The Beautiful and the Confused

California is like the shockingly gorgeous woman at a party who desperately wants people to think she's not just a pretty face with cleavage a lovely landscape and so is always coming out with the polysyllabic words (the production of which seems almost painful) in the hopes that someone will finally take her seriously and stop staring at her cleavage Sierra foothills.

Someone needs to tell her that she really doesn't need to try so hard. Although maybe it is time she figure out the difference between correlation and causation.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was the self-esteem campaign with a task force and everything. (You can read the full report here.) Even though all the other states like to make fun of California and New York (she being so pretty and he being so cool and rebellious), as they go, so goeth the nation. The promotion of self-esteem in children snowballed into almost a religion. Praise became as constant and unrelenting as it was--I'm sure--meaningless to the intended beneficiaries.

As with any method of symptom-mowing, that didn't quite work out as anticipated:

The long-term impact of this rah-rah mentality is already apparent. In 2004, according to Jean Twenge, author of Generation Me, 70 percent of American college freshmen reported their academic ability as “above average.” But, once ego-inflated students get to college, they’re more likely to drop out, says Twenge, when their skewed sense of self and overconfidence affects their ability to make decisions.

Because they got it backwards. Although self-esteem and high student achievement may be correlated, the cause-and-effect sequence is more likely to be that high student achievement promotes self-esteem, rather than the reverse. *Oops. Dang. How much did we spend on that report again?*


(Oddly enough, in a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon six-degrees-of-separation kind of coincidence, just when this self-esteem campaign was a little sparkly idea glimmering on the horizon, I was working as a secretary at an automobile repair shop that was owned by John Vasconcellos's brother. There simmered family tensions, is all I have to say about that. Also, such work did not enhance my self-esteem, as the owner's wife was in the habit of remarking that how interesting that I was a college graduate--she had never attended college--and yet I didn't know how to load paper into a printer. I didn't blame her; no amount of praise could have convinced me I was even a minimally adequate secretary. I was a terrible secretary, maybe the world's worst secretary, with deplorable office skills that were on a par with my knowledge of auto repair. One of my duties was to translate the mechanics' notes on the service orders into descriptions of labor  for the customers' bills. Once, after replacing a part, a mechanic scribbled "lower radiator hose" on the service order. I wrote "lowered radiator hose" on the final bill, which ignorance sort of rendered everyone, from the high school kid who pushed a broom around to the owner, speechless. )

I would like to point out that it's antithetical to serious intellectual inquiry to hijack such a discussion by misrepresenting the "basic premise" in order to promote a political and social agenda:

The basic premise is that racism and discrimination cause minorities to feel bad about themselves, and that this low self-image translates into women avoiding "hard" fields like engineering and blacks and Hispanics doing poorly in school.

Well, no, not exactly. The basic premise is that people--and let's leave race and gender out of it, shall we, because neither has much to do with the main point--who feel bad about themselves for whatever reason, tend to self-destruct--and take others with them--which can only have negative effects on not just society, but the economy, so how might it be possible to kill the snake when it is young address this problem in children so that they are able to become self-sufficient adults who are well-equipped to function and thrive, which will mean less crime, fewer teen-age pregnancies, less substance abuse, and more productivity, which will mean more money for big companies and the local and federal governments that tax them. The means may have been ill-advised, but the goal seems like one we could all get on board with to some degree of enthusiasm, if indeed it be based in fact.

Similarly, the motivation driving the California Department of Education (and those of Michigan and Oklahoma and others) to dissect creativity in order to figure out how it works and thus build it into school curriculum has to do with money business productivity. This isn't a new idea:

The world community recognizes that progress in the arts, in the professions, and in science and technology relies exquisitely on the creativity of people in these professions.

This came from Carl A. Leopold (Boyce Thompson Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York), who went on to suggest

. . . the art of scientific thinking be taught by allowing students to experience all the thrills--and missteps--of an actual science program or research.

Which indicates that independent exploration and direct experience and willingness to fail are essential to creativity. It's an orientation from which to teach, rather than a framework for a curriculum.

Once creativity is allowed in, students may gain mastery, thus building self-esteem without anyone heaping on piles of praise--praise that the students are surely smart enough to recognize as false. Everything is everything.

You Got to Tip on the Tightrope

. . . in the immortal words of Janelle Monae.





