In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state
Aug 242008
Aug 142008
According to the BBC today:
. . . students starting A-level courses in September will become the first to be eligible for the new A* grade when they are awarded to those attaining more than 90% in 2010.
The change followed criticism that the rise in the number of A grades at A-level meant universities could no longer spot the brightest students.
Last year, 25.3% of A-level entries in the UK were awarded an A grade, with 96.9% of entries graded from A to E (pass).
Anthony McClaran, chief executive of Ucas, the body which handles undergraduate applications to UK universities, said: “As with every year, some people will inevitably claim that A-levels are getting easier but we shouldn’t really take away from the hard work of those students who have done well in their results today.
“It is difficult to compare the A-levels of today with those of 40 years ago as the world is quite a different place.”
Sure is. It gets more and more like Lake Woebegon, where “all the children are above average.”
Aug 112008
The thing about Rakim
Aug 052008
What follows is old news in two ways – familiar gist, year-old link – but it’s what’s on my old mind.
Suppose we asked a group of Presidential candidates if they believed in the existence of atoms, and a third of them said “no”? That would be a truly appalling show of scientific illiteracy, would it not? And all the more shocking coming from those who aspire to run a technologically sophisticated nation.
Yet something like this happened a week ago during the Republican presidential debate. When the moderator asked nine candidates to raise their hands if they “didn’t believe in evolution,” three hands went into the air-those of Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo.
I don’t know whether to attribute the show of hands to the candidates’ ignorance of the mountain of evidence for evolution, or to a cynical desire to pander to a public that largely rejects evolution (more than half of Americans do). But I do know that it means that our country is in trouble. As science becomes more and more important in dealing with the world’s problems, Americans are falling farther and farther behind in scientific literacy. Among citizens of industrialized nations, Americans rank near the bottom in their understanding of math and science. Over half of all Americans don’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun once a year, and nearly half think that humans once lived, Flintstone-like, alongside dinosaurs.
Thus biologist Jerry Coyne at The Edge
While we’re having fun, let me add something I read lately, source now forgotten. To shore up the Flintstone thesis, which of course is contradicted by the fossil record, creationists now argue that God so really, really didn’t love the world that after the Flood had stifled the sinners, he proceeded to extirpate every last trace of them, right down to the atoms of which they were composed.
It’s not exactly fun, is it, when we recall just how many people voted for Huckabee? Is it really so melodramatic to claim that in the US, the values we inherit from the Enlightenment are threatened?
Couldn’t happen here? Well no, not in that form. But consider:
- decreasing enrolments in engineering, science and applied technologies
- no improvement in the standards of science journalism – and very few courses in it
- the option of avoiding science and mathematics earlier and earlier in the school curriculum
- education and humanities faculties riddled with the social-constructivist virus (‘science-just-another-story’)
- a strong and increasing tendency in both main political parties to a crude majoritarian approach to policy
- new generations convinced that in the broadest sense of the word, the only culture is ‘popular’ culture, in which, as Neil Postman said, thou shalt have no prerequisites.
I brood. And read Voltaire.
Jul 012008
Pupils are being rewarded for writing obscenities in their GCSE English examinations even when it has nothing to do with the question.
One pupil who wrote f*** was given marks for accurate spelling and conveying a meaning successfully.
His paper was marked by Peter Buckroyd, a chief examiner who has instructed fellow examiners to mark in the same way. He told trainee examiners recently to adhere strictly to the mark scheme, to the extent that pupils who wrote only expletives on their papers should be awarded points.
Hat tip to Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science.
Swift would have enjoyed Buckroyd.
Apr 252008
A while ago I wrote about the swelling tide of creative writing students in our universities. The gist of that piece was that the universities are peddling disillusionment. But if my experience of drama students is any guide, ravening hordes of creative writers may not after all threaten society, and some creative writing students might get some real satisfaction and benefit from their degree.
Australia has a few vocational courses in drama and a lot more which bill themselves as non-vocational. These offer drama as part of an arts or humanities degree. In the advance publicity, and at enrolment, students are sternly advised that the course is not designed to train for the profession, though it makes a good basis for future training. (Even about that there are grounds for scepticism.) Some students listen and nod and continue to believe that in a few short years they will grace the stage or screen or even (O comble de joie) get a gig in a comedy series. Most of these give up the idea after a year or so. A handful keep the faith, and some of them do get jobs – often, I note, those who drop out.
So what of the others, the other 98% who graduate with a degree in drama? Why did they enrol, and what do they get out of it? Many years ago now I conducted a survey of second year students and came up with a surprise result: self-development. But in survey work, every discovery is a new puzzle. What did “self-development” mean? Were we back to the seventies?
I began to understand some years later when teaching a graduate class in non-fiction writing and a course in speech. In both classes, but especially in speech, there was an extraordinary level of commitment and energy, far more than in the conventional subjects I had been teaching. Students obviously valued these courses highly, in spite of the fact, about which we were upfront, that none of them planned to become full-time orators or authors. They valued the skills they were acquiring for their usefulness in a range of future jobs, in editing their workplace’s house magazine, or making those ‘presentations’ which are now de rigeur in business. So far so bread-and-butter – that’s the basis on which they were offered. But the special energy they brought to the work suggested a deeper and more personal investment.
It took quite a while before I realised what was happening. In both courses, part of the requirement was to talk or write about their personal experiences. They were not invited to explore them in groups, an activity I regard as quasi-therapeutic hogwash, but to turn them into formal public communications in which something more than ‘sincerity’ was required. And they did, especially in speech, with seriousness and passion and humour and sometimes very movingly. What they said mattered to them, and to the listening group and after a while I realised why.
It mattered so much there and then because there had not been such a space in their education since middle school – the era of ‘What I did on my holidays’. Overwhelmingly, when their education had called for the personal it had been for their personal opinion about issues. What we had done in the speech and writing options was to give students a chance to consider their lives and to articulate the results. And that I now think is at least part of what the drama students meant by ‘self-development’.
We’re talking about the 90s here. Churches shrinking or shrunk, the therapy movement surviving only in pockets, a strong and increasing tendency to convert all education into a species of training for business: where was the space of the personal? In the last redoubt, the humanities faculty, and there only in a few places. I feel privileged to have taught those courses.
Sp perhaps that’s what happening in the creative writing courses: a space for disciplined subjectivity, a place to consider life as a moral journey. (It won’t be that of course where Theory informs the teaching.)
More to come on this topic, but the Essendon-Collingwood match is calling.