trouble in paradise

uh-oh

Remember the mom who wrote about her 5th grade daughter entering KIPP?

Now she's going to meetings, emailing the Board, and finding teachers weeping in bathrooms:

Thanks for all your support on my ongoing KIPP struggle. The struggle continues, really nothing new to report, other than there are now 12 of 18 teachers who will not be coming back next year. I'm waiting for one of the Board members to get back in town and hopefully respond to some of my concerns. Reading your comments definitely helps me keep my determination to keep fighting. Thank you.

So I went tonight to the KIPP meeting after all. I wasn't going to go. I was going to give myself the night off. I was going to spend the time with my Riley, while Sylvia's still away on her field trip. We were going to have a quiet evening at home.

Wouldn't you know, Riley said she wanted to go. My 7-year-old daughter wanted to spend her evening in a Board meeting. I've corrupted my child!

So we went. I did learn some things. But, unfortunately, not many of them were encouraging. I'm Chicken Little. I'm screaming at the top of my lungs that the sky is falling, and while they listen (and don't laugh), I don't feel like they hear me.

I just made one more effort, one more attempt. I wrote a 1,240-word email. And somehow that's not enough. Once that was done, all I wanted to do was blog. No wonder my 7-year-old is corrupted; I'm seriously disturbed.

I haven't eaten dinner these last 2 nights. I've been in meetings, and when I get home, my appetite has been thoroughly drained. I'm tired, but I can't sleep.

Tonight, I'm having some wine to go w/ my whine. I may have to qualify this as a BUI post.

So here's my main concern. Because screw it, I'm putting it out there.

I have no confidence in the woman who has been hired to replace our Principal. I don't feel like she gives a crap about our concerns. She's treated the teachers poorly. As of tonight, 2 of them still don't know if they have a job next year! As of tonight, 9 out of 18 teachers will not be returning next year. After tomorrow, that number could rise to 10. I personally know only 2 teachers that are returning next year, and only one of them will be my daughter's. I think.

I don't know what the changes will be in the curriculum. I've heard that some subjects will be combined, but when my daughter's in school for nearly 10 hours a day, I don't see the need. Nor do I know what she will be doing in the times she used to take certain classes.

I don't like the sound of some subjects will be combined.

That is a directive straight from the BLOB.

The edu-world's blind faith in wholeism really is something. Here's a typical Statement of Core Belief:

We decided to create a unit plan on ocean animals for many reasons. One reason is the fact that children could have a lot of fun learning this information. It is a topic that sparks a child’s interest and makes them want to learn more. Children need to learn more about ocean life and how that ocean life relates to us. Because the loss of life in the ocean can and will affect everyone in the world it is important for the children to have a general understanding of the life that lives in the ocean, even if they do not live near the ocean.

In addition, this theme is being taught in many schools today and we felt that it was important for us as future teachers to understand that there are many subjects that could be taught using this general theme. The ideas using this theme are endless. Teachers should understand that children will feel that what they learn is important if it is relevant. Teaching subjects in isolation leaves the children feeling disconnected and bored with learning in general. Learning by using themes is a way to add some creativity and enjoyment to learning subjects. Students need to be actively learning and doing in order to grasp the concepts involved. These hands on activities will get the students involved and thinking critically about animals on land as well as those who live in the ocean.

Needless to say, this is not what is typically meant by "coherence." This teacher's Thematic Unit on Ocean Animals springs out of nowhere. It doesn't follow logically from what has come before, nor does it lead logically to what will come after. It simply appears, full-blown, sprung from the brain of Zeus.

Behold, children!

A thematic unit on ocean animals!

We have the universities to thank for this, I think. They got caught up in an interdisciplinary quest a while back, leading to the proliferation of programs ending in the word "Studies." Cultural studies was pretty much the apotheosis of interdisciplinarity, and we know how that turned out.

Interdisciplinarity at the college level is now a selling point in college promotion materials, and continues to have its adherents. (warning: If Robert Sternberg has his way, the middle school model will be coming to a college near you).

There are any number of problems with interdisciplinarity, all of which, for our purposes, can probably be boiled down to the observation that interdisciplinarity doesn't work:

For nearly a decade, I regularly start the semester by asking students in my upper-level interdisciplinary general studies seminar what distinguishes the sciences, social sciences, and humanities from one another. ... [F]ew can offer more than vague ideas of how they differ. Most can identify disciplines that typically fall under the sciences; the majority can situate psychology and sociology in the social sciences, but further categorization of disciplines eludes many of them, as do other distinctions about these areas of the liberal arts such as hallmark methodologies and primary objects of study.

Having significant exposure to disciplines in the liberal arts in conjunction with a primary area of study is a distinctive feature of higher education in the United States. Every spring and fall for at least four years, students throughout the country have to consider fulfilling general education requirements in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. But, for many, maybe most, their general education courses are blank slots to be filled by brief conscripted voyages into less familiar disciplinary waters. They graduate more well rounded, with more breadth of content, not just depth, but few leave with a conscious understanding of how scholarly inquiry is conducted outside of their major and how inquiry in the liberal arts illuminates timeless questions and pressing concerns of humankind. As undergraduates accept their diplomas and exit the stage, they leave with an inchoate awareness of what they have been a part of.

