My mom, a teacher, sent me a link to an article with this headline:

Senate Majority Leader Seeks Passage Of Child Nutrition Bill Before Recess

"I read that twice," she wrote, "trying to figure out how schools could 'do' nutrition before recess."

Gripping them by the blades, rather than the handle, she passed them, safety-side-first, to her teacher's aide, Mrs. Martin. Mrs. Martin then turned them around and passed them back. Then they showed us the "wrong" way to do it. Mrs. Wilson took them by the handle and thrust the blade at Mrs. Martin. We oohed and tsked judgmentally at this act of unprovoked aggression.

"Do you see why that's dangerous?" she asked us. Yes, we said. "What if you were carrying them that way and you fell?" We could die, we said. I pictured my classmates face-down on the floor, impaled on their purple Friskars scissors, blood staining the linoleum. In a few cases the images were sort of satisfying, but I put that out of my mind.

"Now we'll practice," Mrs. Wilson said. And we did. We went around the room, each one of us passing our blunt plastic scissors to a neighbor, handle-first. Then our neighbor would switch the scissors around, just as Mrs. Martin had, and pass them back. There were about 25 kids in my class that year. I don't know how long that exercise took, maybe 15 minutes or so, but when I remembered it later, as an adult, it seemed like a long time to spend on such a basic task. Or at least it would have — except that I graduated from high school with those same 25 students, and throughout the rest of our school careers I cannot remember a single instance of misbehavior involving scissors. That 15 minutes in kindergarten not only saved Mrs. Wilson the headache of constant correction, it was a favor to every other teacher in the building.

What's more, I don't remember being insulted by the exercise. Had I understood her the first time? Yes. I was a girly swot in kindergarten, the kind of child who sat still and paid attention (usually). But I didn't feel condescended to when she went around the room and made us all practice such an elementary skill. On the contrary, I felt proud. I was showing off my expertise in scissors-passing. Look at me. I'm awesome at this. Someone should give me my own TV show.

I thought about this incident much later, as I was staring, dejected, at the library at the afterschool program where I work. I had spent all day cleaning and arranging it –chapter books here, nature books there, we have twelve children's dictionaries, really? — and, as proud as I was of my accomplishment, I knew that it was going to be a disaster area within three weeks. It happened every year. Books would be strewn everywhere, upside down and out of order, some of the pages ripped. I'd feel resentful of my job, resentful of the kids, resentful of Johannes Gutenberg and of literacy itself. Then I remembered Mrs. Wilson.

I enlisted the help of one of my favorite students, a bookworm who wanted order in the library as much as I did. On our first day of the new school year, we gathered the kids on the carpet in the library and she role-played the part of a messy student. She sauntered into the library and tossed a cheap paperback on top of the computers, where it fell behind the table and got caught in the electrical cords. Then she sauntered out. The kids laughed. "Was that the right way to do it?" I asked. No!, they cried. She tried again, this time shoving it spine-first into the dictionary section. "How about that?" I asked. No, they giggled. She tried one more time, putting it carefully in the dictionary section, spine out. "How about that?" I asked. This time they weren't sure. There was disagreement in the ranks. I asked her to pull it out and put it where it belonged, in the chapter books section. Then we went around the room, and each of the kids practiced re-shelving books: neatly, spine out, in the correct section, right-side-up.

It took about half an hour. My library stayed clean the rest of the school year.

Most of the 49 techniques described in Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov's study of excellent teachers and their classroom management practices, fall somewhere near Mrs. Wilson's approach to scissors-passing. If you want your students to line up in a certain fashion, teach them exactly how to do it. The DVD that comes with the book shows one teacher timing his students with a stopwatch as they pass papers across the room; Lemov notes over and over that spending 20 minutes on a skill like this will save X hours throughout the year, as transitions become tighter and as the teacher spends less time reminding, repeating, and cajoling students to come to order.

What I love about this book — and judging from the other comments I've read about it, I am definitely not alone — is that it teaches classroom management as a series of specific, concrete skills that any teacher can learn. Lemov does not talk about abstract concepts like having "high expectations" or "well-planned lessons," and he rejects the notion that teachers must have innate charisma. Though it helps to be a natural performer, anyone can learn to articulate expectations so clearly that students have no doubt what they are supposed to be doing at any given moment. His 49 steps include such minutiae as where to stand in the classroom, how to greet students at the door, and how loudly to speak in different situations. He spends considerable time on the art of calling on students who never volunteer.

But as much as I appreciated each individual technique, taken together they started to wear on me after a few chapters. Although he notes in the introduction that no teacher can or should use every method he describes, the DVD shows classroom after classroom run so efficiently that I started feeling claustrophobic. Students sit in neat rows. There are no extraneous materials on desks. Backpacks are put away. Kids are attentive to their posture. The teacher monitors their eye contact, which must be on the speaker at all times. Worksheets are passed out, and students fill in short answers as the teacher leads them on the overhead: item one, item two, item three. "Are you with me? I see someone's eyes are elsewhere. We'll wait." Item four. Item five.

It's no child left behind, for sure, but it's also no child racing ahead. I didn't see any examples of thoughtful conversation between teacher and student, much less among students themselves, and there was very little time for reflection. It was skill, assess, skill, assess, skill, skill, skill, assess. Woe to the child whose mind wanders now and then, and woe also to the child who's ready to skip ahead. Every kid is literally on the same page, every second of every class. In the book, Lemov often notes that skills learned well the first time leave more time for engagement with the material later — time discussing Hamlet's motives or the causes of the Civil War, for example — but I saw almost none of that in the DVD, and couldn't tell from the book where there would be space for it. Eyes on me. We're waiting. Item six.

I am not one of those hippie New Agey teachers who believes classrooms should be free-for-alls and all learning should happen inductively. In fact one of the reasons I like Lemov's book is that it goes well with one of my favorite education books, Lisa Delpit's Other People's Children. Delpit argues that ALL classrooms have rules and expectations, whether or not they are articulated, and that classrooms where the culture remains implicit favor white middle-class students, since they already know the unspoken rules. She advocates making expectations very explicit, e.g. if you want a student to shut the door, tell them to shut the door. Don't say, "Would you like to shut the door?", which some students will interpret as the question that it is. No, I'm fine with it being open, they think, and so they don't. Now the teacher is angry and the student is confused. I have seen versions of this interaction so many times in classroom situations, including situations where I have been the confused student myself. (Did I miss something? How come everyone knows this but me? I must not belong here…)

So I appreciate Lemov's exhortation to delineate the exact parameters of acceptable behavior, leaving no room for error or misunderstanding. Like Mrs. Wilson with her scissors, there is no option to fail or get distracted. Everyone can learn this and everyone will.

But I also wonder what gets left out. He notes at the beginning of the book that teachers must know their lessons cold, but otherwise doesn't spend much time talking about content. Most of the examples in the book, as well as the examples on the DVD, are of teachers teaching lessons with one right answer. Find the verb, the predicate, the area of the triangle, the meaning of this vocabulary word, the location of a river on a map. If this had been my first introduction to teaching, I'd have chosen a different career. It's not surprising that students in the classrooms he's chosen to highlight score well on tests, because these are skills that are easy to assess on a standardized exam. But those requiring more creativity and deeper reflection would not make the cut. They're messy. They're inefficient.

Ultimately, the question I have to ask is whether I'd want my own child in a class run this way. And the answer is a tentative yes: for some classes, for some of the day, especially in the early years, when discrete skills need to be mastered. But not all day. I would hope that she'd have the space to learn to monitor her own behavior, even in the absence of constant vigilance. And not in every class, especially as she gets older. Over time, I'd hope that the ideas themselves would become intrinsically interesting, that she would get annoyed at having her engagement with them micromanaged, and that her teachers would know when to step back.

Nevertheless, there are a lot of good ideas in here (despite the corny title). It's a book I wish I'd had ten years ago, and one I'd recommend to any new teacher. At the same time, though, it's one of those books that's been heavily hyped in a climate of NCLB, and that always makes me nervous. Did I like it? Yes. Would I want to see it be the next and only model of what classrooms should look like? Ummm, not without further discussion…

Possible topics include:

* Classroom deployments of digital tools such as blogs and microblogs (e.g., Twitter), wikis, video, and other digital and new media technologies to enhance or encourage radical teaching.
* The implications of changing forms of digital labor in the academic environment, including demands to build technology skills, learn software packages, contribute intellectual material to university-owned and/or commercial databases, creating and populating online learning environments, etc.
* How to harness technologies for their empowering potential, including supporting and training students to be active users of technology.
* Commodification of intellectual material, including the modularization and "just in time" delivery of teaching material via commercial courseware on university-owned servers.
* The surveillance and control of teachers and students when learning takes place in digital environments.
* The ethical implications of the underlying political and ethical logics we teach when we use technology in our instruction and research.
* Limitations on material and other types of access; or when "One Laptop Per Child" is simply not enough.
* Demands on instructors to provide vocational training for careers to students; training them to use commercial software packages and delivering a labor force that skilled in technology, as opposed to having support, space and resources for the teaching of academic material.
* The lopsided funding of technology projects over all else in academic institutions over the past decade and a half, and the collusion of academic institutions with high-tech business on joint ventures and for-profit activities.
* The relationship between contingent labor and on-line teaching.
* The relationship between technology and assessment.
* Classroom and institutional use of open source and noncommercial softwares (e.g., Drupal) as alternatives to privatized and for-profit technologies.

