For an Uncertain Value of “Deals With.”

01 Friday Jul 2022

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska, Native American Themes

Tags

Alaska, Ambiguity, Communication, Education, Indigenous Peoples, Miscommunication, Native Americans, Oil, Tribal Colleges

Indigenous communities in Alaska are just like those in the lower 48!

…only not at all.

Seriously, there are some significant differences in the way these communities are defined, along with their relationship to the rest of us. I got an interesting glimpse into the differences one day about a decade back when I and a colleague were asked if we could find a local elder willing to meet by teleconference with a college class from a tribal college in the lower 48. We put the meeting together and it went really well.

But one moment from that meeting has always stayed with me.

One of the students from the outside college asked how the elder and others in the Inupiat community here on the North Slope of Alaska deal with oil companies. The elder said something to the effect that you needed strong leadership that could articulate the needs of his own community to those companies. His terms were pretty general, but the student seemed quite satisfied with his answer.

The thing is; I am pretty sure the student was asking out the local community protests with oil companies. I’m also, pretty sure, the elder was thinking about how the local community negotiates a deal with them. To be sure, that negotiation process too could involve active opposition, but for the elder in question, that kind of opposition was by no means a forgone conclusion. He was at least as concerned about a share of the profits as anything else. I do think opposition was for the student; it was the only thing he could imagine an indigenous community would want from an oil company. I don’t think either of them realized they were not really talking about the same things.

I hadn’t been here that long and so I wasn’t sure about this impression, and I really didn’t think these guys needed a white guy appointing himself as a translater anyway.

So I hesitated.

…and the moment quickly passed.

Over time, though, I’ve become even more convinced that my initial impression was correct. Of course, we can find differences between different indigenous communities in other areas, and even between different leaders in those communities. That’s not entirely new, but at least at that moment, I am pretty sure that the prior assumptions of the students in this class and those of the elder were sufficiently obvious to each that they didn’t feel the need to clarify their intentions.

But I really don’t think they were on the same page.

Biases All the Way Down, Yes, but Some Biases are More Troublesome Than Others

15 Sunday Nov 2020

Posted by danielwalldammit in Philosophy, Politics

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Bias, Education, epistemology, Judgement, Knowledge, Objectivity, Polemics, prejudice, Subjectivity

When I listen to people complaining about indoctrination in the schools or dismissing perfectly sound journalism by chanting the mantra “fake news,” I’m always struck by the hopeless of trying to reason with them. These phrases do not usually convey skepticism; they do not challenge us to provide evidence or compelling reason. Instead, they signal an absolute barrier to any hope of meaningful communication. These phrases did not become popular in the American political vocabulary because they help to explain the problem with erroneous or dishonest journalism, nor have these phrases been generallyused to correct flawed textbooks or abusive teachers. As they are commonly used in America today, these phrases consistently provide thoughtless people with a shield against unwelcome information.

As I listen to such folks talk, or read anything they write, I can’t help thinking those who find nothing but bias in academia or mainstream news are often the same folks who speak of objectivity in terms of the most naive realism. Phrases like “just the facts” spill from their mouths, their keyboards, and their keypads quite often, and not a few of them are happy to remind us that facts do not care about our feelings. Facticity is part of their cultural capital, they own it (so they seem to think), and so they invoke it freely in encounters with others. Ask these people what it means to do a good job as a teacher or a journalist, a documentary film-maker, etc. and they will describe an absolute devotion to facts coupled with a complete absence of subjectivity. They have few thoughts as to how that works, but the goal seems pretty obvious to them.

If pressed, some might concede that such an account of any given subject never really happens, but they are likely to insist that it should be an ideal of sorts, a goal to which one ought to aspire. They don’t understand that the idela itself isn’t even coherent. You cannot describe a fact without injecting yourself into the description. Even the facts you choose to relate reflect a choice and a value statement about what is and what is not important in a story. So, does the language you use to describe those facts, and of course the conclusions you draw from whatever you take to be the settled facts of a story also reflect all sorts of choices about what lessons might be worth learning from the world around us. We never actually get a purely factual account of anything; we can’t even conceive of it in the abstract, because the most rigorous visions of evidence-based reasoning are themselves saturated with value judgements and personal biases.

If objectivity is meaningful at all, it is as a element in relation to subjectivity, (or perhaps inter-subjectivity), not as a pair of alternatives from which we choose. We can speak of an object only in relation to a subject. To imagine the one without the other is to indulge in fiction.

To those who suppose this fictional objectivity is reality, I suppose it is the rhetorical equivalent to reality television, a pretense to veracity offered with a smirk and wink even as any claims to meet that standard unravels unravels around us.

This naive realism goes hand in hand with a pan-partisanship in the consumption of information. As nobody ever actually meets these impossible standards of objectivity, it provides a ready excuse to dismiss any information one doesn’t wish to hear. You can always pick apart the choices other people make when they try to state facts. You can quibble over the language they use to express themselves or ask why they think this fact here is important and not that one there? Nobody meets the standard in actual practice, so each and every source of information comes ready-made with all manner of excuses for rejecting it. One has only to make exceptions for those one wishes to keep after all. If those exceptions seem selective, well then, by what standard would anyone presume to make such a judgement?

***

All of this leaves us with is a sense of bias which provides license for more of the same, and a way of talking about bias that reduces everyone and every approach to information to the level of open partisanship and nothing but partisanship. All biases are equal in this mindset, because those adopting it do not really think about how one sorts a reasonable account of any given subject from a foolish one. They needn’t accept the authority (or the credibility) of a judge, or a scholar, or a journalist, because they can find evidence of a personal point of view in each.

…if they want to.

This flattening of critical merit makes every controversy into a sort of intellectual playground, a range of possibilities all of which possess equal intellectual merit. It puts every couch-potato responding to a 3-minute news segment on Covid19 right on par with a scientist who has studied infectious diseases throughout her career. It empowers the Dunning-Krueger effect, in effect, by denying that there is any meaningful difference in knowledge to begin with.

***

I keep coming back to this, not because the problem is conceptually interesting, but because I find myself talking to so many people who seem to live in this mindset. They know what sources they like, and they know which sources they cannot be bothered with, but their own explanations boil down to a kind of unacknowledged voluntarism. Intellectual rigor of any kind simply does not enter into this mindset, because every actual stance is, for them rooted in pure personal bias. A professional historian writing about World War II might as well be their friend Frank who told them about a thing he saw once in a movie. A journalist summarizing countless hours of research enjoys no more credibility than the first thought that jumps into their own head upon hearing the story. A medical doctor talking about a global pandemic is easily trumped by a blog post detailing an elaborate conspiracy theory. These same people are happy to sing the praises of objectivity, and in particular to use high standards as a foil against their enemies, but in practice, their mental life is a playground of choices made on thin pretexts. That is all they hear from others; it is all they produce themselves.

I find myself struggling to produce a simple account of objectivity and bias, one which affirms neither this naive realism nor this practical pan-partisanship.

***

If I am thinking about bias in the presentation of information, and I am, I usually want to make a distinction between 3 broadly different approaches, objective, polemic, and deceptive. This distinction isn’t metaphysical. It’s a question of intent.

When I refer to an account as objective, I do not mean to suggest that its author has achieved some miraculous account devoid of any personal bias. What I mean in such cases, is that the author has made an effort to express the relevant facts of the story, and perhaps to provide an account of the different positions others have taken on the subject. I will still have questions about the author’s specific choices, the accuracy of their descriptions, and if I know something about the subject, I am likely to sense bias creeping into their narratives. When I call it ‘objective’, it is because I can still see some objective information creeping through the haze of personal bias, and because I perceive the author’s goal as being rooted in the objective features of the story. Whatever their personal views, there is something about the facts of the matter that has their interest. If they are doing their job right, it will have mine as well.

If I am ever tempted to dismiss the prospect of an objective account as a result of the many subjectivities that always seem to accompany them, I have only to consider some of the alternatives. There is a world of difference between someone who is trying to tell a story based on the facts as they understand them, and someone for whom a story is solely an instrument of their own personal agenda. While bias might count as failure in the former case, in the latter, that bias is precisely the point.

