What are we teaching teachers?

Disturbing reference interaction today: "I need help looking up information on x. I'm a teaching major, so I've never had to look up information before."

Book review: The Unlikely Disciple

Kevin Roose is the son of Quakers from Oberlin, Ohio, and was a student at Brown University when he decided to spend a semester at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. While his friends traveled to Europe for study abroad semesters, Roose decided try someplace more exotic still. He would go undercover at "America's Holiest University" and then write a book about it. So far outside his experience was the world of evangelical Protestantism, that his family and friends expressed the sort of fear you would expect if he were departing for Mogadishu.

Roose was well-advised to present himself as a newly-minted Christian, as evangelical culture was every bit as alien as he expected and it’s not easy to fake. Despite numerous faux pas, he managed to deflect suspicion just well enough to evade exposure. His unfamiliarity with the Bible not only threatened to give him away, but it made his Theology and Old Testament Studies classes surprisingly difficult.

Theology and Old Testament Studies had some genuine academic content, but other classes were pure religious, cultural, and political propaganda. His History of Life class was nothing but a recitation of Young Earth Creationism claims, delivered by a Dr. James Dekker who sported a white lab coat and pointedly announced, “I am a real scientist!” (Roose says that Dekker has done some work in neuroscience, but my Web of Science search didn’t turn up any hits for him) Exams include questions such as “True or False: Evolution can be proven using the scientific method.”*

The GNED II course was unvarnished indoctrination into the right wing political opinion. About this, Roose says, “At first, I couldn’t believe Liberty actually had a course that teaches students how to condemn homosexuals and combat feminism. GNED II is the class a liberal secularist would invent if he were trying to satirize a Liberty education. It’s as if Brown offered a course called Godless Hedonism 101: How to Smoke Pot, Cross-dress, and Lose Your Morals. But unlike that course, GNED II actually exists.”

Roose is closer to the mark here than he probably realizes. Many evangelicals do rather believe that secular university professors creates course content by thinking, "What would seduce students away from the Church? Let's teach that!" Just as many conservatives believe that Fox News is no more biased than the "mainstream media," they believe that relentless propaganda is merely a mirror image of secular education. This is, of course,yet another manifestation of the Paranoid Style.

"The Liberty Way" is all about rules**, covering everything a religious conservative worries about: no visitation to opposite sex dorms, no kissing, and no hugging for more than three seconds. Holding hands is okay, but alcohol and R-rated movies are forbidden. No shorts, no jeans with holes, for men no shirts without collars (you have to have a collar, so they can tell your hair isn’t long enough to touch it). Rooms are inspected three times a week and you cannot spend the night off campus without written permission. Reprimands, and even monetary fines, keep the miscreants in check. Roose gets fined for falling asleep during church.

It may sound like prison, but for devout students it's an effective path to true liberty (thus the school's name). It's the Fifth Freedom, the Freedom from Distraction - here in the cocoon, you can concentrate on God instead of sex and parties. That cocoon is so essential to maintaining the "Liberty Way" that some students rather dread the summer break, when they have to leave the cocoon and fend for themselves, with only God to help them. "I'm scare I won't be able to keep this up over the summer," one friend confides to him, afraid he won't be able to maintain his level of religious commitment when he's no longer subject to so much social control.

That inability to succeed with only God's help is a contradiction at the heart of evangelical religion that I've never been able to get over, and one that Liberty demonstrates in spades: faith is maintained almost entirely by social pressure, and very little by the power of God himself. Tell an evangelical minister that you don't need the church because you commune directly with God and his first order of business will be to convince you that your spiritual journey requires a professional navigator and that he's there to plot your course for you.

Nowhere is this more evident than with that intractable problem, masturbation (and its evil ally, pornography). There are counselors on campus to help students fight the temptation, and there are strategies for resisting temptation. Those strategies consist mainly of making sure you're never entirely alone and you might get found out if you misbehave. Turn your bed so that your computer screen faces the door, and leave that door open to all passersby. Some kids even go so far as to sign up with a service called X3Watch, which sends a copy of your browsing history to designated supervisors - their parents, maybe, or more often their pastor. It's not so much self-control as it is a commitment to eternal supervision.

