Do Grades from Princeton Mean Anything at All?

What are grades supposed to do? Shouldn’t they indicate whether or not  or to what extent a given student has mastered material? I am under the impression that students think that if they master material, demonstrate that through the assigned assessments, that they earn the grades that indicate that. As one professor of mine once quipped, “I don’t give grades; you earn them.” Of course, I didn’t attend Princeton, where apparently grades are spread in a a quota system, despite Ms. Malkiel’s explanation otherwise, quoted in EducationNews.org:

Nancy Weiss Malkiel, dean of the undergraduate college at Princeton, said the policy was not meant to establish such grade quotas, but to set a goal: Over time and across all academic departments, no more than 35 percent of grades in undergraduate courses would be A-plus, A or A-minus.

What happens at Princeton is irrelevant to me, other than the fact that it has tried to become some sort of bizzare leader in curing grade inflation. Grade inflation would be when students are given higher grades than they deserve. The cure for that seems screamingly obvious: set standards for performance. Those who meet various levels earn the grades that those levels represent. The fact that, according to EdNews,  “Goldman Sachs, one of the most sought-after employers, said it did not apply a rigid G.P.A. cutoff. ‘Princeton knows that; everyone knows that,’ said Gia Morón, a company spokeswoman. ” There is a rich irony in the fact that one of the companies  that created the world-wide financial crisis is one of the companies that a)Princeton grads would be wanting their grades to impress and b) that standards don’t mean that much to Goldman Sachs.

Instilling arrogance is apparently a by-product of the education where grades are awarded on a curve regardless of the performance of the student. Grades are for the appearance of the school, to the likes of economy-wrecking financial firms, like Sachs. The EdNews article continues: “Jonathan Sarnoff, a sophomore who sits on the editorial board of The Daily Princetonian. ‘A Princeton G.P.A. is different from the G.P.A. at the College of New Jersey down the road.’” I wonder if he means that those grades are different in that they represent a particular level of mastery.

Health care debate irony

What I love about putting the old and new adjacent are the creative insights they provide when side by side. Someone explained to me that health care is not a right because we are only guaranteed “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Health care, he continued, is something of a privilege. I have heard that repeated several times  lately, sometimes attributed to the inspiration of Dr. Ron Paul. What confuses me is how the proponents of this line of thinking define life. For that, I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary:

The active or practical part of human existence; the business, active pleasures, or pursuits of the world; freq. to see life. Also: the position of participating in the affairs of the world, of being a recognized member of society; esp. in to begin (also enter) life, to settle in life.

How one participates in the practical part of human existence sick with an infection, out of commission with a broken limb, or struggling with cancer is beyond me.

Here is an excerpt from a December 3, 2009 Reuters story:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Most Americans would like to see a “public option” in health insurance reform but doubt anything Congress does will lower costs or improve care in the short term, according to a poll released on Thursday.

The survey of 2,999 households by Thomson Reuters Corp shows a public skeptical about the cost, quality and accessibility of medical care.

Just under 60 percent of those surveyed said they would like a public option as part of any final healthcare reform legislation, which Republicans and a few Democrats oppose.

Here are some of the results of the telephone survey of 2,999 households called from November 9-17 as part of the Thomson Reuters PULSE Healthcare Survey:

* Believe in public option: 59.9 percent yes, 40.1 percent no.

* 86 percent of Democrats support the public option versus 57 percent of Independents and 33 percent of Republicans.

* Quality of healthcare will be better 12 months from now: 35 percent strongly disagree. 11.6 percent strongly agree. 29.9 percent put themselves in the middle.

* Believe the amount of money spent on healthcare will be less 12 months from now: 52 percent strongly disagree, 13 percent strongly agree.

* 23 percent believe it will be easier for people to receive the care they need a year from now.

The nationally representative survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.8 percent.

Has anyone calculated the cost of no health care? What are the numbers if all the people who currently have no care suddenly need to be fed and housed because they cannot work due to preventable health problems? I am trying to think this through here. While I am thinking it through I learn that the person who does did not believe in the public option was just laid off and lost health insurance, about which I sincerely feel badly. In an odd twist of fate, the stress of not being able to “participate in practical part of human existence” has this individual feeling badly. I was not rude enough to suggest seeing a physician.

