"Treason," Testing, Teaching — Citizenship

Initially published as

‘Academic bulimia’ and the test game

March 8, 2010

I became aware of the problem early in my teaching career, in 1967 or so. We were doing a standard-definition exercise in a composition class, and a student was reading aloud her brief definition piece that began, “In the United States treason is” — and then merrily gave her own definition.

“Whoa!” I said, “Time out!” and made the “time-out” gesture. “If ‘treason’ is the word you want to define, you can argue for all sorts of definitions, but if you start a sentence ‘In the United States treason is,” you have to finish the sentence with the definition in the Constitution.”

(It’s Article 3, section 3, but I just looked that up; I couldn’t have given the citation from memory in 1967, and didn’t. But back to the story).

Blank stares from the class.

“It’s the one crime defined in the Constitution.”

More blank stares.

“You’ve got to know this!” I said; “You’ve all just passed an exam on the Constitution.” And indeed they had.

I was teaching at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, and my class was 100 percent students from, mostly, Illinois, with a few from New York. They had to pass the Regents’ Exam in New York, or the Public Law 195 exam in Illinois to get their high school diplomas, demonstrating among other things working knowledge of the U.S. Constitution.

“Right,” one of my students replied, “we passed the exam.”

“OK, so you have to know this,” I said.

Giving me the sympathetic look we insensitive people give the pathetically slow, the student repeated, with more careful enunciation, “We passed the exam.”

I had figured — like the legislators who mandated the exams — that high school graduates would pass a pretty thorough examination on the U.S. Constitution and, therefore, have a working knowledge of the Constitution. My student knew that they had passed the exam and, therefore, didn’t need to know the material any more, and probably wouldn’t.

I was starting to learn to take very, very seriously what has recently been called, “academic bulimia,” the process by which students “cram” for an exam and “regurgitate” the material on it.

When you regurgitate, you get some poison or irritant or excess out of your system.

Now an English-speaking student might, figuratively, chew on an idea, decide to swallow it, digest it and assimilate it. (We like eating metaphors for learning.)

The easier method, though, is cram and regurgitate, and that was what the fully certified high school graduates in my class had done to get to a major university, and that was back when U.S. education was in good shape.

They had figured out the system, played it and won: If not a top slot, they got a respectable niche in higher education.

The only problem is that they were U.S. citizens who had passed the exams and came out pretty much ignorant of the most basic way — an elegant theory, not messy political facts — their government worked.

Students in the 21st century will be equally proficient in gaming the system of high-stakes exams, and nowadays the schools have money on the line, too, and many schools will help with the game.

So, don’t expect much from high-stakes exams beyond more kids and their elders in the education business getting good at the various games of high-stakes exams.

What you can hope, wish and pray for is a change in American culture where education for citizenship and the life of the mind are respected by people important to kids, primarily by other kids.

Don’t hold your breath while waiting.

Grade Inflation: GPAs and SATs

          USA Today reports "A's on the rise in U.S. report cards, but SAT scores founder" (17 July 2017) — and I think, "Here we go again."

            Fairly frequently over 35 years I handled grade complaints in a good-size university department of English. I usually mentioned in my annual reports that there were fewer complaints than we should have in a department as large as ours, so it was likely that colleagues were grading too leniently.

            I believed in the existence of grade inflation and that grade inflation could hurt returning students whose, averages had been good back in the day but looked less good against the inflated grades of younger competitors. Still, grade inflation was balanced by requirement inflation so there was some fairness: "Back in the day," one could graduate college with 120 semester credit-hours; by the time I left teaching, the more usual requirement was 128 hours: a half-semester more.

            Measuring high school GPA's against SAT scores must be done carefully, however, and reported carefully. For one thing, you need the numbers for who's taking the tests.

            In the 1970's, Richard Ohmann examined the "literacy crisis" and reported on it in an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Oct. 25, 1976). "Johnny can't read / Johnny can't write," and the cause had to be radical changes in American high schools in the 1960s.

            Not really,

            What had changed most was more young women going to college, so the issue was good news with Jane, not degeneration for Johnny: college teachers were seeing a more typical sample of (female) high school graduates.

            There has been grade inflation, but SAT averages are affected strongly by who's taking the tests, and we should expect a decline in scores because of the mostly good news that more high school grads are going to college meaning more people are taking SATs meaning a more typical sample of US high school students — and lower scores.