That need for human surveillance strikes me as odd, because you're supposed to believe that God is watching you every minute. Somehow, the certainty of divine observation has almost no force at all compared to even a slight possibility that someone you know will see you misbehaving. The internet has exposed this dirty little secret: upstanding Christians, even many pastors, who would never risk being seen entering a porn shop can't keep their browsers off the porn sites. How deeply can even a pastor believe in an omnipresent God if God's presence has less influence over his behavior than the possibility that his wife or kids could come home at any moment?

As Roose self-reports, the bubble was so enveloping that he became partially assimilated himself. He experienced the contagion of religious ecstasy. He began to enjoy church for the camaraderie, as a gathering of his friends, but kept enough awareness to realize that the camaraderie was the bait and religion the hook. Come for the friendship, absorb the dogma. It's not that he started to believe in fundamentalist religion - but he began to forget how ludicrous it all is.

Roose writes surprisingly well (he was only 19 at the time) and, more importantly, learns genuine affection and respect for most of his dorm mates. In many respects, they’re not much different from other college students – except they may be even more sex-obsessed than kids who occasionally get a little action. Their attitudes toward religion, the Bible, and Jesus don’t offend him, but the relentless homophobia does. He finds himself quietly enraged at the way his dorm mates casually throw out the epithet “faggot.” But he also becomes numb to it, and worries that his outrage may be diminishing (Roose has gay relatives, so it's a particularly salient issue).

He finds some reassurance in his dormmates' reaction to Henry, an older student who is exceptionally homophobic and patriarchal. At one point Henry angrily announces, "If my wife ever cuts her hair, she'll learn about submission to her husband." Eventually, Henry acquires the delusion that the majority of his dormmates, and Roose in particular, are gay, and seems almost on the verge of violence. Roose is unsure what to make of Henry. On the one hand, it's a useful reminder that however unserious his friends might seem when they throw out the word "faggot," Christian homophobia is real, intense, and its effects on real people is no joke. On the other hand, no one likes Henry, because even at Liberty University, being a Christian is not as important as just not being an asshole. Dogma does not entirely override the instinct for human decency.

Roose has two reasons for being hopeful about the graduates of Liberty University. One is that he has met a few students who are open-minded, questioning, and critical of the regimentation they experienced at Liberty. He hopes that exposure to the wide world will undo some of the spell that Liberty has woven around them. Second, to be a legitimate university, Liberty has to hire faculty with Ph.D.'s, and some of these long to be doing the sort of work that a real university, not a brainwashing facility, does. They want to be real professors and in time they might gain some influence in that direction.

In short, Roose has faith in the temptations of conventionality in shaping religion and religious people. I'm not sure he knows enough religious history to appreciate how strong that tendency is, but it's a well-founded hope. As much as religious leaders like to imagine themselves standing up to the world, in the end they can only maintain their position by riding the cultural current. One of Roose's friends, who has given extra study to Jerry Falwell, concludes bitterly that while Falwell had toned down his racism in his latter years, he probably hadn't changed his attitudes - he just knew he couldn't remain respectable saying what he really believed.

But it cuts both ways. Religion will conform to the cultural norms it no longer has any hope of undoing. But his friends may also become more conventional, and less open-minded, as they leave youth and approach middle age. Much depends on what passes for conventionality in 10-15 years; let's hope it's a less fearful and authoritarian style than is conventional among the people who support Liberty University nowadays.



____________________________________
* Roose provides a sample quiz at his web site. I got a perfect score; how 'bout you?

** Apparently Liberty doesn't want just anyone to know what those rules are - you need a password just to read the Code of Conduct at their website!

Healthy music

At History News Network, Iliana Alanís notes this about the Texas SBOE's new education curriculum:

Not even music was immune to the chopping block. The Board removed hip-hop and Tejano music and replaced them with country music, justifying it as the genre for family values.

I'm guessing they had David Allan Coe in mind.

The joys of teaching

My brother posts at Positive Liberty:

Best line so far from final exams. Question: Who votes? Best part of the answer:

Eventually all black males were allowed [to vote] but if they were not free I believe they needed owners permission.

I swear that’s not how that lecture went.

Probably necessary, but not sufficient, not by a long sight.

Texas Board of Education Follies

Scott Stantis nails it pretty well, I'd say:


via Millard Filmore's Bathtub

Archivists on Wikipedia

This came through the archives listserv a few days back and I meant to blog it, but it slipped my mind. ArchivesNext has the story.

