I am one of those professors who makes their undergraduates write papers. No midterms, no final, just papers. This is apparently a bizarre oddity outside of English Literature classes, but there it is. My students generally buy into the argument that I really don’t care whether or not they can fill in the bubble for the correct difference between Piaget’s ideas of accommodation and assimilation, if they can’t use those ideas to help them understand the development of children they actually encounter or life in general.

So they don’t fuss too much about the papers themselves. It’s the preparing to write the papers that seems to give them trouble. When they ask me how they could improve their grade on the next paper, I typically say something like, “well, your argument was kind of all over the place. did you write an outline first? did you write a rough draft and edit it?” Inevitably they sigh, look away, and say no. So I resigned myself to the fact that maybe this is just a reality of teaching undergrads in classes where there is writing, but that are not Writing Classes.

But then my seven-year old son brought home a very dog-eared and marked-up version of his beautiful report on “Bats: The Only Flying Mammal!” we had just seen displayed at Open House the week before.

“Hey, Connor,” I asked him, “is this the rough draft from your bat report?”

“Yes,” he said. “We call it ‘The Sloppy Copy.”

“Oh, great!” I reply. “So you can make all your mistakes on this version, right?”

“Yes,” he said again. “It’s like we say in class, ‘The Sloppy Copy is your friend.’”

So there you have it. My second-grader has a better understanding of the writing process than the majority of my undergrads. I hope the next ten years of K-12 schooling doesn’t squeeze it out of him.

Why have I never heard of this before?

Oops, I mean this. Ha Ha.

I may love this even more than the LOLCats. Maybe. Almost.

Well, so thanks to some offhand remarks by Barack Obama last week at a fundraiser in San Francisco about blue-collar folks from Western Pennsylvania who “cling” to guns and religion (jeesh–bet he wishes he could take that back) that were decontextualized and broadcast all over the major news networks as “elitist,” once again we’re looking at a presidential election in which all the candidates try to prove how folksy, approachable, and “in touch” they are. Jon Stewart already did a great Daily Show bit on this where he explained why we might actually want someone smarter than the average American to be answering that proverbial phone at 3am (see video clip archived at Huffington Post here). But I’ve been thinking a lot recently about why it is that the whole anti-intellectual rhetoric is so freaking powerful. (Let’s just round up all those smart people and burn them at the stake, why don’t we?)

I think a large part of it has to do with the fact that we tend to treat intelligence not as a goal state, but as a static characteristic. (Now I’m channeling Carol Dweck, but it’s a good point.) We believe in things like IQ, “gifted” education, MENSA, Advanced Placement, and even that watching Baby Einstein and listening to Mozart can make babies smarter. (Interestingly, nobody argues that listening to Mozart might make adults smarter, which makes just as much sense. Developmental psychologists, neurologists, and some freakishly brilliant marketing people have managed to convince many Americans of the plasticity of the infant brain, but then we think that somehow it stops there.) Once you get to be about 5 years old (about the time we enter school, coincidentally enough), intelligence is seen as something you either have or don’t have, and the whole rest of your life is spent encountering various means of sorting the haves from the have-nots. “Smart” kids get special treatment, better teachers, go on to better colleges, get better jobs, make more money, etc. So all this resentment sets in. It seems awfully unfair, doesn’t it? Why should the smart kids get to be president too, on top of everything else? (Although we’ve already seen what happens when the C-student gets to be president…)

What if, instead, we thought about intelligence as something attainable that people could and should cultivate, like honesty, cleanliness, or a good work ethic? What if we saw intelligence, like many things in life, as the product of behavior and effort? Certainly, for a few people with special needs, they are limited by their biology. But for the vast majority of people, they are limited by their circumstances and by their own choices. The human brain responds well to practice. Want to get better at thinking? Practice. Read books and magazines at a level slightly beyond what you’d normally choose. Talk to other people who make you think hard about things and who use big words. Solve problems that are not easy. Then do it all again. And again. And again. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

True, some people get a head-start in life this way. These are the kids who already seem “smart” when they enter school and get all the advantages because of it. But it’s not because their brains are inherently better, but because they are born into families where this sort of thing happens all the time. So they don’t have to choose it for themselves. They get practice without even knowing they are practicing. But they’re only 5 years ahead. By the time someone gets to the point where they’re running for president, that’s at least 30-50 years the rest of us have had to “catch up.” But we don’t, largely because we think we can’t, and because we are hampered by an educational system that tends to agree with us. We resent the smart person, rather than admire him/her and think we can be like that too if we try. It’s a sad state of affairs, frankly.

Now, admittedly, if all of society started thinking of intelligence as something people can achieve on their own, and we stopped looking up to the “intellectual elite” as somehow inherently different than everyone else, I might find myself out of a job. Bet I’d find myself in a better world though.

So, the short story is that I did the decidedly un-academic thing of talking to news media about some research a colleague and I did on children and computer games. In addition to a few local radio and TV bits, some of which haven’t aired yet, I was on Future Tense on NPR late last month. (Link to mp3 of the segment here.)

