GELFAND’S WORLD-The political activists are wrong in asserting all their negative views about American education. This thought comes to mind after being a volunteer judge at the International Science and Engineering Fair, also known as the ISEF, that came to Los Angeles this week.
I'll lay my cards on the table right here and argue that teachers should not be judged on unattainable educational outcomes. Instead, they should be judged on whether or not they provide students the right opportunities.
If the students fail to take advantage of the opportunities they are given, that becomes a problem in sociology, not pedagogy.
From what I saw at the ISEF this week, it's obvious that a lot of students in a lot of different places have seized on their opportunities and have excelled. Their teachers obviously have been doing a superlative job.
These thoughts come after chatting over a cold beer (after a long day of work) with some of my fellow science fair judges, including a high school teacher from Arlington Heights, Illinois, a geneticist who is beginning work on analyzing the DNA of Neanderthals (no kidding) , and a plant biologist from Purdue University who runs summer science programs. They were all focused on supporting the students who want to do the work and think the deep thoughts. This is not to understate the case that the American educational system needs work, but that when done right, it holds its own.
We had all come together to evaluate and then honor the work of young scientists that I tend to think of as kids, but are generally functioning at an intellectual level that would put the average politico to shame.
The context: The fair attracts high school students from all over the world. They have to have qualified by winning at a lower level, such as a state science fair or a county fair. In some cases, they are the equivalent of national champions. I interviewed students from 4 different continents. In a couple of cases, the spoken part of the interview was held through an interpreter, but this is not as limiting as it sounds. It was the data and scientific evidence on the board in front of me that told the story.
Here is my overall impression. High school students of today have access to knowledge that could only be dreamed about in my day, particularly with regard to the life sciences. They also are learning the tools -- math mainly -- at a much younger age than in my day. It's not uncommon for students to have progressed through advanced algebra and calculus at a fairly young age. In some ways this is a good thing, because they get through it and move on. It's a huge advantage to those who are capable of doing the work.
More and more, we are seeing student projects which involve sophisticated computer evaluations of complicated data sets, using mathematical tools that my generation of students would never have heard about. We are seeing contributions to the science of protein structure (important in all manner of sciences including cancer research), genetics, ecology, and materials science.
It's the flip side of the hacking culture. Instead of trying to bust into the Pentagon's computers, these students are figuring out how to solve previously intractable problems such as how to treat acute influenza.
Of course not everyone can be a budding genius, and some projects we saw were merely excellent, as opposed to mind boggling. That's also OK. The merely excellent students will go on to become the leaders of tomorrow -- its doctors and engineers and equally important, the people who will raise another generation of creative students.
When you are chatting with people at the post event cocktail party, and your fellow imbibers include one of the world's preeminent mathematicians, scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the above mentioned biologists, you begin to lose track of the outside world because you are immersed in what I think of as the scientific culture. What this means, in brief, is that the ordinary subterfuges and lies that we have become used to hearing in the political realm are absent. There is a kind of bluntness, but it's an honest bluntness. You have the strictures inherent in being truthful not only to other people, but to yourself.
It's a luxury, because you get to try out ideas on other bright people, and they will tell you quickly when you are wrong. If you can get past your own sensitivity, it's a real time saver (and an attitude that we could use a little more of in our local politics and neighborhood council structures).
You can also, once in a while, get support for a position that is not generally popular. In my conversation with the high school science teacher, there was a consensus that bright students, given a good learning environment and supportive parents, could learn at a high level and even do original scientific work. We tended to agree that blaming teachers for what happens (and doesn't happen) at home is a self-defeating concept.
We agreed on this idea: Don't blame the teacher when the parents are at fault.
I added one thought, perhaps a bit harsh, that goes like this: You also have to blame the students if they don't try or don't show up. I suggested that we have an obligation to tell children this truth, that their actions will have consequences throughout their lives, and that means that if they goof off in school, they are never going to catch up. Perhaps it's the "tiger mother" concept resculpted into a more general form, but I think it's important. And I haven't found anybody who is willing to disagree with the idea to my face.
Many of our students are trying hard and their academic success makes it obvious. Perhaps society as a whole should be less accepting of student inattentiveness, less down on the teaching profession, and generally a little more objective about student performance. Maybe the idea is as old as the line, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." You can offer children a chance to learn to read, to do arithmetic, and even to study higher math, but if they ditch school or don't do their homework, they are going to fall behind and never catch up.
In other words, when you look at the group of high achieving students, you should be allowed to use this observation to point out the contrast to low achieving students.
By the way, I'm not trying to generalize this notion to students who come into our educational system in the middle grades having never learned English. I'm also not talking about kids who live in fear over the simple act of walking to school. Those are not fair comparisons, and are not intended to be part of this discussion. But your average kid growing up in Lakewood or Santa Barbara is given plenty of educational opportunities, and can run with them or not as he sees fit. We interviewed plenty who obviously took advantage of what they were provided and then wrenched open other doors to learning as they went along.
We also agreed that there is no need to push every student into college-prep, that some students ought to be offered a more trade oriented education, and that the American system is woefully lacking in this. The Europeans do this part of public education much better, and we ought to look carefully at what they have been doing.
But in developing scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, we seem to be doing pretty well. The students we see at the high school science fairs are good evidence of that assertion. Without going into the details, I think it's sufficient to quote one of my fellow judges, who was talking about a particular student's work. He said that it would be equivalent to the majority of a PhD research project, and should be published in the peer reviewed literature. We heard that same remark, or a close equivalent, about other students over the course of the day.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture an politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 40
Pub: May 16, 2014