Student Culture
Six Reasons I Apologize to My Asian Students
Published June 06, 2009 @ 09:08AM PT
I had lunch today with my Korean sisters-in-law, both of whom are gonzo, like all parents in Korea, to get their kids out of those public Korean schools of which EdSec Duncan and President Obama are so enamored - and into American schools.
One of my sisters-in-law speaks English, as does my wife, but the other one doesn't, and I don't speak Korean, so there was much two-way interpretation work for my wife. It came in handy after she saw me laugh a private laugh while watching her and her sisters talk.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Because watching everybody talking with their mouths full made me think of a Korean student of mine years ago, when I didn't know your culture. He always talked with his mouth full, and it always grossed me out. I'd order him not to do that around me. Now that I realize it's normal in your culture, I realize how many other ways I was unfair to my East Asian students."
That led to a long conversation, which I summarize below. I'm tempted to think everybody knows this already, but then I remember that not everybody has lived in Asia for almost a decade. So this might help some teachers and administrators out there to understand their Asian students better.
1. I once thought they were being disrespectful by not looking at me when I was talking to them. I was wrong. Eye contact to elders and authorities is considered rude in their culture.
2. I once thought the boys were all lacking confidence because of their limp handshakes. This may be true, in a sense; but in another sense, Asians don't value the confidence and assertiveness connoted by a firm grip. They value harmony and hierarchy instead. And Koreans don't even shake hands, as a rule. Instead, they bow - especially to anyone older, even if only by days, weeks, or months.
3. I once thought my Chinese and Korean students were disprespectful brats for greeting me, "Hey, Burell" - sans "Mister." This greeting is hard for them to get the hang of. In their culture, they simply call the teacher "Teacher." They're not being disrespectful.
4. I once thought Asian students were unable to think critically or originally about the ideas studied in class. This may be true to a degree as well, but it's largely because, again, in their culture, authority is to be respected and valued, not challenged. Asian students are considered successful for learning the ideas of the "masters," not for challenging them. Challenging them would usually be frowned upon in their native schools.
5. I once thought Asian students lacked curiosity and a desire to learn because they almost never asked questions or took a shot at answering them in class discussions. I didn't understand the Asian premium on knowing the right answers, on not being wrong, on not looking ignorant. We in the West have a radically different take on these things.
6. That talking with the mouth full thing: it's normal for them. Some of the things that are normal in the West - yawning, for example - are considered far more rude to them than they are to us.
I just share this stuff because I'm leaving Korea. Call them lessons learned. If they stop anybody else from forming bad opinions of these students - which in the worst cases can result in lower grades or negative labels for them - then it was worth the time it took to write them.
I can only imagine the types of cultural disconnect that go on in U.S. schools with dozens of different ethnicities. What a rabbit-hole.
And sorry, kids. I get it now.
[Update: I passed this by my wife and her sisters, and they suggest that yawning is only rude when the young do it around the older. A better example of Western customs seen as outrageous in the East is our comfort with wearing shoes inside our homes, a habit seen as unbelievably unhygienic here. My wife wants me to add that Koreans only talk with their mouths full among friends, so I stand corrected.]
USA, explained by Jim Carson
Graduation Speech 2: The Political Truth That Dares Not Speak Its Name
Published June 04, 2009 @ 06:09AM PT
I love graduation season for the speeches and writings it inspires among an older generation wanting to pass on its wisdom to the younger. I featured Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement in the last post; now I'll point to editor and author Tom Englehardt's imaginary commencement address "from the Edge of the Campus of Life."
I'll give you the ending, and leave it to you to read the rest to discover what Englehardt argues is the political word that dare not speak its name in American education. So, last things first:
You are, I assure you, entering an extreme world at an extreme moment. Don't leave it solely to them to describe it for you. Don't just let yourself be used by the language that our world makes so readily available to you.
Back in 1946, in his stirring essay, "Politics and the English Language," which he would later vividly illustrate in his novel 1984, George Orwell wrote of the problems, but also the satisfactions, of letting them define the limits of what can be spoken. You can, he pointed out, certainly save yourself some trouble "by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself."
But he also wrote: "Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
Maybe what we need is fewer lies, less wind, and a new, stripped-down, weeded out, more honest vocabulary for our political world, words that don't fall so far short of the world as it is. . . . It's your job to find more of them, and where they don't exist to invent them. If you want to live in this world and not The Matrix version of it, you need a language that works for you, and you may have to create it. You need, in short, to speak up.
