Isn't it ever so satisfying when your hard-earned taxes are spent on something useful and constructive, such as the report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, which was charged with answering the question of why American students are falling behind the rest of the world in mathematical preparation. Of course, enormous piles of research has been done on mathematics education, and any math or science professor can tell you about the abysmal preparation of students who have gotten into college (and who are thus high school graduates).

The task of the advisory panel was basically to collate all the knowledge out there into a plan of action for fixing the disaster of math education in this country. Wouldn't it have been nice if math education researchers themselves brought all this knowledge together? Indeed, the mere existence of the panel shows that our problems go much, much deeper than any set of recommendations in a report can solve.

Fixing the problems with math education in this country will involve breaking a cycle that goes back decades at least. Until education professors face up to the elephant in the room, that poor students find an elementary education major an easy alternative, a million reports and recommendations like this one will be meaningless. All the experts in the world can make absolutely correct statements such as this:

Teachers and other educational leaders should consistently help students and parents to understand that an increased emphasis on the importance of effort is related to improved mathematics performance. This is a critical point because much of the public's self-evident resignation about mathematics education (together with the common tendencies to dismiss weak achievement and to give up early) seems rooted in the erroneous idea that success is largely a matter of inherent talent or ability, not effort.

But if elementary teachers consider themselves inherently "bad" at math, as I guarantee you many (if not most) of them do, they cannot possibly make their students understand that no one is just born bad at math.

There is a fundamental problem that has created this crisis to the point where any solution is at best decades away, if it is possible at all. Culturally, math illiteracy is not considered a deficiency. In fact, many people (including undergraduates taking required math courses) seem to wear it as a badge of honor. How did it get this way? We seem to take language illiteracy much more seriously (which is not to say that students are adequately prepared in reading and writing either). After all, while I have heard dozens of people proclaim their math illiteracy, I have never heard one person proudly announce that they cannot read or write. Parents don't think math is important, so their kids don't. Some of those kids go on to be elementary teachers. How do they get the degree when they continue to be illiterate in math? They do it within a system that gets many of the worst students, because instead of making them meet high standards, it accepts them adjusts courses accordingly. Minimum grade levels to graduate are meaningless; they just result in grade inflation. Programs focus more time on "methods" teaching than on content; even while all the skills in teaching methods in the world are useless if you do not have a firm grasp of what you are teaching.

Why are we passing poor math students through unchallenging courses that result in teaching degrees? One, because of the cultural stigma tied to proficiency in math. Two, because the profession of teaching today provides little rewards, even for the saints among us, which results in a high demand due to high turnover. Most teachers will tell you that it is not even about the pay and benefits - although the pay discrepancy between the teachers and administrators is a travesty. It is about a lack of autonomy in the classroom - due to government's and administration's love of relentless standardized materials and testing, which prevents even the smartest and most motivated teachers from using their abilities to teach creatively. It is also about parents who think schools are daycares for their snotty, insolent, bored-without-TV brats, instead of a controlled environment for children who have been taught respect to participate in the excitement of learning.

Thus, we have classrooms of teachers who know little content in certain areas and are even taught about teaching math in a way that reinforces its stigma:

Teachers and developers of instructional materials [added emphasis] sometimes assume that students need to be a certain age to learn certain mathematical ideas. However, a major research finding is that what is developmentally
appropriate is largely contingent on prior opportunities to learn. Claims based on theories that children of particular ages cannot learn certain content because they are "too young," "not in the appropriate stage," or "not ready" have consistently been shown to be wrong.

How is it that the people creating instructional materials have no idea what all the research has been telling us for years? This is a fundamental disconnect in most areas of education. The educational research that has been done decades ago and today is emphatically ignored by the people charged with actual education, such as school boards and administrators. For example, everyone knows that the best time for language acquisition (single or multiple) is early childhood. Yet, when is foreign language instruction begun in the U.S.? High school.

Another fairly futile recommendation:

...teachers must know in detail and from a more advanced perspective the mathematical content they are responsible for teaching and the connections of that content to other important mathematics, both prior to and beyond the level they are assigned to teach.

This seems to be a bizarre concept to students in math education. Even those at my campus planning to teach high school math - and thus who are essentially getting a content degree in mathematics with a few education courses - are known to complain, "why should I have to take this high-level math course when I will never teach this material?" The utter lack of interest in their major subject is astounding. Why are they math majors then? Because with such a shortage of math teachers, they are certain to get a job. And with teachers relatively uninterested in the subject they are teaching, the cycle of poor preparation continues.

And let's not forget that there is seemingly always a role played by big business when policy makes no sense:

Mathematics textbooks are much smaller in many nations with higher mathematics achievement than the U.S., thus demonstrating that the great length of our textbooks is not necessary for high achievement. Representatives of several publishing companies who testified before the Panel indicated that one substantial contributor to the length of the books
was the demand of meeting varying state standards for what should be taught in each grade. Other major causes of the extreme length of U.S. mathematics textbooks include the many photographs, motivational stories, and other nonmathematical content that the books include.