Apparently David Pogue is famous

When my son moved up a notch in camera equipment, I eagerly scooped up his digital camera. I promised myself I would learn to manipulate all its bells and whistles with the skill and perfection of Annie Leibovitz. Even though Kodak has a workable, interactive manual for my camera that I worked through, I still had questions. What happens when set the dial to “A”? What happens when I set it to the little guy who looks like he is running? What is with all those numbers around the screen? So I decided to buy a book so I could learn how to take pictures that capture a moment, that stir an emotion in the viewer, that make me smile when I remember the time I pressed the button.

I went to three booksellers in the Nashua, New Hampshire area. I spent time sitting on the floor with several choices spread around me while I compared and contrasted the features of the books. Maybe I even spent more time choosing the book than I had spent playing with the buttons on the camera. Eventually I settled on Digital Photography: The Missing Manual by one David Pogue.

The next time my son came by, I showed him the book, mentioning that this Pogue guy seems pretty good at writing about this stuff. My son’s kind and measured reply was, “Well, he is a New York Times technology columnist.” Ah, I thought, I did not discover this guy. No, I didn’t. I guess he has an Emmy for his work with CBS, and that whole “Missing Manual” credit, blogs, speaking engagements, and his website to show for himself.

Yet I am really glad I didn’t know that when I picked the book, because that might have been like buying brand name peas or brand name soap only for the brand without regard for what the peas taste like or how the soap washes. I picked the book because I am the great-unlearned when it comes to cameras. This guy made me feel that he can explain my new toy to me and that when he is done, I will have some pretty good pictures. The next time I go to buy something, I hope I don’t know anything about the authors so they have to convince me by what they have to say that they deserve $20 of my hard earned money.

Cat O’clock

For twenty years, I really didn’t need an alarm clock, because Stormy knew when it was 5 a.m. This little mutt of a cat came into our lives when my son was a Cub Scout: “Good news, Mom, Tony says we can pick out our cat today.” I did not really remember asking Tony, another Cub Scout in the local pack, for a cat, but when a Cub Scout says your cat is ready, you show up with a shoe box and a can of tuna.We climbed the two flights to Tony’s apartment, found our way through the kitchen to his bunk bed, and out of a carton brimming with fluffy kittens, a little black, grey and white fur ball joined our family.

Despite his humble roots, Stormy was proud and was smart. He took charge immediately, showing  up at 5 a.m. on my head for his can of food. Somehow, he never scratched my eyes out waking me up. He breathed on me, and when I was really tired, a tender brush of his face next to my cheek roused me. Over the years, when our work schedules changed, Stormy seemed to realize that the best bet for a prompt can of food would come from my husband, so he moved over a pillow and made his gentle request there.He was so reliable, Verizon could set their time by him.

We moved twice during his lifetime. He came to us when we lived in an old farmhouse with three acres, located in a smal town in western New Hampshire. When we had to move, he stayed with a friend who had a pack of animals; yet when we retrieved him to bring him to our little cape-styled home in a suburban neighborhood, he figured out that teens in cars should be avoided, along with large dogs and state highways. Always an outside cat, somehow he knew his address and never came back from his morning walk after we left for work. He ate his breakfast, went to the door to go for a walk and when it was time for us to leave, he was at the back door, ready to have the house to himself for the day.

This went on for twenty years!

Long after my Cub Scout had a Master’s degree, a wife and a passport stamped for many countries, Stormy made his daily rounds. We moved again, this time back to a small town with both hazards: 28 acres of woods behind us and a state route in the front. Neither tractor trailers or fisher cats were a threat to Stormy. He made his rounds, and showed up for family meals to sit with us when we watched a movie or read the paper.

It should have been no surprise to me, then, that when he slowed down last weekend, he would keep his routine. But it did surprise me that on the day he breathed his last, he tried so very hard to keep his appointments. Here it was, 2009, a full 20 years after his 1989 debut into our lives, that he began to slow, really, really slow down. He rose slowly, walked slowly, mused over his dish with just a few licks and slept more than ever. He preferred milk over fish and drank water in abundance. He squinted at a passing mouse, as if the chase held no interest for him. And he began to pee on the dining room carpet. That was not good.

Yet what do you do for an old friend, one who has curled up in your lap on winter nights like a warm muff? You clean the carpet, lay out plastic and move the litter box. You know his time is short and he has been so faithful for so many years, it seems a matter of respect.