In sum, Wikipedia has a policy against organizations filling their articles with links to themselves; that sort of self-pimping is deeply frowned upon and the links usually get deleted rather promptly. Unfortunately, this entirely reasonable policy was also sweeping up some well-meaning archivists who were trying to improve the documentation in Wikipedia by linking to the sources they knew best - their own archives. Their work was being deleted as illicit self-service.

The good news is that the Wikipowers-that-be have granted a desirable exception to their rules against self-promotion, which can only improve Wikipedia's reliability. Assuming they don't abuse their new privileges, archives will be allowed to link to their own relevant holdings. Thank goodness! The reference section of your average Wikipedia article tends to be an utter embarrassment, a small collection of links to random websites with dubious credentials. Letting archivists in on the act can only make the product stronger.

Via Pharyngula, I learn that Al Franken would know where his towel is, no matter where he left it:



That has to be some parlor trick he developed as a smart-ass kid.

How an open-minded museum behaves

A couple years ago, I shared a class with a student who was working at the UM's Museum of Natural History. I took the opportunity to express the shock I had felt when I encountered a set of dioramas depicting Indians in villages, doing Indian things and whatnot. An anthropology museum, sure, but natural history? As if Indians weren't humans?

The student explained to me that the dioramas were some 50 years old, that many older patrons had cherished memories of them, and the museum staff found it all a terrible dilemma. They fully understood the problem with them, but just doing away with the exhibit was not so easy to do.

A few weeks went by and one day this same student turned to me and said, "I have to tell you what happened at the museum the other day!" It seemed a handful of undergraduates, goaded by their instructor into making some exhibitionist stand against the dominant imperialist culture, had stormed the museum and loudly protested the dioramas. It was, to put it mildly, disruptive; it was meant to be disruptive (you can read part of the story here, but unfortunately the second page of the article isn't archived). Allowing themselves to be ignored would have defeated the entire operation.

What did the museum staff do? Not much, other than explain to the other visitors what was going on and why. They didn't call the police, nor did they have guards with guns and tasers hauling out these kids who were interfering with the other patrons' experience. No, they seized the educational opportunity and explained what the controversy was about.

So keep that in mind while you read Ken Ham's self-congratulatory tale of how his armed guards only threw two atheists out of the Creation Museum (one of them for the intolerable crime of wearing a t-shirt with a slogan the other visitors didn't agree with, the other for trying to film the removal). Mind you, this is his own account, pimped to show you how unbelievably tolerant he is. And compare it to what a real museum does when faced with dissenting views.

Secret libraries

Well, you can't believe everything you read on the internet, but I so want to believe that this is real.

Via librarian.net.

Teaching history in US colleges

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is out with the results of another quiz on college students' knowledge of American history and institutions and the report, as you might guess, is highly critical. I tend not to get into the sky-is-falling nature of these annual reports, especially when you attach letter grades to the percentages. I recall being a teaching assistant for two history classes one semester, both of which relied on multiple-choice tests. In once class almost everyone got a C or better, while in the other no one could get an A; the questions were just that much harder. Some of the questions here should be common knowledge, but others are certainly more obscure.

This is what caught my caught my eye [sorry about the formatting, but I just copied the table from the HTML]:

2006 NATIONWIDE RESULTSAverage Percent Correct by Subject and Class Year
Test Section	Freshman Mean	Senior Mean	Value Added
Overall	50.4%	54.2%	+3.8%*
American History	56.6%	58.8%	+2.2%*
American Political Thought	52.0%	55.2%	+3.2%*
America and the World	46.8%	50.8%	4.0%*
The Market Economy	44.9%	51.1%	6.2%*
* The difference between the freshman and senior means is statistically significant with confidence of 95% or greater across the 50 schools surveyed.

In other words, after four years of college, few students have learned significantly more than they knew coming out of high school. No matter how much you might want to praise the high schools, that's still a miserable performance.

You can take the quiz yourself. I scored a 95% (57/60) and was embarrassed about one of the errors (won't say which one).

Don't be like Them

Part Of The In-group? A Surprising New Strategy Helps Reduce Unhealthy Behaviors

In another study, researchers placed fliers in freshman dormitories on a college campus. In one dorm, the fliers emphasized the health risks of binge drinking. In another dorm, the fliers linked binge drinking to graduate students. Participants in the dorm with the second flier consumed at least 50 percent less alcohol than those who saw the health risk fliers.

