Selling Education (Part 1)

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Seonaid

As I may have mentioned, I have spent much of the last 8 months immersed in marketing courses. There’s a knack to marketing, but it’s not rocket science… and I would know.(1) It makes perfect sense. Figure out what you have that’s worth selling, to whom, and how to find and contact those people that will go, “ooh! ooh! That’s exactly what I’m looking for! I’m so glad you found me!” and shower you with money and compliments. (That’s called “social proof”, BTW.)

At any rate, one day I was sitting with my Book of Many Questions spread in front of me, and it said, “Clear benefits that you offer: ” And I froze, like a deer caught in headlights. Benefits. Of education that doesn’t come with a degree that allows you to participate in the ongoing education process… what is the intrinsic benefit of education? What are the instrumental benefits? What is education for, anyway? (1b)

Fortunately (I guess), I have already spent several years considering that set of questions. So I had a starting point, at least. (2)

Let me start at the top of my one-page mindmap that resulted from “Thinking about Education: In which I attempt to answer the question, why should anybody pay me to teach them something in the first place?”, (3) on which is written “Heuristics” and “Hermeneutics”. I invoke the sociological concept of “ideology” as a failure to recognize that a worldview is a temporary model, an interpretation (if you will) of the universe (the text). It includes a portion that compares Fractals, Emergence, and Entropy to the transmission and memory of stories, and George Kelly’s Personal Construct Theory. Human needs appear on a spectrum from “staying alive” to “being whole”, there is a comparison of consciousness and reactivity… Myth. Spiritual Materialism. Communities of practice. Problems of translation. “Physicists speak math.” Neil Postman’s point that as teachers we must necessarily sacrifice comprehensiveness for coherence… and it ends with the following statement:

The purpose of education is to communicate (as clearly as we can) the stories and models that (in our experience) provide effective means of predicting and influencing the patterns of the universe (1) of which we are a part, (2) which we can affect, and (3) to which we are subject.

And then I sat back, and thought, “Well, then, what does it mean that we’ve made it a private good?” (4) and then I went to Toronto for a week and wrote poems instead of coming up with an answer.

To be continued…

1. That joke is one of the fringe benefits of a physics education.
1b. I also don’t know who my target market is. Really, what I’ve learned is that I don’t think like a marketer. Or possibly that marketing is harder than rocket science. Or maybe that I’m better at rocket science than I am at marketing.
2. Honestly? This would be easier if I knew less. Then I’d be able to take a side, dig my heels in, and puff smoke at anyone who took a contrary position.
3. You are in no way expected to follow and/or believe the free-association that follows.
4. As you can see, I wandered away from the marketing problem and back to the one that I was writing about five years ago, which falls into the “important, but not urgent” category.

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Thinking about Thinking

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Seonaid

When this picture was taken, I was actually thinking about trees. Photo credit: D.J. King, (who does some wonderful portraits and lives in Calgary, if you happen to need such a thing.)

You might not be surprised to hear that I’m big on metacognition. It’s one of my things. It might actually be my thing.

I have struggled with this, because in the academic world I was brought up in, one does not become an expert in process, one becomes an expert in object. The topics in most courses are existing thoughts and models of the world, not where those came from or what to do with them. When we write papers, we are expected to summarize the results of our thought processes, not to expose the thought processes themselves. (This mistake tends to lead to such comments on undergrad papers as, “rambling and incoherent.” This may be true. It might alternatively be, “circuitous and experimental.” One is bad writing, the other art. Avant garde or confused? Sometimes only time will tell. Although usually? It’s just bad writing.)

When I was studying physics, I was interested in the experimental methods, not the outcomes of the experiment. I fear that I didn’t care about the crystal structures of halogenated methanes, although the idea that you could use particular methods on particular materials intrigued me. I liked preparing samples, running experiments, figuring out what experiment might work next… but the main body of the work was in analyzing the data, sitting in front of a computer doing the same thing again, and again, and again.

When I was studying education, I was interested in what claims could be made and how to support them. I like teaching. No, I love teaching. I live for the moment that the eyes light up! But I don’t just want to teach the things I already learned. I want to teach people how to learn. Why are doing this? What’s the point?

When I was working with faculty members to develop their courses, I was interested in (and tasked with) the structure, not the content. I designed a course about designing courses. I’m all about the framework.

Until very, very recently, I have considered this a flaw. A failure in my character. An inability to commit to one line of investigation and see it thought to its conclusion. Occasionally, I have despaired. OK. Frequently, I have despaired. I am a generalist, I have said, in a world that rewards specialization. But it’s not quite true. I have been telling myself a false story, one which is attached to a model of The University as The Place where thinkers go. If I can’t find a place there, I can’t be a thinker. More recently, The Media has supplanted The University. If only I could get something published, if only somebody in a place of judgement would deem my thoughts, my writing, my self worthy, my existence would be justified. It would be OK to be a generalist. I would have value in the world.

