Education

“Squaring The Circle” Or Lukewarm Water? The Disappointed Idealist vs. Horatio Speaks Affair

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[They] are like poets, you know, like Shelley or Byron, or people like that. The two totally distinct types of visionaries, it’s like fire and ice, and I feel my role in the band is to be kind of the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water.

— “Derek Albion Smalls” from This Is Spinal Tap

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"Derek Albion Smalls" as played by Harry Shearer

Chemistrypoet invites someone to “square the circle” between two powerfully written — but diametrically opposed — posts from Disappointed Idealist and Horatio Speaks.

Disappointed Idealist writes that he loathes what he sees as the current government’s obsession with drawing a line in the sand and declaring those on one side winners and the other as losers. He writes movingly of the experiences of his three daughters:

They just called my daughters “mediocre failures” . . . Like most clever people who don’t have difficulty with language or maths or spatial awareness, or other academic activities, I fundamentally find it impossible to truly understand why they can’t, despite endless practice, remember how to spell basic words, or how to do basic sums. The school have tried all sorts of different methods of teaching it, and so have we at home, but one day it’s there, and the next it’s gone. Some things stick for a while, some things don’t stick at all . . . At home, they are delightful, loving, awkward, stroppy, generous, always hungry, funny and, above all, happy. But they won’t “pass” their Y6 SATs.

I am sure most teachers are familiar with that “one day it’s there, the next it’s not” sensation when teaching SEN students (I wrote a post about it a while back). In my experience, patience and kindness and persistence are the order of the day in this scenario (not that anybody says it’s not.) My experience also tells me that sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Horatio Speaks makes the case that recent scientific research shows that all children can be taught to read, write and do mathematics effectively, bar a very few severely disabled individuals.

To which I say: good! Like most teachers, show me a better way to teach and I am all over it. Horatio Speaks goes on to say:

I applaud the passion of the Disappointed Idealist . . . But I would be happier if he – and the thousands who cheered him on – were directing their anger at the education establishment’s assumption that we will always have children who fail. It’s a false assumption, as is the emotional caricature that those advocating for more accountability for children’s progress care less about the children. I have worked with SEN long enough to know that the most deadly poison is sympathy. It kills by paralysis.

Over the years and from time to time, sadly, I have seen some bad SEN: “death by word search”, for example. And Horatio Speaks is right, bad SEN can kill by paralysis; or, more probably, boredom. But, obviously, not all SEN is bad SEN.

The nub of the disagreement between Horatio Speaks and Disappointed Idealist, I believe, lies in the use of the phrase “children who fail”.

Horatio Speaks rails against an educational establishment that assumes that we will “always have children who fail”. In my view, he is referring to the fact that some children leave school without basic literacy and maths skills.

Disappointed Idealist rails against a system that wants to label children as “mediocre failures”. In my view, he is lamenting the fact that, according to a politically imposed and essentially arbitrary standard, some children will be labeled as “failures” through no fault of their own and that this is, frankly, unhelpful.

My own view is that both of them have valid points. While it is undeniable that some children will do less well than others, by whatever measure is taken, the question is: what should the education system do with this information?

I suspect that both Disappointed Idealist and Horatio Speaks would argue for a diagnostic rather than a judgemental approach as far as each individual student is concerned.

Circle squared? Maybe, maybe not. This is Derek Albion Smalls, signing off.

Playing the Game

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Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry.

— J. R. R. Tolkein, The Two Towers

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If there’s anything that makes me lose the will to live, it is being in the same room as an educational Player of Games. I’m sure everyone is reasonably familiar with the type: “I want every intervention from now until the end of term focused on improving the A*-C pass rate for left-handed Y11 students whose birthday month has an R in it.”

Yes, it might help, marginally, in some sense. On such massaging of the margins are modern educational careers and reputations built.

Personally, such considerations leave me cold. Such teachers, it seems to me, hold their statistics in higher esteem than their students. The percentage is adjudged to be the outcome, rather than merely an indicator of a number of successful outcomes.