Feel free to circulate this!

Both women are also known for their uncompromising personalities. I have my misgivings about both of their stances on educational reform and labor issues; I'm sure I'm not alone there. But I'm also capable of recognizing this argument for what it is, which is a professional disagreement. Newsweek, however, seems to think it's a sequel to Mean Girls. Under the headline Schoolyard Brawl, we get a story that might as well come with a cartoon of them pulling each other's braids in the girls' bathroom. It's creepy and it's sexist. To wit:

Rhee has a chance to set a strong example for weeding out incompetent teachers—if she doesn't overplay her hand against Weingarten, who is a formidable foe. "You have two strong-willed and very smart and determined women with very different agendas," says Chester Finn Jr., a former assistant secretary of education and a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. "It has an almost gladiatorial aspect to it."

"Gladiatorial"? Really?

I think what's really going on here is the Bechdel test playing out in real life. The Bechdel test is an idea from an old Dykes to Watch Out For comic, in which a character says she will only watch a movie if it has 1) at least two women 2) who talk to each other 3) about something other than a man. It's amazing how many movies fail.

Out in the real world, we're accustomed to seeing women in the public eye when they're in fields where their bodies are paramount (actors, athletes), and, increasingly, in politics (Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi). But how often do we see a woman engaged in a public debate with another woman, over ideas?

Rhee and Weingarten, who first tangled about five years ago when Weingarten was running the New York City teachers' union and Rhee was testifying against her as the head of a nonprofit organization promoting school reform, clearly dislike each other.

Well I would hope so! It would be hard to have much integrity if they were having tea every week.

This isn't Jennifer and Angelina. It's a debate about one of the thorniest problems in school reform: how to get rid of bad teachers without any fair and reliable measure of what constitutes bad teaching. Rhee and Weingarten occupy the extreme ends of the argument. In a field that is overwhelmingly female, but where administrative positions are still largely held by men, it is refreshing to see women in leadership roles. As I said, I disagree with both of them on any number of issues. But it would be nice if those ideas could be discussed without falling back on stupid gendered stereotypes.

The 9/11 curriculum, believed to be the first comprehensive educational plan focusing on the attacks, is expected to be tested this year at schools in New York City, California, New Jersey, Alabama, Indiana, Illinois and Kansas.

It was developed with the help of educators by the Brick, N.J.-based Sept. 11 Education Trust, and was based on primary sources, archival footage and more than 70 interviews with witnesses, family members of victims and politicians, including Giuliani and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a New York senator at the time of the attacks.

The curriculum is taught through videos, lessons and interactive exercises, including one that requires students to use Google Earth software to map global terrorist activity.

Teaching Students About 9/11

At a press conference on Tuesday at a hotel blocks from the World Trade Center site, Giuliani said the program can help students think critically about the attacks as both a historic event and one that shapes the present, noting the continued threat of terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Teachers say that today's middle and high school students might be too young to have strong memories of the attacks, so the program can help them develop insight into what actually happened.

"Students are getting progressively younger as we move further and further away from the events," says Torres. In a few years, students who are taught about the attacks will not even have been alive when they occurred, adds Anthony Gardner, executive director of the Education Trust, whose brother died in the World Trade Center.

9/11 as a Lesson, Not a Memory

Eight years later, this is an example of what Sept. 11, 2001, has become for a generation that's too young to remember much, if anything, about that day: It is an educational DVD, a 167-page textbook, a black binder of class handouts titled "A National Interdisciplinary Curriculum." In Room C215 at Lincoln High School, images of the collapsing Manhattan skyline are now a classroom "warm-up exercise." "Militant," "imploding" and "rubble" are boldfaced vocabulary words for students to memorize. Homework assignments and essay questions ensure that Sept. 11 will indeed be remembered by millions of schoolchildren, if with a new sense of detachment.

More:
The September 11 Education Program
The September 11 Education Trust

Fifteen Christians and 15 Turks bound at sea in one ship in a terrible storm, and the pilot declaring a necessity of casting one half of these persons into the sea, that the rest might be saved, they all agreed that the persons to be cast away should be set out by lot in this manner, viz., the 30 persons should be placed in a round form like a ring and then, beginning to count at one of the passengers and proceeding regularly every ninth person should be cast into the sea until of the 30 persons there remained only 15. The question is, how these 30 persons ought to be placed that the lot might fall infallibly upon the 15 Turks, and not upon any of the 15 Christians.

A few things I noticed here… One is that this class is huge! I count 34 children. I've read elsewhere that small class sizes are not prized in Japan the way they are in the U.S., and that it's common to have classes with 40 or more kids. I would love to know more about how they manage this.

Another is the noise level. The classroom doors are open and you hear a steady stream of shouting coming from other parts of the building, but no one seems annoyed or distracted by this. I find this interesting because the American stereotype of Japanese schools envisions kids in identical uniforms bowed silently over their desks. "We could have their test scores," we say, "if only we were willing to stifle children's will like they do." As you can see from the scenes of children sliding around in the mud during recess, that's not really what's happening.

Part three is amazing. I've never seen a child take this kind of risk on behalf of another child:

I also find it interesting that the kids took collective responsibility for one child's actions. In one telling story I read about Japanese middle schools, a 9th grader had stolen some money from the treasury of one of his extracurricular clubs. Stop and think about how that would be dealt with in an American school — probably by isolating the child, giving him detention or a suspension, involving his parents and possibly the police. How connected would such a child feel to his club or to the school after such an incident? What pathway would he have to get back in everyone's good graces? And how frustrating would that be? It's easy to see how kids who make a few mistakes quickly go down the path of total disengagement.

In Japan, however, they took a totally different approach. They called in one of the older boys in the club and criticized him for not providing leadership and mentoring for the younger boy. The older boy apologized, and right away the younger boy (i.e. the thief!) felt guilty and embarrassed and promised to make amends. He was welcomed back into the group despite his actions… but also with a dose of "hey, dude, quit making the rest of us look bad." It worked.

It's easy to see where this approach could go wrong. I remember spending more than one recess standing by the wall with my whole class, being punished for the actions of one or two kids. It felt profoundly unfair. But in those cases we weren't given the responsibility, or even the option, of interacting directly with the "problem" kid, except I suppose by teasing and bullying him, which the teacher probably hoped we'd do. In the case above, the older boy was punished (lightly) for someone else's actions, but he was _also and simultaneously_ reminded of his power and responsibility in the situation.

One of my first instincts is to wonder how inefficient it must be to spend so much time working on group dynamics and social skills. When I step back, though, I think it must be time-saving in the long run. A few years ago I took an intensive workshop for ESL teachers, and was surprised that we spent the first 3 or 4 days just talking about the culture of "the group." Isn't this a waste of time, I wondered? We're only here for a month! A couple weeks into it, though, I realized how beneficial that had been. As everyone started to get burned out from the intensity of the workshop they naturally started to turn on each other, but knowing that this was a normal stage in the process, and that it would pass, made it easier not to take things personally. We also worked better as a team, because we'd already discussed the kinds of problems that typically come up with the kind of group projects we were doing. We didn't spend a lot of time on petty resentments.

I imagine it would be even more important with young children, who are still getting used to school culture and who might lack the vocabulary to talk about shame, fear, anger, justice, and other emotional concepts that are difficult to articulate. Spending time learning exactly how to do this gives them the tools they need to avoid eruptions later. It also helps them feel safe in the classroom and invested in the classwork, which is good for the teacher because it's easier to explain things one time well than to repeat the same information all year long to kids who are half-engaged, anxious, or defensive: kids who don't feel like their classmates are allies or their teachers advocates.

I've never been to Japan, and I realize this teacher is unusual there, too, but from what I've read Japanese schools do spend more time than American schools on fostering group dynamics and a sense of inclusion and belonging. It's funny to me because in the United States these are considered useless feel-good hippie concepts — get back to your basal readers, everyone! — but Japan is hardly known for its lack of rigor. It would be nice if we could discuss the importance of emotional learning outside the culture wars framework.

The last segment is just beautiful:

I'd like to add more reviews of Arabic language learning books and software to this site. The more I think about education and pedagogy, the more I find it useful to be a student myself. How do I learn? How do I not learn? I think learning a foreign language is an especially good way to keep you humble. When I was first learning the Arabic script, I found I had a lot more sympathy for the kids I was working with who were learning to read.

WordPress doesn't allow me to put a comment box on static pages, so this post will serve as the comment space for Rosetta Stone. If you've used it in the past, in any language but especially in Arabic, feel free to share your experience here. I'm especially interested in the changes they've made since version 2.

I don't agree with all the choices, but it's an interesting thing to ponder. If you could update the liberal arts curriculum, what would you add? What would you subtract? Many of the suggestions revolve around the collection, organization, presentation, and marketing of information. As a few commenters point out, these are really "skills" more than new "fields," but either way I think it's true that schools don't teach enough of them, considering how much they'll be used.