Our campus press people were thrilled that I was willing to do this. Apparently academics have a bad reputation for staying in their ivory towers and not engaging the general public (really? I had no idea this stereotype even existed. *snarf*). But, silly me, I thought, why would I not want to? There’s a public message to some of the work I’m doing, so isn’t this a good way to get it out there? Now I know. I thought the NPR segment came off well, actually, but I definitely understand now why most academics won’t touch the media with a 10 foot pole (unless it’s, you know, NOVA or something).

If you listen to the segment, it sounds like a brief but very smart and easily flowing conversation between Jon Gordon (the producer) and me. In actuality, the conversation we recorded was over 20 minutes long, and then in post-production Jon took what he thought were the most interesting parts of what I had to say and re-recorded his own questions in between, so that they were more relevant to those parts. Now I remember feeling a bit ramble-y in a few places when we talked, so I’m glad he didn’t put those parts in. Instead he made me sound smart and succinct. But it was a bit weird when I first heard the broadcast version, and I admit to feeling somewhat unsettled by the whole thing.

We academics are control freaks when it comes to language. We worry over every word in our written prose, and we carefully plan out our conference talks (well, at least most of us do). When we get editorial reviews back asking us to change things about our carefully crafted prose, we’re glad if it ultimately results in a better book or article, but we resent it a little too. And we get to decide if we want to make those changes or take our work elsewhere. Our ideas are our own. But with media, we give up control of how our ideas are packaged and presented. Ultimately the story belongs to the reporter, not to the academic interviewee.

Thanks to Jon Gordon for making me sound great. But I have no guarantee that someone else won’t make me sound like an idiot. (I do enough of that on my own, but I really don’t need it broadcast to the general public.) I was willing to take that risk. But I completely sympathize with those who aren’t. The Ivory Tower is a lot less scary.

Some days I think that the value in the godawful rent we pay for this place is probably 40% house, 60% landscaping. The outdoor space here is just awesome. (A covered back patio would make it perfect, but whatever. Next house.) Here are some pictures as of yesterday. The Calla Lilies are in the back, the Japanese garden is the side yard, and the wisteria grows over the front patio. We also put in an herb garden in a raised bed out back: Italian parsley, rosemary, oregano, thyme, and sage. Last summer we had basil and mint too, but they didn’t make it through the winter. I think we’ll have to replant those. But whomever gets this house next will get free herbs!

Japanese Garden

Calla Lillies

Wisteria

Herbs: Italian parsley, rosemary, oregano, thyme, sage

These are all in random order.

Four places I’ve lived:

Urbana, Illinois

Irvine, California

Pueblo, Colorado

La Mirada, California

Four jobs I’ve held:

Professor

Dishwasher and brewer of stinky yeast food in a genetics lab

Office girl and database manager in a urologist’s office

Assessment development associate

Four computers I’ve owned:

Mac SE (I inherited this one from KC in undergrad. it’s still in a closet somewhere. vintage!)

IBM Thinkpad

Toshiba Tablet PC (never used the tablet functions as much as I though I would)

MacBook Pro 15″ (writing on it now, in fact. love it. love it.)

Four things I used to be but am not anymore:

Vegetarian

Super-skinny

Quiet

Band Geek (well, not literally anyway. once a band geek, always a band geek, though. at least I don’t have to wear that damned fuzzy hat anymore.)

Yes, I know it’s a tough market for sellers right now, what with the home loan crunch and the declining sale prices. But some of you really aren’t doing yourselves any favors. Seriously, I’ve looked at a lot of houses the past few months. Clearly you aren’t watching “Designed to Sell.” Or maybe you need a more direct approach. So I’m modeling this list after “REALLY!” with Seth & Amy on Saturday Night Live.

(1) You happen to come home while your house is being shown. And, rather than driving around the block, running some errands, even parking down the street until the people leave, you just walk in and start going about your business. Really. And, as you’re wandering all over the house, you give the prospective buyers and their realtor dirty looks. Really.

(2) You think that a new interior paint job might spruce things up a bit. But you get your paint from the super-bargain bin, the odd collection of cans that look like they might have been mixing mistakes, because no one in their right minds would actually want to paint their walls that color. Really. And then you decide that you’re going to do the paint job yourself. But you do it very badly. Really. So badly, in fact, that you leave big smudges of paint on the baseboards, on the window panes, and on the floors, causing the buyers’ realtor to speculate that perhaps you were in a hurry and let your kids paint their own rooms. Really.

(3) You are trying to sell what might actually be a fairly large home, with a nice open floor plan. But you’ve crammed it to the ceiling with giant ornate nouveau-riche furniture that makes the rooms look tiny. Really. You’ve stuffed every single closet with super-tacky clothes, including one closet devoted entirely to hats. Really. And you’ve completely covered every square inch of wall, shelf, and counter space with knick-knacks. Really. Have you ever passed a “Country Clutter” store without buying the whole lot?

(4) So, you get a call that someone is coming to look at your house in 30 minutes. And what do you do with those 30 minutes? You take the dog for a walk, start a construction project in the garage, or decide now would be a good time to start putting all the junk out on tables in your yard for the garage sale tomorrow. Really. You don’t clean what seems to be several days of dirty dishes in the kitchen. Really. You don’t pick up your dirty laundry scattered everywhere, including a prominently displayed super-size pair of granny panties. (I think my husband had to scour his retinas after that one. Some things cannot be unseen.) Really.

