I resolve to

• believe that my child and I are always on the same side.
• trust that my child knows what’s best for her.
• remember that children model better than they listen.
• assume that if an activity is valuable to my child, it is valuable for my child, if I can only see why.
• ask “Why not?” more than I ask “Why?”
• believe that my child will do it if she can do it.
• believe, even in the face of short-term evidence, that my support and approval are among my child’s most important goals.
• look at what’s right, not what’s wrong.
• defend my child when his instincts are right; take a stand against any system that is looking more to its goals than to my child’s.
• take a flame thrower to every unworthy homework assignment that crosses my doorstep.

Happy New Year!

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’m fascinated by Wikipedia, and would like to think it is a bellwether of some larger changes in the world.

But is it accurate?

When we go to an encyclopedia, say to the magisterial Encyclopedia Brittanica, we know we are getting the Truth, right?

Wikipedia has recently been getting a “pros and cons” press – entries were vandalized and warped, which led to accusations of gross and widespread inaccuracies. But while that brouhaha was still developing, Nature reported that Wikipedia’s entries, at least in the sciences, were almost as accurate as the Brittanica’s. (It turns out that both sources had quite a few errors in the articles surveyed.)

In What is it with Wikipedia?, BBC News Technology commentator Bill Thompson reviews and comments on the interlocked stories. He concludes:

No information source is guaranteed to be accurate, and we should not place complete faith in something which can so easily be undermined through malice or ignorance thanks to its open architecture….

One benefit that might come from the wider publicity that Wikipedia is currently receiving is a better sense of how to evaluate information sources….

An educated audience is the only realistic way to ensure that we are not duped, tricked, fleeced or offended by the media we consume, and learning that online information sources may not be as accurate as they pretend to be is an important part of that education.

I use the Wikipedia a lot. It is a good starting point for serious research, but I would never accept something that I read there without checking.

Mr. Thompson and I are both fans of Wikipedia. I agree with him about the necessity of an educated audience. I agree that we shouldn’t entirely trust Wikipedia because it can be so easily undermined. But I don’t like the implication when he says he would never accept something he read there without checking.

From what single source would you accept information without checking and evaluating? From the Britannica, since it’s a few percentage points more accurate than Wikipediai? From our trusted elected leaders any time after Watergate? From which one of our news sources? When you get right down to it, how much do you trust your mother’s opinion of you?

I’d suggest a reworking of the quotation above, as a mantra for all of us, to be repeated whenever we fear there may be information lurking nearby:

No information source is guaranteed to be accurate, and all can easily be undermined through malice, ignorance, or hidden goals. Our only defense against the information we consume is to evaluate it warily and skillfully. At any moment, it’s best to assume someone is hoping to dupe, trick, and fleece us. (I don’t imagine anything can protect me from being constantly offended.)

In short, raise your hand (the sinister, of course) and repeat after me: I solemnly swear that I will never, ever accept uncritically any information provided to me. (Unless I really, really want to believe it.)

In the model of intelligence I present in Grow With the Flow, two tributaries help us to help our children learn to protect themselves from the misinformation that assails them. As part of “The Director,” (the third tributary), we want them to become observant and thoughtful problem solvers, who can think logically and clearly, and avoid hasty judgments or conclusions. We want them to actively search for data to test their existing knowledge, and check the compatibility of old and new knowledge; to gather information and evidence with an eye for what’s important, to evaluate information both intuitively and reflectively, to incoprporate emotions as a part of their analysis, even while they manage their own emotional response; and to check the in-the-world performance of everything they think they know. As part of their “Knowledge, External Intelligence, and Information Management” (the fifth tributary), we want them to learn to actively seek knowledge and information, to access a wide variety of knowledge realms, to be able to organize what they know in a way that suits the needs of the situation, to know what information is missing from what is presented to them, and to come to have an intuitive feel that someone is trying to hoodwink them.

Fortunately, the world will give us ample opportunity to help them hone these skills!

I see educating our children in these strategies as a kind of inoculation. We can’t possibly shield them from misinformation, manipulation, and untruth. But we can teach them to cope.

