The second in an unplanned series of posts about the pitfalls of an elite education: John Summers on teaching the banal and privileged at Harvard.
In the first meeting of my first seminar of my first year, Kushner's son Jared entered my classroom and promptly took the seat across from mine, sharing the room, so to speak. I was drawing an annual salary of $15,500 (£7,700) and borrowing the remainder for survival in Cambridge, in order that he might be given the best possible education. Jared later purchased The New York Observer for $10 million, part of which he made buying and selling real estate while also attending my seminar. As publisher, one of his first moves was to reduce pay for the Observer's stable of book reviewers. I had been writing reviews for the Observer in an effort to pay my debts.
From earlier in the week: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education. Also relevant here is the growing discussion of gigantic college endowments and how best to use them.
The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, nutshelled: you have no idea how most of the rest of the world works.
The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren't like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely-indeed increasingly-homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.
(via lone gunman)
For the first time since the 1998 creation of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, the top honors have gone to girls. One of the two projects to take the $100,000 prize was the creation of a molecule to help block drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria from reproducing. The other studied the bone growth in zebra fish.
Interesting tidbits: Three-quarters of the finalists have at least one parent who is a scientist. Girls outnumbered boys in the final round for the first time. Most of the finalists were from public schools. The most popular project was from three home-schooled girls who have conceived of a Burgercam, a system for monitoring the elimination of E. coli bacteria in burgers. (via nytimes)
Regarding the theory that kids are set up for disappointment and failure later in life when they value their innate gifts too highly over their ability to grow, this Scientific American article claims that the key to developing a child's potential is teaching the child that the greatest reward comes from effort, not intelligence or ability.
The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with little regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well. Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability, those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study less in the future, try never to take that subject again and consider cheating on future tests.
via Marginal Revolution
A primary school in the UK has moved from the bottom 25% of schools to near the top 5% using a curriculum based on Harry Potter.
During the most recent visit from Ofsted, the inspector witnessed a maths lesson where the children were motivated to learn about subtraction by pretending that it is a magic formula created by Harry Potter. Pupils were not allowed to answer questions without first saying a spell -- "numerus subtracticus", which they devised themselves.
(thx, david)
Summary of a talk by Malcolm Gladwell on precociousness. "What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement."
The Rotenberg Center is a school for special education students that is essentially a giant Skinner box. Students are hooked to electrical devices and shocked when they misbehave. At once fascinating and disturbing. (via mr)
Scott McCloud, who wrote Understanding Comics, is taking an unusual approach to the education of his two daughters. Over the next year, the family will be traveling the US doing talks and presentations, with the daughters taking an active role in speaking, doing research, and recording the talks in various formats. Here's their travel blog on LJ. (via snarkmarket)
Meg and I took a Thai cooking class today at Baipai Cooking School on the recommendation of my friend Darby (thx, Darb!). Since cooking is her thing, Meg's got the full write-up with photos. They pick you up at your hotel, you spend 4 hours cooking (part instruction, part hands-on) in a small outdoor kitchen (there were about 8-10 other people in the class) tasting as you go, you eat the meal you cook, and then they drop you back at your hotel. All for around US$35 per person. We made pad thai, tom kha gai (chicken & galangal in coconut milk soup), fish cakes, and tab tim grobb (water chestnut in coconut milk). Very fun and highly recommended.
A project to offer free textbooks (as opposed to the $120 ones you get at the college bookstore) is looking for some web design help. "In response to the textbook industry's constant drive to maximize profits instead of educational value, I have started this collection of the existing free textbooks and educational tools available online."
I am a Japanese School Teacher. Experiences teaching junior high school in Japan.
Choirboy. "As head boy at a legendary choir school, Lawrence Lessig was repeatedly molested by the charismatic choir director, part of a horrific pattern of child abuse there. Now, as one of America's most famous lawyers, he's put his own past on trial to make sure such a thing never happens again."
