Monday, May 5. 2008
 How to recall everything you'll ever learn. Piotr Wozniak and SuperMemo. One quote:
SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they? Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.
It takes a software program.
Tuesday, April 29. 2008
 A propos the piece on reading in college which we linked this morning, Insty came across another bit in The Chronicle titled America's most over-rated product: the Bachelor's Degree.
Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science. Perhaps more surprising, even those high-school students who are fully qualified to attend college are increasingly unlikely to derive enough benefit to justify the often six-figure cost and four to six years (or more) it takes to graduate. Research suggests that more than 40 percent of freshmen at four-year institutions do not graduate in six years. Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than nongraduates, but that's terribly misleading. You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they'd still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound — they're brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.
Read the whole thing. It makes sense that the degree must be degraded as more people seek it, and as more colleges seek students to fill their buildings. I am reading the new biography of Albert Einstein. Few college students today could pass the entry exams that he took, which included calculus, literature, French, physics and chemistry. He failed them the first time, in part because his French exam was judged to be weak. (No, he never flunked math.) He spent a year after high school studying to take them a second time. My point is that "education" or a liberal arts degree was never intended to be a "consumer product." Now it is viewed that way, in the US. And that is a big part of the problem in how we think of education today, because it is not something that can be bought for any price: it is something that can only be taken by those who really want it. Photo: Columbia College's Alma Mater - one college where a BA degree still means something. Same goes for the great University of Chicago.
Is college supposed to be more demanding than High School? Maybe not, in the new, democratized Higher Ed. From a post at Chronicle on reading books: ...when I listen to students today chat (not, I hasten to point out, the ones in my very own class who are all good looking, strong, and above average) about their classes, I too often hear criticism of the work load rather than excitement about the subject matter, a complaint about the hours taken from meeting with friends or playing sports rather than engaging in debate, deciphering philosophy, history or a good poem. “Keep it neat, simple and to the point,” my faculty colleagues tell me. If I assign too much work, they say, students will write negative comments and the following semester enrollment will plummet.
Unbelievable abuse of power, in the WSJ. (h/t, Betsy)
Thursday, April 24. 2008
From Roger K on "post-colonial studies" at Harvard: In the ambivalent world of the “not quite/not white,” on the margins of metropolitan desire, the founding objects of the Western world become the erratic, eccentric, accidental objets trouvés of the colonial discourse—the part-objects of presence. It is then that the body and the book loose [sic] their representational authority. Black skin splits under the racist gaze, displaced into signs of bestiality, genitalia, grotesquerie, which reveal the phobic myth of the undifferentiated whole white body.
I first read those words back in the 1980s and knew instantly that its author was destined for academic stardom.
Indeed. I think the Prof must be talking about me, because I often feel like a "part-object of presence," don't you? I blame Brit imperialism for that, and my little bestiality issue would seem to confirm it.
Saturday, April 12. 2008
From an essay by Richard Wolin in Chronicle of Higher Ed, titled Jurgen Habermas and Post Secular Societies. It begins: Among 19th-century thinkers it was an uncontestable commonplace that religion's cultural centrality was a thing of the past. For Georg Hegel, following in the footsteps of the Enlightenment, religion had been surpassed by reason's superior conceptual precision. In The Essence of Christianity (1841), Ludwig Feuerbach depicted the relationship between man and divinity as a zero-sum game. In his view, the stress on godliness merely detracted from the sublimity of human ends. In one of his youthful writings, Karl Marx, Feuerbach's most influential disciple, famously dismissed religion as "the opium of the people." Its abolition, Marx believed, was a sine qua non for human betterment. Friedrich Nietzsche got to the heart of the matter by having his literary alter ego, the brooding prophet Zarathustra, brusquely declaim, "God is dead," thereby pithily summarizing what many educated Europeans were thinking but few had the courage actually to say. And who can forget Nietzsche's searing characterization of Christianity as a "slave morality," a plebeian belief system appropriate for timorous conformists but unsuited to the creation of a future race of domineering Übermenschen? True to character, the only representatives of Christianity Nietzsche saw fit to praise were those who could revel in a good auto-da-fé -- Inquisition stalwarts like Ignatius Loyola. Twentieth-century characterizations of belief were hardly more generous. Here, one need look no further than the title of Freud's 1927 treatise on religion: The Future of an Illusion. Today, however, there are omnipresent signs of a radical change in mentality.
Read the whole thing.
Monday, March 3. 2008
 Christina Hoff Summers on the dearth of women in math and science, as quoted in a piece at Attack Machine:
Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is legendary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester freshman course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.
and “I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.” Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physical sciences?
Read the whole thing.
Sunday, March 2. 2008
A healthy rebellion against the teacher's union and for the students (h/t, Insty). Does anyone today doubt that the reactionary unions are the largest obstacle to experimentation for problem schools? These kids need a chance.
Monday, February 18. 2008
Schools don't teach Hyper History, but they should cover it before they teach any specific historical period. During most of my formal history education, I struggled to orient myself in historical time. Hyper History means what happened over the broad sweep of time, say 30,000 BC to 1900 - those old-fashioned time lines, to help you put whatever you learn in some kind of context. Since it isn't taught, you have to make one yourself with big rolls of paper, which will make you learn it better, or, next best for the lazies, buy one from HyperHistory Online. and hang it on a long wall. It's not just for kids. I also found a very cool Roman timeline.
Climate change in California Maoism in Arizona Whatever happened to physics, chemistry, and history?
Wednesday, February 13. 2008
A piece in The Nation instructs teachers in how to slip "Social Justice Education" into everything they teach. It's sick out there, and getting sicker.
