A School for People

A friend sent me a piece of memetic folk wisdom called "The Animal School":

Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something decisive to meet the increasing complexity of their society. They held a meeting and finally decided to organize a school.

The curriculum consisted of running, climbing, swimming and flying. Since these were the basic behaviours of most animals, they decided that all the students should take all the subjects.

The duck proved to be excellent at swimming, better in fact, than his teacher. He also did well in flying. But he proved to be very poor in running. Since he was poor in this subject, he was made to stay after school to practice it and even had to drop swimming in order to get more time in which to practice running. He was kept at this poorest subject until his webbed feet were so badly damaged that he became only average at swimming. But average was acceptable in the school, so no body worried about that – except the duck.

The rabbit started at the top of her class in running, but finally had a nervous breakdown because of so much make-up time in swimming – a subject she hated.

The squirrel was excellent at climbing until he developed a psychological block in flying class, when the teacher insisted he start from the ground instead of from the tops of trees. He was kept at attempting to fly until he became muscle-bound – and received a C in climbing and a D in running.

The eagle was the school’s worst discipline problem; in climbing class, she beat all of the others to the top of the tree used for examination purposes in this subject, but she insisted on using her own method of getting there.

The gophers, of course, stayed out of school and fought the tax levied for education because digging was not included in the curriculum. They apprenticed their children to the badger and later joined the groundhogs and eventually started a private school offering alternative education.

I'd like to criticise the parable on its assumptions.  The idea that we all have different natural abilities as differentiated as flight to an eagle and a rabbit's swiftness suggests a reductivist genetic determinism that eventually leads us down the slippery slope to social Darwinism.  The other extreme that people are blank slates to mold and fashion doesn't hold up either.  

Really, people are like web pages: that is, they are plastic templates onto which nearly anything can be pasted (with a few exceptions, like some aspects of math for instance).  For the purposes of our education system, the ability to compose sentences and paragraphs (English), an understanding of numbers as a language (math: something that I have argued is of utmost importance to societal well-being), a thorough grounding in the scientific method and what we have learned from it (science), a firm grasp of who we are and where we came from as a species, civilization, culture, country, region, or ethnic group (social studies) have all been widely agreed as being important enough for every citizen to learn.  That all citizens may be given access to this important knowledge was a battle hard-fought by progressives at the turn of the century, and the result was the national, standardized, public school system that has provided millions of American citizens with the basic suite of knowledge required to determine their own paths.  The result has been the most technologically skilled workforce in the history of the world.  

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Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny (in Education)

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

The phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" refers to embryological parallelism, the idea that the development of any individual organism strongly parallels that organism's evolutionary history.  For example, in mammalian embryos, the backbone appears very early, followed by other neural developments in the order that they first appeared in mammalian macro-evolution.  The cerebrum is the last brain structure to develop in the individual human, as it is the newest structure in macro-evolutionary terms.  

If we look at whale embryos, legs begin to develop before retracting back into the body cavity.  Hair also develops briefly, but whale embryos lose this hair at further stages.  Birds have fingers at early stages of development, but these eventually fuse to form wings.  Birds also possess the genes for teeth, but these genes have been "turned off", and teeth never develop in birds.  Both human and monkey embryos briefly have tails to reflect our be-tailed common ancestor, but this tail disappears abruptly in humans, whereas it continues growing in monkeys.  This all correlates strongly with both genetic, mathematical models and the fossil record.

I find the parallelism between macro-evolutionary history, individual organismic development, and mathematically modelable genetic histories endlessly fascinating, and I am obsessed with reconciling and systematizing these phenomena.  But, I do not know enough about the subject right now; it is something that I would like to explore in depth in the future.  

For now, I'd like to see how such a model could be applied to education: that is, the educational development of the individual student recapitulates the macro-history of human knowledge.

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Memory, Memory, Mnemonics, Metacognition, Systemization, Learning, Postmodernism, and Memory

Appropriately, this is the second time for me to write this post.  I don't know whether to blame my mother-in-law's computer or Squarespace (or myself) for ironically erasing a post about memory.  I'll try to fight back impatience and frustration and craft a cogent argument.