Why all the extra garbage in these math books? (For an extreme example of textbooks with gratuitous material that schools should definitely avoid, see this YouTube video.) Interestingly, the panel's report does not spell out the obvious reason: publishers' profits. The textbook industry has gotten completely out of control, filling books with junk to make them longer to justify the cost, and coming out with new editions every couple of years, which forces school districts to spend the money to replace their entire inventory, rather than order a few replacement books. In science, this can be justifiable given the rapid increase in knowledge and thinking that occurs - textbooks that define only two biological kingdoms, for example, would not be useful in preparing students in biology. But school-level math has been the same for decades, if not centuries. Discoveries on the frontiers of mathematics do not change how you do long division.

There are so many problems that the panel's report goes on and on. One suggestion the panel makes that has merit is the idea of having math specialists teaching at the elementary level. Like art and music teachers, they would travel from class to class an alleviate the burden of teaching math from all the teachers who hate it. The only way to break our current cycle of math phobics creating more math phobics is for kids to realize at an early age that math is interesting, and fun for everyone, not just for geeks. Math is part of what makes us human.

Another more radical suggestion is that there be no mathematics teaching at all until middle school. This may seem counterintuitive to the recommendations of the panel, but the main reason most students are terrible in math when they get to middle school is that their aversions have been so reinforced they are already lost causes - poor teaching at the elementary level has already convinced them they are no good at math so they don't even try. What if we waited to teach math, so that students haven't already closed their minds before they have a teacher who is actually interested in math? Why not use the time in elementary school to teach a foreign language? Since many current college students today cannot do middle-school-level math, no one can claim that it would be impossible for students to catch up at that point. As the report points out, the same simple concept is often taught year after year after year in elementary school, which adds to the boredom factor.

Whatever we do, it must somehow involve changing the greater American culture that looks down on the enjoyment of math as geeky, and the hatred of math as cool. Maybe someone could make some Einstein and Von Neumann action figures for Happy Meals. If the culture does not change, the performance of American students in math will not either.

Labels: education, mathematics

The genetics-solves-everything crowd is continuing to have an influence on society that threatens to set Americans' notions of equality back decades. I still believe these attitudes are cyclical, but it is always depressing and disturbing to be in the regressive part of the cycle, with no hint of change in sight. The target now of course is public education - always in the sights of extremists, whether it involves adding prayer, subtracting science, or the current fad, teaching kids their gender roles, as if society weren't taking care of all of these things adequately outside the classroom.

Dr. Leonard Sax's website is called "Why Gender Matters". His publications have such objective scholarly titles as "Reclaiming Kindergarten: making kindergarten less harmful to boys" (Psychology of Men and Masculinity, American Psychological Association, 2(1):3-12, 2001), which like his other writings set up an absurd dichotomy between boys and girls as if they are unrelated species. He claims that for boys, but not girls, kindergarten is "a series of alienating failures and humiliations" and implies it is thus the end of their academic careers. Many women competing for professional jobs (requiring extended education) with men would be surprised to hear that all males' spirits were crushed in kindergarten, given that they are still pretty much running society.

The problem with our educational system is not that "no one is teaching them how to be men and women" (from Sax's website) but that we are using blunt instruments, such as standardized testing, which saps what little autonomy teachers had in the classroom before NCLB. This means they are unable to address differences among individual students in development times of different skills. Yes, that variation exists, but using gender as the blunt instrument to guide education reform is even worse than using a standardized test. On top of it being a pointless exercise to assume anyone's academic strengths and weaknesses at a given age can be assessed using their appearance, it also reinforces so many stereotypes that so many of us had finally begun to move past, and furthermore gives them false "scientific" credibility. This type of "science" is no different from attempts a century ago to demonstrate through physical qualities that blacks were less intelligent than whites.

This blog has previously summarized the alarming trend of claiming genetic origin for every trait anyone can think of, and why the papers supporting these ideas tell us absolutely nothing. The problem of the other type of research cherry-picked by Sax to support his agenda is that it studies already-developed human beings. Anyone who has raised a child should understand the intellectual dishonesty of claiming that behavioral traits possessed by a baby or toddler are clearly genetic. Humans are social creatures, programmed from birth to learn from other humans how they should behave. That includes identification with a particular gender, and all the traits associated with it in a particular society. Brain development does not occur in a vacuum, but is affected by experience. Brain-scan differences even in a newborn can not be determined to be genetic, because the newborn's brain started developing nine months before.

Most important though, the differences found are minor and slight - meaning it is unlikely that they are biologically significant. From the Times magazine article:

Sax initially built his argument that girls hear better than boys on two papers published in 1959 and 1963 by a psychologist named John Corso. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent a fair amount of energy examining the original research behind Sax's claims. In Corso's 1959 study, for example, Corso didn't look at children; he looked at adults. And he found only between one-quarter and one-half of a standard deviation in male and female hearing thresholds. What this means, Liberman says, is that if you choose a man and a woman at random, the chances are about 6 in 10 that the woman's hearing will be more sensitive and about 4 in 10 that the man's hearing will be more sensitive. Sax uses several other hearing studies to make his case that a teacher who is audible to boys will sound too loud to girls. But Liberman says that if you really look at this research, it shows that girls' and boys' hearing is much more similar than different. What's more, the sample sizes in those studies are far too small to make meaningful conclusions about gender differences in the classroom.