If ever we forget the merits of an objective account, their absence is certainly noticed whenever we encounter polemic work. An author or speaker whose primary goal is the advancement of a partisan view tells a very different story than one who is trying to give us an objective account. The facts they elect to provide are not merely shaded by personal bias, they are explicitly chosen on that basis. One literally doesn’t get any information that doesn’t help the polemicist build his case. His language too is chosen for the purpose of expressing a clear stance on the subject in question. We don’t expect of such writers that they will spend a lot of time on things that don’t facilitate their own argument. To so so would be setting ourselves up for disappointment.

What do I mean? Let’s take for example the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan at the end of WWII. I have plenty of textbooks that provide a basic (if horribly brief) account of this event. One of the major controversies of this story is the question of whether or not doing so was necessary and/or justified in any sense by the circumstances facing the allies near the end of that war. Any author trying to tell me that story will normally provide some account of the reasons for dropping the bomb, and in doing so, they are likely to show some sense of their own take on that controversial subject They will cover the facts most relevant to their position on the subject, and they will likely describe them in language that suggests some degree of their own sense as to whether or not the decision was sound. Some authors try to address the controversy by providing an account of the controversy itself, telling us what different people have said about the question over the years. In such cases, it would not be unreasonable to expect they will do a better job of accounting for those positions they agree with than the ones they do not agree with.

…all of which is very different from reading a text in which an author takes a stand on that very question. You can find such readings. You can find people who will tell you the decision was absolutely appropriate, and they will make the case as to why. Others will describe it as an atrocity, and they too will provide an argument as to why that is the case. In neither of these instances would one expect the polemicist to spend a great deal of time covering facts which don’t help their case. If they do, it will only be to show how their position deals with these facts after all, and so their account of these seemingly neutral features of the story will of course be largely an exercise in stretching a specific viewpoint to cover the facts in question. None of this is a terrible thing. There is a place for polemics in human communication. My point is simply that a polemic is very different from an attempt at an objective account. If bias is a bug in the former; it is a feature of the latter, a genuine benefit. If polemic writing is well done, it leaves us with a clear vision of the viewpoint expressed within it. It is a good thing, but it is a different kind of thing than we get from those trying to write a more through and objective account.

Whatever the goals of a writer or a speaker, whether it be polemic or objective, we can also distinguish between those who show a certain respect for truth and reason and those who are consciously deceptive about such matters. Even the most strident of polemicists is perfectly capable of telling the truth as she understands it and using reasoning that is at least plausible rather than fallacious. On the other hand, some people are just bad actors. Not only do they make a conscious choice to advance a single point of view; they are willing to deceive to us in the service of that point of view. Their account of the facts will contain not mere errors but conscious lies, and their reasoning will include deliberate cases of misdirection. Such people are not merely influenced by personal values and personal agendas; they operate free of any moral or intellectual restraint. Lest we forget that objectivity matters, or give up on it altogether, an encounter with such a deceitful soul ought to remind us that facts matter after all, and so does sound reasoning.

***

As I finish this, I am struck by my own feelings of discomfort over the way I am talking about ‘objectivity.’ I really do not mean to advocate some naive objective metaphysics, but I am sure some folks will say the way I have tried to qualify my use of the term here is inadequate, but this post isn’t really meant to outline an epistemological theory. It is mean to describe some differences in communicative practice. The need to do so is motivated less by abstract philosophical questions than a general sense that it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain any standards of honesty or intellectual rigor in public discourse. The problem isn’t just that some people cannot tell the difference between sound journalism and internet gossip; it is that such people increasingly dominate our public discourse and they are increasingly able to obscure such distinctions for purposes of public policy. Much of their ability to do so lies in their ability to find personal or political bias in even the most professional of publications (whether scholarly or journalistic). My own point here is not to suggest that some people are above personal bias; it is call attention to the different ways in which bias enters into the work of public media.

For some people bias is a problem they can never really seem to escape.

For others, bias is precisely the point.

For some, it is the only point.

A Cheating Post

05 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Anecdotes, Assessment, Cheating, College, Education, Ethics, exams, Students, UNLV

unlv2 In high school, I could hardly be bothered to cheat, mostly because I could hardly be bothered at all. The freshman class president once offered to do all my English assignments for me. All I had to do was turn them in. It just irritated her that I wouldn’t do anything at all in class. It irritated her more that I turned down the offer.

A year later, I did find it amusing to hand my finished weekly vocabulary assignment to the student behind me. After she’d copied them, she’d hand them to the guy behind her and so on. My goal was to have two full rows copy off me before the end of the period. I never quite made it, but I was damned close on several occasions. As this was the only homework I ever did in that class, I didn’t get much of a grade out of it, but it was fun to see how many could cheat off my paper.

Ah well!

***

In college I was pleasantly surprised to find myself actually giving a damn. This led to an awkward moment in my first semester as I suddenly found myself unable to answer a question in psychology on a test I actually wanted to pass. The wanting part alone was new to me (and very weird). I found my eyes drifting slowly to the scantron sheet of a student two rows down. It was more a kind of wishful thinking than a decision to cheat. I hadn’t yet focused enough to read what he’d put down, but I wanted so desperately to find the answer somewhere. The thought did occur to me that I had no reason to believe he would know the answer anymore than I did, and then I felt guilty, and then I thought maybe I could get just a few answers from him, and then I thought about the cute girl nearby…

and then I looked up to find the teaching assistant staring at me.

Nothing came of it except a decision to play the rest of my college years straight, so to speak

***

The prospect of cheating didn’t enter my head again until one summer in my senior year. I retook the introduction to political science. By then I knew a fair bit of the material, but that didn’t change the C- I’d received one semester when I blew the class off out of disinterest. Getting rid of that lowlier would help my GPA substantially, so there I sat in an intro class on a topic I knew pretty well at that point and feeling really out of place. When a test came down for a chapter on the Judicial Branch of the U.S. Government, I suddenly felt especially stressed. I ought to know that subject damned well, I thought. Still I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t quite prepared, not like I should have been. So, I sat there, wanting desperately to cheat off the incoming freshman girl sitting beside me. Once again, I had no reason to believe her paper would be better than my own production, but once again, I wanted a magic solution. The sudden desire to look at her paper was overwhelming, and that alone felt damned disconcerting. I kept my eyes to my own paper, of course, but doing so took a surprising amount of effort. I got a ‘A’ on the test, but to this day I shudder at the feeling of uncertainty I felt staring down at the test that day and thinking I didn’t really know the answers.

***

Oh wait a minute! There was one other time I wanted to cheat. In logical theory, the professor used to walk out of the class, wait a few minutes, then burst through the doorway looking around to see if he could catch us cheating. I learned a lot from that guy, but sitting there killing the written portion of that test, I couldn’t help but think it might be nice to cheat somehow just to spite him.

***

I had another professor who used to hand out the tests and go to his office. Oddly enough, I don’t think any of us cheated on his exams. Our classmates would have handled it.

******

As a graduate student I began to see cheating from the other side. I recall once watching a student sit motionless for half an hour of a test before making himself one of the first students to hand it in. Half the exam had been multiple choice using a scantron sheet and half had been written. I was damned surprised to see the essay portion of his exam completed in full, especially since it was in black ink and he had filled out the front of the booklet in blue. Not to mention, he hadn’t written anything while I was watching. W

What surprised me most about this case was that we didn’t flunk him. Instead the department chair advised me to grade the assignment as though it were a graduate-level essay.

Oddly enough, that always seemed kind of unfair to me.

***

I was once one of four teaching assistants (TAs) in a large class on German history. Each of us ran our study groups once a week. At some point, I recall hearing that one or two of the other TAs were going over the questions for up-coming exams in their study groups. This was definitely contrary to our instructions from the professor. I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe it until a students approached me before the final exam to ask about the specific answer to a specific multiple choice question he knew would be on the test.

Yeah, that was just a little frustrating.

***

One of the most amusing examples of cheating I ever encountered began one day in an advanced course on constitutional history. We received take-home essay questions a week before coming in for an in-class exam. So, I walked into the last class session before the in-class exam to find a guy who’d been gone all semester. He offered to pay $50.00 to see my take-home essays. What bothered me most about this was the offer of money. It also bothered me that I didn’t know him. Taken together, these were not a good sign.

Had the guy been an active student, and had I known him, I wouldn’t have hesitated to share my essays with him. I did that with many friends on take-home assignments. We learned from each others’ work and wrote our own responses. But this was an unknown entity offering me money. I figured the $50.00 wasn’t for a casual look at my work; he would certainly be handing in those very essays. Before I could even reply, the man added insult to idiocy, commenting that the two girls sitting in class at that moment wouldn’t do it. Listening to him emphasize the word ‘girls’ I think I actually laughed a little. Obviously, I thought, as a man, I must be obligated to do the good buddy thing and help a bro out. So, I guess it was kind of a gender-bender moment when I turned him down.