********************************

p. s. It’s a whole different topic, and part of that bellwether hope with which I opened, to ask whether a source like Wikipedia, with transparent and immediate public accountability, may eventually prove to get closer to Truth than the Britannica. I wonder: the errors that Nature found – have both sources already fixed all of them?

In a New York Times article, Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don’t, Carl Zimmer describes his daughter’s participation in some research about problem solving and imitation in chimpanzees and human children.

If chimpanzees watch someone open a box with a routine that includes several unnecessary steps, they just ignore those steps and open the box the obvious way. Human children imitate: They leave in the unnecessary steps even though they can easily see how to open the box the straightforward way.

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best strategy. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.

As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn’t understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.

Not long ago, many psychologists thought that imitation was a simple, primitive action compared with figuring out the intentions of others. But that is changing. “Maybe imitation is a lot more sophisticated than people thought,” Mr. Lyons said.

We don’t appreciate just how automatically we rely on imitation, because usually it serves us so well.

Let’s speculate: Usually, imitation and problem solving aren’t at odds: A child models an experienced adult who shows the proper way to do something. (You’ll find a discussion of the critical role of modeling in Grow With the Flow, on pages 158-160. That portion isn’t online yet.) Sometimes the task is one where the child would eventually develop the same strategy by problem solving. Sometimes the task is so complex that generations of problem solving have been involved, and the demonstration summarizes what has been learned. In that case, the reason for all the steps is unlikely to be either obvious or intuitive, so strict imitation is adaptive. As the skills involved in acculturation become more and more complex, modeling may more and more often avoid errors likely to develop from strictly individual problem solving.

We know that other primates imitate. We know they can be inspired problem solvers. We know that humans have pushed both of those cognitive abilities considerably forward. From this recent research, it appears that in human children at least, the default is to imitate when imitation and direct problem solving are in conflict, and that this is likely to lead to efficient learning and knowledge transmission.

Language adds another layer to the process. Our kids often simply watch us do something and imitate. Often we don’t notice they’re doing this – we’re getting the job done, they’re watching how we do it. But when we’re in our teaching mode, adults naturally combine language with demonstration, which is usually very efficient. There are times when modeling is primary: “Hold it this way.” There are times when language does what modeling can’t: “We hold it this way because…” But usually the process is a smoothly integrated one, with language and demonstration, modeling and questioning combining to give efficient learning.

Speculating on apace: Children’s frontal lobes, primary home to our executive functioning, aren’t fully developed until the late teens or early twenties. That is to say, the research described here involves kids who don’t yet have fully developed reasoning ability combined with an ability to direct that ability towards complex goals.

The middle years – when language is well developed, but the frontal lobes aren’t – is one of the great periods of knowledge acquisition. Brains in this era seem more like sponges than at any other point in our life span. During these years, we seem especially attuned to knowledge acquisition – both declarative knowledge (like the names of dinosaurs) and procedural ("how to") knowledge. That’s important, since these are the years when children develop much of the knowledge that they will need to function in their culture. It seems intuitively reasonable that imitation – modeling – would be a preferred mode in these years. It isn’t yet time to challenge, so much as to understand what and how.

Imagine yourself doing this same experiment: demonstrating how to open a box, where the person watching could easily figure out the simplest way to do the task, but where you add in unnecessary extra steps. We know from this recent research that a child would imitate with the extra steps. I can guess how a teenager would be likely to respond. ("That’s stupid.") But what about an adult? My guess: the adult would either use language ("Why did you add the extra steps?” or “Should I imitate your procedure?") or else open the box the sensible way. That would represent another level of human cognitive complexity. But that, in turn, makes me wonder: What would young chimps do? Wouldn’t it be a kick if durng their younger (acculturation) phases, chimpanzees imitated like human kids?

**********************

It seems to be Primate Research Speculation Week around here. I just posted a comment about girl bullies, amusing myself by wondering if they represent a remnant of primate dominance behavior, and whether that will still prove to be adaptive, or whether it may obtain short-term goals like status in junior high school at the expense of long-term goals like satisfying careers.

“Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self reliance.”

Merlyn, in The Sword in the Stone
(p. 53 of my edition)

I reviewed World Wide Words in my previous post, because I think it’s a great place for kids to explore words, but also to be able to thank Mr. Quinion for introducing me to “approximeeting.” *

You’ve watched the process: A group of young people move to a meeting by successive approximations, starting with a general idea that they’ll get together, then trading messages among the group to tighten details until they’re all in the same physical space.

I watched. fascinated, a parallel, conceptual tightening, when my sons, home for a holiday, ran into mutual friends. “What happened to so-and-so?” “Oh, he’s in Seattle. Here’s his number,” as the cell phones came out. In the course of five minutes, a group of high school friends tightened a network which had frayed a bit over a decade, reestablishing the possibility of contact through information carried in the devices which would also allow the contact, the next time one of them was going to be in Seattle. Listening, my image of the event was physical – I could see the network tighten.

I remember Dad, when we got a cordless phone, tethered by habit to the two foot distance “where the phone was.” I’m the same with my cell phone – tethered by habit to use it like a surrogate for a “real” phone. For twenty-somethings and teens, it’s velcroed to their lifestyle – often with artistry.

Approximeeting. “Kids are so disorganized. They don’t plan ahead. They don’t know how to be on time. If they didn’t have their phones, they’d never find each other.”

Better to say “We’re looking at new ways to be organized, new ways to plan, new ways to think about being on time.”

I talked to Penelope Brandt, from The Bean Cycle (That’s her behind the counter.) about approximeeting. She’s somewhere under 30, and got her first cell when she was around 20, but she and her friends got together the same way I did a couple generations earlier: called each other, agreed on a time and place to meet. Obviously, there are good organizational and time management skills needed to do that successfully.

But organizing an approximeeting involves an impressive set of skills. Compare these skills to the intelligences proposed by multiple intelligences theory. (See Chapter 3 of Grow With the Flow.) And consider the possible application of these skills, a decade from now, as these teens move into the work force:

* Personal (i.e., social) Intelligence to communicate appropriately with a group of people, sharing others’ plans and intentions, balancing interests and needs of group members.

* Verbal precision and clarity

* Memory for the multiple inputs from the members of the assembling group, and complex working memory tasks as a variety of diverse inputs are fitted into a plan that coordinates the (constantly changing) locations (vectors?) of several people

* A complex visual-spatial mapping of locations in relation to a planned meeting place (including likely travel times – “Well, if you aren’t speaking to him, when can your mom bring you?")

* Strategic control of problem solving – where the problems shift constantly and are frequently interlocked. (There are dozens of skills here, but I’ll grab a sample from some old notes: “includes important considerations and balances information and evidence from various perspectives.")

*Multitasking, time management, flexibility, adaptability, management of emotions, information management, use of technology – all those go without saying.

* Finally, note an important change from traditional meeting models, where one person typically is in charge – every member of the assembling group is using these skills. There are leaders. But planning is mutual and the needed skills are widely shared.

Count on it – what you see in the mall will influence tomorrow’s workplace. Dad eventually got comfortable moving through the house with the cordless phone. Maybe it’s time for me to take Remedial Cell Phones from someone a fourth my age.

——————————————————————-
* The term is from Sadie Plant, and appeared in “On the Mobile,” an analysis of the culture of cell phones done for Motorola.

You can download Dr. Plant’s original article

or an abridged version, without the photos (shorter download)

Michael Quinion of Bristol, England publishes a lively discussion of words, delivered to your emailbox just in time for weekend reading. It’s a great site for intrepid young readers and language questers. From words invented yesterday to ones that passed out of use centuries ago, World Wide Words looks at origins, uses and misuses, and often at the history that frames and explains a word.

In his current column, you’ll find malapert, “keen as mustard,” splog, chock-a-block, fulsome, and synanthropic. That last one is a word I’ve needed for decades – I’ve had the concept but no name for it.

A caution: There are lots of words in the world, and you may prefer not to hear some of them around the house. Depending on your child’s age and your standards, you might want to glance over content, and even cut and paste.