Others also mention design. I couldn't agree more. I always liked art as a kid, but like most people I thought of it as an "extra" subject, not up there with math. Then I started working with kids, and realized what an advantage the artistic kids had when it came to core subjects. Being able to hold an abstract idea in one's mind is SUCH an important skill, but five- and six-year-olds really struggle with it if they haven't spent much time imagining something and then making a picture of it. As we get older we spend more and more time "reading" graphics, signs, photos, and other visual content. We also need to produce that content, even in ostensibly non-creative fields — think PowerPoint presentations. Yet when schools need to cut something from the curriculum art is one of the first things to go, and most people have no shame when they say "I'm not artistic," even though they'd be embarrassed to say "I'm not so good at reading."

Art also teaches critical thinking. Someone mentioned being able to recognize a "real" photograph from one that's been manipulated. Others mentioned cartography. I thought of anatomy. The other day I heard someone say he felt like his hands were enormous, almost as big as his head, and I thought, well, they are. Your hand should cover your face. We think of heads as large and hands as small because that's how we drew them in kindergarten, and for many of us our art education never went too far beyond that. But once you get into figure drawing you start learning that your mental representations don't match reality. Drawing things properly forces you to grapple with what's really in front of you; it's like taking a class in logic. Even the impressionists understood this. If you look at Van Gogh's early sketches you can see he was still struggling with proportions, but he eventually worked it out.

I'd also like to see statistics be a required course in high school. And have foreign languages begin in kindergarten. I could go on. But read that thread.

http://laura.fo/german-language-resources/

I followed a path similar to the one she recommends and I agree with most of what she says (although how she says it sometimes grates — more on that below). When I was fifteen I studied abroad in Germany, but not on any formal exchange program. I just moved in with my grandparents and enrolled directly in the local public high school. That same year an American girlfriend moved in with my aunt and uncle, also living in Germany, and their daughter went to live with my friend's parents in California. Arranging these exchanges is pretty straightforward if you know someone — or know someone who knows someone who knows someone — willing to swap children for a few months. It makes no sense to pay an agency $10,000 or more to go to the trouble for you, and Frost's book provides several tips on setting something up in a country even if you have no contacts (yet). She rightly calls most of these agencies a waste of money, with the notable exception of organizations like Rotary that provide scholarship funding.

She argues that students shouldn't wait until college (or later) to do this. Young brains are still flexible, she says, and the impact of living in another culture will do more for a teenager than it will for someone over twenty. Adolescence is a period of intensity. Teenagers notice everything around them; they are not even capable of shutting that part of their brain off, of getting stuck in a rut, of saying "but we always do things this way…" That intensity is inevitably going to go somewhere, and it's better to direct at something real, like foreign travel, than to stifle it in the world of shopping, malls, prom queens, and video games. Young people also pick up languages faster. Exposing the teenage brain to another culture will pay off for a student's entire life in ways that travel when s/he's older will not.

Most teens who come back from such an experience will have different priorities about their future. This, she argues, is a feature, not a bug, although it's often the thing that scares parents most. The tiny world of high school seems so limited after you've spent a year managing on your own in another country, in another language. It was in Germany that I decided I wanted to graduate early; when I came back home I heaped on the correspondence classes in order to make that happen. Apparently I'm not alone. Her book is filled with stories from other high school exchange students who've had the same experience of wanting to get high school over and done with as soon as possible — or who simply decided not to come home at all. This possibility terrifies most parents, but again she argues it's a positive. The world needs global citizens, and the flexibility and language skills acquired abroad are more useful in the long run than staying on the regular high school track would be. She advises teens not to worry about having the typical four-year college experience and to just pick up as many college credits as they can through a combination of CLEP tests, community college and correspondence courses, and foreign language programs abroad. Transfer the whole lot to any affordable college, spend a year or two there, and you'll have a BA by the time you're twenty or so. It doesn't matter if it's a name-brand university; what matters is that you're fluent in Spanish or Swahili, you have no debt, you're young, and that you know how to travel the world.

Predictably, most of the criticism she's gotten focuses on class. "This is a rich white kid thing," she's told. She (and her husband, who seems to be the primary breadwinner) argue that actually it's cheaper than the regular high school-to-college track. A Rotary program might cost a couple thousand dollars, which is cheaper than having your sixteen-year-old live with you in your own home for a year; after all, they're being fed by some family in Paris. And colleges abroad are usually cheaper than their American counterparts, since most countries subsidize higher education.

I feel strongly both ways. Frost's audience is the suburban family for whom college is a non-optional expectation. She tells them to get out of the rat race and quit worrying about AP classes and SAT scores, to not be so overprotective of their children, and to teach them the virtue of getting by on less. She's clearly not thinking about the kids who know all about getting by on less, who live in dangerous neighborhoods where children being "overprotected" is the least of their parents' worries, who don't stress about AP classes because their school doesn't offer any, who will have to fight to get a high school diploma at all because the teaching they receive is so ineffective, or who have disabilities that can't or wouldn't be managed by an unrelated family in a foreign country. When she says parents can save tens of thousands of dollars on their children's educations she's assuming they have college savings or will be contributing to their kids' educations out of pocket, but five or ten thousand dollars isn't "cheap" if your starting expectation was zero. And when she says it's less expensive to send your child abroad than to have him/her live at home, she's assuming your child doesn't contribute anything to the household, like income from a part-time job that goes towards the utility bill, or unpaid care for younger siblings. Most of all she's assuming that duh, of course your kid is going to college somewhere: it's just a question of where and how. The better part of her book is about dealing with criticism from people who will think you're crazy for sending your kids abroad and letting them miss rites of passage like prom. But for a lot of families, that's the least of their worries.

She also assumes that your kids will be competing with other monolingual white American kids, and won't they be lucky to have this global advantage? Absent are the kids who are already bilingual, by virtue of growing up in an immigrant family. She constructs many hypothetical situations in which your global child is favored in a job interview over Jessie and Steve, who've only been to England, but in my experience the real competition is Noriko, who speaks Japanese without an accent. On the surface this may seem like an argument for pushing a global view even harder — after all, other countries have much greater facility with giving their students a multilingual education, and the world is increasingly transnational — but underneath it there needs to be a discussion of white/American-born privilege. If Ben who spent two years in France is getting a job over Emmanuel whose family is from Haiti, well, what's going on with that? Did Ben really get his job because he's "a global citizen," or is there a little bit more to it? Would Emmanuel's summer working on a farm abroad really look the same on a college application as Ben's summer doing the same? Are we allowed to talk about that? Or are we just supposed to celebrate Ben's ability to order a meal in a Romance language?

All that said, I appreciate that she's taking a machete to the view that traveling abroad is reserved for the children of the elite. Although more than half of graduating high school seniors say they plan to study abroad, very few of them actually do, because they look at the price tag for these programs and assume they're out of the question. One of the things she hammers home is that "official" study abroad programs are far more expensive than organizing one's own travel — what she calls "indie" programs — because when you go with a study abroad program you are paying the university fees at your home institution, too. She advises students to enroll directly in foreign schools.

This is what I did as a college junior at The American University in Cairo, and I was shocked to learn that some American students had spent an extra ten or twenty thousand dollars for the exact same credits I was earning. I also learned that there were even cheaper options I hadn't known about. Later, in grad school, I went back to Egypt and arranged independent study credit for research I was doing and for taking Arabic language classes at a private language school. This cost even less than AUC, which was already cheaper than most American colleges. And Egypt, like most countries, had a lower cost of living compared to the United States. Here she is absolutely correct: getting most or all of one's college education in another country is potentially far cheaper than entering the American system of higher education, where even public universities charge tuition.

Unfortunately, Frost's book is mainly concerned with convincing you that this is a viable option. That's great, but what would have been more helpful would have been lists, lists, and more lists of universities abroad, high school correspondence options, short-term study options, foreign language schools, work abroad programs, Peace Corps alternatives, and tips for funding it all. Luckily this information is available online for the dedicated student who is willing to search for it, but it'll be nice when it moves into the realm of common knowledge, when parents, teachers, and guidance counselors stop telling kids there is only one — monolingual, monocultural — path into adulthood. Frost's book is a start.

Why such a staggering increase in the cost of housing? That is a long, separate discussion, but one point is worth underlining here: when a family buys a house, it buys much more than shelter from the rain. It also buys a public-school system. Everyone has heard news stories about kids who can’t read, classrooms without textbooks, and drug dealers and gang violence in school corridors. Failing schools impose an enormous cost on the children who are forced to attend them, but they also impose an enormous cost on those who don’t…

Consider University City, the West Philadelphia neighborhood surrounding the University of Pennsylvania. In an effort to improve the area, the university committed funds for a new elementary school. The results? At the time of the announcement, in 1998, the median home value in the area was less than $60,000. Five years later, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “homes within the boundaries go for about $200,000, even if they need to be totally renovated.” The neighborhood is otherwise pretty much the same: the same commute to work, the same distance from the freeways, the same old houses. And yet, in five years families are willing to pay more than triple the price for a home, just so they can send their kids to a better public elementary school.

As inequity between school districts grows, or is perceived to be growing, middle-class parents will do almost anything to buy their way into a better home. (I'd argue that a lot of parents don't understand how to evaluate a school system, a fact that works to real estate agents' advantage, but that's a topic for another post.) Looking at data from 1984 to 2001, the authors find that housing prices for families with at least one minor child grew at a rate three times that of other families.