I have to admit, it felt kinda good when the teacher caught him cheating on the in-class portion of the essay.

******

A friend of mine once told me he was taking his English teacher out to dinner in exchange for a passing grade. Another neighbor of mine once told me about a beautiful young woman who received an ‘A’ in his sociology class. I reckon, that’s the pay-off to cheating from the other side. For myself, I figure any pay-off I get would have to be worth the risk of losing an entire career. So, I always tell my students I can be bought, but they can’t afford the price. If pressed, I clarify, that the pay-off would need to be sufficient to fund my retirement.

I’m almost certainly joking about that.

******

Since becoming a teacher, I’ve run into my share of efforts at cheating.

I once had a student tell me she was leaving town, so she asked if she could take the exam early. Her two friends turned in the same answers she did, which might have helped them had she given me the right answers to begin with. All tree received failing grades on that assignment, and for a time I began assigning the same penalty to exams taken early as I did to those taken late. I generally announce my essay topics ahead of time, so students have often tried to sneak pre-written essays into the classroom. This lead to a brief period in which I handed out colored paper with every exam. Like a lot of people, I think, I now ask students to hand their research papers in in stages, so that I can see the progress they make on them. A few students have been disappointed when producing a completed paper on a completely new topic earned them a choice between a zero and little extra time to redo the whole project.

I have yet to burst into class looking around in hopes of catching someone cheating.

***

I once had a married couple turn in virtually identical take-home essays. I gave them a do-over. When they turned in a second pair of essays with barely a few lines different between them, I sent in a couple Fs to the registrar.

***

Not surprisingly, the internet has proven itself to be my biggest cheat-hazard. I am continually surprised at the number of students who have copied Wikipedia entries and handed them in after making a few minor changes. I’m a little more surprised to see how often they will then cite Wikipedia as if naming the source resolved any questions about turning in a paper that was nearly identical to that source. Perhaps, the biggest surprise for me came when a high school teacher with a master’s degree did that very thing. I offered him a chance to rewrite the paper, which I thought a damned generous move on my part. So, I was REALLY surprised to find the fellow arguing over the matter with me. When he asked to speak to my supervisor, I recall giving him the contact information for the Dean, adding something along the lines of; “but let’s be clear about this. We are talking about plagiarism.” Ten minutes later, I received an email telling me he would send in a new paper that evening.

I really don’t can’t imagine what he was thinking.

******

What strikes me most about the cheating I’ve seen since making the transition from student to teacher is just how often cheating proves unhelpful, even from the standpoint of a grade. Simply put, the same student who needs to cheat is rarely a student capable of cheating the subject effectively. That may vary between different disciplines and pedagogical techniques, but as a general rule, when I catch someone cheating, I generally catch them cheating badly. Of course, I have no doubt that a few have gotten past me. Perhaps, that blank spot in the data set contains all the information necessary to refute my little observation here.

If so, I reckon the refutation will one day make an appearance in a wiki entry somewhere.

I’ll learn it from a partially rewritten essay.

Creeditize it! …or Don’t.

21 Saturday May 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Native American Themes, Politics, Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

College, Creed, Dogma, Education, GOP, Islam, Moderation, religious freedom, U.S. Constitution

US-Constitution Last week a man named Trebor Gordon, Pastor for the Harris County GOP, tried to block a Muslim, Syed Ali, from serving as a precinct chair for the Republican Party in Harris County, Texas. As reported in Gawker, Gordon objected on the grounds that Islam is not consistent with the principles of Republican Party politics.

A video of Gordon’s efforts can also be found on Youtube. Gordon’s argument, as quoted in Gawker is as follows:

If you believe that a person can practice Islam and agree to the foundational principles of the Republican Party, it’s not right. It’s not true. It can’t happen. There are things on our platform that he and his beliefs are total opposite.

“There are things on our platform,” Gordon went on to say, that he (Syed Ali) is, he and his beliefs are in total opposite.”

You may suspect this is the beginning of a GOP-bashing rant. Well, not today. I actually found the response to Gordon’s efforts rather encouraging (especially that of Dave Smith). Granted, I would love to live in a world where people just don’t act like he does, but in the real world, I take it as a good sign that the Gordon was voted down, by other members of the local GOP mind you. It’s a welcome reminder that there are sane and responsible people in the GOP. On this count, at least, I think they done right.

What fascinates me about this incident is something about the particular argument Gordon used. Well, actually two things. First, I’m always fascinated by the use of architectural metaphors in ideological matters, particularly in the rhetoric of conservative Christians. They will often tell us that atheists lack a moral foundation for our behavior. They will also speak quite often of Christianity (or belief in God in general) as providing the foundations (or alternatively, the ‘foundational principles’) of our country. There are of course endless permutations to this theme, and they are all highly problematic.

On one level I get it. These metaphors do communicate a sense that the ‘foundational’ beliefs or values in question are in some sense more important than others, or that the other beliefs and practices are in some sense dependent on the foundational ones. If you like the First Amendment, this argument seems to suggest, that part of our government comes (in some way) from Christianity. I get that much at least, so the trope isn’t entirely opaque, but I do think it’s rather telling that so much of this rhetoric takes place within the scope of this particular metaphor. I also think it’s quite telling that people making such arguments are often ill-prepared to flesh out the metaphor in literal terms. The same person who is quite sure that Christian values and beliefs are the foundation of our republic is often at great pains to explain what those values are and just how they actually generate the rest of the features of the republic at large. Take a way the architectural metaphor, and an awful lot of these folks struggle mightily to flesh out the details of their argument.

…or even to deal with them in any way whatsoever!

Now Gordon isn’t talking about America as a whole in that speech. The foundation he references in that speech is something belonging to the Republican party. Still, I do think it worthwhile to note that he has fallen into the pattern of a much broader fashion of speaking about religious and political ideas. To say that he leans a bit heavily on the architectural metaphor is putting it mildly. It is Smith that references the relevant features of the U.S. Constitution (namely the proscription against religious tests). Gordon has only his talk of foundations. THAT is exactly what I am talking about. The rhetoric of foundations consistently helped people to side-steps relevant details rather than to illuminate them.

…which brings me to a second and (to me) much more important aspect of Gordon’s approach to the issue. He has effectively taken the GOP platform to function as a creed of sorts. It isn’t enough to actively support that platform, according to Gordon. One must not, so it seems, hold views in opposition (or even potentially in opposition) to that platform. All of which is a very interesting way to speak of a party platform.

By ‘interesting’, I might mean ‘ridiculous’.

A party platform is itself the outcome of a political process. It has winners and losers even within the party, and many of those who lose out on battles over the construction of that platform can be expected to go on and support the party anyway. That’s how the process works.One doesn’t normally turn around and use that platform as a plank-by-plank litmus test of acceptable beliefs for party members, even party leadership. Creeds are used in precisely that manner to define membership in a religious community. Party platforms are not.

A party platform may represent the goals of a party in its relation to the outside world, but one wouldn’t normally assume that it represents the precise views of each member. To be fair, Gordon isn’t simply suggesting that a Muslim will be in disagreement with one or two items on that menu. He seems to be suggesting that a Muslim must be in disagreement on some very important points. What are those points? Well that takes us back to the whole ‘foundation’ metaphor.

An additional problem here would lie in the abstract nature of the argument. Gordon isn’t asking whether or not this particular Muslim, Syed Ali, is opposed to the key tenets of the party platform. He is arguing that a Muslim must do so. It’s in their nature, so it seems, or perhaps it’s in the nature of their professed beliefs.

It’s a kind of theology by proxy, an all-too-common one at that. Folks often assume they can draw inferences for believers (or even non-believers) on the basis of an assumed premise or two. This type of argument parallels the reductio ad absurdum, but it fails insofar as it ignores the embedded nature of the beliefs in question. A reducto ad absurdum can show us the inconsistency of combining different beliefs, but it can’t tell us much about how any particular individual relates to the people and institutions around him. Gordon isn’t arguing against Islam in general. He is arguing against a specific Muslim, and that makes the specific views and behavior of that specific Muslim directly relevant to the issue at hand. But Gordon doesn’t addres what Ali actually thinks. It is enough to know that he is Muslim. To call this approach dehumanizing is putting it mildly.

