Tricotomania and more

Franklin’s post on the election campaign is absolutely fabulous. Why hadn’t we noticed the uncanny resemblance between Delores and Sarah before? Go read. And offer to host Delores on a campaign tour.

In both the US and Canadian elections this seems to be the major campaign strategy: Don’t mention the war. Argue about lipstick and hairstyles and who is allowed to participate in leader’s debates and puffins. Anything to avoid mentioning the war.

Becky pointed me in the direction of this brilliant article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic. Lots of history and a terrifying conclusion. Even more frightening is the fact that John McCain himself thinks that his views on war will not win him this election. He’s not really talking about them. Why are his opponents not talking about them? Pro-Death. That’s what he is. The death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and possibly Iranians. And Americans in the process. But are the lives of Iraqis, Iranians, Afghans really worth less than American lives. And is this not worth debating.

At the same time, just before the election was called up here north of the border a study came out showing that most Canadians are not happy with the role our military is playing in Afghanistan. The only mention of the war that has been made so far is Stephen Harper trying to make a statement that will end the possibility of debate. Again, where is the opposition. We have more than 2 parties in this game. Where is the debate?

Following on from that last post, I wanted to make it clear that I have no problem with drugs either medicinally or recreationally. My main problem is with a dominant debate about drugs that says that if they are sold to you by some black guy on the corner (and, lets face it, that’s who the bad guy drug dealer is pictured to be) you should “just say no” but if they are sold to you buy a medical doctor who had them sold to him/her by someone in a suit representing some big company with a multi-part name reflecting a solid history of corporate mergers, then this is a good thing and you don’t need to know any more. This is BS. Both sides.

So, as many folks pointed out in the comments, Ritalin and other drugs prescribed for ADHD and whatnot are stimulants. And there are perfectly good stimulants in most of our kitchens and, if not, easily available in a grocery store near you. Now technically, caffeine is not a drug. It’s a food. And anyone who tries to tell you that social construction is a crock should try to explain why that is without reference to the fact that it is because the government says so. The distinction is all about how the stuff is regulated. From the point of view of whether it has a particular kind of impact on the chemical and electrical processes in your brain, caffeine is in the same group as Ritalin. But it’s an amateur drug. No prescription required.

As comments on the last post pointed out, however, it can be highly effective in helping folks with ADHD concentrate and focus. In fact, unless I am mistaken, the pros cut their amphetamine with a bit of caffeine when they make their prescription remedies. Now it is up to you whether you decide to medicate your kids with caffeine (just like it is with the pro drugs) but if you do, I suspect you want to give them some safety tips. It is also socially acceptable (and legal!) to take caffeine recreationally. Lots of people do it. You may need to get used to the taste of your source of choice but experiment and see what you like. There is plenty of advice available. And the price covers quite a range so you should be able to find something good in your price range.

Different sources of caffeine contain different amounts/doses. You might want to start with something light like tea. Dark roast coffee apparently has less than mild roast. Sugar is also a stimulant so be aware that you are combining drugs when you put sugar in your tea/coffee or when you drink cola.

Don’t take more than you need. That might mean that you don’t want a whole can of cola which is a drag because it only seems to come in large containers. But coffee/tea cups come in different sizes and, if you brew your own, you get to fill them. So start with small cups. Heck the Italians traditionally use really small cups.

Common symptoms of a mild overdose include a jittery feeling. This will go away on its own. Try not to take so much the next time. If you get heart arrhythmia you might want to really cut back. (personal experience; it also goes away but I now drink half-decaf) If you drink way too much you might end up with stomach problems. Really 12 cups a day is a problem however you slice it. (that was my dad’s personal experience during the period immediately after he quit smoking) Despite what others will tell you, caffeine and high stress environments don’t usually add up to good things.

Some folks find that their sleep is disrupted if they take too much. This might mean that you can’t take any after about 2 p.m. Or it might mean that you have to reduce the dose more radically. Experiment until you figure it out. It is a bad idea to complement your stimulants with depressants to help you sleep. And the long term effects of sleep deprivation are not good.

All the normal rules about food apply. Think about the source. How well are the workers treated? Has this stuff been treated with pesticides and whatnot that might still be in the final product? Too much sugar rots your teeth (important consideration if cola is your preferred source).

