E Is for Education

Education may change

In 1943 when my parents were in high school their teachers augmented lectures and reading with blackboards and chalk. The teachers used chalk to explain mathematical concepts, to focus student attention on main points of science, history, language, and to list assignments and due dates.

The world was engulfed in World War II. Schools were open.

Young men in school then, knew that if the war didn't end before they graduated, they would go. Indeed some, like my Daddy couldn't wait to graduate. As soon as they were 18, they enlisted foregoing their final year of school.

When they went to war, no one knew if they would come home again. Or what home would look like when they did.

Methods of teaching in the classroom have changed.

Blackboards disappeared from classrooms before my time in school. By then they were green. And overhead projectors had come into vogue. In fact, when I was in the 8th Grade, us Baby Boomers were overwhelming the schools and schools were covering the shortage of teachers with educational television. In those early days, that did not mean Sesame Street or Reading Rainbow. It meant actual classroom topics with a teacher on the screen.

My 8th Grade physics class was held in the school cafeteria. TVs (black and white, of course) sat on  wheeled carts, placed to be seen by students seated at long tables. 220 8th Graders, monitored by one teacher, learned the basics of physics in that class. Our teacher, (I can't think of his name right now, but he was a very brave man) carried a "pointer." It was a long, tapered stick. Previously, such sticks were actually used to point at things like equations on green blackboards or locations on large maps.

Now that I think about it, he used the pointer rather like George C. Scott playing General Patton used a quirt in the movie Patton. He (our teacher) walked constantly up and down among the tables, occasionally slapping his pants leg with the pointer or using it to threateningly point at a recalcitrant student. Mr. Whatever-his-name-was must have occasionally wished he were wearing that pearl-handled pistol that Patton wore.

When we graduated from high school, the draft sent the young men off to Vietnam. The World may not have been at war, but we felt as though it were.

Today schools are closed throughout America. Students were sent, not to war, but home. With no forewarning. They went to Spring Break, which was extended a week, then through March, and now until the end of April with the understanding that schools may be closed through the rest of the school year. Students in Denver start online learning today.

This was my daughter's first year to teach as a graduate student at the University of Houston. Last Fall Semester she taught Introduction to Fiction. It went swimmingly. She loved choosing which bits of fiction to teach. She enjoyed her students. She decided teaching is definitely for her.

She is a student in three classes this semester, working toward her Masters so she was especially pleased to be assigned to teach Introduction to Fiction again this semester. A very helpful assignment. She didn't have to develop new lesson plans from scratch and she could use her experiences with the Fall class to adapt and improve the class for Spring. She had confidence.

Then Corona Virus 19. All bets were off.

Now she is being taught and is teaching online. Luckily, she is a digital native as are most of her students. Having used computers practically since birth is not enough though. Neither her teachers nor she has been trained to teach online -- so it's all by guess and by gosh. Having lived in a house all your life does not fit you for building one. None of them can have confidence in what they are doing. Little comfort in this time of Covid-19.

Students have left school, but the world is not at war. If it were, we could choose sides and hate those other people. We could build bombs and make bullets. Then the old men would get together, declare a winner. Name what is left Peace and go back to business as usual until the next war.

This is a World-wide Health Crisis. A pandemic. There is no side to choose. Weapons do not exist to fight it. Our hope is that the best minds of the World, working together, will develop treatments and vaccines to control humanity's susceptibility to Covid-19. Only fools will declare a winner and return to business as usual.

The thing about education is that we can

Why? -- On Writing

image from measurethefuture.net

See all these books? Your public library probably looks very like this. Prefer to read on your electronic device? You can probably get ebooks from your public library. Your favorite bookstore will either have the book you want or they can get it poste haste. That bookstore most likely will help you get the electronic version if that's what you want. And there's always amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.

Now why, with all these choices would you read a book that doesn't suit your purpose?

And as far as television and movies go -- same question. Why would you willingly, or worse yet unwittingly, donate your time and intellect to a production that will not meet your needs?

As a writer I have three needs that should be met by the books I read and the movies and television I watch. 1.) inspiration   2.) education  3.) entertainment. Yep. It's all about me.

(Well, okay there's one more but we're not supposed to talk about it.  4.) kill time, exercise denial, and avoid. All available on demand from the internet.)

The thing is, if what I'm reading or watching meets any or all of the first three needs, I'm less likely to spend time on the fourth. And more likely to get the laundry done, go to bed at a reasonable hour, and write.

Good writing inspires me. Barbara Kingsolver's work is an excellent example. She is a maestro of English. Much of her work is in first person which in the hands of many authors actually distances me from their characters.

She uses simple language beautifully. Here's a sample from Animal Dreams published in 1990.