In re California legislation S.B. 789

This bill would require the advisory committee to consult, as appropriate, with individuals who are experts or have experience in innovation in the fields of business, science, technology, mathematics, engineering, and arts education on the development of a voluntary Creative and Innovative Education Index, to be based in part on the creative opportunities in each participating school, as specified. The bill would require the advisory committee to make recommendations by June 1, 2013, to the Superintendent on the extent to which this index should be part of the state’s accountability system and methods to foster creative and innovative education in the public schools.

Does it make you nervous  to think about legislators regulating creativity? It seems as disagreeable as the prospect of the business folks messing with the talent.


But maybe "regulating" is too strong a word; the bill started out like this, was amended to this, and then to this. Perhaps it's more accurate to say "considering implementing recommendations about"?


My first thought is that when deciding whether to follow a recommendation, one must carefully consider the source.


Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests that there is a creative personality.


Can creativity be taught? Or should we think about creativity as the seed of a flower that must be nurtured in order to bloom? If so, what conditions will encourage that little flower?


When in doubt, I turn to Einstein:

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

Italics mine.


Meanwhile, if (in addition to allowing them some autonomy, some freedom to experiment with what they think) we can give kids music to listen and dance to, cool stuff to mess with, and beautiful things to look at, they'll figure out what to make of it all.


They need as many opportunities to wonder as possible:

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead. . . .

Are you wondering about the tightrope? Oh, it's balance, and the need to take risks. Edwin Land said, "An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail." We all of us need to be able to boldly go without worrying about what will happen when--not if--we fumble. Fumbling isn't failure; it's part of learning.


UPDATE: Wish I'd seen this earlier. From Namaste Nancy, the reminder that creativity is for everyone.

Big Wheel Keeps on Turning

This just in, from Frank Brockmann, Center Point empresario and fellow quality crusader:

President Barack Obama announced last week that 10 states will be exempt from the requirements of the highly-criticized No Child Left Behind legislation. In exchange, those states will have to agree to a series of reforms. But some experts say the law should be scrapped completely for models that don't rely on standardized tests.

Interesting, because last night I was reading about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire California Learning Assessment System. CLAS was not the first--and surely will not be the last--testing program to be felled by public controversy. Among the many objections to CLAS were to the reading passages (two of Alice Walker's stories were excised after complaints that "Am I Blue" promoted vegetarianism, and "Roselily"was anti-religion), to the writing prompts (which were considered invasive), and to the test questions themselves (too subjective and based in emotion, according to critics).

When I began my career in hand-scoring, CLAS was one of my first projects, so I did at one time have more than a passing familiarity with the tests and how students responded to them. In general, I liked the questions (what did I know? I hadn't any content development experience at that point), although scoring did present a problem.

In some parts of the test, students were encouraged to take notes--which were called "marginalia"-- and for some questions, were offered various options as to how to respond: they could draw a picture, for example. Anyone who's ever been presented with a drawing by a small child understands the obstacle in scoring there:

You: Oh, what a lovely dinosaur.
Child: It's not a dinosaur.
You: No?
Child: No.
[pause]
You: What is it, love?
Child: It's a manatee.
You: Oh, yes, of course it is.

I see what the developers and supporters of CLAS were attempting to accomplish, and the goal is a laudable one: to lure students into engaging with authentic literature and then to welcome their genuine, individual responses to what they read. However, in retrospect, these goals might be more readily achieved at the classroom level, through both instruction and formative assessment (and by "formative assessment," I really mean all those teacherly techniques for paying attention to one's students, not the administration of a series of badly-written multiple-choice quizzes), than through a standardized testing program.

The point is really to define clearly one's purpose, and then create the assessment that will best serve that purpose, as "the man without a purpose is like a ship without a rudder," in the immortal words of Thomas Carlyle.

Big wheel keeps on turning. We went from bubble-in to performance assessment, back to bubble-in, and now we're talking about performance assessment as if it were the hot new thing, never before attempted.

Not that we shouldn't move in that direction--I like that direction very much--but if we do, there should be a moment of planning and taking stock (For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?), a gathering of the elders for the harvest of wise counsel, before there is a marshaling of forces. What is our purpose? What will we gain, what will we lose, is the loss worth the gain? How do we prepare teachers for this role?

What do you think?