Students Solve Problems Better When They Think Critically

February 7, 2010
Chronicle of Higher Education
How Students Can Improve by Studying Themselves
Researchers at CUNY’s Graduate Center push ’self-regulated learning’

. . . College students of all types, not just obviously struggling students who are assigned to remedial classes, will learn better if they think critically about their own studying.

“Errors are part of the process of learning, and not a sign of personal imperfection,” Mr. Zimmerman says. “We’re trying to help instructors and students see errors not as an endpoint, but as a beginning point for understanding what they know and what they don’t know, and how they can approach problems in a more effective way.”

Tim Tebow: The Boy Who Lived

. . .destined to grow up as an example to us all. Of — um –

Are you ready for some football?
(Olympic Excess coming up next!)

We homeschooling families like learning at home in our living rooms, especially for free. You could even say we celebrate it! But you’re a Thinking Parent as well, so think about this — is “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life” a sports message best taught on tv as multi-million dollar ad wars? Or is it paid political speech we’ve learned from real-world experience celebrates division and shooting to kill, the kind of combative warfare all learned people know that neither Christ nor America was ever about, despite false advertising through the ages?

What lessons are being taught in our living rooms, not by individual homeschooling parents or great literary characters like the Boy Who Lived but by corporate-controlled televised sports as entertainment, and is it sacred business, serious business, or funny business (if business has any business teaching any of us any of it?)

Our best entertainers and artists in any era help us conjure our own Patronus against the universally human fear of the dark.

Who in this story capitalizes, controls, one might even say conjures, this unarguably public education for which corporate America is unelected and unaccountable?

What if Tim Tebow had been born gay instead of gridiron-gifted? Would his mom still have been chosen for her choice to teach SuperBowl fans everywhere her ethics and how to define “family and life” worth celebrating? What if her unaborted son once grown to be a sports star, openly credited magic rather than miracles? Would he still have been chosen by CBS to dramatically break the network’s policy against advocacy ads mixed with hero worship? Is ignoring your doctor’s advice as Pam Tebow (and Sarah Palin) chose for themselves and apparently preach as mom gospel to everyone including the Supreme Court, a lesson CBS will be held accountable for as both profit-seeking and public broadcast system?

Here’s something your children will NOT learn about celebrating family and life watching the CBS SuperBowl:

“Women take decisions about their health very seriously. They consider their doctors’ advice, they talk with their loved ones and people they trust, including religious leaders, and they carefully weigh all considerations before making the best decision for themselves and their families.”

“My daughter will always be my little girl,” [the sports star] says. “But I am proud everyday as I watch her grow up to be her own person, a smart, confident young woman. I trust her to take care of herself. We celebrate families by supporting our mothers, by supporting our daughters. By trusting women.”

Upon which [the evil schoolmarm as minister of education] retorted tartly that students couldn’t be trusted to know what was good for them and they were a bunch of negative whiners . . .

Ethical? Educational? Christ-like? Good enough for your child at any age or stage?

Preparing for SuperBowl Sunday as a secular Gator up on cultural controversy, I’m reflecting on my own education through many years of bleeding orange and blue and watching UF sports, especially Tim Tebow as our most famous student-athlete ever. Yes, the most famous ever.

The Boy Who Lived has clearly surpassed even Steve Spurrier’s renown although the reasons seem murky and not merely statistical — perhaps because not even the most fanatical fan nor the SEC, the Heisman Committee or The Old Ball Coach himself, ever confused Steve Spurrier with Christ-like beatitude?

I think my best self-learning on this subject was laid out in biblical allegory style, in What Should We Call Christ as a Kick in the Head? Tim has had his last on-field performance as a Gator for God but his first as a bought-and-paid-for shill airs tomorrow. I’ll let you know if it teaches me anything new . . .

*********
What Should We Call Christ as a Kick in the Head?

Just drove Young Son to Irish dance and musical theatre. Their performing arts studio is in a neighborhood shopping center with a sandwich shop and pizza place, a chinese food restaurant, a small computer shop — and a huge, very busy martial arts place with big glass walls across the front so you can watch from the sidewalk or your car, called Karate for Christ Ministries.