***

…which illustrates another point. People tend to turn mission statements, party platforms, etc. into creeds precisely when they don’t like the people they assume to be unable to vouch for the creed in question. I used to see this when I was a participant at Christian Forums where the members were at times expected to vouch for the Nicene creed and/or the Apostles Creed if they were to be considered Christian. Among other things, being recognized as Christian provided access to large parts of the forum denied to non-believers (who were largely confined to ‘open debate’ sections of the forum). I never had much problem with this as I just say ‘no’ to gods, but I lost track of the number of liberal Christian friends who had to explain countless times how their actions or beliefs could be squared with the creed(s). That conservative Christians did accept the creed, even though their own actions and statements could as easily be taken to suggest otherwise seemed to go without question. In the case of Christian Forums, where a creed was an explicit part of the forum policy, that policy provided endless grounds for personal back-biting and mean-spirited bickering, almost always at the expense of those more socially vulnerable than theologically off-base. Seeing the number of people hurt by that process did a lot to confirm my suspicions about how ugly religion could get. It also helped me to see that the problem had less to do with what people believe than how questions about beliefs are handled with in a larger community.

***

I wish I could say that secular folk are immune to this kind of behavior, but I can’t. I once joined a secular forum in which I had to press a button vouching for the fact that I didn’t believe in a god. After some hesitation, I pressed the button. After all, I don’t believe in a god, but I always regarded the policy as remarkably petty and quite dogmatic in nature. It was an ironic dogma to be sure, but I reckon when you start deciding who is and who is out of the club on the basis of what they do or don’t believe, you are well into dogmatic territory whatever the content of the beliefs in question. I had similar views when the old Internet Infidels website decided to allow believers to act as moderators. (I was a low-level moderator on that website at the time.) Many objected to the move on the grounds that a believer couldn’t possibly agree with everything in the mission statement for the site. I found myself thinking, “neither do I.” Simply speaking, there were a couple items on the mission statement that I didn’t agree with. I joined because of teh ones I did agree with, and (more importantly) because I wanted to help facilitate the discussions then taking place on that forum. No-one had asked me if I agreed with each item on that mission statement, and no-one had done this for the rest of the staff either. So, the argument that a believer couldn’t serve as a moderator for the site always struck me as an odd misunderstanding of the nature of both forum moderation and mission statements. It also struck me as an ugly double standard. Making these arguments in public debates on the matter didn’t exactly make me popular, but I always found it odd that so many critical thinkers were apparently quite comfortable with the assumption that everyone on staff had to agree with every point in the mission statement.

Textbook dogma!

***

In life offline, one of my more frustrating experiences with policy-driven dogma came while I worked at Diné College (a tribal college) on the Navajo Nation. Faculty were expected to adopt an educational model known as Diné Educational Philosophy (DEP). It was a fairly elaborate theory, requiring us to divide our lessons up into four steps (generally portrayed as four individual quadrants of a circle), each of which was thereby linked to some aspect of Navajo cosmology. It was easy enough to do this, of course, and some of the Navajo faculty could do this brilliantly (and authentically). The rest of us, were doing it by the numbers of course, and the students knew it. I still recall the day one of my more traditional students shrunk in his seat as I drew a circle on the board and raised the topic. “Please don’t!” was all he said. He was absolutely right to do so. The man had been enthusiastic just moments before, but moments before I had been talking American history. Now I was speaking about Navajo philosophy and that was a subject he didn’t need to hear about from a white guy. It might have been my job to address the issue, but that didn’t make the moment any less ridiculous.

One of the more frustrating things about DEP was that its proponents often described western educational theory as top down and western religion as dogmatic. It seemed to be a forgone conclusion that Navajo thinking wasn’t any of these things. There was certainly some justice to this. After all, it was the white people that brought missionaries to the reservation and at one time instituted educational policies amounting to little more than government enforced kidnapping. There were so many respects in which I could see Navajo approaches to education were more flexible and less dogmatic than mainstream approaches; they just weren’t respects that had much to do with the official policies of the college. An educational policy incorporating explicit ceremonial themes mandated by administration, taught to faculty (who were mostly outsiders) and then imposed on students in the classroom was by definition a top down approach, and when that policy (along with its ceremonial themes) becomes obligatory, it is a dogma. If I was ever prone to think otherwise, I lost any grounds for doubt one day in a meeting as two of the Navajo faculty argued over the specific implications of a corn stock metaphor in DEP. One of them, I thought quite sensibly suggested that there was room for different approaches to the subject. The other insisted that we all must be on the same page when it came to that theory. The rest of us, being white, had little to do but wait to see how the indigenous faculty sorted the matter out.

I don’t mean to suggest that all the classes at Diné College were taught according to a set dogma. I do mean to suggest that this was official policy, yes, but that’s one of the beauties of actual human behavior. Sometimes the practice is way better than the theory behind it. People pursued a wide variety of approaches in the classroom, and (at least when I was there) many of those approaches simply didn’t match the vision enshrined in that narrow policy. My own approach was a bit more Socratic. I adapted my lessons to the classroom by asking my students how things worked in their world; they told me, and I worked their answers into the lessons. My students’ mileage will vary, of course, but I at least found that process to be interesting and rewarding. The official policy of the college didn’t help much.

***

So anyway, my point is that people often turn a range of bureaucratic communications into an obligatory set of doctrines. Mission statements, party platforms, educational procedures aren’t necessarily things that should call for total agreement from those working with them. They outline goals. People in an organization can generally be expected to work toward the goals in such documents, but the notion that someone must agree with every point in such a document is an odd (if rather frequent) inference. Those taking such an approach often do a great deal of harm in so doing, and I generally make it a point to oppose them whenever and wherever possible.

***

Bringing the issue back to the relationship between Islam and American politics, I think Gordon’s approach touches on a particularly disturbing example of this sort of behavior. It has become relatively common to hear that Islam is not consistent with the U.S. Constitution. Ben Carson seems to have used this as an argument against allowing a Muslim to become president. Others have used this as an argument against allowing Muslim refugees into the country (or into western nations in general) and/or against the notion that Muslims are protected under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. The thinking here seems to be that aspects of Islamic doctrine are inconsistent with basic principles of American government (including perhaps the establishment clause). Those pushing this argument will often produce texts from the Quran or related documents suggesting obligations contrary to American law and/or the Constitution itself. But of course that misses the point. The Constitution protects the right to believe any number of things, including those contrary to the constitution itself. It even protects a range of practices, at least those consistent with the constitution itself and the social arrangements made under its authority. That there are limits to these protections is clear enough, but those limits simply do NOT become an excuse to deny people protections altogether.

And of course once again, this approach amounts to a kind of fundamentalism by proxy. I have no count that there are Muslims who want to do things contrary to the law and the constitution. I also have no doubt there are Muslims who respect the law at least as much as the rest of us. How do you tell the difference? I reckon the answer to that question depend on what they say and do, not what a critic can spin off a cherry-picked line or two from the Quran for purpose of fielding an argument. In any event, the possibility that someone may believe (or want) something contrary to the Constitution simply isn’t an excuse for excluding them once and for all from the entire body of constitutional protections.

(Were it otherwise, Gordon might be in trouble!)

The notion that people must demonstrate consistency between their beliefs and the provisions of the U.S. Constitution is (once again) how people treat a creed, not a plan of government. The Constitution too, it would seem, is among the many things people tend to treat as a Creed even though they shouldn’t.

Pedagogical Metaphors From Half-Baked to Totally Stale

26 Saturday Mar 2016

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Education, IAIA, Lessons, Metaphors, Pacman, Parties, Pedagogy, teaching, Tropes

20160105_233707 Pedagogical metaphors are like a sober friend on your way out an especially good party. You can lean on him a bit. If he’s a good friend, you can lean a little more. Lean too much and you both fall in the gutter and he’s not gonna wanna party with you any more.

I was thinking about this as a medical professional gave a presentation on HIV awareness to my students this week. She came to a few of my class, and each time she made a point to tell us about macrophages, a kind of white blood cell that engulf and consume debris in our blood stream. Every time she got to this topic, she made a point to ask the students if they’d ever played Pacman.