Sometimes, when I try and express this, people look at me as if I had twelve heads. It is a nuanced and subtle difference of emphasis, admittedly, but I think it’s a valid one. As an analogy, imagine a doctor who focuses on (say) a patient’s temperature to the exclusion of all else: “Doctor, I think I’ve broken my leg.”

“H’mm, let’s have a look. Actually, your temperature is a wee bit high. Here, let me apply this cold compress to your forehead.”

“But what about my leg?”

“Well, your body temperature is back to normal now. That means that we now have the officially mandated number of ‘healthy’ patients as per Ofdoc guidelines.”

“But what about my bloody BROKEN LEG?”

“My work here is done. Next patient please!”

The other note of caution that needs to be sounded more loudly in the education world is awareness of what is known as the Halo Effect.

I learned about this in Duncan Watts’ excellent book Everything Is Obvious (When You Know The Right Answer) in which he summaries the work of Phil Rosenzweig:

Firms that are successful are consistently rated as having visionary strategies. strong leadership, and sound execution, while firms that are performing badly are described as suffering from misguided strategy, poor leadership or shoddy execution. But, as Rosenzweig shows, firms that exhibit large swings in performance over time attract equally divergent ratings, even when they have pursued exactly the same strategy, executed in the same way, under the same leadership all along. Remember that Cisco Systems went from being the poster child of the Internet era to a cautionary tale in a matter of a few years . . . Rosenzweig’s conclusion is that in all these cases, the way firms are rated has more to do with whether they are perceived as succeeding than what they are actually doing.

— Watts, p.197 [emphasis added]

In one early experiment, several teams were asked to analyse the finances of a fictitious firm. Each team was rated on their performance and then asked to evaluate their team in terms of teamwork, communication and motivation. The high scoring teams assessed themselves very highly on these metrics compared with the low scoring teams, as you might expect. However, the kick was that performance scores had been allocated at random — there was no real difference between the teams’ performance at all. The conclusion is that the appearance of superior outcomes produced an illusion of superior functionality.

Watts argues persuasively that we tend to massively underestimate the role of plain, dumb luck in achieving success. He cites the case of Bill Miller, the legendary mutual fund manager who did something no other mutual fund manager has ever achieved: he beat the S&P 500 for fifteen straight years. Watts notes that this seems a classic case of talent trumping luck. However:

. . . right after his record streak ended, Miller’s performance was bad enough to reverse a large chunk of his previous gains, dragging his ten-year average below that of the S&P. So was he a brilliant investor who simply had some bad luck, or was he instead the opposite: a relatively ordinary investor whose ultimately flawed strategy just happened to work for a long time? The problem is that judging from his investing record alone, it’s probably not possible to say. [p.201]

I trust that I do not have to draw too many lines to highlight the relevance of these points to the education world. Outcomes, in the sense of exam grades, are currently the be-all and the end-all of education. But the Halo Effect makes it clear that a simplistic reading of successful outcomes can be highly misleading.

Negating the Halo Effect is difficult, because if one cannot rely on the outcome to evaluate a process then it is no longer clear what to use. The problem, in fact, is not that there is anything wrong with evaluating processes in terms of outcomes — just that it is unreliable to evaluate them in terms of any single outcome. [p.198]

Ofsted. managers and politicians please take note: our search for a signal continues.

Approval of what is approved of
Is as false as a well-kept vow.

— Sir John Betjeman, The Arrest of Oscar Wilde At The Cadogan Hotel

Actions and Consequences

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‘I think we all owe Howard a debt of gratitude for coming up with the solution to all our difficulties,’ said one of Kirk’s [university] colleagues.

Kirk took this as his due and nodded, ignoring [the] accurate observation that all the difficulties had been created by him.

The assembled academics had all just tunnelled through the service area under the student picket lines which had been brought into being by Kirk and had surfaced in a conference room to deal with problems which had been fomented by Kirk and had finally got around to passing resolutions in conformity with the wishes of Kirk.

