Gritty

Seth Godin just wrote a great post called "Red Lantern" in which he argues that we should reward kids who persevere at least as much as we reward those who have more natural talent. Winning the gene pool is one thing, but persevering is a skill that can and should be encouraged.

The whole article is brief and worth reading, but here's the anecdote that begat the title:

At the grueling Iditarod, there's a prize for the musher who finishes last: The Red Lantern.

Failing to finish earns you nothing, of course. But for the one who sticks it out, who arrives hours late, there's the respect that comes from finding the strength to make it, even when all seems helpless.

The solution here isn't simply to give out more "participation" ribbons. This piece in New York sets out the dangers of giving out unwarranted praise. The key is to somehow recognize, foster, and reward grit, that trendy personality trait) getting so much attention lately. It's not just about effort, but perseverance even when they fail the first time or the first three times.

I think my school generally does a decent job of rewarding a variety of students, not just the ones with the most natural talents. But what can I do in the classroom to foster grit–a trait I would not say I personally have in abundance? It's the same challenge faced by video game designers: it's easy to make an impossibly hard or incredibly easy game. The challenge is getting that balance–difficult enough to be worthwhile, but with opportunities for growth and success to prevent frustration.

If I go too far towards the "Challenging" side of the spectrum, I will lose a lot of students who simply get frustrated and do not see any payoff (especially since I teach an elective and they can simply quit). But if there are too many rewards just for effort, there won't be any meaningful growth.

There are a lot of complicating factors, not the least of which is a culture that often expects an A for effort. I'm not sure yet how to navigate all this. Maybe new technology can make students' effort/progress more visible to them, in a way more meaningful than a spreadsheet of grades? I'm not sure, but I do want to help form gritty students.

Towards a Unified Field Theory of Summer Movies

I'm a big fan of summer movie season. I've always enjoyed movies in general, but I've never been a capital-F "Film-lover" type. Sure, I appreciate a good arty or independent movie, but I've never taken a film class, nor have I seen Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia. As such, I tend to see more movies in theaters in the summer than during the winter awards season (not to mention the difference in free time I have in the summer vs. December and January). I also, having stolen the idea from a friend, run a Summer Movie Draft, where five of us draft a "team" of summer movies. We then give each movie a score, based on how well it does at the box office, as well as its Rotten Tomatoes score. Below are two screenshots, one of last year's results, and one for this summer's contest.

2012 Summer Movie Draft

My team was the purple, helped by a mid-season acquisition of Magic Mike. 

2013 Movie Draft

Still a couple weeks to go, and a more wide-open race without anything as huge as Avengers. 

All this to say that I spend a lot of time thinking about summer movies, especially the blockbuster types that tend to dominate the box office all summer. What surprised me this summer was the extent to which Man of Steel under-performed, despite its massive marketing push and pre-release buzz. Yes, it made a lot of money, and there's already a sequel planned, but the critical response was tepid, with only a 56% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Superman is clearly a well-known and beloved property, more so than the Avengers or Iron Man. So why did Man of Steel fail where those others did so well?

Most of the complaints about Man of Steel are with the film's third act, in which (spoiler) the entire city of Metropolis is leveled, mostly because of Superman. Geeks complained because this was out of character for Superman, who is known for defending as many civilians as he can, no matter what the cost to him. While there are legitimate concerns about what this means for Superman's character, the biggest problem is that this was simply a bad choice for the story. There was certainly plenty of action in the last 40 minutes of Man of Steel, and ostensibly that's what summer moviegoers are looking for. Yet for all the punching and flying and explosions and destruction, the finale of Man of Steel was undeniably boring, in a way that other explosion-packed finales are not.

We know Superman is essentially invincible, so any story featuring him must have stakes other than simply his survival. Superman and Superman II accomplished this by having Superman saving Lois Lane and other civilians, or by taking his powers away temporarily. In Man of Steel, director Zack Snyder and screenwriter David S. Goyer instead place the survival of the entire planet, and especially Metropolis, at stake. The problem is, we viewers cannot really comprehend or relate to planetary stakes. A good story can make us care about whether certain characters live or die, but an entire city or planet? That's more difficult.