This was a particularly dated metaphor, but oddly enough it seemed to work as almost all of the students had played this old game at some point in their lives. So, they got her point. Still I thought this an odd artifact of sorts. If it worked today, it must have worked so much better a couple decades back when Pacman was a common presence in just about everyone’s daily life. People might have walked by the machine back then (I did, right on to Asteroids), but they saw it, they knew it, and most had dropped a quarter or three in a Pacman at some point in their lives.

I want an Asteroids-themed lesson!

I couldn’t help wondering if this metaphor wasn’t more important to her own thinking than it was for the students. …if it wasn’t less a means of communicating with them than it was an essential crutch propping up her own approach to the topic. Then I remembered how much I love my soda wars (Coke and Pepsi) analogy when I talk about the Cold War. I know damned well the students don’t remember the cola wars. Most of them weren’t even alive when Pepsi set fire to Michael Jackson’s hair. But the metaphor just seems so perfect for me that I can’t resist using it, even if I have to teach the students about the cola wars in order to then use this to teach them about the cold war. (The punch line here, for those with enough morbid curiosity to damn a give, is that third parties were the real losers in the conflict). I use that metaphor a lot, but it’s probably more compulsive behavior than focused and well designed pedagogy. So, that’s at least one conceptual party-buddy that I’ve squashed on the curb in return for his patient efforts to guide my clumsy ass through a topic.

As to dated material, you can ask any student about my many pop-culture references, most of which haven’t made sense to young folks for at least a couple decades. I suspect the bottom line is that most teachers have a few of these tropes in our tool-box, little analogies that work for us more than they do for our students.

As my guest speaker moved on to discuss other things, I found my own mind wandering over the range of metaphors we teachers use in our lesson plans, wondering how many really help the students and how many get used for our own benefit.

IAIA

I can think of at least one really great metaphor a friend of mine used to work into a first year seminar to teach the students at The Institute of American Indian Arts. She likened the educational process to flying a plane, and the steps necessary to learn a subject and pass a course to prepping for a flight. What made this metaphor work, mind you, was the part where the students actually got to fly a plane toward the end of the semester. Most metaphors stand or fall in words spoken, dribbled on a page, or splattered on a screen. Her metaphor literally took off, and it did so in the hands of her students.

You can’t get more cool than that!

We tried something similar here at Iḷisaġvik, comparing the educational process to whaling. That may seem odd to some folks, but the Inupiat community of the North Slope does engage in whaling and we are a tribal college, so this fit right in line with promoting the indigenous practices central to our own mission. That said, results were mixed, I think. Whether or not students liked the course, I don’t think that master-metaphor was one of its major selling points. I was never entirely sold on the value of a master-metaphor in a class like that. The one they used at IAIA worked, yes, but I suspect it worked because it was linked to a uniquely personal experience.

It’s hard to compete with flying a plane, yes it is.

I expect the argument-as-warfare meme is all over my logic class. Ah well! For a borderline peacenik, I’m a veritable war-monger when it comes to syllogisms. But this is hardly novel, or even that interesting. Talking about arguments without using violent metaphors? Now that would be interesting. Hey look now, all I am saying is give peace a chance!

…okay someday, maybe I’ll take my own advice on that.

Other metaphors come and go. A topic may yield a race of some sort. An essay can become a veritable construction project. An idea may become rich (in sugar or money, I sometimes wonder). A fact or a sub-theme may become central to a topic. An event may serve as a trigger (World War I anybody?). We can meditate on a topic when we are really just talking about it, and a certain kind of speculation quickly becomes an experiment, or at least a ‘thought experiment’, when we want to endow it with a sense of the sciencey. Half-conscious tropes abound! Most of the time we don’t even think about these things.

Sometimes a student finds their own metaphors, and sometimes they even tell us about them. And sometimes those metaphors turn out to be gold, but I have to admit I’m a tough sell. I often grumble a little inside when I hear these things. Student generated metaphors often strike me as evidence the students have missed the point. I grumble! Perhaps these metaphors would be better thought of as evidence the student has a point of their own. Nah! That approach is just way too wholesome, and we’ll have none of that kinda thinking on this blog dammit!

Coming back to my, …um, …central metaphor in this post, I am wondering if a pedagogical metaphor might be better thought of as your drunk friend who invited you to the party in the first place. He’s the one that’s already three drinks on the road to happy-happy, and if you take the beer he’s offering you, then maybe it’ll be a pleasant evening (and a rich conversation), but you should always find your limit a little before he does. After all, there is a reason this guy is more dialed-in to the party scene than you are. So, it’s less a question of how hard you want to lean on your metaphorical friend than it is a matter of realizing he’s always going to want to do that one more shot that’s gonna totally do you in. Then you just have to say; “No metaphor! No more booze for me. I’m done for now.” …which is of course a metaphor for backing out of metaphorical implications that seem a little silly.

…and on that count alone this last paragraph is a total failure.

What the Hell would I know about parties anyway!?!

Son of a Bullet Point Mind: Cold Reading the Textbook

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education, The Bullet Point Mind

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

bluffing, cold reading, College, con artists, Education, Learning, psychics, Reading, School

It was a few years back. I had a couple students I had agreed to help with a reading. Since I didn’t think they were reading at all, I thought I would begin the session by simply giving them time to read. We would discuss the article after they had had a chance to read part way through it, or at least that was my plan. But there I was, not a full minute into the reading session and one of the students had already commented on the point of the article. He finished with rising tone, as if inviting me to confirm or deny the validity of his point. His overall demeanor seemed to suggest that he was ready to begin the discussion.

I asked this student to just read for a little while, explaining that we would discuss the article afterwards. If he had specific questions about the meaning of words in the text, I would be happy to answer those, but I wanted to save the general discussion until he had had a chance to read the material.

It wasn’t another minute before he asked me a question about the point of the article. And another before he made another point about a random line on the page. Each time, he seemed to be trying to kick off the full discussion. I decided to compromise and agreed to discuss the matter after he’d finished one page.

He never made it through that one page.

I should point out that this was a college student, and a rather bright one at that. But it was very clear to me that he didn’t read. I wouldn’t say that he couldn’t read, because I’m pretty sure that he could parse any reasonable sentence you threw at him, but perhaps the effort to concentrate on a full reading was too much. Anyway, the specific reasons for not reading in this case are beside the point. What interests me most about this example is what the student was doing INSTEAD of reading. He was working me, lifting a word or a phrase off the page and inviting me to elaborate on his own contributions. Whether phrased as a question or a comment, his every utterance was an effort to put the ball back in my court and get me started explaining the material. The one thing that was never going to happen that semester was him reading a text, but if he could pull it off, I would never realize he hadn’t done the reading at all. After all, he had so many thoughts about the reading.

…the reading he didn’t do.

On some level, this is simply a bluff. We’ve all done it, partly because we’ve all been caught with our pants down so to speak. At some point in our education, we’ve all been asked a question about readings we didn’t do. You can admit you didn’t do the reading or you can say something in an effort to sound like you know a thing or two about what you were supposed to have read. Most of us have probably tried the bluff a time or three. It’s not that unusual, at least not as a single instance. But what was unusual, or at least very striking to me in this case was the realization that this was standard operational procedure for the student in question. Near as I could tell, this was how he handled all his teachers and all his readings. And why not? It worked.

Most of the time anyway.

What made that particular circumstance unusual, and awkward, was my own determination to get this student to read something on that day, even if it was just a single page. Had we not been meeting outside the classroom, and had I not made it a point to ask him to read then and there, the painful impossibility of my expectation that he actually read something might never have given us both cause to regret each others’ company that evening. I might have come away suspicious, but in this case it had become unusually clear that this student didn’t read, and that at least one of the reasons he didn’t read was that he never needed to. All he had to do was field an observation or two and let the imagination of his instructors fill in the gaps for him. It’s how he learned what was in all of his books.

This is exactly what psychics do, or at least one variety of them, the ones who do cold reading. Ostensibly ‘picking up a vibration’, or ‘getting an impression’, a psychic may ask you if there is someone important in your life, someone having trouble, and since of course all of us have someone like that in our lives, we will happily fill in the details and confirm that they are right. Soon we will be talking with the psychic about cousin Ernest and his heart problems. And if we’re not very careful, we may just think it an amazing thing that this psychic somehow knew about cousin Ernest without us ever telling her about him. We’ll come away from the experience thinking it’s amazing, and amazing of course is exactly what the psychic wants us to think about the whole experience.

Perhaps she wants to think that way about it herself.

