Teaching while female

I’ve been here before. You care about your teaching, so you give the class a form asking for anonymous evaluations, with criticisms welcome…because you seriously want to hear what you can do to improve learning. And then there are always a few students who blow it off with stupid remarks and irrelevant ‘witticisms’ — I’ve been told the class needs more Jesus, for instance (I do not preach religion or atheism in my classroom).

But I’ve never had to face the special challenges of teaching while female.

Later that afternoon, I started going through the responses. It was encouraging to see that, in general, responses to the first two questions indicated I was getting better, which was gratifying given the amount of time and energy I spent re-developing the class. For the most part, students were surprisingly honest when responding to questions 3 and 4, showing they understood their responsibility in their progress, or lack thereof. Somewhere towards the end of the ~160 evaluations, I came across one that answered question #2 with: “Teach naked.”  I can’t tell you what the rest of this evaluation said; this is the only part I remember.  I was so angry, and embarrassed, and exasperated, and hopeless, all at once.  I worked so hard.  I am so knowledgeable.  I take such care to present myself professionally. I care deeply about my students’ learning outcomes, particularly with respect to learning critical thinking skills.  But none of that matters.  I clearly will never be more than a thing to look at.  How depressing is that?  None of my work, achievements, or intentions matter to people like that—just because I’m a woman, an object.  It’s maddening!

I can’t even imagine students sexualizing me, so I’d never had to think about how I’d handle such a problem. The Jesus thing? Easy. I just ignore it. But treating me as your own personal sex monkey? Never had to worry about it.

But now I know exactly how to respond to such an unlikely eventuality, and for those of you for whom it is far more likely, here’s an example of dealing with it strongly:

Almost two weeks later, before giving an exam, I announced to my class: “I want to take the first couple minutes to call out the person who used the anonymity of the mid-semester evaluations as an opportunity to sexually harass me.”  The class was suddenly at full attention.  You could hear a pin drop.  My voice trembled.  I felt humiliated having to admit that some people see me as an object.  I had decided not to make eye contact, so as to not implicitly accuse anyone, and instead stared towards the back.  I proceeded with increasing audible confidence:

“Now, I’m going to give you the benefit of doubt and assume this was not a malicious comment.  Now here’s where the teachable moment comes in: these types of comments, as well as things like catcalls, are not taken as compliments.  They constitute sexual harassment, which is a form of bullying, and like any bully, you are a coward.  An adult would own up to it and face the consequences.  For those of you who may have heard about it afterward and snickered, high-fived, or didn’t in any way condemn it publicly, you are complicit in condoning such cowardly behavior.  Now, here’s a good rule of thumb if you are unsure whether you are harassing or bullying someone—ask yourself: would you do or say this to your mother, sister, or eventually your daughters?  If the answer is no, then, it is inappropriate to do or say to a person you do not know very well.”

Bravo.

Hey, isn’t that a well-spoken truth even outside of the classroom?

On the upside, maybe I could start beating students with a stick

It’s the end of summer, and it’s a slow news time, so the newspapers are dredging the bottom of the fecal lake for material, but this is ridiculous. How about Syria? Come on, that’s important stuff. Instead, though, we get op-eds like this one in the Globe and Mail from Zander Sherman, proposing a solution to a nonexistent education problem by making education worse.

His problem: there are too many educated people.

As an entry point for the middle class, our institutions of luminous knowledge have lost their efficacy.

This is an economic consequence of oversupplying the market with similarly educated labour. Too many graduates have the same qualifications, resulting in a loss of competitive edge in the workplace.

To stay relevant, students are reaching ever higher in the pursuit of more specialized degrees. It used to be that a high school certificate was all you needed to get a decent job. Now even a bachelor’s degree is often insufficient. In this credit inflation spiral, we have devalued both our labour market and the institutions we’ve relied on to populate it.