— Clive James, review of 1981 TV adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, from Glued to the Box, 1983

I am sure all teachers have been in that student disciplinary meeting that suddenly goes all Kafkaesque in a manner reminiscent of the academic conference described by Clive James above: what begins as a formal gathering to address the many difficulties created by the student, challenge the obfuscations and untruths put in place by the student, and alleviate the problems fomented by the student; suddenly and inexplicably, often at SLT’s behest, turns to passing resolutions in conformity with the wishes of the student. For example, Kayleigh gets to come off Red Report and SLT will have a serious chat with her teachers about their “questionable attitudes towards her” because, after all, “Kayleigh wants to do well“.

I started thinking about actions and consequences in response to the Quirky Teacher’s provocative post Is Hardship Really So Bad?

TQT argues that perhaps people today are too insulated from genuine hardship. While I think he has a point, I would argue (as in the example above) that, although Kayleigh may well have hardships enough in her life, what the education system as it stands is insulating her from are the long-term, serious consequences of her actions — until it’s too late.

It seems to me that there is, or can be, a widespread acceptance of misfortune and hardship — although perhaps it can often be characterised as sullen rather than stoic. What is different from the world I remember being raised in, is the precipitate rush to don the holy mantle of victimhood; as if the fact that that other individuals or institutions were involved in creating the unfortunate situation absolves the “victim” of all responsibility whatsoever.

At times, of course, the victim is truly the victim and, in all fairness, no portion of blame can be attached to her.

That given, what I am attempting to highlight is an unfortunate trend in modern culture that seems to hold that if one has been sinned against, then by definition, one cannot have sinned: in other words, victimhood = sainthood.

This is, I think, the mindset behind the demands that students cannot be “allowed” to fail and that it is entirely the responsibility of the teacher to make sure that every student not only passes, but achieves their over-inflated “aspirational” (dread word!) target grade.

I disagree: of course, the teacher has a responsibility to ensure that every student in her care is as well prepared as possible. But the student is also responsible for her own preparation and I am concerned that the balance of responsibility has shifted too far towards the teacher (and, to be fair, towards the school and SLT — which is why the pressures are passed down the line management structure).

It has been said that a pennyworth of example is worth a pound of preaching. I cannot help but feel that having more students (and parents) being aware that failure is an option and that success is not a birthright would result in a healthier educational culture.

You must reap what you sow. There is no reward, there is no punishment, but there are consequences, and these consequences are the invisible and implacable police of nature. They cannot be avoided. They cannot be bribed. No power can awe them, and there is not gold enough in the world to make them pause.

— Robert Green Ingersoll, Ingersoll Again Answer His Critics IV, 1891

Education And The English Language

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Or: Tristram Hunt: Must Try Harder

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“When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946

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“Ladies and Gentleman, my argument today is very simple: we must transform. And we must trust. Because a powerful convergence of social, economic and technological forces are creating huge challenges for our future prosperity that education can no longer ignore. We find ourselves at a unique and incredibly fragile moment in our economic history. With technology and globalisation combining to ferment a ‘third’ industrial revolution. Creating a digitally enhanced brave new world filled both with enormous challenges and opportunities.”
— Tristram Hunt, Speech to ASCL Conference 20/3/15

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“This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”
— Orwell 1946
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“[This] means education must also serve as a strategy for national economic renewal; that our country’s future prosperity depends on unlocking our education system’s hidden potential. It is that force which I would suggest drives our system’s ‘high stakes’ nature. And it is not an inconsiderable concern.”
— Hunt 2015
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“Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation . . .  [and], like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.”
— Orwell 1946
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“[Y]ou have the democratic promise of Sir Timothy Berners-Lee’s “this is for everyone” vision. Where enterprise, creativity and idea becomes the true currency of opportunity. As opposed to class, identity, power, wealth or status . . . For this truly is the wonderful thing about the digital revolution. It democratises power. It stimulates innovation. Weakens bureaucratic control. And provides new platform for articulating an alternative.”
— Hunt 2015
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“The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details . . . Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.”
— Orwell 1946

The purpose of education (2); or, forward the Flynn Effect!