So here’s a different story for me to consider: I am an expert in metacognition. What have I done for 10,000 hours? I have investigated my own thought processes, the nature of thought, the support of truth claims, the structure of disciplinary knowledge, the construction of coherent models, and the ways in which teachers and students communicate their models to one another. I have constructed and torn down so many possible ways of knowing inside my own head that it’s a constant renovation project. I have thought deeply about thinking. I have been reluctant to make these claims, because they are the landscape of the philosopher, the professor, the specialist in the discipline. I tend to believe that I’m not entitled to form a critique of something until I have succeeded at it, and my strongest critique is of the structures in the education system, particularly the post-secondary education system. And then I think, “Well, maybe I’m just bitter?” I ponder, construct, deconstruct, consider, philosophize… and come back again and again and again to, “People are going to say that I’m just bitter because I couldn’t make it as an academic.”

I still love the university! It has libraries, and theatres, and people to talk to, and frankly, it pays the bills. (“Many of my dearest friends are professors,” she protested feebly.) But honestly? There’s some truth there. I’m a little bitter. I’m a little frustrated that I have never found my path, that I’ve never had a full time permanent job, that I have become an expert in something that everybody says is so valued in our society, but that I can’t seem to find a way of turning it into gainful employment other than by trimming off the majority of the skill and finding a market for the portion that is left. I happen to think that it is wasteful to have me working at a job that only requires a high school diploma. I find myself apologizing for my education, which is both too much and inadequate, depending on where I stand.

Well, no more, I say! I’m thinking about thinking, and I’m proud! My next two posts are going to be titled, “I see your Levinas and raise you a Wittgenstein” (which is about internet comments and the limits of knowledge. I promise it requires no knowledge of either Levinas or Wittgenstein.) and “Why are we here, anyway?” (which is, tangentially, also about internet comments). There will also be, as time goes on, “Writing about Writing”.

All of which is an elaborate precursor to saying that I’m back, and that I’m in transition to taking my own writing seriously as a tool of engagement with the world. I’m willing to be subjective because I’m a subject! I have a position. And part of my position is that we generalists need to find a different way of being in the world, one that doesn’t require us to leave behind, immerse, drown, or amputate parts of our selves. When we judge ourselves by the same standards by which we are judged, those of the specialist and the expert, of course we are found wanting. We can’t change that part of the world, but we don’t have to subject ourselves to it. (See what I did there? Subject/subject. Noun/verb. Actor/acted upon? Oooh! I love when words do that.)

And then we need to find new ways of making a living. Because waiting for the path to appear? That way madness lies.

(I know. I’ve thought about it.)

Filed under: Essays and Musings, WorldView | Tagged: , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Ten Fundamentals

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Seonaid

Welcome to the March Carnival of Natural Parenting: Natural Parenting Top 10 Lists

This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama. This month our participants have shared Top 10 lists on a wide variety of aspects of attachment parenting and natural living. Please read to the end to find a list of links to the other carnival participants.

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I have a friend who asks me hard questions. It’s part of what ties our friendship together across the years and the miles: we go on long drives and she asks me hard questions. What is fundamental? How do you know what is true? What do you know? It’s great to have a friend like that, because it keeps me honest.

Being childfree herself, she is fiercely committed to my children, who are part of her hope for the future. So, partly in the vein of Extreme Philosophy, partly to feed the Meta Monster, and partly for CL, here is my list of ten things I want my children to believe about the world that are the foundation of why I parent live this way.