Why is it now acceptable to use "science" to foster people's underlying prejudices about gender, but no longer about race? Apparently there is some sort of hair-splitting going on in the minds of these "scientists" that of course skin color and other associated traits tell you nothing about what is going on in someone's brain, we know that now, so forget about that. But different genitals, now that clearly must be correlated with brain function. Especially the genitals of pre-pubescent humans!

It is especially insidious that the idea being promoted is just a new version of "separate but equal", which as anyone knows who is at all familiar with history, means anything but. Sax's motivation is clear. He has been on a crusade for years to convince people that public education is biased against boys because most of the teachers are women. (Of course, who is responsible for that? Surely not the men who over the ages told women that the only profession they could have was teaching, since obviously it is such an undesirable job. Surely not the principals and superintendents who for some reason are still overwhelmingly male, and oversee overwhelmingly female teaching staffs. But I digress.) He does a clever job of convincing people that he cares about girls too, but this concern is nothing but pandering to get people to buy into his system of segregation.

It's truly a shame, because for completely opposite reasons, single sex classrooms in public schools can be a good idea. For instance, in the context in which many kids are more interested in what the kids of the other gender think of them than the academics going on in class, single-sex classrooms can remove a major distraction. Because it's a good idea for kids to learn to relate to the other gender socially, it seems that the best situation is some, perhaps not all, single-sex classes in coed schools. It also does help remove some teacher biases which have usually been documented to favor boys (not girls, as Dr. Sax claims) in their participation. But if, as Dr. Sax claims, the majority of schools going to single-sex classes are basing their new paradigm on his "genetics" theories, then we are in big trouble, because it will make many of the gender prejudices that have sunk below consciousness openly acceptable again.

Labels: brain, education, gender, genetics, statistics

Rising periodically in the op-ed media and blogosphere are calls for more conservative university professors. There is seems to be an idea out there that everyone's children are being brainwashed by leftist ideologues giving them 'F's if they don't write papers agreeing with the professor's politics, because there is no room in these classrooms for different points of view.

Perhaps those on the right wing are concerned because they are imagining that this is how they would run their classrooms (if they had them), but their insistence that there is a problem is clearly belied by the fact that while Ph.D.s indisputably tend to have more liberal political opinions, I know of no identified trend in political opinion among those with bachelor's degrees. Nonetheless, this call for more 'conservative' professors is misguided for many other reasons.

People tend to hire those who they relate to and desire to interact with. In this sense, academia is no different from law, business, or any other profession. It seems likely that political conservatives are overrepresented in business, for example. There are those who find examples of conservative academics who do not get a job offer or even and interview and use that to support their charge of political bias. This is a straw man, as anyone who has recently been involved in an academic job search knows. There is a glut of Ph.D.s in most fields searching for jobs; for example, something like a third of the English Ph.D.s graduating now can expect to get a tenure-track position. When one of us looking for a job has a stellar publication record and recommendations, yet does not get an interview, it is easy to pick any reason we want as to why, and claim a bias. Certainly bias exists, but these days it is damned hard to prove because there are just too many qualified candidates out there for the number of positions available, and the reality for those of us who are not white liberal males is that there probably is one applying to the same job that is equally or more qualified than us.

But why do those with academic careers tend to be liberal in the first place? (The term 'liberal' is used here in its traditional sense, rather than the Right's derogatory term for 'leftist', though liberal opinions do of course coincide more with politics that are left of center.) Perhaps there is actually a reason that those who follow the long path of their studies to the point of becoming professors tend to be liberal. First of all, part of the true definition of 'liberal' is open-mindedness, and those who seek scholarship as a lifelong endeavor are more naturally curious about the world than those who don't. So the profession is self-selecting. Clearly if your goal in life is to make a ton of money, academia is not a career you will choose. As people who work hard for low pay, academics are not naturally sympathetic to policies that favor the affluent.

But a tendency toward liberal thinking is certainly reinforced in the field of education. No, not because we were all brainwashed by our predecessors, but because unlike those in many other professional careers, educators are exposed to people from a large cross-section of society, especially if they work at a large state university (as the majority of them do). One finds it harder to objectify and stereotype people of a certain race, social class, religion, etc. if one knows personally people in that group. The policies supported by those who consider themselves to be conservative tend to make the assumption that all Americans are born equal and treated equally. This is understandable when one largely associates with people within one's own social class, but much harder when the realities of inequality are staring you in the face all day. Faculty and graduate students at a large state university get to know students as people from across the societal spectrum, and as a result tend to support policies (associated with liberals) that treat different groups differently, in an attempt to make up for some of these inequalities.