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Coelum, non animum, mutant.

— Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65 – 8 BCE), Letter XI to Bullatium

Place may be chang’d; but who can change his mind?

Chrismwparsons writes, somewhat provocatively, that the ultimate purpose of education is to “ensure the increasing success of the human species.”

To begin with, I thought that this was perhaps a grandiloquent flourish too far. As a teacher, it is not surprising that I believe that education is genuinely important — but that important?

However, some further thought has led me to believe that Chrismwparsons has, in fact, hit the nail squarely on the head. Education, even in the limited sense of formal schooling, does have a definite and measurable impact on the human condition. That impact is known as the Flynn Effect.

In the 1980s, philosopher James Flynn noticed that the producers of IQ tests periodically adjusted their scoring formulas upwards so that the average IQ score remained fixed at 100. In other words, the tests were being made harder in order to prevent “IQ inflation”. IQ tests have been used in many countries over the last century. In some places, every schoolchild has been tested, as well as adults entering the military or government service. Flynn examined these datasets and his conclusion was startling: IQ scores have been rising over time.

And rising at a non-trivial and fairly constant rate of three IQ points per decade. Steven Pinker comments:

The implications are stunning. An average teenager today, if he or she could time-travel back to 1950, would have had an IQ of 118. If the teenager went back to 1910, he or she would have had an IQ of 130, besting 98 percent of his or her contemporaries.[ . . . ] To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental retardation.

— Steven Pinker, The Better Angels Of Our Nature p.884

One of the causes of the Flynn Effect is more school. Over the course of the twentieth century and in every country, children spend more time in school. By contrast, in 1900 a quarter of adults in the United States had less than four years of schooling. Flynn suggests that this has led to more people seeing the world through “scientific spectacles”: a number of forms of scientific reasoning have percolated from the schoolhouse into everyday thinking.

And, Flynn suggests, the mindset of science trickled down to everyday discourse in the form of shorthand abstractions. A shorthand abstraction is a hard-won tool of technical analysis that, once grasped, allows people to effortlessly manipulate abstract relationships. Anyone capable of reading this book, even without training in science or philosophy, has probably assimilated hundreds of these abstractions from casual reading, conversation, and exposure to the media, including proportional, percentage, correlation, causation, [ . . . ]  and cost-benefit analysis. Yet each of them—even a concept as second-nature to us as percentage—at one time trickled down from the academy and other highbrow sources and increased in popularity in printed usage over the course of the 20th century. [Pinker p.889]

Graph from Flynn, J. R. 2007. What is intelligence? Cambridge, U.K.: CUP p. 8, cited by Pinker p.886
The Flynn Effect: Rising IQ scores, 1947–2002. Source: Flynn, J. R. 2007. What is intelligence? Cambridge, U.K.: CUP p. 8, cited by Pinker p.885

It is noteworthy, however, that the rising tide of the Flynn Effect does not seem to lift all cognitive boats equally. For example, arithmetical skills have not increased at the same rate as interpretation of complex visual stimuli — it is supposed that since we live in environments which feature increasingly complex visual displays, we are perhaps getting better at extracting information from them.

Arthur C. Clarke once made the mordant observation that we have no evidence that high intelligence contributes towards the long term survival of a species. He suggested that it might turn out to be as useless in the long run as heavy armour was to some species of dinosaur.

He also commented that, in his opinion, humanity was engaged in a race between education and disaster.

I think he was right in both respects. The Flynn Effect suggests we are getting smarter. But are we getting smart enough quickly enough?

Only time will tell.

 

The Ineffable Cargo Cultism of Sir Ken Robinson

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[PETKOFF‘s daughter RAINA makes a perfectly timed and spectacular entrance]

PETKOFF (aside to Catherine, beaming with parental pride). Pretty, isn’t it? She always appears at the right moment.

CATHERINE (impatiently). Yes: she listens for it. It is an abominable habit.

