Author Archive for Diana Senechal

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Medical students take liberties online

Published on September 23, 2009 in Culture, Education and technology. 12 Comments Tags: , , , , . By Diana Senechal

According to new study published in JAMA, a majority of medical schools surveyed report that their students have posted unprofessional material online. The authors (Drs. Katherine C. Chretien, S. Ryan Greysen, Jean-Paul Chretien, and Terry Kind) write:

In the past year, 13 percent (6/47) of these had no incidents, 78 percent (36/47) had fewer than 5 incidents, 7 percent (3/47) had 5 to 15 incidents, and 2 percent (1/47) had some incidents but did not know how many. Incidents involving violation of patient confidentiality in the past year were reported by 13 percent (6/46). Student use of profanity, frankly discriminatory language, depiction of intoxication, and sexually suggestive material were more commonly reported. Issues of conflict of interest were rare.

According to the authors, most of the material fell into one of four categories:

Sexual-Relational Content. Ten open-ended text examples detailed sexually suggestive or explicit content or inappropriate relationships. Examples in this category included sexually provocative photographs of students, requesting inappropriate friendships with patients on Facebook, and sexually suggestive comments.

Affiliation With School. Nine open-ended text examples detailed negative comments pertaining to specific medical school experiences. Examples included using profanity or other disparaging language in reference to specific faculty, courses or rotations, classmates, or medical school. Some examples were reported as discriminatory in nature.

Intoxication or Substance Use. Seven open-ended text examples detailed content suggesting intoxication or illicit substance use. Examples involved photographs (illicit substance paraphernalia, depiction of intoxication, students holding alcoholic beverages), video, and comments.

Threats to Patient Confidentiality. Four open-ended text examples detailed references to patients in which patient privacy was at risk. The majority of examples involved blogs that described clinical experiences with enough detail that patients could potentially be identified. One example was related to posting patient details on Facebook.

The authors recommend that the professionalism curriculum include a “digital media component,” as “may not be aware of how online posting can reflect negatively on medical professionalism or jeopardize their careers.”

Agreed. But isn’t the problem bigger than that? What would compel a medical student to post confidential information about a patient? Career or professionalism aside, why so little respect for privacy?

This may be an overlap of several conditions: the sheer volume of personal and suggestive material online (“everybody does it”), the market for confession and sensationalism beyond the Internet (talk shows provide a good clue to this), and the social habits of young adults who, especially in school, tend to mix with others their own age.

The vast majority of medical students probably don’t post inappropriate material online–and some of the material may be only borderline inappropriate. But the problem extends beyond isolated incidents, beyond ignorance or indiscretion. It takes a certain muscle to keep things to oneself, and maybe we have forgotten to exercise it.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Published on September 22, 2009 in Education. Closed Tags: , . By Diana Senechal

The Carnival of Homeschooling is up at Apollo’s Academy, with an autumnal equinox theme.

“Standards are not curriculum”

Published on September 22, 2009 in Careers, College and Education. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , . By Diana Senechal

The revised Common Core standards are ready for review. The NGA clarifies in its release that “standards are not curriculum.” Robert Pondiscio comments that “it’s good to see a measure of clarity” about the distinction between the two.

These standards do look clearer than the previous version, although, as before, the math is more specific than the English. Chester E. Finn, Jr., at Flypaper comments:

We’re still reviewing the latest version but at first glance it appears that the math standards, while not perfect, have a lot going for them. The “English” standards are harder to appraise. They’re not actually English standards, but, rather, standards for reading, writing, speaking and listening. The drafters acknowledge that they would need to be accompanied by solid curriculum content, and they’ve provided a handful of examples—good ones, mostly—of such content. But they’ve also left most of the heavy lifting to states, districts, schools and educators. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But it also means that the “common core” standards, at least in this version, are more a vessel waiting to be filled with curriculum than an actual framework for what teachers should teach and students should learn.