My personal principles include: don’t drink instant coffee; buy fair trade; organic is probably good, too; drink the best stuff you can afford; half-decaf is a good way to limit the caffeine dose but keep the social aspect.

If anyone has further tips to add, chime in in the comments.

As Tigger approaches adolescence, I occasionally consider issues like drug education. Talking with a younger friend recently, I learned that the drug of choice for university aged kids these days seems to be Ritalin or similar, often obtained via friends with a prescription. I have all kinds of issues with the over-medication of our children, and this just seemed to add another good reason to be concerned.

And then yesterday I saw a really interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It is one that is secured to subscribers but it is very interesting. The author, Nicolas Rasmussen, gives us a brief history of amphetamines. (I don’t think I had realized that Ritalin and other drugs prescribed for ADHD were actually speed, but it makes a lot of sense.) The drug was invented in 1929 but didn’t come into widespread use until after WWII. The American military has been one of the main pushers of this type of drug, providing it for soldiers in combat and ignoring any addictive properties. In the 1950s and ’60s, amphetamine was prescribed for a whole range of ills from depression to obesity. And much of the non-prescribed abuse of amphetamine was acquired through prescription users. Controls on production and distribution were tightened in the early 1970s.

But now, apparently, it’s back. And in force. The main driver now is treatment of ADHD and related issues. As Rasmussen points out, proportionately amphetamine use is not as high as it was in 1969 but that is because we now have a much broader range of drugs to treat what amphetamines were prescribed for 40 years ago.

So the amphetamine-assisted, physician-abetted social adjustment of yore is back as a mass phenomenon. But it does not, at first glance, represent as severe a problem proportionally. There are fewer than 10 million medical and nonmedical amphetamine users today, whereas the population has increased from 200 million to 300 million since 1969. Amphetamine use is therefore less than two-thirds as prevalent as it was in 1969. But we might expand our purview beyond simple statistics to ask a broader sociological question: Has the medical demand that amphetamines once filled abated? Apparently not. Counting all the medicines used now for conditions that amphetamine once treated — depression, obesity, and “fatigue,” or inadequate working attention — we can estimate that, proportional to population, each year roughly twice as many Americans now take a drug that would, in 1969, have very likely been an amphetamine.

That calculus suggests that if the amphetamine epidemic of the 1960s was symptomatic of a deep-rooted social disease — drug use to meet unwholesome expectations of incessant cheeriness, unnatural productivity, and extreme slimness, and to boost the postwar consumerist ethos that the sociologist David Riesman once called the “fun morality” — then America is now twice as sick. When Allen Ginsberg helped open the counterculture’s own anti-amphetamine campaign in 1965 under the slogan “speed kills,” he wasn’t referring just to the drug that so many Americans relied on to keep up. He was also thinking of the demand that amphetamine satisfies. It might be time to think again about heeding his call.

Rasmussen has written a book, On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine. I suspect it might be very interesting.

For me, homeschooling has been part of a larger lifestyle shift that has been driven by resistance to precisely this culture. Working for myself. Working less. Not rushing around trying to do everything possible. Growing and cooking my own food. Sleeping more. All of these things are part of resisting the culture of speed. And when I meet folks who are employed, I am continuously stunned by the extent to which they just accept the normality of working overtime for no extra pay; of feeling (and being) overloaded; of not having time for themselves. This can happen with homeschoolers and the self-employed, too, but I think we have more opportunities to consciously resist these demands. Or at least to recognize that we are putting them on ourselves.

Thinking about it, perhaps the beauty of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (which I posted about almost exactly a year ago) is that it sets out a life lived to this different rhythm: seasonal, slow, human.

Maybe the real drug pushers, the ones we need to be worried about, are all those who normalize our culture of overwork including, but not limited to, those who would prescribe medication to enable individuals to keep up that pace.

Willa has sent me off to read more interesting things. In addition to the points she drew out of this post at Rational Mathematics Education, I wanted to highlight what seems to me a very sound argument for the negative political consequences of the dominant mode of mathematics education.

