Skip to content


Technological micro-generations

Brad Stone writes in the New York Times that technology is narrowing generation gaps.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

I’m more or less on the same page as my students, technologically speaking, and I wonder how long it’s going to last. Will I hit the point where I don’t want to keep up because I’ll have isolated my peer group? Is being in the same micro-generation as my students an asset (don’t give me your thin email excuses about “my printer got a virus”) or a liability (if I text and tweet obsessively, am up on the net memes, and sometimes eschew capitalization in emails, I don’t qualify for full “adult” respect from kids)?

The idea of collapsing “generations” is interesting stuff, but, guys, please don’t name these micro-generations, or next thing you know Katie Couric will present an earnest segment about Kindlegartners (yeesh, sorry) and then we’ll have to stop talking about it for dignity’s sake.

[Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/weekinreview/10stone.html]

Posted in Tech.


US history students discuss firehoses

My US history students are just starting to discover how much information is out there on their research paper topics. When I tell them “it’s like drinking from a firehose,” I get a wide variety of reactions:

“You mean because firehoses are hard to find?” (girl)
“That’s hilarious! Did you make that up? You’re funny.” (guy) “No.” (me) “Oh.” (him)
“That would be sick. The back of my head would get blown right off, and there would be brains all over the place.” (guy)
“Frankly, I’m not THAT thirsty.” (girl)

Posted in Teaching, Tomfoolery.


Beatles song titles, as rewritten by high school teachers

  • Doing It In The Road Is A Violation Of Our Guiding Principles
  • All You Need Is Love And Thoughtful Decision-Making
  • Happiness Is A Warm Feeling Of Mutual Respect
  • With A Little Help From My Friends, Who Help Me Make Good Choices
  • I Want To Hold Your Hand And That Is All
  • Doctor Robert Burns
  • Hey Jude The Obscure
  • Maxwell’s #2 Pencil
  • She’s Leaving Home, But She Has To Be Back By 10:30 Or Else
  • She Came In Through The Front Door And Introduced Herself To My Parents
  • Your Mother Should Know

Posted in Tomfoolery.


Why doesn’t curiosity kill the cat?

Britain’s Royal Society, celebrating its 350th anniversary, has released 60 historic scientific papers to the public. I found this oddity from 1666: Trials Proposed to be Made for the Improvement of the Experiment of Transfusing Blood out of One Live Animal Into Another (.pdf file). An inquiring “Mr Boyle” seems to have gotten up in front of the Royal Society and started musing about bleeding dogs, upon which occasion his colleagues encouraged him to publish, not his findings, but his questions. Yes, the entire paper consists of a list of sixteen questions Mr Boyle has about dogs and blood. “[These questions] may excite and assist others in a matter, which, to be well prosecuted, will require many hands,” writes Boyle. He can’t try them all, but he wants others to experiment and then check back in with him. Here are Boyle’s sixteen questions, paraphrased and simplified.

dog blood1. Does putting blood from a tame dog in a wild dog make it tame?
2. If you put another dog’s blood in your dog, will it still know and love you?
3. Can you transfer unusual characteristics across breeds by transfusing blood?
4. If you teach one dog to dive after ducks and give its blood to another dog, will the second dog know how to dive after ducks?
5. Will a dog’s pulse, urine, feces, or sweat be different after a blood transfusion?
6. If you feed a dog and transfuse its blood to a hungry dog, will the second dog feel full?
7. What if you don’t feed that second dog anything and just keep transfusing blood? Will it live?
8. If you give the blood of a sick dog to a healthy dog, will it become sick?
9. If you give the blood of a young dog to an old dog, will it become more energetic and youthful?
10. If you give the blood of a large dog to a small dog, will it grow bigger than normal?
11. What effect does putting medicine in with a blood transfusion have on the medicine’s action?
12. If you give a dog purging medicine and then give its blood to another dog, will the second dog throw up?
13. Do we have to stick with dogs? Do we even have to stick with warm-blooded animals?
14. Will blood transfusions change the color of an animal? [At this point, Boyle has moved away from dogs.]
15. Can you change a dog into another species with frequent blood transfusions? [Boyle thinks it might be more likely if that other animal at least looks sort of like a dog.]
16. Can you give blood transfusions to pregnant dogs, and what does it do to the pups?
[Boyle adds that he had many more ideas, but the rest of them were only fit to be performed by physicians. You know, because normal folks do blood transfusions on their dogs all the time.]

