Lanny on Learning: January 2023

Let's begin with this mock quiz.

1. Complete the line:
You can lead a whore to culture _________________________.

2. What question was asked that provoked this line as response?

3. Who is the author of this line?

4. What other line was this a parody of?

My guess is that my cohort from high school (we graduated in 1972) could answer these questions in their sleep. But if you posed it to college kids today, most wouldn't have a clue. Let's assume that's true now, just for the sake of argument. Is that quite okay, because knowledge of the content in the mock quiz really should be generational? Or is it indicative of a larger problem, because every educated person should know the content in the mock quiz?

(Answers to the mock quiz: 1. ________ but you can't make her think. 2. Can you use the word horticulture in a sentence? 3. Dorothy Parker. 4. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.)

Over the years as I became familiar with the various issues in how people learn, I picked up this knowledge nugget. If an example is presented that people already know and understand, they begin on terra firma. From there they then can branch off to the more general issue, which people may be less comfortable with at first - take what you know and use it to learn what you don't know. In this case the issue is about literacy, particularly among students. Are we doing a good job of teaching literacy? The Magic 8 ball would say - very doubtful.

Actually, the example gets at something else that is related. What do we already know and do we we know enough to be literate, making good meaning of what we read when the piece is intended for a general audience? As an example, do we already know the answers to the mock quiz? From there one can generalize - what other things do we need to already know to be literate?

This question has captured the attention of many and been a matter of public debate and policy. During the Reagan Presidency, the issue was part and parcel of the culture wars, as they occurred then. In my own experience teaching undergraduates, particularly in intermediate microeconomics, but in other courses as well, I found many of the students lacking this way and I had no good methods for the students to overcome their deficiency, good in the sense both of effectiveness and that the students would willingly do the work. What is evident to me is that the students need to read a lot more than they were reading, and what they read must be interesting and challenging material. There is learning by doing. That much I believe. How to get the students to read a lot on their own is another matter. It's a challenge that remains unmet.

Over the years I've written about literacy and about learning to read. This post, Are We Ketman?, was written just before I retired. Much of it was fueled by Diane Ravitch's book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, which I was in the midst of reading at the time. There is also mention in my post about Cultural Literacy and E.D. Hirsch. I was somewhat sympathetic to him there. I've refined my thinking some since. It is definitely true that when I was a kid there was an ideal that was encouraged - to be a Renaissance man - know at least a little bit about everything. As an adult there are things I simply don't care about at all and am quite okay with my own ignorance. A couple of examples are pop music and interior decorating. Perhaps the first of these made it harder to relate to my undergraduate students when I was teaching (pre-Covid). I really don't know. I will briefly consider other ways to relate to students that to me matter more for the issue of cultivating their literacy.

There is also in the Hirsch conception that it all has to be prior knowledge. I think that is wrong. If one has a deficient background to consider an important subject of interest, then one needs to be able and willing to self-teach and acquire that background then and there. This means that sometimes when we read something, we must read other things as well to appreciate what is being said in the original piece. A graduate student learns this by seeing a literature review whenever they read a published paper. But surely the need exists well before the student pursues graduate education. And nowadays, with so much content readily available online, this is much easier to do. Back when I was a student, you needed to go to the library to track down the related readings.

The following paragraph from my post is worth reading, as the history on the literacy issue during the Reagan years is still very interesting to consider, in particular the importance of the document A Nation At Risk.

I found her history of the events immediately preceding and succeeding A Nation At Risk fascinating. I was an Assistant Professor at the time and pretty locked into my econ research, so this gave me a different perspective of what was happening in the Department of Education then. I should add that the ANAR document itself is well worth the read. It seems to hold equally well today as it did when it was written, though now the risks are even greater having gone through No Child Left Behind, and the emphasis on accountability that continues under President Obama.