As all the collapsing businesses and the millions of out of work Americans make clear at this moment, you can be constrained from doing many things, but not from defining the world for yourself, and maybe even for some of the rest of us. Not if you want to.
Don't take my word for it. Take your own... and depart. (Read the rest....)
Next up, Barbara Ehrenreich offers some related words to the poor souls who are graduating with a journalism degree.
On the Wisdom of Dropping Out: Steve Jobs' Must-See Graduation Speech
Published June 04, 2009 @ 03:10AM PT
"I dropped out of Reed College within the first six months, but then stayed around as a 'drop-in' for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?"
So begins Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address. I discovered it last school year, and showed it to my AP Lit students for its heretical wisdom: dropping out can not only be okay, it can be transformative. Better still, 'dropping in' to college, only for classes of personal interest, can be a better path than 'staying in' for a piece of paper. Jobs dropped in to school a lot, but not to chase that paper. He never graduated college, and he obviously did okay.
My first year of college was 1981. I quit within a semester too. Everybody told me not to, that I'd never go back - and everybody was wrong. I dropped in and out over the next decade plus as the spirit moved me. I'd often take a class in, say, philosophy, where we'd read only snippets from philosophers that intrigued me, and then move on. Classes like that often spurred me to drop out for a semester or more in order to read some of those philosophers' complete works independently. After drinking my fill, I'd drop back in.
It took me way longer than the norm to finally get that degree, which I wasn't really chasing. In fact, I graduated because my college told me I had too many credits as an undergrad to receive any more financial aid, to which I responded, "Really? I've got enough credits to graduate? I had no idea."
I'm not recommending this as a model, but I am pointing to it as an example of paths less traveled by that might benefit a certain type of student. I'm no Steve Jobs, but I can say I have no regrets for learning and growing in my own way, at my own pace, against the common wisdom of the beaten path crowd. And I think any graduating high school student who hasn't figured out what path to take, hasn't applied to college, and thus may be hearing all sorts of dire predictions about a life of failure - maybe that student needs to hear this different narrative.
Better still, those students who have it all figured out at 18 - probably because their parents have figured it out for them - maybe they would benefit even more from Jobs' speech. It's a very rightly acclaimed 15 minutes that is well worth a student's time.
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Tell Lawmakers to Say NO to Tax Dollars for an 8th Grade "pre-pre-SAT"
Published May 27, 2009 @ 07:05AM PT
From the Department of "Enough, Already!" The College Board, "non-profit" purveyor of the SAT, PSAT, AP, and other money-makers from the bubble-sheets-equal-intelligence economic bubble, is poised to inflict yet another standardized test on our students - this time in middle school.
Where will it all end? College prep bubble-tests for newborns?
This is no idle kvetching session. School districts - that means you, taxpayers - will end up paying for this new test, if the College Board isn't stopped, which means they won't have money to spend on more constructive ways to help our students learn.
Read more below, or just cut to the chase and sign this petition to Obama, EdSec. Duncan, Congress, and state governors to say NO to a middle school SAT clone.
The Big Money on Slate has more:
Before the financial crisis hit, eighth-graders across the country were scheduled to take a new test this fall, their first to get into college. The exam is called ReadiStep, and it's a new standardized test that simultaneously says it's "low-stakes" while also being a "vital step" toward getting ready to get a bachelor's degree. It's all multiple-choice, and it's split into three parts: reading, writing, and math. The test will offer teachers "insight into students' academic progress and early feedback that enables them to help students create a road map for success." Plus, administering the exam "helps create a college-going culture"—don't we have one already?—and the results are "predictive" of PSAT scores. PSAT scores, of course, are predictive of SAT scores, which are predictive of where one gets into college. ReadiStep is poised to become a new rite of passage for American youths.
But the test is not provided by the federal government. Nor is it a brainchild of state and local school boards or mandated by No Child Left Behind. It's provided by the College Board, the same organization that administers the PSAT and the SAT. It was originally supposed to launch this fall, but was postponed due to economic circumstances. . . . For students, ReadiStep is the gateway to a life of bubble-sheets and No. 2 pencils.
For the College Board, it's another way to make tons of money.
ReadiStep will cost 10 bucks a pop, which will likely be paid by school districts. That money goes straight to the College Board, just like all of the revenue generated by its other standardized tests. Read more....