— George Bernard Shaw, Arms and the Man

In this post, I want to revisit the progressive versus traditionalist educational debate from what I hope will be an original perspective.

TV critic Clive James once made, I think, a telling observation about auteur director Ken Russell’s films of the lives of the great composers: that, although full of swelling sound and technicolour visual fury, they never showed any of the artists sitting down quietly at a desk and getting on with some actual work.

And, while I yield to no-one in my admiration for the work of physicist Richard Feynman, it is a matter of record that his apparently uninhibited and spontaneous public persona was the result of meticulous planning and intensive preparation and rehearsal that would have put Raina from Arms and the Man to shame.

Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, mind; but both Russell’s filmic presentation of the creative process and Feynman’s playing to the gallery highlight a popular current of thought: geniuses are different from the rest of us — not only cleverer, but their minds are utterly unlike ours. Their thoughts are periodically “touched by the hand of God”, if you will: it is a Romantic conception, in every sense of the word, and has influenced our very idea of genius for over two centuries.

Take Mozart, for example: his symphonies were channelled directly from God, or emerged mysteriously from the depths of his subconscious, sublime masterpieces that the maestro transcribed without a single flaw or mistake.

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone . . . it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come I know not, nor can I force them . . . the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.

Except that he didn’t. The above quote is not genuine Mozart. It is actually a nineteenth century forgery known as the Rochlitz Letter. Modern scholarship paints a very different picture of how he really composed: like most composers, he used a keyboard to work on short musical phrases (out loud, not silently in his head) and wrote “sketches” on scraps of paper (which were often thrown away), before combining them into the finished work. While there are few hesitations or corrections in his original manuscripts, they are there. Sorry, Amadeus.

[C]reative people are at their most creative when writing their autobiographies. Historians have scrutinized their diaries, notebooks, manuscripts, and correspondence looking for signs of the temperamental seer periodically struck by bolts from the unconscious . . . [The truth is that] Geniuses are wonks. The typical genius pays dues for at least ten years before contributing anything of lasting value. (Mozart composed symphonies at eight, but they weren’t very good; his first masterwork came in the twelfth year of his career.)

— Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works, p. 350

The reason I mention all of the above is because a very good friend (who is not a teacher) recently sent me a link to a Sir Ken Robinson video — Sir Ken’s idea that education requires a transformation rather a reformation is gaining considerable traction.

Now, it may well be that Sir Ken is a kind and sincere man, and I agree with some of the points that he makes. However, his ideas on unleashing the creative genius in each and every student are, to put it bluntly, simplistic.

[C]reativity is not a linear process, in which you have to learn all the necessary skills before you get started . . . Focusing on skills in isolation can kill interest in any discipline. Many people have been put off mathematics for life by endless rote tasks that did nothing to inspire them with the beauty of numbers.

–Sir Ken Robinson, May 2013

To my mind, these words are redolent of the Romantic conception of Genius as a capricious, otherworldly visitation into the human psyche. It also seems incredibly strange to me that Sir Ken is apparently suggesting that the best way to learn what he tellingly refers to as a discipline is — to be undisciplined.

I am not arguing in favour of an unvarying diet of driller-killer-rote-learning tasks for our students. I agree with Sir Ken that the “real driver of creativity is an appetite for discovery and a passion for the work itself.”

However, I do not agree with him that students will somehow automatically “naturally acquire the skills they need to get the work done” [my emphasis] or that their “mastery of them grows as their creative ambitions expand”.

If we wish to encourage genius, we must have a accurate idea of how real geniuses actually work, not some misty-eyed romanticised version. Actual geniuses have “paid their dues” and have done the endless rote tasks (perhaps with a measure of enjoyment because of their passion and appetite for discovery!)

The famous “cargo cults” of some remote island chains seek to lure valuable “cargo” from the skies by building fake runways and even crude bamboo “control towers”. However, the abandoned World War 2 airbases they seek to reanimate remain abandoned because the cultists have a misapprehension of why the planes originally landed.

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Sadly, I cannot help but feel that Sir Ken’s well-meaning perorations in favour of Creativity with a capital C will have much the same result.