So, I think it fair to say that the issue has been with us for some time. Indeed, the book Why Johnny Can't Read came out in 1955, the year I was born. Evidently there was some controversy about how to teach reading to first and second graders back then - either the Dick, Jane, and Spot way or the sounding out words phonetically way. I can't remember how my classmates and I did this back then. (I'm thinking it was some of both but I'm really not sure.) What I do remember is far more recent, this little snip from the movie Eddie which pokes fun at the entire endeavor.

Ivan Radovadovitch : [Ivan is doing a commercial] Ivan learn important English words like "renegotiate," "eliminate salary cap," and "union lockout."

[the respective words appear on screen]

Ivan Radovadovitch : That is why I am Hooked on Phonics.

[Ivan turns to the camera holds up a box saying "Hooked on Phonics" as the phone number appears on screen]

Now I'm quite unsure of how younger students are taught to read. I do recall that when I was a kid there was a related fear that watching TV would hamper literacy - Gilligan's Island might be cited as a pure time waster. Maybe it was. But I watched quite a bit of TV and yet was also able to read a lot on my own. The thing is, there was ample time for both. Nowadays kids tend to be over programmed. Reading time gets crowded out by other things.

Let me return to the literacy of college students. This post, The Purpose of General Education, argues that it should be one of the fundamental goals, though in that piece I referred to it as reading comprehension. We in Higher Ed don't seem to be doing a very good job of it, especially for those who enter college with mediocre to poor reading habits. Further, if my teaching during retirement is any indication, there was an inflection point in 2015 where things got worse than they were in 2012-2014. (In any one class that I taught, this could be explained by a cohort effect, but it persisted thereafter, which makes me suspect that the inflection point really did happen.) During my 2016 class, I expressed my frustration in this post, When Students Don't Get It. The post gives several different examples where non-learning is happening. The post might make it seem to be entirely the student's fault. But that is wrong.

The university has a responsibility here as well. Consider the following. Gen Ed classes are often taught as large lectures. Why is that? One reason, at least at Illinois, is the budgeting model. Revenues per student credit hour generated are much higher in the major classes than they are in Gen Ed classes. So departments that offer the Gen Ed classes have incentive to teach them in a less expensive way. Offering large lectures is one way to do this. (The introductory rhetoric classes and introductory foreign language classes are the exceptions. Class size there is modest. But the instructors are almost always graduate students.) Further, these courses tend to be textbook based, with few if any outside readings. Most of the instructors teaching these classes nowadays are not on the tenure track. The instruction tends to be teaching to the textbook. Students prepare for exams by memorizing the textbook and/or the lecture notes. None of this promotes growth in student literacy.

We seem not to talk about about the university's responsibility but instead will talk ad infinitum about student cheating in writing assignments by using AI. (Before AI, it was cheating by purchasing already written essays online or essays written to order.) Let us understand that students whose literacy skills are poor to mediocre will have incentive to cheat, simply to conceal their deficiency. Students are fearful of the judgment of others - peers as well as instructors - if that judgment concludes that the student is stupid. This is a form of fear of failure. Students must learn that they need to fail, again and again, until they do things well. The idea that they'll get everything right the first time out is a delusion. Big writing assignments, especially those that don't have a rough draft first, encourage this delusion.

Will the handful of students who are literate also resort to AI in writing assignments? Here, I think, a different issue comes to bear. Does the student perceive the assignment to be truly instructive or is it thought to be busy work? I wish this was the only concern such a student would have, but I want to report that in fall 2019 I had a student who was taking 24 credit hours of coursework (done by taking 8 3-credit courses). Such behavior, to the extent it exists suggests that getting through is the sole priority and enrichment to learning that might occur in any one course is not of importance. I fear that such a student would also use AI for the essay writing.

Let me quickly consider what might help on the student literacy front, by considering this post from my fall 2019 Economics of Organization class. As it may seem frivolous and is evidently not about economics, I need to give some explanation first. This is a class that frustrated me and I felt I had lost a great majority of the students. I did not require attendance. Eventually many students took the class as if it were taught online, even though I didn't teach it that way. (My face-to-face classes probably had more online stuff than most Econ classes back then.) To counter the evident lack of student engagement, near the end of the semester I began to give "Quizzes" which were jokes or riddles. Students were supposed to figure out the punchline. The thought was that if they found this entertaining, they might engage more on the economics as well. This post was not a quiz. Instead it presented a few different "curiosities" that might entertain the students.

