The new school year is about to start, and it’s customary to take a moment and philosophize.  But I’m really busy, so I’m going to dust off something else and let that stand in.  Back in 2010 December, I was nominated for a prize offered by Princeton University Teacher Prep.  Part of the process was to submit a statement of my “philosophy of education”.  I’d never actually put down on paper my educational philosophy, so I had to write it fresh.

I didn’t win the prize but I did get to spend some time thinking about why I’m doing what I’m doing.  That’s worthwhile.  And since I was once instructed by a very wise professor that anything worth writing is worth using at least three times, I figured I’d recycle my statement here.  Enjoy.

I entered the profession of teaching without any clear educational philosophy.  Having done well in school myself, I more or less assumed that the key to being a good teacher would lie in offering an environment like the one I had experienced.  And even though I had taken many advanced education courses in pursuit of my degree, what I encountered in them lay fallow in my mind — the seeds of good ideas that had not, yet, found fertile ground.  It did not take long in the classroom to convince me that my recollections and preconceptions would be wholly inadequate to the daunting task of teaching.  My thinking perforce had to evolve.  What has emerged as my philosophy of education is therefore somewhat ad hoc and eclectic, but I believe it serves me well.  This is what I have learned about the arts of teaching and learning.

The foremost truth I have learned is:  Students will perform to our expectations of them.  Oh, of course it is possible to set the bar too high and be disappointed; or to underestimate your students and be surprised.  But by and large, students perform to our expectations.  Tell your students that you believe the material is beyond them, and their learning will suffer.  Show them that you believe that, and you make it irrefutably true.  On the other hand, set high expectations and consistently hold the students to them — show them by your own persistence that you believe they should master the material, can master it, and will master it — and they will move heaven and earth to prove you right.  They will not even know they are doing the amazing.  In my second year of teaching, one student complained, “Mr. Gilroy, you act like we’re so much smarter than we are”, to which another opined, “But that’s better than if you treated us like we’re dumb”.  I have encountered students who do not know how to learn and too many who do not care to — but I have yet to encounter one who cannot learn.

This was brought home to me by my experience teaching our course on Space Science and Astrophysics.  Due to the vagaries of our scheduling process, it turned out that most of the students in SSA were not “science kids” (most of whom opted for Advanced Placement courses in biology or physics).  Indeed, most SSA students had not even taken introductory physics — which I expected would make the astrophysics part of the course extremely limited.  But I was mistaken.  Despite little formal training, these students dove into the topics and wrestled successfully with some of the more abstruse topics in modern science: the evolution of black holes, the origin of the Universe, the possibility of life elsewhere.  Moreover, they learned to teach each other and to share what they found — so much so that fellow members of the faculty actively sought to sit on the panel of experts judging their final projects.

My second precept is, time is too precious to waste — mine and theirs.  There is little point in spending a year rushing through a litany of disconnected facts that make no impression on their lives.  My courses are organized, as is my discipline (physics), around problem solving:  The retention of definitions and figures has value only in that it speeds the solution of problems.  My students learn to dread four infamous letters — HDYK? — which festoon their papers, because I am relentless in forcing them to answer “How do you know?”  It is not the answer but the process that matters — even more so in this century, when the answers we take for granted are liable to change beyond recognition.  Many of my students enter my courses with only a rudimentary problem-solving ability, and so we linger on topics more than other teachers might.  I cover less, but I like to think that collectively, we uncover more.

Because time is so precious, very few of the lab experiments we run center on cookbook verification of accepted fact.  Instead, the experiments usually ask the students to predict the outcome of some procedure.  Along the way, they must measure the content-relevant parameters.  For example, my introductory physics class just recently completed a “race” wherein each group measured the acceleration of two carts and predicted where they would cross.  We then videotaped the actual race so that they could use video analysis software to precisely measure how far from their predicted location the actual crossing occurred.  In many classes, measuring the accelerations would have been the explicit point of the experiment; for us, it was just a waypoint.  Having a specific goal helped focus the students and allowed them to see some application of the material.  (Of course, the element of competition also helped motivated them!)

