Grading Participation?

Today, I had an unexpected and quite interesting conversation about grades, including how we evaluate participation, and so I wanted to record some ideas here for further discussion. In the past, while teaching both as a TA and in my first few years at the secondary level, I've always built a participation component into my overall schema. But, after reflecting on what participation means over the past year, I no longer include it. It's a big shift from how I used to approach grading, but I think it's for the best.

The current conception of grading is severely flawed, as more and more educators are realizing; but I just want to focus here on participation, in that it may help us to see this bigger and fuzzier picture more clearly. I'm particularly interested in this question, since it has a lot to do with developing EQ and non-cognitive skills in students, which is one of my major projects this year. With that, grading participation, as I see it, is flawed for developing emotional and social intelligence for a number of reasons:

• Grades are founded on the "carrot and stick" model that Pink has criticized so well in his discussion on motivation (cf. Drive pp. 32-57). I've come to believe that we should never force kids to participate in class, but rather create the sorts of environments that encourage and welcome their participation in their own individual ways. It's thus our responsibility as educators to facilitate classroom participation, not our kids'. As such, they shouldn't be penalized for our own failures.
• Based on our different levels of "social comfort" within classrooms, participation cannot be evaluated evenly and fairly within a given group. How do we evaluate the more talkative students beside those who aren't as comfortable or confident voicing their opinions? How can we take into account different levels of brain development and self control? Too often, I fear, we attribute participation grades to personalities more than anything else.
• As far as I know, participation can't be easily defined and therefore measured. Is there such a thing as a "rubric" for participation, especially within "one size fits all" model? How do we give effective feedback for participation that accurately reflects an understanding of the brain?
• Most critically of all, perhaps, participation is often used as a tool to "fudge" grades, arbitrarily moving some kids up or down a grade level. Is it fair that one student with an 89.7% should get an "A-", while another a "B+" based solely on participation? Shouldn't an 89.7% that's fairly earned equal another 89.7% (whatever that even means!)? Opacity in grades just isn't fair.

Ultimately, this is a discussion about ego. It's not that egos are inherently bad, per se, but when we let them control us, as in this particular case, we build an expectation for participation, which we use grades to enforce. Within the traditional framework, then, assigning a grade to participation is more about us than about our students. But if we can let go of these expectations and let the kids be themselves, while we work to design engaging environments for them, we can develop EQ without the need for a carrot or a stick. In other words, it's about controlling our ego and expectation by building empathy, or an understanding of our classroom experience from our students' individual perspectives. It's not easy, but I think it's the right thing to do.

I'll admit that I'm heavily biased, so I welcome comments or other ideas below or on Twitter. What do you think about participation? Why or why not do you believe in using it to evaluate students? Can we make it work, or is it inherently flawed? What have I missed?

A Shallow Collective?

As I begin my summer reading binge, I've been trying to balance my consumption of pro-technology materials to include anything that offers alternative and/or critical views of the new (e.g. tech.-focused) directions in education. Much like I've argued with questions of the value of foreign language, I think it's healthy to face and even embrace criticism, since it helps us to build a fuller understand of why we do certain things in certain ways through reflection, lest our ideas become dogmatic or myopic.

With that, I recently read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, followed immediately by Douglas Thomas and John Brown's A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, which seem to have been written for one another, despite having no apparent knowledge of the other book's existence (other than a single citation in New Culture without any explicit commentary on Shallows). It's proven quite interesting to read both books in succession, since in many respects they occupy entirely different ends of the technological spectrum and can thus be read as criticism of each other in the regard mentioned above.

Carr's Shallows, an "exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences" (cf. this video summary), gives a thought-provoking challenge to those who advocate technology. Carr's thesis is that the increased use and even dependence on the internet is affecting our attention, focus, and deep-thinking skills, and he presents a rather impressive collection of evidence in favor of the neurological consequences of certain technologies. Since finishing it a week ago, I've been thinking more about the broader applications of technology in education in light of his conclusions, and I'll outline just a few of the ideas that I've found interesting.

The first few chapters paint a 2000-year intellectual history of literary culture and the relation to the neuroplasticity of the brain, before he probes the internet's more recent effects on our thinking. One of his main criticisms is that more information necessarily allows less time to use it (Shallows 170), which then leads him to a short and subtle attack against Google's search engine (Shallows 72). And with less time spent in reflection and deep thought, we're unable to achieve a high level of memorization (Shallows 177), since the internet harms "working memory" (Shallows 193) and our attentiveness (Shallows 193-4).