Note that there is one comment from a student in the class, who is posting under an alias that I assigned. There was no course credit given for such comments. He liked the play on words and that he commented on it is a simple demonstration of intrinsic motivation, something we instructors should strive for more with students. Let me make a few other observations here. There was only one such comment. The analytics on the post now shows 19 hits, some of which surely are me, and the class had enrollment in the low to mid 30s. So many students never saw it and among those who did nobody else chose to comment. This experience is akin to what I've seen with my instructional videos on YouTube done under my ProfArvan ID. The comments are few and most express gratitude. The average viewing time, however, is typically around 30% of the video length. Intrinsically interesting content might be helpful for literacy, particularly of the wordplay variety, but it surely isn't the full solution, as many students will never access it.

I also want to note that I learned both the Palindrome and the Theorem in that post during 11th grade math. That math has wordplay shouldn't be surprising, yet nowadays we seem to consign literacy teaching in Gen Ed to English and Comparative Literature classes. Also, my Econ of Organizations class is intended for juniors and seniors. So I was exposed to this wordplay much earlier in my own learning trajectory than the student who made this comment. I'd like to expand on this further.

What I say here may be unfair to students who are the first in their families to attend college, because the opportunities for this may be less, but it is my view that (a) students should not be over programmed with out-of-school activities or with excessive homework, (b) it is the students themselves who need to pursue their own interests rather than to be directed by adults, and (c) students should find an "intellectual social life" as part of what they do in their free time. I wrote about this in a post called PLAs Please, one of my favorites among my blog posts. The following snippet shows the interplay of school and intellectual social life for me while in elementary school.

Reading was different. Pretty early on, perhaps fourth grade, we had SRA. This history by Don Parker is a fascinating read, if a little melodramatic. We also had individualized reading. (Those who preach a learner centric approach likely will be intrigued at how early this piece is and yet that its critique is not about “teacher centric” so much as it is about “grouping,” where all students read the same book.) And now I must confess that my memory fails, or that I’m not able in looking backward to attribute cause to school or elsewhere or in some combination.

Elsewhere in this case was the public library, but also books that were at home. I recall a series that I believe Random House produced. The books were numbered, each around 150 pages, dealing with a character or event in American History – Kit Carson, The Transcontinental Railroad, Fulton’s Folly, Appomattox, etc. I’d read at least one of these a week, sometimes one in an evening. And there were biographies by Clara Ingram Judson from the school Library. This was an enormous education. I soaked it in. Once the momentum started it self-sustained. I’m really not sure of the spark. What does it matter?

Now I'm wondering whether many of the non-reading activities we did in school or at home also contributed to our literacy. I don't know whether my kids ever learned Old McDonald Had a Farm (the one I remember for them is The Wheels on the Bus), but surely every one of my high school friends would recognize the source of EIEIO. And I'm sure we learned to sing Home on the Range as well, even though we were city kids. We also learned Three Blind Mice and Frère Jacques, which I think happened at school. My dad taught us London's Burning. We did some singing in the family. Is that usual now? And there were games that promoted literacy, notably Charades, but also Simon Says, which encouraged you to pay careful attention, and even jumping rope required spelling out words at the same time.

I don't know if anyone conceived of the play environment we had as kids as complementary to literacy education, but now it seems that way to me. I'm far less sure that kids nowadays have that same type of play environment. And I've yet to mention the parents reading to the kids at bedtime, which is crucial in my view. My dad did that for my brother and me (we shared a bedroom). The stories themselves were important. That my dad implicitly messaged us that reading them aloud was equally important, showed that parenting has to have with it an eye toward the kid's education. Dad, we got the message.

Lanny on Learning

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