Subscribe to World Wide Words

Missing this could be hazardous to your laugh quotient:

Goodbye,Moon

Some serious points could be made about the way we can get to worrying about our kids, or about the increased safety we have brought to their lives, but that would be to run a chocolate mousse through a sieve to make sure there’s nothing sharp in it.

Sometimes our sound-byte-attention-span, this-way-or-that-way culture can yield some quiet amusement. Researchers in California did what looks to me, on a casual skim, like a pretty decent study. Of course it’s correlational, and they’re careful to point out that correlation isn’t causation. They also note some of the limitations inherent in a demographically restricted sample from one state. I find their preliminary report is skimpy on the statistical basis of their conclusions (a single table doesn’t give much detail about a roughly 400 item survey given to 5,500 people at 257 schools), but given how long its been since I really worked over a regression analysis, I should be grateful.

The study, “Similar Students, Different Results: Why Do Some Schools Do Better?” found that some things schools could do (for example, having a coherent curriculum) improved the school’s result on California’s academic performance index, which seems to mean, on a statewide battery of mostly multiple choice questions. (It appears also – hold on to your hat – that teaching to the test improves achievement on the test. Did I say teaching to the test? I’m sorry, the correct phrase is “classroom instruction guided by state academic standards.")

The Washington Post reported on the brouhaha that resulted from one of the study’s conclusions:
Parents’ Effect on Achievement Shaky
Other Factors May Play Greater Role, Study Says.

The article reports “But a new study of low-income public schools in California has concluded that several other factors, including teaching the state’s rigorous academic content and getting experienced teachers, have much more influence on achievement than does parents’ involvement.” Somehow, the “more influence” conclusion has led to “a national debate on the subject, with some parents … saying the study is correct and others saying parental influence should not be so quickly dismissed.” (Did you hear “dismissed” in the study’s conclusions?)

Ironically, the motto of EdSource, who sponsored the study, is “Clarifying Complex Education Issues.” The authors of the study leapt to defend themselves: “The study did not find that parent involvement is not important or not related to student achievement,” but within their sample, some other factors showed more connection to performance on the standardized tests.

Listening carefully to the authors’ protestations, the Post article interviews other experts who assure us that “Building positive relationships … is vital.” “…parent involvement is a key factor in the achievement gap and in improving low achievement.” “Schools should make unequivocal public commitments to involving parents” “there is too much research showing parents playing a significant role to ignore them.”

[Deep sigh]

• When a 23 page initial report gets reduced to a couple sentences, you may lose something.
• Any study needs to be evaluated in terms of its specific purpose, population, and methodology. Its conclusions aren’t general, but specific to the questions asked and how evidence was turned into answers.
• Science builds, assuming it does build, on a slow accretion of such specifics.
• When “The Media” get their hands on your research, run for cover!
• Oversimplifications mislead. Except for the previous sentence.

As Paul says, “Further bulletins as events warrant. Film at 11:00.”

Girl Bullies, a.k.a “Alpha Girls”

In the RiverTown Coffee Shop, several of us have been talking about girl bullies.
Raina asked if any readers were former Alpha Girls. Some of the readings below make it clear that girls may switch roles, and that aside from a few “Queen Bees,” and a few girls who were always targets, many girls have found themselves in both roles – and may bully partly as a defense against being bullied.

Here’s Raina’s request:

I never hear from the alpha-girls themselves, the ones who were on top in junior high. How did they turn out? Do they ever think about it? Did their parents have a clue how nasty they were? Did they approve? How can parents, teachers and other kids deal with this phenomenon? Any alphas (or former alphas) out there willing to talk?

Come join the conversation.

Or, if you’re the studious sort, who always did your homework (and almost certainly got bullied and called a nerdy brown-nose as a result), here’s some background reading:

• Mean Girls: How to Combat Bullying offers a profile of the bullies, who are “often popular, charismatic girls who are already receiving positive attention from adults” as well as examples of exactly the kind of bullying we’re discussing in the Coffee Shop: “Acts of relational aggression are common among girls in American schools. Specific acts can include rumor spreading, secret-divulging, alliance-building, backstabbing, ignoring, excluding from social groups and activities, verbal insults and hostile body language, such as eye-rolling and smirks.”

