch.  But after the video clip was done, and I had recovered from being that long in a state of wince, I started to get mad.  How is this woman qualified to run the Department of Education?  My sense is that she would be out of her depth in a kiddie pool, and the sole reason she is in the position is that she is a multi-millionaire plutocrat who donated to Donald Trump's election campaign.

So, to the conservatives who've read this far: how can you accept this?  This honestly has nothing to do with party.  Betsy DeVos would be drastically unqualified regardless what her political leanings were.  But there she sits, on the Cabinet of the United States, and she does a public interview in which she comes across as a blithering idiot...

... and not a single Republican leader has anything to say about it.

C'mon, people.  At some point sound leadership has to outweigh party affiliation.  It is ridiculous that our country's educational system -- our hope for the future -- is being run by a woman who, in my grandmother's words, "don't have the brains that God gave gravy."

And these sorts of things keep happening, and over and over, not one damn thing is done about it.  All I can say is, I hope that in November, people will remember this and vote out the kiss-ass rubber stampers who are giving Trump and his rich cronies a bye on everything from appointing nitwits to canoodling with porn stars.

Politics and the classroom

A couple of days ago, I was asked an interesting question by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia.

If you're comfortable with it, would you do a piece about what you tell your students about politics and current events?  Or maybe you're not allowed to be political in school.  I'd just be interested to understand how to accept the seriousness of all this without feeling like crawling into a hole and hiding from fear, and I know you would have a way to be honest and forthright without scaring your "kids."  How do you approach this?

It's a difficult question.  The simple, quick answer is that in general, I try to be as apolitical as I can manage.  Since I teach biology, this isn't hard most of the time (the current administration has had little effect on, for example, photosynthesis).  I do periodically have students who want to argue about politics, either with me or with their classmates -- I have one class this year that has a couple of left-wing Social Justice Warriors and a couple of diehard Republicans, and several times I have had to say to them, "This is not the venue for duking it out over political issues.  Save that for outside of class."  And to their credit, they've all acquiesced, and more or less get along (although that might be more because they sit in diagonally opposite corners of the classroom -- by their choice, not mine).

Sometimes, though, that simple answer doesn't quite cover all eventualities.  For example, I'm unequivocal that creationism and intelligent design are not science and are completely unsupported by the evidence.  I do tell my intro bio students that I have no desire to change their minds on religious matters, which may be a little disingenuous of me, because I treat evolution as a fact.  On the other hand, I'm being honest in the sense that students can be successful in the unit on evolution, and come into no conflict with me at all, by simply learning what evolutionary theory is about, irrespective of whether they believe it's true.  It is, as I always say, like learning about communism in a political science class.  This doesn't make you a communist.

These days, though, I don't get much flak over my obvious acceptance of the evolutionary model.  I've taught in this district for 25 years, and by this time, most people know me well enough to realize that I'm a staunch evolutionist but also am not going to get in someone's face about it if they believe otherwise.  Honestly, in the last five years I've had more conflicts with students over climate change than over evolution -- the politicization of that issue has of late been more pervasive and more vitriolic even than the whole evolution vs. creation fight.

But I'm fairly unequivocal there, too.  The evidence strongly supports anthropogenic climate change.  There's no real doubt about that any more.  If you choose to disbelieve it, or to think that 98% of climate scientists are in some kind of immense, evil conspiracy to lie to us so as to give us clean, renewable energy and unhook our economy from the Middle East, and are being challenged by a plucky band of honest and courageous multimillionaire petroleum companies, then that's your business.

The hardest decision, however, comes when I see an issue that I feel is of national (perhaps international) importance that has no connection to the curriculum I'm teaching.  At what point is it incumbent upon me to make sure my students are steered in the direction of taking an appropriate stand on ethical or moral issues?  I've more than once compared the events of the last six months to the rise of fascism in Weimar Germany; wouldn't it have been the ethically right action for a teacher in Germany of the early 1930s to urge his/her students to fight the Nazis, to contradict their anti-Semitic and Aryan-purity rhetoric, to stand up against the evils of the times?

I think most of us would answer "yes," but the problem is, the appropriateness of these actions is only apparent because we see what the outcome was.  We know about World War II, the Holocaust, the wholescale destruction of much of the established order in Europe and elsewhere.  We have access to information that our hypothetical German teacher would not have.  How can teachers here and now decide when (or if) it's appropriate to make a political stand in the classroom, when there is no way to know what the outcome is going to be?

This is one of the reasons that I have chosen not to discuss politics in my classroom.  The possible benefits of doing so, in affecting events in an uncertain future are, in my opinion, outweighed by the breach of ethics that would come from my pushing my political views on a young, impressionable, captive audience.  Things would have to be a great, great deal worse before I'd take that step.  I do encourage them to watch the news (including suggesting to them to get their news from a variety of sources), I urge them to take a stand on issues that concern them, and (for the ones old enough) I tell them they should vote.

Other than that, I really have no business bringing politics into the classroom.

I think I'm more or less successful in being non-partisan, to judge by my Critical Thinking classes.  I always tell them that I'm not going to divulge my own opinion on anything we discuss; my job is to needle everyone into clearer thinking, whether or not I agree with them.  One class was particularly insistent about knowing my political leanings, so when someone brought it up (again) on the last day of class, I asked them to guess where they thought I was on the political spectrum.  No one chose far right (I suppose that's understandable enough, given my obvious acceptance of evolution and climate change).  Other than that, it was a nice bell curve.  A few said center right, a lot said center, a few said center left, one or two said far left.  A couple insisted I must be a libertarian.

So I guess I'm doing something right.  Or left.  Or center.  You understand what I mean.