On Saturday, September 12, Stormy did not wake us up. But when my husband rose and came to the head of the stairs, Stormy lay at the bottom. He didn’t want to disturb him, so let Storm lay there for me to investigate. But when I got up, he had mysteriously staggered to his litter box, where he was sleeping. I picked him up and put him back on his blanket. I held his paw for a while; it became strangely cool as he went to sleep for the last time, as his little chest slowed its expansion and contraction.

What amazed me is that up to the hour of his death, at the same times that he had always done, he tried to carry out his routine. I hope he knows we would have understood if he had just decided to stay in bed that day.

I never thought I’d find myself writing a tribute to my cat, something I promised myself I would never do. But there is something warm and comforting about an animal that seemed to think he was taking care of me that demands a eulogy when he passes away. Having a close relationship with an animal is a relationship I recommend to everyone. A heartfelt bond without words brings a special peace.

I still wake up at 5. I glance at the sliding door and think I see a little cat upright on his haunches demanding an open door.

Irony, CNN, Senator Kennedy and my uninsured healthcare worker

Today, as CNN carried a tribute to Senator Edward Kennedy by re-playing some of his famous speeches (The Dream Will Never Die ), I sat in the chair in a lab having blood drawn as part of a yearly physical. The young woman phlebotomist noticed my ID badge on my key ring of the public high school where I teach, since she had graduated from there three years earlier. “Where did you study after high school?” I inquired. “Did we prepare you well?” She answered yes enthusiastically, adding that she loves her job and hopes to get full time some time. When she said she wasn’t full time, I asked her if she would mind telling me if she had health insurance. “Oh, I don’t mind at all,” she grinned. ” I would love to have it, but I don’t at part-time.” This young lady was prompt, cheerful, professional, representing her hospital well. But imagine a disgruntled healthcare worker who couldn’t afford the care they are providing. What are we thinking by not covering everyone? Since the other wealthy nations of the world cover everyone, live longer, have lower infant mortality and do it all for less, what are we thinking? That is, if the basic human decency of covering people doesn’t convince you.

Digital native high in the hills of Sicilia

Clutching a photo of my great-grandparents, I walked into the gelateria in Tripi. Using my fledgling skills in speaking Italian (reading is so very much easier), I asked for directions to the cemetery, where I understood my grandparents are buried.  The young woman behind the counter introduced me to another customer, who had retired from working in the cemetery. He hopped in the car with my father and I and took us right to the spot.

My great-grandparents

After a heartwarming conversation, during which the man shared his recollections of family members and of the town, we returned to the gelateria, for more good conversation and refreshing drinks of granita. There were some funny moments of communication due to my mispronunciation and grabs for vocabulary, but we always plowed through with work-arounds and patience, especially due to the good nature of my new acquaintances. Oddly though, somewhere through the afternoon, the young lady let me know she had studied English! She, despite listening to my attempts to speak her language, was a little shy about using her English. Once we got going, tough, we had a delightful mix of words from both languages that let us get our points across.

What happens sometimes with these kinds of meetings is that folks want to exchange information, but have little real hope of using it. On a whim, I laughingly said, “Facebook?” to which my new acquaintance immediately brightened up and we exchanged information, information easy to implement without paper, stamps, etc. What was great about the exchange as it showed that technology does not replace face-to-face meetings, but rather supplements it in a practical way.

As you look at the photo banner of this blog, you see the Tyrrehnian Sea from the steps of the church in Tripi, Sicilia. It is a distance of about 10 miles, I think, which on a clear day seems as if you could reach out and touch the water. While I went to Tripi on a pilgrimage, described in my last entry, I found and wrote this:

“Instead, I found people hybrids in their own ways, and whose stories released me from an internal label as a cheap knock off. I hope to share some of those stories in the coming days.”

Of those stories, my story above, for example, involves the international language that Facebook and Twitter have become. If you count yourselves among the scoffers and mockers and pride yourself as being a non-tweeter (why would anyone do that, you ask), you might find my experience high in the hills of Sicily as an example that make them worth a second thought. My experience there merges nicely with another recent post in which I wrote

“Today, to meet my goal of matching the best of the old with the best of the new, I am sharing the lifestyles of digital natives with a colleague who has dedicated years of her life to the literacy of our town’s youth.”

