A visit to the PARCC

The PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) test scores are coming in, and it ain't pretty.

PARCC is part of the whole Common Core, Test-Students-Till-They-Drop system that upper level educational administration seems so fond of lately.  I'll admit that the basic idea -- to provide all children with a common set of educational standards, and assess them all the same way -- sounds good.  Few could argue with a drive to raise standards, improve literacy, increase deep understanding of math.  In fact, part of its mission statement is, "PARCC helps ensure that all students, regardless of income, family background or geography, have equal access to a world-class education that will prepare them for success after high school in college and/or careers...  set(s) consistent expectations in English and mathematics for every student, and... provides a valid and reliable evaluation of each student’s progress toward them."

Sounds awesome, doesn't it?

But for an educational movement that comes out of a drive for equity and accountability, the implementation of these high-flying goals has been haphazard, and the assessments themselves are riddled with flaws.  The roll-out of new standards was rushed, leaving many teachers without adequate training and materials to deliver a completely new curriculum, and the end-of-year exams have been poorly aligned with curriculum expectations and, in some cases, at difficulty levels that are completely grade-level inappropriate.

This hasn't stopped the anti-public-school movement from treating those scores as if they were actually reliable.  The PARCC data for the state of Illinois were just released last week, and showed a considerable drop in average scores from previous assessments, prompting claims of incompetence against teachers and local administrators, withering criticisms of unions for protecting inadequate faculty members, and calls for defunding public schools and replacing them with charter schools and voucher systems.  It also prompted one Illinois teacher to write a concise list of the flaws in PARCC exams, which include the following:

• giving children exams on computers in schools that don't have functional computer labs for kids to practice on
• requiring all students to type their answers, thus adding "typing speed" as an unspoken parameter for success on the test
• vague standards that are assessed by highly specific exam questions, leaving teachers uncertain about the depth to which they are supposed to address concepts
• a "formative evaluation" on 75% of the standards, given 3/4 of the way through the school year -- but no information about which 75% of the standards would be tested
• no scores released on the formative evaluation until after the school year ended and students had taken the final ("summative") assessment, leaving one wondering who the scores were supposed to be "formative" for

And need I add that the scores on these flawed exams are being used not only to evaluate children, but to evaluate teachers, administrators, schools, and entire districts?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You know who stands to gain here?  Pearson Education, who holds the extremely lucrative contract for designing all the exams, pre-tests, practice tests, review materials, and curriculum guides.  States are spending millions of taxpayer dollars to purchase a framework for assessment that, to put it bluntly, does not work, and then using that framework as a weapon with which to destroy public schools.

It's not just the teachers who are beginning to realize this.  Some institutions are recognizing the inherent flaws in the design and administration of standardized tests -- and are rebelling against the stranglehold they have over the educational system.  Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, chose last year to stop accepting SAT and ACT scores from applicants; its president, Jonathan Lash, stated outright that "standardized test scores do not predict... student success" and that "multiple-choice tests don't reveal much about a student."

US News & World Report, which each year releases its rankings of US colleges and universities, retaliated by deleting Hampshire from its rankings.  Lash reacted with a shoulder shrug: "We surveyed our students and learned not one of them had considered rankings when choosing to apply to colleges," Lash said.  "Instead they most cared about a college’s mission... At college fairs and information sessions, we don’t spend time answering high school families’ questions about our ranking and test score 'cut-offs.'  Instead we have conversations about the things that matter: What does our unique academic program look like, and what qualities does a student need to be successful at it?"

Lash said that the experiment thus far has been an unqualified success:

Without the scores, every other detail of the student’s application became more vivid. Their academic record over four years, letters of recommendation, essays, in-person interviews, and the optional creative supplements gave us a more complete portrait than we had seen before. Applicants gave more attention to their applications, including the optional components, putting us in a much better position to predict their likelihood of success here.