Ten Things I Want My Children to Believe

  1. That the world is basically safe
    I know that this is not true for all places and all times. But where we live, you can drink the tap water, you can play in the yard, you can go for a walk. There are germs, but they are not lurking under every passing bush or on every surface of every public space. There are coyotes and foxes in the forest, and there is a river at the end of the driveway. There are cars to be avoided. But these are not reasons to stay inside, and they are not things to fear. They are risks to be mitigated.
  2. That people can be trusted
    “People” starts with their parents. This means that I need to become a trustworthy person, and keep working on my own stuff. It also means that I surround them with trustworthy and healthy people who will reinforce their strengths. This has partly meant seeking out the natural parenting community here, but it has also meant maintaining strong friendships with chosen family, those people who care for my children as if they were blood. Once again, I’m not naive. I know that not all people are worthy of trust, and I am teaching my children about boundaries and autonomy. I’m just avoiding that “dog eat dog” worldview that holds us back from cooperating enough to accomplish necessary change.
  3. That they are capable
    Human beings learn stuff. That’s what they do. Kids will become fully functional adults, with talents, and skills, and knowledge, and the ability to get through the world, as long as we don’t get in their way. My job is to make sure that they have access to the opportunities and resources that they need. Sometimes that involves classes, sometimes it involves reminders to practice things that they care about, and sometimes it involves giving them enough help that they can dig themselves out of a hole. But I can’t rescue them; they need to learn to rescue themselves, because I won’t always be there. And I can’t push them to reach their greatest potential, because I’m outside them, and I don’t actually know what that is. But they do, somewhere deep inside, and I want them to learn to trust that.
  4. The world is sacred and life is precious
    Sometimes, I am overwhelmed by this one, because it seems to be at odds with everything our culture holds to be true. I can’t make sense of most of the choices our systems lead to, but if we don’t reintegrate this, we will never make changes.
  5. That other people are as important as they are
    When I was calling this list out to my husband, our son came past and said, “You mean each person, right. Not all 7 billion other people are as important as me. Because that would be pretty silly, dividing my worth among 7 billion other people.” So I’ll let him have the word on this one.
  6. That they are as important as other people
    It would be very easy to let the needs of 7 billion other people overwhelm you. But you aren’t really dealing with 7 billion other people. You are always dealing with one other person. And so I try to help them deal with the world one human interaction at a time.
  7. Feminism is still necessary
    OK. My daughter wants to be a Mom when she grows up. And my youngest son trashes things just by picking them up too forcefully. And maybe I abandoned my career just when it was starting to look promising. Twice. I’m still not going to entertain any worldview that assumes that I am lesser because I happened to be born with a uterus. Nor am I willing to accept that mothering is less important work just because it is ubiquitous.
  8. It’s OK to ask for what you want
    Not only that, it is encouraged. Articulate. Be clear. Please, please, don’t ask me to guess why you are standing in front of me twisting your hands and murmuring “um…” Tell me what it is that you are after, because everything flows better when the communication is clear. Also, if you don’t ask for what you want, you are not as likely to get it.
  9. Nobody owes you a yes
    Oh, this was hard. Early on, we were working on not screaming, calming down, and asking politely. Then one night, my (then) 18-month old child, who was precociously verbal, said, “I calmed down. I calmed down.” And I almost cried, because I had to say to him, “Oh, sweetie. You worked so hard at calming down. But I still can’t give you what you asked for. Sometimes the answer is just No.” I felt awful. I don’t remember what it was, and I don’t remember the reason (I think we were in the car and he wanted something that was at home) but I remember the feeling that I had betrayed him. It wasn’t because the answer was no. It was because I hadn’t thought about that possibility. In retrospect, I can say that I was being unfair to myself, since he was about a year ahead of schedule and I hadn’t prepared myself for that possibility, either.
  10. Life is better when it is generously peppered with laughter
    Reading this list, it would be easy to imagine that our house was earnest beyond all belief. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We find ourselves laughing until the tears stream down our faces, gasping for breath. We get great pleasure from the world around us, the music we make with friends, and the food we grow and share. But it is the laughter that carries us through when I don’t believe.

Most of the things on this list are things that I only “think.” I haven’t integrated them into my core, and I still have to check my responses. I still have fears of things that I know rationally are not all that dangerous. I still want the people I love to conform to my expectations so that I don’t have to deal with disappointment. I still hiss at my children when I am frustrated, and scream when I get angry, and cry over the state of the world. But what I do believe is that the world will only get better if the next generation expects it to. So I am doing what I can to contribute to that.

And this is why.

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Carnival of Natural Parenting -- Hobo Mama and Code Name: MamaVisit Hobo Mama and Code Name: Mama to find out how you can participate in the next Carnival of Natural Parenting!

Please take time to read the submissions by the other carnival participants:

Filed under: Family, WorldView | Tagged: , , , , | 21 Comments »

Observations on an Urban Campus

Posted on February 23, 2011 by Seonaid

30,000 people live, work, and study here. It is a university.

If you were to walk into the soaring atrium of the central campus building, and were to stand for a moment, and really notice where you were, you would know that you had entered a temple. In ancient days such an edifice would be reserved for the gods, but at this place people pass through with heads lowered, cell phones raised, lost in conversation. Look up! The architect draws you into the conversation: knowledge is worthy of awe, merits such a building. Pause and reflect on the luxury of marble and polished wood in a building used only as a thoroughfare.

Let us not forget the books. The bookstore brings my long-deprived rural mind to the brink of tears – Oh! To possess such tomes! The words of the French philosopher: captured in the year I turned four, here translated and transcribed, so vividly conversational that I yearn to write a letter to the long-dead man, to ask what he thinks of all this.

