How average am I?

Years ago, during my California days, when talking about teaching and students, a colleague--who also moved out of the state--described the challenge this way: we need to target the "average student."  That means there will be students who will be above average, and there will also be students who are below average.  To make things worse, odds are that most faculty were consistently above-average students, which means that we have no idea what it means to be an "average student" leave alone the below-average.

My conclusion has always been one additional step--this is all the more the reason why the factory-style mass education system won't work.  Especially with the growing technological opportunities, customized education ought to be a lot more possible, like how the rich and the powerful in history had their personal tutors.

So, of course, I am always delighted when more important people say stuff that appeals to me.  Like when a Harvard professor, Todd Rose, says this about higher education:

In higher ed we have a brutally standardized system. It doesn't matter what your interests are, what job you want, everyone takes the same courses in roughly the same time and at the end of the course you get ranked.

A brutally standardized system.  A system that even developed the idea of the "average" grade, even when we insiders know all too well that grades are useless!  Especially the grades via the puke-inducing bubbling approach!

To make things worse, we blame students!

our system of judging people according to their deviation from the mean (faster, slower, stronger, weaker) is smothering our talents. The sweeping generalisations of averagarians, as he labels them, cannot but gloss over the multifaceted nature of an individual. The effect is pernicious in the extreme. Schools, for instance, rate pupils largely on their ability to learn faster than the average, and design curriculums to suit the speediest. Yet learning slowly does not preclude a student from ultimately mastering a subject.

So, what can we do?

There's plenty of ways we're making smaller units of learning to combine in ways that are useful to you. To me, competency based education is nonnegotiable. I don't think you can have fixed-time, grade-based learning anymore. I don't see how you justify diplomas.
It doesn't mean students can take forever, but allowing some flexibility in pace and only caring whether they master the material or not is a sound foundation for a higher ed system.

I am all in favor.  Oh wait, who cares about the students, right!

High crimes and misdemeanors ... in an Atlanta middle school?

The older I get, the less I find most of the happenings in the world to be Manichean, binary, as in good or bad. Of course, there are instances when I have no doubts whatsoever--like how President "Dubya" Bush and his minions ought to be tried for war crimes and torture.

However, we hoi polloi don't get to positions of power and privilege, which means we have no idea how we might act if we, too, could bomb a country back to the Middle Age.  Criminal acts and high offices go together, I suppose!

Now, it is not as if we do not face moral questions day in and day out; we do.  It is just that our decisions influence the lives of very few others and, thus, we don't get accused of war crimes.

I urge you to read this essay in the New Yorker and judge for yourself whether the various characters mentioned there are guilty or innocent.  It is not an essay that deals with war. Nor is it about any form of violence as we would typically define violence.  It is all about a middle school cheating scandal.
(Btw, the magazine has opened up its entire content, archives included, in a summer-free-for-all. Read up all you can before the paywall goes up.)

So, a cheating scandal at a middle school. Given that it is a middle school, what can be the biggest scandal there that could merit a lengthy essay in the New Yorker?  It is not about misappropriation of money.  It is not about sex.  It is about, get ready, teachers and administrators fudging and manipulating the standardized testing so that their schools will not be dinged, and that the teachers and principals will not be fired from their jobs.  Slate described the plot well:

The story paints a portrait of how the pressure to meet unreal expectations on standardized tests drove teachers to cheat in order to save their jobs and prevent their school from shutting down.

If it were a work of fiction, we would refer to the teacher, Damany Lewis, as a protagonist.  Is he a hero?  A bad guy?  Do not jump into any conclusion until you have read that essay.  To quote from Slate, again:

Teachers at Parks Middle like Aviv’s protagonist, Damany Lewis, were forced to recalibrate their moral compasses to justify changing test answers on student papers or giving them test questions in advance.

Yep, "forced to recalibrate their moral compasses" because of the standardized tests that resulted from the highly controversial No Child Left Behind, which was the passionate domestic project of the war criminal, er, Bush.

Those war criminals didn't even get a rap on their knuckles, thanks to the snooper-in-chief who declared that "we need to look forward."  But, of course, the protagonist in this story loses his job, his marriage, his home ...

Lewis was the first to be fired. “I felt like someone had hit me with the butt end of an axe,” he said. He shaved off his dreadlocks, which, in Rastafarian tradition—a culture with which he sporadically associated—signalled the loss of a child. What troubled him most, he said, was that “I was fired for doing something that I didn’t even believe in.”
He applied for jobs at charter and alternative schools, community centers, and jails, but he didn’t get any of them. “Education let me go,” he finally concluded. He broadened his search, applying for positions that required manual labor. In interviews, he promised employers that he had the “persistence and tough skin of a middle-school teacher to bring to the workforce.” He applied for a job installing cable, and, after getting a nearly perfect score on the applicant test, he daydreamed about how he would use his teaching skills to help employees streamline the process. But a few days later the company told him that he didn’t have enough experience.
His house was foreclosed on and his car was repossessed. ... He supported his wife, their newborn son, and his daughter from his previous marriage by working as an auto mechanic.

Meanwhile, those war criminals are enjoying luxurious lives and spending hours painting awful art pieces!

Whoever said life is fair, eh!