Going even farther, Carr claims that the "offloading of memory" poses a threat to our very culture: "Outsource culture, and memory withers" (Shallows 197). We can even lose our "humanity" by relying so heavily on the internet (Shallows 207, 220), and we pay the price via alienation from each other (Shallows 211).  To my mind, Carr's claims at times tend toward the sensational, but that's not to say that they should be dismissed.

If The Shallows can be read as the critic's cautionary tale against the increased use of technology, then New Culture champions the proponent's response.  For what it's worth, New Culture doesn't privilege technology in its discussion or even discuss very many specific examples of tech. tools.  Instead, it's about, as the title makes clear, the "new culture of learning" that technology and the "fluid infrastructure of the twenty-first century" (New Culture 17) has given us. Nearly everything that Carr offers as evidence for the dangers to thinking that internet brings to the brain finds a response in New Culture, and the two books couldn't present two more contrary views of the cultural value of technology.

The ideas in New Culture are centered around the "collective" environment, where "teachers no longer need to scramble to provide the latest up-to-date information to students because the students themselves are taking an active role in helping to create and mold it, particularly in areas of social information" (New Culture 52).  The new learning collective, then, is far from the solitary experience that Carr describes in The Shallows.

The "new culture of learning about the kind of tension that develops when students with an interest or passion that they want to explore are faced with a set of constraints that allow them to act only within given boundaries" (New Culture 81).  That is to say, taking advantage of the new media in education is more than simply unleashing students on internet; rather, there's a concerted attempt to incorporate innovation, combining structure with freedom (New Culture 48-9).

In the old mod model of education, students learn about world and their learning culture was precisely equal to their environment, within the "intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration" (Shallows 114); but in the new model, they learn with world (New Culture 38) and their culture emerges from environment (New Culture 37-8). The learning community is constructed such that its members are constantly referencing each other (New Culture 25) and learning from other's experiences (New Culture 29), with the result that they learn more than just "data":  their learning is "personal" and students are thus more invested (New Culture 31), in contrast to being "alienated" by technology (Shallows 211).

It's proven interesting to read these two books in succession, given the seemingly contradictory ideas they propose.  If I have any criticism of my own to levy against The Shallows, it's that Carr is too "traditional" in his outlook. He has overlooked the communal advantage that the internet and social media offer to today's students. Carr openly acknowledges that the world is shifting to the paradigm of digital culture and away from solitary reading and "intellectualism" (Shallows 108), but, aside from the argument against attention loss, it's not clear to me from his conclusions why such a shift can only have negative consequences.

I'm not one to dismiss intellectualism, but I also don't think that the world needs more solitary intellectuals right now. Thomas and Brown claim that "[a]lmost every difficult issue we face today is a collective, rather than a personal, problem" (New Culture 59), and it seems that these sorts of problems that we face and will continue to face can only be effectively addressed through collaboration.

While Carr laments the "outsourcing" of memorization (Shallows 181), Thomas and Brown applaud the shift away from it (New Culture 43). Digital culture allows students to ask more inquiry-based questions like "what are the things that we don't know and what questions can we ask about them?" (New Culture 83), where answers serve as starting points for other questions. I couldn't help but think of Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiment, in which he gave kids in India access to the internet and watched as they collectively taught themselves how to use it. These kids look like anything but automatons who have been "numbed" from overexposure to the internet.

Carr's critical attitude toward Google is patently clear (Shallows 172), as are his beliefs about the price we pay for digitizing the world's libraries.  Thomas and Brown, on the other hand, offer a real-world example whereby Google was used by a neophyte coder to learn from his mistakes by using Google to find solutions and improve his work in the process (New Culture 26).

Though Carr argues that dependence on the internet leads one to lose identity by viewing it as an extension of themselves (Shallows 219), Thomas and Brown believe that digital culture via "collective indwelling" actually helps to create identity by giving students the opportunity to question their relationship with others through "hanging out" (New Culture 101) and by giving themselves more personal agency through "messing around" (New Culture 103). Most of all, "[g]eeking out provides an experiential, embodied sense of learning withing a rich social context of peer interaction, feedback, and knowledge construction enabled by a technological infrastructure that promotes 'intense, autonomous, interest driven' learning" (New Culture 104).  9-year-old Sam illustrated the example of the "new culture" well, in that he is able to take advantage of collective learning not only to improve his knowledge of programming, but to improve his overall understanding of citizenship (New Culture 20-21) — an understated but crucially important result of an effective collective.