The ultimate goal of education, in my opinion, is to build in students the confidence, habits, and skills to allow them to ask intelligent questions and set about intelligently finding answers. The world into which they will enter is so different from the world I encountered at their age, as to be entirely uncharted.  I cannot tell them what they need to know, because I can’t possibly foresee that — what they need to know very likely hasn’t been imagined yet.  My best hope is to train their minds to be supple so that they can flex and adapt.  This finds its best expression in a yearly project of the Advanced Placement Physics course.  The XLP (extended lab project) challenges the students to formulate their own goals and questions, to design an experiment, and to commit to it for nearly half a year.  From conception to completion, the students drive the experiment, allocating their time and maintaining a budget.  Though I of course remain present to facilitate their work and to help them past roadblocks, within a few weeks of starting, they inevitably surpass my own knowledge of their particular question.  They shift from student to expert and must adapt their style accordingly.  The XLP is both daunting and exciting for them. Despite requiring considerable hard work toward the end of their senior year, the students rarely complain and never seem to suffer senioritis.  Indeed, they often ask (only half-jokingly) if they can skip other classes to get more time in lab.

A third truth I’ve come to is that learning is an emergent behavior.  It only happens in its purest form by collaboration.  This has posed a difficulty for me, as my discipline is traditionally evaluated primarily through individual performance on isolated exams.  It has taken persistent effort for me to craft assessments that accurately measure the interplay of learners — a goal that I readily admit continues to task me.  Wherever possible I have made the experimental portions of my courses acts of collaboration not only in the data-collecting but in its analysis and reporting.  This complements another strong opinion of mine, which is that science education should be viewed as a public art.  The output students create should be intended not for my eyes but for the larger world.  Thus, in SSA, each quarter ended with a research project conducted in groups and presented to a panel of reviewers drawn from the larger school community.  In AP Physics, for every experiment, every group must prepare a report that passes review by at least three other students; since we run every experiment twice, this means the second report must also respond intelligently to the feedback of the reviewers.  The XLP concludes with a tradition lab report but also with a public presentation to the school community.  All of these help underline the central point: Science is a human endeavor whose results are meant to be shared, not hidden away in a file somewhere.

I don’t have a grand theory on which to hang these precepts or sophisticated jargon for what they mean.  My philosophy of education is an unfinished product.  Every once in a while, though, I do have the satisfaction of speaking with a former student who regales me with a tale of a time when they encountered some phenomenon and said to themselves, “That’s the sort of thing we might have run into in Mr. Gilroy’s class.  I can understand that.”  For me, all the rest is window dressing.иконописikoni

And if so, what cn be done about it?

A study referenced in Discover has the provocative conclusion that seeing a small American flag while completing a political questionnaire can induce the respondents into being more Republican, even up to 8 months later. Is our society doomed by our optic nerves to surrender to the rabid right?

First off, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. If the description given is accurate, this study doesn’t meet the bar. The sample size is smallish (worse for the followup) and the controls seem ill-defined. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, of course. There is also a danger in defining some policies as solely Republican, or pretending that the conservative position is monolithic. Serious replication efforts are called for.

But for the moment assume the causitive effect is real. Why would seeing a flag make one more identify more with Republican views? I would argue it’s because, since the 1960s, the Republicans have highjacked the symbols and language of patriotism. They have been aided in this by the tacit complicity of the media (which like simplistic us-v-them soundbites), the Democratic Party (which has been timid in defense of its country and of itself), and the American people (who have lazily accepted the sports-team approach to politics pioneered by Fox News and embraced by the rabid right).

What path of action is there for progressives and liberals, who perhaps might be driven to despair over the apparent psychobiological advantage this gives the Republicans? The same one as always: Fight back by reclaiming those symbols. The advantage comes from two crossed circuits in people’s brains: “flags = patriotism = good” and “flags = Republican”. This leads them to erroneously conclude “Republican = good”. Progressives must break the chain at the second link. If we concede owenership of the trappings of patriotism to the rabid right, we _will_ lose the public.

Granted, this will be a challenge. Firstly, a lot of time has been wasted and a lot of ground lost. People would have to unlearn their unexamined habits of thought, and no one welcomes that. More importantly, patriotism is more complex for progressives. The message of the rabid right is starkly simplistic: My country, wrong or right. America – love it or leave it. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. The progressive position is more abstract, more nuanced: I love my country, but I don’t always love what it does. I recognize its greatness but I also recognize the uncomfortable ugly truths that are part of its history. America is not the pinnacle of history; it is a path to a better tomorrow. That’s harder to sell. It’s harder to enforce message discipline. It’s harder to tweet.