Finding myself between lunch and coffee, imposing on the workday of friends still here, I wander, dumbfounded, so out of practice at this scale. I perform social experiments on the urban residents, smiling at strangers. I compliment a fun pair of canvas sneakers, and a (truly) great leather fedora. The clothes are sharper, the students better dressed, the technology shinier, the buildings bigger. I am in my faculty disguise; I could be on any campus in North America. But I am out of water.

What have they done with the Faculty of Education? When did I last use an elevator? I never noticed this weird courtyard before… They have double-decker buses! I am so thrilled with the double decker buses that I briefly ponder getting on one just for the fun of it.

And here is the highlight of my day, which is filled with wonders and good conversations with old friends. It gives me great pleasure (and, truth be told, hope) to see the young white man plastered with rainbows and bedecked with piercings, walking ahead of me, in animated conversation with the headscarfed woman in the jeans and backpack. Look! Right here! This is possible.

This is a university.

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Finding the Holy Grail

Posted on February 19, 2011 by Seonaid

Before Holy Grail, Fix Cars, Ferry Children. After Holy Grail, Fix Cars, Ferry Children

This week we finally got to a point that we’ve been working towards for the last twenty years: my husband got tenure. I think that this is an occasion that should include a ceremony involving funny hats, because lacking such ceremony, we’ve had trouble raising the energy that such an accomplishment merits.

Tenure is a widely misunderstood thing. It is a mark point in an academic career at which a university declares your work (finally) “good enough”. All that other stuff you did up until now – it is all weighed and measured, and stamped with a grade, and if your grades are good enough, then you get to stay. It is a big deal. Frankly, it is a really big deal, because a denial of tenure is tantamount to dismissal from the institution, and in the modern academic world, that frequently amounts to a dismissal from the entire academic community. So. Phew. Tenure. Protection of academic freedom. More ability to be controversial (which means something significantly more to a radical queer theorist than it does to a physicist, but, nonetheless. Yay! Academic freedom!) It is not a license to be sloppy or bad at your job, or to start doing bad research in other fields, although those are the stories that usually make the national press. It is confirmation. The last twenty years of work have paid off. You are “good enough.”

You would think that this would make us jubilant, that we would have a big celebration, that we would feel something resembling happiness. But in the end, the path was so long, and the final step so insignificant that there was no energy left for celebration. Relief, yes. Excitement, no.

In fact, he didn’t even announce it. It simply came up in conversation, “Well, I’ve got tenure now…” Me: “Your tenure came through? When did that happen?” Him: “Oh, my tenure letter came from the president a couple of days ago.” Me: “That’s nice. We should go for dinner or something.” Conversation continued along original lines. Then we couldn’t get the flat tire off the van, a necessary step in getting the whole family to dinner. We did manage to get the kids to their swimming lessons in the smaller car, and open a bottle of our homemade wine.

After tenure, fix cars, ferry children.

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But is it Technology?

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Seonaid

My daughter and I were working on her social studies project last night about technologies that are important to her. She had to have 10 pictures to paste onto a piece of paper, and to be able to talk about why she picked them. She quite quickly looked around our house and recognized that pretty much… well… everything in our house would count, other than the cats and the plants. What with one thing and another, we didn’t get the photos taken and printed, so we finally resorted to cutting out pictures from the flyers. It was pretty simple as tasks go: she would name a technology from the house and we would look for pictures of them. Chairs, lamps, kitchen appliances, TV… all simple.

We had a little trouble with finding a book, until I remembered that we had a school book order kicking around.

Then she got to the supermarket flyers. “What about juice?” she asked.

Hrm. What about juice? Made in a factory, concentrated, flavour packs added. Juice probably fits the broad definition, but maybe not for a grade 2 project. “How about juice boxes?” I suggested. We went searching for a more specific picture. It looked pretty much like this:

Then she pointed at a head of broccoli. “That’s not a technology, right?” “No. Broccoli is not a technology.”

She’s seven. I didn’t want to confuse things. But secretly I was thinking, “Hybrid broccoli, grown by industrial methods, shipped to a supermarket in Cape Breton in January. That sounds a lot like technology to me.”

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Gluons Make me Dance

Posted on November 3, 2010 by Seonaid

In a long ago meme in blogland, people offered to write posts about things that they don’t usually talk about. One of my friends going through old LJ posts asked me to write about the Standard Model of Physics. So here we go…

“At this final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicoloured universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron… So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art.” Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942

I didn’t know that I had a favourite sub-atomic particle until I was teaching a class on the Standard Model. Then I found myself at the front of the class, dressed in a suit, and hopping up and down. “Oh!” I clapped my hands, childlike! “This is the best part!” I suspect that there were a few raised eyebrows, but I was in Physics-Land, so I’m not entirely sure. I did catch myself, however, and sheepishly faced the classroom. “Gluons,” I said, “are really cool.”