I have some hope that these sorts of decisions are indicators of a coming sea change in our attitudes towards paper-and-pencil exams.  But we have a long way to go.  PARCC and the Common Core aren't going anywhere soon; Pearson Education, and people like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (who famously stated that the only people critical of Common Core exams were "white suburban moms who are upset because they have discovered that their kids aren't as brilliant as they thought") are still pushing flawed assessments down our throats, along with all of the other outcomes -- loss of diversity in curriculum, loss of teacher autonomy in curriculum design and implementation, and a drastic increase in anxiety over testing in the children themselves.

So the fight's not over, not by a longshot.  I can guarantee that the failing scores on PARCC assessments in Illinois are not going to lead any of the powers-that-be to come to the conclusion that it's the assessment itself that is at fault.  They have too much at stake, both philosophically and financially, to reverse course that easily.  

So the power is in the hands of the parents, which is why it is so critical that the opt-out movement not lose its momentum.

I'll end with a repeated call for action: opt your children right the hell out of all of the state-mandated standardized grade-level exams -- at least the ones that have no impact on your child's passing a course (which, honestly, is most of them).  Keep them home.  Give Pearson no data to work with.  State departments of education have made unilateral bad decisions about how to assess your children, and it's time to take the control of education back to the local level -- where it should be.

Time to vote with your feet.

The least among us

In Ava Norwood's gripping novel If I Make My Bed in Hell, we read about the ordeal of Annabeth Showers, who has spent her seventeen years on Earth under the control of parents who belong to a cult called the Tabernacle of the Living Word.  She is forbidden to cut her hair, read any outside literature, listen to music.  Transgressions are punished by beatings and public humiliation.  Annabeth's journey from repression and fear to peace, freedom, and the right to self-determination is impossible to put down -- and should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the role of religion in the oppression of women and children.

It is also a true story.

I don't mean in the details; there is no such person as Annabeth Showers.  The other characters in the story are equally fictional.  But for those who get to the last page of Norwood's book and heave a sigh, and say, "Well, at least none of this is real," I have news for you.

There are people now, in our modern society, who use the threats of god and hell and sin, and sometimes physical punishment as well, to control children through fear.

Coppo di Marcovaldo, Hell (ca. 1301) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let's start with the Fort Wayne, Indiana elementary school teacher who shamed a seven-year-old boy and gave him three days' worth of detention for telling another child he didn't believe in god.

Second-grade teacher Michelle Meyer found out that the boy -- who is referred to only as "A.B." -- was asked by another child if he went to church.  He said no, and allegedly, the other child "started to cry."  This brought the situation to Meyer's attention, who instead of using it as a teachable moment about tolerance of differences, proceeded to tell A.B.  that she was "very concerned" about his disbelief in god and about "what he'd done," and that she was going to call his mom.

She never did.  Probably realized that if A.B. doesn't go to church, neither does mom, and so a call home would be a losing proposition.  So Meyer came up with her own way of dealing with the situation.  According to the news story:

Ms. Meyer required that A.B. sit by himself during lunch and told him he should not talk to the other students and stated that this was because he had offended them.  This served to reinforce A.B.’s feeling that he had committed some transgression that justified his exclusion.

And to make matters worse, Meyer had A.B. and the girl whose religious sensibilities he'd offended talk to another adult, who also apparently believes in the Bring Children To God Through Humiliation approach:

Upon hearing [the story], the adult employee looked at A.B.’s classmate and stated that she should not be worried and should be happy she has faith and that she should not listen to A.B.’s bad ideas. She then patted the little girl’s hand.

A.B., who used to love school, is now afraid to go there because "everyone hates him," and frequently comes home crying.

Praise Jesus and hallelujah.

Of course, this is mild.  There's only so much you can get away with in a public school.  But take away the protection conferred upon children by the eyes of outsiders, and you end up with the Twelve Tribes -- a group that sounds so much like Norwood's Tabernacle of the Living Word that the phrase "art imitates life" barely suffices.