I was showing the book to my daughter tonight, and she commented on its size. It's small. All my German textbooks were. My cousin, who grew up in Germany and now teaches in the United States, has said that the first thing she would do, if she were to reform American education, would be to get rid of the monster-truck-sized textbooks and replace them with shorter, more challenging books like they use in Germany. Then she'd devote more classtime to conversations. That's something else I remember from my German high school — how little lecturing there was, and how much discussion.

I was thinking of this tonight because I was reading this piece by Tamim Ansary, a former textbook editor. In it he talks about the politics of textbook development, which is done by committee and carefully avoids controversy, leaving students with the heaving books we remember so well, the ones that somehow manage to take genuinely interesting subjects (revolution! pirates! the plague!) and make them god-awful boring. He also talks about the role of Texas in influencing curriculum content, which means whatever their local school boards are doing is likely to trickle down into classes throughout the country.

"Every day I wish I had never gone to college," Castillo said. "It has been the biggest mistake of my life. Sometimes I wish I had gone to prison instead of college. At least I would have learned a trade or two and started being independent once I got out."

This article references StudentLoanJustice.org, a site I've been hearing about more and more lately.

It seems to me there are several different conversations that should be happening simultaneously, but rarely are. One is the issue of student loans. But another is the cost of tuition, which varies wildly from "free" in some state systems to over $36,000/year at some private institutions. Even within the public system, it depends a lot on what state you're in. I'm in Massachusetts, where public universities cost more than double what most public schools in the Midwest do. When I was at The University of Iowa about half the students were from Illinois, a choice they often made because paying out-of-state tuition to Iowa was cheaper than paying in-state tuition in Illinois. University of Iowa tuition has more than doubled since I went there, but that's still a bargain compared to UMass-Amherst.

I hear so much about tuition going up (which it is, and this is a huge problem across the board) but so often this is reported as though all schools have a similar starting line. Princeton was praised for "setting its lowest tuition increase in decades." Yay. Now it's a mere $47,020/year to go there.

But then of course there are endowments, which is why it can be advantageous to apply to schools that seem, on the surface, to be outrageously expensive. The richer the school, the more money they have to give — not loan, give — to incoming students. And not just students whose families are in dire straits. Is this common knowledge? I know my parents didn't understand it when I was applying to college. They'd look at a sticker price like $16,000 and think they'd be responsible for every penny, or that I'd have to take out loans to make up the difference. They didn't understand — and I didn't know either, and my guidance counselor never told me — that private colleges habitually write thousands of dollars off the initial cost. For this reason it can be cheaper to attend an ostensibly "expensive" private college than to go to a public school, since public schools, already subsidized, give their students less money in aid. But first you have to ignore the sticker price and apply there, which I think a lot of kids don't bother doing because it looks so hopeless.

Another conversation that needs to be happening here is the cost of living. My parents worked their way through school by bagging groceries part-time. Which was possible… in 1968. Not because tuition was so much cheaper, but because they weren't paying as much in rent. At one point I calculated that my first post-college job paid 6 times more than my mom's first post-college job (not adjusted for inflation), but that my rent was 24 times higher. If full-time workers at Wal-Mart are living in their cars because they can't earn enough to support themselves, there's no way students working there 20 hours a week could support themselves AND pay their college tuition. Yes, there are people who still work their way through college (I'm doing it now!) but they make other compromises along the way: they supplement their income with loans, they go part-time, they take time off, they get grants, they have spousal or parental help, they dip into their savings, or they wait until their "work" is the professional, full-time, salaried variety (which is still difficult to do on top of school, mind you, but not quite the Horatio Alger story of which my parents are so fond).

And this gets worse all the time. When I went to school in the early 1990s, my parents' story was no longer realistic but at least the $3.35/hour I earned at the library could pay my rent. It would only pay my rent, not my tuition, books, and food as well, but that still looks impressive in retrospect when I try to imagine my daughter paying for a Boston apartment on a part-time minimum wage job. At my previous job I'd get discouraged sometimes at how so many parents would try to talk their kids out of college — in some cases forcing them to forfeit impressive scholarships — but there was a real reluctance, in some cases panic, at the thought of losing a productive member of the household. Not only would it mean setting up a whole additional household for the student, but it meant losing their income, if they worked, or their labor, if they were the oldest child in the family and responsible for younger siblings. Financial aid will give you a break if you have two students in college at the same time, but they aren't going to factor in your newfound day care and afterschool costs for your younger children now that the resident 18-year-old is out of the house. Living at home while going to college is one solution, but that drastically limits your school options, and might also require buying a car.

And all of this assumes students really will be more employable after getting a degree than they were when the started. See above: the guy who wishes he'd gone to prison instead.

I still think college is important enough that I'd get depressed whenever it wouldn't work out for the kids I knew who really wanted to go and had so much promise, and I'm willing to do about anything to make sure my own daughter gets a four-year degree, assuming it's what she wants and she puts in the effort. But there are a whole mess of things going on here, and it's not enough to talk about any one of them in isolation. If and when the U.S. ever gets socialized health care I hope we can take a similar look at higher education.

After all, Lieberman said, his students were all adults – and needed to know the meaning of certain words in order to avoid making embarrassing mistakes on the job or with friends.

"These were bad words the students didn't want to mix up with other words, like 'sheet' or 'beach,'" said Lieberman, a six-year veteran of the adult school…

Firing someone over this is absurd. The caption on the piece says he was fired for "teaching his students about how to swear in English," but it sounds like he was actually teaching them how not to swear in English. This is a cultural issue as well as a linguistic one. In Germany, for example, the word "sheisse" is thrown around much more casually than is its English counterpart ("shit"), so when German students come to the U.S. it's not uncommon for them to say "shit" in situations where it's inappropriate. This is something you'd want your English teacher to tell you, no? By the same token, I would have been grateful if a German teacher had told me I can't translate "I am hot" to its logical German equivalent, "Ich bin heiss," without it carrying a sexual connotation. I went around saying that for 3 or 4 years, completely oblivious, thinking I was making mundane small talk. In A Place for Us, Nicholas Gage's memoir about growing up in a Greek immigrant family in Massachusetts, he writes about his father intending to say "I can't" to one of his female customers, and having it come out, simply, "cunt." That exchange ended poorly.

Some people have said teaching swear words is justifiable because Lieberman's students were adults, but I'd argue this is appropriate and necessary for younger students, too. Lately I've been reading about the need for students from "outsider" cultures to be explicitly told the "rules" of the "insider" culture (where "insider" is defined as the dominant culture of the school — which is usually white and middle-class and English-speaking). I'll write more about that later, but I wanted to note this case because it seems like such a clear example of it.

Everything about this is heartbreaking, but I was especially moved by the girl who gave a speech about the political situation and had to cover her face to hide her identity. She's only 12 or 13 but already fearing personal reprisals for speaking out in favor of something as basic as her right to go to middle school.

More about the video at alt.muslim

This year, many of these colleges say they are more inclined to accept students who do not apply for aid, or whom they judge to be less needy based on other factors, like ZIP code or parents’ background.

“We’re only human,” said Steven Syverson, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. “They shine a little brighter.”

This impacts international students even more dramatically than American students, since international aid is one of the first things cut — but also, at the top end of the scale, because more international students are being admitted if they can pay full tuition, in order to subsidize the educations of less-wealthy American-born students.

Colleges say they are not backing away from their desire to serve less affluent students; if anything, they say, taking more students who can afford to pay full price or close to it allows them to better afford those who cannot. But they say the inevitable result is that needier students will be shifted down to the less expensive and less prestigious institutions.

“There’s going to be a cascading of talented lower-income kids down the social hierarchy of American higher education, and some cascading up of affluent kids,” said Morton Owen Schapiro, the president of Williams College and an economist who studies higher education.

And colleges acknowledge that giving more seats to higher-paying students often means trading off their goals to be more socioeconomically diverse.

Minnesota is home to the largest population of Korean-American adoptees in the country. MPR News wants to know what the 2012 end of international adoptions from South Korea means for these Minnesotans and their communities. Is this a victory? A defeat? Bittersweet? Are you expecting a change in your own community or its identity?

Respond

The Gulf states have been happy to take advantage of this collapse. But a rearguard of academics contends that the new schools there are academic Disneylands that can't eclipse the old centers. "Intellectuals and academics don't want to live in a mall," says Osama El-Ghazali Harb, the Egyptian former head of the Arab Association of Political Scientists. "Science is more than labs. It's the people, it's the environment."

Egypt has even started fighting back, by trying to recruit U.S. universities to open campuses on its soil, too. But it's had relatively little success. "Do you really expect us to open a campus in a country that could be run by the Muslim Brotherhood in a few years?" said one high-ranking NYU official involved in the school's search for a Middle East campus.

Closer to home, I agree with almost every word of this critique of American secondary education ("almost," because I think early college isn't the answer; high schools themselves should be reformed):

To make secondary education meaningful, more intellectual demands of an adult nature should be placed on adolescents. They should be required to use primary materials of learning, not standardized textbooks; original work should be emphasized, not imitative, uniform assignments; and above all, students should undergo inspired teaching by experts. Curricula should be based on current problems and issues, not disciplines defined a century ago. Statistics and probability need to be brought to the forefront, given our need to assess risk and handle data, replacing calculus as the entry-level college requirement. Secondary schools and their programs of study are not only intellectually out of date, but socially obsolete. They were designed decades ago for large children, not today's young adults.