The article sheds much light on the true nature of the selfless-sounding entities known as "non-profits." The president of the "non-profit" College Board pocketed a saintly salary of
$673,757 in 2006, an 88 percent increase from his initial starting salary," and "the College Board has 10 senior vice presidents and 28 vice presidents; senior staff members make an average of $239,374 in compensation. These numbers are presumed to have gone higher since 2006."
Who needs profit when two years at a non-profit can make you a millionaire? Thanks, charitable donors and taxpayer-financed government grants!
Again, please sign the petition here. This is getting ridiculous. Let's spare our 12-year-olds the anxiety of thinking bubbles determine their fate, and instead teach them that they have much more control over their lives than those bubbles do.
Attend Yale in Your Underwear - with Open Courseware
Published May 26, 2009 @ 02:17PM PT
A refreshing take on Bible study.
I'm halfway through the first of 24 lectures from Yale's Religious Studies: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) course from 2006. Click on that link and you can download all the lectures as videos, plus transcripts of them, and course reading assignments (unfortunately, the readings themselves aren't included, so you're stuck with either buying the texts yourself, or playing the classic college student game of skipping the reading altogether and relying wholly on the lectures to understand the content).
It beats the hell out of American Idol.
She's a good lecturer, though I'm tempted to quibble with some of her characterizations of the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian culture and religion already. But I'll wait until she gets into it more deeply in future lectures.
Religious Studies not your bag? The world of Open Courseware surely can fill it with something to your tastes. Check out Open Yale's full online (and again, free) course offerings to see for yourself.
It doesn't end with Yale, of course. I'm also following UC Berkeley's Modern European History course. Check here for all of Berkeley's courses that offer video lectures in all their departments.
Finally, there's iTunes University. You can download podcasts on many subjects there as well. (And read this little piece of research showing students learned better watching lectures on their iPods than they did sitting in the lecture hall.)
Search Google for "Open Courseware" for more.
High school, maybe even middle school, teachers should consider showing some Yale lectures to their students. The level of language and concepts seems entirely appropriate for teens, at least in the introductory courses. It might demystify the realities of college for these students, and lower their anxieties about what college demands. And you can certainly do worse than a Yale professor for a "guest lecturer" in your classrooms.
Asian Students and Western Teachers: Down the Rabbit-Hole
Published May 25, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT
I finished cultural psychologist Richard E. Nisbett's The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (Free Press, 2003) last week - which I swear I'm not reading because I'm in my second year of marriage to a Korean - and marked a few more tidbits to share (see previous posts on this topic here).
Today's tidbit should interest any history or literature teachers who have East Asians - mainly Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, and Japanese - in their classrooms. Having taught English and history in Asian-dominated international schools in China and Korea over the last eight years, I'll be the first to admit a long-running, low-key bewilderment about these students in my history and literature classes. While they were generally capable of learning the content and demonstrating that learning in assessments, there was a hugely noticeable difference between them and their Western classmates in terms of their pleasure in that learning, their capacity to have what I call "omigod" reactions to some of the wildest plot twists in the great stories of literature or history. While the Western students gasped, the Asian students conformed to the most notorious stereotypes in Western culture of Asian impassivity and inscrutability. They just seemed to be following altogether different scripts - and Nisbett's book suggests things appeared that way to me because they are that way in fact.
Nisbett summarizes these differences toward the end of his book:
I have presented a large amount of evidence to the effect that Easterners and Westerners differ in fundamental assumptions about the nature of the world, in the focus of attention, in the skills necessary to perceive relationships and to discern objects in a complex environment, in the character of causal attribution, in the tendency to organize the world categorically or relationally, and in the inclination to use rules, including the rules of formal logic (189-90).
Before going further, I should share that my Korean brother-in-law, when I told him about this book, asked with some suspicion, "Is it saying the Western way is better than the Eastern?" The answer, thankfully, is no. Nisbett does entertain possible advantages and disadvantages to the Greek/individualist/essentialist versus Confucian/communal/relativist hard-wiring of the two cultures' ways of perceiving, thinking, and behaving; but he spreads his praise and blame evenly, in ways instructive to both East and West. (More than once, I added marginalia such as "If only Joel Klein and Arne Duncan were less Greek-agentic, and more Chinese-contextual, in their thinking about education reform." But maybe that's a later post.)
Now, on to that "tidbit."
