Mrk! Fmn, Gn, GnaH!

[Brimshack]

Okay, so every now and then I come across a student who gives the absolute lie to the places I prefer to teach. Specifically, they show the limits of trying to deliver education to underprivelaged and/or undeprepared students.

Lately, I keep connecting this to a few lines from a blog (I'll see if I can find it) talking about the absurdity of treating greater access to education as a means of helping those with under-privelaged backgrounds. The argument of that author had been that since much of the conomic value of education is rooted in elitism of one variety or another, making it more available served to dilute its economic value. Normally, one might expect an argument like that to bemoan the loss of standards, etc. and talk about the day when an education meant something, but here the point is that people of underprivelaged backgrounds should not be tricked into working very hard to get through programs that aren't really going to give them a leg up. It's not exactly the same problem that has me gritting my teeth today, but I can't helping thinking this plays out in my own work.

Every now and then a student walks in who proves himself to be essentially unteachable, which would be less of a problem for a more elitist institution, but at places like this, we work with anyone. It usually takes a little bit of time before I realize the depths of the problem, but sooner or later it sinks in; I'm just not going to get anything through to this guy.

Case in Point: I remember one semester, I was teaching philosophy. My book was chosen for me by the department. So, the first task was to find the easiest articles out of the book and assign a small number of them, then take my time with each. It was a struggle for everyone, but one woman proved completely clueless. We eventually agreed to meet after class and see if some extra help might ...help.

We happened to be reading John Stuart Mill at the time, so rather than explain it again, I asked her to read a paragraph and explain it to me. I watched her look at the first sentence carefully. Her eyes moved along until she found the word "freedom" which she then said out loud. She scanned the sentence another moment and found "will." She then looked up thought for a minute and said; "You have freedom of the will." After half an hour of these she finally finished the paragraph in like manner, always picking a couple buzz-words out and then trying to think of the connection between them. Not knowing anything about John Stuart Mill, she of course had no idea that he would disagree with the folk wisdom she drew from in order to interpret his words, and she was continually surprised to learn that the actual point was pretty much the opposite of what she took it to mean. ...which illustrated one of her intellectual limitations.

This student lacked any sense of the perspectival nature of the course. She could not understand that the assignment was to understand what JSM had to say about freedom of the will, because she could not understand that I would have assigned a reading that covered anything less than the factual truth of the matter. If I had assigned the reading, it must have been because that reading was teaching the truth of the subject, anything less would be incompetence on my part. And of course, the truth of that subject could not be far from some of the things she had heard before, so if she could identify the major themes, she figured she should be able to connect the dots and come up with the truth that I was obviously trying to teach her. ...In effect, the class was a sermon which would reinforce the wisdom she already had.

But that was a side-theme compared to the real problem. When I explained to her that I needed her to read an entire sentence, her eyes got wider. This was a controversial proposition to her. I assumed she had read full sentences before. She had a high school degree, and she worked as a secretary in one of the reservation bureacracies, so she should have met some minimal standards of literacy. Now JSM was pushing the point for her skill level, but the more I worked with her that evening the more convinced I became that this was her normal reading strategy. She did not read sentences much less paragraphs, or articles, and books were out of the question. When I told her that I wanted her to read every word of every page in the article (about 5 pages), she looked at me like I was insane. It wasn't just that this article was difficult. That simply wasn't how she read.

Mind you, this student had never been diagnosed with any special classroom needs. I had no instructions for lesson modifications, nor did she have any special help assigned to her. She was well past the half way point on her way to a 2 year degree, and as far as the school (and she) was concerned, she was good to go. And she seemed to feel that her reading skills were adequate; what was my problem? How could I be so unreasonable as to expect her to read a full sentence?

So, there I sat, trying to teach John Stuart Mill to someone who was functionally illiterate. I couldn't help thinking, as I do now, that this was a no-win situation. That student simply did not belong in a college level philosophy class, introductory or otherwise. This student was not part the usual struggles we would have in those classrooms... dealing with cultural differences and trying to help people with remedial reading skills to understand something well beyond their intellectual comfort zones. This student just wasn't in the game at all, and there was nothing I could do to get her there in the course of 1 semester.

