the Sam Jackson College Experience

One of my classes this semester, The Intellectual in Politics (HUMS 331 / PLSC 328), has a final research project which revolves around the use of the Yale University Archives and the Manuscripts and Archives division. An institution hundreds of years old has a great deal of interesting documents pertaining to its own history, but Yale also has thousand upon thousands of other collections of papers from noted intellectuals over time. All told, Yale has more than 12 miles of papers entrusted to it by various persons.

Our final project for this class will be to create an online exhibit around five different documents, so I will definitely share it when I’m done.Everywhere you look, there are amazing things to find – you can request the personal notes and documents of people from important people hundreds of years since left to the history books, or zoom in to chronicle the personal diaries and thoughts of noted government figures and other intellectuals. It’s really just like a time machine, except with more paperwork to fill out.

At the moment, I am in Sterling Library reading through some of the records associated with the presidency of Kingman Brewster, my personal favorite Yale president. While there is too much to type altogether, I am going to share one piece that I really like that I just read. It makes me sad to think that in 1965, it was a *problem* that students were not motivated by money. How different were the problems facing educators in 1965? Read on to find out:

This is text of a speech of President Kingman Brewster, Jr. before the American Council on Education, Washington, D.C., October 8, 1965

“If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?”

Boredom is not a newcomer in the halls of academe. But there is a mounting impatience and if we admit it, a new and unpleasant aroma of scorn among some student groups –impatience with education, scorn for educators.

Of course faculties are, and always should be heavily populated by people who are dedicated to the proposition that the search for truth is an end in itself. I am not one of those who buy the notion that the only worthy end of thought is action. Thought and learning, like experience and beauty can be ends in themselves. Not the least part of our job is to awaken a capacity for this enjoyment in the oncoming generations so that theirs may be delight in living as well as doing.

But the tragedy of the highly motivated impatient young activist is that he runs the serious risk of disqualifying himself from true usefulness by being too impatient to arm himself with the intellectual equipment required for the solution of the problems of war and poverty and indignity. You and I have seen too many among our students of high promise squander their talent for a lifetime of constructive work at a high level for the cheaper and transient satisfaction of throwing himself on some immediate barricade in the name of “involvement.” Posturing in the name of a good cause is too often the substitute for thorough thought or the patient doggedness it takes to build something.

Because we assume our own faith in education perhaps we have not preached it well enough. We have left it to the economists and the politicians to translate teh value of education into earning power and let it go at that. A generation whose brightest minds are unsatisfied with the dollar as the measure of success cannot be expected to find relevance in such appeals.

One of the new responsibilities for our old generation of educators is to remind the most highly motivated among the oncoming generation that there is no shortcut to the intellectual capacity which is now required to be useful in this ever shrinking ever complicating world. The chance to make a constructive difference in the lives of others, not the full dinner pail, is the highest reward of a higher education. If impatient anti-intellectualism of the radical left is not to seduce many of our best brains away from true usefulness; we and our faculties have to resassert again and again that emotional oversimplification of the world’s problems is not the paper to their solution.

But let me return to my text. What of the ends? If they don’t justify the means, what does?

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Hello everyone! This is my first time hosting a blog carnival, but it is the 160th Carnival of Education! I got a lot of submissions for this week and chose the best ones to share with you today. Welcome to the February 27, 2008 edition of the carnival of education, let’s get started! When you’re done with these links, be sure to check out all the higher education content you can find right here on my site : )

General Education

Alvaro with the Brain Fitness Center at SharpBrains gives us some helpful suggestions for how to keep our brains in tip top shape–he also hosted the 159th carnival!

Should parents pay for college (in whole or in part)? An interesting question… and one that I’m glad my parents answered basically in the affirmative.

Phil says that, paying for college or not, parents should do more to teach their kids patience. It took too long to read everything he wrote so I’m not quite sure, however, of what the entire post was about–I guess I’m just in such a rush all the time!

Noirlecroi is a big fan of blog carnivals, which is good, because it makes me want to link to their review of Mosaic of Thought, a book about teaching comprehension, that much more.

The Daily Grind provides a suggested Student Code of Ethics… what do you think about it?

Matthew K Tabor writes about the links between baseball and education, and they’re more compelling in the context of the UFT than you might have imagined.

Great for Educators and Teachers

When, and if, to use if instead of when: tips from So You Want to Teach? about just that–teaching.

For more tongue twisting fun, consider the post about questioning questions, or at least the way teacher-questioners question. Lead from the Start ponders this and more in the context of preschool.

In case these other posts were sounding too cheery, read about this nightmare situation from Scenes from the Battleground, a blog about teaching in tough situations.