In an exposé of this repressive cult by The Pacific Standard, I read with an increasing sense of horror about what these people do to their children out of a false belief based in fear -- the beatings, the terror talk about hell and the fiery furnace, the prohibition against play, the compulsory work starting as early as age five.  Like the Tabernacle, the Twelve Tribes is good at putting on a pleasant public face, running places such as the Blue Blinds Bakery in Plymouth, Massachusetts and the Maté Factor Restaurant in Ithaca, New York.  Their shops have a cool, back-to-the-earth vibe, and their food is high quality.

But you don't see what's behind the scenes.  Children being whipped with bamboo canes on their naked posteriors for minor offenses.  The oppression of women, who are forbidden to use painkillers during childbirth to "atone for Eve's sin."  The message that any doubt, any questioning, any hesitation is of Satan, and will result in eternal damnation.

The article I linked -- which is as hard to read, but as necessary, as Norwood's If I Make My Bed in Hell -- tells about a few children who successfully escaped from the cult's grip.  One girl was so perpetually terrified of punishment that her jaw would lock shut, preventing her from talking or eating, for hours or days at a time.

"If one is overly concerned about his son receiving blue marks," wrote cult founder Gene Spriggs in 1973, "you know that he hates his son and hates the word of God."

"Blue marks," by the way, are bruises.

Freedom of religion, like any freedom, has its limits; when you use your freedom of belief to oppress others, there is something seriously wrong.  As my mother put it, "My rights end where your nose begins."  And the situation stands out in even starker relief when the exercise of freedom of religion involves putting the powerless in a situation that amounts to physical and psychological torture.

It makes you wonder why the ultra-religious are so focused on the reality of hell in the afterlife, doesn't it?  They've already created something very like hell, here on Earth, for their own children.

Hearing voices

I'm a little concerned that the next president of the United States might be either delusional or else an outright liar.

I know this statement probably has a lot of people shrugging.  We here in the United States have a long history of electing a colorful combination of the insane and the dishonest to public office.  But this is the first time in my memory that we have so many people seeking the highest office in the land who are proud to announce that they hear voices.

Let's start with Ben Carson, who last November told Christian Broadcast Network's David Brody that he felt the "fingers of god" pushing him to run for president.  He's been up front ever since that he's running because god has told him that's what he wants.  "I serve God, and my purpose is to please Him, and if God be for you, who can be against you?...  I am running for president because God grabbed me by the collar and asked me to run."

Pat Robertson concurred, and said that god sent him a personal message that Carson's the real deal:

God came to me in a dream. He had a white robe and a white beard, and told me our next president would be another colored man.  I’m interpreting that to be Dr. Ben Carson. Unless Barack Obama seeks a third term.

I wouldn't expect the Lord of Hosts to use verbiage that makes him sound like a bigoted white dude, but what do I know?

Then there's Mike Huckabee, who attributes his political support to... Jesus Christ:

There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of five thousand people.  That’s the only way that our campaign can be doing what it’s doing.  And I’m not being facetious nor am I trying to be trite.  There literally are thousands of people across this country who are praying that a little will become much, and it has.  And it defies all explanation, it has confounded the pundits.  And I’m enjoying every minute of them trying to figure it out, and until they look at it, from a, just experience beyond human, they’ll never figure it out. And it’s probably just as well.  That’s honestly why it’s happening.

Rick Perry also received a message from god that he should run for president:

And it has been an incredible outpouring and I can tell you that has given me the calmness in my soul that, you know, God sends messages through a lot of ways and through a lot of messengers... You may not see that burning bush, but there are people seeing that burning bush for you. I’m getting more and more comfortable every day that this is what I’ve been called to do.

Burning bushes notwithstanding, Perry decided on September 11 to throw in the towel.  Maybe it's just as well, given the mixed messages god's sending to everyone.

