Stories about scientists

While cleaning out my email,I came across this dated entry from Scientific American entitled "James Watson disses today's high school teachers" (which, incidentally, is tangentially related to my current interest in movies about teachers and students)

Watson, 80, was part of a panel discussion at the New York Academy of Sciences that followed a screening of a new documentary called Naturally Obsessed, The Making of a Scientist. The film is about the trials and tribulations of graduate students in biochemist Lawrence Shapiro's x-ray crystallography laboratory at Columbia University in New York City.

...

But Watson said he believes there is a larger hole in the U.S. educational system that is sapping our lead in science. "Part of the problem is too many of our teachers are dumb," he said, balking that "Teachers' unions are corrupt." He said that the relatively low pay educators receive has prompted smart people to flee teaching for other careers— although he made a point of noting that he does not support giving them raises. Teachers like the "bright woman that taught me Latin are nowhere near our schools [now]," he crowed.

The article generated a somewhat interesting discussion in the comments.

I guess it is obvious once you begin thinking about it, but it did not strike me so clearly until now. If you go into a career in teaching don't expect to be the darling of society. Instead you can expect continuing criticism of your role in shaping society.

Come to think of it, who is it that the general public holds in esteem now-a-days? Everyone seems to be at the receiving end - Doctors, Teachers, Pastors, Politicians.

Stories about school - Grease, the Musical

The second Broadway revival of Grease is now on national tour. We saw it last night (for the first time).

It made absolutely no connection with me. I was not drawn to any one of the characters or groups.

Stories about teachers

I am looking for authentic stories about teachers - biographical, autobiographical, fiction, semi-fiction, historical fiction. Anything that captures the experience of being a teacher. Please send in your recommendations via the comments.

I can think of two movies that I've seen recently.

1.
Hobart Shakespeareans: A documentary about Rafe Esquith, a 5th grade teacher in inner-city Los Angeles who among other things uses Shakespeare to engage his students. I really enjoyed this movie, even though I was not even thinking about becoming a teacher at the time. Even then I could not help thinking that this sort of approach to teaching was no 9-5 gig.

2.
Knights of the South Bronx: Loosely inspired by the work that David MacEnulty did to bring scholastic chess to the city of New York's public school system.

3.
I saw To Sir, with Love so long ago, I don't remember anything of it. Coincidentally Sidney Poitier was interviewed on NPR this morning. "I always wanted to be someone better the next day than I was the day before. ... Today [at 83] that is my drive, still my drive."

4.
Until today I had not heard of Dangerous Minds ( Michelle Pfeiffer).

5.
I wonder if Dead Poets Society counts?


Books.

1.
I am currently reading Ms Hempel Chronicles. This book is less about a teacher than about a young woman at a specific point in her life. Part of that life is teaching English to 7th grade as her first job. It is not a great book, but there are a few gems scattered through it. Like this one that grabbed my attention.

p. 40 Ms. Hempel Chronicles.

Dear Parents,


You recently have received an anecdotal about your child. Although it might not have been immediately apparent, this anecdotal was written BY your child, from the perspective of one of his or her teachers. In response to the students' entreaties, I did not include a note of explanation. They wanted to explain the exercise to you themselves, and I hope you have had a chance to talk with your children about the letters they wrote. At this point, though, I would like to offer my own thoughts about the assignment and provide a context in which to understand these "anecdotals."


The assignment was inspired by a passage from the memoir we currently are reading, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff. When this passage occurs, Toby is longing to escape his abusive stepfather and the dead-end town he lives in. When his older brother suggests that Toby apply to boarding school, he becomes excited about the idea, but then discouraged when he realizes that with his poor grades, he will never be accepted. Help arrives in the form of his best friend, who volunteers in the school office and supplies Toby with all the official stationery he needs to create his own letters of recommendation.


"I felt full of things that had to be said, full of stifled truth. That was what I thought I was writing—the truth. It was truth known only to me, but I believed in it more than I believed in the facts arrayed against it. I believed that in some sense not factually verifiable I was a straight-A student. In the same way, I believed that I was an Eagle Scout, and a powerful swimmer, and a boy of integrity. These were ideas about myself that I had held on to for dear life. Now I gave them voice....


"I wrote without heat or hyperbole, in the words my teachers would have used if they had known me as I knew myself These were their letters. And in the boy who lived in their letters, the splendid phantom who carried all my hopes, it seemed to met saw, at last, my own face."