Bart! Don't make fun of grad students! They're just people who've made terrible choices.

Now, whenever James says something I don't like, I'm going to say, "Yeah, they believe that at Washington, too."

Apropos of nothing at all

So I'm reading blogs, especially takedowns of WorldnetDaily, and my mind suddenly takes me back to the ol' D&D days, when I actually subscribed to The Dragon magazine, read it cover to cover, and tried out most of their suggestions (not IRL, though). And I remember an issue that included a game, complete with cut-out board and components, called "Food Fight." You moved your player around a school cafeteria, throwing different foods at your rivals. Some foods caused more "damage" than others and you tried to use up your opponents' hit points before your own were exhausted and you had to retire from the fight in disgust.

Here's what I remember: the cheerleader character had, oh, five hit points or something like that. The first Boston cream pie that landed in her hair, she was fleeing the room. The nerd, on the other hand - he had 100 hit points. He could be one sticky, gooey mass of butterscotch pudding, with soybean porkchops sticking out both ears and keep going with no sense of embarrassment. Not a fair fight at all.

Just a random memory while reading people trying to criticize idiots on the web. I have no idea why I remembered that just now.



PS. You can find anything on the web! Especially if it appeals to nerds.

Creationists lose again

UC Wins Lawsuit Over Christian Courses

The best part is in the comments:

University reviewers had asked Calvary to accurately identify the book because they could not verify its existence,

followed by

What, you didn't think Jack Chick tracts have ISBN numbers, did you? That would mean accepting "the mark of the beast."

Respecting knowledge, and alphabetizing

While I've been on the topic of ignorance not respecting knowledge, here's another example - one that is exceedingly self-defeating. In the IT world, building your own wheel when you could pull one off the shelf is a sign of incompetence, not a demonstration of skill.

My main reason for posting this, though, is just to point out the Shark Tank web site. The stories of clueless users are amusing and I'm tech-savvy enough to usually laugh along with the writer - I already knew that the bubble sort has О(n²) complexity, for example, and that this gets very bad as your lists get very large. But once in awhile, I come across a story that surprises me and I have to think, Hmm, I'm not sure I would have known not to do such-and-such, either. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

Unfortunately, the stories don't always provide enough information for me to understand exactly what should have been done rather than such-and-such, but I still find it a valuable exercise. I may avoid some terrible error some day because of it.

Speaking of sorting, I had a chance to do some at work the other week. The contents of our rare book room had gotten considerably disordered at some point, plus there were a couple tables of books outside the RBR that needed to be blended in. I began by creating groups of books within certain call number ranges; then I could deal with each small subset in turn. It worked rather well - I got done sooner than my supervisor expected.

I first started using this method - a variant of quicksort - when I was faced with graded papers or exams that I wanted to alphabetize by student name. I began by tossing them into four piles of A-F, G-L, M-S, and T-Z (in practice, I usually had to treat the W's as a separate subgroup). Then it was fairly easy to sort each of these smaller piles and just stack them with the A's on the top. It turned out to be much less tedious than flipping through the pile to find the correct place for a paper, one at a time.

Story problems

[C]ollege students who learned a mathematical concept with concrete examples couldn't apply that knowledge to new situations. But when students first learned the concept with abstract symbols, they were much more likely to transfer that knowledge.

This is not only counterintuitive, but directly contrary to what I've always believed. Therefore, it is not only false, but wicked as well.

MAC

So I'm back from MAC - the Midwest Archives Conference - in Louisville. Had a good time (did the earth move for you, too?) and learned a few things, met a few people, and ate some terrific brownies.

If there's a common thread, it's to make me appreciate going through the SI program at Michigan when I did. Much of the emphasis on emerging technologies seemed to me ... well, very familiar and rather obvious. SI puts a lot of emphasis on information technology and its effects on storage and retrieval, so it was slightly surprising to realize that some of the folks with less recent training might find some things like Web 2.0 unfamiliar.

I also have to appreciate SI's emphasis on presentations - in most classes, I've had to give a 10-30 minute presentation with Powerpoint slides and get critiqued by my instructor and my peers. And I've sat through innumerable classmates' presentations and done the same for/to them. There were some great presentations in Louisville, but I also saw and heard a few that resembled what I was doing two years ago.