But no one sounded as sure that he has a direct phone line to to the almighty as Scott Walker, who went on record as saying:

My relationship with God drives every major decision in my life.  Each day I pray and then take time to read from the Bible and from a devotional named Jesus Calling.  As you can imagine, the months leading up to my announcement that I would run for President of the United States were filled with a lot of prayer and soul searching.  Here’s why: I needed to be certain that running was God’s calling — not just man’s calling. I am certain: This is God’s plan for me and I am humbled to be a candidate for President of the United States.

But in another startling change in the divine plan, Walker also called it quits, just four days ago.  I guess maybe god's calling of Scott Walker was a misdial.

I don't know about you, but why are so many people accepting of the fact that we have multiple candidates who will state outright that they hear voices?  It doesn't take a Ph.D. to recognize that if more than one person is claiming that god said they'd be the next president, they can't all be right.  In fact, the great likelihood is that all of them are either (1) lying, or else (2) insane.

It is a sorry state of affairs that we have come to a place where to succeed in politics, you have to pander to the ultra religious -- or else be one of them yourself.  I'm willing to believe that Walker and Perry might have just been saying what they thought their constituency wanted to hear; but there's no doubt about Huckabee and Carson, both of whom are avowed young-earth creationists.  In fact, just a couple of days ago, Carson proved that to be a brain surgeon, you don't necessarily have to be rational on any other topic:

I do believe in the six-day creation.  It says in the beginning God created the heaven and Earth.  It doesn’t say when he created them, except for in the beginning.  So the Earth could have been here for a long time before he started creating things on it.  But when he did start doing that, he made it very specifically clear to us the evening and the morning were the next day because he knew that people would come along and try to say that, ‘Oh, it was millions and millions of years.’  And then what else did he say in the very first chapter?  That each thing brought forth after its own kind.  Because he knew that people would come along and say, you know, this changed into that and this changed into that and this changed into that.  So at the very beginning of the Bible, he puts that to rest.

The power of the Religious Right is even affecting Donald Trump, who recently said that the bible is his favorite book.  Pressed for details, though, he began to waffle a little.  "The bible means a lot to me," he said.  "but I don't want to get into specifics."

He later did say that his favorite bible verse was the part in Proverbs where god commands us "never to bend to envy," a passage that is laudable but unfortunately doesn't exist.  Maybe he was confusing the bible with his other favorite book, The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump.

I find myself watching this race with an increasing sense of horror.  How did we get to a place where a group of people who are, honestly, a minority of practicing Christians can wield such political clout?  I am a little aghast that to maintain credibility amongst the Republican powers-that-be, you have to state outright that you are experiencing what amounts to a psychotic break.

Oh, but these are the same people who claim that Christians in America are an embattled and persecuted minority.  So we're not talking about having a serious grasp on reality right from the get-go.

I live in hope that rationality will prevail, and whoever ends up left in the race by the time the serious campaigning starts will at least be sane.  Because what we're looking at right now is more akin to being forced to choose between the Mad Hatter and the March Hare.  And if that's what we end up with, I'm thinking of moving to Costa Rica.

The return of the faith healer

Following hard on the heels of my post suggesting that caveat emptor is all well and good, but there should be a way to stop swindlers from rooking gullible people, I ran across a story that pushes me squarely in the opposite direction.

There are people who are so gullible that no amount of rationality will persuade them, and honestly, these people probably deserve everything they get.

The story came to my attention via Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News, and concerns veteran snake oil salesman and purported faith healer Peter Popoff.  Popoff goes back a long way; over thirty years ago, he had a nationally-broadcast faith healing show, during which he would call up audience members for a "laying on of hands" and would scream, "I heal you by the power of Jesus!"  He claimed to make paralyzed people walk, cured sufferers of cancer and chronic pain, and attracted standing-room-only crowds, many of whom paid hundreds of dollars for a ticket to attend.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole house of cards came crashing down around Popoff after an investigation by James Randi and his associate Steve Shaw.  Some of the dreadfully ill audience members that Popoff healed, it was found, were perfectly healthy people that Popoff and his crew had planted in the audience to give the appearance of miracles.  His knowledge of people's medical conditions ahead of time turned out to be messages delivered not by the voice of god, as Popoff claimed, but by the voice of his wife Elizabeth, who was scanning audience information cards submitted upon arrival and sending the details to Popoff via a wireless earpiece.  (Amongst the not-so-divine messages Popoff got caught receiving was a reference to an African American audience member by a racial slur, followed by the warning, "keep your hands off her tits... I'm watching you.")