Not the cold reading student though. The cold reading student doesn’t want their powers of divination to be noticed at all. He wants you to think his contributions to classroom discussion are perfectly normal, his errors understandable, and his proper calls exactly what one would expect of an individual working his way through the material. He may be hit or miss on tests and other assignments, but as long as he is talking about the classroom materials, he has an angle, and that angle is the imagination of the instructor. If he can land a comment in the ballpark, so to speak, he can rely on the instructor to pick that ball up and carry the game forward.

…perhaps without ever realizing that the student hasn’t a clue.

This is why some students specialize in so many one word answers. You can give them an essay by an abolitionist and ask them what the authors main point is in that essay and they will tell you it was ‘slavery’? What they are expecting you to do at that point is say something like; “yes, he is talking about slavery and what he has to say about…” If instead you insist on asking the student to explain what the author actually says about slavery, then the whole thing is just going to get very unpleasant. Since no-one wants to experience an unpleasant conversation, and since most instructors are dying to get to the interesting details of whatever they happen to teach, odds are quite good that the instructor isn’t going to be that fussy. So, students can just toss a word out and watch what happens, a bit like giving a broken machine a kick in the hopes it will restart.

***

I once had a one-on-one session with a student who had been asked to read an essay by John Stuart Mill. This was admittedly pushing the envelope for this student’s reading abilities, but it was actually one of the more user-friendly readings in the textbook my college (in its infinite wisdom) made me use that semester, so I figured I’d do my best and ask the students to do the same. So anyway…

I thought I would work through the first paragraph of the essay with her and see how things went. She looked at the first sentence and found the words ‘freedom’ and ‘will’ in there. She then looked up and thought about it a moment before explaining that we have freedom of the will. That’s what she thought Mill was saying. She had pulled two words off the page and thought her way to the connection between them. What she hadn’t done was to read the actual sentence in front of her.

We repeated this process for an hour, and she approached every sentence the exact same way, pulling a few keywords off the text, looking up, and imagining the connection between them. This approach yielded an interpretation nearly the polar opposite of the one Mill had been trying to convey. I carefully explained Mill’s actual position, watching her eyes widen as I did, and upon completing that lesson, I risked a comment on her reading strategies. I asked her to read each sentence in turn, each full sentence, and to do that for the full article. She looked at me like I was insane. That’s not how reading was done! She proved even more surprised to learn that this is what I wanted whenever I handed out readings in any of my classes.

And at last, I understood why she never got anything out of the other textbooks.

I can just imagine the number of readers now thinking of this or that tool or technqiue to help this student learn the necessary skills, or to motivate them to learn, and I myself wish the college where this occurred had more in the way of persistence and retention facilities, but all of that misses the problem. The problem in this instance is that this isn’t a problem, at least not to the student. It’s a problem to me, and to anyone who thinks reading is an important skill, and it would be easy to think that since this was a college class and I was the instructor that value ought to have controlled the situation, but that just isn’t the case. What this student was doing worked!

…at least as far as she was concerned.

This was not a young girl with a few Freshman skills to learn. This was a middle-aged woman with a white-collar job and a family, and this was how she read. Most importantly, her reading was NOT simply a function of her own inability; it was also an adaption of sorts, and one which she had been using successfully throughout her adult life. I reckon it suited her purposes for any number of tasks wherein a reader might be expected to have thoughts similar to those of an author. Her knowledge of the written documents in her life had thus been cobbled together from words and phrases off the texts and the verbal exchanges occurring around her.

Where this woman fell flat was in the encounter with an alternative point of view, one which happened to use a vocabulary familiar enough to suggest all the wrong things to her imagination. Did she care about such things? I doubt it. Today, she probably tells the story of her asshole teacher and that insane book that said all the wrong things about something important. Hell, her approach probably even handled quite a number of errors. If she misread a document, someone would correct her, perhaps without ever thinking twice about. Most of the time, I expect she was just fine.

But I do wonder what disasters might have followed when she wasn’t.

My point isn’t that these are mistakes. They are not. They are coping strategies, and they can be damned effective, at least insofar as these approaches can get a student through a discussion and perhaps even an essay. Students employing these strategies as a way of life may well accept that they will take a hit on exams and assignments, but when it comes to conversation, they will often be just fine. All they need is an instructor willing to fill in the details for them, to imagine that one word answers are the tip of a thoughtful iceberg, and to give a student the benefit of the doubt on ever so many moments of silence.

It really does work.

But of course the real question isn’t how this works in education. It’s how it works everywhere else?

I Rant! I Does!

23 Sunday Aug 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education, Irritation Meditation, Write Drunk, Edit Stoned

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bureaucracy, Committees, Education, Frustration, Paperwork, Rant, Reform, Reform Movements, teaching

Me gal thinks I'm grumpy. I really don't know why.

My gal thinks I’m grumpy. I really don’t know why.

Context? We don’t need no freaking context! Let’s just get this started…

1) Reform happens. What needs reforming; who will take charge of the reform and what direction the reforms will take remains to be determined. In any case these are not important questions. Reform will happen! It is a singularity.

2) Resistance is futile. The most effective opposition to any given reform consists of failure to act on it. Many great plans have withered and died as people went about their business, just as they did before, but nothing nourishes a reform quite like vocal and open opposition. Write a few memos against a reform agenda, and you just may get added to whatever committee has been formed to enact it. Write a few more and you just may find yourself chair of that committee. (…true story!) You may ignore a reform, unless of course you can’t, but active resistance will shine a rainbow of regret all over your already miserable work-day.

3) Change is a Many-Splintered Thing. Support for any given reform means that people have found a way to read their own agendas into that reform. Every ‘yea’, ‘amen’, or ‘right on’ is invariably a sign that someone sees in a given proposal the chance to do something they’ve really been meaning to do for a long time. Listen carefully to the planning of a new policy and you will hear as many different reforms as there are active and energetic participants. When a reform policy is finally put in place, it may look nothing like it did in its initial conception. In fact, its originator is doing very well if the final policy isn’t completely inimical to her own goals.

4) Fresh and Refresh. Listen carefully to a given proposal and you just may hear the echoes of an old policy. Listen very carefully, and you may just realize how much reform is really about repackaging, but don’t try telling that to those peddling old drugs in new prescription bottles. Just learn to present your standard way of doing things as a new and original approach to business. Say it with enthusiasm and hope that you then get to play tug-of-war with a host of enthusiastic supporters, each of whom really wants to turn your new/old thing into their new/old thing and then make sure everyone else does it.

5) ‘Studies say’ and ‘research suggests’. You would be surprised at just how often a room full of highly educated people needs no more than to hear one of these phrases to be convinced that whatever claim follows them must be true.

6) Correlation is not causation. …unless of course you are one of the millions of people making policy on the basis of nothing more than a correlation loosely established using shady procedures most of which never make it into the summary that you only skimmed anyway.

…just like everyone else at the committee table!

7) You can count on objectivity, or at least visa versa. The most important thing about objectivity is that it takes the norm of numbers. It isn’t that the numbers provide more accurate information than qualitative data, personal reflection, or even interpretive dance, but committees know what to do with numbers. They can act on numbers, and that makes all the difference in the world. Once a committee gets wind of a compelling set of digits, they aren’t going to be too fussy about where those numbers came from. …or too patient with anyone who does want to get fussy about that.

8) Yes, in fact you are a number. For all the talk of ‘learning objectives’, ‘learning outcomes’, and other nice fluffy ‘learning’ talk about intellectual development, never forget that a student is also a statistic, and a very significant one at that. Her presence on forms describing participation in your institution and/or your own classroom can be used to facilitate transfer of funding back and forth between various agencies, both private and public. She may or may not learn a damned thing from any part of the curriculum, but her significance as a statistic is vital to all concerned.

Even you!

And yes, her too!

At least some of the money triggered by the presence of students on forms typically makes its way to faculty. Whether it be now or later, the presence of any given student on forms may also provide her with sufficient forms to open up new possibilities of money transfers into her own future bank accounts. No sane person would say that it was more important than all that ‘learning’ mumbo jumbo, but few sane people would allow the learning mumbo jumbo to interfere with the digital life of a catalyst for funding transfers.

This might seem a particularly cynical view of education, but don’t despair. With any luck your student will learn whatever she really needs to know from social media. …probably when she’s supposed to be listening to you.

9) Autonomy is a double-clawed hammer. Staff and administration will either want to change something in your classroom or they will want you and your students to spend more time outside of it. Every new policy will exacerbate one or both of these tendencies.

