The Newsstand Sophisticate

CNN recently ran a story about students using iPods to cheat on tests. It talks about students who have recorded course material to listen to during their tests, resting their heads on their hands to hide the headphones. Several schools in the U.S. and Canada have subsequently banned all electronic devices from their schools.

Cheating is bad, obviously, but the ways in which classes are too often taught in the U.S. and elsewhere is as much to blame as new technology. When I was in high school, students cheated much more often in the dull classes than in the hard, challenging classes. (And we did it the old-fashioned way—by writing on our hands!) In dull classes, students are expected to be something like an “electronic device” themselves: recording facts and formulas so they can be “played back” during the test. When history, for instance, is taught as a list of facts and dates to be memorized, it’s small wonder that students use their technological knowledge to avoid such tedium.

The best classes I took in high school and college introduced me to ways of thinking—disciplines—more than simply to a body of information. The tests then asked us to apply those disciplines to new subjects, an approach which makes it difficult to cheat. You couldn’t use an iPod very effectively to cheat on an in-class essay test, for instance, or a biology test that asked you to devise an experiment to test a particular hypothesis. Interesting classes are harder to cheat in, and because they’re engaging, fewer students will need or want to cheat in them.

My guess is that many teachers teach boring, “cheatable” classes not just out of laziness but due to state bureaucratic demands for standardized, quantitative ways of comparing school performance. This story in the L.A. Times cites figures showing that fifty-seven percent of California teachers who quit their jobs cited “bureaucratic interference” as a reason for leaving. As long as students are expected to be iPods, some of them will outsource the work to the real thing. The great irony is that students using technology creatively like this (however dishonestly) may often be learning a more valuable skill than they would if they bothered with memorizing a long list of facts.

The Economist has an article detailing the spread of anti-Darwinian ideas from the U.S. to other countries around the world. (The article is also reproduced on Richard Dawkins’s site.) It’s unfortunately no surprise to find that the ideas are finding fertile soil in Muslim countries; they’re also having an impact in Russia and Brazil, where groups are beginning to challenge the teaching of evolution in schools.

The article shows how ideas—no matter how preposterous—can move around the globe as rapidly as commodities nowadays. It also shows that thinking about “globalization” simply as either good or bad is silly. Global markets and communication networks make offshoring backward pathologies as easy as spreading ideas of human rights, freedom and reason, which is why it’s vital to defend the latter with vigor. When Westerners fail to do so out of fear of being “imperialist,” they should realize that much more noxious Western ideas will be exported anyway.

Jazz composer and pianist Andrew Hill died last Friday. I was working at copy shop in Portland, Oregon, when Hill was a professor at nearby Portland State University, and he used to come in occasionally to copy music (lots of Bach, if I recall) for his classes. He was always very friendly, in contrast to many of our customers, and had the rumpled, disorganized air many musicians (and professors) have. I had no idea he was such a well-regarded player and composer until several years later when I recognized him on an album in a record store. And when I listened to his music, I wished I had known when I was in Portland so I could have talked to him about his music. Too late for that now, but it’s nice to see in the New York Times obituary that he was getting some long overdue recognition late in his life. You can listen to some of his music here.

The Vatican announced last Friday that limbo doesn’t exist.

E pur si muove!

A member of the Texas House of Representatives, Warren Chisum (a Republican from Pampa), has introduced a bill that would require Texas’s public high schools to offer an elective class on the Bible if enough students (twelve, I think) ask for it. The bill calls for the class to be taught in “an objective and nondevotional manner” and states that it “may not disparage or encourage a commitment to a set of religious beliefs.”

I might support such classes if they were taught by teachers with scholarly training in a relevant discipline and were truly critical and non-religious. (Though it hardly seems the most pressing need when the resources could better be spent on improving the teaching of math, science, and writing.) But it isn’t hard to imagine how the scenario will play out in the average small town in Texas. After the school board fails to land one of the legions of Biblical scholars who want to teach high school students, some zealous citizen will stand up and say, “Well, Brother Thompson down at the First Baptist Church knows a great deal about the Bible. He even got a degree from Oral Roberts University. He’d be a good influence on those kids, too.” And soon the class will be non-religious only in the sense that it will not be actively devotional, and maybe even that’s being optimistic. I don’t want to play mindreader, but it would not shock me to learn that the bill’s authors are hoping for just such an outcome.

I can’t help thinking, however, that this sort of thing might backfire on its supporters in the long run. One of the best ways to get most teenagers to think something is square, useless, and boring is to make them study it, take tests on it, and then grade them on it. Chisum might at least consider the possibility that his classes could raise a generation who consider the Bible to be as exciting as a chemistry textbook.

I’ve decided to start blogging again, on a new site all my own. If you wish to read my old blog, you can find it here. Any suggestions are welcome. You can e-mail me at jndevereux [at] gmail.com.

Welcome to any and all.