The Gluon, you see, is the particle that holds everything together. I’d love to take you there, but we need to tunnel down through some levels of “reality” as we physics types describe it. You may have heard the word “quarks”, but I’ll start this exploration a little higher up, at the enormous scale of the atom. (1)

Let’s talk atoms

Richard Feynman once told us that if he were going to preserve only one piece of scientific knowledge, it would be that the universe is made of atoms. These are not a modern conception; they were originally envisioned by the ancient Greeks to be the indivisible building blocks of the universe, from which everything else is constructed. You might want to think of them as Lego, but don’t get too attached to that image, because it’s not very useful in the end. At very least you need to think of them as more than just those single-bump legos. Those can be Hydrogen, though. For now.

NOT TO SCALE! Image by Ryan Somma. Reused under Creative Commons license.

Everything is made of atoms, but atoms are made of still smaller particles: protons, neutrons and electrons. In the technical lingo, atoms are not fundamental particles. They contain a veeeeeery tiny core made of protons and neutrons surrounded by a cloud of electrons. What defines the type of atom (or the Element) you are looking at is the number of protons in the nucleus. Scientists have “observed” 118 elements at last count, but you need a particle collider to make anything heavier than plutonium, which is the 94th.(3)

High school chemistry may have steered you awry, because along the way we still teach a model of the atom with the electrons orbiting the nucleus like planets in the solar system. It’s only a stop on the way to the final destination. The math is simpler and it’s easier to picture… which makes it a dangerously enticing model, because it is wrong. Unless you need to calculate a hydrogen spectrum, you should throw it out, because it’s going to make things harder from here on in.

The sneaky but vital electron

Here’s the sneaky quantum part: electrons don’t really exist, not the way that you and I do (or the chairs, or table, or computer). Now, they are REAL, but they sort of, erm… blip in and out of existence as they interact with things. When you aren’t looking, they aren’t exactly there. But when you do look, or feel, there they are again. Electrons are key to all of our experiences of the world, so don’t abandon them. Just don’t imagine them as little plinko chips bouncing around. That will take you down a completely wrong path for imagining the structure of the universe. (4)

Touch your fingertips together for a moment. Try warming your hands by rubbing them quickly. Now feel a couple of different textures around you. Each of those interactions is a situation where electrons on one set of atoms are interacting with electrons in your skin. The electron clouds around atoms can’t go through one another, so you don’t fall through the chair you are sitting on. They also let you touch things, and feel the edge of your body. What’s more, the messages that travel up your arms and deliver themselves to your brain do so via a cascade of electron interactions. The same can be said of the chemical processes that allow your body to move, breathe, and live. Texture, temperature, taste, sight – all our perceptions of the world are made possible by the fact that electrons are not permanently bound to their nuclei. They vibrate, they absorb and emit energy, and they get moving so fast that they pop right off one atom and move to another.

Nothing you see is standing still. All around us, electrons are careening around, being struck by photons, attaching to new atoms, raising and lowering their energy states and kicking out radiation as a result. No panicking, here! When I say “radiation”, I mean heat and light, not just the scary stuff that runs a nuclear reactor. The atoms and molecules containing the electrons are doing the same things. That’s why your guitar doesn’t stay in tune, why your glass of water evaporates, and why your broken-down-car’s brakes are worse after it has been sitting for several months. At the material level, everything is in constant motion.

Teeny-tiny quarks and charge

Which brings us back, indirectly, to gluons. If you recall, the electrons in atoms are flitting about in clouds around a nucleus that is made of protons and neutrons. As far as we know, electrons are fundamental – that is, they don’t break down into anything smaller, and they have no internal structure. Protons and neutrons, on the other hand, are built of still-smaller particles: the quarks.(5)

But wait! Before I can talk about gluons and what they have to do with quarks, I have to talk about charge.

Remember the electron? The electron has a charge that we define as “negative”. Negative charges do not like to be too close together – they repel one another. Protons also have “charge”, which we define as “positive”. (pro = positive) Stay with me here, because protons repel one another every bit as much as electrons do, but they are jammed together into a much, much smaller space. If an atom containing electrons is a football stadium, the nucleus containing protons (and neutrons) is a marble at the middle. (6) The atom is held together by the attraction between the electrons and the protons, because opposite charges attract.