I had hoped that through this exercise students could give voice to their own visions of themselves, visions that might differ from those held by teachers, parents, or friends. I wanted to give them a chance to identify and celebrate what they see as their greatest strengths. During this crucial stage of their development, kids need, I think, to articulate what they believe themselves capable of.

The students approached the assignment with an enthusiasm that overwhelmed me. In their efforts to sound like their teachers, they wrote at greater length, in sharper detail, with more sophisticated phrasing and vocabulary, than they ever have before. Spelling and grammatical errors instantly disappeared; drafts were exhaustively revised. They felt it important that their anecdotals appear convincing.

The decision to mail these anecdotals home was fueled by my desire to share with you these very personal and often revealing self-portraits. When I read them, I found them by turns funny, poignant, and, as Tobias Wolff writes, full of truth. I thought that you, as parents, would value this opportunity to see your children as they see themselves. The intention was not, as I think a few students have mistaken, to play a joke.


I hope that this assignment has offered some meaningful insights into your child, and I deeply regret if it has been the cause of any misunderstanding or distress. Please feel free to contact me if you have further questions or concerns.

The Internet. Searching came upon the following.

1.
A collection of user-submitted 'Inspirational Teacher Stories' The ones I looked at are pretty short, and thus do not give you the opportunity to get into the Teacher's character.

2.
Google Book Search throws up a pretty long list.

Mentors, masters, and Mrs. MacGregor: stories of teachers making a difference‎ caught me attention. Scattered throughout it are quotes from children. "A really great teacher is someone who...." (Unfortunately my local library does not have a copy.)

There are other books too (e.g. Apples and Chalkdust), but in all of them the stories are short. Not book or movie length, which is what I am looking for.

Reinventing ourselves as teachers: beyond nostalgia, By Claudia Mitchell, Sandra Weber seems a bit heavy (read scholarly), but quite intriguing. Ch. 5 is entitled "Reel to Real: Popular Culture and Teacher Identity"

In Box 5.4 The authors assert that "most popular teacher texts are 'romantic' ..."

1. Teacher heroes are usually outsiders who are teaching through circumstances rather than choice.
2. Teaching is natural, you do not need training if you've got 'the right stuff'.
3. Teacher heroes are rare and stand out in contrast to anti-hero teachers.
4. Teacher heroes liberate students by defying the official school rules and curriculum.
5. Real learning occurs outside of school.
6. Teachers become heroic through a turning point of sudden enlightenment, divine intervention or the 'a-ha' experience.
7. Teaching is a heroic and solitary act. Teachers do not work collectively for reform.
8. Teacher heroes are devoted to their students and are rewarded with their undying love and gratitude in a dramatic scene.
   

Reading the above reminded me of Whoopi Goldberg's 'Sister Act'. But I can't help thinking that some of those 8 points have elements of truth.

The Teacher as Performance Artist

I was talking to a parent today who is a professional actor. This was a very interesting conversation as I know nothing about the theater or the culture of the profession.

It is no surprise to educators that every lesson is part performance. I'm thinking aloud now as I extend this analogy as far as it will go.

Producer: The school district
Director: The principal
Script: The curriculum
Actors: The teachers
Patrons: The students
set design, costume, makeup, sound, lights, sets, props, stage manager, stage hands, publicity, fund-raising, backstage hands, ... etc: As available

What I learnt from my conversation today is that acting is not about the content, and therefore not specifically about the delivery. Acting is about what happens in the space between the actor and the audience. It is about the meeting of these two. The play is just the context for the meeting.

In the classroom-as-interactive-theater, the students are simultaneously audience and participants over an extended period of time. So acting is not just about what happens in the interstices, but more importantly about the relationships that develop within. The curriculum is just the context for the meeting.

Now I am going to argue that a work of art is not to be judged by how well it was delivered, or by how much the patrons were entertained, or how effusive the applause and reviews were. It is be judged by how it changed each (or any one) person's life.

Wouldn't it be nice if the success of each component part of an education could be evaluated based on how it changed a person?

But the teacher-as-actor has to work within the constraints. There are people paying good money for school students to have a set of skills at each milestone of the educational journey. And the people footing the bill want assurances that these targets are being met. This in itself is not unreasonable. At the theater, the audience wants to be entertained. So a production can get column-miles of critical acclaim, but be a flop at the box-office if enough people don't enjoy it. Turning that upside-down, the parent in me says "I am not sending you to school to have fun! I want to see some professional critic rave about your skills at the end of the season."

Producing this season's run of 3rd Grade is a thus obviously a delicate juggling act. A good script, great director and talented actors need to come together in a way that satisfies both the box-office and the critics, and leaves the lives of the patrons intangibly richer.