So, acknowledging that most professors are liberal, should there be 'Affirmative Action' for conservatives? No, because Affirmative Action targets groups that are disadvantaged across society, and is meant to address unchangeable qualities such as race and gender. Though one can be discriminated against for one's opinions, they are a lot easier to keep to oneself. The truth that is never brought up in these discussions is that the political opinions of the professor are almost never relevant to any class discussion; professors who impose their views to the point of making students uncomfortable are wrong not because they may be liberal instead of conservative, but because it is inappropriate of them to do so no matter what their political persuasion. Sometimes however, a subject that happens to be a hot political issue is relevant to a class. If a professor is teaching an ecology course, he will naturally be passionate about his beliefs that ecosystems should be preserved. Should then his campus find an ecologist who supports clearcutting to 'balance out' his opinion? Such a person is not likely to exist -- after all, who would choose a field of study that he was not passionate about?

But aren't liberal universities then indoctrinating your children into beliefs that to you are wrong? There are several reasons you have nothing to fear. First, hiring and promotion have pretty much nothing to do with what goes on in the classroom. At most universities, they are all about how much money a faculty member brings into campus. But the uncomfortable truth is that questionable personality traits in a job candidate who hasn't ever received a grant suddenly recede into insignificance when that candidate shows he can bring in big bucks.

The main irony about those who fear indoctrination, however, is that they obviously do not believe in education. By definition, education involves learning the ability to critically think for oneself. Those who think that students will come out of universities as leftist automatons are the same type who fear that those who are exposed to the ideas and science of evolution will suddenly lose all religion. Simply, those who fear indoctrination are those who believe in the power of indoctrination. Those who make a career in education receive no benefit from indoctrination of their students; if they like to make outrageously one-sided arguments in the classroom, it should only have the effect of forcing students to learn to develop the proper counter-arguments to what the professors are saying - that is, to think critically. Universities are not madrassas of leftist thought that need "balance". A student who complains about a "D"on a paper in which he asserts the evidence for global warming is inconclusive is not being punished for his ideology, any more than a student who touts creationism in a paper about evolution. He is getting the grade he deserves for ignoring the known body of scientific evidence in his paper.

Imposing some sort of quota for conservative professors, as some suggest, would make a mockery of education, which is not about the promotion of specific ideologies, but rather the free exchange of ideas. Again, if a professor is not living up to this ideal, her actual political opinions are irrelevant; the issue is not a 'liberal' vs. 'conservative' one. When it comes to job applications, political opinions are as taboo as marital status, sexual orientation, etc. at a job interview; the interviewer has no business bringing them up, and the interviewee should not either, because they have no bearing on the interviewee's qualifications for a job.

There are lots of ways that people at work behave inappropriately, in ways that make clients or coworkers uncomfortable. Are professors to be held more accountable because they have the serious task of educating the next generation? Perhaps so. But the inappropriate remarks and behaviors by professors cited by those on the right as examples of why we need conservative 'balance' on campuses are not inappropriate because of the particular opinions of a professor or group of faculty; the nature of the problem is that of a hostile environment. If universities truly are making conservative students (or faculty) feel threatened, they need to address appropriate workplace behavior with staff. In my experience, the conservative students hold their own quite well, and I've never met a professor who was a shrinking violet.

Labels: education, politics

I have a kid's book, "What Makes a Rainbow," in which a juvenile rabbit asks various creatures what colors make a rainbow. Curiously, every female animal is addressed without an honorific: Little Chick, Bluebird, Ladybug, and Butterfly, while the male animals are addressed as Mr. Fox and Mr. Grasshopper. Is it petty to suspect that this sends the message that men are to be addressed (and perhaps treated) in a more respectful manner than women? Does it matter that the creators of this book were all women?

No doubt there are those, including women, who would answer "yes" to both questions, but to me they are answered with a clear "no." From birth, girls and boys are given many subtle messages that males are more important than females, that clearly outweigh messages of equality. And those messages of equality sometimes feel forced. Why? Because we do not yet assume equality as second nature.

We have dealt with overt discrimination through legislation probably as best as we can. Only in Orwellian or Vonnegutian worlds have attempts been made to deal with the policing of thought, because in a just and free society this is simply not tenable (even if it were possible). But the question remains, why does sexism by both men and women continue to exist, a generation after we thought we had solved the problem?

This is a question beyond the scope of Linley Erin Hall's new book, "Who's Afraid of Marie Curie? The Challenges Facing Women in Science and Technology" (see link on sidebar*), which attempts only to document that discrimination still does exist, even though many people in power (such as the infamous Larry Summers) deny that it does. This book is necessary, because the current fad of using genetics to explain every possible personality and behavioral trait has ushered in a new dominating ideology that there is nothing more we can do to increase women's success in the workplace, because success now only has to do with the choices that women make freely.