Yes, he is exhorting people to mess around rather cruelly with dogs. The dog lover in me doesn’t like this side of Mr Boyle, and I don’t think the fuzzy black spaniel-thing nuzzled in the crook of my elbow as I type thinks much of him either. That said, my impulse is to toast Mr Boyle’s curiosity and bravery. Yes, Boyle is far more courageous than I am: by writing nothing but questions, he’s laying his knowledge bare. He tells us exactly what he does not know. I don’t see a trace of ego in the man. He doesn’t preface the questions with a summary of his research or a list of his accomplishments. He doesn’t strut his conjectures. As a result, unlike most wrong guys with lab benches (as a history of science major, I’ve read a lot of ‘em), he doesn’t look silly in retrospect. He’s simply curious, though curiosity, in his case, may have killed the dog as well as the cat. What’s more, his questions reveal his intelligence. He’s really curious about two concepts: the nature of traits, innate or otherwise, and the place in the animal body where each trait resides. He proposes looking at them experimentally almost two hundred years before Darwin and Mendel’s time. His questions show observation, experience, and credibility. He’s cannily used his inquisitiveness to showcase his knowledge.

I’m going to use this. I’m going to exploit and evaluate my students’ knowledge via curiosity. It’s scary, because I’m quite sure I’m not going to be able to answer many of their questions, but I think I may be able to tell more about them by the questions they ask than by the answers they give.

(Full disclosure: I didn’t find this because I frequently check up on the Royal Society, but rather via Wired. See: Ground-Breaking Science: Very Old Papers are Both Awesome and Hilarious.)

Posted in Teaching.


Am I a lousy linguistic role model?

Every time I grade papers, I wallop kids for using slang in their writing. No, you may not say Buddha was “kind of a big deal.”* Yes, he was quick with a pistol, but you can’t call Andrew Jackson “hardcore” in your DBQ. The problem is that I use this sort of language in class all the time. I can’t help myself. I have a serious penchant for slinging the ’90s slang I missed out on in high school and dropping an Internet meme or two into my lectures. I know I’m not actually funny, but at least my dorky hijinks keep folks awake.

If I read that “Louis XIV always kept half an eye on his posse,” I correct it to “Louis XIV always harbored a degree of mistrust towards his court,” even when I know I referred to Louis’ court as his “posse” at least once during class. Probably twice. I might have even written it on the board, in a moment of synonym-hunting fatigue. I seem to be sending a very mixed message to my students: I’m allowed to be funny, but you’re not. I suppose they need to learn to modulate their language according to the context – a skill they’ve been working on the first time somebody told them not to say “yo” to Grandpa. Still, it sucks that yours truly has to be the one forcing them to abandon the rich, goofy slang lexicon. I’d like to let them explore words more freely.

I might actually get that opportunity as soon as this week. My U.S. History kids are currently working on a project wherein they’re creating websites for the political parties of the 1840s and 1850s. I’m really curious to see how writing history for the web will affect their styles. Will they cling to the stilted, comma-speckled sentences that populate their essays – this is, after all, what they think I want – or will they chill out and adopt a bit more fluidity?

* These excerpts aren’t verbatim. I don’t use kids’ work online without asking them.

Posted in Teaching.


Is the “digital native” a myth?