I often play Memory in my kids classes.  This is the game where players turn over cards and try to match them from memory.  I usually play with a set of cards depicting colors and shapes (such as yellow octagon) or a set of cards depicting letters and animals (such as G, Goat).  When I first started playing Memory in my classes, I used only twenty cards arranged in a four by five matrix.  I found that such games typically lasted between five and ten minutes, and students very seldom forgot the positions and identities of any of the cards.  If there were four players, the final score would be something like 4-2-2-2.  Whoever went first or whoever was lucky enough to be last when there was only a few pairs left would often be the winner.  This unfairness usually didn't bother me, since the primary goal of the activity was to memorize English objects, and the beneficiary of structural unfairness - that is to say the winner - seemed to rotate each class in random, egalitarian fashion.

Nevertheless, my class of seven-year-olds soon insisted that we use all the cards.  As a decidedly non-micromanaging, hippy teacher, I complied and began to arrange fifty-four cards in a six by nine matrix.  I found that this bigger version of Memory took anywhere from twenty to thirty minutes to complete and changed the nature of the game completely.  The advantage of going first or last was relatively minimized, and so was the egalitarian distribution of winners.  The same students won every time we played.

In the fifty-four card version of the game, winning seemed to be a function of not raw memory skill but how fundamentally-limited memory capacity was employed.  Of course, in terms of raw memory, some students were superior to others; but for the most part this difference was marginal: Susy could remember eleven cards; Nancy could remember thirteen; Jimmy could remember ten; Johnny could remember twelve.  It couldn't have been this small difference in raw ability that was driving the emergence of lopsided final scores like 15-6-3-2. 

Instead, winning seemed to be based on the approach students took to the game.  Students with no strategy - who drew at random - were at an extreme disadvantage in the fifty-four card array, whereas students who made and followed some sort of rule - whatever it was - always seemed to win.  This rule could be, for example, always drawing new cards from the bottom left of the board, always drawing cards in clockwise order around holes, or always drawing in a counterclockwise spiral from the middle of the array. 

Students who employed some sort of general rule for drawing new cards only had to memorize the rule, the card, and the order - one constant and two variables; students who drew at random had to memorize card, x-position, y-position, and order - four variables.  Efficiency gains resulted in overwhelming victories for rule-following students, since these rules effectively reduced a game played in two-dimensional space to a game played in one neural dimension.

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The Mind of a Child

I had always figured the linguistics literature exaggerated the ability of children to acquire second languages at rates exponentially faster than adults, but watching my stepson not struggle at all with English when immersed has forced me to consider the possibility that this natural ability of children may actually be understated.   

My eleven-year-old stepson has been picking up words and phrases from day one.  Even when he confesses to me in Japanese that he has no idea what the individual words mean, he uses entire phrases correctly, such as "Is it okay if I come?", "Can I put my jacket here?", and "He likes baby toys."  He thoroughly enjoys communication in English it seems, and I cannot detect any self-consciousness or fear of failure.

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Four Cultural Gaffs in One Day (Maybe)

I may or may not have made four cultural gaffs yesterday.  The trouble with living in a foreign country is that you often never know whether you're in the wrong because of some cultural misunderstanding or whether you're just dealing with a bad individual (or whether you're a bad individual).  I've gotten better at realizing when I'm about to cross some cultural line, but I usually don't even get this right in my own country, so I try to err on the side of caution (or on the side of being taken advantage of - future post).  Here are three scenarios presented for your own consumption, my dear readers...  

...A student quit my lesson yesterday morning.  I was especially disappointed and confused because I always thought her lessons were great, and she was one of my favorite students.  At about one in the afternoon, my student walked into a classroom that I rent out with two other freelance teachers and announced that she wanted to have class outside.  I thought this was a bit strange considering it was December and it was actually snowing.  I had tea and a heater ready inside the classroom, but, the customer is always right.  

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On TOEIC and Embracing the Void

This passage comes from a TOEIC prep book I used in a lesson yesterday.  I found myself fighting back vomit as I maintained a requisite, grinning, foreign visage of utter seriousness:

A really good city must have all of the necessary facilities for its citizens.  There must be government offices, which people use to register automobiles, pay taxes, and so on.  There must also be plenty of financial institutions like banks, loan offices, and insurance companies.  Shopping is vital to peoples's lifestyles, so there must be lots of places like shopping malls, clothing shops, and grocery stores where people can buy things.  Citizens also need to enjoy their lives by, for example, seeing a game at a sports stadium, watching a performance at a theater, seeing a movie with friends, or dining at a nice restaurant.