The Avengers faced similar difficulties in last summer's blockbuster. Again, the entire planet was at stake, with the battle for its survival taking place in New York City. I think there are a couple reasons why the final act of The Avengers (mostly) works, where Man of Steel does not. One, the characters are more vulnerable. While we know intellectually that none of our heroes will die, they are all (except Thor) mostly human. Sure, there's a high-tech suit of armor and a giant green rage monster, but their basic humanity gives them a vulnerability that Superman lacks, at least in this most recent version. The team dynamic of the Avengers also keeps the action from getting stale. It's not a question of whether the superheroes will defeat the supervillain, but how they will do it. They even spend some time figuring out how to keep civilians safe, something Superman does not seem to consider. The stakes are still too high to be comprehensible, but the script keeps things interesting. Man of Steel is relying on the action sequences of one super-strong alien flying and punching another super-strong alien to be entertaining enough, but without any connective tissue, it feels rote.

There was a tweet from @FilmCritHulk the other day with an excerpt from Raymond Chandler that covers this ground much better than I could:

Action is not a substitute for the emotional response that moviegoers crave. With modern CGI, the action is easy. But relying on it at the expense of plot or characters isn't going to work, no matter how popular the superhero. And while my wonderful assistant principal may disagree, I don't think that Superman is being held to a different standard than the Avengers. The problems in Man of Steel are problems of execution. The best summer movies, the ones that appease both the hoi poloi and the critics, are the ones that understand Raymond Chandler's advice: the action has to be a means, not the end.

O, the Humanities

Maybe it's because it is summer, commencement address season, but I have read several vocal defenses of the humanities lately. As a teacher of Latin and History, and somebody who reads history books for fun, I certainly agree with these arguments on an intellectual level. At the same time, there's something about the way many of these arguments are presented that strikes me as counter-productive.

Recently, many of the articles I've read have been responding to a report written by the Academy of Arts and Sciences' Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. If you read their suggestions (here's their executive summary in a PDF), there's not much to argue with. Most of their goals boil down to ensuring the American population is literate, able to communicate clearly, and capable of contributing to a global society. One thing this report does quite well is avoid the trap of arguing for the humanities only from a position of utility. While it does mention that a humanities education can strengthen creative thinking and writing skills, etc., it argues for "cohesive curricula" to practice those skills, which I think is precisely the correct goal.

The problem is that most arguments defending the humanities are not so nuanced. David Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times this week called "The Humanist Vocation." In it, he cites the Humanities Commission report and bemoans the death of the humanities.

A half-century ago, 14 percent of college degrees were awarded to people who majored in the humanities. Today, only 7 percent of graduates in the country are humanities majors... But the humanities are not only being bulldozed by an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in their own enterprise.

So according to Mr. Brooks, the problem is that the world needs more literature and history majors, and would indeed have them if only the college humanities professors were more vocal about their love of the humanities. And while he praises the Commission's report, he says it lacks "the missionary zeal" he saw in his college professors. He then tells the story of one of his college professors at the University of Chicago (where Mr. Brooks studied history) who was clearly passionate about the importance of reading Pericles and Plato and Paul, and how his life was enriched by that knowledge. Brooks ends by saying,

"Teachers like that were zealous for the humanities. A few years in that company leaves a lifelong mark."

So let me summarize David Brooks' career in the humanities. He went to college to study history, which tells me he must have had some pre-existing interest in the subject. Of course, maybe he changed his major after he arrived, but at some point during his four years at the University of Chicago he was inspired by his various professors who left "a lifelong mark." That is all fine and good, but I think it's a mistake to assume that the solution for the problem of not enough people reading Vergil is to replicate his particular kind of experience. The goal is not to have more humanities majors, the goal is to have more citizens who understand the lessons of art, literature, and history.

The solution is not for professors and pundits to shout from the rooftops, "The humanities are important!" It doesn't matter that they are right, or how much missionary zeal they show. As my high school English teachers repeated ad nauseam: Don't tell, show. The "cohesive curricula" suggested by the Commission are absolutely a step in the right direction. It's not about having more people who major in literature, it's about having scientists, engineers, and doctors who are also fluent literature, history, and art. If the humanities are so important, and again, I think they are, we should trust students to figure that out for themselves.

I'm reminded of something Roger Schank, author of Teaching Minds, wrote:

Of course one can make a legitimate argument for the idea that every person should know everything that matters or might matter. Works of literature? Why not? What harm could Dickens do really? Everyone should know about World War II. How could one be a citizen of the world and not know about that?

The problem is that once you accept that idea two things happen and both are bad. The first is that you implicitly accept that telling (or reading) are the means by which students will “know” about these things. But that model doesn’t work.

School doesn’t work that way, in part, because of the second bad thing. Once we think there is important stuff to know, someone is going to make a list of exactly what that is... The list is long and so in the end someone decides what matters most and that is how we have the curriculum we have.