Hopefully this book will shatter these ivory-tower illusions, and help usher in a new era in which we start thinking about real institutional change, rather than just having another "sensitivity training" session and forgetting about the problem. Hall very clearly and correctly points out multiple times that a bad professional climate for women is a bad professional climate for men as well, and that the long hours and grant/publication stress required to establish a productive scientific career in the U.S. are psychologically damaging for most people, regardless of gender. But the book focuses on women because, as bad as the long slog through the meat grinder of graduate school, postdocs, job search and promotion is for men, it is significantly more difficult for women for a number of reasons. (Hall does not point out, however, that other countries have shown that scientists can be productive with reasonable hours. Dutch researchers, for example, have been leaders in entomology, while working 40-hour weeks - which I can attest to based on the hours I spent alone doing research in a lab at a major university in Holland.)

One of the root reasons was touched on above: scientists are often viewed as authority figures, and both women and men still tend to assume that women are not authority figures. Hall's examples, both anecdotal and from published studies, are numerous. For example, when men and women work on a project together in an academic or industrial setting, it is usually assumed by their superiors that the men did the bulk of the work while the women merely assisted. Many superiors assign better projects to men in the first place, and then turn around and deny women promotions because their work does not stand out as much.

One of the biggest problems is how women view themselves. Many never get into science or drop out early because they don't have the self-confidence to proceed. I used to blame these women for their decisions, which can be made despite lack of overt sexism. As my career and life has progressed, however, I have reached a better understanding of how many subtle negative signals about a female's scientific ability over time can eat away at that self-confidence, leading one to take the easy way out, rather than continuing to fight for every achievement. The mainstream media call this "opting out," as if men and women are now on equal footing when they make the decision to quit.

On the other hand, men receive the constant signal that quitting their career makes them a failure, because they are brought up to believe that they are supposed to be the bread winners. So, men are much more likely to stick out unpleasant work environments, because "real men" can handle the stress. Is this really the way for science to be efficient and productive? Does it make sense simply to weed out all those who aren't competitive enough in their class work and research, and make a good proportion of the rest miserable with stress? Yet this is the American system.

The solution to problems caused by ingrained attitudes is elusive, but research Hall describes supports actively addressing hostile work climates. For example, science departments with positive leadership that addresses problems of sexism and harassment as they come up were shown to have much higher graduation rates by women than those departments in which complaints are downplayed or ignored. Women's graduation rates were also correlated with strong student-advisor relationships, which of course benefit men as well. Those departments with few successful women projected the attitude that those who do not like the environment need to "adapt to it (or get out)."

There is also no logic to support the current system of grant and paper reviews that are single-blind only - the reviewers are anonymous, but know who they are reviewing (and thus the reviewee's gender). Arguments that reviewers could still often figure out the author of a paper or proposal based on its content are specious; although that may be true, the process still reduces bias overall. Making reviews double-blind would promote fairness and be an easy policy shift for journals - publishers need simply to provide papers to reviewers without a cover sheet.

Grants are more complex because the granting institution wants to be assured that the awardee has the professional experience to complete the work, but it would certainly be possible to reduce even unconscious bias involved, much of which results in women automatically given less benefit of the doubt as to their abilities. Grants could be evaluated first by the panel for the intellectual content, with biographical sketches of the principal investigators removed. It is clear now that many grants are awarded to people, not projects, and those people review each others' grants in a tit-for-tat system that often excludes women, because there are so few women within the ranks of established researchers. A panel could recommend funding based on the research proposal only, and afterwards evaluate the skills of the researcher. Huge granting institutions such as NSF and NIH could have strict guidelines making it difficult to reject a highly rated grant based on a biographical sketch. Frankly, it is rare that anyone submits a well thought-out project proposal that they are then incapable of implementing, and yet this excuse is used on rejections.

It would be naive to suggest that stricter evaluation procedures would remove bias completely, but they certainly would do a lot to level the playing field for women scientists. Then perhaps women will have a better chance of receiving the grant that might allow them to circumvent the glass ceiling that still persists. Read the book if you still believe it's all about genetics.



* Disclaimer: I was one of the subjects interviewed in this book. However, I receive no benefit, financial or otherwise, tied to the success or failure of the book.

Labels: bias, education, gender

Time for a rare music post, and opportunity to promote a fantastic jazz group, the Jeni Fleming Acoustic Trio. I've been lucky enough to hear them play three times in the last few years, despite not getting out much, because they are based close by, in Bozeman, Montana. Jeni Fleming is the vocalist of the group, with her husband Jake Fleming on saxophone and guitar, and with Chad Langford on acoustic bass.

The trio has two main reasons why it is great: the perfect unity of Langford and Jake, and Jeni's voice. The bass and guitar are as tight a unit as they can be, playing classic and more novel jazz rhythms. Jeni uses the solid backing to free her voice to do what it does best. Her voice is everything a jazz singer's should be - mellow, controlled, fluid, and with an expansive range, both dynamically and vertically. They win converts from the ranks of people who don't like jazz. One person I know said, "I don't like jazz, but this is great." Another was less willing to budge from his anti-jazz preferences, but admitted that he could listen to Jeni talk all day.