This is a strangely twisted view; it’s about using education as a tool to promote hierarchical stratification; “The more available and abundant something is,” he says, “the less it’s worth.” We should reduce the number of college graduates, because then the few will be worth more and get paid more…leaving unsaid the corollary, that more will be worth less and can be paid less. It’s a blatantly anti-egalitarian perspective.

Furthermore, it only looks at education from the economic side. There is a real problem, that too many look at college as a magic formula for a certificate, rather as a path to greater knowledge, and it’s fueled by cheesy exploitation — I’ve seen the late night TV ads touting ways to get your bachelor’s degree in 6 weeks! Part time! By mail! I’d like to see those outfits shut down cold, but they say nothing about a real education, in which you invest time and effort in learning. Education is a path to self-knowledge and broader understanding of the world around you. It makes you a better person and a wiser contributor to society.

And yes, if you must put it that way, it creates a more educated workforce that is better able to handle challenging new jobs. If your economy is built around serfs and laborers, I guess you wouldn’t need more education.

But Sherman, who was home-schooled, could use a little education himself. He completely distorts the history of education.

The link between school and work was connected in the mid-20th century by the president of the University of California. Clark Kerr envisioned a large middle class, and saw the postsecondary certificate as a way of achieving it. By influencing the Basic Educational Opportunity Act, Kerr effectively commoditized social mobility. If you could afford to go to college – or fill out the paperwork required for a bursary – you could effectively buy your ticket to the middle class.

But Kerr didn’t predict the perverse ramifications of such a decision. By putting degrees in the hands of anyone who could pay for them, he made the work those graduates performed less valuable. A measure that was designed to mobilize society has ground it to a standstill.

Oh, nonsense. The previous system was one in which you bought your degree: even now, those most prestigious institutions in our midst, the Harvards of America, have been and are finishing schools for the rich. You do literally buy your Harvard degree. But the University of California changes were to remove most financial barriers and make a college degree an actual measure of merit. You couldn’t just pay your way through, you actually had to earn passing grades in a curriculum to get a diploma at the end of it all.

Does it even make sense to declare that students were paying for their degrees when the whole point of the institutional changes was to make a college education as close to free as possible?

So far, Sherman is just stupid. But brace yourselves, he’s about to explain his fix for the problem.

The solution to our present predicament lies in the past. In medieval times, university attendance was extremely rare. This was at least partly because school environments were so hostile. Freshmen students spent every coin they had just to get in the door, at which point they endured a hazing ritual that included dagger attacks and assaults with buckets of scalding water.

Provided they reached their dormitories alive, students slept in dank quarters, awoke before sunrise, and attended lectures in the dark (where they memorized nearly everything they learned – paper was prohibitively expensive).

When it came time to demonstrate their knowledge, students were called upon to recite epic poems in both Latin and Greek, perform a variety of musical compositions on a variety of instruments, and then bow to the same panel of judges and examiners who had made their lives intolerable for the last several years.

It’s this model we should be adopting.

You know, I didn’t go into teaching because I’m secretely an afficionado of sadism. How do dagger attacks, living in misery, and memorizing epic poetry in Greek contribute to my goal of giving students knowledge of biology?

To turn this trend around, fewer people should be furthering their educations. With fewer people furthering their educations, value will be restored to the university degree. And with value restored to the degree, the workplace will function as it should: as a powerful, competitive meritocracy.

While a privileged few fret about the problems of philosophy, the rest of us will go happily unschooled, living student debt-free, making our own jobs, and being living exemplars of the age-old axiom that ignorance really is bliss. Rarefied in such a manner, we might then find that knowledge takes on a special luminosity.

Then, finally, we’ll have a truly enlightened society – just like in the Dark Ages.

That makes no sense. The university is already a competitive meritocracy — how does it improve that to throw up additional obstacles to entry? I can predict what those obstacles would be, too: money. The same as they already are. Something that has nothing to do with intellectual merit at all.