Sunday, February 10. 2008
- Is your kid an athletic recruit?
- Is your kid a minority?
- Can you donate big bucks to a school's development office? Those were the first three questions asked of She Who Must Be Obeyed by the young Barristerette's college advisor. No, no, and, sadly, no. ("Big bucks" seems to mean a third to a half million at minimum, with more to follow if your kid doesn't flunk out)
Apparently legacies do not carry too much water anymore except at Princeton, and extracurricular passions matter little unless almost world-class ability has been demonstrated. We were also advised that GPA matters more than the classes taken, so avoid classes in which one cannot excel: schools worry about their magazine rankings, and GPA of kids admitted is a factor in that. Well, the latter advice made me despair about higher education, because if kids avoid things that are difficult for them in high school for college admission purposes, and then avoid them in college for grad school admission purposes, how will they ever learn what they need to understand the world? Kids have to take courses in which they cannot excel. One cannot understand much about this world without calculus, Shakespeare, statistics, economics, chemistry, physics, bio, history, geology, Chaucer, philosophy, religion, music history and theory... etc. Of course, you can learn all these things after you get "educated" in schools (not so easily, though, with statistics and calc) - but then what is formal education good for other than certificate-chasing, professor-employment, and kid-indoctrination? Sometimes I think I am too old-fashioned for this modern world.  Before I decided to post this little meditation, I ran into this book review/essay re Higher Education's Loss of Purpose. A quote:
...the research ideal devalues the connection with thinkers of the past. The belief that students benefit from participating in a timeless conversation with the great voices of our civilization falls by the wayside.
That was all bad enough, but the tide of political correctness (an edgy term for someone from the heart of mainstream academia) washed over the humanities with the destructive force of a tsunami. Why? Because the insistence of the diversity/multiculturalist crowd that human beings are imprisoned by their immutable characteristics (race, gender, class) means that there is no point in trying to learn from the past. Dead, white males and their “hegemony” are what we must break free of, not learn from. In one of his most penetrating sentences, Kronman asks, “For if my most fundamental attitudes are conditioned by my race and gender, so I cannot help but see and judge the world from the vantage point they fix, how can I ever hope to escape their orbit, subject these attitudes to critical review, and set myself the goal of living in some way other than the one they prescribe?”
Whereas the physical sciences and some of the social sciences have rejected the idea that there is any pedagogical value in “diversity,” the humanities swallowed it whole and thus further degraded their intellectual standing.
Photo on top: An 1837 one-room schoolhouse in Norwalk, CT
Lower image: Harvard College, 1767
Monday, January 7. 2008
From Slow Learning by Laurie Fendrich in Chronicle of Higher Ed, about her mother in law: I can’t help but wonder, as I watch colleagues pulling out their hair over the mucky writing of their college students, whether we didn’t lose something important when we abandoned the kind of education Mary Jayne Shields enjoyed. Even though she experienced an admittedly slower, duller, more metronomic approach to learning than many high-school students are subjected to now, that ancient pedagogy served her quite well. Perhaps it even explains why she could write beautifully, whereas so many of our college students can barely write at all.
Read the whole thing.
Thursday, January 3. 2008
Wednesday, January 2. 2008
Why do we extend to universities the priviledge and advantage of being tax-free and partly if not largely tax-supported institutions? What is it that they do which is so special? Is it their duty to be conservators of knowledge and wisdom, or to be "adversarial" critics of society? I would make the case that few of the great thinkers of world history worked for universities, almost none of the great writers, and, until the past 30-40 years, few to none of the great scientists. I would make thae case that, in a world of high liteeracy and high levels of education, professsors no longer represent a unique intellectual priesthood as they might have in the Middle Ages. And I would make the case that there is nothing about being a professor which renders their views of anything outside of their teaching expertise of any more value than my own views. Mark Bauerlein takes on The Adversarial Campus. One quote: ...the Adversarial Campus Argument isn't really an argument. It's an attitude. And attitudes aren't overcome by evidence, especially when they do so much for people who bear them. For, think of what the Adversarial Campus does for professors. It flatters the ego, ennobling teachers into dissidents and gadflies. They feel underpaid and overworked, mentally superior but underappreciated, and any notion that compensates is attractive. It gives their isolation from zones of power, money, and fame a functional value. Yes, they're marginal, but that's because they impart threatening ideas. The powerlessness they feel rises into a meaningful political condition.
Read the whole, brief essay. Also, David Thompson on the same topic. A quote: The idea of academic administrators and professors picturing themselves as Luke Skywalker figures - pitted against an evil empire of oppressive bourgeois vales - is rather quaint and not without comic potential. And, as we’ve seen, ‘rebellion’ of this kind is often difficult to distinguish from absurdity, psychodrama and reactionary role-play.
Tuesday, December 18. 2007
From a piece in Opinion Journal, a quote: Ironically, these government handouts are creating the tuition problem. Tuition has risen about three percentage points faster than inflation every year for the past quarter-century. At the same time, the feds have put more and more money behind student loans and other financial aid. The government is slowly becoming a third-party tuition payer, with all the price distortions one would expect. Every time tuition rises, the government makes up the difference; colleges thus cheerfully raise tuition (and budgets), knowing the government will step in.
and Our financial-aid system also hurts middle-class applicants. Parents who have saved money for their child's tuition quickly find that, by the strange calculus of financial aid, they are charged more for college tuition than if they had blown their savings on a bigger house.
Read the whole thing.
Monday, December 17. 2007
Free Death, and other Yale courses, online
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