We’re doing a research project on political parties of the 1840s and 1850s, and we’re in the library – this means I get to interact more casually with the kids, and it means the Kick-ass Librarian and I get to bounce off each other as we observe how the students research. The K.L., however, missed the following interaction between me and one of the juniors, and I would have liked a witness.

“Can we use Wikipedia?”

“Sure, as a starting point – but you can’t cite it, and you need to fix any errors you find.”

“Fix… errors?” He turned away from the screen (no small feat there) and looked at me.

“You know, no-good vandals trashing the page, misspellings, factual mistakes, obvious bias. Lots of stuff.”

“But… fix?”

Then it dawned on me. This young man did not know he, personally, could edit Wikipedia. He’s 17, well-educated from an early age, a pretty good reader, and he seemed very comfortable mousing around Word and a browser. He knew Wikipedia is somehow suspect – hence his asking me if he could use it – but I think the extent of his knowledge was that teachers seem not to like Wikipedia because teachers want to make his life hard and Wikipedia wants to make his life easy. In other words, Wikipedia is sketchy for the same reason Cliffs Notes are sketchy.

I wish I could wrap this complicated problem up in shiny rhetorical paper and curl the ribbons with a pithy phrase describing how to rethink information literacy. Nope, tonight I’m all problem, no solution; maybe I’m just feeling demoralized by the fact that, when I then showed my student how to edit Wikipedia, his voice said “that’s cool,” but his expression clearly said, “now why would I want to do that?”

Posted in Teaching, Tech.


Isn’t “green grading” fantastic?

Since I started my paperless “green grading” system, using track changes in Word to grade papers, my students have – unprompted – told me over and over how much they like it. (This must really be good, as grading is a rather thankless job that, understandably, doesn’t usually lead to compliments from students.) What they don’t know is that this system is also far, far better for me for many reasons, most of them rather selfish and not at all environmental:

  • The feedback I give is just plain better. I can type complete thoughts (when I’m handwriting, I resort to abbreviations and symbols which I then have to explain). I can type full sentences (when I’m handwriting, I write words or phrases). Better feedback leads to better grades on the next papers, and we all know teachers are far, far happier when they get to give legitimate good grades. (Why is it that students think we’re all sadists?)
  • Students can read my comments easily. My handwriting isn’t that bad, but typing is easier to read than even the neatest handwriting.
  • I can’t lose papers. Once last year, I lost a student paper and I felt absolutely terrible. I tore my apartment apart looking for that thing, and when I didn’t find it, I had to bare my disorganization to a whole lot of people.
  • I can’t spill on papers. I also did that last year, and the kid definitely let out a little “hmmph” when I handed him back a paper with a big ol’ coffee ring on it.
  • Papers are objectively timestamped. None of this “but Miss Wilson, I left it on your desk at 2:59! This one guy saw me do it!” business. I hate arguments like that, which always devolve into some awful form of “Miss Wilson, don’t you trust me?”
  • If a student ignores the paper specs and uses a wack font or huge margins, I can recast the document in a more normal fashion. I can’t really mark off an otherwise solid paper that happens to be in 16-point Helvetica, but I’m so typographically grumpy by the time I’m done with it that I’m really tempted to knock a third of a grade off that puppy. Now I can soothe my inner font snob by putting everything in Georgia.
  • If a student later asks me to write a recommendation, I have copies of all substantive work and can give reasonably precise accolades.

The only downside comes about when students come in to meet with me and discuss doing an essay rewrite. I want students to write their own comments in the margins, and that’s just not quite the same when they’re fumbling around with my keyboard and my track change system. I always print a copy of the essay when I know a student’s coming by.

Posted in Teaching, Tech.


Are you proofreading? Yes, you.

At the Coffee Tree in Squirrel Hill last night, I spotted an herbal supplement I could add to my smoothie called – wait for it – “Fat Stripper Blend.”

