Apparently, the latest “fad” to enter the education reform arena is an intense focus on “subject mastery,” unfortunately to the exclusion of other skills necessary for student success. There’s nothing wrong with the idea that students need to master the subject matter that they’re supposed to be studying.  Such mastery is absolutely necessary, but again, the reformers, at least all those mentioned in The New York Times article on it on November 28^th, are throwing the baby out with the bath water.

They have observed, wonder of wonders, that many students with terrible grades actually know the material, and that many other students with good grades don’t.  They have rightly identified a real problem in many American schools – that appearance and behavior and apparent attitude often result in inflated grades for students who really don’t learn what they should.  Unfortunately, from there, a number have gone to the assumption, and even implemented revamped curricula and standards, that very little besides subject mastery matters.  Homework is downgraded to counting not at all, as are attendance and behavior.

This idiocy – and it is idiocy – ignores so many factors I almost don’t know where to begin.  However… first, homework.  If homework is designed properly, it should both require learning and skills mastery. It should also teach students research skills and get the point across that you just can’t find answers in one place.  Admittedly, all too much homework is indeed busywork, but that’s not a problem with the idea of homework;  it’s a problem with how teachers use homework.  Second, if homework isn’t graded, in our society, unfortunately, it doesn’t get done, because we’ve taught children, by example, that the only things that are important are those that “count,” either in dollars or grades.  If homework doesn’t get done, then skills mastery suffers for most students.  In addition, both higher education and jobs requiring that higher education also require “homework,” doing projects and presentations, research, etc., and removing that facet of education or downplaying it into insignificance does students a great disservice.

Second, attendance.  Like it or not, most jobs require attendance.  It doesn’t matter how smart you are, because, if you’re not at work, sooner or later you’re going to get fired.  Discounting attendance because there are a few students bright enough to learn matters without being there – and those students are indeed a minority – sends a societal message that encourages a self-centered and eventually self-destructive attitude.  The same is true about behavior.  Employees who continually misbehave get fired.  College graduates who do the same seldom ever make it in either professional or executive positions.

Students not only have to master skills, but they have to learn how to learn, how to apply that learning in society, and put all three together.  Yes, skills mastery is vital… but without the other factors, it’s also useless.

When will we as a society ever get away from the “one-big-simple-fix” attitude?

The kind folks at Goodreads featured two of my books, one fantasy and one science fiction, as their November choices for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Club members to read and comment on, if they wished.  The books were The Magic of Recluce and Haze.  As I suspected, I took a certain amount of flak on one aspect of The Magic of Recluce, and that was my “creative” use of textual sound effects.  This was something I’ve known for years, especially since Dave Langford’s “poem” created solely from the sound effects in the first few Recluce books.  Needless to say, the later Recluce books have far, far, fewer sound effects.  And some Goodreads readers also noted that I was a bit too elliptical in areas, a tendency I think I’ve largely corrected in later fantasy books [after all, The Magic of Recluce was my very first fantasy book, written over twenty years ago, and I have learned a few things more about writing in the years since].

The negative comments about Haze, however, bothered me more, not because a number of readers didn’t like the book, because that’s to be expected.  Any book by any author will find some readers who don’t like it.  What bothered me was why these readers didn’t like the book.  Almost all of those who posted negative comments made the observation that they couldn’t connect with Keir Roget, the main character, because he showed no emotion.  In point of fact, that is not true.  He shows no overt emotion beyond politeness and tactfulness, or a quiet reserve, even when his life is threatened. It’s not that he has no emotions; it’s that they’re kept under tight rein, because in both his culture and his profession [security agent] revealing emotions can be dangerous, if not fatal, particularly when you’re already under suspicion, as Roget is.  The safest way not to reveal emotions is to repress them so that you don’t feel them strongly yourself, and this is exactly what Roget does.  There are numerous clues in Roget’s small actions as to what he feels in his actions, but these are subtle.

From a reader’s point of view, this clearly presented a challenge, and that difficulty was magnified because the “culture” is future Earth, and future southwestern Utah in one series of events.  That’s a future where at least some U.S. readers “expect” a certain emotional pattern from the character, and Roget didn’t deliver.  Of course, if he had, he wouldn’t have survived even to the point where the book actually begins. I suspect that, had I made the entire culture more Sinese and the main character had been identified as of Chinese heritage and genetics, readers would have had less difficulty, but perhaps not.

But what all the comments underline is that at least a certain percentage of readers are so isolated in their own culture that they have great difficulty in getting “outside” their own cultural and personal expectations, in particular when the setting “looks” familiar.  Yet that was actually one of the basic points of the book, shown in many ways – that what looks familiar may not be at all and that our own future may be far more alien to us than many could possibly imagine.  The problem of course, was that, for some readers, I succeeded in making that seemingly familiar future so alien that they could neither accept nor identify with it… and that doesn’t help sales a great deal.

What I’ve experienced with Haze may also reflect why comparatively few SF books, especially those with high sales levels, depict heroes or heroines with emotional complexions more than slightly different from those in current western society.  Emotional differences are far more alien than physical differences, it would seem, at least in current SF, and that’s why so many aliens are really just humans in disguise.