So seriously, people, think. You can only blame so much on the market. The rest of it is your fault.

Slate.com has an ongoing feature called “fixing it,” wherein a well-known expert on some federal policy issue writes an open letter to the next president, whomever s/he may be, containing their suggestions for how to remedy the train wreck du jour. (And that metaphor describes quite a lot of the current policy arena, so there’s a wide array of topics for this feature.) One of the more recent topics was education. Jim Ryan, of the University of Virginia School of Law, focused his suggestions on (what else?) everybody’s favorite choice for target practice, No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

In principle, I agree with many of his suggestions. Mainly, that we stop the hemorrhage of punitive damages for failing schools and start giving them the resources they need to address whatever deficits are uncovered through the assessment process. (NCLB in its current form is all stick and no carrot, basically.) But Ryan was not in favor of scrapping the wide-scale and high-accountability assessment system altogether.  So I found myself puzzled that the larger assumptions behind this infamous policy went unchallenged.

In their award-winning book, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle argued that widespread “school failure” is a made-up story, invented by arch-conservatives and the religious right and designed to bring down public education as an institution and replace it with vouchers for parochial schools, homeschooling, or whatever other for-profit alternatives arise in a competitive marketplace. While I’m not sure I agree with the conspiracy theory behind their conclusions, the points they make in support of the “fraud” argument are good ones.

First, that the vast majority of Americans with school-age children, regardless of race or income, seem to be caught in a paradox: they believe that public schooling as a whole is in dire straits, but they also believe that their local public school is serving their children well. So they’ve bought into the myth of “failing education,” but they think their child’s school is the exception to the rule.  Now, if everyone thinks this, which schools are actually failing? (This is pretty much the opposite effect of the Fed saying a housing market recovery is already on the way, but people don’t believe it when their own home is being foreclosed. Apparently just saying the outlook is rosy doesn’t make it rosy, but saying doom and gloom makes it so.)

Second, that education as we know it is a moving target, so comparing assessment numbers and international comparison charts to those from decades ago is basically apples-to-oranges logic. American education in the last 30 years has witnessed a huge influx of cultural and linguistic minorities; cognitively, physically, and behaviorally disabled students; and increasing numbers of children in poverty. As compared to generations past when such students were warehoused in “special” classes, today we rise to these challenges by welcoming them into the general education classroom, offering them the same opportunities for learning (or trying to), and testing them with the same tests as those students who fit a more “normative” profile. All this while education funding continues to plummet. So we’re actually doing more with less, which, in the corporate world, would be a sure-fire recipe for a Christmas bonus. (Sadly, no such luck.)

Berliner and Bruce’s book was published in 1996, and I remember being in the audience at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association when they won the “Best Book of the Year” award. (One of two times in 12 years I’ve seen a standing ovation at this normally somewhat staid conference. Gloria Ladson-Billings’ presidential address on “The Education Debt” was the other.) Their diagnosis of educational policy rhetoric is even more relevant today.

In medicine, before someone undergoes life-threatening invasive surgery, it’s generally assumed that a full diagnostic work-up has been conducted to determine that there is a problem warranting such a dramatic solution. I’m fairly certain that the diagnostic phase was pretty weak before Congress put education under the knife of NCLB.

Personally, I’m throwing my support (and my vote) behind Obama for President. And while I generally think the advice in Slate’s “Fixing It” series is solid, this is one issue on which I hope Obama can live up to his reputation of thinking differently about the fundamental assumptions that both drive and plague us. God knows we could use it.

Northern California is the best of both worlds. Unlike “Down South,” where I spent much of my life before the Midwestern hiatus, we actually do have seasons. Summer is hot, the leaves turn in the fall, winter is foggy and grey and cold (but not bitter cold, thankfully!), and spring is gorgeous. The trees flower, the grass turns green again, and everything is a riot of color. This happens in the Midwest too, I admit, but not until May! Here spring starts in early March, so now it’s in full force. Below are some pictures of what is in my backyard as of this weekend. We’re renting, currently, and I hope that wherever we end up next after we buy (IF we buy, but more on that in a different post) is as beautiful.

I thought I didn’t want a blog for the longest time. Seriously late-adopter here. I was thinking, why on earth would I want one more thing I felt compelled to write on a regular basis? (Or, more accurately, one more thing I felt guilty about not writing on a regular basis.) I’m an academic. I’m always writing, but most of it is not the sort of thing my friends and family are interested in reading.

Then I got started on Facebook a few months ago. And I loved keeping in touch with people scattered across the country–from long-distance colleagues who now feel closer, to long-lost friends who connect me back to the girl I used to be. But the two-sentence “status update” just wasn’t cutting it. I found myself wanting to share more, to reflect with more substance, to write about issues beyond social networking and what I was up to on a semi-daily basis.

So here it is. I have no idea how long it will last, or whether this will be the sort of thing I become completely devoted to or quickly abandon (like the title says, driven to excess–it’s either one or the other). But here’s to the journey, wherever it goes.