You don’t stop teaching after the homework assignment is finished.

This is by Mark Bauerlein at Brainstorm (via AHA Today):

A while back, a principal at an elementary school explained to me how it happens. He said that his 5th- and 6th-grade teachers are having a problem with research assignments. If they ask the kids to do a report on, say, the colony of Jamestown, they follow a predictable process. Type search terms, pull up the first three or four sites, cut and paste sentences and paragraphs into a document, add their own comments, print it up, and turn it in. They have, they believe, completed the assignment.

As I wrote in the comments over there:

If this happens in the classroom the proper thing for the 5th and 6th grade teachers to do is to explain to the students how to do the assignments properly then have them do a similar project again. If there’s a connected computer in the classroom they can all learn how to use internet sources together.

Since when does learning stop when the homework is turned in?

And come to think of it, if Bauerlein is so worried about electronic sources, what does he have to say about Google Books or the Making of America or even J-Store, for that matter? All of these are resources that really help make up for woefully underfunded and inadequately stocked libraries like mine. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. It’s the teacher’s job to explain how to use these resources well.

History teachers all over the world now have unprecedented access to primary sources – including, books, movies and photographs – and he thinks this is a bad thing? Notice how it wasn’t a history professor who came up with this argument.

Barack Obama feels my pain.

“I recognize I have assigned a lot of reading for a seminar. Before many of you go the registrar about dropping out, let me explain.“

– From Barack Obama’s 1994 syllabus for his Current Issues in Racism and the Law seminar at the University of Chicago Law School, via the NYT’s blog, The Caucus.

I, however, certainly wouldn’t have made “at least half of the material optional.”

Ballot Box Bunny.

I wonder if the Muppet-obsessed bloggers at the Edge of the American West are aware that whole Bugs Bunny cartoons are available on YouTube. This one seems appropriate in an election year:

Of course, I mention this only because I suspect they might be as excited as I was when I figured this out.

Steamboat Willie.

I really am continually amazed at what they have on YouTube. Didn’t Disney get copyright law just for cases just like this one?

Perhaps the publishing industry isn’t Evil incarnate.

Here’s another passage from the first article of that NYT series on reading and the internet that I’ve been blogging about:

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at the University of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.

On the Internet, nobody knows if you’re a crank (and oftentimes you are). While the publishing industry does not always have the highest standards, at least it can serve as a gatekeeper to protect readers from idiocy.

Read reputable sources in print. That helps you pick them out when you’re on the internet too.

Why can’t kids learn to read in more than one way?

Wouldn’t you know it? The day after I do my first post on reading in months, the New York Times starts a gigantic series on the subject. The controversy at the center of the first article seems to be whether reading on the Internet is really reading:

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.

Why does it have to be either/or? Can’t kids learn to read both ways for use in different situations? The Times article itself offers the explanation:

The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards.

I’m not against the Internet in any way (you are reading my blog, after all), but it’s this sort of thing that scares me:

Despite these efforts, Nadia never became a big reader. Instead, she became obsessed with Japanese anime cartoons on television and comics like “Sailor Moon.” Then, when she was in the sixth grade, the family bought its first computer. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net, she turned off the television and started reading online.

Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages. Many of them have elliptical plots and are sprinkled with spelling and grammatical errors. One of her recent favorites was “My absolutely, perfect normal life … ARE YOU CRAZY? NOT!,” a story based on the anime series “Beyblade.”

Let Nadia read that stuff, but if she’s going to grow up and enter the workforce some day should have plenty of examples of books that use proper grammar and spelling. Indeed, reading is the best and easiest way to learn grammar, spelling and vocabulary. Read enough and getting it right becomes almost automatic.

So I say read online. Text with your friends. Have a blast.

Just don’t make that the only place you go to read.

PS Some time this week I’m going to have to pull Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book off my office shelf again. Van Doren himself has a lovely article in my New Yorker that just came today about his role in the Quiz Show Scandal of the 1950s. This just makes me want to see more about what he and Adler had to say about reading, and whether anything there is relevant to this so-called dispute.

Hasn’t he ever heard of skimming?

AHA Today sent me to this piece by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Here’s the core of the argument (complete with obligatory reference to Marshall McLuhan):

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

If I remember right, the classic, How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren suggests at least five different ways to read a book, depending upon how much you want or need to get out of the material. But we don’t need to complicate things that much. Everyone’s heard of skimming, right? I simply don’t understand why all these can’t people skim things on the World Wide Web and deeply read the stuff they want to digest further. Is there only one gear on their mental transmission?

