I found out by accident. I had a meeting in a building across campus and one of my students had a job there staffing the reception desk. She is one of those students every professor always hopes to get: insightful, very well trained, a terrific writer, great sense of humor. She also brings personal experience in multilingualism and multiculturalism to a class on linguistic anthropology. I am hesitant to ask any individual to stand for a topic as a token so I have not completely mined her for what she could contribute, but she has lived many of the class subjects.

We chatted about this and that. And then I said something about how much there is to talk about in the class and how I feel we always run out of time. I also expressed regret that we had not spoken about her country’s complex background as much as I would have liked.

“It’s okay. We talk about it on our own.”

What? This was something I rarely heard.

“Our table”—the classroom has an unusual configuration that I call the “dinner table” arrangement of four tables of ten—“goes out to lunch after every class (and that’s three of them a week!) and we talk about the class. You should come with us sometime.”

This is the Holy Grail. This is winning the teacher’s lottery. This is getting a golden ticket. This is all I’ve ever wanted in my decades of teaching: for students to care and to want to learn the subject. I don’t have any genuine stake in whether they remember the names of Sapir and Whorf or if they know what duality of patterning is, even though we talk about such things. Whether they can define language revitalization or pidgins and creoles or adjacency pairs or negative politeness or index and icon ten years from now….that is not the point. All I really want is that they become intrigued by the complexity of language and culture and the mysteries of human social interaction.

So by my own criteria, I have passed this particular course with flying colors!

I have worked hard to make this magic happen, as I have since I first realized that not all students come to class as excited about the subject as I am. From the very first day I insist on students’ talking. They have group projects, small group discussions. They have to ask questions daily about the reading. The room has a certain special atmosphere that I adore. But there are also mysterious ingredients—one student with a passion, two students with particular experience—that transform a group of people going through the motions and fulfilling requirements into a tight-knit body of eager discussants. I do not claim credit for this success. The alchemy of any group of humans is beyond the analysis of THIS anthropologist.

But however it happened, I want to savor it.

So you can bet I’m going to lunch with them. And I want to listen and bask in our joint accomplishment: making something learned in school come alive with possibility and meaning.

Sometimes formal education works. And when it does, when the students are buzzing with interest in the subject, when they don’t even tell the teacher about their out-of-class conversations—this is worth every moment.


Image source:
http://www.news.wisc.edu/wisweek/17-Nov-2004/images/Midori_Chadb_cafe04_9946.jpg

There is a drama unfolding even as I write: thirty-five suspects have been indicted in a criminal conspiracy, and only a few of them have surrendered to authorities. They face decades in prison and millions of dollars in fines. The deadline for all to give themselves up is today.

Is this about drugs? Kidnapping? Treason? Securities fraud?

Nothing so alien as that; it is an everyday criminal context: It’s about administrators and teachers changing answers on standardized tests in order to boost their schools’ and districts’ scores. Former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Beverly Hall made it clear that she would reward teachers whose students achieved higher test scores and punish those whose did not.

But after a set of criminal investigators worked on teachers to turn state’s evidence, wearing a wire to break the silence about the score-changing events where Dr. Hall wore gloves as she handled the answer sheets, this has exploded into a full-fledged crime show.

There is no need to rehash the question of whether teachers’ value should be tied to their students’ test-score improvement, nor about whether scores of even special needs students and those just learning English should be included in the scores of a given school. (This tends to boost the scores of charter schools, who have fewer of those categories of students.) We will not here discuss the absurdity of tying success to continual improvement. (I was once associated with a school with an attendance rate of 95%. They had to improve each year—but some kids were bound to be out sick from time to time. So they aimed for 96%. Failure to meet goals would result in punishment.)

What I want to ask is about the point of all this testing.

Isn’t our goal to get children ready for the world they will enter?

When all that matters is test results, people will do everything they can to make them look good. High-stakes testing gives the message that the process doesn’t matter—not even for the teachers. High-stakes testing puts the attention on the measurable: simple answers to simple questions.

And cheating is always tempting when people are in competition with each other. Ask Lance Armstrong. Ask the overseers of the Chinese Civil Service Examination, who struggled in vain for more than a thousand years to prevent cheating.

In the game of learning, everyone could be a winner. Not in the now-deplored sense that everyone gets a medal for participating. But in the sense that everyone could actually learn basic skills.

When schooling first became compulsory in the United States in Massachusetts in 1647, the goal was literacy and numeracy for all, so they could participate in the basic operations of democracy. In the neoliberal quest to pit every unit against every other unit—child against child, teacher against teacher, school against school, district against district, state against state—it has seemed as if the declared goal is to produce losers.

In that sense, Dr. Hall’s fierce protection of her kids makes sense: She didn’t want them to be losers.

But of course they are certainly seen that way now.

I like to think that this house of cards will now fall and that the era of children’s death by assessment will soon end.

After all, some of the criminals will be behind bars. There will be others out there tempted to do the same thing. But maybe, just maybe, the conversation will become urgent and even sensible. And then we can go back to teaching kids.