And part of what makes this problem so striking is that the places I teach really try to work with just about anybody. I've heard people repeat the mantra that there are no bad students just bad teachers. A more reasonable variation on that theme would be to suggest that if a student isn't getting the lesson, the responsibility lays with the teacher to come up with an innovative approach to solve the problem. And most of the time, you can manage something. You twist the lesson this way and that and look for some sign that a given approach works, and then you adjust your standards a bit. Try enough things and you can usually make some headway and count a littlle learning as sufficient grounds to give a passing grade. But every now and then, as with this particular student, I just can't help thinking that there is no way that this one person is going to learn what they are suppose to learn in this class. No innovation will get it done.

It's at that point that I can't help thinking the cheery press for innovative teaching turns into a mandate for dishonest assessment. Sometimes the effort to teach anybody becomes a mandate to find a way to convince oneself that someone has learned something no matter how clearly they didn't.

In the end, this student stopped coming to class and failed the course. We had resolved to meet weekly outside the normal class time, but she just disappeared. So, she took herself out of the equation and I never had to assign a final grade to any real effort. So, she is still out there, still completely illiterate, and still working in a job that assumes some competence in reading and writing. She probably has an AA by now, because she probably found a way around that class, or at least me.

So be it, but sometimes the students don't give me the easy out.

[Crumb]

[Ensign Steve]

Oh, Crumb, you are going to hell.

And so am I for laughing.

This was my 22,000th post!

[BrotherMan]

WOO! FREEDOM! FUCK YEAH! You said it Brimmy ol' boy! SUCK IT COMMIES!

[livius drusus]

The thought of John Stuart Mill's glorious prose being reduced to keywords and overlayed with something Sarah Palin said one time gives me the sads. So yeah, it's probably better for you both that she dropped the class, which I guess is kind of the point that blogger was making.

[Brimshack]

Nuther Case ...just for Crumb: This semester I have a student in government with real cognitive difficulties (and in this case, he is actually under medical care, school is part of his rehabilitation program). Much of the issue boils down to concentration. If I were to say to him; "The chair is red" he would be hard pressed to repeat that sentence back to me. It's not that he couldn't understand the sentence; it just gets lost in the maze so to speak. So, of course the difference between what I say and what gets in his notes is quite substantial. If I ask him a question, he answers a different question. If I use an example, he loses track of the point the example is intended to illustrate. If I try to work with one of his tangents, he just goes off on a tangent from that, and so on, and so on, and so on.

It is as though the conversation is always one sentence thick with this student, or more accurately, one phrase thick. So, nothing ever becomes context for anything else.

That means I cannot teach him how government works, because he cannot understand anything systematic. He might learn some facts by brute memorization (and that with a LOT of work), but he will never understand the principles or mechanisms that are at work. To me, this means he will never reach a college-level understanding of the subject. I can drill him on facts and make a point to test him in a way that makes that good enough, effectively deisgning a test to be passable at well below appropriate standards. What I cannot do is teach him the real point of the subject.

And this would be much easier if he was not trying. But he is, or at least he is willing to do so. In fact, this guy works harder than any student I have ever seen. He is in for tutoring constantly. I have seen him do all-day sessions with a teaching assistant in biology and math. I don't know how she stays sane, and I don't know how he keeps going. But here I do run into one other problem. In math and biology, this student is aware of his own limitations, but he has been talking about governmeent for decades (this is an older student). So, he doesn't quite know that he doesn't know about government, because he actually has a lot to say about it. So, in class he is usually going off on tangents that become disruptive, and outside of class he hasn't been putting in the extra effort, because he does not seem to realize how far he has to go to understand the material.