In the end, while I disagree some of Carr's conclusions in favor of the ideas in New Culture, he does an excellent job of collecting various studies on brain development and behavior to show how technology can affect our brains. For instance, it's clear that we learn much worse when distracted, as has been shown through various experiments (cf. especially Shallows 133). Carr's challenges to the growing importance of technology allows us to reflect on the purpose behind our choices. Whether beginning a 1;1 program, moving students to an LMS, or even just doing digital media projects, we should be clear about our goals, and we should never use technology simply to use technology. It's up to educators to craft the right kind of collective environment for our students so we don't end up too shallow or too deep.

If interested in the intersection of pedagogy and education, I suggest reading both of these fantastic books.  The #CAedchat summer book club will hold Twitter discussions on each of them over the next few months, where I'll be eagerly looking forward to continuing the discussion about these ideas.

#latinlangchat Twitter Chat

I've had a great time participating in Twitter chats like "CAedchat", with hashtag #caedchat, which happens Sunday evenings at 8pm PST and provides a forum for CA teachers to discuss current topics in education and pedagogy.  As far as I know, there exists no current live chat devoted to Latin and the ancient world, and so capitalizing on the popularity of Twitter chats like this one (cf. this list for more), I'd like to start one.  It seems to me that we Latin teachers don't talk shop with enough frequency, and this could be a great way for us to build community (even Pompeii had social networks, after all!).

Latin graffiti from Pompeii

Given that the hashtag #latinlangchat is already in use by some Latin teachers, it makes sense to continue using it for this purpose.  I've created the #latinlangchat calendar that I'll use to plan our discussions, and I welcome help in any capacity, including co-moderators.  Though we're tagging our discussion with #latinlangchat, it is open to those who teach Greek, ancient history, and any other related fields.  Everyone should feel free to participate as much or as little as desired.

Let's have our first hour-long chat on Tuesday, 4/9 at 6pm PST and talk about the promotion of Latin programs.  How do we convince students to take Latin and maintain our program strength?  Is retention an problem, and if so, why?  Depending on how it goes, we can reconvene every other week at 6pm.

We'll follow the usual chat format and introduce ourselves, before jumping into questions labeled "Q1", "Q2", etc.  For convenience, answers should begin "A1", "A2", etc.  For chats of this sort on Twitter, it is usually suggested that tweetchat.com (vel sim.), which has worked very well for me, be used to monitor the discussion.  Chat digests will be kept using Storify.

Disclaimer:  I am in my fifth year teaching Latin at a middle school in Los Angeles and will be implementing a 1:1 laptop program for our 7th graders next fall.  I'm consequently very interested in discussing the incorporation of technology into our program.  I will again teach our 9th-grade Latin I course, designed for students new to the school or students taking a second language.  Traditionally, we have used the Oxford Latin Course for both the Latin IA-IB-II progression and this accelerated course, but I don't like its pacing for Latin I and will try Wheelock instead next year.  Finally, I teach Latin III to advanced 9th graders, using a reading-based approach that departs from the Oxford texts.  We begin with Balme and Morewood's Cupid and Psyche text, before moving on to one of the Focus Aeneid commentaries, in addition to other supplementary readings.  I am thus interested in discussing textbook choices and other resources for intermediate Latin students.  Based on my own experiences, I'll offer some of tentative ideas for discussion here, but I'd love to know what concerns others have:

• Building a Latin program
• JCL club culture 
• Latin and technology
• Textbooks and digital resources
• The AP Latin curriculum
• Latin-specific professional development opportunities

I can be found at @mosspike on Twitter, and our JCL club lives on at @hwjcl.  I'm looking forward to our first #latinlangchat next week!

Chromebooks and Word Processing

I finally picked up a Samsung Series 3 Chromebook, which I've had my eye on since I had the chance to work with one at the Boulder GAFE Summit last August (cf. my notes taken on a Chromebook).  I'm a big fan of Google Apps and have transitioned the majority of my work into my Drive account, so it's certainly a sensible purchase.  Additionally, my Mac is on its last leg, and the school-provided laptop is much too big for travel, and because I find using an iPad tedious for conferencing, the Chromebook seems like a great choice for a portable yet functional device while on the road.  After playing on it for a few hours, I'm very happy with the purchase.  Some quick observations:

• The Spotify extension didn't initially work, but after going through Facebook, it now opens the player.  The web player still in demo and doesn't offer full functionality.
• The trackpad is a little clunky, but I like the keyboard.
• The screen resolution is fine.
• The sound is surprisingly loud, even if somewhat muddled at high volumes, and the camera is respectable.