[Or see it on Huffington Post]

MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses—are not the same thing as the enormously popular interactive games titled Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). Nor are they the same thing as going to college. And this matters.

MOOCs are good at certain things and terrible at others, and we need to understand the difference if we wish to educate human beings, not just workers with credentials.

In case you missed it: MOOCs are the latest thing, online courses that package the best, most effective classes and send them out, free, to the world. Tom Friedman and many others see them as the saving power for the coming world, the “disruptive innovation,” in Clayton Christensen’s phrase, that will challenge conventional education. Some see this as “meeting the unmet need for higher education.”

Many critics (including myself) worry about the passive “sage on the stage” model of learning that MOOCs exemplify, but what I want to talk about here, along with games, is the non-academic side of residential colleges. (I am not weighing in here on what happens in classes; some are effective and some ineffective, but for exactly the same reasons as I am about to unfold.)

Comparing MOOCS with MMOGs and residential colleges might seem odd. But the contrast is instructive: both create relationships, play, and intrinsic rewards.

MOOCs are not play.

And they are not games.

And they do not encourage meaningful interaction, certainly not if they are to result in certification. If you want certification, you do it alone. That’s how testing is done. Cheating epidemics are feared.

MOOCs do not engage the fully physical person.

I have had my own disruptions, but they are not favoring the MOOCs:

For most of my life I had a hard time taking seriously the online gaming world but I have learned some facts that changed my mind, among them that MMOGs such as Happy Farm have 228 million active users and World of Warcraft has almost 12 million monthly subscribers—almost the same number as students enrolled in higher education in the United States.

Stanford communications scholar Nick Yee identified three types of motivation that explain the popularity of MMOGs: achievement, social, and immersion factors. These are compelling human motives.

Liberal arts and other residential campuses also draw students. But I would argue that aside from the financial gains promised by a college diploma, the aspect of residential colleges that is especially compelling for many students is not the academic side of college but the same goals as Yee saw.

As a professor I used to regard the non-curricular side of college as competition with what I saw as the central focus of college (the academic side). Then about a decade ago I began to wonder what it meant that students cared so much about all those activities. Why were students so committed and so competent at them? Why were they so meaningful to them?

On residential campuses students direct plays; they function as professional athletes fought over by recruiters; they produce dance parties; they tutor disadvantaged children; build houses for previously homeless people; organize food drives; play in bands.

I came to notice the contrast with classrooms, where often students are treated as children, scrutinized and marked “tardy” or berated for seeing to their bodily needs, where the overseeing adults are largely regarded as adversaries rather than as partners.

As I learned more about learning, it began to make sense to me that classes and the academic side of school are not the principal draw for a large number of students. Humans are and must be both embodied and enmeshed in social networks. Their full selves are present in the face-to-face activities that entice them—often much more than in classrooms where students are expected to engage in purely cognitive activities often in isolation from others.

In the increasingly important “co-curriculum” students not only master complex “leadership” and “team-building” skills for their resumes, but they also enjoy them.

A few weeks ago I did a brief exercise among first-year college students, asking why they were in college. After jobs, money, and careers, a number of them listed “fun” as a compelling motivation.

Instead of dismissing this as frivolous and distracting from the central purpose of turning out workers, we need to attend to this as one of the principal aspects of our humanity.

Students like play—as do all people, as Google knows.

Play not only fosters productivity and creativity, but also makes life more meaningful. And it helps learning.

So the most skilled performers and educators may deliver “knowledge” and information through MOOCs. Students can catch the enthusiasm just as they might from watching PBS shows. If they want to do assignments they can get feedback from fellow volunteer students. Some MOOCs include discussion fora.

MOOCs may deliver academic information in an enjoyable way, and students motivated by credentials may complete the course along with all its evaluations. Some enjoy learning and writing and test-taking, after all, just as in regular classrooms.

But those people we encounter in school or in online games are more than simply learning machines. And they know it themselves.

Humans are not isolated test-taking brains. Those learners are people, fully engaged with multiple dimensions of their life: social, physical, pleasure-appreciating, playful. We can carve out the cognitive and academic, but most students will resist that in one way or another, at every level of schooling.

If our ultimate goal is to educate human beings, then we must focus not only on knowledge and information, discipline and surveillance as measured by tests, but also on non-academic pleasures, motivations, skills, and the full array of human engagement that sustains attention and meaning. MOOCs may give us insight into this perennial necessity—if only by missing. We will soon know.

Sources:
Nick Yee. CyberPsychology & Behavior. December 2006, 9(6): 772-775. doi:10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772.

Image source:
http://highereducationmanagement.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/moocs1.jpg?w=690

I have been thinking a lot lately about money and grades. Not for the reasons you may think: that I want more and better of both (or to “give” tough grades). But because they share interesting qualities. My thinking is analytical rather than greedy.

Money and grades, I propose, are both supersigns.