On the note of troublesome students… Siobhan has a teaser about what he’s doing dealing with tough COLLEGE students.

But we shouldn’t always blame the students! What about when parents make it difficult for students to stay in class by constantly moving? Bluebird’s Classroom tells us about this unfortunate trend in certain seventh grade classrooms.

Any history teachers reading? History is Elementary has a post about hundreds-of-years-old fashion styles as it relates to teaching. Check it out.

Speaking of history–over at Scheiss Weekly we have a post asking whatever happened to the unsung heroes?

Does school kill poetry? Read Jennifer Ward’s take on it.

Social Commentary about Education

The relationship between New York education policy, great apes, and why the teachers wants Joel Klein to understand more about teaching. All this and more at Under Assault, now!

They’re not the only ones with complains about New York City schools: check out what Education Notes has to say on the subject.

SwitchedOnMom says that there should be more field trips. I totally agree.

EduWonkette wants to ask you what you think of different approaches to mitigating the achievement gap… and also to remind you to try to avoid being food poisoned.

Which brings us to Dave’s commentary on some problems with metrics for measuring high school drop out data in California. What lessons can be learned from different measurement techniques?

General Educational Resources

SarahSpy has a great listing of free / pay-whatever days at a long list of NYC museums. Definitely worth checking out, sending along.

Life. Money. Development, writes about the seven habits of highly effective students… and how to acquire them. By clicking that link, presumably.

 

Web Tools for Students, Educators, and More

OEDb has some excellent (50!) tools for students and educators alike for use on the web, for research and learning. Check out their top 50 tools for researchers and students.

Bill Ferriter, 6th grade, teacher, is encouraging teachers to use RSS, in Pageflakes for Teachers, a good informative post.

CollegeDegree.com mentions 25 excellent tools for librarians. While most of these are fairly commonsensical, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of some avenues that might be missed; worth looking at for others in a similar situation.

Some fun math games, courtesy Let’s Play Math.

Successful Teaching writes about blogging in the classroom– always a great subject.

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And that’s it for this edition of the carnival… Submit your blog article to the next edition of the carnival of education using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page. The next edition is currently set for March 12. Thanks for reading, and be sure to have a look around my site before you go!

[Brief note on my selection methodology, since concerns have arisen in the comments: some people thought I was overly selective with this carnival, but I put in almost every post that was about education... if you or someone you know was left out, it was most likely not intentional. I volunteered to host this carnival after another, for March, was already ticketed; this means that if you submitted a post BEFORE my carnival for this date was open, it may have been directed there instead and so you might not have been left out at all, you might just have to wait two weeks.]

Teachers, educators, and librarians sometimes ponder the possible uses of Facebook as an education tool; students and teachers alike talk about the awkwardness and occasional utility that arises from online social networking interactions between-groups. The Education Committee of Missouri has weighed in with a proposal which paints its picture using a giant “sex offenders are everywhere, trying to sneak into our schools” brush. The Columbia Missourian reports:

Teachers would be restricted from connecting with students on Web sites such as Facebook under a proposal by the House Education Committee chairwoman.

The Education Committee added a section to a bill Wednesday regarding teacher-student interaction on social networking Web sites that parents cannot access.

The umbrella bill, aimed at keeping sexual offenders from teaching in Missouri schools, would prohibit teachers from using a “non-work-related Internet site” to communicate with students where third parties have no access. In other words, parents need to see profiles.

“Rep. Jane Cunningham, R-St. Louis, committee chairwoman and sponsor of the bill, said its purpose is to protect children from offenders that school administration cannot catch.” Thus, to protect children from the very small fraction of would-be teachers who might possibly be sex offenders or otherwise have villainous intentions for the youth of Missouri, a whole potential range of social interactions are set to be neutered. Why not ban e-mail, telegraphs, or carrier pigeons, too?

There’s a joke in here somewhere about Missouri being the “Show Me State” but I’m not even going to search for it, because this is just so poorly calculated in my mind–the goal and the means to achieving that goal seem very disconnected and its reminiscent of the deeply misinformed national debate on so many “protect the children from the scary internet” stories in Washington. Thoughts? Christian, other teachers and educators, your opinions especially wanted. Faculty + facebook — always no go?

Today was the first day of classes at Yale, and I decided it was time to finally start getting back into the blogging spirit. What better way to start than a proclamation of my love for this new place?

I don’t know that I can sufficiently articulate my supreme delight and excitement for the next four years here at Yale. Based on the last 10 days this place and these people are proving to be amazing and awesome in every respect possible. Aside from the fact that I have the smallest suite at Yale, sharing my small room with someone 6′ 9″ (that is not hyperbole) , everything is better than I ever imagined.