They mix original jazz tunes (primarily Jake's), classic jazz such as "'Round Midnight" and "Garota de Ipanema" (yes, the Portuguese version), a wide range of pop tunes including "Still Crazy After All These Years" and "Time After Time", and both old and recent show tunes, such as "Somewhere" (from West Side Story) and "Stars and the Moon" (from Songs for a New World). At a recent concert, I heard a fantastic jazz rendition of "She's Leaving Home," the Beatles' classic from Sgt. Pepper's. This is the third major strength of the band - its willingness not to be limited by the original genres the tunes came from. As Jeni Fleming says herself at performances, a good song is a good song, no matter where it came from.

They are comfortable and interactive with listeners both in the more intimate setting of a bar, and onstage in a large auditorium. The only real criticism I have of their live performances, which isn't much, is that they spend a little too much time explaining the genesis of their original numbers. Because Jake and Jeni are husband and wife, some of the personal anecdotes definitely border on TMI. I'm there to see great musicians perform, not to hear their life stories. But this is a case where too much is probably better than too little, because they are humorous and establish a good rapport with the audience, making us feel as though they've let us in on some creative secrets.

Check out their music page or iTunes to listen to clips. Although recordings never do a good live band justice, Jeni Fleming's vocal ability will come through loud and clear. (Four tunes, including one of their signature originals which is highly representative of their sound, "Once Around the Sun", can be heard in its entirety on the band's MySpace page.)

One additional sideline of note: Jeni and Jake Fleming have collaborated with the family of Greg Mortenson to produce the song "Three Cups of Tea," available as an accompaniment to the book (below) about Mortenson's Central Asia Institute (also based in Bozeman, Montana). Mortenson's young daughter Amira is an aspiring professional singer and sings with Fleming on the song. Some of the proceeds support the CAI, which funds school building in remote regions of middle eastern Islamic countries. The CAI is particularly devoted to providing education for both boys and girls in countries where they have previously grown up in ignorance. Although the book is padded with quite a lot of gratuitous material about Mortenson's personal life, especially early on, it is worth a read by Americans who support bombing and destruction as a means to combat terrorism.

Labels: education, jazz, music

Finally, a paper that is fun to read: Sand-Jensen, K. 2007. How to write consistently boring scientific literature. Oikos 116: 723-727.

Dr. Sand-Jensen has hit the nail on the head with this one. The ten rules below are his for making a scientific paper as inaccessible as possible - a problem frequently encountered by those of us trying to make the scientific literature more accessible to a general public which is not science literate.

1. Avoid focus
2. Avoid originality and personality
3. Write l o n g contributions
4. Remove implications and speculations
5. Leave out illustrations
6. Omit necessary steps of reasoning
7. Use many abbreviations and terms
8. Suppress humor and flowery language
9. Degrade biology to statistics
10. Quote numerous papers for trivial statements

Sand-Jensen needs to make it clear he is being tongue-in-cheek, however; honestly, it would not be surprising for some of the scientists out there to take his advice seriously. So he summarizes his views:

Because science ought to be fun and attractive, particularly when many months of hard work with grant applications, data collections and calculations are over and everything is ready for publishing the wonderful results, it is most unfortunate that the final reading and writing phases are so tiresome.

Most of these problems could be alleviated by the authors themselves. Why are they not? Because papers that have these characteristics continue to get published. In fact, if one were to attempt to remedy "rule" no. 8, it is likely that most reviewers for most journals would send the paper back in order to have all entertaining language removed.

But this is the proximate cause of the problem. What is the ultimate cause? Most people are never taught to write, including Ph.D.'s. They adopt the absurd jargonist language of their field because they were taught to write when training for that field. The crisis in our educational system does not end at the university level. Students are not trained to write in high school; a literate 10-page paper turned in for a typical college course is currently so rare it can be considered an endangered species. College professors then are left with two options: either to try and make up for basic skills that students should have learned in high school, or to join the ranks of the bitter cynics and hand out passing grades and thus degrees as rewards for students showing up to class. And guess which professors get the better evaluations, and therefore, less hassle from administrators.

Thus, many students who are bright enough in a certain field and interested in going to grad school still lack basic communication skills, and the cycle is perpetuated when they become professors themselves and teach their students to write specifically in the jargon of their field.

So getting back to why all these terrible papers get published in the first place, is it simply because standards are so low for good writing? Or even that people so rarely see good writing that they don't recognize the bad? This is part of it, but while the existence of the bad writing in the first place was a catalyst, the whole equation also includes the ego factor - there is the distinct subtext in many unnecessarily complicated papers of, "if you don't understand my paper, it's because you are not as brilliant as me." There is no other possible explanation for the slew of poorly written and mistake-ridden modeling papers in ecology. Reviewers must be afraid to tell editors that a paper does not make any sense, not realizing that if this is the case, it is the writer's fault, not the reader's fault, when the reader is an educated and well trained professional in the field.