I’ve waited for the kids and wondered about this incongruous pairing of east and west before. School football players in the South seem very well-educated if Christianity is the standard and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes is the measure. My favorite quarterback Gator Tim Tebow is always blessing the tv announcers and thanking his lord Jesus Christ for his touchdowns. His whole family goes on mission trips and he even convinced his coach to join him on one last summer. But school football and school religion are compatibly American — at least so I was taught — especially in the Bible Belt.

Karate though? For Christ?

So today as Spunky started a new conversation about what it means for a child to be “well-educated” I noticed it afresh and thought I’d mention some of what it makes me wonder, about what’s being taught and learned and why to our kids out of school, not in.

The phone number is painted on the glass, too: want your child well-educated in mind, body and spirit all at the same time? Who needs School OR Church? Just call 8-WE-KICK.

I called up wikipedia instead:

Politics as Usual? You Betcha . . .

Dr. Frank Luntz Pens GOP Talking Points Memo: The Language of Financial Reform

What’s in a Name Like Harvard, Yale, Princeton?

Classic snooking around that seems timely again:

What IS in a name like Harvard, Yale, Princeton? Entitlement, privilege, status, the life lesson that wealth and leisure define success? At best a sense of noblesse oblige to all the little people left behind? What do whole generations learn from the culture of aspiring to be accepted by such a name, literally from wanting and then being found wanting?
(Compare that universal lesson to the very best learning Harvard could hope to give the few, the chosen, the accepted and enrolled — does the effect balance out in society’s favor, or not so much?)

See “School Socialization Should Shame Us All”:

Everything about college campus life — from getting in to getting along, to getting through, to getting a job through those social contacts — imposes this same lesson by institutional design and with institutional support, and college presidents must’ve learned it as well as any silly sorority girl or rejected chubbette.

Maybe better! – some university presidents are in practice shamelessly playing for institutional reputation, recruiting by rankings, weeding and culling and shuffling students like playing cards for the next bet, grasping for the top and misrepresenting the truth, all for institutional glorification bigger to them than the import of any individual students underserved, unserved or downright devastated by the “lesson” –

Why Do Voters Oppose Their Own Interests?

“It’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come
pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.”

BBC NEWS

Why do people often vote against their own interests?

. . .Political scientist Dr David Runciman looks at why is there often such deep opposition to reforms that appear to be of obvious benefit to voters.

. . . it is striking that the people who most dislike the whole idea of
healthcare reform – the ones who think it is socialist, godless, a step
on the road to a police state – are often the ones it seems designed to
help.

In Texas, where barely two-thirds of the population have full health
insurance and over a fifth of all children have no cover at all,
opposition to the legislation is currently running at 87%.

. . .In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an
exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the
argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side.

It’s not facts. Here’s a hint: POWER OF STORY!!!

Nobody Does It Better: Unpacking Political Corruption

Before she knew Barack Obama much less Sarah “Pallin’ around with Terrorists” Palin and Joe “You Lie” the Plumber — um, Wilson — JJ once wrote:

I feel like we’ve been fighting each other so long that it’s not about fighting for competing goals or visions any more, as much as it is the fight itself. . .

I’m not in the hole alone, and dirt is flying all around me.

IF it’s really completely hopeless, and we always must be at war among ourselves just because we’re human, then progressive thinkers can at least admit it to ourselves and figure out how to integrate THAT into our world view. It would be more honest.

She concluded much later by asking, “So — now what?”  None of us could answer that then, beyond another shift in party power.  Can we (any of us) do any better now?

In October 2006, Culture Kitchen was hosting serious, honest good-government talk among Thinking Citizens.  Remember way back then? The GOP was in authoritarian command and control (government as god and guns for private profits) but an election was on the horizon and Scientist-Democrat-blogger Mole wrote a post making the case that

“Democrats Stand for Honest Government“
The Republican Party is imploding because of corruption. Their corruption has already sent Randy Cunningham to jail and forced the resignation of Tom DeLay and Mark Foley. In Ohio and Missouri and Kentucky their corruption is shocking. And voters are tired of it.

