Getting Started

When I was a kid, before I took piano lessons, which I started when I was 8, I learned two songs. One was Chopsticks, which was a very easy piece. You can see why it became an introduction to playing the piano. The other was Heart and Soul. That was played as a duet. One person, sitting on the right side of the piano bench, played the melody. The other person, sitting on the left side, played the accompaniment. Now I'm wondering how Heart and Soul found its place to be in this role and did the composer, Hoagy Carmichael, have any idea when he was writing this tune that it would eventually come to play this role.

Maybe those of us who care about teaching and learning should spend more time considering gateway activities, do-able and compelling at the same time. Identifying those poses a challenge, certainly. But the payoff from having found one seems quite large indeed.

I Am Not A Psychiatrist, But Really...

 ... how can the ADHD research be so inane?

I am reacting to this piece from the NY Times Sunday Magazine.   At first, I thought it an interesting read but as I got further into it I became increasingly frustrated with the maintained assumptions.  Let me explain my concerns.

Here is the setup in many of the experiments described in the essay.  Students known to have ADHD are divided into two groups.  Both are tasked with doing something cognitively challenging.  The first group gets some treatment (Ritalin, Adderall, or something else in that family of drugs) while the second group gets the placebo.  Then they are scored on engagement in the doing the task and in the success on working out the problem.  On the engagement front, the first group well outperforms the second.  In identifying a solution, however, both groups are equally bad.  Though engaged, the first group doesn't come up with a good strategy for addressing the problem posed. 

Now, let's take a step back from ADHD and instead focus on learning.  Then we'll return to ADHD and its consequences for non-learning.  It seems appropriate to posit that learning is cumulative.  That goes for reasoning skills, background knowledge needed to make sense of the current situation, and a sense of confidence that when working a problem one can get to a reasonable solution.  For those students who don't have learning disabilities, whether ADHD or something else, we'd fully expect the junior high school student to be more proficient than the first grader in these dimensions and we'd expect the high school student to be even further along.  But for a student with ADHD or some other learning disorder, is that true?  If the lack of prior growth inhibits the learner at a later stage, why should we think that engagement will address the issue, unless engagement goes back to square one and allows the growth to occur so as to catch up, albeit at a later time in life than is usual?  But that's not what the experiments reported about in the essay did.  Apparently they assumed the students had age-appropriate reasoning skills, only to find that their experiments revealed otherwise.

Now I'm aware that students are scored on their reading by grade level.  I wish students were likewise-wise scored on their reasoning by grade level, but to my knowledge they are not.  What, however, would happen if reading grade level were taken as a proxy for reasoning grade level?  Could the experimenters have obtained the students' reading grade level before administering their treatment?  If they had done that, would the experimental results have been so surprising?

Later in the piece there is a discussion about stimulants and their impact on engagement of the people who are taking the stimulants.  After reading a bit in this part, I did a Google search to ask, is coffee a stimulant?  Indeed it is.  If the author of the piece acknowledged that up front, and also acknowledged that most readers of the piece were doing so while drinking coffee, then the idea of stimulant or not seems unrealistic.  The vast majority of us are on stimulants.  Comparing Adderall to coffee might then be useful to establish level of intensity as an important matter.  But stimulants or not as an issue should never have been brought to our attention.  

Finally, I believe that engagement itself is not a sufficient test, though it is evidently necessary.  The issue is engagement in something that promotes personal growth versus engagement that is mainly dissipative.   And on this matter, one needs to ask whether others can task the student and merely by doing so assert that is important.  Were the student to task himself or herself and do so in a responsible way, would he or she concur or do otherwise?  We can only speculate about our historical giants.  Were Einstein and Freud, for example, hampered by learning disabilities, ADHD or otherwise?  We can all agree that Vincent van Gogh was so hampered.  But he clearly was engaged.  Is that the answer then?

Charity, Government, or Joint Provision of Social Services: When Is One Better than Either of the Other Two?

For the past few years I have been making a monthly contribution to the local food bank, part of my usual charitable giving.  A couple of weeks ago I learned that USDA had been giving grants to food banks around the country, but those were cut by DOGE recently.  I wondered how I should respond to this news.  Should I increase the amount of my monthly contribution?  As one person operating in isolation, that would just be a drop in the bucket.  Would it be possible for enough like-minded people to contribute more so as to enable the food banks to continue their operation, even if it weren't a perfect match for the DOGE cuts?  And how would the needed coordination come about to make this outcome possible?  It is these questions which provide the fuel for this post.

The post is also fueled by the little bit of news and opinion pieces I have been reading as of late, which have the Democrats searching for a coherent direction in which to respond to the Trump offensive.  I will offer an idealistic pie-in-the-sky approach that might at least be considered some before dismissing it as too impractical.  Let me begin.