The school K. attended for 5th and 6th grade had, as part of its original charter, a model for teaching that was closer to being a professor. Teachers taught fewer classes, had more prep time, were given sabbaticals, and received bonuses for research and artistic contributions in their field. Over time they moved away from this, which was part of the reason I wasn't as excited about it by the time she finished her second year there. But I still think it's a great model for secondary education.

Last Friday I met K’s cousins, Omar (3) and Laila (5), the children of X’s sister. They’re growing up in Colorado, but come to Egypt in the summers to keep up their Arabic. K’s never met them, and unfortunately will miss them this year, too, because they’re going back to the U.S. at the end of the month and she’s not coming to Cairo until mid-August. They are adorable children. Energetic, amusing, and astonishingly well-behaved, even at times when they’d have every excuse not to be.

These pictures were taken in X’s mom’s apartment in Heliopolis.

This is Omar’s bubby. You can’t tell from the photo, but it barks. Incessantly. It’s supposed to walk, too, but that bit broke. This doesn’t stop Omar from putting it on a leash and shouting ta’ala! (come on!) at it. May Allah reward him for his efforts.

Can I take a moment and gush about my new camera? I’m still learning landscapes, but for close-up portraits I love it. This was taken one-handed while she was sitting on my lap and I was holding the cards in my other hand, auto-focus, auto-flash, no editing afterwards. It might be the best picture I’ve ever taken.

Playing with (and occasionally abusing) their auntie, X’s youngest sister:

Their parents debated about where to raise them. They were born in the U.S., but their mother (X’s sister) originally wanted them to grow up here in Egypt. They transferred back to Cairo, but Omar kept getting sick, so they transferred to the U.S. again. After a few years they started to talk, and she realized they were playing together in English. So, their baba stayed in the U.S. this summer, and she took the children back to Egypt for a few months so they will keep speaking Arabic.

It's hard, she said, in the U.S., because the only language schools are on weekends, and no one takes them seriously. "I always compare their education to mine," she said. She and X and their sisters went to French language schools in Egypt and Kuwait, became fluent in Arabic at home and on the street, and picked up English because everyone does. There are a few schools in the States that provide that kind of education, but they're mostly for diplomats' kids, they're rare, they're private, and they're expensive. Coming back to Egypt for extended trips is kind of a pain, but she doesn't want them to grow up monolingual.

She also, as she put it, “wanted them to get used to seeing the zebel boy” while they were still young. Cairo’s zebeleen are the city trash collectors. All Christians — in part because it’s nasty work and they are the oppressed minority here; in part because the work relies on pigs to sift through trash — they collect garbage from every apartment in the city and take it back to the Moqattam, a hill on the edge of Cairo, where they pick through it for valuables. Cairo has tried to replace them with a more modern sanitation system, but that would be expensive, would rob many many people of their livelihood, would take money out of Egypt and put it into foreign companies, and in the end wouldn’t be as efficient. (The zebeleen fought hard against a proposed recycling program a few years ago, because once people start separating their cans from their bottles they might realize that whoops! that’s where my wedding ring went!)

Obviously this is really dirty work, and the people who do it are, too. X told me that when he was a child he was told not to touch the railings in his apartment building because the zebel boy had touched them. When his sister says she wants her children to see this, she’s talking about a whole range of things: the poverty on the streets, the waiting in line for every little thing, the heat and traffic and noise and cars held together by scraps of wire and all the other evidence of grime and human suffering that is hidden from view in American suburbs. We were both worried that K., at fourteen, is already old enough that she’ll be annoyed at these things, hate Egypt, and won’t want to come back.

But there are trade-offs. I told her I enjoyed being here when K. was little because Egypt was so friendly to children, and she said oh really? because her experience was just the opposite. We compared stories and decided maybe the key factor was being a foreigner. In Egypt I was the American mother and everyone wanted me to have a good experience here, welcome to Egypt! your daughter is beautiful! but she’s just seen as another Egyptian mom. In the U.S., however, the reverse is true, for both of us.

Also, in the U.S., she’s able to control everything her children are exposed to. This is funny to me, because so many U.S. Muslims, including native-born American Muslims, complain that the U.S. is a den of sin and vice and it is hard to bring up good Muslim children in Gomorrah. For her, however, the U.S. is a country where you can put parental controls on the television (“not like Egypt, where they can look at anything”), the food in all the restaurants is clean, and you can enroll them in clubs and classes where everything is well-organized and you know the people they’ll be seeing there. And the only Arabic they hear is the Arabic their parents decide to use. Yesterday she told Laila not to do something and Laila came back with why she was going to do it anyway and then flipped her hand up, in a classic Egyptian hand gesture, and said “fi eh?” Literally it means “is what?” but its meaning is a sarcastic “what’s the issue?” or “do you have a problem with that?” I burst out laughing and Laila ran off and her mother said, “See, this is the kind of thing she hears here.” The other day, she said, her son called someone the son of a dog.

It’s interesting to hear this perspective because I come from the opposite place. One of the things I first loved about Egypt, and one of the reasons I initially wanted to raise my children here, was that it wasn’t sanitized like the U.S. is. Children are out at all hours, in every public space, exposed to everything that adults see. I thought that was healthy, and a nice alternative to what I saw as the hypocrisy of so many American parents, who live one kind of life in front of their children and another one once the kids are asleep or at the babysitter’s. But I can also see the appeal of having precision control over the way you parent, especially if you’ve grown up without that.

2.
An hour-long NPR program about the differences between Muslims' experiences in Europe vs. the U.S. I was actually pretty impressed with this. You can't go into any depth in an hour, but they hit all the major points about why these are such different demographics — namely, why the U.S., despite its bootstraps attitude towards immigration and its greater participation in international imperialistic adventures, is nevertheless having fewer problems with integrating Islam.

It also has this great quote from Aminah McCloud:

Interviewer: But, isn’t it possible that this internal dynamic could turn into something more outwardly destructive? Could America’s young Muslims follow the path of some of their European counterparts?

McCloud: I want to say that they wouldn't, but I also know that there's always a chance for anything. I don't think they could ever emerge on the scale that they are in Europe. There are non-Muslims here who don't particularly care about Muslims, but they care about freedom of speech. They care about opportunities for everybody. There are also that indigenous groups of Muslims who say, no you're not going to bomb the street on which my mom lives, because then you won't have to worry about the US, you'll have to worry about me.

I'm not studying linguistics or ESL, but in the course of researching immigrant children's experiences in American schools I've come across a lot on the subject of kids learning English as a second language. I'm not going to try to be comprehensive here, but there are a few common myths that deserve debunking:

"Children learn second languages faster than adults."

Given the same exposure and instruction, older learners will generally learn faster than younger ones. People persist in believing children "just pick up" other languages for a several reasons:

– We expect less of children. The younger the child, the fewer words needed to appear fluent, meaning a 3-year-old who speaks like a native-speaking 3-year-old will appear more fluent than will a 15-year-old who speaks like a native-speaking 10-year-old, even though the second child has mastered much more of the language. We also confuse "knowing enough English to get around in an English-speaking country" with "knowing enough English to write an academic paper." The latter skill can take seven to ten years to develop (and, I'd submit, is something many native speakers never do ). Since a third-grader isn't held to that standard anyway, it's easier to be impressed with his or her accomplishments, compared with the long hard slog a college-bound high school junior has in front of him/her.

– Extroversion is highly correlated with the ability to learn languages, regardless of age, and children are assumed to be much more extroverted than adults are. Overall, this is true. But there are ranges of introversion and extroversion within any given age group, and the adult assumption that kids learn faster because they "don't care if they make mistakes" does a disservice to shy kids, ones who care very much. In classroom situations, these introverted children may be pegged as obstinate or unintelligent if they are reluctant to speak the new language even after several months of exposure.

– Pre-pubescent children in full immersion settings will usually learn to speak the second language without an accent. For adults, accent reduction is an aspect of language learning that may never be mastered, even after they achieve fluency, so they envy children's facility with this. But accent is a very small part of "knowing" a language. It is common for teachers to mistake a child's accent-free English for fluency. Like their shy counterparts, these children may be believed to be obstinate or unintelligent if the complexity of their ideas (expressed verbally) doesn't match their facility with idiom and accent.

(Lest anyone dismiss these things as obvious, let me say I was told repeatedly as a teenager that my parents had "missed the window" by not speaking German with me at home, so that by age 14 or 15, when I started studying German in earnest in an immersion setting, teachers and relatives alike treated me as though I were no better than a dabbler and that teaching anyone as old as me was a waste of their efforts. You definitely see this attitude in American high school teachers as well, when faced with immigrant teenagers: by 13 they're already believed to be "too old" to ever learn English well, so why waste resources on them? Go pick lettuce instead. Meanwhile their younger siblings are considered addled if they're not speaking in complete sentences within five minutes of arriving in an American classroom. After all, don't kids learn languages immediately, as if by magic, just by breathing English-speaking air?)

"My grandfather got off the boat at Ellis Island and was speaking English fluently within a month. Why can't everyone do that?"