Yet even with the relative vagueness of the English standards, they have more substance than some of the state ELA standards I have seen. Here’s what the standards say about the quality of reading material:

The literary and informational texts chosen or study should be rich in content and in a variety of disciplines. All students should have access to and grapple with works of exceptional craft and thought both for the insights those works offer and as models for students’ own thinking and writing. These texts should include classic works that have broad resonance and are alluded to and quoted often, such as influential political documents, foundational literary works, and seminal historical and scientific texts. Texts should also be selected from among the best contemporary fiction and nonfiction and from a diverse range of authors and perspectives.

I looked at the illustrative texts and the commentary. I have some minor quibbles, but all in all they look fine. My main concern is that English class would turn into “a little bit of everything.” There should be literature class, and then there should be extensive reading and writing in the other subjects.

The math standards look promising, though the illustrative examples seem a bit on the easy side. Also, I am not sure why they avoided organizing the material around areas of mathematics such as geometry, algebra, linear algebra, calculus. Only probability and statistics get their own categories. Otherwise the material is organized around general skills and concepts. Why?

“A new, hard test of our wisdom”

Published on September 21, 2009 in Culture and technology. 8 Comments By Diana Senechal

Back in August, Terry Teachout suggested in the Wall Street Journal that those of us grappling with new media take a few lessons from the history of TV. Television succeeded for a number of reasons, he says, including its unanimous, unquestioning acceptance by the people.

Americans of all ages ­embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought. That’s the biggest lesson taught by the new-media crisis of 1949. Nostalgia, like guilt, is a rope that wears thin.

But is this accurate? Did everyone embrace it “without a second thought?”

In a remarkable essay “A Forecast of Television” (1935), Rudolf Arnheim wrote:

Television is a new, hard test of our wisdom. If we succeed in mastering the new medium it will enrich us. But it can also put our mind to sleep. We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to others made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.

More from the same article:

Television will make up for actual physical presence even more than does radio. All the more isolated will be the individual in his retreat, and the balance of trade will be correspondingly precarious: an enormous influx of riches, consumption without services in return. The pathetic hermit, squatting in his room, hundreds of miles away from the scene that he experiences as his present life, the ‘viewer’ who cannot even laugh or applaud without feeling ridiculous, is the final product of a century-long development, which has led from the campfire, the market place, and the arena to the lonesome consumer of spectacles today.

Arnheim does not fit into Terry Teachout’s plan. He neither embraced TV nor fled to the past. He wrote of its potential dangers, but he was no misty-eyed radio-knob-turner. His wariness of the new technology was prescient, not nostalgic.

What can we learn from the past? That TV was immensely popular but not unanimously and unquestioningly accepted. Nor were the critics all clinging to the past. No matter what trends come our way, no matter how popular they may be, they need critics so they don’t get out of hand.

Let’s make writing pleasant

Published on September 20, 2009 in Education. 20 Comments Tags: , , , . By Diana Senechal

Will Fitzhugh, editor of The Concord Review, explains why writing instruction in the U.S. has failed: we dare not make it hard. This pillowed approach comes not from novice teachers, but from the NCTE itself.

Writing has “historically and inexorably been linked to testing,” says the NCTE. Moreover, it has been “associated with unpleasantness–with unsatisfying work and episodes of despair–and thus evoked a good deal of ambivalence.”

Fitzhugh takes us to the consequences of this strange historical analysis:

So, how does NCTE propose to free writing from its unhappy association with testing, episodes of despair, and so on? By encouraging students to do what they are doing already: texting, twitting, emailing, sending notes, sending photos, and the like-only this time it will be part of the high school “writing” curriculum. In other words, instead of NCTE encouraging educators to lift kids out of the crib, it wants them to jump in with them.

What happens when teachers encourage kids to just keep on doing what they’re already doing? They don’t learn how to write about anything. Lucy Calkins told Fitzhugh once, “I teach writing, I don’t get into content that much.” But what happens when you teach writing without “getting into content”?

For one, students don’t write about the topic at hand, even if they have one. On a NAEP test, students were asked to write a brief review of a book worth preserving. of Fitzhugh cites part of a student’s review of Hermann Hesse’s Demian :

High school is a wonderful time of self-discovery, where teens bond with several groups of friends, try different foods, fashions, classes and experiences, both good and bad. The end result in May of senior year is a mature and confident adult, ready to enter the next stage of life.

