Which students should we deny the chance to improve their lot in life?

Ohio University economist Richard Vedder has never been one of my favorite people in the world. This argument doesn’t exactly endear him to me more:

While it is true that areas with high proportions of college graduates tend to have higher incomes and even higher rates of economic growth than other areas, it does not necessarily follow that mindlessly increasing college enrollments enhances our economic well-being. My own research shows that there generally is a negative relationship between state support for higher education and economic growth. Sending marginal students to four-year degree programs, only to drop out, is a waste of human and financial resources, and lowers the quality of life for those involved.

So which students should we deny the chance to improve their lot in life? The ones from bad school districts who just happen to be poor? And what about the poor students who aren’t marginal, but simply can’t afford college?

The other problem with this argument is that it forgets the rather obvious point that college exists in order to teach people. A good education can turn a marginal student into an excellent student, but Richard Vedder doesn’t want to fork over his tax dollars for something that frivolous. Instead, he’d deny colleges as much money to do their jobs as possible and then argue that they’re failing institutions.

I bet most of Vedder’s students at Ohio University couldn’t sit in his classes without student loans. Yet if Ohio University ever went down the tubes, Vedder’s always got the American Enterprise Institute to break his fall. What do those marginal students have?

Let’s torture pigs so that we’ll have more left to kill.

I am so done with Freakonomics. Like me, you’ve probably read all the stuff about how bad the global warming chapter is in Superfreakonomics. Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker writes:

Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong.

I figured I’d skip the new book, but keep reading the Freakonomics blog as it can sometimes be very interesting. Unfortunately, it seems like Levitt and Dubner have decided to give a permanent platform to this guy. Today he offers a heartfelt, compassionate defense of pig torture:

Horrible as it all sounds, many pig farmers vehemently insist on the humaneness of the farrowing crate. Critics might condemn the crate as little more than a productivity maximizer. But consider why it maximizes productivity: farrowing crates prevent piglets from being crushed to death. As many conventional pig farmers note, the crate’s design is carefully engineered to discourage mothers from rolling over on their suckling or sleeping babies, something that happens with alarming regularity in open systems.

Luckily, a reader named Richard has already posted what I was thinking in the comments:

OK, so let’s get this straight. Option 1: pig suffers. Option 2: baby pigs get killed.

Consider now option 3. If we cannot raise pigs humanely (because of 1 or 2) above, then we should not raise pigs. To the farmer who says they have to do option 1 to prevent 2, I say “no you don’t”. You are inherently engaged in a cruel, inhumane business – don’t make out that you are some sort of saint. You are not.

Paul Krugman picked out a particularly good line from Kolbert that applies here as well:

But what’s most troubling about “SuperFreakonomics” isn’t the authors’ many blunders; it’s the whole spirit of the enterprise. Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are.

In this case, you don’t have to be a trained scientist to figure out the problem with the pig argument. You don’t even have to be a vegetarian. You just have to realize that there are other ways to raise pigs than by the thousands.

“[D]o try to make it clear your heart hasn’t actually stopped beating.”

I’ve written before of my fondness for Heather Cox Richardson’s “Richardson’s Rules of Order” over at The Historical Society’s Blog. In this case, however, she has really outdone herself:

Please remember that your professors are human and it’s hard work to stand in front of a hundred pairs of eyes and talk for an hour. In the last decade, students seem more and more to regard us as if we’re behind a screen, and seem to think they can talk, read, sleep, or just stare at us glassy-eyed without it having any effect on our performance. This is a shared enterprise. It’s hard to lecture to an apparently disinterested sea of eyes. If you don’t think a lecture hall is intimidating, take a minute after class some day to stand behind the podium and look at all those seats. Then imagine holding the attention of everyone in those seats for an hour, two days a week. Wouldn’t it be easier if the people there seemed interested? You don’t have to act like you’re watching U2, but do try to make it clear your heart hasn’t actually stopped beating.

Perfect. Just perfect.

Personally, I’ve started mentioning the Political Science professor I had in college who would stare at the ceiling while lecturing, as if he couldn’t bare to look us in the eyes because he had committed some unspeakable sin. I then explain that this always made me so angry that I try hard to avoid it. Therefore, I can actually see what you’re doing while I’m talking.

This last line always seems to get a laugh. It shouldn’t.

Robo-lecturers.

Those of us who read University Diaries regularly know that UD hates PowerPoint. I’m of the “PowerPoint is a good tool that can be terribly misused school,” but no matter where you fall on this issue I still think she’s missed something important from this post she’s dug up:

His lectures are all Powerpoint presentations. He didn’t write the presentations. He downloaded them from the same place I did, the textbook publisher’s website. No new material that is not in the book or on the Powerpoints is introduced.

[Emphasis added]

This student isn’t complaining about the PowerPoint. They’re complaining about the fact that the professor doesn’t know the material. This is more clear in a later comment she unearths:

…[M]any textbooks now come with ready-made PowerPoint lectures for each chapter. The problem is that when the professor does not make the presentation, they run the risk of sounding like they don’t know what they’re talking about.