The piece starts with a long, and very interesting, quote from Fred Goodman, in which he elaborates on the importance of games (as distinct from puzzles) in mathematics education. It is from this that Willa quoted and pondered. I note particularly his statement:

As the world moves closer and closer to a world where Gods collide and their followers depend with greater and greater certainty on the correctness of their God’s solution, we need to look more closely at the relations that might exist between games, Gods and grades. If learning is conceived primarily as a matter of finding the one correct answer according to the teacher who already knows the answer, and students’ sense of worth is tied to their ability to discover, understand and accept that correct answer, we may be encouraging, even in our secular schools, a tendency towards sectarian thinking.

As I have been reading about mathematics and physics, I am struck by the sense of uncertainty, of working towards better knowledge but of never having the “right” answer. Indeed in First You Build a Cloud, there is a whole chapter on Right and Wrong, which explains the ways that physicists see these questions. And they are very different from dogmatic approaches. She quotes physicist David Bohm:

The notion of absolute truth is shown to be in poor correspondence with the actual development of science. … Scientific truths are better regarded as relationships holding in some limited domain.

I got the same impression from the Keith Devlin book that I reviewed a few weeks ago.

Goldenberg, the author of Rational Mathematics Education, goes on the connect Goldman’s long discussion to the broader issue of democracy:

The mentality that has been used to teach mathematics to the masses in this country (and in many others) has for far too long been grounded in authoritarianism. It cannot be a coincidence that progressive-minded reformers continue to call for approaches to classroom teaching that are more student-centered and which stress communication of mathematical ideas, offering sound reasoning for mathematical answers and procedures, while anti-reformers decry this as “time-wasting,” “fuzzy,” and somehow too “touchy-feely” to matter.

and later

my concern here is for the way that subjects are taught and what the political lessons are that aren’t explicitly stated or acknowledged. And those lessons are fundamentally anti- and undemocratic. The focus upon single right answers that are arrived at by (generally) one approved method speaks volumes towards the underlying values of the teacher, the school, the district, right on up through the state and federal governments. The job of students becomes not learning and thinking, but anticipating what teachers expect exactly as they expect it: no less, and generally no more. And therein lie a host of tragedies, even were there not the anti-democratic issues to consider.

I cannot do justice to the argument with excerpts. The whole piece, basically a long quote from Goodman followed by further discussion by Goldberg, is excellent and raises many important points. As many homeschoolers already know, the idea that learning comes in neatly divided boxes labeled “mathematics”, “civics”, “language”, etc is a fiction. What this article nicely points out is that it is a dangerous fiction.

In the frontispiece of First You Build A Cloud, I find this quote:

Newton himself, as well as those … who attacked him … would have all alike been amazed at the more recent contention that natural science has nothing to do with “values,” that it can and should itself remain “value-free,” and that those seeking a direction for human life have nothing to learn from our best knowledge of the nature of things. Even a little science … is a thing of infinite promise for human values. (John Herman Randall, Jr., Newton’s Philosophy of Nature)

Whatever our values, we need to be aware of how the methods we use to teach are promoting or undermining them.

I have just read The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz thanks to Willa. Wow. There is so much in there. It is long but worth it.

Some of what he says is not new, but it might be time to hear it again. Particularly the stuff about reproducing class. And about how once you get into an Ivy League you almost automatically get a whole lot of privileges. But that those outcomes (the “good” jobs, etc.) aren’t necessarily based on the quality of the learning.

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world (unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale.

I also liked his take on what a “good” post-university job might be.

When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

When I think of my own criticisms of the public debate about higher education today many of these issues are at the root of it: credentialism, the implicit (and sometimes explicit) hierarchy of possible careers, the implicit (and sometimes explicit) valuing of careers by their earning potential. There is plenty of food for thought in this article and I highly recommend it.

As some of you know, I’m on the board of the Alternatives to Marriage Project. We know that a significant number of Americans of voting age are unmarried at any given time. But how involved are they in the political process? If you are unmarried, American, and of voting age, please take a couple of seconds to respond to AtMP’s poll about voting behaviour. One question:

We know that barely half of unmarried people voted for president in 2004. And we know that lots more people are turning out to vote in 2008. But we haven’t seen any reports about changes in unmarried voter turnout - so we need to write the report ourselves! Politicians won’t respect us and our lives unless they know that we vote. Help us tell the real story about how much unmarried people care and vote. Did you vote (or caucus) in this year’s presidential primary?