After these revelations, the donations dried up, the audiences stopped showing up, and in 1987 Popoff declared bankruptcy, leaving over 790 creditors unpaid.

And that, you would think, would be that.

But no.  After a humiliating takedown that would leave most of us unwilling to go outside ever again without wearing a paper bag over our heads, Popoff has restarted his "healing ministries," this time in the UK.  According to a piece over at the site Good Thinking, we find out that he's once again raking in the cash:

Over the last six months, we have been investigating ‘faith healer’ Peter Popoff and his highly-lucrative current business of promising to heal sickness and cancel debts in exchange for ‘seed faith’, in other words: cash donations.  In May of this year we attended Popoff’s event at The Troxy Theatre, London, to covertly record his miraculous claims and supposed acts of faith healing, and to witness thousands of people donating large amounts of cash to his ministry.

The Daily Mirror did a story a couple of days ago about the investigation, and called it correctly:

Is the old charlatan “Reverend” Peter Popoff returning to his wicked ways? 

The American snake oil salesman has been in the UK, churning out begging letters and holding a rally to heal the sick. 

Among those “cured” at the latest London gathering was a woman who said her body was wracked with pain. 

Popoff laid his hands on her and yelled “Back to the pits of hell,” apparently with remarkable results. But was it all it seemed? 

Among the audience members was Michael Marshall of the Good Thinking Society, a charity that promotes rational debate. 

“The woman he ‘healed’ had a convulsive fit when he touched her on the head,” said Michael. 

“But she seemed to be part of his team, she was handing out pens and a questionnaire at the start, which leads us to believe that it is possible she was a plant. 

“If she was part of their team, they should have been open about this, but just before the ‘healing’ she came out of a row of seats in the auditorium as if she was just another member of the audience, and left soon afterwards.”

In other words: Popoff is once again rooking audiences, using exactly the same techniques as he did before.

I find it hard to believe that anyone could fall for his schtick, after the events of thirty years ago.  Did god forgive him for his earlier transgressions, and now he's actually healing people through divine power?  Or was James Randi persecuting an innocent man, leading us to the uncomfortable conclusion that god told Popoff "keep your hands off her tits?"

Or is he a cheater and a fraud who was so successful the first time that he is banking on people having short memories and more money than sense?

I'm pretty much certain it's the latter.

So we're looking at a situation where a proven swindler has returned to swindling, and people are once again falling for it.  Which returns me to my original point; if you are taken in by people like Popoff, as harsh as it sounds, you are so foolish that you deserve everything you get.

I'm so blue

There comes a point when caveat emptor just isn't enough.

I know that my general take on spurious claims has been that if people can't be bothered to learn a little science, then they deserve to be hoodwinked by the unscrupulous.  Heartless as it may seem, we all have a responsibility to exercise caution and rationality with respect to our own decisions.

But dammit, when a doctor gets on the public airwaves, and recommends all kinds of sketchy shit, there should be a way to stop him.

And for once, I'm not talking about Dr. Oz.  This time the Very Alternative Medicine Award goes to Dr. Joel Wallach, who basically thinks every human disorder is caused by a mineral deficiency.

The topic comes up because I was listening to the phenomenally wacky radio broadcast Coast to Coast AM, hosted by George Noory, and Dr. Wallach was a guest.  Mostly it was the usual fare, with Noory asking questions about how unhealthy Americans are and about cancer rates and the incidence of heart disease, and Dr. Wallach responding with bogus-sounding stuff about mineral deficiencies.  And then Noory started taking callers, and a woman called in and asked for Dr. Wallach's advice about how to treat what sounded like a genital yeast infection.