Sherman’s entire proposal is so insane and so irrational, yet so closely in alignment with what a good American Republican would endorse, that I at first thought it had to be some kind of clumsy attempt at Swiftian satire. So I dug a little deeper into this guy’s views…and discovered that he’s completely incapable of expressing himself with clarity and coherence. He has a book called The Curiosity of School, and I first tried browsing it for clues for what he really advocates. It was nearly impossible. Here’s a snippet from a Q&A, for example.

Were people better educated before the modern education system came into existence?
The case could be made that institutionalized education–what we’re now calling school–has negatively affected people’s sense of passion and wonderment. In The Curiosity of School I was less interested in making this argument myself and more interested in providing the means by which it could be made (along with plenty of other arguments) by other people.

Passion and wonderment are good things to encourage in school. But blaming the loss of those senses on modern institutionalized education (which definitely does have flaws) while praising the cruelty and rote memorizations of the scholastic system of the Dark Ages is bizarre. And he’s not interested in making an argument? What? So I read the preview of the book on Amazon to try and figure out what the hell he’s talking about (it’s a bad sign when you have to struggle so hard to understand a writer — lucidity is not Sherman’s strength). And yes, again, he starts out with a long section describing the horrors of a medieval school, and talks about the Prussian system of using education to shape students for the military, for instance, and then switches to a litany of terrible things that have been done in the modern school system and announces that that will be the focus of the book.

What a mess. Even without his silly op-ed, I’m able to read between the lines here.

And worst of all, he ends his introduction with a vacuity.

Finally, discerning readers will notice this book has no thesis. It doesn’t argue that school is bad, or that homeschooling is good, or any such similar thing. My intention is to simply present the story of school, and let you take away what you want.

Wait, that’s not an empty statement — it’s a lie. When you present a series of selective examples and distortions, when you focus on treating education negatively and call elitism a “meritocracy”, when you subtitle your book “the dark side of enlightenment”, you clearly do have a thesis — you’re just too great a coward to come out and state it openly.

Holy crap, it’s gotten this bad?

The brain drain is beginning. Nearly 20% of American scientists would like to get out of this country.

New data compiled by a coalition of top scientific and medical research groups show that a large majority of scientists are receiving less federal help than they were three years ago, despite spending far more time writing grants in search of it. Nearly one-fifth of scientists are considering going overseas to continue their research because of the poor funding climate in America.

Why, you might ask? Because funding for research is drying up everywhere.

changeinfunding

That could be fixed, you know. Divert that cash that’s being deployed to prepare to bomb Syria and other foreign countries, and we could probably rebuild our scientific and technological infrastructure before it’s too late.

Although, with all the idiots emerging from public education believing in nonsense while the media cheer them on, it might already be too late.

How to read a scientific paper

If you’ve been wondering how the pros do it, here’s a guide to dissecting a science paper.

Don’t be intimidated: it’s a description for how to really take every detail of the paper apart, and it’s a rough outline of what I do before talking about a paper on the blog. But it’s also a little bit of overkill for most papers. I read a lot of papers, and I can’t possibly analyze them as thoroughly as that article prescribes, and I take shortcuts — often, the methods are the most boring part, and I’ll just skim over them rather than doing the thorough diagramming recommended. I’ll go back and cover them thoroughly if I find other parts of the paper provocative, though.

The other course I’m teaching this term is an independent writing course, though, in which the students have to produce a well-researched term paper. I’ll have to send them a note telling them to read this article now.

A strange calm descends

It’s very strange. Classes start tomorrow, and I’ve got a tough semester ahead of me with both our core cell biology course and an upper level cancer biology course…and I freakin’ know what I’m doing. Syllabi are all laid out, my lectures are all planned, and I’ve got my first assignments loaded into the blunderbuss, ready to be fired out at the classroom. It’s like I’m organized or something, when usually I’d be bouncing off the walls, panicking at all the stuff I have to get done at the last minute. Is this what it’s like to be an old teacher?