As our school moves toward a 1:1 laptop program beginning next fall, I've been working to keep the Chromebook in the picture as a viable laptop choice, and I've pushed toward as many web-based applications as possible to obviate the need for students to purchase expensive software that they would rarely use (I could easily see these software lists getting out of hand).  While web-based versions of most of the tools that students rely on are now available, however, there's still a dependence on Microsoft Office for all of our word-processing tasks.

I'm positive that I'll get quite a lot of use from the Chromebook, but one of my biggest issues in using it with students is the limited utility of fonts within Drive. Classics and linguistics consistently rely on specialized fonts for written work, and while Google Docs support nearly everything that we need, it is extremely tedious to generate non-standard characters easily within a document.  Consequently, I have two questions that I need to answer by August, before Drive can become a viable primary word-processing tool and the Chromebook can be a legitimate "BYOL" device for what I want to do in my Latin classes.

My Latin classes have found Drive useful (especially Docs and Spreadsheets), but we haven't yet used it to its full potential.  The default Chrome language can be set to Spanish, French, etc., with all diacritical characters readily available, and so modern language teachers should have little issues with writing the target languages.  But there's no "Latin" keyboard that offers the capability to write a long vowel with a "macron" over it, e.g. writing a verb like dūxērunt "they lead" (pf.).  When our students are doing written work on the computer, I want them to have the capability of marking vowel length without fuss, rather than having to insert a special character manually or type the Unicode character for each one, e.g. U+0113 for ē.

My question:  is there a way to create shortcut keys to type long vowels?  In Word, once can easily create a custom shortcut key, but because shortcuts are tied to browser function in web-based text editors, I'm not sure that this is possible.  Alternatively, can custom keyboard layouts be created?  If not, I'm worried that the usefulness of Docs will suffer, at least for Latin students, and that it will be even more difficult to move away from Word.

Similarly but going a step farther, it's impractical for me to do work with Proto-Indo-European (which traditionally does not use IPA), if I have to rely on inserting special characters like *gʷʰ or *ṷ (I can find no syllabic r). This issue isn't as urgent as the need for marking long vowels in Latin, but I would love to be able to do collaborative work with others.

I'll continue to explore Chrome-related questions over the next few months and will share my thoughts here.  As usual, I would greatly appreciate input from others.

Pink's Drive and Motivation

Thanks to a bit of extra free time over spring break, I finally had some time to read Daniel Pink's Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, since I've been lately thinking about the sometimes tenuous relationship that faculty have with professional development (PD.  The first half of the book focuses on the problems of motivation mainly from the perspective of the the business world, but it has clear applications to other fields, especially teaching (Pink offers suggestions for parents and educators later in the book).  The book is fantastic, and Pink is able to articulate much of what most people know from intuition but don't put to practice.  I'll briefly underscore only a few of Pink's points that I found salient to me:

Pink argues compellingly that now is the time for "motivation 3.0", which is based on intrinsic nature in humans "to learn, to create, and to better the world" (225), to supplant reward vs. punishment-based motivation 2.0.  His arguments are all based on scientific studies, which he cites fully in his rather convincing attempt to prove that motivation 3.0 is a real phenomenon that the world just hasn't yet adjusted to.

Pink criticizes the "carrot and stick" model for motivating people to complete tasks in that it simply doesn't work.  While it may have some positive effect for more "algorithmic" tasks, it does nothing for "heuristic" work that requires creative and independent thought (27ff.).  Unfortunately, much of what we do in education is driven by algorithm (e.g. excessive lecturing, needless homework, standardized testing, etc.).

To break from this model, Pink underscores the role that autonomy plays in creating the intrinsic motivation that drives people both to be productive in a given task and to feel fulfilled in their work (83ff.).  He then offers several examples of the "results-only work environment" (ROWE), in which companies have given employees "FedEx" Days (e.g. Atlassian; cf. p. 91) and "20% time" (e.g. Google; cf. p. 94) to use for whatever creative projects they wish to work on, and the results have spoken volumes.