And Dr. Wallach recommended soaking a tampon in colloidal silver, and inserting it into her vagina.

Well, that got my attention.  And I'm thinking, "Wasn't there that guy who took so much colloidal silver that he turned his skin blue?"  So I looked it up, and I found out that yes, there was a man named Paul Karason who became convinced that colloidal silver was the answer to all of life's ills, and took so much that he developed argyria, a permanent discoloration of the skin.

To put it more succinctly if less scientifically: he went from a basically normal human being to looking like the love child of Papa Smurf and a zombie.

Now, to be fair, it's unlikely that one application of colloidal silver would result in problems, even if it is applied to your tender bits.  But I myself wouldn't do anything of the kind, even if I had the tender bits in question, which I don't.  Because to say that Dr. Wallach's claims are suspect turns out to be a mammoth understatement.

The wonderful site Quackwatch did a stinging exposé of Wallach a couple of years ago, especially apropos of his stance that "Americans are slowly starving to death" and the way to reverse the problem is by taking lots of colloidal mineral supplements (which, to no one's particular surprise, you can purchase from Dr. Wallach's company Youngevity).

Here are a few of his specious claims (there is more information on each in the Quackwatch article linked above):

• He backed the useless apricot-pit derivative laetrile for treating cancer.  
• Hydrogen peroxide can be used to treat coronary artery disease.
• Cystic fibrosis is "100% curable in its early stages."
• Multiple sclerosis is caused by mercury poisoning from dental amalgam.
• There are cultures where people routinely live (in good health) to 140 years, and they do so because they drink glacial creek water saturated with pulverized minerals.
• Alzheimer's disease is preventable (guess how?) and that 50% of American 70-year-olds have it.
• Both gray hair and aneurysms are caused by a copper deficiency.
• Male pattern baldness is caused by a tin deficiency.
• Diabetes is caused by a vanadium deficiency.

Getting the picture here?  Add to this the fact that he has claimed to be the author of a medical textbook and over 70 peer-reviewed papers in medical journals (he isn't), and that in his training he did 20,500 human and animal autopsies (he didn't), and his veracity is definitely suspect.  (James Pontolillo, author of the Quackwatch piece, calculated that in order to perform that many autopsies, Wallach would have had to perform six a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year, for twelve years.)

So I think you can see that we're dealing with someone here whose recommendations are pretty much uniformly unsupported by the evidence.  Personally, I think that Wallach's level of reliability is such that if he said the sky was blue and the grass was green, I'd want to go outside to check for myself.

And lest you think that Pontolillo just has some kind of axe to grind, Wallach has also been excoriated in The Skeptic's Dictionary, received withering and exhaustive rebukes from nutritionists Stuart Adams and Stephen Cherniske, and was outright called a "liar" both at the skeptical site The Millennium Project and in a publication by the National Council Against Health Fraud.  

But the guy still has followers who revere him with near fanatical devotion.  Adams in particular has been attacked for his criticisms of Wallach -- he has stated that he is still getting hate mail for his exposé, which was released over ten years ago.

Which just goes to show how persuasive bullshit can be.  And it makes me wish there was some way to save people from their own gullibility.  I know you can't legislate against ignorance; but the fact that there are snake-oil salesmen out there who are taking advantage of people's fear about their health to rook them for millions of dollars is just not nice.  

I suppose I should draw some solace from the fact that Wallach's credibility is now so low that he's appearing on Coast to Coast AM.  It's not like most of the stuff on that show is the pinnacle of rationality, after all.  I mean, the piece after Wallach's spot had to do with the "akashic record" -- the idea that every person who has ever lived, and every event that has ever happened, is still accessible through a universal quantum energy frequency vibrational field, or something.  So it's to be hoped that any listeners who were still on the fence were left chortling and saying "Yeah, right" after the show was over.