So, I have been trying for 3 weeks to get him in to see a tutor. The tutor herself is a real sweetheart who will be as helpful as she possible can, but 1) she is not real up-to-date on government issues, and 2) she is a student advocate which means her involvement is just a little more ...involved. Her response is to schedule me in for the same tutoring session. This gives her a chance to tap my knowledge in the session and to transform the project of helping-him-learn-the-lesson into one of helping-me-to-learn-how-to-help-him-learn.

Now, an amusing/frustrating failure. One of the first readings for the class was Federalist 10. I didn't expect him to get the reading, but I had hoped he might have gotten something out of the lectures. His notes included a lot more detail than I had expected, but they included a lot of small errors as well, and his reading of his own notes proved that he did not understand them, or the lecture. So, we started over.

We boil it down first to a couple key terms, how about 'factions'? The student advocate tries using an example he is familiar with and (perfectly in keeping with my experience with the student) he names one that would illustrate the point quite well, then goes on to discuss it in ever greater detail, shutting off her attempts to break into his monolog and shape the point into a lesson on factions. Ten minutes later and after several attempts to reboot the example, she moves on. Somewhere in there a workable definition was fielded and we got him to write it down (actually, there were several; we ended up with "a group of people that want something from the government"). So, he has a definition, and he has an example on his notes. At no time does he produce a verbal explanation that shows how the example illustrates the definition. When he reads the definition out loud, he does not appear to understand it. But it is in his notes and he can read it out loud.

Now we move on to the basic argument in Federalist 10, which must be simplified. I suggest; "bigger governments will limit the damage done by factions, because the factions will cancel each other out." The Student Advocate tries to convey this with a visual aid. It looks something like this:

GOVERNMENT
xxx

GOVERNMENT
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

(x = a faction)

She then tries to explain that the bigger government is less likely to be dominated by factions than a smaller government would (using the size comparison to illustrate the point). Each time the concept was tossed back to the student, he explained how the government wants to oppress people. The student advocate tries to clarify a couple times, and finally after one of these she asks if he understands and he says "mmmhmm." She then moves on. (Hell, I've done this too. The alternative is to belabor the point until it becomes a morale problem. Still, it's not win, not by a long shot.)

But first she takes the time to suggest to me that when teaching this student I need to be as concrete as possible. Visuals will help.

This is what fascinates me about the exchange. The visual did not help him (which surprised me; I thought it had a real chance of working). If her example was intended to illustrate the ability of big government to resist the corruption of factions, what he saw was that big government had more power to oppress the people, in effect reversing the point of the lesson.

So, in what sense will the concreteness of the visual help here? It will give him something he can reproduce on the test, perhaps even accurately. ...as in, he might literally be able to put that same visual on the page. I will then be able to give him credit for remembering that much of the lesson. Of course this leaves the problem that he does not have a clue as to what that visual represents. So, in effect, at least as of this moment, he has NOT learned the lesson. But the concreteness of the visual gives all of us a chance to indulge in the illusion that he has learned something and get on with our lives / move on to the next theme.

It's one of those little moments in which a novel means of teaching a subject turns into a novel means of grading around the limitations of the student. And this one strikes me as illustrative of many of the comments students make about being "visual learners." I can hope that an illustration will provide the stepping stone necessary to get the lesson across to someone, but often as not, it becomes a substitute for the lesson, and someone who has no clue what the illustration illustrates can nevertheless procede with great confidence that they can reproduce the illustration itself. I've seen this more times than I can count. And so be it, an honest failure is nothing to be bugging about. What does bug me is the feeling that at least part of the point of producing illustrations for "visual learners" is so that they can get the illustration right even if they don't know what it means. It's like giving someone credit for remembering a word without being able to use it.

And this brings me back to the larger problem. We have very few students at this college, and so there is a real sense in which we need them at least as much as they need us. Which is why we chase them down if they don't come to class and employ an army of support personel to help students through the process. This college bends over backwards for each and every student. When they fail, we fail, so it seems, ...and we do our damnedest to keep that from happening.