From this insecurity-soaked process then emerges a kind of code language for professionals within a narrow field (and the narrowness of some of these fields is suggested by some of the journal titles out there, such as "Journal of asynchronous learning networks" and "Journal of aquatic ecosystem stress and recovery" just to pull out a couple from the thousands of journals available from a typical university library). This spirals inward sometimes to the point where there are only four people out there who can read a particular paper, and it gets published because those people are the reviewers - because no one else can understand the paper.

This is a particularly important issue with human health because from papers that are often horribly written, leave out important methodological information, use bad statistics, etc., the public is spoon fed a misleading press release that makes bold new health claims that are not at all substantiated by the paper, but that give publicity to the journal and sell newspapers.

So the problem identified by Sand-Jensen - but always known to the few scientists who care about proper scientific communication - reaches much further than the frustration of a scholar having to wade through a morass of bad writing. It affects the public's attitude and education about science, which in the U.S. couldn't be much lower for an industrial country. And it makes even those of us who did go into science as a career feel sometimes like closing the journal, turning on the TV, and watching Law and Order reruns for the rest of the day. Dr. Sand-Jensen speaks for me when he says, "It has been a great relief from time to time to read and write essays and books instead." That is the raison d'etre for this blog.

Labels: education, humans, statistics

This past weekend was the Montana state jazz festival. I didn't get to enjoy the music as much as in previous years, because I had the fam in tow, but it is always fun to play there and give my students a chance for a broader audience than they get on our small campus. Here's our mp3 of "Black Orpheus," for the more than passingly interested.

Plus, we all get the benefit of a half hour with a professional jazz educator who hones in the band's strengths and weaknesses and gives some great tips for taking our playing to the next level.

Those of us who play jazz consider it one of the purest forms of music, because of its emphasis on improvisation. It's tough sometimes to be directing students because of the difficulty of convincing beginners to go out on a limb and try something new. I used to have one trumpet player (sadly just for one year) who was a great player, but did not like to solo because she felt it had to come out sounding like Miles Davis on the first try. She's a Type A, overachieving excellent student, but performance is not like other disciplines. You cannot learn what you need from a book and do it perfectly the first time; or, even acknowledging some trial and error is necessary in fields such as molecular biology, failure is not a public exercise, and a perfectionist can accept that it will take a few tries to get it right because there are no public consequences.

Obviously I get the other type of student too, who is willing to take a risk. Those students improve a lot over time, because the only way to practice soloing is to do it there, with your whole band standing around you. About 80% of soloing is confidence, I think. Sure, we don't really want to hear you if you have no sense of rhythm or melody or don't understand jazz chord structure and scales at all, but that's the stuff everyone picks up as they go, even in the big bands in which they don't solo (that is if they are all interested in continuing to play, and are not there just because Mom and Dad made them). But all the wrong notes really start to sound wrong after awhile, and as time goes on everything you hear flows to your fingers, which start doing more and more of the right thing. Then you reach the point where "wrong" notes actually have a place in the structure of your solo.

This is why I love listening to Ornette Coleman. His solos stretch the form to its extreme, because he employs so many notes that are not in the chord changes, but fit in perfectly because of the way he sets them up. (This is not really an uncommen idea - most of the melody notes of the bridge of "Girl from Ipanema" are not actually in the chords, making it difficult to sing, but incredibly rich to listen to.) Coleman's classic album "Free Jazz," for which he is the most famous, explored the idea of improvisation in its purest form, by having two quartets play together without any structure at all for both sides of an LP. Each performer takes his solo in turn, and it is up to the other musicians to respond to what he is doing. Jazz is all about communication, which is why it is so fun to play when the band really clicks.

Unfortunately, at my school, it is difficult to keep students in the jazz band for longer than a year or two, so they never get the chance to see themselves really improve, and see how this connection works among musicians used to playing with each other. There tends to be a high-school mentality here that music is uncool and partying is really where it's at - all but one of my 8 or so freshmen that started the year dropped out within a few weeks, and this mentality clearly played a role. It's a shame of course, because understanding the fundamentals of music is a basic part of a liberal arts education, and because training in music is something that is much easier to keep with you throughout your life - which is what tipped the balance for me to become a biology, rather than music, major. It worked out, because I'm going strong in both fields, and realized I have only scratched the surface of what I could do in both of them.

The infinite possibilities of jazz make the same tune exciting to play over and over. Even when you have the head of the tune mastered, you can always stretch a little and try something new on your solo, with the rest of the band trying it right along with you.

Labels: education, jazz, music

Neurophilosophy recently posted on current research on why our brains have trouble paying attention to several stimuli presented in quick succession. While getting at the mechanisms behind these processing "bottlenecks" is an ongoing endeavor, it has actually been known for some time that what some people proudly describe as their ability to "multitask" is actually no such thing. Humans (and probably other animals as well?) are actually terrible at this, and the conceit that we are good at it is actually responsible for loss of productivity. So it's not exactly clear why an article trumpeting this as news has appeared in the popular media. Nevertheless, the article motivated me to read up a bit more on the topic. I focused on the recent paper: Sigman, M. and Dehaene, S. 2006. Dynamics of the central bottleneck: Dual-task and task uncertainty. Plos Biology 4:1227-1238.