"It was hot and my mind was fraying at the edges. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and massaged my prickly scalp, thinking I must look like a drowned hen, but maybe nobody would recognize me today. Living without a lover was beginning to produce in me the odd sense that I was invisible."

Here is a woman returned to the small Arizona town of her unhappy youth after an absence of fourteen years. She's broken up with her boyfriend of ten years. She didn't belong in that town when she was in high school and she didn't feel that she belonged there now.

I am inside the character. I can feel what she is feeling. Inspiration.

Compare that with Andy Weir's The Martian.

"It's a strange feeling. Everywhere I go, I'm the first. Step outside the rover? First guy ever to be there! Climb a hill? First guy to climb that hill! Kick a rock? That rock hadn't moved in a million years!"

If he didn't use exclamation points I wouldn't know he was experiencing any feeling intensely. And what was his "strange feeling?" I don't know. Expletive deleted! Here's a man alone on Mars with little chance that he'll survive long enough to be rescued. Surely something is going on inside him. Wonder? Amazement? Sheer terror?

Okay, to be fair, Weir is writing his castaway as though in his mission log. And a log is traditionally a formal document expected to hold fast to unembellished facts. That would seem to preclude exclamation points. Or an exploration of the astronaut's emotional response to his predicament.

I understand that the very situation should give the reader a "feeling." But a writer is supposed to show that the character is having a feeling. I just never could get close to Astronaut Watney. It's hard to be inspired by someone I can't relate to. Need number one -- unmet.

Education from The Martian? Hardly. Either Mr. Weir chose to ignore Martian reality or he didn't do his research.

Mars does have dust storms. And they do present problems. They temporarily block out or reduce sunlight which is the major energy source for equipment on Mars. According to NASA "The winds in the strongest Martian storms top out at about 60 miles per hour" but with an atmosphere only 1% of Earth's atmosphere, that 60 MPH wind would not be enough to do the damage ascribed to it by Mr. Weir.

Emotion is hard for me to write, too. My own writing weakness is enough reason for me to read someone who does it well and learn how it's done. Inspiration and education.

So, yes, I threw Weir over for Kingsolver. And now I'm also being entertained.

If you're a writer, you will probably have the same needs, but those needs will be met differently. The trick is to find out what suits you and don't pay too much attention to what meets my needs.

We're in Trouble, BUT -- essay

image from usnews.com

We’re in trouble. As a nation. As a society. As a culture. 

We are undereducated which makes us susceptible to the worst of the charlatans selling snake oil to make us thin, beautiful, and long-lived. Susceptible to the worst of the schemers promising fool-proof investment strategies that will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams. To the worst of the politicians offering lowest-common-denominator solutions to poverty, crime, and terrorism. And to the worst of the promulgators of conspiracy theories. The Moon-landing hoax. Who killed JFK? Anti-Vaxxers. You name it. A group of shady someones somewhere are threatening our “good life.”

This blog post is not a conspiracy theory about how we got undereducated. And how our children are continuing to be undereducated. Ignorance has been with us since the beginning of time. You could argue that it’s human nature. BUT, to quote one of my favorite movie lines, "Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” (Kathryn Hepburn as Miss Rose Sayer to Humphrey Bogart’s Charlie Allnut in The African Queen.)

Our various news services have announced the 2013 rankings, state by state, of our high school graduation rates, touting the overall average of 81%. BUT those various news services go on to say why that 81% may be misleading.

Each state has its own requirements for graduation. Each state has its own method of counting those students who do not graduate. And not all states were required to report. My natal state Oklahoma was one of the states given an extension. No numbers from there were figured in the 81% average.

One way we can compare the success of the education of these graduates is the ACT exam. It is the same for all who take it regardless of where they received their high school diploma or what kind of diploma they received. Some states have more than one kind of diploma

Iowa came in at Number 1 with a graduation rate of 90%. Iowa offers one type of diploma and does not require any exit exam to graduate. In 2014, 68% of Iowa’s graduating students took the ACT exam.

Of that 68%:  75% met the ACT benchmark for English, 52% met it for Reading, 48% met it for Math, and 47% met the ACT benchmark for Science. 

ACT benchmarks are “scores on subject-area tests that represent the level of achievement required for students to have a 50% chance of obtaining a B or higher or about a 75% chance of obtaining a C or higher in corresponding credit-bearing first-year college courses.” (ACT) 

The State of Texas came in 2nd with a graduation rate of 88%. Texas offers eleven kinds of diplomas and requires graduates to pass exit exams in algebra and English. 40% of Texas’s graduating students took the ACT exam in 2014. (62% of Texas’s graduating students took the SAT exam, 33.9% of whom met the SAT benchmark score.)