So how do we incorporate the humanities into education in a more meaningful way? What does this look like in practice? I don't know exactly. I just know that no matter how many times I tell my students that TS Eliot called Dido and Aeneas' meeting in the Underworld the most civilized scene in Western literature, they don't automatically see its importance. Maybe I'm not zealous enough.

As it is right now, I try to impress upon them the importance of the Aeneid, and then I hope that someday, maybe soon, likely later in life, they develop an appreciation of it. They'll have some experience when they are thirty years old, and think, "I'm glad I read the Aeneid in high school. I didn't get it then, but I sure appreciate it now." That's not the worst plan in the world. Clearly it works well enough to keep me employed. But what if they were finding their own works of literature to read, their own historical analogues? Answering questions that seem vital to them now, using the humanities? Wouldn't that be more meaningful to them now and also have a more lasting impact?

This has been a lot of words to simply end with, "I don't know the solution." And I'm getting close to repeating my earlier screed against the College Board. I do think, however, that op-eds and commencement speeches aren't going to be enough to "save" the humanities. I feel like there has to be a way to make the humanities relevant without simply saying, "Trust me, kids, it's important."

Confident & Aware

Spring. It’s graduation season, and commencement addresses are one of my guilty pleasures. Perhaps it’s because my college graduation had a poor speaker (“Don’t waste your life marketing hairspray,” she said to the dozens of marketing majors hoping to work for Procter & Gamble). Or maybe I am hopelessly trying to cling to my youth, remembering when I was a naïve young graduate ready to conquer the world. Either way, I enjoy a good commencement address. Each May I again read David Foster Wallace’s classic “This is Water,” or Steve Jobs’ address at Stanford, both of which are really the pinnacle of the genre.

This season, I enjoyed Jon Lovett’s (not Jon Lovitz) speech at Pitzer College. Here’s the bit I liked the most:

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "Yeah, this should definitely be in 3D."

No, what he said was, "[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." That's what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential, and aware of your inexperience. And that's really tough. There are moments when you'll have a different point of view because you're a fresh set of eyes; because you don't care how it's been done before; because you're sharp and creative; because there is another way, a better way. But there will also be moments when you have a different point of view because you're wrong, because you're 23 and you should shut up and listen to somebody who's been around the block.

As somebody who has long suffered from “Smartest Guy in the Room Syndrome,” I wish I’d been able to internalize this advice sooner. I’m still decades away from having enough wisdom to give a commencement address of my own, but I’ll add this to the list of things I wish somebody had told me when I was young(er) and stupid(er).

Why I Teach

My colleague has been commemorating “Teacher Appreciation Month” by recalling some memories of his teaching career. He’s much, much older than I am, so he has many more stories than I do. Still, it made me think of a question my students ask often: How’d you know you wanted to be a teacher?

When I started high school, I met teachers entirely different from those I’d had in grade school. They were just so intelligent, and would actually ask questions for which I didn’t immediately have an answer. Nearly every one of my teachers was not only an expert in their subject, but also clearly cared about us students and enjoyed their job. But for all the great teachers I had, the one who is most responsible for me being a teacher was without a doubt my least favorite.

My favorite class as a freshman was World History. I’d always enjoyed reading about history, especially ancient civilizations, and so this course was right up my academic alley. Unfortunately, I did not like the teacher. He was sarcastic (but not charming, like I am), frequently rude to the students, and one day he stole my milk money (true story). I’d always been a teacher’s pet, but for the first time I was in a position where I loved the subject matter but not the teacher. I found myself going home often and thinking to myself, “If I were teaching about ancient Rome, I would’ve done it this way...” I was formulating in my head my own little lesson plans and projects.

I actually have a specific memory of lying in bed one night, thinking about that class and what I would do differently, and realizing, “Huh, I guess that means I want to be a teacher.” From that point on, I never really wavered, no matter how much my mom tried to convince me to be a doctor. I flirted with Corporate America briefly, but fortunately Corporate America dumped me before it was too late. I imagined going to law school, but then I realized I didn’t actually want to practice law, just wanted to tell people I went to law school—not a good reason to do anything.

That teacher that “inspired” me to do better? He’s still teaching, and I even had the... pleasure of working with him briefly. I never told him his role in making me who I am. I wonder if he’d be flattered?

Comics Gene

I’m a nerd, always have been, and presumably always will be.

As a kid, my nerd interests of the moment almost always involved collecting things. First, it was Transformers—the original Transformers, not Michael Bay’s bastardized explosion-fests. Then, I became a voracious reader, with shelves and shelves lined with Star Trek and Star Wars books, neatly arranged chronologically or alphabetically, depending on my mood.

