education
Cadete (Mescalero Apache) on Indian & White culture
In the main Western culture has had a poor record of pausing in conquest long enough to record the views of vanquished foes. We have always sent soldiers to dismantle cultures in the way of ‘manifest destiny,’ so too often it is the hard country of military dispatches in which the death songs of whole peoples echo down through the years. Perhaps we catch so much of the rich intonation and meaning in Cadete’s words because Capt. Cremony was both a journalist by training and a fluent speaker of Apache, indeed the first white man to learn the language.
Here Mescalero Apache chief Cadete offers not the expected maudlin call to the old ways, but an incisive comparative analysis of Western and Apache cultures.
“You desire our children to learn from books, and say, that because you have done so, you are able to build all those big houses, and sail over the sea, and talk with each other at any distance, and do many wonderful things; now, let me tell you what we think. You begin when you are little to work hard, and work until you are men in order to begin fresh work. You say that you work hard in order to learn how to work well. After you get to be men, then you say, the labor of life commences; then too, you build big houses, big ships, big towns, and everything else in proportion. Then, after you have got them all, you die and leave them behind. Now, we call that slavery. You are slaves from the time you begin to talk until you die; but we are free as air. We never work, but the Mexicans and others work for us. Our wants are few and easily supplied. The river, the wood and plain yield all that we require, and we will not be slaves; nor will we send our children to your schools, where they only learn to become like yourselves.”
– Mescalero Apache Chief Cadete,
as related to Capt. John C. Cremony, “The Apache Race,”Overland Monthly, Vol. I (September, 1868), 207.
BBC: The future of education in Africa is mobile
The UN’s Steve Vosloo arrives at the same conclusion I drew five years ago from my experience in Grenada, specifically that increasing mobile bandwidth was the way to get data connections into every home (as opposed to cable or fiber solutions). From an educator’s perspective I instantly saw this as a way to get the strongly mobile- and cloud-based curricula I was designing into as many hands as possible.
While education struggles to cope, mobile communication has grown exponentially. Africa is today the fastest growing and second largest mobile phone market in the world. While in some countries – including Botswana, Gabon and Namibia – there are more mobile subscriptions than inhabitants, Africa still has the lowest mobile penetration of any market. There is plenty more growth to come. Over 620 million mobile subscriptions mean that for the first time in the history of the continent, its people are connected.
These connections offer an opportunity for education. Already, we are starting to see the beginnings of change. An increasing number of initiatives – some large-scale, some small – are using mobile technologies to distribute educational materials, support reading, and enable peer-to-peer learning and remote tutoring through social networking services. Mobiles are streamlining education administration and improving communication between schools, teachers and parents. The list goes on. Mobile learning, either alone or in combination with existing education approaches, is supporting and extending education in ways not possible before.
This is the conclusion I made in 2009: that cloud- and device-based distance learning curricula were the single best, most reliable way to bring ‘first world’ education to the developing world, let alone represent a quantum expansion into untapped markets for online education. At the time the prevalent mindset was to adapt current web-based services for online on private servers. Cloud curricula aren’t subject to point-outages of power, servers, or internet. Providers of free cloud services (Google, for instance) don’t ‘do’ down. The First Law of Online Education is ‘Access is everything,’ and in places where cable or fiber internet are impracticable or prohibitively costly mobile internet –fueled by & in turn fueling the explosion in mobile devices & laptop-like 4G Chromebooks– is the only technology that can plug entire communities in with the flick of a switch. Those communities are then free to be informed, conduct commerce, or learn.
Read the remainder of Steve Vosloo’s story here.
Arming teachers in America
Asking a teacher to carry a gun is like asking a Marine to carry a speculum. Yeah they didn’t cover gynecology at Parris Island, and yeah there are people better suited for that job, but imagine how you’d feel watching one of your buddies get a really gross infection for lack of a pap smear…
I’m a college professor (read: teacher). I’m also a realist. If we’re going to have a country full of unregulated guns we are accepting a calculated risk just in going out in public. Up here a guy got hit in the side of the head by a stray bullet while driving down the street in his minivan with his family. Can’t get much more random than that, and you can’t get much more ‘gun violence’ than headshot in front of your kids.