The authors make a few relevant observations. Referencing what has been previously known:

A dynamic trace of central limitation is ... manifested at a slower time-scale (seconds to minutes) in the inability to rapidly switch the control processes that harness together independent processing modules ... This effect is most evident in task-switching paradigms, which show, using a variety of different experimental manipulations, that reaction times increase when participants change between different task configurations...

Typical result - multitasking slows us down. But why? Here is one of the authors' conclusions:

Although central processing of task 2 can be executed immediately after central processing of task 1 has been completed, the outcome of task 2 cannot be executed until the system has disengaged from the previous response-setting mode.

This means that in addition to the lag in performing a second task, due to the need to finish the previous task first, there is an added lag during which our brain has to shift gears from the first task to the next. So if you add up all the time one task takes if you focused on it completely to the time the second task takes if you focus on it, it will be less than the time you take doing them both together. Thus, as the example in the Times article suggests, shifting your attention back and forth from the road to your cell phone introduces dangerous delays in your driving response time. This probably explains why the accident rate for cell phone users is said to be equivalent to that of drunk drivers, who also suffer from impaired response time.

But what do a few seconds here and there matter for a situation in which we are not in control of a lethal weapon hurtling 75 mph down the highway? The problems go beyond time delays; there are impacts long term memory as well. For those of us in education, the problems introduced by task-switching too often are obvious. The standard university schedule of four to six classes every day, mostly lectures, pretty much could not be a worse way for students to learn. Many professors may not like this characterization; obviously we went through this system and did well enough to become professors ourselves. The problem is, the great majority of our students are not like us. They are not riveted to a lecturer's every word because they find the topic so fascinating, thinking about it in depth after class. No, most of our students attend our lectures, do their best to listen, and probably most of them genuinely understand the material at the time it is presented. When they do lousy on our tests, however, we blame their inability to apply themselves, and certainly that is a factor. Unfortunately, our system is setting up all but the brightest and hardest-working students to fail, when it comes to long term retention of the material in a class. Even many students that manage a B or C in a prerequesite might as well have not taken it when they get to the next class in the sequence.

It is known that humans possess both short-term and long-term memory. For memories to be shifted from the short-term to long-term, these memories must be retuned to and further processed. But when a student leaves my lecture and heads for the next class, what happens? Simply, the toilet flushes - all that new information sitting there in short-term memory waiting to be processed gets dumped instead, as the new information takes over. The student does not think about the material usually for two more days until the next lecture, which then is harder to follow because the student has not processed properly the previous information which is critical to the understanding of subsequent material. Even worse, the student usually does not review his or her notes until the night before a test, when they no longer make sense because the broader ideas associated with those notes have not been properly processed and stored in long-term memory. Our system is idiotic and stupid.

But there is indeed a better way, that a few colleges in the U.S. (at least) employ: block scheduling, or the taking of one class at a time. In this model, the students take one class for three hours of class time every day for 18 days, which represents the class hours necessary for a 4-credit class. Actually, many people are familiar with this format from taking summer session classes. Summer session students, though, may not have received the same benefit because for students to be able focus on the material, you can't lecture at them for 3 hours - meaning you can't take a semester class and force it into the block format as is if you want to see a real change in what the students retain from the course. Fortunately, the block format is perfect for lab exercises, field experiments, or other hands-on tasks that also do a much better job of relating concepts than the passive absorption of information spoken by a lecturer, so the students get two better ways of learning for the price of one. But more important, for three and a half weeks, students are thinking about the material in only one class, not half-listening to (or skipping) a lecture while they worry about an exam next period. They have the time to follow the connections in the material, to internalize the relevant ideas which make the material make sense, simply to think about it, not just mindlessly write down notes that they don't look at again for weeks. They come to class, because they learn quickly that to miss a day is to miss a week on the standard schedule, and miss with it a vital component of the class. They become comfortable with the terminology associated with the field of study, which in my experience rarely happens in the semester format.

So why don't more schools do this? Number one, there would basically be no point with a class of 300 students because you would be reduced to the lecture format anyway, and standard lectures are 50 minutes because that's about all our attention spans can handle as it is. Number two, this is more work for the faculty, because teaching in this environment is highly interactive when done properly. It is also much more intense to grade tests, papers, etc. in a compressed format quickly enough that students benefit from your feedback. But at a small college, it can be done when the faculty care about their students' performance.

Our big university model is basically there because it's the cheap, easy way to chunk students through and give them the degrees they have paid for. But I think most of us teaching at college and universities lament the lack of true liberal arts education that students are receiving there. Simply, most of our graduates are not critical thinkers. Were they ever? That is probably debatable, but many more people go to college now than used to, and a degree probably provided some basic measure of assessing the competence of, say, a potential employee. It's not clear to me that it does at this time.

Colleges now on the block program full time are Colorado College, Cornell College, Tusculum College, and the University of Montana-Western.

Labels: brain, education