I stared at the sign for about ten seconds. “Do you get a lot of fat strippers in here?” I asked the barista. “It’s a weight loss supplement,” was her non-answer, until she realized what I was getting at. “Oh my god, you’re right,” she said, “we should probably call it ‘Fat Reducer’ or something.”

Posted in Tomfoolery.


In defense of silly videos

Rock the ziggurat, y'all.

Rock the ziggurat, y'all.

Nothing I did last year – not the careful comments on papers, not the resources sifted from archives – seems to have had as enduring an impact as a music video of They Might Be Giants’ version of “Istanbul, Not Constantinople.” (That’s not the version I like, but I can only find the Tiny Toons one at the moment.) Kids come up to me in the hall singing snippets of it, and this year’s crop of 9th graders has made a joke out of asking about it daily, even though we’re still a good 3 months away from Byzantium. So this year I showed TMBG’s “We’re The Mesopotamians” after we finished with, well, Gilgamesh and pals. Lo and behold, kids are buying the song for their iPods, and reading ahead to figure out who Ashurbanipal was (he got a mention in the song, but we haven’t hit the Assyrians yet). I thought I was just being dumb and blowing off steam with them, but there is clearly something more going on here, and, even though I’m always feeling strapped for class time, I should keep showing these videos.

In order to enjoy “We’re The Mesopotamians,” one has to know who Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh ARE, to recognize those mysterious, enchanting ancient names. My students have earned this knowledge in their daily trudge through the textbook, having been diligently pushing pencils and flipping pages when they’d rather be eating ice cream and watching TV. The Mesopotamians seem especially quaint, distant, difficult to visualize: kings of a Fertile Crescent that no longer exists, speaking a language whose sounds we will never know. My kids are well-mannered enough not to ask when they are going to use this in “real life,” but I can tell more than a few are thinking just that. If one asked me, what would I say? I’d stammer something about how they are building the groundwork for a rich, full life. How they’re trailblazing neural pathways that will help them out in law school. Maybe I’d crack wise and say that MCAT stands for Mesopotamian Culture Awareness Test, without which you’d never make it to medical school. (If this were true, malpractice compensation haggling would be a thing of the past: Hammurabi says that all surgeons who screw up get a hand cut off. Bam!)

All cracking wise and philosophizing aside, though, I can’t give them a solid, practical, 9th-grade-friendly answer for why I am asking that they know who Ashurbanipal is. Because it’s on the test? Because I said so? Not a chance I’ll ever stoop that low. I’ll stoop almost as low, though: I’ll give them a silly, obscure little present and a wink. They’re in on the joke now. And what is high school but feeling perpetually out of the loop? I can initiate them into a dorky but relatively exclusive inner circle: the confraternity of people who can pick a ziggurat out of a lineup and who – like them – dissolve into giggles when they see TMBG’s droopy, emo Hammurabi rocking out with his axe.

Posted in Teaching, Tomfoolery.


Strong verbs for history essays

My students came up with this list of strong verbs, and I actually really like it and thought I’d share it. “Was significant” gets old REALLY fast. True, it’s a bit random, but might help to jostle an interesting sentence or two into place.

Strengthened
Prospered
Flourished
Helped
Caused
Created
Sparked
Generated
Connected
Unified
United / reunited
Allowed / allowed for
Developed
Associated
Incited
Transformed
Advanced
Modeled
Discovered
Revolutionized
Formed
Dictated
Deteriorated
Destroyed
Collapsed
Disintegrated
Perished
Dissolved
Emerged
Regulated
Empowered
Established
Revitalized
Controlled
Overcame
Sabotaged
Defeated
Followed
Set the stage for
Organized / reorganized
Foreshadowed
Contradicted
Demonstrated
Illustrated
Defined
Improved
Anticipated
Reflected
Revealed
Justified
Accepted
Overwhelmed
Encompassed
Embodied
Accelerated
Benefited
Characterized
Proved / disproved
Ended
Began
Introduced
Maximized
Responded

Posted in Teaching, Tools.