The   November 20^th edition of The Economist features an observation on the growth of data surrounding purchases of bonds, stocks, derivatives, etc. The article notes that since the founding of the Centre for Research in Security Prices at the University of Chicago in 1960, initially funded by Merrill Lynch, the number of academic economic journals dealing with, analyzing, or providing such data has grown from 80 then to over 800 today.

Yet some economists, such as Robert Shiller of Yale University, according to The Economist, dispute the value of such information, noting that even with all the proliferation of data, no one can explain the market melt-down of two years ago.  Others dispute Shiller, pointing out that the market demand for such information proves its value.

In my view, they’re both right, because each is talking about a different aspect of the information.  Shiller is talking about understanding how the securities markets actually work, especially in times when markets perform “abnormally,” while all those who want more and more data are talking about how valuable they find it in making money through trading.

Combine all that data with sophisticated trend analysis and you get knowledge that can make a great deal of money, generally always in short-run situations, but what all that data won’t tell you is when something basic is going to change, and change abruptly.  And those who mine the data are more than happy to be able to use that data 99% of the time to make piles of money. As for the one percent of the time that they’re wrong… well… everything they’ve made the rest of the time covers that – for them.  What their profits don’t do is remedy the vast economic damage that ripples through the economy when one of those unforeseen market meltdowns occurs.

The problem with the computerized use of all this securities market data is that, because it works so well so much of the time for those with the resources to exploit it, there’s little incentive to fund or look into basic research in the field.  In addition, the economists who do all the short-term analysis are, according to Professor Shiller, “idiot savants, who get a sense of authority from work that contains lots of data.”   Again, the problem is that the focus on daily market economics stresses immediate returns to the detriment of long-term understanding… or wisdom, if you will.

And what else is new?

Today is “black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving when supposedly the Christmas shopping madness seizes the American people and drives them into a frenzy of buying for themselves and others.  While the term “Black Friday” was used at least as far back as 1869, it originally referred to financial crises, but at some point in the mid-1970s, newspapers and media began referring to the day after Thanksgiving as an indicator of what merchants were likely to be “in the black,” or profitable, because of the Christmas buying season. After a time, and particularly in the last decade, this meaning of “black Friday” has usurped all others.

Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with this usage, and especially with the implications behind it.  Because everyone seems to want to concentrate on the economic side, I’ll begin there.  First, the idea of “black Friday” emphasizes consumer buying and consumption as the primary measure of U.S. economic power and success, at a time when the majority of the goods consumed come from other countries.  Second, it ties expectations to a given day of the year. In addition, it creates a mindset that suggests, if a retail business’s holiday revenues are not substantial, then there’s something wrong.  While that may be true for seasonal goods, not all consumer products are seasonal.

Beyond those reasons are the ethical ones.  Do we really want to continue to push the idea of consumer spending as the only – or even the principal – way to keep the economy going, particularly at a time when our entire societal infrastructure, from roads to bridges, to financial structures, to the electrical grid, among others, need rebuilding or total re-structuring?  At a time when Americans, with something like five percent of the world’s population, already consume 25% of its annual output?  Do we want to create a mindset that emphasizes consumption at a time when so many people are struggling to make ends meet?

Then there’s the purely practical question of whether it’s a good idea to emphasize consumption – most of it temporary in nature – when those goods are largely produced overseas, while neglecting building and using capital goods that will generate jobs in the United States.

Black Friday – an economic success or a societal disaster?

As some readers may know, my wife is a professional singer who is also a professor of voice and opera.  Among her many duties is that of teaching aspiring classical singers diction and literature.  One notable type of song literature required of these students is that of “art song,” and a significant percentage of art song consists of poetry set to music by composers.  Various forms of art song, if called by different names, have been composed in many languages, although classical singers usually begin by learning art songs in English, French, German, and Italian.

Earlier this semester, my wife was beginning the section on American and English art song, and out of a class of fifteen students, she found that what they had read in high school appeared to be limited to a bit of Chaucer and Shakespeare, along with Emily Dickinson, and perhaps T.S. Eliot.

None of the students had learned any poetry by such greats as John Milton, William Blake, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Yeats, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rosetti., Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden, A.E. Housman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Amy Lowell. In fact, none of them even appeared to have read Robert Frost. Moreover, none of them could actually read verse, except in a halting monotone.  This lack of background in poetry puts them at a severe disadvantage, because these are the poets whose words have been put to music in art song and even in choral works.

These were not disadvantaged students. They came out of high school with good grades and good standardized test scores.  Yet they know essentially very little about the historical written arts of their own native language.  In turn, this lack shows up in their narrowness of word usage, metaphor, and general weakness in both oral and written expression. Whether it’s related or not, it does appear that there’s also a correlation between the loss of  solid English instruction and the growth of such phrases as “you know”; “I mean”; “like…dude”; and scores of other meaningless phrases used to cover lack of even semi-precise expressiveness.

Bring back the great old poets… all of them.