My concern is that sometimes we fail anyway. Sometimes, I can't help thinking that an education just isn't the best thing for a given person. I haven't made up my mind on this student. There may be benefits beyond learning the lessons, but I see little grounds for hope on the lessons themselves. We'll be working with him all semester, and I can only hope that I am being overly pessimistic.

But somewhere in there I can't help thinking there is a lesson on the limits of an egalitarian approach to education.

[Demimonde]

Gatekeeper!




No really that last guy may well have a brother that I am tutoring at the moment for Poli Sci and Writing Skills. We are up to three hours a week. I have yet to see any real progress with him.

[Brimshack]

Yeah, there just comes a moment when you realize it isn't going to happen. With this guy, he really cannot seem to keep 2 concepts in his head at the same time. So, even something as basic and good-for-remedial-students as providing examples will backfire every time. He just gets lost in the example, and the point it was supposed to illustrate is completely gone from his mind within a few seconds of bringing it up.

In this case, I really think that someone figured he needed something constructive to do with his time and put college in his therapeutic regime. Which is I suppose a big part of the problem. I don't think he was really sent here to learn. The end result is a lot of frustration for all, but most of all for him. He has really been set up to fail.

[erimir]

I'm sure that these people could benefit from education.

The problem is that philosophy and civics are above their skill levels.

They should be learning literacy and things like basic math, you know "life skills" types of courses.

That is to say, college seems above their skill levels in general. They ought to be working on GEDs (for the first) and perhaps something less advanced than that for the second one. In spite of the first one apparently already having a high school diploma. And once they get that, maybe they can see about something more advanced.

[Naru]

That post was fucking long, so I just read one word out of every sentence.

[maddog]

Originally Posted by Naru

That post was fucking long, so I just read one word out of every sentence.

And? Help me out, here! What did it say?

#2518

[Brimshack]

Originally Posted by Naru

That post was fucking long, so I just read one word out of every sentence.

[lisarea]

I'm sure it's not his only problem, but I'd bet that part of that second guy's problem is the keyword issue. There are some key words and phrases that put people into emotional mode, and 'big government' is one of them. Lots of people seriously cannot think logically once you hit their triggers like that.

I know this because I use it for trolling on the internet sometimes.

I agree with erimir, though. There's a certain point after which you just have to sorta give up, but it is not uncommon at all for people to graduate high school without basic critical thinking skills. People should at least have access to some kind of remedial class on how to think good if they want to pursue a liberal arts education. If they can't get through that, though, there's not much point in them continuing because they're not going to get anything out of it.

[Kyuss Apollo]

I can see what your problems are Brim. First, you are not teaching to the test.

Second, is phonics. ph -uh -on -iks. phonics.

[wildernesse]

I had some clients whose rehab/IEP goals included "college". Some of these clients were not taking any basic academic classes at all in high school, because they did not have the mental capacity. They were not on track to receive a high school diploma, but would receive a special diploma.

None of my clients were likely to ever see the inside of a college classroom, unless they were cleaning it. They didn't have the resources or support to get there. Unfortunately, they didn't have the resources or support to attain more realistic goals either.

[BrotherMan]

I keep seeing the thrad title as "Mark Fuhrman, Gn, GnaH!"

[Sock Puppet]

IA! IA! JOHNNY COCHRANE FTAGN!

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by BrotherMan

I keep seeing the thrad title as "Mark Fuhrman, Gn, GnaH!"

Ha ha, Bort. Twins, except my version was "MARK FUHRMAN, GO ON! GO ON HOME!"

[Brimshack]

This student clearly does have a very emotional reaction to government, and especially to indigenous rights issues. I have learned to avoid using examples he is familiar with, but that has more to do with controlling his tangents than increasing the likelihood that he will understand the lesson. I really haven't ever seen him get the point of an example. Keeping away from certain themes means less time controlling the resultant distraction.

Teaching the test does seem to be a fairly common resolution to this sort of thing.

This guy is at least getting more help than your clients Wildy, this time. I'm just not sure it's really feasible, even with the help.

[Ensign Steve]

I thought it was in Klingon (the thread title, that is).