We see only the bottom line of that calculation though, in the sum of men, women, and children killed by firearms. We’re asked to accept –with increasing incredulity– that this bloody price isn’t too much to pay for whatever inscrutable, intangible benefit gun owners enjoy.
Boys I sure hope you’re enjoying whatever it is you get out of guns, because your neighbors are paying the price every day.
I’ve been telling my students this for years: bad language skills hurt them professionally
Granted one example hardly proves my point, but it does give that point some traction by proving a certain viewpoint exists, namely that people with poor language skills are looked down upon in professional situations (my emphasis):
If you confirm an interview with Kyle Wiens with a note that says, “See you their,” you’ll never be hired at iFixit. Wiens, CEO of the San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based online repair community, won’t hire anyone who uses poor grammar or misspells words. In fact, he thinks people who haven’t mastered basic grammar deserve to be passed over, even if they’re otherwise perfect for the position.
“The person who has decided to not care about grammar is not the kind of person I want to work with,” Wiens said. “I understand missing a comma, but if you use ‘to,’ ‘too’ and ‘two’ incorrectly, it shows me you have no idea what you’re talking about. There’s a very big difference between a typo and something that makes it clear you’re fundamentally incompetent.”
Read the rest here.
What do professors do, anyway?
This is a good synopsis of the thrill-a-minute, behind the scenes life of academics. If a few commonly-held (and often pervertedly cherished) misconceptions about the work of educators are dispelled in the process of reading this article, so much the better:
For professors, actual time spent teaching in the classroom is the tip of the iceberg that follows a great deal of preparation: sifting through mountains of books and articles to pick the texts for students to read; creating detailed course plans; producing voluminous notes and presentations for every class and writing a syllabus, among other things. Professors don’t just stroll into class and say what’s on their mind.
The value of paying attention in English class
This moment of mortification is brought to you by someone in the agency for Starbucks and every single person in their marketing department who vetted these materials.
Business students, learn this important fact now: if you’re not going to attend your English/writing classes because you can’t reconcile the ROI, you’d better make so much money you can hire someone who did. Just like there is never a second chance to make a first impression, the appearance of laziness & amateurism is stickier than maple syrup on a three year old.
Link deprecated as of 12/15/18. I’ll keep looking for this image again to restore this post.
The arc of lifelong learning
Last night I read a description of the boyhood of Quanah Parker to my kids:
“…[as prepubescent boys] they roved about in gangs, wrestling, swimming, racing their horses. They would often follow birds and insects, shooting hummingbirds with special headless arrows that had split fore-shafts. They shot grasshoppers and ate the legs for lunch…”
All this play was leading up to something, though. By the time a Comanche boy had been recognized among his People as a warrior he could:
“from fifty yards…reliably hit an object the size of a doorknob four out of five times. From ten to fifteen yards he could shoot a twenty- to thirty-inch arrow with such force that it would drive entire through the [body] of a two-thousand-pound buffalo if it did not hit bone.”
The relative usefulness of archery in the 21st century aside, what knowledge are you/I/we teaching our children that describes so straight a line in transformation into essential lifelong skills as adults? Fishing? Honesty? Mathematics? How focused are you/your kids on these things in daily life?
Own-Horn Tooting
This just in from the department of own-horn-tooting: a letter from an international student of mine (from Vietnam).
hi professor,
I am glad to hear that. Me and my family is doing well, too. Your kids is getting bigger now right? I will say they going to keep you busy all day. I didn’t know that you are working two job those. But anyways, you are the best professor i havent had in my college life.
I have some good news that i just got my green card a month ago. Because i was first came here as an international student and i have met my husband here so he was doing the paperwork to petition.
As an international student so i had to go school all the time and didn’t have time to take care of my son and the family. So after got the green card to stay here, i just took the fall quarter of to spend time with them and we are going to Vietnam on January. I know it have been four year far away from my dad, my mom, my sisters and little brother. So i am getting excited looking forward for the trip.