And that few of them were tempted to insert mineral-soaked tampons into their naughty parts.

The end of the world as we know it

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we're all gonna die.

Sorry if that's kind of a downer of a way to start your morning.  But it's best to face facts, you know?

Some time in the next week, according to multiple sources, god is going to play a game of cosmic Whack-a-Mole with the Earth.  Never mind that none of those sources have any apparent understanding of astronomy, nor necessarily even contact with reality.  Just believe 'em anyway, because what do those cocky fancy-pants scientists know, anyway?

First we have Pastor John Hagee, whose motto is "Jesus accepts MasterCard."  This guy has made a career out of passing along the cheerful message that god thinks we're all sinners and we're doomed to the fiery furnace and the only way to escape our (well deserved) fate is if we make a generous donation to John Hagee Ministries so that John Hagee can purchase another Yacht for Christ.  (Why Christ needs a yacht remains to be seen.  Didn't the dude walk on water?)

This time, though, god is serious, and he's going to show us how pissed he is at our iniquity through an unequivocal sign: a lunar eclipse this Sunday.  Or, as Hagee likes to put it, a "blood moon."  Because the moon turns kind of red during an eclipse, which means blood.  And god and prophecy and hell and all the rest, so you damn well better give generously, or else.

Is it just me, or does Pastor Hagee look really... happy about the whole thing?  You get the impression that here's a guy who is just thrilled that Rivers Will Run Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers.  After all, the unbelievers don't donate to John Hagee Ministries, so fuck 'em, right?

But it isn't just Hagee saying that we're in trouble.  A lot of folks down in Costa Rica are up in arms over the appearance a couple of days ago of a weird cloud, because there's obviously no other explanation for this other than the imminent end of the world.

Eladio Solano, meteorologist at Costa Rica's National Meteorological Institute, said the phenomenon is rare but perfectly natural.  The iridescence, he says, is caused by the refraction of light through high ice crystals in the atmosphere, and has happened before without the world ending.  But what does he know?  He's just a scientist.  We all know it's better to get your information from superstition based on a Bronze-Age understanding of the universe.

Then we have the fact that the physicists over at CERN are firing up the Large Hadron Collider today, and the rumor has started that they're trying to "recreate the Big Bang."  The result will be that the new Bang will rip the current universe apart from the inside out.  And/or create a black hole.  Either way, we're pretty much fucked.

Because that's what all scientists are after, right?  When they're not busy distracting you from the actual meaning of weird clouds over Costa Rica, they're plotting to destroy the world.  Why else would they have gone into science?

And if that wasn't enough to ruin your morning, add to that the fact that Mercury goes into retrograde starting on Thursday.  And this means that all hell is going to break loose on Earth, even though (1) it's only an apparent backwards movement because of the relative motion of Mercury as seen from Earth, (2) the movement of a planet against a backdrop of impossibly distant stars has zero to do with anything happening down here, and (3) Mercury goes into retrograde three times every year, and the world hasn't ended any of those times.

But never mind all that logic and rationality stuff.  This time it's gonna happen.  Blood moons + weird clouds + LHC + Mercury retrograde = really bad shit.  You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that.

In fact, it's better if you're not a scientist at all.

Stop asking questions

I had a conversation with a student yesterday that illustrated all that is wrong-headed about public education.

Our school is fortunate enough to have an awesome selection of science electives, thanks to a forward-thinking principal we had ten years ago.  I teach an introductory neuroscience class, which is a great deal of fun for me and (I hope) the students -- we get to spend a semester looking at the intricacies and peculiarities of our brain and sensory processing systems.  The subject is one that seems to have a lot of intrinsic interest for high schoolers, and it's often the genesis of some pretty cool class discussions.