In fact, it turns out that all this collecting may be in my genes. I recently spit into a test tube and mailed it off to 23andMe. While I wait for them to analyze my DNA, the 23andMe website has a series of surveys to entertain me, and to be used for various research projects.

Some of the surveys ask obvious questions about my health–those are boring. The much more interesting ones are the personality surveys. So far, I’ve learned that I am introverted (no kidding) and neurotic (yep). Relevant to my nerdom, I scored highly above average on the “Systemizing Quotient”, which means that I am quite driven to arrange or reduce things into a system. This isn’t surprising, and probably explains a lot about my various geek tendencies over the years. I am genetically predisposed to collect and organize things.

With all of this being said, it’s a bit surprising that I never really got into comics as a kid, seeing as that seems like a hobby tailor-made for a kid like me. I had a phase, but it was not particularly long-lived. I picked up the Death of Superman TPB at K-Mart (not exactly a local comic shop), and I followed the various Supermen stories that came out of that for a while before I got bored. I was also a big fan of the X-Men, but I just couldn’t keep up with all the titles. I would watch the cartoon, and then be massively confused by all the different characters in the comics. I still remember one issue that I bought primarily because it had a shiny cover. I was thoroughly confused, and went back to following comic book movies, but not comic books.

I received a copy of Marvel: The Untold Story for my birthday, and it actually explained why, despite all signs pointing to me being a childhood reader of comics, it never came to pass: comic books weren’t very good in the 90’s. There seems to be a consensus that the quality of comics has improved lately, and indeed, my semi-dormant nerd genes have awoken in a way not seen since I amassed a triple-digit DVD collection in college. I’m reading comics.

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​A sample of my collection.

I’ll put the quality of Saga, All-New X-Men, or Hawkeye up against anything on the bestseller lists. Even my skeptical wife plowed through the entire run of Y: The Last Man and eagerly awaits new issues of Saga. And for somebody like me with so little time to read for pleasure, 22-page issues are the perfect mental health break.

If I’d read this post before I started this hobby, it would’ve been very helpful. Fortunately for me, I had my own Comics Godfather to help me get back into comics, telling me what was essential reading (House of M and A v X) and what to skip (most of The New 52, except Scott Snyder’s Batman). Fake-Internet-Celebrity Merlin Mann was also influential by turning most episodes of Back to Work into a comics podcast—and more specifically, by talking incessantly about Saga until I started reading it. (Seriously, read it. But only if you’re a Mature Audience.)

At first, I was reluctant to admit that I Read Comics, but now I’ve embraced it. I’m a Collector, and right now that means collecting (digital) comics. It’s in my genes.

173 days

The iPhone 5 was announced 173 days ago.

The Edmodo app has still not been updated to take advantage of the larger screen.

A big deal? Not really.

Indicative of the pace of ed. tech.? Absolutely.

Battery Life: The iPad's Killer Feature

One thing that didn't happen during my iPad trial? Tripping over charging cables. The battery life of the iPad, including the iPad mini that's become my primary device, is taken for granted a bit. But in a school, knowing that your device will last all day, no matter how you are using it, is transformative. I'm currently at 10 hours of use, and still have 32% battery remaining. All hardware requires trade-offs (like the non-Retina display I'm using right now), but I for one am glad Apple has prioritized battery life. Less than 10 hours would be a huge disappointment now.

iTunes U and Edmodo

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The Info tab for my AP Latin course. Lofty goals.

For this school year, I have been using Edmodo as the LMS for all of my classes. It’s worked better than I had anticipated, and certainly better than our school’s current system. For the period my AP students were a part of the iPad trial, I wanted to test out using iTunes U, so I created a course just to use during those five weeks.

There are enough great walkthroughs of iTunes U out there that I won’t go into much detail, but there are a lot of things that I, and my students, liked about it.

Positive:

• The teacher interface for managing the course was easy to learn and pleasant to use.
• The ability to easily add content was very helpful, particularly when adding content from the iTunes Store. I added (free) apps, iBooks, and podcasts to the course, and the students had no problems finding them. In general, the students seemed to have less trouble accessing any of the posted resources than with Edmodo.
• Most students took notes in their preferred note-taking app, but the ability to take notes on books, podcasts, and lectures and have them all in one place was very slick.
• So long as the students had Notifications enabled, I could be reasonably certain that if I posted something, they would see it.
• Several students commented that they simply liked using iTunes U better, because it was so well-designed. That "delight" factor is tough to quantify, but not unimportant.