I get it! I could write about Paradise Lost:

Life is full of trial and error. Sometimes we make big mistakes, but most of the time we make little ones. We should always remember that mistakes are surmountable–even when we make someone mad or fail a test. No matter how embarrassed we are, we can laugh at ourselves, learn from our mistakes, and move on.

Very pleasant and very sad.

For another excellent piece by Will Fitzhugh, see “Critical Likability.”

Long live the history of education

Published on September 20, 2009 in Culture and Education. Closed Tags: , , . By Diana Senechal

It was inspiring to be at a history of education conference. I have not commented in detail on the presentations, because I don’t want to misquote or misrepresent them, nor do I want to reveal my favorites. I learned from them all and was happy to see so many scholars involved in the history of education. I left with many thoughts and titles of books I wanted to read.

The atmosphere was thoughtful, cordial, and low-key. I felt comfortable there though I had met no one previously and was one of the few presenters not affiliated with a college or university.

I had a great time giving my presentation and sensed the interest of the audience. I talked about why schools need a philosophy of education and how the ideas of Michael John Demiashkevich could help us today.

We had beautiful weather in Chicago. After the conference I walked to the lake and visited the Thorne Miniature Rooms at the Art Institute. I haven’t visited them since childhood. This time I paid attention to the spaces beyond the rooms. Each room had open doors with glimpses into other rooms, or windows with views, or stairs going up. Some of them had wonderful light effects; a French hall had light spilling through the doors and throwing shadows of the furniture onto the floor. As I was looking at it, someone behind me commented to her friend, “You’ve seen one of these rooms, and you’ve seen–” She stopped suddenly. As far as I know, that sentence was never finished.

Do we need cursive anymore?

Published on September 20, 2009 in Education and technology. 23 Comments By Diana Senechal

Kids aren’t learning cursive anymore, reports the Associated Press. Katie Van Sluys, a professor at De Paul University and president of Whole Language Umbrella, says that students have difficulty seeing the relevance of handwriting. They use computers at home, so schools should reflect this. “We need to make sure they’ll be ready for what’s going to happen in 2020 or 2030,” she says. “They’re writing, they’re composing with these tools at home, and to have school look so different from that set of experiences is not the best idea.”

Not all agree. Sharon Spencer, a teacher at Mountaineer Montessori in Charleston, teaches her students cursive starting in first grade. She believes that it helps with muscle control and coordination, and argues that one can’t always count on having a computer at hand. “In the age of computers,” she says, “I just tell the children, what if we are on an island and don’t have electricity? One of the ways we communicate is through writing.”

The most ambiguous point comes from Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who, according to the article, “cites multiple studies showing that sloppy handwriting routinely leads to lower grades, even in papers with the same wording as those written in a neater hand”:

Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students’ overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.

Yes, but does that mean students should or shouldn’t learn cursive? How will students become proficient writers if they can’t form letters (or type) quickly?

There are at least two questions here. First, are there compelling reasons to continue to teach cursive handwriting? Second, how can we ensure that students become proficient in forming letters, whether in handwriting or through typing?

For the first, I can only speculate. I would favor keeping some kind of handwriting instruction in the schools, because it has a different quality from typing, especially typing on a computer keyboard. There is greater commitment when you write on paper, and at the same time more of a “draft” sense at the outset. On the computer, you can simply delete what you don’t like, and you can turn a draft into a final version without showing any words crossed out or changed. The revision is often hidden (unless you use Track Changes or version control). Why does this matter? For one thing, those crossed-out words often trigger good ideas; they also can help us see what is going astray.

On the other hand, the keyboard is an “equalizer” for those who struggle with handwriting. And there are situations where it is simply handy to delete a mistake instead of writing the whole thing over again.

Also (in favor of handwriting), unless students use laptops in every class from the early grades up, they will still need to do much of their work in handwriting. There will still be many situations that call for written statments, essays, letters, and more. There will still be diaries. For that reason alone, they should learn to write by hand. Why cursive? Once learned, it can be more fluid than print. But I would settle for print or cursive, as long as students can write fluently. Others, such as Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld, point out the benefits of cursive over print and hybrid handwriting styles.