UD correctly concludes that these teachers aren’t teaching at all, but presumably that problem could be fixed if these professors at least wrote their own PowerPoints. What we have here then is a different problem.

In order to differentiate and therefore sell more of their overpriced survey textbooks, giant publishers now provide professors reading quizzes, PowerPoints, online grading platforms, lecture notes…even entire lectures. I’ve grabbed pictures and especially maps from these handouts because they’re the best and most convenient visuals available, but I always tell the publishers reps who visit me that there are some things I just have to do myself.

I always imagined that these are the crutches that help frenzied contingent faculty survive being drastically overworked and underpaid, but maybe it’s more mainstream than I imagined. Yet would professors like the ones described above be teaching on autopilot if the publishers didn’t make it so easy to do so? I’d argue that they couldn’t, because nobody else would do their work for them.

Don’t get me wrong: I agree that reading PowerPoints you didn’t write and calling it teaching is fraud. Even if the publishers are pushers, it’s still the faculty who are knowingly and willingly committing the crime. Nevertheless, it will be a lot easier to clean up the streets if we clear out the pushers first. We can’t lock them up (capitalism being what it is), but perhaps we could all shun the worst offenders?

Best. Wombat picture. Ever.

As a well-known wombat fan, I was particularly struck by this picture:

The post at the Book Bench which this comes from is also very interesting.

Best food history link…

…from my History of Food Bleg:

Food Timeline. Apparently, it’s been an Internet project since 1999! That’s like forever in cyberspace.

History of food bleg.

Cross-posted at La Vida Locavore (where I’m expecting most of the answers to pop up).

I’m a history professor by profession. My training is in American labor history, but the problem with that is that whenever it goes on the schedule I can’t get enough students to sign up for it so that the class survives. Therefore, next semester I’m trying to pioneer a subfield that nobody really has training in: Food History.

I’ve already ordered my books (all of which I’ve already read and recommend highly):

Levenstein, Revolution at the Table.
Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table.
McNamee, Alice Waters and Chez Panisse.
Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

I’ve also ordered a bunch of books with article length pieces from which I’ll assign pieces:

O’Neill, Ed., American Food Writing.
Remnick, Ed., Secret Ingredients.
Kurlansky, Ed., The Food of a Younger Land.

As this course is going to be a reading seminar, I’m afraid I don’t have enough stuff (particularly as I won’t assign everything in the collections). Therefore, I’m looking for good essays on the history of food in America that I could just link to in the final syllabus when I write it. It doesn’t matter what kind of food, my hope is to cover everything from Breakfast through midnight snacks with everything in between.

So ya got anything for me? [URLs are crucial here, of course.]

Isn’t that slavery (or at least a blatant violation of American labor law)?

Some contingent faculty in California state schools are apparently now teaching for free. This news leaves me with many questions. The top of the list would be: Isn’t that slavery (or at least a blatant violation of American labor law)?

Seriously, think about it. Do these people still have to sign a contract in order to work for free? If so, what are the instructors getting in return? How can a contract for no wages be enforceable? Can they just decide not to show up some morning and get fired from their non-jobs? Can their students leave them tips? Presumably these instructors used to teach there for a (low) stipend before the State of California ran out of money. You can’t somehow become an intern AFTER you already work somewhere, can you?

The Florence and the Machine YouTube channel.

Culturally backward American that I am, I never heard of Florence and the Machine until I saw them on Boing Boing a few months back. Now that their first album is out, I’m totally hooked. This was the video that got me, but it’s all good. Today, I discovered their YouTube Channel where you can see more.

And in other personal music news, my daughter just asked to borrow my Talking Heads albums after hearing just a part of “More Songs About Buildings and Food.” I knew that child had class. I think I’ll start here here:

An education in education is a useless distraction.

Thank goodness somebody wrote this, and in the New York Times no less:

Once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently from how we have in the past. Too often, teaching students spend their time studying specific instructional programs and learning how to handle mechanics like making lesson plans. These skills, while useful, are not what will transform a promising student into a good teacher.

First, future teachers should continue studying the subject they hope to teach, with outstanding professors. It makes no sense at all to stop studying the thing you want to teach at the very moment you begin to learn how.

What I’ve heard over the years is that there are two education courses that are of any use: the one on developmental disabilities and the one in classroom management. Everything else is a distraction from actually learning what you’re supposed to teach.

Surprisingly, I Googled up the Arne Duncan speech that seems to have inspired this op-ed and it appears that the Secretary agrees with this sentiment:

Teacher-preparation programs should ensure that new teachers will master the content of the subjects they’ll teach and they will have well-supported field-based experiences embedded throughout their preparation programs.

Everything I’ve read about him to this point in time as left me thoroughly underwhelmed, but perhaps there’s hope after all.