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

Still trying to get WordBooker to move my Mongrel Dogs posts to Facebook.

I’ve had my iPad for just under two months now and thought it’s a good time to reflect on it.

I’ll admit to hesitating before buying one.  I’m not really a fan of Apple — they do good hardware but (in my opinion) only so-so user interface work, and I cannot abide the zealots who are legion who believe that every decision by the Cupertino company is sublime, inspired, and unassailably correct.  (The single button mouse?  For twenty years? Really?)  But my school is currently investigating providing an iPad to every student, and purchased 20 for faculty to use to get acclimated, and then offered a decent deal on purchasing them.  So I thought, What the heck?

My impressions are below the fold.

Is the iPad a game changer?  Unquestionably so.  I borrowed one while we administered the SAT and I was blown away.  I was walking around the big creaky gym floor proctoring the exam, and I could stop at any minute to consult my notes or the student facebook or what have you.  Likewise, when a few weeks later I borrowed one while attending the Rally to Restore Sanity, I found it astounding how present the Internet felt.  I really felt I had the entire ‘Net at my command at any time.

Now that I have my own personal device, that feeling has grown.  No more do I have to sit through interminable arguments over (say) who scored the most triples ever.  I can just pop open the iPad and check.  (By the way, it’s Sam Crawdord.  Who knew?)  I can also check email and compose replies, keep my bankbook, read news (lots and lots and lots of news), and do all the amazing Internet things that make up my life … and because the device is very light, reasonably fast, and remarkably long-lasting on the battery, I can feel comfortable bringing it anywhere and accessing it anytime.

I’ve also gotten into reading ebooks way more than I’d expected.  I like the ability to search and collate my notes, and of course, carrying a library around in one device is nice.  I prefer the iPad over the Kindle or Nook not because the reading experience is better — I have not read enough on either of the competitors to say — but because I don’t have to choose between them.  I can buy from iTunes or Amazon or Barnes & Noble.  (As an aside, I am still dismayed at the too-oft-unnoticed winnowing of our First Sale rights, and that has soured me on ebooks quite a bit.  Buying one now is a moral struggle for me, and I’ve definitely shied away from purchases in the hundreds of dollars.  Someday, I hope, ebooks will go the way of DRM music, which found it couldn’t compete with the portable and open MP3 standard.)

I am using the iPad more than I expected, in ways I couldn’t have predicted, and having more genuine fun doing so.

Having said that… The iPad is nonetheless subject to surprising constraints.  Some stem from immature technology; some from limitations of the medium; and some are outright design decisions.  The iPad is “reasonably” quick but it isn’t really blazing.  The WiFi is a bit spotty and certainly not a world record-breaker.  Despite what Apple fans swear vehemently, Apple software can crash and the apps (many of which are, admittedly, third-party) can be extremely flaky.  “Multitasking” isn’t really that — it’s more like individualized application hibernation — and no matter what Steve Jobs tells you, if you don’t periodically clear the task bar manually, you will run into trouble.

But my disappointment runs a little deeper than that.  More than the particular design choices, I dislike Apple’s implicit but overriding design philosophy.  The iPad is the long-heralded “appliance computer”, as opposed to the “general computer” we are all used to.  Yes, there are a zillion apps and you can do a zillion things.  But it’s still a surprisingly stilted ecosystem.  It took me a while to understand it, but this is the basic problem I have with the iPad:

The iPad is a device for consumption not one for creation.

It’s designed to deliver media to you and it does a beautiful job of it.  If you want to read books, or watch video (but not all video), or cruise the Web, the iPad is awesome.  It’s elegant and snappy and, of course, terminally hip.  But if you want to actual create content, it suddenly becomes awkward and ungainly.  Sure, you can make Keynote presentations (sort of) and you can write in Page (kind of) — if you’re willing to shell out another $30 for the iWorks suite.  You can upload video, though of course lacking a camera, you can’t shoot any video.  You can post to Facebook or Twitter but only with a virtual keyboard that isn’t really meant for extensive, expansive writing.

Don’t get me wrong.  I like my iPad and I think it was worth the $500 I plunked down — and even the additional money I’ve sunk into apps.  I’m just not as impressed by it as much of the digital press is.  It’s functional and in places sleek.  But to my eye it is very clearly a transitional technology.  It’s just barely possible that my next tablet will be an iPad.  But I’m pretty sure the one after that will be an open, vibrant competitor which probably doesn’t even exist today.

The Internet is meant to be free, not walled, and I think Apple’s garden will end up a quiet cul-de-sac, nice to visit but no place to live.

So I wonder why my iPhone can run the WordPress app and see Mongrel Dogs but the iPad (running the same app) cannot see the posts (but it -can- see the comments). Odd.

Bravo, Paul Krugman!

“The Invisible Bond Vigilantes Continue Their Invisible Attack”

Could we call this the phantom menace? 

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. 

This captures my experience grading entirely…

PhD comics:

The writing was on the wall for a while, but Texas just approved a revision to its history curriculum.  It has an explicit conservative bent — I mean, literally, students are to learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

Because it is such a large market and has a very central purchasing authority, Texas carries a lot of weight with textbook publishers, meaning that students of many states will receive textbooks crafted to meet the Texas requirements.  (California is an even larger market but is not buying new books for a long while due to its ongoing slow meltdown.)

Am I worried?  Less than might be expected by people who know me.  Why?  Because I’m a teacher.  I have learned that the easiest way to cause students to reject any piece of knowledge is to proclaim it loudly in a textbook.  Especially with an increasingly distrustful and tech-savvy student population, attempts to ram down an official line on anything seem likely to fail.

• “We’re #37“

And, who’s looking out for the Insurance Companies?

OK, I should have posted this nearly a week ago.  But it’s been a whirlwind and I just couldn’t get to it.  Surprisingly still on track, despite my trip to California.  I had thought I’d gain some, since my exercise was irregular and my attention to the plan spotty at best.  But in fact I continued a weight loss, albeit a small one.  We’ll see if the weeklong roadtrip to DE and MD had any different effect…