After teaching that class, I blasted Marilyn Manson on my iPod on the way home.

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Lying with Math

I lie to and manipulate my students all the time using basic math, but it's okay because I'm better than them.  Here is how I did it today with my class of three eight-year-olds:  

We had some extra time at the end of class, so I let the kids each choose a game they wanted to play.  One of the students chose Crazy Eights.  One of the students chose Old Maid.  One of the students chose Go Fish.  

Normally, I'd just have the students play paper, rock, scissors if they couldn't agree on what game to play, but I really didn't want to play Crazy Eights, since I've been playing way too much Crazy Eights recently, and a regular game of Old Maid usually clocks in at twenty-five minutes or so and we just didn't have that much time, plus, I thought the kids could use a bit of work on using the verb "have", so I really wanted to play Go Fish.  The real dilemma for me was how could I force the kids to play Go Fish without appearing arbitrary and despotic?

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Guest Post on Kevin Kato's Blog

Kevin Kato, who I often work with, has been gracious enough to let me guest post on his blog, Travel. Write. Drink Plenty of Fluids.  Kevin is the author of several books.  His latest novel, The Tunge Pit, is a pungent mixture of the American Gothic, ensemble tale, horror nouveau, and pulp suspense genres.  I'm a quarter of the way through it, and it's fascinating so far.  I will be publishing an interview with Kevin here in the near future. 

Anyways, here is my post, cross-posted to Kevin's blog:

As a teacher of English as a foreign language, I prefer teaching kids to teaching adults. There are several reasons for this. The first is that our civilization has wildly misunderstood the nature of language learning, and teaching kids doesn't require any unschooling. Adults don't learn second languages easily. There is usually a lot of unfounded, reductionist neurotechnobabble behind this assertion, but in practice it's because adults are often unwilling to look foolish. Adults learn facts about languages instead of languages. Kids on the other hand are seldom embarrased when they make mistakes. The trial-and-error style of learning required to learn a new language comes naturally to them. If adults are to succeed at language learning, they must either be shameless sociopaths or fluent in the metacognition behind language learning. (Check out this article in The New Yorker.) Apropos, language learning is something that suits the learning style of just jumping right in preferred by kids over the taxonomic style of learning preferred by besuited economic automata.

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Memory and Language

There are two fundamental kinds of memory: declarative and nondeclarative.  Declarative memories are the kind of memories that we can declare; when we talk about our "first memories" we are talking about our first declarative memories.  Nondeclarative memories are things like muscle memories or skills that we acquire throughout life: walking, writing, skiing, trapeze, and supernatural Halo ability are all nondeclarative memories.  

Mastery of traditional Japanese arts like aikido and shodo is based on the formation of nondeclarative memories.  The reason students of karate practice the same blocking move over and over again even when there is no opponent is to fuse this movement into their nondeclarative memory systems so that it can be recalled as a fixed action pattern when the situation arises.  It's literally a case of true mastery coming without effort. 

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Which of the World's Languages is Most Difficult?

One thing that should puzzle and repulse thinking foreign visitors to Japan is the widespread insistence that Japanese is objectively one of if not the most difficult language in the world.  It's an insistence that is flatly unfalsifyable, and it's obviously insulting to the foreigner to whom it is directed!  

This is something I heard a lot when I first came here and started learning Japanese, and it is something I've heard a lot recently in the context of my first daughter, who is quickly developing proficiency with both English and Japanese.  Friends, relatives, students, clients, everyone wants to know every last detail about my daughter's linguistic development, and I suspect - at least for some - that this curiosity stems not from any altruistic concern for my daughter nor out of simple intellectual curiosity, but from the conscious or subconscious desire to get definitive proof from something as controlled as a bilingual child's development, that despite losing the war, despite being bombed and bombarded and used as a test case for the most destructive weapon ever produced and despite being occupied and neutered and told what to do and despite watching as cultural elements deemed too nationalist or obtrusive were gutted and dissected by occupying foreign authorities and despite having to reinvent culture as a strange blase neon avant-garde, there is still in Japan a deep-seeded and irrepressible drive to be Number One.