The good about charity is that it addresses a felt need and that those who make donations to the charitable organization do so voluntarily.  Under these circumstances, the need always seems to exceed what the charitable organization can deliver.  In other words, the donations and the need don't line up perfectly and the charitable organization is constrained to limit its services within what's made available via donations.  Government provision of service, in contrast, can scale up well beyond that, but then services are funded by taxes (or deficit spending) and taxes are often cast as coercive rather than as social obligation needed to maintain the public weal.  With this simple (and perhaps simplistic) casting of the circumstances, the scale of the need then determines the better way of doing things.  At low scale, charity is better.  At very high scale, government provision is better, so food stamps rather than food banks.  Joint provision makes the most sense when the scale is somewhere in the middle.   This story could be readily complicated to make it more realistic.  I will refrain from doing so here, because I want to move onto other matters.

I receive lots of solicitations from non-profit organizations, some of which are charities, but some of which are not, such as for a Democratic Party organization or a Democratic candidate. I find there is a very large number of such solicitations.  And I also get commercial solicitations, a remarkable number for life insurance that I don't need, and others for a new credit card or a new bank account.  In total I find the solicitations overwhelming and for the most part I entirely ignore them, which renders them ineffective.  I wonder how many others are in the same boat as me on this score. Would it be possible to reduce the volume of the solicitations, perhaps by consolidating many of them, and thereby get the few that do still come through to capture my attention in a way where I might respond positively to one of them?

On a different point, one needs to concede that the Republicans are far better at propaganda than the Democrats.  In large part, this is because negative messaging is usually more effective.  In the past, some of that negative messaging has gone into demonizing the people who receive government assistance, casting them as immoral cheaters.  For example, back in the 1970s  in response to AFDC, we heard about Welfare Queens who were ripping off the taxpayer.  While personally I find such messaging offensive, there is no doubt that it was effective with many other voters, by appealing to their prior prejudices. The Democrats have a harder job here, in trying to deliver an uplifting message about government being helpful to its citizens, one that voters take sincerely rather than regard with deep cynicism.  How might such a message get through?

And still a different thought, which I think should be given some consideration.  In a well functioning society every citizen plays a role.  But in the rhetoric of politics, there is a tendency to focus on some sub-population only and ignore the rest of the voters.  It is necessary to have inclusivity across economic classes in the political rhetoric, if at all possible.  The Democrats now want to embrace economic populism, which to me is quite okay, but then it seems that voters like me are largely ignored, a mistake in my view.  We have an important role to play, though mainly out of social obligation rather than as recipients of government largesse.  Widespread need and social obligation are two sides of the same coin.  The political rhetoric should reflect that.

Having set the table, I'm ready to deliver my proposal to address these issues.  The Democrats should form a charitable foundation, for now call it the Democratic Party Foundation (DPF).  (I tried to come up with an alternative foundation name that was a riff on The Invisible Hand, but everything I attempted was already taken.  Somebody more adept at marketing can come up with a better name.)  The purpose of the DPF is first to make grants to charitable organizations, such as the food bank.  Second, when there is evident need but there is no charitable organization operating to address the need, the DPF will be empowered to create such a charitable organization to fill the gap. Third, as long as the Democrats maintain minority status in Congress all Democratic organizations, such as the DCCC, will suspend their own fundraising activity and instead redirect potential contributors to the DPF.  Likewise, Democratic candidates for office will redirect their campaign contributions to the DPF.  The hope is that this will refocus attention on the need the DPF attempts to address and away from current political issues, which are quite nasty.  Fourth, partly just to educate Americans about their fellow citizens and partly to encourage additional donations, the DPF will shine a light on people in need, under various circumstances.  And last, up front the DPF will announce that if and when the Democrats become the majority party in Congress, and take over the White House as well, some of what the DPF supports might very well move to government provided programs instead, because the need is much greater than the contributions the DPF can bring in to address the need.  

Some evident challenges that the DPF will face are about how to maintain fairness in selecting those charities the DPF does support and what level of support the DPF does provide, how not to become overly bureaucratic so that the bulk of the donations to the DPF end up as grants to other charities, and how to avoid even an appearance of impropriety.  I don't have solutions for these challenges that I can present here, but it is evident that such solutions need to be contemplated in advance of the formation of the DPF.  Further, as one can anticipate that many of those in need won't receive any help from the DPF, one wonders whether they will remain bitter about the Democrats or if they might as least come to agree that the DPF is doing as best as it can to address the issues.  What would it take to make the latter more likely?

In case it is not evident yet, going all in with the DPF is meant to be an extraordinarily drastic solution, which one might hope should become evident soon after the DPF begins to operate.  For the sake of argument, let's say the DPF has some early success, the consequence being that the narrative in the media becomes more about the overwhelming need many citizens are feeling and much less about what Trump and Musk are doing to upset the apple cart.  Further, suppose this new narrative begins to have appeal to some very wealthy Americans, both Democrat and Republican.  Might they then make significant donations to the DPF?   And might they also speak out about the absurdity of tax cuts on their own behalf?  Were that to happen, we'd almost be home.

When I was a child my dad would read to me and my siblings at night before we went to bed.  Sometimes it would be Aesop Fables.  My little sketch of a solution to our current dilemma is very much in the spirit of The North Wind and the Sun.  In the story, the Sun wins out.  Wouldn't it be delightful if that were to happen here, pipe dream though it may be.