The Republicans try to cover up their corruption, lying for each other. They even protected a sexual predator for six years! When faced with corruption in their ranks, Republicans lie and cover their tracks. Their final defense is to whine pitifully, “but the Democrats do it too!”

Well, Democrats have indeed been known to be corrupt. But there are differences.  .  . We attack Republican corruption and on the rare occasions it comes up we attack Democratic corruption as well. I see no comparable reform movement within the Republican Party. All I see are more lies, more sleaze and more greed. All I see are Republicans and companies like Halliburton and Exxon and Enron in an orgy of greed and profit, looting America and sacrificing American troops for profit.

. . .Republicans wallow in corruption. Democrats are fighting corruption.

So Nance (longtime Democrat) and JJ (longtime independent non-partisan) engaged this argument, in ways disconcertingly relevant this morning in January 2010, knowing what we know now and having just watched the State of the Union last night — President Barack Obama (longtime Democrat) appealing to GOP power brokers and especially to us longtime independent non-partisans.

I recommend you go to Culture Kitchen and read the whole conversation because we weren’t the only ones thinking and talking, but here are some excerpts just from JJ and Nance:

Just Can’t Buy It

Submitted by JJ Ross on 11 October 2006 -

That ship has sailed, hopefully for the last time with a majority of American voters innocently at the pier waving goodbye and welcoming in the new.

However earnest and sincere individual candidates and operatives may be, polls and personal observations persuade me neither Rs nor Ds will be able to dump a load of “purity and honesty” cargo on us to just buy on faith and pay for later, and maybe that’s a good thing.

Some new third party for the same old system isn’t my idea of change, either. The system is corrupt, nobody does it better, and we’re just not in the media mass market for any more cheap and peeling tricks with a fresh coat of paint slapped on,peddled as progressive government.

I suffer from chronic liar,liar, pants on fire exhaustion, like nearly everyone I know in ordinary family life. Say we ARE collectively in the mood for real change, toward something that really is more honest and productive than we’ve constituted as government in our lifetime. What would we suggest, without the union (or any other) label I mean? There ought to be ideas other than soundbite-slogan partisan ones we can at least start imagining and working toward, building new frames, having new conversations . . .

Unpacking Corruption

I’d unpack the sins and slogans a little differently is all (I am not R or Green or any other festive party color.)

Yes, of course, honesty is the right direction, so great for us all if some Dems are heading that way or at least acknowledging it’s the right direction. But it’s not just because they ARE Dems though, is it, really? And they aren’t all alike, nor are all R pols or us independents.

And are they really the only ones you see moving that way? That’s all I’m saying, not throwing out rhetoric, honest!
The poll says I’m not alone in seeing dishonesty in too many places and all the wrong faces . . .

I think your case can be made reasonably to the public but ironically, it would have to be a masterpiece of brutal, humble honesty! To work would mean full disclosure, one party owning up to ALL the lies and coverups and dirty tricks from impeachment and investigations to treating sex scandals with young pages, interns and secretaries differently depending on the perp’s party registration. Without that everyone seems like whores, and I don’t mean seduced women or boys – I mean the powerful politicians who took the oath to represent us faithfully and then screwed us and our children instead.

Speaking only for myself as one disillusioned middle-aged mom who doesn’t follow party politics much anymore, on or offline, this really is just my own thinking over time, not any party’s rhetoric — I DO see you as being personally honest and trying to head toward better government through hard truths handled with less self-serving power plays and egomania. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been likely to read your thoughts much less bother to comment.

Did you hear cable news the other day, something about the female demographic over decades being generally more liberal yet also more thoroughly disgusted with the lying and destruction of hardball party politics? If I’m any example, it’s true, believe it!

So I am honestly asking (not to quarrel but because I am interested in how you really see this and in finding solutions that work for us all) why you’d believe that shouting “we’re honest!” through a bullhorn out the front window can get Dems where you want them to go with skeptical women voters like me, when there’s an unacknowledged cigar burning a hole through some soiled blue dress “lying” in the back seat, its stale rhetorical smoke about private sex-as-power in the highest halls of government stinking to high heaven.