Delayed Gratification: Don’t Eat the Marshmallow!

Near our hotel in San Francisco, on our last vacation, was a Cold Stone Creamery.

Cold Stone has a certain mystique for my two boys - one I deliberately promote by going there for only a few times a year. They go to Baskin Robbins every week. So Cold Stone is reserved for when you want to plan a trip, anticipate it, salivate over it, spend 20 minutes walking up and down the counter putting together that perfect ice cream you been waiting for....

So we are walking down the street, and there beckons a Cold Stone franchise. Now my boys don't yet know about Ghiradelli's. So I make a deal with them - 'You can go to Cold Stone on your own money, or I will take you to Ghiradelli's and you can buy whatever you want.'

The older boy (9) takes the deal. The younger one (5) does not. The older one then tries very hard to explain to him the benefits of this deal.

That episode got me thinking enough, that later I actually jotted down notes about it.

The two things that caught my attention were

1. Is the promise about the future believable? Will dad actually buy me anything I want? (In fact I did break that promise. Ghiradelli had a $30 concoction that I said no to.)

2. Will the the ice cream at Ghiradelli's be better than the one at Cold Stone. (That did turn out to be true. But we had just finished a four hour bike ride on a sunny day, and we'd stood 15 minutes in line just to order.)


Given this little bit of history, you will now understand why I was suitably primed to read Jonah Lehrer's piece in the May 18th New Yorker - Don’t! The secret of self-control.

[btw, given my previous blog post about Science, this article is a really good example of how good science just seems to happen, but only to good scientists.]

The article is built around Walter Mischel's experiments at Stanford in the late 1960's.

A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.

It surprised me that 30% of the children were able to wait until the researcher got back - some waited 15 minutes. I expected the number to be much lower - if they were all 4 years old.

In 1981 Mischel got interested in what happened to those 653 children. (I don't yet know their ages, but Carolyn was 4 at the time). Before you read on, I urge you to take a moment to think whether their adult lives would be any different, and in what way. The answer is a real kicker.

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

Carolyn Weisz [now 44] is a textbook example of a high delayer. She attended Stanford as an undergraduate, and got her Ph.D. in social psychology at Princeton. She’s now an associate psychology professor at the University of Puget Sound. Craig [her brother, older by a year, who in fact took all the candy, and then broke into the desk to see if he could get even more] , meanwhile, moved to Los Angeles and has spent his career doing “all kinds of things” in the entertainment industry, mostly in production. He’s currently helping to write and produce a film. “Sure, I wish I had been a more patient person,” Craig says. “Looking back, there are definitely moments when it would have helped me make better career choices and stuff.”

Gosh!

Lehrer's article also includes mentions of how this line of research has continued since 1981, and is still on going. I don't completely agree with the way the research is proceeding (at least in the way Lehrer describes it) in terms of developing 'self-control' in school children. At least I'd like to see it go further than just developing strategies to block out all those appealing 'distractions' - those mordern day marshmallows.

But first some more quotes

Mischel :

Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.

Jonides, who is now brain scanning the original subjects:

This is how self-control “cashes out” in the real world: as an ability to direct the spotlight of attention so that our decisions aren’t determined by the wrong thoughts."

The article ends thus.

Mischel knows that it’s not enough just to teach kids mental tricks—the real challenge is turning those tricks into habits, and that requires years of diligent practice. “This is where your parents are important,” Mischel says. “Have they established rituals that force you to delay on a daily basis? Do they encourage you to wait? And do they make waiting worthwhile?” According to Mischel, even the most mundane routines of childhood—such as not snacking before dinner, or saving up your allowance, or holding out until Christmas morning—are really sly exercises in cognitive training: we’re teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires. But Mischel isn’t satisfied with such an informal approach. “We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner,” he says. “We should say, ‘You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how.’ ”

So here's my take, based in part on that earlier San Francisco experience.

Firstly, in Life, delayed gratification is not about getting two marshmallows instead of one. It is about making a choice now for a future you cannot adequately imagine. "Will my life after I go to college be 'better' than my life if I did not go to college?" "Will my life after I save for retirement be 'better' than my life if I did not save now?"

In large part our answers to these depend on how much we believe the people who assure as that these choices are worth it. (Like my 9 year-old assuring his 5 year-old brother that this is a good deal, while the 5 year-old is wondering if the Ghiradelli ice cream is really all the good.)