Your grandfather probably did no such thing. As the blog post linked above says, "It sometimes seems as if some of these students project their own relative comfort back several generations, even while they also claim a family legacy of "working hard to make it"." A look at the historical data prior to the 1920s (when national origin quotas were introduced) tells us several things.

One, your grandfather probably got off the boat and moved immediately to an immigrant enclave, where he socialized primarily with other immigrants. If he was financially successful it was likely because he found a niche in that community.

Two, if and when he did learn English, it was limited at first to the phrases and simple sentence constructions required for his work. (He would not have aced the SAT a month of that boat.)

Three, it's unlikely your grandfather went to college. That usually took a few generations.

Four, prior to WWI and the Depression, when nativist sentiment dramatically increased, the U.S. had a great deal of linguistic diversity. It was very common for German immigrants to send their children to German schools, for example. There were hundreds of foreign-language newspapers in New York City alone. It was possible to achieve a reasonably fulfilling working-class lifestyle without ever learning English, just because support for one's home language was so strong. (There are parallels with that today in some regions and communities, but they are proportionately fewer than in earlier eras.)

Five, the reason he is your grandfather is because he was a member of the successful minority, one who was able to stay, marry, and survive to have children in America. The "sink-or-swim" climate of the 1910s and 1920s meant a whole lot of people sank: a third to one-half went back to their country of origin; of those who stayed, many died of illnesses that could have been treated if they had more financial, social, and linguistic resources. As rough as your grandfather had it, when you speak of him you are actually speaking of a privileged minority, given the brutal class and ethnic divisions of the time. Which is fine — good for your grandpa and everything — but his experience doesn't provide much of a road map if we're talking about creating a model in which all immigrants will learn English, since that emphatically did not happen in the early part of the 20th century.

Six, your grandfather probably benefited from white privilege, which compensated for some of his language issues. With the caveat that modern paradigms of race should not be applied retroactively (Jews, Greeks, Italians, etc. were seen as, referred to, and treated as separate "races" back then), and the acknowledgment that therefore modern immigration issues do not constitute an entirely new framework in that regard (despite the oft-repeated claim that racial pluralism is "new"), a Jewish/Greek/Italian man in the Jim Crow era was going to have some competitive but wholly unearned advantages over other workers that a modern Somalian refugee will not.

Seven, your grandfather probably had more trouble assimilating than you think he did. Italians in the 1930s, for example, were considered truants, drop-outs, and troublemakers, and folks often wondered if there was something inherent to the Italian character that made them less hard-working and less intelligent than proper English stock. Then, like now, ethnic discrimination outside the school system was less likely to be entertained as a factor.

"Bilingual education is the answer."

The flip-side of the above argument — that everyone should learn English but without any support — is that schools should become fully bilingual, teaching kids one week or half the day in one language, and the rest of the time in English. Data shows this is the best way for immigrant children to learn, because it allows them to develop content knowledge appropriate to their grade level in their language of origin, and that it's useful for monolingual (English-speaking) children as well.

The trouble is that it's a Spanish-centric argument. In some regions you might have a critical mass of other students, say Chinese, to merit their own bilingual school, but at the end of the day you are always going to have kids who speak Amharic, Swahili, and any number of other languages who will not be served by the fully bilingual option. And even within Spanish schools you have dialect diversity and students who are considered minorities-within-a-minority. (One of the saddest case studies I read this year was of a Salvadoran girl who had been ostracized by her Mexican classmates in her ESL class, a division her teacher was oblivious to. Since she couldn't speak English, either, she had literally no friends in school.)

None of this is an argument against bilingual education where it's practical; only that as a mass solution it's unworkable. Students will still need more traditional ESL support.

"Schools should be preparing kids for The Real World^TM, not engaging in these PC debates about multiculturalism."

The irony here is that The Real World^TM has already embraced multiculturalism, sheerly because it's profitable. The book Pledging Allegiance: Learning Nationalism at the El Paso-Juarez Border has a good discussion of border cultures and how business has embraced bilingualism faster than the education system has. McDonald's, for example, "makes sure even monolingual English-speaking employees know how to ask if customers want their papas to be chicas o grandes." I know plenty of isolationists who will treat that as cause for alarm — my kid can't even get a job at McDonald's without learning Spanish! — but they are often the same people arguing for a pro-business, up-from-your-bootstraps vision of success. And there they face a contradiction, because you don't get to have it both ways: you don't get to claim capitalism=God AND demand that immigrants learn English (thereby becoming bilingual) WHILE still believing your own monolingual children should have some natural advantage in a workplace that favors linguistic pluralism.

Luckily, that view is rare. I don't know many parents who are opposed to their children learning languages, although living in the U.S. we have less experience with how that's accomplished. What I do see, though, is a lot of educators forced to abandon ESL and foreign language programs to accommodate No Child Left Behind, as well as a sense of nervousness about prioritizing this issue because they believe there will be strenuous parental and political opposition. There's also a lack of teachers of languages other than Spanish, and of course never enough funding to overhaul the system, ground up.

This is why I think international studies in education are so valuable. You cannot argue that something is purely biological if you're not seeing the same result in other countries.

In this case, an analysis of PISA scores shows girls in Iceland outperform boys in math and that boys and girls have roughly equal scores in Scandinavian countries. In the U.S. and Britain, boys slightly outperform girls. The gap (in boys' favor) grows larger in countries like Italy, South Korea, and Turkey. Researchers studied a total of 40 countries and found that girls' math scores generally correlated to their countries' rank on gender equity as measured by the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index and other similar research. The study was controlled to ensure the findings "are related not to economic development, but directly to improvements in the social position of women."

The reading gap (where girls traditionally outperform boys) did not disappear with increased gender equity. The average reading gap is also larger than the average math gap (6.6% to 2%) and there is no country where boys outperform girls. But overall scores for boys were higher in both areas in countries where women have the most advantages: "This is important because it shows that advances for girls do not come at the expense of boys," Sapienza says.

There's room to quibble with the results, and I'm sure people will be falling all over themselves to do just that. There were a few anomalies: Germany has a larger math gap than its high gender equity rank would suggest; Indonesia and Thailand have lower gender equity but girls and boys perform equally. One gender equity index can be found here (pdf); the PISA scores can be downloaded here (xls — look at table 6.2c). One thing that jumps out is that the country where girls outperform boys most is Qatar — by 14 points to Iceland's 4 — and yet the country earns a dismal 109th place on the gender equity scale. Expect that to be headline news in every article and blog post questioning these findings; as an Arab Muslim country it will serve as convenient shorthand for a Handmaid's Tale-style learning environment. Having never studied Qatar I have no idea what's going on there, but I do know that the "boys study math, girls study languages" trope is not universal, and that in the Middle East medicine and engineering are valued for both genders to the point of being a cultural cliche. It would be interesting to tease out what's going on with these outliers, but the fact that they exist does not, in and of itself, negate the entire study. There may be other things that do, however, so it's worth watching to see how this does or doesn't change the discussion around learning differences.

At a bare minimum, though, research like this shows how inadequate it is to use American data alone (or British, or Namibian, etc.) to try to explain biology. Especially when even -that- data evolves over time. Biological differences may still play a role — the researchers themselves discuss this — but it's not the result you'd get if you limited yourself to a single country's test scores.

One on the presentation of the Iraq situation prior to the war, from the founder of FAIR:

In the fall of 2002, week after week, I argued vigorously against invading Iraq in debates televised on MSNBC. I used every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers — no real threat, cost, instability. But as the war neared, my debates were terminated.

In my 2006 book Cable News Confidential, I explained why I lost my airtime:

There was no room for me after MSNBC launched Countdown: Iraq — a daily one-hour show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. Countdown: Iraq featured retired colonels and generals, sometimes resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pre-game analysis and diagramming plays. It was excruciating to be sidelined at MSNBC, watching so many non-debates in which myth and misinformation were served up unchallenged.

It was bad enough to be silenced. Much worse to see that these ex-generals — many working for military corporations — were never in debates, nor asked a tough question by an anchor. (I wasn’t allowed on MSNBC unless balanced by at least one truculent right-winger.)

Except for the brazenness and scope of the Pentagon spin program, I wasn’t shocked by the recent New York Times report exposing how the Pentagon junketed and coached the retired military brass into being “message-force multipliers” and “surrogates” for Donald Rumsfeld’s lethal propaganda.

The biggest villain here is not Rumsfeld or the Pentagon. It’s the TV networks. In the land of the First Amendment, it was their choice to shut down debate and journalism….

What makes me really angry? Is that this article is followed by comment after comment saying versions of "I don't watch TV," "who watches cable news?" "who believes this stuff in the first place?" "we all know Corporate Media lies," on and on.

Hurray, you don't watch television. HOW FANTASTIC FOR YOU. I appreciate non-participation as one strategy — will even call it the best strategy — against the way the Big Media^TM machine is currently constructed, but that yawn-and-dismiss tactic is INSUFFICIENT. Not when millions of other people DO watch television, DO get the majority of their international news from cable television, and DO use that information to vote and otherwise influence political events. I don't have any great answers here myself; it's not like I run something larger than the Pentagon and can combat this kind of thing in my spare time. But this guy is making some excellent points, if not strictly new ones, and I would appreciate having many more discussions about the issue without seeing them consistently bogged down in "you watch Hardball? what's wrong with you?" discussion-closers.

Sheesh.

