I was recently asked to moderate a debate hosted by a school club Moving On Racial Equality on Affirmative Action. Additionally, I was asked to facilitate a separate discussion on the HBO Documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White after the junior class watches it. The book The Secrets of Facilitation has been on my shelf for a bit so I’m going to pore through that beforehand. Race relations has always interested me but I’m the first to admit that I don’t know much in the way of history, policies, etc. At the moment, affirmative action w/ respect to school admissions is something that interests me. If anyone knows of any good articles or resources on these topics please let me know.
Category Archives: School / Education
Analogical Thinking
There’s been lots of chatter “out there” about analogies. One meme talks about analogies in business and their value when sizing up markets.
The rest of the chatter has to do with the elimination of analogies from the new SAT (which I took yesterday). In Today’s NYTimes, Adam Cohen opines that “An SAT Without Analoges Is Like (a) A Confused Citizenry.” He makes several good arguments about the power of analogies for persuasion. Analogies, he says, are more prevalent than ever in daily discourse. People draw comparisons to prove a point – and more often than not completely butcher the analogy. (His example is someone comparing the Estate Tax to the Holocaust.)
Cohen, unfortunately, falls into his trap of irony. He draws an analogy between the SAT and an Educated Citizenry; that is, if analogies are eliminated from the SAT then we are churning out young people ill-equipped in the skill. Although Cohen cites a handy-dandy example of an SAT-style analogy:
Poverty:Money::
(A)Wealth: gold; (B) Hunger: food; (C) Car: Driver; (D) Cook: Stove.
The vast majority of standardized test analogies are far more confusing, far more tricky, far more stupid.
Kudos to Cohen for an astute observation of a trend in rhetoric, but shame on him for drawing an analogy to the SAT.
The New SAT Debuts
If you’ve been following the news at all recently you probably have heard about the new SAT which debuted today making millions of high school students sit for 4 hours this morning slaving through harder math, a 25 minute writing essay, but thankfully no analogies.
I was one of those high school students.
The first part was the Essay, the part that’s gotten all the attention. It has been a little controversial because doing well on the SAT Essay doesn’t mean you know how to write well. To do well on the SAT Essay, test-prep companies say, you need to fill at least 1.5 of the 2 pages with writing, have 5 paragraphs (intro, three supporting examples, conclusion) and use big vocabulary words. As I opened up the test booklet this morning ready for an essay on some abstract topic like “Do you think most people learn from their mistakes?” I was stunned.
The prompt (italicized quotation) was from Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I read Csikszentmihalyi’s other book Flow: The Psychology of the Optimal Experience over Christmas. So, I dominated the essay (which asked whether nurturing creativity should be higher on the world’s agenda), made references to Csikszentmihalyi’s teachings at Claremont, and cited his other book. What luck.
From there, it was tons of sentence completion, error ID, math, and the like. Going into the test, I had studied some with the Princeton Review Online because while my PSAT scores predicted very high verbal scores (high 600’s/low 700’s) my math scores were dismal. Reflecting on today I still don’t think I’m very good at standardized tests.
During the test, I had to correct the proctor three times on how much time we had left on the section because he couldn’t read a hand clock and I was using a digital stopwatch on my watch. Around me, cheating was rampant but no one does anything because if you report a cheating incident they void all tests in the room. And no one wants that.
I have strong objections to standardized testing and how people look at it as a “smarts” test when really it’s a “how rich are you to be able to prepare/get coached for the test” examination. The math sections are mostly tricks and traps and the verbal sections test vocabulary that the average human being would only see if they read the dictionary as a hobby. It promotes alarming attitudes among high school students and to that end I sincerely hope more colleges vent their frustration with it (like the UC system did) or not accept scores at all (like many are starting to do).
Visual Literacy in Businesses
I took a Photography class because I wanted to fulfill my Arts requirement but I also heard that the teacher was one sharp cookie. She is a big believer that art is a language that you are either literate in or not. She believes that images and photography is going to be the most important language to know in the coming years. Be it the point of view of a photojournalist (and how people always forget that photojournalists have biases just like regular journalists do), or the ramifications of camera phones and all the visual media that anyone – like bloggers – are creating, the language of visual literacy has some interesting angles to explore.
She has some provocative challenges. Bring her a photo album of your family and she will tell you more about your family that you can yourself. Put up a plain old photograph and if everyone in the room agrees it’s “good” there may well be a cultural consensus for why that’s so. Finally, she thinks that any company that hasn’t brought in someone like her trained in the field to talk about interpreting and understanding visual images is nuts.
I’m not a big arts guy, but these ideas seem to be much deeper than just “a picture is worth a 1000 words.” Shouldn’t EVERYONE be trained in this language, not just advertisers? Are you?
I Turned 17 Today
17 years ago I came into this world and was immediately put into intensive care and had a 50% chance of dying. If I lived, the doctors said, I would be perfectly normal. (Looks like they blew that one!)
I think about the teenage years with 13 as the tweener year, 14-15-16 as the first set, and 17-18-19 as the last set. The difference between being 14 and 16 is huge, the gap is narrower between 17 and 19. At 17, I still can’t vote or be drafted.
When I look back at old emails I sent when I was 12 or 13 or even 14 or 15, the vast difference in my writing ability shocks me. When I look back at my overall knowledge and sophistication about the world a few years ago it is funny.
The adolescent years contain more emotional, physical, and intellectual development than any other period in our lives. Neurons are still being connected (but only for a few more years). I’m excited about getting smarter and more savvy about the world around me.
I am still a kid, I’m still a teenager, and I’m still cherishing the special moments that come with this time of my life. But I’m also ready to burst out of these walls I’ve had to live in and go make an impact on civilization. I believe I can do anything.
Finally, I’m grateful. Each and every day I can get hit by a bus or be involved in a freak accident or be disabled. I have none of those restrictions. Saying I am “lucky” is a humongous understatement.