The upside of the ultra-cramped room is of course that I am forced out of the room to get out and do things, socialize, study in other places, etc. Excepting those times, like right now, when I’m blogging from my room…

The list of reasons why Yale is so excellent would be obscenely long, as everywhere I look I find new reasons to be in love with this place. The classes today? Superb. I liked most of my professors that I was shopping today and was even impressed with the ones that I wasn’t so fond of (personality differences?). All the courses looked interesting, though the French that I was shopping turned out to be too easy, but my very cool professor there recommended me some other very neat courses to take which I will shop post haste.

I have some more fantastic courses to look at tomorrow, too. The only problem where classes are concerned seems to be a lack of time to take all the ones that I want.

I will try to make more posts in the coming days about specific interesting / super fun things that are happening / have happened; there are almost too many to keep track. I wish Yale had a Wesleying equivalent; maybe I will have to think up a clever name and start one. In the meantime, my adventures continue!

Our good friends at IvyGate, through what I assume must be great cleverness and sneakery, posted the top 25 overall and top 25 Liberal Arts colleges in the U.S. News’ 2008 rankings earlier today. At first had ethical reservations about saying really anything on the topic since I felt I could be indirectly promoting the rankings which I criticize frequently for their negative impact on the college search and application process (as Thacker would say, for their commercializing of it).

Then I saw that some more of our good friends, this time at EphBlog, had reposted some of it (for the LACs) and so had some other blogs, so I said why not cover it myself! Those of you following logically should realize that that should do nothing to clear my conscience, but all the same I’m going to write about the rankings a little : )

I’ll relate the shocking news right now: The top 3 slots are the same as last year! Gasp! In the same order, no less–Princeton, Harvard, Yale. (For complete list, see the end of this post) While we’ve all become accustomed to the top 10 or so’s relative lack of volatility over the years, it’s worth remembering the way the methodology has been changed based more on editorial discretion than statistical or scientific merit. The methodology is explained on USNews.com; I will look through it and discuss the changes they made this year in another coming post.

Steve Hsu, who writes a totally awesome blog called Information Processing (he’s a physics professor at the U of Oregon), brought a Slate article to my attention back in July. It’s a fun read, centered around an explanation of the various ‘fudge factors’ that U.S. News uses to make sure the rankings maintain a certain… standard, shall we say.

The story of how the rankings were cooked goes back to 1987, when the magazine’s first attempt at a formula put a school in first that longtime editor Mel Elfin says he can’t even remember, except that it wasn’t HYP. So Elfin threw away that formula and brought in a statistician named Robert Morse who produced a new one. This one puts HYP on top, and Elfin frankly defends his use of this result to vindicate the process. He told me, “When you’re picking the most valuable player in baseball and a utility player hitting .220 comes up as the MVP, it’s not right.”

The article is from 2000, and I know there have been changes since then, but the points it makes are still entirely valid as they touch on the whole history of the rankings. In 1999 Caltech was #1 but the next year dropped to #4; the reason for this was the application of special ‘logarithmic adjusters,’ applied only in categories where Caltech had an edge on HYP. These ‘adjusters’ in place, Caltech dropped back down, HYP went to the top… problem solved, from U.S. News’ perspective.

…the credibility of rankings like these depends on two semiconflicting rules. First, the system must be complicated enough to seem scientific. And second, the results must match, more or less, people’s nonscientific prejudices. Last year’s rankings failed the second test. There aren’t many Techie graduates in the top ranks of U.S. News, and I’d be surprised if The New Yorker has published a story written by a Caltech grad, or even by someone married to one, in the last five years. Go out on the streets of Georgetown by the U.S. News offices and ask someone about the best college in the country. She probably won’t start to talk about those hallowed labs in Pasadena.

The fact that the formulas had to be rearranged to get HYP back on top doesn’t mean that those three aren’t the best schools in the country, whatever that means. After all, who knows whether last year’s methodology was better than this year’s? Is a school’s quality more accurately measured by multiplying its spending per student by 0.15 or by taking a logarithmic adjuster to that value? A case could also be made for taking the square root.

But the logical flaw in U.S. News’ methodology should be obvious—at least to any Caltech graduate. If the test of a mathematical formula’s validity is how closely the results it produces accord with pre-existing prejudices, then the formula adds nothing to the validity of the prejudice. It’s just for show. And if you fiddle constantly with the formula to produce the result you want, it’s not even good for that.

Caltech is #5 this year. Happy rankings everyone…

Here’s the Top 25, after the break:

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