The second question is easier to answer. Schools should teach typing and handwriting. Students may find down the road that they type 90 percent of the time, but at least they will have the choice. It should be part of the curriculum in the early grades, and there should be workshops in the later grades for those who did not learn it. I have had many middle-school students who typed with their forefingers only (looking for each letter as they went along). It took much effort for them even to do a Google search. Some children are quite agile when texting with their thumbs, but they depend on the shortness and abbreviations of the text message. If we turn into a “texting” culture we will limit what is actually said and will encourage what American University linguistics professor Naomi Baron calls a “sloppy or laissez-faire” attitude toward the mechanics of writing.

The times may be a-changing, but the need for writing remains. Students should learn the mechanics so that mechanics won’t get in their way.

OEH conference newsflash

Published on September 18, 2009 in Culture and Education. Closed Tags: , , , . By Diana Senechal

I am at the 2009 Conference of the Organization of Educational Historians, and so far I have enjoyed every bit of it. The question and answer sessions have been as interesting as the presentations themselves.

The first panel I attended was on desegregation; it included a presentation on desegregation in Chicago, followed by one on Webb v. School District No. 90 and one on Pease Elementary School in Austin. For the next session I chose “The Purposes of Schooling and Teaching,” which featured presentations on Kant’s lectures on pedagogy (“Über Pädagogik”), the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, the educational philosophy of Horace Mann, and the role of civic organizations in shaping education policy. After lunch I went to a panel titled “Responding to Challenges,” which included a presentation on the first underground school built in the United States, as well as a presentation on the deconstruction of history textbooks and one on “the Gaelic League’s call for an Irish Ireland.”

In the afternoon I attended the keynote address of Dr. George Marsden, author of The Soul of the American University, who spoke about the separation of religion from higher education over the past 150 years and signs of recent change.

My presentation on Demiashkevich is tomorrow morning, and I need to go over my notes! So that will be all for today.

OK outflunks AZ on civics exam

Published on September 18, 2009 in Education. 3 Comments By Diana Senechal

Back in June, the Goldwater Institute gave a version of the United States Citizenship Test to Arizona high school students. Only 3.5 percent of students got 6 or more questions correct, reports Matthew Ladner at Jay P. Greene’s blog. To the question “What do we call the first ten amendments to the Constitution?” 48 percent of students replied “Don’t know.”

Grim, but things get grimmer still. When high school students in Oklahoma took the exact same test, only 2.8 percent got 6 or more questions correct.

Ladner decided to take a look at the Oklahoma state standards for civics. Here’s a quote:

A social studies education encourages and enables each student to acquire a core of basic knowledge, an arsenal of useful skills, and a way of thinking drawn from many academic disciplines. Thus equipped, students are prepared to become informed, contributing, and participating citizens in this democratic republic, the United States of America.

That sounds good, except that apparently the learning isn’t happening. Students don’t know the bare basics about our government. I mean, they really don’t know it.

Ladner concludes, “These kids wouldn’t do much worse if the pollster asked them questions in Sanskrit instead of English.”

According to a binomial distribution calculator, the chances of getting at least 6 out of 10 questions correct (where each question has 4 options) is about 2 percent. So, no, they wouldn’t do much worse in Sanskrit.

Thanks to Joanne Jacobs for the tip.

Correction: In the final paragraph (regarding binomial distribution) I gave the incorrect impression that the surveys as administered to students were multiple-choice. They were not. The students had to offer their own answers to the questions.

Coming to you soon from Chicago

Published on September 17, 2009 in Culture and Education. 2 Comments Tags: , , . By Diana Senechal

In a few hours I leave for Chicago, where I will be presenting a paper on Michael John Demiashkevich at the annual conference of the Organization of Educational Historians. This is my first time at an OEH conference. I would love to blog about it but will have to make sure that is OK. In any case, I will give you a “Chicago perspective” on something every day, be it conference proceedings, an education news update, or a topic I have been pondering.

My grandmother lived in Chicago her entire life, and I have been there many times since childhood. I won’t have much time for exploring, but on Saturday afternoon I will likely walk around, visit the Thorne Miniature Rooms, which I haven’t seen in many years, or go to the lake.

I am glad that an organization of educational historians exists. I look forward to this conference.