Last week I assigned them to read an article called "The Future of Brain-controlled Devices," about the possibility of brain-machine interfaces, and we discussed it in class yesterday.  What I had anticipated would be a ten-minute discussion of the scientific and ethical questions raised in the article turned into a whole period's worth.  The topics jumped, free-association-style, away from the subject at hand -- sensory enhancement, brain-to-brain connections ("machine-mediated telepathy"), virtual reality interfaces, restoration of sensorimotor abilities in the disabled -- and soon we found ourselves discussing the nature of seizure disorders, the role of sleep in memory consolidation, how the pleasure-reward circuit in the brain works, what happens when someone has a migraine, how visual pattern recognition works.

When the bell rang, one of my students chuckled, and said, in an amiable sort of fashion, "Wow.  We really got nothing accomplished this period."

I asked her what she meant.

She indicated the blank page in her science notebook.  "We didn't even write down any notes.  After we turned in the responses to the article, we just spent the rest of the period talking about random stuff."

I smiled and shrugged -- as I said, she's a nice kid and a good student, and didn't mean it as any kind of serious criticism -- but inwardly, I was a little appalled.  Here we have a senior in high school who has been taught, in her thirteen years in public schools, that a wide-ranging class discussion driven by the students' own curiosity, which never leaves the purview of the class's curriculum, somehow doesn't count unless they are made to write down lists of vocabulary words so they can study it later for the test.

These kids were focused and engaged, actively pursuing questions that they were interested in, driving their own learning and using me as a resource and a facilitator.  Not a single one tried to derail the conversation into other subjects; no one said, "So Mr. Bonnet, how do you think the New Orleans Saints are gonna do this year?"  We may have wandered off of the topic of brain-machine interfaces -- but would I really have been doing a better job as a teacher had I halted the discussion, and said, "Okay, stop asking questions.  On to the next topic, which is neurological disorders.  Get your notebooks out...."?

I think public schools, despite amazing obstacles, do a pretty damn good job of educating children.  But we do teach them an unintended lesson, one which some of them never unlearn.  It's the lesson that education is a passive enterprise, with the teacher as the knowledge donor and the student as recipient.  We tacitly pass along the message that if the information isn't on the test, they don't have to think about it, that it isn't worth knowing.  That we'll tell them what to write down, we'll decide for them what counts, that learning consists only of copying everything we write on our white boards into their notebooks.

And it's a notion that is fostered at every level.  If it's not a Quantifiable Outcome, if you can't measure it on a standardized test, to the federal and state departments of education, it does not exist.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And just last week, the New York State Board of Regents voted to increase the impact of standardized tests by raising to 50% the contribution of exam scores to a teacher's end-of-year evaluation.  But we're apparently not supposed to ask questions about that, either.

You have to wonder why the powers-that-be in education seem so dead set against fostering creative, out-of-the-box thinking in children... or in the teachers themselves.

What does it mean to be truly educated?  It means having some kind of knowledge base, some fundamental set of facts at your disposal, sure.  But it's far more than that.  Education should foster creativity, drive, the ability to make new connections, the confidence and skill to be the author of your own understanding.  The If-It's-Not-On-The-Test-Don't-Waste-Your-Time mentality has warped what should be the true mission of schools -- to give children not only a set of tools, but a passion that will push them never to stop questioning, never to stop learning about the world around them.

And that memorize-and-test attitude has poisoned the children themselves.  I see it especially amongst the best and brightest, in the anxiety over scores, the fretting over learning every last definition, date, and detail.  Synthesis and questioning become a distraction.  They've learned their lessons well, and come away with the impression that minutiae are more important than curiosity.

We've come a long way from the original meaning of the word "education," which comes from a Latin verb meaning "to draw out of."  We've come to think of it as stuffing facts into children's minds, and after that, more facts still, and judge our success by how many of those facts they can successfully regurgitate on the end of the year tests.  How many opportunities for questioning, how many "teachable moments," are lost because we are chained to Student Learning Objectives and Measurable Outcomes?

I'll end with a quote from Socrates which I think sums the whole thing up:  "Education is not the filling of a vessel, it is the kindling of a flame."