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Reference:

            Ohmann, Richard. "The Literacy Crisis Is a Fiction, if Not a Hoax." The Chronicle of Higher Education 25 October 1976.

Also:

            Erlich, Richard D. "[…] The Parable of the Masturbating Madmen." Views from a Jagged Orbit. Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2017: pp. 141-43.

The Most Important Thing, He Said, He Learned in College ...

I've been thinking about a line by one of my students at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), probably in the late 1980s. I've forgotten what the context was, but there was a context; this wasn't off the wall. Anyway, the student said "The most important thing I've learned at college is, 'Not everybody is Catholic.'" And this was at Miami U at Oxford, a school with a lot of conservative Irish (and some Polish) Catholics.

Not everyone is Christian or monotheist or theist either.

Good for him. However woefully ignorant many American Christians are of their religion(s), however much the US of A is a (revolutionary, secular) Republic, and not a nation, Christian or otherwise — there's still an issue with us of "Do fish know they're in water?" Much of American culture is strongly inflected by Christianity, and the Christianity of the Western, Roman Church and its dissenting (and agreeing) descendants. E.g., what I as an outsider see as an otherwise strangely strong concern with beliefs and attitudes and "state of mind" is understandable among people who must seriously deal with the line "By Faith and Faith alone shall ye be saved" (unless it's irresistible Grace or the Sacraments of Holy Church).

That may be the most important thing going away to college teaches. The Truth is out there, but we see it from different angles and with different suppositions, right down to differences in training in different sub-fields. (The one time I did real science in what came down to a classic physiology lab, our data sets were a few dogs or maybe a few dozen rats. Things were different in microbiology, where we usually dealt with bacteria and such by the millions and billions. You asked different kinds of questions.)

Back in the 1980s, the State of Ohio was still pitching in a bit to subsidize the education at public schools like Miami of Ohio residents; with this student, the taxpayers got their money's worth.

Teaching Controversies: Global Warming

            An energetically polemical editorial in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel on "Global warming in the classroom" asserts that "Indiana" — presumably the Indiana General Assembly — erred in passing "an 'academic freedom resolution giving teachers great latitude in how they help students 'analyze and critique scientific theories,'" finding that resolution "almost an invitation to teach flat-Earth-theory mumbo jumbo and Earth-is-the center-of–the-universe nonsense" (22 June 2017).

            I taught a course in rhetoric and composition on "The Literature of the Life Sciences" where students analyzed and wrote about scientific controversies, including the "nonsense" of the theory of spontaneous generation: that under the proper conditions, life nowadays can arise and develop: e.g."if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog," as Hamlet puts it, or later when what we'd call bacteria arise in a suitable medium exposed to air.

            Spontaneous generation theory went against the Book of Genesis and its assertion that creatures were, well, created and since then reproduce "each after its kind" — but it was widely accepted until effectively exploded by elegant experiments, notably by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s.

            Studying that debate teaches science as a method — not a body of facts that dispel nonsense — but a method and as a human activity with social, political, philosophical, theological, and historical contexts. (Why wasn't there religious opposition to spontaneous generation theory the way there was to evolution?)

            Similarly, why did educated Europeans and others from ancient Greece on deny the evidence of their senses and come to believe the Earth wasn't flat, if lumpy, but a sphere? And how can we know that they knew? (Hint: Check the "ball and scepter" motif with kings: they don't hold a plate to signal power on our planet.)

            And, of course, it took a long time for the theory of a sun-centered universe to be accepted, and long time after that before the universe expanded to the universe or multiverse of today. (And I've got $100 for the favorite charity of the writers of "Classroom" if any one of them can write out from memory the main evidence for why common sense is wrong and the sun does not revolve around the Earth.)

            A tough job for teachers is getting kids interested, and those kids should at least be curious why their elders are so exercised over whether and how the Earth is warming and what, if anything we can and should do about it if it is.

            There's a great teaching opportunity there, not preaching some truth or other. It's just that teaching controversies requires broadly-educated teachers perhaps team teaching, and literate people reading essays of analysis, not giving multiple-choice tests.