But it is no less a stirring vision of America. Indeed, I believe it is more so. I think that the American people are sleeping, and in their slumber, the rabid right have been whispering illusions of a center-right nation. But at root, despite it all, the American people are a smart and a good people who will not dream forever. They believe not in an America that never was but in an America that should be. That is a message that finds far more resonance in the progressive ethos.

Do people associate the flag with Republicanism? Has the rabid right seized the symbols of patriotism? Maybe. But that’s not reason to surrender them. It’s a call to take them back.

I was just watching a season 2 episode of Castle called “When the Bough Breaks” and it annoyed me, by going along with a societal convention that annoys me.  In it, a young Czech immigrant is murdered and, after a convoluted investigation, it’s revealed that a doctor had switched his baby for hers in the delivery room.  The doctor’s child had an untreatable always-fatal condition and he couldn’t face it, so he changed the babies.  Eventually, she figured it out, arranged to get access to his son (which was in reality the child she bore), swap the boy’s mouth for DNA, and get a lab to confirm the identity.  The doctor panicked and killed the woman before she could tell anyone.

All well and good, and relatively well-written.  Here’s what bothers me: At the end of the episode, Detective Beckett makes a happy ending by connecting the doctor’s wife (who has just discovered that the child she’s been raising as her son is not the child she bore) and the woman’s estranged husband (whom she divorced because it was too painful being reminded of her “lost” child).  It’s very touching, with the man obviously overjoyed at finding his son and the mother asking about her child before he died.

Here’s what annoys me:  The man hasn’t found “his” son.  His son died of the untreatable disease three years earlier.  Sure, the kid in front of him shares his DNA, but he has had absolutely no role in that child’s life since birth.  Likewise, the mother wants to hear about “her” son before he died.  Does that lessen the love she feels for the boy in front of her, who calls her Mommy and knows none of this?  Will she tell him at some point that she’s not “really” his mother?  Should she?  Would that even be true?

Isn’t parenthood more than mere donation of genetic code?

The writers of Castle certainly haven’t invented this meme.  Indeed, it goes virtually unchallenged in all media.  It’s just another expression of a DNA-driven division of the world into “kin” and “other” — as if what most is what particular sequence of A,T,U, and G you possess, rather than what you do with it.  I think we’d all be a lot better off if we could shake this particular habit.  People are not defined by their genetic information.  People are information in action, and it is the actions that matter.ПРАВОСЛАВНАТА ИКОНА

This is a mostly-pointless TED talk that celebrates the vast Lego culture … It’s fun even if it isn’t all that deep.

For about ten years, I’ve been running a project in my Honors Physics course called Days of Miracle and Wonder (yes, title taken from a Paul Simon song).  In it, the students are asked to create a business case for a product or service not available today but likely to be so by 2030.  Although they are expected to construct a likely technological path from today’s state-of-the-art to that future product, they aren’t expected to actually build their device because, after all, it’s supposed to be 20 years away.

In one of the early years, a team chose as its device a free-standing holographic display a la the chess scene on the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars.  They presumed it would involve some sort of fast-spinning mirror.

Today, I came across this – a SIGGRAPH paper and video demonstrating a free-standing three-dimensional display utilizing a fast-spinning mirror.  It’s about 20 years early.

I guess I have to revise my project rubric. 

Headline at ABC News: “Democrats are Dropping Like Flies”

Reality:

So the retiring Republicans outnumber the retiring Democrats in every chamber– and in what we are told is destined to be a “Republican year” — yet it’s the Democrats who are dropping like flies?

How exactly did the myth of a liberal bias in major media ever get started??

See Political Animal for more details.

OK, that’s melodramatic.  All that’s occurred so far is that their mediocre site has choked several times since I’ve tried to post a comment in response to a blog post there.  The post blames President Obama for the jobs lost in the past 11 months and worries what it would mean if he does a “hard pivot” towards jobs creation in January.

Now, it might just be that the GOP site is poorly designed (other evidence suggests this) or that they’re just slow.  And it might be that they don’t like hearing feedback from people who haven’t drunk their Kool-Aid.  In any event, after my third attempt to post, I decided to cut-and-paste my comment and post it here.  Ah, the joys of the vanity electronic press!