Of that 40%: 60% met the ACT benchmark for English, 42% met it for Reading, 47% met it for Math, and 36% met the ACT benchmark for Science.

My home state of Colorado came in 36th with a 2013 graduation rate of 77%. Colorado offers two types of diplomas and requires no exit exams. 100% of the graduating students took the ACT exam in 2014.

63% of all graduating Colorado students met the ACT benchmark for English. 43% met it for Reading. 39% for Math and 36% for Science.

For me the most damning of these statistics is the very low percent of graduates who meet the ACT benchmark for Reading. Remember, those percentages are of percentages of percentages so the ACT exams can confirm only that slightly more than 29% of the Number 1 state’s graduating students meet the benchmark for READING. We’ve no way to tell what percentage of the 32% who didn’t take the test would have done. Not to mention the 10% who did not graduate.

Okay. So a person graduates from a less than admirable secondary school without an acceptable level of Math and Science education. If that person can and will READ, he can fill in the holes. Self-taught doesn’t have to mean substandard.

I could indict our national education system. But we don’t have one. Or our abysmal failure to support the fractured education system that we do have. We don’t support it by setting high standards. We don’t support it by firing subpar educators or respecting competent educators or rewarding the exceptional educators. We don’t support it financially.

BUT these failures can be corrected. We can work on correcting them at the local, state, and national levels. Expect quality and be willing to pay for it.

In the meantime, we can do what we can at home

I know if you’re reading my blog, you are a reader so I’m preaching to the choir. BUT us choir members can do something. We can read to the children in our lives. We can read around the children in our lives so they see reading as a good and desirable activity.

We can donate our books and magazines to places where they’ll be read again – schools, churches, libraries, medical clinics, rec centers, day care centers, nursing homes. And a whole bunch of places you can think of.

Give kids books – for their birthdays and Christmas. (Try to avoid giving that special nephew the same book two Christmases running like I did.) Drop a book in their Trick or Treat bag. How about giving them a book just because it’s Tuesday? Take them with you to the local public library so they learn that it’s their library.

And, while you’re at it, do these things for the adults in your life, too.

Educating Americans, the Shocking Failure -- An Essay

image from brainyquotes.com

I woke up this morning feeling fine. We had 47 degrees at 6 a.m. That's a good way to start the day. Then my husband told me about an article in this morning's Washington Post.

A national survey by Oklahoma State University's Food Science Department found that more than 80% of the American public would support mandatory labeling for foods containing DNA. The information included about DNA in the survey question is all completely true, but it is presented in a way that would sound frightening to a reader who does not know what DNA is. Apparently the vast majority of survey respondents do not know what DNA is.

This should be taken as an indictment of our education system. I do not know if biology is required for high school graduation. If it isn’t, it should be. I had high school biology in the 1960s and DNA was not mentioned, but in college it was. Scientists were just beginning to understand DNA. In 1962 Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize for their work with DNA, so I don’t know how many public school biology teachers knew much about it then. Which brings up the question of continuing education for school teachers. Is it required even after they get their Masters? And does that continuing ed have to be in the field they’re teaching?

The responsibility for education does not fall solely on teachers. If we didn’t learn it from them, we have a responsibility to learn it on our own. And the world’s knowledge keeps growing. Even after we leave school. The resources for our own continuing ed are more available to us than they’ve ever been in human history. Pluto is no longer classified as a planet. Why not? Stem cell therapies are being used to treat various forms of cancer. Why?

If we like Dancing with the Stars, that’s fine, but just like eating burgers and fries is just fine, we need fruit and veggies for a healthy body. And we need healthy food for our minds. Watch Nova. Listen to Star Talk. Read a book. Google it.

When we get into the habit of exploring things we were just wondering about, we’re feeding our minds and learning to recognize that hunger for knowledge. We’ll soon discover that that hunger pops up more often than we ever imagined.

Flip a switch and turn on the light. Where did those electrons that are lighting our room actually come from and how did they get here? Read Isaac Asimov’s Atom. (What? You didn’t know he wrote anything but Science Fiction? Which, by the bye, is worth a read, too.) Exploring electricity, we’ll run into the names of Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla. Check them out.

Why don’t you ever see crows dead on the highway? Are they too smart to play in the road? How smart are they? Watch the documentary A Murder of Crows originally shown on PBS’s Nature. Now available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=s472GjbLKQ4. That’s right, youtube has things other than people and cats being dumb and cute, respectively.

Why do some people let their small children run loose in restaurants? Hmmmm. I don’t think Google can answer that satisfactorily. We’d probably have to ask those people and that might get us a few choice words we don’t need to look up.

Ask a question. Learn a new word. Expand your mental horizons.

And keep in mind, if it ain’t got DNA, it ain’t food. It might be a food supplement, but it ain’t food.