Thanks.

We have talked before about how to present the history of WWII without falling into the trap of thinking it was all about liberating the Jews. Not that the Holocaust isn’t an important topic or that we should avoid teaching about it, but it wasn’t the primary reason for the war and presenting it as such seems a serious distortion.

Well, today I was reading the most recent Guardian Weekly and an editorial caught my attention. Peter Wilby argues precisely this point and goes on to show how presenting WWII as being motivated by humanitarian concerns has affected later foreign policy debates, or at least the public justification of foreign policy decisions. A few extracts to entice you to click the link:

… the war was not fought for humanitarian or democratic ends. Britain fought Germany for the same reason it had always fought wars in Europe: to maintain the balance of power and prevent a single state dominating the continent. America fought Japan to stop the growth of a powerful rival in the Pacific.

and

Romanticising the second world war has led us into foreign policy traps ever since. We look for new crusades against new Hitlers and new Mussolinis. We yearn to cheer our young men into “good wars”, to fight wars once more against the simple badness of fascism. Blair thought he could detect a national interest in fighting Saddam because he was so anxious to emulate Churchill and defeat “evil”. Hitler was monstrous: but we fought him, not for that reason, but because he was trying to make his country a rival, using force where necessary.

Exactly. Didn’t that guy Marx say something about those who don’t understand history…

Elsie had a post about Goals, Objectives, Standards and the like that raises some interesting points. It made me realize that part of the problem is the woeful lack of understanding of statistics both in the general population and in professions who are using statistical information to provide advice (or even design regulations). So here is a little Statistics 101 conceptual refresher to help you deal with educational standards, like the definition of “on grade level”.

Developmental milestones, in health and in education, are based on statistical data on very large populations of children. They are averages of some sort. Those numbers are very meaningful for large populations, which can be expected to have about the same level of diversity as the even larger population from whom the figures are derived. So, for example (and using made up numbers), if you were to say that “on average” children learn to read by age 6, this would mean that in a very large population when you add up the ages at which children learn to read and divide by the total number of children, 6 pops out (the mean). That number could be the average even if NOT ONE CHILD actually learned to read at age 6.

You might actually use a different kind of average, the median. If the median age at which children learn to read is 6, that means that 50% of children learn to read before (and including) 6 and 50% learn to read after (and including) 6. If you strung all the kids in the population out in a line ordered by the age at which they learned to read, the half-way mark of the line would be a kid aged 6. Or between two kids aged 6. Or between a kid age 5 and a kid age 7 (unlikely to happen but it illustrates the point that this could be the right median even if no individual kids actually learn to read at 6).

With either measure you can see that those numbers can be correct, for a population, even if large numbers of children learn to read at ages ranging from 3 to 12. What counts as “normal” is not the same as “average” (by either definition). If the range of ages at which children learn to read and the percentage of children learning to read at a particular age remains relatively stable over a period of time, then learning to read at any age within that range is “normal”. Unfortunately, those statistics are much less interesting and harder to understand so they don’t get talked about in the media and by politicians very often.
So what use is the average? It might be nice to think that statistics lie, but that wouldn’t be true. A statistical average can be a useful measure when comparing large populations. So, for example, if you wanted to compare the quality of education between one state and another state, you could look at the average age at which children learn to read (or some other measure of attainment, ideally several). There are enough children of each age in each state to make that comparison meaningful. With that size of population, you could assume that the variation should be within the same range. So if it is not, you would want to figure out why. That might be because of the quality of education, but it could also be because of the quality of library provision, or the percentage of the population with English as a second language, or something else.

It probably also makes sense to use these kinds of statistical averages to compare school districts though some might be getting small enough that the differences from the average could be the result of random variation (in other words, not problematic). At the level of individual schools, the populations are probably not big enough for the statistical averages to be significant. Having one kid out on the far end of the range could skew the average significantly even though it is “normal” for a certain percentage of the population to be at that far end of the range. That doesn’t stop many jurisdictions, including the UK, from using school level standardized test results to rank the quality of schools. The fact that some authority does it, doesn’t make it meaningful.