Quarks also have charge. I suspect that if they had been imagined earlier, the whole definition of charge would be different, but they weren’t, and it isn’t, so quarks have fractional charges.(7) And when you combine three of them, they add up to either 1 (proton) or 0 (neutron). But here we have a problem – the nucleus is highly compacted, and highly charged. If the electronic forces were all that was at work, there could be no nuclei. The protons would blow apart and the universe would be a soup of structureless particles. The gluons hold it all together so that we get to eat, and breathe, and sleep, and make love. And dance!

Finally! With the gluons, and the dancing, and the hopping up and down!

Oh, I am so proud of you for staying with me so far! I tried not to put in too many numbers. Did it help?

In addition to the particles that make up matter, the Standard Model of Physics includes force-carriers. These are particles that are exchanged by bits of matter to… um… let them know where they are in space, how to stick together, and what types of particles they are, so to speak. Lets think of them as a conversation among the fundamental particles that tell them how to make themselves into protons and neutrons, how to combine to make atoms, how to be attracted together to make galaxies – in short, how to create the structure of the universe.

The gluons are only one of the charge carriers, but they have charge, and they have colour, and they have ephemeral existence, and are created by borrowing energy (very briefly) from the space-time continuum. They are SO COOL! They’re elegant. And they’re dynamic. And they, themselves are in a constant dance. In fact, what the standard model of physics tells me is that change and communication are the fundamental characteristics of the universe. We are in one giant sub-atomic cosmic dance with the stars, the galaxies, the protons, and the gluons, the cats, the chickens, the mountains, and the oceans. The dance is what is fundamental. So, you see, I just can’t help myself. It’s the way I am.

If you want to see an animation of this, have a look at this BestofScience video . The voice-over is a little irritating, and I’m not sure what’s up with the robotic scientist narrators, but the gluon part starting at 5:50 has pretty pictures.

1. The scales I used to work on were so small that I once complained (in all seriousness), “This model sucks. My atoms are moving around by an entire angstrom.” Reality check: That is 1/10th of a nanometer, or 1/10,000,000,000 th of a meter.
2. If you want a sweet song about the atoms and their classification, I can recommend They Might Be Giants song Meet The Elements. For older kids and adults, you might want to take a look at The Particle Adventure. I got my students to look at this as a pre-class activity. They had funding. It shows.
3. Also, most of them above Plutonium are only good for showing off how your particle collider is better than your colleague’s particle collider. I, myself, do not have a particle collider, so I may just have PC envy.
4. Don’t completely discount this approach, though. It’s a very good model for building electronics.
5. For our purposes, we are going to pretend that quarks only come in two “flavors”: up and down. There are four more, including the Strange one, but they are considered “exotic”. If you want more detail, check out the Particle Adventure.
6. I haven’t checked this calculation. I’m feeling lazy at the moment, and I’d like to get to gluons before I turn 40. And I still have to worry about Taekwondo, heteronormativity, and chickens in the chard, and that’s just today. Really, I’m just trying to explain why I was jumping up and down in class.
7. up quarks are +2/3 and down quarks are -1/3

 

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Here’s the Payoff

Posted on November 2, 2010 by Seonaid

Last night I was taking my 7-y.o. daughter to her first Taekwondo class, and my 11-y.o son asked to come along for the ride. In the car on the way the conversation turned to why she wanted to take it in the first place. “Well,” she said, “Christopher likes it. And I like a lot of boy things. So I thought I would like it too.”

In my mind, the thinking went a little like this: “Hmm. Boy things, eh? Yay, liberation, I guess! Um.”

My son said, “What do you mean, boy things?” So I kept my mouth shut and kept listening.

She said, “You know. Pokemon. Soccer. Running. Boy things.”

Son was kind enough to say, “Those aren’t boy things.”

“Sure they are.”

“No,” he said. And then the conversation took a turn I wasn’t expecting. “What if,” he said, “there are no boy things or girl things, there are just things. And what if,” he continued, “there are no girl colours, or boy colours, there are just colours?”

“What???” said his firmly-committed-to-pink sister.

“Did you know that 200 years ago, pink wasn’t considered an appropriate colour for girls?” (This is historically accurate, BTW.) “It was considered too strong a colour.”

“What?” (A brief conversation ensued regarding the social construction of conformity regarding clothing choices, colour, and aesthetics. Really. This is the sort of thing we talk about in the car.)

Then my son offered: “And that girls didn’t used to be allowed to do boy things?”

“What?”

I did chime in here. “Did you know that women weren’t allowed to be doctors, or run for parliament?”

“Or vote,” added my son. “In fact, only rich, white, men got to vote.”

I got a shiver, really I did. Name race, name class, name gender in the same sentence and warm the cockles of my heart, dear child. 11-year-olds don’t tend to bat around the words “privilege” or “intersectionality”, but that’s a kid who is going to grow up to tell a different kind of story.