Some highlights:

Matt Blessing from Marquette, Helmut Knies from the Wisconsin Historical Society, and Roland Baumann from Oberlin, spoke about turning your collecting policy into actuality. Much of this session focused on the diplomatic art of cultivating donor relations. I'd heard much of this before in SI's archives practicum lectures, but it's always a good idea to hear it more than once - especially when you're a new archivist who happened to badly lose his last game of Diplomacy.

Cynthia Miller of the Henry Ford Museum led us through several exercises in selecting "The Useful Ten Words of the Ten Thousand" that might describe a photograph. I've heard Cynthia speak before (at the aforementioned practicum), but I picked up a useful rule here. Instead of asking whether a term might describe a photograph, she asks, Would a user who was searching on that term be glad that this photograph turned up? That sounds like a rule that's likely to narrow the list of good terms you might choose for your description of a photo and I'm going to employ that when cataloging my own photos (which is itself a rather exhausting project that I may never finish). Also, you need to consider the terms that are useful to your particular repository as well as those useful to a researcher. Standard references for controlled vocabulary terms are the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM) and The Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus Online. When describing objects, Cynthia prefers the Getty to TGM.

Leah Broaddus of SIU-Carbondale gave an assessment of the University of Illinois's open source Archon software, which provides archival organization and generates a searchable public web site. Sounds like a cool product that any small repository might be grateful to learn about. In the same session, Chris Prom of UI at Champaign-Urbana described his experience using Google Analytics, also free ("I am at least as cheap as Leah," said Chris), to better understand how internet searchers are using one's website. One key insight: people who are searching on a topic through Google will reach the topic page directly. That beautiful home page that you spent so much loving attention on? Most people never see it. It's important that your deeper pages not be dead ends, that they fully identify your institution, and that they indicate where in the overall website structure that this page is located.

Finally, we closed out on a discussion of Web 2.0, beginning with Kevin Leonard's YouTube video, Beth Yakel's discussion of what UM has learned through the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections, and Kevin Schlesier's talk on community collaboration with physical exhibitions - again, this is all about diplomacy.

Again, I had a great time at MAC. Everything went smoothly and there was a lot to learn, not least the fact that I really have learned a lot at SI. I don't know whether I'll be staying in the Midwest, as I'm open to moving almost anywhere, but MAC is well worth attending, wherever I might be.

Specialization

You see a lot of t-shirts like this at the University of Michigan. Each department has their own, done in exactly the same style. So you'll see "Michigan Engineering," "Michigan Social Work," etc., but you have to look just a little closely to see which field the wearer is boasting.

My favorite, though, has to be the one I saw this morning which reads "Michigan Undecided."

On the training of minds

I've been meaning to comment on this video of a tour through a natural history museum, led by creationist brainwashers. "Suffer the little children to come unto me," because a grownup will see through this crap in an instant (although we know that not everyone is going to become a grownup).

I really like the part where the curator says, "Regardless of what the tour director says, some of those kids are going to start thinking for themselves." And it's true. Today the kids will all say what they're told to say, but the only way to maintain this is to totally control the information they receive. The difference between these two outlooks can't be overstated. Too many Christian parents remove their children from school because they see the child's mind as something to be programmed.* Any contradictory data can only corrupt the proper functioning of the mind. The curator here, on the other hand, trusts the kids' minds to work on their own, if they're just given scope to operate. Who respects these children more - the man who tells them what to say, or the one who's happy that they'll encounter a variety of information?

[James also has some commentary on this video]


*As further evidence, I might offer the evangelical sport of Bible Quizzing, where the participants are asked theological questions and recite the prescribed Bible verse by rote. Given a sufficiently fine memory, one could be an ace Bible Quizzer in a completely unfamiliar language.

Trading notes v. attending class

Some professors are claiming copyright to their lectures, in hope of stopping the trend toward online note-swapping. Their main objection, of course, is that some students see this as a substitute for attending class.

The money quote:

"Missing a class and relying on notes eliminates the context of the discussion," Lindsay said. "It's easy to spot the students who do this, and it shows in their performance."

Then, what's the problem? It's not like we can eliminate every way of being a poor student.