Time and again, you will encounter policies which make claims on your contact time. In the worse case scenario, you may face command and control over what you teach and how you teach it. In the best case scenario, you will be dealing with opportunity costs that can leave you kissing your own plans for this or that lesson goodbye. It will only take 15 minutes to complete this survey, explain that policy, or just step back and let someone from student services talk to your students for a bit.

…and cross something you meant to teach off your to-do list.

Don’t worry though, because you can always save the essential lessons by eliminating the most interesting themes from your lesson plans (you know the ones that made you want to become a teacher in the first place). There is always time for reform!

If the faculty at your institution have successfully minimized these incursions into your contact hours, then congratulations, but now you have a new problem. Your classroom has become dark matter to staff and administration, which means everything that takes place inside it is irrelevant to their view of the educational process. It has to be irrelevant to them, because they can’t affect it. So, when everyone else sits down to plan out how they want to improve the learning process at your school, they will envision these improvements taking place anywhere else but your classroom. This means the institutional world outside your classroom is going to get a lot busier. You will be attending more meetings and writing more reports, but don’t be too depressed about the time lost to course preparations, because your students will also be too busy taking advantage of support activities to attend to their studies.

And cosmic balance is thus preserved!

10) New people bring new policies. This often has the fringe benefit of meaning that old policies die with each new administrator, but rest assured these new administrators will replace them with something new. The near certainty that new policies will be allowed to die on the vine with the next administration does not seem to dampen enthusiasm for creating new ones. It’s the cycle of life.

11) Don’t Kid yourself. You are not quitting this job to go and join the circus.

***

Kumbaya! The committee chair sleeps tonight!

Underdogs All the Way Up!

13 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska, Native American Themes, Politics

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Authority, Education, Political Correctness, Politics, Popular Culture, Rhetoric, scape-goating, Social Justice, Underdog

Sled dogs waiting patiently

So, I am enjoying the Alaska Native Studies conference in Fairbanks last weekend, and one of the many things that keeps catching my attention is a persistent use of outside authority for a kind of whipping boy. I hear about how ‘the media’ portrays Alaska natives and minorities i general. I hear complaints about The Federal Government, academia, and ‘the system’ in general. Different people have thought these phrases through to different degrees, so the quality of the references vary from the completely vacuous posture to reasonably well defined concerns.

Meh, nothing particularly new under the sun (unless it’s a rather Northy start for the Iditarod which began right in front of the Hotel I was staying at this year, …a couple hours after I flew out. …dammit!) I haven’t attended many academic conferences in the last decade or so, but this is hardly new to me. I just have to cast my mind back a bit to remember how often I used to hear this theme in the old days of my grad work.

…or I could just remember the last time I visited more conservative friends and family down South. They too like to complain about the Federal Government. They too like to complain about academia. (Oh yes they do!) And they too can sometimes be heard to talk disparagingly of something called ‘the system.’

I am keenly aware of the fact that these groups often argue for radically different political goals, but I am rather struck by the fact that they do so using remarkably similar narratives. Each seems rather consistently to present themselves as countering the effects of some overarching authority that resides somewhere out there, so to speak. But this is hardly unusual. In America, at least, most people seem to frame their politics in populist terms. That includes the most well-funded of incumbent political candidates and their supporters. It also includes people arguing for the clear and forceful exercise of political authority just as it includes those arguing against such authority, and it includes all manner of politics falling somewhere in between. It isn’t just that we can’t always tell who is exercising authority and who is objecting to it. What strikes me about this is the fact that the common preference lies on the down-side of the equation. It seems as though everyone wants to be the underdog, and you could take a lantern about in the day looking for someone who will happily cop to playing the man to all his low-brow critics.

In the culture wars lefties typically presented themselves as countering long-term abuse of authority by privileged parties; their right wing opponents bash PC politics and the liberal establishment that tells them what to do and what to say. Evangelical Christians complain of persecution in schools and other government institutions even as secularists fight against believer-bias in those same institutions. And how many religions count oppression somewhere in their founding narratives? (Probably as many as appear in each others’ oppression narratives, I should think.) Climate scientists struggle against well-funded corporations to counter the effects of powers both political and mechanical even as climate skeptics buck the authority of a plot to spread government authority. Some folks will burn a flag to protest the authority of government. Others will wave it to flaunt their patriotism in the face of ‘elitists’ who don’t like it. Even Hollywood actors sneer at the culture of Hollywood, and the educational reformers who crash upon the curriculum in waves of paperwork and conference panels always seem to see themselves as flying in the face of some institutional conventions. Retention and Persistence specialists complain about professor-sages who just want to pronounce wisdom to their students from a lectern and those same professors complain of reformers using administrative leverage to force dubious changes and undermine academic freedom. Advocates of gay marriage often appeal to personal freedom even as its opponents appeal to personal freedom to disregard such marriages.

Indie this and Indie that! (Just cross-apply this theme to movies, music, fashion designers, writers, and Hell, most likely fish-tank designers at this point. I wonder if guppies complain of pretentious betas while zebra fish moan about the abuse of authority of neon tetras.)

…okay, the fish tank bit was probably a bit of a stretch, but hey I’m trying to buck a system here!

Some of these narratives are more authentic than others, and I certainly don’t mean to suggest that all these agendas are really of equal value, but I am interested in the way so many different political views (some of them diametrically opposed) seem to vie for the moral low-ground. It really is fascinating to see just how ubiquitous the underdog status seems to be in contemporary political rhetoric. Sure, those with political power will exercise it, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who frames a political agenda in terms of a straight forward claim to authority and an equally straight forward intention to use it. Even those with tremendous power seem to present their exercise of that authority to some other regime at power.

When at last we meet the Man so to speak, he usually tells us that he is new to the job and only there to finally undue the damage done by the real Man, the guy with all the power who is only just out of office (and probably lurking somewhere nearby). That other man, the real man, is the real bastard. He has power even when he doesn’t, and it’s his abuse of that power that necessitates the use of power by real people in charge of real institutions.

…who always seem to be underdogs despite themselves.

I sometimes wonder at this vacuum into which all authority seems to escape. Is it purely a function of rhetoric? To listen to folks, the real power always seems to lie somewhere else. And yet it must really exist or all this rhetoric is hot air. And of course we do encounter power and authority in our daily lives, but its presence is almost always akin to a force of nature. It is a fact with which we must contend even if we cannot find a cogent case for it. And when one looks for that case, so often we find only a case against some other use of power.

Could it be that all this obligatory underdogging be a product of cognitive bias? Is it easier to see authority in others and damned hard to feel the power of authority when it’s in your own hands? There is often (perhaps always) a little bluff in the exercise of authority, a little sense that its successful use depends on the willingness of others to accept it.

I once TAed for a professor who liked to mock his own authority. The students were not reassured by his self-deprecating humor. He might have hoped to communicate that he didn’t take himself too seriously, but what his students heard was that he didn’t take his position seriously, and most particularly, that he didn’t take seriously the responsibilities of that position and the limitations of his authority. This was underdog failure at its finest and most cringe-worthy.

And I suppose this is what bothers me the most about it all. I can’t help but see in the collective impact of all this underdogging something a bit like the students saw in that professor a marked inability to grapple with the authority that people actually do have and very clearly will use. We can’t all be under-doggier than the next guy. Or if we can, then perhaps it says something rather sad and ironic about the value of low-brow politics. For one reason or another, it is often more effective to position oneself as the underdog than the authority.

And if you can get by with wielding authority while pretending to be that underdog?

Well, ain’t that just the cat’s pajamas!

An Uncommon Holiday Celebration

22 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by danielwalldammit in Alaska, History, Native American Themes

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Alaaska Native Heritage Center, Alaska, Alaska Natives, Education, Indians, Native Americans, Schools, Thanksgiving, Yupiit

Take a look at this image from an old Thanksgiving celebration. It’s part of an exhibit at the Alaska Native Heritage Center (which is definitely worth a visit if you are ever in Anchorage).

These children are Alaska Natives, in this case Yupiit, which would have placed them a long way from New England during the mythic days of the first Thanksgiving celebrations. Still, I can’t help but shake my head at the notion that someone thought to costume these ‘Eskimos’ as ‘Indians’ for Thanksgiving.

So yeah, that happened.

God, This Movie is Awfully Damned Trite!