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MSM Caricatures of Japanese Education

My friend recently sent me a CBS News article on the Japanese education system "Respect for Japanese Teachers Means Top Results", which makes me throw up in my mouth a bit; it sounds like the author, one Celia Hatton, came up with the title from something her smiling guide said that she scribbled in her notebook during a tour of a model school.  This article basically used an assumed causal link between cultural prestige for teachers in Japan and high test scores for Japanese students to grandly and baselessly assert that we in the U.S. should have a system more like the Japanese one.  (Yeah, that old trope) 

I think it's a noble goal to look at the education systems of other countries and incorporate their best practices into our American public schools, but as someone with considerable experience working in the Japanese education system (and this has undoubtedly been my main research interest for the last four years), I'm sick of lazy journalists reporting lazily on Japan for lazy mainstream media outlets with lazy readers.  I'm sick of having to struggle against this lazy caricature.  The Japanese Education system is a complete nightmare.

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Textbook Time Capsule

Noam Chomsky reads the Wall Street Journal because it is a trade newspaper and is therefore more likely to be accurate than other mainstream newspapers (at least until it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch) which exist to entertain.  People generally read the New York Times to be amused.  They read the Wall Street Journal for information which they then use to make money.  Hence the accuracy of that information: the profit motive. 

The same logic tentatively applies to English textbooks.  They are designed to convey information for travelors to use (at least most of them).  I generally don't like textbooks, but one I do use occasioally is called "New American Streamline" from Oxford University Press.  One of my students described it as "furukusai" which I'll translate as "reeks of old" but note, this phrase connotes fecal matter.  Sure enough, New American Streamline dates from 1995, and it is the most quintessential picture of the nineties I've come across anywhere - more than Zach Morris himself:

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On the General Shittyness of Textbooks

A language textbook is at best an approximation; at worst a distraction. 

In The Black Swan,  Nicholas Nassim Taleb describes two types of knowledge (admitedly an overgeneralization): nerd knowledge, and non-nerd knowledge.   The former is the kind of knowledge that comes from mastering the rules comprising systems.  Some examples of nerd knowledge would be Keynesian economics, computer programming, chess, and most of what we learn in high school.  Non-nerd knowledge on the other hand is the kind of knowledge that comes from intuitive grasping of part of reality.  The corresponding examples are Austrian economics, biology, business, and most of what we learn in college.  The key difference is that it's possible to master nerd fields, while non-nerd fields remain elusive.  For this reason, the non-nerd is often unsure of himself, depressed without rewards, and in need of a nerd hobby, like car-maintenance or Halo 3. 

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Nostalgia

Recently, the ten and eleven-year-old boys I teach are starting to get really interested in their own hair, skin, and eyebrows.  Were this America, I imagine there would be a media scare about the "homosexuals indoctrinating our children", but this isn't America, and boys beginning to pay attention to their physical appearance isn't necessarily a sign of budding homosexuality, but a sign of budding sexuality (especially in countries where the survival of offspring is a relative certainty).  

I remember when I was ten or twelve and began gelling and spiking my hair along with the other boys in my class.  It was more memetic than conscious choice I think, and seemed to coincide with the strange, new phenomenon of liking girls, which was also more memetic than conscious choice I think.  Basically, we all had no idea what was going on.

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Intemperate Rant about Next Week

Next week, I start teaching at a magnet school run by Fukushima University, which is supposedly the best elementary school in the city.  I just finished watching the "official" guidelines DVD for teachers, and I can say that after watching it I had an express desire to punch every single person in the DVD square in the face.  I could not begin to describe the humiliatingly idiotic and pointless things which the model teachers in the DVD have to go through and do (but I will), except to say that the people in charge of things in Japan must be retarded tyrants and their underlings complete coward scum.

As I mentioned in a previous post, most teachers either leave Japan bitter over just how stupid the curriculum is or become lazy, freeloading public servants leaching off the tax-pool.  We'll see which one I become next week I guess, but there is absolutely no way I'm dancing, acting like a clown, smiling excessively, using unconventional gestures proscribed by the morons in charge, having the students repeat lines of their own language, or attempting to teach greetings in Kiswahili.  

Japan has the worst English test scores in Asia after North Korea, and this should absolutely outrage people, especially since Japan is a wealthy, highly-educated country, which mandates English instruction for six years or more.  So, umm... get outraged.  Unless there is a radical change of curriculum immediately (Anything would be better than the current system, including giving children and schools more free time by ending English education!), I urge the current DoE bigwigs to publicly apologize, retire, and do Japan and the world a favor by jumping in front of the Shinkansen.