Another one, this one about Debbie Almontaser, the Yemeni-American woman who was forced to resign as the principal of NYC's first Arabic bilingual high school. It's long-ish, but worth reading, especially pages 4 and 5, for another example of the oh-so-helpful role media (this time local media) play in defining political issues. Even I — who had been following this case, and wrote about it elsewhere last summer — was under the impression that she was fired because she was wearing an "intifada" t-shirt. While I personally don't have any problems with that, this article says she wasn't even doing that much: she was on the board of an organization that had an office that was sometimes used by a group of young women who were selling an "intifada" t-shirt:

Critics of the Madrassa Coalition say its tactics are typical of campaigns singling out Muslims: They lean heavily on guilt by association. The nuances of the claims against Ms. Almontaser were lost as the controversy lit up the blogosphere, said Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at Political Research Associates, a liberal organization outside Boston that studies the political right. One Web site, MilitantIslamMonitor.org, displayed photographs of Ms. Almontaser wearing her hijab in different styles, suggesting that she had undergone a public relations makeover to “disguise” her “Islamist agenda.”

But no worries. "She's certainly not a terrorist" –Mayor Bloomberg.

White May Be Might, But It's Not Always Right

Recently I showed my college students a YouTube clip of Bill Cosby's and Alvin Poussaint's appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." After hearing Cosby plead for poor blacks to embrace their parenting responsibilities, many of the students said they wished their parents had followed his advice. They regretted that some of their peers had done poorly in school, abused drugs and alcohol, and run afoul of the law. These problems, they agreed, might have been avoided with more supervision at home.

They might have been the perfect audience for a Cosby town-hall lecture on the dangers of self-destructive values in black America. They might also have been perfect illustrations of the growing "values gap" between poor and middle-class blacks described in a widely cited recent Pew Research Center poll.

Except almost all my students are white…

credit: Mark Wilson, EmpireWire.com

New York City has proposed building the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a public high school that will teach classes in both English and Arabic, and some folks are none too happy about it. Good ol' Daniel Pipes showed up, to warn us that "a madrassa grows in Brooklyn."

* cue screeching theme from Psycho *

First of all, I think it's funny that the word "madrassa" has been co-opted so thoroughly. Like the words fatwa and jihad, this one has been wrenched out of its original context and thrown around so carelessly that even I have trouble hearing it anymore without picturing rows of boys in the mountains of Pakistan rocking back and forth, thrashing their heads against their Qur'an racks in unison, training to become suicide bombers. (The word, of course, simply means "school" in Arabic. Where it has an Islamic connotation, it's because mosques were early promoters of literacy, and the "madrassa" was known as the section of the mosque devoted to education, as opposed to the sections devoted to prayers, ablutions, charity, and so forth. "Radical madrassas" do exist, but the term is not redundant.)

Secondly, I'd like to note that Khalil Gibran himself was a Christian. Just like the majority of native Arabic-speakers in the United States.

Call it what you will, however: this school is certainly pushing some buttons. The terrorists are coming for our children! And they are doing it by expecting them to learn Arabic morphology, verb tenses, and the triconsonantal root system! My, those jihadis are clever! Can't get nuthin' past them.

To be fair, many of the complaints against the school centered not around its subject matter, but its physical placement. It was originally to be housed in an existing public elementary school, and parents of students already attending that school legitimately worried that their own children's resources would be sapped to make room for new students, and that the match between an elementary school and a high school was a poor fit. Presumably due to parental pressure, the school has been moved to another location, where it will share space with the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, and the Math & Science Exploratory School.

So that should be the end of it, right? Yeah not so much.

I hate to call women shrill – I think it's sexist – but this woman? Shrill. A regular writer for the Sun, she calls the "madrassa" plan "insane," "a disastrous endeavor," and says that "[w]hen I first heard of this proposed school, I thought it was a joke." She's not concerned with kindergarteners sharing bathrooms with ninth-graders, or the prospect of fifth-graders losing their library: she says she's outraged because "we're bending over backwards to appease those sympathetic to individuals who would destroy us again," and invites her readers to "break out the torches and surround City Hall to stop this monstrosity."

If that's not enough to get your eyebrows muddled, she recounts the story of her daughter receiving an Arabic message on her cell phone's voice mail, from Michigan (p.s. Michigan is where the terrorists live), the result of a wrong number. Quickly realizing that she was the unintentional recipient of Al-Qaeda's launch codes, she did what any patriotic American would do upon hearing Arabic unexpectedly, and turned the message over to the FBI. To her dismay, the FBI was uninterested in her intelligence. (Quote: "Fools!")

But I don't want to pick on this particular woman, because there's nothing especially extraordinary about her worldview. Yet that's the point. I talk to folks, I read the news, I listen to the radio, I follow politics, and while I think we can agree her opinions aren't representative of all America, they do represent a large portion of it. (If that weren't the case, we'd have someone else in the White House by now.)

"During World War II," she asks, in a misguided attempt to be rhetorical, "did we open a German public school to explain the Third Reich?"

She calls the idea preposterous, but in a way that's exactly what we did. Not a single school to indoctrinate high school students into Nazi propaganda – there's a difference between the words explain and defend – but, following World War II, we made learning European languages, including Russian, a priority, an overdue recognition of the fact that students who'd grown up in immigrant households weren't the only ones in need of this particular form of expertise. In the 1980′s, as Japan's influence grew on the world stage, more and more high schools and colleges offered Japanese language classes. In this light there should be nothing unusual or surprising about the recent push for Arabic (and, while we're at it, Chinese). Currently there are 60 other dual-language schools in New York.

And as anyone who's taken even a single semester of foreign language knows, learning a language goes hand-in-hand with learning about the civilization that developed it. Hell, my 13-year-old daughter was up until 10:30 last night banging out a report about ancient Rome – not because she's taking history, but because she's taking first-year Latin. Do I fear that this newfound knowledge of hers will turn her into a Jupiter-worshiper? Not really, though I try to keep an open mind.

But we should also be careful. It's easy to look at the goofy, over-the-top hysteria of conservatives who believe an Arabic high school will produce a graduating class of wild-eyed Qur'an thumpers, and to respond by saying Arabic is important from a national security standpoint: after all, "we must learn the language of our enemy!" I've had plenty of friends whose parents pressured them into studying Russian for this reason, friends who wore baggy trousers and unconventional hair-dos and who were really more the Gaelic-by-correspondence type.

What we need to recognize is that teaching Arabic language and literature is important because Arabic language and literature are important. Imagine, for a moment, that – ha! – the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, the Palestine Question is settled to the universal satisfaction of everyone involved, all the corrupt dictators in the Middle East are replaced with democracies exquisitely attentive to human rights and international law, and mosques around the world announce that they will, from here on out, be giving their sermons in their native tongues. Does the need for Americans to learn about the Middle East magically disappear?

No. Because Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization, because the Holy Lands figure prominently in European history, and because there is a thousand-year-plus history of interaction between Christian and Muslim countries, resulting in countless futile deaths, true enough, but also countless advances in the arts and sciences. Americans might have misinterpreted the word "madrassa," but there are other words imported from Muslim cultures that, historically, we've accepted without prejudice – "algebra," to name just one example. Learning this isn't important because we're at war with an Arab country, or because we want to make Arab American students feel included in the curriculum. It's important because it's important. Full stop.

He needed to double-check that the version he uses is the one that matches her birth certificate.

Coincidentally, yesterday I found a good piece from 2002 about the trouble with Romanizing the Arabic alphabet. The author has a good web site, too.

A George Rogers Clark High School junior arrested Tuesday for making terrorist threats told LEX 18 News Thursday that the "writings" that got him arrested are being taken out of context.

Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole's home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.

Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.

"My story is based on fiction," said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies."

Even so, police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky," said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.

Poole disputes that he was threatening anyone.

"It didn't mention nobody who lives in Clark County, didn't mention (George Rogers Clark High School), didn't mention no principal or cops, nothing,"
said Poole. "Half the people at high school know me. They know I'm not that stupid, that crazy."

On Thursday, a judge raised Poole's bond from one to five thousand dollars after prosecutors requested it, citing the seriousness of the charge.

Poole is being held at the Clark County Detention Center.

So now I'm trying to remember just what we did all that time in church. I know we sang, a lot, the same children's songs over and over again. We said the Lord's prayer. We put on a play about Noah's Ark once in third grade, and did nativity scenes every Christmas. We visited the nursing home every couple months, and wrote letters to members of the church who were in the hospital. We decorated the church for holidays. We colored pictures of Jesus. We gave out Christmas trees to "poor" families ("poor" in quotes, because it was a small working-class town without much wealth disparity, so the "privilege" we're talking about was there by a pretty slim margin). We collected canned goods. We took turns handing out communion wine and lighting the candles on the altar. We learned little stories — Noah's ark, Moses, Adam and Eve, Jesus's birth — but never discussed them except in the most obvious terms: love is better than hate, being good is better than being bad, freedom is better than slavery. We said prayers for sick people. We made crafty items for our parents out of glue and yarn.

In short, it was a service agency. Not a religious education. I'm not sure I have a problem with this — I'm just calling it what it is.