22 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Religion

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Apologetics, atheism, Christianity, College, Education, Film, God is Not Dead, Movies, religion

The most fascinating thing about the movie ‘God is Not Dead’ isn’t the conflict between atheism and Christianity; it’s the tension between narrative and argumentative styles of presentation. The premise for this film is simple enough; an atheist professor demands that his students sign a statement to the effect that God is dead. When a student refuses to do so, the professor commands him to prove that God exists in a series of 3 debates to be held in the first few weeks of class. Failure, it is clear from the outset, will mean an ‘F’ for the class, but the student’s only other option is to sign the statement. This a clash between Christianity and atheism to be sure, but its also a clash that takes the form of a debate, and the sort of reasoning that takes place in a debate changes a great deal when it is reframed in narrative form. In God is Not Dead, arguments become a story, and the premises and conclusions of those arguments become events in a storyline.

If the main characters appear as proponents in a debate between a College Professor (Jeffrey Raddison played by Kevin Sorbo) and a college student (Josh Wheaton played by Shane Harper), they are also antagonists in a life or death struggle quite familiar to movie-goers of all faiths and none. Josh is the underdog fighting for his faith; Radisson is a monster who torments his students without mercy. This is David and Goliath to be sure, but this time Goliath wields a grade-book, and David goes to the library. The David and Goliath aspects of the story are not an accident, and the film-makers were clearly trying to make a statement about the treatment of Christians in academia.

The opening scenes of God is Not Dead drive home just how important winning the debate will be to Josh Wheaton. In the event that he loses that debate, Josh will get an ‘F’ in the class, and (as his high-school sweetheart reminds him) that will be the end of long-term career plans. To make matters worse, she regards his willingness to risk his own future as a betrayal of the future they have planned together. She will thus leave him if he goes through with the effort. Josh’s pastor doesn’t help matters much by telling Josh his own actions may be the only exposure his classmates will have to Christianity. So, the stakes are awfully high. Just as David, Josh is fighting not only for his own future, but also for the good of his people (in this case, his classmates). This might seem like a heavy load to put on the shoulders of a college freshmen, but they would be quite familiar to many Christian apologists. This is not just debate over the the truth of a given claim; it is a battle for the souls of all involved.

So, this story about a classroom debate is really a sort of war-story. And of course it will be told in three acts. It should come as no surprise that the villain will be vanquished in the end, though it may come as a surprise just how completely vanquished (and yes, saved) this villain will be.

The first act of the story is largely about Josh’s decision to accept the debate in the first place. His preparations are unimportant, as is the actual argument he produces when the time comes. Josh begins this first round of battle with an argument to the effect that the Big Bang is consistent with, and even requires, the existence of a creator. Radisson simply tells him that according to Stephen Hawking it doesn’t, going on to ask if Josh thinks himself smarter than Hawking. Thus ends the first debate with an outcome that should surprise no-one. What kind of principle villain gets his ass kicked in the First Act of the story? Certainly not this mean-spirited professor!

Still, the first debate does establish a bit more than the fully expected set-back for our underdog Josh. Already, a few patterns begin to emerge from the vision of academic dialogue presented in this film. Both participants rely heavily on appeal to authority, even to the point of simple quote-mining. Both parties will also spend a significant amount of time on science, and in particular the science of cosmogony. The end result is a rather sophomoric vision of philosophy in which the battling heroes themselves pay homage to their own heroes in lieu of exploring the full arguments, all the while coming across as arm-chair scientists rather than participants in a philosophical exchange. To say that this is an impoverished vision of philosophy would be putting it mildly. To say that it is a vision common among Christian apologists would be putting it closer to the point.

In the second debate, Josh returns with a source describing Hawking’s own arguments on the origins of everything as circular. Pressed upon the matter, he reminds Professor Radisson that Hawking himself has suggested that philosophy is dead. Josh goes on to raise familiar concerns about abiogenesis in evolutionary theory. Hawking was of course talking about precisely this sort of second-hand science discussion, but most importantly, playing the anti-philosophical card in this scene raises the dramatic significance of the debate. A humiliated Radisson has little to offer in response, opting instead to mock Wheaton after the other students have left the room. It is an angry confrontation, and in his anger Radisson reveals his greatest weakness. Asked by Josh, what happened to make him so angry, Radisson recounts the story of his own mother’s death and the prayers he offered as a twelve year old in the hopes she would live. This is an interesting speech, because it is one of the few times when the professor is allowed to be something other than a foolish caricature. He ties his own pain in the loss of a loved one to the outrage that some divine plan could ever account for it, and for just a brief moment Radisson seems both eloquent and human.

The final debate is all about the argument from evil, the notion that the existence of God as he is commonly envisioned in Christianity cannot be reconciled with the existence of suffering. Both parties advance arguments on the topic, but the most significant feature of this scene is the increasingly emotional tone of the discussion. Josh can feel the threat to his grade and his ambitions and Radisson can feel the growing threat to his own credibility. Their voices grow louder, and their demeanor more intense. As both parties become increasingly excited, Josh asks Radisson in front of the class to explain why he hates God so much knowing that science supports His existence. In the heat of the moment, Professor Radisson answers Josh in precisely those terms, proclaiming that God took everything from him.

One could chase ugly rabbits down so many holes in this film, but that single response from Professor Radisson really is the core message of the film. It is also the most disturbing thing about the film. For all it’s many simplicities and distortions, God is Not Dead is first and foremost a statement to the effect that atheism is really about hatred of God rather than disbelief.It is a statement that arguments against the existence of God (and counters to arguments in favor of His existence) are simply deceitful rationalizations. The argument from evil is, as this film would have it, less an argument about the (in)consistency of someone’s thoughts about God than an expression of hatred aimed directly at God himself.

In this plot twist, the very topic of debate simply vanishes in front of us, and the story sets all questions of god’s existence aside. Radisson is not really an unbeliever at all; he is a rebellious child (which might help to explain his childish antics). The storyline of the film thus overtakes any effort to address the issues at hand, presenting us with a narrative in which non-believers produce arguments only in the service of venting their own pain. One does not resolve their questions by rational rational argument so much as a kind of spiritual counseling. This counseling is presented still more clearly in one of the films many side-stories, that of a snarky atheist blogger who enjoys poking wholes in religious thought (…hey!). The script-writers must have found it quite amusing to pre-empt a decent portion of their future critics with this particular story-line, but to get back to the point, Amy Ryan (played by Trisha LaFache) learns that she is dying of cancer, a fact which throws quite a curve ball into her life of internet snarketry. When she finds her way backstage at a Christian concert, all of her arguments crumble quite completely as the drummer for the Newsboys suggests that she had actually come to their concert, not to mock them, but so so that they could help her find faith.

…and the subplot ends with a lovely group prayer.

The Newsboys concert fills the final moments of the film with enough exposition to compete with the worst papers from a creative writing workshop. It includes an appearance from Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson who cheers on Josh and invites the concert audience to send out a text telling everyone they know that God is Not Dead. This is a message clearly intended to break through the fourth wall and reach into the lives of audience members in the theaters. So I suppose it is no small wonder that evangelical Christians of all shapes and sizes were indeed pushing this film for awhile. I lost track of the number of people who told me that I really should watch the film, assuring me that even non-believers would find it thoughtful and enjoyable. Most seemed quite prepared to concede the one-sidedness of the story-line, even to accept that Sorbo’s character was a bit over the top (it was in fact, well out of earth orbit). What many of those urging this film on others seem unaware of is just how demeaning the story really is for those of us who don’t believe in God. It isn’t just that this film portrays an atheist in an extraordinarily bad light, or even that portrays academia in general as a place filled with cruel and sadistic professors just looking for an excuse to hurt those of faith. What this film does is to empower a dismissiveness that undermines any subsequent dialogue. It encourages believers to think of atheists (and skeptics in general) as people who do not understand our own motivations. It encourages Christian apologists to think of our words as unworthy of consideration, mere diversions from a spiritual tragedy which they understand and we do not.

It is a deeply dehumanizing vision of atheists that this movie presents. For me at least that vision is a conversation-ender; it is not the opening stages of a promising dialogue. As with so much of what passes for Christian apologetics, what is so unfortunate about this film is the degree to which it poisons its own well. In the end, this film does little to engage those of us who don’t share the Christian faith. It never really takes us seriously to begin with, and it never takes seriously the possibilities of dialogue between believers and non-believers.

Its fans should not be surprised to find many of us will respond in kind.