academic steroids

so this past spring, there was a ton of hype on the news about the olympics ranging from the tibet controversy to pollution in china. but perhaps what got the most press (at least on the radio) was athletes taking steroids to boost their speeds.

now, any ordinary and moral person would look at that and say, "those terrible cheaters. how dare they defile the sacred trust of sportsmanship?" after all, these people are cheating to get ahead. they are not relying on their years and years of hard work and suffering. they're doing what they can to get a quick boost ahead of the rest.

and now, we draw attention to something else that has silently crept into our society for academics. SAT and ACT prep classes. it seemed like only a small minority enrolled in such courses when i was in high school. after all, at $1,000 for a handful of classes, it was only for the rich elite. now however, it's a bit of a different story. it seems that everywhere you turn, kids are cramming for these big tests and taking classes and trying to do what they can outside of school to prepare.

but wait, what is the ACT and SAT suppose to be testing anyway?

aptitude - n. - capability or ability either innate or acquired

but since it is a standardized test, students today are not competing against a certain score or percentage, they are competing with each other. this in turn quickly boils down to how many ACT/SAT prep courses you can take, which outlandishly guarantee lavishly high scores if you take their course. and thus, the whole point of it is missed altogether. you see, it is now no longer how able you are. it is a measure of wealth and how many prep courses you can afford. it is now not about how much knowledge and intelligence you have acquired over the years. it is about how many tricks you can do on the test to help you guess the right answer.

kaplan is a steroid for academics.

cookies and the world we want

it's christmas time and that means one thing: seminar christmas parties at school. i like to joke with my kids and tell them that i am against fun and against breaks, but not a single seminar is christmas-party-less during the last week of school before we all run home to be rid of this thing called school for two whole weeks.

all of us have seen this situation. you have only 15 cookies, but there are twenty four kids in your class. you are now faced with two options that both follow a single underlying principle.
a. you can break the cookies in half so that everyone gets half a cookie and you have some leftovers
b. you can not give out any cookies at all

as i was contemplating this issue, a humorously evil thought crossed my mind. "what if i passed out the cookies in order starting from my favorite student all the way down to the kid that gives me white hair?" or maybe "i could start with the kid with the highest gpa and work down to the kids with the lowest." either way, i would obviously run out before the end.

any teachers reading this (or any decent human beings with an ounce of fairness) would be appauled if this actually happened in a classroom. shame on me for thinking such terrible thoughts! you see, that "single underlying principle" that i had been talking about earlier pertained to this universal and highly regarded idea of fairness. we place such a high premium on this fairness.

wait a second...

everyone gets the same share regardless of how hard they work? communism? the question then is this: when in the rest of their lives will they ever have another situation where they will be treated with such fairness?

do educators serve their students better when they prepare them for what they will encounter in the future? if this was the case, i think everything would be merit based. the smartest kids would get the best party foods, they would get the most attention and all the best stuff. but this is a sobering thought to even the most cynical of teachers. why? are we not preparing our kids for the world that is?

perhaps this is no great epiphany for most people in my profession, but this was a bit of a realization for me. someone once mentioned to me that one major role of teachers is to stand as a safeguard against the elements of change and ignorance. essentially, we preserve a society. although i agree with the latter, i think a very critical aspect of teaching is to challenge the status quo. another way of looking at it, we aren't administering merit-based snacks or merit-based supplies. we still adhere to this moral idea of fairness and goodness. there is some mystical moral element to our work that we seldom think about because of all the pressures to meet curricular and content expectations. we are teaching them how to live.

we are not simply here to prepare kids for the world that is. we are training them to become the citizens of the world we want and hope for.

the age of happiness

so we're going to take a quick break from the techno-stuff that has dominated the blog for quite some time now and focus on something a little less tangible. earlier tonight on a drive to ann arbor, i began to think about how today's class went. specifically, i thought about my exploring psychology class. they are a special bunch of kids who love to complain. probably the biggest complaint is, "mr. liu, are we done yet?" i often just point at the clock and say, "is school over yet?" these rather often exchanges show me something has happened since i was in school (or maybe i was too much of a nerd while i was in high school to have noticed). school is no longer a place to learn. it's all about the FUN!!! wooohooo!!

this idea lead me further to consider a few interviews i heard on the radio about parents trying to make it through this hard economic time. the prevailing message that they were conveying was, "well, times might be tough, but we will still do most of our christmas shopping because we want our kids to be happy."

and that's just it.

HAPPINESS

it seems that such a construct has immerged from being a luxery to being a commodity to being a norm to being a right. some of my students are genuinely offended when i tell them that we're going to have a test. "a TEST? come on mr. liu... that's no fun..."

i think we as teachers have largely bought into this as well. we think long and hard about how to make our lessons and our classrooms more "fun" and over time, "fun" and "effective" become synonyms. somewhere along the way, the premium on happiness has become the most valuable factor in raising a child.

so what's the solution?

there certainly isn't a quick fix, but i'm not sure if there really even is a fix at all. this generation has lived its life in prosperity. we have not known struggle or hardship of any kind. why should we not be self-centered? maybe the silver-lining of this recession will be that we lose our offspring-centered perception of the planets, and return to a solar-centered one.