I totally agree.  After all, it’s simply irrelevant that the economy inherited by the President was bleeding jobs at a rate unseen in 70 years, after his predecessor managed to follow a decade of strong growth with a decade of retrenchment, turning surpluses into deficits while squeezing the middle class and giving away trillions to the uber-rich.  And it doesn’t really matter that many private forecasters believe that the economy would be in far more dire straits absent the stimulus (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/11/charts_and_graphs_that_will_fi_2.html), including shedding perhaps an additional 2% of jobs if the money -hadn’t- beeen spent.

What really counts is ideological purity, not pesky things like facts or reality.  After all, if you stay pegged to reality, you might -never- get the chance to turn a national tragedy into carte blanche to launch your own war of choice against a nation completely unaffiliated with the attackers, while ignoring the fact that 15 out of 19 of them came from the Middle Eastern country that you and your daddy were so close to.  And what would even -be- the point of being in power if you can’t shred two hundred years of judicial philosophy to pursue your own mean ends?

One of the unsung heros of the health care debate is the Congressional Budget Office, an agency that few really understand and fewer appreciate.  Ezra Klein has a tidbit on them, including a description so pithy I can’t help but steal it:

If the role of the Federal Reserve is to take away the punchbowl just as the party is getting started, the role of the Congressional Budget Office is to walk around the party telling everyone exactly how drunk they’re getting and reminding them that there will be consequences for their actions tomorrow.

I join with Mr. Klein in wishing all the hardworking government types a happy holiday.

Everyone has their own unique signs that summer is upon us, the signature sound that signals the academic year is winding down. For me, it’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears.

More below the fold.

Real Genius tells the story of Mitch Taylor, a 15-year-old supergenius admitted to Pacific Tech to work on a new laser power source.  His mentor, of sorts, is Chris Knight (Kilmer), who used to be the hottest genius on campus but who, in his senior year, has suddenly gone a bit wild.  Both work for Dr. Jerome “Jerry” Hathaway, played by the inimitable William Atherton. Back in the 1980s, Mr. Atherton made a virtual career of playing stuck-up, neurotic antagonists (the EPA guy in Ghostbusters, the arrogant reporter in Die Hard) and here is no exception — and he’s still the guy you love to hate.  The movie weaves together Mitch’s coming-of-age tale with the simple but brutal politics of campus life and a larger-picture concern over the weaponization of outer space.  (Really.)

Real Genius is actually quite a funny movie and deserves to be remembered more and better than it is.  That’s only one reason why I show it, though.  The larger reason I show it has to do with the population I teach and the culture we live in.  Specifically, Real Genius has a message I think it’s good my kids hear, especially on the night before their big exam:  It’s OK to be smart.  In fact, it’s preferred.

Too often, in Hollywood, brains are to be despised or distrusted.  When tolerated, it’s only because they’re useful.  (Think: The Professor from Gilligan’s Island.)  There’s always something suspicious, unnerving, even faintly un-American, about the intelligent characters.  Movies are about “regular Joes” who demonstrate that book smarts might be useful in the short run, but it’s the aw-shucks simple spirit of the common man that will save the day.

Real Genius takes that motiff and says, Bollocks.  The kids in this movie are smart.  And it’s not just one lone smart kid, who has to learn to embrace his inner mediocrity and be accepted into the group.  The group is smart.  Beyond Mitch and Chris, there’s quirky love interest Jordan, budding mad scientist Ick, and silent guy in the steam tunnels Lazlo.  They are individually intelligent and collectively, well, geniuses.  Every one of them brings something to the endeavor and every one of them is appreciated by all the others for being smart, not in spite of being smart.

The other Hollywood stereotype undermined by this movie is the evil scientist.  Generally, the assumption (especially in the 1970s and 1980s) was that anyone who did basic research and used his/her brain was, to be blunt, dubious.  Many were in it to develop weapons and not think of the consequences.  Real Genius embraces but then subverts that stereotype.  The kids at PacTech certainly delve into their fields and don’t think about the applications.  But they uniformly reject Hathaway’s attempt to weaponize their work — even foil and nebbish on-campus antagonist Kent, when confronted with the fact that he’s actually been working on a phase conjugate targeting system for a laser death ray, is stunned and dismayed.  Heck, in backstory, we learn that Lazlo, faced with a similar discovery, actually broke and went from #1 rising star to hermit living in the steam tunnels.  Mitch and Chris are outraged at Hathaway’s perversion of their work and take positive steps to correct the mistake.  Even Hathaway is shown to be motivated not by crazed visions of scientific power but from a mundane desire to succeed materially.