Statistical averages tell you NOTHING meaningful about an individual. And if someone tells you that the quality of education you are providing is poor because one student is performing below average then they are misusing statistics to lie to you. If you know the normal range then that information can help you work out where an individual fits in relation to the population as a whole. Sometimes that information will be expressed as percentiles or deciles. So if your child is in the 60th percentile on some standardized test, it means that her attainment is higher than 60% of all the children who took the test. The median is the 50th percentile. Deciles cut the population into 10 groups. It is also helpful to know something about how the attainment varies between each decile because most of the population is likely to fall in a relatively narrow range, with fewer people at the outliers (the famous belled curve). So variation within the 5th decile might be minimal, but within the 1st and 10th decile might be considerable. The number of people within each decile is the same.

Do not get confused. If the results of some test say that your child is in the 60th percentile that DOES NOT mean that your child scored 60% on the test. It means that whatever your child scored was higher than what 59% of the test takers scored, and lower than what 39% of the test takers scored. Ideally, those percentiles will be calculated over a large enough population, like the whole state, or all individuals who took that particular test over the past 5 years or something.

Broader notions of grade levels are also based on some understanding of statistical average attainment for kids of a particular age. Ideally, those understandings should take into account the normal range of attainment within a particular age group. A good teacher should be able to work with reasonably diverse group in terms of ability and attainment. Unfortunately, the rise of standardized testing (and funding linked to performance in standardized tests) and ever more detailed “state standards” or “provincial curriculum” make it difficult for teachers to do this, as Elsie points out. It is important to remember that most school systems are graded by age, not by attainment. It is only a very small minority of children who will be held back; and a similarly small minority that will be accelerated. The combination of that with the narrowing of the acceptable range means that ever more kids need to be diagnosed with some “learning disability” in order get even some of their learning needs met. But that is another story.

For homeschooling parents, these notions are practically meaningless unless you are actually going to put your kids into school and need to know whether they are going to be ahead or behind the kids in their grade. What is important at the level of the individual, as opposed to the population, is whether a child is developing. Does your child know more now than she did 12 months ago? Has your child developed new skills or improved any skills? You only need to be worried if your child is stagnating or is going backwards. And that would be a trend over a period of time, not a few days. Development is notoriously uneven. You might also be worried if development is particularly slow. Slow development or lack of development might indicate an underlying problem that could be addressed. Development in some areas might happen more quickly or at different times than in another area. A certain amount of judgement, and perhaps advice from trusted others (including doctors, psychologists, etc) is required to work out if this is a “problem” or just what normal looks like for your kid.

The other thing this means is that, politically, it is in our interests to ensure that statistical measures are not being used inappropriately to judge us or to judge schooled children. If education policy misuses statistics to develop methods of working, regulations, test, funding formulas or whatever, that misuse will impact us. It may take a while. But if other kids are expected to meet certain milestones by a certain age, then sooner or later someone is going to ask that your kids be required to meet those milestones. And if it isn’t good for your kids, then you can bet there are at least some kids in the system who are also disadvantaged by it. Even if we don’t use them, public schools are provided on our behalf to provide an education for anyone who needs it. How much we do about it is up to us. But if we have opportunities to point out the misuse of statistics in formulating policy, we should take them. Even explaining the problem to relatives and friends increases the general understanding in the population. And challenging elected representatives who put forward these crazy proposals is probably a good idea.

Thanks to Shaun for sending me over to read something on Elsie’s blog. Elsie has written a few posts recently that get into some of the fundamental questions about the politics of education. She has been a school teacher and now homeschools and has some very thoughtful posts on the relationship between those two roles.

Reading some of these have reinforced some ideas I’ve had for a while. It would be good for homeschoolers and teachers to try to understand their points of commonality and also their differences and then to work together to address some of the bigger problems with education in many of our countries. Because the problem isn’t fundamentally about the teachers. It is about the mistrust of teachers, demands for accountability of a particular sort, and larger political decisions about both the funding of schools and how we will make schools accountable. Teachers as much as homeschoolers suffer from too much emphasis on standardized testing. And many of the good teachers have left the system because they don’t think “teaching to the test” is good teaching.