And yes, this time I’m totally bragging.

Filed under: Family, WorldView | Tagged: , , , | 3 Comments »

In defense of Theory

Posted on October 2, 2010 by Seonaid

This is a very long article (word count 1800)  that I wrote several years ago to explain why I spend so much time immersed in theory, even though I am deeply concerned with practical implications. The examples are specific to education at the university level, but the idea of the connection between theory and practice is legit for other fields. To put the comments in context, I was working in faculty development at the time. That would be the “promising” academic career that I scuppered a couple of posts ago. I miss that job. A bit. Sometimes.

I do consider myself (despite all job descriptions to the contrary) to be, primarily, a practical theorist. I have a great passion for academic pursuits, and I am constantly engaged with the creation and dissemination of knowledge. I certainly have critiques of how we do it – I don’t think that the university is responding particularly well to societal forces, and I am concerned that the institution may be changing so markedly that we are losing sight of several of its roles. However, I don’t think that we should respond to perceived probelms by throwing out all the goals of education in the process of critiquing it. So I continue to work on it and in it, despite my growing cynicism. [I did recently express the belief that we have made so many 'compromises' for the purpose of 'doing the good work' that we are no longer about the 'good work' but are actually now about the 'compromises'. This is quite the truth claim, and would need substantial backing up.]

So… why do I theorize? Why do I continually seek out the positions of other people and hold them up to the light, rather than just concentrating on getting better at what I am actually paid to do by developing my technical skills? I could do that. There are Master’s degrees in educational technology that are entirely skills-based. I don’t have to do this to keep my job. In fact, I suspect that they could legitimately fire me if I focus too much on theory. Yet…

Theory is one of the ways in which we aggregate human experience. Ideally, I believe that, as educators, we should have ways in which to judge our impact that are more informed than, “I tried this and it seemed to work”. Educational theory is part of an ongoing discussion by educators and people who think deeply about education [who may or may not consider themselves educators]. Theory is not simply a range of different perspectives – it is a body of work which exists in constant conversation. Different theories are founded on different assumptions and have different implications. They are not all created equal. They are testable and can be challenged within their disciplinary context. Otherwise, they are just opinions. The standards of what constitutes good theory differ depending on discipline.

To be clear, education is not a discpline – it is a “practice” that draws from (at least) philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology. [The concept of professional knowledge of theory reflectively informing personal practice has a name (praxis) but it is a slippery concept at best. I'll leave it aside for now.]

Using findings from psychology and anthropology we can improve how we teach. We can observe patterns of human behaviour and know that certain approaches are more likely to achieve desired aims than others. These are fairly scientific fields, and they have disciplinary standards of rigour that are used to assess the validity of the findings that would look familiar to scientists… including predictive power and reproducibility. Hopefully, if we share our knowledge by publishing the results of our research, more effective approaches will be adopted more widely, and we will systemically get better at what we do. Current understanding of cognition and the learning “process”, for example, strongly supports:
- getting students to work together as new ideas are introduced,
- being explicit about your conceptual framework and where new knowledge fits into it
- getting students to reflect upon their knowledge as they integrate new knowledge (even mathematics!)
- providing frequent and immediate feedback on learning tasks
- providing ‘realistic’ learning tasks and complex problems (at least for advanced learners)

A large part of my job involves distilling the current research on ‘how to teach’ and providing it in theory-free workshops. Yet I need to maintain the position that although I’m not inflicting the theory on the participants, I am, in fact, familiar with it myself… I am not just telling them what I did last week. In an academic context, this largely consists of referring to theorists whom, I am quite confident, will never be read by my participants. (Were I a nastier person, I could do a lot of damage with that.)

Cognitive and learning theory doesn’t have much to say about whether it matters if the student thinks you care or not. In fact, there is a significant body of work on student feedback (a completely different type of educational research more based in sociology and anthropology) that indicates that it doesn’t really have any impact on how much they learn. Implication: nurturing environment = not important for learning of factual knowledge. You might, however, still give a damn, because it may have an impact on whether the student still enjoys learning, and whether they are going to be motivated to seek out learning later in life. (jury’s still out on that one) You might also have a philosophical position that values the ‘humanness’ of your students which impacts your approaches.

Cognitive psychology also doesn’t have anything to say about how to choose what to teach. If we are very very good at transmitting information, but we don’t give any consideration to what we are teaching or what the point of it all is in the first place, we have only done part of our jobs. If I care that my first-year students know what biology is about, but I (because of my research) am extremely interested in the mating behaviours of a particular obscure toad and use that as my only example, I will have done my students a disservice by misrepresenting the structure of knowledge in my field. If, however, I am interested in teaching the research process to graduate students and how the “mating behaviours of a particular obscure toad” are representative of a particular small branch of biology, I may very well be doing my job with exactly the same approach that I used in the other course. Context, context, context.