        ‘You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.’

‘Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’

— R. S. Thomas, Poetry for Supper

The Purpose of Education

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“The value of a university education resides in the fact that it puts young people in proximity to learning. The students of Good-enough Dormitory are less than thirty yards from the Library, no more than fifty yards from the Physics Lab, and a mere ten yards from the Chemistry Lab. I think we can all be justly proud of this.”

— Robert Sheckley, Journey Beyond Tomorrow

I am simultaneously a cynic and a romantic when it comes to education.

Yes, I am the curmudgeonly staffroom cynic, always ready with an eye roll, a derisory snort and a sarcastic quip. (Or two. Or three. Or four — I mean, just read this blog!)

However, I am also a romantic: show me something that works, or even could work, and I can’t wait to try it out, for all the world like I was a naive young bright-eyed bushy-tailed NQT.

The great untold truth of teaching is that it can be a lot of fun being in the classroom. Of course, it can also be a major league pain in the arse. And the weird thing is that, even after many years experience, my expectations of whether it is going to be a good day or a bad day are often completely and utterly wrong.

A number of edu-blogger heavy hitters have been weighing in on what the point of education is. I particularly enjoyed the posts from ijstock, Daisy Christodoulou and Esse Quam Videri: they disagreed with the Education secretary’s recent assertion that the point of education is essentially to increase one’s earning power.

I agree with them, of course. But, then, what is the point of what we do?

I think it is simply this: ignorance is not bliss. It is not foolish to be wise. A person who believes (say) N sets of true things is less likely to make poor decisions than person who believes even N-1 sets of true things.

As Samuel Johnson observed to Boswell as they were being rowed to Greenwich on a summer’s day in 1703:

“Nay, Sir, it is wonderful what a difference learning makes upon people even in the common intercourse of life, which does not appear to be much connected with it.”

Boswell immediately countered that “people go through the world very well, and carry on the business of life to good advantage, without learning.”

Johnson conceded his point. “Why, Sir, that may be true in cases where learning cannot possibly be of any use; for instance, this boy rows us as well without learning, as if he could sing the song of Orpheus to the Argonauts.”

But then, unexpectedly, Johnson turned to the boy and asked him: “What would you give, my lad, to know about the Argonauts?”

“Sir,” said the boy, “I would give everything I have.”

In all my many years as a teacher, I haven’t encountered a single person who has looked back and wished that they had worked less hard in school. (The trick, of course, is to make students realise that while they’re still in school.)

I will leave the last word to the estimable Doctor Johnson:

“Sir, a desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being, whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has to get knowledge.”

Never Mind The Data, Feel The Noise (or, seek the signal, young Jedi)

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Everyone in education loves data.

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This is the only time it is correct to use the word "Data" in the singular...

Or at least claims to. One sometimes wonders what would happen to the UK education system if a computer virus disabled every Excel spreadsheet overnight — h’mmm, perhaps someone should get in touch with those nice hacker people at Anonymous . . .
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However, I digress. I wanted to share a recent epiphany that I’d had about data, particularly educational data. Perhaps it’s not much of an epiphany, but I’ve started so I’ll finish.

It came when I was listening to an interview on the evergreen The Jodcast (a podcast produced by the Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory). Dr Alan Duffy was talking about some of the new technologies that need to be invented in order to run the new massive Square Kilometre Array radio telescope (due to begin observing in 2018):

And then we have to deal with some of the data rates . . . essentially we recreate all of the information that exists on the internet today, and we do that every year without fail, it just keeps pouring off the instrument. And what you’re looking for is the proverbial needle in the haystack . . . how do you pick out the signal that you’re interested in from that amount of data?
— The Jodcast, October 2014, 18:00 – 21:00 min approximately [emphasis added]

The realisation that hit me was: it isn’t the data that should be centre stage — it’s the signal that’s contained within that data. And that signal can be as hard to find as the proverbial needle in a haystack, even without data volumes that are multiples of the 2014 Internet.