Ch. 6 discusses purpose and the "most underused word in the modern workplace: Why" (137).  I wholeheartedly agree that we don't often enough discuss the "whys" of what we do.  Failing to do so, I fear, can prevent the formation of a strong community, when the goals of a given project aren't immediately clear to those asked to support it.

While considering these ideas, I've been trying to think of ways to implement more 3.0 strategies in education.  My focus right now isn't in the classroom, however, but with faculty ourselves, given that it's very difficult for me to believe we can continue to be strong teachers if we're not doing regular PD.  We're too often busied with administrative tasks (albeit many of which are self-imposed) that we don't have a chance to explore, create, and stay "fresh".  Consequently, even potentially exciting PD work can seem like drudgery for some, rather than creating a sense of "flow" (a somewhat opaque "Zen" concept discussed on pp. 114ff.).

Based on these points, I've listed some ideas I've been churning:

• I'm interested in giving a "flow test" (153-4) or doing an "autonomy audit" (166-7) for both faculty and students.  I will be heading the Student Workload Committee at our school next year and will certainly incorporate some of these ideas.

• I'm thinking about ways to give faculty a periodic "FedEx" day to use as they please.  How would this look?  Is it even practical?  It's important, to my mind, to give faculty as much autonomy and freedom as we would like to give to our students.

• How could faculty then use "FedEx" days inside the classroom while simultaneously supporting their curriculum?  Cf. Mike Jackson's blog post on his own thoughts for giving students more autonomy.

• How can we restructure our current "team" models to give faculty more autonomy in what they do in their classes?

• Finally, we need to have more "why" conversations to foster community. They need to happen frequently and in small groups, where people can ask questions and feel open in voicing their opinions, even if dissenting.  The lack of teacher collaboration is well known (cf. this article from the Atlantic) and needs to be addressed.

I have more questions than answers right now, but I'm also optimistic that we have the opportunity on the horizon to do some interesting things.  I'd love to hear other reactions from those who have read Drive.  Alternatively, I welcome suggestions for other books.  Find me at @mosspike on Twitter to start a conversation.

My Childhood "Gears"

Seymour Papert's "Gears of My Childhood", the foreword to his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, serves as our first LCL activity to share.  Briefly, Papert reflects back on his love of mechanical gears, viewing them as an adaptive model onto which he was able to overlay new and potentially difficult concepts in a familiar way. In his words, "[a]nything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models."

Chaisson and McMillan

An astronomy textbook was my childhood gears.  No older than 6, I still remember being in the bookstore in the Meadows Mall in Las Vegas and finding the book.  I can no longer recall the title or authors, nor am I sure I even know where the book is anymore, but I was compelled at that moment in the mall to have it.

Thoroughly engrossed by the pictures, I studied every page of the book.  But I also read through it over and over again and was particularly fascinated by the planets.  I made "information" sheets for each of them and asked my mom to make copies, along with images taken from the book, which I then distributed to my friends, so that they could also become experts in one or two of the planets.  So, for Christmas one year, my parents bought me a telescope.  And in the middle of a cold winter night in 1986, my dad took me out to the mountains to look at Halley's Comet, which is still one of my favorite childhood memories.

This book fueled my love of science and astronomy in particular because, in retrospect, I was fascinated at how we could come to know about objects that were so far away from us.  I was fascinated by knowledge and the process by which we acquired it.  I was captivated by the challenge that we had to overcome to send probes into space that would send information back to us.  And most of all, I was infatuated by connected systems that influence each other and work together, not unlike Papert's gears.  On account of that, my love of astronomy transformed to a love of chemistry, physics, and then engineering; but everything came together when I found historical linguistics, studying languages as connected systems that evolve through time.  It's hard to believe, but there are quite a number of similarities between astrophysics and historical linguistics.  And thanks to my obsession with that book, I've been able to use these similarities to make more sense of the both of them.

Thoughts on Interest-Based Learning

Our second session assignments for the MIT Medial Labs Learning Creative Learning MOOC is to, in part, read through some of +Joichi Ito's blog posts on learning and respond with our own thoughts about what we found most surprising or interesting, and offer disagreements or questions, should we have any.  Moreover, we're challenged to keep it short, so I'll refrain from delving more deeply into the ideas below.