So there are layers of theorizing to be done. One of the things that we are being asked to do, in teaching dossiers, and teaching philosophies, and teaching statements is to develop a coherent personal theory. This should be informed by the range of theory that is available, but you should apply a standard of proof to those theories. See above: Not all theories are equally valid. Moreover, you, personally, must take a place in all of this.

It is my opinion (here is my own theorizing) that I should be aware of my beliefs about how students learn, why they are in the classroom, why they might be taking my subject, why they might be taking this particular course in the subject, why they want/need a university degree/high school diploma/college diploma… Are they going to join a book club or be a graduate student? Do they need to do their taxes or buy the right amount of material for a fence? Do they need to be able to do calculus, or do you want them to have enough mathematical knowledge to judge whether an “expert” is manipulating their vote?

From a teaching perspective, I also need the sociological and political foundation to be able to tell when I am being manipulated or when I am being asked to do things by administrators that conflict with current thinking in educational circles. I do some of these things, because I am low on the totem, and I know that somebody else will do them if I don’t… and probably less thoughtfully. But I still (at least) have the questions at the back of my mind that help me measure the relative merit of my actions.

********************
The non-theorizing portion

Questions that theory gave me:
What was the process by which this absurdly large ‘corpus’/ curriculum was determined? What beliefs about education does that reflect? Who stands to gain and who stands to lose? What are we NOT teaching and why? (Conversely, for the conservatives in the crowd: How come we can’t just keep using Plato and Socrates? What’s up with all this postmodern crap?) How did Coca-Cola/Pepsi get exclusive contracts on campus? Does it impact what are able to do? Does it matter if it does?

[Positioning myself in case you couldn't read between the lines: I am a fan of postmodernism... and radical feminism, and ecofeminism... and physics. Really. My standard by which I reject conservative theory is that it cannot account for my existence. Neither can strict structuralism, so I'm not much of a Marxist either. Foucault... pretty good at accounting for my existence. But I don't think that the postmodernists would accept me, because I'm too practical.]

One of my pet issues:
Does it matter if our students burn out in third year and resort to surface learning strategies to just get through? If you think that university is for credentialling and you’re only interested in the ones who are going on to graduate school anyway, and you think that only the ones who are tough enough deserve to make it, it doesn’t really matter. But if you want your students to ‘learn’ and you still give them a reading load that overwhelms them you’re using a BAD educational practice. Um… and, yes. If you fall into the first category, I will be doing everything in my power to convince you that it is a morally reprehensible position. And I will probably refer to theorists in my argument. (although I will also tell you about my very brilliant and very bitter friends at the same time)

**********************

And where I’m going with all of this… the thing that drew me back into graduate school was the theory in my B.Ed. program. We were asked to consider, to reflect, to challenge, to weigh different positions and come to conclusions. We were asked to develop coherent positions and talk about why we wanted to teach as well as how we thought we could do it best. We were immersed in a role of responsibility where it wasn’t enough just to do what we were asked, but where we needed to know why we were doing it. And I put in my application to go back for more: “If I had had more of this when I was an engineering student, I would probably now be a pretty decent engineer.” As opposed to my years of wandering in the wilderness.

Filed under: Essays and Musings | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Poem: Calling in…

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Seonaid

For a change of pace: Bad beat poetry about universities.

Calling in…

Apathetic.
I’m too tired.
And my chest hurts anyway.
And somehow I just don’t care.

About your priorities,
And all your pet projects,
And the fact that you guys just can’t
Get it together.

So you’ll buy a $60,000 multimedia
Whiz-bang high def
Projector
With
No sound system and
No Brain.
How is this my problem?
Just because you spent more on that stupid machine
Than you’ll pay 4 grad students for their souls this year.

You had my heart for
15 years
But I’m beginning to think it’s a
Fool’s Game.

When “everybody” started getting a degree,
You just started needing a degree to do…
Anything.

Grade inflation?!?
98% of WHAT, exactly?
And how does it do the world any
Good
For us to make sure that
30% of our students are so
Beaten down
That they never get what they came here for?
And so many of the rest
Never want to read or think again
[Even though they can't help themselves.]

What if…

Our graduates weren’t bitter and
Got jobs that let them think and
Knew the value of human decency and
Loved their bodies and
Found at least one idea every month that
Made their eyes light up?

Then

I might be able to care enough to
Come in today.

Filed under: WorldView | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

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