Teaching Americans to Argue Civilly

             In a quietly inspiring story in the USA Today network of newspapers, Gabe Cavallaro tells how Meg Heubeck of the Center for Politics' Youth Leadership Initiative (UVa) "works with teachers nationally to help students respectfully deal with the divides of our society through civil discourse, debate[,] and compromise."

            From what I've seen in comment sections of articles on line, and based in 40 years teaching courses in rhetoric, "the art of ethical persuasion," I'll suggest a broader project.

            One of the reasons so much of our public discourse is uncivil is that too few Americans know how to put together an argument and therefore fall back on personal attack. (Too few Americans can argue well privately with a spouse or other family member or friend, which is a related issue.)

            For the last three generations, middle-class kids have gotten little practice arguing in contexts they care about. Their families have fewer children, and family dinners have become rare, so young children don't get supervised practice arguing with siblings, with feedback from parents on the order of "'Johnny is a doodie-head' is not an argument!" Older children aren't routinely shooed out of the house to organize their own games, and by the time they're teens moving toward adulthood, economically-privileged kids are trapped in what I've called "The Little-League Syndrome."

            Little League Baseball and similar organizations for other sports, and grammar school and high-school athletic teams, teach kids to play the sports well, and these adult-organized and coached sports have been excellent for father-daughter relationships. They have been bad, though, for allowing American kids opportunities to organize their own activities and learn how to persuade their peers.

            On a couple of occasions, my students were surprised to learn my age cohort really didn't have Little League when and where I grew up, but teenage boys had high school fraternities and social-athletic clubs and ran our own leagues. "It's not like we built the parks and playing fields," I told my students, but we did put together teams, arrange schedules, and, sometimes, had to decide what to do with some schmucks who'd embezzled the money the clubs had chipped in for trophies.

            And there were year clubs for boys and for girls that arranged social events.

            Poorer American kids still have gangs — which look to me authoritarian and led by adults — but current fashions in middle-class American parenting and school management seem to preclude kids' organizing their own activities.

            So, one thing that can be done to improve American discourse is for parents and other adults to teach children basic manners and insist on basic decency to others — including no bullying — and to draw back a bit at a time to allow older kids to run more of their own activities and have to persuade one another to do what they want them to do.

            Little League and such teaches kids how to fit into a bureaucracy and follow orders; kid-organized activities teach democratic organizing, which includes persuasion of peers on issues kids care about (and some activities that may legitimately horrify their parents and others in authority).

            The schools need to teach things kids may care less about: argument as a kind of summation of skills, but also description and definition and analysis and other "modes" of discourse. For a slogan for this kind of teaching, we used to have "Unplug the Scantron machines!": i.e., get rid of multiple-choice tests (as an ultimate goal) and have students write out present orally descriptions, extended definitions, analyses, and finally arguments.

            Logical thought isn't exactly natural, and kids need to be taught, and adults need to be reminded, how to use evidence and present a logical argument (if one with enough of an emotional appeal to get it accepted).

            And young adults and some older ones need to be taught how to debate with one another on matters for adults, and for citizens.

            This doesn't mean just pure politics, but — obviously! — issues in the sciences, including military science and tactics, history, theology, and the arts. And it means some training in the sort of deep analysis where you can figure out why political arguments so often go in circles.

            One reasons for a "failure to communicate": Different people often use the same key words with different meanings. E.g., if a human being is essentially a soul to be saved and "ensoulment" occurs at conception, then abortion may be worse than murder. If you're not big on theories of souls and/or if you think theological issues shouldn't enter American politics — then you'll have a different view on abortion (and we haven't even gotten to historical questions on control of women's bodies!). For another example, what do we mean by "patriot"? In 1969 or so, I told an FBI agent, "Mr. N_____ is a very patriotic young man" since Mr. N_____ started out in Marine ROTC, studied US warfare in Vietnam and decided it was wrong, dropped his plans for a military career, and joined the Peace Movement, actively opposing the war. Now that is a patriot, like John Kerry, only a bit earlier. The FBI agent may have had different ideas on patriotism and, indeed, might have thought my idea of a patriot his idea of a traitor.

            The sort of rough-and-ready analysis I just did requires training, and pulling it off in the real world requires practice — a lot of practice — in controlling one's temper and getting opponents to control theirs.

            Meg Heubeck is doing important and difficult work; she deserves a wide variety of support.