In the end, the students best the professor and the military-industrial complex.  They do it not by being purer (though they are) or by working together (though they do).  They do it by being smarter than their opponents.  The movie celebrates their intelligence.  And yes, they are pure and they are noble.  But this is shown not to be the aberration but the usual order of things.  They are amplified by their intelligence, not lessened by it.

It’s a lesson I want my AP kids to see.  They’re also bright and even a little noble, and they’re about to dive into university life, where there will be pressure to compromise their intelligence and their principles.  Almost the entire culture is screaming at them to cover their light under a bushel and be less than they are in order to fit in.  I wanted them to hear at least one voice against that cacophonous chorus, that lone whisper that says,

It’s OK to be smart.  In fact, it’s preferred.

OK, this is another silly Facebook object trouve meme. Let’s see how this turns out.

INSTRUCTIONS::
1. Put your iPod or other music player on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the “next” button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS! (or stupid)
4. Tag friends who might enjoy doing this as well as the person you got this from

My list is below the fold; my conclusions are given right here: This is dumb. Although it’s supposed to yield deep insights or at least some humor, it really just generates noise. There is a disturbing trend in today’s society tho believe in the innate wisdom of randomness, as if throwing a patische of things together somehow tells us something important. That can happen but it rarely does.

More significantly, perhaps, the originator of this meme misunderstood iPods nearly as much as Apple does. I have 26 GB of songs. Most of them were on albums with other songs I like. Some were on albums I decided I didn’t like after hearing. Probably most have been listened to one or two times. Heck, some of them are just physics demonstrations. Picking songs at random from that collection is no more likely to reveal something interesting about me as, well, pulling Scrabble tiles from a bag is to reveal the Question to life, the universe, and everything.

I can see two ways to improve this and give it a fighting chance of being interesting. First, the songs should be picked from a Party Shuffle of songs you actually, you know, listen to. Second, I think it would be better to pull maybe 20 songs into a playlist but then choose which song matched which question. Utter randomness is, by definition, without meaning. But allow me to mediate consciously, and I just might reveal something.

WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
“The Beat Goes On” — Sonny & Cher

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
“One More” — Greg Sell

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE?
“Me & Julio Down By the School Yard” — Simon & Garfunkel

WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
“Pyjamarama” — Roxy Music

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF You?
“New & Improved” — Michael Giacchino

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT OFTEN?
“House of the Rising Sun” — Shawn Mullins

WHAT IS 2+2?
“This River is Wild” — The Killers

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
“The Pinnacle” — Kansas

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
“Ending Titles” (Tron) — Wendy Carlos

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
“Welcome to Pylea” — Robert Kral

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
“The Twelve Days of Christmas” — Boston Pops Orchestra

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
“Flash Lightning” — Papa Fritas

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
“Pistolero” — Juno Reactor

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
“So I Built Myself a Shoulder” — Palivicinni

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
“Looking Ahead: Governance and Democracy” — Larry Diamond, John McMillin, Paul Collier

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
“Influence of Masking Noise on Pitch” — Houtsma, Rossing, Wagennars

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
867-5309 — Tommy Tutone

WHAT’S THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN?
“The Wild Frontier” — Bruce Hornsby

HOW WILL YOU DIE?
“Stretched & Compressed Scales” — Houtsma, Rossing, Wagenaars

WHAT IS THE ONE THING YOU REGRET?
“The Long Race” — Bruce Hornsby

WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
“The Trio (Main Title)” — Ennio Morricone

WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
“Fire Down Below” — Nick Cave

WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
“Be Here Now” — Ray LaMontagne

WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
“King of Pain” — Alanis Morrisette

DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
“West Wing Main Title” — W.G. “Snuffy” Walden

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
“It’s Just a TV Show” — The Be-Fives

WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
“Mandatum Novo Do Vobis” — The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos

WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?
“Strip Polka” — Johnny Mercer