By junior high it became a sort of extended guidance counseling session. We talked about our friends and the tyranny of popularity and our relationship with our parents, what we wanted to be when we grew up, and all the Big Issues of '80s like suicide and AIDS. That sounds nice, doesn't it? I remember it as excruciating. Being forced to discuss matters this private with a community I had not chosen was hell on earth.

And again, not a religious education.

The mosques in this area have an entirely different view toward children. There's no singing, period; a lot less art and a lot more rote memorization of Qur'anic verses and the Arabic alphabet. I don't like this approach, either. The Arabic I like in theory, but in practice it favors the kids who speak it at home and ends up alienating those for whom it's a second or third language. And memorizing the Qur'an in Arabic without learning the translation and without discussing the meaning is something I've never understood. What's the point? I know it's beautiful to listen to a child say a surah, but to them it's just the babbling of nonsense words until they sort out the meaning and the context.

I don't have any better ideas. Just something I'm thinking about today.

But damn if there aren't people who would come this shy of arguing that it is a TOTAL COINCIDENCE that Japanese babies born in Japan to Japanese-speaking families end up speaking Japanese as their first language and Italian babies born in Italy to Italian-speaking families end up speaking Italian as their first language. (And here watch as someone pipes up with "well I know this girl who was born in Italy, but she learned Spanish first." Because that would be just totally par for the course in this sort of discussion. I can set my clock by it.)

Lila Abu-Lughod, who wrote one of my all-time favorite books (Writing Women's Worlds) has written about the inherent contradiction between the need to avoid "trafficking in generalizations" and the fact that cultural anthropology's raison d'être is the study of human behavior in all its manifestations and as such relies on offering up an analysis that goes slightly deeper — or rather wider? — than "John woke up. John put on his shoes. John had oatmeal for breakfast." The way most seriously unreadable ethnographers seem to deal with this is to say "John woke up. John put on his shoes. NOT ALL MEN NAMED JOHN WEAR SHOES. John had oatmeal for breakfast. NOT ALL MEN NAMED JOHN EAT OATMEAL FOR BREAKFAST. IN FACT, NOT ALL MEN NAMED JOHN EAT BREAKFAST PERIOD. EVEN THIS MAN NAMED JOHN DOES NOT EAT OATMEAL FOR BREAKFAST EVERY DAY OF HIS LIFE. WHICH BRINGS TO MIND THE PROBLEMATIC NOTIONS OF 'OATMEAL' AND 'BREAKFAST.' AND 'EAT' [see 3-paragraph footnote]."

It's tedious, you know? It's tedious as hell. And it's not just tedious, it undermines the entire point of the endeavor, which is to create some kind of descriptive narrative that is applicable to circumstances outside of those being directly observed. Note that "circumstances outside of" != "all circumstances everywhere on the planet ever in the history of all time Isweartogod I've just figured it out Once And For All."

It goes beyond noting that the plural of anecdote is not data and that one person's inability to identify with a particular thesis doesn't mean the thesis is inherently wrong, unless said thesis was literally arguing "all x are…" (e.g. that Men Are From Mars crap). It has to start with the very basic premise that people ARE influenced by the world around them. That kids in Japan speak Japanese for a reason. And that if such variables in our environment exist, they can, perhaps, be studied, discerned, analyzed, discussed. Some analyses will be better than others and some will be just downright offensive and some people doing the analyzing will be people you really, really wish had stayed out of the conversation, but all that is separate from the act of questioning itself.

I think what's really at the root of this is the pain that comes from being misrepresented. Which happens, like, constantly, especially to people(s) who aren't charged with writing the narratives. Not just in the macro sense ("The Arab Mind"; "Lakota Traditions") but in the smaller acts of applying to a particular reading to a particular phenomenon ("this movie sends the message that…") — both make assumptions about audience, and can be not just 'problematic' but actually painful if it's a view you don't share. And yet what I want to see is a way to deal with that, the misrepresentation, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

More and more people resort to I-statements to get around this problem — "I had oatmeal for breakfast" "my coming out experience went like this" "as a disabled person I feel" — and maybe that's the way to go. "Speak for yourself, mister! Oh wait, you are." But in addition to turning discourse into the academic equivalent of a me-fest replete with parallel play ordinarily associated with toddlers — I'm over here with my yo-yo/experience/history, you go be over there with yours — it ignores the question of people as agents of influence on others. How can I say that I was influenced by this or that without accepting at least the possibility that others might be, too, and so I should adjust my behavior accordingly? I mean if I were terrorized by, I dunno, scary clowns as a child, I can admit that not all children are but that some might be, it's a reasonable thing to think, and therefore I maybe should think twice about dressing up as a scary clown and hanging out at a day care center. But there I go, making assumptions about audience, and have likely offended more than one 4-year-old who LOVES SCARY CLOWNS. And if one of those 4-year-olds happens to protest, there we'll be, stuck, arguing about "some" vs. "all" for the next five years, and never get to the part about what it is about clowns that can be frightening.

Stasis. It's maddening.

On Christmas night a year ago, God fled Heaven to escape an audacious demon attack — a celestial Tet Offensive. The demons smashed to dust his palace of beautiful blue-moon marble. TV news kept it secret, but homeless children in shelters across the country report being awakened from troubled sleep and alerted by dead relatives. No one knows why God has never reappeared, leaving his stunned angels to defend his earthly estate against assaults from Hell.

…

All the Miami shelter children who participated in this story were passionate in defending this myth. It is the most necessary fiction of the hopelessly abandoned — that somewhere a distant, honorable troop is risking everything to come to the rescue, and that somehow your bravery counts.

…

Research by Harvard's Robert Coles indicates that children in crisis — with a deathly ill parent or living in poverty — often view God as a kind, empyrean doctor too swamped with emergencies to help. But homeless children are in straits so dire they see God as having simply disappeared. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam embrace the premise that good will triumph over evil in the end; in that respect, shelter tales are more bleakly sophisticated. "One thing I don't believe," says a seven-year-old who attends shelter chapels regularly, "is Judgment Day." Not one child could imagine a God with the strength to force evildoers to face some final reckoning. Yet even though they feel that wickedness may prevail, they want to be on the side of the angels.

They knew he was already married. In fact that's all they knew about him. But he was from Cairo, a man with means enough to travel, and they must have recognized his compliment as an opportunity. So she'd be a child bride, the second wife to a stranger, but the link to the city would be solidified and the dowry would be enormous.

He agreed to the meeting and then we laid low in another part of town for a day or two, as was right and proper. He couldn't cast doubt on their intentions with their own daughter. His "she's much too young" would be interpreted as "she's beautiful but not beautiful enough to marry"; his "I don't believe in polygamy" would become "I won't share my good fortune with a family such as yours." Better to let them think he'd been unavoidably detained than to reject the proposal outright.

I can still picture her in her long red dress. The age my daughter is now.

The little girl with big black eyes who could have been my co-wife.

Frank Gannon found the students in his "English 99″ class (the no-credit prerequisite to English 101) divided into three categories: bored-looking girls, jocks, and Bosnian refugees. He let them write about whatever they wished — a mistake, by the way, that I made at the beginning of first grade with K. and won't make again. Writing about whatever, I've come to believe, is a gift you give to experienced writers, and even then only when they need to work out something in their heads unencumbered by "my summer vacation" themes. New and nervous writers need springboards.

But he let them choose their own topics, and 100% of the responses broke down into the following themes:

Bored-looking girls: LIFE IS HARD, I CAN'T DO ANYTHING, and I AM TIRED
Jocks: I HAVE FUN, I NEED FREEDOM, and WHAT I CAN DO GOOD
Refugees: LIFE

You know, I'd never have thought I AM TIRED would be such an omnipresent theme, but once that tidbit lodged in my brain I started wandering around other journals and realized that probably half the entries from women are I AM TIRED posts. What's up with that? Are all women chronically sleep-deprived, or do they just have an inordinate need to talk about it all the time? Or does it go back to that expectation that women are "so busy" all the time, ergo a tired woman = a good woman? You're a busy woman! That's why you deserve to pamper yourself with our hand cream/apple conditioner/moisturizing soap/cleansing bath bubbles! Busy, busy women buy, buy, buy!

(I am a woman whose lifestyle can be supported on a 97 cent bottle of shampoo.)

This was funny, too, in its own morbid way:

Sometimes the refugees write things that, if written by one of the other groups, would get me to write "nice detail" in the margin. Many times the only thing I could ever think of to write was "good." Sometimes I would look at the word after I wrote it and cross it out because it seemed like a stupid thing to write. So I would just circle things and correct sentences.
Adnan lived next door has hand blown in war.
I corrected it.
Adnan, who lived next door, had his hand blown off in the war.

What do you say to that?

I also love this quote, from Garret Keizer's "Why We Hate Teachers":

So to the svelte mom in the Volvo, Ms. Hart is an air-headed twit without a creative bone in her body, who probably had to write crib notes all over her chubby little hand just to get through Hohum State College with a C. To the burly dad in the rusty pickup truck, Ms. Hart is a book-addled flake without a practical bone in her body but with plenty of good teeth in her head thanks to a dental plan that comes out of said dad's property taxes.

That sums up my reasons for avoiding teaching for the past ten years, although I've been attracted to education issues for as long as I can remember. I just couldn't stand to be both patronized and resented.

But lately "professional integrity" has taken a back seat to raw, all-consuming interest.