A simple example from the history of science: Edwin Hubble’s famous graph from 1929 that was one of the first pieces of evidence that we exist in an expanding universe. The data are the difficult and painstaking measurements made by Hubble and his colleague Vesto Slipher that are plotted as small circles on the graph.

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The signal is the line of best fit that makes sense of the data by suggesting a possible relationship between the variables. Now, as you can see, not all the points lie on, or even close, to the line of best fit. This is because of noise — random fluctuations that affect any measurement process. Because Hubble and Slipher were pushing the envelope of available technology at the time, their measurements were unavoidably ‘noisy’, but they were still able to extract a signal, and that signal has been both confirmed and honed over the years.

In my experience, when the dread phrase “let’s look at the data” is uttered in education, the “search for a signal” barely extends beyond simplistic numerical comparisons: increase=doubleplus good, decrease=doubledoubleplus ungood.

The way we use currently use data in schools reminds me of SF author William Gibson’s coining of the term cyberspace (way back in the pre-internet 1980s) as the
 

consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legimate operators . . . a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system
— William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

In my opinion, almost the whole statistical shebang associated with UK education, from the precipitous data-mountains of the likes of RAISEOnline (TM) to the humblest tracking spreadsheet for a department of one, is actually nothing more than a ‘consensual hallucination’.

The numbers, levels and grades mean something because we say they mean something. And sometimes, it is true, they can tell a story.

Let’s say a student has variable test scores in one subject over a few months: does this tell us something about the child’s actual learning, or about possible inconsistencies in the department’s assessment regime, or about the child’s teachers?

My point is that WE DON’T KNOW without cross referencing other sources of information and using — wait for it — professional judgement.

I believe that the search for a signal should be central to any examination of data, and that this is best done with a human brain through the lens of professional experience. And, given the inevitability of noise and uncertainty in any measurement process, with a generous number of grains of statistical salt.

All I Really Need To Know About Teaching I Learned On My PGCE

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Book cover

Flumine perpetuo torrens solet acrius ire.
Sed tamen hæc brevis est, illa perennis aqua.
— Ovid, Rem. 651.

In course impetuous soon the torrent dries,
The brook a constant peaceful stream supplies.

“May you live in interesting times” is said to be an ancient Chinese curse. Sadly, I think it is evident that teachers in the UK (and elsewhere) are currently living through some very interesting times indeed.

It certainly seems that before one torrent of change has finished running its impetuous course, another torrent of radically alternative change is unloosed upon us from another direction. Heraclitus pondered whether one could step in the same river twice; teachers ponder if today’s modish ‘best practice’ will be the same as tomorrow’s ‘best practice’, because it certainly isn’t the same as yesterday’s.

And where does all this frenetic change get us? The answer, based on my two decades of experience is: nowhere.

Sadly, this doleful and melancholy truth does not seem to be widely accepted. The purveyors of the many varieties of educational ‘magic beans’ continue to loudly hawk their wares, all too many of which rely more on cant, humbug and the partiality (and sometimes naked partisanship) of friends in high places rather than any demonstrable or proven effectiveness.

Too much of students’ and teachers’ precious, precious time is wasted attempting to implement the latest muddle-headed initiative, or at least minimise the harm it will do. Careerists — teachers, politicians and inspectors alike — pay fulsome public lip service to ideas that they then go on to cheerfully deride in private. (Mea culpa! on that one BTW.)

So what are the eternal verities of teaching? I’m not sure if I can provide an exhaustive or definitive list, but here are a few of what I consider to be, if not eternal undying truths, then reasonably sound advice. And, yes, I do think I learned many of them on my PGCE course.

1. Avoid whole class detentions or sanctions: they are almost always unfair and an admission of weakness rather than a demonstration of strength.
2. Avoid shouting or raising your voice: it might work the first time, but each iteration of this behaviour diminishes its effectiveness.
3. Set suitable work. Although it won’t magically resolve all behaviour issues all by itself (contrary to what some misguided mentors think), it does help.
4. Watch what you say, especially any offhand negative or sarcastic comments, even if meant in jest. Although it may not always seem like it, most students genuinely care what their teacher thinks of them.