I was thinking about finding a job after the trip and i need your help with my resume. :). Hope you will help me out with that.
Thank you being my teacher.
[name]
I love connecting with my students in meaningful ways: that what I do even has the capacity to do so.
Class notes: Own-Horn-Tooting, pt. 1
My final requires students to write a “scrupulously correct business letter” in which the student is encouraged to:
“weigh in on any subject as long as it expresses an opinion about some aspect of this class. You may offer your impressions of the quality/difficulty/amount of work you’ve been asked to do in this course, the job I’ve done as your teacher, opportunities to improve our use of the online milieu or learning technologies, what you enjoyed/appreciated about this course &c.
I get evaluations from the university, but the comments submitted in Assignment #6 come from students who are told the entire quarter to divorce their written work from their identities. These letters represent a chance to finally open up and be opinionated, if not just understood. Hereunder are excerpts from some submissions, offered in the way of a healthy dose of own-horn-entootment:
I was apprehensive to take another online class. I have had several bad experiences with classes on Blackboard. It was a nice surprise when I realized that you class was quite a bit better than most. We were never made to try to meet group members who live on the opposite side of the pass, or show up for a “digital lecture” at a specific time. It seems like you fully understand how an online class should be run.” -C., Accounting.
“In the past I have had a very negative opinion about online classes in general, and I am so relieved that this class was nothing like any previous online class that I have taken. Assignments were graded in a timely manner, feedback and progress was given on every assignment, and the professor understood that we have more than one class. I especially liked that our course load was easier during the weeks of midterms when it seems that we have tests, assignments, and projects in every class all due at the same time. This was noted and greatly appreciated.” -N., Health Sciences
“Nothing in this class felt like busy work. I appreciated how everything built upon each other and previous knowledge garnered from each assignment was necessary to complete the next one. Your immediate feedback on each assignment was helpful to make sure I was on the right track with my writing. The subject matter and target audience remained the same for assignments 3-6, therefore feedback was important and I benefited greatly from it.” -W., Food Sciences/Nutrition
“Another aspect of the class that I thought was effective that I am still not sure why many of my other teachers do not do it is sending us feedback on our work. Just doing homework is not enough for me it helps me to get feedback from the teacher on what aspects of my assignment were done correctly and what I need to do in order to improve it.” -B., Business
“Between discussion boards and weekly assignments I felt more like this was a normal class and it helped me to remember to keep up the reading and work… Also, I really appreciated that the assignments were all connected so even though there was a lot of research to do one week we were able to use that information on every assignment for the rest of the quarter.” -K., English
“…I began to see finishing the quarter as insurmountable. With the understanding and kindness that has been communicated by you…I soon learned to gain a better regard for my capabilities and recognizing when I should attend to personal matters. I would like to thank you for your input and all of your help. I also have learned many ways in which I can improve my writing skills at work and in my personal life. Your encouragement was paramount in my success with completing this phase of my scholastic goals.” J., Sociology
“…despite being an online being, you were in fact concerned with not only our learning but how we were doing in the class as well. Sometimes in online classes it is hard to see a person behind the Blackboard, but you did an exceptional job of creating a persona that the class could trust on both judgment and compassion.
“To sum it up, I would definitely recommend this class to any other writing majors as a staple to their careers. Also I want to reiterate how appreciative I am for all the work you put into making this course important to everyone, and being a real person instead of a machine that we talk to every day.” E., English
And a complaint, which resolves itself in a satisfactory manner:
“The class tended to be less structured than a normal class, so I had to rely on my own planning skills to make sure I was on top of the assignment schedule. I often found myself remembering about an assignment only a day or two before its due date, or in the case of assignment six, forgetting about it entirely. This is my only real complaint about the class, and like I mentioned, it really is my own fault. I suppose you could say it was a good learning experience.” J., Film Studies
A good bunch of students this quarter.
A Biscuit In The Sun 