So I’m going in to work this morning. I have to fuss over fish, and I do have one planned meeting with my new advisees, but otherwise, I think I’m going to tidy up a student lab, clean up my office (it looks like a library walked in and exploded right now), and sit back with a cup of tea. Weird.

I might get anxious because I feel too relaxed for the day before classes.

At least I’ve got that interview on Christian talk radio tomorrow, right before my first class, to get me jazzed up and wired. I don’t want to be too mellow when I start lecturing.

Don’t you wish you’d chosen UMM?

Now that the academic year is starting, the Star-Tribune puts out a short summary of success at Minnesota colleges. We’ll use it next year to recruit more students.

The University of Minnesota, Morris stands out among the state’s public four-year institutions for generating more grads than expected at a good price. UM-Morris Chancellor Jacquie Johnson attributes that result to a tight-knit, supportive campus culture that allows the nearly 1,800 students to build strong relationships with faculty. One of every three students at Morris is either minority or international in origin. The school’s success with that diverse student population warrants examination and imitation.

Yay, us!

Signs & portents

The Times has released their rankings of the world reputation for various universities. The news is rather depressing.

Overall, the US continues to dominate the rankings, with seven of the top 10 places and a total of 76 institutions in the top 200 – one more than last year and 45 more than any other nation. The UK has 31 representatives, followed by the Netherlands with 12.

But the US’ dominance of the rankings masks a picture of decline.

Although the US ultra-elite at the summit of the rankings have generally managed to consolidate their positions – with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rising two places to fifth and the University of California, Berkeley moving from 10th to ninth – many more American institutions fell than climbed the table.

“If you only give a casual glance at the top 200, you’re likely to think it’s just a round-up of the usual suspects,” says Ruby. “Yes, many of the big names of US higher education head the list – the ‘super-brands’ still dominate, and they will continue to do so while they attend to core business and protect their image as elite research-based institutions.

“But when you look more closely, most of the flagship US public universities are slipping down.”

How can this be? Slipping? Us? I believe it.

And that’s exactly what’s been happening, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Public universities and colleges in nearly every state have seen their state funding decline sharply. Nationwide, states are on average spending 28 percent less this year than they did in 2008, a decrease of $2,353 per student. As a result, colleges and universities have had to raise tuition, make changes that undermine educational quality, or usually both.

Not surprisingly, the changing position of American universities mirrors the larger political economy of the United States: a few “super-brands” at the top (which educate the sons and daughters of the world’s elite) continue to stay at the top while most of the others (which are supposed to educate the children of the American working-class) are falling behind, both nationally and internationally.

Meanwhile, our Republican masters will consider all this a good thing, and propose more cuts to put those eggheads in their place, and consider more demands to include religious dogma in our science classes, and replace objective sources of information with more right-wing think tanks that give them the answers they want to hear.

Fascinating logic

Manboobz finds an explanation for the shortage of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. It’s because women are inferior, of course. It’s written by a guy going by the name “IHaveALargePenis”, which just screams academic authority.

largepenistemhighighted

So what’s the problem for women? Many jobs require discipline and stamina.

Many fields have horrible deadlines and any person not finishing their work on time can slow an entire project and become the weakest link. When you’re holding up something that thousands of people are working on, relying on, etc and they’re all waiting for you, not fun. Additionally you’ll be pushed to do overtime, heavy overtime. When it comes to software development for example, in the last few months leading up to release, you’ll be better off bringing extra clothes and a sleeping bag to work. This can apply to virtually all other fields in different ways for different reasons.

OK, that’s nice. As someone who teaches in a STEM field, however, my experience has been that the women, in general, are more likely to be responsible and get their work done on time than men (this is a broad generalization, of course: some women are slackers, some men are meticulous and focused). Somehow IHaveALargePenis thinks the demands of a field predispose it to favor men, when I’d suggest the opposite is true.

But then, men must be just plain smarter than women?