These, to my mind, begin to exemplify the “constant peaceful stream” that makes the genuine difference in teaching, rather that over-hyped “Year Zero” and “world-turned-upside-down” models so beloved of politicians and careerists at all levels.

I am not against change; it’s just that a lot — an awful lot! — of the changes that I have been asked to carry out over the years have proven to be transient and temporary, and within a matter of days, weeks or months we go back to the old ways. Show me a better way and I will gladly do it, but I have grown both wary and weary of the change-for-change’s-sake that is all too often foisted on us as a profession.

Genuine, useful change? Only time will tell.

Opinionum commenta delet dies, naturæ judicia confirmat.   
–CICERO, vi. Att. 1.  

Time obliterates the fictions of opinion, and confirms the decisions of nature.

Secular Pantheon? Oh noes!

e=mc2andallthat6 Comments

I read Joe Kirby’s excellent blog regularly and find myself nodding happily in agreement with many of the points that he makes. However, his recent post Secular Pantheon: what can schools learn from religions? (following suggestions made by Alain de Botton) made me spit out my muesli in frustration. Richie Gale has also written a thoughtful response to Joe’s post, but was in broad agreement with its theme that schools could learn some useful lessons from religion.

I am not.

My main problem is with the claims made by Alain de Botton:

Probably the most boring question you can ask about religion is whether or not the whole thing is ‘true’. Unfortunately, recent public discussions on religion have focused obsessively on precisely this issue, with a hardcore group of fanatical believers pitting themselves against an equally small band of fanatical atheists. [ HuffPo 3/2/12]

While de Botton pats himself on the back for being so much more nuanced and accommodating than the “fanatical atheists” he decries, he is actually neither. I believe Jason Rosenhouse puts it nicely:

When someone says the truth or falsity of religions are their least interesting aspects, you can be sure you are reading the work of someone who thinks they are false. If there were a strong argument to be made on behalf of the truth claims of Christianity or Islam, say, that would not be boring at all. That would actually be a momentous contribution to humanity’s understanding of the world. [EvolutionBlog 8/3/12]

To me, de Botton’s world weary pose is comparable to that of an adult pressured by her children into presiding over a funeral service for a hamster.

I think it is more actually more respectful of religion to take their truth claims seriously enough to debate rather than sideline them with a twinkly eyed “Well, really, whether they’re true or not isn’t the point, is it?”

Joe approvingly highlights this sentence from de Botton:

We need institutions to foster and protect those emotions to which we are sincerely inclined but which, without a supporting structure and a system of active reminders, we will be too undisciplined to make time for.

Well, on the plus side, here de Botton at least talks about emotions rather than the empirically unverifiable spirit or soul. Emotions are undoubtedly important, and I’ll even accept the concepts of soul and spirit when used metaphorically.

But I would argue that emotional lives are far healthier when they are based on truth rather than falsehood. It may well be emotionally satisfying to conclude that you have not succeeded because the world is against you and always has been, but it is far healthier to have an emotional reaction based on the most accurate and honest assessment of the state of the world that you are able to produce, rather than retreat into any form of fantasy.

The plea for a “supporting structure and system” to address our chronic indiscipline is a simply a plea to return to the world of the child, to have someone or something in authority over oneself. Being an adult is hard work. Taking responsibility for oneself is hard. I am sure that shaking off that burden is an attractive thought for all of us, on occasion.

Perhaps de Botton is right, and most religious believers retreat into the comfort of their religious structure and system without worrying too much about its truth or falsity. However, I think that the majority of religious believers follow their religion because they genuinely (for good or bad reasons) believe it to be true.

They are not organizing their lives and defining their identities around religion because they find the rituals quaint and enjoy socializing at the receptions after services. They are doing it because they believe what their religion tells them about the world. [EvolutionBlog 8/3/12. Emphasis added.]

And therein, I think, lies the problem.