Secondly, in Life, delayed gratification is not about sitting there waiting for the second marshmallow. It is about putting in a certain amount of effort on the front-end in return for delayed, and presumably superior, gratification. It is not about "Do I turn off the TV now, do my homework, and then get to watch TV?" It is more about "Do I quickly finish my homework so I can watch TV? Or do I take more time and effort to do my homework well, and maybe I won't be able to watch any TV? And if I do take more time over my homework, will I really go to college?" (Dad said that if you wait, then he'd buy you anything you wanted at Ghiradelli's. Dad also said that if you worked hard in school, then you'd get to go to the college of your choice. But when the payday comes dad usually explains that what he really meant was.....)

Postscript: I was still mulling over the Lehrer article and this blog post, when, on Saturday after 3 hours in the hot sun at the playoffs for my son's Ultimate Frisbee season, I suggested we go get some ice cream. The nearest Baskin Robbins that I knew off was 30 minutes away. Just before we got onto the freeway, I saw a McDonalds. The older boy decided he would rather have a McFlurry now than wait until we got home. The younger one said he'd wait. When we got back to the familiarity of our neighborhood, I asked "What about Fred Meyer?" and to my surprise he chose that option. He spent $2 on 21 popsicles, took them home, sat in the sun with his brother and they worked their way through 3 different flavors before going off to play on the computer. I still have 15 popsicles in the freezer screaming at me "Take that, Delayed Gratification!"

What makes a good scientist?

1. Curiosity.
2. The ability to ask answerable questions.
3. The ability to answer the questions.

Curiosity.

All children are born with this. The challenge is to keep that alive as long as possible. And the only way to keep it alive is to allow children to keep doing science. Note: This is distinctly different from practising doing science, or learning to do science.

Ask Questions.

Asking the right questions, in terms of effort, is a tiny fraction of a scientist's life. But that creative ability it is what separates the top 10% from everyone else. (Good questions don't come without very deep knowledge)

Do Science.

Being able to pull off an investigation is what makes a scientist famous. This is what takes the majority of effort. This is the scientist as entrepreneur. I'd be surprised if even 10% of the above 10% have the skill and perseverance it takes to sell an idea, raise funding for it, acquire the resources (especially people), manage the execution with sufficient objectivity and scepticism, and then convince people of the results.

Aside: Maybe we should put more effort into matching up pairs or small groups of people so that we are not stuck with that 10% of 10% number.

Why is it that Intel, Microsoft and Google were all started by two friends?

Quick! Name me a pair of famous scientists.

Crick and Watson.

Another pair!

I'm stuck. Curies?

That's it, I am now completely stumped.

Health Reform?

From the SF Chronicle:

California's residents don't feel so good

"Medical care is the repair shop. It takes care of us once we get sick," said Dr. David Williams, staff director of the foundation's Commission to Build a Healthier America. "If we are really interested in improving health, we need to look at what are the forces that drive health, and education and income would be at the top of the list

The basic crux of the article seems to be that the college-educated have the best health.

I wonder which way the cause-and-effect is.....?

If just the act of going to college improves your health, then I think that subsidizing college would readily pay off in reduced life-time health expenditures. [See! This is why we need single-payer health care, because no current health insurer would find it profitable to subsidize any education at any level.]



The article was based on this report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Obama on teacher pay

I continue to mull over the reasons for teacher salaries being low...., and the whole economic model of school education.


This, from last Sunday's NY Times magazine
After the Great Recession
By DAVID LEONHARDT, Published: April 28, 2009


DL: Would you also encourage men to become more comfortable working in fields that they traditionally have not? I mean, nursing is a very well-paying field. There’s a shortage there.

The President

I mean, nursing, teaching are all areas where we need more men. I’ve always said if we can get more men in the classroom, particularly in inner cities where a lot of young people don’t have fathers, that could be of enormous benefit. Now, as you and I both know, in a lot of those fields they have been underpaid because they were predominantly women’s fields. And so part of what we have to do is to recognize that women are just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than men are today. As a consequence, eliminating the pay gap between men and women, and the pay gap between fields, becomes critically important. And we’ve already taken action,
for example, with the Lilly Ledbetter bill to try to move in that direction.

I think that if you start seeing nursing pay better and teaching pay better, and some of these other professions, you’re going to see more men in those fields, although there’s a little bit of a chicken and an egg — if you start getting more men in those fields, then the stereotypes about this being a woman’s field and all the gender stereotypes that arise out of thinking that somehow they’re not the primary breadwinner, those stereotypes start being whittled away.