Women and men study differently. Women are great and memorizing but don’t focus on understanding. This is why there’s a relatively equal amount of girls/boys in STEM the first year, but then it significantly favors the boys as time passes. The problem is that women do great on tests, but don’t bother to understand that knowledge, which is fairly important later on and everything you learn will be used in the future (as you move from first to 4th year). This is why girls have been doing better (or so it seems) ever since standardized tests.

Errm, I don’t do standardized tests. In fact, quite the opposite: as students progress from the multiple choice/short answer tests I give to first year students to their senior year, I rely increasingly on open-ended essay tests and take-home exams so that I can better evaluate their deeper understanding. Women do just fine on such exams. In fact, my upper level courses are packed with women, they’re always the majority, and when I look at my grade distributions, women sort out towards the top of the class.

I’m a little confused, though: IHaveALargePenis first claims that STEM curricula favor men over women, but that women are favored by the standardized tests he claims are in use. Which is it?

At this point, IHaveALargePenis’s neurons must have been exhausted, because he lapses into even more degenerate idiocy.

What exactly is there to attack? There’s 50% more women in college than men. Women have infiltrated every major out there outside of STEM. Do you know how HUGE STEM is? Let me tell you how huge it is. Go look up any non STEM focused University out there (MIT or Standord) and check the faculty for STEM or other majors. You’ll find out quickly that the entire STEM curriculum has fewer faculty than a single major like business.

So the source of his argument for the inferiority of women in STEM is basically that there are more men than women in the field, therefore women must have less aptitude. But now he claims that there are many more women in college than men (although I think his 50% is off; my university is a liberal arts college, which historically tends to attract more women, and we have roughly a 60:40 distribution of women:men). Doesn’t that imply by his own reasoning that women must be smarter than men?

I hate to inform IHaveALargePenis of a fact that might cause some shrinkage for him, but we also have more women than men in our biology and chemistry disciplines, although physics and math are still male-dominated; computer science here is interesting because we have more women than men on the faculty. The trends are all going in a way that IHaveALargePenis is going to find very uncomfortable: enrollments by women in STEM are going up, relatively. If I thought like IHaveALargePenis does, I’d have to conclude that men are dumber than women, and getting dumber year by year (fortunately, I don’t think like he does).

I don’t even understand his last point — it makes no sense at all. Since when are MIT and “Standord” [sic] non-STEM focused? What does the size of the faculty in different disciplines have to do with his issues? I can tell you that the math discipline at my university has more faculty than the psychology discipline does, but far fewer majors…and that’s because math has to teach service courses that provide classes to students across many disciplines.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more business than science faculty at some universities — business is a popular major. So? What does that have to do with the relative merits of men’s and women’s brains?

I’m afraid that IHaveALargePenis must learn to focus on understanding, rather than spewing words on a page. Perhaps the fact that he has a penis indicates that he also has some mental deficiencies? I’m going to give his paper an F.

Knowledge is not a business

This summary of the corruption of higher ed strikes a chord with me.

In their Fall 2012 article in Dissent, Aaron Bady and Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal reveal what higher education used to mean and how it was systematically destroyed. Bady and Konczal transport us to 1950s-’60s California, where bipartisan support for a University of California system built the state into a land of prosperity and innovation, a burgeoning middle class sent its children to college for free, and progressive Republicans happily funded education to support inclusion and social mobility for California’s next generation. In 1960, the Donahoe Act, or the Master Plan for Higher Education, represented California’s commitment to educate anyone who wanted to be educated. Despite the concurrent trends of racism, sexism, and American imperialism that pervaded that era, California’s higher education system was a golden example of what America could achieve.

So what happened? Where did it go? In 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California and began dismantling the promising work of the past 20 years. Previously, admission had been free, except for a few relatively small fees, but the Reagan government lifted regulations on how much schools could charge in fees, allowing costs to skyrocket. Also, incentives were created for colleges to accept out-of-state students, who would pay higher fees. Both of these strategies shifted the financial responsibility for higher education onto students rather than the state. The process of culturally redefining higher education as not a right, or a public good, but an investment, subject to the whims of the marketplace and corporate capitalism, had begun.