[The Lone Ranger]

Originally Posted by Brimshack

I've heard people repeat the mantra that there are no bad students just bad teachers. A more reasonable variation on that theme would be to suggest that if a student isn't getting the lesson, the responsibility lays with the teacher to come up with an innovative approach to solve the problem. And most of the time, you can manage something. You twist the lesson this way and that and look for some sign that a given approach works, and then you adjust your standards a bit. Try enough things and you can usually make some headway and count a littlle learning as sufficient grounds to give a passing grade. But every now and then, as with this particular student, I just can't help thinking that there is no way that this one person is going to learn what they are suppose to learn in this class. No innovation will get it done.

The notion that a good teacher can teach anything to anyone is pure idiocy. And yet, it's frighteningly common.

The most difficult lesson any teach must learn is that no matter how hard you try, a certain percentage of your students simply cannot learn what you're trying to teach them. Perhaps it's because the students in question are insufficiently prepared; perhaps it's because they lack the necessary intellectual gifts -- either way, some people are simply incapable of learning the material.

Why do we insist on pretending that this isn't the case? No one would be foolish enough to think that someone who's 5'3" and suffering from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis could be turned into an outstanding basketball player by a sufficiently dedicated coach. So why on Earth do we insist on believing that a sufficiently-dedicated and sufficiently-talented teacher can take any student -- no matter how lacking in preparation and/or talent -- and teach him or her anything? It's pure idiocy.


Believe me, when I encounter a student who simply can't learn what I have to teach, I still agonize over it. I desperately want him or her to do well, and for the longest time, I would fall nearly into despair over my inability to help him or her.

I have -- sort of -- accepted that there are those whom I can't help, but it is a very bitter pill to swallow. I wish I didn't have to, but at some point, it's necessary to face reality.


One part of the problem, I think, is that we've oversold the notion of college. We tell people that everyone needs to go to college in order to be a "success," and we insist on telling people that anyone can get a college degree. In doing so, I think that we're doing people a serious disservice. In reality, it's not true that everyone needs a college degree; and if you make a college degree something that anyone can acquire, you make it worthless.

Originally Posted by lisarea

There are some key words and phrases that put people into emotional mode, and 'big government' is one of them. Lots of people seriously cannot think logically once you hit their triggers like that.

Cheers,

Michael

[lisarea]

Originally Posted by The Lone Ranger

One part of the problem, I think, is that we've oversold the notion of college. We tell people that everyone needs to go to college in order to be a "success," and we insist on telling people that anyone can get a college degree. In doing so, I think that we're doing people a serious disservice. In reality, it's not true that everyone needs a college degree; and if you make a college degree something that anyone can acquire, you make it worthless.

Agreed, but in part, I think this is a function of the US not really having opportunities outside of information work anymore. We have fewer and fewer opportunities for people working in skilled trades or in union labor jobs, so if you want to be able to pretend you have some financial security, you want to be in some kind of information industry, and a college education is usually useful if not mandatory.

This is ridiculous and unrealistic, but it's probably where a lot of that is coming from.

And it's confounded, too, by the fact that kids are rarely being given the basic learning skills they need in public schools. They really aren't taught any kind of creative or critical thinking skills, which probably makes it more difficult to sort out the kids with potential but no training from those who really don't even have the potential.

[Clutch Munny]

Originally Posted by Brimshack

But first she takes the time to suggest to me that when teaching this student I need to be as concrete as possible. Visuals will help.

This is what fascinates me about the exchange. The visual did not help him (which surprised me; I thought it had a real chance of working). If her example was intended to illustrate the ability of big government to resist the corruption of factions, what he saw was that big government had more power to oppress the people, in effect reversing the point of the lesson.

So, in what sense will the concreteness of the visual help here? It will give him something he can reproduce on the test, perhaps even accurately. ...as in, he might literally be able to put that same visual on the page. I will then be able to give him credit for remembering that much of the lesson. Of course this leaves the problem that he does not have a clue as to what that visual represents. So, in effect, at least as of this moment, he has NOT learned the lesson. But the concreteness of the visual gives all of us a chance to indulge in the illusion that he has learned something and get on with our lives / move on to the next theme.