Reading is not a passive activity. If you read well you make countless decisions about what to take in deeply and what to skim over lightly. The Web, with all those links built into it, practically demands skimming. You read a blog. It refers you to another blog and eventually you get back to the original article that’s worth reading all the way through. I suspect the only site for which I don’t do this at least every once in a while is the New York Times. That’s because so much of what’s out there isn’t worth my time. The Times always is so I know in advance to read it differently. If this process fundamentally changes the way you think, you’re not thinking hard enough.

So is this really the kind of thing that Marshall McLuhan had in mind [Wasn't he talking about TV? Is that really applicable here?], or maybe we have a situation like this at hand:

I’m pretty sure the Flying Spaghetti Monster represents something else entirely…

…and that whoever put up those statues of Moses and Jesus wouldn’t like it:

Would this strategy work on you?

So I just finished reading The 4-Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferriss. My brother the economist was appalled when he saw me reading it at his house in Denver this weekend, but what can I say? I like books about employment and this one certainly qualifies

I’ll save the review for another post (assuming anyone cares), but I was rather intrigued by this passage from pp. 90-91:

“For all four years of school, I had a policy. If I received anything less than an A on the first paper or non-multiple choice test in a given class, I would bring 2-3 hours of questions to the grader’s office hours and not leave until the other had answered them all or dropped out of exhaustion.

This served two important purposes:

1. I learned exactly how the grader evaluated work, including his or her prejudiced and pet peeves.
2. The grader would think long and hard about ever giving me less than an A. he or she would never consider giving me a bad grade without exceptional reasons for doing so, as he or she knew I’d come knocking for another three-hour visit.”

When I first read this I thought it would never work on me because I’d be thrilled to have student actually come to my office hours to talk about the material, rather than to explain why they haven’t produced the assignment on time. Then I digested the part about 2-3 hours of questions. I can’t imagine where 2-3 hours of questions on ANY undergraduate assignment would come from, but perhaps that’s just a failure of my imagination.

Do you think Ferriss’ strategy would work on you? I could certainly see this working on an underpaid teaching assistant, but do you think this strategy would work on a tenured professor?

Oh yeah, it helps to know that Ferriss went to Princeton.

“How many times do you have to get hit over the head before you figure out who’s hitting you?”

I love it when two of my favorite subjects align. This is from the Wall Street Journal:

A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck.

Just ask Bea Dewing. After she earned a bachelor’s degree — her second — in computer science from Maryland’s Frostburg State University in 1986, she enjoyed almost unbroken advances in wages, eventually earning $89,000 a year as a data modeler for Sprint Corp. in Lawrence, Kan. Then, in 2002, Sprint laid her off.

“I thought I might be looking a few weeks or months at the most,” says Ms. Dewing, now 56 years old. Instead she spent the next six years in a career wilderness, starting an Internet café that didn’t succeed, working temporary jobs and low-end positions in data processing, and fruitlessly responding to hundreds of job postings.

The low point came around 2004 when a recruiter for Sprint — now known as Sprint Nextel Corp. — called seeking to fill a job similar to the one she lost two years earlier, but paying barely a third of her old salary.

In April, Ms. Dewing finally landed a job similar to her old one in the information technology department of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., where she relocated. She earns about 20% less than she did in 2002, adjusted for inflation, but considers herself fortunate, and wiser.

Fortunate? She works for Wal-Mart, for heaven’s sake. Like Harry Truman used to say, “How many times do you have to get hit over the head before you figure out who’s hitting you?”

The problem with the Wall Street Journal’s analysis here is not that the market for Ms. Dewing’s education is drying up, it’s that the market for her labor is drying up. Haven’t they read The World Is Flat? [I have and the problem with it is that Thomas Freidman is totally amoral. The reporting is actually pretty good.] There are people in India who can do her job for a fraction of the cost and as soon as Wal-Mart figures out how they can make that happen, her job is going to disappear so fast it will make her head spin.

Luckily, there are people like Nathan Newman around to explain the real problem:

Most workers are seeing a drop in real wages, but in that they are just joining the fate of lower-income workers who have long seen their wages dropping in the face of inflation. For those making minimum wage, this month officially marked another increase in the federal minimum wage, up to $6.55 per hour. Yet, adjusted for inflation, that amount is below what the minimum wage was in 1999.

A college education is about the only hope you have of keeping your head above water in these dark times, yet according to this Journal story:

What employers want from workers nowadays is more narrow, more abstract and less easily learned in college.

Why do the Wall Street Journal and employers like Wal-Mart want you to avoid college? Perhaps because they’re afraid that college educated workers might actually figure out who’s hitting them.