[Also see this and comments on PopAnth: Hot Buttered Humanity]

I teach anthropology at Notre Dame. I have written a book about truth and deception. I have written a different book about college. As an anthropologist I am interested in not only what humans do but what we think about what we do. Humans are fascinating. I am glad to have a front-row seat to our species.

So I need to weigh in on the story of football player Manti Te’o and his fake dead girlfriend, as revealed last week by Deadspin.

But I can’t figure out what kind of story this is.

[Also on Huffington Post]

When we learn things, really learn them, they can never be forgotten. The “riding a bicycle” example is exemplary for a reason.

As a teacher, I want all my subjects to be like bicycle riding.

[Read more]


[Photo credit: http://www.pedbikeimages.org/Mike Cynecki]

[Originally published in China Daily, November 9, 2012]

If the goal of scholarship is to get published, rather than to contribute in a meaningful and substantial way to the growth of knowledge, then any method is acceptable. Academic life is not usually so lucrative that people enter it to get wealthy. Usually people have some drive to know and learn.

Until this has been accomplished in China through a combination of structural and cultural changes, the fight against misconduct and corruption will remain with us.

We academics are lucky, in a way: we get a fresh start at least twice a year. We have a new school year in the fall and a New Year in the winter. With this luck, though, comes the requirement to start anew. Old schedules and habits are over; we have to commit ourselves to new ones. Whether we like it or not, we have to start over.

Following peer pressure—something nobody should ever do—I am therefore setting out some of my winter New Year’s resolutions. These are public, and idiosyncratic, so I will probably regret them many times over before I do it again next year. I am already afraid (see number 7) about posting them!

Academic life comes in three forms—teaching, research, and service—and then there is the personal. I’ll skip the exercise, yoga, meditation, clutter-conquering, calling-my-parents, eating-more-kale, bringing-my-own-bags (hey! I already do this one!) resolutions. You can find these everywhere you look. Instead I’ll look at my academic resolutions.

1.     Procrastinate and fret less. The plan is to start doing the things I’m putting off—grading, bureaucratic reports, polishing articles, reviews, grading, making decisions about scheduling, responding to complicated emails, and, by the way, did I mention grading? Once I am in the midst of a semester I often find myself constantly worrying about getting responses back to students. Once I start I almost always find it takes less time than I expected. So, in order to get to these things, I just have to begin. Preferably this occurs in an empty room with the Internet disconnected.

2.     Plan my daily writing in advance. I already reserve mornings, my most productive time, for writing, but I don’t always get to the writing part. This resolution requires having a concrete plan about what exactly to do. The Pomodoro Technique takes care of this.

3.     Work on fewer things at a time. Instead of compiling lists, starting new things—Oh the joy of starting!—and having oodles of unfinished work weighing down my heart, I will keep in mind what two of my productive colleagues have revealed in the last year, as I’ve asked about work habits: (a) Work on one thing at a time. (b) Recognize that the last 10% takes 90% of the effort. So in order to work on fewer things at a time, I will have to finish the half-dozen articles that are on my list, so I can get to the 600-page manuscript that I am especially excited about.

4.     Stick to my resolution about taking on only tasks to which I feel I can offer something unique. Keep relying on my “No Committee” (my next-door colleague and friend) when asked about new obligations. Each talk, manuscript review, committee, independent study, conference seems intriguing itself, but they add up to an unmanageable whole.

5.     Continue trying innovative approaches to learning, aiming to reach my students where they begin and move them to a new understanding and inspiration, rather than blaming them for not being academically oriented.

6.     Remember that my position is one of a certain amount of privilege—in comparison with many other academics, and in comparison with many others in jobs that bring only a livelihood, not a calling, and then with so many without employment at all—and that with that comes obligation.

7.     Be brave. Speak the truth, as much as I have evidence for this, even if it is frightening. Stop waiting to write the strong views I hold. It might mean people dislike or dispute what I say, but that is supposed to be the point of public discourse. In that vein, I turn to resolution 8:

8.     Blog. I’m starting the New Year able to check this one off right away. But like yoga, exercise, flossing, eating kale, calling my mother, and all the rest, it must be done regularly in order to be effective. And though I give my blogging some thought, I usually let the posts go without stewing too long. They are somewhat risky, but writing helps thinking and responses bring additional clarity.

So now I’ve publicly stated my plans. With the theory that accountability helps, I hit “submit” and enjoy the clean slate that January 1 brings. I wish you a similar hopeful beginning. Happy New Year!

The Chinese winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yan, has been surrounded by controversy: he is too cozy with the Communist Party. He spoke up once about Liu Xiaobo but did not use his platform to do so in his acceptance speech. He did, however, address the controversy, by telling stories.

So is he simply a party hack and stooge?

Read on....

[Also posted on Huffington Post]

Over Thanksgiving weekend, my college-student daughter started singing. She knew, and claimed that her friends knew, hundreds of songs. My father, a pediatrician, asked what he thought was a rhetorical question, “Why do kids know the words to every song but they can’t memorize something for a test that will get them a higher grade?”

This is, actually, a real question.

Also on Huffington Post