It's one of those little moments in which a novel means of teaching a subject turns into a novel means of grading around the limitations of the student. And this one strikes me as illustrative of many of the comments students make about being "visual learners." I can hope that an illustration will provide the stepping stone necessary to get the lesson across to someone, but often as not, it becomes a substitute for the lesson, and someone who has no clue what the illustration illustrates can nevertheless procede with great confidence that they can reproduce the illustration itself. I've seen this more times than I can count. And so be it, an honest failure is nothing to be bugging about. What does bug me is the feeling that at least part of the point of producing illustrations for "visual learners" is so that they can get the illustration right even if they don't know what it means. It's like giving someone credit for remembering a word without being able to use it.

Food for thought...

Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information. However, we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above [that students learn better through instruction tailored to their "learning style" preference/aptitudes than not], which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles. Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. 2008. Learning styles: Concepts and evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9.3: 105–119. (Abstract)

[Brimshack]

Hey, thank you clutch. That is helpful.

BTW: As an update, there has been some progress on individual number 2. The student advocate ended up helping him to make note-cards based on key words I had given her. the students studied them (obsessively) for 3 days straight. I haven't graded his test yet, but he appears to have ignored the written questions in favor of writing out the content of his cards, which he does appear to have just about memorized at this point.

I would not normally be happy about this, but...

...I have been discussing it with the Student Advocate and she is pretty sure that we should be giving him modified testing procedures. I've asked for documentation on this and any specifics about which she may be aware, and she doesn't have anything. We are both pretty sure that her office should have them, but she is newer here than me, and it appears that the last person or three to occupy her position hasn't really been to keen on the issue.

...which brings me to another observation. The entire time I was teaching out on the Navajo reservation, the college had no procedures for dealing with students with disabilities. We would hear that students are entitled to this or that, but it was all word of mouth and near as I could tell, relied more on people's experiences with other educational institutions. When I was adjunct with a regular community college, we had a specific depart that conducted diagnostic tests and notified teachers of specific modifications necessary for specific students. No guess-work, no rumors, no games played. The irony that a college with more than its fair share of people needing extra help would not have any specific means of addressing the issue is pretty sharp. It now appears that I am back in the same situation.

...at least part of my concern here is with the reverse implications. If I give a student a modified test, then I want to know as clearly as possible why I am doing so and what specific modifications are appropriate for that student. I would also like to distinguish between special modifications necessary to enable a student to overcome a specific handicap and simply lowering my standards for a particular student, but that one may be a stretch. I think the current student advocate is competent and capable of setting up a professional approach to the issue. I am not confident that the institution would support here in doing that.

...Thanks to to LR, honestly I think too some degree I am just agonizing over this one in the same way that you describe. I also think you are right about over-selling formal education, and it just may be that I am working here on the cutting edge of that particular mistake.

[Clutch Munny]

Originally Posted by Brimshack

When I was adjunct with a regular community college, we had a specific depart that conducted diagnostic tests and notified teachers of specific modifications necessary for specific students. No guess-work, no rumors, no games played. The irony that a college with more than its fair share of people needing extra help would not have any specific means of addressing the issue is pretty sharp. It now appears that I am back in the same situation.

...at least part of my concern here is with the reverse implications. If I give a student a modified test, then I want to know as clearly as possible why I am doing so and what specific modifications are appropriate for that student.

Exactly. I'm not especially confident that the principles used by the office for learning disabilities at my institution are particularly well-founded in empirical evidence or educational theory -- or whether the educational theory itself is well-founded on empirical evidence. But I'm quite confident that they are at least applying the principles consistently, which I have neither the time nor the background knowledge to do myself. If it can't be completely sensible, at least let it be fair. And that sounds like it's hard for you to be sure of, when you don't have the support structures in place to deal with learning disabilities issues.