Campaign finance reform

Absolutely. Has to happen. Yes.

Do I think either party’s leaders can make it happen or even really want it? Nope. A big reason why I think we need to break out of the party mindset to make real progress toward our common goals.

**************

Then from Nance:
You want to
know why the Foley scandal is so annoying? Because the Republicans paint themselves as pure as the driven snow. Then, like any other set of human beings, stuff happens. It is so much easier to turn on someone who has been preaching at you.

So, great. Democrats are against corruption. Some of them — including you — are doing what should be done.

But don’t pin too many medals on the Dems just for trying to be decent. It will be very unseemly when, inevitably, one of those pins bursts the purity balloon.

I expect and want reality from Dems. Not piety.

Nance

And back to JJ:

I Think You’re Right

with everything you say politically — about there being some important differences worth defining, and which of those favor the Dems, and that the effect of garden-variety disillusionment is to depress turnout all around, likely soften the blow against the currently more vulnerable (Rs.)

I actually don’t equate the parties, hadn’t even considered it (I connect everything, equate nothing!) So I don’t mean to distract you with having to make that case. It’s not necessary, for me at least.

But triumphant Dems in office claiming this time it will be different while controlling the same old corrupt and self-serving Death of Common Sense system, that’s failed us so many different ways already that I can’t hear any political claim without the counter-claim popping unbidden into my brain, just isn’t sufficient to compel my time and treasure any more.

And I don’t think Rs “are imploding because of corruption.” I think it’s because

“We’re the Smart Ones. . .”

We’re the smart ones.
We’re the ones who are “reality-based.”
We can win without being counterproductive.
We can figure it out.

Put it on t-shirts, embroider it on pillows, whisper it to teeth-gnashing, garment-rending fellows as needed . . .

ACORN Pimp Video Wunderkind Arrested by FBI in New Political Break-in

And he made his bail appeal court appearance today with his co-conspirators in a red prison jumpsuit –

James O’Keefe ARRESTED In Landrieu Phone Scheme, 3 Others Also Charged
MICHAEL KUNZELMAN | 01/26/10 04:37 PM | AP

Now I’m recalling all the law-and-order conservative posturing when the Cambridge professor was arrested in his own home and the president dared to suggest the arrest might have been a stupid overreaction on the part of the arresting government employee.

Will we hear the same thing from them now, or the opposite, poor things.
(It’ll be interesting to hear how this was different than Watergate too — only in being even more spectacularly psychopathic? And whether the Congressional Republicans will continue to pretend the CIA would never lie . . .)

Unschooling Passion Play From Apple Computer “Buccaneer-Scholar”

Unschooling on FaceBook thanks Mitrik Spanner for posting:
“Great audio interview of James Marcus Bach, the author of Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success on Wisconsin Public Radio November 13, 2009. He’s a software testing manager at Apple Computer and [pro]ponent of unschooling.”

[Also son of author-poet Richard Bach]

Stream the audio here.

Read Their Lips: Some SERIOUS Mental Mistakes Out There!

Here are three connected “what’s in a name?” rants from today:

Rant One
So the Dickensian SC Lt Gov has just ruined the whole freedom storyline about the GOP No-Go to any human services for anyone (Haiti too?) He let the cat out of the bag literally, when he compared people in need to stray animals that need to be left to starve — and without health care, no doubt — so they won’t breed.

“You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply,” Bauer continued. “They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

Somebody in this story doesn’t know any better all right, but to me, it sounds like him! America as Animal Farm, and some pigs are more equal than others? Maybe his pack of alpha wolves deserve credit for shrewd animalistic survival instincts at least. No wonder they need all those guns guaranteed by their piggy view of the Constitution, rather than the human services by which all living animals could be treated humanely. So many strays are starving and sick these days that they might turn on their overlords and start fighting back . . .