After presenting evidence that Westerners are more prone to assume objects and individuals cause events, while Asians assign greater causal agency to an event's context and relation of forces - that Westerners, in other words, are more analytic, while Asians are more holistic - Nisbett then presents a study or two suggesting that the Asian appreciation for the complexity of any event gives them an advantage of "open-mindedness" over Westerners, an ability to consider more factors as relevant than their simplistic counterparts. A disadvantage to this holism, though, emerges when Asians are tasked to think causally: the sensitivity to a larger number of causative factors makes any predictions and hypotheses far more difficult to formulate. Everything is so complex, any outcome seems an equally plausible coin-toss (or, better, a roll of several dice).
Finally, the rub: the "Asian yawn v. Western gasp" scenario so common in my classes receives some explanatory light in the next section. Nisbett and a psychologist at a Korean university collaborated on an experiment to see if Asian holism reduced the Asian capacity to be "surprised by unanticipated outcomes." They presented studies to Korean and American participants, and gave them either one hypothesis about each study, or two contradictory hypotheses. They then had both groups read the actual study and its findings regarding the hypothesis.
Nisbett gives an example of a study that found that realism is better for mental health than idealism. The Americans who read two conflicting hypotheses found the results of the actual study more interesting and surprising. The Koreans? Yawn. The ones who read both hypotheses before reading the study confirmed one and rejected the other were no more surprised or interested than the ones who read only one hypothesis.
Bringing this back to the classroom, it was very tempting for me to attribute my Asian students' blasé reactions to an unflattering simple-mindedness, apathy, or any number of other negative qualities. If Nisbett is right - and he adduces overwhelming evidence that he is - then the joke, and the simple-mindedness, was on me. The Asian students reacted as they did because they see the world as a far more complicated thing than Westerners - including their teacher here - do. They're not surprised because their culture has inculcated in them since birth an appreciation for complexity that makes surprise far harder to come by. Be surprised when reality confounds our causal expectations? That's like being surprised that the sky is blue.
Let me end this object lesson in culturally responsive pedagogy with the same delicious twist Nisbett gives to end this chapter: there's still an advantage to Western simple-mindedness. Nisbett draws it out by observing that the scientific notion of "action at a distance" - think gravity - was far more at home in Chinese philosophy than in Western. But the complexity of Asian causal thinking left them helpless to scientifically prove this principle. That was left to Westerners who, ironically, were trying to prove, with a very wrong-headed and simple-minded causal model, the opposite: "that all motion was of the billiard ball type, with objects moving only because they come into contact with some other object" (134).
So grab the book. It's a fun read, and sure to help you better understand your Korean wife Asian students - and yourself as a Western husband teacher.
Image by Jonathan_W
Criticizing Capitalism in Classrooms: Taboo? or Good Citizenship?
Published May 11, 2009 @ 10:23PM PT
The New York Times published an article this week on how teachers in classrooms around the world are using the environmental advocacy video, "The Story of Stuff," to get students to think about the consequences of our high-consumption, throw-away lifestyles. Teachers, scientists, and curriculum experts all agree that textbooks do a horrible job covering this topic, and argue that global warming and other environmental crises make it too important to ignore, or to give the three-paragraph short shrift alloted to it by textbooks. Here's the video on YouTube (the Story of Stuff website has a Flash version, with many resources not available on YouTube):
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The Times gives two examples of evidence that the video works to make students re-think their consumption habits: a 9-year-old boy struggles over the consequences of buying a Lego set at a "big box" store, and a high school senior persuades her mother to stop buying bottled water - "the bottles don't just disappear after we use them" - and to install a tap filter instead.
Some parents, though, complain that it is "anticapitalist" and "biased," and object to its use in the classroom.
Their complaints raise interesting questions: Is capitalism a subject that is to be shielded from criticism in classrooms out of ideological loyalty? Is capitalism unable to change and adapt in the face of emergent signs of its unsustainability? Or can shining an honest spotlight on its problems in classrooms lead to next-generation entrepreneurs and policy-makers who lead capitalism in healthier and more sustainable directions in the future?
As for that "bias" charge, it points, as member Jodi Rice points out, to recent discussions in this space about teaching students to think critically about their textbooks. One teacher using "The Story of Stuff" in his classroom in Portola Valley, California, did exactly that: he had his students create a series of video responses to the film, criticising what they felt was a too-heavy reliance on fear and a too-light inclusion of constructive suggestions. Here's the first video:
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More interesting was what happened next: students at a school in Mendocino, California saw the students' video, and made their own to suggest the kind of constructive responses possible. "Don't be scared," they say: "Here are your options." And here they are:
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It's all so interesting on so many levels. I wonder if Portola students ever responded to their peer teachers in Mendocino. It's certainly nothing like the analog schooling of my childhood.