In teaching upper-level interdisciplinary general studies seminars I also have observed that my soon-to-be-graduates struggle mightily when they engage in scholarly thinking themselves. Specifically, they have difficulty forming an intellectual thesis that goes beyond the obvious and supporting it with scholarly evidence, a formidable task. When writing papers or giving presentations, the majority of students unwittingly inhabit the lower realms of epistemological taxonomies. To situate their position in terms of two well-established schemas of educational development, my students are generally more comfortable being asked to recall and comprehend knowledge, the first rungs in Bloom’s Taxonomy (1956), as opposed to being asked to apply, analyze, synthesize, or evaluate knowledge, the higher end of this taxonomy....

Fortunately, students are called upon to reach these upper realms of thought in their major discipline, perhaps many times but particularly in capstone courses, such as senior seminars. The challenge is to do likewise in a capstone general studies course, particularly when such a course is interdisciplinary. However, the extent to which undergraduates can engage in, not simply learn about, interdisciplinarity is uncertain. Some academics who contemplate pedagogical issues, including Howard Gardner, renowned Harvard professor of cognition and education, wonder whether students in undergraduate education have enough disciplinary knowledge to do genuine interdisciplinary thinking (2006, p. 73). In his recent book, Five Minds for the Future, Gardner considers:

"And what of genuine interdisciplinary thought? I consider it a relatively rare achievement, one that awaits mastery of at least the central components of two or more disciplines. In nearly all cases, such an achievement is unlikely before an individual has completed advanced studies" (p. 77).

"Interdisciplinary" courses in middle school aren't interdisciplinary.

Thematic teaching isn't interdisciplinary.

The only people who can actually do interdisciplinary projects -- let alone interdisciplinary teaching -- are people who are expert in more than one discipline, and there are about five people like that on the planet:

We have an enduring fantasy of a grand, unified theory of knowledge in which each discipline contributes building blocks to a seamless edifice. How can we know the ways we are unified if we don't talk to one another?

What we see in practice, however, when broad categories like the sciences, humanities, and social sciences are supposedly bridged, are a lot of courses on "Women and Health" or "Shakespeare and Art." Those are billed as interdisciplinary, and they are if you consider that an English professor who has some interest in visual arts is teaching the latter or a historian who has read about the history of medicine is teaching the former. But such courses aren't really interdisciplinary because both are taught by people trained in one discipline who are essentially amateurs in the other.

Can one person ever be a master of two trades? A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, but a lot of knowledge can be even more dangerous. Careering off in varying directions isn't what our current educational system is about. After all, it takes a lifetime to learn a single discipline. In English, for example, to be expert you have to read a vast body of literature over a long period of time. If a physicist decides to teach an interdisciplinary course on literature and cosmology, will she really be proficient in both fields? Or if I decide to venture into medicine or science, will I have the training of a scientist or a physician? Obviously not.

A Grand Unified Theory of Interdisciplinarity
by Lennard J. Davis
Chronicle of Higher Education
June 8, 2007

These voices will not be heard. Even Howard Gardner, a man who has now written an entire book arguing that K-12 schools should devote themselves to teaching the disciplines, not the interdisciplines, will not be heard.

nope

Instead, we'll be hearing from the likes of Tom Friedman and Daniel Pink:

Pink: Once again, it goes back to integration. Or what I’ve called symphony, which is the ability to fit the pieces together.

Friedman: Absolutely. My friend Rob Watson — a great environmentalist who founded the LEED building concept — Rob likes to say that integration is the new specialty. The generalist is really going to come back. The great generalist — someone who has a renaissance view of the world — is more likely to spark an innovation than the pure engineer.

Pink: Let’s take this to the people who are reading this interview — school superintendents and administrators. Right now we frog-march kids from math to science to English — and too rarely make the connections among the disciplines. In your travels have you seen any examples of a smarter approach?

Friedman: I’ll give you one of my favorite examples: Rainforest Math. There’s so much one can learn from the laws of nature — not just biology, but Einstein, Newton, physics. And you drive both environmentalism and you drive math. So it’s those kinds of intersections that are going to produce the most innovative students.

Pink: So how do we bring that into the system? There’s team teaching, integrating the arts into the curriculum, writing across subject areas. What else?

Friedman: I think you’ve got to force it a little like Georgia Tech did and say: “You are going to study computing, and you are going to study screenwriting.” Then the assignment in the class is: Write an online play with what you’ve learned.

Pink: That makes sense. Instruction in the subject matter areas, but then leave the execution to the students. And give them a fair amount of autonomy along the way.

Friedman: Right. The assignment can be: “Mash these two together.”

Pink: And these kids get mash-ups.

Friedman: Oh, they get mash-ups. They do it naturally. And today, he who mashes best will mash most and be wealthiest.

Pink: Which country is the best masher on the planet?

Friedman: Oh, we are still. It’s not even close.

Tom Friedman on Education in the 'Flat world'
The School Administrator
February 2008

Tom and I see eye to eye on that one. When it comes to mashing up the liberal arts disciplines, American public schools lead the parade.