• GirlsHealth.gov has links to many sites that offer help for both bullies and victims
  for girls,
  for parents,
  for educators.
  Note especially their online quizzes “Are you a bully?” and “Are you being bullied?”

  A quibble about some of the links on this site: Since Columbine, there has been an enormous increase in articles and research on school violence, and bullying has come along for the ride. That leads to articles like
  “Children’s Threats: When are they serious?”: “This article discusses when threats should be taken seriously and how parents, teachers, and other adults can address the threat.” In terms of the theme of school violence, articles like this are useful and, unfortunately, necessary. But that theme is concerned with risk evaluation – “Is my child in danger of being physically harmed?” That is only a first-level inquiry. So far as the kind of Alpha-Girl bullying we’re discussing in the Coffee Shop, the answer is darn well “Yes! Your child is being psychologically assailed when she (or he – sorry, Paul) is the target of Alpha Girl bullying.”

• This Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, “Girl bullies don’t leave black eyes, just agony” describes the Ophelia Project in Erie, Pa (!), “one of the few anti-bully programs for girls.” The article lists half a dozen books on the topic, and also lists names for the aggressors: “also called the girl-bullies, the queen bees, the RMGs (Really Mean Girls) or the alpha girls.”

• A feature by Minnesota Public Radio’s Dan Gunderson describes what is surely one of the coolest responses to girl bullying: an opera, “One False Move,” by New York City composer Susan Kander.

  “I cry every time I see it,” Kander says. “I find all of that pain to be immediate and awful, and I never get through it.”

  
  Don’t be caught stealing the limelight
  
If the limelight isn’t yours, beware.
  
Don’t admit you have a social conscience
  
If the others think it’s cooler not to care.
  
Never state opinions of your own
  
Never let on who you really are.
  
Never doubt that you could be alone
  
For the rest of your life
  
With an invisible scar
  
From that unplanned, unconscious false move.
  

This, then, is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work.

Mind vibrant across a range of occupations.

… to appreciate the degree to which powerful techniques and strategies of mind and body are manifest in a wide sweep of work.

In The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker, Mike Rose invites us “to reimagine and unsettle our prevailing vocabulary of work.” His subtitle implies two goals: to find language to talk about the intelligence required by physical work, and through that, to help us value the cognitive complexity of the work and the intelligence required of the worker. I think what he has to say is vital for every parent and teacher.

Through his interviews, observation, and scholarship, we learn to see and hear the “thought that enables” work. Listen to these snippets from the language he uses as he analyzes the skills of a good waitress:

A basic goal, then, is to manage irregularity and create an economy of movement …. visual, spatial, and linguistic techniques to aid memory … the mix of strategies and processes … a powerful affective component to all this, one with economic consequences … combination of motor skill and vigilance …. an apprehension of the “big picture” … and as well, a cueing toward particulars, and a vigilance for aberration …. the intelligence manifest in making choices within constraint.”

(all quotes from Chapter 1, The Working Life of a Waitress, pp 8-30)

Do you hear what he’s doing? In finding a way to talk about these skills in the language of psychology and cognition, he helps us see the depth of skill involved in the job – helps us see the complexity of the work and the intelligence demanded of the worker.

Always striving to develop a vocabulary that can show us the complexity of the work, the early chapters outline the forms of intelligence and the cognitive abilities required of waitresses, hairdressers, carpenters, plumbers, welders. surgeons, and assembly line workers and their supervisors. Rose turns aside frequently to help us see what he’s saying, the separate images of work link, and a picture builds that can reshape how we see the world around us.