The first thing that comes to my mind in Ito's discussions of "Formal vs. informal education" and "Reading the dictionary" is the debate between content vs. creation that I've been thinking about for a while (cf. a recent blog post on the question).  The formal system that the majority of schools currently work with certainly needs adjustment, but I don't think that the system alone is to be blamed for its inability to engage interest-driven students, namely, the students who enjoy reading the dictionary.  We've got to adapt and find new and interesting ways to motivate them.  When Ito wonders "how many people have personalities or interests that aren't really that suited for formal education, at least in its current form", I first read this sentence as a reference to teachers, rather than students.

I've recently picked up Susan Cain's Quiet:  The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking to help me to work toward an understanding of how introverted learners will be able to adapt in a more open, student-centered classroom (N.B.: that's not the focus of the book, but rather a question I have).  If we were to radically modify our system to the purely informal model, would we exclude all the learners who thrive in the formal, structured system (e.g. Ito's sister), like many of the introverts at our school?  Is there a proper balance between the two extremes, and if so, what does that classroom look like?

I enjoyed "Dubai and learning about the unknowable", partly because I'm currently reading Watts' Way of Zen, and partly because I've tried to build mindfulness and self-reflection into my daily routine, not only in teaching but in everything that I do.  In fact, I had a chat with a colleague about the need for us to continually reflect on why we do what we do with technology throughout the process of integration.  Given how "traditional" and content-based our school is, leaving us with little time to reflect back on everything we do in a given academic year, it's the perfect place to learn to "meditate" on these questions.  Once we're comfortable knowing that we don't know all the answers and definitions of the pedagogical "buzzwords" that we've been throwing around lately, we can relax and start moving forward.

What's the Value of Foreign Language?

Bolchazy-Carducci is one of the more prolific publishers of Classical texts, and they've done a lot of great work for Greek and Latin teachers that has helped to make our jobs easier.  In their February eLitterae newsletter, Sherwin Little's Little's Bits column "A Latin teacher wears many hats..." addresses the complexities of a Latin teacher's job, which often requires us to serve in part as a "public relations specialist" to help keep our numbers strong.  Now that it's time for students to start signing up for next year's classes, the question of why one should choose to study Latin is again placed under the microscope, and the recent news that the Pope's resignation was delivered in Latin has been in wide circulation as more proof of its importance (no fewer than 5 colleagues have independently emailed me news about this in the past week!).  I certainly do believe that PR is a big part of game in this field, as anyone who does JCL club work knows all too well.

At any rate, Little's column today reminds me of an article a few colleagues and I read last summer, Bryan Caplan's "The Numbers Speak:  Foreign Language Requirements are a Waste of Time and Money".  In short, Caplan argues that learning a foreign language is irrelevant and unnecessary in this day and age.  He backs off somewhat at the end of the article, confessing that he actually "got a lot of value" through his German studies, but he thinks that the majority of Americans don't have the same experience (if interested, I suggest reading through the comments to the article for a myriad of varying opinions).  It's a preposterous argument, but it also raises some very interesting questions about the state of affairs in foreign language vis-à-vis the growing importance technology in education, and it's clear that it's not just Latin that's under fire.

What's interesting here, to my mind, is the perceived value of foreign language in our culture.  Foreign language teachers can easily, even if not effectively, dismiss a poor argument like Caplan's from our point of view as language teachers, but it also underscores the challenges that we face in creating a valuable classroom experience for our students.  I read Caplan's article as a call for foreign language teachers to defend why we believe that what we do is important.  If we accept the challenge, it's a great exercise for us to do some self-reflection and actually articulate these reasons, rather than simply dismiss Caplan's claims, without further thought.  Cf. a similar challenge issued by Andrew Hacker in his article "Is Algebra Necessary?" in the NYT last July that math teachers have taken up.

In the comments, several people have asked if Caplan's argument applies to all academic subjects in our schools, like algebra and science, given that most Americans don't use them on a daily basis.  I don't think so, though.  Math and science are privileged right now (and being a former engineer I'll never say that they shouldn't be), and as such they receive quite a deal of publicity, especially at our school, which held a very public STEM day last year, complete with all kinds of interactive events and activities.  Even the arts have frequent public showcases and special assemblies here, but foreign language (and indeed the humanities in general!) has no such days for public celebration, where kids get to share their work pridefully with the community.  And though kids do enjoy their foreign language classes, in general, this very culture that promotes science has also taught our students to undervalue language study, in comparison to the more "popular" subjects.  I suffered from this myself in in high school, when I loaded up on math and science, while loathing my Spanish classes, since I saw relatively little value in it.  Thanks to the growing popularity of STEM work and now President Obama's endorsement of STEM education, administrations aren't going to automatically put foreign language departments on equal footing with the math and science anytime soon.  The burden, then, is on us to make language study more worthwhile.  We have to do a better job of earning attention and making students want to take more languages classes for reasons other than financial gain or status.  Even the Yudhijit Bhattacharjee's NYT article on "Why Bilinguals are Smarter", though insightful, is pragmatic and so doesn't do much to bolster the intrinsic appeal that language study can offer.