This summer, besides my trip to Sicily, I worked on a project with a friendly colleague who is also an English teacher. She, by her own admission, is baffled by technology and often frustrated at the behavior of her students, digital natives whom she struggles to keep at bay from their gadgets and computers. She does this, in good part, because she doesn’t understand and can’t use them herself. To her, it often seems as if technology is a cop-out from the work of developing and using literacy. No doubt, there is an element of truth in what she sees, but some of the benefits of technology tools, or the keys the tools may hold as motivators to literacy, are buried beneath the fear created by lack of either curiosity or opportunity to try and to learn to use the tools.

One of the chief ways new media and technology tools motivate students to literacy is that these tools help writers and readers to speak to the literary world they live in – truly the entire world accessible through the windows of their computer screens as well as their colleagues in the next seat or next house. Students love to create and to write, and they want their work to be effective. Our work this summer showed us that they delight in taking care with detail, more so when they feel the work is meaningful.

While I am not against skills practice, I think skills practice is more effective when learners understand how and why and when they will use the skills. Giving that vision to learners is the job of teachers; to do so, the teachers themselves must understand the tools.

The pilgrimage

When I drove a tiny car with a standard transmission up the narrow, winding road to Tripi, Messina province, Sicily, Italy two weeks ago, I felt I was paying a debt to the great-grandmother I never knew. Guiseppa Rao married Rosario Cicero and had 13 children, 12 of whom left their tiny town for Rome, Pisa, Argentina and the United States. The idea that a woman from a culture that treasures family would have so many children, yet so few grandchildren around in her old age, has long made me sad. I suppose my great-grandfather would have shared her pain in some fashion, but as a mother myself, I feel as if I might understand her feelings better than I might understand his. When I actually knelt by her grave, I was struck by the softness of her image, an image I had seen in photos many times before, but which seemed so much more compelling as my fingers traced its rim.

Tracing not only her image, but her journey compelled me to make the trip. Now two generations removed from those who left, the contacts, the houses, the memories of those still there are swiftly fading. Yet the place itself with its profound silence, its stunning view of the sea miles away, and its current population carrying on their lives reminds me that places are living organisms. For those of use with roots in far away places, the people who live there today are not part of a living museum to our past, but are elements of their own vibrant present: moving, changing and growing with the times. The “old country”/”new country” dichotomy that we heard around the holiday table left me with the feeling that there was an unchanging “old” that owned an authenticity I would never have as a new world hybrid. Instead, I found people hybrids in their own ways, and whose stories released me from an internal label as a cheap knock off. I hope to share some of those stories in the coming days.

Silent alley in Tripi

Colleagues and collegiality

Don’t let anyone tell you teachers don’t work in the summer. If we are lucky, as I am, however, the work we do we choose and we love. Today, to meet my goal of matching the best of the old with the best of the new, I am sharing the lifestyles of digital natives with a colleague who has dedicated years of her life to the literacy of our town’s youth.

How she feels about what she has missed and what she is gaining, I will let you know in future posts.

New Normal

ABC News is curious about the “new normal,” asking people the following:

How have your businesses and personal habits changed in the wake of the recession?

I know that it may seem obvious that people will say how much more they now watch every penny; that they have given up cable for online content; that they spend more time with their families, etc. But I am watching for some glimmers of hope: that presure to have the latest and greatest will be ignored.

Universities Should Heed NYT Editorial About Ending Universities (As We Know Them)

Mark Taylor is right when he says “End the University as We Know It.” To justify his point, he mentions the obvious:

Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost.

What is most disturbing to me is that many high schools continue to coach kids for entry into bachelor degree programs that lead them into just these kinds of graduate programs, thus perpetuating the systems. High schools should create demand for that universities reform by coaching kids for the model Taylor proposes:

These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water..

However, Taylor points out the hypocrisy of university faculty – “Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments” – which unfortunately reflects an outlook up and down the educational system. Students are being prepared for this system by many faculty members who only think in terms of college as they knew it. Rather, guidance offices could train students to find value in programs whose instructors would cooperate across disciplines and continuously strive to grow their knowledge and skills, while working directly with students. Rather than prepare students for an outmoded system that waits for them, I suggest that high schools adopt the innovative, flexible model Taylor suggests for colleges on secondary developmental level, which will create demand, which will create opportunity.