Oh, also…goddamn you, Ronald Reagan, I wish there were a hell so you’d be burning in it.

But weren’t their brains “pretty much normal”?

Brains develop; they go through a process of change and refinement that is dependent on interactions with the environment. As ought to be obvious, then, brains are going to be exquisitely sensitive to their inputs. This state suggests all kinds of interesting experiments we’d like to perform on human fetuses and infants — except that good scientists also pay heed to ethical constraints. Other social institutions may lack such inhibitions, though, and go out and do the experiments for us: witness the case of Romanian orphanages.

Romania has had orphanages for centuries. But its orphan crisis began in 1965, when the communist Nicolae Ceaușescu took over as the country’s leader. Over the course of his 24-year rule, Ceaușescu deliberately cultivated the orphan population in hopes of creating loyalty to — and dependency on — the state. In 1966, he made abortion illegal for the vast majority of women. He later imposed taxes on families with fewer than five children and even sent out medically trained government agents — ‘The Menstrual Police’ — to examine women who weren’t producing their quota. But Ceaușescu’s draconian economic policies meant that most families were too poor to support multiple children. So, without other options, thousands of parents left their babies in government-run orphanages.

By Christmas day in 1989, when revolutionaries executed Ceaușescu and his wife by firing squad, an estimated 170,000 children were living in more than 700 state orphanages. As the regime crumbled, journalists and humanitarians swept in. In most institutions, children were getting adequate food, hygiene and medical care, but had woefully few interactions with adults, leading to severe behavioural and emotional problems. A handful of orphanages were utterly abhorrent, depriving children of their basic needs. Soon photos of dirty, handicapped orphans lying in their own excrement were showing up in newspapers across the world.

Efforts to correct this situation were hampered by the mythology of the government that the deplorable state of these childrens was not caused by institutionalization, but that the ill, weak, mentally retarded children were placed there because of their prior condition. This wasn’t just an opportunity to explore the effects of early socialization on children’s development, but also an ethical obligation to determine the causes of their problems.

This is how the Bucharest Early Intervention Project was launched, a study that tries to examine how social neglect affects children placed in Romanian state orphanages. The answers were obvious, despite state denials: we’ve known for years, at least since the work on Harlow’s monkeys, that the primate brain needs extensive interaction with responsive and caring conspecifics to mature properly. And that’s what they’re finding: these poor desperate children have been damaged and are suffering thanks to long-term policies of social impoverishment.

What they found was unsurprising: children’s brains can be harmed by growing up in the harrowing setting of a state orphanage (read the full story to get the picture of just how awful these particular orphanages could be):

In the Hilton Hotel in Bucharest, with representatives from several Romanian ministries and the US ambassador in attendance, the researchers reported that, as expected, the 136 children who started in institutions tended to have diminished growth and intellectual ability compared with controls who had never lived outside of a family. But there was a surprising silver lining. Children who had been placed in foster care before the age of two years showed significant gains in IQ, motor skills, and psychological development compared with those who stayed in the orphanages.

Oh, and were their brains “pretty much normal”? Nope. You have to be very careful interpreting MRI data, but they got some dismaying results.

As the children got older, the researchers gave them brain scans (renting out time with a private clinic’s MRI machine, one of only a handful in the country). These scans showed that, at around the age of eight, the children who grew up in institutions have less white matter, the tissue that links up different brain regions, compared with those in foster care. The researchers looked at the children’s genomes, too, and found that those who lived the longest in orphanages tend to have the shortest telomeres, the caps on the end of chromosomes that are related to lifespan.

It’s a depressing story, not just because the fate of these children is so sad, but because the availability of strong scientific data that explains what needs to be done to correct the problem seems to be affecting government social policy very, very slowly or not at all.