Ultimately, though, pitting physics against Spanish and chemistry against Latin is a loosing battle, not because the languages can't win, but because education shouldn't be about competition. Where Caplan's argument fails most — and even where much of the argumentation for taking Latin errs, I think — is in the compartmentalization of academia, in treating foreign language in isolation from other subjects.  Language study will not evolve, unless we change our approach for teaching and learning them.

Caplan's compartmentalization doesn't facilitate community, which languages necessarily depend on.  The trouble that language programs have found themselves in, whether now or in past generations (e.g. Latin in the 1960s), seem to be a direct result of the lack of a strong communal focus that leaves students feeling unengaged and unfulfilled.  Today, there are a number of great tools that can help us to strengthen them within the classroom, e.g. PLNs, blogs, digital storytelling, and I'm sure there exist other ideas to explore that I'm not even aware of.  I see no reason my foreign language courses can't work beside English, history, art, and even math and science courses to do more connected work through the use of these tools.  Despite the fact that we don't teach Latin as a living language (though there are arguments about oral Latin), we derive the strength of our program from the strong community of students and teachers here.  I don't expect many of our students to pursue advanced degrees in Classics or linguistics, but I'm confident that the majority of them won't believe in 20 years that what they're doing right now is is pointless.  In fact, a significant fraction of our Latin students begin study of a third language in 9th grade solely because they've enjoyed learning how language works.

Several colleagues at our school have questioned the technological directions that we're taking, but for me, that's really what all this "technofuss" is about:  community and interconnectedness.  Or as Little put it, creating a "buzz" in our classes.  Having to have relied on the strength of our community for the sake of numbers in the past, I'm a big believer in its importance for engagement.  With all the new tools at our disposal now, we can build the kinds of communities that we never imagined in the past.  We've necessarily had to adopt various strategies for creating a strong Latin culture within our program without technology, and now that we have new tools, we can do an ever better job on an even larger scale.  I'm excited to put on yet one more hat, and I hope that others do the same.

Over the next few months, I plan on detailing some of the new directions with technology that our department would like to take, as we plan for our 1:1 program in the fall.  But for now I welcome others to share their own ideas for developing stronger communities and promoting more engagement between students and even classes.

Content vs. Creation in the Classroom

Socrates

I remember an undergraduate survey, when I was a TA in grad school, asking them what they thought made a TA great, in their opinion.  To my surprise, it wasn't how much their TA loved what they taught or how dynamic their classrooms were that mattered most, but rather how well they knew their subject matter.  In other words, undergraduates wanted masters of content, which has become a hotly debated word in education.  There are several ways to explain the survey results away, including the fact that the students simply cared about getting the highest grades possible.  But it's an important statement that deserves more thought in light of the growing criticisms of classrooms that excessively focus on content.

Mitchel Resnick's "All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten" (found in the course syllabus) is first reading in the MIT media lab MOOC I'm taking.  It's a great read on the need for more "creative-thinking skills" in modern education, and I'm certainly in agreement that we need to move our classrooms toward this goal, with the help of various digital technologies.  But I already know how this argument will be perceived, at least at a school like ours, where academic content is privileged above everything else.

Our Foreign Language Department is in the middle of an internal review, for which each language invited a visitor to observe and evaluate our program.  Latin invited Prof. Robert Cape, the chief reader for the AP Latin program, and after extensively talking with him, I, who have been as critical of the AP system as anyone and hopes that what Dartmouth is doing only spreads, came away with new-found respect for the exam.  Rather than representing the ultimate goal that students should aim to achieve, Cape, a trained Classicist, adamantly argued that he sees the AP exam as representing a baseline of skills that should then enable Latin students to do more advanced work after the exam, or what most educators would now call inquiry-based learning.  I was very happy to hear him say this, since, without a set of content-based skills, students are unable to do the kinds of analytical work that the field of Classics is built upon.  Having gone through a PhD program myself, I also firmly believe in the importance of content mastery and skill-based inquiry.  This view of the AP exam as merely a doorway to future study isn't prevalent everywhere, however, especially among the crowd that places content-driven AP exams as the goal of study rather than a means to further study, and this is a problem.