Less-Positives:

• As a teacher, I could only update the course from my computer. Not a huge problem, but as I am using my iPad more and more, this was annoying.
• Communicating with the students was easy, but that communication was only one-way. There was no way for students to turn in materials or communicate with me or the class (other than email, of course).

So, when all of my students have iPads, would I prefer iTunes U or Edmodo? I’m still not sure. I have a lot of issues with Edmodo. For one, I’m wary of any free service whose business model is unclear to me. What happens if/when Edmodo is purchased by some textbook company? I’m also not a fan of their iOS apps, which are buggy at best and non-functional at worst. Still, Edmodo does a lot of things well. Namely, it is easy for students to interact with me and their classmates. That has been even more useful this year than I would have anticipated. In addition, Edmodo’s ability to do some basic polls, quizzes, and to collect assignments can really make it a one-stop shop for most teachers. With iTunes U, I would continue to use other sites (like Quia) for online quizzes and Dropbox or Evernote for assignments. That being said, for an iPad-centric environment iTunes U is a powerful, well-designed app whose design alone makes it a great option. Fortunately I don’t have to decide today.

Using iTunes U for five weeks did really highlight one of its strengths: the ability to create a self-paced course. While my course was created as “In-Session” so that I could attach due dates to assignments, it was obvious that iTunes U would really shine in creating a self-paced learning environment. While at first that doesn’t seem to apply to a high school classroom, I began to think about how it really could help create a more student-focused environment. What if my Latin 4 class had different units, that they completed at their own pace? There could be a “War Unit” with excerpts from Caesar, Nepos, and Vergil. There could be a “Love” unit with Catullus, Ovid, and Vergil. Students would work in class, but at their own pace, on whichever unit seemed most interesting at that time. I would love to create a course like this (cf), and iTunes U would make it very doable for the teacher. Summer enrichment courses or AP review would also be great candidates for a self-directed iTunes U course.

For now though, both Edmodo and iTunes U are pretty good options for teachers. Now if our grade book and SMS software would finally enter the 21st century, I’d be in good shape.

AP delenda est?

A recent NY Times article reported that Dartmouth is no longer accepting credit for high scores on AP tests. According to Dartmouth, 90% of students who scored a 5 on the AP Psychology test couldn't pass the exam for Dartmouth's intro psych class. Now this is only my first year teaching an AP course, so I don't speak with a lot of experience here, but this only serves to feed this question that's been gnawing at me: Can a content-based AP course truly coexist with an innovative 1:1 iPad deployment?

During the five weeks that all of my students had iPads, we were reading the tail-end of the Julius Caesar portion of the AP Latin syllabus. After a semester of traipsing through Gaul with C. Iulius, my students, while good soldiers, grew noticeably weary of the material. The brief foray into the cultures of the Druids and their "wicker man" helped, but there's only so much one can do to make Caesar's genocide palatable for teenage girls. Since they all had the iPads, I tried to think of ways they could save us.

Unfortunately, I kept running into two problems. I will be the first to admit that these are probably just illustrations of my own limitations, as somebody still new to both AP Latin and teaching with iPads. Still, no easy solution presented itself.

The first problem I had was with time. Some of the ideas I had for ways to engage with the material would have necessarily meant slowing down the pace at which we moved through the curriculum. The AP syllabus is not a small chunk of reading, and while I am happy to slow down and look at a few sections in-depth, there's a limit to how much of that can be done while still getting through at least most of the syllabus–which is the expectation.

The larger issue I found myself running up against was the curriculum itself. My students had in their hands devices containing virtually every word ever written in Latin that has survived. Yet, they are stuck reading only the lines that the College Board has declared to be worthwhile. You love Ovid? Sorry, no time. You want to be a lawyer, so Cicero sounds interesting? No can do. The rigidity of an AP curriculum is not new, but it is highlighted when the students have these Internet-connected devices.

I realize I am teaching a dead language, but I like to convince myself that I can still teach important skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, etc. Based on what I've read and my limited experience, teaching those skills is vastly more palatable when the subject matter is something the students are passionate about. How great would it be to let the students choose which Latin authors they want to read and then teach some text to their classmates? The new technologies make that very possible, but what happens when curriculum stands in the way?

To paraphrase Fraser Speirs again, technology, pedagogy, and curriculum all have to adapt to really get lasting change. At my school, the technology is coming, I can learn the pedagogy, but what do I do when I don't control the curriculum? AP courses aren't going away any time soon, so is it possible to really change anything in that context?