Easily my favorite chapter, “A Vocabulary of Carpentry,” visits the wood construction classroom of an extraordinary teacher, Jerry DeVries of John Marshall High School in Northeast Los Angeles. In one of my first posts to RiverTown News, I said about The Mind at Work: “It’s one of the most exciting books I’ve read in recent years: to listen to him describe how a high school carpentry student is learning to think about his work becomes – I don’t exaggerate – thrilling.” This is education as it should be: head, heart, and hand fully committed to a real task. (I’ll let you speculate about the invidious comparison I just excised, but I’ll give you a hint: It has to do with the history class in “Faris Bueller’s Day Off.")

Why The Mind at Work Matters to Grow With the Flow Readers

In Grow With the Flow, I use the analogy of a river to help parents raise children with the practical intelligence they’ll need to meet their personal, real-world goals. I argue that the Intelligence River combines five tributaries: basic cognitive abilities; the many ways we can be smart (multiple intelligences); our executive functions; our deeply felt and focused motivations; and the stored power of knowledge, external intelligence, and information management.

The Mind at Work has helped me see more deeply into some of the themes in Grow With the Flow. Mike Rose’s main goal is to show us the cognitive depth of manual labor. ("Hand work” – have you noticed that the term itself blinds us?) In my framework, he’s showing how the Intelligence River can flow through a wide range of occupations. I think he does a good deal more than that. Here are some of the implications I draw from his analysis.

• As I stress in Grow With the Flow, every job requires a package of skills. No one ability, operating alone, can do much of anything. We want our children to have a whole range of abilities, to have goals that matter to them, and to be able to focus and coordinate their abilities to meet their goals. That’s what the mind at work should be.

  Many real-world competences must work together to make us effective in the world. It’s coordinated skills, working in unison, we want for our children…..

  I also like the tendency of this way of thinking to point us towards a more dynamic view of effective functioning. When we start to talk about a blending of skills, we’re easing up to the idea that the skills in the package have to work together. We can start to see that effective intelligence is dynamic and interactive, with each part of overall competence interacting with other parts, combining into a skilled real-world output ….

  (Grow With the Flow pp 35 & 38)

• Every job that’s being done well requires skill. Rose focuses some kinds of work, because that work has been devalued, disrespected, dismissed. But in respecting some occupations, he leads us to look at all occupations with new eyes. With a thousand examples, he has helped me see what I had been imagining – how many cognitive elements must work together to make a skilled worker in any field.

  His uncle, Joe Meraglio takes the insight to its end point: “There’s really no such thing as unskilled work.” As I started to believe that, I began to see intelligence expressed all around me. I have to say, it has made the world a slightly more optimistic place for me. “The person behind the counter” often goes unnoticed, but once you begin to look, skill is everywhere.

• Prejudice and habit prevent us from seeing the skill in whole ranges of occupations. Kids who do well at academics aren’t the only ones who are smart. But school can make a bad speller feel like he’s dumb, isn’t good at anything, will never succeed, might as well give up. It will be high school (if he lasts that long), before he discovers that he can see a car as a living system, see why it’s struggling, while others see only a pile of inanimate junk. A good deal of my professional life has been spent simply trying to protect the ego of such kids until they find what they’re good at. Many of us have disrespected a whole variety of occupations, steered “the manually minded” to them with barely concealed contempt, and as good as told them they were being shunted into second-class lives. Their frequent revenge – that they make more money lifetime – doesn’t always heal a lifetime of feeling one down.
• If we see more jobs as worthy, we open more paths for our children, and for our culture. Lots of jobs are good ones, so long as we don’t think they’re bad ones, and make kids who take them feel like they’re losers. And some of our traditional ideas of what’s a “good job” are running athwart the market, while jobs full of opportunities for creativity and intrinsic satisfaction become good economic bets, as Dan Pink has pointed out: “…we may finally be at the point where we can tell freshly minted graduates: Look, it’s a rough world out there. There’s only one way to survive. Do what you love.”

  Doesn’t it seem likely to be good for an economy, a culture, and the people in it to have the widest possible range of occupations respected for the skill they require?

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An Interview and Two Other Reviews:

Interview on Marketplace

A review by Marvin Hoffman, in the Houston Chronicle

A review by Manuel Espinoza in
InterActions: the UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies

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Mike Rose

The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker

New York: Viking, 2004