With that in mind, colleagues have and will continue argue that "kindergarten approach" to learning cannot help students to learn the required AP content and skills and will thus quickly dismiss Resnick's argument.  Both our faculty and students are so under the gun to perform on AP exams that there's no time for creation and playing with technology, they maintain.  Moreover, the body of literature advocating creation over content is growing, and nearly every argument I've seen recently in favor of pushing for more creativity criticizes the "failures" of the current system, including Resnick himself, who argues that "today's schools are out-of-step with today's needs".  The majority of this literature, however, is unable to offer very specific and concrete examples of using creative methods in content-driven curricula, which only strengthens the "content" argument.

So, that's where I am right now.  I fully believe in Resnick's plea for the need for creativity in the classroom and I am a firm believer in the power of technology, but I also appreciate the fact that skills and content needs to maintained, in order to teach the next generation of inquiry-based leaders.  And I don't think that the current system, however traditional, is necessarily broken.  There are certainly some deeply-rooted problems in education today. but we're also doing some good things that should be more often identified.  In my own field, at the very least, Classical scholarship cannot continue without mastery the rigorous skills needed to understand and really engage with the material that we study.  But we also need creative thinkers who can look at ancient texts and think about them in new and exciting ways, hopefully asking new questions seeing things in them that no one has hitherto noticed.  The question at hand, now, is how to preserve content, while also embracing creativity and technology not in random games and projects, but as a pervasive feature of the curriculum.  I don't think anyone has seriously addressed how to do this, and that's a big reason why not everyone has warmly embraced the kinds of creativity that using technology can offer.  Blamed for current methods and already skeptical of new ones, they're left to come up with ideas on their own.

Content is important.  Creativity is important too.  I think that there's should be some ideal mix of the two that will look different in different classrooms.  I also think that educational literature that is quick to dismiss tradition and content-based learning, however broken, is ultimately unhelpful and only serves to widen the gap between sides.  Likewise myopic is the claim that using technology to create more opportunities to play can only be accomplished at the expense of content.  Ultimately, it's not the content or the creative technology that matters.  The single most important factor in quality education is the teacher, and I fear that too much of the pedagogical literature being shared right now fails to focus on this fact (cf. ASCD "21st Century Skills" for a good assessment of this).

In addition to MIT's LCL MOOC, I'm also participating in #ETMOOC, which has been fantastic.  Though I started the course almost two weeks late, I've already learned a lot about digital storytelling and have been thinking through some ways to use it to enhance the content that I'm teaching in my Latin courses, perhaps embracing some of the principles of "rhizomatic learning" (which I don't fully understand yet).  And as our school embarks on a 1:1 program next fall, that's what I want to get out of my participation in the two MOOCs, namely, find my own balance of content and creative learning:  not tools that will make be better at technology or smarter in content, but a balance that will help me to become a better teacher.

Vindolanda Mini-Class

I've been asked to teach a "mini"-class for prospective 7th graders at one of our schools Family Visit Days, when we'll host applicants.  The classes are broken down into 20-minute slots for no more than 20 students, and we'll run each class 6 times.  Thanks to the format, it's very difficult to teach a language-based mini-class, let alone one in Latin, but I have an idea that I'm eager to try.

I explored Hadrian's Wall a few years ago and have since been very interested in the military letters found along the wall, chiefly in the Roman fort at Vindolanda.  With that in mind, I've decided to do a very short writing project with the kids, having them write "Vindolanda" letters of their own.  I'll use Google Earth to "travel" to Hadrian's Wall and show them just how far they were from Rome (maybe also briefly using Stanford's ORBIS project?), then give them the Roman cursive script used along the wall and some Latin phrases in a Google Doc as a starting point.  They'll write their letters on a small piece of balsa wood using a black marker (cf. the famous letter 291 below), and I'll paste a QR code (found above) on the back of each "tablet" that will direct them to the same Google Doc, on which I'll allow comments, in case they have any questions or comments after they leave the classroom.  It'll be fun to see how many kids visit the Google Doc after the classes are over.

This project should be a great way to learn actively a little bit about the formalities of Roman letter writing, including names and dates, while working within an actual historical framework.  And it'll be a nice personal project that students will be able to take home with them.  I'm eagerly looking forward to putting some ideas I've had over the past few months to the test.