***************
Rant Two
I just saw a nice conservative Christian school and homeschool teacher, well-educated, longtime advocate for home education — with whom I collaborated to oppose mandatory universal preschool among other things — use a puzzling term completely new to me:TOTUS. She linked it to a news story about the President giving a speech in these dire times, followed by her comment: “The TOTUS speaks to children.”

Treasury head maybe?

I was determined to figure it out for myself, ran through various possibilities as if I were doing a crossword puzzle, but no luck. The thumbnail looked like it could be the President? — maybe among themselves they sneer at him as Teacher or Totalitarian of the US?

Sigh, finally I Googled it. Maybe I am the last person to hear this for the first time or maybe you don’t know either. If you do know, have you really thought about what this label packs in its punch?

These are people agitating to change the constitution to define all human life as fully human even before birth, even when it is just a potentiality — in the same breath they politically dehumanize this extraordinary (and certainly living, breathing) human being who represents all Americans and leads our humanitarian efforts throughout the globe.

At least when their derision insisted he wasn’t American-born and wasn’t black enough or too much like Hitler and was palling around with terrorists, he was still presumably — if barely — “human!”

And at least when Limbaugh snatched away that humanity to call him a giant alien cockroach, he was still a LIFEFORM. But this new political derision is more damning and dismissive even than that: now the President Barack Obama is not only not human, but not even animal life like the stray cats and dogs we must harden our hearts against and not feed, to prevent them from breeding more unfortunate lives to clutter up our conscience (see Rant One): now he’s not even animal or insect, not even ALIVE. Only a machine.

And not even a learning machine that can think for itself and help humankind in valued partnership, like say, Data on “Star Trek: Next Generation.” A stupid machine we should junk. (Alternately, evil enemy technology.)

They are crowing this week that it’s a triumph for American values that suddenly even CORPORATIONS are human and guaranteed individual human rights — but not the Teleprompter?
Think about it. WWJD?

See The Lucifer Effect for more.

***********
Rant Three
Sean Hannity said today on his radio program, and I quote: “I think it is wrong to plan your life.” (Really, then surely it’s wrong to plan other people’s childbearing and marriages and sexual expressions and access to human food, shelter, medicine and health care through government, much less raise armies to fight wars to reshape lives and nations and whole regions of the globe to suit YOU. And if it’s wrong for anyone to plan this life, surely it’s even wronger to spend a moment’s effort trying to plan the next one??)

Meanwhile, back on earth, in reality, among sentient beings, Hannity’s broadcast stance against the morality of human volition, of planning and pursuing life goals, surely devalues every individual’s hard work, savings, initiative, education. All missionary work and politics. All commitments such as friendship, marriage and raising a family. All these are by his simple pronouncement that planning is wrong, rendered worse than pointless — actually wrong!

These are stupid, exasperating and poorly thought out ideas, dangerous even — still I wouldn’t call him not human or not alive, for spouting them.

Guess What Bill Gates Is Talking About

Can you guess what complex challenge vital to our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, he’s referring to here?

There just isn’t enough work going on today to get us to where we need to go.

The world is distracted from what counts on this issue in a big way.

Education? Equality and human rights?
War and terrorism, jobs and the economy, hunger, health care, helping Haitians?

I might answer “all of the above” except this sweaty-palm panic we’re feeling isn’t multiple choice anymore, if it ever really was. Time is expiring on our high-stakes academic exercise, and maybe the only answer that matters now is knowing these two things whatever the question, that no choice left is right, and no choice left just isn’t right!

The way he’s going about all this btw, sounds like a great model for true public education, the kind that just might save the world if anything can:

I spend a lot of my time learning about issues I’m passionate about.

I’m fortunate because the people I’m working with and learning from are true experts in their fields. I take a lot of notes, and often share them and my own thoughts on the subject with others through email, so I can learn from them and expand the conversation.

I thought it would be interesting to share these conversations more widely with a website, in the hope of getting more people thinking and learning about the issues I think are interesting and important.

p.s. If you still want a literal right answer to the original question about which issue he’s referring to in the quote above, check the answer sheet here.

Yale the High School Musical??

Okay, our musical theatre unschooling has just been retroactively validated! This is no joke, just saw it in the Chronicle of Higher Education: