I am of the age where I can look back and see (but try not to say) something like “the more things change the more they are the same” which is infinitely better than saying “Why the last time I saw you, you were......(you fill in the gap). I will soon be 63 and have spent 98% of my adult life working with adolescents and most, but not all, of that work was done in a school. I have a love-hate relationship with our schools. I love the devotion, creativity, commitment and intellect that many teachers bring to their sometimes exhausting, sometimes exhilarating work. Most teachers I have worked with as a peer, as a school board member, as a consultant, as an administrator, as a reading consultant really like their students and earnestly attempt to support student learning in whatever ways they are able or permitted. I admire and honor the generosity of taxpayers and businesses who respond as best they can to the many requests for resources that they get. Having been one, I empathize with the sacrifices administrators make so that they can attend to the endless list of the trivial and profane that populates their every hour. Every day I am in school I see how much there is to love.
But I said love-hate so here is the other part of that picture and it is not really hate. We (the big we) have a awya of embracing innovation and change that seems to be short-sighted and often mundane. Not that there has not been great value in many of those changes but they seem to fail to embrace the magnitude of change in our culture, our communities, our families, our information access, our technology and, most importantly, our students. I am as guilty, if that is even the right word, of this as anyone. At times in my career I have led the change, spouted the data, relied on the research usually ending up with just a twist in the road rather than a u-turn. So when I write about schools it is not from that ”so 90’s“ trash-the-schools talk that some business leaders started and their firestorm then pulled in the press and finally parents. Rightly or wrongly this jihad against American schools was, in my view, a major element in building the unreasonable sense of entitlement that we now encounter from many students and their parents. (While entitlement is the subject of another piece I am working on I maintain that the unrealistic sense of entitlement substantially contributes to the cultural issues we face.) Of course this is a broad generalization as generally speaking polls show parents very supportive of their local schools and many businesses have devoted many resources to support improved learning outcomes for students. But still we have many challenges and sometimes it seems that ”the more we have changed the more we are the same.“

At the risk of getting into a conceptual arena for which I am poorly prepared, I want to expose an essential element of my thinking about school change. Many have postulated about cultural shifts and the history of western culture. Some theorize that we are either entering a third major shift in Western culture. C. Sidney Burrus and Richard Baraniuk identify the three major shifts as aligned with the development of writing and literacy, the second the invention of the printing press and the third and current ”paradigm shift“ is our shift to an electronic, digital culture. Some would argue that there are more complex ways of looking at cultural change such as Dr. Andreas Eppink in The Modern Globalizing Culture Part III: Major Cultural Shifts in Western History . Dr. Eppink identifies ten ”hidden goals“ which are the product of culture and thus play a part in cultural change depending on what is valued. I have heard the argument that we are in the third major cultural shift in western civilization in other places. My own bias is that there is validity and that we are indeed in the midst of major cultural shifts. Further the extraordinary events in the US over the last six months seem to me to be signs of cultural shifts. The viability of a presidential primary campaign being waged between a black man and a woman is a huge sign of some shift. The election of a black man to be our next president is an amazing shift. Unfortunately Obama inherits a third sign of a major shift with the global economic collapse. I imagine that the only way we can restore some global economic security is to rethink our economic structures and realign economic priorities. While I am neither an economist nor a philosopher, I choose to see our western culture on the precipice of another major shift and that the shifting economies and political realities are creating a new context in which we need to investigate how the structure and delivery of essential learning will best meet the needs of our culture and our students.

So why should high schools change?
1. Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind argues convincingly that our culture is demanding a change from Left Directed Thinking to Right Directed Thinking which means the literal, sequential, functional and analytic kind of thinking” that has dominated is being replaced by ”simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual and synthetic“ thinking. (26)If we are to prepare students for this new thinking then we must restructure and revise our curriculum.
2. “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” – Clay Shirky We have yet to adjust to the incredible amount of information that our kids are bombarded with. We try substitution (use the textbook), prohibition (wikipedia, cell phones, electronic/digital games), denial (we have always done it this way) and authority but we are not helping them filter.
3. Post high school education success rate as measured by the number of students who complete their first year hovers in the mid 50’s. So there is approximately a 45-49% failure rate. One can extrapolate from this that nearly half of our high school graduates are not well prepared for further academic studies.
4. In many high schools we continue to make the assumption that the developmental needs of twelfth graders are largely the same as ninth graders. We also appear to believe that the developmental needs of these twelfth graders are the mostly same as their parents and grandparents needs were when they were in high school. It is not so.
5. Bill Gates has funded some of the most profound and forward-thinking high school research and reforms. Last year he asserted that the senior year in high school is becoming increasingly “irrelevant” to our students.

All of this by way of introducing some ideas for school change and specifically for the senior year that I believe could make a significant difference in learning. In my mind this is just one piece of a larger systemic change but it is probably the most urgent. While many pieces of my recommendations are already present in many schools, I want to see implementation in a more systemic manner.

         

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Date: November 21, 2009 8:18:00 AM EST

Subject: Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep...

Reply-To: Chet <noreply@blogger.com>

Source: Science Musings Blog

Author: Chet <noreply@blogger.com>

Yesterday we followed Leonardo da Vinci to his final abode at Amboise in France, in the shadow of the king's palace. Before we leave him there, let's ponder for a moment the thing he was perhaps most famous for: the Mona Lisa's smile.

No kidding. A zillion words have been written about Leonardo, and I would guess that the 

smile tops the chart for volume of interest. Even at age fourteen, I laid abed in a dreamy reverie listening to Nat King Cole croon her praises:

Mona Lisa Mona Lisa, men have named you
You're so like the lady with the mystic smile
Is it only 'cause you're lonely, they have blamed you
For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile?

That was before I ever saw a reproduction of the painting, and long before I stood in the Louvre with the original.

Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa?
Or is this your way to hide a broken heart?
Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep
They just lie there and they die there

Lyrics like that would be considered silly by kids today, but to a hopelessly romantic teenager in 1950 Nat's sexy voice churned up the promise of bliss in the presence of the eternal feminine. Of course, at that age, I wouldn't have known a "mystic smile" from a come-hither or a sneer.

The person who turned on the spigot of words about the enigmatic expression was Sigmund Freud, in his Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, in which he provided a psychoanalysis of the artist, focusing, as you might expect, on the child's oral fixation on his mother. Freud guessed that Leonardo rediscovered his mother's smile in the person of Mona Lisa del Giocondo, a Florentine noblewoman whose portrait he was commissioned to paint, and employed the same feature on every figure, female and male, that he subsequently painted.

Since Freud, the Mona Lisa's smile has inspired a cascade of psychological and even physiological interpretation (look at Mona Lisa with your left-hand peripheral vision).

Contradiction seems to be the key. The smile has been described (by various scholars, all male) as "tenderness and coquetry, modesty and secret sensuous joy," "the charm of deceit, the kindness that conceals a cruel purpose," and "good and wicked, cruel and compassionate, graceful and feline." Freud himself professes to find in the beautiful Florentine's expression "the most perfect profile of women; the contrast between reserve and seduction, and between the most devoted tenderness and a sensuality that is ruthlessly demanding -- consuming men as if they were alien beings." Yipe!

None of this was apparent to me at age fourteen. Women were then deeply mysterious, but my image of them was altogether a product of my own fervid adolescent imagination. It wasn't until mid-life -- the early fifties, say -- that my fantasies had been finally peeled away to be replaced by utter bafflement. Perhaps significantly, this was the same age at which Leonardo painted the lady Giocondo, and the same age at which Freud wrote his Leonardo essay. That cryptic smile expresses the realization that comes to men at a certain age that they haven't a clue what makes women tick. For Leonardo, who was perhaps bisexual, the smile swung both ways, from female madonnas to beautiful male youths.

No doubt the women here on the Science Musings porch will have their own interpretation of the Giocondo smile, and they will certainly be wiser than me. After a lifetime of preoccupation with women, I prefer to look at the Florentine lady out of the left-hand corner of my eye, which for various reasons presumably involving "different cells in the retina transmit[ing] different categories of information or 'channels' to the brain" simplifies the "mystic" expression to one of benign condescension. Condescension I can live with; the inscrutable contradiction of the feminine is another thing altogether.

Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?
Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?

Read more…

 As I look out my still open window the brightness of the foliage belies the overcast morning. A gentle rain-the first in a while-falls on my thirsty garden giving it life even as its season rapidly passes. This has been a long and full week with with passages of all sorts that only now do I feel prepared to begin sorting out.

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